BS: Palin VP McCain choice

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Alice
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 07:17 PM

sorry, meant to type 7th and 8th grades. I sent him back to the public school for high school, and he had gone through public school from kindergarten through 6th grade.

In Montana, it is typical for many very religious parents to home school, because there are very few controls on curriculum for home school. They can teach creationism instead of science, they can teach abstinence only and no other sex education in their home school.

I did not home school because of religious teaching. I just did not agree with the middle school administrators and the way they did not deal with bullying.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Emma B
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 07:16 PM

Kat is absolutely correct too when she says parents can opt out of sex education classes for their children in the UK as they can opt out of religious services, prayers etc

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Alice
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 07:12 PM

pdq, not all children go to public schools. Some children go to private, religious schools. Some children are home schooled.
Home schooling in Alaska is pretty common. I home schooled my son for 6th and 7th grade because I did not like the middle school here. There was no requirement on what I had to teach regarding sex education, as a home schooling parent.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: pdq
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 07:08 PM

Several people have claimed that there are courses in sex education where abstinance-only is the sole choice given. Will someone please find a shread of proof supporting that claim?

The concept is silly. Besides, if the teacher writes on the blackboard "DON'T", what will they do for the other 54 minutes, teach macrame? Decoupage? Perhaps finger painting?

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Peace
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 06:52 PM

Games with words, Hubby. They fucked up. The verb is 'tried'. The result was failure.

I tried a six foot high bar jump when I was in track and field. I failed. Get it?

Go play your games with someone who wants to play games. I don't. I retired from teaching English. Have a nice evening.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: GUEST,number 6
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 06:50 PM

Right on Doug !

biLL

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Susu's Hubby
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 06:48 PM

It (astinence), evidently, wasn't tried.

She turned up pregnant, didn't she?


Hubby

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: DougR
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 06:46 PM

I'm guessing that only two people know why Gov. Palin's daughter became pregnant. The daughter and the husband to be. And, basically, it really is nobody else' business.

DougR

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: GUEST,number 6
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 06:46 PM

Desired Pregnancy Is Pervasive but Largely Ignored

biLL

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Peace
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 06:37 PM

I dislike the passive voice. However

It was TRIED. They FAILED!

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: pdq
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 06:37 PM

Most likely, governor Palin's daughter is pregnant because she wants to be. It will be getting her a husband, seems like right now. Their choices and nobody else's business.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Susu's Hubby
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 06:34 PM

"SuSu's Hubby, how can you say But no one can argue the fact that when abstinence is TRIED, it is effective in preventing pregnancies 100% of the time. When it is obvious, in a very public way, that it did NOT work for Palin's daughter? And, that is what she advocates for ALL of our children."

Kat....do me a favor.

Look up the word "abstinence".

Then when you find the definition and understand it, convince me how it was TRIED when the girl turned up pregnant.

Hubby

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Bobert
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 06:29 PM

Well, sex education is worthless without birth control resources... Herein lies the problem... Knowing what can happen and actually preventing it are two different situations... Face it, people, including young people are going to have sex... That is a reality...

I'd be curious to know what the unwanted pregancy rates are in Sweden which has a much more liberal society all the way around...

B

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: katlaughing
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 06:20 PM

SuSu's Hubby, how can you say But no one can argue the fact that when abstinence is TRIED, it is effective in preventing pregnancies 100% of the time. When it is obvious, in a very public way, that it did NOT work for Palin's daughter? And, that is what she advocates for ALL of our children.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: katlaughing
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 06:15 PM

There's sex and there's sex ed. It depends on whether it focuses only on abstinence or if it actually teaches contraception methods.

This was noted in an earlier post about GB (my emphasis):

In Britain, sex education is mandatory in secondary schools, but it focuses on fetal development and physical changes while contraception and safe sex are treated discretly. Additionally, parents can withdrawl their child from sex education lessons. England is the only country in Europe where sex education does not cover everything and still is a hot topic.

