Is John McCain my ideal candidate? No way. During the competition for a nominee, I clearly preferred Giuliani - though he surely was not a perfect specimen, either (personal ethical challenges, etc.) McCain-Feingold is an abomination, IMHO. McCain holds the wrong position on some issues, such as "fighting global warming". And I do wish that Palin held more moderate beliefs on several social topics.
Yet, I start out with the assumption that no candidate will ever be "my ideal" - just as no friend, however dear, is ever perfect in every respect. When we vote, we must all appreciate that what we need to do is weigh which candidate will be superior to the other. "Perfection" is not in the cards.
Thus, I share with you today two endorsements for John McCain.
The first comes from Charles Krauthammer via HotAir.
The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.
Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the past year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of "a world that stands as one"), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as "the tragedy of 9/11," a term more appropriate for a bus accident?
Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?
The second is from Neal Boortz. It's quite a long column. Yet, it truly is worth your while to read. Here are just a few excerpts.
First - why you should support McCain:
Listen to the rhetoric of the left. Those who are in need are called "the less fortunate." This means that their status as needy was due to nothing but bad luck. It stands to reason, then, that those with more than they need were just lucky. The fortunate and the less fortunate. The lucky and the not so lucky. And here comes Barack Obama riding over the rainbow on his Unicorn to set everything right and make it all fair. Isn't that the world you want to live in?
There's a quote that's been floating around since I began my talk radio career. This quote is most often attributed to someone named Alexander Tyler writing in 1787 about the fall of the Athenian Republic. Others have said the guy's name was Tytler. Let's not argue spelling right now ... let's just get to the quote, because the quote goes to the heart of this presidential election:
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."
Think about this, my friends. Isn't this exactly what we're seeing right now? In fact, hasn't this pretty much been the theme of Democrat Party election politics for nearly as long as you can remember? Here we have Barack Obama promising that he's only going to raise taxes on the evil rich who make over $250,000 a year while 95% of Americans will get tax cuts. Think of this in terms of votes; higher taxes for 5% of the voters, lower taxes for the other 95%. It really doesn't take all that much brainpower to figure out how this is going to work at in an election does it? You take money away from the people whose votes you don't need, and give it to the people whose votes you do need. So very simple. The result is that people have, in fact, discovered that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. Who is promising those wonderful goodies? That would be Barack Obama. Just what percentage of voters out there do you think are going to vote for Obama simply because he is promising them someone else's money? My guess is that the number would be high enough to constitute the margin of victory for The Great Redistributionist.
Somehow I had this idea when I was growing up that if you wanted something bad enough, you would work hard until you got it. That was then. This is now. Now you vote for it. That's change you can believe in.
Second - be realistic; Republicans are not without blame for many of the deep problems we face today:
One thing for sure ... the Republicans deserve exactly what is happening to them in this election. It's just too bad the rest of the country has to suffer the lion's share of the punishment the Republicans so richly deserve. In 1994 the voters were fed up with Clinton and the Republicans swept to control of both houses of congress, largely on the strength of Newt's Contract with America. Do you remember some of the promises? One that sticks in my mind is their promise to dismantle the Department of Education. Republicans – in 1994 – recognized that the quality of American education had been going steadily downhill since this government behemoth was formed. Well, that was then ... this is now. The size of the Education Department, as well as the cost, has doubled. Republicans did this, not Democrats.
As a matter of fact, it's not just the Department of Education; it's our entire federal government. Spending has doubled. Size has doubled. All under the Republican watch inside the beltway. Pork barrel spending is completely out of control, and Republicans are behind the wheel. Education and pork spending aside, we have the Medicare prescription benefit, McCain-Feingold, Sarbanes-Oxley, a tepid response to Kelo vs. New London ... all elements of a well-deserved Republican drubbing. The problem here is that the cure, that being Barack Obama, might well be much worse of than the disease.
Finally? Whatever happens in this election, we should all applaud that we are in a day and age when clearly our country is willing to acknowledge that a black person is capable of running our country. Although there are still racists out there, their numbers are small enough that we can say "we have overcome" from our shameful days of slavery, Jim Crow and open racism. Don't forget what this moment in time can mean to our black neighbors - irrespective of their political beliefs.
Are many black voters going to vote for Barack Obama primarily because of race? Of course, many will. Surveys and polling have shown that the figure may reach 20%. I think it's well more than that. Is race a sound reason to cast a vote? Probably not. Is it understandable? Absolutely. I cannot fault a black American for voting for Obama. It may turn out to be a negative vote insofar as their dreams and goals are concerned. It may not work out all that well for their children, especially if they're ambitions and talented. But I don't think many of us can absolutely say that we wouldn't be casting the same vote were we in their shoes.
If you are a white American there is no way in the world you can look at this election through the same eyes as a third or fourth generation black American citizen. Several months ago a caller to my show suggested that Barack Obama's ascendency in the presidential sweepstakes was Black America's biggest accomplishment. I disagreed. Though I can't remember the exact words, I said that, in a general sense, the shining moment for Black America may have been the show of patience and restraint shown by black men when they returned from putting their lives on the line in World War II and in Korea to a country with segregated schools, colored waiting rooms, whites only water fountains, beatings, lynchings, water hoses, police dogs and systematic discrimination pretty much every where they looked. The restraint showed by black Americans during the civil rights struggles of the 50's and 60's, though not universal, was something to behold.
Now .. try, though you won't succeed, to put yourself into the mind of a black American. How can you experience or understand the legacy of segregation, violence and second-class citizenry your ancestors went through and not take pride in a black American on the verge of winning the presidency? How many black American voters do you think are uttering to themselves: "If my grandfather had only lived to see this." It takes a great deal of maturity and a clear understanding of the possible future consequences for someone to put their racial pride aside and swim against the tide on this one. So, there will be no name-calling, at least not here, for people who cast their vote on the basis of race in this election. As I said, It's understandable.
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