John McCain is a Warmongering Windbag

So I'm watching the news this morning and McCain is delivering a speech.  It makes sense for McCain to give speeches in which he acts all presidential and how he'd do things.  Giving speeches is not one of McCain's strongpoints.  He was extremely boring.  It was boring mostly because most of what he said Bush has already said before about terrorists and how our way of life is despised and the bad guys will never stop until they've blown up some Americans.  Give me a break.  I've already listened to that for the last 6 or 7 years.  In addition, his delivery seemed forced, as if he were an actor portraying an American President.  He just didn't look confident or comfortable.  This speech was touted as McCain's important foreign policy speech, but in the end, all the news networks gave up on his speech and switched to other stuff with the slight exception of Fox, but even they cut out of the speech for a little while and picked it back up as the windbag was wrapping it up.  MSNBC and CNN gave up on him and just used sound bites after he was done.  I hope McCain wasn't thinking he was going to make a speech that was notable or historic in nature a la Obama puts the smackdown on U.S. race relations, because nobody will remember McCain's speech a week from now because he said nothing important. 

As much as the democrats are hurting themselves (really it's not all that much, but Republicans have to point at it so nobody will pay attention to the fact that their nominee wants to continue the war, and most importantly

Doesn't have a definition of 'win' for the war!).

I just don't understand the concept of fighting a war with no definition of what victory means.  Instead, McCain and Bush continue to assert how horrific "defeat" will be.  They do have a definition of defeat which is withdrawing troops from Iraq without having "won" the war.  I'm not going any further with that faulty logic.  The war has been so costly with no tangible benefit to the american people that I cannot see the majority of the american people voting for someone that wishes to continue investing in the death and destruction of a foreign country without clearly articulating what victory means and some reasonable timeline for when victory can be achieved.  It's going to be an even more bizzaro world if McCain is somehow elected.

It bugs me that just because the 'surge' calmed down 'some' of the violence in Iraq, that this progress is touted as "we're winning, I told you so!".

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Lemons Into Lemonade

I just had time to digest Barrack Obama's speech and listen to some of the talking heads from cnn fox and msnbc (interesting to note fox did not carry the speech live--they did the weather).  My initial reaction was that it was a great and frank speech that challenged Americans.  It seemed real, at least to me.  I thought it showed up the media coverage of this whole pastorgate thing for what it is, a distraction from what America should be talking about, which is what will make life better for all Americans.  

I originally wanted to post yesterday about my frustration in the media coverage of the presidential election.  I was and am now going to post about how I had stopped watching media coverage because it was the same thing for a week questioning what is Obama going to do, how this hurts him, and how the back and forth between Clinton and Obama hurts the democrats while McCain jetsets around America and the world galvanizing the republican party (more on that garbage later).  I'm glad that this speech perhaps rights the ship back on course to the issues instead of the horseshit personal and popularity stuff.

It was boring.  It was getting tired.  It was politics as usual last week.  It turned me off.  The real issues were subverted.  After this speech, it's nearly impossible for Clinton to hit back on the issue because his speech made the media coverage of this 'event' ridiculous.  Nobody could associate with anyone else if we could only associate ourselves with people we completely agree with.  That's the point that makes this whole pastor thing so ridiculous to me.  Hopefully everyone's eyes goes back to the real target which is what person best represents the majority of the American people to make this country better as it's next president.

Now about fox.  First it was strange that they didn't cover the speech live.  Second, it was strange to me that a few minutes after the speech concluded they covered it with NPR talking head Juan Williams who seemed to possibly not have listened to the speech himself, as he opened up by stating that Pastorgate was still alive and Obama didn't take responsibility in the speech for being at this Pastor's racially incendiary sermons.  The anchorperson came right back with Obama's quote that he was there, heard stuff that was divisive, and heard things he personally didn't agree with.  Juan Williams then said that wasn't what he said, what he meant was that Pastorgate will continue to haunt him because he didn't explain why he didn't divorce himself from the pastor after hearing the things that are on YouTube in church, demonstrating further that he wasn't clearly listening to the speech if he listened to it at all.  It was disappointing that that one misguided minute was the fair and balanced analysis from perhaps one of the most important speeches on race relations in the last 40 years or so.  MSNBC seemed to do the best but a few commentators fawned on Obama a bit much while CNN's coverage was okay but a bit boring compared to MSNBC's attempt to discuss the issues Obama raised.  Okay, I'm done on that for now.  Hopefully this speech does what I think Obama meant it to do by uniting all have-nots together for a better country for all instead of politics as usual of pitting poor whites against poor blacks against poor hispanics against single moms against women and so on resulting in the status quo.

To lemonade from lemons, people.

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