The 2008 Presidential Race

[G M]

**On what do you base your assumption that Barry is so smart?**


Definitely higher than a low graduating person at Idaho or someone near the bottom of their class at Annapolis who was admitted on connections. 

**You take cheap shots at McCain, yet I wonder what sort of heroism and sacrifice you could point out that Barry Obama has in his past? Anything to demonstrate he's not just an opportunist and an empty suit?**

I am talking God given brain power "smart".  BO is "smart", ask Crafty, only the "smart", actually the very "smart" get into Harvard Law and become Editor of the Law Review.  BO is smart.

As for "cheap shots at McCain, it is a fact.  The guy graduated very very near the bottom of his class at Annapolis.  And for that matter he would never even have gotten in except for his Daddy.  The guy is not smart; sorry, he's the one who is an opportunist.  Except for his Daddy he would be no where.  However to be fair, his experience is excellent and I think he is a good man.  The issue on the table however is "smarts"; not if he is a nice guy.

**You need to read up on what it takes to be a naval aviator. It's a very difficult career path in the Navy/ Marine Corps and not one for those looking to coast along. The applied math/physics just for basic flight school washes out lots of applicants.**

As for his "heroism and sacrifice" what does that have to do with "smart"?  I mean if he ran a four minute mile I would be impressed, but it has nothing to do with smart.  As for sacrifice or not being an opportunist in an empty suit, again as Marc might confirm, graduating from Harvard Law as Editor of the Law Review gives you wonderful opportunities to make big money.  BO didn't go for it; he chose to help people instead.  I have a good friend, she was "only" third in her class at Berkeley Law School, clerked for an Appeals Judge for one year, and now at the ripe old age of 25 joined a firm downtown LA at $175,000 including a nice little bonus.  Now she is bright, but she couldn't get into Harvard (she tried) so I guess that makes BO even brighter. 

**Yeah, what about the "affirmative action" factor? Did B.O. get in because he's smart or a handsome black guy that met "diversity" goals?**

By the way, (separate subject) I have always been curious about the word "hero" and "heroism".  I guess my definition is to do something extraordinary above and beyond your duty and what is expected of you to the benefit of another(s) at risk to yourself.    Simply choosing to be a Policeman, Fireman, or soldier does not make you a "hero".  I respect you, but a "hero" is someone who goes far and beyond their "usual" job.   Following that logic, a soldier who dies on the battlefied or a policeman who is shot by a robber is not automatically a "hero".  Nor is a roofer who falls off a roof and dies.  Or an Iron Worker who falls and dies.  They were doing their job; albeit all deaths are tragic.   But the soldier, the fireman, the policeman, even the roofer or Iron Worker, the individual who goes above and beyond his job at great risk to his own life, now that is a hero to me.  Nor does simply doing your job give you hero status.  Or do you disagree?  Or ?

[G M]

By the way, (separate subject) I have always been curious about the word "hero" and "heroism".  I guess my definition is to do something extraordinary above and beyond your duty and what is expected of you to the benefit of another(s) at risk to yourself.    Simply choosing to be a Policeman, Fireman, or soldier does not make you a "hero".  I respect you, but a "hero" is someone who goes far and beyond their "usual" job.   Following that logic, a soldier who dies on the battlefied or a policeman who is shot by a robber is not automatically a "hero".  Nor is a roofer who falls off a roof and dies.  Or an Iron Worker who falls and dies.  They were doing their job; albeit all deaths are tragic.   But the soldier, the fireman, the policeman, even the roofer or Iron Worker, the individual who goes above and beyond his job at great risk to his own life, now that is a hero to me.  Nor does simply doing your job give you hero status.  Or do you disagree?  Or ?

**Let me give this some thought.**

[JDN]

I understand being an aviator by definition means you cannot be stupid; rather you must be an intelligent person not to mention have physical ability.   Although I wonder how fast an Admiral's son would be washed out.  However the argument on the table was the degree of God given intelligence.  I think McCain is a fine person and he is far far from stupid.  And experience counts.  My young and even beautiful attorney friend whom I mentioned is very very bright, but as Crafty mentioned, sometimes her common sense is very lacking.  But give her time...she has the basics. 

As for "hero" I am sincerely curious about your opinion.  To perhaps repeat my question, please understand I have the greatest respect and gratitude for Soldiers, Policemen, Fireman, etc. but are they all "heroes"?  Or is the "hero" the special individual who goes above and beyond at risk to themselves?

[G M]

My quick answer is it's a matter of degree. Anyone who knowingly places themselves in harm's way for a greater good than themselves has an element of heroism to them, though i'd say that not everyone who puts on a uniform is automatically a hero. I certainly wouldn't describe myself as one. A uniform isn't required to be heroic either. I'd call MLK a hero. I'd say that a teacher with good options that deliberately goes to work in a violent inner city school because he or she wants to give poor kids a chance at a better life is a hero in my book.

Just a few things that leap to mind.

[G M]

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_stump/archive/2008/09/03/focus-group-palin-was-alarmingly-strong.aspx

Focus Group: Palin Was (Alarmingly) Strong
Several moderate-Democrat friends of mine have been emailing--few if any would ever vote for McCain--but all agree that Palin was very strong. The more liberal among them are a little panicked. 
I completely misjudged how negative she would be. Her lines about Obama were brutally cutting and possibly over the top in places. But she's a far better messenger than an angry white man. (Note, by the way, how both Rudy and Huckabee employed a tone that was more bemused than angry. That's the modern GOP's favorite trick--comedic ridicule in place of outright nastiness.)
--Michael Crowley

[Crafty_Dog]

The digs at BO were beautiful in their graceful brutality 

And now the WSJ lays the groundwork for going after Biden:

Biden Was Wrong
On the Cold War
By PETER WEHNER
September 4, 2008

The choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has electrified many conservatives and strengthened John McCain's claim that his administration would be far more reform-minded than Barack Obama's. At the same time, it has triggered accusations that Gov. Palin is far too inexperienced to be vice president, and has little knowledge of national security issues.

Mrs. Palin's lack of mastery of national security issues is often contrasted with Mr. Obama's vice presidential pick, Joseph Biden Jr. Mr. Biden has served in the Senate since 1973, is currently chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and is often described as a "statesman."

In fact, decade after decade and on important issue after important issue, Mr. Biden's judgment has been deeply flawed.

In the 1970s, Mr. Biden opposed giving aid to the South Vietnamese government in its war against the North. Congress's cut-off of funds contributed to the fall of an American ally, helped communism advance, and led to mass death throughout the region. Mr. Biden also advocated defense cuts so massive that both Edmund Muskie and Walter Mondale, both leading liberal Democrats at the time, opposed them.

In the early 1980s, the U.S. was engaged in a debate over funding the Contras, a group of Nicaraguan freedom fighters attempting to overthrow the Communist regime of Daniel Ortega. Mr. Biden was a leading opponent of President Ronald Reagan's efforts to fund the Contras. He also opposed Reagan's efforts to send military assistance to the pro-American government in El Salvador, which at the time was battling the FMLN, a Soviet-supported Marxist group.

Throughout his career, Mr. Biden has consistently opposed modernization of our strategic nuclear forces. He was a fierce opponent of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Mr. Biden voted against funding SDI, saying, "The president's continued adherence to [SDI] constitutes one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft." Mr. Biden has remained a consistent critic of missile defense and even opposed the U.S. dropping out of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty after the collapse of the Soviet Union (which was the co-signatory to the ABM Treaty) and the end of the Cold War.

In 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and, we later learned, was much closer to attaining a nuclear weapon than we had believed. President George H.W. Bush sought war authorization from Congress. Mr. Biden voted against the first Gulf War, asking: "What vital interests of the United States justify sending Americans to their deaths in the sands of Saudi Arabia?"

In 2006, after having voted three years earlier to authorize President George W. Bush's war to liberate Iraq, Mr. Biden argued for the partition of Iraq, which would have led to its crack-up. Then in 2007, Mr. Biden opposed President Bush's troop surge in Iraq, calling it a "tragic mistake." It turned out to be quite the opposite. Without the surge, the Iraq war would have been lost, giving jihadists their most important victory ever.

On many of the most important and controversial issues of the last four decades, Mr. Biden has built a record based on bad assumptions, misguided analyses and flawed judgments. If he had his way, America would be significantly weaker, allies under siege would routinely be cut loose, and the enemies of the U.S. would be stronger.

There are few members of Congress whose record on national security matters can be judged, with the benefit of hindsight, to be as consistently bad as Joseph Biden's. It's true that Sarah Palin has precious little experience in national security affairs. But in this instance, no record beats a manifestly bad one.

Mr. Wehner, a former deputy assistant to President George W. Bush, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

See all of today's editorials and op-eds

[DougMacG]

Sarah Palin knocked my socks off FWIW.  For my money she is the next Reagan.  She is an unapologetic conservative able to explain that view (my view) in simple and direct terms.  I wish McCain had that quality and wish the other side ran as unapologetic liberals instead of sneaky ones who conceal the extent of their liberalism behind centrist rhetoric.

---
Re. the discussion on heroes:  I gave this some thought when people said nice things about me for rescuing my daughter as a baby.  When you climb through harm's way to save yourself or save your own family, you are just a normal living thing or a normal parent with a normal survival instinct.  Not a hero.  But when you enter a burning building for example to rescue your neighbor's children, then you are a hero.  Maybe a few firefighters or fighter pilots are there for non-heroic reasons, but in my view, most anyone like a McCain who served his country, risked his own life, flew a plane into enemy air space performing a mission and held out even a shred of information for more than a second from his enemy captors through even a perceived threat of harm is without a doubt a HERO.  Same goes for people like my father who performed medical rather than combat functions in WWII, maybe not front line but close enough and part of the mission.  They are all heroes.
---

Back to the RNC. GM I think mentioned humor in the message.  My favorite came from Rudy telling Biden to get it in writing:

"Look at just one example in a lifetime of principled stands -- John McCain's support for the troop surge in Iraq. The Democratic Party had given up on Iraq. And I believe, ladies and gentlemen, that when they gave up on Iraq they were giving up on America. The Democratic leader in the Senate said so: "America has lost."

Well, if America lost, who won? Al Qaida? Bin Laden? In the single biggest policy decision of this election, John McCain got it right and Barack Obama got it wrong.

If Barack Obama had been President, there would have been no troop surge and our troops would have been withdrawn in defeat.

Senator McCain was the candidate most associated with the surge. And it was unpopular.

What do you think most other candidates would have done in that situation? They would have acted in their own self-interest by changing their position.

How many times have we seen Barack Obama do that?

Obama was going to take public financing for his campaign, until he didn't.

Obama was against wiretapping before he voted for it.

When speaking to a pro-Israel group, Obama favored an undivided Jerusalem. Until the very next day when he changed his mind.

I hope for his sake, Joe Biden got that VP thing in writing."

[ccp]

*Sarah Palin knocked my socks off FWIW*

Yes mine too.  Gulianni was the best I ever heard him as well.  A definite sigh of relief from me.  The rage from the mostly leftist commentators was palpable and obvious.
The glares, the stares from the likes of Rachel from MSNBC, and Easton from Fortune mag (Fox I think) who were both desparately trying to come up with something negative to say.  Even the 360 guy Anderson had to admit, "well" we didn't mention Obama's speech writer like we are doing with Sarah P. as he and John King were amazingly questioning theirs as well as the newsmedias fairness.

Buchanan was drunk with excitement.  Maybe Reaganism isn't dead.  But with the country's demographics ever changing...
And the people who come here now aren't like the immigrants of our fathers and forefathers.  Now they expect and demand benefits.  So the demographics may still be insurmountable.   

