The title really epitomizes the difference between Obama and McCain, but what it does better is represent the fact that the men are truly opposites on many fronts.

Take the most obvious.  No, not black and white, but young and old.  McCain is in his 70’s and Obama in his 40’s.  McCain is literally a product of a completely different generation, as he is easily old enough to be Obama’s father and nearly old enough to be his grandfather.

The differences there are massive.  The cultural differences alone between those generations are profound.  John can remember World War 2 as a boy, along with Korea and Vietnam, where he was an adult.  Obama can barely remember the end of Vietnam. 

The social fabric of the world is dramatically different.  Ironically, McCain might be able to remember a time when racism and sexism was very commonplace, where Obama grew up in a tine where the civil rights movement had taken hold and provided relief to blacks and women.

Obama is a relatively good looking, physically fit man in his prime, McCain is a weathered, scarred and physically limited by his years of torture in Vietnam.  The mere act of waving his hand is nearly beyond his abilities.

Obama is usually polished and charismatic.  His voice is resonant, clear and ringing.  McCain is better described as crusty, with a gritty voice.

But nowhere are they more different than this week during the financial crisis:  policy versus politics.

McCain has a solid foundation in trying to establish and direct policy.  Obama was more concerned about the election and debate than he was in helping to do his already elected job, and work on solving the crisis.  McCain was willing to take a chance on the election and give some extra time to doing his job.

I am embedding the debate for all to watch, because I think you can see the differences.

Obama is a classy politician.  McCain is also a politician, but he at least does a better job of translating that into a statesman.

I will be down for a couple days wih a bug.

Till then, ask yourself when comparing McCain to Obama, who has style and who has substance, and who engages in politics, and who engages in policy.

More on that in a day or so.

Also, is Biden preparring to bail and insert Hillary as an October surprise?

And do we really need a bailout?

More on these two issues soon.

LSU

If you connect the dots between racism, sexism and democrats you end up with one word:

Hijacked.

In both cases we had serious social issues.  We had serious social revolution.  We had real change and social enlightenment.

And we ended up with both issues being hijacked by the democrat party for political gain, with many of the advances and changes being lost in the betrayal.

In both cases equality and empowerment were traded for victim hood and entitlement.

I am no social expert on either topic.  But I can speak to change because I have seen change.

I have seen peoples attitudes shift and their determination to be fair and to ignore race and sex.

But I have also seen opportunists.  People who stir the flames of distrust to gain power and prestige.

I have seen racism and sexism offered as default explanations to imaginary problems.

I have seen white males herded into an atavistic corner, and told they are racists and sexists and that they can never change because of institutional discrimination and white male privilege.

I have seen well meaning people trashed for nothing.  For using a word that sounds like something bad but isn’t.  For being respectful.  For being honest about common sense issues.

And yes, I have also seen hold outs of a lesser enlightened era, and such people are sad parodies of humanity.  People who do indeed hold onto baseless stereotypes and beliefs.

And when you take those people and ram them headfirst into the opportunists and baiters, you might almost believe that nothing good has changed.

The real truth if liberals were honest, is that race and gender relations are much much better than they used to be.

But to hear some liberal talking heads speak, nothing has changed.

Where it is the saddest and where it exposes the real liberal agenda, is when you couple these two topics with conservatives.  Michael Steele was lampooned in black face  by black liberals.  Clarance Thomas has been castigated as not really being black.  Sarah Palin is undergoing a fierce roasting by liberal feminists, and Condi Rice has always been treated as a side show freak by liberal blacks and women both.

Ever since her nomination in August, Feminists have been losing their minds about Palin.

Her pro life and other conservative positions has frankly driven them nuts.  Chief of the PDS abusers have been the feminists.

One of the first I saw was Sarah Seltzer¹:

 When I saw that John McCain had picked Sarah Palin as his running mate this morning, I was on the elliptical trainer, and my rage propelled me to the most furious workout I’ve had in a while.

It’s always exciting to see women enter the political fray at higher levels. But a lot of feminists out there, are appalled by the cynicism and condescension inherent in this choice. It’s as though the McCain camp believes our irrational she-hormones will lead us, like sheep, to pull the lever for any candidate who looks like us–even if she has a strong record, as Palin does, of standing against women’s interests.

Of course there is a complete lack of basis for that last statement, but ignore that for the moment.

I found this small round up of hysteria by Jonah Goldberg at NRO²:

Feminist author Cintra Wilson writes in Salon (a house organ of the angry left) that the notion of Palin as vice president is “akin to ideological brain rape.” Presumably just before the nurse upped the dosage on her medication, Wilson continued, “Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She’s such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it’s easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.”

