A First Lady we can be proud of!

 

 

As voters continue to question whether one lady is proud of her Country, we must question which lady would our Country be proud of.

 

Ask not what your Country should have done for you,

 but what have you done for your Country.

 “I saw the bodies along the roadside.” Checkpoints were manned by 12- and 13-year-olds with AK-47s. “The kids were drinking — bottles of Guinness, I remember. They would point their guns at you. They wanted money. We paid.” Along the way, she picked up several abandoned young people, later turned over to the care of an Irish charity.

“You could see the chaos, hear the shots, hear the screaming. You could smell it.” What, I asked her, could you smell? “The smell of death,” she replied.”

“I remember having to step over the decomposing body of an infant, covered with white powder, lime I guess, to get into one building.” The field hospital covered four acres. McCain’s team provided primary care for sick and frightened refugees, many of them suffering from dehydration.

 None of her relief work has been done for political consumption or Washington prominence. On the contrary, it has been an alternative life to the culture of the capital — the rejection of the normal progress of a senator’s wife. “It is not about me — it never has been. I felt it was important — that I had to do it. I never took government money. It was my own, and I am not ashamed of it.”

Below is the complete article I read while having coffee in a quite café in Bozeman Montana.  “This is the First Lady” I would be proud to follow.

David Hernandez

www.declinetostatevoter.org

A Quiet Humanitarian

By Michael Gerson
Wednesday, July 23, 2008; A15

KIGALI, Rwanda — Cindy McCain’s first visit to this country, in 1994, was during the high season of roadblocks and machetes and shallow graves.

Following a call for help from Doctors Without Borders, McCain had assembled a medical team with the intention of setting up a mobile hospital in Rwanda.

Arriving by private plane in mid-April, a couple of weeks into the massacres, she realized that the chaos made deploying her team impossible.

 At the airport, she paid for the use of a truck and set out for Goma in then-Zaire, where hundreds of thousands of refugees were also headed.

“I never saw anyone harmed,” McCain recalls, “but I saw the bodies along the roadside.” Checkpoints were manned by 12- and 13-year-olds with AK-47s. “The kids were drinking — bottles of Guinness, I remember. They would point their guns at you. They wanted money. We paid.” Along the way, she picked up several abandoned young people, later turned over to the care of an Irish charity.

“You could see the chaos, hear the shots, hear the screaming. You could smell it.” What, I asked her, could you smell? “The smell of death,” she replied.

Arriving across the border in Goma, in what is now Congo, McCain found cholera victims stacked beside the road “like highway barriers.” “I remember having to step over the decomposing body of an infant, covered with white powder, lime I guess, to get into one building.” The field hospital covered four acres. McCain’s team provided primary care for sick and frightened refugees, many of them suffering from dehydration. For nearly a month, McCain organized deliveries of food and water for the operation, collecting supplies at the Goma airport.

“I have never seen anything like it before,” she says, “and never since. . . . When I came home, I couldn’t put it into words for my husband.”

The rushing return of these memories came on Cindy McCain’s first visit to Rwanda since the genocide. In the shadow of Barack Obama’s world tour, McCain joined a bipartisan delegation — including former Senate majority leaders Bill Frist and Tom Daschle — organized by the ONE Campaign, a group that advocates for the fight against global poverty and disease. (I am also involved in the efforts of ONE.)

McCain came back to a very different Rwanda — peaceful, well governed, and making, with American help, some of the most rapid progress in the history of public health.

“What has struck me,” says McCain, “is that most people are reconciling. A woman I met was gang-raped [during the genocide], her throat was slit, she lost her whole family, but was willing to forgive. The reason this will be a successful country is the women — some of the strongest, most inspiring women I have ever met.”

Given her history of humanitarianism, these adjectives might be associated with McCain herself. The election of her husband would also bring to the White House an adventurous, traveled, intriguingly fearless first lady. Over the years, McCain has taken medical services to a Sandinista stronghold after Nicaragua’s civil war; set up a mobile hospital near Kuwait City while the oil wells still burned from the Persian Gulf War; helped in Bangladesh after a cyclone. And while in that country in 1991 she found her daughter Bridget in an orphanage — “She really picked me,” McCain insists. Sometimes the desire to save every child is properly concentrated on a single child.

Like most of Cindy McCain’s life, these stories are generally hidden behind a wall of well-tailored reticence. She values the privacy of her family and resents the intrusiveness of the media. None of her relief work has been done for political consumption or Washington prominence. On the contrary, it has been an alternative life to the culture of the capital — the rejection of the normal progress of a senator’s wife. “It is not about me — it never has been. I felt it was important — that I had to do it. I never took government money. It was my own, and I am not ashamed of it.”

