Comments Posted By Your Brother Jim
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McCAIN'S SPAIN GAFFE: TOO PROUD TO SAY HE COULDN'T UNDERSTAND THE INTERVIEWER
Theodore Roosevelt escaped military service in the Civil War because he was 3 years old (1858-1919) - which would make sense to anyone who knew anything of US history and that TR became the youngest US president at 42 following McKinley's assassination in 1901.
TR was a moderately liberal Republican (when such creatures existed) who would have been comfortable in his party likely through the 60s or even the 70s, not unlike Javits or Keating or Brooke. He was an aggressive regulator of the excesses of Wall Street and big corp abuses - but he was no Populist. He once said, "It will never be any harder for a working man to make an appointment with me than it will be for a rich man - nor any easier."
I'd guess that McCain identifies with TR's bucking of his own party (in Roosevelt's time, pro-big business legislators)and with his interventionist, even imperialist, foreign policy. TR believed in an almost radical form of what we today call American exceptionalism - that the US had the responsibility to spread its democratic institutions to the far corners of the earth - more of a Bush, neo-con position than a McCain idea.
The combination of aggressive energy, vast intelligence, and political deftness that we now see clearly as the hallmarks of the skills that TR brought to the presidency are greatly needed but sadly lacking in 2008. We have an untested cipher running against a duplicitous moral and mental midget.
Where have you gone, Teddy Roosevelt - and people of such calibre? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you....
Comment Posted By Your Brother Jim On 21.09.2008 @ 16:49
