The Red and Black

Issue date: 6/19/08 Section: Opinions

JEREMY LEE

I'd like to clarify and/or expand on several of the points Mr. Wilson made in his opinion piece in last week's edition of The Red & Black.

The National Journal did rank Obama as the most liberal senator of 2007. That's a fact.

What Wilson failed to add was John McCain's ranking as a conservative senator in the same National Journal findings. Sadly, they were unable to assign McCain a ranking because he missed more than half of the votes on economic and foreign policy matters.

Ouch. At least my candidate comes to play.

Wilson painted a grim picture in regards to Obama's stance on Illinois' Induced Infant Liability Act. He claimed that the bill would have provided "life-saving medical care to babies" who survived abortion.

The fact is that this measure did no such thing.

It simply guaranteed the parent's right to sue the doctor/hospital on the baby's behalf for damages stemming from the medical care the newborn would be receiving. Babies in these circumstances were always receiving medical care, and Obama never sought to deny that care.

If you thought Wilson's attempt to paint Obama as a baby killer didn't pass the smell test, you'd be right. It does not.

For all of McCain's experience, why was he unable to see the same dangers and issue the same caveats Obama gave during the build-up to the Iraq war?

What is his experience worth if he can't use it to help prevent a meaningless war built on, at best, false information?

I'll take the candidate who had the judgment to stand up against this war, especially when it was viewed as political suicide to do so.

To address another of Wilson's questions about Obama's credentials, why is Barack Obama qualified to talk about Iraq after an 880-day break between visits?

Maybe it's because visits to Iraq have nothing to do with one's interpretation of the facts on the ground.

Just ask McCain. After so many visits, he still doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims. He needed Al Gore's one-time running mate Joseph Lieberman to correct him on which faction Iran was training.

In this month alone, McCain has publicly misstated the number of troops we have on the ground and just last week posited that it didn't matter how long our troops stayed in Iraq.

If visits to Iraq were what mattered, McCain would surely be better prepared than Obama to discuss the situation. But his ignorance of the Middle East situation proves there's more to it than that.

Finally, nice jab on the military experience. I wasn't aware that military service was a prerequisite for the Presidency. Someone should have told George W. Bush.

- Jeremy Lee is an a 2005 alumnus, who majored in mathematics.

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