I Politico

devastating

2011-12-27T23:28:00.001-05:00

Two of the most effective attack ads of the campaign so far. The first from the Ron Paul Campaign and the other from Restore Our Future, a super PAC.

endorsements

2011-12-18T03:54:00.002-05:00

-The Des Moines Register-

Sobriety, wisdom and judgment. Those are qualities Mitt Romney said he looks for in a leader. Those are qualities Romney himself has demonstrated in his career in business, public service and government. Those qualities help the former Massachusetts governor stand out as the most qualified Republican candidate competing in the Iowa caucuses.
Sobriety: While other candidates have pandered to extremes with attacks on the courts and sermons on Christian values, Romney has pointedly refrained from reckless rhetoric and moralizing. He may be accused of being too cautious, but choosing words carefully is a skill essential for anyone who could be sitting in the White House and reacting to world events.
Wisdom: Romney obviously is very smart. He graduated as valedictorian at Brigham Young University and finished in the top 5 percent in his MBA class at Harvard, where he also earned a law degree. Romney also exhibits the wisdom of a man who listened and learned from his father and his mother, from his church and from his own trials and errors in life. He does not lack self confidence, but he is not afraid to admit when he has been wrong.
Judgment: Romney disagrees with Democrats on most issues, but he offers smart and well-reasoned alternatives rather than simply proposing to swing a wrecking ball in Washington. He is a serious student of public policy who examines the data before making a decision. His detailed policy paper on the economy contains 87 pages of carefully crafted positions on taxes, energy, trade and regulatory policy, complete with 127 footnotes.

Rebuilding the economy is the nation’s top priority, and Romney makes the best case among the Republicans that he could do that.
He stands out in the current field of Republican candidates. He has solid credentials in a career that includes running and starting successful businesses, turning around the 2002 Winter Olympics and working with both political parties as Massachusetts governor to pass important initiatives. He stands out especially among candidates now in the top tier: Newt Gingrich is an undisciplined partisan who would alienate, not unite, if he reverts to mean-spirited attacks on display as House speaker.

This ability to see the merits of tough issues from something other than a knee-jerk, ideological perspective suggests that Mitt Romney would be willing to bridge the political divide in Washington. Americans are desperate for the Republicans and Democrats to work together. His record of ignoring partisan labels to pass important legislation when he was governor of Massachusetts suggests he is capable to making that happen. - The Des Moines Register editors

the bad Newt

2011-12-13T03:54:00.000-05:00

I have a confession to make. I have been on the Newt Gingrich mailing list from the beginning and I will remain so if only to keep tabs on what he's up to. I've been on the mailing list since he founded "American Solutions" several years ago. I've always regarded him a conservative visionary but I realize now that I was not fully aware of the full spectrum of both good and "bad" Newt. And we are certainly seeing the bad Newt now, and in spades.

Throwing Paul Ryan under the bus should have been the first sign of trouble but in general I gave him a mulligan on that. (Such charity I would later learn to regret.) Gingrich grandiosely declared Paul Ryan's forward looking and visionary way of saving Medicare "right wing social engineering" when apparently he needed to cater to what he imagined was a left leaning audience. He later quasi- backed off that statement. Whatever.

His latest attack on Romney is what pushes me well over the edge and even if I had one foot ever in his camp I cannot now.

In response to Romney's idea that perhaps Gingrich should give back the tax payer money he earned when he was profiting essentially off of what led to the financial crisis by peddling his DC influence to Freddie Mac, Gingrich called for Romney to return, one wonders to whom, the money he made from reconstituting companies in the private sector while a member of Bain Capital. Clearly this is the line of attack that those on the left have lamely adopted on countless occasions. Gingrich seems to have let on that he's at least willing to use the rhetoric of the left when he feels threatened. Such vanity is not an endearing quality.

With one sentence I think Newt may have jumped the shark. With no real memory of 90's politics and giving him a break on the throwing of Paul Ryan under the bus I was buying into the Potemkin village version of Newt, the facade. I was mistaken and naive.

We can only hope the rest of the party catches on before it's too late.

whatever weapon comes to hand

2011-12-13T03:14:00.000-05:00

differences

2011-12-13T03:05:00.002-05:00

collectivist

2011-12-09T05:07:00.001-05:00

Some of my left leaning friends have done their best to dissemble and disavow the term collectivist vis a vis President Obama but I'm seeing a certain philosophical approach being applied here:

"I am here to say they are wrong [advocates of free market capitalism]. I'm here in Kansas to reaffirm my deep conviction that we're greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules. " - Barack Obama 12/6/11

Unlike maybe some others I'm not discarding the above Obama quote as meaningless rhetoric. I take it seriously as statement of his worldview. I think it's clear that the most charitable way to describe the political philosophy of Barack Obama is collectivism.

All of this is within the broader context of an enduring point of mine. For the sake of clarity, I'd like those on the political left to own their own political philosophy as robustly as the right does. Rather than running away from a label, own it. People on the right are striving to be able to call themselves conservatives, and in some cases like with Mitt Romney with limited success are they even allowed to claim that mantle. Meanwhile on the left most, certainly amongst my friends, consider themselves centrists or moderates somehow. My father who hails from England has the courage to proudly call himself a socialist. I can respect that. At least I know where the man stands even if he can't tolerate much debate with me, but that's another (regrettable) matter. In this country, liberals don't want to be called liberals, and to even come close to considering any American politician other than Bernie Sanders a socialist is considered beyond the pale by the mainstream left. Which is why I'm trying to see if anyone on the left, anyone, will admit that the term collectivist applies. It's the most mild term I can possibly think of to describe a certain political worldview currently at odds with the advocates of free market capitalism. But I find it telling that even that has to be rejected. It speaks to what ostensibly seems like at least a reticence if not an outright fear to actually advocate the worldview that most of modern left leaning rhetoric seems to emulate.

fed's failed war on drugs

2011-12-01T10:26:00.001-05:00

baked in the cake

2011-11-13T03:44:00.001-05:00

defining moment

2011-11-11T03:59:00.001-05:00

Uber political strategist Dick Morris called this Mitt Romney's "defining moment". I call it the moment he makes a liberal's head explode. Others have noted that the question was "right in his wheelhouse". And then some, I would add. Just imagine what it might be like to have a President who understands how business works.

the cain mutiny

2011-11-09T01:47:00.002-05:00

Is the Herman Cain sexual harassment saga a complicated conspiracy or is it Occam's razor where "the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one"? Maybe it's both. The simplest explanation is perhaps to understand that there is at least some element of truth to the allegations. But the timing or something intangible about the whole situation sets off the desire to want to at least entertain conspiracy theories. So long as we are all doing that there are at least three possible conspiracy scenarios that I can think of:

Scenario 1: The story was planted by Democrats and it's the liberal media's natural inclination to want to run hard with the story because for various reasons some having to do with race and how Cain does not fit the stereotypical way the left imagines a black man should act, that this is somehow a boon to Democratic/left leaning fortunes and then therefor this is Democratic party doing with the happy participation of a liberal mainstream media already pre-disposed to want to trash Cain. Perhaps you can tell my delivery that I don't put all that much stock into this explanation which has typically been advanced by right wing talk radio and lately, by the campaign itself. As has been pointed out by some of my left leaning friends, it just doesn't seem to be in the Obama campaign's and then therefore Democrat's best interests to try to torpedo the Cain candidacy this early and in the primary.

Scenario 2: The story was planted by GOP operatives in either the Perry or Romney campaigns or from another primary candidate's campaign or possibly by other murkier forces in the GOP "establishment" that don't want Cain as the nominee for whatever reason possibly but not likely having to do with race but that he is ultimately seen as either unelectable on his own or seen as unable to beat Obama in the general election. While this scenario seems more likely than scenario 1, I still don't buy it. Initially the Cain campaign accused the Perry campaign of planting the story with basically no proof and then the Perry campaign went on to reflexively point the finger of blame at the Romney campaign with absolutely no proof. This kind of stuff isn't exactly helpful to a GOP who should rather be focussed on matters of substance/ attacking Obama. In the last two weeks the Cain campaign has backed off of these type of fellow GOP accusations and instead gone with a narrative closer to scenario 1.

Let me preface with a warning to whoever it is behind this if it is a conspiracy to bring down Cain: You better be sure this doesn't backfire. While watching some highlights of the Cain press conference it occurred to me that this entire controversy has in a way made him seem more presidential. This press conference today was one of the most anticipated press conferences and media events probably of the presidential campaign so far.

Scenario 3: The story was planted by the Cain campaign itself or at least.... forces sympathetic to the campaign. Think about it, who stands to gain the most if all of these charges are proven to be false or somehow go away or Cain can somehow otherwise brush this off? The answer of course is Cain. This could be a downright Machiavellian masterstroke of political genius if there's even a shred of truth or validity to this theory assuming it works out. The public would naturally rally around a man so egregiously and wrongly accused.

I'm sure there are other possible conspiracy scenarios that are conceivable other than simply saying the main is guilty so believe what you will but the bottom line is that I now see a pathway for Herman Cain towards getting the nomination whereas before this entire controversy it never really existed.

mutually assured destruction

2011-11-04T03:29:00.001-04:00

The Romney campaign would be well advised to begin creating ads that highlight the countless times Obama has had a wholesale change of position on any issue. They could start here.

trouncing a room of liberals

2011-11-04T01:38:00.001-04:00

"We do not want more stasis in our education system"

In this video Paul Ryan trounces a round table of liberal pundits and governors with his sheer policy knowledge and optimistic, quintessentially American vision. I'm glad that as the general election campaign chairman he is not allowed to endorse anyone in the GOP presidential nomination process. He won't have to have his conservatism questioned for endorsing who I suspect he would endorse.

proxies

2011-11-04T00:59:00.003-04:00

In the coming weeks and months team Obama and its minions will be trying just whatever they can to vilify Mitt Romney. The Washington Post highlights all the misleading information contained within just one ad in the venomous attack ad blitz to come from Obama proxies. Then there's this New York Times article about how other Obama proxies are trying to fire up the liberal base by enraging them over what they infer to be Romney's stance on a theoretical personhood amendment. Thankfully the article goes on to explain that this too is basically a dishonest attack. If this is to be the case for the general election it will redound to Romney's benefit. All he will really need to do in that case is keep talking about the economy and things that matter and let Obama and his proxies use the kitchen sink strategy of character assassination in a desperate attempt to bring up any other issue than the main issues of the day on which they have no standing, i.e. the economy and jobs. Voters will see who is interested in talking about what and vote accordingly.

stirring up mindlessness

2011-07-15T02:41:00.018-04:00

Nothing being proposed would effect the person featured in this ad. AARP is using member dues for this patently absurd ad which desperately tries to drum up a general kind of mindless fear that AARP hopes will scare voters into being against ever tackling the matter of entitlement reform. Anyone with any common sense can see that it may be time to raise the retirement age, for example, amongst a wide bonanza of other reform theories. Every economist acknowledges that these programs are on a collision course with financial ruination and/or are unsustainable in their current form and therefor need to be somehow restructured. I would think this to be elementary. And I'm not aware of a single proposal that would effect current beneficiaries. To imagine that they are the target as this ad does is just laughable. The AARP should be ashamed of its own unhelpful posture on this issue.

in the real world

2011-07-01T02:12:00.002-04:00

shell game

2010-12-19T01:39:00.007-05:00

Proponents of Obamacare often like to point out that many of the individual pieces of Obamacare are very popular with the public according to polling data. So then, they conclude, the fact that a majority of the public doesn't like the overall proposal must therefore be merely a matter of messaging. Since the individual elements of Obamacare are popular it's really only a matter of explaining it better to get everyone on board with the entire law, they assure themselves and us.

Of course, this kind of rationale is not only highly disingenuous, it's really quite silly as I am about to demonstrate.

The parts of Obamacare that people like are the the good parts, the carrots, the giveaways. The parts people don't like are the bad parts like the mandate and fines, the sticks. Of course, in reality the carrots cannot be extricated from the sticks. They are specifically designed to work in concert, there is no getting the good without the bad.

Let's use the analogy of a cruise. Let's say the government is proposing that everyone should go on a one week cruise on a cruise ship because it would be beneficial to society at large. On this cruise there will be free food and beverage, free entertainment, and a free limo ride for everyone to the cruise terminal. However, in order to lower the costs of all of these items every American will be mandated to go on the cruise whether they want to or not and pay $2000 each.

