As pleased as I am to see the MSM continue the narrative on Sarah Palin's lies and her other lies and her other other lies, this election isn’t about Sarah Palin. It’s not even about personalities and candidates, no matter what Rick Davis says. It’s about the monumental issues that face our nation right now, even if the average voter doesn’t know it. In our children’s and grandchildren’s history textbooks, this election will prove to have been among the most pivotal crossroads negotiated by this nation since the Great Depression.
Let's talk about what's at stake.
When we talk about national security, an essential part of that conversation is about our image on the international stage.
Let’s ask the question: What does the McCain-Palin ticket look like from outside our borders?
Discussion begins below the fold.
Last week’s edition of The Economist had this to say:
The moose in the room, of course, is her lack of experience. When Geraldine Ferraro was picked as Walter Mondale’s running-mate, she had served in the House for three terms. Even the hapless Dan Quayle, George Bush senior’s sidekick, had served in the House and Senate for 12 years. Mrs Palin, who has been the governor of a state with a population of 670,000 for less than two years, is the most inexperienced candidate for a mainstream party in modern history.
Inexperienced and Bush-level incurious. She has no record of interest in foreign policy, let alone expertise. She once told an Alaskan magazine: "I’ve been so focused on state government; I haven’t really focused much on the war in Iraq." She obtained an American passport only last summer to visit Alaskan troops in Germany and Kuwait. This not only blunts Mr McCain’s most powerful criticism of Mr Obama. It also raises serious questions about the way he makes decisions.
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Mr McCain’s appointment also raises more general worries about the Republican Party’s fitness for government. Up until the middle of last week Mr McCain was still considering two other candidates whom he has known for decades: Joe Lieberman, a veteran senator, independent Democrat and Iraq war hawk, and Tom Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania (a swing state with 21 Electoral College votes) and the first secretary of homeland security. Mr McCain reluctantly rejected both men because their pro-choice views are anathema to the Christian right.
Voices without Votes, a Reuters project, compiled a few international responses to this week’s question on the Washington Post’s PostGlobal page. The question? "Does it worry you that Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee talks about issues like gun rights and abortion and teaching ‘creationism’ in school, but has no experience in foreign policy? What does her selection say to people in other countries about how U.S. politics works?"
Reactions include one from Beirut-based Palestinian-Jordanian journalist Rami Khouri, who is also an American citizen:
She represents the bottom of the barrel in her provincialism in global affairs, and her willingness to be used as an attack dog whose main job is to savage the Democrats with sarcasm, selectivity and exaggeration. She bases her candidacy on a series of emotional appeals more suited to television soap opera and wrestling arenas than to serious politics — busy mom, moose hunter, rebel, hockey fan, etc. Appealing to emotions rather than to rationality is a common political feat around the world, not only in the U.S. But Americans take this to a higher level of idiocy, treating the citizens as nincompoops rather than serious thinking men and women, offering good vibes rather than sensible, viable policies.
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Her total lack of knowledge of the world and how it works is a major shortcoming for a vice president, but the U.S. does not take world affairs seriously these days so her nomination is an apt reflection of where global issues stand in the Republican worldview.
And, from the WaPo site, Iranian businessman Ali Ettefagh had this to say about the way that McCain’s choice reflects on the candidate himself:
The selection of a thinly-educated, inexperienced running mate makes a distant observer muse whether Mr. McCain wants to have an imperial, selfish and typically Middle Eastern approach as president for life (Hosni Mubarak, Yasser Arafat, Hafiz Assad, Saddam or Franco come to mind), or perhaps he has confused the party convention with a coronation of a man that can realistically serve as a single-term president but as an interim door opener for the radical right of his party.
Bahrainian poster Era'a at Mideastyouth.org puts it bluntly; her post is titled "Sarah Palin Will Grill Our Butts."
It is hard to imagine the amount of damage that we would have to suffer through if McCain wins. An incredibly inconsiderate, disrespectful and ignorant person would be a heartbeat away from the U.S presidency: Sarah Palin.
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It’s funny that Palin and her supporters place a huge emphasis on the word "extremists" without realizing the fact that they fall exactly under that category. Anyone who feels that they have the right to attack any country despite an apparent lack of a real threat are self-serving nuts, these are people’s lives you’re dealing with, and they’re not worth less than your own. Using 9/11 as a strategy is getting quite tedious - the U.S already attacked Afghanistan, Iraq, and arrested/tortured thousands of people or "suspects", many of whom are innocent, as a reaction to 9/11 - we had enough. Now we have to swift (sic) through an endless stream of threats from someone who wants to be Vice President of a country whose military far exceeds anyone else’s in the world.
Palin makes me want to throttle myself... but if she becomes America’s next VP, she will be doing a lot of the throttling herself. She will destroy us at each and every opportunity. I’m sure that makes all the overly paranoid xenophobic racists out there ecstatic.
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This battle for U.S presidency is a matter of life and death for many of us in the Arab and Muslim world.
And its not just the Middle East. From an op-ed in the Moscow Times:
Over the past eight years -- and especially since Sept.11, 2001 -- the United States has been increasingly flouting the very principles it encouraged the world to adapt. As Russia slid toward authoritarianism under President Vladimir Putin, the United States under President George W. Bush effectively squandered its moral authority to judge other nations.
How can Washington criticize abolition of gubernatorial elections in Russia if the U.S. president was himself appointed by the Supreme Court? Or complain about human rights abuses when it kidnaps, tortures and indefinitely holds terror suspects in a legal limbo? Or encourage Russia to open up if it is building a 3,200-kilometer fence on its Mexican border?
U.S. officials can declare that actions such as the Russian invasion of Georgia have no place in the 21st century only if they forget their own unprovoked attack on Iraq. And, of course, Russia's recognition of breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia bring to mind the U.S.-inspired recognition of Kosovo.
An ascendant, angry and anti-U.S. Russia is likely to be a major headache for the next U.S. president, whoever he is. Perhaps when Republican candidate John McCain solemnly declared in August that 'we're now all Georgians,' he meant that the world would have to deal with George Bush's disastrous legacy for a long time to come.
What are the international consequences of moving further toward a perceived theocracy, or away from the values that once epitomized this country for people around the world? Or, to put the question more rhetorically, how does it make us safer to elect a candidate that, as Ettefagh noted, "uttered the word 'fight' more than a dozen times [in his convention speech], and... invited his fellow Americans to join him in 'the fight'" despite his "learned" position against war?
Couple that 72 year old candidate with a running mate who can't be taken seriously in any international forum, who is willing to threaten war in her first national interview, and who is sure that the war in Iraq is "a task that is from God," and you have a disaster waiting to happen.
I know and respect McCain's long history of public service, and I am neither endorsing nor espousing the remarks about him that I have quoted in this diary. But the issues raised by the research I have done on this issue are frightening. The world will live with the decision made by the American electorate for the next four years, and they are four crucial years in the realm of international affairs. When votes are cast in November, we will see a reaction to the election from the world community unlike any we have seen before. When we consider the damage that Bush has done to our global image and his unpopularity abroad, the idea of what that global reaction might be--what it might entail--must be realistically considered in the ongoing conversation about this election and its impact on our future as a nation.