Mrs. Obama=Mrs. Kerry?

Remember what an embarrassment Madame Heinz-Kerry was to the Democratic candidate?  She was a rich foreigner who really didn’t understand America, but that didn’t keep her from criticizing it whenever John forgot to muzzle her.

 Is Mrs. Obama cut from the same cloth?  She was born in this country, as a member of a presumed disadvantaged group, and yet this woman (a Harvard-educated millionaire) just recently pronounced that for the first time in her adult life she is “really proud” to be an American.

 Madame Obama is 44 years old.  I don’t know her birthday, but let’s assume we’re talking about 01/01/1982 and after.  She was an adult during:

• The fall of the Berlin Wall
• The way we came together after 9/11 (that lasted about 2 weeks, but still…)
• The flood of private aid towards those people devastated by the 2004 tsunami

In addition to the big things, I’m even more proud of my country in the little things, which are easy to take for granted:

• I’m proud that the poorest of our poor have cars, microwave ovens, and cable televion.  And that the number one health problem of our poor is obesity.
• I’m proud that our traitorous leftist citizens need not fear arrest, and that they can pretend that they are truly “speaking truth to power,” God bless them.
• I’m proud that we are the oldest continuous democracy in the world.  (Didn’t know that?  Thank your high school history teacher.)

I’m sure you’ve got more, big and little.  Add your thoughts in the comments.

Dirty Harry vs. His Mom

Dirty Harry is the primary blogger at Libertas.  I’ve told you about that site–it’s the place to go for news about Hollywood if you actually have a problem with the political views of George Clooney, Susan Sarandon, et al.

 Anyway, Dirty Harry has his own blog here, and he’s debating his own mother about the relative merits of John McCain vs. Barack Hussein Obama.

 It’s kind of interesting, but I bring it up mainly because I joined in the conversation in the comments here.  Let me know what you think.

Don’t blame me, I voted for Romney

It was just a gut call.  I can’t get excited about either Republican candidate.  I voted based on the degree of contempt each candidate has displayed towards conservatives.  It wasn’t McCain’s amnesty bill that made me vote against him, but his implication that anyone who opposed it was a racist.

 I happen to believe that catering to law-breakers is a bad idea.  If that’s racist, I don’t really understand what that word means.

I could only think of two reasons to vote for McCain over Romney:

He’s more likely to win in the general election in November

I think that’s a weak reason to vote for anyone.  We’re talking about an election that’s nine months away.  No one knows what the state of the world will be then—or even who the Democratic candidate will be.  When you get into who would match up better against whom, you’re venturing into the field of game theory, presupposing perfectly rational opponents.  My opponents are Democrats.  Enough said.

John McCain is stronger on the war.

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This is harder, but here goes:

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He was right about the surge.  He’s wrong about closing Guantanamo.  We should not be placed in the position of having to either release our prisoners of war or giving them lawyers and trying them criminally.

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McCain has also called for our prisoners of war to have 5th amendment rights.  The Supreme Court has ruled that anyone who has 5th amendment protections should also be treated in accordance with the Miranda ruling.  So every prisoner taken would have to be informed of the right to remain silent, and provided an attorney–at the taxpayers expense–during questioning.

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Wrong.

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McCain is a man I admire personally.  I will vote for him in November.  But we should not fool ourselves about his positions.

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He has made it clear that he doesn’t care about economics or cultural issues.  He’s running on the Iraq war.  Yet I question whether a candidate who has stated that one of his primary foreign policy objectives is to re-establish America’s popularity with France and Germany is on the right page in the broader conflict against Islamists everywhere.

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All that said, I understand why fellow Republicans voted for him.  I’ll vote for him too, come November.  But let’s understand what kind of administration he’d have.

Just the FAQs

Cracked.com (yeah, I read “Cracked.”  What?) recently posted a list called 12 Website FAQs We Suspect Aren’t Asked That Frequently.

It includes this gem of a question from Aeroflot’s website:

Question:

Is it possible apropos of epidemic of the bird’s flu to transport shell parakeets by Aeroflot from Moscow to Kaliningrad? The parrots will be bought in Moscow. The reference for export is available; also, there is a sanction of the main veterinary of Kaliningrad. What documents are required else?

How oddly… specific.