For Americans, the republican nominees are worse than hurricane Isaac

As I watched the news on English-language television stations, such as the BBC, CNN and Sky News, I was surprised to read on the ticker at the bottom of the screen that “Isaac has killed two…” without the full name of this Mr. Isaac being given or what line of work he is in. But I quickly realized that Isaac is the name given to the powerful hurricane that has struck the southern U.S. states, leading to the postponement of the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Tampa, Florida, to choose the party’s candidate, for the sake of the participants’ safety. But I believe that for Americans, the Republican nominees chosen in the RNC, that is, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, as has been expected long before the convention, are worse than Hurricane Isaac. To use the Quran’s words in the verse “Do not make mischief in the earth”, I say that while Isaac has “made mischief in the earth” for one week before withering and waning, the Republican duo portend ruin for America for four whole years, subject to renewal. I write against the backdrop of the RNC in Tampa. I have written about Romney frequently in recent months. In short, he is with the rich against the poor, specifically the working class, and he is a multimillionaire who pays less tax than a factory worker. More importantly, he has endorsed every war against Arabs and Muslims, and boasts being a friend of the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he supports against his Arab neighbors. Romney will most likely implicate the United States in a war with Iran, if Israel should attack the Iranian nuclear facilities. I wrote once about Paul Ryan, from the standpoint of his admiration for the novel Atlas Shrugged (that is, Atlas expressed his indifference), written by Russian-American writer Ayn Rand. The novel contained about 1200 pages of pure pontification, and monologues by protagonists who could not be more officious and obnoxious. The Republican candidate for vice president said that the United States is today leaderless. But being leaderless, in my opinion, is probably less catastrophic than being led by Romney. Today, I want to go back to Ryan, beyond his admiration for Ayn Rand and her novel, because the policy he explicitly champions is a threat to both America and the world. Concerning the 1200-page novel, I had written that when he was asked about his admiration for it in a famous statement he had made in 2005, he denied this, claiming that he prefers to be guided by the ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas instead. Now, the Pinocchio Tracker is giving him high marks in lying at every other level. This tracker is named after a legend about the boy Pinocchio, whose nose becomes longer whenever he lies. The tracker gave Ryan one or two Pinocchios several times, and even gave him the maximum mark of three Pinocchios twice, for example when Standard & Poor's downgraded the U.S. credit rating of AAA. Back then, Ryan said that the rating agency held the Democrats responsible, when in fact it had blamed both parties for the downgrade, and said, “It was the failure of Republicans and Democrats to demonstrate they could work together that led directly to the downgrade.” Issues like the economy, the budget and social welfare are very thorny and complex, and it is nearly impossible to explain them adequately in this journalistic haste. But Paul Ryan also lied about another socially important issue that can be easily explained. Ryan worked a whole decade in the House of Representatives with Missouri Rep. Todd Akin, current Senate nominee in Missouri. Ryan said that Akin is a great asset on the budget committee and an example of the kind of leadership America needs. But Akin went on to talk about “legitimate rape”, claiming that the woman’s body rejects the rapist’s “sperm”. This has sparked public outrage that has yet to settle against the candidate and his party, and polls have shown that 80 % of Americans reject these claims. Paul Ryan was quick to repudiate his colleague and partner, and said in many remarks that Akin’s statements are unacceptable, and that rape is rape, period, and end of story. Perhaps Ryan would have gotten away with it but his track record exposed him. He and Akin had voted in favor of around 40 bills in the House against abortion, without exceptions for rape cases. They once even endorsed a bill denying poor women from undergoing abortion at the expense of social security (Mitt Romney supports abortion in case of rape, incest or danger to the pregnant woman’s life). I hope that the Republicans will pay the price for the economic and social extremism of the two candidates. These issues are more important for American voters than their country’s foreign policy, for which we pay the price alone. Here, I blame first and foremost the Arabs’ weakness and complacency before the whole world, rather than the gall of U.S. legislators.  --- The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.