Stumble It!
VDH at his best - they are scared to death of Sarah, and they are rank hypocrites...but then, we always knew that! The democrats were the party of Slavery, of Jim Crow, of racism...yet today they say we are. Democrats claim they are for equal opportunity for women...but they are still sexist. Racist, Sexist...that's today's democratic party...T
Palinomania
If the post-Speech reaction of the talking heads at CNN, PBS and MSBNC, or the op-ed ravings of Gloria Steinem, Maureen Dowd, Eleanor Clift or Sally Quinn are any indication, the Secret Service better enlist the Alaskan National Guard for help ensuring the Alaskan Governor’s safety.
A beautiful, confident, articulate, independent, accomplished—and conservative—woman apparently has enraged Team Obama, the mainstream media, and the entire American intelligentsia, as if they were collectively hit by a cruise missile aimed from Middle America.
When Palin talks about her present life it sounds as authentic as Biden’s showy populism came off as false. Enraged feminists are apparently the gatekeepers for less well-educated American women, who are supposed to have 0-1.5 children not 5! Their husbands must be professors, lawyers, CEOs, editors—not snowmobile champions, union members, oil workers, and fishermen—or, worse, all in one! And unlike a Pelosi, Quinn, or Clinton, Palin, God forbid, did not rely on a powerful, wealthy husband or father to energize her career. Worse still, she took no women’s studies class, never attended the Ivy League, and shoots moose. The danger is not just that Sarah Palin could win McCain the election, but she could expose the entire flimsy structure of doctrinaire liberalism as the hypocrisy—and chauvinism—it has become.
Dumb and dumber
At about the time that the Republicans were making the case that liberals were hyperpartisan, a little unhinged, and out of touch, hundreds of nutty demonstrators were outside the convention screaming in the usual street theater mode about war crimes et al.—even as Joe Biden announced that when elected, he and Obama may well seek out Bush administration officials to try them for crimes!
Two nations….
- The Geraldine Ferraro Democratic Vice Presidential nominee appointment was an inspired stroke of genius that advanced the cause of feminism; Palin’s was tawdry tokenism.
- Edwards was a social reformer brought down by the tabloids; Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is white trash and fair game.
- Insulting “small town mayors” and “good looking” women is funny; suggesting that “community organizing” is often a farce is a felony.
- Obama’s violation of drug laws with a “little blow” was youthful exuberance; Palin’s husband’s DUI was more proof of a working-class messy family.
- Joe Biden bravely continued as Senator after the tragic death of his wife and daughter left his injured young sons with a single parent; Sarah Palin selfishly shorted her children by running for VP and endangered her infants by flying while pregnant.
- Criticizing Clinton’s engaging in sex in the oval office and lying about it to the American people were once “the politics of personal destruction”; lying that Sarah Palin might not have been the mother of her 5th child is the mere overreach of the blogs caused by the improper vetting of the McCain campaign.
This all reminds me of the 2000 campaign when the media beat the dead-horse of Bush (Yale BA, Harvard MBA) as the lousy, lazy C-student, when, in fact, Al Gore’s undergraduate record at Harvard was full of C’s, F’s at Vanderbilt Divinity School (dropped out), and C’s at Vanderbilt Law School (dropped out). The point is not that quitting professional schools is necessarily a sign of anything, but rather once again that the media is shown to be bending and inventing facts for their higher purposes of liberal utopianism— a continuation of some half a century when we remember the “dumb” Ike floundering before the “brilliant” and “witty” Adlai Stevenson (who flunked out of Harvard Law School, a fact hidden from the public for decades.)
The Poverty of the Legal Culture
Every Democratic Presidential and VP nominee of the last thirty years, with the exception of Al Gore (law school drop out), has been a lawyer—Obama (s) and Biden, Kerry and Edwards, Gore and Lieberman, Clinton (s) and Gore, Dukakis and Bentsen, and Mondale and Ferraro. And while Carter was a failure, he at least brought a different perspective from someone whose professional training was argumentation.
The Republicans, at least, understood that legal training is not a prerequisite for the Presidency (one in law doesn’t build things, grow, defend, or create anything). The Democrats need to branch out, and find a Reagan, Palin, or McCain. Had the Bushes and Cheney been lawyers, I doubt they would have been elected. I am not suggesting that the products of modern law schools are not articulate, clever, used to arguing both sides of an issue, often rhetorically adept, and attentive to detail; but all that is part of the problem: they simply rarely wade out and solve problems rather than postfacto examining and litigating those who do.
All About Race, All the Time
Two truths have emerged: after promising to be the postracial candidate, Obama evokes race constantly; after suggesting McCain will, he hasn’t yet.
Remember this from Obama: “So what they are going to do is make you scared of me. You know he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like those other presidents (sic) on the dollar bills.”
Or this Obamism: “They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”
Or this in Berlin: “I know that I don’t look like the other Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.”
Or his slur of his grandmother as a “typical white person” or the Pennsylvania “clingers” nonsense. No need to go into the rest of the Obama racial stable: Rev. Wright’s racist outbursts; Father Pfleger’s creepy rants; Michelle’s more subtle “they” “raised the bar” complaints, or Barack Obama’s own promises to fund more “oppression studies” as a result of the “tragic history” of the United States that requires “reparations” in deed, not just word.
And then, of course, there are the self-appointed spokesmen from the nut-fringe, racists like Ludacris or Diddy who have weighed in with creepy attacks on McCain and Palin. Here I include the ever crazy Howard Dean. Remember this from the Chairman of the Democratic Party: “If you look at folks of color, even women, they’re more successful in the Democratic Party than they are in the white, uh, excuse me, in the (chuckles) Republican Party, because we just give more opportunity to folks who are hard-working people who are immigrants and come from members of minority groups.”
Then there are the op-ed writers weighing in on cue, like Philadelphia Daily News columnist Fatima Ali: “If McCain wins, look for a full-fledged race and class war, fueled by a deflated and depressed country, soaring crime, homelessness — and hopelessness!”
Or this from Harold Meyerson (who earlier accused Hillary and Bill Clinton of playing the race card) in the Washington Post: “In a year when the Democrats have an African American presidential nominee, the Republicans now more than ever are the white folks’ party, the party that delays the advent of our multicultural future, the party of the American past. Republican conventions have long been bastions of de facto Caucasian exclusivity, but coming right after the diversity of Denver, this year’s GOP convention is almost shockingly — un-Americanly — white. Long term, this whiteness is a huge problem.”
Or Bob Herbert’s fantastic claim that a McCain ad showing Obama speaking in front of the Berlin Victory Column was really a racist attack juxtaposing the Washington Monument and the Leaning Tower of Pisa as phallic symbols to scare the public about black male/white women coupling. About all Herbert revealed was that the New York Times columnist can’t distinguish America’s best known obelisk from a European monument to Prussian militarism.
Bottom line: expect more of the race card, especially if Palin gives the Republicans a bounce after the convention—and anyone who objects to it will be preemptively charged—of course—with racism.
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Saturday, September 06, 2008
Target Palin
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Experience? Bring it on!
