Van crashes, burns

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

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.

There's hope for you yet, Anderson Cooper

Perhaps CNN is starting to turn the corner.

Same has come to Washington

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.

Schism

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.

Rubbing raw the wounds

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

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

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?

Incongruity

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

Greetings from Moonbat country.

not a single school of thought

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

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

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.

the politics of grievance and resentment

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

Read this.

root cause

Say it ain't so Joe

Keith Olbermann Brown

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.

unreal

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.