McCain vs Obama Plus Rambling

While I think that McCain is preferable to Obama, I don't think it's by much of a margin.

One of the stupidest things I've read about why we should vote for McCain over Obama is that we will get a better chance to replace him in four years.

WHAT?

When has the party with a pres sitting ever not nominated the incumbent? The fastest route to a Republican that's even remotely conservative is through an Obama presidency. Ick.

My political position is not easily defined by the Liberal/Conservative definition. There are things I am radically far right on and things I am radically far left on. This is what happens when one wants liberty and feels that to have liberty one must let others have it too. I also believe in personal responsibility. I can be compassionate, but there are times when you have to withhold the helping hand. Tough love I think it is called.

I come across as pretty right wing because the broadcast media has confused things so badly. It baffles me that nobody on the left spotted that the media began weighting its economic reporting negatively just about the same time Al ran out of appeals. And gee, whiz, lookie that; the economy started slipping! And no, I don't think the media is controlling the markets. The dot-bomb was destined to happen, but did they affect the timing? Would it have happened sooner, and been smaller, if the reporting hadn't been so overwhelmingly upbeat on the economy for Bill?

There's a formal definition for the dissonance about reading the newspaper and on one page reading an article about something you know intimately and the paper getting it wrong and then assuming that the article on the next page, on a topic you know nothing about, is accurate. I noticed a while ago that the press is very consistent in getting the facts about topics that I am knowledgeable in wrong. When I started wondering what else they were wrong about, I found a lot. That got me to wondering how it could not be deliberate? Then I discovered just how small the owner base is for the mass media. It's like seven people from similar backgrounds. It doesn't even have to be malicious, it's just how they see the world. The problem is, their world view may not be representative of my world, or applicable to the real world.

I am defined as right wing because I am pro-gun; because I think the vast majority of welfare is mooching; because I don't think that higher taxes solve any economic problems; because I want to be left alone to fly or sink on my own merit.

I am defined as a "rabid Bush supporter" because I take the position that he's not Hitler and I think he's doing a better job of it than Al Gore would have after 9/11. If it had not been for what happened on September 11th, 2001 I don't think history would take much note of him.

Being something of a history buff; Name the last Democrat president in office when the USA won a war. Name the last Republican. The answers are Truman and Lincoln. It's surprising, the republicans being the ones who are owned by the "military industrial complex". Wait, wasn't it Eisenhower who warned us about them? What party was he again? That aside, the reason we don't see an R next to the name of the winner in a war is it's very rare that a war started when a republican was in office and it used to be unheard of that the US lost. Twice now a republican president has been handed a loser that was started by a democrat; Korea and Vietnam (and Truman was who got us into Korea). To be fair to Truman, he was winning it and the voters kinda kicked him in the shins. LBJ was a clusterfuck. I'm of the opinion that the present conflict dates from Carter and would have bloomed sooner if we hadn't been so focused on the Cold War.

The current conflict, in meta terms, seems a lot like: Carter committed the original sin. Reagan pissed them off by showing they didn't really matter. Bush compounded the feeling of impotence by riding to Saudi-Arabia's rescue. Clinton made the resentment worse by mostly ignoring them (HOW DARE THEY IGNORE US?) and lobbing the occasional cruise missile in their direction. It finally came to a head for Bush 2 (We will show them they cannot ignore us!). The real roots to this problem stem from the Brits. How the hell is it they have escaped the blame for how they left their empire when they bailed?

Wow, this not the post I started out to write.