To my mind the choice is typical of McCain -- do whatever he likes with little or no input from outside. Not a good plan for a man who wants to run the world.
Perhaps, or perhaps it is the mark of a leader; a man who can listen to advice but not necessarily take it. I mean if you're going to run the world, then run it, dammit. Advice will have been there in spades, you can bet your nads on that, and who on the outside might know what it did or didn't include?
I say good upon them both. I wanted Condi, but I have to say, I'm more than happy with this gun-totin' MILF. Damn, wouldn't it be great to be able to vote with the Yanks just every now and then?
Love him or hate him, you have to admit Mark Steyn has a way with words...
The hostess with the moosest [Mark Steyn]
Over in the Frumistan province of the NR caliphate, our pal David is not happy about the Palin pick. I am - for several reasons.
First, Governor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, "all-American", but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who's done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of "community organizer" and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the political class mouthing the usual squishy Euro-platitudes.
Second, it can't be in Senator Obama's interest for the punditocracy to spends its time arguing about whether the Republicans' vice-presidential pick is even more "inexperienced" than than the Democrats' presidential one.
Third, real people don't define "experience" as appearing on unwatched Sunday-morning talk shows every week for 35 years and having been around long enough to have got both the War on Terror and the Cold War wrong. (On the first point, at the Gun Owners of New Hampshire dinner in the 2000 campaign, I remember Orrin Hatch telling me sadly that he was stunned to discover how few Granite State voters knew who he was.) Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain't run nothin' but his mouth. She's done the stuff he's merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party's corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol (see his campaign's thuggish attempt to throttle Stanley Kurtz and Milt Rosenberg on WGN the other night).
Fourth, Governor Palin has what the British Labour Party politician Denis Healy likes to call a "hinterland" - a life beyond politics. Whenever Senator Obama attempts anything non-political (such as bowling), he comes over like a man visiting a foreign country and being shanghaied into some impenetrable local folk ritual. Sarah Palin isn't just on the right side of the issues intellectually. She won't need the usual stage-managed "hunting" trip to reassure gun owners: she's lived the Second Amendment all her life. Likewise, on abortion, we're often told it's easy to be against it in principle but what if you were a woman facing a difficult birth or a handicapped child? Been there, done that.
Fifth, she complicates all the laziest Democrat pieties. Energy? Unlike Biden and Obama, she's been to ANWR and, like most Alaskans, supports drilling there.
I think its soo funny.
The Democrats have a luke warm convention, with Pro Clinstones stating they will vote for McCain, When Clintsone herself spoke,
"I am proud to be a mother" (raptuous cheers)
"I am proud to be a Democrat" (More raptuous cheers
"I am proud to be an American" (hall falls virtually silent compared to other "proud" moments)
Sums up the anti American attitude of the Socialists, sorry, Democrats.
The only "highlight", though it was more of a sickfest, was the crowning of the "Messiah Obama" which was quite frankly sickening to many outside of the Socialist party encamped at Denver.
Now they are running around like headless chickens about the future Vice President Palin, stating she has no worldly experiance, this from a party with a candidate who knows nothing of the world outside of Chicago!
"We should be led by Obama and Biden!"
"We should be led by Obama and Biden!"
"We should be led by Osama bin Laden!"
Charlie Wilson Said What?
3:00 PM Mon, Aug 25, 2008
Charlie Wilson -- he of "Charlie Wilson's War" fame -- rallied a midday gathering of Texans Monday with a call to end the war in Iraq. The former Texas congressman said the U.S. should have kept its focus on Afghanistan and never gone into Iraq. Wilson knows something about Afghanistan. The book and movie is about his advertures arming the mujahedin against the Soviet Union.
The speech got a good response, but Wilson flubbed one line in his call for new leadership.
"We should be led by Osama bin Laden," he said, then quickly corrected himself. "I mean Obama and Biden."
McCain's policies would be "nonsense," he said. "Just like that last statement."
The Democratic presidential convention finally reached its dramatic and historic climax Thursday night as Barack Obama, appearing in a stadium packed with nearly 80,000 wildly cheering supporters, kicked a 67-yard field goal to defeat the Oakland Raiders in overtime. He also formally accepted the Democratic nomination, thereby becoming the first Hawaiian-born Indonesian-educated African-American ever to become a major-party presidential candidate since Al Gore.
