So angry.... and Beware the internet

Two short posts here:

I have spent a lot of time criticizing Barack Obama recently. Not surprisingly, most of you don't really understand why.

But if you read my posts carefully you will see. Obama possesses an intellectual capacity that few do.

As such, I expect intellectual honesty from him. And that is what I have not seen.

I am not here to criticize again, but to explain certain things about how I present ideas.

For those of you who are parents of more than one child, you know that you have different levels of expectations for each of your kids.

It is much the same here. This is not to say that McCain is stupid. Not at all. Despite what all of you who are so anxious to criticize him want to say, you can't become a fighter pilot without a superior intellect.

But he is not on Obama's level. So what I find offensive with Obama is the way he manipulates most of you. His rhetoric is so finely tuned that it is usually difficult to parse.

And in his case, it is more difficult to discern simply because of his lack of record.

McCain's positions are obvious. Like any politician, even Obama, there is an evolution. That is natural. But with McCain, we can go back and see 20+ years of a voting record.

But here's the truth of the matter. On social policy I am an ultra, ultra liberal. Probably more liberal than anyone you know. You have seen this rarely, but as an example, on my discussion of handguns.

On foreign and economic policy, I am a conservative. And I HATE both of those terms.
But I believe in a balanced budget, low interest rate, strong dollar economy, and an activist foreign policy.

Some people argue that we shouldn't be the world's policeman.

I say they are right. We shouldn't be. We MUST be. We have a moral obligation to be.

Anyone having any experience with the holocaust who repeats what Jews the world over say in synagogue - "Never again" MUST believe this.

As such, I am constantly torn between the two parties.

At each election I have to make the proverbial deal with the devil to support a candidate.

But the anger this seems to generate from the people that blindly follow one side or the other simple baffles me. It is why I just can't listen to talk radio.

But for example, the reaction of Democrats to Joe Lieberman. Here was a man with an overwhelmingly liberal voting record. A loyal Democrat, who simply because of his stance on ONE issue, was viewed as a traitor to his party.

How silly.


Next, I use a warning. My friend [member classyginger] had a commenter on her blog who, among other racist and antisemitic statements, declared that Michael Chertoff, the Director of Homeland Security, had dual citizenship with Israel.

Ginger commented to the guy that he was so wrong about everything, correctly took him to task about his bigotry, but she "conceded" that he was right about Chertoff because she saw this on dozens of internet sites. (Ginger this is in NO WAY a criticism of you!!)

Even as I spoke over and over to her that it was not true, she explained that she had researched it and seen it everywhere on dozens of sites. I told her that that was exactly the problem.

Finally, she simply accepted what I said. That it was a lie, based on another lie about Chertoff's mother.

The point here, is that she is right that the LIE was referenced on dozens of web sites all over the internet.

But the truth was not. Why? Because anyone writing an accurate biography of Chertoff would not even think to deal with the question of his citizenship. For all practical purposes, no cabinet member (not by law, but by fact) could hold dual citizenship. It is simply not something any legitmate biographer would discuss.
Thus the myth, the lie, spreads, and the truth gets buried in cyberspace.

A perfect example of this would the so called "magic bullet" of the Kennedy assassination.

I'm sure if you did a search for that term, you would come up with literally hundreds of thousands of hits. All describing the impossibility of the bullet making the turns in mid air that these sites would have you believe the bullet would have had to make in order to hit Governor Connelly.

But the truth? You will be hard pressed to discover that actually, Governor Connelly was sitting below and to the left of Kennedy, and that the bullet followed an absolutely true trajectory, exactly as expected of a bullet. Probably nowhere would you see that he was sitting in an inboard jump seat.

The point here is that when using the internet to research PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE be careful. Vet your sources.

Do not repeat rumours without checking from a legitimate source.

And even then, what we have seen over the last two decades or so, as the pressure for instant news becomes more intense, these so called legitimate sites can frequently repeat lies.