Pajama's Media Straw Poll

If you look to the left you will see I have added the Pajama's Media Straw Poll widget to my blog. I think it is a neat idea to allow any website to add this widget in order to let as many people participate as possible.

If you are visiting A Perfect Contradiction for the first time, or if you are a regular visitor, I ask you to please take part in the poll. Come back each week vote as this vote is counted not only for the "A Perfect Contradiction" precinct but your vote counts towards the overall count as well. So please, vote once each week at this precinct!

This weeks options:
Dems: Bill Richardson, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Al Gore, Wesley Clark, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Christopher Dodd

Reps: Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Chuck Hagel, Sam Brownback, Jim Gilmore, Tommy Thompson, George Pataki

(the choices are picked by "those national candidates of both parties that score at least one percent on the previous month’s Gallup Poll."

Bingo! Goldberg Gets it Right

This article sums up everything I feel about the 2008 elections (for the Republicans) - SO FAR.

If the election were held today the Republicans have three legitimate* candidates:
1) Rudy Giuliani
2) John McCain
3) Mitt Romney

*I say legitimate because they have a legitimate chance of winning, not because they are the three best candidates.

I will immediately disqualify McCain because
1) He is a narcissistic RINO
2) I don't know a single conservative that would actually vote for him
3) He is old. Very, very, very old. I'm not sure he will live 4 years as President let alone 8 (let me be clear, this is not a threat). He has had cancer, he is elderly. I don't think he is a good pick at all.

So with McCain out, we have Giuliani or Romney... 2 peas in a pod. They aren't exactly RINO's, like McCain, but they are NOT particularly conservative candidates. Not a Bush, and certainly not a Regan.

When you look at Giuliani and Romney, in many ways they are the same candidate, as Goldberg points out when analyzing the abortion issue. (Romney claims to have seen the light on abortion, but that is BECAUSE he is running for the conservative vote).

Over the last 20 years, the largely accurate conventional wisdom has been that the GOP could not nominate a pro-choice politician, just as the Democratic party could never nominate a pro-life one. Some Republicans, including Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush, had to move from a middle-of-the-road position on abortion to the right-hand guardrail, while some Democrats who once leaned to the pro-life side of the road had to make a similar move in the other direction.

That's being put to the test this time around.

...

Of course, Giuliani's national profile expanded enormously because of 9/11. And while the press harps on that point, the more interesting part of the story lies elsewhere. The war on terror hasn't just changed Giuliani's profile as a crisis-leader, it's changed the attitudes of many Americans, particularly conservatives, about the central crisis facing the country. It's not that pro-lifers are less pro-life or that social conservatives are suddenly OK with homosexuality, gun control and other issues where Giuliani's dissent from mainstream conservative opinion would normally disqualify him. It's that they really, really believe the war on terror is for real. At conservative conferences, on blogs and on talk radio, pro-life issues have faded in their passion and intensity compared with the war on terror. Taken together, terrorism, Iraq and Islam have become the No. 1 social issue for conservative base of the party.

Note: I didn't say it's become the No. 1 foreign-policy or national-security issue for social conservatives. It's become the No. 1 social issue, at least for many of them.
More.

Bingo! Give the man a prize.

I believe we can work out the abortion issue over time. I don't think we should drop the issue altogether, but we can deal with it in the future. We can't deal with the War on Terror in the future. It is a problem that confronts us RIGHT NOW. We can win the War on Terror and deal with abortion in time OR we can be wiped out by the terrorists, or maybe just buy some time till the next 9/11.

I would rather we put a President in place who will WIN the war on terror, not retreat into the failed policy of containment.

A point that Goldberg doesn't make which I think is very important is that Guiliani can win the national election. With Romney, who knows, but Guiliani is practically a lock. He has Bush's likability post 9/11 with no culpability for Iraq War fallout hanging over him. He was Time's Man of the Year, for crying out loud.

One thing he has to do, though, is commit to running and not appear indecisive on whether he wants to run. The press has been portraying him as hemming and hawing over the issue. That is bad for him. Leaders need to be strong and decisive.

I really don't know enough about Romney to have a strong feeling for or against him. I do like Giuliani, though, despite my differences with him on secondary issues like abortion. Regarding the gun issue, though, I think we are in agreement: His job is to enforce the laws. IF a gun law is against the second Amendment, the High Court will say so. It is the President's job to enforce laws, it is for the courts to interpret them. He enforced the law as a Mayor, took thousands of ILLEGAL weapons away from CRIMINALS. He didn't break into law abiding citizens homes and take their guns away, and he didn't create executive orders making guns illegal. He just enforced the law.

Jewish Group "Blasts" Romney

Foul!

Romney has been traveling the country talking about inclusiveness and understanding of people from all walks of life," Forman said. "Yet he chooses to kick (off) his presidential campaign on the former estate of a well-known and outspoken anti-Semite and xenophobe. Source.

How ridiculous can you get? I am not terribly suprised that someone, somewhere, could be offended by ... anything, but just because someone can think of a reason to be offended does not make it newsworthy.

Technically speaking, every presidential candidate kicked off their presidential campaign on land once owned by the Native Americans. I am sure that somewhere, if you look hard enough, you will find someone with Native American ancestry who is upset by this. If a group of angry native americans said of a candidate, "Candidate X has been traveling the country talking about inclusiveness and understanding or people of all walks of life; yet Candidate X chose to kick-off his campaign on land that was stolen from our people!"

If that occured, would that be newsworthy? Does the location where you "kick-off" a cmpaign have any political relevance whatsoever?

What was the point of this AP article? To tie Mitt Romney's name to the idea of anti-semitism and cultural insensitivity.

Are these allegations fair? NO! He *could* be an insensitive anti-semite (I don't know one way or the other); but that he chose as the site of his presidential announcement a museum honoring auto pioneer Henry Ford: an antisemite that does not one make.