Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Well, well. Looks like the fox shall be guarding the henhouse:

Hans von Spakovsky, as a top political appointee in Bush’s Justice Department, was a leading player in what has been labeled the administration’s “vote-suppression agenda.”

When it came to voter disenfranchisement, von Spakovsky was a reliable member of Team Bush. And as a reward, Bush tried to promote von Spakovsky to a six-year term on the Federal Election Commission, which touched off a major fight with Senate Democrats, and in turn, effectively shut down the FEC for months.

In May, Dems won when Spakovsky withdrew from consideration. In August, Americans lost, as Spakovsky was hired as a “consultant” to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

If Spakovsky’s history of backing efforts to make voting more difficult strikes you as a poor fit with the Commission’s mission of defending voter rights, consider that of the eight current commissioners at the agency, only two are registered Democrats, a politicization that the New York Times Charlie Savage brought to light last year.

Among Spakovsky’s duties will be overseeing the USCCR’s report on the Justice Department’s monitoring of the 2008 presidential elections, a source inside the USCCR told TPMmuckraker.

Spakovsky’s hiring is at the request of Commissioner Todd Gaziano, who works for the conservative Heritage Foundation on FEC issues and has defended Spakovsky in the press before. According to a federal government source, Gaziano has recommended Spakovsky at the government’s highest payscale — which would work out to about $124,010 annually if Spakovsky was to stay for an entire year.

This is crazy. The guy who was accused of voter-suppression tactics has no business “helping” monitor to the elections on behalf of the Justice Department and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Crazy, indeed. I think this speaks volumes about how Republicons plan to win the election this November. Stay sharp, and have the number to your local elections commission handy.

McCain's running for Bush's third term in all but name. Now, he's not even bothering to deny it:

John McCain has struggled for a long while to explain the ways in which he’s different from George W. Bush. He wasn’t asked the question much during the Republican primaries, but in recent months, it’s been an awkward subject for him.

For a while, McCain would tell anyone who asked about the differences that he disagrees with Bush on pork-barrel spending. Then he’d argue that McCain takes global warming more seriously than Bush does.

Now, he’s decided to hardly answer the question at all, telling the Politico, “I don’t have any need to show that I’m different than President Bush.”

Actually, in an environment in which voters are desperate for some kind of change in how the government operates, McCain absolutely needs to show how he’s different from Bush. If he’s not going to try, I’m delighted to hear it.

Well, I refer you to the previous entry to decide whether McCain feels any pressing need to campaign effectively, or whether he's counting on good ol' Republicon dirty tricks to win him the election.

Dirty tricks - and racism. Limbaugh continues pushing the meme today, no longer ashamed of being an open racist:

Continuing his race-based attacks from the day before, Rush Limbaugh declared yesterday that Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) success so far is because people “can’t criticize the little black man-child:”

LIMBAUGH: It’s — you know, it’s just — it’s just we can’t hit the girl. I don’t care how far feminism’s saying, you can’t hit the girl, and you can’t — you can’t criticize the little black man-child. You just can’t do it, ’cause it’s just not right. It’s not fair. He’s such a victim.

I used to think we lived in a country where vile, openly racist statements such as these could only be made by rabidly insane assclowns on the outermost fringes of our society. I believed that anyone making statements like this on a fucking radio show broadcast nationwide would find his career handed to him with a stake through it. I think we all remember what happened to Don Imus for that "nappy-headed hos" debacle.

So why the fuck is Rush Limbaugh still on the air? Has America fallen that far since last year?

It's not like the media's going to call him out on this. The media's too shit-scared of the rabid right, and besides, they're too busy defending their good barbecue buddy McCain:

During a townhall meeting yesterday, an audience member asked a long-winded question that ended with a call to enact the military draft in order to “chase bin Laden to the gates of Hell.” McCain immediately replied, “I don’t disagree with anything you said.”

Brushing off his instant response, some journalists are refusing to take McCain’s statement at face value. “Does McCain favor a draft? Nope,” the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder wrote on his blog yesterday, deriding liberals for “having a conniption.” When asked about the quote last night on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, NBC Political Director Chuck Todd declared he was going to “give McCain the benefit of the doubt,” unbelievably claiming McCain was simply advocating some form of national service:

TODD: Let me just go there and give McCain the benefit of the doubt as to what he might have thought he was agreeing to. Which is that he has been a big advocate on the national service front, as has Obama, as sort of mandatory service in some form, that you see a lot of politicians take. So it is possible that that’s what he was talking about.

No. It wasn't. And as many have pointed out, there's no other way for McCain to have the wars he wants than to reinstate the draft. He wants us all serving in the military. He wants this country to become nothing more than a war machine.

He wants war, we should give him war. It's time to start an all-out offensive. We need to find a way to make sure that the world knows what a disaster McCain would be.