I was delighted when the news broke this morning that McCain had selected Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate, having gone to bed last night expecting Pawlenty. McCain needs to take risks if he's going to have a chance of winning this election and this looks to be one of the good ones.
McCain needs to get people who can be persuaded to do so to take a second look at him. (If this doesn't apply to you, that's fine. I suspect that McCain could have picked the deity of your choice as his running mate with a divinely-backed promise of Peace on Earth and he still wouldn't be your preferred candidate. :) ) Palin provides that in a way that none of the supposed front-running choices could have. Whether it will make a difference remains to be seen.
And I am absolutely thrilled to have someone on board the Republican ticket who has made her reputation by going in, kicking butt, and taking names in her efforts to rid her own party of corruption. If it were possible to say the same about Senator Obama, I'd be much less worried about him than I am. (Yes, I know about the investigation into Palin. It appears to be a non-event. Certainly McCain knew about it and picked her anyway.)
That is change that I can believe in.
I wish we had such Republicans in Illinois. |
She does seem to be that rare thing, an honest Alaska politician. The ethics investigation seems to be just something silly, I'm guessing a way for the folks in her own party who are angry at her to try to take a slap at her. I'm betting they are even angrier now, which could be a problem for the ticket, she has pissed a lot of republicans off in the last few years.
But overall I think she is about as good a choice for the ticket as McCain could have made.
My personal take on creationism in schools is that there's nothing wrong with spending time explaining to the students why creationism shouldn't be taught by the science department...
God made us smart enough to understand the concept of a metaphor, so it's reasonable to assume he used metaphors in inspiring the bible. Instead, we have people twisting science like a pretzel baked in a tesseract in order to convince the gullible that the earth is only 6,000 years old.
Can't see the Deity of my choice taking second place on *any* ticket...
sometimes i wonder if some of the neocons are actually trying ot bring about teh apocolypse. no, actually, i frequently suspect it.
...who began questioning him in 2002 (when he was parroting the Cheney/Rumsfeld lies about how Iraq was already won now, and totally tracking with tying Saddam to 9-11 and building a global American military empire)
...who began seriously doubting him in 2004 (the fake-ass Bush hug and its all-too-real symbolism of his embrace of the Bush agenda)
...who was flat-out disgusted with him by January 2007 (60 Minutes interview where he buys a rug in a Baghdad market, wearing kevlar and surrounded by soldiers in 10 armored Humvees and 2 Apaches overhead, to prove it's safe there now)
...and who now loathes him more with each new "look" at him, I have to say that this VP pick somehow made the prospect of a McCain administration noticeably more horrifying to me, and that's a feat. I'll tell you why.
I did look at McCain carefully and objectively when he won the nomination. He was even my first of all the (terrible) choices in the GOP stable. The Dems started talking about how he was essentially the same as Bush on all issues, and I went to see how fair that really was. I researched his platform, specifically looking for issues on which he differs from Bush. Know what I found? These:
1. Opposes torture of enemy combatants (in a lukewarm way, but give it to him)
2. Supports embryonic stem cell research
3. Supports environmental issues (opposes drilling in ANWR, pays better lip service to global warming than Bush, though still opposed Kyoto and Obama has a better record)
That was it. So guess which two of those Palin (the Evangelical with the oil-magnate husband) now subtracts from the equation?
Similarly McCain joins Bush in supporting: permanent $trillion tax cuts for the wealthiest, permanent and expanding military involvement abroad, all of our many reasons for invading Iraq (whatever they were then or are this week), warrantless wiretapping, suspension of habeas corpus for anyone the President deems an enemy combatant, privatization of social security, deployment of missile defense (but only without Russian cooperation, so that we can finally establish a nuclear first strike capability on Moscow and win that Cold War, woo!), school vouchers, and TEACHING INTELLIGENT DESIGN (another big red button for me) and school prayer and all the other pet issues of the James Dobson crowd.
Areas in which McCain and Obama's positions do not differ and I consider them both right: support for space exploration, support for alternative energy, opposition to affirmative action, support of disability rights, support for the death penalty, tough on crime.
Areas in which they agree and they're both wrong: giving amnesty to telecoms assisting in warrantless wiretapping (and support of the PATRIOT Act in general), support/expansion of tax funded faith-based programs, both are hypocrites on campaign finance reform, both give credence to an autism/vaccine link
Areas in which Bush/McCain agree and Obama is wrong: free trade/NAFTA, aggressive development of nuclear power (Obama supports this at a considerably more limited scope)
Areas I have no strong opinion on and don't care about the candidates' positions: gun control, immigration, Medicare, cigarette tax, drug enforcement
Additionally, McCain has said he would make it a goal of his presidency to overturn Roe v Wade, that only a Christian could properly be president, that he would continue to expand the executive branch's power and create a "President's Question Time" which George Will called unconstitutional, and his current campaign violates every "soft money" and "issue ad" rule of campaign finance reform he's ever proposed.