[ccp]

It must have been years since Buchanan was this excited. 
I gotta love this line:
"He has made an extraordinary gesture to conservatives and the party base, offering his old antagonists a partner's share in his presidency. And his decision is likely to be rewarded with a massive and enthusiastic turnout for the McCain-Palin ticket"
   
  The article: 
   
***The risk John McCain took last Friday is comparable to the 72-year-old ex-fighter pilot knocking back two shots and flying his F-16 under the Golden Gate Bridge.

McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his co-pilot was the biggest gamble in presidential history. As of now, it is paying off, big-time.

The sensational selection in Dayton, Ohio, stepped all over the big story from Denver -- Barack Obama's powerful address to 85,000 cheering folks in Mile High Stadium, and 35 million nationally, a speech that vaulted him from a 2-point deficit early in the week to an 8-point margin. Barack had never before reached 49 percent against McCain.

As the Democrats were being rudely stepped on, however, Palin ignited an explosion of enthusiasm among conservatives, Evangelicals, traditional Catholics, gun owners and Right to Lifers not seen in decades.

By passing over his friends Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge, and picking Palin, McCain has given himself a fighting chance of winning the White House that, before Friday morning, seemed to be slipping away. Indeed, the bristling reaction on the left testifies to Democratic fears that the choice of Palin could indeed be a game-changer in 2008.

Liberals howl that Palin has no experience, no qualifications to be president of the United States. But the lady has more executive experience than McCain, Joe Biden and Obama put together.

None of them has ever started or run a business as Palin did. None of them has run a giant state like Alaska, which is larger than California and Texas put together. And though Alaska is not populous, Gov. Palin has as many constituents as Nancy Pelosi or Biden.

She has no foreign policy experience, we are told. And though Alaska's neighbors are Canada and Russia, the point is valid. But from the day she takes office, Palin will get daily briefings and sit on the National Security Council with the president and secretaries of state, treasury and defense.

She will be up to speed in her first year.

And her experience as governor of Alaska, dealing with the oil industry and pipeline agreements with Canada, certainly compares favorably with that of Barack Obama, a community organizer who dealt in the mommy issues of food stamps and rent subsidies.

Where Obama has poodled along with the Daley Machine, Palin routed the Republican establishment, challenging and ousting a sitting GOP governor before defeating a former Democratic governor to become the first female and youngest governor in state history.

For his boldness in choosing Palin, McCain deserves enormous credit. He has made an extraordinary gesture to conservatives and the party base, offering his old antagonists a partner's share in his presidency. And his decision is likely to be rewarded with a massive and enthusiastic turnout for the McCain-Palin ticket. Rarely has this writer encountered such an outburst of enthusiasm on the right.

In choosing Palin, McCain may also have changed the course of history as much as Ike did with his choice of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan did with his choice of George H.W. Bush. For should this ticket win, Palin will eclipse every other Republican as heir apparent to the presidency and will have her own power base among Lifers, Evangelicals, gun folks and conservatives -- wholly independent of President McCain.

A traditional conservative on social issues, Palin has become, overnight, the most priceless political asset the movement has. Look for the neocons to move with all deliberate speed to take her into their camp by pressing upon her advisers and staff, and steering her into the AEI-Weekly Standard-War Party orbit.

Indeed, if McCain defeats Barack, 2012 could see women on both national tickets, and given McCain's age and the possibility he intends to serve a single term, women at the top of both -- Sarah vs. Hillary.

The arrival of Palin on the national scene, with her youth, charisma and vitality, probably also portends a changing of the guard in Washington.

With Republicans having zero chance of capturing either House, and but a slim chance of avoiding losses in both, a Vice President Palin, with her reputation as a rebel and reformer, would surely inspire similar revolts in the Republican caucuses.

As Thomas Jefferson said, from time to time, a little rebellion in the political world is as necessary as storms in the physical.

The Palin nomination could backfire, but it is hard to see how. She has passed her first test, her introduction to the nation, with wit and grace. And the Obama-Biden ticket, having already alienated millions of women with the disrespecting of Hillary, is unlikely to start attacking another woman whose sole offense is that she had just been given the chance to break the glass ceiling at the national level.

Her nomination, which will bring the Republican right home, also frees up McCain to appeal to moderates and liberals, which has long been his stock in trade.

With his selection of Sarah Palin, John McCain has not only shaken up this election, he may have helped shape the future of the United States -- and much for the better.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, "The Death of the West,", "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Reader Comments: (250)

Here are a few of the comments submitted by our readers. Click to view all Report Abusive Post
Right on, Pat ! This lady is a winner
and a future President !
Sep 03, 2008 @ 03:14 AMGino, Rio Rancho
Report Abusive Post
Sara is going to gut Biden like a salmon and skin Obama like a moose. Yahoo! I never thought, I would vote for a ticket with McCain on it. Pat we love you for those exchanges with Oberman and mathews.
Sep 03, 2008 @ 04:04 AMJohnny, Pewaukee Wi.
Report Abusive Post
Thank the Lord that Sarah has little or no experience!!!
Consider what Bush's master puppeteer (Dirty Dickie) has wrought - endless wars
(http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5293057486293276897&vt=lf&hl=en); bankrupting banks; Marie Antoinette collapsing economy; etc. etc.
Both McWar & Obama are owned by the Bilderbergs, Trilateralists, CFR (Michelle is a member)& Joe Biden declared himself a ZIONIST. Unfortunately, if Sarah tries to clean up the DC corruption (as she apparently did in Alaska), she better bring her current state security staff with her to Washington.

Sep 03, 2008 @ 04:21 AMART, VA BEACH, VA
Report Abusive Post
With his selection of Sarah Palin, John McCain has not only shaken up this election, he may have helped shape the future of the United States -- and much for the better.
********************************************************

Pat I love you.. But, I couldn't disagree with you more. When McCain selected Sarah Palin as his V.P... This just showed me how John McCain thinks when things get tough. I don't think I want him thinking for me..

Here is the reason why Senator Obama is going to be our next President of American. The people are finally starting to catch on to what is happening in Washington D.C..


I know Senator John McCain has never meet a FREE TRADE AGREEMENT he didn't like, just like President Bush (another four years of Bush). The American people want their high paying jobs back.


I know Senator Obama will bring all those Free Trade Agreements up before the new Congress for debate and just maybe the American people may win the debate this time.

This would force Big International Companies to move back to America all these Plants and good paying jobs they move to CHINA.
Sep 03, 2008 @ 04:29 AMHarry Dingey, Baguio City, Philippines
Report Abusive Post
My Friends America is on the verge of total of a Collapse because of NAFTA and the WTO Free Trade Agreements.

Look around you, all the Big Financial Banks are failing, your house value has drop 30%, the American Dollar has lost 50% of its value and all the higher paying jobs are being move to China.

When you find yourself in a HOLE. “STOP DIGGING”.

Has anyone thought about the repercussions of the lost of all those high paying jobs transfered to China.

Well to start off with all of the America workers will eventually be working for a lot less money. That means the government will end up short of revenues.

You could very well wakeup one morning and the government say, we don't enough money to continue paying you that month Social Security Check any longer. And by the way your Medicare payments will be also be discontinued too.

If you think for one minute this is not a possibility. When America has loss all this income revenues, where will our government get the money to pay for these services?

I live in the Philippines and see exactly what happens. The American people will be the first ones to lose their Benefits..

I really can not believe that anyone is stupid enough to vote for a candidate that tells him he wants to move his job to China.

Then at some point he and his family may be be required to sleep in the street and may be in the soup line. If there is a soup line available.

You people better wakeup before you lose everything.
Sep 03, 2008 @ 05:22 AMHarry Dingey, Baguio City, Philippines
Report Abusive Post
When John Mcain introduced Sarah Palin on Friday at Wright State it was the most excited I've been about an announcement since Pope Benedict XVI was elected in 2005. I wanted to be there since WSU is only minutes away but, unlike liberals, I actually work for a living so I watched on TV (FOX of course!) at work while having lunch. I knew it was going to be a good day because my priest gave the invocation at the McCain rally at WSU!

When Sarah Palin came out and spoke I was so happy. I bawled like a little girl at a Hannah Montana concert during her speech, too, because I realized this country is going to be iin good hands for a long time. She spoke like we do at the water cooler, not using the high sounding language of DC policyspeak.

John McCain just stood there, content to let his VP nominee have the spotlight, and I saw another side of him at that moment. Unlike the left who deal with the cult of personality, John McCain knows this election is not about him. It's about us.

You're on notice, Joe Biden. I can't WAIT for the VP debates because Sarah Palin is going to clean your clock. In fact, I'm going to Jungle Jim's near Cincinnati and buying some moose burgers to grill for the occasion.
Sep 03, 2008 @ 05:47 AMJohn Florio, Fairborn, Ohio
Report Abusive Post
I wish I knew how Harry Dingey makes those incredibly long postings.

Several reasons why Palin is a HOME RUN, in no particular order:

1) Because BOTH she and McCain have a son who either was, is, or will be in Iraq, they have tremendous credibility on the war issue. Leftists are fond of saying that those who support the war don't want to send their own children to fight it. Well, they CAN'T say that about McCain or Palin, or Biden either, for that matter.

2) As a major politician -- which she is now because of her candidacy -- NOBODY has EVER had more credibility on Right-to-Life issues than she.

3) She gets an A+++ rating from NRA for being rabidly pro-gun.

4) Her husband is a classical skilled union manual laborer. Any working class partisan other than the pinky-ring union bosses should readily relate to her and her family.

5) She SUPPORTS ANWR. And she may even be able to get McCain to change his RIDICULOUS opposition to ANWR.

6) Gov. Palin's family situation has attracted a lot of blogging attention in the past few days.

Although it could not have been intended to be so, I hold that her family situation will be of TREMENDOUS APPEAL to the average American family.

ALL parents, and especially dads, who have daughters, have either themselves experienced unwed teenage pregnancies or are petrified that it's going to happen to them.

They will relate VERY well to Gov. Palin.

7) The women's vote. McCain needed to reach out beyond the Party base AND to unite it if possible.

He could NOT do that by the traditional Great White Hopeless male pick, who MIGHT at best help him with a state or two. Instead, THIS year, McCain needed someone who could help in in EVERY state.

This is the year when the Hitlery supporters had screamed that it is past time to elect a woman for president. Did they REALLY mean that, or did they really mean it's time to elect a LIBERAL woman for president?

I suspect it is some of yes, some of no. And in this case, McCain picks up votes in every state he'd not ordinarily get.

I never throught McCain would go past the GOP establishment. I always thought that in the end, he'd pick a safe, nice, but useless Great White Hopeless male GOP hack, like the Party itself did in 1996 when it picked Sen. Bob Dull.

McCain himself has said that whomever he picks will receive greater than normal scrutiny because of his own age and his diminished health (courtesy of the Hanoi Hilton).

Gov. Palin therefore has an EXCELLENT chance of becoming president someday. Even if McCain makes it through 4 years, odds are he'd not run again, so she then becomes the Heir Apparent for 2012, which she again becomes in the event the McCain ticket loses this year.

Are women serious about wanting one of their own to be president? Here's their shot!

A TREMENDOUS pick.
Sep 03, 2008 ***   
     
 

[Crafty_Dog]

A real snore of a speech tonight from McCain. 

[DougMacG]

"A real snore of a speech tonight from McCain. "

He is trying to recapture the enthusiasm of Bob Dole's '96 campaign.  It looks hard for middle of the roaders to get specific or passionate about their principles. 

[G M]

"He is trying to recapture the enthusiasm of Bob Dole's '96 campaign."

Bwahahahahahaha!!!!!!!

[DougMacG]

3 times during the speech I called my daughter in to 'make' her watch because she will be voting next time and 3 times I said skip it because no clarity was being given at the time to any important issue.  Seemed like an NFL coach thanking everyone who made it possible to be only 2 touchdowns (house and senate) and a field goal behind coming into halftime. 

[Crafty_Dog]

'A Servant's Heart'
September 5, 2008 11:24 a.m.
Sarah Palin killed. And more than killed.