Proponents of this cruise plan could then conclude that despite the public's apparent distaste for the entire plan surely the overall plan is great by pointing to polling data on the individual features of the plan. Not surprisingly they would find that the free food and beverage polls well, as does the free entertainment and free limo ride. They could say that yes, the part of the plan where we force everyone to take part is widely despised and it costs too much, but look at how popular the free stuff part of the plan is!

So yes, that some of the individual parts of Obamacare are popular is immaterial in an argument attempting to rationalize the entire law. That the lettuce and tomato are still good in a sandwich with rotted meat does not make the sandwich worth eating.

Triangulation

2010-12-07T05:33:00.005-05:00

This is Obama's first of possibly many triangulation speeches. His framing of the tax cut issue is pure triangulation. He's essentially saying, "The left wants this here, and the right wants that there and I hover above it all and do what's best for the American people."

The endless campaign

2009-10-15T15:09:00.016-04:00

During the 2008 campaign, President Obama promised over and over not to raise taxes on the middle class, which he defined as families making less than $250,000. It was, arguably, a centerpiece of his campaign. A cure all elixir designed to sooth away the compelling conservative argument that the election of Barack Obama would result in an increase in taxes for all Americans. "Look" his supporters said, "...he's promised not to raise taxes on those making under $250 K." That was somehow that.

Also during the campaign, Obama vociferously attacked first Hillary Clinton and then John McCain for their proposals to tax the most expensive health insurance plans, the gold plated "Cadillac" health care plans, in order to help pay for wider health care reform.

It seems as if many of the underpinnings of the Obama campaign are becoming well, unpinned. Not that the campaign ever ended of course.

The monstrosity of Obamacare "legislation" that is attempting to make its way through Congress at the moment represents a massive tax increase on the middle class and it taxes the most expensive health care benefits. These facts are demonstrably true. Obama has therefor begun the process of finding a way to dissatisfy both the fiscally hawkish blue dogs and the far left bastion of the labor unions, each representing a separate wing of the Democratic party. Not that there is anything close to an actual piece of legislation to concretely object to anyway, Obamacare at present is a highly nebulous collection of theoretical rules, regulations, and mandates held together with a liberal dose of fudged numbers. The Max Baucus "bill" is a wizardly crafted collection of cost hiding measures and budget gimmickry. Again, demonstrably true. I especially admire the craftiness of talking in terms of cost over the next ten years when in reality the legislation doesn't actually start taking effect for another two years. Furthermore, the only reason the non partisan Congressional Budget Office was able to somehow, through some sort of tortured logic, predict that it wouldn't add to the deficit is because there is no actual legislative language yet. There are no real numbers behind the pie in the sky numbers. At this very moment, the "bill" is being hammered out in a secretive congressional session of horse trading and influence peddling. The Opacity of Hope at work. Interestingly, there was a time when the Obama Administration promised to showcase a bill on-line for 72 hours before letting it be voted on. That promise went out the window about the the time when the Democratically controlled congress crammed a questionably effective stimulus bill down our throat without even reading it before they voted on it.

The rubber is finally starting to meet the road for The Bamster. All of the impossible sounding promises are, one by one, crashing to earth and reality. Even SNL and the other normally left leaning late night comedians are not covering for their boy anymore, and actually generating some decent comedy in the process.

Yet the campaign never ends.

The Obama campaign has declared war on Fox News in an attempt to subvert any arguments it can't win on the merits and they are using tax dollars to travel primarily to the 2012 election battleground states whenever it is that Obama is doing his used car salesman/ snake oil salesman routine for health "insurance" reform.

Cash for Clunkers, it strikes me, is a great way to sum up the Obama presidency so far. He takes our cash and attempts to promulgate clunker after clunker of pieces of legislation on a largely unwilling public.

However, I don't see how he gets there from here on healthcare reform. Even proponents of Obamacare have conceded that we are months away from seeing a final bill. Months away from seeing the final product of something that was supposed to have been signed into law in August. So months from now, even after the Democrats theoretically manage to coalesce around a single piece of legislation only then does the general public get to voice their opinion on Obamacare in earnest. Assuming that is even allowed in this "transparent" era of hope and change. In any event, I see Obama being able to live up to his arbitrary promise of closing Guantanamo Bay before passing health care reform. After all, closing Gitmo doesn't involve the wrangling of untold special interest groups and the remaking 1/6 of the economy while in a recession.

So far, even the far left would concede, Obama has committed the ultimate transgression for a used car salesman to commit. He's over promised and under delivered.

At some point perhaps, the time for campaigning will end and give way to a time for governing. Until that time, the Obama presidency AKA "cash for clunkers" will remain an endless campaign. At a time when we need Ronald Reagan we're getting Billy Mays on an endless sales call.

The (anti) Obama Chronicles

2009-10-08T22:12:00.005-04:00

BARACK OBAMA ran an impressively disciplined presidential campaign. He has presided over a notably cohesive White House. But in the past fortnight things have started to go wrong. His latest review of strategy in the Afghan war has prompted charges that this president dithers while American soldiers die, and has provoked a rare public quarrel between the politicians and the military men. The timetable for reforming health care slips and slips, as does the effort to get a climate-change bill through Congress. And in the middle of all this Mr Obama and his wife Michelle found time last week to make a quixotic overnight dash to Copenhagen in the hope of winning the 2016 Olympics for his adopted city of Chicago.

What was intended to be another display of star power on a world stage ended in a flop. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) eliminated Chicago in the first round, for some reason rating the delights of Rio over those of the Windy City. Tall and athletic he may be, but in Copenhagen America’s president won nothing and the Olympic gold went to the portlier president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The Olympics, admittedly, are just games; the point, said the White House (afterwards), is that Mr Obama took the time to give Chicago’s bid his best shot. That has not stopped gleeful critics from depicting the failure as a symptom of bigger defects, notably Mr Obama’s overweening self-belief, and the naive trust they say he invests in unreliable foreigners, be they the bureaucrats of the IOC or the nuclear-arming ayatollahs of Iran. Rush Limbaugh, a conservative radio broadcaster, gloated that Mr Obama’s bad day in Copenhagen was the worst of his presidency, at least so far. “So much for improving America’s standing in the world, Barry O” sneered Erick Erickson, a blogger who runs the Red State website.

This debacle may not inflict lasting damage on Mr Obama. The delight some Republicans have shown in a setback for an American city could hurt them more than him. But the dash to Copenhagen was plainly under-prepared. It has bashed his reputation for a sure touch in public relations and added to the suspicion that he expects to achieve too much merely by deploying his celebrity power. Valerie Jarrett, a family friend from Chicago and one of the president’s very closest advisers in the White House, gushed before the Copenhagen trip that the Obamas would be a “dynamic duo” in Denmark. David Axelrod, another, complained afterwards of the IOC’s decision that there were “politics inside that room”. Isn’t the president of the United States supposed to know a thing or two about politics?

Nobody, however, can accuse Mr Obama of under-preparing for the far weightier decision he is pondering in Afghanistan. The administration has now spent several weeks conducting a methodical new review of its strategy, prompted by two deeply unwelcome developments: the crude rigging in favour of President Hamid Karzai in August’s flawed election and the leaked report from General Stanley McChrystal, concluding that the West faces certain defeat unless it adopts an ambitious new strategy, backed by a greater commitment of men (said to be 40,000, though the number has not yet been confirmed) and resources.

That General McChrystal’s report has divided the administration is no surprise: the war is now very unpopular among Democrats who have been encouraged by their success in imposing a rigid timetable for a full withdrawal from Iraq. The surprise is that it has prompted an unusually public quarrel. Vice-President Joe Biden rejects the call for an enlarged counter-insurgency campaign against the Taliban. His is said to be one of several voices inside the White House arguing for a smaller war directed mainly against al-Qaeda. But the merits of the case have now become ensnared in a debate about whether General McChrystal was insubordinate when he appeared to disparage the Biden idea in public. “You have to navigate from where you are, not where you wish to be,” the general told a questioner at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank in London. “A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a short-sighted strategy.”

The charge of insubordination sizzled rapidly through the media and up the chain of command. Writing in the Washington Post, Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law at Yale University, went so far as to invoke the spectre of Douglas MacArthur facing off against Harry Truman over the Korean war. He accused General McChrystal of “a plain violation of the principle of civilian control”. Jim Jones, the National Security Adviser (and a former general), said a president should be given a range of options, not a fait accompli. Robert Gates, the defence secretary, expressed continuing confidence in General McChrystal, but added that everyone involved in the review of strategy should provide their advice “candidly but privately”.

Mr Obama acted this week to fend off Republican claims that fear of his own wavering allies on Capitol Hill is weakening his commitment to a fight that he has always called vital to America’s security, both during the election campaign and since assuming office. On October 6th he invited 30 congressional leaders from both parties to the White House and told them that although he had not decided whether to send extra troops he was contemplating no “dramatic” reduction. The next day his security team convened again to continue their review, focusing this time on conditions in Pakistan. A final decision, says Harry Reid, the Senate’s majority leader, would probably come in “weeks, not months”.

Whether the right description of this timetable is “leisurely” (Senator John McCain) or “thorough” (the administration), the process has certainly been messy. The spat with General McChrystal, Mr Obama’s own recent choice to command in Afghanistan, invites the charge that he is not giving his generals the resources they need. If he does not send the general his extra troops, senior Republicans who have so far restrained their criticism will charge that the president is appeasing his party by endangering America’s fighting men overseas. Mr McCain has already called on Mr Obama to give “great weight” to his commanders’ views. But wading deeper into a war that this week entered its ninth miserable year will stoke the fears of the Democratic leadership in Congress that Mr Obama is sinking into a new Vietnam.

It is a fateful choice, and history is likelier to remember the decision itself, not the circumstances in which it was made. But Mr Obama’s failure to keep General McChrystal in line has made the politics of it very much harder. From Kandahar and Copenhagen (where Mr Obama faces a second ordeal in December at the climate-change summit) a cold wind is blowing through the White House. -The Economist 10/8/09

Weak Himself, Obama Draws Strength From Bush
By Michael Barone
In trying to understand what is happening in the nation and world, we all employ narratives -- story lines that indicate where things are going and what is likely to happen next. We can check the validity of these narratives by observing whether events move in the indicated direction. If so, the narrative is confirmed. But if things seem to be moving in an entirely different direction, it's time to discard the narrative and look for another.

When Barack Obama took office, most Americans and certainly most of the press had a narrative in mind. Call it Narrative A. The financial crisis and the ensuing deep recession had removed the blinkers from voters' eyes and moved Americans away from reliance on markets and toward reliance on government.

The new president's call for hope and change would be followed by enactment of big government policies -- a big-spending stimulus package, government-led health care reform, restrictions on carbon emissions and the effective abolition of the secret ballot in unionization elections. The new president's powers of persuasion would sweep Republicans along and make for bipartisan change.

It certainly seemed plausible. New Deal historians had taught us that economic collapse increases support for big government. Opponents of the Obama program seemed incoherent and demoralized.

But Narrative A looks increasingly shaky. The unions' anti-secret ballot bill is going nowhere, and neither, it seems, is carbon emissions legislation. The stimulus package is widely regarded as a failure, and the Democrats' various health care bills are not winning majorities in polls. If anything, Americans are more leery of big government than they were a few years ago.

Moreover, the balance of enthusiasm has shifted. The tea parties and town halls have shown that millions of Americans are strongly opposed to big government measures. The Obama e-mail lists that brought in so much money and so many volunteers in 2008 now seem unable to get a few dozen people to a rally, and Democratic fundraising is alarmingly low for a party in power.

So it may be time to advance a Narrative B. It goes something like this. George W. Bush's inability to produce progress in Baghdad and New Orleans, along with floundering by congressional Republicans, led voters to give Democrats majorities in Congress in 2006 and the presidency in 2008. But the huge flow of dollars designed to staunch the financial crisis (TARP), finance bailouts and fund the stimulus package raised fears that government would crowd out private-sector growth.

In this narrative, Democrats' big congressional majorities owe more to perceived Republican incompetence and to the $400 million that labor unions poured into Democratic campaigns than to any change in fundamental attitudes toward the balance between markets and government.

Narrative B does a better job than Narrative A of explaining the unpopularity of the Democrats' big-government programs and the unwillingness of many Democratic officeholders, especially those facing voters in 2010, to support them. It does a better job of explaining the shift in the balance of enthusiasm from 2008 to 2009.

