Talk about defining deviancy down. If the incessant “rock star” tenor of the presidential campaign was not syrupy enough to trigger your gag reflex, today’s school girl euphoria over shirtless Obama photos may be the thing. I hope someone has revived Chris Matthews.
Yes, this does reflect poorly on Obama’s supporters in the media because it lays bare, so to speak, the depth of their thinking about Obama. While the President elect is being questioned in connection with the potentially criminal behavior of his closest political advisors, so called journalists are swooning over his physique. How do we rate the relative merits of Obama against say Stephen Harper? It’s hard to say. Most people don’t know who Stephen Harper is because his staff hasn’t arranged for him to appear shirtless on a beach. So there really isn’t much to talk about.
This is further evidence of genius in the Obama camp however. When the dialogue about the President centers on his next quote in Men’s Health, there is little room to be disappointed in his handling of trade policy. All the Obama team has to do is toss their lapdogs in the press a little beef stick and their short term memory is reset.
Obama is now backing away from his plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts. His campaign promise to pay for $4 trillion in new spending by squeezing the filthy rich (aka those making more than $250k a year) and repealing Bush’s modest tax cuts to the rest of us seemed sound. Astonishingly though, It turns out that raising taxes on anyone in the middle of a recession is not such a hot idea. Reality intrudes and the tax cuts stay.
This actually seems to be part of a larger pattern as Obama transitions into office and, as a conservative, I couldn’t be more pleased. As he fills out his cabinet and makes other appointments, I get the distinct feeling that we could possibly have done worse in some ways if McCain had won. Don’t get me wrong: I fully expect my conservative sensibilities to be deeply offended before long. But it’s interesting that the guy who ran around the world talking about bankrupting the coal industry, raising a civilian army (?), closing Gauntanamo, and causing the oceans to recede appears to be preparing to govern from the center. Funny how things change when you actually have to make the decisions that effect 300 million people’s lives.
Which brings me to President Bush. Liberals love to pronounce him the “Worst President In The History Of Our Country.” And possibly in the history of the universe! Of course history will be the judge of that. And history’s judgment will be based in part on the fact that our country hasn’t been attacked in more than seven years. I was thinking of this as I was reading Mark Steyn’s excellent column on the intricately planned terrorist attack in India this week.
As Steyn points out, there is a reason why this hasn’t happened in America recently. And it’s because when he’s not shredding copies of the constitution and listening in on my phone calls, President Bush is making the hard decisions that are necessary to protect our country. Obama will have to decide if he is going to honor every promise he’s made to those on his far-left flank, or if he’s going to make the same difficult decisions that President Bush has made in order to keep us safe.
It’s probably too much to expect Obama to keep Guantanamo open, but I look forward to the reaction from his multitudes of liberal fans when they discover that his foreign policy is not the ”change” they were hoping for. Faced with out current reality, liberal dreams of “hope” and “change” will likely be dashed. And many of President Bush’s decisions will be validated as Obama decides he has no choice but to continue with the status quo.
Since union labor is working so well for Detroit, expanding their influence in the rest of the economy only makes sense right?
As Holman Jenkins, points out in the WSJ this week, It’s well within the realm of possibility to make cars in the nation that God and capitalism built and earn a healthy profit doing it. Unions however have proven to be a back-breaker. As the financial crisis spins ever more wildly out of control, American auto makers pose a real systemic threat. The threat is almost completely self-imposed and unions are mostly to blame. Detroit will always be a shadow of its former glory, hooked up to life support if it can’t normalize its cost structure.
President elect Obama now must solidify his agenda and that means paying up. Unions are near the front of the payback line and they expect President Obama to support the Employee Free Choice Act, which eliminates private ballots as unions try to organize. It’s obviously a lot easier for the union muscle to target their “recruiting” efforts if they know who is standing in the way of the workers utopia.
It really makes you wonder how all the Americans making cars for Mercedes, Toyota and Honda are surviving the squalor and the depravity of those non-unionized plants. Where are the 20/20 exposes about the abuses and misery of these non-unionized workers? The New York Times can’t even make something up?
The Employee Free Choice Act raises another question. How long until we liberate some other special interest groups by making elections totally free and open and public? When will we address unjust ballot initiatives like proposition 8 by ensuring that everyone can see their fellow citizens’ vote? Isn’t that the only way to ensure fairness and “free choice?”
Beware the politician with statist intentions. The Utopian dream inevitably comes to the same dark end. You can only “share the wealth” until the wealth runs out. Entitlement programs are not self-funding and government is unproductive. The high minded promises and condescending explanations about the need to sacrifice for the good of the country and the patriotic opportunity for “the rich” to pay more taxes, culminate in essential theft on a national scale. America is not immune to the natural laws of cause and effect. The “free ride” ends eventually.
Senator Obama has consistently expounded a deeply held belief in the equality of results over the equality of opportunities. He is committed to the idea that the state, should be responsible not just to create an environment where individuals can control their own destiny but that the state should guaranty a certain destiny which is largely uniform. His allegiance is not so much to the middle class as it is to a single class the boundaries of which are defined and controlled by the State. By any but the most narrow of definitions that is the sum and substance of Socialism, even if John McCain can’t bring himself to say it to the MSM.