Dou, you have a point about kids stopping to think about using a condom or other contraceptives, but the world is not the same as it was when you or I were kids. These days the girls are more assertive about boys using protection AND most know about the real danger of STDs of which there are so many more deadly types. Remember when having unprotected sex wasn't a possible automatic death threat ala AIDS?

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Susu's Hubby
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 06:12 PM

As I've said before.....no where that I know of in the USA is astinence the only thing taught in this country.

But no one can argue the fact that when abstinence is TRIED, it is effective in preventing pregnancies 100% of the time.

That is a fact that no one can spin.

By the way...McCain/Palin is up by 4 according to Zogby and forecasted to go higher in the coming days.

Just thought I'd share a little good news in here today.


Hubby

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Peace
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 05:58 PM

Sex education was initially brought into schools because it wasn't being discussed at home.

"Ya got a loaded pistol. Keep it in yer pants" is NOT sex education even if it is good advice.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Emma B
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 05:49 PM

Doug as stated earlier, here in the UK we have the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe

Rates of teen pregnancy have been linked to low socio enonomic status and resources have been put into developing better sex education programmes for the 13-15 age group.

However........

'Doctors who developed a sex education programme for schools throughout Britain have concluded it is no better at preventing unwanted pregnancies than traditional approaches

Known as Share, for "sexual health and relationships: safe, happy and responsible", the programme was designed by the Medical Research Council and NHS Health Scotland to improve sex education by using interactive videos, group work and role play to develop the skills needed for sexual relationships

In a study published yesterday in the British Medical Journal, lead researcher Marion Henderson at the MRC in Glasgow compared rates of pregnancies and abortions among 4,196 young women, half of whom took part in trials of the Share programme, and half of whom received traditional sex education.

The study followed the women from the age of 15 to 20 and found pregnancy rates were the same in both groups, at 300 per 1,000 women. Abortions were the same, with 120 women in every 1,000 having at least one termination'

'Sex education course fails to cut teenage pregnancies'
Ian Sample, science correspondent The Guardian, Tuesday November 21 2006

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: DougR
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 05:45 PM

Can't say I agree, Amos, that that is the bottom line. To me the bottom like would be:does sex education as taught in the public schools (or wherever)ensure that the rate of pregnancies will be affected done way or the other.

If you are referring in your post to Carol C's post you will note that she acknowledges that the report she produced is not scientific. That's when I stopped reading it. Opinion does not make it so.

DougR

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Bobert
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 05:43 PM

Actually, Dougie, you should be scared, too... The conditions were right for the US to prevail in the last Cold War... Our economy was strong and Russia's was not... But Russia is swimming in money right now and our economy is in the crapper because of the tax cuts and the Iraq War so a betting man would give the Russians the edge in the next one...

And McCain and Palin, who both want to play to their NAQSCAR dad, gin tottin' base, are much more apt to get US into a losing Cold War scenerio than is Obama...

Remember this post, Doug... Write it down somewhere... Remember what I said about going into Iraq in the first p;ace??? I was right and I am 99% confident that if McCain gets elected that what I have outlined above will also come to pass... Yes, this ***is*** a dangerous world and we've had 8 years of cowboy foriegn policy and nothin that either McCain or Palin suggests that either of them have the vision or wisdom to keep the US outta that Cold War scenerio...

So remember this warning...

B~

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: GUEST,number 6
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 05:38 PM

"But when two young people with raging hormones get together in the back seat of a Cheverolet (even a Ford)"

Never happens in Japanese or a German cars.    :)

Has the fact occurred to anyone posting in this thread, that many teenage pregnancies occur (these days) because the 'teenage' girl wants to become pregnant?

biLL

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Amos
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 05:31 PM

Doug:

The two posts just above yours offer some telling statistics.

The bottom line question is, should human beings be made or kept ignorant about their physical natures? If not, when and how should they acquire that information?




