A couple of weeks ago the President, the Congress, the Treasury Secretary, the Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan, the media…hell probably Homer Simpson, too were all out braying about how much the $700 BILLION bailout bill was needed to “rescue” the economy from imminent ruin. If we didn’t get a bill written and signed, they told us, the economy was going to collapse in front of our eyes; we just could not go on unless the government gave these failing private enterprises $700 BILLION of our tax dollars to keep them afloat. Bush, Bernanke, Paulson, Schumer, Pelosi, Gretchen Carlson, etc. all told us that it was imperative to do this deal, and that it would be the savior of the American economic system.

Well a couple of weeks in, we see how big a crock that was! The day the bailout bill was signed, the Dow average, the S&P, NASDAQ, Nikkei…all of them dropped faster than a hot rock, and continue to tumble today. From a stock market that had reached all time highs, and seemed to be setting new records almost weekly, we have a market that (last I checked) was struggling to stay above 8000. The markets have all adjusted down since the government stepped in to “save the day” and although I am no economist, I think I understand why.

The thing that all the “experts” don’t understand is that they did not instill any confidence by running in to bail this group out, especially after they just assumed control of Fannie & Freddie. What this bailout did was create a sense that there was another shoe about to drop, since the government had assured us that the Fannie & Freddie situation was where they were drawing the line. Remember how they got on a soapbox after denying any help to Lehman Brothers and declared that the government was not in the business of bailing out failing businesses? That went by the wayside as soon as they convinced themselves that America was clamoring for the government to intervene in the markets, even though they had to ignore every normal person they ran into who was telling them otherwise!

People understand that it is a bad thing generally for the government to try to take over the markets, or to try to rescue the economy. Whenever the government has decided to take an active hand in the private sector it has worked out poorly for the nation; see the government interventions of the1920s that led to the Depression or the price control mistakes made by President Carter in his term during the 1970s. The people realize that the government isn’t that great at what it’s supposed to be doing, and they fear that government intervention will only make things worse. Also, it doesn’t help this measure that the people have watched their elected leaders deliberately circumvent the Constitution, admit to it in public, and then pretend that it was all for the best! When the people see the government doing things like that to achieve an end that they are adamantly opposed to, it destroys any confidence that the people may have had in the government’s ability to make a positive difference.

With this bailout failure they proved the truth of Ronald Reagan’s famous adage: “The nine most frightening words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

Seemingly from the moment Sarah Palin was chosen to be John McCain’s running mate in this election, the hue and cry started about her being “unqualified” for the position. Now the only qualifications that matter for the job are found in the Constitution and are relatively simple:

·         Candidate must be a natural-born citizen

·         Candidate must be at least 35 years of age

·         Candidate cannot be from the same state as the candidate for president

So looking at these simple requirements, it seems that Governor Palin has met all the requirements that the Founders had in mind for the Vice Presidential candidate, no?

With that out of the way, the naysayers go to their next line of attack, and say that she lacks “experience”, without ever really saying what experience she should have. They like to look at history and compare her to others who have been Vice President and say that she lacks the experience that they all brought to the table as the second fiddle on the ticket. In many ways though, Governor Palin stacks up pretty well with other VP candidates in modern history; five previous VPs have been governors of states before assuming the office of Vice President (Thomas Marshall, Calvin Coolidge, Hubert Humphrey, Spiro T. Agnew, Nelson Rockefeller) and three of those were single term governors (Marshall, Coolidge, Agnew). Further, there have been at least two modern Vice Presidents who had held no elected office before becoming VP (Charles G. Dawes, Henry A. Wallace)! So how could Governor Palin be less experienced than those guys?

The next argument made is that Governor Palin would be “a heartbeat away from the Presidency”, so her alleged lack of experience makes it a dangerous proposition for her to be the VP. But in looking back at the nineteen Vice Presidents that I looked at (from Wilson to G.W. Bush), only three took the oath of office at the death of a President (Coolidge, Truman, Johnson) and one of them (Johnson) became President due to the assassination of the sitting Chief Executive. Also, if the press was then what it is today then the death of FDR would not have come as a surprise to the nation, because it was a known fact in Beltway circles of the time that Roosevelt was very ill, and had been for some time. Yet that knowledge was kept secret from the public by a complicit press, and a man who had been shut out of any of the day to day operations of the nation had to assume the Oval Office responsibilities with no real idea of what he was getting into. Looking at the historical record it seems that there isn’t a great chance that John McCain is going to drop dead the moment he takes the Oath of Office, but even if he did at least Sarah Palin knows and understands the challenges before her.

It seems to me that what all the people bleating about “experience” are upset about is that Sarah Palin does not fit into the usual categories that VPs in the past have established. She is a woman, from a small population state, isn’t a lawyer, and hasn’t spent her entire life climbing the electoral ladder in Congress. Think I’m wrong? Then just take a look at these numbers concerning the Vice Presidents that have served from the Wilson Administration to the current Bush Administration:

·         All 19 Vice Presidents from the Wilson Administration until today have been males

·         11 of the 19 have been lawyers by “profession”

·         Only two of the nineteen held no elective office before becoming VP

·         13 of the 19 had served in Congress (House, Senate, or both), with an average of 19 years in office

Governor Palin simply explodes the myth that congressional experience is the standard that should be used to measure experience; most people have more trust in a person who has served as an executive and made tough decisions, than they have for people who serve as either 1-100 or 1-435. Simply put, the voting public does not see membership in Congress as a way to develop any real leadership abilities, because without help from others nothing can get done at the congressional level. That also means that members of Congress have a built in excuse for failure, and we are seeing now with the economic bailout debacle how quickly they run to that excuse.

