I think about everyone who’s watched the Clintons for the last sixteen years or so have seen this coming a mile away and a long time comin.
The message here is obvious: Your children are at risk unless you vote for the experienced candidate. You do love your children don’t you? Well, then ya gotta vote for the most experienced candidate who’s been around long enough to see this ( whatever it is ) coming and done nothing to stop it. So, being the pragmatic type, I took a look-see to see who Hillary is suggesting:
- John McCain is 71 years old. He served in the military from approximately 1958 until 1981. Hillary Clinton is 60 years old. She never served in the military. Barack Obama is 46 years old. He never served in the military. Advantage military would have to go McCain.
- John McCain’s career was military, retiring in 1981 from the Navy. Clinton’s career is legal. Obama’s career is legal. Both Clinton and Obama spent a good part of those legal careers “defending” civil rights. To a lot of people, including myself, protecting the “civil rights” of the unknown masses is what opened the door for illegal immigrants to come into the country and assimilate very easily while planning the attacks which led to 9/11. It is these same “civil rights” lawyers at this time trying to gut what little is left of the Patriot Act. The US Navy, on the other hand, is trained to protect those masses from attack. Their strategy is different in that they are trained to kill, mame, destroy, or annihilate whatever the threat may be with the use of large guns, missiles, torpedoes, jets, bombs, or whatever tool they may have. When dealing with terrorists and rogue nations, I give the Navy more credit in keeping us safe than I do the ACLU. Clear advantage goes to McCain.
- John McCain whetted his political appetite in 1981 for sure. Obama got into it in 1997. Hillary wins this one by being actively involved since 1969.
So, the message is clear. If you want a person who’s got the most experience protecting the country at various levels, you HAVE to vote for McCain or your children will die.
That is such a very strange message for Hillary to be giving at this time.
What makes it even stranger is that for about a year now, Clinton and Obama have duked it out over who would bring the most change to the office. Now, apparently, that change only matters when it’s winning, which then is trumped by experience when it’s not, but only so long as she has more asserted experience than the person at hand, which I assume would be dismissed if she has to face a person with more experience, which then would make “change” more important? Sheez, those Clintons wear my soul out. Let’s just listen to a good tune and see how this ad pans out:
This is very interesting to me:
Angelina Jolie supports the surge. She does because it’s working. In that it’s working, it allows humanitarian aid to get to those in need inside Iraq. And, apparently displaced people are trying to come home. So, she’s trying to keep the surge in place so that they can safely.
I don’t think she’s backing John McCain, she’s pretty well trashed all Republicans in the past although he’s the only supporting the surge. She flies in the face of Barack Obama’s primary campaign theme that he’s the only candidate who has opposed anything to do with Iraq from teh day he was born. And, Hillary as well, who’s basically taken the position it was right when she said it was, and wrong now so it must end immediately.
So, I’d be real curious to see how she would vote. Of course, some people are speculating that she’s gonna be the first female President. I think I’d be up with that.
28
Feb
A lot is suddenly being made over a New York Times article that questions whether John McCain qualifies for President. It seems he was born in Panama. Some people are taking the Times to task since they endorsed McCain a long time ago and “suddenly” realized a critical piece of his biography. Now, to the very conspiracy minded, you could easily think they were setting up the Republican Party to lose. Push someone you know has to be disqualified on a technicality to knock the others out first.
However, some people are quite put out with the new York Times for not doing any research apparently. However, if they had done some, they would have realized a technicality that nullifies the entire issue. Best I can tell, John McCain was born on a military base in Panama. Panama was a United States sovereign territory from 1903 to 1979. A little better definition of Panama’s status at that time from Wiki:
Territories of the United States are one type of political division of the United States, administered by the U.S. government but not any part of a U.S. state. These territories were created to govern newly acquired land while the borders of the United States were still evolving.
What the Times is citing is:
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
John McCain was born a natural born citizen. He just wasn’t born in anything that is now a state.
Case closed.
