An Obama-McCain ticket = sensible foreign policy?

On Tuesday Richard Cohen, who had been on the side of candidate Obama during the primaries, wrote in the Washington Post “I have an even better ticket in mind: Obama-McCain. That way we might get a sensible foreign policy.” Read the rest of this entry »

Wake up, Democrats!

Reading Maureen Dowd’s article published on April 16th, 2008 in the New York Times was like a strange experience. Since the elections’ campaign began to heat up she had been so vituperative whenever she wrote about Hillary Clinton and so praiseful about Barack Obama that this last article sounded as if it had been written on April 1st. Could she have written “The last few weeks have not been kind to Hillary, but the endless endgame has not been kind to the Wonder Boy either” and “Behind closed doors in San Francisco, elitism’s epicenter, Barack Obama showed his elitism, attributing the emotional, spiritual and cultural values of working-class, “lunch pail” Pennsylvanians to economic woes.” Read the rest of this entry »

Somersault opinions about McCain and Ron Paul…

No, I am not doing a somersault on my political opinions. If you read my article about McCain (to which I am thinking about making an amendment) and now you read about Ron Paul you might start wondering. The truth is that as exciting this presidential election is turning out to be both in and out of the U.S. with a black man, a woman and a septuagenarian as candidates, it is beginning to be tiring. At least until we reach the two parties running which does not seem to be happening anytime soon. Let us face it, politically Hillary and Barack don’t offer much to choose between them, except perhaps the developing nastiness among their followers.

Among the Republicans, with the non-expected success of McCain, who managed to eliminate all his opponents, it is time to wait and see how the fight ends in the other camp. And while we Democrats also wait, let me tell you about an ex-candidate for the Republican nomination, Ron Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas, still mentioned in some European papers. He believes that “rights belong to individuals, not groups; that property should be owned by people, not government; that government exists to protect liberty, not to redistribute wealth; and that the lifes and actions of people are their own responsibility, not the government’s”. Branded by many people as a right wing politician he is certainly not in the mold of Bush, to me he is mostly a libertarian. In 2002 he voted against the coming Iraq war, or more accurately the pre-emptive abdication by Congress of its constitutional right to declare war. He opposed the equally shameful Patriot Act and recently, when the House of Representatives was passing another denunciation of Palestinian violence, Ron Paul refused to support it. He abhorred all attacks on civilians, he said - but on Palestinians by Israelis as much as on Israelis by Palestinians. With these views and running in the Republican platform, it was never any doubt that his quest for the nomination was purely quixotical. Maybe McCain who seems at times to distance himself from Bush, would consider Ron Paul in his cabinet?
But please, this is just trying to wake Democrats about the possibility of four more years of a Republican White House. And no, I am no for McCain or Ron Paul!