It still may be possible for Democrats to jam through some of their health care proposals, and tax rates are scheduled to go up when the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010. The Democrats may be able to make basic policy changes because of accidental advantages. In the framework of Narrative B, government-directed health insurance and vastly enhanced union power would be reactions to George W. Bush's inept handling of Iraq before the surge and his hapless response to Hurricane Katrina.

Narrative B doesn't explain all current developments satisfactorily. Voters still have a lingering distaste for Republican politicians and give higher (or less low) ratings to the Democratic than the Republican Party. Republican policy proposals, while not nonexistent as the Democrats charge, have not caught the public's attention and may prove no more popular than the Democrats' health insurance and cap-and-trade proposals. And Democratic proposals may turn out to be more popular than they are today.

But overall Narrative B has done a better job so far of explaining 2009 than Narrative A. Which suggests that it's time that fans of Narrative A who don't like Narrative B to come up with Narrative C.

Obama's Foreign Policy Suspends Disbelief
By George Will
WASHINGTON -- Last Thursday, the president's "engagement" with Iran began. This Wednesday, the U.S. war in Afghanistan will enter its ninth year. And U.S. foreign policy is entering a White Queen phase.

In "Through the Looking Glass," Alice says she is unable to believe the White Queen's claim to be 101. The Queen responds, "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes." Alice: "There's no use trying, one can't believe impossible things." Queen: "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Regarding Afghanistan, the president might believe he can effect a Houdini-like escape, uninjured, from the box his words have built. Regarding Iran, he seems to believe its leaders can be talked or coerced (by economic sanctions) out of their long, costly pursuit of nuclear weapons by convincing them that such weapons do not serve Iran's "security."

On March 27, the president announced "a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." He said his "clear and focused goal" was to prevent the Taliban from toppling Afghanistan's government, and to prevent al-Qaeda from returning to Afghanistan or Pakistan. U.S. forces "will take the fight to the Taliban" in Afghanistan's "south" and "east" but "at the same time, we will shift the emphasis of our mission to training and increasing the size of Afghan security forces."

On Aug. 17, the president reiterated his belief that U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is "not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity." This was two months after he replaced the U.S. commander there with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, directing him to assess the resources required for the strategy. The general has done that. But the president does not yet want to discuss troop numbers. Why not?

The president's national security adviser, Jim Jones, a former four-star Marine general, told The Washington Post that before deciding on troop levels, the focus must be on strategy: "The bumper sticker here is strategy before resources." So, is the president reassessing his March 27 strategy? If so, why?

Perhaps because fraud devalued Afghanistan's election. But it was not a sunburst of new information that President Hamid Karzai is corrupt. Or did the president believe, as only the White Queen could, that Karzai had reformed?

Granted, counterinsurgency -- especially when it includes the nation-building implicit in McChrystal's assessment -- requires a reliable partner. But, again, Karzai was a known commodity on March 27. Besides, a presidential strategy is half-baked if its author decides it is dubious after its first collision with difficulty.

Regarding Iran, what did we learn when we learned about the secret nuclear facility in the tunnel? That Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons? We knew that. That Iran lies? We knew that, too. We did, however, learn something when the president, at the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, went public with his knowledge of the facility.

On one side of the president stood France's president. On the other side stood Britain's prime minister, who said Iran's behavior would "shock and anger the whole international community." Not quite. The leaders of Russia and China were not standing with the president.

China has contracted to provide Iran with gasoline, a commodity that could be central to what Defense Secretary Robert Gates calls "severe" sanctions that he thinks might cause Iran to change course. Russia's real leader, Vladimir Putin, was not even in Pittsburgh. Russia's Potemkin president, Dmitry Medvedev, did say something that only the White Queen could believe means that Russia will participate in serious pressure on Iran: Sanctions are not "the best means of obtaining results" but "if all possibilities" are exhausted, "we could consider international sanctions." Over to you, Queen.

Gates says "the only way" to prevent a nuclear-capable Iran "is for the Iranian government to decide that their security is diminished by having those weapons, as opposed to strengthened." But to accept that formulation requires accepting two propositions that would tax the White Queen's powers of belief.

One is that possession of nuclear weapons would make Iran less secure. Question: If Saddam Hussein had possessed nuclear weapons in March 2003, would the United States have invaded Iraq? Iran's leaders probably think they know the answer.

The other proposition is that Iran's regime seeks nuclear weapons merely to enhance the nation's security and not also for regional hegemony or the enjoyment of the enlarged status that comes from being a nuclear power. To believe that, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.

Feckless

2009-09-30T21:40:00.001-04:00

Joke and Chance

2009-09-22T05:22:00.002-04:00

9-12

2009-09-12T14:10:00.001-04:00

Van crashes, burns

2009-09-06T05:13:00.013-04:00

Obama's "green job" Czar, Van Jones, resigned at midnight on a Saturday night during the long labor day weekend. The 9-11 truther and a race-baiter blamed a smear campaign against him rather than his own past comments and actions for his (un)timely demise. Hardcore Liberals are apoplectic about this resignation saying things like, "Whenever I got sick to my stomach at the thought of Obama's Team of Corporate Zombies - people like Rahm Emanuel, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Jim Messina - running the show, I was able to at least tell myself that hey, someone like Van Jones is at least in there somewhere fighting the good fight as he always has. "

I guess we'll have to see how it goes with the "corporate zombies".

The timing of the release of this news is about as blatant of an attempt to bury a story that I've ever seen. Another example of what I call 'The Opacity of Hope'. Things are really start to unravel for the Obama Campaign, er... Administration.

Things fall apart

2009-08-28T06:14:00.013-04:00

Joe Lieberman thinks that now, during a recession, is not the time for a massive overhaul of 1/6th of the economy. He has opened the door for a Democratic retreat on the issue of health care reform.

I think we all realize now that attempting vilify or otherwise dismiss the town hall protesters was a colossal miscalculation. Team Obama found, unlike when they successfully made the Clintons the enemy during the campaign, that making regular American people out to be the enemy and somehow a product of some nefarious zombie influence doesn't work well at all.

At this point many fellow liberals are losing faith in Obama. At the liberal bastion Salon.com, left-leaning pundits are hand wringing and wondering what went wrong and at The New Republic: what could have been done differently.

The Democratic leadership cannot even get their story straight when it comes to whether or not a "public option" is or is not to be included in ObamaCare.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

-William Butler Yeats

Face it, it's time to pull the plug on ObamaCare.

The Opacity of Hope

2009-08-28T04:10:00.000-04:00

Comment Buster

2009-08-28T04:09:00.002-04:00

This RFL post is going for the comment record.

Comment 90:

The Rube Goldberg approach of creating layers and layers of arbitrary regulatory nonsense and then claiming it will cut costs while at the same time covering millions of more Americans for free is not something people are buying into and therefore it will never work.

Have you dudes on the Left even figured out yet whether or not a "public option" is an essential part of reform?

Let us know when you figure that one out and then ram the legislation through already with no Republican support if its such a swell idea.

I'm happy to hang all these bad policies around Obama's neck. Let's get this era over with, The Opacity of Hope or whatever.

Funnier Than Jon Stewart

2009-08-23T05:16:00.008-04:00

There's hope for you yet, Anderson Cooper

2009-08-15T02:25:00.003-04:00

Perhaps CNN is starting to turn the corner.

Common Sense

2009-08-14T05:50:00.002-04:00

The Beer Summit

2009-07-31T05:34:00.004-04:00

The new CIA

2009-07-28T04:40:00.004-04:00

The Center Cannot Hold

2009-07-22T13:32:00.003-04:00

Some Democrats are not mad.

For the birds

2009-06-30T23:15:00.004-04:00

Jon

2009-06-11T05:46:00.000-04:00

Stand up guy

2009-05-17T07:08:00.006-04:00

Leon Panetta actually seems to care about the agency he runs. Today he turned on Nancy Pelosi in defense of the integrity of the CIA. Bravo.

Even the Huffington Post seems to have turned on the erstwhile Lefty standard bearer, Ms. Pelosi.

"There are some people who project sincerity and integrity, but Pelosi's just the opposite. She comes across as a duplicitous partisan hack. A Tom Delay with tits, yet lacking the balls and efficiency. Whereas Delay was ruthless and resolute, Pelosi's simply an ineffective trainwreck."

Only the crass delivery gives away the fact that that was a quote from a Lefty Pundit.

serious leadership.

2009-05-05T15:52:00.002-04:00

Hillary jumps the shark

2009-04-26T07:13:00.010-04:00

I was actually buying into the new quasi bad-ass Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State until this moment when she devolved into a petty partisan attack as a pathetic attempt to distract from the matter at hand. Hillary appears to wise up and give a serious answer after the follow up question, but there's a shark over there and someone just jumped it.

It's a fascinating clip, I love how the moderator jumps in just in time to prevent us from learning what Hillary's actual position is on the full disclosure of all pertinent documents being discussed.

The perpetually angry left

2009-04-22T00:45:00.015-04:00

The political left in this country has been angry for so long now that when the term "The Left" is used, it's understood that they're angry. The phrase, 'the angry Left' is redundant.

Just take the Left's childishly angry response to the recent Tea Party protests. The big thing for Lefty bloggers and pundits is to use the gay bashing term "tea baggers" to describe the protesters. Those protests, by the way, were probably some of the least angry protests in human history. The Left's reaction to the protests were far angrier than the actual protests. Lefty thinkers like Jeanie Garafolo's angry charge that every protester is merely a white supremacist had more vitriol and anger in it than the sum total of all the protests themselves. So it's childish gay bashing jokes and cartoon like levels of anger from the Left as usual in response to the Tea Party Protests.

And now the (far) Left is downright hysterical that Obama is hesitant to prosecute former members of the Bush administration for essentially being too successful in thwarting an attack on American soil in the immediate days following 9-11 by using enhanced interrogation techniques that were at the time fully legal. If the angry, backwards looking Left wants to conduct kangaroo courts and show trials like a banana republic regime persecuting those whom with which they disagree politically, I say bring it on. I can't wait to see what happens when the American people see that the Left has now taken to punishing and prosecuting certain public servants in the Bush Administration in order to satisfy a political vendetta. Public servants who were in good faith doing what they could to successfully protect us. The whole thing is pricelessly irrational.

All of this anger and hysteria on the left begs the question, why in victory is the Left still so angry?

To answer that question let's consult an article penned by Byron York, frequent commentator on NPR, the ultra right wing talk radio network that I listen to daily.

These should be happy times for liberals and the Democratic party as a whole. They control the White House and both houses of Congress, while opposition Republicans are leaderless and lost. So why do some Democrats, particularly those farther to the left, appear so angry?

If you doubt it, just watch a few minutes of MSNBC, where the recent nationwide series of "tea parties" to protest federal spending and taxes set off an angry, almost manic response. The most telling came on Keith Olbermann's program, during which the actress Janeane Garofalo, who plays an FBI computer geek on “24,” denounced the tea parties as "racism straight up."

"Let's be very honest about what this is about," Garofalo said. "It's not about bashing Democrats. It's not about taxes…This is about hating a black man in the White House."

Garofalo linked the tea parties to what she described as a peculiar feature of the conservative brain. "The limbic brain inside a right-winger, or Republican, or conservative, or your average white power activist -- the limbic brain is much larger in their head space than in a reasonable person," she explained. "And it is pushing against the frontal lobe. So their synapses are misfiring." (The limbic brain is the deep portion of the brain that mediates, controls and expresses emotion.)

Now, it's possible Garofalo was joking; she used to do comedy. But she didn't seem to be joking, and her comments were consistent with a long and dishonorable history of attributing political conservatism to mental abnormality. And as she spoke about the alleged anger on the right, Garofalo herself seemed visibly angry. Why were she, and Olbermann, and many others on the left, so apparently troubled by a virtually powerless opposition?

I asked William Anderson, a friend who is a political conservative, a medical doctor, and a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard. "They are angry, but I think they are also scared, and I think it's because they have a sense that their triumph is a precarious one," Anderson told me. Democrats won in 2008 in some part because of the cycles of American politics; Republicans were exhausted and it was the other party's turn. Now, having won, they are unsure of how long victory will last.

"They see that they have a very small window of opportunity to do all the things they want," Anderson continued. "They see the window of opportunity as small because they know in their deepest hearts that the vast majority of the American people wouldn't go for all of the things they want to do." So they are frantic to do as much as possible before the opposition coalesces. And the tea parties might be the beginning of that coalescence.

