McCain Bank Fails

I think it's odd that there hasn't been more talk about the fact that a bank connected to John McCain failed last Friday. Until shortly before its failure John McCain's son Andrew had been a director of the Silver State Bank. Only the Financial Times and the WSJ had brief articles about it. The WSJ implied that the FDIC may have been delayed in closing the bank by Nevada regulartory authorities, giving Andrew McCain time to quit as a director before it was closed.

Hometown Girl or Trailer Park Trash?

Everybody has certainly fallen in love with Sarah Palin. What does it mean?

CNN Showbiz Tonight this morning had a segment on how Sarah has become a bigger celebrity than Obama. Does that mean McCain will have to disavow those commercials comparing Obama to Paris Hilton? Would it be more accurate to compare Sarah to Paris, or to Britney, or to Britney's mom, since Britney's little sister has gotten pregnant?

Unmarried, pregnant, teenage daughter? No problem, "it just makes her more like you and me." Really? Well, we all have problems, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing. People shoot their neighbors on a daily basis, but by and large they don't get congratulated for it. There are a lot of shotgun weddings, and a lot of unmarried, single mothers, but that doesn't mean it's society's ideal. It's a little suspicious that there was apparently no urgency for Bristol to get married to her baby's father until her mother got named vice presidential candidate. Does that mean they didn't care, that they didn't really like the boy, or what? Apparently the religious right in the Republican party says it's okay for teenage girls to have sex and get pregnant, as long as they don't get an abortion. That's a pretty low moral standard. I'm not sure there's a lot of Biblical support for that position, and maybe some criticism, like the Commandment not to commit adultery. Kids today reading Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter probably have no idea what the fuss is about.

In sum, while Sarah may have been an okay governor, she was a less than completely successful mom.

Meanwhile we have the black candidate, Obama, who comes from a tradition where black men routinely desert the women having their babies, but who has tried to have a traditional family relationship with his wife and kids. His wife says she tries to do only campaign day trips so that she can be at home with her kids afternoons and nights. Did Sarah do that while she was working on her career? Or did her career come first, ahead of her family?

Finally, besides wanting to know what Sarah knows about foreign policy, what else does she cares about. She didn't go to a big name school, no elitism there. But does she read? Does she know anything about Plato, Locke, Samuelson, Shakespeare? What music does she listen to? Does she have in-depth knowledge about the economy, or does she get everything in sound bites? Is she more interested in hockey than war and peace? It doesn't take much effort or intelligence to be a hockey mom. It takes more to be vice president, or at least it should. I would like the Vice President to be someone with a little culture, refinement and background. My impression is that in terms of upbringing and social status, she's no Margaret Thatcher.

The problem with people with little education and experience is that they tend to reinvent the wheel, even if they are smart. They don't know what other smart people have thought about similar problems before, and what solutions worked and what didn't. Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. While Obama has relatively little executive experience, he is well educated, and so far, no matter what you think of Harvard and elitist institutions, they do tell people important things, and if you learn well, it helps in life. Bush's problem is that he went to Yale but made a point of rebelling against it, as McCain did at Annapolis. Remember that Cheney flunked out of Yale; maybe we should have paid more attention to that before we put him in a position to start a war with Iraq and order the torturing of prisoners.

McCain's Risky Foreign Policy

Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times says McCain would be a risky foreign policy maker. He says McCain is too prone to take risks, as illustrated by his selection of Sarah Palin as his VP. His risk taking may work sometimes, but there is the potential for tremendous damage if it comes out wrong, which is possible when dealing with Russia, which he dislikes. Thus McCain is not the "safe" choice for commander-in-chief. Rachman sees the possibility of an even more aggressive foreign policy than than pursued by Bush.

McCain's Intelligence

While this Mother Jones article raises several disturbing issues, for me the worst is the connection between McCain's main foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, and Ahmed Chalabi. This article says that Scheunemann was one of Chalabi's acolytes, along with Cheney and Rumsfeld among others, in his effort to get the US to invade Iraq. Chalabi wanted to replace Saddam Hussein, but ran into too much opposition. He has remained a central figure in the new Iraq, although usually just below the public appearance level. The last I saw he was the head of rebuilding Baghdad, a job that gives him lots of money to siphon off to his Swiss bank accounts.

This MJ article sheds some light on my concern that there may be some truth to the Russian allegations that Bush and the Republicans encouraged Georgia to invade South Ossetia in order to help John McCain's campaign. McCain apparently shares my view that there is no love lost between the CIA and President Bush, and perhaps by extension other Republicans, including McCain. Thus, I think it's unlikely that there would have been an official CIA operation encouraging Georgia to invade. I'm less sanguine about the military, and the MJ article says that's where McCain wants to shift intelligence responsibilities. That would certainly reinforce suspicions that if there were some kind of clandestine effort to foment a war in Georgia to help McCain, the effort would have been led by the US military, not the CIA.

I doubt that the US did anything official to foment war in Georgia, but Scheunemann's connection to Chalabi makes him even sleazier than I thought he was before. He may well have done something to stir things up through his unofficial contacts with Georgians. It also helps explain McCain's rabid stance in favor of the Iraq war. If looks like if you vote for McCain, you're also buying Scheunemann and all his lobbying clients.