When they weren't whining about Obama being some kind of closet Islamofacist commie they were pontificating about the sanctity of free markets, the evils of big government, the purity of privatization, the miracles of laissez faire capitalism and the horrors of such social tools as unemployment insurance, public welfare programs, food stamps and the minimum wage.

One sight that warms the heart of the average conservative is a long employment line. The vision of hundreds, thousands of job seekers vying for bone crushing, mind numbing labor at spirit crushing wages is a romantic one, the favored fresco on the temple walls of Republicanism.

Photo: Some presidents get high schools named after them, others get highways and bridges. What does George W. Bush get? A sewage plant! Through a brilliant plan hatched in a bar, SF voters may be able to name the Oceanside Water Pollution Plant after our current president, George W., in November. dnguyen

In one of the more asinine posts I have read lately the Wall Street Journal today ran an opinion piece titled "The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace ," which I recommend to anyone needing a real howler to start the day after the stress and tension of a long and rancorous election season.

Jeffrey Scott Shapiro begins the piece by castigating San Franciscans for naming a  sewage treatment plant after Bush which which calls "one example of the classless disrespect many Americans have shown the president."

I see a more delicious, if malodorous, whimsical irony in the "tribute" than disrespect or cruelty. But that's just me.

He decries Bush's record low approval ratings as if surprised that the public, the world and his own party would run screaming in revulsion from an arrogant and incompetent sociopath who has personally done so much to bring about the death, destruction displacement and impoverishment of so many.

Shapiro's plaintive cry, "What must our enemies be thinking?,"  has an easy answer from this point of view, his enemies appreciate him somewhat less than his "friends."

I voted Friday in Ohio and although at times in my life I have cast an occasional vote for a local Republican candidate, this time I reverted to my roots and voted like an old fashioned straight ticket Democrat. My Grandfathers would both be proud.

It felt good. No, it felt great as if I were striking a blow for freedom.

After eight years of thoroughly corrupt and incompetent government, the unrelieved horror of several nightmarish wars, the near destruction of American constitutional liberties, the

pillage and plunder of our public treasury by wealth bloated plutocrats and oiligarchs, and the almost total loss of our international reputation I just felt safer somehow checking off the "D's."

Note: The cartoon is the logo of the real Joe the Plumber in Amarillo. Send him some business, I'm told that he's an Obama guy. If his website takes off because of all this attention maybe he can switch from actual plumbing to an online plumbing advice column. Bob

The month began with Sarah Palin celebrating her campaign's close identification and long association with "Joe Six Pack," the mythic every man vision of America that he and they dream that they represent.

Then in last night's "debate" came "Joe the Plumber," a guy who claims that he wants to buy a business which "makes" 250k a year and he's worried about Obama's tax policies. Who's next, Joe Bananas, Joe Cool, Joe Mama?

Forgetting for the moment that I have strong suspicions that "Joe the Plumber" is a ringer. Yes, nefarious as it sounds I'm afraid that Joe may be, a not too carefully selected, and poorly rehearsed plant from the McCain camp. He was probably chosen by the same group of desperately drunken political geniuses who trotted out Sarah Palin.

It has been said in some quarters that the "plan" Nixon alluded to, but never spelled out, was a nutty scheme (nutty schemes seem to abound in the halls of power) to have Kissinger convince the Russians that Tricky Dick was just batshit crazy enough to use nuclear weapons if the North Vietnamese would not come to the table and end the war on his terms.

History has shown that Nixon was nuts enough. So was and is, Henry the K, but the Vietnamese, after fighting a collection of Yankees, French, Japanese and Chinese among others, for uncountable hundreds of years weren't impressed with new and improved threats, from new and unimproved enemies.

They had been hardened over the centuries to leave early for work knowing that they might have to bury their dead or rebuild a bridge or two on the way. They would not be cowed by threats of death and destruction; death and destruction was all around them, forever.

What I saw and heard:

Joe Biden was a picture of confidence and self assurance. He took the stage with over three decades of experience in the Senate and his stature as one of the preeminent legislators of the latter half of the twentieth century and a key policy maker in the current one, was inescapable.

For the most part he offered serious and thoughtful answers to the questions which were put to him and presented a solid supportive picture of the Democratic ticket and their intentions in office.

He performed his first major job as vice president admirably if cautiously. Although I saw his anger rise several times when confronted with Palin's distortions of his and Obama's records, and her flatulent cutesiness, he kept it under control. He proved that he belongs in my White House on either position of the ticket.

Sarah Palin, doggone it, what can I say, golly, wasn't she just precious, the way she read talking points and sound bites to the cameras. She was a model of right wing Church Lady womanhood, all lip gloss and sly winks to the camera, and jeepers she was so folksy, reminded me of the time Aunt Martha fell in the privy at the family reunion.

