Barak Obama is not a muslim!

I've seen news items in the past few days wherein Americans were interviewed about their support for McCain and (shudder) Palin. Several people told the interviewer that they can't vote for Obama because he's a Muslim. They said it with a straight face, and I honestly don't think they were kidding. They reall, truly, honestly were that stupid.

Leaving aside the moral issue of allowing people with such tiny brains to vote and potentially decide the fate of the world economy, I just wanted to make one, final, pre-election statement.

BARAK OBAMA IS NOT A MUSLIM YOU MORONS !!!

It might help, I think, if everyone in America whose IQ is in double digits or higher, would write those words in large letters on a wall somewhere for the benefit of your cognitively challenged neighbours.

Has John McCain Stopped Abusing His Wife?

Here's something very, very strange. Over on the Huffington Post is a piece about a Baptist Minister, Marty Parrish, who stood up at a 'town hall' meeting and asked McCain whether he had actually called his wife a 'c**t' as alleged in Cliff Schecter's book, The Real McCain. Schecter alleges that in 1992, McCain angrily called his wife a "trollop" and a "c**t" in front of aides and reporters. The quote from Schecter's book, which is to be released next month, can be seen on The Raw Story e-zine and goes like this:

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain's intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.

In the book, Schecter is making the case that McCain has a really, really bad temper - an anger management problem, you might say - and that voters would be unwise to put such an unstable personality into the Oval Office.

If this is true, I'd be just as worried about what it says about McCain's attitude to women as I would be about his twitchy finger on the nuclear button. Women who wear makeup are 'trollops' it seems. His own wife is a 'c**t' in his eyes, it seems. (Does that go for Palin, too?) Sounds more like the Taliban than an American politician.

If you're of the Chistian loony persuasion yourself, you might like to wonder what the wedding vows mean to a man who would humiliate his wife in public like that (love? honour? cherish?) or how much charity there is in a man who is well-known for this kind of vitriolic, bullying outburst against subordinates. And, of course, there is the question: if he's like this in public, what's he like in private?

According to Parrish, it is such questions about McCain's mental stability and character that prompted him to stand up and ask the question that no newspaper or TV channel dare ask. I'm sure the McCain publicity machine (as vicious and cynical a group of people as I have ever come across) will paint this gutsy Baptist Minister as a deranged trouble-maker. For all I know, he is. But why is nobody else asking the question? What has happened to the American media during this campaign?

A Pig With Lipstick On

Maybe I shouldn't get so upset about American politics. I mean, I'm living in Australia. It's not my problem, right?

Wrong. The half-wit they have as President at the moment has led the whole world into recession after screwing up the USA's economy about as badly as is humanly possible. He has stalled and delayed everyone's attempts to tackle climate change, leaving us teetering on the edge of irreversible climate damage. And he has dragged the West into an inexcusable invasion of Iraq, killing tens of thousands, ramping up global terrorism, and encouraging countries like Iran and North Korea to push ahead with nuclear deterrence.

Of course, the half-wit is on his way out. Praise be to the twenty-second amendment!

Yet look at who is lining up to replace him: John McCain and Sarah Palin. McCain might not be quite as loony, or as stupid as Bush but he's still loony and stupid and has been a firm supporter of Bush for many years as he climbed the slippery pole to political power. As for Sarah Palin, she seems to be even more loony and even more stupid than Bush himself. Her political views are to the right of Genghis Khan's. Her personal morality is suspect to say the least. (Did she fake a pregnancy - i.e. lie to everybody who voted for her - to cover her teenage daughter's indiscretions?) And there is a distinct possibility that she has committed a gross abuse of power by allegedly pressuring Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan to fire her sister's husband before sacking him when he wouldn't. (I suppose Monegan is lucky she didn't shoot him. She loves firing guns and killing things. She thinks it's fun.)

These people are not just ignorant (did you know that Palin has never travelled outside the USA except to visit US troops in Kuwait?) , they are not just religious bigots (do you know that McCain is a Baptist? that Palin wants Creationism taught in schools as if it was science?), they are not just cruel and uncaring (do you know Palin does not support abortion for any reason whatsoever?) they are not just cynical (look at all that deliberate misunderstanding of Obama's 'pig with lipstick' comment), they are completely and utterly sordid in the way they clamour for and abuse political power.

Yet there is a good chance the American people will elect them, a good chance this pair of sordid, stupid, uncaring, unpleasant, ignorant bigots will be running the USA in a few months.

How low can a country sink?

Is Sarah Palin a Liar?

Barak Obama is right to say that it is wrong to politicise his opponents' family problems. That kind of politics is about as low as it gets. However, I think he's missing the bigger picture here. Sarah Palin's 17-year-old, unmarried daughter is five months pregnant and that's a shame and, frankly, who cares? She's probably a very screwed up young woman - what with a mother who is in politics and who has such nasty, Christian conservative opinions. It should, of course, be a lesson to Sarah Palin that her approach to reducing the number of teenage pregnancies - encouraging abstinence, not teaching children about sex, and keeping contraceptives away from them - just doesn't work. However, we'll let that one pass too.

