2008 August 29 « Silk Roads and Siamese Smiles

Archive for August 29th, 2008

Alaska, GOP, Governor, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Vice President

Sarah Palin (Alaska Governor) selected as McCains VP.

In Politics on August 29, 2008 at 9:55 pm

Will Palin Stand Up to Scrutiny?

August 29, 2008 11:33 AM ET | John Aloysius Farrell | Permanent Link

DENVER—James Carville told reporters last week that his advice for potential presidents is to pick a vice presidential candidate who will make the opposition strategists retch with worry. Well, he said it more pungently than that, but you get the idea.

Sarah Palin fulfills that criterion. The poor Obama folk—they had about 12 hours to enjoy and rest, after putting on a successful and historic convention, and they get up this morning to this stomach-churning bit of news.

There is one important caveat: Palin is an unknown. In 1988, for many of the same reasons that Palin looks good now, Dan Quayle was the surprise veep pick who came bounding across the stage to George H. W. Bush like a big Labrador puppy on the eve of the GOP convention. He was almost immediately revealed as a shallow and disastrous choice.

So, Palin has to survive the vetting she’ll be getting from the national media and all those nasty liberal bloggers. She’d better not have a tangled financial history, or a spouse with questionable investments, like Geraldine Ferraro had in 1984.

And the Ferraro example gives us one more little splash of cold water: Even a historic vice presidential choice won’t help you much if, like Walter Mondale, you’re losing the argument with the other presidential candidate.

That said, Palin is a brilliant choice.

First and foremost, she does well what other alternatives did not—reinforce McCain’s claim to be a maverick, while not upsetting the conservative base. You can’t say too much about this. It is what choosing her says about McCain that is important.

Though I believe it is vastly overrated, Palin can tap what resentment there is among middle-aged women over Hillary Clinton’s loss. The GOP presidential field looked like a lot of aging white guys. Here’s a sign that the Republicans actually do have a future in our diverse democracy.

And though she comes from far-off Alaska, she will help—big time—in Montana, Colorado, and other western states that McCain has to lock up quickly. She can talk guns, and energy, and wildlife, and make conservative dogma sound reasonable.

So, a tip of the hat to John McCain. And can someone get a trash can, quick, for David Axelrod?

From what I’ve read, Governor Palin is an excellent choice for McCain. She’s cleaned up Alaska Republican politics. She seems to live the values that Republicans espouse as opposed to those who give lip service to those values. She’s anti-abortion. She’s just as maverick as he as she has taken on the old school GOP powers in the state. She sounds like a strong candidate for VP despite her relative inexperience.

But, Mr. Farrell says it better than I. So I’ll leave it at that.

Congratulations Governor Palin. Do us proud.

Hopefully, she’ll do well enough to be the first female VP and go on to become the first female President in her own right.

A fairly comprehensive article on the Bloomberg website.

Sarah Palin from a Femiinists point of view.

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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Jordan, Nabataeans, Petra, The Cathedral, The Treasury

This is Petra

In Middle East, Travel, culture on August 29, 2008 at 7:02 pm

Petra, Jordan.

The magnificent facade pictured above was featured in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

I traveled to Petra in April of 1998 with the US Batt CSM and Chaplain. We traveled down through the Sinai via Eilat, Israel and Aqaba, Jordan. On the way there we stopped off at a Crusader Fortress Island on the Red Sea. We didn’t get to go into the Fortress as we had no means of crossing the Red Sea. We snapped a couple of photos and drove on.

Petra is high in the mountains. I was surprised to see snow drifts that were 3 feet high on the road there. One thinks of Jordan as arid desert. I never imagined snow. Certainly not that amount.

Petra is a city built into the side of cliffs by a civilization called the Nabateaens. They pre-date the Greeks and Romans by a few centuries. It is believed that they were a Semitic people related to the Arabs. The city was occupied by the Greeks and Romans in later times. Therefore, the architecture reflects the various styles of those civilizations.

Accessing the ruins of Petra is a bit of an adventure. One must walk down a steep valley and into what amounts to a crack in the mountains of the area. At points the path is no more than 2 or 3 meters wide. As you walk down the path, you see brilliant colors swirling all about you in the sandstone walls. Reds. Pinks. Blue. Purples and Browns. The path narrows and widens. Always sloping downwards. The end of the trail is fairly abrupt and leaves most of us stilled in awe. Mouth agape. Staring at what is truly one of the wonders of the ancient world. The Treasury. You’ll catch glimpses of it as the trail ends. Even so, nothing prepares you for the wonder of coming upon the Treasury. There are no words that can truly describe this place. I stared at it for 15 minutes before I finally remembered to snap a photo. It is as memorable and as beautiful as the Taj Mahal or the Pyramids.

After passing the treasury, you must climb several paths to access the incredible ruins dating from the Nabateaens, Greeks and Romans. There is the Roman Amphitheatre. Several tombs and catacombs. A prison. Roman and Greek buildings and temples. The masterpiece, though, is the Cathedral. A massive structure built high up on the mountain. It’s a challenging trek to reach the Cathedral but it’s well worth the effort.