A

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: DougR
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 05:24 PM

Anybody know if there are reliable studies that show pregnancies occur less often among teenagers who attend sex ed classes than those who do not? If so, can a blue clicky be provided?

I'm all for kids being taught safe sex practices since so many parents apparently fail to do so. But when two young people with raging hormones get together in the back seat of a Cheverolet (even a Ford)I wonder how many of them review, in their minds, the text book used in their sex ed class. How many say to themselves, "Just one time, or it couldn't happen to me." And it does.

DougR

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: CarolC
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 04:15 PM

On the subject of sex ed, it's not a scientific study, but this article has some interesting statistics, and it's from someone currently in the trenches (so to speak)...

http://www.latinitasmagazine.org/teens/articles.php?article=116

"The fact that America has a problem with teen pregnany doesn't surprise us any more. With 821,810 teens becoming pregnant each year, America has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the Western world. But maybe America should take a look at what makes it different from all other countries that have lower rates of teen pregnancy.

Teenagers in America are not more "child-friendly" than anywhere else, since 95 percent of teen pregnancies are unintended, but why do countries in Europe have such a lower rate? Here in America, one million teens will become pregnant over the next year, and half of these teens will end up on welfare. Can you believe that?

After Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Mississippi (which have 113 to 103 pregnant teens in 1,000), Texas has the fifth highest rate of teen pregnancy with 101 pregnant girls. These are startling facts from Naral Pro-choice, an organization that tries to inform the population about taboo-themes. France only has 20 pregnancies per 1,000 and Germany 16–a significant contrast. Countries in Europe have a rate of teen pregnancies five times lower than that of America...

...let's take a look to other countries' methods. In my home country, Germany, I was taught sex education starting in fifth grade. We learned about the penis, period and puberty. We watched interesting videos with naked men and women in them. In class, boys and girls were giggling and glancing at each other. We also learned how to use a condom, where to get it and that it is a contraceptive that prevents you from STDs.

Sex education is taught in Germany with the official reasoning that it shall inform you about human sexual anatomy, sexual reproduction, intercourse and other aspects of human behavior. Most people in my class already knew how children are conceived, but whether they decided to have sex or not – at least they knew all the ways to protect themselves.

During my sex education class, my teacher also asked us to write topics on a small sheet of paper that we would like to discuss. If these wishes differed a lot from the prescribed schedule, the teacher would just change his plans and teach that. Could this type of education—giving information and answering questions—be a reason for the lower rate?

Another difference is conspicious: In Berlin, the capital of Germany, not only teachers, but the whole city, seems to talk more about contraceptives. There is a campaign that advertises for condoms, hands out postcards, free condoms, and, most of all, shows condom posters on every fifth streetcorner. The slogans are funny and colorful. Also, there are youth-magazines that talk about teen topics and have numbers to call with questions. Advertisements and magazines exist in the U.S., but they address this issue with teens less.

So, is it really sex education that makes the difference? To answer this question with a simple "yes" or "no" is not possible, but the following statistic might back up my opinon. Britain has the hightest teen pregnancy rate in Europe with 65 per thousand. In Britain, sex education is mandatory in secondary schools, but it focuses on fetal development and physical changes while contraception and safe sex are treated discretly. Additionally, parents can withdrawl their child from sex education lessons. England is the only country in Europe where sex education does not cover everything and still is a hot topic. This country has the highest rate of teen pregnancies in Europe. Still, the United States with its abstinence-only sex education program has even higher rates of teen pregnancy.

To me, teenagers should have the chance to know as much as possible about sex to decide whether they want a baby or not. They also might not realize that the government's funding for day care centers at school is insufficient. At my highschool, there are 18 spaces for the whole high school. According to the nurse at my high school, 62 teenagers at the school got pregnant last year. As you can see, the government also does not take responsibility for the consequences of its policies."

