I'm starting to feel pity for McCain.

[Naked Gents Rut]

You claiming you aren't a McCain hack is so very precious, but belied by your comments for the past month.

I wasn't even sure I was going to vote for him until the last couple weeks. I blame Bob Barr (as a Libertarian? seriously?) and mindless Obama voters for pushing me to this point. I have to register my disgust in some tangible fashion.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut


C and D are definitely useful for a politician.

They are not traits which I find it useful for those who govern me to have.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut


I wasn't even sure I was going to vote for him until the last couple weeks. I blame Bob Barr (as a Libertarian? seriously?) and mindless Obama voters for pushing me to this point. I have to register my disgust in some tangible fashion.

You are voting for somebody because you don't like the supporters of the other guy? Really?

[Naked Gents Rut]

More importantly, experience is not the same as competence or judgement.

How do you judge the competence of someone who has never held an executive position before? How do you judge the judgment of someone who's never had to make a tough choice in a position of power?

All Obama has on the first point is his own presidential campaign. All he has on the second point is a speech he made in 2002.

[Naked Gents Rut]

You are voting for somebody because you don't like the supporters of the other guy? Really?

Well, I obviously think McCain would be a better president than Obama. I'm not a huge McCain fan, however, and since I don't live in a swing state my vote won't decide anything anyway. Normally this would tempt me to vote third-party, but Barr is terrible and I really want to state my opposition to Obama in the strongest terms. Annoyance with Obama supporters is only a partial reason for this.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut
All Obama has on the first point is his own presidential campaign. All he has on the second point is a speech he made in 2002.

The expected value of Obama is thus higher than the expected value of McCain, though there is more uncertainty.

McCain has shown himself to be managerially incompetent over the last 6 months due to impulsiveness, risk-seeking and a degree of laziness. His capacity/disposition for independent thought and judgment is also, apparently, lower than it used to be.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut

How do you judge the competence of someone who has never held an executive position before? How do you judge the judgment of someone who's never had to make a tough choice in a position of power?

You look at what they say and what they have done. That is why Lincoln got elected even though he also lacked "experience" and had not held executive positions, and he proved a sight better than Buchanan had been, even though Buchanan had a sterling resume.

Obama has shown himself to be an thoughful, intelligent, charismatic individual with great self discipline. McCain hasn't.

[Naked Gents Rut]

You look at what they say and what they have done.

Obama hasn't done anything. He doesn't say much of worth, either.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut


Obama hasn't done anything. He doesn't say much of worth, either.

Yeah, when you write two bestsellers, become a constitutional law professor at a premier law school, and get elected to the US Senate from a large population state, you can say Obama has done nothing.

And of course your claim he hasn't said anything of worth is yet another one of those demostrably false claims you keep making.

[Naked Gents Rut]

McCain has shown himself to be managerially incompetent over the last 6 months due to impulsiveness, risk-seeking and a degree of laziness.

You act as though Obama and McCain started the campaign with an equal likelihood of victory. They didn't, as the fundamentals are all in Obama's favor. You're criticizing McCain for risk-taking when he had to engage in such risk-taking if he wanted to have any chance of actually winning the election.

[Q Classic]

Christopher Hitchens is also pissed off about the fruit fly flap.

Sarah Palin's War on Science:
The GOP ticket's appalling contempt for knowledge and learning

In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.

...

With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn't think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist"—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

...

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

I heard this from Palin. I heard McCain trash a planetarium.

When you have candidates that anti-science, they have no ****ing business in command. Haven't you all played Civ? It's all about the research...

[GePap]

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut


You act as though Obama and McCain started the campaign with an equal likelihood of victory. They didn't, as the fundamentals are all in Obama's favor. You're criticizing McCain for risk-taking when he had to engage in such risk-taking if he wanted to have any chance of actually winning the election.

Back in 2007 McCain was a clear frontfunner for the Republican nomination, while Obama was a huge long shot. Then of course McCain imploded his first campaign, but came back. He faced a weak field while Obama had to contend with Hillary Clinton.

When this all began, over a year ago, only an idiot would have given Sen. Obama the same shot at victory as Sen. McCain. To claim otherwise of completely disingenous.

[Darius871]

Why has Obama's having been a Con Law professor been harped on several times in this thread? All I learned from a whole year of that godforsaken "class" was that some areas of the law have no "wrong" answers, only alternative interpretive approaches. Even Bush could learn that stuff in his sleep if he wanted to.

If that's a criterion what we really need is a quantum physicist as president

[Naked Gents Rut]

Yeah, when you write two bestsellers, become a constitutional law professor at a premier law school, and get elected to the US Senate from a large population state, you can say Obama has done nothing.

My apologies. I should have said "Obama hasn't done anything relevant to being President." He had a chance in the Senate, but his record of legislation is rather weak.

And of course your claim he hasn't said anything of worth is yet another one of those demostrably false claims you keep making.

Yes, "hope" and "change" are certainly examples of Lincoln-esque rhetoric. We are the ones that we've been waiting for.

When this all began, over a year ago, only an idiot would have given Sen. Obama the same shot at victory as Sen. McCain. To claim otherwise of completely disingenous.

Obama had an advantage in the general election campaign, you moron. Any Democrat would've had an advantage over any Republican.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Darius871
Why has Obama's having been a Con Law professor been harped on several times in this thread? All I learned from a whole year of that godforsaken "class" was that some areas of the law have no "wrong" answers, only alternative interpretive approaches. Even Bush could learn that stuff in his sleep if he wanted to.

Sorry, but Bush has shown himself quite incapable of understanding the possibility of several equally valid points of view.