Wednesday, October 15, 2008

It All Started when A Northside San Jose Neighbor Posted a Comparison of the Republican and Democratic Candidates

It all started when M- (a woman) posted a humorous comparison between Sarah Palin, John McCain, and Barack Obama on my Northside Neighborhood yahoo
group.

--------- initial post from M --------------------
Since we're takling about the candidates...

Got this from a good friend and found it to be quite interesting. It's all about spin I guess. I'll try not to send anything else political, but just couldn't pass this one up. Enjoy or not...

I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight...
If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you?re ?exotic? and ?different?. Grow up in Alaska eating moose, you?re an American story.

If your name is Barack, you?re a radical, unpatriotic Muslim. Name your kids Willow, Bristol, Piper, Trig and Track, and you?re a maverick.

Graduate from Harvard Law School and you are unstable. Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating with a degree in journalism and can't name any newspaper you read on a regular basis, then you?re well-grounded.

If you spend 3 years as a community organizer, become the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, help register 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a constitional law professor, 8 years as a state senator of a district of 750,000 people, chair the state senate?s Health and Human Services Committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people, sponsor 131 bills, and serve on the Foreign Affairs, Environmental and Public Works, and Veteran?s Affairs committees, you don?t have any real leadership experience.
...
If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 daughters, all within Protestant churches, you?re not a real Christian. If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, left your ill wife, and married the heiress the next month, you?re a Christian.
. . .

M
N. 21st
--------- end initial post from M --------------------

In response, I quoted the first part of this blog http://tinyurl.com/ilikeSarahPalin up to "I think that that Hilary Clinton and women like her must be wondering how things could be any more unfair" and sent it to the group:

And then M wrote back:

--------- reply from M --------------------
Re: [nnasj] Re:Since we're takling about the candidates... I Hate to Admit It, But I Like Sarah Palin. A Lot.

Just the opposite. I work in the financial industry and I'm surrounded by conservatives (maybe working with money made them so) who refuse to really discuss the issues with me or even around me so hide in their offices and talk about 'guess what Obama did or did you hear what Biden said'. Plus hatred for Obama is much larger and comes from much deeper roots (elephant in the room). Also Palin did not over-strategize Hillary. Palin didn't run - she was picked. I just don't think she's ready. And I think that if not offered this grand opportunity, would she even have strived for it eventually? I don't think so. What I see is not what I get. I feel it's a facade, an act that is not charming nor funny. I just don't see it.

Anyway, it's not just about her. For every election since Reagan, Democrats have been labeled as ammoral, god-less, unpatriotic and liberal. I cannot support a party that adopts such a platform and to claim to be the Moral Majority, looking down on the rest of us.

M
--------- end 2nd reply from M --------------------

---------- start my 2nd reply to M--------------

HI M-,

Thanks for your thoughtful response.

It is funny that you are surrounded by conservatives and I am surrounded by liberals. :-) From my point of view, liberals don't want to dialogue with anyone who doesn't agree with them.

I am not saying Sarah Palin over-strategized Hilary. My point was that Hilary did all the "right things" and didn't get the prize. And it is amazing to me that this comparatively naive Alaskan got picked over Hilary. God's ways are mysterious.

The "Immoral Minority" looks down on the Moral Majority, so both sides do the same thing.

I cannot support a party that thinks it is a "right" to be able to cut up little babies inside of and outside of their mother's wombs. And Obama has fought laws that would intervene to save a baby if the abortion fails and the child is born alive. In my book, anyone who believes that slaughtering pre-born or partly-born babies is OK has lost part of his or her humanity. Rape or incest, two wrongs don't make a right. It would be wrong to kill a baby conceived by rape or incest after it was born, and it is equally wrong to kill a baby while it is in what should be the safest place in the world for it, it's mother's womb.

God loves each one of us. Before we were conceived in our mothers' wombs He knew us. We don't have the right to destroy a baby because of the circumstance of his conception or because she might be flawed. God gives life and only God has the right to take away .

