Decline and Fall

Wow. Just, wow.



We are so screwed if she's elected.

Labels: Election '08, McCain

I'm sure you've all heard the "Trig Palin is actually Sarah's grandson" rumors, and are now acquainted with the "Palin's 16 year-old got pregnant out of wedlock" story. I agree with Andrew Sullivan that the story is still fishy, especially the bit about Palin giving a speech, then flying from Texas to Alaska via Seattle on commercial air and bypassing the big, conveniently-located hospital in Anchorage to give birth somewhere more private--all after her water broke. How to end this responsibly? Here's Sullivan:

Why not kill this rumor with Palin's medical records? A 43 year old woman's pregnancy with a Downs Syndrome child would have been intensely monitored, and the records must be a mile long. Just release them, ok? If necessary in a closed room for reporters, just as with McCain. And we can all breathe a sigh of relief and move on.

I hope, for the nation's sake, this happens soon and Sarah is actually the mother, but I think we deserve to know if a potential Vice President faked a pregnancy.

BUT...

I'm glad Obama has drawn a line in the sand regarding scrutiny of candidates' children. Here's what he said at a press conference today:

Jake Tapper: Governor Palin and her husband issued a statement today saying that their 17 year old daughter Bristol who is unmarried is 5 months pregnant. Do you have a comment?

BO: I have heard some of the news on this and so let me be as clear as possible. I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people's families are off limits, and people's children are especially off limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics, it has no relevance to governor Palin's performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18. And how family deals with issues and teenage children that shouldn't be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that is off limits.

Those of us who comment on politics ought to follow this advice. Attacking the children of candidates perpetuates the politics of slander and trivialities, which diminishes us all. It obscures the real issues of this election. No one comes out a winner.

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings made the human decency argument in the strongest, most humane terms I've seen:

It's easy, in the midst of a political campaign, to forget that the people involved are, after all, people. Some of them -- Sarah Palin, for instance -- place themselves under a media spotlight of their own free will. Others -- her daughter, for instance -- wind up there through no fault of their own. Imagine yourself in her position: there you are, seventeen years old, pregnant, unmarried. Maybe you understand what happened and why; and maybe your parents and friends do as well. But zillions of bloggers and reporters and pundits are about to make the most personal details of your life into a political issue, and they don't understand it at all. And yet, despite that, they are about to use you and your unborn child to score points on one another, without any regard whatsoever for you and your actual situation.

Hopefully those of us who remember Dan Quayle's despicable Murphy Brown remarks (which, incidentally, introduced the phrase "family values" into popular parlance--a dubious achievement if there ever was one) will think twice before criticizing a child for making a mistake. And no, "nyah, nyah, Republicans are hypocrites" arguments are not legitimate either. Not when it involves children and politicians' private lives in ways that say nothing substantive about their policies.

Let's rise above this and do what would have been easy anyway: critique McCain and Palin on substance.

Labels: Election '08, McCain, Obama, politics

The first day of the Republican National Convention has been more or less called off and both the current President and Vice President of the United States will be skipping their party's convention so that Bush and the rest of the GOP can focus on New Orleans relief. I'm surprised but admittedly heartened that Bush would do such a thing, although we all know that his presence at the convention would be poison to McCain's campaign, so it's not a purely statesmanlike move. Given the choice between Bush hiding his head in the sand, behaving like a petulant child and insisting that his surrogates are doing a "heck of a job," and him acting like an actual President, I'll take the latter.

But this is frightening: a contractor for the Army Corps of Engineers filled New Orleans floodwalls with newspaper, in direct violation of the terms of their contract no less, according to an eye witness in this WWLTV report, complete with video:

“It's like putting a Band-Aid on the hole of a gas tank of an airplane,” the resident said.

Instead of an airplane, it's a floodwall, and instead of a Band-Aid, the witness says two years ago, he saw the contractor filling the expansion joint or opening between the floodwalls with newspaper.

“The whole length of the wall was stuffed with newspaper.”

And when he confronted the contractor, the contractor blamed Washington for the substandard work.

