The difference is clear

Gather round, gentle souls, and lend me your ears, as I relay the story of a great divide.......

There was a time.......not so very long ago.......when people could come together.......when they could work together towards a common goal.......when they could share ideas and often disagree and even engage in spirited but productive debate, the end result of which would be to pass laws and instigate actions that would ultimately make the country, and even the wider world, a better, freer and more just place for all who inhabit them.

Yea, there were indeed two opposing sides, and these sides each had their own set of principles and goals and ideals. But in the end the two sides could come together to do things like battle tyranny, overcome economic turmoil, spur innovation, create a dialogue with other nations, even reserve parcels of land as beacons of nature and respite for all creatures and forces of nature and the perpetual benefit of all citizens.

But then all at once came a great cataclysm! We stood in hushed awe as a retired second-rate movie actor stood up and said, “Government is the problem.” And he spoke of government’s real obligation being to enforce morality and decency. And he spoke out on behalf of those who proclaimed that AIDS was God’s punishment for the abomination of homosexuality. And he created the lasting, impenetrable illusion of economic prosperity.

And he was hailed as a hero throughout the free world.

And as a result, I contend, today the natural distinctions between the two opposing sides could not be any clearer. They are simply these:

The Democrats, in their present incarnation, have good ideas. They want to make sure all the people are well-fed, well-educated, and healthy. They want to maintain the freedoms we’ve had for 230+ years (okay, admittedly, some of us haven’t had them quite that long) while ensuring that all citizens pay their fair share, both financially and through active participation in the process of governing, so that this grand experiment in democracy can thrive and continue to lead the world in pursuing liberty and justice for all.

And these same Democrats prove with every opportunity that comes their way that they are completely, totally, hopelessly incompetent at bringing their ideas to fruition. No matter how large a majority they secure, no matter how much political power and influence they obtain, they manage, without fail, to honor some ironclad guarantee that their good ideas will never, ever evolve into the laws that govern our land. Never. Ever.

If their wonderful ideas to promote and pursue liberty and justice were an inflated balloon, and that balloon were located at the North Pole, and the only threat to that balloon was a pin, and that were located at the South Pole, then even if there were no means of transport and no natural forces that could ever possibly connect the pin and the balloon, the Democratic Party would move heaven and earth to ensure that our glorious balloon and our demonic pin would meet, somehow, somewhere, so that the balloon would have absolutely no chance, no possibility whatsoever, of remaining intact.

The Republicans, in their present incarnation, have horrible, destructive ideas. They want to manipulate all social, political and economic engines that drive the entire human race and all man-made, and even some natural, forces that make up the planet Earth and its myriad of ecosystems. They want to ensure a wholesale tyrannical conquest of our land and our rights, and complete eradication of all those lovely freedoms that have represented our national spirit lo these past 2 1/3 centuries, by a conspiracy of conscience-free aristocrats and demagogues whose only understanding of America is that the very rich should just keep getting that much richer and the rest should be forever beholden to them, and that freedom is whatever rich, white men say it is and can change at any time, without warning and without any dissent, according to the vicissitudes of their needs and desires, or merely according to their whims.

The Republicans want to cut taxes to the bare minimum, but only for those who already have so much money that they can buy and sell ordinary, hard-working people for their own amusement. They want to cut government to the point where its entire array of functions consists of: 1) making laws dictate by, and for the benefit of, those same obscenely wealthy individuals; 2) having the world’s most powerful military operation, in which young and hearty progeny of the ordinary hard-working people go all over the world enforcing the will of those same obscenely wealthy individuals; 3) collecting taxes from the ordinary, hard-working people to fund the aforementioned military operation; and 4) building roads and median strips.

And these same Republicans prove with every opportunity that comes their way that they are absolutely brilliant at bringing their ideas to fruition. By mercilessly bullying anyone who disagrees with them. By passing laws of communication and commerce that ensure that the nation’s airwaves are reserved almost entirely for those who agree with them and carry out their efforts to bully those who disagree with them. By launching obscenely expensive wars that make the world safe for no one and nothing but bring great financial and ideological benefit to themselves and their disciples. By deliberately interpreting the most sacred texts of the world’s dominant religions solely for their own benefit, when it’s clear by their actions that they only believe the words that appear in those texts to the extent that they can interpret them to their own benefit. By letting the spawn of Satan rule the entire nation and all of its allies with an iron fist for eight years while disingenuously giving him the title of “Vice President.”

They apply their ingenious methods every time, and in spite of the fact that so many people claim to see through their machinations and manipulations, these ingenious methods seem to work for them every time, no matter what.

And so there you have it. Polar opposites. A clear difference. Isn’t it good to know the two opposing sides aren’t identical after all?

Hello, He Lied

We see it in every campaign. A little distortion of the opponent's record, a little manipulation of the statistics and poll results, a little demonization of an innocuous stance or, more often these days, an innocuous off-the-cuff comment.

But the 2000 and 2004 presidential races, under the guidance of Karl Rove, cleared the way for an ever-expanding snow boulder to make its way down the slippery slope: the bald faced lie.

