Barack Obama for President

Joe Biden smacked the ball out of the park tonight with those statements! The McCain camp wants to make this war about foreign policy and Obama’s lack thereof. Well, after Biden explained how McCain has been wrong on foreign policy and Obama is right, I have no idea how McCain will be able to effectively make that claim about Obama again. I see that as a commercial for Barack Obama, Senator Biden standing up there repeating all the times where Barack Obama was right about foreign policy when John McCain was dead wrong. And if you told anyone that you could shorten anything Joe Biden said down to a 30 second commercial before this year, they would have put you in the loony bin!

But Joe Biden wasn’t all there was tonight. John Kerry had a great line about John McCain voting for things before he voted against them. Bill Clinton showed why he served as President giving us eight years of prosperity.  And after all the marvelous speakers that the Democratic Party has put up in front of the national audience, I fully expect Barack Obama to get up tomorrow and completely blow everyone away. I suspect that this will be the build up to one of the greatest speeches in American history. It will unify the party, attract independents, and be the launchpad for victory in November.

In showing how the Republican party does not quite understand the real world, not only did the Republicans affirm their quest to obtain a constitutional ban on abortion, they also removed the reductions of abortions from their party platform.

So let me get this straight. The party who claims to be pro-life and wants to protect embryos is only caring about criminalizing abortion and not worrying about reducing their numbers? How is that for not being genuine?

Republicans also affirmed their hatred of homosexuals by continuing their support to ban gay marriages. I am sure that marriage defenders David “who would Vitter do” Vitter and Larry “toe tapping” Craig will be leading the battle charge on this one. I’m shocked they are not calling for both a return to Jim Crow laws and a constitutional amendment to keep women in the kitchen and out of the voting booth. Could the Republican Party be any more archaic?

Cross posted at Liberty and Justice for All.

John McCain, in a speech today, praised the nation of Georgia as “one of the world’s first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion”. That is more than just an interesting statement, it is downright frightening. One of the men who wants to be the President of our nation, a nation that established the freedom of religion as one of the main cornerstones, is praising a country for establishing an official state religion? Is that what he wants for our nation as well? If so, he has absolutely no business becoming our next President.

This is another attempt on the part of John McCain to scare us into voting Republican. Why? Because someone else feels like Obama would be a better choice? I am voting for Obama in November, does this mean that I support Castro? In the eyes of McCain I guess it does. However, McCain is dead wrong.

The ad is intellectually dishonest. Just because he may support Obama doesn’t mean that Obama would return the favor and support the way Cuba has been run for years.

What is worse is that John McCain thinks so little of the American public, and so little of the intelligence of American voters, that he actually believes that they will be fooled by such an ad. If McCain has to stoop this low to try and win, that makes me feel really good about our having a Democratic President in January of 2009.

My opinion is that most of the people who believe this ad are likely already voting for McCain in the first place. These are probably the <30% of the country who still supports President Bush. So this is just more wasted Republican money. Again, a good thing.

That’s right, not only is he open to that idea, but he admitted it openly. So not only is he open to raising taxes, but it is for a system that many on the right call “socialist”. Yeah, that should play well to the Conservative base he is seeking to attract.

John McCain, in trying to scare his way into the presidency, is now mocking Obama’s words while attacking Obama’s stance on Iraq.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain, ridiculing Barack Obama for “the audacity of hopelessness” in his policies on Iraq, said Friday that the entire Middle East could have plunged into war had U.S. troops been withdrawn as his rival advocated.

Really? Where did Obama advocate such a withdrawal? I have read that Obama advocate a protracted and careful withdrawal of our troops. I have not seen Obama suggest an irresponsible withdrawl of our troops that “could have” plunged the entire Middle east into war.

The Arizona Republican contended that Obama’s policies — he opposed sending more troops to Iraq in the “surge” that McCain supported — would have led to defeat there and in Afghanistan.

Really? From what I read, Obama supports sending more troops to Afghanistan. How would sending more troops to Afghanistan lead to defeat there? And since we already won the war in Iraq, and we are now trying to win the peace, it is silly for McCain to claim that we would have “defeat” in Iraq as well. But, again, McCain is relying on the Bush scare tactics that terrorists will put a nuclear bomb in every pot if we leave Iraq “too soon” (even though “soon” to Obama is 16 months after he takes office).

Above all, America would have been humiliated and weakened,” he said. “Terrorists would have seen our defeat as evidence America lacked the resolve to defeat them.