Finally, the last argument made against Governor Palin comes back to the idea that she, as the Vice Presidential candidate, has to be “ready to be President”. First of all, people have to realize and recognize that Palin is not running for President, so her readiness is not the real issue; the question is whether Barack Obama or John McCain are ready to be President. The majority of voters are not going to go into the booth on November 5^th and pull the lever based on Palin or Biden, they are deciding based on the top of the ticket. Second, most Vice Presidents never become President at all, either through the death of a President or through a subsequent election on their own merits. Of the VPs I looked at only six (Coolidge, Truman, Nixon, Johnson, Gerald Ford, G.H.W. Bush) became President, and of those three took over at the death of a President (Coolidge, Truman, Johnson), one took over at the resignation of the President (Ford), and only two ran successful campaigns after being VP (Nixon, Bush)*. So I don’t see what all the fuss is over the nomination of Sarah Palin, other than the fact that after years of crying about needing a fresh voice from outside the Beltway, the press and the left are not ready to hear what that voice has to say. I suppose that’s just another case of the rhetoric not matching the reality.

*note: I know that LBJ ran a successful campaign of his own, but I did not include it because it was only launched after he had served as President. After the death of JFK I do not think America was ready to turn LBJ out of office, especially after he positioned himself as the person who was carrying on JFK’s political agenda; note that while LBJ did all of the real work on getting civil rights legislation passed, it has been JFK who has been given the lion’s share of the credit.

Yesterday I watched with undisguised glee as the $700 billion bailout bill died an ignominious death in the House. Being the good conservative that I am, I watched the news coverage on Fox News and was actually surprised by something I heard there. One of the Fox news anchorettes was actually bemoaning the fact that this travishamockery of a bill had gone down in the flaming defeat it so richly deserved. She was saying that this was a time when the members of Congress had to lead the American people instead of listening to their constitutents...you know, "We the People." Then this morning on Fox and Friends all purpose political expert Larry Sabato from the University of Virginia was on saying the the President had failed to sell the bill properly to the people, and that whoever was able to tag the bill a "bailout" had effectively killed any chance of it passing the House. His idea was that if it had been called a "rescue" or "recovery" that the people would have gone along with it, because it didn't sound as if the government was trying to fix the mistakes of private businesses.

1. The American people just forced the Congress to lead us (at least for the time being) away from the precipice of eternal government bailouts of private enterprises. The American people were not going to stand by and watch these entities get free  oney for running their companies into the ground, all in the quest for ever rising profits. And for the second time in a couple of years We the People imposed out collective will on those elected to represent us.
2. The system worked as designed on this bill, since the members of the House, including a sizeable number of the Democratic Party, refused to vote for a bill that they knew the people were opposed to...just like the way it went down with Harriet Meiers and immigration. The Congress responded to the people and did their business, instead of trying to advance their own agendas.
3. The President was never going to get this passed, because he has no political capital left to get this done! George W. Bush could be the greatest salesman in the world, but the People were not going to buy this crock of crap, because we all saw it for what it was. And how could any of the Democrats in the House really be seen supporting this White House backed proposal, after spending the last 7 years telling anyone who would listen what an incompetent boob "Dubya" is? How good would it have looked to the constituents of those anti-Bush House members up for reelection to be out trumpeting  the Bush Plan?
4. Larry Sabato and others need to understand that We the People are not some group of dolts who can be easily fooled b calling something by a different name. They tried that with their immigration proposals, but we all knew that "comprehensive immigration reform" was just a fancy way of saying "amnesty". No one was fooled then, and to think that calling this a "rescue" would divert attention from the fact that this is just a bailout of poorly run corporations is foolish. You can put a dead possum on a plate and call it filet mignon, but that doesn't change the fact that it's roadkill!

 

 America’s political class can be rightly called a great many things: venal, corrupt, underhanded, lugubrious, and smarmy among them. But they are also usually very smart people who are capable of reading the electorate like an open book and who survive by giving the people exactly what they really want. And that usually amounts to more of the same old politics that we claim to hate, but that we relish in our hearts.

Every election cycle we act as though we just cannot stand another year of the negative campaigning and attack ads, and we pretend to be appalled at the number and viciousness of those ads that are produced. “Give us more substance,” we say, and then we settle down in front of the tube, the radio, or the monitor and lap up the latest ad that accuses the candidate that is running against our guy of being a liar, a cheat, or a fraud!