Experience? Experience?! I say bring it on: Compare the relative youth and inexperience of the VICE presidential candidate to the even more inexperienced PRESIDENTIAL candidate! Besides, she is not at all inexperienced. In fact, she was my first choice for the last three months. She's a rising superstar in the conservative-libertarian movement. Great pick, Mr. McCain. Enjoy Mark Steyn's thought on her selection. You'll laugh till your sides split..T
The hostess with the moosest
First, Governor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, "all-American", but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who's done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of "community organizer" and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy.
Second, it can't be in Senator Obama's interest for the punditocracy to spends its time arguing about whether the Republicans' vice-presidential pick is "even more" inexperienced than the Democrats' presidential one.
Third, real people don't define "experience" as appearing on unwatched Sunday-morning talk shows every week for 35 years and having been around long enough to have got both the War on Terror and the Cold War wrong. (On the first point, at the Gun Owners of New Hampshire dinner in the 2000 campaign, I remember Orrin Hatch telling me sadly that he was stunned to discover how few Granite State voters knew who he was.) Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain't run nothin' but his mouth. She's done the stuff he's merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party's corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol (see his campaign's thuggish attempt to throttle Stanley Kurtz and Milt Rosenberg on WGN the other night).
Fourth, Governor Palin has what the British Labour Party politician Denis Healy likes to call a "hinterland" - a life beyond politics. Whenever Senator Obama attempts anything non-political (such as bowling), he comes over like a visiting dignitary to a foreign country getting shanghaied into some impenetrable local folk ritual. Sarah Palin isn't just on the right side of the issues intellectually. She won't need the usual stage-managed "hunting" trip to reassure gun owners: she's lived the Second Amendment all her life. Likewise, on abortion, we're often told it's easy to be against it in principle but what if you were a woman facing a difficult birth or a handicapped child? Been there, done that.
Fifth, she complicates all the laziest Democrat pieties. Energy? Unlike Biden and Obama, she's been to ANWR and, like most Alaskans, supports drilling there.
Sixth,...I kinda like the whole naughty librarian vibe.
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Monday, August 18, 2008
Osama, Obama - He's The One!
Monday, August 11, 2008
Munich Redux?
In a great article titled "The Guns of August", author Monica Crowley details the stunning incompetence of the western powers to this naked attempt to rebuild the ex Soviet Union. We can only pray that Bush can convince the spineless worms of NATO to face down this despicable bully before we re-enter a new cold war...T
When Nazi Germany seized control of Czechoslovakia in 1938, appeaser extraordinaire Neville Chamberlain referred to it as “a faraway country of which we know little.”
The Nazi invasion was based on the simple and reasonable enough-sounding pretext that ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland wanted to be annexed to the Fatherland. Hitler’s invasion of that small, seemingly insignificant country led, of course, to total war in Europe and a global conflict that cost 100 million lives. All because the Western democracies didn’t see—or didn’t want to see—the unsatiable appetites of an expansionist power led by a coldly calculating mass murderer.
It’s often said that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Here we go again.
Russia has used the pretext that ethnic Russians living in a part of the independent republic of Georgia want to be folded into Russia. The Georgians, they say, are doing “ethnic cleansing” of the Russians there, requiring Russia to intervene to defend them.
Of course, this requires Russian tanks, fighter jets, and now ground troops to sweep into Georgia proper, killing thousands while they begin to occupy the country.
To many Americans, Georgia is a “faraway land of which we know little.” Nor do we much care: we’ve got Michael Phelps to cheer on and summer barbeques to attend to.
But as history has demonstrated time and time again, it’s the seemingly small crises that blow up into big ones. Really big ones.
This is one of those times.
The Cold War never ended. The Russians are behind every major state-based threat we face: Iran, North Korea (through China), Venezuela, Syria, the list goes on. They are creating new spheres of influence while re-establishing their old, Soviet-era ones. They extort Eastern Europe on its oil supply. They have blown up part of the oil pipeline that runs through Georgia and Turkey (a NATO member). They are authoritarian at home and expansionist abroad.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had this invasion planned for weeks, if not months. Before ordering the bombs to fall and the tanks to roll, he didn’t rush to the UN seeking international approval. He didn’t seek sanctions or resolutions. He just marched in with a full-on invasion. (If the United States had done this, holy hell would be breaking loose in the hallowed halls of the UN. We wouldn’t be able to count the official condemnations of “America’s reckless, unauthorized breach of international law.” With the Russians, we get a big yawn and a shrug of powerlessness.)
Georgia is a pro-Western, fragile new democracy. It has had 2000 troops in Iraq, making it the third biggest contributor to coalition forces there after the United States and Great Britain. It is struggling to establish its democratic, free market independence in Russia’s long shadow. The Russians didn’t like all of the progress Georgia had been making, nor did it appreciate Georgia’s application to NATO. So Russia rolled in: “If I can’t have you, nobody will!”
The Russians are hammering the old Soviet empire back together. They had been doing it through economic (primarily energy) extortion. Now they’re doing it the old-fashioned way: through force. The Russians have been doing this for centuries. It’s not new.
It’s incredible that the western democracies seem impotent to stop this invasion of a democracy and reverse it. Short of military action, we could strip Russia of its G-8 membership, levy economic sanctions, and stop its membership to the World Trade Organization. Forget about going to the UN: Russia will veto everything.
The western democracies need to show a backbone. What would Reagan do? What would Thatcher do? For heaven’s sake, what would George H. W. Bush do? (Even he went to war to reverse an invasion of the petrotocracy, Kuwait. Georgia may not be sitting on a ton of oil, but it’s the transit point for a tremendous amount of it.)
This is one of those moments when we will wonder why the good guys were paralyzed while the bad guys marched. It’s one of those moments on which the future of freedom hangs. It’s one of those moments when the bad guys test the good guys. And so far, the good guys are contemplating their navels while the bad guys scorch the ground of liberty.
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Tuesday, August 05, 2008
The Energy Revolt of 2008?
I've argued so many times now that Barack Osama is the reincarnation of Jimmy Carter that it's old news these days ("Windfall profits" tax? come on!). I can't ignore though, the similarities between today and the late 70's (aside from the music, jeez, if I hear one more Foreigner song I'm gonna heave!).
Now these similarities have just become, well, weird: Perhaps the Gipper himself will make one last siren call from the great beyond. Unilateral surrender to our enemies? Been there, done that. Save gas and rescue our nation by wearing a sweater? Er, I mean pumping up your tires? Been there, done that. America won't elect a quasi-communistic, anti capitalist, America loathing liberal wussy again; no way, no how. Anything is possible now, even a McCain landslide...T
Larry Kudlow makes an interesting suggestion in his article on NRO:
As Sen. John McCain and the GOP leadership nationalize the drill, drill, drill message, the Republican party might conceivably be riding a summer political rally. The question of offshore drilling, along with expanded domestic energy production, has suddenly become the biggest political and economic wedge issue of this election....There is a voter revolt going on, and it reminds me of the anti-tax rebellion that lifted Ronald Reagan into office twenty-eight years ago. Is the conventional wisdom about to be swept away?...
Without even realizing it, the GOP drilling offensive has become a new contract with America. And it appears to be working. The public is putting aside global warming and choosing instead new-energy production, a stronger economy, and more job creation. Voters want growth, not austerity. They want Ronald Reagan, not Thomas Malthus. And by resisting this grassroots call, the Democratic party is digging itself into one of the biggest political dry holes in history.