HOW on earth would our being smart and moving our troops to actually be deployed to attack those who attacked us on 9/11 be seen as evidence that American lacked the resolve to defeat them? If ANYTHING it is the Bush policy that turned the focus of our “war on Terror” to Iraq that would give the terrorists the message that we lacked the resolve to go after those who attacked us and instead went to another, easier, target. Of course Bush, McCain, and those who follow their flawed policies would ever admit to such a thing.

And I will point out again that Obama does not want to stop fighting terrorists. Obama wants to pull the central front in the war on terror away from the rebuilding Iraq and back to Afghanistan (the place where we should have been focusing on the entire time).

Obama has called for a withdrawal over 16 months. McCain again criticized him for advocating “a politically expedient timetable”

How can McCain logically attack Obama for wanting to pull out immediately and then criticize him for not wanting to pull out immediately? The answer is that he can’t. And anyone who votes for McCain based on his misrepresentation of Obama’s stance on the war is a fool.

McCain has been attacking Obama on his timetable and on his lack of support for the “surge”. McCain keeps parroting the idea that withdrawing troops is surrender (an idea that I have discussed previously as flawed). McCain also has called Obama wrong on the “surge” because Obama was against it and it supposedly worked.

Now, here is the $64,000 question. Did the surge actually work? We can never really know what would have happened on the ground had we not sent additional troops over there. We could have had the same results, better results, or worse results.

And in this article defending the surge, it seems as if the author is saying that policy is what is making the difference. And isn’t that what Obama is saying, that we need better policy and not higher troop levels?

But the bottom line is this. Obama was one of the ones who happened to be right on the issue of Iraq. We have been distracted by Bush in this whole Iraq mess and have allowed Al Queda and the Taliban to get more of a foothold back in Afghanistan. Obama is pushing for higher troop levels in Afghanistan and wants to return Al Queda as being central to the war against terrorism. Seems like that is where we should have been all along… 

Tonight, Rudy Giuliani was on Hannity and Colmes discussing Obama and his energy policy. Rudy praised McCain for wanting to drill and explore clean coal while chastising Obama because he felt Obama would block drilling.

The first problem with McCain’s argument is that we currently have 10,000 open leases that are not being drilled in the first place. So the idea that our policy needs to include new leases soon is just plain silly.

But the major stupidity that came from Rudy when Colmes was discussing the idea that we depend far too much on foreign oil. Colmes asked him about all the domestic oil that currently gets shipped to Asia. He asked why we couldn’t just use that oil domestically. Well, Rudy’s response was that we have private businesses here and that private businesses are free to sell their product where they will make the most money.

Anyone see where I am going with this yet?

My question to Rudy is this. How will it help our reliance on foreign oil if oil companies drill for more oil and just sell that oil overseas as well?

And this is the problems with the Republican pundits. They are so caught up in trying to prevent Obama from becoming President that when making their arguments they fall flat on their faces. Unfortunately Colmes did not see the problem with Rudy’s logic, but I did. And now you do too!

Which candidate do pet lovers support. I mean seriously, is there nothing better to research?

“I think a person who owns a pet is a more compassionate person — caring, giving, trustworthy. I like pet owners,” said Janet Taylor of Plymouth, Mass.

Then why would pet owners vote for the Republican? Seems to me that the party of compassion, caring, giving and worthy of trust would more likely be the Democratic party. (Of course this is not to say that Republican voters are not these things, just the party leadership). Of course, the Republican leadership does a good job at misleading its supporters to make them believe they are something they are not.

Back in March I discussed how the terrorism card has been played far too many times and that eventually it would backfire. I also questioned when the American public would stop being scared by Bush’s comments on terror threats and start realizing that Bush’s policy on terrorism has failed to make us safer.

Now an adviser in John McCain’s camp stated that a terrorist attack would help McCain’s campaign. McCain backed away from the statement (likely because he didn’t want to look like he actually wanted a terrorist attack to happen). However, this line of thinking falls follows the thinking of the previous post.

If a terrorist attack happened, it would not be a sign that we are still unsafe so we need to elect the Republican to keep us safe. It would be a sign that the Republican policy on keeping us safe has failed us and we need to change our way of thinking.

Now, I am not going to speculate on how the American public would actually vote if we got attacked by terrorists again. However, if the American public is foolish enough to believe that electing McCain (who follows Bush’s failed ideas on keeping us safe from terrorism)  after a terrorist attack will make us safer then God help us all.

Cross posted at LJ4A.