Much has been said about her speech, but a few points. "The difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick" is pure American and goes straight into Bartlett's. This is the authentic sound of the American mama, of every mother you know at school who joins the board, reads the books, heads the committee, and gets the show on the road. These women make large portions of America work.

She has the power of the normal. Hillary Clinton is grim, stentorian, was born to politics and its connivances. Nancy Pelosi, another mother of five, often seems dazed and ad hoc. But this state governor and mother of a big family is a woman in a good mood. There is something so normal about her, so "You've met this person before and you like her," that she broke through in a new way, as a character vividly herself, and vividly genuine.

***

 
Associated Press 
Her flaws accentuated her virtues. Now and then this happens in politics, but it's rare. An example: The very averageness of her voice, the not-wonderfulness of it, highlighted her normality: most people don't have great voices. That normality in turn highlighted the courage she showed in being there, on that stage for the first time in her life and under trying circumstances. Her averageness accentuated her specialness. Her commonality highlighted her uniqueness.

She seemed wholly different from, and in fact seemed a refutation to, all the men of Washington at their great desks who make rules others have to live by but they don't have to live by themselves, who mandate work rules from which they exempt Congress, for instance. They don't live by the rules they espouse. She has lived her expressed values. She said yes to a Down Syndrome child. This too is powerful.

***

What she did in terms of the campaign itself was important. No one has ever really laid a glove on Obama before, not in this campaign and maybe not in his life. But Palin really damaged him. She took him square on, fearlessly, by which I mean in part that she showed no awkwardness connected to race, or racial history. A small town mayor is kind of like a community organizer only you have actual responsibilities. He wrote two memoirs but never authored a major bill. They've hauled the Styrofoam pillars back to the Hollywood lot.

This was powerful coming from Baberaham Lincoln, as she's been called.

By the end, Democrats knew they had been dinged, and badly. After the speech they descended on cable news en masse with the dart-eyed, moist-browed look of the operative who doesn't believe his talking points. They seemed like they were thinking, "I've seen this movie before and it doesn't end well." Actually they haven't seen it before in that Palin is something new, but they have seen it before in terms of what she said.

Which gets me to the most important element of the speech, and that is the startlingness of the content. It was not modern conservatism, or split the difference Conservative-ish-ism. It was not a conservatism that assumes the America of 2008 is very different from the America of 1980.

It was the old-time conservatism. Government is too big, Obama will "grow it", Congress spends too much and he'll spend "more." It was for low taxes, for small business, for the private sector, for less regulation, for governing with "a servant's heart"; it was pro-small town values, and implicitly but strongly pro-life.

This was so old it seemed new, and startling. The speech was, in its way, a call so tender it made grown-ups weep on the floor. The things she spoke of were the beating heart of the old America. But as I watched I thought, I know where the people in that room are, I know their heart, for it is my heart. But this election is a wild card, because America is a wild card. It is not as it was in '80. I know where the Republican base is, but we do not know where this country that never stops changing is.

***

It all left me wondering if this campaign is about to take on a new shape, with the old time conservatism on one side, and a smoother, evolved form of the old style liberalism on the other.

It doesn't get more dramatic, or dramatically drawn, than that.

***

I don't like the new media war. I don't like what it has the potential to do to the election, and the country.

The media overstepped. The Republican party resented it. GOP strategists saw a unifying force rising: anger in the base. They too had seen this movie before. They slammed the media. The media shot back: "You're attacking us for doing our job!"

How did the media overstep? By offending people by going so immediately and so personally into issues surrounding Mrs. Palin's family. They did not overstep by digging, by deep reporting, by investigating Palin's professional record.

Campbell Brown of CNN did nothing wrong for instance in pressing a campaign spokesman on Palin's foreign policy credentials. She was unjustly criticized for following an appropriate and necessary line of inquiry. But endless front page stories connected to Mrs. Palin's 17-year-old daughter? Cable news shows that had people insinuating Palin, whom America had not yet even met, was a bad mother, and that used her daughter's circumstances to examine Republican views on abstinence education? That was ugly.

In the end it made Palin the underdog, and gave her the perfect platform for the perfect dive she made Wednesday night.

We have had these old press fights in the past – they were a source of constant tension when I was a child, when Barry Goldwater came forward as a conservative and the press scorned him as a flake, and later when Ronald Reagan came up and the press dismissed him as Bonzo.

But this latest fight commences on a new and wilder battlefield. The old combatants were old school gentlemen, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite; the new combatants are half-crazy cable anchors, the lower lurkers of the Internet, and the anonymous posters on the comment thread on the radical website.

This new war on new turf is not good, and carries the potential of great harm. Everyone really ought to stop, breathe deep, and think.

I am worried they won't. A friend IM'd the day after Palin's speech, and I told him of an inexplicable sense of foreboding. He surprised me by saying he shared it. "Calling all underworlds reporting for duty!," he wrote. "The bed is about to fly around the room, the puke is about to come out." He meant: this campaign is going to engage unseen powers and forces. He meant: this campaign, this beautiful golden thing with two admirable men at the top and two admirable vice presidential candidates, is going to turn dark.

***

It is starting to look to me like a nation-defining election. And in this it seems almost old-fashioned. 1992 for instance didn't seem or feel nation-defining, not as I remember it, nor did 2000. 1964 did, and '80 did, but they both ended in landslides. Landslide is not what I'm seeing here.

Where are the Democrats going to go? I suspect to foreign policy. In politics it used to be called Tolstoy: war and peace. McCain-Palin will mean more war, Obama-Biden will mean peace.

This campaign is about to become: epic.

***

John McCain also made a speech. It was flat.

***

[G M]

http://hotair.com/archives/2008/09/05/guess-which-card-obama-pulled-out-of-the-deck-today/

Guess which card Obama pulled out of the deck today?
POSTED AT 3:30 PM ON SEPTEMBER 5, 2008 BY ED MORRISSEY   


With both Rasmussen and Gallup showing Barack Obama moving backwards even before the Republican Convention dropped its balloons on Andrea Mitchell, one can excuse the Democratic nominee for hearing footsteps.   How desperate has he gotten?  Looks like he’s playing the race card once again:

“I know that I’m not your typical presidential candidate,” Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told executives and employees of the Schott glass company Friday afternoon, “and I just want to be honest with you. I know that.”

“And I know that the temptation is to say, ‘You know what? …The guy hasn’t been there that long in Washington.,’ You know, ‘he’s got funny name,’ You know, ‘we’re not sure about him,’” Obama continued. “And that’s what the Republicans, when they say, ‘This isn’t about issues, it’s about personalities,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘We’re going to try to scare people about Barack. So we’re going to say that you know, maybe he’s got Muslim connections or we’re going to say that, you know, he hangs out with radicals or he’s not patriotic.’

Once again, Obama has resorted to a smear campaign against the McCain campaign.  They have never –never — even hinted that Obama has “Muslim connections”.  They have never made even a slight attempt to make his race an issue, despite this fourth repeat of this particular smear.  Neither has the RNC nor any mainstream Republicans.  In fact, the McCain campaign let go one staffer who only Twittered a link to a Jeremiah Wright video earlier this year.

If Obama wants to argue that some misdirected bloggers have made these kind of attacks, he might have a point.  But by that standard, the Democrats have attacked Bristol Palin, smeared Sarah Palin about the maternity of her youngest child, and questioned the mental capacity of John McCain.  If Obama wants to start making these kinds of accusations, then maybe he ought to get his own house in order first.

That’s not the only data point of desperation today, either:

Sen. Barack Obama ditched his normal languid cool today, punching back at Gov. Sarah Palin as he spoke with reporters in York, Pa, hotly defending his work as a community organizer. He said he assumes Palin “wants to be treated same way guys want to be treated, which means their records are under scrutinty. I’ve been through this for 19 months. She’s been through it, what four days?”

Obama’s hackles were clearly raised by Palin’s dismissal of his community organizing –a response to his earlier dismissal of her record as a small-town mayor. “Why would that kind of work be ridiculed?” Obama said. “Who are they fighting for?” The idea that community organizing is not relevant to the presidency, he said, just shows why Republicans “are out of touch and don’t get it.”

The Obama campaign was clearly on the defensive today, acknowledging how appealing Palin came across, and sending out surrogates hitting their talking points that Republicans have spent their time on attacks rather than substance.

Says the man who keeps calling John McCain the same as George Bush.  There’s a word for a man who can dish it out but can’t take it.  I’ll leave it to you to reach your own conclusions.

[Body-by-Guinness]

Thanks, Guys

The media's attacks on Sarah Palin backfire.
by William Kristol
09/15/2008, Volume 014, Issue 01

The editors of THE WEEKLY STANDARD believe in giving credit where credit is due. The presidential race looks a whole lot better today than it did two weeks ago. For this, thanks are owed to two men--Barack Obama and John McCain--and to that herd of independent minds, the liberal media.

First: Thank you, Barack Obama. He lacked the confidence or the strength to ask Hillary Clinton, recipient of some 18 million votes, to join him on the ticket. Such a ticket, uniting and exciting the Democratic party, would have been hard to beat in this Democratic year. Having ruled out Clinton, Obama then lacked the nerve to double down on the theme of change, by selecting, say, Virginia governor Tim Kaine or Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius. A change versus experience election wouldn't have been a bad bet for Obama. Instead, he settled on an unimpressive vice presidential pick, a long-time, long-winded overrated senator from a safe state, who gave him no lift at all in the polls, and offers no prospect of doing so.

Second: Thank you, John McCain. He showed guts with his pick of Sarah Palin. He also demonstrated a shrewd strategic sense. He knew that running on experience would carry him only so far--most likely to a respectable defeat. He understood the implications of Obama's passing over Hillary--not that Clinton voters would vote for McCain-Palin (though if even a few do so, it could make a difference), but that his pick of Palin when compared with Obama's shying away from Hillary would show McCain as a bolder and more confident leader. And he had the sense that Palin's anti-establishment conservatism, pro-family feminism, and tough-minded reformism would add something important to his campaign.

Third: A special thank you to our friends in the liberal media establishment. Who knew they would come through so spectacularly? The ludicrous media feeding frenzy about the Palin family hyped interest in her speech, enabling her to win a huge audience for her smashing success Wednesday night at the convention. Indeed, it even renewed interest in McCain, who seems to have gotten still more viewers for his less smashing--but well-received--presentation the following evening.

The astounding (even to me, after all these years!) smugness and mean-spiritedness of so many in the media engendered not just interest in but sympathy for Palin. It allowed Palin to speak not just to conservatives but to the many Americans who are repulsed by the media's prurient interest in and adolescent snickering about her family. It allowed the McCain-Palin ticket to become the populist standard-bearer against an Obama-Media ticket that has disdain for Middle America.

By the end of the week, after Palin's tour de force in St. Paul, the liberal media were so befuddled that they were reduced to complaining that conservatives aren't being narrow-minded enough. Thus, Hanna Rosin--who has covered religion and politics for the Washington Post, and has also written for the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the New York Times--lamented in a piece for Slate: "So cavalier are conservatives about Sarah Palin's wreck of a home life that they make the rest of us look stuffy and slow-witted by comparison." I suppose it was ungenerous of conservatives, in our broad-mindedness and tolerance of human frailty, to have let Ms. Rosin down, just when she was counting on us to bring out the tar and feathers. But she gives us too much credit when she suggests we make the liberal media look stuffy and slow-witted. They do that all by themselves.

For instance, what in the world can she be thinking when she refers to "Sarah Palin's wreck of a home life"? The only "domestic irregularities" (to use Ms. Rosin's loaded term) she cites are "two difficult pregnancies--Palin's with a Down syndrome baby and now her unmarried teenage daughter's." The second of these is a situation that the young woman and her family seem to be dealing with appropriately by their own lights. "Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family," the Palins said. But what is "irregular" about bringing to term a Down syndrome child? Is Rosin suggesting--without having the courage to say so--that Mrs. Palin should have aborted the baby? Is it upsetting to her to have a prominent woman choose not to do so?