You’d think the New York Times could have figured that out.
The amazing thing about this one so far is it seems only my buds in at Independent Sources seem to have noticed:
Quoting Barack:
“In Youngstown, Ohio, I talked to workers who have seen their plants shipped overseas as a consequence of bad trade deals like NAFTA, literally seeing equipment unbolted from the floors of factories and shipped to China, resulting in devastating job losses and communities completely falling apart,” Democratic front-runner Barack Obama said at a Texas debate last week, making sure that all the woes of China trade got wrapped in the word NAFTA.
Now, before I get into the real logic of this debate, I need to point out a few things:
- NAFTA stand for North American Free Trade Agreement. It only has three members. It’s members are the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Coincedentally, all three countries reside in, ( drum roll please ), North America.
- China is in Asia. China is not a member of NAFTA. It would be silly for China to be a member of the North American Free Trade Agreement wouldn’t it?
- Given that 1 and 2 are true, it would seem rather silly to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement because of bad trades with China now wouldn’t it? I would think so.
However, since I’m quite certain the education system is SOOOO much better in rural Kentucky than Chicago, I feel I might be picking on a candidate for President of the United States unjustly. I mean, is it REALLY that important that Obama knows that China is on a different continent than say, Canada, or us? So, just to get an idea of how big an issue this is, I thought I’d run us a poll to see if I’m special in knowing that China is not part of North America. If you would:
My idiot of the day is NOT Barack for pandering to the lowest common demoninator. Whether he knows where China is or not, he’s got tons of advisors that do. Some of them are FROM China I’m sure. The idiots are the same media that have trashed Bush for eight years for being an idiot for not pronouncing nukular the way they want and giving an equally or more stupid and dangerous comment a free pass.
That’s the question being asked on CNN right now. Naturally the two Democrat candidates left are battling it out over who the rest of the world will like better. To me that’s not really much of an issue. I’m sure they’ll like either of the two, and probably McCain as well, better. However, that’s appropriate. Bush has not been the abject failure most people like to make him out to be with foreign relations. It’s been clumsy for sure, but it’s been what we had to do. For too long federal focus at the Presidential level has been shifting towards worrying as much or moreso about events happening everywhere BUT in the US. It’s been too focused on convincing the rest of the world to be our best buds when some of them were trying to kill us. It was naive, and misguided. That philosophy I think hit bottom with the second term of Bill Clinton. We sold them missile technology only to have them oppose our efforts to build a missile defense system, capture one of our airplanes, and oppose and completely not support our efforts in the Middle East. Clinton was sidling up to the North Koreans while they were developing nuclear missiles specifically intended to hit the US. I don’t think people quite understood how dangerous Clinton’s policies were. So, given what he had to work with, I think Bush responded appropriately. Most media hated it, Hollywood hated it, and of course all the Democrats hated it. But, the World Trade Towers were NOT the only attack we faced when Bush took over. We HAD to get tough with certain parts of the world. He did that. By doing that, and having Hollywood and media misinterpret and misrepresent what was happening, he had no chance of being successful domestically. But he did it anyway. Now that it’s been done, and it probably needs doing some more, Hillary and Barack get to look back in retrospect and say they would have done it differently.
If they had, we’d be in a world of hurt right now.
The world is a dangerous place. Unless a candidate is willing to face that fact and deal with it realistically, they make me nervous BECAUSE I know they are smart enough to know that once in the Oval Office, they will HAVE to get ugly. So, to say they wouldn’t have, won’t, or have some mythical magical powers, they’re just flat-out lieing.
So far, John McCain is the only one that hasn’t promised us an unrealistic foreign policy. And, for that, Hillary and Barack are using that against him. And for that, a lot of media are as well. Looks like a lot of people didn’t learn squat from September 11, 2001. That is so amazing and disappointing to me.
