I've kept the e-mailer anonymous, but told him where he can find this post in case he wants to continue the conversation. My replies are indented, his original comments are not.
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Thanks for taking the time to read and reply to my comments. Despite the unnecessarily condescending tone you strike I'll make a pass at answering some of your concerns. The purpose of the blog, after all is to generate discussion.
Please do us both a favor and do not forward any more blogs by Jennifer Simpson or someone of a similar ilk..
I'm not certain what "ilk" you lump me in with after reading one piece of my writing. I suppose from later comments that I've been grouped under some "liberal" umbrella. Fair enough, though it concerns me that you request outright not to be included in conversations that might challenge your own perspective. The purpose of a conversation, after all, is to explore an idea you don't already hold.
I am sure Ms. Simpson is a fine person but the way she goes on about Obama reminds me of a 14 year old high school freshman with a crush on the school's star quarterback. Please remind her that this is not American Idol but rather the election of the President of the United States. A pretty face, nice smile and the ability to read "inspiring" words from a teleprompter are not the criteria for the Presidency.
Personal insults aside, I'm not sure what to make of this claim. Senator Obama is a constitutional law scholar, was editor of the Harvard Law review, was professor of Constitutional Law for 12 years, spent 8 years in the Illinois state house and 4 years in the U.S. Senate. He has a long public and published record of advocacy for and positions on issues of major consequence for our world today. He's been thinking about and working on the issues that matter for decades. "A pretty face, nice smile and the ability to read "inspiring" words from a teleprompter" seems to describe your candidate for the Vice Presidency much better than Senator Obama.
On the other hand, I can appreciate that as a liberal, Ms. Simpson and others will vote for Obama because he is the Democratic nominee and liberals vote for Democrats. Quite frankly, John McCain was not my first choice as the Republican nominee and I disagree with him on several issues but, as a conservative, I will vote for him just as I understand that a liberal will vote for Obama. However, at least I know that McCain, although not my first choice, is qualified and has accomplishments that make him deserving of the Presidency. Does anyone voting for Obama, in his/her heart of hearts, truly believe that Obama is qualified or has accomplished anything which makes him deserving of being President of the USA?
Per the above, I absolutely believe Senator Obama to have qualifications to make good and considered decisions about issues that matter to the country. While I have had a degree of respect for McCain over his years in the senate he has lost that respect over the course of this campaign as he has
**refused to release his medical records (as a 72 year old with a history of cancer this is unconscionable),
**recklessly chosen a running mate who, while perhaps able to claim, technically, that she has "executive" experience has no public record and has not been able to demonstrate in any of the interviews she has been permitted to give that she has ever seriously considered or studied any of the major domestic or international issues facing our country, with perhaps the exception of her narrow view of energy policy.
**behaved impulsively and contemptuously toward the American public by racing from one gimmick to another while offering no substantive policy proposals for solving the economic crisis.
Obama has had an economic policy on record for months that would address several of the factors that have led to the current debacle and make real investments in the economy that will allow it to grow in the future.
As for Ms. Simpson's beliefs as raised in the bullet points, I find most of them to be, not merely from the dark side, but in some cases, almost incomprehensible. Consider her concern for how prisoners are treated. I assume she is referring to the the terrorists who are at Guantanamo Bay; you know, those nice Muslim fellows who indiscriminately bomb and murder innocent people. On the other hand, I guess she could be referring to our home grown thugs who commit murder and mayhem on our streets. In either case, contrast her concern for these individuals with her strong advocacy in her first bullet point for the murder of innocent unborn children, aka, "a woman's right to chose"? It is truly incomprehensible that the same person who, I assume very self-righteously, is unhappy about how prisoners are treated, strongly endorses the killing of unborn children.
This paragraph is so sadly entrenched in ideological rhetoric I'm not quite sure where to begin. I'll leave the first, incomprehensible, sentence aside. The concern for treatment of prisoners of war, as defined in and upheld by the Geneva conventions, is primarily for the State to hold prisoners only with just cause. If you have a case, make it. I'm not advocating the release of madmen or terrorists (though the fact that you equate "terrorists" with "nice Muslim fellows who indiscriminately bomb and murder..." is a stereotype of the worst and most dangerous kind), just that the American public be disturbed by its government sweeping people off the streets and throwing them in cells for years on end without formally charging them with anything. That does not make us more safe and it does not advance the cause of democracy around the world.
Next, that you equate a "woman's right to choose" with ""strong advocacy for the murder of innocent unborn children" would be laughable if it were not so sadly, heartbreakingly, wrong. Proponents of choice do not believe that abortion should be common--the position is very clearly that it be safe, accessible, and RARE. Protections for the health and life of the mother are paramount.
In other, more elective cases, there is a human recognition that conception of a child can, and often does occur in cases of rape, incest, and violence. Many women choose, nevertheless, to bring these children into the world, but I do not believe a rapist should be able to choose the mother of his children against her will. Finally, history demonstrates that making abortion illegal does not make it go away--there will always be cases of desperation when a woman is terrified she will not be able to care for a baby. When abortion is a safe and accessible option, she is more likely to have a conversation with her health care provider and understand her full range of options. If doctors are prohibited from discussing termination with those women, more of them will take drastic measures and the life of both mother and fetus will be at risk.
If we actually care about reducing the number of abortions in this country, the best way to do it is to create a climate of open discussion where teens are able to talk about the challenges and changes they face in puberty, learn the self-worth and self-respect that enables them to say no to sex until they are more mature, and understand how to use and access effective birth control when they are sexually active.
