Month: August 2008

It’s rare that a politician allows herself to be exposed in such an obvious lie as this:

Maybe it’s better to think of her as a Monica Goodling figure.

Among the tiny number of occasions on which Sarah Palin has expressed even an opinion on foreign policy, one of the most recent bears putting out there one more time. It’s from a critical moment in the war in Iraq, December 2006, which John McCain has made the centerpiece of his campaign. In fact, his support for a double-down strategy in Iraq in the winter of 2006 and early 2007 is one central argument he has made for his candidacy. He has now chosen as the person who would replace him instantly if, at any time bgetween the ages of 72 and 76, he might be incapacitated or die, a person whose view of the situation was as follows:

Alaska Business Monthly: We’ve lost a lot of Alaska’s military members to the war in Iraq. How do you feel about sending more troops into battle, as President Bush is suggesting?

Palin: I’ve been so focused on state government, I haven’t really focused much on the war in Iraq. I heard on the news about the new deployments, and while I support our president, Condoleezza Rice and the administration, I want to know that we have an exit plan in place; I want assurances that we are doing all we can to keep our troops safe. Every life lost is such a tragedy. I am very, very proud of the troops we have in Alaska, those fighting overseas for our freedoms, and the families here who are making so many sacrifices.

As far as I can tell, her response to this central issue of national security was three-fold: I don’t know enough to have an opinion apart from what I hear on the news, I agree with the Democratic party’s focus on the welfare and safety of the troops, I’m a loyal Republican and patriot, and

I want to know that we have an exit plan in place.

Wasn’t the whole point of the surge to kill off any notions in Iraq that we were going to withdraw and to ramp up counter-insurgency and troop levels indefinitely until the place was secure, and democratic?

The whole point was that there was no exit plan for 2007 or beyond, and McCain opposed such an exit plan. The point, according to McCain, was "victory." So McCain has picked a woman who, in so far as she had any views at all, actually echoed Democratic party talking points, not McCain’s.

Do you think he even asked her about foreign policy? Me neither. This pick has told us very little about Sarah Palin, except that she seems like a promising young governor focused almost entirely – and understandably – on the demands of her idiosyncratic state. But it has told us a huge amount about McCain.

As in: way too risky for the White House right now.

Winston Smith scoops the Onion.

She’s One Of Us! Palin brings McCain $7 million in a little over 24 hours.

Modo in great form:

“The P.T.A. is great preparation for dealing with the K.G.B.,” President Palin murmurs to Todd, as they kiss in the final scene while she changes Trig’s diaper. “Now that Georgia’s safe, how ’bout I cook you up some caribou hot dogs and moose stew for dinner, babe?”

The material McCain has just given to late-night comedians, satirists, ironists and parodists is going to give and give and give. Just don’t ask her where Pakistan is.

April 1936. "Son of farmer in dust bowl area. Cimarron County, Oklahoma."

From Shorpy, the 100-year-old photo blog.  After the jump, a 1924 photo of clerks calculating the "soldiers’ bonus" for the War Department:

Non-movement conservatives may well have this reaction:

I’ve voted a straight Republican ticket every year of my life since 1975, when I first came of voting age, but I was stunned and horrified by McCain’s choice of Palin. I simply cannot even consider voting for McCain after this choice, which speaks loudly of his own selfishness and fundamental frivolousness.   

So I was shocked when I turned to the conservative blogs looking for others who shared my dismay and found a celebration going on. They really honestly believe that Palin’s “inexperience” and Obama’s “inexperience” are equivalent.  I have had no luck at all in the past 24 hours trying to explain that Obama is quite obviously an impressive man (with whom I disagree on almost every major issue) with extraordinary qualities of organization, discipline and leadership.  I see nothing in Palin’s record to suggest that she has any such qualities. 

He is a man who has spent his adult life thinking serious thoughts about serious issues and having serious conversations about them with other serious, well-informed people; while Palin quite as clearly has done none of those things.  He was the president of the Harvard Law Review; she was the point guard on her high school basketball team. 

He has surrounded himself in his campaign with world-class people (with whom, again, I disagree on almost every issue); and though I am doubtless an elitist and snob for saying so, I doubt that she has even met a half-dozen world-class people in her lifetime. 

While Obama might do a hundred things as President that I believe are bad for the country, I am confident that he would surround himself with experienced, informed, competent advisors and that he would make no world-destroying blunders.  I cannot say the same about Palin and, in view of what this choice reveals about McCain’s character and judgment, I cannot say the same of him either.

 

The Palin pick says much more about McCain than it does about Palin (all it says about her is that she didn’t have the good sense to turn it down). What it says about McCain is that he is more interested in politics than policy, more interested in campaigning than governing, tactical when he should be strategic, and reckless when he should be considered.

He is as big a gamble as president as Palin is as vice-president. This decision was about gut, about politics, about cynicism, and about vanity. It’s Bushism metastasized.

Tony Woodlief reads Gary Thomas’s Sacred Influence: How God Uses Wives to Shape the Souls of Their Husbands and plucks out this little nugget:

“If you’ve stopped caring whether you’re ‘good in bed,’ then you’re giving less effort to your marriage than many a mistress would give to her adultery. Does that attitude honor God?”

Woodlief’s response:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen, in an ostensibly Christian book, a statement more theologically errant, more offensive to logic, more contemptuous of women, or more reprehensible in its characterization of marriage and God. Stop scheming for better sex techniques, it says, and you are worse than a whore. The logic is positively Orwellian. I’m sure that’s not what Thomas believes about wives who have not been attentive to their sexual prowess, but that’s what his words mean.

Reason roasts Obama for his populism:

Money quote from Guy Gugliotta’s article on the danger of satellite wars:

Both China and the United States should recall why the superpowers stopped destructive testing in the 1980s. Blow up a few dozen satellites with the same abandon as the Chinese did last year, and a belt of space junk will soon circle the heavens. Unchecked by atmospheric drag and largely free of gravity, debris will zip through space at speeds up to 25,000 miles an hour, turning other multimillion-dollar satellites into extraterrestrial roadkill. No more space-guided cruise missiles. But also, no more instant weather, drought, or flood reports; no more GPS; no more space station; no more space telescopes; no more satellite radio; no more DirecTV. Human spaceflight? Maybe, if you like dodging objects while traveling at 25,000 miles an hour. Those of us old enough to remember the 1950s might welcome the return of the pre-Sputnik era, but probably not. Space war may not trigger nuclear winter, but it promises the end of technological life as we know it.