(no subject)

[winterbadger]

I'm using the "re-defeat Bush" icon for McCain from now on, since that's pretty much what we're talking about here.

Almost as an aside, the Washington Post points out that Phil Gramm has been welcomed back to the McCain campaign team. Phil Gramm, whose banking deregulation efforts created the housing meltdown. Phil Gramm, who thinks Americans suffering from the recession are whiners who need to get a life. Nice signal to send to the average American, Senator Seven-Houses.

Of course, Sen. 7H is not quite as good at sending a clear message as he would like. He may cozy up the religious right, but I doubt that they are comfortable with his tendency to refer to his Senate peers as 'chicken sh!t', suggest they f*ck themselves, and describe his wife as a trollop or a c@nt. On the other hand, those are pretty clear messages. Just not very presidential ones... Perhaps he needs to go back to Solzhenitsen for a few more moving anecdotes...

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

John continues to disappoint me. I was afraid this would happen if he ever made a serious run at the presidency, but I'm sorry to have my doubts about him confirmed. Not that I'd ever intended to vote for him, but I do hold him in pretty high regard. You just have to understand that he's a Naval aviator, and filter everything through that understanding.

He's really, really coming off as shallow on just about all the issues. Maliki is about to make him look like a fool on Iraq, what with Maliki's action this morning against the leaders of the Sunni Awakening.

[peaceful-fox.livejournal.com]

You know, 5 years ago I would have actually considered voting for McCain! He is really falling apart.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Even then, I'd have told you he's too mercurial. The critical thing to me is that he once signed a (meaningless) confession under torture, and he's always regretted it. I think that if he's pushed hard he will always come out swinging because of that experience, and that's a bad thing in a president.

He's not a bad man. In fact he's a pretty good one. But there's a reason he never made admiral even though his father and grandfather both held flag rank. He just doesn't have the level headed judgment necessary under high pressure.

[winterbadger]

He just doesn't have the level headed judgment necessary under high pressure.

Even apart from all the other stuff in my first reply, this is the biggest problem. Even if he believed all the things I sometimes thought he might, he can't be trusted with that much responsibility.

[winterbadger]

Well, I keep reading a lot about how the Sunni Awakening is the saviour of the security situation in Iraq, and it leaves me puzzled. Do all the people praising it really not grasp that it's a desperate move by the Sunnis to try and leverage some support from the US in the face of the largely Shii government? Do these commentators really think that it will survive a US departure? From what I see in the press, there is very little real compromise or accommodation between Shii and Sunni groups in Iraq, because the Shii have very little reason to make concessions and a history of resentment and fear of the Sunni to account for. Pinning our hopes on the Sunni Awakening seems like the British/French/American forces in Russia during the Revolution saying "Well, we can't trust the Reds, but thank god we have these fine White Army fellow to look after the country when we pull out..."

McCain...yeah, I used to hold him in high regard. I really think at one point he had principles, and pretty good ones in some respect. I think he really used to mean the bipartisanship he talked about. But after he started getting serious about being president, and especially this race, I realised that if those ideals had ever been real, they got filed in a dark, faraway cabinet once he decided that he would do whatever it took to become president.

It may be that I was just deluded, and he never believed those things. :-( After all, I was stupid enough to believe that Colin Powell's WMD speech to the UN might be true.

And, as you say, when it comes right down to it, at his most heroic, he was a Navy pilot. Guys who are chosen a lot more for their bravery than for their wits or civility...

[gr-c17.livejournal.com]

According to Peter's conversation with ex-fighter jocks it's the quick reaction time. Something else to consider carfully in a President.

[winterbadger]

Of course, the quick reaction time was 40-odd years ago...

And one can't generalise too much. I worked for one retired USMC combat pilot who was without a doubt one of the smartest, coolest-headed, most capable men I have ever met. I admired Zipper immensely, and I wish that I could have kept working for him for a long time. He was definitely the sort leader that people will follow through anything, just because they trust him.

OTOH, he didn't start unloading F-bombs on the other division managers if he didn't like they way they talked to him...

[ticktockmary.livejournal.com]

If McCain is trying to distance himself from Bush this is not a good step. Gramm is a Cheney wanna-be. Let that roll around in your mind a bit, it's screwed up on so many levels.