But Davis is wrong in saying that personal qualities are what the election is all about. No, it's not.
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When are people going to wake up to the main dynamic in American politics today? : TRIBALISM. The present election revolves around the white tribe vs. the black tribe, the "conservative" tribe against the Liberal tribe. (I place "conservative" in quotes because they aren't conservative at all, as was shown plainly by their triumphal embrace of Radical Feminism, a value of the Far Left. That's the kind of thing you find among guerrilla movements in Latin America, not the Republican Party in the United States. "Liberals" in this country, however, do stick, for the most part, to Liberal values as presently defined. Some of those values, such as favoring abortion-on-demand, are not the slitest Liberal in reality, since Liberals believe Government should protect the Little Guy against abuse by the Powerful, and if you do the simplest, but rigorous intellectual analysis in the matter of abortion, plainly the unborn child is (quite literally) the Little Guy, and the woman is the Powerful.
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"Le conservatisme, c'ést moi." In intellect-based ideology, ideas and principles are what matters, trumping all considerations of friendship or power politics. On the Right, this means, for instance, that anyone claiming to be a conservative who suddenly embraces abortion-on-demand would instantly forfeit the right to claim to be a conservative. But the Radical Right today is the Unprincipled Right of Person, not Principle. Sarah Palin IS their "conservatism". Whatever she does is OK with them, because she is one of the Tribe. We even have "conservatives" saying, for all to hear, that what her dauter decides to do about her baby is a private matter to be decided only by the family. Does that mean that they would consent to an abortion by Bristol Palin, with the assent of her loving mom? Or did it mean only that Bristol's decision to have the baby out of wedlock or marry the father to keep it in an intact nuclear family; or to give the baby up for adoption, was a decision for her and her family only? Certainly no one has seemed to define what range of options — not "choice(s)" — Bristol and her family were to be permitted by "conservatives" as against what would be completely beyond the pale.
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John McCain and the Invisible Hand are understood by the Radical Right to be authentic conservatives. Ergo, anything they advocate is conservative, and any deviation from supposed conservative ideology will be forgiven. The ranks will close immediately around the new stance, because what matters is not the principle but the person: "Le conservatisme, c'est il." So McCain embraces the Radical Feminism of Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer, so what?!? So a woman would become President if the McCain-Palin ticket were elected and McCain were to die (by accident or assassination by (other) Radical Feminists), so what? Since when is a female commander-in-chief a bad thing? We have always stood for female equality. Indeed, female supremacy has always been a conservative cause! No, actually Radical Feminism has NEVER been a conservative cause.
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Hillary Useless. So why isn't Hillary Clinton blasting Sarah Palin every single day? Why have I seen absolutely NO footage of Hillary ridiculing Palin as utterly, contemptibly unqualified to be President? Because there is no such footage because the only thing Hillary has said specific to Palin is that her nomination is an advance for women, exactly the kind of thing she wanted the Democrats to do with their Presidential nomination.
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Again, Hillary Clinton shows herself to be a worthless piece of sh(asterisk), who REFUSES to attack Sarah Palin. Hillary, as a woman, could smack that bitch hard, over and over again, in ways and with bluntness of language that would make any man who used such terms seem a bully. But she won't do it, and Obama is such a pussy that he apparently won't even insist she do it. Or is it that she so despises Obama that he has begged her to attack Palin but she has simply, and maliciously, refused?
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Who else could attack Palin without being viewed as a bully? How about the female Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi? Where is she? Why is she as still as the dead? Of what use is she to the Nation if she won't attack the insanely irresponsible behavior of John McCain in saddling us with a candidate of unprecedented unfitness for the office of President?
