John Mortell’s blog

I really need to start posting more, but frankly, I barely have time to answer emails these days. But in the interim, until ‘normal’ service is resumed, have the answer to all of life’s questions:

The Great Office War:

The Great Office War from Runawaybox on Vimeo.

Quite ‘meta’ but funny nevertheless:

Absolutely brilliant idea here as New Humanist magazine has a version of trumps cards featuring different religions. Part one is here and two here. Though its probably a bit easy, my favourite one has to be this one:

SomeGreyBloke has this up on his youtube page and this video is too weird not to share… Can anybody get all the lyrics?

Very good stuff here, nice to see Stewart back on form & the interview with Jim Cramer is pretty fascinating & rather disconcerting… :

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I love the fake news trailer in this…

Chocolate News is a very good (well what I’ve seen so far has been great) on Comedy Central. This has to be my favourite clip so far…

Man when the Onion is right, the Onion is right:

DENVER—After years of battling crippling premiums and agonizing deductibles, local resident Michael Haige finally succumbed this week to the health insurance policy that had ravaged his adult life.

Haige, who had suffered from limited medical coverage for nearly a decade, passed away early Monday morning. According to sources, the 46-year-old was laid to rest at Fairplains cemetery, surrounded by friends, family members, and more than $300,000 of mounting debt.

So, pretty much every news-site has the nomination of Sarah Palin as Republican Vice-Presidential candidate as one of its main stories. While a lot of the coverage I’ve seen so far has been pretty positive (and my own reaction was initially positive) *I’ll come back to that in a minute*, the question that’s on everybody’s mind now is, ‘was it the right choice?’

No, it wasn’t.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but first I want to go back to my initial response to the situation. While I really have a strong dislike for the Republican Party, as my tongue-in-cheek ‘Republicans are evil’ tag on my blogging hopefully suggests, I initially saw a certain appeal to Palin. It didn’t mean that I thought the Republicans were suddenly ‘good’ or anything, it was just initially I thought she might be a good choice. She’s young (like Obama, but in contrast to McCain), conservative (in a way that ‘the right’ don’t feel McCain is), a ‘maverick’ (like McCain *is* {not really but we’el let the poor media analysis stand for a minute}), pretty and was a woman (to appeal to disaffected Hillary supporters) and so suggested ‘change’ as a general possibility on the Republican side of the election.

And then I started thinking again and the whole house of cards came crashing down.

Firstly, the female vote, which seems to be a big part of choosing her. While this a generalisation, and should be treated with the suspicion that such generalisations deserve, I doubt that many of the women who voted for Hillary support the kind of ‘small government, pro-life, anti-choice’ Republican politics that my reading of Palin suggests she has. A woman who is part of a group like ‘Feminists for life’ that is completely against abortion would have extremely limited appeal in my opinion to Democratic women for whom abortion rights (in some form) are a major issue. Hillary’s campaign featured a lot about universal health care and women’s rights in general. I doubt that Palin reflects either of those views. Furthermore, Hillary also ran on her *strong* foreign affairs and security experience and Palin completely lacks those. So, in that case, if the reasoning was to get Hillary supporters, it failed miserably and what’s worse looks like poor pandering to women in the hope that they’ll be stupid enough to vote for a woman purely becuase she’s there.

Secondly, there’s the ‘maverick’ thing. Now John McCain isn’t a maverick. A person that votes the same way as Bush 90% of the time is not that much of a maverick. As an aside the Economist covered where McCain actually *was* a maverick but notes that he’s since either repudiated those views or has endorsed views that run contrary to those same views. Hardly the actions of a Maverick.

But what about Palin’s supposed ‘maverick nature’? As far as I can see these are a result of her actions in exposing corruption in the Alaska oil and gas commission and her actions against fellow Republicans accused of corrupt behaviour in Alaska (and isn’t it sad that a politician being honest counts as them being a ‘maverick’?). As well as this there is the way she became governor in challenging the Republican party machine in Alaska. In terms of her attacks on fellow Republicans, once again I question how much we should read into an apparently honest politician attacking corrupt ones. While I don’t want to sound to cynical, a person with ambition challenging a famously corrupt political machine is a good way to get votes (and if genuine reflects well on Palin’s personal integrity). Beyond an apparent honest streak however, I don’t see Palin as being that much of a ‘maverick’.

This brings me to Palin’s conservative politics. Given that McCain has had a hard time connecting to those ‘value voters’ on the Republican side so far, choosing a woman who has (at the very least) endorsed creationism, is extremely anti-abortion, even in the case of rape and incest, supports drilling in Alaska (which appeals to those who feel environmentalism is a crock AND those who like ‘energy security’), is pro-NRA and so on. While I have very little to say on this, I will be curious to see how this plays outside of the Republican base. Will McCain gain ‘the right’ but lose ‘the Centre’ from this choice? Certainly, and going back to that Economist article I referenced earlier, that would seem to be the case.

Finally, there is Palin’s youth. This I feel is her biggest weakness. Certainly I feel there’s nothing in what I’m going to say next that she couldn’t overcome but in my opinion, it will be an uphill slog to do so. John McCain has largely run his campaign on the basis of ‘reliability’, ‘experience’ and other such words which suggest that he’s tested. His most convincing attacks have to been to suggest that Obama completely lacks experience and that his ‘change’ (especially given his recent choice of running mate) is largely superficial. Yet having Palin, who if anything is even less experienced than Obama, strongly damages that experience claim. Having been completely untested in national politics, she is going to have a steep learning curve in getting used to the limelight. In contrasting ‘experience’ with Obama, one can see that he at least, got that out of the way in running the primary campaign. Her complete lack of knowledge of foreign affairs is going to be an easy route of attack as is her lack of experience in running large government, especially when one considers that she has not even completed one term as governor.

While she could grow into this job, given that McCain’s health is a definite worry, one has to consider whether someone with such a wafer-thin resume is capable of assuming such office. While Presidents that lacked experience have definitely held the job – look at Bush jr., Kennedy, LBJ and Harry Truman, all of those men had at least had grown up in political families or had considerable experience before becoming VP. Palin, to me, seems a considerable risk to take when it is considered that her running mate is not exactly a picture of perfect health and is quite elderly. Her choice also casts doubt on whether McCain’s claim to be interested in serving the nation rather than his own ego is actually true as she seems a choice of a political machine rather than a choice of the best person for the job. It also shows a lack of clear vision on McCain’s part to his own health, which is hardly a sign of a responsible leader.

Probably the best summary of the whole ‘VP choice’ can in my opinion be best summed up by this cartoon:

But I have to admit that I love the Fox News analysis as to why Palin understands foreign affairs… Continue Reading »