Sorry, but there is a big difference (if you happen to believe in God, which I don’t) in stating that you’re following a plan from God, and hoping that you’re following a plan from God. The film clip I saw was the latter.
As for the books issue, I’ve only seen the one person’s claims, and they said that she asked the librarian about banning books, which Palin later dismissed as a “loyalty test.” The bizarreness of this description alone lends some substance to the claim.
As far as the one hundred years in Iraq, I think the point may be that John McCain sincerely does not recognize that this is never going to be a pacifed nation like Germany or Korea (“never” being “not in the foreseeable future”), whereas Obama does. John McCain is willing to stay there until it is, although he is unwilling to define measurable terms of his envisioned victory. Obama recognizes that there is no such thing as victory possible here and we’d better cut our losses and get the hell out while the Iraqis themselves have a remote chance of saving things from splitting wide open. GWB, through harsh reality as president, has finally had to have the reality driven home to him, but John McCain has not, and still can cling to his idealistic view. If elected, I wonder how many years and how many lives it will take him. I also view with deep fear what these same views will take us into in Iran.
The problem is, we can easily beat these countries. We can squash them flat, by nuking them. But that’s obviously not a way we want to go, and I’m not at all certain we can win any other way, not without making the kinds of sacrifices that Americans are not in the least ready to make. Most Americans today aren’t against the war in Iraq because of principal. They probably have figured out by now that it was morally wrong - that there never were any WMD and that Iraq never had anything to do with 9/11. But they’re against it because it’s costing lives and money, especially the latter unless they have personal connections with the latter. If you’d have asked me six years ago why people would turn against the war eventually, I’d have told you this, because I saw it with Viet Nam. People don’t vote enlightened self-interest, and they certainly don’t vote morality. They vote what they perceive (often incorrectly, as it turns out) to be direct self-interest.
Fortunately for John McCain, they don’t seem to realize that there’s a very real possibility that by the end of a first term we will be involved in not only a third, but even fourth war, both of them bigger than the first two, both entailing huge sacrifice on the part of the American people. First, of course, Iran - bigger than Iraq, and far more unified - they won’t waste much of their time and enery fighting one another. But the real peach of the bunch is Russia. If we put Georgia and Ukraine on the fast track to NATO membership, and Russia then decides it’s really not willing to put up with it, what then? Well, to put it at its simplest, WWIII. I trust Obama to fully exhaust diplomacy in each situation before turning to military options. Can you say the same of McCain? I’m not saying he’s not a good guy. I’m saying he’s a guy who sees military solutions to problems - who despite his horrible experiences still views the military in a very romantic light, guts and glory.
It’s paradoxical. We have two men, one 72 years old and one 47 years old. If all you knew was their ages and their personalities, you would think that Obama was the 72 year old and McCain was the 47 year old.