On The Left Obama, On The Right McCain

The two party system in America is by definition partisan. This stage show of us against them has even infected the media .With Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left. While CNN tacks a course down the middle. Is there a reporter more neutral than Anderson Copper, our new Walter Cronkite?
Every night the guest commentary comes from representatives of the two parties. The people who have run their campaigns and written their speeches are there to add the evenings spin. So we have Paul Begala spinning for the left and Ed Rollins for the right. David Gergen’s gets to play it down the middle, one presumes, after having advised both Republican and Democrat Presidents. But what is the difference between the two parties?
The Democrats have been called the left wing of the Republican Party. It’s been pointed out that Bill Clinton was not as liberal as Nelson Rockefeller. When I think of the two Parties, I prefer the good cop, bad cop analogy. After W., Clinton seems like a saint. Clinton was President just after the Soviet Union disintegrated. He could have cashed a huge peace dividend, but he didn't. He could have cut back military spending and used the money for subway trains and infrastructure. He started his term with his party in charge of the Congress, but no, he didn’t even attempt to scale back the obscene and blotted military budget. For fifty years Hawks cried that we must be tough on communism. Spend massive amounts of money to keep the Commies at check. But when the enemy is no more, imploding due to their own obese military spending, do we get to take a break? Hell no, we don’t even discuss the option. Billion dollar submarines, designed to track the Soviet Navy continued to be funded. OK, the military was weaned back some and this allowed Clinton and Reuben to balance the budget that allowed the good times that we so love Bill for.
And Clinton kept Allen Greenspan at the Federal Reserve Bank, a very Republican thing to do. This economic meltdown is a direct result of theories first put in practice by Ronald Reagan, continued by Clinton, and re accelerated by Bush/Cheney.
And notice, please, that Senator Obama’s response to the financial meltdown has been much the same as Bush’s. And why wouldn’t it be? He has much the same bankers advising him that the boy President has. That Clinton had. And they are all from Goldman Sachs, very respectable men, who worship one very respectable thing, money.
I happen to believe that Senator Obama is one of the smartest and more decent politicians to hit the American stage in some time. But never the less, that stage is owned by the very wealthiest Americans. And that means that certain things are not going to change much. The military, America’s instrument of Empire, is sacrosanct. And so Barack tells us that we must increase our military in Afghanistan. He will say that because of terrorism America must keep its empire. When the reality is that the empire is what the terrorists are fighting us about.