I've had the contrarian instinct for a while that global warming had peaked (both substantively and politically) as an issue. Al Gore's Nobel Prize felt like a pretty good contrarian indicator. And now the drilling issue is beginning to feel a little like tax cuts thirty years ago--key to, and emblematic of, a pro-growth, populist/capitalist/anti-declinist agenda. Obama's tire gauge is reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's sweater. And leave aside the tax revolt analogy; it's worth remembering that energy itself was an issue in 1980. Reagan took what seemed at first a politically dicey drill/deregulate position, and ended up clobbering Carter and being vindicated by the policy of deregulation.
Wishful thinking? Or the lessons of history?
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Monday, August 04, 2008
Drive-By Swoon Continues - Oh Obama!
Extraordinary compilation of the Drive-by MSM's obsession with destroying republicans at all costs and the dismal toll these dolts have taken in the court of public opinion as a result. It's going to be a long three months before we can consign Iraq Insane Osama to the ash bin of history! Thanks to LGF for the link...T
Video Source
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Obama's Very Bad Week
Then there's this from Hugh Hewitt - very convincing...T
"The blast-off didn't materialize, and the Dalibama found his numbers falling in Ohio, Pennsylvania an Florida. Even worse, the late night comics were having a field day with his 'inflate your tires, end the energy crisis' pronouncement."
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President Obama Continues Hectic Victory Tour
This is from The Washington Post of all places! The imperious Dalai Bama is marching straight down his victory parade - and wearing no clothes at all. Be sure and read the whole article, linked below..T
Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee...Win the election? Didn't he do that already?
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Saturday, August 02, 2008
Ruminations on Obama, Pelosi, and Hating America - the Democrats True Passion
And now it's VDH's turn, after Krauthammer (what a team!), to pull the panties around the ankles of Pelosi, the Dalibama, and the "America is the root of all evil!" Democrats...too good to just read - save it! Print it!...T
Where Art Thou, Hillary?
I think buyer’s remorse will soon set in among Democrats. Off the teleprompter, some very strange things come from Obama: reparations for Native Americans and African-Americans; inflating our tires properly and “tune-ups” (do we still have points, distributors, and 10,000 mile plugs?) will all obviate the need for more drilling; “they” (recall Michelle’s “they” and how they raised the bar serial speeches) will mention the fact that Obama looks different, or at least unlike the “presidents” (sic) on one-dollar bills; he will be meeting with Sarkozy and Merkle for the next 10 years… You get the message
“Hoping and changing” day in and day out?
If his handlers are not careful, Obama will “58-state” his way to a 10-point deficit before the convention. They must get him back on the teleprompter, avoid the town halls, and ‘hope and change’ his way back to rock star status (I know that it is wearing thin, but his ex tempore quips are far more damaging.)
Speaker Pelosi should simply swear off private jet trips.
Stopping exploration off the shelf and our coasts is a losing political proposition (as Obama knows when he just flipped on the issue), not only because of the economic factor—even a mere million barrels pumped save us over $100,000,000 a day in revenue kept here at home. But there’s the moral argument as well: there is something very wrong in opposing drilling on environmental grounds while hoping others less careful continue at it–while those who oppose drilling don’t seem any less inclined to use oil (cf. the Pelosi request for a mega-jet for frequent transcontinental trips).
More Praise from Obama, but…
Ludacris is about as “talented” as Rev. Wright was “brilliant.”
What Does This Mean?
Barack Obama:
“I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history, acknowledged. I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it’s Native Americans or African-American issues or reparations, the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer words, but offer deeds.”
Thoughts:
1. Does he know that WWII in our schools is mostly Rosy the Riveter, the Japanese Internment, and Hiroshima–and not much if at all D-Day, Okinawa, or the Bulge? The Civil War is already taught as essentially Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, not Grant and Sherman. Our students already know all the things wrong with the US, and few of what is right, past or present. Honest discussion of American sins is important, but if one doesn’t appreciate that they pale in consideration to others’, or that the culture has created a moral and successful society like none other, then what would be the reason to continue to support its centuries-long institutions? So is our history really more “tragic” than say France’s (compare our respective Revolutions); Russia (cf. the Great Terror); China (compare the 70 million that Mao did away with one way or another); Germany (no need to comment); the post-colonial African states?; maybe the history of Mexico?
2. This complaint is consistent with Obama’s call for more “oppression studies” in our schools. And it seems to be the first call for reparations by any mainstream candidate in our history. Is he serious, and wants a cash grant to anyone who can prove that he has Native-American or African-American ancestry? And the Irish? Hispanics? Asians? One-time money gift–or continual stipend as in the manner of Social Security? And to those like Obama who are of African rather than African-American ancestry? And do we bring back the Old Confederacy racial protocols to ascertain to what degree one of mixed heritage gets 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 of an award?
3. Anyone who has been around a university the last 30 years knows that any bright, well educated student who chooses to make his or her identity essential rather than incidental to their persona–Hispanic, African-American, or female–is snapped up for graduate or professional schools in preference to the proverbial white male. Affirmative action has been going strong for three decades. What again, then, does he mean by “not just offer words, but offer deeds?” Obama should know that for all his own talents, it is rare to have someone with his meager law record selected as Harvard Review Editor, or hired at the University of Chicago Law School, or after a mere two years in the Senate, a presidential candidate. The point is not that his race explains his success, but in America alone it either was irrelevant to it, or, more likely, a great force multiplier.
4. Expect the press, as in the case of Obama’s call for an alternate Pentagon to mirror image the military at the same cost (of half a trillion per year), to simply ignore these quite astounding statements.
Others Listen.
One of the reasons that others abroad trash the US is that they have been versed by our elites in the art of blaming America for their own self-induced miseries. Cf. the latest communiqué from Teheran (at the meeting of the so-called non-aligned nations):
“The rich and powerful countries continue to exercise an inordinate influence in determining the nature and direction of international relations, including economic and trade relations, as well as rules governing these relations, many of which are at the expense of developing countries.”
I agree in some sense, and so suggest that the developing countries create their own non-Western antibiotics, chemotherapy, oil-refinery infrastructure, and automobile industries, and in the meantime forego wealthy nation-contaminated jet travel, I-pods, and Viagra. But apparently the Iranian leadership wants both to practice gender apartheid, autocracy, statism, tribalism, religious intolerance, suppression of free expression, AND import chemicals, industry, medicines, machinery, etc. from those who don’t embrace such failed protocols, AND whine that they are still poorer and less powerful. At some point a Churchillian Western should reply back “we created your oil industry, now sell you the expertise to maintain it, buy your product for $120 a barrel that costs you $5 to pump—and hope you can Westernize in this brief window of windfall profits before we get off oil and leave you to your own devices.”
Lay Off the Race Card—it’s a losing proposition.
I wrote this for the NRO corner:
Why is Obama foolishly evoking race time after time? [Victor Davis Hanson]
And it’s still only July…
Obama’s problems with race have nothing to do with his half -African ancestry or his own experience with racism and unfairness, but boil down to his deftly wanting it both ways: reminding the Germans he is a different sort of American from what they’re used to (false, they knew Rice and Powell well enough), while preempting by suggesting others will evoke race, but in a negative context. But his polls, I wager, will begin to slip from all this, because all this sophisticated triangulation is about to blow up in the public mind.