Then there is the question of self-image. Watching Garofalo and Olbermann discuss the tea parties, it was impossible to avoid the sense that they saw themselves as two good people talking about many bad people. "One of the things about narcissism is that it looks like people who are just proud of themselves and smug, but in fact narcissism is a very brittle and unstable state," Anderson told me. "People who are deeply invested in narcissism spend an awful lot of energy trying to maintain the illusion they have of themselves as being powerful and good, and they are exquisitely sensitive to anything that might prick that balloon."

Again, the tea parties could represent a threat. What if the protesters weren't racists, weren't violent, weren't mentally defective? What if their point was legitimate, or even partly legitimate? Those are questions better batted down than answered.
Finally, there is the sense of anxiety and fragility that stems from the liberals' newly-won power. They control everything in government, and some fear what the responsibility of governing is doing to them.

Their president of hope and change has chosen not to prosecute the authors of the Bush-era "torture memos." He is escalating the war in Afghanistan. He seems determined to bail out the nation's richest bankers. For some on the left, it can be difficult to abide those actions and still maintain the image of one's self atop the moral high ground. So they lash out at the easy target presented by the tea parties.

And that is how political triumph can produce anger and unhappiness. Don't be surprised if there is much more of both in the days to come.

-Byron York Washington Examiner 4/20/09

Ideology vs. pragmatism

2009-04-20T10:43:00.007-04:00

If the left wants to define slapping someone in the face and putting a caterpillar in close proximity to someone as torture then they are watering down the term torture. If this is to be the new wussified definition of torture then I have no problem advocating torture as newly defined by those who incessantly seek to coddle our sworn enemies.

It's that simple. If these enhanced interrogation techniques are to somehow be considered torture, then I'm for torture.

Oh and newsflash for the zillionth time: The Geneva Conventions do not apply to enemy combatants seeking to kill civilians.

New Years Day

2009-04-07T16:43:00.003-04:00

It's been a long, cold, and dreary Obama winter. Springtime...when my thoughts move from Obama to baseball, a slightly less controversial topic.

Pay to play part deux

2009-03-22T06:21:00.004-04:00

inept/corrupt

2009-03-20T06:09:00.032-04:00

Chris Dodd is corrupt. This is not a matter of wild eyed speculation, this is fact, plain and simple. Chris Dodd received tens of thousands dollars of campaign contributions from some of the very AIG executives that are theoretically in line for these controversial bonuses that you may have heard of. Dodd lied about knowing anything about any provisions pertaining to AIG bonuses that were included in the "stimulus" bill on Monday of this week, but by Wednesday he came clean and copped to authoring the amendment in question. So, crazily enough, he's both corrupt and inept.

That's not an easy combo to pull off. He's uniquely un-qualified to hold any position where he and the phrase "public trust" are to be mentioned in the same sentence.

If he and those like him are re-elected in 2010, our Republic is truly in danger.

The New York Times is even turning on him.

Sensitivity

2009-03-10T13:40:00.009-04:00

"It wasn't under me that we started buying a whole bunch of shares of banks. It wasn't on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement prescription drug plan without a source of funding."

That's his argument? Obama is using as evidence that he's isn't a socialist that the previous administration was? In a vacuum, Obama's policies and those he intends to implement either are or are not socialist. Why is this concept so difficult to understand? If someone asks me if I'm a Red Sox fan, I don't start talking about other people I believe to be Red Sox fans. I either am or I am not a Red Sox fan.

Liberals are such relativists. They can't just answer the question based on the facts.

It's always, "Well I may be guilty of X, but what about this person over here?"

So lame. Obama and his followers are way too overly sensitive about this question of Obama being a socialist. If he can save the country's banking system, I think it's worth allowing some pundits to be able to call Obama a socialist. But Noooo, it's all about how Obama appears above all else. Can someone please remind Obama that the campaign is over? It's time govern, not whine about your predecessor.

Obama's gonna have to choose between ego and saving the country on this question of nationalizing the banks.

American Zombie

2009-03-08T15:14:00.020-04:00

Maybe you didn't catch the news but three major financial institutions were renamed recently, or at least they should have been. From now on, until the administration comes up with a real solution for the banking crisis, the new names of these institutions will be:

Citi Zombie Group
American International Zombie Group
Zombie Bank of America

The banking crisis is the circumstance that is the cause and in fact the crux of this entire problem, but almost every other ancillary subject is being addressed first by team Obama. Somehow we have time to address the funding of manure odor control but haven't yet lifted a finger to arrest the free fall of the stock market. As a leading indicator of where the economy is heading, the stock market at this moment sees no upside in the policies that team Obama has promulgated thus far.

Starting with President Bush and now continuing with Obama, the government has been pursuing an ad hock, piece meal solution to the banking crisis. Drips and drabs of government bailouts going in every direction with seemingly little to no rhyme or reason. Bush didn't have a choice really, he had to at least hand Obama a banking industry on life support rather than handing him a dead banking system. But at this point the government is simply propping up these institutions that have long since stopped being viable as money making businesses. Welcome to the world of zombie banks. Remember Japan in the nineties? Well, we're basically there now. No use in denying it.

Another fact that there is no use in denying is that we have now advanced into the territory of socialism. This country has been slowly marching towards European style democratic socialism for a while. Now Obama is sprinting towards it with all this spending and proposed wealth redistribution. But for political reasons, Obama and his supporters have to deny that their policies even vaguely resemble socialism. I'm not sure what the big deal is, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...

It's socialism, so what. Maybe in this time of crisis we don't have a choice when it comes to resolving the problems caused in the banking sector because these institutions were allowed to become 'too big to fail'. So while Obama figures out a way to solve the banking crisis while not appearing to be socialist because he's afraid to be called that, I have the solution. Since I'm not a self-hating self denying socialist like Obama, I don't care if you call the plan I'm advocating socialist.

The only remaining solution to the banking crisis is temporary nationalization of the biggest most troubled banks. The share holders won't like it, but right now the entire market is in a free fall because there is no clear policy emanating from the White House. Is there any disputing that the lack of clarity is causing massive uncertainty in the markets? This should be elementary, but because team Obama has to play political games, they haven't embraced this obvious strategy yet.

This is what they will eventually do of course, just as soon as they devise a clever way of not letting it be called socialism somehow. So while America collectively watches their retirement funds evaporate into the ether, team Obama is busy calculating their own political appearance and concocting childish controversies about Rush Limbaugh.

Until Obama gets over his fears regarding what his detractors will be able to say about him, we will live in this new American Zombie economy.

Imperial IPA

2009-02-27T03:56:00.008-05:00

As I write this I am enjoying quite possibly the best, most complex beer that I've ever had.

Harpoon Leviathan Imperial IPA. A whole new level.

At 12 bucks a 4 pack a whole new level of price too. But none of that matters now.

Here's a description of the taste from Beeradvocate.com:

Pours brassy in color, with bright golden hues and a thin, creamy lacing that sticks just a bit. Massive fruity esters in the nose, with strong notes of overripe pineapple and suggestions of something sweet and syrupy. Strong hop resins. Bread and caramel, too. Harsh fusel alcohols. Thick, viscous and chewy in the mouth with some smoothness and creaminess. Really fruity and sweet up front with more overripe pineapple and stone fruits. Smacking of citrus rinds. Drop of caramel in the malt sweetness. Hops are intense, coating the palate with resins, leaf and pine, and are a bit roasty and ashy around the edges with a deep, earthy flavor. The alcohol is quite noticeable: abrasive, spicy, warming and solvent-like. Some gummy flavors as things warm. The palate dries up with a raw, leafy, earthy and resiny linger that doesn't fade anytime soon.

The waves of booze wash over you after a few sips sink in and begin their magic. It's more refreshing that Harpoon IPA, yet almost infinitely more complex. And as I take another swig I conclude that this is probably the best beverage ever created as far as I'm concerned.

Manny being... stingy

2009-02-26T02:14:00.009-05:00

Manny Ramirez today was offered his third deal of the off season for an eye-popping $45 million for a two year contract. It's the same money he was offered in the first place months ago, when maybe the economy wasn't as bad as it is now.

He should take this money and be happy. If he doesn't take this most recent offer, he's out of his mind.

Especially when you consider that no other team has made an offer yet.

The Age of Obama

2009-02-18T00:13:00.002-05:00

In the dark of night

2009-02-14T04:14:00.006-05:00

In the stimulus bill debacle, we've come a long way away from any notion of "transparency", that buzz word team Obama has thrown around ad nauseam.

We are at the point where we're borrowing a trillion dollars from China and spending it on things that our government doesn't imagine the American people deserve to know.

What sort of banana republic crap is this?

Let the tax payer know what we're being asked to pay for, for god's sake!

Please Listen!

2009-02-10T04:13:00.010-05:00

I hereby demand that some kind of real middle class tax relief be included in this stimulus bill.

A one time payout, a "rebate check" is not a tax cut!

Cut the actual rate of taxation! The percentage has to go down!

A temporary payroll tax "holiday" is a good idea, summarily rejected by lady and lord Pelosi and Reid.

Barack Obama's first move as President was to let those two hardcore leftists author his first signature legislative proposal? Fire the person who allowed that to happen.

Where is Rahm Emmanual? Isn't he supposed to be the hard nosed politician who values winning over ideology? What was he smoking when he allowed Nancy Pelosi to have sole proprietorship of this bill from the get go?

What a botched job debacle this stimulus bill is.

Stagflation here we come.

A Bitter Pill

2009-02-07T17:17:00.013-05:00

Because of the tireless and unending Bush Bashing of the last eight years I was hoping that we could have at least a month or two where the president wasn't a primary source of the nation's ire. A honeymoon would have been nice, a respite from the ever present trashing of the commander in chief.

But the way Barack Obama has been acting the last couple of days is making that impossible.

And I was someone willing to give Obama a chance. Like an arranged marriage, I was willing to try to make the best of it. I had hoped that Obama's pragmatism and penchant for political expediency would win out over his left leaning ideology.

If Obama turned out to be a Ronald Reagan, great. Unfortunately, at this point he's looking more like a cross between LBJ and Jimmy Carter.

Hope and change?

More like fear and same. Within a week or so of the inaugural address the hopeful tone has all but evaporated into the frosty Washington DC air. In its place arguably the same kind of fear mongering that the Left endlessly accused the Bush administration of perpetrating to get things done. The difference of course being that the threat of terrorism is very real and the need for a pork laden spending bill to beat back "The worst financial crisis since the great depression", much less evident. (The stagflation of Jimmy Carter's early eighties was worse).

If Bush had done what Obama is trying to do he would have shoe-horned every Republican pet project into the Patriot Act. That is the equivalent. It's using an emergency to reward the special interests of your political party! With this so-called stimulus bill, the Democrats are doing an end run around the normal budget appropriation process in order to foist upon us their usual political agenda. They are using a financial crisis to lavish their supporters with billions of dollars of federal cash. They can't stuff the bales of cash out the door fast enough, it seems. We're told that it's such an emergency that we don't even have time to think it through really, just sign it. Hurry, hurry, hurry, it doesn't matter what we do, we have to do something, anything! This stimulus bill debacle is madness.

And it could be Obama's political death. He's been trying to scare us that "we will never recover" if we don't pass this bill. I'm afraid that Obama's political career will never recover if this thing passes and then fails to deliver as it will inevitably do according to any economist who understands the basic principle that we will have to raise taxes down the road to pay this thing off. And we'll have to pay this off right around the time that the inflation caused by this will be kicking in according to every economist who's name isn't Paul Krugman.

In one of Obama's recent partisan fear mongering speeches he proclaimed that, "somewhere a business is closing its doors". He has yet to explain how rewarding Democratic special interest groups and simply stuffing cash out of the doors will have a tangible effect on the businesses in danger of closing. A temporary payroll tax suspension will have a tangible effect on businesses and employees, irreversibly increasing the size of government and causing inflation down the road can only harm, not help the private sector economy Obama claims to be interested in helping.

A now we're told by Obama that tax cuts are "the failed policies of the past".

Really? That's interesting considering that Obama actually campaigned on tax cuts. How many times were we told that there would be tax cuts for 95% of Americans? Yet in place of tax cuts were getting the largest increase in the size of government since the New Deal.

Obama promised over and over in the campaign to go through the federal budget "line by line" and eliminate wasteful programs. Well, here's his chance to live up to one of his hollow promises. Don't hold your breath. Like the promise that he wouldn't appoint lobbyists and the promise that he would bring a new tone to Washington. So much for the new tone, in Washington DC it's business as usual as Obama is now digging in his heels in a one-sided partisan defense of Nancy Pelosi's Democratic spending extravaganza.

