This amount of arrogance, the sheer impardonable pretension, is bound to be popular.
I wonder if Barack Obama's tepid, mealy-mouthed response to the violent protests by the Iranian opposition stems from his own complicity in election fixing?
Nah. That would imply possession of a conscience.
And so we have before us the Pelosi waterboarding kerfuffle (which I am dubbing "Prevari-gate" because "Watergate" was already taken).
Who wins if Nancy Pelosi is weakened politically?
Barack Obama. Pelosi will give him whatever he wants, without so much as a whimper.
Note that CIA Director Leon Panetta has come down on the side of the Bush CIA on this one. He wouldn't do that without White House approval. They want Pelosi out of there.
So who wins if Pelosi resigns?
Barack Obama. Obama will have his pick for Speaker, which would probably be long-time Rahm Emanuel ally House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.
House Republicans, agitating against Pelosi because they don't like her very much, are going to give Obama just the Speaker he wants.
In the long run, it will all work out, because Obama-Hoyer-Reid triumvirate will ultimately bring about electoral defeat. But not before they screw the country up in some very bad ways.
Sometimes people are successful at what they do. Others are not. Sometimes people succeed, sometimes they fail. Having failed, we learn (or not) and try again.
When we see other people who are more successful, we have really only two options, though a third lingers: we can resent them, or we can emulate them. The lingering third is what most people end up doing, which is observing from afar and doing nothing. On some level we pass judgment, either in favor of or against the more successful. From the corrupt.org link above:
Some people assume that if any person they don't like is more successful than someone they like it is primarily or solely due to moral inferiority - a greater willingness to lie, cheat and steal. This mindset is common in underground subcultures, though some mainstream progressives also think this way. A more advanced version of this mentality adds the assumption that anyone who is successful in the "wrong" areas - for example dating or country music - must be a despicable and morally inferior individual.There is a danger in giving up, in deciding that your sweat and diligence are no match for the world. But there is no higher virtue than working, being paid for it, and saving for a better future in which you no longer work for money, but money works for you. That, and not mere home ownership, is the American Dream.
I'm not a supporter of Governor Rod Blagojevich. In fact, his politics are about as far away from mine as I can imagine for a fellow American.
But I have to give the guy credit when due. In the instance of the selection of Roland Burris as Senator to replace Barack Obama, Blagojevich, having been publicly tarred with arrest by Federal authorities, continued on in the performance of his duties. And he made a very good choice in Roland Burris.
I'm not a supporter of Burris, either. It's just that of the pool of established Chicago Democrats who are well-known in Illinois politics, Burris is the best available.
Burris showed his ability by going to Washington and telling Harry Reid that he would sue to claim his rightful seat in the Senate. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) said to seat Burris not because of any great statesmanlike respect for the rule of law but because she saw no way around his eventually being seated. Illinois law says the Governor appoints replacement Senators, whether the Secretary of State wants to certify them or not. So Burris is a Senator, whether Reid likes it or not. And the State Legislature can't unseat a Senator to have a special election.
At this point Reid's only option is to impeach Burris or let him serve his term. Burris can promise not to run in 2010, but he's not legally bound by that.
So well done, Governor and Senator.
By the way, I would have liked a special election in this one instance, but how often will these circumstances recur? The current law worked well enough.
I would like to take this time to announce my intention to explore my options to seek the opportunity to decide if the necessary conditions are right to declare candidacy for the United States Senate from the State of Illinois, to complete the term vacated when Barack Obama was forced to resign.
I have resided in the State of Illinois for over twenty years, since my Honorable Discharge from the United States Marine Corps. I'm a graduate of the University of Illinois, and can complain about Illini sports with the best of them.
I currently have a pulse and love to run my mouth, which with the forgoing should more than adequately establish my qualifications for the job.
I hereby challenge opponents to a debate. The site and length of the debate are negotiable. Any blog or other online venue will do.
Feel free to read my other posts here, and donate in multiples of $5, $10, or $50,000 to my PayPal account.
Seeking Junior Senator for Major Midwestern State
Major Midwestern State seeks loyal political partisan to join our team in Washington. Duties include voting "present" on legislation, taking credit for the work of other Senators, and running for higher office. Position is traditionally a career destination, not a stepping stone, though recent turnover rates may signal a change. Other duties include:
Despite all of the fanfare surrounding his election as President, Barack Obama (D-IL) has announced he will step down from his U.S. Senate seat effective today. The embattled politician, who has never been convicted of any criminal activity, claims that his resignation was due to conflicts with his duties as President, a job he will not start for months.
Constitutionally forbidden from holding both offices at once and under a cloud of lawsuits and corruption allegations, Obama has left the task of choosing his replacement to the nation's least popular governor, Rod Blagojevich (D-Chicago), who is also the target of a federal corruption investigation.