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Indeed, the only Democrat I have heard attack Palin's unfitness with even a tenth the intensity all Democrats should employ is Paul Begala, and he has not been joined by any Party bigwig. I see in checking Begala's bio for his party affiliation, that he, like me, was born in New Jersey. Is NJ the only Blue State with guts? Republican former NJ Governor (Governess) Christie Todd Whitman must be disgusted that she was never even approached for either President or Vice President. She was a governor of a major state (10th most populous in the Nation at the time; now 11th, because North Carolina is vastly larger in area) AND a Cabinet officer in the Federal Government, so would have helped win a crucial Blue State that is supposed to be "in play" this time. But NO-O-O-O. Don't choose a woman with some actual qualifications, from a major state. Choose a nobody, with no qualifications, from a NOTHING state. NJ is outside the Tribal Area. The Tribe might not accept a woman from New Jersey. But from Alaska, the great wilderness, sure.
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Qualifications for President. The Constitution implicitly requires any candidate for Vice President to have the same qualifications as the candidate for President (native-born citizen, 35 years old, and fourteen years a resident of the United States), because the Vice President has to be eligible to take the place of the President from "Day One". There is no safe timeframe during which a woman of absolutely no Federal experience can learn to be President. The Vice President must have the same qualifications before taking office as the person elected President, and no one who does not have such qualifications before the election is held, should even be considered for the post of Vice President. That is the simple, obvious case that Obama will not make. He is too weak to be President.
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If Obama himself cannot attack Palin's utter lack of qualifications to be President, he must deploy surrogates — and particularly female surrogates, those Democratic woman governors, Senators, and the former Democratic Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who can trash Palin on her utter lack of knowledge and experience in foreign affairs — to hack her to bits in withering attacks on her preposterously slender résumé and general unfitness for office. They must ridicule the idea of little housewife Sarah Palin standing up to Vladimir Putin and the Butchers of Beijing, or even to Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, or even little Cuba's Raúl Castro.
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Democrats must seriously ask themselves, of Obama: "If Barack Obama can't stand up to Sarah Palin, how on Earth is he going to stand up to Vladimir Putin or the Butchers of Beijing?" It is a VERY serious question. If he doesn't have the guts to slap down a noxious bitch, how is he going to beat the Taliban? There's not one member of the Taliban that would let a woman talk of him the way Obama lets Palin talk of Obama. Maybe Obama just isn't man enuf to be President. Palin thinks she is, tho. And now gender confusion is a conservative value!
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Barack Wussein Obama. Keith Olbermann tonite was shown asking Barack Obama two questions, first, how the party that permitted 9/11 can claim to be preventing terrorism, and second, if the Republican Party, or any party, should have used disturbing video of the 9/11 disaster as a partisan political ploy.
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Wussyboy began his answers to both questions with "Well," and then gave indirect and feckless answers showing that he just doesn't have the kind of mental toughness the job of President requires.
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To the first question (preventing another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11), he should have said, "The 9/11 attacks happened on the Republicans' watch, so Republicans are not remotely entitled to claim to be the only ones who can defend us from a repetition of that disaster. They're the ones who permitted it in the first place. Talking tuf does not substitute for being tuf. The Republicans failed once. There is no reason to believe they cannot fail twice."
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To the second question (showing 9/11 footage), he answered "we wouldn't do it". He should have said, "Not only would we NEVER have done any such thing, but NO one should have used such footage in a partisan way. That was a despicable, detestable, immoral act by people who pretend to the moral high ground. It was inexcusable; it was evil; and decent Americans are deeply offended by it. People who were in fact deeply offended should show their indignation at the ballot box."
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Early Voting. The idea of a national election held on a single day, reflecting the state of affairs right up to that time, has been destroyed by a series of extremely ill-advised laws that permit early voting. "Absenteee ballots", once granted only to people who knew with certitude that they could not make it to their usual polling place because they had to be out of town on that day, have been replaced by "mail-in ballots" — in Oregon, for every single voter — and "early voting" (as much as 17 days before the election in Texas). The consequence, according to Chuck Todd, an MSNBC political analyst, is that enormous numbers of people will have voted as early as October 15th this year, almost three full weeks before the general election.
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That is just plain wrong — insane, really; why not a year early? — and must be reversed. There should be NO mail-in ballots except for people so disabled that they cannot get to a polling place or for people who HAVE to be away from their usual polling place for good reason, not because they want to go on vacation or don't care to stay around their town on Election Day. You don't want to stay near your polling place on Election Day? Fine. Go wherever you want. But you lose the right to vote in that election. There is no reason for society to pander to selfish fools who want elections to revolve around them. No. Go f(asterisk) yourself.