…

On Tuesday, Salon ran one article calling Palin a dominatrix (“a whip-wielding mistress”) and another labeling her a sexually repressed fundamentalist no different from the Muslim fanatics and terrorists of Hamas. Make up your minds, folks. Is she a seductress or a sex-a-phobe?

…

I am getting more and more puzzled by the use of race in this election and more and more disheartened by what that shows about America.

I feel like a lone voice in America protesting the use of race as a polarizing and defining characteristic.

While Biden can say how much of a transformative thing it will be to elect a black man, Ferraro is blasted for noting that Obama’s race was an obvious factor in his candidacy. 

In fact several high profile mentions of race have been made late, both here and internationally, all pointing fingers to how good it will be to elect a black man, and more importantly, how bad it will be if we don’t.

The fact is that if Obama is not elected president, the only aspect of his candidacy that will matter will be that of race.

We may not have the race riots and such that people like Al Sharpton have warned of, but we will certainly have a national debate about race, and about how we are still stuck in the days of Jim Crow because those racist white folk will not break their racial fears and hatred long enough to elect a black man.

We will be subject to (highly paid) expert after expert trotted out in a line all with woeful dour faces bemoaning our loss of progress in equality.

We will have white shills to run apologies for the rest of the poor unenlightened racists.

And little will be said about the fact that maybe some people believe that McCain might be a better choice for president.

It doesn’t matter that Obama’s policies are nothing special despite his claims to be the candidate of change and hope.  It certainly won’t matter that he himself noted in 2004 that he would not run in 2008 because he would not be ready.  Nor will it matter that his years of legislative service have left little signs of innovation or leadership.  In fact little of anything.

Race.

The Democrats took a beating in the court of public opinion recently when they chose to recess for the summer without doing anything productive for the oil/energy crisis.

Now that congress is back in session, they have seen the light and have proposed a new bill to address offshore oil drilling….by banning it again, efectively, as their bill bans all drilling inside 50 miles, and 90-95 percent of the estimated oil reserves lie inside that mark: ¹

The American Conservative Union called out the Dem bluff earlier today:

When we were kids, we all played a variation of the game “Let’s Pretend” in which we pretended to do something or be somebody knowing it was make-believe. The authors of this bill are playing “Let’s Pretend” with the American people, pretending they are passing a bill to increase domestic energy production when they know it will do no such thing.

By eliminating revenue sharing for the states in royalties for offshore oil and gas drilling while requiring states to approve the drilling leases, the bill’s sponsors know it is unlikely the states will bother to give their approval. Even Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana has said this bill “will not see the light of day in the Senate” should it pass the House.

The bill prohibits drilling less than 50 miles offshore when the sponsors know that, to give an example, 95% of the known reserves off the coast of California are less than 50 miles out.

Once again, as in other energy legislation, the bill needlessly increases taxes that only serve to increase the cost of energy. The bill will also increase electricity bills for the average consumer by forcing utility companies to use alternative fuels regardless of the cost. This provision has already been rejected by the Senate in a previous energy bill.

The American people are demanding we change our bankrupt energy policy which has prevented the U.S. from utilizing our own resources and made us dangerously dependent on foreign oil supplies from unfriendly countries. They will not fall for a bill full of gimmicks which does not do the job.

OK, I admit that I am no fan of Obama, but that is a matter of policy and ideology.

Now I have cause to dislike him personally, and I may official upgrade him to scumbag.

Via Hot Air:¹

Amir Taheri accuses Barack Obama of interfering in the attempt to negotiate a status-of-forces agreement with Iraq while making his trip to Baghdad in July. In his New York Post column², Taheri quotes the Iraqi Foreign Minister, on the record, telling him that Obama tried to convince the Iraqis to end the negotiations and instead ask the UN for another one-year extension to the current mandate. That would have left US troops in current position for another year, but more importantly, would have provided the US a diplomatic setback that Obama could have exploited on the campaign trail:

WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.

According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.

“He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington,” Zebari said in an interview.

Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops - and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its “state of weakness and political confusion.”

Hypocrisy isn’t the issue here; it’s the interference of Obama in military and diplomatic affairs. Just on diplomacy, interfering with the United States in its diplomatic efforts is a Logan Act violation. Interfering with war policy treads on even more serious ground, especially since the primary motivation appears to be winning an election without regard to whether it damages our ability to fight the enemy or drives wedges between us and our ally, the elected, representative government in Baghdad.

Deal em up, here comes the race card.

