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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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August 29th, 2008

unixronin: Rodin's Thinker (Thinker)
Friday, August 29th, 2008 07:00 pm

... I still say that both of our Presidential candidates suck.  (And that's in the "wet farts out of dead pigeons" way, not the good way.)

But I gotta admit, after today's perhaps-surprising news, I think our Vice-Presidential choices — or the Republican one, at least — just got a whole lot better.  Sarah Palin appears to be sane, honest, and fiscally responsible, and she's not afraid to out corrupt members of her own party.  She cleaned house in the Alaska state legislature.  Further, it looks as though she stands by her principles, but is willing to calmly accept being overruled or proven wrong, and she's not afraid to publicly change her mind.¹  Her approval ratings in Alaska are frequently in the 90s.  When she ran for Mayor of Wasilla in 1996, she made a campaign promise to cut her own salary — and kept it.  Then when she ran for Governor of Alaska in 2006, she made a campaign promise to sell the IAI Westwind II executive jet purchased (on state government credit) by the Murkowski administration ... and kept that promise, too.

I mean, DAMN!  Can't we, you know, swap the ticket around and make McCain VP?  C'mon, folks, our first female President doesn't HAVE to be a Democrat.

[1]  "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.  With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.  He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.  Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day." — Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

unixronin: Rodin's Thinker (Thinker)
Friday, August 29th, 2008 11:43 pm

... we all wrote in Sarah Palin as President instead of VP?

On a separate but related thought, one of the things that I find most depressing about American politics is not just that the electorate is so deeply and bitterly divided between Democratic and Republican, but that both sides seem to invest so much hatred and vitriol in trying not to heal that rift, but rather to deepen and widen it still further.  Sometimes it makes me wonder whether this century will see a Second American Civil War.