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Frankensteinian Science. News reports, and even late-nite comedians Jimmy Kimmel and Craig Ferguson in their monologs tonite, have said that the world's largest particle accelerator/supercollider, which is set to begin operation Wednesday but take six to eight weeks to produce proton collisions, might produce small Black Holes, which could merge into a larger Black Hole and DESTROY THE WORLD. 'Almost impossible' the scientists who favor this project tell us. Almost.
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Think about this. News reports state plainly that there is absolutely no practical benefit to be derived from this hugely costly endeavor. None at all. It is a dead loss of some $8 billion (a compromise between the high and low figures given in a news summary) just to satisfy some scientists' essentially idle curiosity. There is as well absolutely no way to know if the particles that result from these collisions bear any resemblance to particles during or immediately after the presumed Big Bang. And the Big Bang itself is all theory, not unquestionable reality, to begin with. Those particles may be like those that existed in the first nanoseconds at the beginning of the Universe. Then again, they may not be like what happened in the 'Big Bang' at all. What, then, is the practical value of creating such particles?
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Let me make a simple comparison. A committee of scientists devises an experiment to recreate the conditions that produced the first chocolate-chip cookie in order to understand how this could have happened. They line a room with plain cookie dough, and build a box from quarter-inch-thick chocolate, of the same proportions but much smaller, in the exact center of the room, and place in turn, at the exact center of the space within that box, an explosive device, then detonate it. That explosion sends chocolate shrapnel flying in all directions into the cookie dough, thus proving that a Big Chocolate Bang produced the first chocolate-chip cookies. No, actually that expensive experiment would prove no such thing.
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Now, consider the supreme risk attached to the supercollider, the annihilation of planet Earth.
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We have, on the one hand, the fact that NO practical application is likely to result from these scientific experiments, BUT that the world could conceivably be destroyed by them. So what is the cost/benefit analysis? No benefit, supreme cost. So of course the scientists plow right ahead, reasonably certain that the world will not be destroyed, and we are all to trust their judgment and permit them to risk destroying the Earth. To whom does that make sense?
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This is worse than Frankenstein. At least Dr. Frankenstein was trying to do something of real importance, bring people back from the dead. It didn't go so well. But he had good intentions, trying to deal with a fundamental human problem, death. This supercollider madness, by contrast, answers nothing we need to know, and does NOT promise to give us insight into the beginnings of the Universe but only into some scientists' SPECULATIONS about the beginnings of the Universe. In reality, we cannot possibly ever know what happened in the beginning the Universe.
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The human mind can conceive of, but not really accept the idea of a "singularity", a point of infinitely small size, virtually nonexistent, that before the Big Bang contained all the matter and energy of the entire present-day Universe. Oh, we can state the case, but we can't really understand it. We cannot understand how something can come from nothing. Nor how everything can be compressed not just small, but pretty much completely out of existence. We cannot know if this ever happened. We cannot understand how there could once have been nothing, nor, conversely, how everything could have come from nothing. We cannot conceive of the Universe just always having existed, nor of a state before the Universe existed. We cannot conceive of a Universe of limited size — what's outside it? — nor can we really conceive of everything just going on and on forever, in either space or time. Contemplating such things is as useful an exercise for human beings as it would be for squirrels.
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But rather than simply accept that there are some things we will never know, some scientists pretend that they are of superhuman intelligence and can conceive of everything and understand everything. All things are knowable. No, they really aren't. And if there is even one chance in a TRILLION that the supercollider could destroy the world, it should NOT be started.
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That all of human society is powerless to stop mad scientists is appalling. These are the same people who gave us the Balance of Terror during the Cold War, and now threaten to give us 25 or 30 countries and terrorist organizations with nuclear weapons. Why on Earth would we trust their judgment on ANYTHING, much less the very existence of this planet?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,155 — for Israel.)