PALIN IS A BAD CHOICE AND AN EMPTY SUIT OR IN THIS CASE--DRESS
EIGHT (8) YEARS AS A MAYOR OF WASILLA, ALASKA-POPULATON 5470, SHE WAS SWORN INTO OFFICE TWENTY (20) MONTHS AGO AS GOVERNOR
FOR THE REPUBLICANS, HER BIGGEST ASSET IS THAT SHE IS “HOT”—A FORMER BEAUTY QUEEN WHO CAME IN SECOND IN THE MISS ALASKA COMPETITION
ADDENDUM
Gov. Palin announced today that her seventeen year old daughter is pregnant and if all indications she has been pregnant for five months. One wonders if McCain knew about this pregnancy prior to his introduction of Sarah Palin as his running mate since all reports indicate that he had only met with her one time and talked with her on one other occasion.
It is difficult to believe that a forty-four year old woman, who is Governor of a state, however small, could give birth to a baby with Down’s syndrome, deal with the fact that her son will ship off to Iraq this year and discover that her young unwed seventeen year old daughter was five months pregnant would even consider taking on the added job of campaigning endlessly for the next two months for the second highest office in the land.
Every Democrat, Republican and pundit should express their support for the young woman by giving her the privacy that a pregnant woman requires and support her by keeping her name out of the headlines and the crush of political activity.
THIS IS AN INDICTMENT OF JOHN MCCAIN'S JUDGMENT IF THERE EVER WAS ONE. TO SELECT A PERSON WHO HAS NO IDEA OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS (WHO DID NOT OWN A PASSPORT UNTIL TWO YEARS AGO), TO INTERVIEW A CANDIDATE FOR THE SECOND MOST IMPORTANT JOB IN OUR GOVERNMENT ONCE IS AN INSULT TO HIS CONSTITUENTS AND MORE IMPORTANT TO THE SAFETY AND SECURITY OF THE NATION SHOULD ANYTHING HAPPEN TO THE PRESIDENT
If beauty and personality were the only qualifications for the office of Vice President, Sarah Palin would probably have been a good choice, but there is a hell of a lot more to the office than checking into the health of the president every morning and presiding over the Senate.
A person who is one heart beat away from the presidency needs to be prepared to step into that position, especially when the president is seventy-two years old and has had numerous bouts with cancer.
John McCain has placed this country in jeopardy if by some chance he happens to get elected president and then dies or is assassinated or becomes incapacitated because of his propensity toward cancer. This is a vice presidential chance we can not take.
Serving 10 years in local government in a city of 5470 people is not exactly applicable experience. Adding to her resume, she has been governor of a state with a population of 670,000 people for twenty (20) months (She was sworn in December 4, 2006).
The Republicans continue to whine about the lack of experience of Barack Obama. Years of service is not the question, the question in the quality of service dealing with the issues any president must confront?
While time served is not the critical issue in this campaign, the most intriguing comparison is the time that Obama spent in pubic service prior to his run for the presidency and the time, perhaps our greatest president to date spent in public service prior to his run for the “White House:
ABRAHAM LINCOLN:
THE ONLY EDUCATION HE HAD WAS THAT WHICH HE PICKED UP BECAUSE OF HIS VORATIOUS READING. HE WOULD TRAVEL LONG DISTANCES TO BORROW BOOKS
AS WAS USUAL IN THOSE DAYS, HE LEARNED LAW AS AN APPRENTICE OF A PRACTICING LAWYER AND LATER BECAME HIS PARTNER
BARACK OBAMA;
HE SPENT TWO YEARS IN A MUSLIM SCHOOL
THEN TRANSFERRED AND SPENT TWO YEARS IN A CATHOLIC SCHOOL
HE GRADUATED FROM COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY WITH A B.A.
HE GRADUATED WITH A LAW DEGREE FROM HARVARD UNIVERSITY AND WAS THE FIRST AFRICAN AMERICAN TO BE ELECTED AS PRESIDENT OF THE PRETIGIOUS HARVARD LAW REVIEW.
SARAH PALIN:
SHE GRADUATED FROM WASILLA HIGH
RECEIVING AN ATHLETIC SCHOLARSHIP, SHE GRADUATED FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO IN COMMUNICATION AND JOURNALISM.
A COMPARISON OF THE EXPERIENCE BETWEEN OBAMA, LINCOLN AND PALIN:
ABRAHAM LINCOLN:
· HE WAS ELECTED TO FOUR TERMS IN THE ILLINOIS GENERAL ASSEMBLY.
· HE SERVED A TWO (2) YEAR TERM IN THE U. S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.
