“How many times do you have to be hit on the head before you figure out who's hitting you?”

One can’t help but think of Harry Truman’s famous question in light of the rise of the McCain/Palin ticket in the polls. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that distinguishes the policies (economic, education, taxation, warmongering, religion-pushing, damn the infrastructure, damn the people) of the McCain/Palin ticket from the same old Republican Party approach to government that has driven this country into the ground over the past eight years.

John “Country First, Damn the People” McCain and Sarah “Let Them Eat Moose-Turd” Palin offer nothing but further economic decline, further reduction in opportunities for a good education, further decline in scientific and medical research, ongoing wage stagnation, continued outsourcing, increasing inflation, further reduction of a woman’s right to chart the course of her own life, ever-higher health care costs, ongoing lies and disinformation and secrecy and bullshit ... in essence, the ongoing dumbing down and highway robbery of the American people.

“You can put lipstick on a pig,” Obama said today, “It’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It’s still going to stink after eight years.” And so it is with the Republican Party’s approach to government. They appeal to ignorance and hate, suggest the best way to get ahead is to hurt the competition, grab hold of power and line their own pockets, all the while leaving life a little more difficult for the citizens of this country. The standard-bearers may change, but the rotten fish underneath still stinks.

Unless you are a narcissistic, spite-filled, mega-millionaire (like McCain), you’d have to be a damned fool to vote for McCain/Palin.

So what can we do? Well, we need to make sure Obama/Biden have the resources to get the message out. And we need to get that message out too. In his final complete book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan (the great American scientific educator) warned of the dangers of mixing ignorance with power:

“We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces... I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”

Sagan challenged us all to not sit quietly in the face of ignorance, falsehood and bluster, particularly when coming from persons seeking power, but to speak out in favor of truth, to vocally correct false theories and unsupportable assertions, to insist on intellectual honesty.

Bob Herbert gets into this mind-set in his column today: “Hold Your Heads Up.” Liberals have done a hell of a lot to make this country better. Name one thing the current strain of Republicanism has done. The only thing you could possibly say is “cut taxes”, but lets be honest, you’re paying for those tax cuts ten times over with higher education costs, higher health care costs, higher gas prices, lower home values, lower savings rates, dirtier skies, dirtier water, less-safe products, and that’s just the start of that list.

So donate, volunteer, write, speak out, do whatever you can.