McCain's VP:

H2O MAN wrote:

Can you highlight his public service for us?

You've already accepted and openly mocked his public service.

she could have been trying to end the infant's life.

The Chicago Sun-Times
Sept. 4, 2008

McCain's job tonight: Explain Palin choice

On the day a presidential candidate gives the big speech accepting his party's nomination, it is customary for newspapers to weigh in beforehand with editorials telling the candidate what they'd like to hear. We did just that seven days ago when we urged Barack Obama to move beyond his usual lofty rhetoric to hard tacks.

Now it's John McCain's turn to give the big speech tonight in St. Paul, and we've been thinking about what he needs to say. Perhaps he should talk more about how he would end the war in Iraq, or how he would resolve the home mortgage crisis.

But, no, we quickly realized, McCain must address one concern above all others tonight: He must convince us he's not going to die. At least not anytime soon.

Because his pick for vice president, Sarah Palin, is woefully unprepared to be Leader of the Free World.

Does this sound harsh? We know it does, though we mean no disrespect. Our sincere hope is that McCain, a good and brave American, lives a long and healthy life. But when the senator chose Alaska Gov. Palin to be his running mate, and in doing so deemed her fit to stand a heartbeat from the presidency, he either demonstrated phenomenally bad judgment or put politics ahead of country.

Palin has almost no experience on the national or international stage. She has virtually no qualifications to be commander in chief. She is the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, a town about the size of a couple of Chicago high schools. She has been governor for 20 months of a wilderness state with a population of 684,000 -- about the number of folks in Will County.

And the more Palin's GOP defenders contort themselves to defend her credentials, attempting to inflate the uninflatable, the more obviously thin her resume looks.

Asked by a CNN reporter what qualifies Palin to be commander in chief of America's armed forces, a McCain aide pointed out that, as governor, Palin "commanded" the Alaska National Guard. The reporter then asked, to no avail, for a single instance in which Palin had involved herself in the business of the Guard.

A commentator for the conservative National Review generously granted Palin "foreign policy" experience solely on the basis of geography -- Alaska is next to Russia and borders Canada. If the commentator knew of any Palin-Putin talks, he failed to mention them.

Former Sen. Fred Thompson did his clever best Tuesday to pump up the significance of Palin's tenure as a mayor by grandly referring to Wasilla -- population 6,715 -- as a "municipality."

Sounds more like a hamlet to us.

An alternate tactic of Palin's defenders has been to insist she is at least as qualified to be president as Obama -- a false equivalence. Obama is a globetrotter with a sophisticated worldview, a U.S. senator from one of the most populous states, and a former state senator from one of the nation's biggest cities.

It was Obama's principled stand on the most important issue of our day, the march to war in Iraq, that brought him to national attention.

And Obama was forced to demonstrate his judgment, temperament and executive skills -- for all to judge -- during a grueling 18-month primary election battle.

Obama is the Democratic nominee for president because millions of Americans voted for him. Palin is Republican nominee for vice president because one American -- John McCain -- voted for her.

When McCain announced he had chosen Palin, this page responded agreeably. There is, we wrote, much to admire in a woman who battled the old boys club of Alaska politics, who uncovered ethical misconduct, who lived by her anti-abortion convictions and gave birth to a son with Down syndrome. At the same time, we emphasized, Palin was a complete unknown to most Americans, and we could only assume McCain had vetted her thoroughly.

We assumed wrong.

When McCain chose Palin, did he know her husband was a member of a political party that has called for Alaska to secede from the Union?

Did McCain know she was hiring a lawyer to defend her in a state ethics investigation?

Did he really believe she possessed the basic national and international experience required to be president?

Stay healthy, senator.

And the more Palin's GOP defenders contort themselves to defend her credentials, attempting to inflate the uninflatable, the more obviously thin her resume looks.

FreeDuck wrote:

H2O MAN wrote:

Can you highlight his public service for us?

You've already accepted and openly mocked his public service.

I have not accepted his public service...

You don't understand social realities, Drew. Women are considered a minority in this country. Period.

Have you accepted that the earth turns around the sun?

This one, yeah. When she started knocking him for his service like that I started to think she was being petty and disrespectful. But then I remembered that she didn't write the speech (not that it makes it ok). I'm interested in hearing more of her own words come out of her mouth.