First up is Joe Biden who finally says what everyone is thinking:  Vote for Obama because he is back:¹

Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, campaigning in North Carolina where black votes could help swing the state to the Democrats, said today that electing a black person to the White House would be transformative.

Biden said the policies of running mate Barack Obama make his presidency even more urgent and declared this to be the most important election that any living person has seen in their lifetime. But he particularly singled out the meaning of electing someone who is black.

“That will be a transformative event in American politics and internationally,” Biden said. “That all by itself will be significant.”

So, why is this necessary?

North Carolina last voted for a Democrat in 1976, when Jimmy Carter won much of the South. But the state has a large population of blacks galvanized by Obama’s candidacy, and the Illinois senator has competed aggressively here for months.

Oh, yea, that.  If they won’t vote for you for your failed policies, go for something more elemental.

Now, I posted this in a forum, and was taken to task by a friend who pointed out that Biden never explicitly said to vote for him because he is black.

Here is how I responded:

Context matters <name>. 

If you want to stand on the exact words, fine. I will assume you are a literalist then, and cannot be trusted to look at hyperbole, idioms and metaphors.

A speech is a method (of) communication, and the communication process has four key elements, a sender (biden), a receiver (the audience), a message and feedback.

If you look at what he said, who he said it to, where he was when he said it and the circumstances of why he said it, it makes sense.

Abortion.  Apparently that is the defining issue of our culture.

Sure, there are many things that drive the liberals wacky about Palin, but her determined pro life stance has to be the one I read about the most.  The constant accusations that she will repeal Roe Wade are generally the loudest.

No matter that the ability to make Roe Wade go away is hardly easy and not in the list of executive powers.

Perhaps these panic stricken fear mongers should consider that you have had 3 conservative presidents, all who were pro choice, and gee, none of them managed that trick.

We have a stumbling economy, a war, the constant threat of terrorism and all manner of other important issues, but for some reason, the defining issue keeps becoming Abortion.

Why is abortion such a polarizing issue?  Why does it promote such a visceral reaction?

The reality may be in what the two sides see it as.

Conservatives see the issue as a moral one, that of protecting innocent life. 

Liberals see it as a matter of choice, the choice to terminate a life.

The issue is a serious divide ideologically and morally, and as such, perhaps I should not be too surprised to see it such a defining issue.

But at the same time, as i noted, there are far too many real issues, issues that affect all the American’s who are alive, than to spend a lot of time whining about the ability to kill some of the unborn ones.

Yes, I admit, her solid stance on Abortion impresses me, even as Obama’s cruel stance disgusts me.

But neither of their views is enough to sway me definitively, I have many more fish to fry in my political needs.

If the only reason you can find to dislike Sarah Palin is her stance on Abortion, than perhaps the problem is that you have skewed priorities.

…Becomes truth.  Words spoken long ago by Lenin, they have never before been truer.

The Democrats are not dumb, they quickly realized that they have a tiger by the tail, so in good old Democrat tradition, they launched a campaign of disinformation.  A campaign determined to smear her beyond all respectability.

Fortunately, most of the rumors are easy to deal with. 

The more outrageous obviously come from extremists like Randi Rhodes, who in the clip below suggests Palin is a pedophile¹:

The sheer ridiculousness of that is self dismissing, but still, these rabid loons have rabid listeners who are in turn rabid believers and rabid voters.  They would likely never never have voted for her, but inflame them with enough righteous indignation and they will work much harder to vote against her.

Then you also have the Hollywierd types like Lindsey Lohan² who chides Palin for (among other things) being a media whore, ignoring the reality of Obama the media whore whose face has appeared on more magazines than…well, maybe even more than Lohan herself.  She also takes her to task for an anti gay conference her church is sponsoring, saying Palin herself is hosting it, not the church, but seems to ignore the foolishness of Rev Wright and Obama’s church.

These classes of people are easy to dismiss, they are not credible.

The media, the politicians and the talking heads have been much more ruthless.  Palin in the few short weeks since her nomination has endured a plethora of accusations and rumours unlike anything I have ever seen in such a short time.

Fact check has taken a few apart³:

False Internet claims and rumors fly about McCain’s running mate.

Summary

We’ve been flooded for the past few days with queries about dubious Internet postings and mass e-mail messages making claims about McCain’s running mate, Gov. Palin. We find that many are completely false, or misleading.

• Palin did not cut funding for special needs education in Alaska by 62 percent. She didn’t cut it at all. In fact, she increased funding and signed a bill that will triple per-pupil funding over three years for special needs students with high-cost requirements.