Im-Palin-g McCain's picket

Cultivating relationships

I have made many acquaintances but have very few friends, in fact, the people I call my friends, I have known for at least 15 years, putting that in the time frame of my last long-term partner, beyond that, it goes back 24 years.

Some 22 years ago, when I was made the class representative and a good representative I was, we were a noisy class and when someone challenged me about being the ring-leader of the noise-makers, I had to say if I did not represent my class in noise-making I would not be representing them effectively.

The real context of this is I left that school with 3 good friends, one of whom I have lost contact with in Russia, one with whom I have little contact in Nigeria and the other with whom I talk to quite frequently in London.

These along with the other friends are people I can trust with a lot, talk to about much and expect to act in my behalf just as if I were there without any fear for their judgement and whilst being assured of the quality of their person and integrity.

I am proud to say that where I have recommended these people on my own recognisance they have been accepted in my person and proved to be just as recommended and better.

I have also entered into business dealings with people through having first known them, known their judgement, their values and realised how we can work together for a common good, I do not take these issues lightly at all.

My congratulations to Sarah Palin

It is on this note that I first congratulate Sarah Palin [1] on being selected by John McCain as his vice-Presidential running mate. Until she was selected, I did not know anything about this governor of a backwater state called Alaska [2] apart from the bridge to nowhere [3] which has since been abandoned [4] by her and the indictments [5] of Ted Stevens [6], the longest serving GOP Senator.

What we read about Sarah Palin is interesting, a mother of 5 children, the last being born only in April 2008 with Down’s Syndrome, she is a devout Christian, pro-life and pro-gun politician who seems to be working at cleaning up Alaskan politics.

She has been governor for less than 2 years and might be implicated [7] in trying to obtain the sacking of her ex-brother-in-law who was undergoing a messy divorce and child custody batter with her sister as a serious abuse of power.

Gay abortions of gun marriage

On the issues that excite the conservatives about her candidacy, I find myself more pragmatic than fundamentalist and agree more with Senator Obama’s views on abortion, gun-control and gay marriage as he articulated in his acceptance speech [8].

The need to work on preventing unwanted pregnancies than jostling with the issue of abortion could mean condoms and contraceptives have a place in society, if we are less emotive about presumed societal decay. People would always have sex, it is probably better we ensure they have it safely and avoid regrettable situations.

Being painted as an Annie, Get Your Gun figure does nothing for me, it fact that gun use in the country differs from what guns get used for in the inner cities; there is a need for balance in enacting laws with due respect to the 2^nd Amendment to protect rights as well as protect lives.

If people have a right to love regardless of gender pairing, that love-relationship constitutes their family unit for those concerned such that sharing, caring and privileges should by rights and fairness accrue to that relationship.

I still contend that it is only those whose heterosexual marriages and relationships are weak that think gay marriage would impact on marriage as an institution. If same-sex couples had basic rights conferred on their partnerships, there would be no need for the marriage debate, but the absence of such partnership rights makes many want to go the whole hog and I see nothing really wrong with that.

Time for the United States of Americans

America within itself needs conciliation through pragmatic analysis of social issues not the promotion of political figures that accentuate the wedge issues that divide the people, polarise the nation and try to make traitors of people who disagree about these things.

We need the vision of a new president who brings together the whole country in the unity of purpose looking to change and grasping unto the edifying message of hope than one who dwells on the divisions that has turned America into one of the most divided countries on social issues.

Conservatives and liberals alike have to recognise that they are all American first and the politics of being disagreeable because of the difference of opinion has to stop – I must contend the Obama offers the healing balm of reason that John McCain cannot deign to offer to his most beloved country.

This is no great thing

Nevertheless, I am not excited by any stretch of the imagination about McCain’s choice of vice-President. It is amazing that after so many years in Washington, his numbered years and the need to buttress areas where he is weak, he has chosen to lay such a responsibility on someone he has only met once before, with whom he has no particular affinity.

Nobody can convince me that this selection is borne of some deliberate and considered thinking that binds people who have developed a relationship of mutual aims, goals and vision.

