Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

I've been struggling to put into words just how to explain the tone and character of the Republican rally cry, and I've seen a disturbing trend developing. At this point in the McCain/Palin campaign, the points that they are hitting on are chiefly thinly vailed personal attacks on Obama. Rallying your populace against an unseen enemy has been tried by another politician and we all know that relying on your population's inability or unwillingness to grow their own brains can only turn out badly. We are beginning to see the fruits of our non-labor now, what with a foreign policy that is reckless at best, an economy that has, for all intents and purposes, imploded, and horrifyingly erronious misallocations of valuable military resources.

What's truly troubling is how close the race is between Obama and McCain. Here's part of the problem. People, in general, are pretty dumb. Here's a few things I've heard, unsolicited, out of people where I live here in suburban Chicago:

"Obama supports gay marriage, which means they would be teaching that to our children in school!"

"Obama is a Muslim, therefore he supports terrorism"

"Obama is a Communist"

This is the kind of stuff I've been hearing and unfortunately, for these people, there's obviously no ability to reason logically with them since apparently they're intellectually void. This is the kind of blind, mindless sheep mentality that saw Bush to a second term. As you'll recall, the battle cry in '04 was "we gotta win the war against terrorism"! Of course, no one at that point had any obvious point of reference since the mainstream news media hadn't clued in yet that Iraq had effectively nothing to do with the current domestic terrorist problem, so all they had to go by was the rhetoric from both parties, and the American people put their money on "the devil you know" spot, without any consideration for any of the other domestic problems we faced at that time. Unfortunately, the American people have only partially awakened to the notion that closing your eyes and wishing something to go away doesn't make it actually go away. The only action that seemed to make sense at the time was to move a Democratic majority to the Hill, but all that did was grind the Federal Government to a complete halt for the last 2 years. If for nothing else, at least if Obama makes it into office, SOMETHING will get done!

I've heard many times the saying "the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer". I never really appreciated what that meant until now, and what's really scary about that is that "poor" line is steadily creeping upward. Make no mistake about it. You are all witness to that quote born out in reality. For the last 6 or so years, a lot of people in the banking and loan industry have made insane amounts of money. When that chicken finally came home to roost, guess who got to foot the bill to put Humpty Dumpty back together again?

Scary, eh?