Are you experienced?

There has been quite a bit of winger noise out there the last couple of days telling us that Barack Obama doesn't have the background or experience to be President of these United States.

Sure, he's green but I don't recall any grand examination of W's accomplishments when he ran in 2000. All I recall was that Miserable Failure had run several business ventures into the ground, been handed a baseball team by his father's friends and had put more people to death than any other sitting Governor in the history of the US...and he was only in office for less than 6 years! Nice C.V.

Anyway, one of the talking points I had heard in wingnuttia was that from an election standpoint, Obama was a lightweight as the only person he had bested on a national level was one Alan Keyes for the Illinois Senate seat that Obama currently holds. Now everyone, including the boneheads on the right, agree that Alan Keyes is a wacko , (he was actually roommates with Bill Kristol!!) and never had a chance to beat anyone.

Why then did the GOP prop up Keyes to make Obama's victory such a cake walk? Oh, that's right I had forgotten about this guy. Had you? Jack Ryan was the golden boy of the right until he fell from grace and they had to bring in a stiff like Alan Keyes on in the 11th hour of the campaign.
I mean, c'mon, they even tried to run Ditka for the seat, remember?

Ah, yes, the Grand Old party of Hypocrites...here's an excerpt from Jack Ryan's wikipedia entry:

Campaign demise

Ryan married actress Jeri Ryan in 1991; together they have a son, Alex Ryan. They divorced in 1999 in California, and the records of the divorce were sealed at their mutual request. Five years later, when Ryan's Senate campaign began, the Chicago Tribune newspaper and WLS-TV, the local ABC affiliate, sought to have the records released. Both Ryan and his wife agreed to make their divorce records public, but not make the custody records public, claiming that the custody records could be harmful to their son if released.

On June 22, 2004, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Schnider agreed to release the custody files. In those files, Jeri Ryan alleged that Jack Ryan had taken her to sex clubs in several cities, intending for them to have sex in public.^[1] The decision to release these files generated much controversy because it went against both parents' direct request and because it reversed the earlier decision to seal the papers in the best interest of the child.