Isorski Digs Politics

Actually, I don't. I have religiously avoided the TV news for more than eight years, mostly in revulsion over our current regime (Bush) - watching the news makes me too angry.

But you pretty much can't avoid it these days with the lengthy lead up to the recent Democratic and Republican conventions, and those events themselves.

I have avoided turning this blog into a political forum and I also generally avoid any discussion of politics and religion. But today I feel like I just have to. The sickening display at the Republican Convention has made me too angry to stay quiet.

McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as VP has raised all sorts of interesting issues but at the core, he chose about the rightest-wing person he could find, and this is being overlooked by those who would rather focus on the fact that she is a woman, that her 17-year old daughter is knocked up, how will she raise five kids (one with Downs) as VP, and then as president once four-time cancer survivor McCain kicks off.

CNN contributor Hilary Rosen said it best in a column today. I urge you to read it, and please, come November, do not give the Republicans another four years. They have done enough damage in the last eight, haven't they? Obama will do just fine. Plenty of solid presidents have started with minimal experience, and just because you have experience doesn't make you a good president!

I don't care about how Sarah Palin or John McCain take care of their families. I care about how their policy choices affect my family and millions of other Americans.

McCain and Palin get their health insurance paid for by the government (hers in Alaska and his in Washington). Yet they oppose giving the nearly 46 million uninsured Americans the same access to affordable health care.

John McCain's kids don't have to worry about paying for college. Yet he has opposed every single education support program to help others.

McCain and Palin say they will stand up to oil companies. Yet the only energy policy they support gives millions of dollars in tax breaks to oil companies to do more drilling and he has opposed every piece of federal legislation to explore alternative fuel sources.

McCain and Palin say they will revamp how Washington does business. Yet his campaign is filled with lobbyists and she has cooperated with Sen. Ted Stevens in funneling federal money for useless projects in Alaska for years. And McCain and Palin have no solutions for Americans worrying about their jobs in a fragile economy.

McCain and Palin want us to leave their families alone. Yet they want to make rules for our families by eliminating our right to make our own choices over abortion, eliminate our access to family planning education or domestic partner benefits, and our freedom from discrimination.

They want to control what our kids learn in school about sex and about science. In short, through the policies they promote and the judges they support, they want the government to have more control over our private lives than at any time in history.

McCain and Palin now say their campaign is about change, too. Yet the only real change they have proposed is a change from a suit to a skirt in the vice president's office and one man fighting a misplaced war for another in the Oval Office.

That seems to me to be the right reason to oppose them in November. It's not the process or the people, it's what they represent. This unconventional choice of a vice presidential nominee by John McCain won't result in a win in November, because McCain and Palin are the wrong choice for the country.