We claim that we want our politicians to work to get things done in Washington, that we would like to see less of the hyper-partisanship that so often paralyzes government, and that denies us the public service of well qualified people in judgeships, as U.S. Attorneys, or as Cabinet members. We say that we want the two parties to put aside their differences and work together…right up until a politician actually does that. Then we turn on that politician as a turncoat, not because he has done anything that shocks his conscience, but because he has not towed some ideological or Party line on an issue. We don’t really want to see any cooperation, what we want to see is the other side capitulate to our desires and for “our” guys to vote in lockstep with the Party, come hell or high water.

We pretend that we want to hear new ideas to old problems, but the moment someone actually has a new idea, we go ballistic! If someone says we should allow younger citizens to privately invest some of their Social Security withholding the public has a hissy fit; “No!” we scream, “that would bankrupt the system!” But many of us never stop to think that the system is already a bankrupt Ponzi scheme, which is not guaranteed to even be close to solvent by the time we are expecting to draw benefits from it; no, we are too busy trying to cling to the same old discredited solutions to the same problems. Schools failing the students they are meant to serve? Change the system, so long as it doesn’t include vouchers, school choice of any kind, and fat raise for the “underpaid” teachers toiling in the educational trenches!

We like to claim that we don’t want anymore of the same old Beltway regulars in charge, because we see what they have accomplished for us. But we go crazy when someone without a Beltway mentality threatens to rise to national political prominence. Take Gov. Sarah Palin as the prime example: this is a person who has no experience playing the Beltway Games, who has been busy working for her state as governor, and who has been getting good results. But because she is not a polished media product, and because she isn’t running around currying the favor of either the media elite, nor the Beltway elite, pundits on both sides of the political aisle have declared her to “unprepared” for the Vice Presidency. “Why, she hasn’t met with any leaders of foreign nations, and she didn’t even have a passport until recently…so she is unqualified”, says the left. From the right, the noted political thinker Kathleen Parker has decided that Governor Palin is unqualified because she wasn’t smooth and polished in her interviews with Charlie Gibson, Katie Couric, and Sean Hannity. According to Parker, that is reason enough for Palin to drop out of the race some 40+ days before the election, effectively ending any chance that John McCain had to win the election, and that she should use her youngest son as an excuse to run away from the fight. What the left doesn’t get is that many of us here in the American hinterlands don’t have passports, haven’t visited a lot of foreign nations, and haven’t met many foreign leaders. And as governor, when would it have been appropriate for Mrs. Palin to have met with Kim Jong Il, Vladimir Putin, Nikolas Sarkozy, or Gordon Brown? Her job as governor meant that she dealt with Congressional politicians and state/local pols; not trotting the globe like Bill Richardson is prone to do. And what Mrs. Parker doesn’t get is that the last thing we want right now is another smooth talking politician, with prepackaged answers, and who is seeking the approval of the Gibsons, Courics, and Olbermans of the world!

But the professional politicians promise to give us all we ask for, but specialize in giving us exactly what we expect. They promise us change, but they give us the same old stuff in a package the screams NEW & IMPROVED!!!!  And we buy it, because at heart way too many of us want the same old same and have come to expect and accept it with no questions asked.

I had a political science professor as our class this question one day, and it applies to all of us: If our politicians are corrupt, venal, lying backstabbers, whose fault is that? Is it the fault of the politicians for being those things, or is the fault of the people who elect them? Likewise, if the politicians continue to give us the same old spit, just on a different day who’s really at fault; the politicians who provide the spit, or the electorate that laps it up?

In all honesty, we can’t blame the politicians…they’re just giving the people what they want!

I am officially done. I am tired of fighting the last battle, trying to win a rearguard action when the fight is over. I am laying down my rhetorical rifle and keeping my powder dry for the battles that must be fought, and must be won. My war against John McCain is over.

As much as it pains my conservative brethren to acknowledge it, no matter how it was done, John McCain has become the GOP standard bearer against Barack Obama and he deserves our respect, if not our support. We may not like the way the caucuses and primaries are set up, and changing them would be great, but the system produced John McCain as the winner and we have to accept it. What’s done is done and as much as I dislike many of Senator McCain’s policy ideas, I would much rather wake up on November 5^th with a President Elect McCain than the alternative.

Many of the conservative base have spent a lot of time and effort telling us things about Senator McCain that we already know: he has been way too cozy with the Democrats on too many issues, he has been openly hostile at times towards the conservative base of the Party, he sides with liberal thought on AGW, and we all know his stance on the immigration issue. We also well remember the Gang of 14, McCain-Feingold, and his initial resistance to the Bush tax cut plan. But even with all those negatives, he managed to find a way to win the nomination after everyone had his candidacy dead and buried. He survived that fight and he grabbed the brass ring with both hands, so to speak.

Many conservatives speak of McCain as being no better than Obama, but that is not based on any objective analysis…it based on the enmity that many conservatives have towards McCain. Because of his past actions, they have decided that he can never garner their support, no matter what he does. They have come to the conclusion that because he has voted with the Democrats on some key issues, that he is one of them; what they fail to realize is that McCain is just McCain. He has never represented himself to be anything other than what he is, which is a man who thinks for himself…and the consequences be damned. McCain gets some us conservatives so fired up because he shatters a myth that we have held onto for far too long; the myth that to be Republican means to be conservative.

