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”.

According to The Hill, Susan Bruce, a campaign blogger for New Hampshire Representative Carol Shea-Porter, was recently forced to resign after she raised the legitimate concern about Sarah Palin’s abysmal public treatment of her children, including her down syndrome afflicted son, Trig:

“I don’t think that putting a scarlet letter on your own teenager and throwing her to the wolves in front of the whole world is something to be proud of [and] I don’t think that using a special needs baby as a prop on late night TV appearances is a value to crow about.”

Since being selected to the Republican Ticket, Sarah Palin has made a continuous spectacle of appearing at public speaking events with Trig. Likewise, Sarah Palin has cast her unwed, pregnant, teenage daughter Bristol into the spotlight in an attempt to emphasise her “traditional family” values.

There is a gratuitous example of misplaced outrage. The GOP’s complaint was that such comments wouldn’t be permissible against Barack Obama. And they’re right.

Complaints about Barack Obama aren’t permissible because Barack Obama is a responsible parent who keeps his children in school, where they belong.

The LAST thing that a pregnant teenager and a mentally challenged infant deserve is the agenda-driven overexposure to the stress of a political campaign. If the Palin Family was being investigated by Social Services, the Palin children would have been placed in protective custody by now.

Susan Bruce was forced to resign because, in the absence of social services, somebody had to raise these legitimate concerns about Sarah Palin’s parenting skills. And in the abscense of the GOPs family values, somebody had to be martyred for doing so.

According to The New York Times, a recent Republican fund raising reception managed to suck more than a million dollars out of the hands of hundreds of Hillary Clinton’s fair-weather supporters, some of whom traitorously contributed more than twenty five thousand dollars of their blood money to John McCain.

This disgusting display of misplaced activism is evident that there continues to be a serious problem with self-professed Hillary Clinton “supporters” naively backstabbing her and her feminist values in order to support Sarah Palin.

In flocking to Sarah Palin, they seem unable to imagine what rights women would have achieved had the womens’ suffrage movement had been led by a beauty pageant contestant instead of Susan B. Anthony.

They also seem unable to see see how this same standard applies to modern feminism. They are convinced that a woman whom John McCain chose as his running mate solely for her beauty is more qualified to carry the Feminist Torch than women who have dedicated their entire lives to advancing women’s rights.

Many of these women chose to betray Hillary Clinton because Barack Obama, the candidate she has endorsed and who most closely supports her legacy, defeated her in the Democratic Primary race.

In a spiteful and naive attempt to hurt Barack Obama, these women are putting their energy and resources behind a candidate with a legacy of regressing, not advancing, womens’ rights.

If women take offense to their gender being the butt of jokes, then I am saddened that the profound irony of their stupidity is lost on these women.

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.

Sarah Palin, who supports overturning Roe vs wade, opposes birth control (even among married couples), opposes Abortion in all cases including rape and incest, and who, as Governor of Alaska, forced rape victims to pay for their own rape kits has decried Barack Obama’s pro-choice views as “extreme”, according to a recent article on CNN.com.

As evidenced by the arranged marriage of her pregnant teenage daughter Bristol to Levi Johnson, the boy who knocked her up, Sara Palin offers only one solution to preventing unwanted pregnancies: Shotgun Weddings. Rather than suffer the embarrassment of a bastard grandchild, force your daughter into a marriage built only on lust.

This “Shotgun Wedding” abortion view is a relic from the 1800s, so it’s no wonder that modern concepts such as women’s rights, sex education, birth control, and black politicians seem extreme to Sarah Palin.

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 talking about the economy at a rally in Pennsylvania today, John McCain had a rather amusing gaff:

“Across this country, this is the agenda I have set before my fellow prisoners.“

As I see it, there are five possible explanations for this gaff:

1) He had been hoping to invoke his experience as a Prisoner of War (yet again) as one his credentials sometime during this speech.