For Barack Obama the more things change, the more things stay the same.

I really am fairly surprised that Obama is behaving with such a tin ear. The people are starting to turn against this bill, so to entrench yourself in defense of it in its current form strikes me as politically tone deaf. And I've always known Obama to do what is politically expedient, just ask Reverend Wright.

I have been avoiding directly criticizing the President for about as long as I can on this blog. The issues are too important and Obama is acting far too partisan for me to keep that up anymore. For Barack Obama the honeymoon is over and the bloom is off the rose. Any notion of Obama as a transformational or transformative leader has been swept aside.

And unless a serious overhaul takes place, this bill that is being stuffed down our throat will be a bitter pill indeed.

Stimulus?

2009-01-29T20:17:00.007-05:00

The massive spending bill being debated this week on Capitol Hill is not a stimulus bill. The $819 billion pork laden bill passed the House of Representatives yesterday and is now going to the Senate. Despite the fact the Barack Obama went and visited House Republicans in an effort to get them on board, the only thing bi-partisan about the bill was that both Democrats and Republicans voted agaisnt it.

Eleven blue dog Democrats and each and every Republican in the House voted against consigning future generations to pay for the subsidization of liberal special interest groups like ACORN and pet projects like global warming research.

Perhaps some of the items in the bill are worthy, but apparently not many can be accurately argued to be stimulative to the economy. So what we have then is a massive Democratic pet project spending bill not too convincingly masquerading as an emergency economic stimulus bill. Thank god no Republican voted for this thing (John McCain hasn't voted yet). The Republicans might actually be becoming a viable party again that stands for something.

Sadly, it is the Republican alternative proposal (which was voted down) that stood a chance of actually stimulating the economy. Cutting taxes allows the private sector a better chance to begin to dig our way out of the recession rather than relying on government make-work projects and theoretical R & D type projects to somehow lift us out of the doldrums. By cutting the corporate tax businesses will be able to plow some more money back into their own business and eventually begin hiring rather than firing. And cutting the income tax understands that the people know better how to spend their own money than the state does.

Spending 2.4 billion dollars on "carbon-capture demonstration projects" won't do much to stimulate the economy. Cutting certain taxes will have an immediate effect.

If Barack Obama is truly a transformative and transformational leader, he will listen to the Republicans and in the 'stimulus' bill include some more serious tax cuts and dramatically less Democratic pie-in-the-sky pet projects.

It's that simple. Barack Obama's legacy and the future of this country are at stake.

a gaffe a minute 2

2009-01-25T03:41:00.001-05:00

The campaign is over but apparently the Biden gaffe festival has only just begun.

Clarity

2009-01-13T13:44:00.008-05:00

Please read this brilliant article by conservative syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer. To my liberal friends, if you disagree with Krauthammer's observations and/or conclusions please tell me where you feel he's going wrong. To those who feel that The Palestinians are the aggrieved party in this conflict, please do the same.

Happy New Year?

2009-01-01T23:08:00.028-05:00

Some thoughts on the coming year.

It's all about the economy. By now, my following of the day to day ebb and flow of the daily machinations of the economy has nearly supplanted my following of the day to day political discussion and storyline. With an economy collapsing around us it's hard to take Rod Blagojevich, for example, seriously enough to require my full attention. On the other hand, the car wreck that is the economy is fascinating.

But because everything is everything, the economic discussion is the political discussion. Blago be damned. (or indicted, whatever works.)

While all of the conventional economic prognostications for the upcoming year range from dire to grim mainly because of job losses, I have what is ultimately an alternative point of view:

Everyone who has been coasting and/or gaming the system for the last ten years is in for a rough time. If you find yourself to be unnecessary to the functioning of your company or government agency then you should prepare now to be 'made redundant', as the say in England. In the upcoming pull back, people will have to re-invent themselves in order to continue bring home the bacon. Businesses will have to become lean and mean. People will have to take pay cuts, essentially, to remain employed. This will result in further diminishment of the profit margins of retailers and related businesses which will result is still more lay offs. But at some point, the descent in the amount of total jobs will become an ascent. It's then just a matter of holding on until that begins to happen. Also, there is only so much the government can do to artificially prop up an economy in descent.

The key to recovery will be found in the very DNA of us as Americans. Call it sunny Reaganism, but I happen to be of the belief that Americans are enterprising enough to find a source of income somewhere, in some corner of the vast economy should they find themselves to be laid off. Because, as in the real estate market, we have to find the bottom of this overall financial mess. We have to flush out all the Bernie Madoff's and people who at the end of the day don't work hard enough to deserve being employed or who have been otherwise dogging it. Those employees who have already been operating with a fire in the belly and the essential understanding that they're only as good as their last performance will, in all likelihood, be safe. Everyone else, I'm sorry to have to report, is on notice.

So while 2009 will be a painful year for many, the only way out is through. Ultimately, businesses that are not viable and employees who have been phoning it in for years deserve to and should be allowed to fail. Ridding ourselves of this dead weight will ultimately be to the benefit of our economy moving forward. So take heart, for as our old pal John McCain used to like to quote Chairman Mao, "It's always darkest before the dawn.".

Merry X-Mas

2008-12-18T03:29:00.003-05:00

Allow me to be the first quasi-conservative blogger to wish Barack Obama a Merry Christmas.

Good tithings will be needed whenever it is finally revealed that Mr. Obama cannot be all things to all constituencies forever.

Same has come to Washington

2008-12-02T05:35:00.005-05:00

Obama's position on the Iraq war has migrated all the way from immediate withdrawal, to arbitrary timetable, to essentially adopting the current Bush Policy of listening to the commanders on the ground.

Even if the flop is to the correct position on an issue, it's still a flip-flop.

Too Big To Fail

2008-11-24T06:05:00.004-05:00

Last night the federal government quietly bailed out mega bank, Citi-Group.

Wasn't Citi-Group just involved in a legal battle with Wells Fargo over the right to acquire Wachovia?

Citi-Group, too big and too stupid to fail.

Schism

2008-11-21T15:11:00.007-05:00

There seems to be now a rift developing in the Republican ranks between the moderate and conservative wings of the party.

The following is comment I found on a friend's blog post concerning the future of the Republican party:

Hey what about Charlie Crist. He would get my vote. Long live the moderates!!
BTW. I firmly believe that if McCain had chosen Joe Lieberman rather then Palin he wins. Palin was clearly the choice of the RNC rather then McCain in my opinion. He lost because he chose to cave into the party and go right rather then stay center. I can name several Big Liberal who would have voted for a McCain Lieberman ticket rather then Obama.

While I respect this opinion because Republicans do need moderates in their ranks, I generally disagree with the conclusion that the party needs to essentially move to the left in order to be successful. The other school of thought, reflected by the above cartoon, is the camp that I find myself in moving forward.

The solution to this rift will be the ability of the party to rally behind a compelling leader who appeals to both moderates and conservatives. Someone competent who is yes, a conservative, but is not seen as someone who is necessarily on the far right.

I think we can all agree that a Democrat-light like John McCain, was clearly not the answer. After all, if you run a Democrat against a Democrat, the Democrat wins every time.

Real Leadership

2008-11-19T21:02:00.003-05:00

We haven't heard word one about what to do with the American Auto industry from "the one" but there are those who know what to do with the big three.

Rubbing raw the wounds

2008-11-18T10:34:00.009-05:00

Just when I start to think that Mike Huckabee might be worthwhile, he begins to unravel and undermine any notion that he has something positive to contribute to the conservative movement.

The Huckster is on a book tour now bashing Mitt Romney again. And in a way Huckabee is the perfect foil for Romney. For all Romney's class and dignity, Huckabee is petty and classless. For all of Romney's patient logic, Huckabee is highly emotional and illogical. Who knows, if not for the collusion of McCain and Huckabee conspiring to destroy Romney in the Republican Primary, we may now have a president who actually knows something about the economy heading into this recession. Would have, could have, should have.

There is no point in rehashing the Republican Primary now. I've attacked Huckabee many times on this blog but even I tire of thrashing anyone who still wants to regard themselves as conservative. So I won't say any more about Huckabee other than to point out why his attacks against Romney are so laughable, namely this: All of Romney's criticisms of Huckabee, which occurred early on in the primaries and went away as soon as Huckabee became irrelevant, are provably true (that he raised taxes as Governor, for example). The converse also applies: All of Huckabee's attacks against Romney are provably false (that Romney is responsible for gay marriage in Massachusetts).

Mike Huckabee does himself a disservice by continuing to attack Romney simply because he's still smarting from Romney's legitimate and substantive attacks that were made nearly a year ago now. Think about this, would Huckabee be reacting this way still if Romney's attacks were baseless? People don't respond this vigorously to ridiculous and blatantly false accusations. It's precisely because Romney's critisms of Huckabee hit home so effectivley that the Huckster can't let this go.

Notice how Romney ignores Huckabee? That's the appropriate response to attacks that are not worth the time of day.

a brave new world

2008-11-05T00:45:00.013-05:00

Tonight America elected a platitude.

The mantras "Hope & Change", and "Yes we can" are neither policies nor principles.

What concrete set of principles does Obama stand for?

Obama stands for himself and his cult of personality.

He's the one he's been waiting for.

5 Reasons

2008-11-02T02:36:00.004-05:00

Five reasons to vote against Obama?

Only five?

I could give you 50, no problem.

1. He wants to tax working Americans back to the Stone Age. He lies when he says he will cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans. You know its nonsense because they can’t keep their numbers straight from hour to hour. Obama claims everyone making under $250,000 is safe, or is it $200,000 (the infomercial) or $150,000 (Joe Biden)? On Friday, Gov. Bill Richardson cut it to $120,000.

Oh what a tangled web we weave. The fact is, the wealth-spreaders have vowed to do away with the Bush tax cuts. So everybody who pays any income taxes is going to take a hit. Plus, the friends of ACORN also plan to get rid of the cap on Social Security withholding taxes. That means everyone who makes over $102,700 will be slaughtered. I don’t have room to talk about capital gains.

2. The federal courts. In that famous 2001 Chicago radio interview, Obama wistfully talked about the need for the Supreme Court to break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution. You know, those pesky constraints that make us a nation of laws, not governed by the whims of the Friends of Obama, or Jeremiah Wright. You think Breyer and Ginsburg are beyond the pale? Obama’s crowd thinks they’re too conservative.

3. Teach the Obama-worshipping bumkisser media a lesson. Have they ever been more in the tank for anyone? They’re all worried about the Patriot Act and terrorists’ rights at Gitmo, but they had no problems printing flat-out lies about Sarah Palin. More recently, they took handouts from Obama thugs in Ohio on Joe the Plumber’s tax liens, divorce problems, child-support payments etc. - worse violations of privacy rights than anything that’s happened under the Patriot Act. But who cares - Joe the Plumber is just a typical white person.

3. The character of Barack Obama. You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much. He lectures you that your kids will have to learn Spanish - your kids, not his. He’s always railing about economic justice, but his illegal-alien aunt lives in poverty in Southie. Hey Barack, I thought charity began at home. Like John Kerry and Joe Biden, he doesn’t believe in donating to charity. Obama is a classic liberal hypocrite: He’ll give anybody the shirt off your back, not his.

4. Michelle Obama. Another pampered semi-literate Ivy Leaguer who still considers herself a victim, even with her $360,000-a-year job as diversity coordinator at a Chicago hospital. Can you stand four years of this harridan lecturing you on your greed?

5. All the other stuff I don’t have much room for. Where the heck was Barack Obama really born? Dont forget his pal Bill Ayers dedication of his 1974 book “Prairie Fire” to, among others, Sirhan Sirhan. (Are you listening, Teddy and Caroline?) If Obama loses, Gwen Ifill’s book tanks. The return of the Fairness Doctrine to censor free speech. Joe Biden, a heartbeat away. And the No. 1 reason of all to vote against Barack Obama: If he loses it will drive the moonbats absolutely bonkers.

-Howie Carr

jumping the gun?

2008-11-02T02:17:00.001-05:00

Incongruity

2008-10-31T03:36:00.015-04:00

The liberal mind is an interesting thing to study. It defies logic on such a regular basis that it belies classification. It is slave to neither logic or emotion exclusivley. Rather, it toggles between the two at will, depending on the demands of the particular argument at hand. Truly a unique and mind-bending specimen, the Liberal mind.

