Friday, August 31, 2012


1900 A LITTLE CROW?

I caught part of the Repub convention last night.

I haven’t been following it- but I found the coverage very interesting last night.

I have been a critic of MSNBC and Chris Matthews over the years.


But- to his credit- I thought he did a great job last night.

Why? Because he made the conservative points?

No.

But he did indeed differ with the others and defended Jeb Bush who made the conservative argument about school vouchers.


Vouchers are funds that you could use to send your kid to the school of your choice.

The way it is supposed to work is if you’re a poor mom- maybe a single Black mother living in a tough inner city area.

You could apply for the voucher and send your son/daughter to a better school then she would normally have access to.


Now- there are those against this and for it- and like most things- if your hear one side only- well you begin to say ‘o- I see your point’.

Then you might hear the other side and say the same thing.


My point is Matthews did take the voucher side- and to the obvious dismay of his liberal panel [Sharpton, Maddow, etc.] he knew he was in the minority.


I also liked the view that Matthews and Sharpton took about Romney’s Mormonism.


They were consistent and said it is wrong to go after him on that.



I caught CNN and Fox- all in all- I was happy to see that their coverage- even though they all play sides at times- was pretty fair.



Why was I glad to see this?


Because whoever wins this election- the next president will have to try his best to govern a very divided nation.

 And it will be hard- for either side- to do this if the losing side [whoever it be] simply spends the next 4 years trying to make the winner fail.



This last year I have criticized the president lots- and I have done the same with Bush in the past [mainly over the wars].


But there have been things that I credit Obama for.

As a big news buff- one of the geopolitical issues that came up was this Pakistani road that we used to get supplies to our troops fighting in the border region of Afghanistan/Pakistan.

We had an incident where we accidently bombed the wrongs guys- we killed a bunch of Pakistani troops- thinking they were Taliban.

Now- Pakistan has not been the best ally in this whole war in Afghanistan.

And make no mistakes about it- we buy their support with tons of money.


But- when we killed their troops- they had it.


They shut down this vital road for our supplies and refused to re open it unless that got an official apology.


The Dilemma?


They wanted the U.S. [Obama] to apologize during a campaign year- when the opposing side were accusing him of being weak in the world- and making apologies to other nations.


See?


So- instead of apologizing- the U.S. spent millions of more dollars- every week [day?] flying and using other ways to get the support to our troops.


Now- the Pakistanis did indeed charge us lots for the use of the road- but these other options were much more expensive.


So what happened?


One week- after months of the stalemate- Hilary Clinton made the apology with the approval of Obama.

Huh?

Yeah- he did the right thing- and that was that.


Now- he could have just spent the extra millions and not apologized.

But I’m sure he consulted with the military brass- and they gave him the frank advice that it would be better to get the road back.


He did the right thing- not the most expedient thing- not the thing that would help his election the most.

No- he did the right thing.


My Point?

If Romney wins- or Obama gets re-elected- they will need the support of the people to do ‘the right thing’.


They will need to have some consensus- some middle ground- to fix the things that are really broken in this country.

And we won’t be able to do that if we continue to simply hate the other side.


I was very impressed with the cordial coverage that the networks gave to Romney.

And I trust they will do the same with the president’s convention.


Yeah- I must admit that Chris Matthews was a real news man last night.

Kudos’ to him and MSNBC [geez- I hate the taste of crow!]




Note- Do me a favor, those who read/like the posts- re-post them on other sites as well as the site you read them on. Thanks- John. Don’t forget to scroll down on the timeline [Facebook] - I have posted lots.







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