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: DougR
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 02:42 PM

Love it!
DougR

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: katlaughing
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 02:37 PM

What me, scared? Hahaha...that's a laugh.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: CarolC
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 02:37 PM

Scared with good reason. The possibility of two such people as president and vice president (McCain and Palin) is frightening indeed. Terrifying, even.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: DougR
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 02:34 PM

kat:printing an article by Frank Rich plays well to the lefties but falls on deaf ears to anyone else. Don't know why Mudcatters use known lefties to support their point of view unless they use whatever is written thinking that other lefties haven't read the article. It does not change conservative opinion any more than my quoting Sean Hannity would change the minds of lefties.

After reading all the vitriolic comments in this thread about Gov. Palin, I'm convinced that John McCain finally did something right when he asked her to be his running mate. You folks are plain scared to death!

DougR

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: katlaughing
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 02:02 PM

Democratic Party Platform Draft 2008

Republican Party Platform 2008

From the latter:

"As the party of ideas, rather than
a mere coalition of interests,
we consider vigorous debate
a strength, not a weakness.
Indeed, we are a party — as we
are a nation — of mavericks."

DO we really want a whole nation of so-called mavericks?

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Bobert
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 01:54 PM

Actually, I don't know of any "liberals" who care much one way or another about Sarah Palin's baby... I have commented that Ms. Palin might have benfited from some Planned Parenthood counseling since women over 40 have higher rates of child birth problems but I don't know whether she availed herself or not... It is apparent that her daughter didn't but, really, for liberals this is about as much as non issue as falg burning... Like who cares???

Well, I'll tell you who cares... The folks that want to keep the Repubs in power... They care a lot and they have Karl Rove pulling levers in the background so I find it disgusting, but not surprising, that the Repubs would try to paint "liberals" as these mean people who would attack Palin for giving birth...

This has Karl Rove's fingerprints all over it...

Liberals' couldn't care less... It's a non issue...

B~

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Alice
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 01:51 PM

My last post was referring to this thread and the way politics have been discussed on Mudcat lately.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Peace
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 01:45 PM

It would be refreshing to actually read what the policies of the parties are.

As witk all fights, it is foolish to allow the opposition to set the parameters of the pre-election show. One should establish the tempo and let the other guy/gal play catch-up.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Alice
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 01:41 PM

As I posted earlier, talk "hate" radio spews lies and hatred against Democrats, feminists, environmentalists all day long - and it PAINS me to see those supporting Democrats to stoop to the low level of name calling. If people would keep to the issues, stop the insults, they would get more credibility for their point of view.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Peace
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 01:21 PM

When Barack's berserkers lost the plot

Nick Cohen

The Observer, Sunday September 7 2008



My colleagues in the American liberal press had little to fear at the start of the week. Their charismatic candidate was ahead in virtually every poll. George W Bush was so unpopular that conservatives were scrambling around for reasons not to invite the Republican President to the Republican convention. Democrats had only to maintain their composure and the White House would be theirs. During the 1997 British general election, the late Lord Jenkins said that Tony Blair was like a man walking down a shiny corridor carrying a precious vase. He was the favourite and held his fate in his hands. If he could just reach the end of the hall without a slip, a Labour victory was assured. The same could have been said of the American Democrats last week. But instead of protecting their precious advantage, they succumbed to a spasm of hatred and threw the vase, the crockery, the cutlery and the kitchen sink at an obscure politician from Alaska.

For once, the postmodern theories so many of them were taught at university are a help to the rest of us. As a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it, Sarah Palin was 'the other' - the threatening alien presence they defined themselves against. They might have soberly examined her reputation as an opponent of political corruption to see if she was truly the reformer she claimed to be. They might have gently mocked her idiotic creationism, while carefully avoiding all discussion of the racist conspiracy theories of Barack Obama's church.

But instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk. On the one hand, the media treated her as a sex object. The New York Times led the way in painting Palin as a glamour-puss in go-go boots you were more likely to find in an Anchorage lap-dancing club than the Alaska governor's office.

