John Sidney McCain III and the Republican Party are Bad for America

I think many have been distracted by the polarizing figure of Sarah Palin. Please recall:

George W. Bush and the Republican party started an unjust war with Iraq based on fabricated evidence. John Sidney McCain III has been a vocal proponent of continuing the war. Barack Obama opposed the war from the start.

George W. Bush and the Republican party have made kidnapping, torture, and indefinite imprisonment without habeus corpus "business as usual". John Sidney McCain III, a former POW, opposed legislation that would ban specific torture practices. Barack Obama opposes torture and supports the Unites States Constitution.

George W. Bush and the Republican party took over a country with record budget surpluses and economic growth and created staggering debt, unemployment, and recession. John Sidney McCain III supports the current economic policy. Barack Obama supports windfall taxes on oil company profiteering, creating new jobs by developing green technology, supporting small business, fair trade, workers' rights, and other measures.

George W. Bush and the Republican party have enacted an energy policy written by oil company executives. The current energy policy has driven rapid increases in energy prices, increased reliance on foreign oil, and record profits for oil companies. John Sidney McCain III supports the current energy policy and supports increased domestic drilling for oil. Barack Obama supports rapid development of alternative energy sources.

John Sidney McCain III is inextricably linked with the current Republican administration's failures. He plans to continue these failed policies, and so would his vice president. 

What other failed policies do you want to see stopped? Post them in the comments.

John Derbyshire agrees with me

... almost.

The main reason the 1950s looks so good to so many of us is that in moving from the old order to the new, we lost much of our civilizational confidence. You may say that that confidence was misplaced, or an illusion; you may even say that it was obnoxious, and good riddance to it [yeah, something like that --ed]; and you may be right on all points. There is something awfully attractive about civilizational confidence though. Like innocence, once gone, it can't be recaptured. Those of us who recall it shouldn't be blamed for missing it.

The lack of confidence might have began with the dirty, stinking hippies, but at least Derb and the gang still had the Cold War to keep them going. Without the Cold War, they are really in a fix.

As long as we're talking Latin American politics today

This made my jaw drop:

Edwards, by contrast, sees a non-structural problem here. Bush, on this view, has basically denuded the United States of what you might call the moral capital it built up during WWII and the Cold War era. We've become, in essence, bad guys on the world stage. |Yglesias|

Here are two quick sentences from Greg Grandin that help explain why:

Latin America in particular has long been the Achilles' heel in the hard armor of U.S. virtue, and even the most triumphal of Cold War scholars have been forced into moral contortions to explain away U.S. actions that contributed to the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of individuals. Aside from making visibly disastrous and deadly interventions in Guatemala in 1954, the Dominican Republic in 1965, Chile in 1973, and El Salvador and Nicaragua during the 1980s, the United States has lent quiet and steady financial, material, and moral support for murderous counterinsurgent terror states... |link|