For instance, one of the recent headlines that continues to run across the network tickers is Barack Obama’s visit to Europe and the Middle East — to boost his foreign policy credentials.

Exactly how does visiting heads-of-state, for mere hours, boost ones credentials?  Remember, these are the same officials that never drive themselves, use their own Blackberry’s or ride the very public transportation that they champion at election time — let alone breath the same air as hoi polloi.

In fact, I have spent the last year living and working in Korea and Taiwan yet I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on anything but the ability to find the nearest washroom (and McDonalds).

Thus, what about the foreign policy credentials of backpackers, retirees, businessmen and other expats who at least lived with and regularly dialogued with the local taxpayers?   If Obama or McCain visited a nuclear power plant for an hour, do they receive a engineering bump and are now capable of  designing reactor cores?  Dare one relish the day when the politicos visit a brain surgeon or OBGYN?

See also: The Rise of the Imperial Class

A basic logic lesson and please forgive me if you think I’m talking down to you. I’m really not. It’s just that I’m shocked at how many people, including McCain, don’t seem to get logic. If I say, “All crows are black” and I also say, “That bird is a crow,” then I’m saying that that bird is black even if I don’t say so explicitly.

On ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on Sunday, April 20, John McCain called William Ayers “an unrepentant terrorist.” What was McCain’s evidence? McCain said that Ayers “was engaged in bombings which could have or did kill innocent people…” So McCain is saying that someone who engages in bombings which could have killed or did kill innocent people is a terrorist.

Now consider what McCain did. McCain flew a bomber, an A-4E Skyhawk, over North Vietnam. I don’t know whether he actually dropped his bombs before being shot down. But certainly he was engaged in actions that, if he had succeeded, could have killed innocent people. Which makes McCain, in his own words, a terrorist.

Now McCain could argue that that’s different because, as he said elsewhere in the interview, “I had a reconciliation with the Vietnamese, when we normalized relations.” Did he apologize to them? He didn’t say. If he did, that would make him a “repentant terrorist.” Too bad Stephanopoulos didn’t challenge him.

But the remarks [by Rev. Jeremiah Wright] that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

Pure PC piffle. As for the rest of the speech, eh, not so bad. As Jesse Walker noted,

If you don’t have a friend — a real friend, someone who means something to you and sometimes influences your decisions — who occasionally expresses a nutty opinion (”The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color”) or an impolitic truth (”a country and a culture controlled by rich white people”), then you really, really need to get out more.