Heck of a Mess

The thing that scares me most about McCain/Palin is they are frighteningly similar to Bush/Cheney, only reversed. McCain is as hawkish as Cheney, only now he'd be President. Ditto, the economy. If you liked the last 8 years, vote for McCain/Palin. If not, don't.

The thing that scares me about Obama/Biden is not that they are too radical, but that they are both too Establishment in their thinking. On the one hand, this is somewhat reassuring that adults will be back in charge. But I think the problems facing us as a nation and the world are going to require a lot of outside-of-the-box thinking that I'm not sure that I see in the Democratic ticket.

We are closer than most people think to losing our superpower status in the world. The world is so disgusted with our national behavior and performance--politically, economically, and militarily--they may just turn against us, and we could then fall a lot harder and farther than most people alive today can comprehend. As Paul Krugman keeps saying, unless we turn things around, we're on the road to becoming 'a banana republic with nukes.'

Furthermore, we are close to hitting the wall of an ecological crisis, that will require the greatest cooperation the world has ever known if we are to escape in one piece. We've most likely peaked in world oil production, which will cause all kinds of problems. Right behind that is the still looming issue of world conflict, nuclear war and WMD terrorism.

We cannot return to business as usual of the last century, if we are going to survive as a civilization in any recognizable sense.

So I will vote for Obama/Biden, because they are obviously the better choice (which I'm going to elaborate on in a future series of posts). But I sure hope that they are ready to do the creative, and even 'radical' (as in, 'going to the root'), thinking that the next era is going to be forcing upon us. Because we are in a heck of a mess.