It still amazes me that the party who wants no government control over gun ownership because "guns don't kill people, people kill people" can advocate government intervention in such a deeply personal medical decision and advocate against the kinds of sex education that will empower our children to make better choices about their sexuality and never have to choose abortion.
I recently saw a bumper sticker that said "If you don't like abortion, don't have one". I found myself wondering if, 150 years ago, that same person would have had on the back of their buggy a sticker that said "If you don't like slavery, don't own a slave". I think we all agree that slavery was an evil. It was justified under the guise of "states' rights". Well, abortion is an evil justified under the guise of "a woman's right to chose". An evil is an evil, and the murder of an innocent unborn baby is evil. And please do not give me the "it's only a fetus" story. It has a beating heart. It feels pain. It is an unborn human, as we all were at one time. Thankfully our mothers decided not to kill us in the womb.
I agree that the bumper sticker you reference is crass. It does emphasize that MANY people who support the right to choose would not choose to have an abortion themselves and would help those they love make other choices, but as most bumper stickers do, it oversimplifies a complex issue. Per the above, my position does not rest on an "it's only a fetus" argument, though it also certainly does not rest on a good vs. evil argument that grossly oversimplifies ethical nuances.
Why should I have the right, under the second amendment, to use a gun to shoot a person (with a beating heart, who feels pain) who breaks into my home to steal my television (or to rape my child), but not have the right, if that rape is completed to deny life to that invader's offspring?
Different topic. Gas at $4 a gallon, we send $700 Billion a year out of our country for oil and she is against drilling here in the USA!!!!!! I could go on and on with the problems I have with just about everything Ms. Simpson believes in.
Where to start?! Like it or not, even at $4 a gallon gas is less expensive in the US than almost every other industrialized nation of the world because it is so heavily subsidized by the federal government. I agree that the cost of fuel for transportation is a burden on many Americans and that many years of poor infrastructure planning makes alternative transportation difficult to choose.
I don't believe I advocated anywhere that we shut down existing wells and cease all US Oil production. In fact, I'm certain that I did not. My concern with emphasis on more off-shore drilling is that it grossly distracts from the real problem, which is not only dependence on foreign oil, but dependence on oil period. As long as we are heavy consumers of oil and dependent on it for our energy needs, we will always be consumers of foreign oil--the US can never produce enough to satisfy demand.
When the Congress recently voted to open up the coast to more off-shore drilling, Representative Nick J. Rahall II, the West Virginia Democrat who leads the Natural Resources Committee, said “We are opening up to 400 million acres off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to drilling and expanding the availability of oil by at least 2 billion barrels, and we have done so in a balanced, reasonable and responsible manner.”
Fine, this gets us 2 billion more barrels, most of which won't come on line for many years to come. This represents about a 3 week supply of oil. According to both Chevron and The Oxford Princeton Programme it took us 125 years to use the first trillion barrels of oil, and will take us about 30 years to use the next trillion.
Here's some quick math:
1,000,000,000,000 barrels
___________________ = approx. 91,000,000 barrels/day
30 X 365 days
At a rate of 91 Million barrels, give or take, a day, we'll burn through 2 billion barrels in just about 21 days. And, we wont see any of that production come on line for nearly a decade.
Whether drilling here and drilling now makes sense if we've got it is completely beside the point. Whatever we get from those sites will take years to come on line and won't create anywhere near the impact on the demand market to significantly impact prices at the pump or elsewhere.
The only way to address either your concern for prices at the pump or the $700 billion going to foreign oil producers is to become one of the world's leaders in alternative sources of energy. We have the scientific and engineering capability to be truly great there, and it is something that could actually form the basis for a strong economy. All we lack is political will.
Finally, with respect to the financial mess which you mentioned, I have attached an excellent video which explains how we got into this situation. It is a rather long video so, in case you decide not to watch it, permit me to quickly summarize it. Starting with the Clinton Administration, the government put pressure on banks to lower their requirements for obtaining mortgages. When the banks resisted, the liberals in Congress, particularly Barney Frank and several others, then said that the banks were discriminating racially and threatened action. The banks then started giving loans to people who, in reality, could not afford them. In 2003, John McCain co-sponsored a bill to bring more oversight to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It was rejected by the Democrats. Now we have this crisis. I know this is happening on Bush's watch but this is one problem he is not responsible for creating. Liberal Democrats are responsible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5tZc8oH--o
Though you've tried to paint me in clunky, broad brush strokes, I won't hold Democrats wholly blameless. A lot of people have made bad decisions that helped bring us to this point. The Community Reinvestment Act that Clinton championed was an imperfect approach to fixing the ills that were already starting to be seen in housing markets as the result of more than a decade of deregulation and speculation. This report looks specifically at the impact of economic policies of the Bush administration on this crisis:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/08/pdf/bushonomics.pdf
I frankly don't find "free markets are a fantasy" any more helpful an argument than "liberal democrats did it" though. Markets work best though when oversights are in place to protect against gaming the system. You are correct that McCain had his name on a bill that would have called for more oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (though he was hardly a champion of it, and his campaign manager was receiving $15,000 a month from the housing giants to ensure access to a McCain White House).
You can find a fact-check story here.
Finally, I am not voting for Obama because I am a liberal. Both candidates are surely human and have both strengths and weaknesses. I am voting for Obama not because he's a pretty face and a good speaker, but because his policies demonstrate clear thinking and consideration of the issues I care about and because having a President who values a range of perspectives and doesn't jump to rash judgments will be a refreshing change.
I hope you will not vote for McCain simply because you are a "conservative" but will ask yourself whether a 72-year old man who has shown rash judgment and a running mate who shows no depth of knowledge on any important policy issue is really the best choice for the country.
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