Is it possible that power has corrupted neocons so absolutely that they're willing to do or cause anything to get the conversation back to national security and the supposed war on terror?
Al Qaeda has slowly been creeping up in the administration's dialogue again--the explosion at the U.S. embassy in Yemen last week, and the Pakistan hotel bombed this week(today)--both being tied to Al qaeda.
After eight years of lies, anyone thing this is mere coincidence? 

When Republicans talk about drilling in ANWR, they always say it's only going to be on 2000 acres out of 1.5 million. What they fail to mention is that ecosystems are boundless.  
In other words, it's like saying when you throw a rock in a pond, it will only cause one ripple. They also fail to mention that it's not 2000 "contiguous" acres.
From a recent article on the subject:

The relatively little economically recoverable oil in the refuge is not concentrated in one large reservoir within a 2,000-acre area but is spread across all 1.5-million-acres. Oil from the coastal plain lies in more than 30 small deposits, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. To produce oil from this vast area, supporting infrastructure would have to stretch across the coastal plain. Networks of pipelines and roads obviously would fragment wildlife habitat.

The oil field industrial sprawl on the North Slope provides a relevant example. Including drill sites, airports and roads, and gravel mines, it has a footprint of 12,000 acres, but it actually spreads across an area of more than 640,000 acres, or 1,000 square miles.

If you have any other examples like the one above that would help lift the sanctions Republicans have imposed on the application of brain cells to the field of governance, please share it here.

That's my understanding of it, anyway.  

Any other ways to simplify what's going on in a sound byte?

It's more than a little hypocritical for McCain to suggest that what he meant about fundamentals of economy are strong is that American ingenuity is strong.  
Yet McCain has consistently voted against renewable energy incentives.  
And it is because of the Republicans that America's auto industry is outdated and being outperformed by imports.  It is because of the Republicans that at least one of America's big three auto makers is expected to file for bankruptcy by early 2009.  
It is because of Republicans that researchers are unable to use embryonic stem cells for advancing medicine.  
It is because of Republicans that some of the smartest students from around the world opt not to attend colleges in America, either because it's not affordable, or they can't get visas.
It is because of Republicans that they pursue jobs in their own countries' rapidly evolving economies.  
So McCain can admire American ingenuity all he wants.  
He just won't allow for it.  

Can't find any record of this guy before the mid-90s.   Randy Scheunemann, (McCain's foreign policy advisor, lobbyist for the Republic of Georgia, former advisor to Donald Rumsfeld, and part of the Iraq team that considered a military coup to take out Saddam Hussein, 6 months before 9/11) 

If you have any info, (not from wikipedia, thanks) could you post a comment?  

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post has written about what a lot of us have noticed--in an effort to balance the news, the MSM equates the lies of the McCain campaign with the "dishonesty" of the Obama campaign.
Marcus points out that all lies aren't created equal.