John McCain lost the election due to mistakes that are the hallmarks of failed High School Student Council Elections. These are four of the lessons that John McCain should have remembered from High School:

1: The Homecoming Queen is rarely a good candidate: high school kids are smart enough to realize that candidates whose main appeal is their image usually have neither the ability nor the desire to serve their community.  In choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain assumed that her image would outweigh her lack of substance. It didn’t.

2: Avoid brown-nosing the Administration: in high school, the candidate who publicly tows the Principal’s line at the students’ expense is destined to fail. By voting with President Bush against the interests of the American people 95% of the time, John McCain made just such an alignment.

3: Regular Kids resent Rich Kids and their followers: High School kids have little respect for rich kids. So when a rich kid tries to “get in” with the regular kids with the help of one of his followers, they both become social pariahs. In recruiting “Joe the Plumber” as his mascot, John McCain assumed that Joe would bolster his popularity with the middle class.

4: Don’t Play Dirty: playing dirty usually backfires and, additionally, makes a person look bad (worse) in the community. John McCain’s attempts to tie Barack Obama to terrorists, communists, extremists, and elitists had just that effect.

The Republican Party has spent the last few days in an awkward spiral of jingoism, as evidenced by a slew of controversial statements. Let’s review the events of the last few days:

Friday, 10/17:

Representative Michele Bachman (R-Minnesota) states that she is “very concerned that [Barack Obama] may have anti-American views”

Saturday, 10/18

Representative Robin Hayes (R- North Carolina) tells a crowd that “liberals hate real Americans that …believe in God.”

Sunday, 10/19

Sarah Palin levies a new line of attack against Barack Obama by implying that an Obama Presidency would be an “experiment with socialism”.

Tuesday, 10/21:

Sarah Palin is forced to apologize for earlier suggestions that some areas of the United States are “Pro-America”; and that, by association, other areas of the country are less patriotic.

My fellow Americans, this is NOT an isolated series of unrelated Gaffs. These gaffes are the embarrassing side-effect of the Republican Party’s mindset; that it can successfully use the tactics of Joseph McCarthy, a politician who gained power by publicly targeting individuals and groups as Anti-American, Communists, and Atheists.

Yes, these statements are evidence that the Republican Party is returning to the values of McCarthyism to help them win this election. They do, in fact, want to paint Barack Obama as a communist, but they can’t because they wouldn’t be taken seriously.

Instead, the Republican Party is exploiting politically convenient semantics; “socialism” is closely enough associated with “communism” to concern Americans.

What the Republican Party has risked by playing by Joseph McCarthy’s rules is the possibility of redefining the concept of the “Red Scare”.

John McCain has recently complained about YouTube’s policy of removing campaign videos that infringe upon copyright protection laws is unfair.

As John McCain sees it, removing these videos (which frequently use televised debate footage and pop songs before negotiating the rights to them) ’stifles free speech’.

John McCain has no right to cry about the fair usage in the Media. He didn’t see any problem in using songs by The Foo Fighters, Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Jackson Browne, Frankie Valli, Van Halen, and Heart without their permission.

In fact, the McCain Campaign continued to use Heart’s song “Barracuda” after they expressly asked him to stop, and Jackson Brown even had to sue the Republican Party to stop John McCain from using his song.

If John McCain wants to cry to youtube, perhaps he should listen to the pleas of the musicians he’s tried to exploit first.

Christopher Buckley, the son of the conservative icon William F Buckley, has resigned from The National Journal, the political journal that his father founded in 1955.

Mr. Buckley said he had “been effectively fatwahed by the conservative movement” after endorsing Barack Obama in a blog posting on TheDailyBeast.com.

In response to his endorsement of Barack Obama, conservatives bombarded Mr. Buckley with hate mail, both at the blog and at the National Review. In statements concerning his resignation, Mr. Buckley decried the conservatives’ difficulties in accepting ability and their “angry” discourse that followed his endorsement of Barack Obama.

As a final “Fuck You” to conservatives, Mr. Buckley spun Ronald Regan back at them by repeating his ironically appropriate quote: “I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me”.

Has anybody wondered why Levi Johnston, the boy who knocked up Sarah Palin’s teenage daughter Bristol, had to be forced into marriage?

The Troopergate Scandal has the answers: Sarah Palin will destroy anybody who crosses her family. While this may be admirable qualities for a mother, it’s a maniacally dangerous quality for a Vice President.

The “Troopergate” scandal concerns the Alaska State Legislature’s recent finding that Sarah Palin abused her power in firing of Walt Monegan , a public safety commissioner who refused to be pressured into firing Mike Wooten, a state trooper whose only crime was divorcing Sarah Palin’s sister.

The embarrassing ethics investigation leading up to this finding had been examining whether Sarah Palin’s Machiavellian vengeance against her former in-law constituted an abuse of power.

Now it looks as if Sarah Palin has made yet another man her bitch. Her newest castrato is her husband, Todd. In an effort to take a political bullet for his wife, Todd Palin recently decided that he had pressured Walt Monegan to fire Mike Wooten.

Sarah Palin was, according to her husband, “completely ignorant” of “his” attempts to ruin the career of the man who had divorced his wife’s sister. Todd Palin swears this despite the more than 3 dozen hostile phone calls that Walt Monegan received from “the Palins”; phone calls in which he was pressured to fire Mike Wooten.

On the bright side, The Troopergate Scandal does inspiring a solution to the war on terrorism in the event of a McCain/Palin presidency:

Have the CIA secretly bribes playas from Iraq to break the hearts of Sarah Palin’s remaining daughters. Sarah Palin will then nuke the whole Middle East to avenge them.

In a move that is sure to rattle Republicans more than Barack Obama’s misinterpreted “lipstick on a pig” comment, conservative columnist David Brooks decried Sarah Palin as a “fatal cancer to the Republican party”. He went on to say that, like George W. Bush, Sarah Palin prejudicially scorns not only liberal ideas, but ideas entirely. Continuing his criticism, he also added that Sarah Palin is “absolutely not ready to be president or vice president”.

Conversely, David Brooks praised Barack Obama as a “dazzling” intellectual with “tremendous powers of social perception”. Furthermore, Mr. Brooks admitted to being highly impressed by Barack Obama’s phenomenal ability to build a team of “the most impressive people in the Democratic party”, adding that the people Barack Obama has chosen are “exactly the people I think most of us would want to choose”.

Mr. Brooks also predicts a 9-Point Obama Victory this November.

It’s a powerful statement about the stability and the electability of the Republican Party when its former mouthpieces are abandoning The SS. GOP. Perhaps they know something that the rest of the Party doesn’t.