DON'T DISS McCAIN

The conventions are over. For two weeks I was glued to my seat (pause for
joke). Okay, now I've come unglued. So did the people at the convention when
Governor Palin got up and spoke. Some of it was relief, to find that she
wasn't using an obscure Eskimo dialect.

She spoke out loud and clear and I was glad to find that she's not a lawyer.
Neither is her partner McCain. Both of their opponents are. This could be
significant. How many people in this country are really ready to support
two lawyers against two non-lawyers? Three or four? I see the possibility of
a landslide. If the two lawyers lose, it will be blamed on prejudice,
meaning the anti-black type, but this can be answered by an admission that yes,
there was prejudice, but it wasn't anti-black. It was anti-lawyer, and this is
considered an acceptable prejudice. It's certainly widespread and even
thought admirable by some people. One can even tell anti-lawyer jokes and get
away with it. You can't do that with blacks. Look what happened to Don Imus.

This kind of thinking opens up a new outlook on the election. It is now
safe to vote anti-Obama without being considered a bigot, at least not a racial
one. Before, you could have said you didn't believe in minority government,
but that would have been considered a bit of thinly disguised racism
revealing the poor condition of your soul and your need for therapy.

I have to admit that even before the lawyer objection arose I had been
inclined to vote against Obama because I had doubts about his claim that the
rising water level of the world would recede if he were elected. That was a bit
of a stretch, I thought. What was he going to do about the Aurora Borealis,
I wondered. The Milky Way? The Andromeda Strain? All these things posed
big problems for whomever was elected and I thought that maybe an older hand
than Obama might be better prepared to deal with them.

Now Biden was an older hand, older than anybody except McCain. I disparaged
him the last time I wrote about him, in fact I referred to him as Senator
Malarkey, but that didn't mean that he didn't have some qualities that
compelled admiration. This was confirmed when I learned the other day that he has a
son who works as a lobbyist and also has been receiving a salary of $1,2
million a year as president of a credit card company. Right away it was easy to
figure that this showed that the senator was a hell of a family man and that
was confirmed by papers in the lawsuit stating that he had indirectly
solicited the job for young Robert so lobbying wouldn't be held over his head in
the election. A million dollar job was the result. Who needed lobbying with
that in hand?

Too bad that there's been a falling out between the Bidens and their
benefactor, but no doubt Big Joe will find a way out of the shemozzle, so that he'll
be able to go back to talking about indictments for Bush and Cheney and who
else? General Petraeus maybe? Condoleezza Rice? Why not Laura Bush? Why
not...? You fill in the names. I think it'll be okay in the end, though. Joe'
s not really a vindictive guy. Just get him out of this jackpot he's in at
the moment, somebody lose some of the papers or something, and he'll forgive
and forget. So will his son, Big Bucks Bob, no square from Delaware.

So much for Biden. His sins will find him out, I'm afraid. McCain is a
different story. He has no sins. His problem is that he's too forgiving of
other people's sins. The Vietnamese tortured him for five and a half years.
Years later, he forgave them. Why? Did they say they were sorry? Did they
promise to change their ways? No way. They had no regrets about anything they
had done to him or to any other American. They remained the same barbarians
they had always been, just like their fellow Asians, the Chinese, the
Japanese, and the North Koreans. Add to that mix the Iranians and some of their
neighbors and do not tell me anything about the ancient civilizations of the
East.

The common denominator of all the people I've mentioned is that they've
fought us and tormented and often murdered the prisoners they took from us.
Many Americans questioned whether we should ever have fought these people in the
first place, but it happened. Not every enemy was guilty, of course. Some
were Christians, not indoctrinated in the vindictive religions of their
continent. Others were just decent people. They had a claim to real
civilization, not just a facility for adapting the machines of the West to their own use
without ever realizing anything about the spirit of the society responsible
for such achievements.

No one maintains that Westerners have always lived up to their own standards
for treating prisoners, which I consider a civilizational benchmark. The
Russo-German war of 1941-45 illustrated this, not the juvenile antics at Abu
Ghraib or other such places. But we have standards, we have the Geneva
Convention and insofar as other nations deviate from these codes, they are criminals
and not deserving of McCain's forgiveness or anyone's.

I hope the McCain administration won't be one of those which goes in for a
lot of forgiving and apologizing all over the place for alleged past
misbehavior by bygone generations of Americans. All this groveling and moaning gets on
my nerves. It might make McCain a good campaign issue. It would serve to
highlight the difference between him and his opponent. An Obama
administration can be relied on to find all kinds of reasons for us to get down on our
knees and seek forgiveness from those whom we have offended. We'll be worn out
from genuflecting and doing penance.

There'll be none of that with McCain, I feel sure. He may forgive enemies
for what they've done to him, but he's not about to apologize for what he's
done to them. He's, you know, tough. He was a fighter pilot after all. That
's the way they are. No apologies, no regrets. The last president that was
conspicuous in that way was Harry Truman. He had quite a number of fights.
I was never a fan of his, but today the Democrats cherish his memory. Let's
hope they remember this the first time John gives them the rough side of his
tongue.






Designed and Hosted by Online Ontime Ltd.