Wednesday - February 06, 2008

Hollywood election in a nation under siege:  A WORTHY READ FOLKS.

People, this is a two page editorial on our elections in the USA and our choices. 
I have done some fast and somewhat choppy editing here, so please catch the link.  Mr Heffer is a conservative and also an editor at The Telegraph.
Which doesn’t mean he always agrees with us or even the entire conservative viewpoint on all issues.  But he sure isn’t a pansy-assed libtard.
Anyway ... the guy is well worth reading.  I thought you might find the view from this observer interesting.

Hollywood election in a nation under siege
By Simon Heffer
Last Updated: 4:01pm GMT 06/02/2008Page 1 of

America has much to be defensive about these days. It is unpopular in the world, and it knows it. Its President – who goes unmentioned in the campaign for the White House, as if he had never existed – is a man many here find hard to respect, not least because they are aware how much contempt and ridicule he is held in around the world.

A massive deficit is being run up to try to stimulate the economy, with no great success so far. In some predominantly blue-collar states, such as Georgia, one in 50 homes is in danger of repossession. On New York’s Fifth Avenue, the people look more down at heel than they used to, and too many buildings look as though a little refurbishment would do no harm.

Just below the surface – for it is not really talked about – is the sense that this is a nation under siege. The ultra-vigilance demonstrated when you try to enter America, with fanatical security checks beginning before one even leaves London, seeps out now and again as paranoia in the conversation of rank-and-file Americans. This is the background against which the presidential campaign is being fought; and the unusual uncertainties and introspection of this country perhaps explain why the tournament’s outcome is so hard to predict, and why it has been laced with such shifts of fortune.

John McCain looked finished last summer: but thanks to his correct analysis of General Petraeus’s surge in Iraq, he has proved to most Republican activists that he is a man of wisdom on the most fundamental question facing America today. His lead in the Republican race is all but impregnable: but more of that later. The Democratic race, by contrast, will thrill those who find excitement in politics. To anyone with a leavening of cynicism – and that seems to include somewhat more of the American public than one might expect - it starts to have an aura of unreality.

It would be heartening for America, and for the world, to say that the less fatuous of the two campaigns will win: but it is hard to say which of them is the less fatuous.

Mr Obama orates, in his sub-Martin Luther King tones, of expansiveness and warmth, about “change”: a concept as meaningless and ill-defined here as when the leader of the Conservative party uses it in Britain. Mrs Clinton sounds like the headmistress of an underperforming school in her exhortations to America. Her principal policy is health care for all, a promise handicapped by her husband’s refusal to have released papers from his administration that might prove once and for all how responsible she was for the mess made of health care when charged to reform it after 1993. As in our own politics, competence is not much in evidence.

What you see is more or less what you get, which is why the ultra-conservatives here have in some cases (and with their focus on matters such as tax and immigration, rather than Iraq) said they would rather vote for Mrs Clinton than for him. His choice of running mate will be key: but those who think it might be Mr Huckabee underestimate, I think, Mr McCain’s innate caution. When you take office at the age of 72, your vice-president is more than an academic exercise.

http://tinyurl.com/ytkgtc

Posted by Drew458     on 02/06/2008 at 03:35 PM   
Filed Under: • Politics •  
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