Time?

I think when we look back on this many years from now, I'm confident that people are gonna see what happened in New Orleans as a defining moment in American history. Whether that's pro or con is yet to be determined.
- Spike Lee

It's clearly time for a change, and for that reason not only have I expressed the feelings I have regarding how important it is for Ned Lamont to be elected Senator from Connecticut, it's also why I can not for the life of me fathom why any non-GOP partisan would ever ascribe to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) the sobriquet of "moderate".
In a New York Times article, "McCain Mines Elite of G.O.P. for 2008 Team," we learn that:

He is reaching out to Christian conservatives, who helped sink his 2000 presidential bid, by enlisting the aid of figures like Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. of Utah and former Senator Dan Coats of Indiana, both of whom have strong evangelical followings.

That's right, he's reaching out to the same machine that got us in this hole in the first place:

Among the more prominent members of the Bush team who said they expected to play a role in Mr. McCain'’s candidacy, if he chooses to run, are Mark McKinnon, a Texas political media consultant who has worked for Mr. Bush for years; Terry Nelson, political director of the Bush 2004 re-election campaign; Nicolle Wallace, that campaign'’s communications director; Wayne L. Berman, a Washington lobbyist, friend of Mr. Bush'’s and prolific fund-raiser; and F. Philip Handy, chairman of Jeb Bush'’s two races for governor in Florida and a major supporter of the president.

Inspires confidence, doesn't it?

As for the major U.S. issue of our day, McCain has nothing but "Stay and Pay" for Iraq, i.e. in American and Iraqi blood, no new ideas, nothing but support for Bush/Cheney's debacle. He goes so far as to say:

Most Americans, when they're asked if they want to set a date for withdrawal, say no.

As the Eschaton article by Atrios points out, over 50% of all Americans in surveys by CNN, USA Today and even FOX actually, uh, do want a withdrawel date.

The only Republican (and I include Joe Lieberman in this formation) telling the truth, albeit without villifying Bush/Cheney's original tragic decision and perfidity to get us there, is Sen. Chuck Hegel (R-NB). Even being interviewed on Fox News. He talks about the Middle East being more unstable than any time since 1948 (the year of Israeli independence), the permeating corruption in Iraq, and the need to start withdrawing troops within six months.

Meanwhile the civil war gets worst in Baghdad, as 20 Shiite religious pilgrims get killed by snipers on their way to a shrine. As Juan Cole sees it:

If this incident, which will inspire rage and reprisals by Shiites, can occur in the midst of an enormous crackdown in the battle for Baghdad, I fear the evidence is that that battle is already lost. What Shiites will willingly disarm after today? And if they don't neither will the Sunni Arabs. The armed faction fighting will go on. The US appears powerless.

Speaking of a powerless U.S. and harkening back to the Spike Lee quote at the top of this post, his comprehensive documentary on the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina ordeal, When the Levees Broke, airs in two installments, Monday and Tuesday night on HBO. The reviewer from Variety, Joe Leydon, writes in his personal movingpictureblog:

It's entirely too early, of course, to describe any book, film or TV production as the "definitive account" of Hurricane Katrina's assault on (and the federal government's ill-serving of) New Orleans. Even so, Spike Lee makes a fair bid to be credited as providing one of the major reference works for subsequent chroniclers with his exhaustive -- but never, it should be noted, exhausting -- When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.

This is a huge political issue for the next few elections, how a GOP Administration that already appeared callous to the needs of all but the U.S. aristocracy, allowed a poverty-stricken American city to simply drown, and it appears that Spike has made the monument, the equivalent to Al Gore's cinematic clarion call on Global Warming.

Spike is interviewed on the HBO site, and has this to say about why he's made the documentary:

When Hurricane Katrina went through New Orleans or around it, I was in Venice, Italy at a film festival. It was a very painful experience to see my fellow American citizens, the majority of them African- Americans, in the dire situation they were in. And I was outraged with the slow response of the federal government. And every time I'm in Europe, any time something happens in the world involving African-Americans, journalists jump on me, like I'm the spokesperson for 45 million African-Americans, which I'm not. But many of them expressed their outrage too. And one interesting thing is that these European journalists were saying the images they were seeing looked like they were from a third world country, not the almighty United States of America.

He talks about communicating the horror of what residents experienced, a word we don't often hear associated with Katrina, but the one that cuts to the chase. The Third World USofA, another reason the GOP leaders are truly today's Party of Death, as some would smear the Dems. Per Spike:

Anyone who has been to New Orleans will automatically tell you that what you saw on television, the pictures, they can't really describe the scale of the devastation. When you go to the Lower Ninth Ward, it looks- Hiroshima must have look like that. Nagasaki. Beirut. Berlin after it was bombed in World War II. That's the way the Lower Ninth Ward looks like, and a lotta other places in New Orleans.

I've got the TiVo all set.