Don't tell me that those who have come to hate McCain just need a second look. I would have voted for him over Gore! A second look, third look, hundredth look is how I came to see him for the say-anything political monkey he is, and hate his lying ass. He gets worse and worse with each look and I swear to you, Bill...I swear I am looking for some good in McCain. What little there is disappears daily, and the Palin tap took the biggest remaining chunk of it.
Why don't you take a second look at him? Or Palin, for that matter? Let's see you outline the differences and similarities between Palin's positions and Ann Coulter's? I'd love to hear any you can find.
I'm sorry for the rant, I mean that.
But I'm extremely insulted that you'd suggest that opposing McCain means I'm either hopelessly partisan or haven't done my due diligence on the old man. I'm an independent, in a period of deep disgust with the right and hoping to someday see the rational wing of the GOP take over again. McCain might have been it, once, but he's made all his deals with the devils and the crazies and now he's the best you've got.
Not enough for this centrist. Try again in 2012.
I may end up liking her better than McCain.
This is, in fact, the message McCain needs to get out to the world before the election. This ought to separate him from Bush, in that it will be clear that McCain/Palin want to rid the government of those who aren't following our own laws in both the letter and the spirit.
He can take the risk of somewhat alienating his own party, because the Republicans will still rally 'round the conservative flag. Palin and McCain's differences with the Republican party, after all, are far less than those of Obama's Democrats.
I think the pundits on TV and radio saying that the Palin pick means that McCain is trying to get the women's vote available after Hillary's withdrawal from the consideration are oversimplifying and insulting to both the McCain campaign, and to voters. Women won't vote for other women unless they share a connection and belief system in common, just as we won't vote for a male candidate with views with which we disagree.
Given that, naturally second fiddle doesn't matter to me. What difference should it make who's second, if the guy who's first promotes policies that will be bad for us and for the country?
That said, I do think it's progress that the Republicans have finally tapped a female for a spot on the ticket. And only 20 years behind the Democrats. For the Republicans that represents real progress and I heartily congratulate them on it.
And it's nice to see that McCain agrees that we need a change; fresh youthful enthusiasm, an outside perspective on Washington, rather than another long-time Beltway insider. It's great to know that he gets that change is more important than experience. That's one place I do agree with him.
I would say good things about him picking a candidate with good judgment, except that she turns out to support Creationism in the public schools. :-7
Sarah Palin could be McCain's bad-boy answer to the Repubs, dragging them forward to 1984. Say what you like about ol' John, he's always had a sly sense of humor. Palin may help McCain about as much as Ferraro helped Mondale. Look beyond her positions for a moment, though. She vetoed the Bridge to Nowhere and cut a lot of other pet projects - a real goo-goo of the old school. She's cheerful and not full of herself. This is about as far as you can get from all those rich, pompous guys from the primaries who the echo-chamber partisans were saying "should" have the VP nomination. She's ever so much more clueful than Dan Quayle.
Now look at Palin's positions again, and sigh. Watch the VP debate, and smile.
I lack the imagination to understand how anyone who cares so little about the lives of Iraqis as to support our war there can sincerely care about the "right to life" of a fetus. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps over a million, Iraqis have been killed, including at least one woman in labor, killed by American troops while she was en route to a hospital to have her baby delivered.
So I view the "pro-life" sentiments of Bush and McCain as nothing more than a calculated, insincere attempt to win the votes of the religious right. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, doesn't just talk the talk, she walks the walk. But at the same time, I don't think that giving birth to a child with Down's syndrome qualifies one to be Vice-President. Palin's sincerity on an issue that I feel should be a matter of individual choice is a reason not to despise her, not a reason to vote for her.
I'm happy that the Republicans have selected their first female running mate, 24 years after Walter Mondale selected Geraldine Ferraro. But Palin has governed, for 18 months, a state with the population of Fort Worth, TX. If Bush wanted to select a woman VP, why didn't he select someone with more experience, like Christine Whitman, Kay Hutchison, Elizabeth Dole, Susan Collins, or Carly Fiorina?
I'm not worried so much that Palin would be clueless if she became President, but that McCain would be clueless if he kept appointing people like Palin.
Any President, no matter how experienced or inexperienced, knows only a small fraction of what is needed to make sound, objective decisions. So any President must appoint to his or her administration reasonably impartial, knowledgeable people with expertise in many areas. I know of only two such people in the Busn administration: Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke. They both were ignored because their facts contradicted neo-conservative ideology, so they quit or were fired and wrote books critical of the Bush administration's ideologically based, reality-free policies.
Sarah Palin is not a Paul O'Neill or a Richard Clarke. She would be no more of an asset to a McCain administration than Mike Brown, the Arabian horse guy, was to FEMA. Even the Bush appointees with considerable experience, like Cheney and Rumsfeld, based their beliefs (or at least their claims) on ideology rather than on reality. They believed the fairy tales about the WMDs, collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, "we will be greeted as liberators", and so on, because those beliefs supported the administration's desire to invade Iraq.
This country can't afford another ideological, reality-free administration.
I don't think that giving birth to a child with Down's syndrome qualifies one to be Vice-President.
I realize you never said it does.
Edited at 2008-08-31 11:03 pm (UTC)