But all this would have political consequences in a McCain administration. Even if a first lady is not intrusively political, the whole White House responds to her priorities. Cindy McCain has had decades of personal contact with the suffering of the developing world. And in some future crisis or genocide, it might matter greatly to have a first lady who knows the smell of death.

michaelgerson@cfr.org

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dennis Prager on McCain

Why I Support John McCain
Dennis Prager
Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Last week, a conservative magazine reported that I would not vote for John McCain for president. The magazine based its claim on a column I had written in May 2007 about why I could not support John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination.

The magazine was wrong. Though I did not support Sen. McCain in the Republican primaries, the moment he became the presumptive Republican candidate I endorsed him wholeheartedly for president of the United States. Having not been a supporter from the outset, perhaps my endorsement of John McCain will carry more weight among conservatives who are still undecided about whether to vote for John McCain.

My bottom line is this: The gulf between John McCain and conservatives is miniscule compared to the gulf between John McCain and Barack Obama. This is true regarding virtually every issue of significance to America. The America that a President Barack Obama would shape, with the help of a Democratic Congress and a liberal Supreme Court, would be very dissimilar from the America shaped by a President John McCain.

Conservatives who will not vote for McCain are well-intentioned utopians. They are comparing McCain to a consistently conservative candidate. The reality, however, is that McCain is not running against a consistently conservative candidate. He is running against a consistently left-wing candidate. And America cannot afford to have its first leftist president ever. It can afford liberal presidents — such as Bill Clinton, or Jimmy Carter (who governed as a liberal but became a leftist after leaving the White House), or John F. Kennedy, or Lyndon Johnson, or Harry Truman — i.e., all the Democrats who have been president since World War II. But the Democratic Party has moved well to the left of liberalism. And Barack Obama is at the left of that left-wing party.

Furthermore, given the strong possibility of a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate, and a liberal Supreme Court for decades to come, given the number of Supreme Court appointments a Democratic president will be able to make, an Obama victory will move America more radically leftward than ever in its history.

That is why the argument that an Obama administration will be so destructive that Americans will reject the left and then elect a real conservative to undo the damage done in an Obama presidency is deeply flawed.

First of all, other than impeachment, there is no way to undo Supreme Court appointments, two or three of which a President Obama would likely make. And given how active most liberal judges are, it won’t matter much if the country has some conservative epiphany and then elects a Republican president and Congress. Because even if the Congress and the president will not pass liberal legislation, a liberal Supreme Court will. On almost any social issue that matters — the right to bear arms, late-term abortion, the definition of marriage, capital punishment, and many others — a liberal Supreme Court will rule on these issues, and there will be nothing that a post-Obama Republican president, even with a Republican congress, will be able to do about them.

Moreover, the argument that Americans will have a conservative epiphany after four years of an Obama presidency is predicated on America being greatly damaged by his policies. What kind of mindset welcomes such damage to the country it loves for the sake of potentially gaining politically after the damage is done? Is it, for example, really worth a considerably weakened economy (which Barack Obama’s tax and other economic policies would likely lead to), with its widespread suffering and unforeseeable social and political consequences, just to — hopefully — get a conservative into the White House four or eight years later?

And the damage won’t necessarily be undone. Even Ronald Reagan, the most popular conservative to ever serve as president, could not roll back most liberal creations. He never could get rid of the useless Department of Education, for example. Nor could a then-popular President George W. Bush do a thing about Social Security even when he had a Republican House and Senate. And how will Barack Obama’s successor undo the damage done to Iraq, the Middle East, the War on Islamic Terror, and the credibility of America’s assurances to allies once Iraq slides into chaos as a result of America’s precipitous withdrawal from Iraq?

 

Therefore, as well meaning and sincere as many conservatives are, this mode of thinking — let the country suffer under a left-wing president, Congress, and Supreme Court and then it will come to its conservative senses — will likely lead to a downward spiral from which it is hard to see the country escaping for a generation, if it is lucky.

There is one person who can prevent this unhappy future — John McCain.

He will not raise taxes, the last thing we should be doing in a weakened economy.

He will reduce government spending, and thereby prevent the state from controlling even more of American life.

He will ensure that America wins in Iraq. That will make one of the biggest and richest Arab states the freest of the Arab states. And it will hand Islamic terrorists the biggest defeat they have ever suffered. It will teach potential enemies not to attack America (whether Iraq did so directly is irrelevant to the point). And it will reassure America’s allies around the world, many of whom, as in Iraq, risk their lives for America and liberty, that America will never abandon them.

He will appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court and to federal benches, thereby depriving the left of its most powerful weapon in reshaping America in its image.

He may attract enough Hispanic votes (while securing the borders) to prevent that critical constituency from identifying with the Democratic Party, something that would ensure left-wing victories for decades to come.

He will develop nuclear power, environmentalist (read leftist) opposition to which has been morally indefensible. We would all love to have a solar powered or wind powered country. However, on planet earth at this time, nuclear power may be the cleanest source of energy we have. That is why France, not heretofore known as politically conservative, relies on nuclear power for nearly 80 percent of its electricity.

However noble their intentions, conservatives who do not vote for John McCain will be morally complicit in what happens to America during an Obama presidency.