JOHN CHUCKMAN ESSAY: POLITICAL BITS AND PIECES

POLITICAL BITS AND PIECES

Occasional Collection of Observations on the American Presidential Primaries and Related Matters

John Chuckman

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SUPER TUESDAY

McCain has no real competition.

His opponents are both relatively weak candidates and poor campaigners.

Romney is insipid, but rich enough to carry on.

Huckabee is simply an idiot, but an idiot with some strong emotional appeal to the Religious Right.

Romney and Huckabee do have the advantage of pulling the Religious Right from McCain, slowing his way to the nomination which does appear inevitable now.

Clinton has the pull for those who think being a woman
is the most important quality, not a small crowd.

Unfortunately this crowd fails to recognize that the first women to do a big, big job are often nasty pieces of work.

I cite Mrs. Thatcher, Ms. Albright, and Ms. Rice - the last two surely qualifying as war criminals by international standards.

Clinton's reference to "it ending" at the beginning of 2009 in her speech is totally ambiguous. What is the antecedent for the pronoun "it"?

The woman voted for this pointless war, and she has endorsed other atrocities including Israel's pointless attack on Lebanon.

She also brings the unwelcome baggage of her husband, a man we all had enough of, even those of us who defended him against impeachment.

If McCain ands Clinton are the candidates, the war as an issue might well be out of the campaign, a truly depressing thought.

But one must take heart that Obama has come from nowhere just two months ago. That is a remarkable achievement, and his opponent is someone who has been a national name for the best part of two decades.

He is the only candidate to offer genuine promise against the violent insanity Bush has ignited.
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MCCAIN AS WAR HERO

McCain "a genuine war hero"? What a black joke.

The man was bombing civilians around Hanoi when he was shot down.

The entire Vietnam War was an insane holocaust, the greatest such event since Hitler's. I’ve always thought the black subterranean walls of the Washington Memorial fitting for this reason. That mass murder was a national shame.

Three million corpses left behind along with a deadly sea of Agent Orange and a million landmines to cripple thousands of poor farmers for years afterward.

And for what? Choosing a government of which the U.S. disapproved.

The government of the artificial rump-state, South Vietnam, was in every detail as much a dictatorship as the one in the North. It was deliberately created in conniving with the departing French colonial power.

The U.S. had no business trying to tell the Vietnamese how to settle their affairs.

These facts considered plus the clear fact that the U.S. never bothered with the nicety of declaring war pretty much means that McCain and the other murderers of innocents were exactly what the Vietnamese called them, war criminals.

Actually, despite McCain's whimpering about his treatment, he and the other prisoners got off rather lightly.

Do a thought experiment: just imagine a North Vietnamese pilot during the war somehow getting through to a city in California and dropping bombs or napalm.

What would have happened to him if he were shot down?

He would have been torn limb from limb or lynched by the people who almost launched an atomic attack on Afghanistan because of something done by some Saudis and who used to enjoy family picnics during lynchings of blacks.