My challenge on Sowell's article:
Record Versus Rhetoric
Thomas Sowell
Friday, October 17, 2008
Apparently there is something about Sarah Palin that causes some people to think of her as either the best of candidates or the worst of candidates. She draws enthusiastic crowds and provokes visceral hostility in the media.
The issue that is raised most often is her relative lack of experience and the fact that she would be "a heartbeat away from the presidency" if Senator John McCain were elected. But Barack Obama has even less experience-- none in an executive capacity-- and his would itself be the heartbeat of the presidency if he were elected.
Sarah Palin's record is on the record, while whole years of Barack Obama's life are engulfed in fog, and he has had to explain away one after another of the astounding and vile people he has not merely "associated" with but has had political alliances with, and to whom he has directed the taxpayers' money and other money.
Yes, Sarah Palin is on the record. Sam Stein of Huffington Post had this to say:
Sarah Palin had a few memorable moments during her campaign stop in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday. But the most eye-opening of them all came, it would appear, when the Alaska Governor somehow drew a connection between Barack Obama’s tax policy and an encroaching, nightmarish, communist government. The Illinois Democrat, she hysterically suggested, would, through his proposals, create a country “where the people are not free.”
Sarah Palin has had executive experience-- and the White House is the executive branch of government. We don't have to judge her by her rhetoric because she has a record.
Yeah, she's a quitter.
Rich Galen, a Republican strategist who advised former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, questioned Palin’s move. “This hardly seems like a well thought-out strategy,” Galen said.
“You just can’t tell what she’s up to,” he added.
‘Nutty’ Decision
Resigning as governor is a “nutty” decision if Palin plans to run for president, said John Weaver, a former top political adviser to McCain. The best preparation for a White House run is to “be a good governor and get re-elected -- not be the point guard who walks off the court,” he said, alluding to her high school basketball experience.
We don't know what Barack Obama will actually do because he has actually done very little for which he was personally accountable. Even as a state legislator, he voted "present" innumerable times instead of taking a stand one way or the other on tough issues.
"Clean up the mess in Washington"? He was part of the mess in Chicago and lined up with the Daley machine against reformers.
If he was “part of the mess in Chicago,” why didn't Sowell list them? Most conservatives blame Obama for Chicago's high crime rate, but how do they come to this ridiculous conclusion? Does any one person affect crimes rates in a big city? I would like to see evidence of this.
He is also part of the mess in Washington, not only with numerous earmarks, but also as the Senate's second largest recipient of money from Fannie Mae, and someone whose campaign has this year sought the advice of disgraced former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines, who was at the heart of the subprime crisis.
Why then the enthusiasm for Obama and the hostility to Sarah Palin in the media?
One reason of course is that Senator Obama is ideologically much closer to the views of the media than is Governor Palin. But there is more than that. There are other conservative politicians who do not evoke such anger, spite and hate.
Now, why is that? Has Sowell yet figured out that Obama holds a more realistic and popular view? Is this America or what?
Sarah Palin is the one real outsider among the four candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency on the Republican and Democratic tickets. Her whole career has been spent outside the Washington Beltway.
On the one hand, Sarah Palin has more experience, but she's an outsider? How did Mr Sowell come to this conclusion and contradiction?
More than that, her whole life has been outside the realm familiar to the intelligentsia of the media. She didn't go to the big-name colleges and imbibe the heady atmosphere that leaves so many feeling that they are special folks. She doesn't talk the way they talk or think the way they think.
Worse yet, from the media's perspective, Sarah Palin does not seek their Good Housekeeping seal of approval.
Much is made of Senator Joe Biden's "experience." But Frederick the Great said that experience matters only when valid conclusions are drawn from it.
Now, why would Mr Sowell want to compare Biden with Frederick the Great? What is Mr Sowell trying to prove with this comparison? What is the conclusion Mr Sowell derived from this comparison?
Senator Biden's "experience" has been a long history of being on the wrong side of issue after issue in foreign policy. He was one of those Senators who voted to pull the plug on financial aid to South Vietnam, which was still defending itself from Communist invaders after the pullout of American troops.
The Vietnam war was started on false justifications. We shouldn't have been in Vietnam to begin with. We are not the world protector; we can't afford to be the world protector. That's a responsibility for the world community.
Biden opposed Ronald Reagan's military buildup that helped win the Cold War. He opposed the surge in Iraq last year.
Reagan's military buildup was not the cause to the end of the Cold War.
Quote:The Soviet Union's defense spending did not rise or fall in response to American military expenditures. Revised estimates by the Central Intelligence Agency indicate that Soviet expenditures on defense remained more or less constant throughout the 1980s. Neither the military buildup under Jimmy Carter and Reagan nor SDI had any real impact on gross spending levels in the USSR. At most SDI shifted the marginal allocation of defense rubles as some funds were allotted for developing countermeasures to ballistic defense.
If American defense spending had bankrupted the Soviet economy, forcing an end to the Cold War, Soviet defense spending should have declined as East-West relations improved. CIA estimates show that it remained relatively constant as a proportion of the Soviet gross national product during the 1980s, including Gorbachev's first four years in office.
Sarah Palin will not be ready to become President of the United States on the first day that she and John McCain take office. Nobody is.
Nobody is ready on the first day, but they must have the exposure and overall intelligence to answer questions asked by the media and others concerning the Constitution and the federal government.
Sarah Palin is way over her head when she answered a third grader's question.
Sarah Palin, in response to a question sent to a local NBC TV affiliate in Colorado by a third grader at a local elementary school, answered that the Vice President is “in charge of the United States Senate”.
But being Vice President is a job that can allow a lot of time for studying, and everything about Governor Palin's career says that she is a bright gal with her head on straight. The country needs that far more than it needs people with glib answers to media "gotcha" questions.
If she claims that she has foreign experience because she can see Russia and Canada from her state, that's her level of “intelligence.”
Whatever the shortcomings of John McCain and Sarah Palin, they are people whose values are the values of this nation, whose loyalty and dedication to this country's fundamental institutions are beyond question because they have not spent decades working with people who hate America. Nor are they people whose judgments have been proved wrong consistently during decades of Beltway "experience."
Funny how the American People voted for Obama, because as Mr Sowell claimed, “John McCain and Sarah Palin, they are people whose values are the values of this nation, ...”