The fellowship of minds

I have just started a new job today, the company has in the past employed the best consultants money could buy to solve intractable problems with solutions that sound amazing but yield none of the expected results.

The team has now regrouped into one that seeks shared experiences with others who they have worked with before to address the problems with the fellowship of minds that are geared to succeed rather than push a particular solution provider’s agenda which just accumulates hours of expensive waffle.

I find myself amongst people who I have worked with in different companies over the last 5 years, who I know, who I respect, who have a shared vision and acknowledging each others expertise and who have gathered together to be a winning team – we know we would crack those problems because we have developed a relationship of peers and expertise.

After an exemplary life

The choice that John McCain has made is the most cynical ploy to emotively use gender sympathies and religious adherence to befuddle voters into a false sense of thinking sameness brings comfort, it offers the opportunity for a complacency that imagines things would be done the way we believe we would do things. How further from the truth can we be about judgement and the assessment of character?

It is a presidency not a bishopric that is at stake, it is about human government not church government. I would be fearful of an ultra-religious person who dreams dreams, sees visions and reckons that God commands them to take some action without considering all the consequences for the basis of secular government.

America has been too divided along wedge issues to tolerate more of the same again for 4 more years.

I am surprised that no one sees that after 72 years of a rather distinguished and exemplary life John McCain could find no friend, colleague, confidant, mentor or protégé in his long political, social, business or military life and career to join him in the most important quest of his life but a stranger.

No judgment no story

This man has no judgment; he fails woefully at what should have been the culmination of relationships with other men and women he has met in all walks of life; this should have had a history and story that fills us with awe, but he picks someone he met only six months ago.

He is both a maverick and breathtakingly reckless; the levers of world government must never be within his grasp.

There is no greater poverty of spirit and goodwill than to share your greatest stage with strangers rather than with friends, with people you hardly know, in order to prove you are different.

This is exactly what makes John McCain unworthy of the calling to which he aspires, he has made vain a lifetime of experiences to hug the limelight alone and he has dangled a juicy bait that has everyone whooping too distractedly to realise that they are being patronised by a consummate denier of his legacy and his original platforms for the want of power.

A picket not a ticket

It has left the Economist asking Bring back the real McCain [9] in their leader this week, just as John Kerry compared and contrasted Senator McCain with Candidate McCain in his speech [10] at the Democratic National Convention last week.

The selection of Sarah Palin does not present us with a McCain-Palin ticket, rather it is an appalling McCain picket; it is not revolutionary but reactionary, it not inspired but desperate, it is not conciliatory but anarchist, it not cultured but vulgar, it is not considered but rash, it is maverick in its context and reckless to the extreme.

For a man of John McCain’s stature to impose on a nursing mother he hardly knows regardless of her abilities and suitability a responsibility so large as to create the most exacting pressures on her needs to satisfy motherhood and the call of office is in the least irresponsible and at the most heartless.

If the 3:00AM advertisement [11] would ever question the ability of anyone to meet the demands of a great crisis, just imagine accommodating that under the stress of nursing a child that most definitely needs that extra bit of care and having another child away in harm’s way in a war that should never have been started.

I am sorry, this selection is not gentlemanly at all and it proves once and for all that Senator John McCain is probably better a senator and definitely not material for a president by any stretch of the imagination.

The man is just not the man we used to know.

Sources

[1] Sarah Palin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[2] Alaska - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[3] The Bridge to Nowhere: A National Embarrassment

[4] 'Bridge to nowhere' abandoned - CNN.com

[5] Nation & World | Ted Stevens indicted, longest-serving GOP senator | Seattle Times Newspaper

[6] Ted Stevens - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[7] Alaska Public Safety Commissioner dismissal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[8] Obama: We are better than these last eight years - CNN.com

[9] The presidential race | Bring back the real McCain | Economist.com

[10] Transcript: Sen. John Kerry On Foreign Policy : NPR

[11] Hillary Clinton, 3am commercial White House Ad - Truveo Video Search