2) This gaff is the result of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The traumatic experience of campaigning, especially after last night’s rhetorical beat-down at the hands of Barack Obama, has been stressful enough to trigger random flashbacks. These flashbacks, in turn, are the subconcious basis for his Freudian Slip.

3) John McCain shares Ronald Reagan’s senility in addition to his values.

4) This is the latent result of Brain Damage that John McCain suffered during the Vietnam War.

5) This is a desperate cry for help, because Cindy McCain and Sarah Palin have secretly conspired to hold him hostage and force him to run for President.

Evidently, the prospect of either himself or Sarah Palin having to participate in a serious debate with the Democratic Candidates scares John McCain to death.

Yesterday, we found out that John McCain used the excuse of Obama’s proposed bi-partisan effort to address the Wall Street Crisis to delay Friday’s upcoming Presidential Debate.

Now we learn that John McCain also wants to indefinitely postpone Sarah Palin’s upcoming Vice-Presidential debate against Joe Biden. This, after the McCain campaign begged the Commission on Presidential Debates (who is sponsoring the Vice Presidential debate) to grant Sarah Palin a de facto handicap.

Specifically, the McCain campaign pleaded that the candidates be restricted to a short, question-and-answer style debate with few opportunities for the candidates to directly respond to each other. This debate style helps Sarah Palin by sheltering her from the dangers presented by  having to stray from pre-scripted talking points.

I’m sure that Sarah Palin’s fear of an open debate with Joe Biden has nothing to do with her request to have her financial records suppressed until the day after the Vice-Presidential Debate.

John McCain and Sarah Palin fear having a free and open debate with the Democrats because they know that such a debate would expose them as the poor option that they are. There

Trauma Bonding is the sociological effect where, in traumatic times, victims of that trauma will cling to the most convenient source of authority as a means of protection, regardless of that entity’s connection to the source of that trauma. This is the root cause of Stockholm Syndrome.

9/11 is perhaps the most evident example of this. By constantly reminding people of 9/11 in the run up to the 2004 election, the GOP was able to remind Americans of the trauma that the threat of terrorism causes them to feel. Out of a misplaced sense of desperation, Americans (or at least, the gullible ones) clung to perceived authority of the Bush Administration, even thought it was ultimately responsible for the 9/11 attacks in the first place.

The GOP is doing it again, but this time to women. After centuries of striving for empowerment, Hillary Clinton narrowly failed to grasp the Democratic Nomination. This feeling of being snubbed has been so traumatic to many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters that, out of desperation, they’re clinging to Sarah Palin as a feminism-related authority figure.

This is just what the GOP hoped for. The GOP is using trauma bonding (and the prospect of a female Vice President) to seduce women into supporting a misogynist Presidential candidate, his pied-piping running mate, and the historically anti-feminist political party that they serve.

Anybody who has tried to play the “family values” drinking game during televised McCain/Palin rallies has probably found themselves in a disappointing state of sobriety.

Why are they silent on this usually exciting buzz phrase? Because to repeat it would expose them to the media’s embarrassing spotlight and the hypocrisy it would reveal.

Let’s expose John McCain first. Carol, his devoted starter wife, was nearly killed in a car wreck on Christmas Eve, 1969. This near-death experience left her permanently scarred and crippled, despite the 3 years of agonizing surgery she had to endure. Her modelesque beauty destroyed, Carol nonetheless withheld the tragic news of her accident from John in order to help him survive his torturous internment in a Vietcong death camp.

Upon his return from Vietnam, John McCain was horrified to discover that his trophy wife had become a hideous gimp. He thanked Carol for her compassion by cheating on, and then abandoning, her and their three children for his new mistress, whose comparative beauty, youth, and ridiculous wealth he had somehow come to appreciate.

So yes, here are John McCain’s “family values”. And John McCain seems to share my bleak assessment of them. Or at least, he did when he wrote the following in his memoir: “my marriage’s collapse was attributable to my own selfishness and immaturity…I cannot escape blame”.