In the 2000 Republican primary race, it was the Bush campaign's intimation that John McCain had a child with a *GASP* non-white woman (BTW, heads up, Senator Obama – I hear they have actual documented evidence that you've done the same thing). Played very well in South Carolina, which, as a state, is today finally seeing its reputation catch up to that of the U.S., circa 1965.

In the 2000 election, it was the same campaign trying to make Al Gore look like a cheating husband who lied under oath to the U.S. Congress and now continued to lie every time he opened his mouth. Gore's now-legendary misstatement about the advent of the Internet notwithstanding, his real crime was having been Bill Clinton's veep. (Just as an aside, can anyone recall Bush's year 2000 promise to restore honor and dignity to the White House without wanting to laugh and vomit simultaneously?)

In 2004, the unapologetic-lie-as-political-art-form reached its pinnacle with what we now casually call “swiftboating.” A heroic war veteran, a volunteer, no less, finds himself on the defensive against a bunch of tough-talking cowards who hid behind family connections to prevent themselves from ever having to go into harm's way. Why? Because he spoke out against the war he fought and the unnecessary war we're still fighting while the same cowards told lie upon lie to keep the latter war going strong and to continue enriching their cronies.

And, with apologies to Bread, if you're wondering what this song is leading to, I give you the apparent strategy of the 2008 Republican presidential campaign: truncate one of the opponent's policy goals to make it flat out untrue, have everyone in the party hammer the idea into everyone's head until it becomes widely accepted as fact, and then use it to cut down the opponent and make him sound like the enemy of capitalism, economic growth and plain common sense.

It goes like this.

After the shellac job McCain endured from the Bush campaign in 2000, back when Ben Stein was praising Dubya to the heavens for being “a decent, honest man,” you'd think the senator would seek to rise above the strategy of the bald faced lie. But alas, he's a politician, and he's a Republican, and naturally he just can't help himself. But we can.

We can show him that we don't believe it just because the right-wing smear machine pummels us with it on television and radio 386,597 times a day. We can go to his oh-so-democratic town hall meetings and call him and his party on their favorite lie.

When called on, we can simply ask, over and over, “Senator McCain, Senator Obama has said he wants to eliminate the upper class tax cuts President Bush introduced, and his puppet congress approved, in 2001, and he wants highly profitable corporations and the wealthiest 2 percent of individuals to start paying a little more of their fair share. Why, then, do you and nearly every Republican politician who can get airtime insist and telling the bald faced lie that, if he's elected, Senator Obama will raise everyone's taxes?”

I borrowed the title of today's entry from producer Lynda Obst's book about surviving and thriving in the Hollywood studio system. I never read the book, but from the time I first heard the title, I thought it was spot-on perfect to describe not Hollywood, but Washington in the new millennium. (It also went a long way in describing a lot of people I worked with, and for, at the time, but that's grist for a different mill.)

I don't truly believe that, if Obama wins the November election and the Dems hang on to both houses of Congress, honor and dignity, or even a consistent nod to honesty and straightforwardness, will make their way to ol' number 1600. But if not a mad rush to the best of our better angels, how about at least a determined charge away from the opposite end of the spectrum?

At noon next January 20, we will have endured eight solid years of contempt, corruption, polarization and outright lies from those entrusted to be the leaders of The United States of America and all of its citizens. Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Gonzales, Lott, DeLay and especially Cheney have all demonstrated time and again how capable they were of pure, venal hatred for all Americans, but especially those who disagreed with their method of democracy via propaganda-flooded tyranny.

We're stuck with the current administration until then, but it's time for anyone who may be involved with either of the two potential incoming administrations to just stop it.

Stop the contempt for anyone who speaks a disagreeable truth. Stop the blatant corruption that comes from lobbyists, perhaps the world's most self-interested individuals short of dictators, being top advisors on how to con the most votes and then serve the entire populace in a way that primarily serves their own interests. Stop the cynical polarization of 300 million people who all have to face the same collective obstacles.

And, to Senator McCain and his supporters, stop trumpeting from the mountaintops that Barack Obama wants to raise everyone's taxes. You know it's not true, even if there are plenty of voters willing to believe it. I promise there will be no glory in winning this election using any of Karl Rove's tactics. I, for one, will promise only to hate you and all you stand for throughout every minute of your administration. I will never hesitate to let you know how much I hate you, and I will never cease to do so. And I have a feeling I'm not alone.

I don't want to hate the next president, whoever he turns out to be. I want to support as many of his decisions as I'm able, in good conscience, to do so. And if it becomes necessary to declare war on a foreign nation that truly threatens our national security, I want to feel that it's a necessary action and that I can support the war and its aims. I want to support ideas that will revive the economy, reinforce our security and, ultimately, reunite us as citizens of a country we can cherish and be proud of, no matter our different ideas and ideals.

But for this to happen, we have to get beyond the fog of the worst president and worst administration in our country's history, and the candidates have to abandon the tactics that put them in power.

In simplest terms, to all sides: Just stop the lies.