“He basically told me when Congress sent down the money, it would be repaired the proper way.”

But during a recent trip to the area, two years later, it was apparent that didn't happen. Much of the newspaper had deteriorated or been eaten by bugs, but some still remained. In fact WWL cameras even captured the date May 21, 2006, on a page of the Parade magazine from the Times-Picayune.

I hope the people on the gulf coast are getting out now, or are already gone. This one looks big, and I doubt anyone in its path feels confident in the U.S. government's ability (or inclination) to make sure they are safe. I sure hope they don't still think the walls will save them.

Via Sadly, No!

Labels: Bush, McCain, politics

The web is abuzz with debates on Sarah Palin's experience, fitness to take over if the oldest President ever keels over moments after being sworn in, and how much cuter she is than Joe Biden. What I haven't seen mentioned as often (in the 40 or so hours since many of us first heard of her) is the fact that she just got her first passport about a year and a half ago, after assuming the governorship of Alaska. And from what I can tell she's used her passport just once: to visit troops in Kuwait and a military hospital in Germany. Here's the relevant graf, from the New York Times story:

Ms. Palin appears to have traveled very little outside the United States. In July 2007, she had to get a passport before she visited members of the Alaska National Guard stationed in Kuwait, according to her deputy communications director, Sharon Leighow. She also visited wounded troops in Germany during that trip.

If you've never seen a military installation in a foreign country, let me describe it for you: a walled, razor-wired compound, overwhelmingly populated by Americans, the few locals you see almost always speak decent English, and among the dining choices are one or all of the following: Burger King, Pizza Hut, Cinnabon, Starbucks and KFC. (Yes, yes, I know: "Sounds like a foreign city to me!" Bear with me.) There are lots of reasons why this is the case, and some of them are even pretty reasonable, but the fact remains that if you have only been to Ali Al Selim Air Base in Kuwait and the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, you've only technically left the United States. Counting that as "foreign travel" is like counting airports you've had layovers in as "visits" to that city. (This is one reason why you should take the pronouncements of pundits and politicians who have "just returned from a trip to Iraq" and are ready to render judgment with a plentiful helping of salt--those people rarely, if ever, leave the seclusion of American fortresses.)

Not that there's anything wrong with visiting the troops, especially at Landstuhl. I commend her for doing that.

OK, so apparently she once visited Ireland. Which is nice, but it says a lot about her lack of interest in the rest of the world that she's only traveled to a couple of military bases and an English-speaking country, and only in the last year and a half. This is excusable (though lamentable) in the Governor of a sparsely-populated state, but not in the biography of an aspirant to the second highest office in the land, in which she would spend a sizeable chunk of her time meeting with foreign dignitaries, all of whom will know significantly more about her country than she knows about theirs.

The greatest challenges facing America right now depend heavily on what the rest of the world does: energy, the environment, national security, trade, outsourcing, and that little skirmish just north of where she tasted her first international Frappuccino come to mind. She appears to be in way over her head on all of these issues (with the possible exception of energy, on which I merely disagree strongly with her), and has evidently not been studying up, even though her name was floated early as a possible "darkhorse" running mate.

Face it: we all know why he picked her. To steal some of Obama's "historic" mojo. (Now we know why McCain was so "gracious" about congratulating Obama on his historic moment the night before this announcement.) He wouldn't have chosen her if there had been another, experienced running mate who could theoretically bring in undecideds while simultaneously kowtowing to the Religious Right. This is a pick designed to dominate a news cycle, not inspire confidence in the judgment of our next President. It's insulting to women, who evidently in McCain's view care less about the issues than if a candidate has ovaries, and it's insulting to the rest of us voters, who generally expect a veep candidate to be someone we've heard of, or at least someone who knows something about the job. The stakes are too high for such a cynical ploy. Just think of it: we could be one "Barack Obama Photographed Looking Goofy in a Helmet" incident from the reality of Vice President Palin.

By picking someone with no detectable interest in the world beyond our borders, McCain has shown himself to be serious about running for President, but unserious about being President.

Labels: conservatism, Election '08, McCain, politics