1) The voter is starting to hear serially from Obama about race; they were promised a racially transcendent candidate, but so far Obama seems obsessed with identity, either accusing others of racism, or using heritage himself for political advantage. This is a tragic blunder.
2) He has the same want-it-both-ways with odious racists: Rev. Wright is a former spiritual advisor, and “brilliant” scholar who nevertheless serially slurs America, whites, Italians, Jews, etc. Ludacris is “a great talent” and “talented” to such an extent Obama wants him in his I-pod menu, and has met with him—but also a racist to be shunned. Ditto Pfleger. A pattern is emerging: Obama associates with or tolerates racists when such quasi-intimacy cements street-cred as an authentic minority or someone cool in the anti-Bush mode; but then when they inevitably revert to form, he not merely casts them off, but is “shocked” at their usual expression, and so like speed bumps they litter the roadway as he barrels ahead.
3). The “typical white person”, grandma under the bus riff, Pennsylvania “clingers” rant etc. , ‘no more disown Rev, Wright/ but now leaving Trinity Church’, etc. themselves are immaterial, but in toto provide a thin margin of tolerance when something like Ludacris or Obama’s latest accusation of racism surfaces.
4) Right now Obama does not need to solidify his 90% African-American base or the Moveon.org white liberal adherents; but instead he must remember why he lost all those primaries to Hillary and to what degree his campaign since then has addressed those concerns that lost him those electorates. When a West Virginian hears that Obama is accusing others of racism, or hears him promise that racial reparations will now be a matter of government deeds not words, or a rapper brags he is a favorite of Obama and then slurs Clinton, McCain, Bush in thinly disguised racist terms, it starts to create an image of someone who is not bringing people together, but precisely the opposite.
Why all this? Inexperience and hubris—the same overconfidence that makes him say we need a Pentagon-sized new civilian aid department, to inflate our tires to avoid drilling, and must stop merely talking about reparations and starting doing something about them. His handlers need to return to the teleprompter, since all these incidents have in common the impromptu moment.
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Pelosi: Save the Planet, Let Someone Else Drill
Comrade Pelosi from the People's Republic of San Francisco says "I am here to save the planet!" Perhaps her and the Dalibama should start a new country. Only they can afford to fuel their private jets...would be an interesting looking love child as well, I say!
Krauthammer devastates their foolishness. It is excerpted here..T
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposes lifting the moratorium on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on the Outer Continental Shelf. She won't even allow it to come to a vote. With $4 gas having massively shifted public opinion in favor of domestic production, she wants to protect her Democratic members from having to cast an anti-drilling election-year vote. Moreover, given the public mood, she might even lose. This cannot be permitted. Why? Because, as she explained to Politico: "I'm trying to save the planet; I'm trying to save the planet."
A lovely sentiment. But has Pelosi actually thought through the moratorium's effects on the planet?
Consider: 25 years ago, nearly 60 percent of U.S. petroleum was produced domestically. Today it's 25 percent. From its peak in 1970, U.S. production has declined a staggering 47 percent. The world consumes 86 million barrels a day, the United States, roughly 20 million. We need the stuff to run our cars and planes and economy. Where does it come from?
Places such as Nigeria, where chronic corruption, environmental neglect and the resulting unrest and instability lead to pipeline explosions, oil spills and illegal siphoning by the poverty-stricken population -- which leads to more spills and explosions...
Compare the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico, where deep-sea U.S. oil rigs withstood Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single undersea well suffering a significant spill.
The United States has the highest technology to ensure the safest drilling...Does Pelosi imagine that with so much of America declared off-limits, the planet is less injured as drilling shifts to Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea? That Russia will be more environmentally scrupulous than we in drilling in its Arctic?
Democrats want no oil from the American OCS or ANWR. But of course they do want more oil. From OPEC...They seem blissfully unaware that the argument for their drill-there-not-here policy collapses on its own environmental terms.
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Friday, August 01, 2008
The One
Verily he said, "And ye shall all be saved" ...as he walked on water. And we all thought Bill Clinton was W.C. Fields...give me a break, this guy is an absolute charlatan! AND a quasi-communist to boot. God save us all if he sneaks in, but it looks more and more likely that he will not.
On another front: This add is fantastic! The best political add in a generation. You know, any good add, or joke, only works if it has the ultimate quality of being true! Looks to this eye that, against all my expectations, the McCain campaign is going to be tough as nails after all. Good for him...T
Dawn in America
As I have been saying all along: Yes, we have won the war, no, there is no recession. Gas prices? Simple economics 101 - "what goes up must come down"...
No, we don't need a quasi-communist as president to "change" everything. As the author writes: "Let’s recap: wars being won, enemies being decimated, economy recovering and growing, gas prices coming down, homelessness plummeting. And this is all just this week."...T
The only way Democrats can win is by running America down: the president stinks, the economy stinks, Iraq is still a failure, Afghanistan is weak, there’s no Middle East peace, Americans are morose and depressed, and the deficit is out of control.
Well, that last point is correct. Republicans and Democrats have spent like drunken sailors, and it’s been disgraceful.
But everything else, frankly, ain’ t that bad.
It may not yet be Morning in America, but the Dawn is certainly upon us. Given the daily left-wing media fandango of negativity, you’d never know it. So, here’s an alternative newscast with the good news:
We are winning the war in Iraq. Thanks to the astonishing bravery of our combat troops, we have secured what General David Petraeus calls “durable” progress there. Violence is at its lowest level since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Iraqi security forces are stronger and more self-reliant every day. The Iraqi government is more stable and self-sustaining every day. And organized terrorists from al Qaeda to the Iranian-backed Shia militias are almost thoroughly crushed. Freelancing terrorists will continue to strike, and there will be some backsliding. But what we have accomplished there is nothing less than stunning. Troop levels can now be reduced, based on breathtaking success, not humiliating defeat. Progress continues in Afghanistan (with more cooperation from the Afghan government than the Pakistani one), and the al Qada strongholds are now in ever-narrower locations.
The U.S. economy GREW by 1.9 percent in the second quarter this year. This is up by a full percentage point from the first quarter. While it’s not bounding robust growth, the economy is moving in the right direction. And in the opposite direction from what many doomsayers were predicting: that we’d have at least two consecutive quarters of economic contraction that would qualify as a recession. The stock market has responded to the growth, and stocks are climbing again. There are still challenges in the financial, credit, and housing sectors, but the positive numbers show how resilient and powerful this economy is.
At the mere talk of drilling here at home, OPEC freaked out a little, the much-maligned speculators began speculating that the price of oil would come down, and voila! The price of oil has dropped significantly over the past two weeks, meaning filling your tank is still crazy expensive, but less so. And the trend is for gas prices to continue to fall.
As the New York Times reported this week, homelessness has fallen a staggering 30% over the past three years. And alas, with a “compassionate conservative” in the White House! Democrats never produced such a drop in homelessness, despite all of their supposed care for the issue.
Let’s recap: wars being won, enemies being decimated, economy recovering and growing, gas prices coming down, homelessness plummeting. And this is all just this week.
The sun is peeking over the horizon.
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Thursday, July 24, 2008
"Ich Bin Ein Beginner!"
