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Tuesday, August 05, 2008

What I Want In A President

I do not wish a good old boy. Nor do I wish they guy or gal that I'd like to have a beer with. (~shudder~) I do not wish someone who looks like Stringbean, nor one who resembles Junior Samples. This is being discussed on globalized and trivialized TV: whether a country where 66% are overweight and a staggering 33% are obese may vote for a fellow as thin as a railsplitter, preferring someone with hands the size of ham hocks, or, lacking that, someone not too in your face with the lack of avoirdupois. I want someone with good judgment. Smarts aren't enough. Education is not enough. Powerful friends are not enough. The CEO at Freddie Mac, Richard Syron, is said to have received numerous warnings about the types of dangerous loans Freddie Mac was buying, http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSBNG17231320080805 and he ignored them. Business background and knowing how to run a company do not make for good judgement in changing times. When someone says the government should be run like a business, or a businessman would make a good president- like my mother who adoooores Mitt Romney-they miss the point about "good judgement". One may be successful for a good while without good judgement. When things are just bubbling along, everybody wins and everybody looks like a bloody genius. When the proverbial waste hits the proverbial breeze maker, that's when you find out who's got good judgement. President Bush allowed the horrendous Richard Cheney to tarnish his memory by backing the torture regime, letting the USA be the first G8 country to trample the Geneva Conventions. Republicans...among their crimes you see a lack of scale; whereas President Clinton was impeached for relatively minor infractions, President Bush et alii suffer no rebuke for a long list of serious malfeasance, topped by the above mentioned disregard for the Geneva Conventions. When we purchased an automobile 6 weeks before Hurricane Katrina hit, we ask a Ford salesman what the fuel economy of the particular Ford we were looking at was. He replied, amazed and humorous, that we were the first people in 5 years to ask about fuel economy. The whole country is in the grips of a "poor judgement" crisis. Whether it was 9/11, or a sort of a terminal tarantella-like giddiness inspired by the fall of the USSR, or just bad karma, bad mojo, bad hoodoo, the USA just does not seem able to exercise good judgement. I shall vote for the Democrat. The Libertarian is too tainted by the Clinton Impeachment for me to think he has any modicum of good judgement. I like John McCain, but I vowed to never vote Republican again. Nader is nadir. Obama will make a good president. He had better. The need for good judgement is going to be greater than any time in the past 50 years.

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