Experience for the Presidency, Bowling, Movie Reviews

Probably the most talked about attribute of our current presidential candidate choices center around the word—experience. Recently Time magazine did a fairly comprehensive study on this aspect of the presidency of the United States and it revealed some interesting stuff. While I personally had never felt it really mattered how much experience the candidates had in politics I have always felt that their willingness to service the people who elect them and their understanding of the presidency itself mattered the most. Since the minimum age to run for the presidency puts people in a somewhat of a mature age bracket I would assume real life experiences at that point would play a major role in their ability to lead and direct the many facets of our government. Now I am sounding a little Pollyanna but I still think that concept has some merit. In the study by Time they designed a graph that illustrated the amount of political experience each of the previous 42 presidents has had, without regard to their outside profession before becoming president. This experience ranged throughout their service in local, state, regional and National service. It is interesting that 10 of our presidents were generals in the armed forces and 3 of those had no political experience before being elected to the presidency. While two of these generals (Jackson and Eisenhower) were rated in the near great list of presidents, in one survey, most were rated in the above average to below average, with none in the failure category. Another interesting observation is that 11 of our presidents served as vice-president before becoming president. The one VP who served the shortest tenure, but became one of the great presidents was Harry S. Truman. Before taking the VP seat he had served 18 years in local government and had a haberdashery business (it failed). When it comes to serving as VP you would think that this would be the ultimate experience influence on being a good president. In some cases it has but in others it has not. Richard Nixon was a vice president but ended up resigning from office and is now rated in the below average, as president, category. He actually did a lot of good things, but his paranoia with the press and the slight of hand dishonesty finally got him. The real irony to all of this experience evaluation of the previous presidents is that the one president who had more experience in public service politics was James Buchanan, with 35 years experience, and he is continually rated the worst president of all time. He even admitted when leaving office that he was a dismal failure and hated the office of the presidency. Now, where does this leave us for the next presidential election when it comes to evaluating the experience of the likely candidates we will have to vote for? For sure we will not be too short changed on the experience side, but does that make them good choices? It appears at this time that we will have the choice of John McCain with 25 years experience, plus he was a prisoner of war for 7 years in Vietnam. Now why that experience is significant I really don’t know, except it does mean that he was willing to serve the country and was a survivor. So, that must mean something. But, I feel that his age when taking office, 72, is really just too much. I am close to the age and I know that my ability to handle the stresses of the most powerful job in the world would be quite a challenge for me. We saw what happened with President Reagan in the latter years of his presidency, he just wasn’t there mentally at times. Mr. Obama considered the spring chicken and least experienced, brings 10 years of public service to the table. On the other hand Hillary Clinton brings 15 years to the table except 8 of those were as the first lady. This will be another first for the country if she receives the nomination and then is elected. Does being the former first lady give her any clout? Depends on how much Mr. Bill confided in her and vice versa. In conclusion, I don’t really think this experience thing means as much as the ability to serve the people, work with the congress and take care of the foreign policy issues of the day. I also feel that having the understanding of the office (as President Truman had) is very important and I am convinced that has been lost by most. Now a days it is the ability to get elected through how much money you can spend on the election and your ability to sway the voters with sometimes useless dialogue. The choices for me in the election are going to be very hard since my guy, Mitt Romney, did not make it. So, good luck and happy voting!!

As I have mentioned in other posts bowling can really suck some time and then some times it really is fun. It just so happens that the past few weeks it has really sucked. Last week we lost to a young couple that turned out to be the weirdest bowling team I have seen to date. The lady of the team was extremely over weight and when she sent the ball down the lane she just walked up to the line and dropped the ball hoping it would stay in the lane and knock some pins down. Most of the time it didn’t do either, it just guttered and she would end up with a 70 or 80 score. On the other hand her husband was good enough to hit 7 strikes in a row and would always pull them out. Long story, we lost 3 of 4. To add insult to injury they did these massive, passionate, deep tongue thrust kisses between each throw of the ball. I am certainly no prude on this subject, but give me a break here. So, on top of kicking our butts they were doing this little sucky face thing right in front of a very conservative bowling group. Then this week we got beat 4 of 4 by our friends who usually don’t bowl that well. However, my partner had a bad ankle and was not on his game. The good news is that we still have two months to pull it out and finish in the top 3.

Movie Reviews: “Witless Protection”, *, This movie is terrible, but I give it one star since the popcorn was fresh and let’s give Larry the Cable Guy a slight break. He was way in over his head and while he is funny on stage with his other red neck friends telling stupid red neck jokes, he just can’t carry a real movie. There were a couple of times that I did laugh at his jokes, but I suggest saving your money or watching it on cable when it comes around. Rated PG-13 for crude and sex-related humor.

“Vantage Point”, *, Man, what a waste of good acting talent(Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt, etc.) and money spent on the production of this movie. It had a great plot, assassination of an American president is always a good one, but this movie failed to make its’ point. In the first place they used a play back of scenes type format that drove you crazy. They played the same scene back and forth 8 times, while it had different aspects of what happened during that sequence it still drove you nuts. It finally got so bad for me that I went to sleep and missed the final 30 minutes. I was told by those that stayed awake that I missed nothing and they envied me for getting some shut eye during a boring movie. If you chose to go see it after this review, Good luck and Good night, since you will probably catch some shut eye. Rated PG-13 for violence, disturbing images and strong language.

greerman