2 posts tagged “alaska”

Roger Simon wrote a piece dripping with sarcasm for Politico today.  And I love it.

Focusing on the outcry over the media coverage Sarah Palin has been receiving since the announcement about her taking the Republican VP slot last week, Simon perfectly enunciates what I never could in my severely limited attempts at voicing my opinions:

…On behalf of the elite media, I would like to say we are very sorry.   We have asked questions this week that we should never have asked.  We have asked pathetic questions like: Who is Sarah Palin? What is her record? Where does she stand on the issues? And is she qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency?

…We should stop making with all the questions already. She gave a really good speech. And why go beyond that? As we all know, speeches cannot be written by others and rehearsed for days. They are true windows to the soul.  Unless they are delivered by Barack Obama, that is. In which case, as Palin said Wednesday, speeches are just a “cloud of rhetoric.”

…Sarah Palin wanted the media to report on her teenage son, Track, who enlisted in the Army on Sept. 11, 2007, and soon will deploy to Iraq.  Sarah Palin did not want the media to report on her teenage daughter, Bristol, who is pregnant and unmarried.  Sarah Palin thinks that one is good for her campaign and one is not, and that the media should report only on what is good for her campaign. That is our job, and that is our duty. If that is not actually in the Constitution, it should be. (And someday may be.)

On the other hand, I think that a portion of the coverage Palin has received is unfair.  And, apparently, some of Hillary Clinton’s aides agree with me:

Georgetown University professor Deborah Tannen, who has written best-selling books on gender differences, said she agrees with complaints that Palin skeptics — including prominent voices in the news media — have crossed a line by speculating about whether the Alaska governor is neglecting her family in pursuit of national office.

“What we’re dealing with now, there’s nothing subtle about it,” said Tannen. “We’re dealing with the assumption that child-rearing is the job of women and not men. Is it sexist? Yes.”

“There’s no way those questions would be asked of a male candidate,” said Howard Wolfson a former top strategist for Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Ultimately, I like Palin.  A lot.

But there’s still no way in hell that I’d ever attached my vote to a McCain campaign.  The fact that they managed to find someone to run in the VP position who would do much better headlining the ticket doesn’t change the fact that McCain is a slimeball with nothing better to do than sell Americans out at the domestic level while playing up his foreign policy credentials.  If we’re going to have four more years of mismanaged policy at home, why not put it all in the lap of someone as easy to write-off as Barack Obama?

Barring the possibility of McCain dropping out of the race in the next two months for age-related reasons, I will continue to throw my vote in for a post-Obamalyptic dystopian future where Americans are finally shaken back to reality.

Yeah, it sounds bad, but we have a nasty tendency of finding order only after chaos.  Just look at Carter and his inspiration for Reagan.

Leave it to me to take some stupid references to my father and a 70's Robert Redford flick for me to start getting sentimental, but I guess that's what happens when family comes to visit.

Last night, for some reason my mother and I were discussing Jeremiah Johnson, one of my fathers all-time-favorite movies.   She made some joke about how Dad always kind of envisioned himself as the Jeremiah character.  J, pointing out the obvious, piped in and said that sounded strangely familiar - I'm always fantasizing about being a rugged adventurer somewhere and somehow when, in reality, I'm just some guy with a blog living in Southern California.
And, damnit, J has a point.

To my credit, I feel like I should play the old 'I'm still trying to finish up college' card here.  However, while I'm putting my dreams of adventure on hold for a BA, I'd like to start doing some kind of pre-planning for my future adventures.  That's where this little blog is going to come in.  I'm going to start making posts about potential adventuring in my future.  Possible adventuring could include South American leopard hunting safaris, visiting North Korea while there's still a ridiculously Orwellian communist government in control, or even something as simple as a motorcycle trip across the desert.  No potential adventure is too great or too small for me, here.  It just has to be something that I think I'd be interested in experiencing on some level.

Corey Arnold - Horse and Cat Fisherman

And, to kick things off, I thought I'd offer up a link to a blog post I found today entitled 'How To Be An Alaskan Fisherman.'  It was written by one Corey Arnold, a gentleman who spent a number of years working as a fisherman on the Alaskan coast, starting from scratch and actually moving onto one of those crabbing boats that you see on the Discovery Channel.  If you're at all interested in the hardened life of a modern fisherman in the cold waters of the north Pacific, perhaps you should consider giving his entry a quick read.  The photos, alone, seem like they would warrant a glance from even the most disinterested of readers.

Anyhow, I kind of like the idea of making these 'adventure posts' with some kind of frequency.  Henceforth, they will be known as the 'choose your own adventure' posts.  Assuming that I can dig up enough adventuring to keep myself busy, these might actually become a weekly event.  We'll see how that works out, though, after I've got a few under my belt.  For now, I'd just suggest that you take a look at Corey Arnolds post and close your eyes for a moment to imagine the cold, salty air of the Pacific morn'.