Palin

The stories are now beginning to come out. They are not good. They make Palin look like a total loser. But it is important to remember that the blame for being so close to becoming president of the United States is not Palin's fault. And the real problem is not by any means the amazing amount of money she spent on clothes - we need to forget that and focus on the important part.

To a substantial degree the fault is John McCain's. He screwed up. Bad. This means he was even LESS qualified to become president than even I thought he was. We can only infer from this that had he been elected, Palin would have been only one of many incompetents placed in positions of power to play games with, to irritate and try to outsmart each other. At least most of those others - cabinet members and department heads would have been subject to approval by congress.

That brings us to that problem referred to earlier: the REAL problem. And that is the constitution itself. It has never known how to handle the vice-president. The founding fathers awarded it to the person who came in second in the election. If that had endured, today Obama would be the president and McCain would be the vice-president. That would not work. Apparently George Washington - first president - and John Adams - first vice-president - did not get along much better than Obama and McCain would. That was taken care of by the 12th Amendment to the Constitution. But the result of it all now has become that the person chosen by his or her party to represent them as their choice for president can simply pluck out of the bucket anyone who strikes their fancy. Hence Palin who did not know the VP did not "run" the Senate, or that Africa was a continent, or . . . well, let's skip the rest!

So, what to do? Well, the whole process is badly screwed up. Neither the president or vice-president of the United States is required to pass any type of mental or physical examination. You can't drive a bus or fly an airplane or practice medicine or be in the military without passing a series of qualifying standardized examinations. So if you should fail any or ALL of those, you could still become president. There is not any kind of a review board who can examine the legal history of the individuals selected by their party to represent them for the most public of all positions.

There is more. A LOT more. But this is a blogpost not a completed paper. Yet it remains for a fact, that no military officer can have any kind of access to nuclear weapons without EXTENSIVE medical, mental, background checks, while the person who might tell them to "bomb, bomb, bomb" some country could just fly in off of a wall if he or she could temporarilly lie to or somehow fool enough people. Plain's problems only serve to shine a bright light on this problem.