Apparently there is a video tape that depicts Barack Obama in attendance at a 2003 send off banquet honoring Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian scholar and activist. This video tape was given to the LA Times who have suddenly decided not to release the tape to the general public claiming that they are under an obligation not to air the tape.

The McCain campaign is demanding that the Obama supporting LA Times release the video tape.

My question is: Who gives a video tape to a major media outlet, and then demand that they not release it?

The LA Times excuse for not releasing the tape is very implausible, and stinks to high heaven of media bias.

In the tank for Obama anyone?

If that blatant example of media bias weren't enough, Obama supporting liberals are now simultaneously arguing that Obama's relationship to Khalidi is no big deal and then in the next breath, argue that the tape should not be released.

Well which is it? Is Obama's relationship with Khalidi no big deal?

Then what, one wonders, is the harm in releasing the tape?

At some point here, the last thread of logic is lost.

Just release the tape, LA Times, and this thing goes away.

So long as there's a tape that exists still unreleased, there will always be this additional unresolved partial-revelation about a man who, as we learn more, has a veritable tapestry of shady and/or questionable associations that all share more or less the same sort of anti-American and/or anti-Zionist bent.

But in the new Stalinst 'Obamerica', we're not allowed to ask such questions or have such concerns, I guess.

No doubt the comrades in the MSM will succeed in suppressing any further evidence, including this video tape, that may depict Obama in even the slightest of unfavorable lights.

Here's to hoping that there's something left of America in 2012.

Moonbat, Massachusetts

2008-10-25T15:09:00.005-04:00

Greetings from Moonbat country.

not a single school of thought

2008-10-22T03:24:00.011-04:00

John Fund, of opinionjournal.com, asserts that there's not a single school of economic thought that says that you raise taxes in a recession.

Yet that's precisely what Barack Obama and this Democratically controlled Congress propose to do, he goes on to point out.

This critique makes so much sense, it must make a liberal's head spin like a top.

You wanna make a recession a depression: Vote Obama.

Hack

2008-10-22T01:05:00.034-04:00

It's clear to me now that Joe Biden is a hack.

I'll confess that I didn't know all that much about Biden before he was selected as Obama's running mate. Secretly I was giving him the benefit of the doubt. All I hear from the mainstream media is what a genius he is, so I couldn't just conclude the opposite until presented with sufficient evidence one way or the other.

The new wave of various Biden gaffes have been catalogued for weeks now and yesterday reached a crescendo with the outrageously candid confession that Obama would face an international incident within 6 months of being elected and react slowly. See my previous post.

But for me there is a rhetorical moment where someone reveals themselves to be an intellectual hack. A final "Jump The Shark" moment.

In a campaign rally today Biden discussed the exchange in the recent debate where McCain turned to Obama and said, "I'm not George Bush, if you wanted to run against him you should have run four years ago." An effective line to be sure.

Biden's response to this line today was, "Methinks he doth protest too much." How original... quoting Shakespeare. Only, if you find yourself to be a political junkie like myself, you know that this exact turn of phrase was used just yesterday to describe Biden's own phony outrage that his own patriotism has been questioned one too many times.

The discussion goes like this: Why is it that Democrats are always whining about people questioning their patriotism? Methinks they doth protest too much. That turn of phrase was used in a recent article, I don't remember where at the moment, in reference to Joe Biden's vociferous phony outrage about people questioning the patriotism of Democrats. Awww... people question the patriotism of leftists. Cue the tiny violins.

It appears as though Joe Biden is essentially back to his old plagiarizing ways. This time not whole passages of text at least, but he must have heard the Shakespearean turn of phrase applied to him just yesterday. Surely some aide showed him the article that called to task his phony outrage by effectively invoking Shakespeare.

But because Democrats like Biden are generally rhetorically unoriginal, he must have thought that it was a turn of phrase worth "borrowing" I suppose. But then he massacres the saying by using in an unconvincing fashion. It really is the height of lameness when you rip off the exact turn of phrase that was just used effectively against you, only to have it not make much sense and in turn, not resonate.

Many McCain supporters were wondering when McCain was going to more forcefully attempt to separate himself from President Bush for months now.

The Obama campaign strategy, for its part it seems, was written when Bush won the last election four years ago: Vote Obama because (insert the Republican candidate's name here) is another four years of Bush.

And the Democrats, with their getaway driver the mainstream media, have been routing for things to go badly in America for as long as I can remember at this point in order to drum into the heads of Americans this as their 2008 winning campaign theme.

Things go badly in the war: good for Democrats. Things go badly in the economy: good for Democrats.

So now that McCain has for the first time pointed out that he is not Bush, after months of letting the charge go unchallenged, he's protesting too much?

What???

If you're going to purloin rhetoric, you should at least employ it in an effective manner. To not do so is a blatant example of intellectual hackery. Many have followed Biden for years and have drawn their own conclusions. It now seems that it was largely a function of time, but I now join the chorus that declares Joe Biden to be a hack.

Together with the voluminous body of work of his constant gaffes, his previous history of plagiarism, his propensity to play fast and loose with the facts, and his ongoing rhetorical unoriginality the truth is clear now.

This guy is a joke, a hack, a charlatan.

a gaffe a minute

2008-10-21T15:22:00.001-04:00

It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking.... Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy....

I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate… And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you - not financially to help him - we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.

-Joe Biden

Say it ain't so Joe. But thanks for the candor.

dissembling acrobatics

2008-10-16T03:36:00.004-04:00

Greg Sargent, a prominent Obama supporting blogger, wrote the following in response to McCain's correct assertion during the debate that Obama voted against a bill that would have explicitly required a doctor to do whatever he/she could in order to attempt to save a baby's life after surviving a botched abortion attempt:

Desperation: McCain Claims That Obama Voted To Let Babies Die

Sheer desperation: John McCain hits Barack Obama for allegedly voting to let babies die.

The reference, of course, is to Obama's opposition to a measure in Illinois that would purportedly have provided care for babies born amid abortions -- something that was already legally required, anyway. The bill was widely viewed by critics as a sneak attack on Roe v. Wade.

To our ears, this is a more despicable smear than just about anything we've seen, worse than Ayers or anything else. It wreaks so overwhelmingly of desperation and dishonesty that it's incredible that McCain actually agreed to it when Steve Schmidt or whoever told him it would work and he really, really would score big points if he lobbed this attack tonight.

Obama himself attempted to perform the same sort of dissembling rhetorical acrobatics during the debate on this issue but the fact remains that the statement that Obama voted against this particular piece of legislation is a correct statement. Mr. Sargent here states that, "The bill was widely viewed by critics as a sneak attack on Roe v. Wade.". So Critics saw it as an attack on Roe v. Wade?

Conclusion: Due to political pressure from the far left pro-abortion lobby, Obama voted against a bill which would have spelled out what was required when a baby was somehow born alive during a botched abortion attempt. This does seem to be an extremely pro-abortion stance and, as McCain stated, out of the mainstream.

There is at least one documented case that I am aware of where a down syndrome baby was left to die in a laundry closet.

Legislation was brought about to prevent further incidences of this sort of thing.

Barrack Obama voted against this legislation.

To point this out is not some scurrilous charge that is outrageously beyond the pale.

It's very simple, either Obama did or did not vote against this piece of legislation.

There, all dissembling has been reassembled.

the politics of grievance and resentment

2008-10-14T14:36:00.007-04:00

In words, Obama is a uniter instead of a divider. In deeds, he has spent years promoting polarization. That is what a "community organizer" does, creating a sense of grievance, envy and resentment, in order to mobilize political action to get more of the taxpayers' money or to force banks to lend to people they don't consider good risks, as the community organizing group ACORN did.

After Barack Obama moved beyond the role of a community organizer, he promoted the same polarization in his other roles.

That is what he did when he spent the money of the Woods Fund bankrolling programs to spread the politics of grievance and resentment into the schools. That is what he did when he spent the taxpayers' money bankrolling the grievance and resentment ideology of Michael Pfleger.

When Barack Obama donated $20,000 to Jeremiah Wright, does anyone imagine that he was unaware that Wright was the epitome of grievance, envy and resentment hype? Or were Wright's sermons too subtle for Obama to pick up that message?

How subtle is "Goddamn America!"?

Barack Obama has carried election-year makeovers to a new high, presenting himself a uniter of people, someone reaching across the partisan divide and the racial divide-- after decades of promoting polarization in each of his successive roles and each of his choices of political allies.

Yet the media treat exposing a fraudulent election-year image as far worse than letting someone acquire the powers of the highest office in the land through sheer deception.

-Thomas Sowell

the roaches nest behind the curtain

2008-10-08T23:03:00.011-04:00

Read this.

root cause

2008-10-08T00:28:00.001-04:00

Say it ain't so Joe

2008-10-02T23:26:00.004-04:00

Keith Olbermann Brown

2008-09-25T00:13:00.011-04:00

I believe that Keith Olbermann has been reincarnated.

As Campbell Brown.

The tip off isn't necessarily the ridiculously obvious pro-Obama bent as much as it is the sanctimonious delivery and snide yet sing- song tone of voice as she recites what some lefty wrote on the tele-prompter.

Who does Ms. Brown think she's fooling, I wonder, when everybody knows that she's so in the tank for Obama, she's soaking wet.

I love the fact that Sarah Palin is pissing off the MSM.

If Campbell Olbermann Brown is angry, then the McCain campaign is doing something good.

Doctrinal confusion

2008-09-20T03:08:00.003-04:00

"Charlie Gibson's gaffe..." Damn right.

unreal

2008-09-13T14:17:00.017-04:00

In an effort to influence the election by influencing voters, ABC News apparently edited out whole chunks of the Sarah Palin Charlie Gibson interview.

Here we go again with blatant left leaning media bias. I'm sure ABC News would argue that they edited for time constraints or some other lame argument, but the effect of editing out certain key passages of what Palin was saying had the obviously intended effect of making her appear less coherent on matters of foreign policy.

Why do liberals have to constantly cheat in a pathetic attempt to win the argument?

Here's some advice to ABC News: If you don't want to be accused of cheating and being guilty of left leaning media bias, just run the interview of a Republican candidate in it's entirety. Don't edit out whole passages of the strongest arguments of the candidate! Because we're gonna find out what you did, you stupid bastards.

Would it even be possible to have someone at ABC News editing the interview who isn't in the tank for Obama?

If Charlie Gibson had any knowledge of this insipid editing then he's no better than Dan Rather (who I'm sure most lefties privately regard as a hero for fraudulently trying to take down President Bush on the eve of the 2004 election).

Here's the full context of the foreign policy discussion with the bold and underlined sections being those that were conveniently left out in order to shape people's impression of Sarah Palin's grasp of the issues being discussed.

A lesson in objectivity from Mike Gravel

2008-09-13T05:59:00.005-04:00

Listen to this clip of a liberal radio show where the leftist presidential candidate Mike Gravel attempts to set the two partisan hosts straight on "trooper-gate" and a variety of other misguided arguments that are commonly parroted by every liberal media outfit under the sun in an effort to attack and impugn Sarah Palin's character rather than attack her policies.

For those who would seek to try to discredit Palin rather than debate the substance of the issues at hand, listen carefully to Mike Gravel, he's a lefty with some common sense.

7 years

2008-09-11T12:39:00.008-04:00

Rescue workers remove a Father Judge, a parish priest from one of New York's fire halls. Father Judge was administering last rites to a firefighter who was killed by one of the many bodies that fell to the ground after people leapt from the tower to their deaths, when he too was struck by a body and killed.

It seems to me that if President Bush is solely responsible for the sub prime mortgage crisis and for high gas prices, as some would have us believe, then he is also solely responsible for keeping America safe from terrorism for 7 years.

I for one have never bought into the narrative, that has been peddled for years now, that George W Bush is worthless. He has done more to confront the threat of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism than any other world leader in history. To me that is far from worthless, it's priceless.

The fine art of moral equivalency

2008-09-10T02:57:00.007-04:00

"If you were watching Sean Hannity consistently..."

Huh? Is that Obama telling us that he watches Sean Hannity more than Bill O'Reilly does? I don't doubt it.

At least Obama tried to explain (away) his associations with Reverend Wright et al.

He was unconvincing, yet refreshingly candid.

Liberals and the media

2008-09-09T02:17:00.023-04:00

Sometimes I wonder if liberals even understand what it is that every one else objects to about the biased and slanted general news coverage provided by the predominantly left leaning mainstream media.

Keith Olbermann and Chris Mathews were today relieved of their duties as MSNBC news general election anchors.

