The Bush-Cheney-McCain-Palin Banana Republicans

John McCain parachutes into Washington to wreck a serious negotiation about a subject he knows nothing about. George Bush stages a fiasco meeting that was nothing more than a McCain campaign ad that failed. Sarah Palin sounds incoherent and ridiculous discussing Russia. The national debt rises above $11 trillion and the budget deficit approaches $500 billion, destined to rise again because of an incompetently organized bailout of bankers.

Republicans in Washington are turning America into a banana republic nation with an amazing combination of creating massive fear, pursuing unwise war, dumping massive monies, allowing massive corruption from Wall Street to war profiteering, and doing it all without a president or Congress having any idea what they are doing. McCain gambles, picking a vice president he doesn’t even know who abuses power to pursue vendettas and lies about her record. Now McCain gambles with the very livelihood of American families in the most shameless, incompetent and partisan intervention in an economic crisis in American history.

We must end the banana-republic politics, finance and war policies. It was banana republic to force-feed an Iraq war vote with lies about mushroom clouds days before the 2002 election. It was banana republic to force-feed the patriotic act that did grave harm to the Constitution in an atmosphere of fear and panic with a bill that virtually nobody in Congress read.

Letting troops die preventable deaths without body armor, Humvees or adequate medical care while the rich gorge themselves on tax cuts and Wall Street gorges itself on speculation is banana republic.

Torture is banana republic. Massive domestic spying without public debate is banana republic. $500 billion deficits is banana republic. $11 trillion in debt is banana republic. Spreading false fears about a depression is banana republic, and letting America slide into recession from an orgy of greed is banana republic. Being unable to explain the bailout is banana republic. Rushing into it without intelligence or common sense is banana republic.

The repeated lies of John McCain and Sarah Palin, which are now well-documented, are banana republic. John McCain jumping into the morass of a serious negotiation on an economic crisis like a wrecking ball of political exploitation and economic ignorance is pure, unadulterated banana republic.

Everything about Sarah Palin is banana republic. Her continuing lie that she killed the Bridge to Nowhere is the kind of lie told in banana republics. Her very existence as an ignorant, uninformed, unknown vice president with virtually no record, protected by a bodyguard of lies, with her abuse of state power to pursue her personal, political and family vendettas is pure 1980s-style Latin American banana republic.

She acts in Alaska like Generalissimo Palin. Banana republic. McCain runs a campaign about Britney Spears and Paris Hilton while families worry desperately about making ends meet. Banana republic.

McCain lying when he says he suspends his campaign is banana republic. The inadequate and shallow media coverage, which foments fear and fails to have a serious discussion, which is full of uninformed hosts and ignorant pundits who know nothing about serious finance, is banana republic.

Congress should pass, immediately, perhaps $150 billion to $250 billion of money for the Treasury to begin action, and then stop, step back, pass economic stimulus, reform the corrupted bankruptcy law pushed by the very people who caused this banana-republic crisis, and enact a freeze on foreclosures.

Let’s be clear: Democrats are far from perfect, but Republican grabs for power, Republican economic incompetence, Republican spreading of panic and fear, Republican coddling of the rich, Republican tolerance of the corrupt, and Republican political extremism are far more like the banana-republic regimes of Latin America in the 1970s than the United States of America we know and love.

Let John McCain run for president of Paraguay, or Bolivia, or Guatemala in the days before the spread of Latin American democracy.

Bush, Cheney, McCain and Palin embody a banana-republic style that is unworthy of the United States of America in 2008 or any other year.

Enough is enough. It’s time for real change, big change, and the time is here, and now. It is time to throw the bums out, and the bums are the banana Republicans.