This is a general commentary relative to Alaskan Governor, Sarah Palin: her choice as McCain’s Vice-President and her speaking performance at the RNC. I’ve also included a few other general concerns of mine.

 

Rant mode on…

 

There are several reasons why the topics of politics and religion elicit such elevated levels of vitriol. However, the most common and most damaging is the way opposing parties state their inferentially drawn conclusions as absolutes.

 

I don’t think it’s something people do intentionally; most that do it have no inkling that they’re doing it. Regardless, we have to try to stop doing it. Sadly, the reporting media seems to have lost sight of the importance of its role in helping the electorate do this.

 

The news media hasn’t always been this clueless. Good news reporters of yesteryear were neutral. They reported facts in terms of who, what, when, where, how—and if verifiable—why.

 

Good news reporters still do it this way. There just seems to be a dangerous shortage of them nowadays and we’re all the worse off because of it.

Huge corporate conglomerates are gobbling up TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, and myriad news magazines. Ratings rule when vying for the advertising dollar, elevating the lowest common denominator to king of the hill.

 

Objective news reporting becomes the first casualty whenever new media owners transfer news departments from public service overhead centers to bottom line profit centers.

What’s left? For the most part, it’s a cadre of quasi-news reporters creating irrelevant speculation, along with other visceral goodies, and reporting it all as “news.”

 

Rant mode off (for now)…

 

Now, on to Sarah Palin. I think her speech was outstanding. Her delivery far exceeded her party’s expectations while raising quite a few “ut oh’s” among her political foes.

 

Did she exaggerate some of her points? Of course she did. Process always supplants substance during party conventions. Joe Biden did the same thing. It’s a cardinal rule followed by all politicians.

 

For whatever reasons, we’ve become greatly obsessed with our desire to support candidates that are “ordinary” people. You know… people just like us, facing the same kinds of daily dilemmas that we do.

 

Mrs. Palin mesmerized her audience with an air of “ordinariness.” And, it seems to be genuine, encompassing her whole family. Her speech left me with the impression that yes, she’s Alaska’s governor, but it’s just her day job.

 

She’s a natural at being “ordinary.” As such, I think she tried a bit too hard to deliver the point. She seemed to force it and there was no need for her to do this.

 

Not only did she fulfill our visions of “ordinary,” she’s also become a poster child for amazing originality and unadulterated political courage.

 

She confronted the two most powerful Republican families in Alaskan politics and won. Then she beat “big oil interests” on their own turf, not to mention a few other nasty bits of Republican corruption.

 

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if our next president-elect, whichever one it will be, turns out to have a backbone made of the same stern stuff? Let’s dare to hope!

 

I think Mrs. Palin is a fair match for Joe Biden in terms of verbal feistiness, personality, and debate-savvy. I give Biden a slight edge, though, based on sheer long-lived national experience. Regardless, it should prove interesting.

 

However, the key to this lies in the news outlets’ willingness to concentrate time and effort on all of the candidates’ relevant qualifications—as opposed to just Mrs. Palin’s.

 

How refreshing it would be to see reporters deal with genuine issues and pertinent qualifications instead of the usual primeval stuff they seem so fond of digging up.

 

The time they’ve wasted writing and talking about her daughter’s out of wedlock pregnancy and the swirling speculation that somehow Mrs. Palin will become a less fit mother due to the time demands of the vice-presidency are just two examples of why I’m not holding my breath.

 

A pet peeve of mine…

 

Over the past decade or two, we’ve allowed the notion that American individualism is not compatible with shared responsibility. It’s become a festering sore.

 

The Left lets its extremists overdo the latter while the Right lets its extremists overdo the former.

 

The middle now struggles with finding whatever makes a good compromise. We know that one exists, but first we have to overcome an “either/or” mindset that pits stalwart individualists against rabid shared responsibility advocates.

 

But alas, we may be on the brink of a breakthrough! America is in the throes of a serious financial crisis. And, many of those stalwarts of individualism aren’t too happy about it.

 

I’m sick of hearing about the multitude of “irresponsible” dummies that purchased homes well beyond their means to pay for them and, as such, brought their financial woes upon themselves.

 

Undeniably, they did. However, there are other equally culpable facets. It’s just not as simple as wannabe homeowners living beyond their financial means.

 

A huge network of subprime lenders contributed just as greatly to the problem. Like the homebuyers, many of them had to borrow tons of money in order to lend it.

 

Not only did they do so with abandon; they did it without so much as a cursory glance from oversight authorities, mostly because few of them, if any, still exist.

