blony

[Update: The post referenced below has been taken down. That's a good thing.]

Does anything go in politics? Anything and everything? Would you aggressively drag a 16 year old face down into and through the barnyard in order to discredit the veracity of her mother even if there were incontrovertible evidence? What if there's only circumstantial evidence?

Consider: Who is it going to harm?

This is none of our business!

That's the gut reaction. It's not unusual for our gut reaction to give rise to an equal and opposite reaction that says: Stop, Look, Listen, and Think. After the internal debate that entertained the importance of pro-choice to the Liberty of female citizens with respect to McCain's reckless reach to ideologically impaired wing nuts and the importance of the suitability for president of the possible successor to a 72 year old 4 time cancer survivor whose reckless and bellicose impulsiveness and anachronistic sense of militaristic honor masquerading as patriotism make him a disastrous pick as a serious presidential candidate in the first place - the question remains:

Can't we elect Obama over McCain without, possibly inaccurately, mortifying and traumatizing a child? Even if accurate, it's none of our business.

In a forum that is an affront to the US Constitution and the principles of the Founders in the first place, Barak Obama distinguished him self beautifully with respect to John McCain in answering the very stupid question of a very stupid man who happens to have psycho-emotively enthralled millions of Americans. We; no, I mean they, all love a whore. And there's no greater an intellectual whore than the leader of an evangelical flock than a politician who will give them, that leader and his flock, an intellectual blow job: Enter John McCain.

The question was:

At what point does a baby [deserve] human rights?

Barak Obama played along a bit over far; he is, after all, a politician: I wish he'd have said/asked:

I've never held, seen, or even thought of a baby I didn't think deserved human rights. How do you define a baby, a person, a human being? How do you define the human rights of an innocent young girl with respect to the hand full of cells in her womb that might,or might not become a baby? At what point do you believe a girl or a woman deserves human rights? And by what authority and by what means is the knowledge and wisdom derived to be imposed upon those who are already empirically human beings against their best thinking and their feeling?

Who among you and I should play god on this issue and what is the empirical evidence that either or any of us know better than the person who might or might not choose to be a mother at the time and circumstances any of us have determined to be compelling, or not, for reasons of our own?

And that, the phrasing of the question and the candidate's need to reinterpret it in and from the context of the immediate audience as opposed to the context of the combinination of the principles and values our nation is founded upon and the degree to which we are able to discern concrete answers to questions that actually do not have concrete answers: is why the forum is an affront to the Constitution in the first place.

Most politicians simply speak crap that makes their immediate audience feel good.

But, to his political credit and the credit of intelligent life at large, Barak Obama did not totally cave to the emotionally loaded version of Have you stopped beating your wife? First he fielded Warren's implicit interpretation of the question and appropriately adjusted it: What is your position regarding women's choice?

Obama's response was merely and masterfully honest and appropriately humble:

1: The answer to that question is beyond my pay grade.
2: [The individual Woman has the most difficult time making these decisions with respect to her own person and what is going on inside of her self and with respect to those who love [or don't] and support [or don't] her and that which might [or might not] become a baby. Bottom line: her body, her being is hers; the decision of fetus cum child, or not, is hers, with respect to the possibility of giving birth to a baby. She is the most authoritative judge, all things considered, because it is her own person who is the only current person whose body, life and future is at stake.]
3. [Theology vs. theology and theology w.r.t. science are still working on these issues]. Neither has a supportable definition of when it is that a fetus and a woman become separate human beings. But,at least, science acknowledges that - and so does Barak Obama.

The bottom line, but for an idiot, is very clear:

1. For millenia all know a baby when they see him/her and all but the depraved have affection and a sense of identification that leads to the conclusion that all human babies have human rights.
2. For millenia, a baby is one who has been born.
3. It is, as yet, unknown ethically or practically just when, if ever, while part of a woman's body, a fetus becomes a human being, a baby. What we do all know is that we all recognize a baby when we see him/her having been born.

In short, Barak Obama refuses to play god insofar as deciding when a girl/woman must surrender her being an individual human being to having become a mother.

John McCain has no such diffulty; his answer to the same question is:

At the moment of conception.

The irony of all this is that Obama has been touted as the, so-called, elitist, the arrogant.

What we discover is that Obama is the intellectually honest, the more acknowledging of his own ignorance, on the issue, the more acceptant of multiple ponts of view, the more reluctant to impose the religious perspectives of some upon the lives and being of others.

What we discover is that McCain is an intellectual whore who'd give an intellectual blow job to the religious right or anyone else [read president of Georgia as McCain claims for every American to be a Georgian].

We don't need yet another intellectual whore as President of the USA.

