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”.

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 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.

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.

The Republican Party is actively trying to deprive hundreds of thousands of Americans of their right to vote by illegally purging them from voter rolls, according to a reports by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice and the Public Interest Group USPIRG (their reports are available here and here, respectively).

This disenfranchisement campaign, which is being undertaken by at least 19 State Governments, is in direct violation of Federal Laws that prohibit the purging of voter rolls within 90 Days of a Federal Election. Specific disenfranchisement tactics have also included erroneously listing voters as former convicts, mass flat-out purging, and in the case of Florida, mismailing letters to (black) voters and then using the “failure to deliver these letters” excuse to wipe them from voter rolls.

But all is not lost. Steal Back Your Vote is an organization dedicated to helping you guarantee your right to vote. They also have provided a comic book voters’ guide, which is available by clicking on the picture below