John McCain elected president in 2000

Chaos theory (or rather, "unstable problems" as my ODE and PDE textbooks put it) basically boils down to "small things can have an unexpectedly large effect". However large things will still generally have much larger effects on the system. So, minor human activities can, practically speaking, be ignored most of the time. It still makes it impossible to solve weather (it's an ill-posed problem), but for the purposes of AH, it can be more fun to imagine things turning out basically as OTL. That's pretty plausible, too (well, depending. If your POD is a giant asteroid hitting the Earth in 1620, all bets are off).

EDIT: Back to McCain, I was only 11 when that was going on so I don't have much of substance to add. I didn't like 2008 McCain much, though (OTOH, I didn't actually listen or watch him much, either).
 
Chaos theory (or rather, "unstable problems" as my ODE and PDE textbooks put it) basically boils down to "small things can have an unexpectedly large effect". However large things will still generally have much larger effects on the system. So, minor human activities can, practically speaking, be ignored most of the time. It still makes it impossible to solve weather (it's an ill-posed problem), but for the purposes of AH, it can be more fun to imagine things turning out basically as OTL. That's pretty plausible, too (well, depending. If your POD is a giant asteroid hitting the Earth in 1620, all bets are off).

EDIT: Back to McCain, I was only 11 when that was going on so I don't have much of substance to add. I didn't like 2008 McCain much, though (OTOH, I didn't actually listen or watch him much, either).

It's hard for many younger people to imagine. But frankely, you can take all the racism, fear, and hyperbole of the post 9/11 Bush Administration world and divide it by half to get what it was life being a young (10 years old in 1990) person growing up in the 90s. Frankly, in my opinion, regardkess of politics, we were much more civil then. And ABSOLUTELY NO ONE CALLES FOR THE ASSASINATION of political figures. (He actually did three tours, but the U.S. government forgote he was there on his third. Which is another whole issue. But obviously, there are paid advocacy groups, or were paid advocasy groups, proclaiming that was impossible, and his third tour was a myth. But anyways, I belive a man who won the silver star and presidential unit citation over others. Anyways..)

Bush caused this. In a McCain wins in 2000 world, I can pretty much (at least from my own perspectiver) assure that the higly acrimonious politics of today would not have survived the Bush transisation if McCain were in charge. He's too decent for the cheap (You're not a real American) politics that places my two tours in Vietnam father outside of real American in modern day Conservatisvism.
 
Last edited:
I'm of the post-CW generation, but I think that the US is in a transitional stage right now. While politics may not be as civil as the 90's, it's not a replay of the 60's either.
 
Would McCain have responded to the USS Cole attacK?

What if he sent some more Tomahawks and at least some Special Forces operations against Al Quaida fo attacking the USS Cole?

9/11 attacks still happen, but US war on terorr is already heating up.
 
Top