B. Insane Osama: “I want to see a change in the wall, change is everything.” Result: nothing, as he tries to gain the presidency simply by looking like JFK...T
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Suggested Alternate New Yorker Cover
The Audacity of Vanity
Krauthammer eviscerates the Obamessiah. This is, I think, the issue that can bring down Barack Insane Osama. Not his foolishness about Iraq, not his plethora of proposed radical Tax hikes, and not his refusal to drill for oil. Not even, to be sure, his skin color.
No, it's his elitism. He makes Michael Dukakis look like a Pennsylvania coal miner. His campaign is dripping with contempt for the average American, and this column is devilishly witty in pointing it out...T
Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast -- a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins -- would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign policy credentials.
What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Ronald Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final "tear down this wall" liquidation. When President John F. Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.
Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George Bush the elder -- who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap -- called "a Europe whole and free"?
Does Obama not see the incongruity? It's as if a German pol took a campaign trip to America and demanded the Statue of Liberty as a venue for a campaign speech. (The Germans have now gently nudged Obama into looking at other venues.)
Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself. There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?
Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.
It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history -- "generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment" -- when, among other wonders, "the rise of the oceans began to slow." As Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, "Moses made the waters recede, but he had help." Obama apparently works alone.
Obama may think he's King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty.
After all, in the words of his own slogan, "we are the ones we've been waiting for," which, translating the royal "we," means: " I am the one we've been waiting for." Amazingly, he had a quasi-presidential seal with its own Latin inscription affixed to his lectern, until general ridicule -- it was pointed out that he was not yet president -- induced him to take it down.
He lectures us that instead of worrying about immigrants learning English, "you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish" -- a language Obama does not speak. He further admonishes us on how "embarrassing" it is that Europeans are multilingual but "we go over to Europe, and all we can say is 'merci beaucoup.' " Obama speaks no French.
His fluent English does, however, feature many such admonitions, instructions and improvements. His wife assures us that President Obama will be a stern taskmaster: "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism . . . that you come out of your isolation. . . . Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."
For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is?
We are getting to know. Redeemer of our uninvolved, uninformed lives. Lord of the seas. And more. As he said on victory night, his rise marks the moment when "our planet began to heal." As I recall -- I'm no expert on this -- Jesus practiced his healing just on the sick. Obama operates on a larger canvas.
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Friday, July 18, 2008
Obama's Lack of Historical Knowledge Clouds His Iraq Position
For a searing analysis of Barack Obama's current position on Iraq, you can't do better than this editorial from the Washington Post. The final sentences sum it up:
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Thursday, July 17, 2008
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Final Thoughts on Tony Snow
Final thoughts on the passing of Tony Snow from the incomparable Michael Barone. He knows politics better than anyone alive, and his ranking of Snow is to be taken seriously. I know I do...T
"Future historians will do right to wonder whether the repute of George W. Bush and his administration would not have been a lot higher if Tony had been offered and taken the job back in 2003, when Ari Fleischer left. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that Tony may have been the best White House press secretary ever"...
... He didn't hesitate to challenge, good-humoredly, the premises of reporters' questions. I assumed that Tony resigned from this job he obviously loved because of the disease threatening him and the need, genuine in his case, to spend more time with his family and provide for them while he could. We have lost an absolutely first-rate human being, and I have lost a friend who was always brimming with curiosity, learning, and good cheer.
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Saturday, July 12, 2008
God Bless Tony Snow
God Bless Tony Snow. I awoke to see the initial report and was sure it had to be a hoax. I've been a fan of Tony's since the early 1980's when he was the Detroit News Editorial Director, and he blew me away then. Then, first at the Washington Times, which I would buy every week at Barnes & Noble, and soon as the excellent guest host behind Rush Limbaugh's golden EIB microphone, finally kicking the cr*p outta Helen Thomas the last few years, he always saw the world in perspective. It is a sad day. He will be missed...T
From The American Mind, today: It was sad enough when we found out Tony Snow had cancer. It got worse after learning it came back. Now, we find out the energetic, passionate, entertaining conservative voice has left us.
More than being the White House press secretary when the Bush administration really needed communications help I’ll remember Snow for being the best fill-in for Rush Limbaugh. His smooth voice and humor were perfect for radio. Snow made you want to listen for the full three hours and only sort-of miss Rush.
Rush Limbaugh on his dear friend Tony Snow:
Vice President Cheney eulogises Tony Snow on Fox News Sunday:
Here’s a great speech that gave many conservatives hope from CPAC 2008.
James Joyner put together a blogosphere roundup.
Godspeed, Tony.
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Sunday, July 06, 2008
You're Next!
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We're winning this War on Terror - Al-Qaeda and the Taleban are in retreat, the surge has worked in Iraq and Islamism is discredited. Not a Bad Haul
Further conclusive evidence from the Times -View Full Article- We have won an historic and glorious victory...T
Background
The hallmark of the Iraq debate is its unreality
Iraq: Has America lost the will to win?
Iraq surge fears after al-Qaeda's deadly return
Petraeus rewarded after ‘surge’ success
Related Links
Iraqis lead final purge of Al-Qaeda
Afghanistan
In the past three years there has been no attack on anything like that scale. Al-Qaeda has been driven into a state of permanent flight. Its ability to train jihadists has been severely compromised; its financial networks have been ripped apart. Thousands of its activists and enablers have been killed. It's true that Osama bin Laden's forces have been regrouping in the border areas of Pakistan but their ability to orchestrate mass terrorism there is severely attenuated. And there are encouraging signs that Pakistanis are starting to take to the offensive against them.
Next time you hear someone say that the war in Afghanistan is an exercise in futility ask them this: do they seriously think that if the US and its allies had not ousted the Taleban and sustained an offensive against them for six years that there would have been no more terrorist attacks in the West? What characterised Islamist terrorism before the Afghan war was increasing sophistication, boldness and terrifying efficiency. What has characterised the terrorist attacks in the past few years has been their crudeness, insignificance and a faintly comical ineptitude (remember Glasgow airport?)
The second great advance in the War on Terror has been in Iraq.
The “surge”, despite all the doubts and derision at the time, has been a triumph of US military planning and execution. Political progress was slower in coming but is now evident too. The Iraqi leadership has shown great courage and dispatch in extirpating extremists and a growing willingness even to turn on Shia militias. Basra is more peaceful and safer than it has been since before the British moved in. Despite setbacks such as yesterday's bombings, the streets of Iraq's cities are calmer and safer than they have been in years. Seventy companies have bid for oil contracts from the Iraqi Government. There are signs of a real political reconciliation that may reach fruition in the election later this year.
The third and perhaps most significant advance of all in the War on Terror is the discrediting of the Islamist creed and its appeal.
This was first of all evident in Iraq, where the head-hacking frenzy of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his associates so alienated the majority of Muslims that it gave rise to the so-called Sunni Awakening that enabled the surge to be so effective.
But it has spread way beyond Iraq. As Lawrence Wright described in an important piece in The New Yorker last month, there is growing disgust not just among moderate Muslims but even among other jihadists at the extremism of the terrorists.