Some may think we should also thank Sarah Palin for coming through, under pressure, with flying colors. But we're looking forward to expressing those thanks personally, at the vice presidential residence here in Washington.

--William Kristol

[Crafty_Dog]

Bill Kristol is a sharp guy, but I will disagree with him here on his comments about BO not nominating Hillary.  What he says is true I suppose, but utter ignores that if BO had won, he would have been but one of three presidents and would have been spending a lot of money on food testers and time hiring new ones. 

[DougMacG]

" if BO had won [with Hillary], he would have been but one of three presidents"

Barack in his quiet wisdom may know that part of the Obama phenomenon was really anti-Hillary, anti-Clinton excitement - to win WITHOUT these weaseling triangulators.  On that theory, the combined Hillary and Obama forces are not additive, but partially canceling.  With her on the ticket he might or might not lock in Hillary voters but certainly would alienate parts of the grass roots far left.

The food taster comment is very funny but Clintonistas in the White House would always have the power of the leak to undermine Obama. 

My thought is that he would lose his entire image by having the old guard share the stage, removing the mystique of amazing new leadership and a complete break with the past.  Instead he chose Washington consummate insider Joe Biden. Lol.

[G M]

Pretty much anyone else but Biden would have been a better choice.

[G M]

http://hotair.com/archives/2008/09/06/the-recycled-flags-of-the-dncc/

The Recycled Flags of the DNCC; Update: Pathetic spin by Team O
POSTED AT 12:00 PM ON SEPTEMBER 6, 2008 BY ED MORRISSEY   


Democrats brought out tens of thousands of American flags to Invesco Field, saluting Barack Obama as he spoke from the Styrofoam columns of the Barackopolis at the conclusion of the Democratic convention.  Perhaps some of them took the flags home as souvenirs, but where did the rest go?  According to David Harsanyi, they went into the trash — and would have gone to a landfill, except for a worker at Invesco who rescued them from the dumpsters:

This morning, Republicans tell me that a worker at Invesco Field in Denver saved thousands of unused flags from the Democratic National Convention that were headed for the garbage. Guerrilla campaigning. They will use these flags at their own event today in Colorado Springs with John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Before McCain speaks today, veterans will haul these garbage bags filled with flags out onto the stage — with dramatic effect, no doubt — and tell the story.

Didn’t anyone make arrangements for better disposal of these flags from Invesco?  At the very least, they were an investment that could have been re-used at rallies in Colorado as well as the rest of the nation during the general election.  Instead, they’ve handed a dramatic moment to John McCain and Sarah Palin, as well as relieved them of the cost of 12,000 such flags — as well as a full 3′x5′ flag that also wound up in the trash.

Remember when the DNCC was supposed to be the “greenest convention ever”?  How they worried about the color of the food and using organic materials in their merchandise?  I guess we can see where the “green” concern ends … at red, white, and blue.

Still … I hope the RNCC did a better job rescuing discarded flags at the Xcel Center.

Update: If you want to know how to properly dispose of flags, you can check the US Flag Code. If you’re still confused, contact your local American Legion or VFW, and they will help you dispose of them.  (h/t: Indythinker in comments)

Update II: I’m getting e-mails saying that we need to “stop the lies” because Team Obama put this out as a statement:

Stories circulating about flags from the Democratic National Convention are false. More than 125,000 American-made flags were distributed at the Convention - any flags removed from the Convention after the event were taken without authorization.  It’s disappointing that someone would take American flags without authorization and then falsely describe their intended purpose. We have the utmost respect for the American flag and it’s sad to see them being used for a cheap political stunt.

They claim that the flags were “bundled” for return to their manufacturer.  If so, it’s the first time I’ve ever heard of anyone bundling returned merchandise in Hefty bags and storing them “in and around dumpsters” while awaiting the RMA.  Here’s the picture that ran in the Denver Post:



I sincerely doubt that these flags got sold to Team Obama in Hefty bags.  And let’s try to parse this story down with some common sense:

Why would a manufacturer provide a refund on open product?  They certainly couldn’t resell them, especially not after being left like this at Invesco.
12,000 flags must have cost at least $2,000 or so, and probably more.  Once Democrats discovered the “theft”, why didn’t they report it to the police?  It’s been more than a week apparently since they were “stolen”, and Team Obama just discovered it?
Leaving material in and around dumpsters, especially in Hefty bags, makes it look like trash.  That’s hardly a way to store American flags, and it’s certainly not a way to keep janitors and waste management people from taking them to landfills.
Instead of just saying that their people made a really stupid error and apologizing, though, Team Obama decided to tell a ridiculous lie to get themselves off the hook.

Update III: David Harsanyi now has several updates to his first report, including this:

I just spoke with the person at Invesco who found the flags and he thinks both sides are exaggerating a bit. The person claims the majority of the bags with flags in them were near the trash, on a dock, and would have been thrown away. The person thinks it was probably an “oversight” by the Democrats rather than any nefarious plot against the flag. But the person doesn’t believe anyone was coming to get them: “The flags were there for a week and a day and no one came looking for them.”

No one suggested here that it was a “nefarious plot”, and like Harsanyi, I hardly think that Obama would have directed his staff to throw 12,000 American flags in a dumpster.  In fact, until Team Obama issued this ludicrous statement, the story didn’t have anything to do with them.   However, the obvious carelessness with which the DNCC treated the flags is a rather revealing moment for them, and the lie for people in Obama’s organization.

Update IV: Gateway Pundit has pictures of individual flags sitting in trash bags, but that’s not the DNCC’s fault; it’s the fault of the individuals who threw out their flags.  The DNCC couldn’t possibly be expected to sort through all of the thousands of bags of normal trash.  They can be expected to know better than to toss 12,000 American flags in with it.

Jazz Shaw’s following the story at TMV.

[DougMacG]

The Biden pick:  Before the pick and before the final short list I tried hard to think of a Democrat with perceived 'gravitas' and perhaps foreign policy experience that could fill his ticket.  Shallow bench.  They really had to have served in the Clinton administration or settle for one of the second-guessers from the foreign relations committee.  I thought of Madeline Halfbright but I don't think she is eligible.  Sandy Burglar, but the docs in the boxers was for sure a deal-killer.  Not exactly foreign policy experience, but I recalled that Clinton had a pretty well respected Treasury Secretary from the private sector.  Came up with the name Robert Rubin, looked him up on Wikipedia to find out he was older than McCain [correction: similar in age to McCain].  That wouldn't work.  I still couldn't take seriously the idea that the dream--hope-change ticket would have Joe Biden on it.  I assume that he was the neutral choice for Obama, not to enhance his ticket but for the party faithful across the board to accept without revolt.

Questioning Biden's experience, I LOVE this piece by Thomas Sowell from last week:

"The difference between being a spectator and being a participant, with responsibility for the consequences of what you say and do, is fundamental."

Foreign Policy "Experience"
by Thomas Sowell, Sept. 3, 2008

Now that the Democrats have recovered from the shock of Governor Sarah Palin's nomination as the Republican's candidate for vice president, they have suddenly discovered that her lack of experience in general-- and foreign policy experience in particular-- is a terrible danger in someone just a heartbeat away from being President of the United States.

For those who are satisfied with talking points, there is no need to go any further. But, for those who still consider substance relevant, this is an incredible argument coming from those whose presidential candidate has even less experience in public office than Sarah Palin, and none in foreign policy.

Moreover, if Senator Barack Obama is elected, he will not be a heartbeat away from the presidency, his would be the heartbeat of the president-- and he would be the one making foreign policy.

But the big talking point is that the Democrats' vice-presidential nominee, Senator Joe Biden, has years of foreign policy experience as a member, and now chairman, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

That all depends on what the definition of "experience" is.

Before getting into that, however, a plain fact should be noted: No governor ever had foreign policy experience before becoming president-- not Ronald Reagan, not Franklin D. Roosevelt, nor any other governor.

It is hard to know how many people could possibly have had foreign policy experience before reaching the White House besides a Secretary of State or a Secretary of Defense.

The last Secretary of War (the old title of Secretaries of Defense) to later become President of the United States was William Howard Taft, a hundred years ago. The last Secretary of State to become President of the United States was James Buchanan, a century and a half ago.

The first President Bush had been head of the C.I.A., which certainly gave him a lot of knowledge of what was happening around the world, though still not experience in making the country's foreign policy.

Senator Joe Biden's years of service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is even further removed from foreign policy experience. He has had a front-row seat as an observer of foreign policy. But Senator Biden has never had any real experience of making foreign policy and taking the consequences of the results.

The difference between being a spectator and being a participant, with responsibility for the consequences of what you say and do, is fundamental.

You can read books about crime or attend lectures by criminologists, but you have no real experience or expertise about crime unless you have been a criminal or a policeman.

Although I served in the Marine Corps, I have no military experience in any meaningful sense. The closest I ever came to combat was being assigned to photograph the maneuvers of the Second Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

That was photographic experience, not military experience. If someone gave me a policy-making job in the Pentagon, I wouldn't have a clue.

The fact that Senator Joe Biden has for years listened to all sorts of people testify on all sorts of foreign policy issues tells us nothing about how well he understood the issues.

Out of the four presidential and vice-presidential candidates this year, only Governor Palin has had to make executive decisions and live with the consequences.

As for Senator Obama, his various pronouncements on foreign policy have been as immature as they have been presumptuous.

He talked publicly about taking military action against Pakistan, one of our few Islamic allies and a nation with nuclear weapons.

Barack Obama's first response to the Russian invasion of Georgia was to urge "all sides" to negotiate a cease-fire and take their issues to the United Nations. That is standard liberal talk, which even Obama had second thoughts about, after Senator John McCain gave a more grown-up response.

We should all have second thoughts about what is, and is not, foreign policy "experience."

[JDN]

Actually Robert Rubin although "old" is still younger than McCain.  That is my worry; simply put, McCain is too old for the job.  And Rubin, although brilliant (more than I can say for McCain or Palin), has had no foreign policy experience.  Biden, short of a former Secretary of State, has the most "experience" of anyone possible.  As Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee he has done more than simply "listen" to the experts.  His knowledge and contacts are vast.  His experience will be a great asset to Obama.  "Executive decisions" hmm what "executive decisions" did Palin make as a mayor of a town with less than 5000 people???  That's a joke I presume?  Or governor for only two years of perhaps the least populated state???  That's experience???  Please...Palin might be a brilliant political pick, but please don't talk about her "experience".

[DougMacG]

JDN, I appreciate having different views posted.  From my viewpoint, Biden presided over the Bork and Clarence Thomas, two of the worst chapters of phoniness and character assassination in our history and was wrong twice on Iraq - by his own judgment.  Not the new harmony or leadership Obama claimed he would bring.

Since it is an opinion board I must say that I have a hard time holding against McCain the years he wasted in N. Vietnam while I frolicked in freedom.  Maybe he should have run 5 1/2 years sooner, but he was detained.

Curious, would you repeal other laws about age discrimination or just make this exception?   - Doug

[G M]

Barry-O has 20 years attending a racist, America-hating church and mostly voted "present" as a legislator. And this is experience we want for a president?

[JDN]

Doug, to be honest, I happened to like Bork, he was/is brilliant, although I don't always agree with his conclusions, but that's ok.  Thomas is not; simply put, I don't think he's up to the job.  Unfortunately, Republicans and Democrats politicize the judiciary system.  I think it's wrong.

I too frolicked in freedom (also I was a bit young) rather than serve in Vietnam; McCain in contrast served our country with distinction.  But that was 30+ years ago; what does running 5 1/2 years sooner have to do with it?  He should have run a long time ago and he did to no avail.  Time has defeated many fine politicians.

