Letters concerning the presidential campaign: Obama is this reader's choice

Letters concerning the presidential campaign: Obama is this reader's choice



Bob Fliegel
St. Augustine
Publication Date: 11/02/08


Editor: I will vote against McCain-Palin, which requires me to vote for Obama-Biden. Four principal reasons:

1) McCain would perpetuate Bush's jingoism and propensity for preemptive military intervention. Having decided that high-level talks with radical or rogue regime leaders are inevitably ineffective at best, appeasing at worst, he would give short shrift to diplomacy and containment, seeking instead futile, alienating, and costly military solutions to age-old and intransigent ethnic and cultural conflicts.

I say, no more American blood and treasure for regime changes in nations the threat from which is tenuous or, to force feed unreceptive nations with Jeffersonian democracy.

2) McCain is wound too tight. He's temperamentally unsuited to be our commander-in-chief.

3) Sarah Palin. No amplification is necessary.

4) My personal contact with Captain McCain in 1981, when he was the Navy's Senate liaison officer and I, the executive assistant to the Navy's director of international security assistance, echoes reason two. I found him an arrogant, dismissive, and volatile churl then and have seen no change for the better in recent years.

An Obama landslide may well result in a filibuster-proof (and runaway?) Democrat/liberal majority in the Congress. So be it.

I will chance that rather than be part of the electorate that could put McCain in the White House.

Bob Fliegel

St. Augustine


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