McCain's Speech

Sep 05, 2008 07:15

Is it just me, or did anyone else almost feel sorry for McCain and the fact that his moronic audience would not let him deliver his speech effectively? A handful of protesters made their way in there and the audience seemed to think that the "USA! USA! USA!" chant was the way to deal with them, but that was also the way they dealt with everything they heard, whether they were drowning out a protester, or they were drowning out McCain.

I mean, I had high hopes that some clever protester would infiltrate the sound system and have McCain rickrolled (that would have been just so awesome), but the audience upset McCain's rhythm much more than a rickroll ever would have.

Where McCain actually was able to get some substance out (which wasn't much), here are two places that stand out to me:

1. "We lost their trust when instead of freeing ourselves from a dangerous dependence on foreign oil, both parties -- and Sen. Obama -- passed another corporate welfare bill for oil companies. We lost their trust when we valued our power over our principles."

I don't know WTF he was talking about here. He seemed to be taking part of the blame and then suddenly laying it at the feet of Obama. Anybody know what bill he's talking about here? Or was he just talking out of his ass, or did the audience upset his rhythm so much that he lost his place on the teleprompter? This came out very sloppy--I'm not sure it came out as intended.

2. "We're going to stop sending $700 billion a year to countries that don't like us very much, and some of that money... [audience, for some reason, chooses this time to go wild, as if the GOP doesn't share the blame for this one or that the Democrats haven't been saying as much forever and a day] ... We'll attack -- we'll attack the problem on every front. We'll produce more energy at home. We will drill new wells off-shore, and we'll drill them now. We'll drill them now. We'll -- we'll -- my friends, we'll build more nuclear power plants. We'll develop clean-coal technology. We'll increase the use of wind, tide, solar, and natural gas. We'll encourage the development and use of flex-fuel, hybrid and electric automobiles. Sen. Obama thinks we can achieve energy independence without more drilling and without more nuclear power. But Americans know better than that."

Well, some Americans don't know better than that, including this one. Senator McCain, perhaps graduating near the bottom of your class at the US naval academy didn't prepare you to understand the complexities of something like nuclear power. But, and I say this as a former nuclear power engineer in the US navy that graduated near the top of his nuclear power training classes, the only thing you understand about nuclear power that exceeds the knowledge of George W. Bush is how to pronounce "nuclear" (and thank you for that--truthfully, truthfully--thank you for that). The notion of expanding nuclear power in the ways you say simply lacks a connection to reality. There aren't enough qualified people to operate these plants, there isn't enough raw material to collect and there aren't enough qualified construction companies (and the qualified companies are full-up doing other things) necessary to put 45 nuclear power plants in service within a decade or even three decades. And that's assuming we can come to some political consensus about nuclear waste disposal, and no, Yucca Mountain is not the answer, even if you could get the local NIMBY folks to roll over (which would be a political miracle in and of itself).

Stop talking about nuclear power. It won't work, not on the timescale required for the problems we face. Worse yet, it would constitute a diversion of the critical resources required to make other plans work, such as wind and solar and geothermal power. We cannot do all of these things. We need to prioritize early and focus, and if that focus and priority falls on nuclear, oil, and coal, then wind and solar will simply never happen, and moreover progress will be too slow for nuclear to solve the problem in time (unless something really ridiculous happens, and we start to embrace real conservation and efficiency programs that slow down the rate of load demand growth).

Anyway, the first thing up there, I don't know what he was talking about, and the second thing is nothing new. My primary reaction to McCain's speech is the part the audience played in not understanding how to be spoken to, and how they pretty much ruined any skillful presentation of ideas that McCain might have been capable of by throwing off his rhythm at every turn (and don't try to blame that on the protesters--the protesters were miniscule compared to the moronic audience when it comes to throwing McCain off his game).
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