Yes, the GOP has the reputation for being the home of conservative thought but it has never been a truly conservative Party in my memory. In fact, in my memory the GOP has only produced on real “movement conservative” as President and we all know who that is. And GOP congressional leadership has produced some outstanding conservatives, but they have been more a product of their state/district electorate than of their Party leadership. Many want McCain to embrace that myth, and when he acts on his own initiative instead of the mythical values of the Party he is attacked, instead of people recognizing that McCain is not out of step with us…the Party is.

The problem is that too many conservatives are not worrying about what is best for the country, but are instead worried about salvaging the position of influence that conservatives have had in the GOP. It is all about the idea that if McCain wins that conservative influence in the Party will wane, and we just can’t have that. Who cares if a President Obama, the absolutely most left wing candidate to ever win the Democratic nomination, paired with a Democrat controlled Congress could do serious damage to the Republic? Who cares if a President Obama would be able to replace not just two Supreme Court justices with left wing ideologues in the mold of Ruth Bader Ginsburg? And more importantly, who cares if a President Obama packs the federal appeals courts and district courts with the same type of judges? And who cares if we see a Justice Department filled with US Attorney’s in the mold of Patrick Fitzgerald or Ronnie Earle, appointees who will use the office to do the bidding of their political master?

So what if a President Obama would snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq? What does it matter if an Obama administration abandoned Israel, or refused to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression? What’s the big deal if a President Obama would spend all day talking to Iran, while she armed herself with a nuclear weapon?

My friend Philosophocon at his blog sees those arguments as scare tactics to move conservatives into the McCain camp, and discounts them. I see them as legitimate questions that many conservatives are willing to overlook in their nearly blind devotion to opposing McCain. Many conservatives say that an Obama administration could not do that much damage in a four year period, that he would not have enough time to do any lasting damage to the Nation; but they are banking on Obama being so bad that the people will reject him after a four year term. But what happens if the people re-elect him? What then? And we know what kind of damage liberal courts are doing now, so why do we think that federal courts packed with even more liberals won’t do even more damage?

We conservatives have fought the fight for this election cycle and we lost. We split our votes among too many candidates, and our numbers were blunted by the more moderate Republicans who picked a guy and stuck with him. But instead of recognizing the mistakes we made in the primaries, we have decided to punish the winner of the Party nomination. We have spent more time waging war against him for his ideological impurity than we have in going after the candidate who is our ideological opposite! We have been so worried about protecting our ideological turf inside the GOP, that we have forgotten that there is a bigger issue than the fate of the conservative voice within the Party. We are willing to swallow four years of socialist dogma from Obama, under the assumption that it will act as castor oil, when it is much more likely to act as arsenic. It may not kill us immediately, but it may very well cause us a slow, painful death. And we are willing to take that chance not because McCain really is as bad as Obama, but because we have to paint him as such in order to justify our abandoning the field to the opposition.

I am not going to tell anyone how to vote, who to vote for, or question their motivations for their decisions; that’s not my job.  Heck, I’m not even sure how I’m going to vote because I still have my issues with Senator McCain. But I can say that when I go to Forest Chapel Church on November 4^th, get my ballot, and go in to mark it I will not be in there basing my decision on the future influence of the conservative voice in the GOP. I will not be making it on any personal animosity for McCain, nor will I decide on the basis of protecting my “territory”. I will be making it based on the issues that I deem to be the most important, and I will be making it based on what is in my view in the best interest of this Nation.

And I trust that all of you will as well.

 

The big stories of the week (so far) have been the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the federal bailout/takeover of AIG. Now I am no economics expert, but with all of the talk about why these institutions collapsed, it seems obvious to this novice that much of the problem comes from the past doings of Allan Greenspan when he ran the Fed, in addition to the usual stupidity of Congress. The way I see it, this whole industry collapse is based in the way Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were run as a quasi-independent company, with heavy backing from the federal government. Freddie and Fannie were able to underwrite huge amounts of mortgage loans to people who were very high risk because a) the government was pressuring them to and b) because they knew the government would guarantee the loans they made. The idea of a “society of home ownership” is nice, but it has to be based on the ability of the borrowers to repay the lenders, and when the Congress started pressuring Fannie and Freddie to make loans to help low income earners get into their own homes, that opened the door to the collapse that we a couple of weeks ago. The part that Greenspan played in this was his decision to lower interest rates over and over, which made money and capital cheap, which in turn induced more people to take on loans that they could not pay back at any reasonable rates. When the rates began to raise again, as was inevitable, suddenly you have a situation where the people with the mortgages found themselves overextended and unable to pay; voila, instant crisis. As for Lehman in particular, they were caught up in this mess after having bought a bunch of mortgage based securities, and when people started defaulting on their mortgages right and left , Lehman was left holding the bag. Finally, I am no big supporter of the G taking over private enterprises, but I can understand why they took over AIG; as large as that company is, a failure of AIG would be devastating to the overall economy, since AIG has their fingers in so many pies. Hopefully the G will be able to find a way for AIG to get back into private hands and pay back the $85 billion in “loans” they were extended.

