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Published Saturday, September 27, 2008

Random thoughts

Our elected officials are exhausted after spending a whole week trying to figure out how to make the taxpayers spend $700 billion to save the stock portfolios of Wall Street bankers. They call this a "bailout" plan. Maybe that's not the right term.

In nautical terms, bailing is the act of scooping excess water out of a vessel and dumping it back into the (lake, river, creek, ocean) before the boat sinks. In congressional terms, "bailing" is scooping bad investments off the balance sheets of Wall Street firms and pouring the garbage on taxpayers so incompetent investors won't suffer a loss.

In my neighborhood, we call this getting dumped on.

In non-financial news, Republican handlers have finally let VP candidate Sarah Palin off the leash and allowed her to do a few interviews. None have been a disaster, although some have not gone as well as hoped.

Naturally, Democrats -- a term that now includes almost all the "major" American media outlets -- have replayed Palin's stumbles time and again.

Recently, the ever-perky and never credible Katie Couric asked Palin how living next to Russia qualified as foreign policy experience. Too bad Palin didn't ask Couric how having an office down the hall from Dan Rather at CBS qualified as journalistic experience.

But I digress. Palin's answer about Russian proximity constituting foreign policy experience wasn't incorrect, but it was weak.

To no one's surprise, the CBS wing of the Obama campaign spent most of the next two days replaying Palin's answer and asking with furrowed brows how this woman had the experience to be vice president.

Too bad Couric didn't apply the same "journalistic" standards to Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden. A few days before the Palin interview, Couric interviewed Biden. When the pending economic meltdown came up, Biden jumped in with a statement that should have left Couric gasping with laughter.

Biden said that when Wall Street crashed in 1929 to kick off the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt took decisive action to save the republic. According to Biden, Roosevelt went on TV and told Americans to calm down and that he had a plan to solve all our problems.

Only two problems with this story. First, Roosevelt wasn't president during the 1929 crash. Herbert Hoover was. Second, the TV that Biden said Roosevelt used to calm the nation's troubled hearts was still an experiment.

Palin's answer on foreign policy experience was weak but not incorrect. She gets a C-. As far as American history goes, Biden gets an F. Not many people heard Biden's gaffe, though, especially not on Couric's network, which never replayed Biden's fairy tale about a man who wasn't president using a machine that didn't exist.

Bottom line: Palin's lack of foreign policy expertise --which is about the same as Obama's -- can be corrected with experience. Biden? As a wise man once said, "You can't fix stupid."

In other world news, The U.S. and Russians learned long ago that sending men into space is tricky business. But the Chinese recently announced they had done it. Unfortunately, the claim is now in doubt.

Blame falls squarely on the Chinese Ministry of Propaganda for jumping the gun. The day Chinese astronauts soared into space, the state-controlled Chinese press issued a glowing release about how well the flight went. They even quoted a member of the crew as he allegedly performed a spacewalk.

The Red Chinese were left red-faced when someone pointed out that the news story -- including the live interview with the so-called spacewalker -- was released before the Chinese rocket left the ground.

The Chinese called the bogus report a "technical error." They could probably straighten things out by hiring Biden as the Chinese press secretary. No one expects him to get it right to begin with. And when he does, no one calls him on it.

(send your e-mail comments to: alex@newnan.com)

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