I am not asking to repeal any laws about age discrimination; I am talking reality. There is no law at this level.   You mentioned that you admire Robert Rubin.  Did you know that Goldman Sachs has a mandatory retirement age for partners?   Also, the four US largest accounting firms have a mandatory retirement age at 60 for partners.  And most major law firms have a mandatory retirement age at 65.  Most Corporate Presidents must retire at 65, but many like HP have a mandatory retirement age at 60.  They demand energy and vitality and brilliance from their partners and managers.  Is that wrong?  They all want their partners and presidents at their best.  I would not expect less from the President of the United States.  Maybe the toughest job in the world.  I know many very successful people in their 70's, they are fine people, but even they will admit they are past their prime both intellectually and physically.  And they are all retired.  I am not picking on McCain, but he too is past his prime regardless of how he spent 5 years of his time thirty years ago.

[G M]

http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/534rlysq.asp

Why They Hate Her
Sarah Palin is a smart missile aimed at the heart of the left.
by Jeffrey Bell
09/15/2008, Volume 014, Issue 01

For months John McCain has apparently been hoping to use his selection of a running mate to shake up the presidential race. By picking Alaska governor Sarah Palin, McCain has accomplished that--and very likely a lot more than that, more than he or anyone else could have imagined.

I'm not talking about the widely remarked fact that if Palin performs well, and regardless of whether McCain wins or loses, she becomes a future Republican presidential prospect. Given the end of the remarkable 28-year run of the Bush family--present on six of the last seven GOP national tickets, a record that could stand forever--and McCain's own status as a pre-baby boomer, this was baked in the cake no matter what younger Republican politician McCain chose to elevate.

But even apart from its political implications, the rollout of the Sarah Palin vice presidential candidacy may be regarded decades from now as a nationally shared Rorschach test of enormous cultural significance.

From the instant of Palin's designation on Friday, August 29, the American left went into a collective mass seizure from which it shows no sign of emerging. The left blogosphere and elite media have, for the moment, joined forces and become indistinguishable from each other, and from the supermarket tabloids, in their desire to find and use anything that will criminalize and/or humiliate Palin and her family. In sharp contrast to the yearlong restraint shown toward truthful reports about John Edwards's affair, bizarre rumors have been reported as news, and, according to McCain campaign director Steve Schmidt, nationally known members of the elite media have besieged him with preposterous demands.

The most striking thing in purely political terms about this hurricane of elite rage is the built-in likelihood that it will backfire. It's not simply that it is highly capable of generating sympathy for Palin among puzzled undecided voters and of infuriating and motivating a previously placid GOP base, neither of which is in the interest of the Obama-Biden campaign. It also created an opening for Palin herself to look calm, composed, competent, and funny in response.

In her acceptance speech last Wednesday night, anyone could see the poise and skill that undoubtedly attracted McCain's attention months ago, when few others were even aware that he was looking. But it was precisely the venom of the left's assault that heightened the drama and made it a riveting television event. Palin benefited from her ability to project full awareness of the volume and relentlessness of the attacks without showing a scintilla of resentment or self-pity.

This is a rare talent, one shared by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. For this quality to have even a chance to develop, there must be something real to serve as an emotional backdrop: disproportionate, crazy-seeming rage by one's political enemies. Roosevelt was on his party's national ticket five times and Reagan sought the presidency four times. Each became governor of what at the time was the nation's most populous state. It took Roosevelt and Reagan decades of national prominence and pitched ideological combat to achieve the gift of enemies like these. Yet the American left awarded Sarah Palin this gift seemingly within a microsecond of her appearance on the national stage in Dayton, Ohio. Why?

The most important thing to know about the left today is that it is centered on social issues. At root, it always has been, ever since the movement took form and received its name in the revolutionary Paris of the 1790s. In order to drive toward a vision of true human liberation, all the institutions and moral codes we associate with civilization had to be torn down. The institutions targeted in revolutionary France included the monarchy and the nobility, but even higher on the enemies list of the Jacobins and their allies were organized religion and the family, institutions in which the moral values of traditional society could be preserved and passed on outside the control of the leftist vanguard.

Full human liberation always remained the ultimate vision of the left--Marx, for one, was explicit on this point--but the left in its more than 200-year history has been flexible and adaptable in the forms it was willing to assume and the projects it was willing to undertake in pursuit of its anti-institutional goals. For more than a hundred years, the central project of the global left was socialism.

It's hard to credit today, but as recently as the 1940s most Western political elites believed government ownership of business and national planning were the keys to economic modernization. Even when socialism's economic prestige was eroded by the West's capitalist boom after World War II, socialism retained credibility as a means of income redistribution.

It was the turbulent 1960s that proved a strategic turning point for the left. The worldwide social and cultural upheavals that culminated in 1968 were felt as a crisis of confidence by institutions in the West. Some institutions (universities, for example) defected to the rebels, while others saw their centuries-long influence on the population greatly weaken or drain away virtually overnight.

In the short run, most political elites weathered the storm. A big reason, the left gradually realized, was that socialist economics had become an albatross. Increasingly, the democratic parties of the left in Western countries downplayed socialism or even decoupled from it, leaving them free to pursue the anti-institutional, relativistic moral crusade that has been in the DNA of the left all along.

This newly revitalized social and cultural agenda made it possible for the left to shrug off the collapse of European communism and the Soviet Union nearly two decades ago. Even in countries like China where the Communist party retained dictatorial power, socialist economics became a thing of the past. Attempts to suppress religion and limit the autonomy of the family did not.

For the post-1960s, post-socialist left, the single most important breakthrough has been the alliance between modern feminism and the sexual revolution. This was far from inevitable. Up until around 1960, attempts at sexual liberation were resisted by most educated women. In the wake of the success of Playboy and other mass-circulation pornographic magazines in the 1950s, men were depicted as the initiators and main beneficiaries of sexual liberation, women as intolerant of promiscuity as well as potential victims of predatory "liberated" men.

With the introduction of the Pill around 1960, things abruptly began to change. Fears of overpopulation legitimated a contraceptive ethic throughout middle-class society in North America, Europe, Japan, and the Soviet bloc. China, which discouraged contraception and welcomed population gains under Mao Zedong, flipped to the extreme of the One Child policy in 1979, shortly after pro-capitalist reformers took charge and fixed on strict population control as an integral and unquestioned part of the package of Western-style development.

The fact that the Pill was taken only by women gave them a greater feeling of control over their sexual activity and eroded their social and psychological resistance to premarital sex. "No fault" divorce, a term borrowed from the field of auto insurance, in reality amounted to unilateral divorce and began to undermine the idea of marriage as a binding mutual contract oriented toward the procreation and nurturing of children. Contrary to nearly every prediction, the ubiquity of far more reliable methods of contraception and the growing ideological separation of sex from reproduction, coincided with a huge increase in unwed pregnancies.

Though earlier versions of feminism tended to embrace children and elevate motherhood, the more adversarial feminism that gained a mass base in virtually every affluent democracy beginning in the 1970s preached that children and childbearing were the central instrumentality of men's subjugation of women. This more than anything else in the menu of the post-socialist left raised toward cultural consensus a vision in which the monogamous family was what prevented humanity from achieving a Rousseau-like "natural" state of freedom from all laws and all bonds of mutual obligation.

If this analysis is correct, the single most important narrative holding the left together in today's politics and culture is the one offered--often with little or no dissent--by adversarial feminism. The premise of this narrative is that for women to achieve dignity and self-fulfillment in modern society, they must distance themselves, not necessarily from men or marriage or childbearing, but from the kind of marriage in which a mother's temptation to be with and enjoy several children becomes a synonym for holding women back and cheating them out of professional success.

On August 29, in the immediate aftermath of the announcement by the McCain campaign, all that was widely known of the governor of Alaska was that she was married with five children, the last one of whom had been carried to term with Down syndrome, and that she was pro-life. No one knew that her oldest daughter was pregnant. No one knew much about what she had done as governor or in her previous career. No one knew how she had been drawn into politics, or that her sister had had a reckless husband and a contentious divorce. Above all, with the possible exception of John McCain, no one knew that Sarah Palin was both a married mother of five and a brilliant political talent with a chance not just to change the dynamics of the 2008 election but to rise to the top level of American politics, whatever happens this year.

The simple fact of her being a pro-life married mother of five with a thriving political career was--before anything else about her was known--enough for the left and its outliers to target her for destruction. She could not be allowed to contradict symbolically one of the central narratives of the left. How galling it will be to Sarah Palin's many new enemies if she survives this assault and prevails. If she does, her success may be an important moment in the struggle to shape not just America's politics but its culture.

Jeffrey Bell, author of Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality (1992), is completing work on Social Conservatism: The Movement That Polarized American Politics. He is a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

[Crafty_Dog]

Interesting thought piece.  Some overlapping points with the book "Liberal Fascism" which I have not finished yet.  It is an uneven, but interesting book.

And here's this humorous stroll down memory lane with the NY Times-- not the date:   

From a New York Times editorial on July 3, 1984, on Geraldine Ferraro's nomination for vice president:

Where is it written that only senators are qualified to become President? . . . Or where is it written that mere representatives aren't qualified, like Geraldine Ferraro of Queens? . . . Where is it written that governors and mayors, like Dianne Feinstein of San Francisco, are too local, too provincial? . . . Presidential candidates have always chosen their running mates for reasons of practical demography, not idealized democracy. . . . What a splendid system, we say to ourselves, that takes little-known men, tests them in high office and permits them to grow into statesmen. . . . Why shouldn't a little-known woman have the same opportunity to grow?

[DougMacG]

responding to JDN's points but writing to all ( or none?):  I challenge you or anyone to post and rebut ANY written opinion on the supreme court from Justice Thomas that makes you think he is not up to the job.  Without an example or a pattern, that sounded too much like an Obama talking point and Obama also did not provide one example.  My point was not just the vote on an opposing party's appointment, it was that the conduct of the hearings was a disgrace (IMO) and that the leadership lacking came from the chair. Regarding votes on nominees, I would point out that Obama was one of the 22 furthest to the left in opposing confirmation Chief Justice John Roberts, a very competent opposing party appointment IMO.  Is Roberts also not "up to the job"?

Age discrimination: I very rarely support ANY rule where government tells private companies how to run their business, but certainly there is a difference between retirement according to a consensual contract with a fat golden compensation package and the issue of not hiring a qualified applicant.  Our personal experiences are obviously VERY different on age.  Some of the people I admire most in the world right now are a decade older than McCain.  I would more likely question Obama as too young and too new.  The Palin situation is slightly different because she MIGHT serve suddenly as President, but she  is running for 2nd position.  Assuming, and I don't, that McCain dies or retires later in his term or more likely declines to run for a second term, she will have new experience gained because of her selection, just as Obama would have more experience running for a second term that he doesn't have now.

JDN, thanks for your honest, candid views.  FWIW, if you read deeper in these threads you will see that I didn't support McCain and I didn't favor the Palin appointment before it was made.  I just prefer this ticket at this time presented with these choices. 

[G M]

Poll: Convention lifts McCain over Obama
By Susan Page, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The Republican National Convention has given John McCain and his party a significant boost, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken over the weekend shows, as running mate Sarah Palin helps close an "enthusiasm gap" that has dogged the GOP all year.
McCain leads Democrat Barack Obama by 50%-46% among registered voters, the Republican's biggest advantage since January and a turnaround from the USA TODAY poll taken just before the convention opened in St. Paul. Then, he lagged by 7 percentage points.

The convention bounce has helped not only McCain but also attitudes toward Republican congressional candidates and the GOP in general.

"The Republicans had a very successful convention and, at least initially, the selection of Sarah Palin has made a big difference," says political scientist Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia. "He's in a far better position than his people imagined he would be in at this point."

However, in an analysis of the impact of political conventions since 1960, Sabato concluded that post-convention polls signal the election's outcome only about half the time. "You could flip a coin and be about as predictive," he says. "It is really surprising how quickly convention memories fade."