Deeply encouraging has been the widespread revulsion in Muslim communities in Europe - especially in Britain after the 7/7 attacks of three years ago. Some of the biggest intelligence breakthroughs in the past few years have been achieved from former al-Qaeda supporters who have turned against the movement.
There ought to be no surprise here. It's only their apologists in the Western media who really failed to see the intrinsic evil of Islamists. Those who have had to live with it have never been in much doubt about what it represents. Ask the people of Iran. Or those who fled the horrors of Afghanistan under the Taleban.
This is why we fight. Primarily, of course, to protect ourselves from the immediate threat of terrorist carnage, but also because we know that extending the embrace of a civilisation that liberates everyone makes us all safer.
Every death is an unspeakable tragedy. It's right that each time a soldier is killed in action we ask why. Was it really worth it?
The right response to the loss of brave souls such as Corporal Sarah Bryant, the first British woman to die in Afghanistan, is not an immediate call for retreat. It is, first of all, pride; a great, deep conviction that it is on such sacrifice that our own freedoms have always rested. Then, defiance. How foolish is the enemy that it might think our grief is really some prelude to their victory? Finally, confidence. We are prevailing in this struggle. We know it. And everywhere: in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and among Muslims around the world, the enemy knows it too.
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Iraqis lead final purge of Al-Qaeda
Finally some Drive-By love for our total victory in Iraq - From the UK Times of all people. They usually make the NYT look like Human Events! The greatest victory, with the fewest casualties, in the history of warfare...T
American and Iraqi forces are driving Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror.
After being forced from its strongholds in the west and centre of Iraq in the past two years, Al-Qaeda’s dwindling band of fighters has made a defiant “last stand” in the northern city of Mosul.
A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10.
Operation Lion’s Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans’ 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, has already resulted in the death of Abu Khalaf, the Al-Qaeda leader, and the capture of more than 1,000 suspects.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Engineering An Empire: China in the Age of Zheng He
This will help flesh out the theory laid out in my previous post. This does not address Menzies' theory either pro or con, but does demonstrate for the record the voyages of the Chinese fleet in the 15th century that history acknowledges did take place, and they covered vast swaths of the globe.There are some discrepancies (the year of Zheng He's death for instance) but you will see how it was done in 1421 & 1434. Fascinating!...T
Saturday, June 28, 2008
1434: The Year A Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Rennaissance
This will blow your mind my friends! Believe me, if it sounds fantastic, it is. But Remember that Chinese history was expunged as the Ming dynasty turned inward and away from the world. Also remember that The Age of Exploration went forward with carbon dated pre-existing detailed maps of the world, including the Americas and the straights of Magellan. Where did they come from?
» Watch the video on 1434 - click the picture above!
They came from the Chinese expeditions of 1421 which circumnavigated and mapped the entire coastal areas of the world.
I've looked into this for years now. It's true. Many professional historians remain sceptical, but they always do. Conclusive proof is subjective in history. The proof is there though. Read the books, 1421 & 1434 and see for yourself. Native American history has always told that the Chinese were here long before the Europeans. And they stayed. Just think of how much of history will have to be re written once these developments become accepted as truth, which they are - be sure to check out the 1434 Home Page...T
View 1434 Video SourceHow George Washington's Savvy Won the Day
The author states: "George Washington had won the lasting support of America's civilian authorities, to whom he returned all power at war's end. Hearing of that gesture, Britain's King George III said that Washington would be the greatest man in history if it was true. It would be only slightly less praise to say that Washington's surrender of power was just part of what made him the first great leader in the modern world."
Read the referenced book if you will, it is excellent, and really fleshes out WHY Washington was such a great and historic figure...T
Idolatry has done George Washington a disservice. His popular image as the stolid icon of republican virtues—given earliest form in the cherry tree and other apocryphal stories of Parson Weems—obscures not only the complexity of the man but also his genius for leadership. Ripening fully in his presidency, Washington's gifts first found expression on the battlefields of the American Revolution. As commander in chief of the Continental Army, the Virginia planter and veteran of the French and Indian War did not simply best the world's most formidable fighting machine. He set the template for a new, truly American style of command—a style rightly called leadership.
Yet, says historian Thomas Fleming, author of Washington's Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge, "people still don't get Washington." Thanks largely to hagiography and, until recently, a neglect of military history by scholars, most Americans remain unaware of Washington's less obvious strengths, as well as those flaws that made his achievements all the more remarkable.
Political skills. "The fact that he was successful against the best combat officers of his day didn't mean that he was the best commander ever," says Mount Holyoke College historian Joseph Ellis, author of His Excellency: George Washington. Washington particularly struggled, Ellis says, when he couldn't see the whole battlefield, devising plans that were often too complicated for execution. Even in the successful surprise attack on Trenton in December 1776, only one of three elements of Washington's force made it across the Delaware River on Christmas Day. But many of the greatest generals in history, including Napoleon, did not in the end do what Washington did: "He won," says Ellis. "And he won because he understood the war, the big picture, including the political context."
...Fighting force. Washington's vision was vindicated in the winter of 1776-77, as his Army, often working with militias, scored quick-hitting successes at Trenton, Princeton, and other parts of New Jersey. Washington even made the best of a painful setback after the British conquest of the nation's capital, Philadelphia. Settling in for a hard winter at Valley Forge, Pa., Washington built a distinctively American fighting force even while exercising political skills that allowed him to overcome insubordinate rivals in the Army and to mollify critics in the Continental Congress.
...The Army that came out of Valley Forge would quickly prove itself in the Battle of Monmouth, exhibiting even greater discipline and courage than it had shown in the earlier New Jersey battles. If ultimate victory and independence were still far from assured, Washington had forged an Army that mirrored his own blend of prudence and daring.
Just as important, he had won the lasting support of America's civilian authorities, to whom he returned all power at war's end. Hearing of that gesture, Britain's King George III said that Washington would be the greatest man in history if it was true. It would be only slightly less praise to say that Washington's surrender of power was just part of what made him the first great leader in the modern world.
Full article
Friday, June 27, 2008
Krauthammer Rips Obama a New One!
Charles Krauthammer takes on B. Hussein Osama today in his Washington Post Op-Ed column, "The Ever-Malleable Mr. Obama".
Here's some excerpts, enjoy!...T
"The truth about Obama is uncomplicated. He is just a politician (though of unusual skill and ambition). The man who dared say it plainly is the man who knows Obama all too well. 'He does what politicians do,' explained Jeremiah Wright.. . . Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he's finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous."
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The Real New Deal
Obama has been using the "Blue Eagle" of the new deal era NRA as his podium's seal up till this week, when even the sycophantic press turned against it. Let's take a look at the real legacy of the new deal, of it's attempts to impose fascist ideology on the USA, and it's attempts to hijack the US constitution. If not for WWII, FDR would have gone down in history as the worst president in the history of this nation...T
...The seal (of the Blue Eagle) was the public symbol for one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's greatest policy disasters. (This was the) emblem of the National Recovery Administration, FDR's attempt to beat the Depression by collectivizing the U.S. economy.
The NRA was the centerpiece of the "Hundred Days", FDR's whirlwind law-passing spree following his inauguration. It was the work of "brain trusters" Rexford G. Tugwell and Adolf Berle, adapted directly from Mussolini's "corporative" system.
