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The Worst Vice-Presidential Nominee in U.S. History
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-j-elisberg/the-worst-vice-presidenti_b_122491.html
An article by a MCCAIN SUPPORTER:
"Selecting Sarah Palin as its choice for a vice presidential candidate is perhaps the worst such choice in American History. To be fair, maybe there are worse choices, but I don't know how bad William O. Butler was when he ran with Lewis Cass against Zachary Taylor.
But it's far worse than Dan Quayle, who was a sitting senator. Worse even than Geraldine Ferraro, who at least served in Congress for three-terms. And far worse than William Miller, a choice so obscure when selected by Barry Goldwater that he (honestly) later did an American Express commercial asking, "Do you know me?" And that ad was after the election. But even Miller had been a Congressman for 12 years. And been a prosecutor during the Nuremberg War trials against Nazis. Sarah Palin lists her credits as a hockey mom.
...
And so I felt that John McCain, for all his weaknesses, was the lesser of all evils and was glad he got the nomination. Throw that out the window. McCain-Palin is an unthinkable disaster. ... It's always said that the most important decision a presidential candidate makes is their pick for vice president. It shows their thinking and judgment. John McCain, in his first decision, has just told the world that he believes Sarah Palin is the most qualified person to be a heartbeat from the presidency. ... it's near-impossible to look at the list and suggest to the American public that Sarah Palin is the best choice of Republican women to be vice president. And again, this is ignoring the men he who could have been chosen.
...
It's not that Sarah Palin is inexperienced. It's that this is gross political misconduct. ... on a grassroots political level, her nomination takes away the Republicans' ONLY weapon in the campaign - calling Barack Obama inexperienced. .. She has so little experience that she makes Sen. Obama look like FDR, Winston Churchill and Julius Caesar combined. ... All they have is "Dear Democratic women: please pretend our VP candidate is Hillary Clinton. Just forget that she's pro-life. And against most things Democrats stand for."
...
What this does in the most profound and grandiose way possible is give lie to John McCain's pompous posturing that he Always Puts America First. And that undercuts the most prominent campaign issue of his entire career, that everything he does is for reasons of honor. There is nothing honorable about making Sarah Palin your vice presidential nominee. Nothing. Unless you define honor as "blatantly pandering."
...
when people around the nation were waiting to hear about Sarah Palin's qualifications and gravitas to be Vice President of the United States, the first five minutes of her speech were spent talking about her husband being a champion snowmobiler. ... In the end, the only case she herself made for being on the ticket was praising Hillary Clinton! That's it, period. Now, it might be enough to attract some women -- but it doesn't make a case for the ticket. Why? Hint: some women did vote for Hillary Clinton solely because she was a woman. But most women voted for Hillary Clinton because she was a Democrat, as well as a woman, who stood for important Democratic values they seriously believed in. ... And, in the end, it all focuses back on Barack Obama, with his indictment of eight years of the Bush Administration and of John McCain's flawed judgment - and John McCain's defense of all that. "
What the religious fundies don't seem to understand is that Argument From Authority is a logical fallacy. They do this same stuff when trying to discredit science. They campaign to find any quote at all that can be attributed to a "scientist" that will seem to imply that the scientist believes in god. That we all embraced his scientific notions because he's a "scientist", so therefore we should embrace his "religious" notions because he's an authority figure. That's not how it works. It's the CLAIM, not the person.
The same thing goes with gender issues. Feminists and egalitarians want a woman in positions of political authority, sure. But we don't want them in positions of authority because we think the shape of their genitals is important. We want them in positions of authority because the shape of their genitals is IRRELEVANT. Which means, we do not want a woman in office because she's a woman, we want a QUALIFIED PERSON in office and we do not want QUALIFIED WOMEN to be overlooked.
Sarah Palin is just flat out not qualified. From her lack of experience to her values and beliefs that threaten to undermine the very system our nation was founded on, she is not qualified to be second in command to the leader of our country.
And she's a disgrace to both women and men everywhere.
*Edit:
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leora has done quite a bit of early research on just who Palin is and what she stands for, plus some rather insightful musings on her interpretations of the early data. Check out her journal for more information. This was mainly a rant and to point out that even the Republicans don't like her.
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I'm actually fairly pleased with how my school taught religion. I went to public schools until college. Religion came up twice. It came up in social studies when we read about and discussed the history and beliefs of Hinduism, Buddhism, and possibly some other religions, but I don't recall a this point. It was mainly in the context of: this is the basics of what these religions believe. We were studying it, I assumed, because it is part of the culture of the regions. We were also studying other things about the regions.
Religion also came up in English class, sort of. We had to read portions of the Bible. The teacher explicitly stated something like: no matter what you believe, the Bible has a huge effect on culture and literature, you will need to be familiar with what it says to be an informed person.
That seemed to be true then, and it does still seem to be true now. Given that the demographics of my classes was roughly 50% Christian and 50% Jewish it meant that many of us really hadn't read the New Testament and had only rough ideas about what it said.
I also got religious training in Hebrew School, but that is obviously a completely different thing. And I did read Genesis and Exodus because of it (it was a book a year thing, but only for the older kids, so I never ended up doing all of the books. I read Leviticus on my own later and still haven't read Numbers or Deuteronomy or all of the New Testament. I tried to read The Book of Mormon once but the writing was even worse than reading the translated Bible. I am not intellectually rigorous enough to want to read this and still hold with the opinion that any book written by a divine being should be better written and easier to read.)
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We had 8 semesters of religion class and one of them was a mandatory World Religion class, in which we briefly touched upon all the other major religions around the world. We also had an elective upper-class English course that studied world literature, which, of course, touched upon that culture's religious beliefs. All lessons in religion were in the vein of "this is the philosophy we are studying", not "this is the belief system you should have".
I had 7 years of Health Ed, which included sexual biology, from 6th grade up through senior year, each year being age-appropriate and progressively more complex. Never once was it abstinence-only. We discussed it in pure biological terms and completely removed religious opinion on the matter. In biology, we were taught that Evolution was *the* theory with no mention of "alternative theories" since, y'know, there *are* no alternative theories being bandied about the scientific community (not that they wouldn't accept one, if one somehow managed to be better than Evolution, which currently has *all* evidence supporting it).
Attending the various religious ceremonies was mandatory, but participation in them was not. I could sleep during the Christmas mass if I wanted to and did not have to accept communion, but I did have to go. The main reason was that all the teachers were attending and there wasn't anywhere else for us to go that was supervised.
The only time I ever encountered any resistence was when I had to do an oral report on any world religion and was denied the opportunity to do my report on Satanism and during my religion class, each student was expected to participate by leading a "prayer" at the beginning of class. The "prayer" could be about anything and on the student's own religion. Since I was atheist, I was not allowed to skip the prayer entirely because it was graded under "participation", but I was offered the alternative of playing soothing music and leading a "meditation" instead, which I did even though I disagreed with the principle of allowing paganism but not allowing atheism. Upon reflection, I wish it had occurred to me to use the time to explain atheism, perhaps using something like Greta Christina's post about Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing To Do With God, but my atheism was not well-formed and I had virtually no philosophical resources to guide me back then.
I'm shocked and appalled that I got a more fair and unbiased education in a private Catholic school than our children do in public schools.