The next president may or may not improve relations with “the rest of the world”. For me, that’s a moot point in the first place as there is no one entity that is “the rest of the world”. I hate stupidly thought out polls. I only hope the next President improves relations with those countries that are fer us, and gets ugly with those that are agin us. That’s what the next President of the US is mandated to do by the US Constitution. Nowhere in that Constitution does it mandate us to win popularity contests.
In the face of record high profits, and expenses, for oil, Nancy Pelosi has just the plan to ease our pain.
Add some taxes to the cost.
The House bill, similar to one that failed to win Senate approval last fall, would roll back two lucrative tax breaks for the largest U.S. oil companies, and use the money for tax incentives to support wind, solar and biofuel industries as well as energy efficiency programs…..
Pelosi called the shift of tax benefits from oil to alternative energy development critical to increased energy independence and lowering energy costs.
The White House maintains that singling out the oil companies for higher taxes “would reduce the nation’s energy security rather than improve it” and “lead to higher energy costs to U.S. consumers and business.”
Call me a Bushie all you want, but I tend to side with The White House on this one for several reasons:
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Adding an expense to the cost of energy ONLY adds to the expense of energy. It does nothing for anything else. Now, giving additional tax incentives to alternative energy sources would be a good thing in the long run, but it’s the short run right now that has everyone hurting. Making that short run even more painful isn’t a good thing.
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Rather than falling back on the staid and predictable Democrat plan of taxing everything that they don’t indivudally like, how’s about getting creative and doing something about the problem instead? Just making it more expensive for the average person isn’t solving anything. And, given the shaky nature of the economy right now, could have some rather drastic consequences. How’s about a pro-active idea instead of punitive? Something like allowing drilling in the middle of the Alaskan Tundra and limiting it to U.S. only companies with extremely rigid strings attached like complete ecological restoration upon completion? Yeah I know Greenpeace doesn’t trust anyone of their own species, but it’s worked in Kentucky in a BIG way. Some of the most beautiful and wild forestry you’ll find in Kentucky is reclaimed mines. You’ll have a hard time verifying that tho, it’s still restricted federal property. But, nature has a miraculous way of fixing itself. The Tundra I’m sure will do the same. So, let’s get pro-active ok Nancy? Let’s swamp the US economy with home-made petroleum that drives down the world demand and drives OPEC back into a bargaining position that then allows us to demand that ALL oil companies invest in alternative fuels instead of JUST the US companies. Sound simple don’t it? It is. The only reason Nancy would never think of it is just as simple, it doesn’t involve taxes.
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Lastly, this goof-ball liberal plan of hers will only succeed in making foreign companies even more competitve outside of the US than they are now. They’ll be laughing all the way to the bank at Nancy’s bird-brained megolamaniacal fixation on taxes as the cure-all for all her spending plans. It wouldn’t be so bad if she had actually gotten one spending plan passed that benefitted anyone living IN the United States.
And don’t forget this folks, Nancy’s on the same political side of the fence as both Obama and Clinton. She’s just not as liberal as either candidate. So, if you want to continue to give tax breaks to foreign competition and penalize the home teams, vote for either of those two. ( Clue for those scratching their heads, ALL of the other Top 10 oil producing companies are STATE OWNED. Most pay no income taxes at all. )
24
Feb
With the dwindling list of candidates, the major parties have become kinda boring. Sure we’ve got a race on the Democrat side, but I don’t think it’s going to last much longer. So, to spice things up a little, Ralph Nader has once again jumped into the fray.
OLBERMANN: The phrase here, “protect the candidate from himself.” “Intervene.” This sounds, this sounds eerily familiar. We harkened back to the efforts from members of President Clinton’s staff to try to keep Monica Lewinsky away from him ten years ago or more. Those are eerily similar uses of the language, are they not?
The only problem here is the best anyone can tell, the New York Times basically made up their story. Which, being as the two stories use “eerily similar uses of the language”, my guess is they simply used what they wrote about Clinton when making up their story about McCain. Plagiarism is “eerily similar use of language” every single time.