The NRA attempted to "organize" the U.S. economy from the largest corporations to the smallest Mom n' Pop store. Businesses were encouraged to sign up with the proviso that they would be able to write their own rules for their industries, effectively turning them into cartels. Member businesses were allowed to place the Blue Eagle in their windows, along with the slogan "We Do Our Part".
Businesses were required to pay minimum wage, abandon child labor, and adapt wage and price controls. As for businesses that held out... well, the NRA was run by an ex-general, Hugh Johnson, who, to put it kindly, was not Colin Powell. Johnson took the Mussolini connection to heart, declaring all businesses not displaying the Blue Eagle to be "enemies of the people", and encouraging the public to boycott them, if not worse.
But it was even more dangerous for companies that signed up. Businessmen were jailed for breaking NRA rules, and goon squads roamed the streets of Manhattan looking for violators The story is told in detail in Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascim. The Secret History of the American Left and Amity Shlae's The Forgotten Man. A New History of the Great Depression. How this nonsense was supposed to end the Depression is anybody's guess. In short order, it ran afoul of the Supreme Court, which on May 27, 1935, found the NRA illegal in Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States, the so-called "sick chicken" case. The Court struck down the NRA as an unconstitutional extension of executive power. Roosevelt was forced to drastically modify his plans for the economy. (Not to mention waste the next two years on his notorious "court-packing"scheme.)
But the major point as far as the Obama campaign is concerned lies in the fact that the NRA -- along with all of FDR's collectivist policies -- was a complete failure. Centralization and planning gave the economy a brief kick, but one that lasted only months. By 1937 unemployment was higher than it had been when Roosevelt took office four years earlier. By the New Year's he was reduced to pleading to his cabinet, "Won't somebody tell me what to do?" It required WW II to pull the U.S. out of its tailspin.
So what kind of campaign picks one of its party's greatest disasters for use as a symbol? Seeking a connection with Roosevelt is understandable, but why not the Roosevelt of the war years, rather than the bumbling and inept rookie president of the 30s? The answer is probably simple ignorance. In which case Obama is lucky that the media (similarly uninformed) missed the connection and spared him that much extra adverse commentary. But he's relying all too often on luck to ease the way for him.
The Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs (no relation to the Marxist theoretician Georg Lukacs) has warned us on several occasions to be careful how we select our symbols. Symbols, Lukacs tells us, mean something because we think they do, and they tend to have lives of their own. If we select one that reflects badly on us, or one whose meaning can betray us, it can have repercussions all out of proportion to the actual source. (Curiously, one of the examples Lukacs gives also involves an eagle: the double-headed imperial eagle that fell to the ground at Austro-Hungarian emperor Karl's coronation in1916. Two years later, the empire was extinct, and Karl was the emperor of nobody.)
In choosing an emblem of arrogance, incompetence, and failure for his "seal", Obama has told us a number of things about himself that he probably would rather we didn't know. We should heed the warning.
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Thursday, June 26, 2008
Supreme Court Grants Terrorists U.S. Constitutional Rights
And Roosevelt, the messiah of the Left, imprisoned the ENTIRE west coast Japanese population for 4 years, without Habeus Corpus! Now, If there was a democrat in the presidency the court would never have reached this bizarre conclusion. Never in our history has a war been fought this way. Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus during the civil War, and totally ignored Supreme Court decisions with impunity.
Now do you know why we need McCain to keep B. Insane Osama out of the White House?...T
Change I Could Believe In
Now thats change!..T
One can advance arguments for drilling for oil in ANWR, off the continental shelf of several states, and for drilling for natural gas, mining oil shale, and developing cleaner coal technology. The basis for the arguments is simply that we already have the technology to take all those steps rather quickly and that taking those steps would allow the economy to grow, going a long way toward improving the lives of Americans, especially those lower on the economic ladder. It apparently it is only a a cliche headline to the naysayers that "the economy is bad; the poor hit hardest." Sometimes it's "women and children hit hardest." Or "African-Americans hit hardest." In any case, the truth is that policies which stifle the economy do hit hardest on the lower economic strata. Which makes one wonder why Democrats propose policies that hinder the economy, but that's another topic.
The anti-drilling arguments seem to be settling into several rather bizarre statements:
1) Even if we started exploring offshore now, it might take (7 or 10 or 25 or whatever number the naysayer wants to throw out) years to start producing the oil. To which the proper answer is THEN WE BETTER GET STARTED! YOU THINK IT WILL TAKE LESS TIME IF WE WAIT?
2) We should develop alternative energy sources. To which the proper answer is IF YOU THINK IT WILL TAKE A FEW YEARS TO GET OIL FROM THE CONTINENTAL SHELF, HOW LONG DO YOU THINK IT WILL TAKE TO DEVELOP SOURCES WE HAVEN'T EVEN INVENTED YET? BUT HEY, LET'S GET STARTED! Just don't stop drilling while we look for alternatives.
3) We should consider nuclear power. INDEED, BUT HOW LONG DO YOU WANT TO CONSIDER IT? HASN'T IT BEEN CONSIDERED ALREADY AND TRIED WITH GREAT SUCCESS? So let's stop "considering" and GET STARTED BUILDING THE PLANTS! If we find something better later, we can always stop building new nuke plants.
4) The base argument appears to be that, unless something will work immediately, we shouldn't do it. Does this strike you as logical? If that were a criterion, nothing humanity has ever done would have gotten started.
5) And then there's the TAX THE OIL COMPANIES PROFITS angle. Does it not strike people that there is already a tax on oil company profits? Does it not strike people that this is just an added oil company expense which drives up the price of gasoline and takes research and development money out of the oil companies, takes dividends out of the pockets of oil companies' investors, and is a brake on the economy and is part of the problem, not part of the solution? Does it not strike people that this has been tried before and was a disaster? Does it not strike people that government bureaucrats don't know anything wortwhile and effective to do with the money they have now? If government bureaucrats can solve a problem, they've kept it a secret for a long time.
6) And there's the Church of Global Warming fanatics, but that's a computer-model driven theory that has become less and less tenable. The whole solar system's been cranking up the thermometer a degree or two, it appears, and that's all due to the sun's output. The Earth is a part of a warming system, and we aren't the driver here. The sun's in the driver's seat. The global warming theory, along with the global cooling theory, the nuclear winter theory, and all the other catastrophic theories concocted over the past 50 years or so have been nothing but the handy theory du jour for those wishing to hinder America.
It's time to DRILL, BUILD NUCLEAR REACTORS, LEAVE THE OIL COMPANY PROFITS ALONE AS THEY KNOW MORE ABOUT ALTERNATIVE ENERGY SOURCES THAN POLITICIANS, AND TELL THE ANTI-AMERICAN ECONOMY-STOMPERS TO GET TO THE BACK OF THE AUDITORIUM AND SIT DOWN!
That's change I could believe in.
Full Article
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
OBAMA’S NEW STRATEGY
Exactly. We need to debate the extreme far left proposals Obama has already laid out, and stop obsessing about him being the Manchurian Candidate (which I'll grant he is). Excerpts...T
Quite simply, Obama would rather address his religious views and his optimism about America and his embrace of diversity than talk about his plans to raise taxes, let gasoline prices soar and socialize healthcare...
