Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Hillary or Barak?

We've seen a lot of TV news snips from the US over the past couple of weeks about the Democrat's pre-selection process to choose their presidential candidate. The main focus here has been on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Amongst Mr Obama's fans is the TV personality Oprah Winfrey. I rarely watch her because she seems so... - well she seems so obtuse. But I did see her the other day endorsing Mr Obama. She reckoned she was backing him not because he was black, but because she believed he was the best man for the job. That was the limit of her reasoning.

Unfortunately the also black Ms Winfrey has a lamentable record when it comes to picking the best persons for jobs. It was only a few months ago that some of the people she'd approved to be in charge of her charitable foundation's school for young black women in South Africa turned out to be sexual predators.

I don't think Ms Winfrey has elaborated on Mrs Clinton's revelation that in the past Mr Obama used to be a lawyer for a slum landlord. Perhaps it was because he urgently responded that he only did it for a short time?

Mrs Clinton has demonstrated in the past that she has strong social ideals. One of them has been to establish a universal health care system for all Americans. That sounds like a good idea. I checked Mr Obama's website. He's also expressed that same sort of thing in the past. So they've both had good ideas.

A major ambition of Mrs Clinton's is to initiate an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq. Last year Mr Obama spent time on trying to reduce the number of suicides by US service personnel in Iraq. No criticisms there.

Mrs Clinton has a website too. It seems flashier than Mr Obama's. More spin perhaps? I noticed in my superficial inspection that she wants to make life better for America's 'middle class.' So much for the notion of America being a classless society.

I quite like the idea of a woman president for the US, but then I think of what Mrs Thatcher in the UK was like. One of the worst war mongers of all time.

But if I was part of the voting process I would have to go for Mrs Clinton. She's better looking than Mr Obama and there's a really nice official photo of her on her website. She looks so young for her age.

The way to quickly find both candidates on Google is to put the word 'homepage' after their names. Then you can explore their utterances to your heart's content before you make your own subjective decision.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

When there are multiple image links in some of my original essays, it might be easier to explore them by simply going direct to the cache at my Panoramio website. Most of them have a brief description and link back to the relevant essay. All the images can be enlarged even more by clicking them.

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!