Religious people are being labeled as amoral, dangerous, sexually-repressed, the source of all wars and all the evil in the world. These slurs ignore the vast numbers of murders under atheistic regimes such as Russia and Cambodia. But why not overgeneralize when the facts will prove you wrong?

But this is too big a subject. I don't have anything against you. I just thought I'd try to speak my piece.

Best to you,

Roseanne

---------- end my 2nd reply to M --------------

And then G- (a man) joined the discussion

Re: [nnasj] Re:Since we're takling about the candidates... I Hate to Admit It, But I Like Sarah Palin. A Lot.

Hi Roseanne,

Thought I'd take a moment to correct a couple of the more insulting stereotypes with which you apparently feel justified in dismissing large segments of human civilization.

>I generally am surrounded by people of a uniformly liberal > bent. You know the type. After their professors indoctrinated them in > the whole "religion is a crutch" curriculum, these people walked away > all facing the same direction, away from God and Christ, and never > looked back.

A lot of *people* - as distinct from brainwashed types, y'know those convenient strawmen that get paraded when a sweeping generalization is otherwise unwarranted - are atheists because there are simply better explanations available in the 21st century that render the concept of gawd as superfluous as luminiferous ether. It's called Occam's razor in case you're curious.

> And they pretty much walk in lock step in all their other > sympathies, likes and dislikes: I don't have to ask any of them where > they stand on issues of sexual morality, global warming, or Sarah > Palin.

Yes, there is a probable majority of the American electorate who have decided to vote for Barack Obama on the basis of these and other issues. For many these include disgust with the Republican party's platform of endless war, ruinous economics, blatant disregard for civil liberties, etc. etc.

Oh, and the cynical valuation of loyalty over competence that brings us the token-female candidacy of Sarah Palin.

Cheers,

G-

---------- end G's first post --------------

---------- start my reply to G's first post --------------

Re: [nnasj] Re:Since we're takling about the candidates... I Hate to Admit It, But I Like Sarah Palin. A Lot.

Hi G-,

The media and other anti-religious people are insulting believers all the time. Don't I get a chance to try to get my licks in too?

I didn't think I was making sweeping generalizations: I never heard anyone say what I wrote from my own observation, that anti-religious people's opinions are usually cookie-cutter versions of each others'. There is no nuance. Whatever was picked up while they were sophomores is carried high like a banner the rest of their sophomoric lives. Even when the evidence of their wrecked lives and a wrecked society proves that there is a fallacy involved somewhere in their God-less belief system.

Whether or not you think God is superfluous, He does not think the same about you.

You know, whatever slur you could throw against religion, I have hurled it too. I left the Church when I was a 18, brainwashed by the big thinkers like Satre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Ashley Montagu, an endless list of anti-religious novelists and intellectuals, and by my college professors. And I came back 15 years later after trying all the available alternatives and finding all the other explanations of life fall short. I am not a blind believer. I am a sadder but wiser believer.

Don't get me wrong, I loathe the Republicans too. I think John McCain is despicable for having been unfaithful to his injured wife and for abandoning her for a trophy wife. It was crazy for President Bush to have invaded Iran. Torture, the lack of respect for human rights in Guantanamo, and croneyism of the rich greasing the hands of their rich friends, all are shockingly wrong.

I was mostly trying to say I'm amused that a woman who did all the "right things" was eclipsed by a woman who didn't.

I suspect that Sarah Palin was talking nonsense because she was picking up the scorn of those questioning her, and it made her nervous. That happens to me sometimes.

Really, I don't know who out of the whole bag of politicians is any more competent than any other.

The history of the American presidency is full of people who weren't qualified. Who ever could be?

If you think Barack Obama is the best man for the job, then vote for him. I don't know why, but I feel that there is something really scary about him.

But it really comes down to the fact that I basically cannot support a party that has in its platform that it is a moral good to slice up little babies in their mother's wombs. And also when they are partly outside of their mother's wombs. It makes me sick.

Sorry. I guess that makes me a single-issue voter.

Roseanne

More later

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