That is a radical change for America although it is certainly not a new idea. If that idea worked there would be no social discord in Europe. To read the MSM, there is nothing but love at home in the EU. Those who have spent time in Europe know this is not the case.
How many times have you heard the “man on the street” manifest his intention to vote for Barack Obama because, well, he just sounds Presidential. They get a kind of vacant glassy eyed look and mumble something about how he looks the part of a President.
There is a lot more to Barack Obama than meets the eye and apparently, the mind, of the swing voter who estimates the duties of the president to be somewhere between Game Show host and News Anchor.
Senator Obama and the DNC have a well articulated plan and it looks something like this . . .
The current Axis of Socialism, Bush Paulson and Bernanke, is only a shadow of things to come.
Many Americans seem to be evaluating the presidential candidates based on their persona or their gifts for oratory while there is so much more at stake. The combination of radical liberal Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches of government has implications that are almost certainly not contemplated or understood.
For many Americans our way of life may be seem inevitable but we are on the brink of giving away our birthright for a mess of pottage.
Obama surrogates are squealing as the polls tighten. Like Pallin, Joe the Plumber resonates because he is recognizable to the real middle class.
Obama contends the discussion about Joe is diversionary which of course it is not. The fact liberals are screeching about Joe is prima facia evidence the story hurts Obama. The liberal media are positioning Joe as a McCain stunt calculated to distract from the real issues; taxes, jobs and the middle class way of life. What is diversionary are the attempts to focus attention on Joe’s licensure or the reaction of the local pipe fitters union. Everyone will be shocked to hear them come down on the side of the liberal.
Joe is the karmic nexis of all these issues. Someone who just wants to the government to watch the borders, keep the peace and stay out of his way while he works hard to make his way in the world. Like every other socialist parasite, Obama sees Joe as a host organism from which he can draw blood; money he can take from Joe and use to buy votes from those who doubt themselves.
Is there anything more unlike change than the idea of redistributing wealth to curry favor?
Rachel Maddow borrowed some lines from her old Air America buddy Al Franken, calling McCain and Palin Lying liars with their pants ( and skirt ) on fire .
With Keith out, Rachel was compeltely unplugged. It’s hard, watching this tirade, not to remember Wolf Blitzer, Campbell Brown and company licking their wounds the night of Palin’s speech and talking about how mean the Republicans were.
McCain has put himself in an impossible situation and reminded the conservative base, again, why he makes them so uncomfortable.
Today he introduced his Vice Presidential Candidate as an affirmative action play targeted at disaffected female Hillary supporters reluctant to embrace the Obama-Biden ticket. Since when was the Republican party the party of affirmative action?
Sarah Palin will resonate with Republicans. She typifies government of the people, by the people and for the people. She sincerely believes in principles and ideals that are dearly held by bedrock conservatives such as the value of human life, the perils of expansive government and common-sense energy policy.
However, conservatives and McCain supporters who have for some time been pointing to Senator Obama’s lack of experience are now in the awkward position of having to argue that Govenor Palin’s lack of experience is not an issue, which it obviously is. It demands explanation. Why not select a more tenured partner with so much at stake? Because she is a woman? That would bring us very close to being just like liberals who say that we should elect Barack Obama because he is black, as though that will prove something. The logical extension of these arguments is farcical. It’s like the breathless announcements we hear that so and so is the first latino woman with double jointed thumbs to swim the English Channel or the first black man to summit Everst in June wearing no socks.
Liberals like to talk about conservatives lack of sensitivity to the opinions of our neighbors around the world. They are usually desperate to impress the French but as long as we are talking about the issue, what message does this send to enlightened foreigners like Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez, Hu Jintao and Mahmud Ahmaddinejad? This is not Margaret Thatcher.
As a conservative I appreciate having an actual conservative on the Republican ticket but we are still the party of pragmatism and realism. This is not who we would have picked as the second in command. What if McCain wins, will the RNC be supporting and Sarah Palin presidential bid?
Republicans have been quick to crticize Obama’s accceptance speech in Denver and rightly so. It was style and spectacle over substance. It was marketing to the lowest common denominator. It was MTV and Pop Tart commercials. Unfortunately McCain’s selection partakes of the same strategy. There are some cracks in the argument.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, will be tried in New York City, in a key test of the White House's strategy of trying terrorist suspects in U.S. civilian courts.
Robert Lipson has attended every Kansas State home game since 1972, bucking up fans even though the team has one of the worst records in college football.
Florida attorney Scott Rothstein's fast rise came to a crashing halt last month after investors alleged that he had sold them stakes in phony employment-dispute settlements.
Suicide car bombs ripped through an office of Pakistan's main spy agency in the country's northwest, killing at least 12 people in what appeared to be the Taliban's latest attempts to target the nation's security forces.
Colombia's top electoral body ruled that millions of signatures endorsing a referendum on President Uribe's second re-election bid are invalid, dealing a major setback to the president's bid for a third term.
