Friday, August 29, 2008

McCain Picks Palin: Let the Brickbats Fly

Republican presidential candidate John "I Was a P.O.W. at the Naval Academy" McCain picks Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his vice

president.

Palin is pushing for Creationism to be taught in Alaskan schools. Big deal: 1,000 more under-educated Gen Y-ers won't make a deep dent anywhere.

Palin's a Vogue girl under investigation for improper ethics while in office. Let's call them Beauty and the Beast, and when McCain croaks (he is 72 and was a P.O.W. at the Naval Academy), she can play both roles, seeing as how she's very, ah, inexperienced and most likely a Rover

choice.

3 comments:

John E said...

So many seem to forget that the office of the President is in the executive branch of the government, an that being an executive means leading a team to accomplish a goal. Neither Senators Obama or Biden have done that. Neither has the executive experience to run a Starbucks, let alone a country. Senator McCain has, among other command positions, run the largest unit in the navy at the time -- an aviation training unit. The Governor Palin has run a state with bottom line responsibility in the billions.

So, it is zero experience against substantial experience. No one who has ever had the responsibility for actually managing people and been held accountable for the result, would hire either Senator Obama or Biden to manage their small business, let alone the largest organization in the country -- the Executive Branch of the government. If you couldn't reasonably put Senator Obama in charge of your local supermarket, how can you suspect he can run the country?

GCSchmidt said...

John, reasonably good points. However...McCain's unit wasn't "the largest" at the time: His command was given "Top Star" status (higher profile and enhanced budget) for Public Relations purposes. (Department of Defense plans for 1974-1977 were to "visibly rebuild the image of the Armed Forces." None of those programs exist today.) Whether he did a good job or a great one thus depends on many factors beyond his mere presence, leadership and/or experience. It's also possible he could have sucked at the job (like he sucked big-time at the Naval Academy) and still come out smelling like a rose due to external factors.

"The Governor Palin" runs the largest land-area state in the U.S. with a population barely half of that of My Island, Puerto Rico, which also has a bottom line responsibility in the billions. By that token, you would consider Our Governor a better choice for V.P., something I would have a hard time accepting. ("Hard" as in "When Hell freezes over and the Sun runs on biodiesel.")

You contrast the candidate teams' experience as "zero against substantial." Biden has been in the Senate longer than Palin has been in any kind of office (where she started as Mayor of a town of 1,500 people. You know what We call a 1,500-person area in Puerto Rico? A neighborhood.)

Foreign policy experience? Biden is acknowledged by both parties to be a renowned foreign policy wonk, while Palin may have seen Russia once or twice. Most likely on TV.

As for the two head honchos, Obama has little experience in domestic and foreign affairs, whereas McCain has some experience in domestic and almost none in foreign policy. Advantage McCain if you count voting blindly to the murderous moron's mistakes, not showing up to vote 62% of the time and flip-flopping on everything from abortion to economic issues as "experience."

Oh, and McCain was a P.O.W. You GOTTA give him that, right?

GCSchmidt said...

John, I made a mistake, for I originally wrote "...barely half of that of My Island's capital, San Juan...", but edited it badly and ended up with a mistake. My bad.

You see, Alaska has about 660,000 residents, whereas Puerto Rico has about 3,989,000, with San Juan at about 1,020,000. So "The Governor Palin" runs a basketball team while Our Non-Governor runs a whole league. Badly, but then again, apparently so does "The Governor Palin."

Sorry to have misedited My response. Maybe not as sorry as you should be for backing Palin, though...