I respect John McCain for getting back to his maverick roots by selecting Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.
There are things about her that I don’t like, her anti-choice stance being the main one. Note by the way that Ron Paul is also anti-abortion, as is the loathesome Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party’s candidate for President.
Palin is also against school vouchers, but for basically the same reason as Ron Paul: she doesn’t trust the government to hand out vouchers without mandates.
She’s against legalizing pot, but sensibly, would make cracking down on methamphetamines a higher priority.
Finally she is against gay marriage and would support a ballot question that would deny spousal benefits to gay couples.
That’s a lot of negatives, but Palin’s accomplishments in her short tenure as Governor of Alaska include the astonishing feat of shaking up that state’s corrupt Republican party. You know, the wonderful people who gave us Ted Stevens.
Corruption in government is a major issue for me, and outweigh the ones listed above. For that reason, I’m more favorably disposed to the McCain candidacy.
Along similar lines, I’m pleased that the Republican leadership has toned down their convention because of Hurricane Gustav.
I’m not offended by the notion that they did this for political reasons: regardless of the motivation, it was the right thing to do.
That contrasts with the Democrats’ selecting an unqualified person to be their candidate for President, trashing about 18 million of their voters in the process, and putting on an unnecessarily lavish spectacle in hard economic times.
Evidently a lot of people foot to the same conclusion: CNN reported this weekend that Obama got no lasting convention “bounce”, and that he and McCain are once again even in their poll.
I’ve been criticized for this, but I am hoping that the combined Republican national and state (Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Texas) administrations will do a far better job of managing relief efforts this time around.
It’s the right thing to do, it’s what they should do, and I really don’t care what the motivations are, I just care about the results.
Some pundits were hoping that Gustav would rain on the Republicans’ convention parade, but from a political perspective, the Dems are the ones who have classless egg all over their faces.
That’s the result of a video showing former DNC Chairman Don Fowler and House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt laughing about how the arrival of Gustav is coincident with the start of the Republican convention.
Maybe the public isn’t as stupid, crass and selfish as the media thinks we are. And maybe after this election is over, those who run the media will have mercy on the rest of us and fire all those spoiled brats who’ve been shoving their half-baked political point of view down our throats for the last 18 months.