A strange thing happened on the road to the White House last week…
Conservative legal scholar, Reagan Solicitor, prominent Republican and John McCain campaign adviser General Charles Fried, endorsed and voted for Barack Obama.
This week, Fried announced that he has voted for Obama-Biden by absentee ballot. In his letter to Trevor Potter, the General Counsel to the McCain-Palin campaign, he asked that his name be removed from the several campaign-related committees on which he serves. In that letter, he said that chief among the reasons for his decision “is the choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis.”
Fried further clarified his reasons for his move to Obama-Biden:
I admire Senator McCain and was glad to help in his campaign, and to be listed as doing so; but when I concluded that I must vote for Obama for the reason stated in my letter, I felt it wrong to appear to be recommending to others a vote that I was not prepared to cast myself. So it was more of an erasure than a public affirmation–although obviously my vote meant that I thought that Obama was preferable to McCain-Palin. I do not consider abstention a proper option.
Fried is listed in a May 6, 2008 press release on John McCain’s web site as a member of the McCain campaign’s steering committee. As late as September 15, 2008, McCain’s campaign had Fried listed as a member of McCain’s Honest and Open Election Committee.
Thanks to our friends at Drinking Liberally in New Milford for the nod on this one.
In other campaign news, salmon fisherman Seth Kantner apologized on behalf of the people of Alaska for inflicting the diva on the lower 48:
I’m an Alaskan — born in an igloo, enjoy whale muktuk, all that — and in case you aren’t sick of our state by now, I’ll start off with an apology for one of our residents: Sarah Palin.
We Alaskans are not generally so magazine-pretty like her, nor are we so confrontational and vapid. Most of us don’t have those peachy cheeks — we have sunburn, windburn and frostbite. Our fingernails are dirty from actually gutting moose, not yakking about it. Our hands are chapped from picking thousands of salmon out of nets, not holding one up for the camera.
Mr. Kantner brushes off Palin’s claim that being mayor gave her the administrative experience to serve as President of the United States:
Tougher in Alaska? Not necessarily. Here most anyone can be dogcatcher, city planner, governor, with little or no experience. That’s one beauty of our state — although, often the only thing keeping it all working is the lubrication provided by obscene amounts of money.
Sitting on this worn-to-the-hide bearskin chair of mine, scribbling, I pause to glance at a month-old newspaper before I stuff it in the stove. Lo! — there’s yet another photo of Gov. Palin; she’s sitting in a glass office in Anchorage, with a bearskin, too, draped across the back of her expensive couch. Sarah’s wearing heels. The bear’s wearing a fake head with a plastic snarl. In the foreground on a glass table crouches something with pincers — a taxidermied king crab!
I’ll have to show this photo to my Eskimo friends I grew up with. We simply never contemplated such wanton unAlaskanness. Why not eat the damn thing? We ate this bear I’m sitting on, including the paws and jaw and fat — some of which we ate raw; some got rendered for piecrusts.
It’s worth reading the whole piece.
Eight days and counting, er, my friends.