When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life.” In Philadelphia, Senator Obama topped that: Greater love hath no man than to lay down his gran’ma for his life..................
Trouble is Jeremy meant "lay down with his friends"
If one earns $20M in one year and $100M over 8, and is 61 years old (and the old bugger with the dodgy ticker is 62)...WHY, WHY, WHY would you bother with all this?
No need to be concerned with flow control and slots
To save the crap just put "RMK/COB" on the plan and if I'm on flow control(COB=Clinton On Board) I'll give them priority, lets make it an ICAO standard and put them out to pasture pleeeeaaaase!
Location: FR | IC luftballons | Page 20 - photo thread: there be PPRuNe's most beautiful woman...
Posts: 297
Those politicians who've earned an average income of over $10 million per annum have absolutely no rights to claim that they do or can legitimately represent those who live on a few dollars a day.
People who amass such fortunes should remain discrete!
The only thing you can do with a $100 mil is spend it (depressingly easy nowadays, too. And anonymous.), but with the Presidency, you can make a $100 mil AND boss 300 million Americans around. Power trumps even the almighty buck, everyday.
OR
"We need the money to get the power, we need the power to keep the money"
The latest "OOPS" in the Hillary champaign has been caused by her good old hubby Bill. It seems that he did the classic 'open mouth, insert foot' gaffe by resurrecting the "Bosnia Sniper Fire" story.
In a speech Bill Clinton claimed that Hillary was "tired and exhausted late one night and due to her exhaustion misspoke about the sniper fire". He went on to say that she only made that statement only once, again saying the mistake was caused by her being so tired.
Now, not only did this bring her lie about being under sniper fire back to prominence after it had somewhat gone away it raised a few more issues.
One. She made the sniper fire statement not just once, but three times at three different appearances.
Two. None of the times she made the statement was late at night. In fact one was at 09:30.
Three. Remember the controversial "Who do you want answering the phone at 3AM in morning" add that was aired on TV by Hillary? Bill's statement puts rather a new twist on that add. Shoot if she, according to her husband, can't remember the facts at 11PM at night, what makes us believe she would be any more aware of anything at 3AM?
Now my question is, ya think good old Bill is trying sabotage Hillary's chances of becoming President?
This race is just getting better all the time.
Last edited by con-pilot : 13th April 2008 at 00:44.
Reason: Forgot to proofread the post, duh.
According to the NY Times today (pg A12), it is worse, for you, much worse!! They report he said of reporters, "when they're 60, they'll forget something when they're tired at 11 o'clock at night, too." He meant the comment as an explanation for her forgetting details about Tuzla. Comments like that deserve fighting back!!!
PS Do you think he wants Obama to be the "second black president?"
I still believe that by August, Obama, the half-term rookie Senator, will have become the second George McGovern. Cf. his latest declaration to the Marin County faithful (coming on the heels of the crazy anti-Semitic rant of Rev. Eric Lee, a prominent LA Obama supporter):
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
PJ O'Rourke | April 22, 2008
LANDING on an aircraft carrier was the most fun I'd ever had with my trousers on. And the 24 hours that I spent aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt - the "Big Stick" - were an equally unalloyed pleasure.
I love big, moving machinery. And machinery doesn't get any bigger, or more moving, than a US-flagged nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that's longer than the Empire State Building and possesses four acres (1.6ha ) of flight deck.
This four acres, if it were a nation, would have the fifth- or sixth-largest air force in the world - 86 fixed-wing aircraft plus helicopters.
The Theodore Roosevelt and its accompanying cruisers, destroyers, and submarines can blow up most of the military of most of the countries on earth. God has given America a special mission. Russia can barely blow up Chechnya. China can blow up Tibet, maybe, and possibly Taiwan. And the EU can't blow up Liechtenstein. But the USA can blow up ... gosh, where to start?
But I didn't visit the Theodore Roosevelt just to gush patriotically - although some patriotic gushing is called for in America at the moment.