It seems that the more the left leaning media digs it heels in, the more ground it loses. Yet amazingly, declining readership of liberal publications and bottom of the barrel ratings for liberal television and radio enterprises have served only to somehow embolden far left influenced media rather than discourage it.

When your enemy is in the process of destroying itself it is unwise to point it out, but in this case I can't resist.

How it is that these supposedly intelligent lefty media types could have such a tin ear when it comes to what is expected of them in the realm of journalism? It must have to do with their own high opinion of themselves that causes them to fail to realize that their own audiences, those that cling to guns and religion, are not as stupid as they think. This is what Sarah Palin means when she speaks of the 'elite media', who in her case, have taken media bias to new levels of tawdriness and hypocrisy.

I mean, does the left at least grasp what people objected to when Dan Rather capsized his own career in a blatant effort to influence a political campaign by promoting a fraudulent Bush National Guard story on the eve of the 2004 presidential election?

That fact that many of those on the left are inclined to defend Dan Rather in "Rathergate" essentially dictates that they are doomed to repeat similar, if not the same, mistakes. Because this narrative of left leaning media bias has been around for so long at this point, it has fully taken hold in the public consciousness at large as a normal feature of the political landscape.

So when people see Keith Olbermann berating 9-11 victims or Chris Mathews "getting a thrill up his leg" for Obama they have clear confirmation of the insidious permeation and general brazenness of left leaning political bias bleeding into what is presented supposedly as hard news.

They never learn, so they're gone. Do Olbermann and Mathews even understand why they were taken off their assignment of delivering general coverage during the rest of the campaign? They seem so stubborn and one-sided that I'm sure that they have some sort of rationale that blames Haliburton or George Bush rather than the real culprit: their own failure to comprehend the difference between commentary and general news coverage.

grand slam & smack down

2008-09-04T11:50:00.011-04:00

In case you missed Sarah Palin's killer speech last night, like Barack did, here it is in it's entirety. It's gonna be pretty tough for McCain to top this speech, but clearly, picking Sarah as the VP nominee was a stroke of genius.

Fred Thompson, thy hitter of home-runs

2008-09-02T23:42:00.016-04:00

Many of the pundits were raving about Joe Lieberman's speech last night but I was partial to Fred Thompson's, I thought his speech was excellent.

He delivered a masterful blend of story telling and red meat dispensing. Fred Thompson knows how to get my conservative leaning juices flowing. He used his acting skills to regale the hall with perhaps the most interesting and compelling account of John McCain's POW experience and then he delved into some of the reasons as to why Obama is decidedly unprepared and unqualified to be president. Here are some of the best lines of the night delivered by Fred Thompson.

On McCain's Hanoi Hilton experience:

We hear a lot of talk about hope.

John McCain knows about hope. That's all he had to survive on. For propaganda purposes, his captors offered to let him go home.

John McCain refused.

He refused to leave ahead of men who'd been there longer.

He refused to abandon his conscience and his honor, even for his freedom.

He refused, even though his captors warned him, "It will be very bad for you."

They were right.

It was.

On tele-prompters:

Because John McCain stood up our country is better off.

The respect he is given around the world is not because of a teleprompter speech designed to appeal to American critics abroad, but because of decades of clearly demonstrated character and statesmanship.

On Democrats:

To deal with these challenges the Democrats present a history making nominee for president.

History making in that he is the most liberal, most inexperienced nominee to ever run for President. Apparently they believe that he would match up well with the history making, Democrat controlled Congress. History making because it's the least accomplished and most unpopular Congress in our nation's history.

Together, they would take on these urgent challenges with protectionism, higher taxes and an even bigger bureaucracy.

And a Supreme Court that could be lost to liberalism for a generation.

This is not reform.

And it's certainly not change.

On taxes:

A President who feels no need to apologize for the United States of America.

We need a President who understands that you don't make citizens prosperous by making Washington richer, and you don't lift an economic downturn by imposing one of the largest tax increases in American history.

Now our opponents tell you not to worry about their tax increases.

They tell you they are not going to tax your family.

No, they're just going to tax "businesses"! So unless you buy something from a "business", like groceries or clothes or gasoline ... or unless you get a paycheck from a big or a small "business", don't worry ... it's not going to affect you.

They say they are not going to take any water out of your side of the bucket, just the "other" side of the bucket! That's their idea of tax reform.

In conclusion, a salute to McCain:

Tonight we are being called upon to stand up for a strong military ... a mature foreign policy ... a free and growing economy and for the values that bind us together and keep our nation free.

Tonight, we are being called upon to step up and stand up with John just as he has stood up for our country.

Our country is calling.

John McCain cannot raise his arms above his shoulders.

He cannot salute the flag of the country for which he sacrificed so much. Tonight, as we begin this convention week, yes, we stand with him.

And we salute him.

We salute his character and his courage.

His spirit of independence, and his drive for reform.

His vision to bring security and peace in our time, and continued prosperity for America and all her citizens.

For our own good and our children's, let us celebrate that vision, that belief, that faith so we can keep America the greatest country the world has ever seen.

Fred Thompson, thy hitter of home-runs.

Sarah Palin

2008-08-29T08:30:00.010-04:00

It appears as though McCain will pick Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska, as his Vice presidential running mate.

Putting aside the transparent identity politics play of this decision for the moment, I give McCain credit for picking someone with at least some executive experience.

If Sarah Palin is the Vice Presidential nominee, at least one of the four politicians on the two major party tickets will at least have had some experience running something. The other three: Obama, Biden, and McCain have never run so much as a corner store let alone something like the US Government, the largest enterprise in the world.

But then again I could just be being petty by imagining that the CEO of the free world essentially, should have at least some experience running something other than a self-serving political campaign.

Enter Sarah Palin, a fresh face with executive experience who represents an obvious attempt by the McCain campaign to win over disaffected Hillary voters. I wish her and McCain luck in their quest to defeat the Obama juggernaut and his getaway driver, the mainstream media.

McCain/Palin '08.

UPDATE: As of 10:40 a.m. eastern it has been confirmed that Sarah Palin is indeed McCain's VP pick.

Algebra with Bill

2008-08-27T11:17:00.001-04:00

I wonder who he could be talking about.

Tom Ridge

2008-08-17T15:38:00.011-04:00

After watching Tom Ridge on Fox News Sunday today it occurs to me that I could probably live with Ridge as McCain's VP choice. Ridge seems ready to "echo" the President as he put it today as the primary responsibility of a Vice President. If that is the primary criterion for Vice Presidential consideration then Ridge is your man. Not a pushover, but not pushy.

The fact that Ridge is pro-choice only lends centrist credibility to the ticket. And it does not harm McCain's pro-life stance because Ridge seems to understand that he is expected to subjugate his own views on abortion were he to be selected.

Of course if McCain wants to run along side an exiting and dynamic Vice Presidential candidate who is already pro-life and who would immeasurably help him win the argument, there's always Mitt Romney.

Obama flops on drilling

2008-08-02T02:48:00.006-04:00

Obama today changed his position on off-shore drilling.

Maybe he is led by the facts after all.

If so, we can expect more flip-flops about Iraq in the offing.

change we can believe in

2008-07-31T12:16:00.003-04:00

What will be left of your paycheck after taxes under an Obama Administration.

Couric vs. Obama

2008-07-24T13:51:00.009-04:00

Katie Couric actually committed journalism the other day when she asked Obama some pointed questions about the war in Iraq and the war on terror. More significantly, she followed up doggedly when Obama did his usual equivocation and obfuscation. In the following excerpt, Obama becomes noticeably peeved when it becomes apparent that Couric was not going to be conducting the standard MSM softball interview that Obama has grown accustomed to at this point. In fact Obama routinely avoids situations where he might be pinned down to decide on an actual stance on an issue or answer even mildly difficult questions about his 'evolving' policy positions.

Couric: But talking microcosmically, did the surge, the addition of 30,000 additional troops ... help the situation in Iraq?

Obama: Katie, as ... you've asked me three different times, and I have said repeatedly that there is no doubt that our troops helped to reduce violence. There's no doubt.

Couric: But yet you're saying ... given what you know now, you still wouldn't support it ... so I'm just trying to understand this.

Obama: Because ... it's pretty straightforward. By us putting $10 billion to $12 billion a month, $200 billion, that's money that could have gone into Afghanistan. Those additional troops could have gone into Afghanistan. That money also could have been used to shore up a declining economic situation in the United States. That money could have been applied to having a serious energy security plan so that we were reducing our demand on oil, which is helping to fund the insurgents in many countries. So those are all factors that would be taken into consideration in my decision-- to deal with a specific tactic or strategy inside of Iraq.

Couric: And I really don't mean to belabor this, Senator, because I'm really, I'm trying ... to figure out your position. Do you think the level of security in Iraq ...

Obama: Yes.

Couric ... would exist today without the surge?

Obama: Katie, I have no idea what would have happened had we applied my approach, which was to put more pressure on the Iraqis to arrive at a political reconciliation. So this is all hypotheticals. What I can say is that there's no doubt that our U.S. troops have contributed to a reduction of violence in Iraq. I said that, not just today, not just yesterday, but I've said that previously. What that doesn't change is that we've got to have a different strategic approach if we're going to make America as safe as possible.

Couric: If you believe, Senator, Afghanistan is, in fact, the central front in the war on terror, why was this your first trip there? And why didn't you hold a single hearing as chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the fighting force there?

Obama: Well, the, actually, the subcommittee that I chair is the European subcommittee. And any issues related to Afghanistan were always dealt with in the full committee, precisely because it's so important. That's not a matter that you would deal with in a subcommittee setting. And the fact that I didn't visit Afghanistan doesn't detract from my accurate assessment that this has been the central front on terror.

Clearly Obama has difficulty figuring out what his own stance is on Iraq, yet he ceaselessly insists that he has always been consistent on every related topic. You name the topic, Obama has always held the same position all along. It's just us not listening closely enough, you see. What's more disturbing than Obama changing his mind on Iraq (and a host of other issues) is that he now apparently imagines himself to be infallible.

the amateur's guide to flip-flopping

2008-07-18T00:23:00.030-04:00

John Kerry lost the last presidential election, in many people's estimation, because of his being tagged as a "flip-flopper".

John Kerry was a punter compared to the leftist demi-god messiah, Barack Obama.

In the last few weeks Obama has flipped and flopped around, with such astonishing speed, on matters of such importance like the war in Iraq, that it's actually difficult keep up with his ever changing positions and positioning.

He has twisted himself into knots at this point, as a master political contortionist.

After saying whatever he needed to in order to lock up the far left base of the Democratic party by running to the left of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, Obama shrewdly and cynically deduced that he had to move to the political center in order to begin the process of appealing to the non-far left leaning contingent of voters he would be required to successfully romance in order to win a general election. He would at least need to soften some of what many people correctly imagined as some of his more far left positions into more palatable forms for the mass consumption of the general electorate. His campaign I'm sure would argue that this all is merely a matter of emphasis. You see, by emphasizing the more conservative elements of his existing platform he could soften his hard left edge without actually changing his fundamental positions. This explanation is of course hogwash. Obama has in recent weeks, changed wholesale positions on major issues. On issues about which none are simply so nuanced as to have such conveniently ambiguous parameters that there is no real way of knowing what is triangulation and what is the simple adopting of the direct opposing position. Let's rundown Barack Obama and his 'flip flopper's guide to the galaxy'.

• (Iraq) In the case of the war in Iraq, Obama has changed from one position to another and then back to the original position in the span of 48 hours. He based his entire primary campaign against Hillary as the true anti-war candidate, but in the last few weeks has now said that he would be making "refinements" in his Iraq policy. Refinements that include listening to the commanders fighting the war rather than imposing the arbitrary timetable for withdrawal that was trumpeted as his position in the primary campaign. But now he has flipped back to the original position because of the outcry coming from his far left anti-war base who have no time for the argument that our course of action in Iraq should not be dictated by leftist politicians making academic pronouncements and judgments about a tactical and strategic military situation. This is an example of what I call the compound flip flop, where's there's a flop, then a flip and then another flop back to the original position.

•(FISA) Many of Obama's most ardent supporters have found their candidate's blatant flip-flop on the issue of FISA wiretaps and telecom immunity difficult to stomach. In the primary, Obama promised to filibuster a bill to protect telephone companies from liability for their cooperation with national security wiretaps, then he flipped and voted for the exact legislation he promised to rebuke. The diametric flip flop.