She was the Stepford Vice President. I thought her delivery to be robotic, canned, and obviously drilled into her by rote.

Compared to the calm seriousness and substance of Joe Biden she offered the ultimate pop cultural spam of what modern Republicans pass off as political discourse.

She also pronounces the word nuclear exactly like George Bush: NuKUler. I find that single fact eerily and enormously frightening. Hell, she even cribbed on Ronald Reagan, "Now Joe, there you go again."

Palin could not be a more transparent fraud. In that area she needs no practice; she learned the curtsy and dimples shtick in the beauty pageant business.

I do not want this woman anywhere near my White House. Alaska is not far enough away, maybe we can get her a place on Big Diomede so she can see Russia for the first time.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

I think that single decision shows us who John Sidney III really is, reveals him more clearly than anything I have seen in this or his many previous failed campaigns.

His choice, as far as I have been able to determine, may have been partially forced upon him by the darker forces of neo-conservative Republican politics. The Roves and the Cheney's intend to rule from Mordor long after their official tenures are over in Washington. They need their Bushes, their McCains and Palins.

Forced though the choice may have been, McCain made it with a degree of public glee, of arrogance and cynicism that I have never personally witnessed in presidential politics in my tired old life.

As McCain says, in times of extreme crises like this we should suspend political debate and all this unseemly partisan electioneering and put Wall Street first.

There are a lot of people wearing Gucci shoes and Hermes neckties gathered in the halls of power right now, eagerly waiting for his assistance in the slicing of this historic pie of capitalist opportunity.

McCain, after all, has chips in the game and so do his people, it is important that he, and they, be in on the split. They, who did so much in their tireless, albeit well paid, efforts to deregulate the finance industry deserve to be in on the grim harvest. These are truly historic times.

I have tried to remember, yes, it comes back to me now, Lincoln campaigned against his own Republican party as a National Unionist at the height of the Civil War until he hammered out a deal with Fremont and defeated McClellan, an unenthusiastic Democrat, who he had relieved from command years before. I don't remember Lincoln running home to avoid public political debate.

Wilson ran a bitter campaign against Hughes during the darkest hours of the "war to end all wars,"
when American neutrality and our imminent involvement in Europe was the central issue. Woody did not run home to avoid political debate, he campaigned to victory.

FDR fought serious health problems and a tenacious Republican named Tom Dewey in 1944 amidst the Allied invasion in France and as a prelude to the "Battle of the Bulge." He did not avoid political debate with cynical and self serving calls to "put country first." He solidified his party and beat Dewey's republican ass although the campaign probably hastened his death.

I know John McCain to be a liar of the first order. I know John McCain to be a panderer and a pimp for corporate, religious, and political interests that he believes will assist him on his road to what he mistakenly believes is power. John McCain is "a fraud."

I have read that John McCain was dubbed "Songbird" by his fellow POWs. I now believe that John Sidney McCain is an unconscionable opportunist as well as a political coward. In my book he is "unfit for command."

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

"I believe if we had, and would, keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. That they design and want. That they fight and work for...and not the American style, which they don't want. Not one crammed down their throats by the Americans." David M Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps 1958-1963

A war in Afghanistan that is now losing ground held only tenuously and shedding blood at the highest level since it began seven long years ago.

The stalled fiasco in Iraq, a war that has nearly ruined our armed forces by stretching them, year after year, on the rack of a bloody and unending futility.

A foreign policy of swagger and boast, diplomacy and firm negotiation recklessly discarded and replaced with bluster, threats and sanctions that harm only the innocent and fuel the fires of radical hatred resulting in the creation of more enemies.

In Iran, Georgia and Russia in Europe and Asia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Honduras in the Americas, sabers are rattled, coups are plotted, gauntlets are thrown and the seeds are sown for another generation of war, of poverty, of  instability and chaos and profits for those control the game.

This is the Bush Foreign Policy, this is the Republican Foreign Policy, this is the McCain Foreign Policy, and this is the Neo Conservative Foreign Policy. This is the "Project for a New American Century," whose motto seems to be "Peace never, peace nowhere."

They will co opt the message of the Democrats at every opportunity and swift boat anyone who gets in their way. They will, as in the past, use the politics of personal destruction, of sneer and smear, a style that has become a necessity in modern Republican strategy as it so purely reflects the mentality and ethos of a sizable and increasing fraction of their base.

The party that has come to reflect the endemic racism, sexism, religious intolerance, and the rapidly widening schism between economic classes in this country has nowhere else to turn. They have become directors of a noisy, and potentially dangerous lynch mob. A criminal mob acting to serve the interests of an out of control business culture and an irrational priesthood that sees the face of God in its own self righteousness.

