Monday, July 14, 2008

Its a Small World After All

Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama told a group in Georgia this past Tuesday that American's need to learn a foreign language before graduating school. Predictably, the Right jumped all over Senator Obama for this remark. The arguments range from surrendering to illegal immigrants by forcing Americans to learn Spanish to our country to exponentially bigger than Europe so we don't need to learn foreign languages to go from one end of the country to another.

So far all the arguments don't cut it. I have lived in Europe for two years and seen how Americans act when they travel abroad. It is not pretty and can be insulting. We sit back and say that people who come to our country should learn English because that is the (unofficial) language of the United States. However, Americans travel abroad and expect everyone they meet should speak English and are usually catered to. Many times I tried to perfect my German in shops, restaurants, and biergartens only to have to employees reply back in English.

Changing economic fortunes and changes in communications technology have Americans interacting with people from other countries more than ever before. More and more Americans are working for companies based in Japan, Korea, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. American companies such as Chrysler and Anheuser-Bush are owned by European companies. Chances are Americans will need to communicate with their bosses who might like it if their employees learned the language of the company. Internet applications such as Skype allows people to contact anyone around the world for free if you call a computer.

Senator Obama is just saying something I have been saying for years so I have to give him his due. If Obama's idea of teaching foreign languages to American students is all the Right have to attack him on then Senator McCain may be in serious trouble in November. Of course if all the Left has to attack McCain is their version of Swift Boating claiming the Republican nominee was a bad pilot and got special treatment in the Hanoi Hilton while a POW they have problems too but that is a story for another day.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

John McCain and the Right Wing Conspiracy

Don't blame liberal media bias on the publishing of the New York Times article claiming Republican presidential hopeful John McCain had an illicit affair with a lobbyist. There have been claims the NYT had sat on the story, waiting until McCain was clearly the winner of the Republican nomination to attack him. In my opinion, the people who "leaked" where part of Hillary Clinton's vast Right Wing Conspiracy who wanted this information to come out earlier.

The reason this is not a liberal attack is because they would be throwing stones in their glass house. First, Gary Hart's 1988 presidential ambitions were sunk as if the Monkey Business were torpedoed by the Donna Rice affair. By 1992 Bill Clinton was hit with a scandal about an affair with more substantial evidence than the McCain accusation. Hillary Clinton announces she will
"stand by her man" and all was forgiven. Later, the majority of the country said it was none of their business when details of Bill Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky led to the second impeachment of a president in United States history. The American people would probably now "say so what, they all do it." Another reason it could not be the liberals is because the party is currently in a heated battle between factions of the old guard backing Hillary Clinton and new elements who are supporting Barak Obama and are too distracted with each other to start in on McCain.

It is no secret the conservative wing of the Republican Party do not like McCain and wished Mitt Romney or even Mike Huckabee became the party's standard bearer. Unlike the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party, who will hold their nose and support whoever the Democratic nominee is, the right wing would rather see the Republican Party destroyed in order to save it. Unfortunately, the right wing have never been able to tolerate the gray playing field that national politics plays in. To the extreme right you must be 110% conservative or they will have no use for you. Whoever leaked this story probably wanted to discredit McCain so a proper Conservative would gain the nomination. However, the New York Times did not run the story to suit the timetable of this story's architect.