Mark Izzo

Today Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated as the forty-fourth President of the United States.  In the coming weeks and months we’ll all have a chance to analyze and critique the decisions made and the policies undertaken by the new president.  There will be questions about his patriotism, his experience, or lack thereof; Some will even question whether or not he was born in this country and deserves to hold its highest elected office.  There will be endless interviews with supporters and detractors alike; an old black woman, weeping with joy at what this moment means to her, what it would have meant to her mother.  A man scoffing at the fact that Obama was a mere state legislator a few short years ago.  It will be the best  day of some lives and the worst of others.

And people will talk about the ceremonies themselves; “Could you believe how cold it was?”,  “I loved Michelle’s dress”, “Really? I hated it!”.  And what about Obama’s speech?  “It was great”, “I expected more”.  “Wasn’t it funny when Obama and the Chief Justice screwed up the oath of office?”, “That piece John Williams arranged was good”, and “Who the hell was that awful poet?”, “I know! But Aretha sounded awesome.”

And then there’ll be the talk about Bush.  What he did wrong, what he did right, will history look on his presidency with kinder eyes or ones more cruel?

All these things should be talked about…but they can wait till tomorrow.  Today we watched one man turn over the keys to the greatest nation on earth to another.  We watched this happen for the forty-fourth time in the history of our country.  Despite economic failure, two wars, the shadow of terrorism, and the fearful uncertainty of the future, the ritual happened again.  It still works.

Inauguration Day is always a good day to be an American.

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An Associated Press story that appeared in the Boston Globe this week reports that a Catholic priest in South Carolina is telling parishioners not to take communion if they voted for Barack Obama…No, seriously, he did.

The Rev. J. Scott Newman has said that voting for Obama “constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil.”  Boy, and I thought Obama was just a socialist-communist-terrorist Muslim, but I never would have voted for him if I knew he was intrinsically evil.  Specifically, the good reverend’s issue seems to be Obama’s pro-choice stance, about which he had this to say:

“Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exists constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil, and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ’s Church and under the judgment of divine law. Persons in this condition should not receive Holy Communion until and unless they are reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation.”

 To my knowledge Barack Obama has never performed an abortion himself, he just supports a woman’s right to choose that option if she wishes, and according to Rev. Newman this makes anyone who even supported Obama ineligible to receive communion.  Someone should ask the reverend if the Catholic priests who sexually abused children over and over again, or their superiors who knew about their crimes and did nothing, should be banned from taking communion.  Because last time I checked, they weren’t.

Reverend Newman’s reprehensible attempt to inject religion into politics and intimidate his congregation is just the latest in a long string of things the Catholic Church should be ashamed of.

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Barack Obama won last night in a landslide over Republican challenger John McCain, 349-147 electoral votes.  For the first time in history this country has elected an African American to it’s highest political office.  The election was easy; now comes the hard part.

With an economy swirling down the toilet, two separate shooting wars, the beginnings of a new cold war with Russia, and the threat of Islamic Fundamentalism rampant in the world, the real question is:  Who the hell wants to be President?  Under the best of circumstances you have to be slightly mentally ill to put yourself and your family through an agonizing eighteen month ordeal like the one faced by presidential candidates, let alone the circumstances facing them today.  I for one believe that the very fact that someone would want to be President shows they are mentally unfit for the job.

Nevertheless, now that Obama has what he wanted most, the Presidency of the United States, what will he do with it?  Will he live up to every paranoid right-wing radio show host’s assertion that he is a Communist, a Marxist, a Socialist?  Or will he be the answer the radical liberal left-wing’s prayers and prove that he truly can change the environment and reverse the effects of global warming single handed?

FDR got most of the New Deal passed in his first hundred days in office, what about you, Barack?  Don’t get me wrong.  My sincere congratulations to President-elect Barack Obama, but the interview process is over.  The job starts now.

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I just got through watching John McCain on Fox News Sunday and I got a little nostalgic for the John McCain of old.  What happened to John McCain the war hero?  John McCain of the Straight Talk Express?  John McCain the stand-up guy who’d take it on the chin and admit when he was wrong?

I don’t know, but that John McCain is nowhere to be found.  He’s been replaced by a bitter old man who’ll stop at nothing to become President of the United States.  He calls Barack Obama a socialist because he wants to raise taxes on the wealthy, but insists that using $700 billion tax dollars to bail out Wall Street isn’t.  He called the pre-recorded phone call attacks made on him in the 2000 election despicable but has since hired the very same person that ran that program to attack Barack Obama’s relationship to Bill Ayers.  If you didn’t know anything about Obama’s connection to Ayers, (as most people who are getting these automated calls undoubtedly don’t) you’d think that Obama had been sitting right next to him, handing him bomb making parts.  When called on these things McCain simply shrugs his shoulders and says, “Well, it’s true.”

