Thanks, Carly!  This is excellent. For Sean Penn’s complete post, read here.

“McCain values McCain. His blood boils every time his integrity is questioned, as though his five-year imprisonment allows him the arrogant assumption that he may tread on all that followed unquestioned. He was one of the Keating Five for good reason. Indeed McCain had abused his power as a Senator in lobbying for Keating. And it was not until he was tipped off by regulators of the criminal investigation of Lincoln Savings and Loan, that he severed relations with Keating. It was a little late. More than 21,000, mostly elderly investors, had lost their life savings. And, Cindy McCain’s bookkeeping was not a thing apart. All the righteous indignation, or prior heroics one wants to advertise, does not change the pattern of self-service by this man of seven houses.

I can’t help but reflect on the issues of health and homelessness that our Vietnam veterans faced for decades, just think of the tidal wave of veteran’s issues about to return to our shores. John McCain claims the surge as a “victory.” Well, it’s no victory for the nearly 5,000 American dead. For the hundreds of thousands of civilian dead. It’s no victory for the veterans who under this Republican administration, it has already been demonstrated, will not be served upon their return. It’s no victory for our country to have a broken and depleted military, a broken and depleted economy, with so much work to be done at home on issues of healthcare, poverty, infrastructure, education, environment, and perhaps, most of all, security. And it’s no victory, that in attacking the wrong country, we boosted Al Qaeda recruitment worldwide 300% (as we stop-loss our own.) Finally, it is no victory for our children, reared in an America of such divisive loathing, enormous debt, and tarnished standing.

Despite recent boasts to the contrary, by the Director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, (Bush’s key bumbler of the Katrina debacle) our country is not safer. It is not safer from without, and it is not safer from within. The divisiveness brought on by the policies of George W. Bush and John McCain has created an emotional civil war. We have to ask ourselves, at what point emotions may even turn to violence here at home.

By and large, the media is going to do what’s good for the media. If that means covering the McCain/Palin ticket for fashion, or fraud, assume fashion their more likely target. (While Americans died in the Middle East, Donald Rumsfeld was voted one of People Magazine’s sexiest men.) Palin, married to an 8-year secessionist, has as much as admitted that she has no interest whatsoever in any culture but her own. It is that kind of lacking in basic curiosity and the void of insightfulness that comes with it which embodied George Bush’s folksy failings.”