The Best Possible Choice

[billroper]

I was delighted when the news broke this morning that McCain had selected Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate, having gone to bed last night expecting Pawlenty. McCain needs to take risks if he's going to have a chance of winning this election and this looks to be one of the good ones.

McCain needs to get people who can be persuaded to do so to take a second look at him. (If this doesn't apply to you, that's fine. I suspect that McCain could have picked the deity of your choice as his running mate with a divinely-backed promise of Peace on Earth and he still wouldn't be your preferred candidate. :) ) Palin provides that in a way that none of the supposed front-running choices could have. Whether it will make a difference remains to be seen.

And I am absolutely thrilled to have someone on board the Republican ticket who has made her reputation by going in, kicking butt, and taking names in her efforts to rid her own party of corruption. If it were possible to say the same about Senator Obama, I'd be much less worried about him than I am. (Yes, I know about the investigation into Palin. It appears to be a non-event. Certainly McCain knew about it and picked her anyway.)

That is change that I can believe in.

I wish we had such Republicans in Illinois.

Comments

Look at McCain? Please.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a former rabid McCain supporter (2000, when he seemed a plain-talking moderate, fiscal conservative who questioned the role of the religious right in hijacking the party's agenda)

...who began questioning him in 2002 (when he was parroting the Cheney/Rumsfeld lies about how Iraq was already won now, and totally tracking with tying Saddam to 9-11 and building a global American military empire)

...who began seriously doubting him in 2004 (the fake-ass Bush hug and its all-too-real symbolism of his embrace of the Bush agenda)

...who was flat-out disgusted with him by January 2007 (60 Minutes interview where he buys a rug in a Baghdad market, wearing kevlar and surrounded by soldiers in 10 armored Humvees and 2 Apaches overhead, to prove it's safe there now)

...and who now loathes him more with each new "look" at him, I have to say that this VP pick somehow made the prospect of a McCain administration noticeably more horrifying to me, and that's a feat. I'll tell you why.

I did look at McCain carefully and objectively when he won the nomination. He was even my first of all the (terrible) choices in the GOP stable. The Dems started talking about how he was essentially the same as Bush on all issues, and I went to see how fair that really was. I researched his platform, specifically looking for issues on which he differs from Bush. Know what I found? These:

1. Opposes torture of enemy combatants (in a lukewarm way, but give it to him)
2. Supports embryonic stem cell research
3. Supports environmental issues (opposes drilling in ANWR, pays better lip service to global warming than Bush, though still opposed Kyoto and Obama has a better record)

That was it. So guess which two of those Palin (the Evangelical with the oil-magnate husband) now subtracts from the equation?

Re: Look at McCain? Please.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

Frack, typo. No matter how you proof these rants, one gets away. 2002 should be 2003.

Re: Look at McCain? Please.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

And the 60 Minutes interview was April, 2007. A fact I checked as I was writing but forgot to correct. Is it true that paid LJ accounts get to edit their posts in other journals? *sigh*