A first taste of Palin on foreign policy

Lets preface this short post (I'm working on something longer to be up soon) with a story regarding actuarial tables that try to estimate how likely it is that John McCain will yield the presidency in one way or another to Sarah Palin should they be elected:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20080903/pl_politico/13096

So there is about a 15% chance that McCain won't survive four years in office, and if you add in the chances that he'll be impeached, that he'll be rendered unfit for office by something like a stroke or medical condition, or that he'll resign before the 2012 election to offer Palin a chance to run as an incumbent, I estimate the chances that Palin will be the president for some period of time at about 20-24%.*

So it's worrying when her lack of foreign affairs knowledge shows through. In the speech she gave yesterday she reportedly linked Iraq and 9/11. It's worrying to hear her talk like George W. Bush. It's even more worrying when her back story starts to sound a lot like his. It turns out that Palin has only ever been on one trip outside the U.S. (excluding I'm sure Canada, but I have no evidence to back that up), and that came in 2006 when she got her passport to go and visit Alaskan national guard troops in Germany and Kuwait. In that time of course she met with no foreign leaders, nor has she ever as she admitted in her interview with Charlie Gibson. She went on to say that most vice presidential candidates in the past hadn't either at the time of their nomination, which has been proven false through at least the last 32 years. This link has some clips and summaries from her interview with Gibson. All of the points brought up in the article are disturbing (especially the hard talk about Russia, see my previous WWIII posts!), but one of the most frustrating to me was the dialogue quoted in the end about the Bush Doctrine.

The Bush Doctrine was, to me, the most frightening aspect of the war with Iraq. It essentially set a precedent for waging preemptive war, and in the case of Iraq specifically, without the consent of many nations of the UN. In hindsight now that the intelligence has been shown to have been rigged, over-blown, and in cases falsified, it is highly likely that the government of the U.S. or another country will use this war as a precedent for waging similar actions. It's also been demonstrated how easy it is for an administration to start a war without even having to go so far as to stage another Gulf of Tonkin.**

You could tell when Gibson asked the question that Palin was frustrated by his attempt to see whether or not she knew what the Bush Doctrine referred to, which clearly she did not. Her canned answer about fighting terrorism was a little embarassing. Once she had it explained to her though, she seemed crystal clear about her willingness to do "whatever it takes" to stop "extremists". Well fuck me, I thought she was a maverick, but it turns out she's just another fake fucking Bush-clone cowboy. Couple her responses with her talk about Russia, and there's no way we can let this ex-sportscaster have her finger anywhere near the nuclear button.

So please, please do everything you can to make sure that Obama is elected this fall. Failing that though, pray hard for McCain's health.




*This is how I got my crude guesstimate

Of all 50 presidents:

JFK assassinated in 1st term.
Lincoln assassinated in 2nd term.
William McKinley assassinated in his 2nd term.
FDR died in his 4th term.
Richard Nixon resigned in his 2nd term.
Warren Harding died in his 1st term.
Zachary Taylor died in 1st term.
James Garfield died in 1st term.
William Henry Harrison died in 1st term.

So 9/43 presidents did not last their full term. Of those 5 died of natural causes. So that means 4/43 or 9.3% of them did not finish their terms for reasons other than those covered by the actuarial analysis covered in the article. That added to the 15%chance that McCain will not survive the next four year period yields about 24%. Of course this is a crude estimate and I think the actual chances are slightly less likely than 24%, but I just wanted to emphasize the point that there is an absolutely realistic chance that Palin will become president. This makes her lack of foreign affairs all the more poignant. I realize too that that this whole excercise is more than slightly morbid, and I apologize.

** While it's been revealed one of the attacks on a US ship was falsified, it's never been shown that the first was. To all wingnut conspiracists out there, please don't bring up 9/11 as an inside job based on this off-hand comment.