• (Gun Control/2nd amendment) After a recent supreme court decision lifting a ban on handguns in Washington DC, Obama was seen pronouncing that he "has been a consistent supporter of the second amendment." (By the way, whenever you hear someone say that, "they have always been consistent" or John Kerry's favorite "let me be clear", you have a clear indication that the person making those remarks is in fact in the process of flip flopping.) Shortly after declaring support for the second amendment out of nowhere Obama then essentially recanted by attempting to straddle the issue by saying that he was also in fact for the regulation of hand guns by the federal government. The 2nd amendment is unambiguous. It states that The government "shall not infringe" on a citizens right to keep and bear arms. Either you support the 2nd amendment or you do not. But Obama on this is clumsily trying to triangulate by appealing to both polar opposite positions. Instead of triangulation though all he really is doing is flipping and flopping back and forth so fast that it becomes so difficult to track that people lose interest in actually figuring out where he stands on the issue. The high speed flip flop.

• (Public campaign funding) One of Obama's signature positions, as the self declared standard bearer of the "new politics", was his promise not to take private money for his campaign. That was before he saw just how much money he could raise privately. He now has completely flipped on the issue by spurning the public finance system he previously promoted. The signature issue flip-flop.

• (an undivided Jerusalem) When speaking to the Israeli lobby in a speech a few weeks ago Obama declared that he was fully supportive of an undivided Jerusalem. Then the Palestinians reacted badly and Obama flipped over to the mindset that Jerusalem should be shared by both Jews and Palestinians. The foreign policy gaffe flip-flop.

• (direct talks with Ahmadinejad, Chavez) At the You Tube debate last year, Obama famously declared that unlike the Bush administration he was in favor of direct talks with all of the leaders of various rogue nations. Obama indicated that he would be for talks with Ahmadinejad, Raul Castro, Hugo Chavez ,and Kim Jung Il with "no preconditions". These days he has heavily backpedaled into a back flip on the issue. He has done a back pedal flip flop on this issue whereas he now would want some form of "pre-conditions" before meeting with the various rogue nation heads of state mentioned in the original YouTube question.

• (town hall meetings) McCain challenged Obama to a series of town hall meetings style debates where both candidates would be subject to direct questions from the general public. Obama, not wanting to look like he was backing out of a confrontation with the lowly John McCain, initially entertained the idea to only later and quietly deny the request. Apparently Obama isn't as much of a fan of town hall meetings as his book "The Audacity of Hope" would have us believe. There's a passage in the book explaining how and why he loves town hall meetings so much. That was before he might be subjected to difficult questions I suppose. The hypocritical duality flip flop.

• (Partial birth abortions) Obama was once the champion of abortion in all of its grisly forms. Now he seems to be having doubts about the practice of partial birth abortion. Again, either you support partial birth abortion or you don't. The abortion related flip-flop.

And unlike McCain changing on domestic drilling, for example, who may do so because of drastic changes in the facts on the ground, Obama has been wildly flip-flopping for no other reason than political expediency. In other words, Obama needs to be able to adopt whatever stance at whatever time for whatever political reason on whatever issue.

This is flip flopping redefined. 'Change (of position) you can believe in' indeed.

Vive la flip-flop!

Happy 4th!

2008-07-04T15:31:00.006-04:00

Happy Independence Day from Boston, home of America's team The New England Patriots, the World Champion Boston Red Sox and Boston Celtics, and the beginning of the American war for Independence.

Trial Balloon

2008-07-01T02:21:00.008-04:00

This is one of those campaign flaps that seems too silly to comment upon yet too memorable to ignore.

In this clip, the former presidential candidate and current Obama surrogate demeans and generally assails John McCain's military service.

This is a very odd road that the Obama has now chosen to go down. Attacking McCain's military credentials was never anything that any of the Republican contenders would have ever dreamed of doing in the primary a few months back.

But like any well executed special op, the commander has to have 'plausible deniability'. So in the case of Wesley Clark's obtuse comments, I'm sure that Obama "had no idea" what arguments Clark would be making. Just like he had no idea about Reverend Wright, or Reverend Phleger, or William Ayers, or Tony Rezko I'm sure.

As we've seen in the Democratic primary many times by now, a surrogate of a candidate will go out and make an argument or comment that was then later revealed to be unauthorized only after the negative repercussions started to roll into the campaign headquarters, of course.

Obama has now indirectly denounced the comments of Wesley Clark accordingly.

Nobama

2008-06-27T13:20:00.004-04:00

Some of the most passionate supporters of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary have banded together in an effort to see to it that Barack Obama does not get elected president. Perusing the website, it's interesting to see that some of the most virulent forces of anti-Obama are actually Democratic voters who feel that their candidate was snubbed in the worst possible way. At present, I'm inclined to agree with their conclusion, Nobama in '08.

Au contraire

2008-06-22T06:00:00.004-04:00

The short version of the Democratic Party primary campaign is that the media fell in love with Barack Obama but the Democratic electorate declined to.

"I felt this thrill going up my leg," said MSNBC's Chris Matthews after one of the senator's speeches. "I mean, I don't have that too often." Au contraire, Chris and the rest of the gang seem to be getting the old tingle up the thigh hairs on a nightly basis. If Obama is political Viagra, the media are at that stage in the ad where the announcer warns that, if leg tingles persist for more than six months, see your doctor.

Out there in the voting booths, however, Democrat legs stayed admirably unthrilled. The more the media told Hillary she was toast, and she should get the hell out of it and let Obama romp to victory, the more Democrats insisted on voting for her. The more the media insisted Barack was inevitable, the less inclined the voters were to get with the program. On the strength of Chris Matthews' vibrating calves, Sen. Obama raised a ton of money – over $300 million – and massively outspent Sen. Clinton, but he didn't really get any bang for his buck. In the end, he crawled over the finish line. The Obama Express came a-hurtlin' down the track at 2 miles an hour.

But what does he care? Sen. Obama has learned an old trick of Bill Clinton's: If you behave like a star, you'll get treated as one. So, even as his numbers weakened, his rhetoric soared. By the time he wrapped up his "victory" speech last week, the great gaseous uplift had his final paragraphs floating in delirious hallucination along the Milky Way:

"I face this challenge with profound humility and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people … . I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal … . This was the moment – this was the time – when we came together to remake this great nation."

It's a good thing he's facing it with "profound humility," isn't it? Because otherwise who knows what he'd be saying. But mark it in your calendars: June 3, 2008 – the long-awaited day, after 232 years, that America began to provide care for the sick. Just a small test program: 47 attendees of the Obama speech were taken to hospital and treated for nausea. Everyone else came away thrilled that the Obamessiah was going to heal the planet and reverse the rise of the oceans: When Barack wants to walk on the water, he doesn't want to have to use a stepladder to get up on it.

There are generally two reactions to this kind of policy proposal. The first was exemplified by the Atlantic Monthly's Marc Ambinder:

"What a different emotional register from John McCain's; Obama seems on the verge of tears; the enormous crowd in the Xcel Center seems ready to lift Obama on its shoulders; the much smaller audience for McCain's speech interrupted his remarks with stilted cheers."

The second reaction boils down to: "'Heal the planet'? Is this guy nuts?" To be honest I prefer a republic whose citizenry can muster no greater enthusiasm for their candidate than "stilted cheers" to one in which the crowd wants to hoist the nominee onto their shoulders for promising to lower ocean levels within his first term. As for coming together "to remake this great nation," if it's so great, why do we have to remake it? A few months back, just after the New Hampshire primary, a Canadian reader of mine – John Gross of Quebec – sent me an all-purpose stump speech for the 2008 campaign:

"My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you'll join with me as we try to change it."

I thought this was so cute, I posted it on the Web at National Review. Whereupon one of those Internetty-type things happened, and three links and a Google search later the line was being attributed not to my correspondent but to Sen. Obama, and a few weeks after that I started getting e-mails from reporters from Florida to Oregon, asking if I could recall at which campaign stop the senator, in fact, uttered these words. And I'd patiently write back and explain that they're John Gross' words, and that not even Barack would be dumb enough to say such a thing in public. Yet last week his demand in his victory speech that we "come together to remake this great nation" came awful close.

Speaking personally, I don't want to remake America. I'm an immigrant, and one reason I came here is because most of the rest of the Western world remade itself along the lines Sen. Obama has in mind. This is pretty much the end of the line for me. If he remakes America, there's nowhere for me to go – although presumably once he's lowered sea levels around the planet there should be a few new atolls popping up here and there.

Marc Ambinder is right. Obama's rhetoric is in a different "emotional register" from John McCain's. It's in a different "emotional register" from every U.S. president – not just the Coolidges but the Kennedys, too. Nothing in Obama's resume suggests he's the man to remake America and heal the planet. Only last week, another of his pals bit the dust, convicted by a Chicago jury of 16 counts of this and that. "This isn't the Tony Rezko I knew," said the senator, in what's becoming a standard formulation. Likewise, this wasn't the Jeremiah Wright he knew. And these are guys he's known for 20 years.

Yet at the same time as he's being stunned by the corruption and anti-Americanism of those closest to him, Obama's convinced that just by jetting into Tehran and Pyongyang he can get to know America's enemies and persuade them to hew to the straight and narrow. No doubt if it all goes belly-up, and Iran winds up nuking Tel Aviv, President Obama will put on his more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger face and announce solemnly that "this isn't the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad I knew."

Every time I hear an Obama speech, I start to giggle. But millions of voters don't. And, if Chris Matthews and the tingly-legged media get their way and drag Obama across the finish line this November, the laugh will be on those of us who think that serious times demand grown-up rhetoric.

-Mark Steyn

Going Green

2008-06-18T07:28:00.005-04:00

credit: Boston Herald

Obama as Cosby with a socialist twist

2008-06-16T15:40:00.017-04:00

On Father's day yesterday Barack Obama delivered a speech which essentially ripped off the message of Bill Cosby vis a vis the black community. Except that rather than draw scorn from the liberal media and masses as Cosby did, Obama has been lavished with yet more "messianic figure" praise.

Obama not only shamelessly co-opted the message of Cosby, he then proceeded to add his own socialistic touch to Cosby's thesis by concluding that with the benefit of yet more social programs black fathers will be better able to hang around and raise their offspring like a responsible adult. In other words, if the government hands money to black fathers then they will do what they are already "supposed to do" as Chris Rock would say.

Obama's socialist conclusion misses the point of Cosby's thesis, which has much more to do with personal responsibility than it does with the government handouts Obama favors.

But Obama's rationale on this matter is not at all surprising given the fact that to Obama, the answer to all of societies ills are found in the boilerplate principles of socialism.

As Europe, China, and Russia move away from socialism by embracing more and more aspects of capitalism, Barack Obama proposes to rush us towards socialism, the very form of government being abandoned by even the most stubborn and ardent historical proponents of it.

If you strongly feel that taxes are far too low, then by all means vote Barack Obama.

Obama with no tele-promter

2008-06-10T01:02:00.002-04:00

liberal drivel pap

2008-06-05T04:50:00.005-04:00

“John McCain is not ever going to be an operatic orator but he is not the Chinese dinner that Barack Obama is. You never know what he said an hour later. Just like you never know what you ate when you have a Chinese dinner. What did he say? He gave some liberal drivel pap, the likes of which we’ve heard before and it hasn’t worked, it’s not gonna work and it’s why he’s really an ideal candidate to contrast with the kind of conservatism we need to discuss.”

-Mary Matalin

Rich White People redux

2008-05-30T01:20:00.007-04:00

The above footage is of Catholic minister Michael Pfleger giving the sermon at Obama's church the other day. The highlight comes about halfway through this clip, where he lampoons Hillary Clinton for being rich and white.

It appears as though racism and the promotion of racial division are alive and well at the church Obama has attended for the last 2 decades. But Obama was never present during any of the most controversial comments. Yeah... right.

in memoriam

2008-05-26T19:29:00.004-04:00

gaffe as policy

2008-05-23T23:12:00.007-04:00

'Before the Democratic debate of July 23, Barack Obama had never expounded upon the wisdom of meeting, without precondition, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hugo Chávez, Kim Jong Il or the Castro brothers. But in that debate, he was asked about doing exactly that. Unprepared, he said sure -- then got fancy, declaring the Bush administration's refusal to do so not just "ridiculous" but "a disgrace."

After that, there was no going back. So he doubled down. What started as a gaffe became policy. By now, it has become doctrine. Yet it remains today what it was on the day he blurted it out: an absurdity. '

-Charles Krauthammer