Questions for Our Country

Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, both with the New York Times, had serious and valid questions for the people of this country today. We would do well to listen and we’d better start searching for answers before November if we want to take this country in a different direction.

I’ll start with Dowd: “While McCain’s experience was heroic, did it create a worldview incapable of anticipating the limits to U.S. military power in Iraq? Did he fail to absorb the lessons of Vietnam, so that he is doomed to always want to refight it? Did his captivity inform a search-and-destroy, shoot-first-ask-questions-later, “We are all Georgians,” mentality?”

Rich asks this: “Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures? Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization? Does a bellicose Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?"

Maybe Rich is right, maybe it’s time to bury “Change We Can Believe In”, because zero hour is indeed here and as this presidential race finally gains the country’s full attention, the strategy that vanquished Hillary Clinton must be rebooted to take out John McCain.

The press has not been Obama’s friend, not with 28 percent positive and 72 percent negative and that in spite of McCain’s blatant confusions, memory lapses and outright lies that still barely cause a ripple, lies that include falsifying crucial details of his marital history in his memoirs, as The LA Times uncovered in court records last month.

What does it take for this country to wake up? Change? Yes, we desperately need change. The fierce urgency of the 21st century demands not just “Change We Can Believe In”, but “Change Before It’s Too Late”.

What does it take for us to get past the pouting and sulking of Hillary’s followers? No one is disputing McCain’s courage during the Vietnam War, but people, that was forty years ago! Just how long is McCain going to ride that horse? And what does it have to do with the world we live in now? Other than plant the seeds of fear that causes us to see enemies everywhere? If we don’t take care of our own country now, it truly is going to be too late for “change” of any kind.