Another awful Express-News endorsement

First they endorsed George W. Bush in 2000. Then they endorsed him again in 2004. Now the San Antonio Express-News is endorsing John McCain.
Clearly the editorial board at the E-N has not learned its lesson. After eight years of what has been without a doubt the worst presidential administration in modern times, the E-N is endorsing someone who was in lockstep with Bush 90 percent of the time and promises to carry on the same economic and international policies.
The E-N says McCain would bring fiscal responsibility to the White House (I could swear they said the same thing about Bush in 2000) and point to his demagoguery on “wasteful earmarks” which make up less than 1 percent of the federal budget. But they ignore the fact that McCain is right with Bush on the two biggest contributors to the ballooning deficits of the past eight years — (1) Bush’s fiscally irresponsible tax giveaway to the rich - which almost overnight wiped out a $236 billion surplus and put us back on the road to record annual deficits all without delivering on the promised boost to the economy; and (2) the $10 billion per month that we continue to flush away on the quagmire in Iraq which has gone on longer than our total involvement in World War II. McCain wants to make Bush’s tax cuts permanent and has no plans to extract the U.S. military from the Iraq debacle.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, has promised to pull us out of Iraq and has a plan to reverse Bush’s disasterous tax cut policies, raising taxes on the wealthy back to the level they were under that oppressive socialist Ronald Reagan.
The E-N also goes on to praise McCain as the only candidate “willing to speak the unpopular truth” about entitlement spending. And what truth is that? That it would be insane for us to privatize Social Security and invest it all in the stock market like Bush and McCain wanted to do?
Under President Bush and the Republicans, the federal debt has increase by $4.5 trillion. That is more than was accumulated under Carter ($337 billion) Reagan ($1.6 trillion) Bush Sr. ($1.6 trillion) and Clinton ($1.5 trillion) combined. I can assure you that was not a result of runaway spending on “earmarks”.
As bad as George W. Bush has been, McCain has the potential to be much worse. He is a 72-year-old with serious medical problems who tapped as his running mate someone who is supremely unqualified to take over as president.
He is admittedly clueless when it comes to economic issues and takes his advice from people like Phil Gramm, one of the architects of the deregulation fiasco that led to the current collapse of our financial system. His campaign is filled with lobbyists who had a direct role in undermining the regulatory framework of our financial markets.
The fact that you can point to a couple of areas like immigration policy and global warming where he has bucked his parties wrong-headed views does not excuse the fact that he would continue leading us down the same path in every other instance.
The fact that the Express-News would make such an awful endorsement has caused me to lose all respect for the paper and its current leaders.