We need a person of intellectual integrity who will perceive and wrestle with
issues of consequence from all the perspectives necessary and honestly refrain from oppressive/repressive government and policy to satisfy the craven lusts of those who pressure him to make them feel good.

I have to disagree that all believers are against the notion of having [their] gov't. - once "transformed" - to be in a position of directing everyone's beliefs. The fundamentalists, I say, desire to accomplish exactly that end! That is why they have blazed their inroads, politically, and it is not to be inferred that they tend to be at all tolerant! If rational atheists seem angered, perhaps it is because they are the most feared and disrespected populace on the planet, for no rational reason. They are, essentially, banned from political office, unless they manage to evade the radar under some semblance of a "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. There can be no such policy for such folks, as they are scrutinized for their non-belief more so than their experience or problem-solving abilities. The aggregate of this country eschews the idea of atheists partaking of political office, plain and simple. I, for one, see much wisdom in the saying, "Madness .... rare in the individual, rampant in the group." There is little to be said for safety in numbers with regard to the sanity/mentality of Nazi Germany, or the Crusades. Disease is disease, be it the mind or body. The aggregate collective can survive the numerous individuals who go astray, but not necessarily the holocausts group mentality can engender.

Our ability to empathize, to occupy the point of view of others, is one of the more powerful, albeit poorly exercised, capabilities of the individual in a society of societies. It is difficult to do so with integrity; to leave our own psycho-emotive baggage unattended for a time. I think most of us aren't very good at it. One of the biggest mistakes or, perhaps more frequently - ploys, we engage in is to take some one else's point of view from our own point of view . In doing so, a straw man is created that is actually no one's point of view.

In particular, it seems that folks with deeply held, i.e. brain-wired beliefs that are tangled up with their feelings and color their thinking are simply unable to grasp that there are others who are dissimilar in that regard.

Oh, they understand that others might believe differently - that's too obviously so not to comprehend; the world and our history have a plethora of religions and it is easy for one to understand (and propagate) the process of indoctrination. And they can learn, through very difficult hard fought lessons, to be tolerant of such others because they can identify.

But is it possible for such folks to grasp, much less occupy the perspective of, another in whom such a deeply held belief system is simply absent, perhaps by an enduring personal struggle in a psycho-emotive process that includes the discrediting of the process of formulation of such a belief system and a subsequent un-wiring, so to speak, of its effects on the brain?

As one who is not a theist, hence an atheist, the mistake, if it is a mistake, that theists consistently make in articulating their point of view that scientists who are not theists have, like them, a deeply held belief system that has some metaphysical, albeit different from their own, basis. Hence the science as religion straw man.

Science is not a belief system; science is a disciplined process. That does not mean, though, that ethics cannot be derived from such a process. The root meaning of the word philosophy is love of knowledge. A disciplined scientist is a philosopher and a disciplined philosopher respects and applies the disciplined process of science. A disciplined scientist continually questions and tests what might, otherwise, have been his own beliefs and those of others.

As for ethics, one who is not a theist does not believe that humans are special because they are chosen to be saved by a supernatural entity. Such a one might, however, value humans as the leading edge, so far anyway, of the process of evolution in nature in this rather strange region where entropy has been defied for a relatively brief era. Why? Without

Back in 2002 Barak Obama made a speech that is foundational to the assessment of the astuteness of his judgment during this presidential campaign. The majority of the world agreed with him then; the majority of Americans agree with him now.

... I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income – to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
http://jimhancock.blogspot.com/2007/10/barack-obama-dumb-war-theory.html

Obama's judgement during the neocon propaganda frenzy before the invasion, evokes the purloining of Kipling:

If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs ... you'll be a [president] ...
If... by Rudyard Kipling

That judgment stands in stark contrast to the mindlessly feelings-based, ideology-driven mentality of John McCain, not to mention W and the nut cases, including Joe Lieberman, who pulled his strings, patted his back and induced a simple fool to incredible malfeasance.

As the campaign heats up it is refreshing to hear:

More bluntly, Kilcullen, who helped Petraeus design his 2007 counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, called the decision to invade Iraq "stupid" -- in fact, he said "fucking stupid" -- and suggested that if policy-makers apply the manual's lessons, similar wars can be avoided in the future.

"The biggest stupid idea," Kilcullen said, "was to invade Iraq in the first place."
Rice Adviser: Iraq Invasion was F*cking Stupid

Barak Obama was correct - then and now. There is good reason to think the man will consistently be correct in his judgment far more frequently than not. The reason is ... just that: Reason - the man thinks.

In spite of Lou Dobbs on CNN, Katie Kouric on CBS and a general free pass by MSM to pretend it isn't so, it has become increasingly clear that John McCain will simply say anything.