McCain has narrowed Obama's wide advantage on handling the economy, by far the electorate's top issue. Before the GOP convention, Obama was favored by 19 points; now he's favored by 3.

The Republican's ties to President Bush remains a vulnerability. In the poll, 63% say they are concerned he would pursue policies too similar to those of the current president. Bush's approval rating is 33%.

In the new poll, taken Friday through Sunday, McCain leads Obama by 54%-44% among those seen as most likely to vote. The survey of 1,022 adults, including 959 registered voters, has a margin of error of +/— 3 points for both samples.

Among the findings:

• Before the convention, Republicans by 47%-39% were less enthusiastic than usual about voting. Now, they are more enthusiastic by 60%-24%, a sweeping change that narrows a key Democratic advantage. Democrats report being more enthusiastic by 67%-19%.

• Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a national unknown before McCain chose her for the ticket 10 days ago, draws a strong reaction from voters on both sides. Now, 29% say she makes them more likely to vote for McCain, 21% less likely.

Obama's choice of Delaware Sen. Joe Biden as running mate made 14% more likely to vote for the Democrat, 7% less likely.

• McCain's acceptance speech Thursday received lower ratings than the one Obama gave a week earlier: 15% called McCain's speech "excellent" compared with 35% for Obama.

 

 
 
Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-09-07-poll_N.htm

[JDN]

responding to JDN's points but writing to all ( or none?):  I challenge you or anyone to post and rebut ANY written opinion on the supreme court from Justice Thomas that makes you think he is not up to the job.  Without an example or a pattern, that sounded too much like an Obama talking point and Obama also did not provide one example.  My point was not just the vote on an opposing party's appointment, it was that the conduct of the hearings was a disgrace (IMO) and that the leadership lacking came from the chair. Regarding votes on nominees, I would point out that Obama was one of the 22 furthest to the left in opposing confirmation Chief Justice John Roberts, a very competent opposing party appointment IMO.  Is Roberts also not "up to the job"?

Age discrimination: I very rarely support ANY rule where government tells private companies how to run their business, but certainly there is a difference between retirement according to a consensual contract with a fat golden compensation package and the issue of not hiring a qualified applicant.  Our personal experiences are obviously VERY different on age.  Some of the people I admire most in the world right now are a decade older than McCain.  I would more likely question Obama as too young and too new.  The Palin situation is slightly different because she MIGHT serve suddenly as President, but she  is running for 2nd position.  Assuming, and I don't, that McCain dies or retires later in his term or more likely declines to run for a second term, she will have new experience gained because of her selection, just as Obama would have more experience running for a second term that he doesn't have now.

JDN, thanks for your honest, candid views.  FWIW, if you read deeper in these threads you will see that I didn't support McCain and I didn't favor the Palin appointment before it was made.  I just prefer this ticket at this time presented with these choices. 

Doug, nothing wrong with supporting McCain or Palin; I don't but frankly, if they are elected I will still sleep well at night.  I just think we really do need a change from Bush and McCain voted 90% of the time with Bush.

And I don't think our experiences are that different on age.  I too admire many people older than McCain.  And I respect them deeply.  Many are wise and experienced.  But the daily rigors of the job of being President of the US is truly amazing.  People seem to age before your eyes.  It's a tough and demanding job; you need to be at your peak mentally and physically.  No one, especially after what McCain has gone through can be at their "peak" and begin a job as difficult as being President at age 72. 

As for Justices, perhaps I was too harsh on Thomas, but I do not think he has the intellect of the others; he just seems to go along.  While I may not always agree with Scalia he is brilliant.  And I think Robert's runs a good court, not to mention he too is very accomplished.  And I think it is wrong (both parties seem to have a litmus test) to politicize the selection of Judges.  I think good people can be found on both sides of the aisle.

For example, regarding age and nonpartisan, for a long time I have belonged to an old social/business club (The California Club) here in LA; it's comfortable and quiet.  Mostly Republican, but a few Democrats.  All great people.  It's fun to listen to Pete Wilson argue politics in the steam room, a CEO express his business opinion on the squash court, or Warren Christopher criticize Rice over lunch.  I may not always agree, but most of them are accomplished and I learn a lot; it's casual so we have fun and it's a good and take (I usually lose) but how else can one learn but to listen and hear all sides?  Their being a Republican or Democratic doesn't affect me in the least.  Nor does their age.  Warren Christopher is still brilliant, I admire him greatly, however, as I implied above, could he now maintain the daily demands and rigors of the office of Secretary of State?  I doubt it.  Age catches up with all of us. 

[Crafty_Dog]

", , , for a long time I have belonged to an old social/business club (The California Club) here in LA; it's comfortable and quiet.  Mostly Republican, but a few Democrats.  All great people.  It's fun to listen to Pete Wilson argue politics in the steam room, a CEO express his business opinion on the squash court, or Warren Christopher criticize Rice over lunch."

Tres cool

[Black Grass]

Barry-O has 20 years attending a racist, America-hating church and mostly voted "present" as a legislator. And this is experience we want for a president?

GM,

Sarah Palin went to a church that equates gibberish to speaking to God. Mitt Romney believes in holy text that were reveled from a hat,  and I go to church that protected child molesters. Look at any church/religion hard enough and you will find something 'f*cked up'. Obama has already addressed and has made his feelings clear, its time to move on.

I agree though that voting "present" as a legislator is relevant, what is also relevant is what were the votes for.

Vince

[G M]

Barry-O has 20 years attending a racist, America-hating church and mostly voted "present" as a legislator. And this is experience we want for a president?

GM,

Sarah Palin went to a church that equates gibberish to speaking to God. Mitt Romney believes in holy text that were reveled from a hat,  and I go to church that protected child molesters. Look at any church/religion hard enough and you will find something 'f*cked up'. Obama has already addressed and has made his feelings clear, its time to move on.

I agree though that voting "present" as a legislator is relevant, what is also relevant is what were the votes for.

Vince

**If Sarah Palin attended a church that taught "christian identity" theology (white supremacist ideology masquerading as christianity) I could not vote for her ever, for any reason. Barry-O chose to find a "black church" in Chicago. Obviously there were quite a few to choose from. He had to choose one that is formed around a racist theology, one that honored Louis Farrakhan. In fact, the only person to appear on the cover of the church's magazine cover as many times as Farrakhan was Barry-O. Does he hate the white people that raised him, or was it just a cynical move to enhance his "blackness" for running for the Illinois state legislature? Neither speak well of his character.**

[G M]

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/31200_Bill_Ayers-_Violent_Resistance_Not_Necessarily_the_Answer

**Obama's political mentor. Unrepentant terrorist.**

[Crafty_Dog]

and Frank Davis Marshall, and Rev. Wright, and Rezko, and the Syrian (IIRC?) businesman with Rezko, and ACORN (voter reg. fraud) and and and

[DougMacG]

The original political point about Justice Thomas was that he received bad treatment from the judiciary committee under Sen. Biden's watch.  The allegation wasn't 'vetted'. This was pre-Lewinski when they brought 'pubic hair on a coke can' and 'Long Dong Silver' into our living rooms with our children and into our congressional record based on one person saying it was so.  No incident before.  No incident after.  No pattern.  No evidence.  No second 'victim', no witness, no contemporaneous complaint.  The point at the time IMO was that Thomas like Bork didn't find an unenumerated right of privacy unwritten into the constitution that trumped life so they believed the adjudicated right to an abortion would become in jeopardy.  That may be enough reason for certain senators to vote against him, but not a license to smear.

Obama dove in there lately by singling out Thomas as unworthy of the court, then like I said previously, failed to back up his harsh judgment with anything unique to this Justice, such as at least one badly reasoned opinion.  Two recent posts at powerlineblog.com take this story from there:
---------------------
August 19, 2008
A strange singling out

During the forum at Saddleback, Barack Obama said he would not have nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court because Thomas lacked relevant experience at the time. I (Paul Mirengoff at powerline) suggested that this statement was disingenuous because Obama clearly wouldn't have selected Thomas, a powerful spokesman against the "liberal" view of civil rights, regardless of how much judicial experience Thomas had possessed. I agreed, though, that Thomas lacked substantial experience as a judge, adding that in this respect (and this respect alone) Thomas could be viewed as the Barack Obama of the Supreme Court.

A reader reminded me, however, that when Thomas joined the Court, it was not unusual for Justices to have little or no prior judging experience. Two of the sitting Justices at that time, White and Rehnquist, had never been judges. Two others, O'Connor and Brennan had never been federal judges. Lewis Powell, who retired four years before Thomas joined the Court, likewise had never been a judge before he joined the Supreme Court. Neither had former Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Obama isn't the only person who has singled out Justice Thomas for his lack of prior judging experience. It makes for interesting speculation to ponder the reasons for this singling out.
-------------------------
August 24, 2008
A strange singling out explained

Barack Obama's recent comment about Justice Thomas -- that he would not have nominated Thomas for the Supreme Court due to Thomas' "inexperience" -- coupled with Obama's selection of Joe Biden as his running mate, provide a painful reminder of the judicial confirmation wars of the past 20 plus years. I wrote about Biden's central (and disgraceful) role in these wars here. I wondered why Thomas is singled out for having been inexperienced at the time of his nomination here.

The latter post brought this response from a reader:

    The answer is this: liberals like Mr. Obama simply cannot fathom how a black person could hold seriously thought-out views about jurisprudence like those of Clarence Thomas. And there is something too crass about attacking Justice Thomas' jurisprudence on the merits, as well as too time-consuming.

    Liberals deem it too crass because they like to pretend that their objections are unrelated to politics, perhaps out of a concern that conservatives will apply the same approach to liberal judicial nominees when the tables are turned. So they find other reasons: Bork is too smart and doesn't understand the "common man;" and Thomas is too dumb. But the Thomas-as-too-dumb view is too crass also, so the easy thing to do is say he was "unqualified" or too inexperienced.

    Substantive critiques of Justice Thomas' jurisprudence are too time-consuming because people like Mr. Obama don't want to read, much less engage, his opinions. Note that criticisms of Justice Thomas never cite any examples of actual opinions he's written. Obama certainly failed to do so at the Saddleback forum.

    Ultimately, the theme continues for liberals: "self-hating" minorities who deviate from liberal orthodoxy are attacked because liberals view them as turn-coats. For more recent examples, see the treatment Miguel Estrada and Janice Rogers Brown received when the president nominated them to the D.C. Circuit, while the white guy, John Rodgers, sailed through to confirmation. And, recall Justice Thomas' words:

    "This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree."

    The "old order" is liberalism. Mr. Obama's cheap shot against Justice Thomas, which would be applauded in Cambridge and Hyde Park, is the most recent example of the stereotypical left-wing effort to keep minorities on the plantation.

[G M]

http://hotair.com/archives/2008/09/10/biden-hey-you-know-who-might-have-been-a-better-pick-for-vp-than-me/

Joe Biden tells the truth!

[Black Grass]

**If Sarah Palin attended a church that taught "christian identity" theology (white supremacist ideology masquerading as christianity) I could not vote for her ever, for any reason. Barry-O chose to find a "black church" in Chicago. Obviously there were quite a few to choose from. He had to choose one that is formed around a racist theology, one that honored Louis Farrakhan. In fact, the only person to appear on the cover of the church's magazine cover as many times as Farrakhan was Barry-O. Does he hate the white people that raised him, or was it just a cynical move to enhance his "blackness" for running for the Illinois state legislature? Neither speak well of his character.**

Wright and  Christian Identity are hardly the opposite of the same coin. As for why he chose that church, again i think you are streching in saying he hates his white family because he joined a black church and as for joining to appear more black for legislature, come on now, he joined the church in the 80's he did run for state legislature until 97.

Vince

[Crafty_Dog]

Vince:

What do YOU think explains his decsision to join this church/follow this pastor?  What do YOU think this says about him?

