Tag Archive for ‘McCain’

Ignorant Armies: Final Thoughts on the Election

This election is too tedious a farce to deserve a serious editorial, but since I wake up every morning with a few complaints that I inflict upon my family, I may as well subject my readers to some of them.

Tribal Politics

Was race a factor in the decision of Colin Powell to repudiate his party’s nominee and friend of 25 years, Sen. John McCain, two weeks before Election Day, and to endorse Barack Obama?

Gen. Powell does not deny it, contending only that race was not the only or decisive factor. “If I had only that fact in mind,” he told Tom Brokaw, “I could have done this six, eight, ten months ago.”

Yet, in hailing Barack as a “transformational figure” whose election would “electrify our country … (and) the world,” Powell seems to testify to the centrality of Barack’s ethnicity to his decision.

An Amnesty for Stupidity

Is it fair that businessmen who fail in neighborhood stores have to close shop and often sell their homes, while Wall Street titans are spared the consequences of monumental stupidity and greed?

No, it is not fair. Yet, Treasury’s Hank Paulson may be right. To save the sheep who might have been wiped out in a general financial panic, we may have to save the pigs.

The Neocons’ Palin Project

Will the neocons who tutored George W. Bush in the ideology he pursued to the ruin of his presidency do the same for Sarah Palin?

Should they succeed, they will destroy her. Yet, they are moving even now to capture this princess of the right and hope of the party.

Editors’ Round Table on Sarah Palin: An Innocent Abroad

Mrs. Palin’s alleged weaknesses are her strengths. Being an innocent abroad, in the dangerous world modelled on Hobbes and Darwin, is preferable to having “experience” in the obsessive attempt to tame and conquer that world. The Weekly Standard cabal and their ilk will be hard-pressed to make President Palin obey a bunch of Manhattanite intellectual pseuds, let alone to internalize their foreign policy schemes that are evil, stupid, and harmful to our troops’ safety: unlike any laptop bombardier, she has a son on his way to Iraq. I’d say that it is at least 50-50 President Palin would act as a foreign policy realist who’d refrain from new “missions,” “engagements” and “force projections.” That translates into 17 percent chance of America conducting a sane foreign policy, for the first time in decades, some time before 2012.

Editors’ Round Table on Sarah Palin: The Palin Moment

Thomas Fleming, Scott Richert, and Aaron Wolf have all offered typically thoughtful pieces raising important points to consider in evaluating Sarah Palin.  But I would like to offer a different perspective, focusing on the speech Palin delivered at the Republican Convention and the reason the speech succeeded, to the point that Palin now enjoys a higher approval rating in the polls than either Barack Obama or John McCain, not to mention the hapless Joe Biden.

Editors’ Round Table on Sarah Palin: Energized—For What?

I will resist the temptation to steal my own thunder for next week’s John Randolph Club meeting in Philadelphia, where I intend to talk about the most important aspect of the Palin Pandemonium: the conservative Christian rejection of the natural order.

There are at least two other aspects of McCain-Palin that are troubling: abortion and Israel.

James Dobson predictably ate his own words, and pro-lifers now, nearly to a man, are “energized.”  George W. Bush’s words are now in the mouth of McCain, and we’ll hear them again and again until the first week of November—”culture of life.”  What conservative doesn’t want a culture of life?  Sarah Palin, we are told, is a sign, a winkie-winkie to the pro-life community that a Roe-reversal is in the cards.  “Change is coming!”

Distant Drums at Sarah’s Party

ST. PAUL, Minn.—The American Right has just died and gone to heaven.

Wednesday night’s convention address by Sarah Palin here in St. Paul has confirmed the bold decision of John McCain to choose the Alaska governor as his co-pilot and united the Republican Party as it has not been since the second term of Ronald Reagan.

A wild enthusiasm for Sarah Palin has brought conservatives home to John McCain, and GOP leaders of all hues—from Fred Thompson to Mitt Romney to Mike Huckabee to Rudy Giuliani—to the rostrum to lacerate the liberal media for their five days of feral assaults on Sister Sarah.