The Bush and McCain Show  

John McCain is advocating alternative energy to solve America's energy security problems - unfortunately by "alternative" he means coal and nuclear. I guess they hadn't invented solar or wind power during his mid-life years - though someone is shamelessly using wind turbines in some of his campaign material.

The Huffington Post meanwhile, has a look at the fantasy world the McCain campaign is trying to get voters to inhabit for a little while.

John McCain unveiled his new campaign strategy today: invite the American people to take a magic carpet ride with him to the land of Eternal Sunshine.

In a speech this morning in Ohio -- backed up by a companion TV ad -- McCain hopped into an imaginary time machine and took us all to the year 2013, offering a sneak peek of what the world will look like at the end of his first term as President.

And what a wonderful world it will be: "The Iraq War has been won": "Iraq is a functioning democracy"; "al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated"; Osama bin Laden has been captured or killed; there's been no major terrorist attack in the U.S.; Iran and North Korea have renounced nuclear weapons; "the size of the Army and Marine Corps has been significantly increased and are now better equipped"; there's been "a substantial increase" in veterans' benefits; the genocide in Darfur has been stopped; "the United States has experienced several years of robust economic growth, and Americans again have confidence in their economic future"; "the world food crisis has ended"; "test scores and graduation rates are rising everywhere in the country"; "health care has become more accessible"; Medicare and Social Security have been fixed "without reducing benefits" or "increasing taxes and raising premiums"; America is "well on the way to independence from foreign sources of oil"; "our southern border is now secure" and "illegal immigration has been finally brought under control." And, oh yeah, there are a lot fewer fat kids trudging their way through PE class.

Sounds pretty great, doesn't it?

There's only one problem: it's pure, unadulterated fantasy. The political equivalent of the trippy tour the Beatles gave us in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds -- only instead of rocking horse people eating marshmallow pies, we have "professional and competent" Iraq Security Forces and an Iraqi government "capable of imposing its authority in every province" and "defending the integrity of its borders."

Despite starting his speech by saying how important it is for candidates to lay out "what they plan to achieve not with vague language but with clarity," McCain then proceeded to spin his cotton candy daydream with nary a hint of how his lofty and admirable goals will be accomplished. He's taking us on a trip to Fantasyland, but at no point does he show us how we're going to get there.

Sure, he tossed out a few generalized, pie-in-the-sky allusions to "reforms of the [health] insurance market" and "reforms to the way we acquire weapons programs" and a handful of specifics, including "a reduction in the corporate tax rate" and the building of "20 new nuclear reactors." But when it came to Iraq, he didn't offer even the vaguest clue about how -- after five long years of failure -- victory, democracy, the defeat of al Qaeda, the prevention of civil war, the disbanding of militias, and the sudden competence of the Iraqi military will magically be achieved. Rather, one morning four and a half years from now, we're going to wake up and pigs will be flying, and all will be right with the world.

I get the thinking behind the McCain camp's strategy. With 82 percent of the public unhappy with the direction of the county, and with 68 percent unhappy with the war, and 75 percent anxious about the economy (which McCain admits he doesn't understand all that well), there is no way McCain or his fellow Republicans can run on reality or their record over the last seven-plus years, so they have to run on fantasy.

But building castles in the sky -- and painting rosy, reality-free scenarios -- runs counter to McCain's brand as a straight talker™ who tells it like it is, even when that means admitting that ending the war or fixing the economy or passing needed reforms won't be easy.

Meanwhile Keith Olbermann has a great dissertation on the evils of the Bush regime, noting that they may one day face international war crimes trials for their destruction of Iraq - check out the videos.

Hopefully Bush's disgraceful performance in the middle east this week makes people think about the attraction of another 4 years of Republican fear and war mongering if they are foolish enough to vote for McCain (whether or not Obama or Hillary will pull out is pretty questionable of course, but you can be sure McCain won't).



Watch the videos - there are more gem quotes in here than I have seen in a long time.

Moving on, the Huffington Post has a review of John Cusack's new movie "War, Inc"

War, Inc. is a radically different kind of movie. In fact, it really defies genre. It is sort of like this generation's Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and The Wizard of Oz mixed together with the un-embedded reporting of Naomi Klein, spiced up with a dash of South Park. It is a powerful, visionary response to the cheerleading culture of the corporate media and a pliant Hollywood afraid of its own shadow.

On the surface, War, Inc. appears to be a spoof of the corporatization of the occupation of Iraq. Cusack plays a hit man, named Hauser, deployed to Turaqistan with the mission of killing a Middle Eastern oil baron (named Omar Sharif). Hauser's employer is a secretive for-profit military corporation run by the former US vice president, played by Dan Aykroyd. We first meet Aykroyd's character as he sits, pants down, on a toilet seat during a closed-circuit satellite videoconference call to give Hauser his mission. Hauser arrives in the Turaqi capital and heads for the "Emerald City" (read: the Green Zone), where his cover is director of a trade show for the military corporation, Tamerlane, which is basically running the Turaqi occupation. Hauser soon falls for a progressive journalist, played by Marisa Tomei, who is in Turaqistan to investigate Tamerlane, and what follows is an insane ride through Cusack's interpretation of the radical corporatization of war.

Singer Hilary Duff gives a surprisingly fun performance as a pop star, Yonica Babyyeah, who performs a song in the war zone with the lyrics, "You say you want to invade me, baby/Enslave me, baby." As Duff delivers the song, she caresses a phallic gas nozzle decorated with diamonds while singing, "I want to blow you....up." Obviously Cusack and his co-writers, Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser (REDS/Bulworth), sought to tap into the extreme nature of the corporatized war and take it to another level, but anyone who thinks the premise behind War Inc. is "over-the-top" has not been paying attention to real life.

Cusack, Leyner and Pikser are not predicting the future, they are forcefully -- and with dark humor and wit -- branding the present for what it is: the Wal-Mart-ization of life (and death) represented in the new US model for waging war. With 630 corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton on the US government payroll in Iraq getting 40% of the more than $2 billion Washington spends every week on the occupation, Cusack's "futuristic" film is not far from the way things really are. A powerful, for-profit war corporation, run by the former US vice president "owning" the war zone; tanks with NASCAR-like sponsor logos speeding around the streets firing at will; "implanted journalists" watching the war in IMAX theaters in the heavily-fortified "Emerald City" to get "full spectrum sensory reality" while eating popcorn; a secretive "viceroy" running the show from behind a digital curtain are all part of Cusack's battlefield in the fictitious Turaqistan. But how far are they from the realities of the radically privatized corporate war machine Washington has unleashed on the world?

War Inc. is already an underground cult classic and will likely remain so for years to come. The film is not without its shortcomings -- at times it is confusing and drags -- but its faults are significantly overshadowed by its many strengths. It also accomplishes the difficult feat of being very entertaining and funny, while delivering a powerful punch of truth. War, Inc. is a movie that deserves a much wider viewing than the barons of the film industry are likely to give it. But by filling the theaters in the opening days, people can send a powerful message that there is -- and must be -- a market for films of conscience.