OBFSL. Thanks very much for your explanation, makes it much clearer.
The bit I read about the open primaries was somewhat vague and didn't say that you could only vote in one primary and I took the description to mean you could vote in both parties primaries (since they are effectively different elections).
Okay, I have thought long and hard about what I am going to post here. I decided to go head and post this just for an example of the possibly of how this election can go really dirty really fast.
Well, I'm sure lotsa skeletons will fall out of McCains closet soon. Everyone in politics gets dirty.
McCain and Huckabee seem to like eachother, kind of cameradie and Huck's religious background is absolutely necessary in the US. Still I wonder what McCain is doing with the US economy in comparing with Romney because that's the real issue not some ridiculous expensive foreign war and Obama needs to steer away from the Clinton mudslinging to make a chance.
PS Arnie supports McCain, now he's a very clever man in politics, so the momentum for McCain is building up fast...
I didn't see tonight's debate, and haven't read any account of it other than Paul's. (I deleted the 50 or 60 emails that came in to my Blackberry from the campaigns.) So I have nothing to say about tonight's event, but do have some broader comments on the general subject of politics and business.
I know many successful businessmen, and a number of successful politicians. In my experience, businessmen generally think that they are smarter and tougher than politicians. "Smarter" goes without saying, "tougher" means that they interpret politicians' equivocations and changes of position as weakness. I think the businessmen are wrong on both counts. Successful politicians, on the average, are both "smarter," i.e. abler, and tougher than successful businessmen.
In the business world, Mitt Romney is as successful as anyone can be. No one attains his level of achievement without enormous talents and an oversized ego. Yet, compared to John McCain, Romney is modest and self-effacing. As a businessman among politicians, he is a boy among men.
Politics attracts the most ambitious and ruthless of men. (That's the real reason why, at its upper levels, politics, much more than business, is dominated by men, not women.) In many countries, men with unnatural appetites go into politics because if they are successful, they will be able to have the people they don't like shot. Here in America, we don't shoot our political losers, and politics is not just a variety of organized crime. Still, many of the same sorts of people are attracted to it.
Businessmen, in my experience, are generally more idealistic than politicians. Businessmen really do make deals with a handshake. No one would dream of doing that with Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi or the Clintons. Turning a businessman loose in the political world is basically a mismatch. That's the sense I get of McCain's reaction to having Romney as his last serious rival. He can't believe his good fortune; Romney is an amateur. McCain can poke him in the eye, knee him in the groin, and the rule-following businessman has no idea how to respond.
I don't view this as an argument in Romney's favor. As President, he wouldn't be dealing with honorable, law-abiding businesspeople. He would be going up against the Vladimir Putins, Osama bin Ladens and Harry Reids of the world. This is not a game for amateurs. I think we should recognize that professional politicians bring important experience and skills to the table, and that one of those skills is the ability to knee an opponent in the groin and get away with it. It's not pretty. But, compared to politics, business is beanbag, and politics is the game the Republican nominee will have to play.....
Mark Steyn's view of the above opinion and the last debate is quite amusing:
........Maybe. But it's a wee bit similar to the case for Hillary: She thinks nothing of having Elizabeth Edwards whacked with a tire-iron in a dark alley, so she'll do the same to the mullahs. Just because McCain can poke Mitt in the eye is no indication he'll be as effective with Putin, a remarkable number of whose enemies wind up splattered on the sidewalk outside their apartment house after opting for a strangely uniform manner of fatal auto-defenestration.
Although, oddly enough, after tonight's debate, I'm tempted to join them.
I like the way you guys can slip something absolutely outrageous in there as if to say, "Oh yeah, everyone knows that..."
Actually, far from being necessary, bringing religion into American politics is an anomaly. It says right on the box that there should be no test of religious beliefs of candidates, which rams a spike through some of what Romney has been speechifying, for instance. Huckabee I have paid no attention to, expecting that he's just one of those quirky candidates the system throws up from time to time. Okay, we once did end up with a peanut farmer in the White House but that was another anomaly.
Bush got going with that slobbering on about how Jesus got him back on track from being Joe Six-pack and people have put up with it, perhaps even liking having their boobish religious sentiments stroked, but it is not mainstream American politics as it should be played.