On the other, liberal journalists turned her family into an object of sexual disgust: inbred rednecks who had stumbled out of Deliverance. Palin was meant to be pretending that a handicapped baby girl was her child when really it was her wanton teenage daughter's. When that turned out to be a lie, the media replaced it with prurient coverage of her teenage daughter, who was, after all, pregnant, even though her mother was not going to do a quick handover at the maternity ward and act as if the child was hers.

Hatred is the most powerful emotion in politics. At present, American liberals are not fighting for an Obama presidency. I suspect that most have only the haziest idea of what it would mean for their country. The slogans that move their hearts and stir their souls are directed against their enemies: Bush, the neo-cons, the religious right.

In this, American liberals are no different from the politically committed the world over. David Cameron knew that he would never be Prime Minister until he had killed the urgent hatred of the Conservative party in liberal England. A measure of his success is that hardly anyone now is caught up by the once ubiquitous feeling that no compromise is too great if it stops the Tories regaining power. Hate can sell better than hope.

When a hate campaign goes wrong, however, disaster follows. And everything that could go wrong with the campaign against Palin did. American liberals forgot that the public did not know her. By the time she spoke at the Republican convention, journalists had so lowered expectations that a run-of-the-mill speech would have been enough to win the evening.

As it was, her family appeared on stage without a goitre or a club foot between them, and Palin made a fighting speech that appealed over the heads of reporters to the public we claim to represent. 'I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion,' she said as she deftly detached journalists from their readers and viewers. 'I'm going to Washington to serve the people of this country.'

English leftists made the same mistake of allowing their hatred to override their judgment after the Iraq war. If they had confined themselves to charging Tony Blair with failing to find the weapons of mass destruction he promised were in Iraq, and sending British troops into a quagmire, they might have forced him out. They were so consumed by loathing, however, they insisted that he had lied, which he clearly had not. They set the bar too low and Blair jumped it with ease. 'When a man believes that any stick will do, he at once picks up a boomerang,' said GK Chesterton, and when the politically committed go on a berserker you should listen for the sound of their own principles smacking them in the face.

Journalists who believe in women's equality should not spread sexual smears about a candidate, or snigger at her teenage daughter's pregnancy, or declare that a mother with a young family cannot hold down a responsible job for the pragmatic reason that they will look like gross hypocrites if they do. Before Palin, we saw hypocrisy of the right when shock jocks who had spent years denouncing feminism came over all politically correct when Bill Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky.

In Britain, the most snobbish attacks on Margaret Thatcher did not come from aristocrats but from the communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who opined that Thatcherism was the 'anarchism of the lower middle classes' and the liberal Jonathan Miller, who deplored her 'odious suburban gentility'. More recently, George Osborne, of the supposedly compassionate Conservative party, revealed himself to be a playground bully when he derided Gordon Brown for being 'faintly autistic'.

In an age when politics is choreographed, voters watch out for the moments when the public-relations facade breaks down and venom pours through the cracks. Their judgment is rarely favourable when it does. Barack Obama knows it. All last week, he was warning American liberals to stay away from the Palin family. He understands better than his supporters that it is not a politician's enemies who lose elections, but his friends.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Peace
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 01:04 PM

I will post Nick Cohen's article in its entirety.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: mg
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 01:00 PM

I am not for a minute going to say she is qualified for VP. But there are sure some nasty people here. I live in a double wide prefab by the way. So do many people in the town where I live.

Her baby does not look delicate to me. He looks quite sturdy but of course I don't know. mg

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: CarolC
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 12:28 PM

And if the author of that "Barack's berserkers" opinion piece had really been unbiased, as I am sure we are meant to believe, then he would have pointed that out himself.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Bobert
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 12:25 PM

Geeze, bb, I didn't hear all this hatred when the Rebubs had control of the White Houes, the Congress and the Courts...

Try again... That excues was not credible...

