At first, I got a rush of journalistic adrenaline upon learning something new about the mysterious McCain son, now deployed in Iraq. But then I decided not to investigate further, because, in truth, most people are kinda bored by who is screwing whom, and who is taking drugs. Most people figured out a long time ago that sex and drugs are a part of life, for better or for worse.

Republicans, as hopefully a majority of Americans have finally figured out, are for the most part a collection of hypocrites, thugs and pious thieves. That is why they verge on being not old-fashioned conservatives, but American fascists.

Sinclair Lewis wrote about fascism in America in his great Depression-era novel, It Can’t Happen Here. Today’s Bush Republicans harken back to those dark days. They represent the Know Nothingism that has always been a component of the Republican Party.

Mind you, a few individual Republicans of the old-fashioned kind are honest, decent human beings, who even played the game with a strong sense of justice and fair play.

In It Can’t Happen Here, such a man is the skinflint old Republican New England newspaper editor who is the protagonist of the novel. He becomes the hero of the novel as well. Despite being a conservative Republican, Doremus Jessup ends up in the concentration camps along with trade union leaders, socialists and Jews because he has that elemental sense of decency.

The GOP’s mantra has always been about lower taxes and letting the market decide most things. Despite their pious denials, they have hated Social Security ever since Roosevelt created it during the Great Depression. Every campaign, they talk about how Social Security is such a failure and ought to be replaced by people investing in the Stock Market, which is a great way of making the powers that be on Wall Street richer than they already are, mostly at the expense of old-age pensioners.

As much as I always found this offensive as a political policy, you still could find an old-fashioned Republican here and there who believed such economic nonsense, but still had a genuinely real commitment to the grand experiment of individual liberty and real democracy that the American Revolution was all about. These old fashioned Republicans also idolized the founders of the Revolution, men like Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, who were the furthest thing from the Know Nothings, the Pilgrims, the religious fanatics who were this country’s earliest occupiers and missionaries. The deists, who later wrote the Constitution, knew of what they spoke, and had many very good reasons for going to such great pains to separate religion and state.

In the last decade, American politics has been transformed maybe forever by the ascending branch of the Bush-McCain wing of the Republican Party. Such decent men as some of the traditional old-fashioned Republicans have been banished. Without the constraints of decency and enlightenment, the GOP has turned brutal and ugly in disrobing the terrifying reality of American fascism. McCain may be a bit senile, but then so was Ronald Reagan, and it never seemed to hurt him. So it is not impossible that McCain could complete the total disrobing of America’s fascist state by giving it a signature perverse and ill-tempered turn, as the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and no one better complain.

When the pop singer Madonna linked McCain to Hitler at the beginning of a concert tour, you couldn’t tell it from the media, but behind that linking was a very valid intellectual question about the true nature of the beast we are facing.

I won’t presume to understand why America, with early leaders like Paine and Jefferson and Franklin, also had such a strong anti-intellectual side of its culture, a Know Nothing movement that worships ignorance over human intelligence. At the same time, America has racked up some of the greatest literary, scientific and musical accomplishments of mankind. I think it’s probably the struggle for the soul of the nation between the Enlightenment and the Dark Ages that still forms the dynamic of our society. While the Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution were deists, the original pilgrims were religious fanatics from the Cromwellian wars of England.

At a religious forum at an Orange County mega-church, Obama offered a brilliant analysis of the question of when life begins, consistent with the best thinking of science and theology. Without thinking at all, McCain quickly offered a Know Nothing answer that pleased only the simple minded and Know Nothings in the audience. Thoughtful politicians are antithetical to their mentality.

This is why the nation is at such a crossroads. Will it be a totalitarian society run for the convenience of the rich, or still a democratic society in which all people have a stake?

When you consider it, Bush has done an amazing thing. He has started a war, made everyone but the rich pay taxes for it, and caused a Depression all at the same time. The situation President Roosevelt inherited from Republican Herbert Hoover was simply the result of decades of thieving and stealing on Wall Street, which ushered in the Great Depression.

Bush has gone one further. He privatized his Iraq war - making his political cronies in the private army businesses multi-billionaires by creating unregulated militia unanswerable to the Constitution or even to God.

But most of all, he has created an economic collapse while the country is at war.