 

So, while millions of “dummy” homebuyers hocked themselves into a state of certain default, many lenders propelled themselves into a state of ever-predictable insolvency by borrowing billions without so much as an ounce of collateral, not even overleveraged houses.

 

Someday we’ll learn that irresponsibility is irresponsibility regardless of which side of the ledger it’s on.

 

Whenever the financially fat do the unprotected “nasty” with arrogant politicians, the resultant love child is kid called “Cocky.” And, the Beltway motel rooms have been renting out, nonstop, over the past 25- to 30-years as a matter of total accommodation.

 

The United States Congress learned valuable financial lessons from the DEPRESSION of the ‘30s. Both Houses enacted numerous safeguards aimed at preventing future national financial disasters.

 

There’s no doubt about it. The architects of special interest finance have paid huge room rental rates in order to seduce the U. S. Congress into overriding virtually every one of them. And, it has worked!

 

The result? A gargantuan credit derivatives market that is between four and five times larger than our stock market, operating, thanks to the lords of Wall Street and their U. S. Congressional concubines, with virtually NO public oversight.

 

Believe what you wish, but our economy is a confidence game. And, right now, neither investors nor borrowers have a lot of confidence in it or the banks that finance it. It’s reached a point where banks don’t even trust other banks!

 

And predictably, the rest of the world has lost confidence in America’s economic strength: a beacon of steadfast financial inspiration for the past 150-years. It’s going to take more than some smiley-face talk to fix it, too.

 

So, where have Joe Biden and John McCain, both long-sitting U. S. Senators, been while this has been going on? What have they been doing all of this time?

While it’s true that Barack Obama’s only been around for the past seven or eight-years, the questions still beg answers: where has he been and what has he been doing?

 

The news media hasn’t brought this up in any meaningful ways, let alone one that “ordinary” people can understand and identify with. I wonder why. Do they think it’s too complicated for us to understand?

 

Or, are they showing their own collective stupidity by being too preoccupied with irrelevant and meaningless “gotchas?”

 

On the other hand, it could be that shrewd politicians have become ever more astute at forcing the wrong questions, thereby rendering the answers meaningless. It’s probably a combination of these!

 

I’m not blaming either presidential candidate for all of this mess. Who knows, all of it may have taken place while Obama, Biden, and McCain were out to lunch.

 

At the very least, though, I’d certainly like to hear John McCain’s explanation for hiring Phil Gramm, the fiasco’s chief architect, as his economic guru.

 

It seems to me that things like this should be far more pertinent to McCain’s suitability for oval office ascendency than where he stands on gay marriage, abortion, God, marital infidelity, torturing war prisoners, or the precise number of homes he currently remembers owning.

 

Some political truths…

 

George Will covered some of these in his current Newsweek essay. However, some of it bears repeating; but since I don’t have a copy of Newsweek in front of me, I’ll paraphrase a bit.

 

We’re a Republic. We don’t get to decide the issues. We get to decide who the deciders of the issues will be. So, it’s important for us “ordinary” folks to know where those potential deciders REALLY stand on the issues.

 

The best way for “ordinary” people to do this is to check the Congressional Record and make frequent visits to neutral fact-finding sites such as FactCheck.org.

 

Is John McCain really as much of a “maverick” as he claims? He’s certainly talked a good talk, but the Congressional Record shows that he’s voted with George Bush about 95% of the time.

 

Is Barack Obama really as much of a moderate Democrat as he claims? The Congressional Record shows otherwise. He’s more to the Left than he is to the Liberal middle.

 

Their political blustering notwithstanding, when it comes to their respective party lines, there is not a hill of beans difference between these candidates: one’s a Conservative and the other’s a Liberal.

 

Is Barack Obama an elitist? Yes, he is! So is John McCain. They both have personal net worths measured in millions. Senator McCain’s net worth, however, dwarfs that of Senator Obama.

 

But, hey! Even a half a bundle is still a bundle in the eyes of us “ordinary” types. So, there’s no need to feel bad for Barack.

 

Given the current sticker price for running a national campaign, only elitists can do it. Anymore, it boils down to a matter of which elitist will occupy the Oval Office because we “ordinary” folks can’t afford it.

 

I don’t really care who occupies the Oval Office as long as it is someone competent. For some reason, I like to think that a person politically smarter than I am—elite or not—will be leading this nation.

 

Finally, we all need to stop the ridiculous bickering over the irrelevant stuff the media likes to put out there.

 

Knuckle-draggers still exist, whether they are Conservatives blaming Liberals for everything or Liberals blaming Conservatives for everything. If the news media would stop giving them air and print time, maybe they’d all go away. Or, at the very least, simply shut up.

 

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.