OK two years ago this woman was a part time mayor of a town of less than 10000 people. Given McCain might depart at any moment (72 years old and fading) say hi to the "soccer mom" (that he only met ONCE before choosing) !
And so say a few others, Bombay Duck. To my mind clearly the best American columnist because he can take the piss out of anyone and do it gently and with unfailing humour. P.J. O'Rourke can be just as funny, but it's always biting and it's always one-sided. Conservatives good, liberals bad. It's like reading this thread really.
Don't for one minute think I am telling Americans how to vote. Oh no siree Bob, I know I'm not allowed to do that.
I just wonder why the usual suspects bother? Have we not all got the message by now that liberal equals socialist equals communist equals big brother interfering in our everyday lives? Where is Send Clowns when we need him? Oh, sorry, we don't need him at all, we have ten carbon copies in America.
Reading this thread is a really depressing experience. Even those whose views I had come to respect if not agree with are yawningly repeating the socialist mantra.
It's becoming sadly obvious to me that the usual suspects, and we all know who you are, care only for their own kind, and fear and loathe anybody who may pose a threat to that insularity. Do any of you not think it remotely possible that a bilateral government would be a good thing for any democracy?
Please try and explain to me again how trickle down economics works. In the Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck summed up the whole situation in one sentence, which I would have to search long and hard to find. I'll summarise it in Australian. If you accumulate so many riches you stand out and want that to be the case, don't be surprised when those who don't have the same opportunity want to take those riches away from you.
In other words, don't complain about having to put bigger and better security systems on your gated communities. You reap what you sow.
The Blacks in this country have progressed from a constant fear of lynching - over trivial transgressions - to satellite dishes and a Caddie Escalade in the driveway.
And still eligible for Section 8 (low income subsidy) housing.
And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression.
Quote:
Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow. ...and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Mr Steinbeck, one of Eight Americans to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and a Pulitzer Prize winner for said novel. One wonders if The Grapes of Wrath is on any school curriculums any more.
I'm impressed, TC. The first quote is the one I remember from 30 years ago: it struck an immediate chord of such "self-evident truth" that it has stayed with me for ever, even as my politics swayed inevitably to the right with advancing age.
Welcome to the gang of unreconstructed PPRuNe socialists. Because you earn a comfortable living you will of course be known as a chardonnay socialist, a latte sipper, a two bob capitalist and a payday millionaire, not to mention the inevitable bleeding heart. You'll survive.
liberal bugaboo! Yes, well, you see, very late in his writing career he paid a visit to Viet Nam, took a ride in a gunship and wrote about how he would like to do that sort of work, that it looked challenging and exciting.
Up until then he was up there in the liberal pantheon with Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan (well, before he went electric). After that I guess his core audience assumed that he wanted to hose down an orphanage with hot lead and largely deserted him. Even his own son (an anti-war G.I.) got down on him for that one. By now that little slip of the pen has been forgotten by most so that he's back to being idolised for "The Grapes of Wrath" and perhaps rightly so.
Well, I shall let Sunray M & Co. work the "social justice" side of the street while I take a wild swerve across to comment on the charming and original choice McCain has made of a running mate. As I write this I hear the sound of many tiny hammers at work trying to warp liberal preconceptions about McCain and the Republican Party into a shape that will fit this new reality. I really need to read what the liberal pundits have to say to counter this move, what sort of mean things they can say about a good-looking, straight-shooting mother of 5 who manages to run one of our major states. I bet even Hillary is sat there gasping like a boated bass trying to come up with something suitably snide but feminist. She will, she will, but it might take a few days.
OK two years ago this woman was a part time mayor of a town of less than 10000 people. Given McCain might depart at any moment (72 years old and fading) say hi to the "soccer mom" (that he only met ONCE before choosing) !
McCain possibly early stage senile?
And the succeeding two years she's been the chief executive of the US' largest state. And commander in chief of its state militia.
And to get there she defeated both the incumbent and his predecessor.
She's also run a business.
Obama and Biden between them have 0 of those qualifications. Both have been to law school and then polictics. Not a lot of real-world experience in my opinion.
