Quote from oktiri:
None of them men cater to the White trash wing of the republican party.
Ron Paul is a principled fiscal hawk.
Colin Powell is the embodiment of integrity and service.
Hitchens is an intellectual a la David Brooks
Matthew Dowd saw the Irak lie /mess firsthand while working as a political operative inside the white house
All these men have college degrees and impeccable credentials.
To get a better idea of your average Republican nowadays, you have to look a Joe the Plumber : 40 k yearly income, Zero ambition, fucked credit score, drunkard whose main "raison de vivre" is watching sports and playing poker, father with criminal record, divorced, no education, limited 3rd grade vocabulary, no understanding of free markets beyond "Tax cuts," No political motivation or strategic ideological positioning beyond hating black people . .....Basically, an ignorant bitter loser.
You should have seen and heard the NRA nutjob I ran into over the weekend. Scared me to the point I had to get away and I never even mentioned politics. He just started ranting and raving about "that nigger jerk" running for president who was going to outlaw hunting and take our guns away.
OTOH-more conservatives on McCain and Palin:
George Will: [Senator McCain] is "behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high" in his response to the financial crisis.
Charles Krauthammer: [Senator Obama has a] "first-class intellect and a first-class temperament," and these strengths "will likely be enough to make him president."
Kathleen Parker: [Governor Palin] is "clearly out of her league" and should bow out of the campaign.
Chicago Tribune editorial: "On Nov. 4 we're going to elect a president to lead us through a perilous time and restore in us a common sense of national purpose. The strongest candidate to do that is Sen. Barack Obama." [Sen. John McCain] "failed in his most important executive decision" by naming Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate."
[The Chicago Tribune has never before in its almost 170 year history endorsed a Democrat, including eschewing favorite son Adlai Stevenson twice.]
Chicago Sun-Times editorial: "Americans want to rise above ideology, race class and religion" and Obama is the best candidate to do that. "Americans across the land want to pull together, and in Sen. Obama they see a man of exceptional gifts who just might show them how,"
[The Sun Times is a past holding of the Rupert Murdoch empire, and has had several other owners including, for several years, the deeply conservative and now infamous Conrad Black.]
Los Angeles Times editorial: "We need a leader who demonstrates thoughtful calm and grace under pressure, one not prone to volatile gesture or capricious pronouncement. We need a leader well-grounded in the intellectual and legal foundations of American freedom. Yet we ask that the same person also possess the spark and passion to inspire the best within us: creativity, generosity and a fierce defense of justice and liberty. The Times without hesitation endorses Barack Obama for president.
[The Los Angeles Times has never before endorsed a Democrat, and indeed has not endorsed any candidate since 1972.]
David Brooks: [Sarah Palin is] "a cancer on the Republican party."
Christopher Buckley: (son of William F. Buckley, contributing editor and part owner of The National Review) "This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget "by the end of my first term." Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking? As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a "first-class temperament,"
Christopher Hitchens: "McCain lacks the character and temperament to be president. And Palin is simply a disgrace."
Andrew J. Bacevich in The American Conservative Magazine: "Barack Obama is no conservative. Yet if he wins the Democratic nomination, come November principled conservatives may well find themselves voting for the senator from Illinois. Given the alternatives--and the state of the conservative movement--they could do worse."
Andrew Sullivan: "If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today's actual problems, Obama may be your man.
Peggy Noonan: "But we have seen Mrs. Palin on the national stage for seven weeks now, and there is little sign that she has the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office. "
Jeffrey Hart: (former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon) reading an Obama speech: "I am not opposed to all wars," Hart intoned, quoting a 2002 speech in which Obama, then a state senator, had warned of the perils of invading Iraq. "I'm opposed to dumb wars." Looking up from the page, Hart nodded his approval. "Very Burkean," he said, referring to the 18th century Irish political writer Edmund Burke, hailed by many as the founder of modern conservatism. "Prudential. A sense of history, and what we're up against there."
Wick Allison (editor in chief, D magazine in Dallas; former editor National Review): "Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don't matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. ... Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.
Bill Bennett: "He's a cool guy, a handsome guy, has a fabulous voice. A leading Democratic candidate, a black man in America, and he does not talk about race, does not play the race card. It appeals to the better angels of all our natures."
Susan Eisenhower: Granddaughter of President Eisenhower & President of the Eisenhower Group. "Given Obama's support among young people, I believe that he will be most invested in defending the interests of these rising generations and, therefore, the long-term interests of this nation as a whole."
Seneca