It looks like McCain is going to lose this election, and when he does I think he might have a little trouble looking at himself in the mirror.  And maybe, given time, the old John McCain, the one we knew so well, might be back.

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Well the 2008 presidential debate season is officially over and fight fans everywhere finally got to sees some blood.

Bob Schieffer gets an A-plus for his job of keeping things lively and actually forcing the two candidates to not only answer the given questions, but also engage one another.  In fact, at times he seemed to be more instigator than moderator, goading Obama and McCain into verbal sparring.  As always, his demeanor was professional as he invited each candidate to respond to allegations made by the other, but reading between the lines one could hear him actually saying, “You gonna let him get away with that?”

A good portion of the evening was spent talking about “Joe the Plumber” referencing a You Tube video of Obama talking to, well, a plumber named Joe.  McCain latched onto Joe, doing a good job of putting a face on the average American, but it wore thin quickly and started to seem a little surreal.

I’d have to score this one a draw, if only because McCain didn’t score the knockout blow he desperately needed to give him some juice in the home stretch.  He did land one great shot when Obama tried, again, to depict him as the second coming of George W. Bush:

Sen. Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.

Great line, but too little too late, in my opinion. 

19 days to go…

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With only twenty-one days to go until the election tonight’s final debate at Hofstra University is John McCain’s last chance to close a steadily increasing gap between himself and Barack Obama.  With some pundits putting the over-under on Obama at 300 electoral votes, McCain is in need of a serious Deus ex Machina.

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Let me start off by saying that last night’s presidential debate was, in a word, boring.

Which is odd, because as I look back on my notes, most of the questions were pretty good.  And most of the answers weren’t horrible.  What really ruined it, though, was that idiotic format they chose.  It was advertised as a town hall meeting and I guess it was, at least superficially, but they took away the very heart of the town hall meeting, the thing that makes it interesting: the back and forth between the two candidates.  The debate was nothing but ninety minutes of carefully scripted remarks.

A big part of the blame goes to Tom Brokaw, who was just awful as moderator.  Again and again he let the candidates exceed their time limits without so much as a warning and then, only when they were done talking, he admonished them to obey the rules.  He was completely ineffectual and ended up sounding like a whiny hall monitor.

As for the candidates themselves, I felt Obama was the clear winner.  He seemed more at ease and he genuinely engaged the audience as he addressed their questions.  McCain on the other hand, lurched around the stage like the living dead, stiff as a board, and seemed to intimidate the audience, standing just a little too close to people as he gesticulated wildly.  On more than occasion, an audience member recoiled from him, as if afraid that he would suddenly lunge at their throats.

With less than one month and one more debate to go before the election, it would seem that John McCain is in need of a miracle.

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Well, the most anticipated Vice Presidential candidate debate in the history of American politics is over, and to sum up the evening’s performances in one word : unsurprising.

Longtime Delaware senator Joe Biden performed as expected, appearing poised and completely at ease behind his podium.  He demonstrated his experience, rattling off complicated facts and figures, seemingly without thinking too much.  He avoided his trademark long-winded responses and answered questions briefly, without much fanfare.

Governor Palin performed competently as well.  She seemed nervous at times, especially when the subject turned towards foreign affairs, but got into a comfort level when on more familiar ground, such as energy policy.  All in all, she did what she needed to do, most importantly doing no damage to herself or her running mate.

There was little excitement, certainly there was no Lloyd Benson-Dan Quayle moments, but neither candidate tripped up too badly.

If anyone ever wondered how debates are prepared for or how they’re won and lost, check out this article by GOP consultant Mike Murphy in TIME Magazine, probably the best description of debate tactics I’ve ever read:

TIME Magazine Article

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I can almost feel sorry for John McCain.  I mean, everyone has had one of those moments where embarrassment is so great that death seems like an attractive alternative.  McCain’s came yesterday morning when it looked like Congress was going to pass the economic bailout plan and save the country’s nose-diving financial system.  He couldn’t resist patting himself on the back, touting his own bi-partisanship and praising his decision to suspend campaigning to work on getting the bill passed.  He called himself a “Teddy Roosevelt Republican” and blasted Barrack Obama for his perceived non-involvement.

Then the bill was voted down…Insert cricket sounds here.

McCain’s senior policy advisor Doug Holtz-Eakin was quick to lay blame.  “This bill failed because Barack Obama and the Democrats put politics ahead of country,” he said.

It’s what one would expect from a campaign advisor during a close race.  The only problem is, it was so blatantly false that even John McCain seemed embarrassed by it.

The bill was shot down by a 228-205 vote with more than two thirds of Republican law makers voting against it.  By comparison only forty percent of Democrats opposed the measure. 

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