Lawsuits challenging Barack Obama's eligibility to become President have popped up all across the country.
At issue is whether Obama was born in the United States. Naturalized citizens are not elibible for the Presidency.
And it's not just former Pennsylvania Attorney General Philip J. Berg filing suit. Plaintiffs ranging from ordinary citizens to former Obama opponent Alan Keyes have sued seeking release of basic documentation such as the former Senator's birth certificate.
Many legal experts believe the seriousness of these charges warrants a hearing by the Supreme Court, so that all Americans can be confident that our President is actually eligible to hold the office for which he was chosen.
Somehow managing to type wearing a helmet and drool bucket, David Sarota writes:
It wouldn't be the George W. Bush we all know if our shamed president didn't spend his remaining White House days in a final fit of polarization.Wha? Talk about paranoia! Mr. Bush wants the Columbia Free Trade deal to go through, and knows that it's union opposition which makes Obama also oppose it. And why are the Democrats so in favor of an auto maker bailout? The unions want it, to keep their fat, blood-sucking lifestyle going.
Therefore, if Bush successfully uses the economic emergency to hustle a faction of Wall Street Democrats into supporting the deal, he will have potentially engineered 1994 redux: Democratic infighting, a demoralized progressive base, and these newly elected fair-trade Democrats humiliated — and thus electorally endangered — by their own party's standard bearers.
If there was a moment that highlights to what extent the Democratic Party has become captive to its special interests, this might be it. Mrs. Pelosi and Harry Reid have spent this week demanding that Washington stave off a car-maker collapse. What makes this a little weird is that Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Reid are Washington. If they so desperately want a Detroit bailout they could always, you know, pass one.
Jennifer Rubin at Pajamas Media has a list of 30 things that cost John McCain the election. But she missed the top reason.
It was the bailout that did it. As Iain Murray at BeyondBailouts points out, the election was close in September, and
In short, it’s the economy, stupid. Surprisingly for a self-described maverick, it appears to have been Sen. McCain’s desire to cling to the self-serving nostrums of Wall Street and the Beltway that doomed him.
The McCain site actually has a very good breakdown of the issues in the campaign and the reasons to vote for the hero McCain instead of the demagogue Obama.
If Obama wins, I'm not moving to Canada -- but I fear for our nation.
Barack Obama is the culmination of the 1960's radical movement. If you like that sort of thing, he's your guy.
If you are still undecided on whether to vote for John McCain, Barack Obama, or some other person for President in 2008, let me fix it for you.
Do you think common ownership of everything is good? Vote Obama. If you'd rather see the result of your labors stay in your hands, vote McCain.
Is experience important? Vote McCain. Otherwise, Obama.
Do you look back nostalgically at 1960s protest marches and rioting? Vote Obama.
Do you want the Democrats who currently control Congress to run everything? Vote Obama.
Are you embarrassed by your country? Vote Obama
Are you a proud American? Vote for John McCain.
From The Washington Post:
And just as younger Protestants found JFK less threatening than their parents had found Al Smith, younger whites - even in bright-red states - don't view the prospect of a black president with great alarm.
Jay Nordinger at NRO finds the continental divide in this election. Is Communism good or bad? Is it a wonderful idea which has had some suboptimal implementations, or is it a rotten idea which has been tried and found to be a rotten idea?
I think it's a rotten idea. Barack Obama appears to think it just needs his special touch to make it work.
Your call.
Why did we get Iraq?
The basic problem was a peacetime President elected in reaction to Bill Clinton's style and errors, forced to deal with a world gone mad.
Because of Bill Clinton's slick style and personal morality issues, people didn't want someone with a slick style and morality issues. So here was GWB, with the image of a twelve step graduate and simple speaker. He got elected.
Then comes 9/11, and he's totally unprepared, I think. We all were. Like most people, I thought he did very well right after 9/11, with his doctrine that harboring a terrorist is being a terrorist.
But Iraq was pretty iffy. Was Saddam really the one to attack next? His relationship to 9/11 was tenuous at best, even though he clearly supported and encouraged terrorism and anti-Americanism generally. And everybody thought he had WMD. I was uneasy because I thought we should do one war at a time, but in the year and a half between 9/11 and the Iraq invasion, it became more and more reasonable to think Saddam Hussein was hiding something. I wondered why we were waiting, giving him time to plan his defenses.
I turned out that his defenses, if he had prepared them, were pretty ineffectual.
Barack Obama, meanwhile, was bravely telling his anti-war constituency in Chicago, much to their delight, that the war was bad.
Suppose someone stands up on a clear day to say, "RAIN!". It doesn't rain, but there he is the next day shouting "RAIN!". Some clouds roll in, but no rain. The next day, there he is, shouting "RAIN!". Sure enough, it rains. Should you hail him as a prophet, even though the next day is clear and he continues to shout "RAIN!"?