Republicans dare not run on their party's record of governance over the last eight years. The record is abysmal and they know it. As much as possible that record will be kept in the dark dank shadows with the sordid history of the modern Republican Party. It will be hidden in that shameful place where they will store Bush, Cheney, their denial of health care to America's children, denial of decent wages to America's workers, our terribly fractured economy, serious unemployment, two misguided and mismanaged wars and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents.

The headline tops a story by NYT writers Gretchen Morgenson and Charles Duhigg which, like so many articles on finance, quickly leaves me floundering in a murky wake of economic jargon, acronyms, and boardroom corporatese.

I understand the gist of what I read, though I would have opted for a different headline, something along the lines of "CEOs and CFOs of Major American Financial Companies Lie to Regulators, Shareholders and Public, Throw Markets into Chaos, Cost Taxpayers Tens of Billions."

I am I admit on medication.

I realize that writers and reporters seldom write the headlines that lead their stories and shouldn't be held to account for them. That duty is performed by headline writers under the supervision of editors who are answerable to the corporate structure and its advertisers.

Writers pen their stories under the same supervision and are answerable to the same powers and advertisers, hence we get stories which fail to state the case clearly, as does my substitute headline.

I am not currently working in the "news biz."

The story of the private collapse and public bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac which follows is well written, as we usually expect from the "Times," and informative, to a point. However it neglects to tell the whole story or to truly point us in the direction of the "real story."

"It is the quality of patriotism to be jealous and watchful, to observe all secret machinations, and to see publick dangers at a distance. The true lover of his country is ready to communicate his fears, and to sound the alarm, whenever he perceives the approach of mischief. But he sounds no alarm, when there is no enemy; he never terrifies his countrymen till he is terrified himself. The patriotism, therefore, may be justly doubted of him, who professes to be disturbed by incredibilities..." Samuel Johnson

The stage is covered with American flags, draped and propped and perched everywhere, to the left, to the right and behind the speaker's dais, which itself is covered with flag bunting and a covey of microphones nearly buried in a spreading nosegay of ... flags.

The wall at the rear of the stage is covered by a gigantic "Old Glory" and every participant, from the high and the mighty to the clipboard bearers, coffee servers and floor sweepers wears a flag on his lapel or near her heart. Ubiquitous is the term that comes to mind, sleazy is another, frightening yet another.

The people, the true believers in the audience are waving smaller versions of the national banner in a crazed, grinning, drooling frenzy of nationalistic sentiment, carrying signs, and banners, wearing shirts, hats, and neckties on which the same theme is repeated, ad nauseum projectillum.
All in all, there are more flags in attendance at this rally than swastikas at Hitler's lovely Nuremberg torch light soirées of the thirties.

Such is the face of American politics, American policy, in the 21st century, lurid, self righteous and jingoistic, the face of rabid, belligerent sanctimony.

There is significant part of this crowd as all the throngs in attendance at these events who wish that, along with the flags there would be represented, with equal prominence, the cross, the symbol of the God that they believe has led them to ravage large portions of the world, to slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocents, to maim, to cripple and traumatize, and to displace millions more, to drive hundreds of millions of others to despise with a nearly everlasting hatred, the very symbols that they display in their leering, insensate, mocking pride.

Sorry, the question was rhetorical and asked out of personal frustration with the evil festering stew of lies, theft, brutality and domestic and international piracy that this administration has created in the place of what was once the USA.

No, I'm not naive enough to believe that we were ever a perfect country, free of guilt from participation in many and various Machiavellian schemes and plots over the last two centuries, the influence of the power lusts of private wealth have always had far too much influence in our public affairs to allow us to avoid responsibility for the results of our contributions to the general level of human misery. We have committed serious crimes against people in places as varied as Vietnam and Chile, and as far apart in space and time as Nicaragua and Iran.

In the generally business driven efforts to support the interests of entities such as United Fruit, Chiquita Banana, Anaconda, various oil giants, mining companies, and financial institutions we have gone to bat for tin horn dictators in Iran, Cuba, Chile, Cambodia and in other places to numerous to name here.  Even the Mafia found support in the efforts to prop up the fascist pig Batista against communist pig Castro.

The "distinguished jurist" told them in open hearings and in written communications that he could not call waterboarding "torture," and reportedly, pravately expressed his fear that doing so might open the gates for some executive department and military officials to lawsuits or criminal prosecution.

Notice here that what is important to this "distinguished jurist" is not the fact that the laws of the United States regarding the use of torture may have been violated by highly placed government officials, or that subordinates were directed to violate the law, but that those officials must somehow be shielded from civil or criminal sanction.