Yeah, Eb... That is why the Repubs are going to "cacoon" her... Oh sure, they they will send her to one rigged town meeting after another... They will send her to one lilly white ralley after another... They will ***not*** allow her anywhere like Meet the Press, or an open town hall meeting in Chicago or Phiadelphia, or even Northern Virginia, for that matter...

Reminds me of Bush's '04 campaign strategy...

Warch for Palin ti interupt Biden in the debates and try to change the conversation every chance she gets to curtural issues... I beleive she may even drag out flag burning yet again... Like who burns flags these days???

B~

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: CarolC
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 12:22 PM

If whether or not a candidate wins is based on the behavior of his or her supporters, then McCain hasn't got a chance. Because compared to the utter viciousness that McCain's supporters have been aiming at Obama for several months now, what some of Obama's supporters have been saying about Palin in the last week is a walk on the beach.

I'm not apologizing for anything they have said or done. I don't agree with making personal attacks on Palin or her family (her record and history in public office is another matter). But if the amount of that sort of thing is what will determine who will win or lose the election, then Obama will win in a landslide.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Ebbie
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 12:05 PM

The word here is that an unscripted Palin is a fearsome thing. The GOP campaign managers are waking up.

In the debate with Biden, will there be the outline of a little box under her suit, I wonder?

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: katlaughing
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 12:03 PM

NYT
Palin and McCain's Shotgun Marriage

By FRANK RICH
Published: September 6, 2008

SARAH PALIN makes John McCain look even older than he is. And he seemed more than willing to play that part on Thursday night. By the time he slogged through his nearly 50-minute acceptance speech — longer even than Barack Obama's — you half-expected some brazen younger Republican (Mitt Romney, perhaps?) to dash onstage to give him a gold watch and the bum's rush.

Still, attention must be paid. McCain's address, though largely a repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy, reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He took his (often inaccurate) swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasn't smug or nasty.

The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.

As is nakedly evident, the speech's central argument, that the 72-year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops on the most destructive policies of the president who remained nameless Thursday night. (In the G.O.P., Bush love is now the second most popular love that dare not speak its name.)

Even more fraudulent, if that's possible, is the contrast between McCain's platonic presentation of his personal code of honor and the man he has become. He always puts his country first, he told us: "I've been called a maverick." If there was any doubt that that McCain has fled, confirmation arrived with his last-minute embrace of Sarah Palin.

We still don't know a lot about Palin except that she's better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter's right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is fiction.

She didn't say "no thanks" to the "Bridge to Nowhere" until after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers' money anyway. Far from rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita average in other states). Though McCain claimed "she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities," she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her "executive experience" as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: "It's not rocket science. It's $6 million and 53 employees." Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.

How long before we learn she never shot a moose?

Given the actuarial odds that could make Palin our 45th president, it would be helpful to know who this mystery woman actually is. Meanwhile, two eternal axioms of our politics remain in place. Americans vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. And in judging the top of the ticket, voters look first at the candidates' maiden executive decision, their selection of running mates. Whatever we do and don't know about Palin's character at this point, there is no ambiguity in what her ascent tells us about McCain's character and potential presidency.

He wanted to choose the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman as his vice president. If he were still a true maverick, he would have done so. But instead he chose partisanship and politics over country. "God only made one John McCain, and he is his own man," said the shafted Lieberman in his own tedious convention speech last week. What a pathetic dupe. McCain is now the man of James Dobson and Tony Perkins. The "no surrender" warrior surrendered to the agents of intolerance not just by dumping his pal for Palin but by moving so far to the right on abortion that even Cindy McCain seemed unaware of his radical shift when being interviewed by Katie Couric last week.

That ideological sellout, unfortunately, was not the worst leadership trait the last-minute vice presidential pick revealed about McCain. His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct over facts, potentially reckless.

As The New York Times reported last Tuesday, Palin was sloppily vetted, at best. McCain operatives and some of their press surrogates responded to this revelation by trying to discredit The Times article. After all, The Washington Post had cited McCain aides (including his campaign manager, Rick Davis) last weekend to assure us that Palin had a "full vetting process." She had been subjected to "an F.B.I. background check," we were told, and "the McCain camp had reviewed everything it could find on her."

