It's Hip To Be Square

I saw McWar on the news today and in a question about his houses said there was a time when he didn't have a kitchen table or chair. An obvious reference to his POW days. This is the same McWar who criticized John Kerry , saying he was “sick and tired of re-fighting the Vietnam War.”, saying his emphasis on his military record is “clearly a tactical or strategic move.” First, I think that John Kerry emphasized his military record at the convention. After that it was the Republicons who spent all the time talking about it.

Here is a post noting that John McWars POW experience seems to be a catch all. One of the points made in the post is that this may end up doing him more harm than good. It has been my thought for a while now. If his POW experience is the touch stone for everything in his life then I certainly don't want him being the man that makes decisions about our country. If Barak Obama made the same type of references to his “black experience” I am sure there would be a howling heard on Jupiter.

From his POW touchstone to his willingness to find armed confrontation as a solution to so many of our foreign policy challenges you will find it apparent why in my book his name is McWar.

Miss Barbara, whom I just don't read enough of, has come up with another point I find quite cogent.

The dumbing down of our nation through politics and media is nearly complete. Mindblowing stupidity and 3-6 word sentences to describe an issue is the way to go these days. But hey, stupid is easy, smart is hard.

Here's a few tidbits:
Smart is elitist, and elitism is, you know, bad. So we can’t elect smart people, and instead elect stupid people, because they connect with us, and they’re more fun to have a beer with,...It’s just plain not cool to be smart.
To me, weighing, analyzing and explaining issues are inseparable from “confronting” them. You have to understand an issue thoroughly before you can deal with it wisely, and sometimes the wisest course is to leave the dadblamed issue alone. In Rightieworld, however, “confronting” an issue takes these steps:
Identify what you want to do (e.g., attack Iraq; help your oil industry buddies increase their profits).
Find or manufacture a reason why you should do what you want to do.
Overwhelm news media and the American people with blustering rhetoric about why America must do what you want to do, accompanied by juvenile taunting of anyone who disagrees with your doing what you want to do.
Do the thing you want to do.
Spend the next several months or years denying or making excuses for the mess you made by doing what you wanted to do.
Eventually, when the mess turns out to be an undeniable failure — blame liberals.
Notice there is neither weighing nor analyzing in the list above. Weighing and analyzing is for academics and women. Red-blooded Americans take the hairy-chested, Neanderthal approach and just smash the hell out of whatever is bothering them.
But, by gawd, “moral clarity” works great on television. The “morally clear” can look the camera in the eye and give decisive, sound-bite answers. People attempting to deal with reality have to explain things. They must fall back on nuance. Boooooooring. (Ron: And hard!!!)

See how we’ve solved the energy crisis? All we have to do is drill, drill, drill and we’ll get all the cheap oil and gas we want as soon as we want it. And we’ll never have to worry about an energy crisis again. We don’t have to listen to the boring liberals and their boring explanations about science and renewable energy and technology and stuff.

Stupidity like this makes me wonder how our species survived as long as it has, frankly.

Here, Here Barbara! I think the dumbest thing I have heard McWar say in this campaign, and likely the dumbest of the entire campaign is from his appearance at the Brokeback church forum.
When asked what we needed to do with “evil” he said....Defeat it!!!! Obama gave a much more nuanced view of evil and how it was in the area of dieties to “win” that battle. A far preferable answer, and the correct one for me. If we actually succeed in defeating evil we will be the first of any species at anytime in our planets history to do that. Ya, it is a great rah rah 3 word sound bite but it is light years away from any common sense answer on how to deal with evil.

One final note, Speaking of their religious forum, now that Barak Obama has gone in front of the radical right wing fundies how about another forum at a black church. John could maybe give some of his morally clear, steely eyed answers to them and see if they found them as solutions to their problems.