Obama  Vs. McCain – Not A Contest

By James Donahue

We have been shaking our heads at the odd “news” coverage of the so-called contest going on between Democratic and Republican Party presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain.

If we are to believe the information flowing from our nightly television sets and even Internet news outlets, polls are showing these two candidates currently running almost neck and neck among potential voters.

How could this be?

After the hard-fought contest and elegant speeches delivered by Senator Obama during his competition against Hillary Clinton, it appeared as if Mr. Obama was going to be an easy choice for the job.

McCain may be a Vietnam War hero and former prisoner of war, but he is 72, he seems to have a problem remembering things, his public presentations are somewhat lame, and he appears to be in total support of all the policies put in place by the most unpopular president in American history, George W. Bush.

Surely, Mr. Obama has shocked many of his supporters by doing an about-face over such a controversial issue as the FISA wiretap bill, and he is under almost daily assault by the radical right-wing talking heads at Fix News, but it ought to be evident to most Americans by now that we either elect Obama, or give in completely to another four years of the same-old, same-old.

While we may still be wondering where Obama is coming from, and what his goals may be once he gains the high office, selecting McCain does not appear to be an option. McCain will mean at least four more years of the same political system we have had . . . a big corporation controlled war machine that operates behind a web of secrecy with high level operatives who defy the Constitution, thumb their noses at the other branches of our government, and looks to all the world like a fascist dictatorship.

From where we sit, it seems that few, if any Americans on the street support President Bush. Folks seem anxious to get him out of office, are upset with congress for ignoring efforts to get both Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney up for impeachment hearings, want something done about the global warming crisis before time runs out, and are fearful that the Republican machine is about to fix yet another election so we will be robbed of our chance to throw the bums out of office in 2009.

Now, as both parties prepare to hold their national conventions and prepare for the big autumn campaign leading up to the November election, there seems to be a growing concern that this whole affair might be rigged. A lot of people think elections in 2000 and 2004 were fixed.

If McCain wins this election, it is going to seem obvious that America is no longer a free nation. We have already lost most of our Constitutional freedoms under the Bush machine, and the Democratic controlled House and Senate did nothing to stop that from continuing since voters put them in control in 2004.

Obama was saying all the right things and giving us a sense that, at long last, someone was going to get in office who can speak to us with some degree of intelligence, will work to unite not only this country but heal our disparities with other major world players, bring the Middle East wars to a conclusion, join the rest of the world in the race to halt global warming, and start getting America out of the deep debt created by the Bush Administration.

But after the FISA vote, we must ask if Obama has also sold out? And if so, to whom did he sell his soul? Will the choosing of either candidate going to make any difference in the future of our nation? What will be the future of our children?

As we watch these things unfold before our eyes, and think about the strangeness of what appears to be happening, there is a growing concern that perhaps we are all participants in a giant chess game, or stage play, and that our every move is being calculated. Are we no more than pawns in a world controlled by the few who have their hands on all the wealth?Are we then rushing back into another period like that marked in our history books as the Dark Ages, when the masses were servants to the kings who owned everything.

If you are a student of history, you know that things remained in that condition until there was a bloody series of revolutions. It took hundreds of years to dig out of that ugly blot in our past. Is this the path we are on, or dare we dream to head it off this fall and get our once great nation back the way it was?