On the campaign trail things have really begun to heat up, with both the Obama and McCain camps accusing the other of running misleading ads. The Obama camp complains that McCain’s ads stating that the junior Senator from Illinois voted for a bill that advocated teaching “comprehensive” sex education classes starting in kindergarten was “false” and “misleading”, and that the bill was actually about protecting children from sexual predators. The only thing is that the bill was exactly what the McCain camp purported it to be, a sex education bill! While there is some languages about helping children protect themselves against molesters, the bill is obviously a rewriting of an older state sex-ed law to reflect the current liberal attitudes in the legislature. In response, the Obama campaign launched an ad that portrays McCain as being out of touch because the Senator from Arizona “doesn’t use email”. The only problem with that is that McCain doesn’t use email because the injuries he suffered in the “Hanoi Hilton” makes it almost physically impossible for him to use a computer. Boy, that Obama is really a class act, eh? And finally, the Obama camp…which is changing the tone and running a post-racial campaign…rolled out an ad that portrays John McCain as a racist! The ad is aimed at Hispanic voters and tries to link John McCain’s stance on immigration to that of Rush Limbaugh, and incorrectly portrays El Rushbo as calling Hispanic immigrants “stupid” and telling them to “shut up and go home”. Rush has fired back, and Jake Tapper has exposed the lies and distortions in the ad on his blog at ABC. So much for that “new tone”, huh?

In sports, Dallas Mavericks forward and Winston-Salem, NC native Josh Howard made the news this week because of comments he made during the playing of the National Anthem at a charity flag football game in July. Howard was caught on camera saying that he doesn’t “celebrate that s**t” because “I’m black”. Now notwithstanding the fact no one is asked to “celebrate” the Anthem, this simply goes to show that no matter where you go to school (in his case Wake Forest) or what you do for a living, a twit is still a twit. I am sure that Wake Forest was so proud to have this dumbkoff standing right with guys like Rusty LaRue, Ricky Proehl, Chris Paul, Muggsy Bogues, and Tim Duncan as exemplars of the type of people their sports programs produce.

And that’s the roundup of the most important news of the week. So in the immortal word of Dan Rather…Courage.

In all honesty I must admit to not watching the entire GOP convention this week, but I did manage to catch what I thought were the most important and interesting moments. All in all, the convention was a pretty good kick-off for the general election campaign, with some highlights…and some not so wonderful moments. So what follows are my personal observations of what was right and wrong with the convention.

Rudy rises to the occasion: As much as we conservatives fond to dislike about Rudy Giuliani, we have to give him his due; the man knows how to give a speech and engage a crowd. His speech was a gem, especially in singing the praises of McCain and Palin and making them seem like a perfect combination to have on the ticket. And he was especially good in hitting Obama and Biden on their lack of leadership and vision, with his most memorable line being, “Change is not a destination, and Hope is not a strategy.” That pretty much sums up what the Obama campaign has been about, and did a good job of pointing out that the words are nice but more is needed that Hope & Change to govern this nation.

Fred ain’t dead: Fred D. Thompson did a great job in reintroducing himself to the folks with his speech as well. He showed a fire in the belly that seemed to be lacking in his early campaign, but which was evident later on in his run. He was engaging, he did a great job in telling the McCain story, and he was pretty biting in some of his criticisms of the Obama ticket. Whether he was just stumping for McCain or angling for a spot in the administration, he did a great job of getting his name back out before the people.

Joe Lieberman…not so much: I understand that Joe Lieberman and John McCain are longtime friends and colleagues, and I know that the sight of Lieberman onstage at the RNC was supposed to show bipartisanship, but in my view it was a failure. Lieberman was boring in his delivery for the most part, and his speech brought into focus the very things that make conservatives so wary of McCain. Did anyone in the McCain camp actually think that having Lieberman get up there and remind us of McCain-Feingold, McCain-Kennedy, or the Gang of 14 was the way to get the base fired up? I could have seen it if Lieberman had gotten up and given a passionate, heartfelt, rousing oration like Zell Miller did in the ’04 convention, but unlike Miller, Lieberman only breaks ranks with the Democrats on national security issues. Lieberman is still on the left side of the aisle on nearly every other issue, and his presence there made McCain look as if he is willing to tilt left, instead of moving a little more to the right. This was a case of a good idea in theory, but a terrible one in practice.

The Palin pile-driver: When Gov. Sarah Palin took the stage at the Xcel Center; I have never seen a crowd pop like that at a political event! This was the moment the delegates had been waiting for, the chance to hear from “Sarah Wasilla”, as some liberals snottily refer to her. This was a chance for the delegates to hear her story from the source, not given to us through the MSM filter, and Gov. Palin did not disappoint. She was poised on the stage and her story of being the PTA member who ran for office in her town, who became the mayor of Wasilla (population 9,000), and who made her way to the governor’s office was compelling. And her story of her family life, of having met her husband in high school and his still being her guy 20 years and five kids later; of the birth of their youngest son, born with Down’s Syndrome but loved nonetheless; the pride she has in her son and nephews who are serving the nation in the military, and her touching on her daughter’s unexpected pregnancy showed her to be just one of us. And as much as Obama’s story is the American Dream, so is hers; she has risen from the simplest of roots to possibly the second highest elected office in the land. What really stood out was her willingness to fight back against the Obama campaign and media questions about her experience by pointing out the lack of experience that Obama brings to the top of the Democratic ticket. And her lines that stung Obama so much were well written and well delivered, and directly on point; as much as the Obama camp and the media began caterwauling about her “demeaning” his experience as a community organizer, she was not wrong in her criticisms. In what world does being a community organizer prepare one to be President of the United States? And it was delicious to hear the Obama camp and media crying foul about her describing him in that manner, when the Obama campaign has made it a point to overlook the fact that Sarah Palin is the sitting governor of the state of Alaska, while trying to portray her as only the mayor of Wasilla (population 9,000). All in all Sarah Palin did exactly what she needed to do in her speech; she introduced herself to the public, she showed she was more than willing to fight back hard in the coming campaign, and she rallied the conservative base. That was as effective a speech as I have seen in some time, and it served notice to the Obama-Biden ticket this won’t be any easy win for them.

