
Finally, here is the final part of The Issues According to McCain’s Website. Indeed, this is my final The Issues According to a Candidate’s Website that I am doing for the US Presidential Primary race. If you missed Part I or Part II, simply follow the links.
Education: After the obligatory mentioning of the importance of education, McCain lists no specific accomplishments or goals in education reform. The language of his thoughts on this issue are very non-specific, but seems to give support to school vouchers and subtle condemnation of teachers’ unions.
School vouchers have the potential to kill public eduction. Private schools are under no obligation to accept students. Naturally, private schools will choose students they believe will perform the best, thus enhancing the prestige of the school. They will also choose students who are low cost, such as students without special needs. Thus the students left in the public system will be disproportionately less qualified and/or have disabilities and/or discipline problems. This would cause public schools to have worse performance records and worse discipline problems. So instead of solving these issues already present in many schools, school vouchers promise to concentrate and amplify these problems. It’s a solution for select children which fails to provide the “equal opportunity” for all children that McCain supposedly champions on this issue.
Did I mention that most private schools are religious and government funding for them is in violation of the First Amendment?
National Security: The subtitle for this issue on McCain’s website is “A Strong Military in a Dangerous World”. Anytime I see someone claiming something is ‘dangerous’, it gets my skeptic sense tingling. Too many times has danger been exaggerated or made up wholesale in order to motivate people to buy certain products, tune-in to certain news shows, or vote certain ways. Sure enough, when listing the threats to America, he puts global terrorism and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the top of his list. As I’ve written about elsewhere, these problems pose relatively minor security risks to United States. He also lists Iran and North Korea is potential threats. Seeing as North Korea is openly hostile to the US and has nuclear technology (albeit primitive), I would agree with him. Iran isn’t far behind North Korea both in terms of hostility and technology.
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