Due to the recent financial crisis on Wall Street, the US Treasury Department has issued a new one dollar bill:
I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight....
* If you grow up in
* Grow up in
* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
* Name your kids
* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.
* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well-rounded.
* If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services Committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works, and Veteran's Affairs Committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
* If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.
* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
* If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.
* If you teach responsible, age-appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
* If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.
* If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent
* If you're husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DUI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25, and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.
OK, it's much clearer now.
So I come home late from work today, and I find my kids around the table working on homework. Right out of the gate, I assume it’s another day of the usual, but I take one look at my daughter's work and nearly crash into the sofa! It came to me in a flash -- she’s making a RANSOM note!! Her mother also thought it was a ransom note.
By MAUREEN DOWD
Op-Ed Columnist
New York Times
Published: September 13, 2008
I’ve been in Alaska only a week, but I’m already feeling ever so much smarter about Russia.
I can’t quite see it from my hotel window, but, hey, I know it’s out there somewhere, beyond all the stuffed bears and cruise ships and glaciers and oil derricks.
The proximity of the country from which William Seward bartered to buy Alaska for $7 million — Seward’s icebox — is so illuminating that I suddenly realize that we would commit a grave error by overestimating Russia’s economic strength. After all, it represents only 2.8 percent of the world’s G.D.P., even though its gross domestic product has ballooned from $200 billion in 1999 to $1.7 trillion this year.
But I overanalyze.
An Arctic blast of action has swept into the 2008 race, making thinking passé. We don’t really need to hurt our brains studying the world; we just need the world to know we’re capable of bringing a world of hurt to the world if the world continues to be hell-bent on misbehaving.
Two weeks after being thrown onto a national ticket, and moments after being speed-briefed by McCain foreign-policy advisers, our new Napoleon in bunny boots (not the Pamela Anderson kind, but the knock-offs of the U.S. Army Extreme Cold Weather Vapor Barrier Boots) is ready to face down the Russkies and start a land war over Georgia, and, holy cow, what business is it of ours if Israel attacks Iran?
The trigger-happy John McCain has indeed found a soul mate. Trigger squared. In Fairbanks on Thursday, at a deployment ceremony for her son who is going to Iraq, Governor Palin followed the lead of McCain and W. in fusing Osama bin Laden’s diabolical work on 9/11 and the mission in Iraq. She told the departing troops, “You’ll be there to defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the deaths of thousands of Americans.”
Asked by Charlie Gibson what insight into Russian actions her Alaskan proximity gave her, Sarah blithely replied: “They’re our next-door neighbors. And you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.”
Being a next-door neighbor is not quite enough, though. If Sarah had been reading about the world she feels so confident about leading rather than just parroting by rote what Randy Scheunemann and the neocons around McCain drilled into her last week — Drill, baby, drill! — she might have realized that as heinous as Russia’s behavior toward Georgia was, it was not completely unprovoked. The State Department has let it be known that it warned McCain’s friend, Misha, the hotheaded president of Georgia, not to send troops in to crush the rebellion in two breakaway states.
And she might not have had to clench her jaw and play for time when Gibson raised the Bush doctrine, the wacko preemption philosophy that so utterly changed the world.
The really scary part of the Palin interview was how much she seemed like W. in 2000, and not just the way she pronounced nu-cue-lar. She had the same flimsy but tenacious adeptness at saying nothing, the same generalities and platitudes, the same restrained resentment at being pressed to be specific, as though specific is the province of silly eggheads, not people who clear brush at the ranch or shoot moose on the tundra.
Just as W. once could not name the General-General running Pakistan, so Palin took a position on Pakistan that McCain had derided as naïve when Obama took it.
“We must not, Charlie, blink, Charlie, because, Charlie, as I’ve said, Charlie, before, John McCain has said, Charlie, that — and remember here, Charlie, we’re talking about John McCain, Charlie, who, Charlie, is John McCain and I won’t be blinking, Charlie.”
She tried to finesse her previous church comments about Iraq, asking worshipers to pray “that there is a plan, and that plan is God’s plan.” Earnestly repeating after her tutors, she said she had meant to echo Abraham Lincoln, that in war we must pray that we are on God’s side rather than that he is on ours. But her original comments sounded more W. than Abe — taking your policy and ideology and giving it the hallowed mantle of a mission from God.
Sarah has single-handedly ushered out the “Sex and the City” era, and made the sexy new model for America a retro one — the glamorous Pioneer Woman, packing a gun, a baby and a Bible.
Her explosion onto the scene made Obama seem even more like a windy, wispy egghead. Like W., Sarah has the power of positive unthinking. But now we may want to think about where ignorance and pride and no self-doubt has gotten us. Being quick on the trigger might be good in moose hunting, but in dealing with Putin, a little knowledge might come in handy.
Click here for a link to the column.
Did McCain really think it would be SO easy to wrap up all the votes for hardcore Christian conservatives and women in one tidy little package?? I guess he did. But it seems he may have gotten it wrong.
I don’t know if Palin has won over the conservatives, but it seems the women-folk aren’t buying it. A female pal of mine said she felt that bringing in a woman was nothing more than a ploy by the McCain campaign to say “see how progressive we are???” She went on to say “you know I would love to see a woman running but GEEZ.... she is in over her head and does not give a RIP about women's rights.”
Troopergate and the other recently revealed tidbits about her past are infinitesimal compared to scandals involving many other politicians, but the steady flow of these little nuggets makes it seem like McCain & his people did not choose wisely. No matter how you feel about her level of experience (a. she doesn’t have enough experience with the way things run in Washington or b. you’re fooling yourself), you have to admit that it looks like McCain chose her in haste. Regardless of the reality, that’s the appearance. It seems like a bad, rushed choice and who wants a president who can’t make good choices under pressure? Oh wait… well, I mean who wants ANOTHER president who can’t make good choices under pressure?
Kudos to Obama for saying that Palin’s teenage daughter is off-limits. I agree. Too bad the media can’t get on-board with that. My friend said: “If I hear one more media person say: of course she is not fair game... and then they analyze it for 15 minutes. Not fair game would mean - just not talking about it at all.”
I don’t really want to hear any of the crap about her being a Mom to five kids and how can she do that, who’ll take care of the kids, etc. It’s the twenty-freakin-first century; I think a woman has a right to choose to work outside the home. It’s none of my business how the family down the street manages with a working mom and it’s none of my business how the VP manages it.
I’m interested in seeing how her speech goes tonight.
The RNC was totally using the sandwich method to deliver W’s little speech last night at the convention. You know the sandwich method, right? When you have bad news to deliver, you start w/ something good and end with something good and sandwich the bad news in between to lessen the impact. Laura Bush is more popular than her hubby so they had her speak before AND after him.
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