Heeeere’s Johnny: Finally we came to the acceptance speech of the nominee, John S. McCain. After the excitement generated by Palin, all McCain had to do was ride the wave, give the people a reason to get behind him, and show that he valued the base that Palin had so energized with her performance. In my view, McCain dropped the ball with his speech. For one it was nearly an hour long, and I don’t want to listen to anyone speak for that long unless they are saying something truly captivating. In cases like that an hour seems like a few minutes, but McCain’s speech felt every bit like an hour long speech; the man is just not a speech maker. Now I see why he prefers the town hall approach because it allows him to move and really engage with the crowd, but even with the new stage at the RNC he just never seemed to be in his element. It was compelling to hear him finally tell his story of captivity and his realization of just how much his country meant to him, and it was inspiring to hear him tell of his change in attitude , “No longer was I my own man, but my country’s”, the speech just lacked pop. And it was obvious to me that McCain was still trying to draw in the moderates and independents with his speech, and in doing that he was managing to off put a number of conservatives who are searching for a reason to back him. We all know that hyper-partisanship does not allow important work to get done in Washington, but with McCain’s reputation for dallying with the Democrats a bit too much, his talk of reaching across the aisle and embracing all good ideas will make some conservatives that were leaning towards him take a step back. I was watching the speech on CSPAN, and you could see it on the faces of many of the people in the crowd that this talk was not what they wanted to hear. Even after the acceptance speech McCain still has work to do in shoring up his base for the general election.

All in all, the RNC was pretty well done, especially with the juggling done in the face of Hurricane Gustav. It would have been great to have heard from Gov. Bobby Jindal in person, but his decision was to stay in state and lead in the face of the hurricane. And the staging of the events were a stark contrast, with the DNC being about glitz, what with those “Styrofoam pillars”, while the RNC was more reserved and traditional. The one thing that I did notice was similar in both tickets is that they are both upside down in their own ways; the Democrat ticket has all of its experience at the bottom of the ticket, while the GOP ticket has the unifier of the base at the bottom. We will soon see how this works for the two tickets as we start the general campaign in earnest now that the conventions are over.

The convention of Hope [their caps, not mine] has just ended and a very interesting week (or two) of politics has gone by the wayside. A period that started with Obama picking his running mate, progressed through the staged unity of the convention, and ended with the One speaking from his own personal temple constructed at INVESCO Field was surprisingly upstaged by the McCain campaign. Here is a brief look at my take on the week that was.

Obama picks Biden. What was Mr. Hope & Change thinking with this pick? After basing his entire campaign on the theme that he was an agent of change and that he rejected the “old politics”, Obama goes out and picks a living symbol of the status quo as his running mate. Joe Biden, 36 year senator Joe Biden, is going to bring change to America? As one pundit said at Fox News, “Who knew that the agent of change had been sitting in the Senate for the last 36 years?”

A topsy-turvy world. It seems that the reason many gave for Obama getting Mr. Insider as his running mate was that it added experience to the ticket, and perhaps it did. But what type of experience exactly? Just because Joe Biden has been a part of the Foreign Affairs committee and its chair does not mean that he has any real experience in the area. What foreign leaders has Biden dealt with and what problems has he solved? And if that is seen as out of bounds, then ask yourself this: Seeing that Biden has been consistently wrong on his foreign affairs pronouncements (remember, according to Old’ Joe the surge wouldn’t accomplish anything), is that the type of experience you really want? And the idea that picking a person with experience somehow transfers experience to another is laughable!

Where are the celebs? Everyone knows that Hollywood is totally in the tank for Obama, but the stars were conspicuous by their absence. Sure there were some at the acceptance speech by Obama, but even then they were largely out of sight of the public. It seems that the McCain ad really struck a nerve when he linked Obama’s rise to his celebrity status. Even though Oprah was there crying her fake eyelashes off, the celebs were mostly out of sight-out if mind, and that had to be by design.

The Clinton Convention. Even thought they were nowhere on the ticket, this convention was all about the Clintons. Hillary did her part to try to heal the Party fissures, but even that didn’t seem quite sincere. Because in all of the things that she said in her speech, and even in urging her voters to board the Obama bandwagon, Mrs. Clinton stopped well short of really endorsing Obama. She urged her voters basically to vote for the party, but she never said that she believed that he was the man to lead…just that he was the winner of the nomination. Then there was Bill; the speculation over what he would say, and how he would say it was a source of much drama in the days leading up to his speech. He gave a pretty good speech and he actually gave Obama something of an endorsement. And strangely, Bill Clinton was the only speaker who really made an effort to sell Obama the candidate, not just appeal to Party loyalty.

