US Presidential Politics: Really Only for Comedians

A “Papa and Daughter” Ticket?
By Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog / August 29, 2008

I was delighted to find someone has already put my opinion of McCain’s pick (and reason for it) into a picture! McCain dumped his first wife for Cindy; claims she has a pre-nuptial (and owns most or all of the homes they have), and has riden on her skirt. Now he intends to ride on the skirt of a young woman; a ‘papa and daughter’ ticket?

If you take Palin’s experience and educational history; use that ‘resume’ as a guideline, and handed it to a ‘guy’ – telling him, ‘…hey, give this to McCain, and he’ll pick you for his running mate’, don’t you think he’d laugh himself to tears? Don’t you think he’d tell you to have your head examined? Then again, as I write this, maybe it’s McCain who likes having his ‘head’ examined (I know – bad taste on my part; no pun intended of course).

In any case, I hope Oprah jumps on this ridiculous decision; I hope she reminds all of us women, that it’s an insult to our intelligence, and Palin is nothing more than a token female who’ll get McCain what he wants. I’m sickened by this man; the one and only time I met him over 20 years ago, I couldn’t stand his smile; the way he ‘lusted’ after every single woman at the gathering I went to in California!

In any case, this is my personal rant and opinion, but I think whoever the artist was who promptly got this picture completed in record time, has said it perfectly!

Worse Than Quayle
by Trapper John / August 29, 2008

So it’s official – John McCain has thrown a Hail Mary and tapped Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. The trad med types are ga-ga about what a game-changing choice Palin is. And they’re right. It is a game-changer. The Palin pick takes a race already leaning toward Obama and pushes it further into his corner.

Why? Because Sarah Palin is the most unqualified VP nominee in modern history, with the possible exception of Admiral Stockdale.

She’s worse than Quayle.

After his selection in 1988, Dan Quayle was rightly lambasted as a dim, inexperienced lightweight with no real pertinent experience who was named by George H. W. Bush as a gimmick – a case of an old, out-of touch candidate trying to appear relevant by teaming up with a much younger pol. Now, Palin’s not Quayle – by all accounts, she’s quite bright. But she’s fantastically inexperienced, far more so than Quayle was when he was tapped. And she possesses an attribute far worse than Quayle’s stupidity – she’s a big corrupt wheel in Alaska’s big corrupt Republican Party, arguably the most corrupt political apparatus in the United States.

We’re told that McCain really wanted to pick his old friend Joe Lieberman to run with him, but that Karl Rove and the rest of the elite Republican politburo nixed the idea, and told McCain that he had to take a conservative. And as he has at every step of his campaign, the one-time “maverick” sold out to the venal, icy core of the Republican leadership, and acquiesced by selecting Palin. Palin is really a Republican after Rove’s heart – she’s a product of the party that produced the indicted Ted Stevens and ethically tarred Don Young, and she’s embroiled in a Troopergate scandal of her own, with state investigators looking at serious allegations that Palin abused her office by pressuring the state Public Safety Commissioner to fire “an Alaska state trooper involved in a rough divorce from Palin’s sister.” Sounds like a woman after Karl Rove’s heart.

In addition to further associating McCain with the Republican culture of corruption, the Palin pick undermines one of his main anti-Obama narratives. It’s going to be laughable to hear McCain assail Obama’s supposed lack of experience after naming the first-term governor — only one-and-a-half years into her term — of the 47th largest state to be his running mate. Palin lacks any foreign policy experience, and is bereft of even the two core areas of policy expertise that governors are supposed to bring to a ticket — ag policy (Alaska doesn’t have much in the way of traditional agriculture) and urban affairs (Anchorage is the 65th largest city in the US, behind giants such as Corpus Christi). She’s easily the least experienced running mate in recent memory, which is pretty scary, given McCain’s age and his history of cancer.

By picking Palin, McCain revealed his desperation to make a splash to rival the genuine excitement generated by the Obama campaign. But desperation leads to poor decisions — and McCain’s Hail Mary, like most last second desperation moves, is destined to fail miserably. He’s smeared himself with the pungent mud of Alaska Republican corruption, while cutting the legs out from one of his most reliable attacks against Obama. And he’s presented Americans with the prospect of electing a dangerous neophyte to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, behind a man whose life expectancy is less than two presidential terms.

We all expected McCain to pick someone underwhelming to run with him. But we never could have expected a pick worse than Quayle. Yet that’s what we got. Thanks, John!

(And for those who are certain to point out that Bush-Quayle won in ’88 — do you really think that Barack Obama is remotely close to Michael Dukakis in political skill? No? Didn’t think so.)

Source / Daily Kos

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