BARACK OBAMA:
· HE WAS ELECTED TO ILLINOIS STATE SENATE FOR EIGHT YEARS.
· HE IS SERVING HIS FOURTH YEAR IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE AS A MEMBER OF THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE AND THE SENATE COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY.
SARAH PALIN:
· SHE SERVED 10 YEARS ON THE CITY COUNCIL OF WASILLA, ALASKA, A TOWN OF 5470 PEOPLE.
· SHE HAS SERVED TWENTY (20) MONTHS AS GOVERNOR OF ALASKA, A STATE OF 670,000. PEOPLE.
My real consternation of Palin is her 18th century thinking on issues from the environment and global warming where she insists that there is no such thing as man made pollution, to her insistence on teaching creationism in the schools along side evolution in the science curriculum, to her position that would not allow abortion under any circumstance including rape and incest. That is archaic thinking and while it coincides with McCain is still out of step with the vast majority of Americans
This woman could well be a disaster as president should that unfortunate circumstance occur, but more importantly she is in no way prepared to take on the more complex problems confronting the world now.
“Cute” and “hot” are not qualifications for the presidency of the United States of America. A good personality, while preferable, is not a prerequisite and is in no way a reason for voting a person into office. It is part and partial of the same nonsense that less exacting voters who vote for someone simply because they could sit down with them and enjoy a beer. What in the name of everything good does a voter need to sit down with a candidate and feel comfortable enough to drink a beer have to do with his or her capacity for running the country? Americans need to grow up about how and why they vote.
There are times when I feel that we have some of the most absurdly one-dimensional voters in the whole world. George W. Bush won the contest for feeling comfortable enough to have a beer and, in the end, proved once and for all that that qualification is one of the stupidest measures anybody could use to decide for whom to vote.
The important quality necessary for a great president is superior judgment. Without judgment experience is nothing more than “sounding brass and clanging symbol.” i. e .in other words tons of experience without an ounce of judgment is worthless. In the George W. Bush administration we had men with some of the finest experience of any modern day government.
There is Dick Cheney who served as Vice President, U. S. Secretary of Defense under George H. W. Bush, U. S. House minority whip, U. S. House of Representative from Wyoming-at-Large, and White House Chief of Staff under President Gerald Ford.
Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford, Chief of Staff in the office of President Gerald Ford, and was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives from the 13th District of Illinois. When he dig even further you find the years of experience of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and dozens more with years of experience in both the executive branch, department of defense, state, treasury, etc.
And just take a look at what all of this experience did for America. All the way from Iraq, to Katrina, to the corruption that permeates every department of the Bush administration from huge tax breaks to the very rich, to failure to provide our troops with sufficient armored vehicles to protect them from I. E. D.’s and on and on and on.
We needs people with the judgment, the moral underpinning to not only make judgments for the welfare of all Americans, but to make the right decisions.
We are told the John McCain met with Sarah Palin ONCE and talked with her on the phone again. People applying for jobs as janitors are interviewed more than once. McCain insulted the constituency of the United States by placing this nation in the hands of a nice, cute woman with tissue thin experience should the oldest man to ever run for the presidency should die.
In short, Palin is a lovely lady with a marvelous personality whose resume is so thin it fits well on tissue paper. This nation cannot be fooled by the religious right who are so overjoyed to have someone who will back their foolish belief in “intelligent design” or to put it correctly, “creationism,” who are violently opposed to abortion even in the cases of rape and incest, and are married to the obvious false conviction that global warming is in no way caused by human beings, that the truly critical issues are ignored.
We cannot afford to have voters who pay no attention to the war in Iraq, terrorism, the Middle Eastern quandary, the vacillations of Russia, the growth of China’s reach for power, the world economic fluctuations, Iran’s defiance of the larger world in their attempt to become a nuclear power, the economics of the housing market and the number of foreclosures, the jobless rate and the decline in American jobs, the steady rise in medical costs and the insurance necessary to meet those increases i.e. people who are single issue voters (abortion, etc) are a danger to our national security. We must have voters and leaders who know and understand the broader agenda of problems facing our nation in this crucial time.
IT IS BARACK OBAMA WHO HAS THE INTELLIGENCE, THE KNOWLEDGE, THE JUDGMENT, AND THE COURAGE TO ACT WHEN A SEVERE CRISIS ARISES.
It is not that the president must be an expert in all of these areas of crisis; it is that the president must have the good judgment to select the best people in the country and have the persuasiveness to convince those people to come to work for his government. Judgment is the crucial agent for change and progress. In the selection of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency of the United States and the next in line for the presidency, John McCain has demonstrated, without a doubt, that he does not possess that judgment.
2:13:33 PM 
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