The Times had it right. The McCain campaign's claims of a "full vetting process" for Palin were as much a lie as the biographical details they've invented for her. There was no F.B.I. background check. The Times found no evidence that a McCain representative spoke to anyone in the State Legislature or business community. Nor did anyone talk to the fired state public safety commissioner at the center of the Palin ethics investigation. No McCain researcher even bothered to consult the relevant back issues of the Wasilla paper. Apparently when McCain said in June that his vice presidential vetting process was basically "a Google," he wasn't joking.

This is a roll of the dice beyond even Bill Clinton's imagination. "Often my haste is a mistake," McCain conceded in his 2002 memoir, "but I live with the consequences without complaint." Well, maybe it's fine if he wants to live with the consequences, but what about his country? Should the unexamined Palin prove unfit to serve at the pinnacle of American power, it will be too late for the rest of us to complain.

We've already seen where such visceral decision-making by McCain can lead. In October 2001, he speculated that Saddam Hussein might have been behind the anthrax attacks in America. That same month he out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a role in 9/11 — even after both American and foreign intelligence services found that unlikely. He was similarly rash in his reading of the supposed evidence of Saddam's W.M.D. and in his estimate of the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. (McCain told MSNBC in late 2001 that we could do with fewer than 100,000.) It wasn't until months after "Mission Accomplished" that he called for more American forces to be tossed into the bloodbath. The whole fiasco might have been prevented had he listened to those like Gen. Eric Shinseki who faulted the Rumsfeld war plan from the start.

In other words, McCain's hasty vetting of Palin was all too reminiscent of his grave dereliction of due diligence on the war. He has been no less hasty in implying that we might somehow ride to the military rescue of Georgia ("Today, we are all Georgians") or in reaffirming as late as December 2007 that the crumbling anti-democratic regime of Pervez Musharraf deserved "the benefit of the doubt" even as it was enabling the resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. McCain's blanket endorsement of Bush administration policy in Pakistan could have consequences for years to come.

"This election is not about issues" so much as the candidates' images, said the McCain campaign manager, Davis, in one of the season's most notable pronouncements. Going into the Republican convention, we thought we knew what he meant: the McCain strategy is about tearing down Obama. But last week made clear that the McCain campaign will be equally ruthless about deflecting attention from its own candidate's deterioration.

What was most striking about McCain's acceptance speech is that it had almost nothing in common with the strident right-wing convention that preceded it. We were pointedly given a rerun of McCain 2000 — cobbled together from scraps of the old Straight Talk repertory. The ensuing tedium was in all likelihood intentional. It's in the campaign's interest that we nod off and assume McCain is unchanged in 2008.

That's why the Palin choice was brilliant politics — not because it rallied the G.O.P.'s shrinking religious-right base. America loves nothing more than a new celebrity face, and the talking heads marched in lock step last week to proclaim her a star. Palin is a high-energy distraction from the top of the ticket, even if the provenance of her stardom is in itself a reflection of exactly what's frightening about the top of the ticket.

By hurling charges of sexism and elitism at any easily cowed journalist who raises a question about Palin, McCain operatives are hoping to ensure that whatever happened in Alaska with Sarah Palin stays in Alaska. Given how little vetting McCain himself has received this year — and that only 58 days remain until Nov. 4 — they just might pull it off.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: katlaughing
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 11:58 AM

If she can't take the heat, what is she doing in the kitchen?

Palin Won't Give Interviews Until Campaign Is Ready, Davis Says

By Jim O'Connell

Sept. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin isn't giving interviews to the news media and won't until ``the campaign is ready,'' campaign manager Rick Davis said today.

Palin will answer questions from reporters ``when we think it's time and when she feels comfortable doing it,'' Davis told ``Fox News Sunday.''