So it is with Barack Obama. His one tune for several years was to be against the Iraq war, to call for withdrawal in the face of defeat, even though that would have meant chaos and complete strategic weakness for the United States for decades.
No, once the decision to take out Saddam Hussein was made, we were stuck with that decision. We could not withdraw without having our sacrifice go for naught, and without losing the trust of every ally and potential ally anywhere in the world. We had to show loyalty and constancy in the face of hardship and seemingly impossible odds. Thanks to John McCain we did show loyalty and courage as a nation, and things are going our way now.
But while you can topple a government with air power and 100,000 troops, you can't hold a hostile area the size of California with that. And once we went in, we could not afford to leave without nation-building. The key error of the Iraq war is the repeated mistake of Viet Nam: failure to go all in. I blame Rumsfeld, and Bush's inexperience and penchant for stubborn loyalty.
I'll vote for John McCain, even though I don't like a lot of what he's done, because I don't like anything about Barack Obama except that he's black. But on the Iraq war, John McCain was right all along. He'd been arguing that more troops were needed right from the start, and was one of the early voices for getting rid of Rumsfeld. In retrospect, we'd have been a lot better off with him the last eight years.
Barack Obama, via Treacher and Hot Air:
“The point is, though, that — and it’s not just charity, it’s not just that I want to help the middle class and working people who are trying to get in the middle class — it’s that when we actually make sure that everybody’s got a shot – when young people can all go to college, when everybody’s got decent health care, when everybody’s got a little more money at the end of the month – then guess what? Everybody starts spending that money, they decide maybe I can afford a new car, maybe I can afford a computer for my child. They can buy the products and services that businesses are selling and everybody is better off. All boats rise. That’s what happened in the 1990s, that’s what we need to restore. And that’s what I’m gonna do as president of the United States of America.
“John McCain and Sarah Palin they call this socialistic,” Obama continued. “You know I don’t know when, when they decided they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.”
Barack Obama is trying to divert attention from his collectivist economic policies through his usual redefinition+strawman tactic. Noting that John McCain and Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher called his wealth-spreading ideas "socialism", Obama complains joyfully:
"By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich."
The NY Times, a failing company grasping at the straw of relevance, put a week-old poll on the front page today, trying to claim that Sarah Palin was a "drag" on the McCain ticket.
Mrs. Palin will do well to remember this in January when she presides over the Senate.
The poll shows that Sarah is not popular among people who love Barack Obama. It was not Sarah Palin's job to appeal to those folks, but to the Republican base. She does that, because without the negative lens of wanting to elect Obama, people see she's made of awesome.
Rather than showing that Sarah Palin is a drag on the ticket, what their poll really shows is that a week ago people thought Barack Obama was going to win the election.
Here is how the poll was conducted, and also a PDF of the entire results.
We note that the poll was conducted as a random selection of telephone exchanges, weighted by population. In other words, urban areas favoring Barack Obama were more likely to be called.
Then there is this:
The combined results have been weighted to adjust for variation in the sample relating to geographic region, sex, race, marital status, age and education. In addition, the land-line respondents were weighted to take account of household size and number of telephone lines into the residence, while the cellphone respondents were weighted according to whether they were reachable only by cellphone or also by land line.
Some findings regarding voting were also weighted in terms of an overall “probable electorate,” which uses responses to questions dealing with voting history, attention to the campaign and likelihood of voting in 2008 as a measure of the probability of respondents’ turning out in November.
Tom Blumer at Pajamas Media nails it:
It is becoming more obvious with each election cycle that that the widespread adoption of no-excuses-needed early voting has been a big mistake.Read the Whole Thing, as they say.
Douthat finally notices that no matter what the McCain campaign (or anyone else who doesn't support Barack Obama) says or does this election cycle, he or she will be called a racist. That's because liberals think of liberalism as the definition of goodness.
Since they know conservatives don't espouse liberalism, they think conservatives must be somehow corrupted by some other external force that keeps the conservative from expressing his inner liberal.
That is partly why sex scandals among Republicans (not all of whom are actually conservative) get so much attention: it reinforces to liberals that Republicans (and by extension, conservatives) are all, or substantially, deviants suffering from repression of sexual gratification. Oddly, liberals typically don't see anything wrong with the behavior itself, as long as one shouts it from the rooftops.
Similarly, liberals see Republican financial corruption as greed luring what would otherwise be a fine and good person away from liberalism, corrupted by evil corporate interests.
And finally, to Douthat's problem: liberals charge Republicans generally and conservatives specifically with racism because racism explains to the liberal why anyone would be against the obvious goodness of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Never mind the obvious injustice to Paul; there are for more Peters, and each Peter gets to vote at least once.
