Carl Bernstein: The Palin Pick -- The Devolution of McCain

[babylonsister]

Ouch!


The Palin Pick -- The Devolution of McCain
Carl Bernstein


In one of our many conversations as we crisscrossed the country during his campaign for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, John McCain said to me, "I've always tried to act on what I thought was the best for the country. And that has guided me.... The only thing I can do is assure people that I would act on principle."

I traveled with McCain for weeks that political season, stayed in Arkansas with him, Cindy, and their children, and - for a Vanity Fair cover profile -- filled dozens of notebooks and tapes with observations from and about a potentially heroic politician who seems far removed from the man running for president today.

Three weeks after the 2008 Republican convention, on the cusp (maybe) of the first presidential debate, it is time to confront an awkward but profound question: whether in picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has committed -- by his own professed standards of duty and honor -- a singularly unpatriotic act.

"I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war," he has said throughout this campaign. Yet, in choosing Palin, he has demonstrated -- whatever his words -- it may be permissible to imperil the country, conceivably even to "lose" it, in order to win the presidency. That would seem the deeper meaning of his choice of Palin.

Indeed, no presidential nominee of either party in the last century has seemed so willing to endanger the country's security as McCain in his reckless choice of a running mate. He is 72 years old; has had four melanomas, a particularly voracious form of cancer; refuses to release his complete medical records. Three of our last eleven presidents (and nine of all 43) have come to office unexpectedly in mid-term from the vice presidency: Truman, who within days of FDR's death was confronted with the decision of whether to drop the atom bomb on Japan; Lyndon Johnson, who took the oath in Dallas after JFK's assassination; Gerald Ford, sworn in following the resignation of Richard Nixon. A fourth vice president, George H.W. Bush, briefly exercised the powers of the presidency after the near-assassination of Ronald Reagan.

more...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-bernstein/the-palin-pick----the-dev_b_129373.html

[groovedaddy]

1. Honestly, Dan Quayle was joke too, so it's not like this has never been done. n.t

[ShortnFiery]

2. But Dan Quayle has a highly intelligent spouse, Marilyn, but we will be stuck with

the "First Dude of Alaska." :nuke:

[taddles]

3. Actually,

Dan Quayle was a competant legislator with 12 years of elected office as a state senator and then as a 2 term US senator. Dan Quayle, for all his verbal gaffes that he was vilified for, was fully qualified to be the VP of the US unlike Gov. Palin, who's knowledge of government could nearly fill a thimble.

[groovedaddy]

4. Jeesh, I NEVER heard this from any Democrat while Quayle was v.p.! n.t