The real issues is whether Palin pretended to be pregnant with what may or may not be her fourth child, to disguise the fact that it was actually her daughter's baby. This piece of information is one that is of crucial importance to the American voters. If her last pregnancy was a fake, then Sarah Palin is a liar and a deceitful person. She is someone who believes that fraud is acceptable. She is someone who believes that to avoid embarrassing herself and her family, she is justified in deceiving her constituents.

Politicians who preach honesty and integrity deserve to be dragged through the streets and pelted with rotten fruit - or the tabloid press equivalent - if they don't hold themselves to the same standards they want to impose on everyone else.

With any luck, running as John McCain's VP will sink her career and also McCain's.

McCain Makes A Hideous Mistake

I've mentioned before what an idiot presidential wannabe John McCain is. Well this week he rose to new heights of folly by choosing Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running-mate.

What makes a man - even a man who can't think straight - choose a woman who is known as 'the barracuda' to help him run the country? Why, when America is reeling from the right wing fundamentalism of George Bush Jr., would he think that picking a tough-minded, right-wing ideologue would help him win the hearts and minds of the voters. This woman has a lifetime membership of the National Rifle Association for Heaven's sake! She likes shooting things - living things! She thinks it's fun to kill animals! (Not foetuses though - she's a rabid anti-abortionist, of course. But I imagine she approves of the death penalty so she won't mind killing grown-ups. She definitely thinks the Bush Administration is being to soft on polar bears by declaring them a protected species and would prefer the great hairy things not to be around eating fish and hanging out while her friends the oil companies ravage Alaska.)

Let's face it, McCain is no spring chicken. If anyone is dumb enough to vote for McCain, this woman could become President!

Can I make a plea to all my American readers: for your own sakes, don't vote McCain. Now that he has this Palin creature gnashing and slavering at his heels, his presidency could turn into something even worse than Bush's. And if you don't believe me, talk to anyone who was alive in the UK during the reign of Margaret Thatcher. It was a dark, dark time and I still shudder at the memory of it. Thatcher was a vicious thug in a skirt, a monster that wore lipstick. She crushed civil liberties wherever she found them. She trampled on democratic rights. She terrorised and politicised the civil service. She took the country to war. She was the worst Prime Minister ever to blight the British Isles.


















Don't, please don't, put a woman like that in a position where she might become President of the USA. You will regret it.

Thou Shalt Not Suffer A Herbalist To Live

Does US Presidential candidate John McCain believe in witches, I wonder?

I ask because on Tuesday night, local time, a mob rampaged around a district in Kenya with a list of suspected witches burning down their houses. They burnt 30 houses in all, killing 11 women in total, most of them between 70 and 90 years old. And it got me thinking.

It's always shocking to me when people let their fantastic beliefs get so out of hand that they start killing people. It must have been even more shocking when Christians were doing the same thing some years ago in Europe and the US. (The last execution of a witch that I know of in Europe was in 1738 when two German women were executed. However, the last bit of witch-hunting I know of in the West was December 1999, when a student in Oklahoma, USA was suspended from school accused of casting spells. Of course, it still goes on in Africa and the Middle East – but then, what doesn't?)

So back to my question. If John McCain is elected president, can we expect a more vigorous clamp-down on witchcraft in the home of the brave? I ask because John McCain – one of the saner Republican politicians as far as I can tell - is a Baptist.

This means, for instance, that he believes, “The Scriptures, consisting of the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, are the infallible Word of God. They were written by holy people of God inspired by the Holy Spirit and have supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct.” (This quotation is from the Baptist credo as approved by their 1979 Assembly, amended to gender inclusive language following 2002 and 2003 Assemblies.) And therefore, this means he must follow the injunction in Exodus 22:18, namely, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.'

I've mentioned some of the more ludicrous passages from the Bible before, so I won't dwell on how screwed up you'd have to be to believe this nonsense. Let me instead use their creation myth as an example. Since McCain believes that Genesis is “the infallible Word of God”, he therefore, I suppose, believes what Creationists believe – that the world was made by a magical being sometime around six thousand years ago. Human beings were made then, along with all the animals, all the plants, our planet, in fact, everything. Fair enough. Lots of loonies believe such things. However, consider this, McCain is also an advocate of reducing carbon emissions to help mitigate human-induced climate change. How does he square this with the fact that most of the evidence for climate change depends very heavily on the assumption that the Earth is rather more than 6,000 years old? I can't imagine. Even the last ice-age – something extremely recent in geological terms – ended 13,000 years ago. For Pete's sake, the original settlement of his own continent happened more than seven thousand years before McCain believes the world was created!

So, if a man like this, steeped in magical fantasies, who regularly talks to invisible beings (I don't know if they talk back to him), who can think ten contradictory things before breakfast, were to become head of state of the United States of America, might he not feel it is his duty to persecute witches? It seems quite plausible that a man with such beliefs might do any crazy thing.

Incidentally, there is an interesting article by Alexei Kondratiev on the Proteus Library site suggesting Exodus 22:18 was mistranslated and that it is 'herbalists' not witches who are the bad guys that God wants us to persecute. Wow, I think if I was an American herbalist, I would definitely vote for the other guy!