From his infamous B.S. about safely walking the streets of Baghdad to the unrelenting and quite revealing string of information and fact challenged utterances regarding Iraq as the first major conflict for the US since 9/11, Sunnis, Shiites and Al Quaeda, the non-existing fifteen years since Checkoslovakia ceased to exist as a country, the non-existing border between Iraq and Pakistan, the scrambled chronologies, not to mention cause and effect, about the rise of Al Quaeda in Iraq, the Sunni 'Awakening' vis a vis the, so-called, surge and the near completion of ethnic cleansing and separation in his cherry-picking narrative about diminished violence in Iraq ... uncritically silent as the MSM is about the blatant confusion - i.e., incompetence, of this harpie-wanna-be-president - the dots are connecting and the public image of this character is unmistakably emerging from the MSM smokescreen. What/who is John McCain: A cranky old bull shit artist.

It turns out that, not only does John McCain not know what to do - he doesn't even know what happened or what is. And that's just in his strong suit - foreign policy expertise.

While mirrors are required to straighten out McCain's understanding, much less his talk, on foreign policy it's unlikely that anything at all can obscure the reported $2.8 trillion difference between what he says in, so-called, town halls and the less reality challenged information his campaign staff quietly proffers to the Tax Policy Center.

$2.8 Trillion worth of B.S.

Earlier this year, the Tax Policy Center did an analysis based on private correspondences with the McCain campaign staff and advisers. But in a revision of their analysis they found that if they did an analysis based only on public statements and publicly available text on their website, his tax plan would cost an additional $2.8 trillion over ten years. That’s over “two-thirds more than the plan described by McCain’s campaign staff.”
...

McCain’s public plan is even more skewed towards the rich than his adviser’s plan is, with the richest .1% of Americans earning “twice the tax cut that they would get under the more modest plan outlined by Senator McCain’s economic advisers.”

In addition, the Tax Policy Center points out that the public version of McCain’s plan “would add enormously to the public debt,” making his public plan to balance the budget require “a radical and unprecedented downsizing of government.”

It's no wonder that John McCain's smirks are beginning to raise the this is insane mind worms to a cacophonous din.

All B.S. asside, the conceptual cesspool of a mind that somehow insists that any sort of victory can emerge from an unnecessary, therefore immoral and illegal, invasion and occupation that has directly and indirectly slaughtered, maimed and displaced millions of people at the cost of many hundreds of billions of US taxpayer's hard earned dollars and squandered the lives and well being of thousands of Americans in the military and their loved ones has already been occupying the Whitehouse for nearly 8 years. America does not need more of the same.

And neither Iraq nor America need more of this

Senator Barak Obama has clarified his position on the FISA bill. The link is to what he said; this is what we hear:

I know you think I am not taking a forceful stand against retroactive immunity for the telecom industry's collaboration with the Bush/Cheney administration in ignoring US law, including the Constitution. I have said I will support this bill in the Senate but I have said, and repeat, that I will work to strip retroactive immunity from the bill.

I know that position is an oxymoron but I think it's imperative that some bill pass and this bill is better than the last bill. I think that gathering intelligence is more important than prosecuting illegal malfeasance of the Executive Branch and US corporations; therefore I am willing to compromise and blink at the latter.

I understand this position is unpopular among many who want change. I acknowledge it is not the bill it should be. I understand and respect your activism and opposition to this position. But, in the overall context of what we are engaged in I think it is the best we can do for the time being. We all know we are in a political campaign that is going to get worse before it gets better. Even if you disagree with my stated position, and I acknowledge that neither it nor I are perfect, I trust and you trust that we must win this election for President of the United States.

Bottom line

I am working in some dimensions where I need maneuvering room and resilient flexibility. Not all of the dimensions are visible all the time and some of them are, as yet, only anticipated possibilities. It isn't always pretty; after all, we're involved in politics here. I'm your candidate and winning this election is my larger responsibility and it is your responsibility. We have to choose our battles, perhaps even forfeit some to maintain and gain position for those that matter most. Sometimes I must feint, sometimes I must compromise; sometimes you won't know whether or why and you won't like it. But we all know we have to win the end-game of this contest or we lose the opportunity for real change. You have to trust me to do the best that I can, all things considered - even if you or/and I, for that matter, do not savor the current snapshot.

I think I have to swallow hard and do it this way. I think you have to swallow hard and continue to support me.

General Wesley Clark probably delivered the most simple, clear and accurate assessment and rebuttal of a major premise, of the McCain presidential campaign:

I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

Of course, the fellow travelers of the Neocon regime, including main stream media which invested its skin from the earliest days leading up to the invasion of Iraq through the embedding of its personnel during the invasion is quick to expand the observation of General Clark to dimensions he did not address.