Lies and Hollow Talk

Watching the Charles Gibson interview with Sarah Palin, and listening to and reading about the McCain assertions regarding his running mate, and attacks against his opponent, I've come to the conclusion that the Republicans are running a McCain/Palin campaign built on hollow generalities and blatant lies.

He is literally running to be Liar in Chief!

After eight years of being lead on by the Bush administration, perhaps the press has finally had enough and the strategy to try to pull one over on the American public for just long enough to win this election will be exposed, and voters will reject it.

Gibson's interview exposed Palin to be a fraud. She clearly appeals to many people because of surface attributes; she looks young and attractive and folksy. But as we dig deeper, we find she's ill-versed on international issues, and her policies are based on generalities she cannot back up with specific actions to carry out. Reform? She's got no idea how she'll achieve it. Change? She's got no idea what to change. Washington D.C. isn't Wasilla. You're not dealing with the local librarian in this job, you're staring down Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao.

Her list of problems, false claims, and extreme positions keep piling up on a daily basis. Now she's the only candidate under investigation with a spouse that's been subpoenaed.

It would be one thing if this was the opposition ticket, but these guys are from the same team that gave us Bush and Cheney. Their appeal should be limited to the diehards who cling to the hope their eight year wrecking crew can get another four years. But this election we're dealing with a complicated electorate. We've got unreliable young voters. We've got racist voters. We've got vindictive voters. We've got friends who'd be happy with a loss, and enemies that would be friends. We've got the old guard pretending to be the new guard, and the extremists packaged in pretty ribbons.

And we've got a lot of liars clouding the facts in the minds of voters.

Post convention polling shows the race has levelled. The good news for Obama is that he was previously working from a lead, so as voters begin to see through the McCain/Palin lies and hollow talk, beyond the cheap candy kisses, those that have been waffling will likely come back to the Obama/Biden ticket.

If there is any hope for this country, that's the hope.

On this day

I was about to post something tongue-in-cheek about Sarah Palin's candidacy, but then I remembered which day of the year it is, so instead I am going to say that today is a day to remember that there is never a legitimate reason to kill innocent people.

Dangerously Poor Judgment

Georgian provinces, Abkhazia and South Ossetia are are breaking away and Russia is welcoming them into their fold with open arms - literally.

John McCain decided on Friday that politics were more important than experience when he picked Sarah Palin as his Joe Biden equivalent on the Republican ticket. Where before McCain suggested Barack Obama lacked experience, in a Fox News interview with Chris Wallace, he now has the gall to suggest experience is not important, what matters is judgment:

WALLACE: You have criticized Obama as being, quote, "dangerously unprepared to be president." In the sense of national security and foreign policy specifically, isn't Sarah Palin even more dangerously unprepared?

MCCAIN: Oh, no. Look, she has got the right judgment. She has got the right judgment. She doesn't think, like Senator Obama does, that Iran is a minor irritant. She knows that the surge worked and succeeded, and she supported that.

Senator Obama still, still to this day refuses to acknowledge that the surge has succeeded. She has been commander-in-chief of the Alaska Guard, that has served back and back (ph). In fact, as you know, she has got a son who is getting ready to go.

But she has had the judgment on these issues and — that Senator Obama has not had in the — he has had all the wrong judgments. And Governor Palin understands these issues, and she understands the challenges that we face.

So she has had 12 years of elected office experience, including traveling to Kuwait, including being involved in these issues. And look, I'm so proud that she has displayed the kind of judgment and she has the experience and judgment as an executive. She has run a huge economy up there in the state of Alaska. Twenty percent of our energy comes from the state of Alaska, and energy is obviously one of the key issues for our nation's security.

WALLACE: But, Senator, you talked about her years of experience. Ten of those years were as a city councilwoman and mayor of a town of 9,800 people. And in terms of foreign policy, in March of 2007, after, two months after the surge had started, she was asked about it, and she said: "I've been focused on state government. I haven't focused on the war in Iraq." Understandable for a governor; not understandable for a vice president.

MCCAIN: Well, by the way, also she was a member of the PTA. I think it's wonderful.

Amazing. From PTA to staring down Putin and Medvedev.

How McCain can claim any judge of "judgment" after making a pick such as he made in Palin to be a heart beat away from the leadership of this nation, is beyond me. Putin and Medvedev must be licking their chops at the very real prospect Americans actually choose to make that a possibility in two months time.