Dan Streib, in his October 10th article, suggested that the McCain-Palin ’08 campaign ought to focus more on the economy, and praised McCain’s record on cutting government spending. Let’s examine what’s happened these past few weeks: Mr. McCain suspended his campaign in order to interfere with the legislative process to get the $700+ billion package passed through the House, and was eventually thwarted by House Republicans. To his relief, the bill came back with extra pork and they passed it. Mr. McCain has promised that if elected he will socialize the remaining subprime mortgages: a plan proposed by Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries (which he falsely claimed as his own in the most recent debate), that would cost $300+ billion. McCain has also pledged to add $200+ billion of red to the government’s pocketbook by cutting the corporate profit tax rate from 35% to 25%. His rhetoric does not match the record. We are now in a recession, and McCain’s solution to stimulating growth is to freeze government spending: anyone who has taken even the most elementary economics course realizes how moronic this pro-cyclical proposal is.

The only positive thing about the current financial crisis is that it will almost certainly ensure that the woefully incompetent Arizona senator enters into a sorely overdue retirement, and Sarah Palin can get back to what she does best: keeping an eye on those sneaky Russians and reading all of the world’s newspapers.