September 04, 2008
Palin and Independents
OK, I'll admit it. I used to be such a fan of John McCain that I voted for him in the 2000 primary election. I registered as a Republican to do it, and I was sincere in my support.
No shit.
I was drawn to his campaign finance reform message. Unless you dealt with that, I believed, you weren't going to get anything else done. And I'll admit this too: McCain's position was unpopular in his own party. Though the 2002 McCain-Feingold law ended up being completely ineffective (c.f. Swift Boaters), it was indeed fought by leading Republicans.
I saw a little bit of the old McCain in his acceptance speech tonight. So even though I've had that picture of McCain hugging Bush on this blog since June 2005, it's still hard for me to reconcile the reasonable things he sometimes professes to believe with the policies he's implicitly endorsing by choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate.
While McCain has always been anti-reproductive rights, it never seemed to be a priority for him. But then he went and picked Palin, who believes that women should be forced by the government to keep their babies, even if they are the result of rape or incest.
McCain claims to be concerned about climate change, but Palin is still unsure whether it's a real man-made problem—and even Bush has finally figured that one out.
McCain is supposedly against drilling in the National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska, but Palin is the nation's most prominent supporter of it.
McCain's flip-flops are numerous: first he was against the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, now he is for them; first he was against off-shore drilling, now he is for it; first he condemned waterboarding, then he refused to vote for a law that would have banned its use by the CIA.
But with his choice of Palin, he's lost all remaining credibility as a centrist who could cross the aisle and pick up independent voters like the one I used to be.
By Will Friedman in Politics | Permalink
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Comments
Do not even get me started on what a creepy, pandering, white-trash, religious-psycho choice it was to pick Palin. The sickening, blatant hypocrisy of this whole thing is almost unbearable.
Posted by: dks | Sep 6, 2008 10:21:16 AM
I especially like tonight's revelation that Palin was a Pentacostal and went to a church in which people spoke in tongues. I lived in the South for 13 years and please, people, let me tell you...anyone who has any illusions whatever that a sane person could attend these churches needs to wake the f**k up. Palin is a complete nutjob.
More on my gentle, delicate thoughts on Palin here:
http://cdeluxe.blogspot.com/2008/09/palin-you-knew-it-was-coming.html
Posted by: cdeluxe | Sep 8, 2008 9:45:57 PM
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