Dumbest.Election.Ever

Let's get right to it. This blog is to help the undecided; friends who don't have the time, or inclination, to read as much as I do can hopefully find some new and helpful information here. Author William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut.org deserves today's Cut To The Chase award. To paraphrase, forget the SwiftBoatLiars, forget the CBS TANG documents, focus on the forest, not the trees. Here's an excerpt:

Issues we are not hearing about because we have spent so much time talking about television advertisements:

• Millions of jobs lost in the last four years;
• Unbearably expensive health care;
• A total loss of confidence within the international community in our moral leadership;
• The underfunded farce that is the Department of Homeland Security;
• The underfunded farce that is the No Child Left Behind bill;
• The fact that military assault weapons will soon be making a perfectly legal return to a neighborhood near you;
• The deeply illegal outing of a deep-cover CIA agent by Bush administration officials, who did it because they wanted to silence a critic;
• The rape and torture of men, women and children in the Abu Ghraib prison, horrors that were sanctioned in writing by Bush's own lawyer and the Secretary of Defense;
• The allegation by Senator Bob Graham of Florida that Bush torpedoed any aspect of the 9/11 investigation that came within spitting distance of his friends in the Saudi royal family;
• The allegations by several generals that Bush's people started stripping necessary troops and resources from Afghanistan to bolster their ill-conceived charge into Iraq;
• The myriad accusations by a dozen insiders that Bush and his people ignored the terror threat until the Towers fell, and then used the attacks to scare the American people into an unnecessary war in Iraq and a mammoth payday for their friends in the weapons and oil business;
• The fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq;
• The fact that no connections between Hussein, bin Laden and 9/11 have been established beyond the bloviating hyperbole of a few senior Bush officials who haven't yet gotten the memo;
• Does anyone even remember Enron?

Tomorrow is the third anniversary of September 11th. We deserve better than this.

Yesterday, we ran a feature article that carried a photograph of every soldier who has died in Iraq. The article read, "The men and women whose faces fill the page below were not told this. They were, in fact, told the exact opposite. They raised their hands and took the oath, they donned their uniform and picked up their weapon, they boarded a plane and flew far from home, and they died. They were doing their duty, and they believed their President."

Look into the eyes of those 1,000 lost faces and tell me they don't deserve better than this stupid election and its stupid public debate.

Read the whole thing.