Early senility? I think it was a brilliant choice. To fear her being 'one heartbeat' away, the guy has to get into office first. I think this was a great practical move to do that.
Funny, those 'wailing' about the 'usual right wing suspects' aren't either congratulating us for 'advancing' in women's rights or offering up anything more than 'woe is me.'
Standards are slipping...
Concur on Dave Barry. Outstanding writer/columnist!
Welcome to the gang of unreconstructed PPRuNe socialists. Because you earn a comfortable living you will of course be known as a chardonnay socialist, a latte sipper, a two bob capitalist and a payday millionaire, not to mention the inevitable bleeding heart. You'll survive.
Like you possibly may be, I'm a centrist with slight leanings both ways and have voted both ways. Grapes of Wrath was on my school curriculum. I quite like American Literature* - Whitman, Steinbeck, Twain, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Heller and Vonnegut to name a few.
As for perceptions, using a football/rugby analogy: To someone positioned on the extremities of the right wing but possessing a lack of depth perception, a person in the centre of the ground appears to be 'well to the left'. However, the former make easy targets for sciolism.
Don Brown lurks here, he is a retired Atlanta Air Traffic Controller who earned around $150,000pa in his last year. He actively pushes Barack's barrow on his blog..
IMO One doesn't need to earn $5/hour to have a social conscience. I find it strange that those of us that earn six figures a year are not permitted to having positive views of peace, goodwill, egalitarianism and the governments obligations in the provision of healthcare, infrastructure etc.
Anyways, too much sober rational thought. Must save the torment and bandwidth for the forthcoming elections.
*A TC junior came home with the classic To Kill a Mockingbird recently so good American Literature is still around the Southern land's English curriculum.
flash8, I think she will do far better in debate than you give her credit.
I actually feel a little sympathy for Biden. He's probably much better in the forum than Mrs. Palin (although I think she has participated in her share of debates), but he will be operating under a handicap of how tough can he be towards her?
Does he do damage to his cause by going on the offensive? Does he risk being cast as a 'bully?' I don't know the answer, but I suspect the Obama/Biden campaign are thinking about that now and for their future 'messages.'
Palin will operate under no such constrictions and will be going for Biden's 'dangly bits.'
Or, heaven forbid, it turns into a courteous, thoughtful debate along the lines of Leiberman/Cheney in 2004.
"We should all be proud of Gov. Sarah Palin's historic nomination, and I congratulate her and Sen. McCain. While their policies would take America in the wrong direction, Gov. Palin will add an important new voice to the debate," Clinton said.
Translation: "She won 'Miss Congeniality'? 'Miss f*%&ing Congeniality'? She'd better have a big butt, that's all I'm saying. Why the f*%& don't I ever win Miss f*%&ing Congeniality? It's always Sarah, Sarah, SARAH!"
Quote:
"But the fact that she's been nominated, I think, or will soon be nominated, I think is one more indicator of this country moving forward," said Obama. "I congratulate her and look forward to a vigorous debate."
Translation: "Oh, boy... I need another SPEECH... STAT!"
Quote:
(CNN)—California Senator Barbara Boxer said Friday John McCain is “badly mistaken” if he thinks picking Sarah Palin as his running mate will win over Hillary Clinton’s supporters.
“The vice president is a heartbeat away from becoming president,” Boxer said in a statement. “So to choose someone with not one hour's worth of experience on national issues is a dangerous choice.”
“The only similarity between [Palin] and Hillary Clinton is that they are both women,” The California senator adds. “On the issues, they could not be further apart.”
Translation: "At least... I think Hillary's a woman (they're certainly different... congenial vs. ill-tempered, and on and on...)... of course... who knows where Hillary's supporters are anyway at this point... has my 767 been approved yet?"
What really worries me is not so much Palin, but McCains judgement. You don't elect VP's after meeting them once, especially ones so inexperienced.
This woman has been part-time mayor of a town of 8,000 people up until 2 years ago, 1/20th of the size of Barack's State senate district. She has NO national or foreign policy experience. She was elected governor by a state which cast only 100,000 votes and is being investigated as we speak for abuse of power.
Would anybody, hand on heart, have Palin as CinC?
And be honest.
Because that is the decision that you are possibly making if you vote McCain.
Those that say yes really need to take a long cold look at the situation. This is supremely worrying for many.
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