Being a reporter, I wasn't there to report on things. I was there to get a journalistic hook for a preconceived idea. I wanted to say something about senator John McCain. And as soon as our visitor group donned "float coats" and ear protection and went to the flight deck and saw F-18s take off and land, I had something to say.
Carrier launches are astonishing events. The jet is unleashed and so is a steam catapult that hurls the plane down the slot, from 0-210km/h in two seconds. And - if all goes well - the plane is airborne.
Carrier landings are more astonishing. We were in heavy seas. Spray was coming over the bow on to the flight deck, 18m above the waterline. As the ship was pitching, 16tonnes of F-18 with a wingspan of about 12m approached at the speed of celebrity sex rumour. Four acres of flight deck has never looked so small. Had it been lawn you'd swear you could do it in 15 minutes with a push mower.
Four arresting cables are stretched across the stern. The pilot drops his tail hook. The hook is supposed to - and somehow usually does - strike the deck between the second and third arresting cables, stopping the plane dead.
Some say John McCain's character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what John chose to do - voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge, discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer's or a half gallon of Dewar's.
I look from John McCain to what the opposition has to offer.
There's Ms Smarty-Pantsuit, the Bosnia-Under-Sniper-Fire poster gal, former prominent Washington hostess and now a senator from the state that brought you Eliot Spitzer and Bear Stearns.
And there's the happy-talk boy wonder, the plaster Balthazar in the Cook County political creche, whose policy pronouncements sound like a walk through Greenwich Village in 1968: "Change, man? Got any spare change? Change?"
Some people say John McCain isn't conservative enough. But there's more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honour, duty, valour, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilisation, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy are based.
Given what screw-ups we humans are in these respects, conservatism is also a matter of sense of humour.
Heard any good quips lately from Hillary or Barack?
A one-day visit to an aircraft carrier is a lifelong lesson in conservatism. The ship is immense, going seven decks down from the flight deck and 10 levels up in the tower. But it's full, with about 5500 people aboard. Living space is as cramped as steerage on the way to Ellis Island.
Even the pilots live in three-bunk cabins as small and windowless as hall closets. A warship is a sort of giant Sherman tank upon the water. Once below deck, you're sealed inside. There are no cheery portholes to wave from.
McCain could hardly escape understanding the limits of something huge but hermetic, like a government is, and packed with a madding crowd.
It requires organisation, needs hierarchies, demands meritocracy, insists upon delegation of authority. An intricate, time-tested system replete with checks and balances is not a plaything to be moved around in a doll house of ideology.
And yet an aircraft carrier is more an example of what people can do than what government can't.
Scores of people are all over the flight deck during takeoffs and landings. They wear colour-coded T-shirts - yellow for flight-directing, purple for fuelling, blue for chocking and tying-down, red for weapon-loading, and so on. These people can't hear each other. They use hand signals. And, come night ops, they can't do that. Really, they communicate by "training telepathy." They have absorbed their responsibilities to the point that each knows exactly where to be and when and doing what.
These are supremely dangerous jobs. And most of the flight deck crew members are only 19 or 20. Indeed the whole ship is run by youngsters. The average age, officers and all, is about 24. The crew is in more danger than the pilots. If an arresting cable breaks - and they do - half a dozen young men and women could be sliced in half. When a plane crashes, a weapon malfunctions, or a fire breaks out, there's no ejection seat for the flight deck crew.
Supposedly the youth vote is all for Obama. But it's John McCain who actually has put his life in the hands of adolescents on a carrier deck. These would have been interesting subjects to discuss with the Theodore Roosevelt shipmates, but time was up.
Back to the fantasy world of American solid ground. In this never-never land a couple of tinhorn shysters - who, put together, don't have the life experience of the lowest ranking gob-with-a-swab cleaning a toilet on the Big Stick - presume to run for president of the United States.
They're not just running against the hero John McCain, they're running against heroism itself and against almost everything about America that ought to be conserved.
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