Dave Lindorff

Sarah Palin and I may not have much in common, but we do share an early history of bloodlust.

We both got guns before we were teenagers. According to a report in the British Times newspaper, Palin took a shotgun at age 10, crawled through the grass in back of her house with it, took aim at a bunny "and blew its furry little head off."

For my part, I got my parents to let me buy a single-shot .22 rifle when I turned 12, and proceeded to go out in the woods, alone and with friends, to shoot at targets, trees, and the occasional animal. A crack shot, I remember picking off what I thought was a dove perched at the top of a tree a good 200 yards away. I nailed it, but when I went to the base of the tree, what I discovered was a dead robin. Oh well. 
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There are many reasons why most Americans should be turned off by Republican presidential candidate John McCain's last-minute choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate.

She's an evangelical Christian who believes in creationism and thinks this fantasy belongs in the school science curriculum alongside evolution. She's opposed to the right to abortion. She thinks global warming is not a proven phenomenon. She favors drilling for oil in the Arctic Refuge and damn the environmental consequences. This supposedly family-centered "hockey mom" is happy about sending her 18-year-old son off to war in Iraq, even as Iraq is trying to shoo us out of the country and even as the president is tacitly admitting that the whole thing is a bust by agreeing to a timetable for withdrawal.

But the real reason Palin, the former mayor of little Wasilla, Alaska (pop. 5,000 when she was there) and two-year governor of Alaska, is a disastrous pick for the vice presidency on a ticket headed by an ailing 72-year-old presidential candidate who has suffered two bouts of melanoma and who is showing early signs of dementia, is the evidence that she has abused power as governor.
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Sen. Barack Obama scored big in the Invesco Stadium last night with an acceptance speech that managed to do everything that the political operatives, pundits and critics had argued he'd have to do: It was at once impassioned, full of actual policy plans, and aggressive in its attack on John McCain, his Republican opponent for the presidency.            

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One of the sorrier legacies of eight years of Bush and Cheney in the White House has been the conflation of the terms "National Security" and "Foreign Policy" by both Republicans and Democrats.

Granted that the history of U.S. foreign policy in the world has been heavily larded with wars, many of them at America's instigation. It is nonetheless true that foreign policy is much bigger and more far reaching than just what has come to be known as "national security" issues.
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I was a speaker Tuesday night at an anti-war event sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Monmouth County, Progressive Democrats of America and Democrats For America in Lincroft, NJ, near the shore. It was a great group of activist Americans who want to see this country end the Iraq War, turn away from war as a primary instrument of policy, and start dealing with the pressing human needs of the country and the world.

Yet even in this group of committed people, one woman stood up during the question-and-answer session and said, "I want to get involved in writing e-mails to members of Congress urging them to cut off funding for the war and other things, but if I do that, won't I end up getting put on a 'watch list'" or something?"

I told her the short answer was yes, she probably would. In George Bush's and Dick Cheney's America, no one is safe from such spying, and even from harassment, as witness Tom Feeley, the man behind the Web site Information Clearing House, who had armed men invade his house at night and threaten his wife complaining about his First Amendment-protected effort to publicize important stories on the Internet.
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We've come a long way towards imperial government in the U.S. -- towards a view of the relationship between the federal government, and especially the administration, and the citizenry that has more of a ruler-subjects than a democratic feel to it.

Now I know it is easy to gloss over the way things were, and since I spent a few days in federal prison for protesting the Indochina War at the Pentagon in 1967, after being beaten by federal marshals for doing nothing more than exercising my Constitutional right to protest on public ground, I am well aware that 40 years ago we were also often treated like serfs. But that said, there was something different back then -- a sense that you could deal with powerful officials as an equal.

Back in the summer of 1968, I spent one of several summers on the road (something more young people should do today). I had hitchhiked across the country from Connecticut to Washington state with Allen Baker, a college buddy, and then, towards the end of that summer break, had bought an old pick-up truck for $100, which we were driving home via the West Coast and the central route. Not having much cash, we were stopping at cities along the way, where I would play guitar for gas money.

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Well, it's happened, and it's no surprise. Barack Obama, the prospective Democratic presidential candidate, has managed to turn a 5-8 point lead over prospective Republican opponent John McCain into a 7-point deficit -- a double-digit slide -- in just two and a half months following a campaign that had voters really excited over his candidacy.

How did he manage this feat (which is documented in the latest Reuters/Zogby poll)? Simple: he followed the tried-and-true strategy of Democratic centrist advisers who have increasingly dominated his campaign since the end of the primaries, and who have a proven track record of producing Democratic electoral disasters now for several decades.

Like John Kerry and Al Gore before him, Obama, who ran his primary campaign as a liberal, staking out an anti-war position, has morphed over recent weeks into a Republican-lite candidate, calling for a hard line against Palestinian rights, threatening to attack Iran, calling for an expansion of the disastrous war in Afghanistan, and backing away from genuine health care reform and other important progressive goals here at home.
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American Secretary of War Robert Gates knows a real leader when he sees one.  "Clearly, as far as I'm concerned," he said, Vladimir Putin, and not President Dmitry Medvedev, "has the upper hand right now."  

Well hell, Gates should know. After all, he deals on a daily basis with the same peculiar situation here in the U.S., where the president also is a figurehead and the real power lies in the hands of Vice President Dick Cheney.
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We Americans got a graphic illustration of the demise of any independent American corporate news media these past few days as the coverage on TV and in print was saturated with reports about John Edwards' infidelity and, equally important, Russia's invasion of Georgia.

In the first case, we had the completely pointless if prurient airing of Edwards' sordid extra-marital affair. Pointless because Edwards at this time is a has-been politician. If there were any point to the coverage it should have been, as Alex Cockburn pointed out in his journal Counterpunch, the abject failure of those same reporters and "news" organizations to cover the story back last fall, when it might have mattered.

Back then, when the only paper covering the story was the National Enquirer, Edwards was still a viable candidate for the presidency, or a possible contender for vice president again. It's not that his personal sex-life has any news value in and of itself. The point is that had he won the nomination, or been picked as a vice presidential running mate, its inevitable exposure later during the general election would have destroyed any Democratic presidential chances. And the corporate media knew back then all about this story. They just weren't pursuing it (and the current blitz of stories proves that they weren't holding back out of principle!).
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