Palin, the governor of Alaska, was picked by Republican presidential nominee John McCain on Aug. 29 to be his running mate. Palin gave a speech at the Republican National Convention and has appeared at campaign events.

``She's not scared to answer questions, but you know what?'' Davis said. ``We run our campaign, not the news media.''

``Sarah Palin will have the opportunity to speak to the American people,'' Davis said. ``She will do interviews, but she'll do them on the terms and conditions'' the campaign decides.

Davis referred to the media as ``piranhas'' and said that reporters focused on Palin's personal life, including the pregnancy of her unmarried 17-year-old daughter.

The coverage last week was ``not what I would call objective journalism,'' Davis said. ``So until at which point in time we feel like the news media is going to treat her with some level of respect and deference, I think it would be foolhardy to put her out into that kind of environment.''

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Amos
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 11:44 AM

" "I know the governor of Alaska has been, you know, saying she is change," Obama said at a town hall here. "But when you [have] been taking all these earmarks when it is convenient and then suddenly you are the champion anti-earmark person. That is not change, come on. I mean, words mean something. You can't just make stuff up.""


Barack on Palin

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: katlaughing
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 11:43 AM

I question the veracity of the op/ed piece, Emma, for that's what it really is. It doesn't even have the gender of her baby right. Trig Palin is a boy.

Bobert, well said.

Dick, I hear you! Think what she would do to Roe v Wade, people, and science education, to say nothing of the Supreme Court.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: beardedbruce
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 11:39 AM

Bobert,

I came here by way of Digital Traditions: Two of my satires are in the database.

Should I be asking what *You* have put into it?


So, any criticsm of your candidate is a smear, and justifies anything you want to say about others?


Your comment that those opposed to Obama are racist is offensive: I find that I do not agree with his *politics*, his past record, and the fact that I do not want to see one party in control of both the House, the Senate, and the White House, without even the possibility of slowing them down by filibuster. You might want to see that: I do not, and resent your calling me racist because I do not agree with you.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Bobert
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 11:26 AM

Well, Emma, we gotta vent somewhere... Yeah, I'm working in the Obama campaign here in my county and all we are getting from the Repubs is the same rude and quite uncivil behavior that epitomizes the McCain/Palin strategy so alot of us are about filled up with personal attacks yet in the interest of the campaign just take their crap, stuff it down in our tummies, smile and go on...

It's been the same here...The personal attacks and hatred ****started**** with the usual suspects pounding away with smear, lies and hatred against Obama... But unlike the campaign where I have to take their crap, I don't have to take it here...

Might of fact, this is a folk musican's web site and I find it interesting that the people who have been leading the smear campaign afainst Obama aren't even musicans... Hmmmmmmm???? Makes me think that the Repubs are paying trouble makers to be disruptive on websites such as Mudcat... I woudn't put it past the Bush/McCainites to do just that...

No hate here... Just observations and an opportunity to call stuff the way I see it...

Bobert

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Ed T
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 11:11 AM

"Will someone just listen to people like Joe Offer or are you determined to go on a hate rampage"?

Seems like Joe O went off on his own version of a "hate rampage" rant a few messages back...regarding most of the recent USA administrations (save Lincoln).

Guess we all have the same potential within?

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 10:44 AM

It would be nice if folks would stop fretting about her past, and take a good look at what she stands for. She makes McCain sound like a raging liberal by comparison.

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Amos
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 10:30 AM

I dunno who is talking to whom here. I don't think enthusiastic support for a better candidate qualifies as "berserking" and could only appear as such to a dented viewpoint--at least anything I've seen on these threads.

It was not Barack Obama supporters who invented Swiftboat campaigns, you may recall.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Palin VP McCain choice
From: Emma B
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 10:24 AM

sigh you people really are scraping the barrel - why don't you take up Gregs description too Donuel while you're at it?

Will someone just listen to people like Joe Offer or are you detirmined to go on a hate rampage?

If this is what the supporters of the possible next president of the US represent heaven help the rest of the world.