A very bad idea, says Charley Reese.
by http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3700
Republicans waited too late to nominate John McCain. When he ran in 2000, he was bright and alert, but they chose George W. Bush. Now they want to hand the presidency to McCain, soon to be 72 years old. He’s not up to it.
The senator has made eight http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3877 extremists?
He did that three times on his last trip. Three times. That’s like http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3300 of his Naval Academy class. He’s never pretended to be a scholar. Now he’s nearly 72 years old, and if he ever did understand the Middle East, he obviously doesn’t now.
Al-Qaida people are Sunni Muslims of the Wahabi sect. That’s the equivalent of the American Puritans. They are very much fundamentalist. Iran is a Shiite country. Shiites and Sunnis are roughly comparable to the Catholics and Protestants when people in both religions took their beliefs extremely seriously.
So, unlike what McCain kept saying, Iran is not training or supplying al-Qaida. When we decided to go to war against Afghanistan, the Iranians were helpful because both the Taliban and al-Qaida are Sunni. The Iranians support Shiite militias and Hezbollah in Lebanon. There is no evidence that they support al-Qaida. On one of the three occasions, Sen. Joe Lieberman corrected McCain, but he made the same mistake again on two other occasions.
McCain’s handlers, of course, will try to confine him to prepared scripts. They don’t want him talking off the cuff because he has a tendency to wander off the subject. Well-disciplined handlers, coupled with a lazy and inattentive press, could elect a near comatose person, and the public would never know it. McCain may have good genes and physically live to a ripe old age. I sincerely hope he does. But the organ you should be concerned about in a presidential race is the brain.
Bearing in mind that nobody ever accused McCain of being a brilliant thinker even in his prime, you should be alert for signs of forgetfulness and confusion. Presidents don’t have to fight or run marathons. They have to absorb and assess a great deal of information, often conflicting information, and they have to form very sound judgments. Unless they are going to be helpless captives of their staff, they have to be well-read and continue to read and to seek information “outside the box.” Otherwise, they are just puppets and don’t know it. Presidents need sharp minds and almost boundless energy.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese442.html