[G M]

Why Does Obama's Pastor Matter?   
By John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, February 04, 2008

Barack Obama, in a way that recalls John F. Kennedy, a politician to whom he's frequently compared, has carefully controlled and burnished his image to create the impression of an independent figure, free from dogma and ideological entanglements. But there is one man who threatens to undermine Obama's appealing narrative as a man above the ugly quarrels and divisive partisanship of the past: his longtime pastor and spiritual adviser, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.


On March 1, 1972, Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. became the pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), a position he still holds to this day. Because he has been a revered figure in the life of presidential aspirant Barack Obama for two decades, Wright's political views, which he commonly draws from the tenets of liberation theology, are worthy of some scrutiny—if only to shed light on the teachings that have had enough resonance to retain Obama as a TUCC congregant since 1988. So great is Obama's respect for Wright, that the former sought the Reverend's counsel before formally declaring his candidacy for U.S. President. Moreover, Obama and his wife selected Wright to perform their wedding ceremony and to baptize their two daughters. These are honors of considerable magnitude, and it is reasonable to speculate that if we learn more about Rev. Wright, we may gain some insight into the personal qualities and belief systems Barack Obama holds in high regard.

When we read the writings, public statements, and sermons of Rev. Wright, we quickly notice his unmistakable conviction that America is a nation infested with racism, prejudice, and injustices that make life very difficult for black people. As he declared in one of his sermons: "Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!... We [Americans] believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."

In a similar spirit, Wright laments "the social order under which we [blacks] live, under which we suffer, under which we are killed."[1] Depicting blacks as a politically powerless demographic, he complains that "African Americans don't run anything in the Capital except elevators."[2] On its website, Wright's church portrays black people as victims who are still burdened by the legacy of their "pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism," and who must pray for "the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people."

Wright detects what he views as racism in virtually every facet of American life. In the business world, for instance, he attributes the high unemployment rate of African Americans to "the fact that they are black."[3] Vis-à-vis the criminal justice system, he similarly explains that "the brothers are in prison" largely because of their skin color. "Consider the 'three strikes law,'" he elaborates. "There is a higher jail sentencing for crack than for cocaine because more African Americans get crack than do cocaine."[4] Notwithstanding Wright's implication that the harsh anti-crack penalties were instituted by racist legislators for the purpose of incarcerating as many blacks as possible, the Congressional Record shows that such was not at all the case. In 1986, when the strict, federal anti-crack legislation was being debated, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)—deeply concerned about the degree to which crack was decimating the black community—strongly supported the legislation and actually pressed for even harsher penalties. In fact, a few years earlier CBC members had pushed President Reagan to create the Office of National Drug Control Policy.[5]

In Wright's calculus, white America's bigotry is to blame not only for whatever ills continue to plague the black community, but also for our country's conflicts with other nations. "In the 21st century," says Wright, "white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just 'disappeared' as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns."

Remarkably, no mention of jihad—the ageless Muslim tradition of aggressive, permanent warfare whose ultimate aim is to achieve Islam's dominion over the human race at large—managed to find its way into Wright's analysis. Rather, he assured us that the 9/11 atrocities were ultimately traceable to the doorstep of U.S. provocations. In fact, Wright apparently sees no reason to suspect that Islam may be incompatible in any way with Western traditions. "Islam and Christianity are a whole lot closer than you may realize," he has written. "Islam comes out of Christianity."[6]

Apart from America's purported racism, Wright also despises the nation's capitalist economic structure, viewing it as a breeding ground for all manner of injustice. "Capitalism as made manifest in the 'New World,'" says Wright, "depended upon slave labor (by African slaves), and it is only maintained by keeping the 'Two-Thirds World' under oppression."[7] This anti-capitalist perspective is further reflected in TUCC's "10-point vision," whose ideals include the cultivation of "a congregation working towards ECONOMIC PARITY." Dispelling any doubt that this is a reference to socialism and the wholesale redistribution of wealth, the TUCC mission statement plainly declares its goal of helping "the less fortunate to become agents of change for God who is not pleased with America's economic mal-distribution!"

This view is entirely consistent with Rev. Wright's devotion to the tenets of liberation theology, which is essentially Marxism dressed up as Christianity. Devised by Cold War-era theologians, it teaches that the gospels of Jesus can be understood only as calls for social activism, class struggle, and revolution aimed at overturning the existing capitalist order and installing, in its stead, a socialist utopia where today's poor will unseat their "oppressors" and become liberated from their material (and, consequently, their spiritual) deprivations. An extension of this paradigm is black liberation theology, which seeks to foment a similar Marxist revolutionary fervor founded on racial rather than class solidarity. Wright's mentor in this discipline is James Cone, author of the landmark text Black Power and Black Theology. Arguing that Christianity has been used by white society as an opiate of the (black) masses, Cone asserts that the destitute "are made and kept poor by the rich and powerful few," and that "[n]o one can be a follower of Jesus Christ without a political commitment that expresses one's solidarity with victims."

Many of Wright's condemnations of America are echoed in his denunciations of Israel and Zionism, which he has blamed for imposing "injustice and … racism" on the Palestinians. According to Wright, Zionism contains an element of "white racism." Likening Israel's treatment of Palestinians to South Africa's treatment of blacks during the apartheid era, Wright advocates divestment campaigns targeting companies that conduct business in, or with, Israel.

Given Wright's obvious low regard for the U.S. and Israel, it is by no means surprising that he reserves some of his deepest respect for the virulently anti-American, anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. "When Minister Farrakhan speaks, Black America listens," says Wright. "Everybody may not agree with him, but they listen … His depth on analysis when it comes to the racial ills of this nation is astounding and eye opening. He brings a perspective that is helpful and honest. Minister Farrakhan will be remembered as one of the 20th and 21st century giants of the African American religious experience. His integrity and honesty have secured him a place in history as one of the nation's most powerful critics. His love for Africa and African American people has made him an unforgettable force, a catalyst for change and a religious leader who is sincere about his faith and his purpose."

Wright's paean to Farrakhan was parroted in the November/December issue of TUCC's bimonthly magazine, the Trumpet, which featured an interview with the NOI "icon" who, according to the publication, "truly epitomized greatness." "Because of the Minister's influence in the African American community," the Trumpet announced that it was honoring him with an "Empowerment Award" as a "fitting tribute for a storied life well lived."

This seems an odd distinction to confer upon someone whose anti-American, anti-white, anti-Semitic statements are numerous. For example, in 1996 Farrakhan told a Tehran newspaper that God would "bestow upon Muslims" the honor of "destroy[ing] America." In February 1998, he sent a cordial and supportive letter to Saddam Hussein, calling him a "visionary" who had earned the Iraqi people's "love," and whose demise would "mean a setback for the goal of unity [among Muslims]." In July 2002, he declared that America, "with blood dripping from [its] hands," had no moral authority by which to overthrow Saddam. In February 2005, he condemned the United States for waging a war "against Islam," adding: "[T]here's no way that I, as a Muslim, could countenance my children or grandchildren fighting a war against fellow believers in any part of the world."

Farrakhan also has a long, well-documented history of venom-laced references to the white "blue-eyed devils" and Jewish "bloodsuckers" who purportedly decimate America's black communities from coast to coast. Moreover, he has referred to white people as "the skunks of the planet."

On a 1984 trip to meet with the Libyan dictator (and America's arch enemy) Muammar Qadhafi, Farrakhan was accompanied by none other than Jeremiah A. Wright.

Farrakhan has long considered Qadhafi to be his trusted "friend," "brother," and "fellow struggler in the cause of liberation for our people." In 1996, the NOI leader formed a partnership with Qadhafi, who pledged $1 billion to help Farrakhan develop a Muslim political lobby in the U.S. Said Qadhafi: "We agreed with Louis Farrakhan and his delegation to mobilize in a legal and legitimate form the oppressed minorities—and at their forefront the blacks, Arab Muslims and Red Indians—for they play an important role in American political life and have a weight in U.S. elections." "Our confrontation with America," added Qadhafi, "was [previously] like a fight against a fortress from outside, and today [with the NOI alliance] we found a breach to enter into this fortress and confront it."

Farrakhan's October 16, 1995 Million Man March ranks among the events about which Rev. Wright has written most extensively and passionately. Wright attended the rally with his son, and has described it as "a once in a lifetime, amazing experience."[8] When a number of prominent African Americans counseled fellow blacks to boycott the demonstration because of Farrakhan's well-documented history of hateful rhetoric, Wright derided those critics as "'Negro' leaders,"[9] "'colored' leaders," "Oreos," and "house niggras"[10] whose most noteworthy trait was their contemptible "Uncle Tomism."[11] "There are a whole boat load of 'darkies' who think in white supremacist terms," added Wright. "… Some 'darkies' think white women are superior to black women…. Some 'darkies' think white lawyers are superior to black lawyers. Some 'darkies' think white pastors are better than black pastors. There are a whole boatload of 'darkies' who think anything white and everyone white is better than whatever it is black people have."[12]

In the book titled When Black Men Stand up for God, a collection of sermons and reflections on the Million Man March, Wright identifies Kwanzaa founder Maulana Karenga as an attendee of the rally.[13] In the end notes that follow a transcript of one of Wright's sermons, Karenga is described as "an internationally acclaimed social activist and scholar in Pan African Studies"; "the founder and creator of Kwanzaa, the well-known African American holiday"; and "the director of Pan African Studies and Visiting Lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside."[14] Unmentioned is the fact that Karenga is a self-identified "African socialist" whose "Seven Principles of Blackness," which are observed during Kwanzaa, are not only the Marxist precepts of parity and proletariat unity, but are also identical to those of the 1970s domestic terrorist group, the Symbionese Liberation Army. Nor is it noted that in 1971 Karenga was convicted of torturing two women who were members of United Slaves, a black nationalist cult he had established.

On its website, Wright's church describes itself in distinctly racial terms, as being an "Unashamedly Black" congregation of "African people" who are "true to our native land, the mother continent, the cradle of civilization," and who participate in TUCC's "Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community."

Some have suggested that such seemingly exclusionary assertions, coupled with Wright's own racially loaded statements and his close affiliation with Farrakhan, indicate that Wright is guilty of racism. But Wright casually dismisses this charge, stating: "I get tickled every time I hear a 'Negro' call me a racist. They don't even understand how to define the word. Racism means controlling the means."[15] In other words, Wright employs a rhetorical escape hatch that permits him to evade all charges of racism simply by claiming that only the "dominant" (i.e., white) demographic is capable of such ugliness. The implication is that no deed or utterance, however hateful or vile, is egregious enough to qualify any black person as a racist; that blacks are always the victims of racism, never its perpetrators.

American voters ought to have more than a passing interest in the fact that when Barack Obama formally joined TUCC in 1991, he tacitly accepted this same Jeremiah Wright as a spiritual mentor. Moreover, he pledged allegiance to the church's race-conscious "Black Value System" that encourages blacks to patronize black-only businesses, support black leaders, and avoid becoming "entrapped" by the pursuit of a "black middle-classness" whose ideals presumably would erode their sense of African identity and render them "captive" to white culture.

In addition, voters should examine carefully the question of whether Obama shares Wright's socialist economic preferences. They ought to be aware, for instance, that the Democratic candidate is on record as having said that his religious faith has led him to question "the idolatry of the free market." Moreover, Obama's voting record and his issue positions show him generally to favor high spending and increased government intervention in all realms of life.

When Rev. Wright's controversial statements and positions recently became more widely publicized, Obama said, "There are some things I agree with my pastor about, some things I disagree with him about." It is the duty of every American voter to determine exactly where those agreements and disagreements lie.

