Recommendations, or not

My friend Coop just sent me this Obama video which was linked on Reason’s Hit & Run blog. I watched it. I wish I hadn’t. Click play if you dare:

Maybe I’ve just payed too much attention to politics in my life, maybe I’m just too cynical, but anytime I see parents pushing their views on children I cringe. If you don’t think there’s anything wrong with that video, pretend it’s a room full of young impressionable children singing about marriage only being something between a man and a woman, or about how awesome Guantanamo Bay is. Think about how you’d feel if instead of wearing Obama t-shirts they were wearing something like this:

The message doesn’t make this kind of thing OK. In fact it fact it hurts the cause these people are trying to support. Using children to push your political, religious, or any other kind of ideals is just wrong. I’m really kind of disgusted.

In the past week or so I’ve had close to 87 million people send me this poll on PBS.org. The poll is asking if Sarah Palin is qualified to be the Vice President or not. Let’s ignore the fact that polls like this are insanely hackable for just a moment, and ask the larger question, why does anyone care? People are acting like this is the actual vote and the outcome of this poll will some how have an impact on, well, anything except the traffic to PBS.org. It won’t. So what the hell?

But the larger question is about this “qualifications” thing. Is she qualified? Well let’s look at what the qualifications are:

Qualifications for the Office of President

Age and Citizenship requirements – US Constitution, Article II, Section 1

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident within the United States.

Term limit amendment – US Constitution, Amendment XXII, Section 1 – ratified February 27, 1951

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

So is she qualified? Yes she is. But being elected to this isn’t really about who is qualified is it? It’s about who is the best person for the job, and that’s a much better question. Is she the best person for this job? The person who can do a better job than anyone else in the country? I don’t know how anyone can answer that question with a “yes.” She didn’t have a passport until last year, that alone tells me she isn’t the best person for the job. I should not be more well traveled than the president of the united states. I shouldn’t be more well traveled than anyone in major public national office. A major part of running a country is relating to other countries, which requires having been to them. That alone is enough reason for me to know she isn’t the best person for the job.

This on the other hand, is enough to scare the piss out of me. In this Newsweek piece, Sam Harris makes one of the best cases against I’ve seen yet. He writes about her religion:

“In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” “miraculous healings” and “the gift of tongues.” Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin’s spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of “the final generation,” engaged in “spiritual warfare” to purge the earth of “demonic strongholds.” Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: “All options remain on the table”?

Also, isn’t it somewhat telling that all the sudden the discussion is no longer Obama vs. McCain but now Obama vs. Palin. And what does it mean that half the country is ask “who the hell is this woman and is anyone really serious about her being VP?” while the other half is spending all their time making up excuses to justify everything she says and does?

I’ve been meaning to write something about the Sarah Palin thing since I first learned about it. Of course I’ve been swamped and bullshit politics seems to always get pushed down the list of things I want to think about but I wanted to actually say something before the election actually happens. I read the incredibly thought out piece that danah boyd wrote about being offended, as a women, by this choice and watched this video that Jason DeFillippo posted.

And those folks said, much better than I could, pretty much everything I was thinking. Choosing her was such a transparent grab for votes it’s amazing. I’ve had good things to say about McCain in the past but this is so shady and so spineless it’s fairly clear, to me at least, that none of what he’s said in the past holds true and he’s right in line with “cheat and play every dirty move so long as we win” policies that Bush laid out. What’s worse is that people are buying it. I don’t recall a time recently where the two biggest public reactions I’ve seen to a political move have been “Are you serious, you’d have to be a complete idiot to not see that this is a total scam move” and “Amazing! Best move ever!” It’s shocking, it’s embarrassing, and it’s disappointing. In my travels outside of the country I’m frequently confronted by folks who want to know how Americans can be so stupid as to support Bush enough to elect him twice, and I have to explain that it was a close call and there’s a lot of people who don’t agree and actually think things through. But then something like this happens and I can’t turn on the news without seeing some a mic shoved in some housewife’s face while she goes on and on about how she either used to support Hillary but since she’s out Palin is clearly the choice, or how she wasn’t sold on McCain but with the addition of Palin she’s 110% behind him while her husband stands supportively behind her nodding. Hook. Line. Sinker.

And today, the “lipstick on a pig” thing. I can’t believe the McCain camp thinks anyone believes they are offended by it. I can’t believe the McCain camp thought that would be the good thing to pull out of context and over react about. I can’t believe that McCain supporters are jumping right in line behind this and wagging their fingers. I can’t believe it. Yet it’s happening right here in front of me. A month ago I was positive there was nothing McCain could do to win, and that Obama was locked in already. I think I was giving the Republicans too much credit.

As you may or may not be aware Nabisco quietly release a new flavor of Oreo, that being the Peanut Butter Cream filled version. As you should be aware peanut butter and cookies are two things that go amazing together. So Tara and I decided to pit these up against the old faithful, Nutter Butter. After careful consideration it was decided that the cookie on the Oreo tasted better, but the filling on the Nutter Butter was more peanutty. What to do? It was pretty obvious:

We pulled the cream out of each cookie and performed a transplant of sorts, resulting in an Oreo filled with the guts of a Nutter Butter. As you can imagine it was amazing. However, it was very time consuming and to prevent ourselves from spending the next 16 hours making cookie mashups, we did the honorable thing and ate both bags of cookies in their original form as quickly as we could so as not to be tempted. Feel free to attempt this on your own.

That lovely design is via Diesel Sweeties and I think says what a lot of people are thinking right now. I have to say I’m pretty amazed at how many of the folks I knew who were rabid Obama supporters 2 weeks ago are completely disappointed with him this week thanks to the FISA thing. It’s been crazy really, I haven’t seen people as up in arms over a candidate as long as I can remember so to see so many of those die hard people change direction so quick has me dizzy. In the last week I’ve seen:

• A guy in a parking lot at a grocery store pealing off an Obama bumper sticker
• Another recently removed sticker in a different parking lot.
• A lady with an Obama pin on her bag ripping an Obama poster off an electric box
• A whole group of bike riders taking Obama spoke cards off their bikes and throwing them in a near by trashcan.

In an e-mail thread with a few friends, one of which who has been a strong supporter for a while and worked on his campaign since early on said this:

“His approval of the bill doesn’t endear him to most independents/regular folks (who don’t care as much about this issue) — but it is an enormous insult to those of us who backed him from the start (who tend to be really passionate about civil liberties stuff). So he lost on both counts.”

And I think that’s pretty much it. The dude tried to win friends with the wrong approach, and only pissed off his biggest supporters basically telling them all that everything he’s ever said is suspect and possibly a lie at this point. But then again, he’s a politician so I don’t know why this is too shocking for anyone.