Consider his proposals:
• In effect, he would legislate a 60 percent tax bracket for upper-income Americans, killing all initiative and innovation. He’d raise the top bracket to 40 percent. He’d apply FICA taxes to all income, not just that under $100,000 as at present. So add 40 percent plus FICA’s 12.5 percent plus Medicare’s 2 percent plus state and local taxes averaging, after deduction, at 5-6 percent, and you have a 60 percent bracket.
• He would double the capital gains tax, saddling the 50 percent of Americans who own stock with dramatically higher taxes.
• He’d double the dividend tax, hitting elderly coupon-clippers now retired and depending on fixed incomes.
• He wants to cover 12 million illegal immigrants with federally subsidized health insurance, dramatically driving up costs and forcing federal rationing of healthcare. As in the U.K. and Canada, you will not be permitted certain medical procedures if the bureaucrats decide you are not worth it.
• He proposes requiring Homeland Security operatives to notify terror suspects that they are under investigation within seven days of starting the investigation
• He says that unless they can establish that there is “probable cause to believe that a certain individual is linked to a specific terrorist group,” Homeland Security cannot seize his documents and search his business. The current standard is only that the search be “relevant” to a terror investigation.
• In effect, he would legislate a 60 percent tax bracket for upper-income Americans, killing all initiative and innovation. He’d raise the top bracket to 40 percent. He’d apply FICA taxes to all income, not just that under $100,000 as at present. So add 40 percent plus FICA’s 12.5 percent plus Medicare’s 2 percent plus state and local taxes averaging, after deduction, at 5-6 percent, and you have a 60 percent bracket.
He does not oppose $5-per-gallon gasoline but only says that he wishes there had been a more “gradual adjustment” to the higher prices.
Obama can talk about the Rev. Wright and flag lapel pins and his wife’s love of America all day long. But what he resists is a specific discussion of his own plans for our country. That’s the discussion he fears and he avoids. And it’s the discussion John McCain must force upon him if he is to have any realistic chance of winning the election.
Full Article
Sunday, June 22, 2008
History will say that we misunderestimated George W Bush
As the author, one of the preeminent historians of our time, phrases it - the time will come when George W Bush will be able to say what Lord Salisbury called the four cruelest yet sweetest words in the English language: "I told you so."
Told you that this war has been the greatest triumph, with the fewest casualties, in the history of warfare.
That the turning of the drive by press so radically left wing is the untold story of our decade, and has consequences I can only shudder at considering.
That Bush's refusal to fight back against the outlandish charges leveled against him post 2004 reelection (He caused hurricane Katrina, the Iraq victory was a "Civil War", the economy is in "recession" etc..) rapidly accelerated this degeneration to radical leftist press institutions.
That if Obama is elected and the Dem's get to magic number 60 in the senate, then all political dissent will be silenced. The Democrats' have plans to destroy talk radio, not just with the Equal Time Rule but also by requiring liberals to be appointed to station boards of directors and to top positions in station management - Read about them here -
McCain must be elected.
G.W. Bush has been a great, not good president, and will remembered in history for his monumental accomplishments...T
As he leaves the White House at the end of his second term, the President has a poll rating of only 23 per cent, and is widely disliked and even despised. His foreign policy has been judged a failure, especially in view of the long, painful, costly war that he declared, which is still not over.
He doesn't get on with his own party's presidential candidate, who is clearly distancing himself, and had lost many of his closest friends and staff to scandals and forced resignations. The New Republic, a hugely influential political magazine, writes that his historical reputation will be as bad as that of President Harding, the disastrous president of the Great Depression.
I am writing, of course, about Harry S Truman, generally regarded today as one of the greatest of all the 43 presidents, and the man who set the United States on the course that ended decades later in the defeat of Communism.
If the West wins the modern counterpart of that struggle, the War Against Terror, historians will look back in amazement at the present unpopularity of George W Bush, and marvel at it quite as much as we now marvel at the 67 per cent disapproval rates for Truman throughout 1952.
Presidents are seldom remembered for more than one or two things; the rest slip away into a haze of historical amnesia. With Kennedy it was the Bay of Pigs and his own assassination, with Johnson the Great Society and Vietnam, with Nixon it was opening up China and the Watergate scandal, and so on.
George W Bush will be remembered for his responses to 9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq, but since neither of those conflicts has yet ended in victory or defeat, it is far too early categorically to assume - as left-wingers, anti-war campaigners and almost all media commentators already do - that his historical reputation will be permanently down in the doldrums next to poor old Warren Harding's.
I suspect that historians of the future will instead see Bush's decision to insist upon a "surge" of reinforcements being sent into Iraq, combined with a complete change of anti-insurgency tactics as configured by General Petraeus, as the moment when the conflict was turned around there, in the West's favour.
No one - least of all Bush himself - denies that mistakes were made in the early days after the (unexpectedly early) fall of Baghdad, and historians will quite rightly examine them. But once the decades have put the stirring events of those years into their proper historical context, four great facts will emerge that will place Bush in a far better light than he currently enjoys.
The overthrow and execution of a foul tyrant, Saddam Hussein; the liberation of the Afghan people from the Taliban; the smashing of the terrorist networks of al-Qa'eda in that country and elsewhere and, finally, the protection of the American people from any further atrocities on US soil since 9/11, is a legacy of which to be proud.
While of course every individual death is a tragedy to the bereaved families, these great achievements have been won at a cost in human life a fraction the size of any past world-historical struggle of this magnitude.
The number of American troops killed and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan is equivalent to the losses they endured - for a nation only a little over half the size in the mid-Forties - capturing a single island from the Japanese in the Pacific War.
British losses of 103 killed over seven years in Afghanistan bears comparison to a quiet weekend on the Western Front in the Great War, or the numbers the Army loses in traffic accidents in peacetime. History can lend a wider overall perspective to what are nonetheless, of course, immeasurably sad events.
History will also shine an unforgiving light on those ludicrous conspiracy theories that claim that the Iraq War was fought for any other reason than to implement the 14 UN resolutions that Saddam that had been flouting for 13 years.
The CIA and MI6 believed, like almost every other intelligence agency in the world, that Saddam had WMD, and the "Harmony" documents seized and translated since the fall of his regime make it abundantly clear that he was also supporting almost every anti-Western terrorist organisation imaginable.
Historians will appreciate how any War Against Terror that allowed Saddam to remain in place would have been an absurd travesty.
When the rise of al-Qa'eda is considered by historians like Philip Bobbitt and William Shawcross, it will be President Clinton's repeated refusal to act effectively in the 1990s, rather than President Bush's tough response after 9/11, that will be held up as culpable.
Judging by the rise in the value of the Iraqi dinar, the huge drop in the number of Iraqi deaths in the insurgency, the number of provinces now cleansed of al-Qa'eda, and the level of arms confiscations by the Iraqi Army in Sadr City, the new American "clear and hold" tactics have succeeded far better than the cynics ever thought possible even 12 months ago.
Give Iraq five, ten or twenty years, and Bush's decision to undertake the surge - courageously taken in the face of all bien pensant and "expert" opinion on both sides of the Atlantic - will rank alongside some of Harry Truman's great decisions of 1945-53.
If that happens, the time will come when George W Bush will be able to say what Lord Salisbury called the four cruellest yet sweetest words in the English language: "I told you so."
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