She chose to speak someone else's words, and now they are hers to own.

Diest TKO wrote:

She chose to speak someone else's words, and now they are hers to own.

She was hands on in writing the speech and she spoke the painful truth.

I agree with you about the "painful" part.

Warning! This pundit isn't feeling the same way as many of my colleagues about Sarah Palin. She is being attacked for her lack of experience for the job and for whether she should be putting her family first instead of her career.

This just isn't that unusual in my book. And the more it goes on, the more uncomfortable I feel with that message.

Let's reflect. In her acceptance speech, we saw a woman who was compelling, charming and aggressively partisan. She succeeded in demonstrating that she is a regular mom who came to government to make a difference.

And she had that crowd in the convention hall eating out of her hands. Celebrity? It will be hard for the Republicans to attack Sen. Barack Obama for his celebrity now that they have one of their own.

A superstar of the radical right was made Wednesday night. And she may also have made some headway with those who buy her folksiness without knowing the extreme nature of her actual policy views. Read the transcript of Palin's speech

So where does this leave us as Democrats in making the case against Sarah Palin and her running mate for president? What is the choice now for the American people? There is a really strong case to be made against the McCain/Palin ticket and Democrats need to make it the right way, right away.

I am a woman who someone took a chance on several years ago when they gave me a job that had only previously been done by old white guys. Experience? How do you get any if no one takes a chance on you? And the decision to take a chance can be instinctive, as John McCain said.

And what about the argument that she is a negligent mother who will be distracted from her important role? I am a mother who constantly feels the pressure from others about whether I am fit to be a parent, whether I put my kids first often enough and whether my children get enough of my attention. Who has the right to judge my family?

My grandmother always said, "You can't tell time on someone else's clock." Judgments about people's personal lives are better left unsaid and unrealized.

So why then do I think that Sarah Palin would be a terrible vice president? Because I also think that John McCain would be a terrible president.

I don't care about how Sarah Palin or John McCain take care of their families. I care about how their policy choices affect my family and millions of other Americans.

McCain and Palin get their health insurance paid for by the government (hers in Alaska and his in Washington). Yet they oppose giving the nearly 46 million uninsured Americans the same access to affordable health care.

John McCain's kids don't have to worry about paying for college. Yet he has opposed every single education support program to help others.

McCain and Palin say they will stand up to oil companies. Yet the only energy policy they support gives millions of dollars in tax breaks to oil companies to do more drilling and he has opposed every piece of federal legislation to explore alternative fuel sources.

McCain and Palin say they will revamp how Washington does business. Yet his campaign is filled with lobbyists and she has cooperated with Sen. Ted Stevens in funneling federal money for useless projects in Alaska for years. And McCain and Palin have no solutions for Americans worrying about their jobs in a fragile economy. iReport.com: Is Palin the right choice for you?

McCain and Palin want us to leave their families alone. Yet they want to make rules for our families by eliminating our right to make our own choices over abortion, eliminate our access to family planning education or domestic partner benefits, and our freedom from discrimination.

They want to control what our kids learn in school about sex and about science. In short, through the policies they promote and the judges they support, they want the government to have more control over our private lives than at any time in history.

McCain and Palin now say their campaign is about change, too. Yet the only real change they have proposed is a change from a suit to a skirt in the vice president's office and one man fighting a misplaced war for another in the Oval Office.

That seems to me to be the right reason to oppose them in November. It's not the process or the people, it's what they represent. This unconventional choice of a vice presidential nominee by John McCain won't result in a win in November, because McCain and Palin are the wrong choice for the country.

So, Palin is not going on any of the Sunday shows this week. She refuses to take interviews with any reporter. It seems the McCain campaign is too cowardly to allow her to take questions that aren't carefully molded to their advantage.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

So, Palin is not going on any of the Sunday shows this week. She refuses to take interviews with any reporter. It seems the McCain campaign is too cowardly to allow her to take questions that aren't carefully molded to their advantage.

This is tame when compared to Obama's refusal to face McCain in any town hall style debates.

Obama and his handlers are pussies!

Don't forget the other half of the campaign history where Obama extended an alternative offer and McCain refused it.