The One speaks from his Temple. The craziest thing that went on that I saw was the temple that was erected for Obama to give his acceptance speech from. If nothing before pushed the idea on the public that Obama was being set up as some sort of secular messiah, the construction of that temple…complete with Roman columns…sealed the deal. I mean really, how many other presidential aspirants have ever given a speech from their own personal temple?! And speaking of the speech, what was so great about it? It was just more Democratic Party boilerplate and the usual list of socialist plans: raise taxes, grow government, increased dependence in the populace. But what struck me was the part of the speech where Obama talks of his grandfather getting an education using the GI Bill, and his mother managing to raise him as a single parent and helping to create a better life for him…and then he unravels it all by saying that it shouldn’t be that way! He says that, if elected, he will basically take that responsibility from the individual and transfer it to the state, because no one should have to struggle like that to make it. Does this man not understand that those “struggles” are what make America great? Does he not know that he is the American Dream and that his plan would destroy the Dream forevermore? And why does he fail to understand that the American people generally want to earn their way in the world, rather than be perpetual wards of the State?

Stealing Obama’s thunder. The day after the convention, John McCain was able to effectively push Obama from the front pages and lead news stories by announcing his pick for Vice President. By picking Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, McCain shook up the ideas of a “status quo” pick and wrested the headlines from the DNC. Gov. Palin was a good pick, in my opinion, because she does several things for the McCain campaign: she appeals to disaffected women voters, she is the ultimate Washington outsider, and she can appeal to the conservative base of the GOP which has been very wary of McCain. Now, some feel that Palin is damaging her future political prospects by running with McCain as his VP, but if she is part of a winning ticket I don’t see how her career is going to be adversely affected. Others are arguing that her addition to the ticket somehow takes the issue of experience from McCain, but I fail to see how that works. Gov. Palin has nearly 2 years on the job in Alaska, has a 65% approval rating, and is the only person on either ticket with any executive experience! And honestly, she has about as much political experience as Barack Obama, since he has only been in national office for about 3 years and has spent 2 of those running for President! Gov. Palin has a record that she can stand on, while Obama has only rhetoric and the unabashed adulation of the media and the celebrity set. But all of that is actually irrelevant, since the only people whose experience matters reside at the top of the ticket, and in that contest McCain wins hands down; the experience that Biden has cannot be transferred to Obama, no matter how hard the media tries to make it so.

So that’s what I think about the way things are, and I am looking forward to what the GOP does at their convention that kicks off early next week.

Seemingly lost amid the reporting on Brett Favre's trade to the New York Jets, John Edwards's infidelity, and the opening of the Olympics is the shooting conflict that has erupted in the Republic of Georgia. Earlier today the Russian Army sent a column of tanks into a breakaway province of Georgia in an effort to support the "independence" of a group of ethnic Russians living inside of Georgian territory. It seems that the Russians have had "peacekeeping" troops stationed in Georgia to "protect" their ethnic bretheren for some time, and now with the attention of the world diverted they have decided to help them gain their independence.

With Barack Obama and John McCain on the trail attempting to foo..., I mean convince the voters to install them in the White House, it is time to inject some sanity into the process. In a season that has gone on for seemingly the last 3 years, we are all starting to get a serious case of "campaign fatigue", but if you just hang with me.....

Some of you may have seen/heard this on Hannity & Colmes last night, but if you didn't you have got to read this. It is satire at it's very best from a writer for the Times in the United Kingdom. It is a hilaious take off on the near worship of Obama by the media and others, witten in the style of a Biblical gospel. Enjoy!

Let me be upfront, I am NOT a John McCain supporter. I have major problems with his policy positions, as they have generally listed to the left side of the political aisle and despite his recent sop to conservative sensibilities, I do not trust him to govern from the right if elected. He has co-sponsored a bill that gutted the 1^st Amendment, he sponsored a bill that would have granted amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants if it had passed, he opposed the very tax cuts that he now lauds, and he is suspect in his taste in judicial appointments. For those reasons, and others, I cannot in good conscience support McCain’s candidacy for the Oval Office.

However, I am becoming more and more appalled by the way too many conservatives are attacking McCain; too much of it is becoming personal and not focused on policy differences. I am seeing conservatives attack the man’s honor on a personal level that is totally unbecoming of the conservative movement. Generally conservatives have claimed to be about ideas, and have always tried to explain their differences with others by pointing out the differences in ideas, not by taking personal potshots at their adversaries. That has generally been the province of the liberals, who stoop to ad hominem attacks when they are unable to refute the ideas of the other side; but in this election, and with this candidate the right has unleashed a torrent of abuse on this man.

