Did Mencken Have It Right?

It's been just over a week since those zany Republicans put their 2008 presidential show on the road. Early reviews indicate it should never make it to Broadway, and heaven help us if it makes it to D.C.



Produced by the Right's fleshy impresario, Madcap Karl Rove, the GOP's lead player is John McCain, senior senator from Arizona, a bastion of tolerance and participatory democracy, if one is Caucasian.



McCain, at age 72, is resolutely uninformed. He didn't know the location of Pakistan, didn't know Sunni from Shiite, once referred to "President Putin of Germany," doesn't know how many homes he owns, and has only a vague awareness of the existence of the internet. He admits he knows nothing about economics, but is probably being modest since he is inextricably linked to the Keating Five Scandal and the biggest federal bailout prior to the current Bush-Cheney debacle.



Sen. McCain is on record as stating his education benefitted most from his attendance at the U.S. Army War College, following his return from imprisonment in Viet Nam. That says a lot about where his interests lie.



The senator's running mate is Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the hottest thing on TV until the new season of American Idol kicks off. If Sen. McCain is vastly unaware, Gov. Palin may be infinitely so. Morever, she obstinately defends her ignorance as uninformed folks often do. In her case, responses seem mostly scripted and her delivery of them mostly snide.



Into these hands Impresario Rove has entrusted the 2008 GOP scenario. Noting the 18 million primary votes for Hillary Clinton, Rove unearthed Palin. Further noting the popularity of Obama's promise of change, the wily Karl abrogated its use into the GOP script. Neither candidate seems to understand that change is a renunciation of Republican performance over the past eight years; that change spotlights Sen. McCain's role as a major player in the Bush-Cheney cataclysm, and casts Gov. Palin as a nouveau wannabe with particular interests in bridges, oil, creationism, denial of women's right to choose, with at least one exception, and in her special relationship with God.



Of course, what the GOP proposes to change and how they intend to accomplish it, are yet to be defined. Both what and how will presumably be revealed as the campaign progresses. Or perhaps not.



One aspect that will not change this year is the lamentable Republican tactic of promoting malleable incompetents for high office.



President Bush, the most egregious example to date, is despised by 80 per cent of the U.S. electorate. Western allies have been in turn appalled by him and are by now merely contemptous. On the other hand, Russian, Mid-East, and Chinese leaders must be enchanted by the erosion of American stature presided over by Bush that has come to them at no cost at all.



Vice-Presdent Cheney, disdainful of Constitutional authority and custom, has been single-minded in fostering oil industry interests which are closely related to those of Halliburton, his former employer, as well as those of the military/industrial complex in general.



Preceding them were the first Bush, another longtime functionary of the oil industry and the military/industrials, plus his second in command, the unforgettable Dan Quayle. No group has claimed him.



Ronald Reagan, the actor and host of the 20 Mule Team's "Death Valley Days" on TV, is the brightest star in the modern Republican Pantheon, but his reputation in Europe was that of an amiable dunce.



Richard Nixon was neurotic. Spiro Agnew was a highly-placed grafter. Wendell Willkie and Alf Landon were nonentities, as was Calvin Coolidge.



Herbert Hoover, the autocrat from Iowa, ordered an attack by the U.S. Army on U.S. WWI veterans who came to Washington as Bonus Marchers demanding payment of bonuses promised at the end of the war, but still unpaid fourteen years later. Warren G. Harding, up until the present, was considered to be the worst president ever. Harding had the distinction of being the first to engage in extramarital sex in the White House, which, as it later turned out, was not an exclusively Republican monoply.



In reality, the list of Republican presidential marionettes goes all the way back to the election of U.S. Grant in 1868.



Presently, the U.S. must contend with and resolve issues of war, energy, education, health care, infastructure and dismantled federal regulatory mechanisms.



The incestuous American financial community, which owns and controls corporate America, has brought the country perilously close to 1932, the year the financial system crashed. Its political arm, the Republican Party, has greased the slide by nominating another two typically incompetent candidates.



How will the electorate respond? Will it refute or reaffirm H.L. Mencken's dictum that "there's no underestimating the ignorance of the American public"?



If it reaffirms, as it did in 2000 and 2004, then the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.







Rev Cox