Notes:
[1] When Black Men Stand up for God (Chicago: African American Images), 1996, p. 17.
[2] Ibid., p. 102.
[3] Ibid., p. 17.
[4] Ibid., p. 17.
[5] John DiIulio, Jr., "My Black Crime Problem, and Ours," City Journal (Spring 1996), pp. 19-20.
[6] When Black Men Stand up for God, p. 16.
[7] Blow the Trumpet in Zion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 2005, pp. 8-9.
[8] When Black Men Stand up for God, p. 10.
[9] Ibid., pp. 11, 37.
[10] Ibid., p. 80.
[11] Ibid., p. 11.
[12] Ibid., p. 81.
[13] It should be noted that Wright's church has conducted Kwanzaa programs for its congregants. See When Black Men Stand up for God, p. iv.)
[14] When Black Men Stand up for God, p. 25.
[15] Ibid., p. 102.

[Crafty_Dog]

The side by side comparison is pretty special:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sj91NH5fvw

A spontaneous endorsement of McCain

http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=TG4fe9GlWS8

[Body-by-Guinness]

Obama’s Descent to Earth
It’s hard to maintain a celestial conceit for four years — even if you believe it yourself.

By Charles Krauthammer

The Democrats are in a panic. In a presidential race that is impossible to lose, they are behind. Obama devotees are frantically giving advice. Tom Friedman tells him to “start slamming down some phones.” Camille Paglia suggests, “be boring!”

Meanwhile, a posse of Democratic lawyers, mainstream reporters, lefty bloggers, and various other Obamaphiles are scouring the vast tundra of Alaska for something, anything, to bring down Sarah Palin: her daughter’s pregnancy, her ex-brother-in-law problem, her $60 per diem, and now her religion. (CNN reports — news flash! — that she apparently has never spoken in tongues.) Not since Henry II asked if no one would rid him of his turbulent priest, have so many so urgently volunteered for duty.

But Palin is not just a problem for Obama. She is also a symptom of what ails him. Before Palin, Obama was the ultimate celebrity candidate. For no presidential nominee in living memory had the gap between adulation and achievement been so great. Which is why McCain’s Paris Hilton ads struck such a nerve. Obama’s meteoric rise was based not on issues — there was not a dime’s worth of difference between him and Hillary on issues — but on narrative, on eloquence, on charisma.

The unease at the Denver convention, the feeling of buyer’s remorse, was the Democrats’ realization that the arc of Obama’s celebrity had peaked — and had now entered a period of its steepest decline. That Palin could so instantly steal the celebrity spotlight is a reflection of that decline.

It was inevitable. Obama had managed to stay aloft for four full years. But no one can levitate forever.

Five speeches map Obama’s trajectory.

Obama burst into celebrityhood with his brilliant and moving 2004 Democratic convention speech (#1). It turned an obscure state senator into a national figure and legitimate presidential candidate.

His next and highest moment (#2) was the night of his Iowa caucus victory when he gave an equally stirring speech of the highest tones that dazzled a national audience just tuning in.

The problem is that Obama began believing in his own magical powers — the chants, the swoons, the “we are the ones” self-infatuation. Like Ronald Reagan, he was leading a movement, but one entirely driven by personality. Reagan’s revolution was rooted in concrete political ideas (supply-side economics, welfare-state deregulation, national strength) that transcended one man. For Obama’s movement, the man is the transcendence.

Which gave the Obama campaign a cult-like tinge. With every primary and every repetition of the high-flown, self-referential rhetoric, the campaign’s insubstantiality became clear. By the time it was repeated yet again on the night of the last primary (#3), the tropes were tired and flat. To top himself, Obama had to reach. Hence his triumphal declaration that history would note that night, his victory, his ascension, as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Clang. But Obama heard only the cheers of the invited crowd. Not yet seeing how the pseudo-messianism was wearing thin, he did Berlin (#4) and finally jumped the shark. That grandiloquent proclamation of universalist puffery popped the bubble. The grandiosity had become bizarre.

From there it was but a short step to Paris Hilton. Finally, the Obama people understood. Which is why the next data point (#5) is so different. Obama’s Denver acceptance speech was deliberately pedestrian, State-of-the-Unionish, programmatic, and only briefly (that lovely coda recalling the March on Washington) lyrical.

The problem, however, was that Obama had announced the Invesco Field setting for the speech during the pre-Berlin flush of hubris. They were stuck with the Greek columns, the circus atmosphere, the rock-star fireworks farewell — as opposed to the warmer, traditional, balloon-filled convention-hall hug-a-thon. The incongruity between text and context was apparent. Obama was trying to make himself ordinary — and serious — but could hardly remember how.

One star fades, another is born.

The very next morning, John McCain picks Sarah Palin and a new celebrity is launched. And in the celebrity game, novelty is trump. With her narrative, her persona, her charisma carrying the McCain campaign to places it has never been — and by all logic has no right to be — she’s pulling an Obama.

But her job is easier. She only has to remain airborne for seven more weeks. Obama maintained altitude for an astonishing four years. In politics, as in all games, however, it’s the finish that counts.

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist

http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=N2JiYTc5OWEyYmRlZjY0ZTI1NjQ5OTU4ODgzMmM2YmE=

[Body-by-Guinness]

McCain Flies His Campaign Past Obama
Michael Barone
Saturday, September 13, 2008
John McCain was trained as a fighter pilot. In his selection of Sarah Palin, and in his convention and campaigning since, he has shown that he learned an important lesson from his fighter pilot days: He has gotten inside Barack Obama's OODA loop.

That term was the invention of the great fighter pilot and military strategist John Boyd. It's an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

"The key to victory is operating at a faster tempo than the enemy," Boyd's biographer Robert Coram writes. "The key thing to understand about Boyd's version is not the mechanical cycle itself, but rather the need to execute the cycle in such a fashion as to get inside the mind and decision cycle of the adversary."

For a fighter pilot, that means honing in above and behind the adversary so you can shoot him out of the sky. For a political candidate, it means acting in such a way that the opponent's responses again and again reinforce the points you are trying to make and undermine his own position.

The Palin selection -- and her performance at the convention and on the stump -- seems to be having that effect. Obama chief strategist David Axelrod admitted of the Palin pick: "I can honestly say we weren't prepared for that. I mean, her name wasn't on anybody's list." But it was known that McCain's VP adviser had traveled to Alaska, and anyone clicking on youtube.com could see Palin's impressive performance in political debates. The McCain campaign shrewdly kept the information that she was on the short list and that she was the choice to a half-dozen people, who didn't tell even their spouses. The Obama team failed to Observe.

Then they failed to Orient. Palin, as her convention and subsequent appearances have shown, powerfully reinforces two McCain themes: She is a maverick who has taken on the leaders of her own party (as Obama never has in Chicago), and she has a record on energy of favoring drilling and exploiting American resources. Instead of undermining these themes, they dismissed the choice as an attempt to appeal to female Hillary Clinton supporters or to religious conservatives.

Then team Obama and its many backers in the media failed to Decide correctly, so when they Acted they got it wrong. Their attacks on Palin tended to ricochet and hit Obama. Is she inexperienced? Well, what has Obama ever run (besides his now floundering campaign)? Being a small-town mayor, as Palin said, is like being a community organizer, "except that you have actual responsibilities."

Is she neglecting her family? Well, how often has Obama tucked his daughters in lately? For more than a week we've seen the No. 1 person on the Democratic ticket argue that he's better prepared than the No. 2 person on the Republican ticket. That's not a winning argument even if you win it. As veteran California Democrat Willie Brown says, "The Republicans are now on offense, and Democrats are on defense."

Perhaps the Obama campaign strategists expected their many friends in the mainstream media to do their work for them. Certainly they tried. But their efforts have misfired, and the grenades they lobbed at Palin have ricocheted back and blown up in their faces. Voters are on to their game.

Pollster Scott Rasmussen finds that 68 percent believe "most reporters try to help the candidate they want to win" and that 51 percent -- more than support McCain -- believe the press is "trying to hurt" Sarah Palin. The press and the Democratic ticket are paying the price for decades of biased mainstream media coverage.

I am not the only one to notice that John McCain and Sarah Palin have gotten inside the Obama campaign's (and mainstream media's) OODA loop. Blogger Charlie Martin sprang into pixels on www.americanthinker.com before I could spring into print with this column. But as I write, Barack Obama is in his second daily news cycle of explaining why his "lipstick on a pig" comments are not a sexist attack on the hockey mom who compared herself to a pit bull with lipstick.

Robert Coram describes what can happen when one player gets inside another's OODA loop. "If someone truly understands how to create menace and uncertainty and mistrust, then how to exploit and magnify the presence of these disconcerting elements, the loop can be vicious, a terribly destructive force, virtually unstoppable in causing panic and confusion and -- Boyd's phrase is best -- 'unraveling the competition.' ... The most amazing aspect of the OODA loop is that the losing side rarely understands what happened."

John Boyd would have been a terrific political consultant.

[JDN]

I think I am Over Dosing on the "OODA loop".  But what a great acronym, huh?  GM on 8/30 quoted a similar article (almost the same) on the "OODA loop" in the McCain forum as referenced (Charlie Martin) in this article.  I am sure it has excellent military application, it's brilliant, but McCain himself was a fighter pilot over 40 years ago.  And I think Boyd wrote about the OODA Loop after McCain's service as a fighter pilot...

[G M]

http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000172.html

More on the history of the OODA loop concept.

[Black Grass]

Vince:

What do YOU think explains his decsision to join this church/follow this pastor?  What do YOU think this says about him?

Crafty,

Sorry took so long to respond.  Work getting in the way!

For me to really get a feel for his decision to pick this particular church I think i would need to read his books. Not much for auto biographies (zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!).

From what I gather this is a fairly prominent church in Chicago with many community out reach programs, seems like a good reason to join any church. Is it Black centric, yeah, where they angry at white people, yeah, I also think at the times they good reason for both. (I think its debatable if this type of rhetoric is needed now and if so to what extent). Do I think this mean Obama hates white people, no.

As for staying, as Obama has said he has many ties to the church. A church is not just pastor but all the people who belonged.

I give you an example, a friend of my thinks that both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI are too liberal and didn't particularly like them. I asked him if he considered them anti-popes, he said "no they are the real popes, they might lead the church but they are not the church".

Vince











 

[Crafty_Dog]

I appreciate your points, but apart for Rev. Wright this is a church that had a particularly warm relationship with Louis Farrakhan and featured him prominently.  There's plenty of black churches with community programs that don't promote such virulent bigots.

[Body-by-Guinness]

I think I am Over Dosing on the "OODA loop".  But what a great acronym, huh?  GM on 8/30 quoted a similar article (almost the same) on the "OODA loop" in the McCain forum as referenced (Charlie Martin) in this article.  I am sure it has excellent military application, it's brilliant, but McCain himself was a fighter pilot over 40 years ago.  And I think Boyd wrote about the OODA Loop after McCain's service as a fighter pilot...

The acronym might post-date McCain's training, but the concepts have been stated one way or another in aviator training since it began. Indeed, I'd argue the FMA concept of flow is pretty synonymous: you move more fluidly than your opponent and hence get inside his or her game. Think McCain/Palin have that going currently.

A point of order: McCain is not a fighter pilot; he flew ground attack aircraft. NYT et al can't get that one right.

[ccp]

This tends to highlight BOs fraudulant claims that he is "post" partisan:

ANALYSIS:

Sen. John McCain's record of working with Democrats easily outstrips Sen. Barack Obama's efforts with Republicans, according to an analysis by The Washington Times of their legislative records.

Whether looking at bills they have led on or bills they have signed onto, Mr. McCain has reached across the aisle far more frequently and with more members than Mr. Obama since the latter came to the Senate in 2005.

In fact, by several measures, Mr. McCain has been more likely to team up with Democrats than with members of his own party. Democrats made up 55 percent of his political partners over the last two Congresses, including on the tough issues of campaign finance and global warming. For Mr. Obama, Republicans were only 13 percent of his co-sponsors during his time in the Senate, and he had his biggest bipartisan successes on noncontroversial measures, such as issuing a postage stamp in honor of civil rights icon Rosa Parks.

[ccp]

Zogby electoral college - gap is closed.  Looks like the usual red vs blue map:

http://www.zogby.com/50state/