Keith Olbermann is an idiot. If you’ve read this blog for very long, that phrase will be “eerily similar” to several previous posts.
I finally read someone who’s better at writing than I am comment basically what I’ve been saying here:
I don’t know who Robert Samuelson is. I have no clue what his politics are. However, he seems to have hit my concern on the head. It’s easy to like Obama. It’s hard to figure out politically why. The crux of the primary so far is it’s easy NOT to like Hillary, politically there’s no real difference between her and Obama. That leaves the biscuit being Obama is riding on a wave of people just liking him better I think. However, where it gets problematic to me is I’ve never seen a candidate people just liked do too terribly well once reality sets it, either during the race or after. If you pin him down on purely political issues, which is what voting is supposed to be about to some degree, his rhetoric is purely very liberal canned stuff. Tax the rich, spend more on entitlements, give tax breaks to the poor working familes, etc.. As a REAL Republican who eschews smaller government, that’s bad news. I’ve got real issues with his platform that he rarely mentions. But, it’s hard not to agree that the country needs to come together, blah, blah, blah. If he’s expecting “change” to be only what he envisions, the country can’t, and won’t. So, I get concerned with this cult of personality where people are obviously very excited about their candidate, but can’t really say why. What happens if after the fact, his “change” isn’t what they expected?
The wife of Barack had this to say today:
Naturally, Hot Air and a lot of others are jumping all over this. Cindy McCain, wife of John, admitted she has pretty much always been proud of her country. That probably will ring a little better with most voters. But, it certainly won’t get the heat Michelle’s comment is.
And, that comment deserves heat for several reasons. First of all, it belies that perceived ultra-liberal philosophy that they are not patriotic in the least bit. They say they are, but they blame everything on the US first whether the US had anything to do with it or not. Michelle can not cite one thing in the last 25 years to be proud of. Not one apparently. That’s the ultra-liberal everyone perceives and knows well. Whether it’s accurate or not is irrelevent. Politics is ALL about perception. This will just steel that perception not only with the vast right wing conspirators, but those floating around in the middle as well.
Secondly, that’s not really the type of person I want representing the US abroad as a serious head of state. I want a Cindy McCain who is quite proud of her country and more than willing to say it publicly.
Thirdly, what Michelle cites as something to be proud of flies squarely in the face of the prevailing criticism of Obama:
I’ve seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic common issues, and it’s made me proud.”
What is that basic common issue? “Change” is not an issue. “Change” doesn’t put food on the table. “Change” doesn’t stop martyr wannabes. “Change” doesn’t make your car go farther or use less fuel. “Change” doesn’t set examples for kids. “Change” doesn’t mean squat. Obama has not run his race on issues, he’s run his race on appealing to people who want “change”. She may have seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic common issues, but if they have paid any attention to Obama’s speeches, they still are.
Lastly, she is pandering to something that I have griped about repeatedly here, the cult of personality moreso than the cult of knowledge. She is proud now even though she never was before. She has no clue what she is proud of. She just is. However, I think she is proud for a specific reason but knows she can’t say what that reason is. That reason would be purely racial and that’s the very last thing this country needs. As soon as this primary or general election devolves into a racial issue, it will set back what has been gained fifty years. And, if Michelle Obama can’t do a better job explaining what she is proud of, she leaves open the very real possiblity that she is proud for the first time of her life in her country simply because a black man can do so well in politics. I would prefer a person in her position EXPECT that a black man can do as well in politics as anyone.
Politics, especially on a national level, is all about perception. The perception that person creates greatly affects the perception people have. Michelle’s in the national spotlight now whether she likes it or not. Whether she likes it or not, we are looking at the entire picture Obama brings to the table. Whether she likse it or not, this is no time to be adlibbing or expressing her own personal opinions. If she’s never been proud of my country, why should she be the most important spouse of my country?
Sheez, that was just a stupid, stupid, comment by Michelle. Someone needs to hire her a speech writer. And, I think Barack needs to hire a damage control team.
