heat shock protein

I should've ended that last post with "...so you can cease with the snarling attacks, mccain/palin". they are the party of pitbulls. which we already knew, but there is some scary shit going on recently at their rallies, sincerely racist/bigoted shit that is frightening to me. scary enough that the secret service is on it. why do the two of them stand there and let people shout things we should no longer hear, in this day and age and in this country? because they are desperate. because they know their only base at this point is the die-hards so rabid to vote republican that they will take any reason.

palin has gone from laughable, to scary.

I watched the debate a night late, and thought there were some high and some low points. several of brokaw's questions were high points - especially, and I'm sorry that the standards were lowered so far, but in light of that awful stephanopoulis/gibson debate between obama and clinton. the question about health care - is it a responsibility, right or privilege - I think alone made the debate worthwhile, and the answers were appropriately revealing. this was one of the very, very few times I felt that the political rhetoric actually fell away and cleaved closer to something more fundamental: the actual philosophical stance behind all the various proposals and counter-proposals. do people deserve healthcare? yes, yes they do. they do not deserve it in a way that is like, hmm, okay, I guess we'll do our best to help you but if the free market decides it's cheaper to not give you your chemo or your surgery, too bad, we've fulfilled our responsibility. they deserve it in a way that you yourself feel you would deserve treatment if you were ill.

so, that was a good question. good job, brokaw.

at other points, it seemed like mccain (and I guess obama, although he was twenty times more eloquent than mccain during the debate) got away with some really ludicrously general statements that meant nothing. example:

[Obama] still will not admit that he was wrong about the strategy of the surge in Iraq, and that's the same kind of strategy of go out and secure and hold and allow people to live normal lives.

And once they feel secure, then they lead normal, social, economic, political lives, the same thing that's happening in Iraq today.

I mean, this answer was almost about a principle, the guiding principle behind invading another country and why we feel entitled to do it, but mccain totally turned it into gibberish. I was kind of shocked at his inability to form a coherent sentence.

not to mention the laughably hyperbolic "america is the greatest force for good in the history of the universe". I believe that's verbatim.