It is clear that the next President will face a nearly insolvable mess. Obama will face a situation not unlike that which Roosevelt inherited from Hoover. McCain is constitutionally incapable of doing that job because it was his kind of thinking which created the problem in the first place. The notion of McCain, who subscribes to the same bogus economics as Bush, would be a tragedy.

I mean, wasn’t it Lincoln who said you can only fool most of the people some of the time and never all the people all the time?

I am a bit of a cynic, so I broke out in a cold sweat. What if Bush’s chosen successor gets re-elected as the result of an October Surprise. Say Bush decides it’s time to bomb some convenient foreigners somewhere. What if on the domestic front, they are able to use their Diebold voting machines again, which are still around in some key states. You might remember that the machines left no paper trail in contested votes. They were purposely designed not to be double-checked. They were manufactured by an avid supporter of Bush by the name of Diebold who vowed to do everything he could to make Bush president. They are still in operation, although under a less embarrassing brand name—and apparently did their dirty work by undercounting metropolitan centers. Then there were other vote stealing methods perfected by the Republicans in Florida and Ohio. These could be put into employment again, I realized.

Despite the caterwauling by the Cheshire Cat grinning right wing as it proclaims how “liberal” the media is, the main stream media can be counted on to support whatever the right wing does. But mainstream media is losing its mojo, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt faced the same problem when he took over a collapsed economy from the Republicans - a fanatically right-wing press.

You can fight those feelings of despair that the forces of dark will once again successfully steal the election by keeping in mind what Lincoln said about how you can’t fool all the people all the time.

A McCain victory will mean America has descended to the level of a “Banana Republic,” an irony of sorts which might provide a bit of humor, but for the fact that for that moment of hilarity, we will be living in the kind of chaos which almost always is an excuse for the iron hand.

I don’t know McCain personally, but it would appear that McCain has a dysfunctional family, not surprising, considering that he obviously is a difficult old man. It is sickening to contemplate the possibility that the putrid candidate of the Republican Party could still somehow win in November—and complete the downward spiral of the American Empire begun by the most venal and corrupt administration in our short history.

I sometimes wonder if McCain and Bush were diabolically planted as Manchurian candidates to defeat this country? The Republican Party is their cover. I sometimes wonder about this, but ultimately reject the notion.

McCain was, as is famously known, a prisoner of war at the “Hanoi Hilton.” Everyone knows he came from a family of military aristocracy: his father, Admiral John McCain, Jr., was commander of the Pacific Fleet during the Vietnam War and his grandfather, John McCain, Sr., had commanded the aircraft carriers in the Pacific during World War II.

No one could have resisted the torture used against him. He ultimately signed a document saying he was a war criminal, but when he got home, he used that torture he had tried to endure to promote himself as a military genius of some sort.

When a famous general, Wesley Clark, suggested the obvious, namely that having been a prisoner of war does not make you a military strategist, the press acted as if he had verily proclaimed the righteousness of the Devil himself.

If I were in a conspiratorial mood, I would further weave McCain’s VP choice into the scenario. One of her classmates in Wasilla, Alaska, 8,000 denizens, claims Sarah Palin was a pothead who got Jesus, and then was elected mayor by the members of her church. She first made her mark by successfully leading a campaign against the town’s beloved librarian because she had books that described evolution. “Sarah Palin can’t stand scientists, whether they are trying to protect polar bears or spreading the ridiculous notion that the world is more than 4,000 years old,” he said.

I did not find Palin any more attractive when I learned that in the year 2000, the ambitious young lady, a former beauty queen contestant, also strongly supported the candidacy of Pat Buchanan, a Hitler praiser and an open anti-Semite whose ideology is clearly sympathetic to fascism in all its forms. You can excuse me if, despite her superficial attractiveness, she seems to me to be a brittle, hardened creature, who along with her fellow candidate, represents the dark side.

How pathetic a notion that the country that was once the leader in technology and science would be led by such a person? It almost makes you wonder if she is as well part of a Manchurian Candidate scenario, with the express purpose of bringing down the Empire.

But let’s be generous, and assume that the Bush-McCain ticket is not a very sophisticated “Manchurian Candidate” operation, merely the result of unusual massive corruption of historic levels, along with a corresponding amount of brutality and ignorance worship. This will leave you no choice but to pull the lever for Obama and Biden, for the sake of our souls and for the sake of our nation.

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