...and how many of you on here responding have served in a war zone for the US military? Within that category, how many of you have had the opportunity to serve the US military as a POW? It's an elite job description. Requirements are the ability to endure enormous amounts of suffering while bringing respect to the flag that put you in that situation. Sometimes these are contradictory requirements and it requires some high personal standards and a brilliant set of skills to endure that I rarely detect on this board. Leadership skills. Hello, yes!! Let's back up a minute and do a little history lesson for you keyboard junkies. Vietnam wasn't a war that young men and women were thrilled to fight. Some ran to Canada, some spent their tours trying to escape their duties with mind altering drugs. Many (probably most) served admirably and are still dealing with its demons. Whooz appears to have drawn the grace card known as "in between wars", just as I would have had I been a man. McCain didn't. War sucks but sometimes it's necessary. You face your mortality at a very young age. How many of you had a will at age 18 because of the possibility of losing your life in a war zone? You may give up some of the usually more productive years of your life (as McCain did) and as many of the over 30,435 (OIF) 2,257 (OEF) injured as reported in the Army Times 8/4/08 have done Killed total 4,116 and 555. Missing or possibly captured, 1. Do you even know who he is? With this group the answer has to be NO. Yet, you can find the number on a sleeper car with no difficulty. Priorities, guys, priorities.
If McCain now has 7 tables to eat at, so be it. Quit whining, show some initiative and earn enough so that you can have 7 tables, if it is 7 tables that you want. The opportunity is in front of you by virtue of the providence of being a citizen in this country. I've pondered the "what if I'd been born in Africa" thought.
Until you have (POW experience) you will never know what it takes to have the resolve and discipline to make it through difficult times. He faced the possibility of dying in a foreign land, caged, without any family around him and having his body land where it would never be found.... except that the US has such a respect for this service that we are still finding and bringing our Vietnam soldiers home to this day. It's a d*mned shame that you guys (with maybe one exception) don't have the same respect for the self-sacrifice that this required. But, that's a reflection on you, not McCain.
What McCain has done for his country is admirable. The man is a hero, an honest, fair, reasonable, decent fellow. Being a war vet can do nothing but add to his ability to run our nation. But the thing is, its not enough reason. A president is not just the head of our military. He is the head of our country, the man who must make tough decisions for everyone's benefit. McCain has limited knowledge of economics, very limited connection with the people of our country currently going through a recession, and he is not a negotiator, a maverick of the senate. In this time and place, the war is an issue. But Jodie, its not the only one. I don't think he can handle many of the others.
Railroads are good but as the ****s discovered, they can be used for evil purposes. So, guys, get it in perspective. Get the right guy in the office and then use the power of the pen to get Amtrak permanently funded.
If my only problem with McCain was his position on Amtrak, he'd have my vote. There might be a few people on this board who are single minded enough to argue with that position, but I doubt it. If they do, they are probably currently active employees of Amtrak, and I don't blame 'em.
Make sure that you vote for a President that can lead in war if it once again becomes necessary. From a military wife, PLEASE, do not put someone in that office who cuts the number of military members serving.
I think that an ability to lead in a war is important, and personally I think Obama might be able to in the event that he has to. But personally, I think he'd be better than McCain at the more important issue of avoiding a war in the first place.
The burden is too great on the remaining and Pres. Bill Clinton (not Bush) is directly responsibile for that idiocy while making sure that parents had to explain "o*al s*x" to their children long before it was time because it was an inescapable part of his life and character. For pete's sake, if that's what the man needed, Hillary should have been bright enough to figure it out.
His sexual preferences, and his relationship with his wife, are almost as irrelevant in this argument as my aforementioned prehensile toes.
As far as computer skills.. guys, guys, guys. You have no clue how stupid YOU sound when you think it's a prerequisite to run for Pres. You all appear to have the TIME to mess with this machine and that's all it is. A machine, a tool. In time, it will be as antiquated as a telephone. It is far more important in life to have good relationships than it is to have computer skills. This comes from someone whose first programming experience was putting COBOL (and the language that starts with an F, -forgotten it now), codes on punch cards, getting the cards in line, getting myself in line, feeding them into a card reader, getting a printout on green-lined side-punched paper and wondering which card got out of order and having to repeat the process. What you have in front of you will at some near future point seem as odd as the punch cards I used.
Tell me, would you trust building your house to a carpenter that didn't know how to use a hammer? Being president of the united states means you have to take advantage of all things, and the computer is too important a tool to not have to do your job. People who are familiar with computers think differently.
Before computers, if I was reading or writing something and though of a piece of information I could use, I'd make a mental note to look it up next time I happened to go to the library. As often as not, I'd forget. Now if I want to use information, say to quote Amtrak's ridership for 2007, I'd hit "Command-T" to open up a new tab, mid sentence, and type into the Google bar "Amtrak 2007 ridership", click on the
first link on the list and quote you the number, 25,847,531.
A president likely to look up information, any information, that he doesn't happen to know exactly, this second... tell me, is that not a useful feature in a leader?
Anthony: Same as Sky.
If I go to Cornhusker football games every fall along with Chiefs games and have season tickets to both venues, I probably REALLY support these teams, so equate that to Biden riding a train everyday to and from work, he's probably pro-rail and not an advocate against it.