Mr Huckabee seems to be out there somewhere, close to the edge of the radar screen with his politico-religious practices. Check how far that other one got, the one who claimed to have deflected a hurricane with his prayers (!), Pat Robertson. Lots of money, plenty of support from his simple-minded followers, but did it play with main-stream America? No, not actually. I do not expect to see another God-botherer in the White House.
We might be homicidal but at least we are not, generally speaking, religious fanatics back in the U.S.A.
McCain can poke him in the eye, knee him in the groin, and the rule-following businessman has no idea how to respond.
Same goes for Billary and Obama. I'm not sure I agree with this. First of all a POTUS needs to have vision both long term and short term. Unfortunately not many presidents had this quality the last decades. Again, I shiver what Junior, or McCain, would have done during the Cuban Crisis or when Gorbatsjov made the opening in the Iron Curtain.
Dear or dear, look what the NYT has dug up about what Bill has been up to getting money for his library. I wonder how Hillary will deal with this one. The usual "it's a right wing conspiracy to get us" spiel - or her cackling laugh - I suppose.
The New York Times accuses Bill Clinton of using his status as an ex-president to cosy up to a Central Asian dictator and undercut US foreign policy in order to secure uranium mining concessions for a business partner and donor to his foundation and library..................
"I believe my party has gone astray. I think the Democratic Party is a fine party, and I have no problems with it, in their views and their philosophy." -- John McCain
The bit I read about the open primaries was somewhat vague and didn't say that you could only vote in one primary and I took the description to mean you could vote in both parties primaries (since they are effectively different elections).
Nope, you only get one ballot.
Quote:
Dear or dear, look what the NYT has dug up about what Bill has been up to getting money for his library.
As I've said before, the Clinton's are completely corrupt. They were corrupt in Arkansas (Whitewater, cattle futures, etc.). They were corrupt in DC (Mark Rich, etc.). This is just another example of their corruption.
How people can overlook this and support Billary is quite beyond me.
"Come come Westie, you couldn't serve up a worse one than the current one could you ?"
Dang it, Con beat me to it. I suppose I could run for office if you need another boogeyman over there in Europe.
Kaos is simply planning for the future, be it McCain or someone else. Going to be harder to be a yank basher soon. Easy to hide behind that monster Bush as a cover story.
I dont either, but they're going to have to change the disclaimer. "I'm not a yank basher but that ______ adminstration needs to______"
How disappointed they will be to find out how little things will change. Much the same the Euro's played up the Dem's taking back the House and Senate only to find out it really amounted to a hill of beans.
Easy to hide behind that monster Bush as a cover story for disliking the US.
Thought you could do better than that Westie
You'll find a much more positive JUNK when that cretin has left the White House. I think you may even come round to the fact, given time, that many on here are not America Bashers but Bush Bashers. I live in hope
Nixon committed no worse crime/sin than Clinton did. Nixon resigned, Clinton went on to fame and fortune.
Harding/Charter, about the same. Both terrible.
Not yet on the McClain link, I'll get to it.
By the way, I was a member of PPRuNe before Bush, and the yank bashing was just as bad if not worse. I actually joined in late 1999 under the name of ozone ranger. I don't use that name anymore, so if anyone wants it you can have it.
Oh, by the way, Nixon was not disbarred as Clinton was.
Capt. K, where is the McClain link, I can't find it?
Last edited by con-pilot : 31st January 2008 at 22:56.
Reason: McClain link.
Well, Nixon is a good example of a president nobody much liked then, and nobody much likes now. But that was all based on Watergate, a relatively minor offense in the whole scheme of things. I don't care much for him either, as I think he was a schemer, and he certainly was a liar.
That said, he deserves credit for opening up the way to dialogue with China, something his Demo predecessors had not done in their 8 years. He began the process of "getting along" with the Soviet Union. He also did much more than they had to get out of Vietnam. And he brought a little stability to the incredible national disunity going on in 1968.
He also had the good grace to quit, rather than subject the country to his impeachment!
IMHO, you can't tell much about legacy while the guy is still there.
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