One of the things that many are using to assail McCain’s personal honor and integrity is his divorce from his first wife. “Why, she stood by him while he was in Vietnam,” they say, only to have him divorce her after he returned from his captivity. “The fact that he divorced his first wife,” say the anti-McCain crowd, “is evidence that he has no honor.” But honestly, how silly an argument is that? We do not know the circumstances of their marriage before he went to Vietnam, we don’t know the circumstances of the marriage while he served in Vietnam, and we have no idea of what their circumstances were after he was released from his extended stay at “The Hanoi Hilton”. I am pretty sure that 5 years of captivity and torture will change a man, so that the John McCain who came back from Hanoi was not the same dashing young pilot who shipped out.

But the point is, this has nothing to do with his qualifications to be President, and should have no place in the debate over whether or not to support him. Electing a President is supposed to be about ideas and the direction a candidate plans to take the nation; not about his personal failings from decades ago.

If you want to support McCain, that’s your business…, I’m not trying to sway anyone for or against him. But if you are one of the people who cannot find it in themselves to support him, would it kill you to base your opposition on something substantive? Confine it to the issues and policy differences at hand, and leave the personal attacks out of it. I would like to think that conservatives could argue their points without attempting to destroy the man holding an opposite viewpoint.

I would like to think that we are better than that.

Once again the so-called “N-word” has made an appearance in the public eye and touched off a firestorm of controversy. In case anyone missed it, the Reverend Jesse Jackson actually used the so-called “N-word” when lamenting that Barack Obama was “talking down to n_ggers” about continuing to pursue faith based initiatives to help solve some of the problems that blacks face today, instead of relying solely on the government. Whether or not this was simple campaign rhetoric or not, and I personally think it was, is beside the point; the point is that Jackson chose to use a vile term in describing his alleged constituency.

The flap grew even hotter when it was discussed by the resident geo-political and renowned social commentators on “The View”, the sorry excuse for a talk show fronted by Barbara Walters, Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, and some chick named Sherri whose main claim to fame is being the black woman to replace Star Jones on the show. They got into a discussion about it that included Whoopi and Sherri saying that it is perfectly fine for blacks to call each other n*gger, but that whites better not let it come from their mouths, and with Whoopi bringing la Hasselbeck to tears by telling her that blacks and whites live in “different worlds”.

What struck me about all of this is that anyone in the black community, much less a high profile person like Whoopi Goldberg would have the audacity to try to continue the myth that n*gger has some transcendent, positive meaning or connotation when used among blacks. I have been black for all of my life and I have rarely seen that word used as anything other than what it is, namely an insult. For a short time young black men walked around saying that their friends were their “n-words” and it may still go on today; but for as long as I can remember the adults that were around me only used that word as a put down. It was usually attached to a person that was lazy, shiftless, a drain in the community, and someone that was not particularly welcome in the community because of the above mentioned traits. I am not defending their use of that word here, but simply trying to point out that even among blacks the word is most definitely a negative depiction of blacks.

But my broader point is that as far as I am concerned, the “n-word” is one that none of us should be using to refer to one another. No matter how much people try to “reclaim” the word, nothing they do is going to redefine it; the age old meaning is going to hold true. There is a reason that Jews don’t refer to each other as “kike”; that Hispanics/Latinos do not call themselves “spics”; why Chinese do not call themselves “chinks”; why Vietnamese do not call themselves “gooks”, and why Italians do not call themselves “dagos”. They don’t do it because they know that their feeble attempts at “reclaiming” a slur does not undo the pain, hurt, and racism embodied in that word. Some words are unchanging, and quite honestly they should be unchanged. Some words need to be preserved to show our younger generations just how vile and hurtful some words can be, and they should be taught that these words are anathema to any thinking person trying to function in an ethnically diverse society.

Slurring a person or ethnic group is never alright, even if the slur comes from within the group; in fact, slurring from inside the group may be worse than if it comes from outside the group. When a person uses one of these words to attack someone within his own ethnicity, he is unleashing the worst word he can find in an effort to destroy that person; there can be no doubt about the intent if another black person gets angry at me and drops the “n-word” on me. So instead of trying to “reclaim” a slur, or trying to justify its use, we should be doing everything we can to eradicate it from our vocabularies, and we should damned sure be teaching our children what the word means and why it is on the same level as a curse word. Because when we make excuses for its use, all we do is keep the word in circulation and give others our implicit imprimatur for its use.

Maybe Whoopi, Sherri, and others will keep that in mind the next time a Michael Richards does off the deep end, because it’s just a “term of endearment.”

What has gotten into President Bush? I was watching his press conference on FNC today and was pleasantly surprised by his attitude and answers to the press on questions about the economy and the energy situation. For the first time in a ling time, President Bush went right after the questioners and their premises, and he made sure that he was going to be heard. I especially liked how he told the assembled media that the talk now about how drilling for American oil reserves now would only impact things in 7 years or so, that if they had taken action when he first suggested it we would be reaping the benefits now! And he followed that up by saying that it would in fact help the situation today, because it would impact the futures markets; if the speculators knew that America was about to start producing more oil it would bring prices back to earth because it introduces more supply into the market pipeline.

Listening to this I thought I would fall out of my chair! For all of the talk of Bush being stupid, ignorant, and disengaged he was at his finest today against the loyal opposition,er…assembled media (yeah, that’s it!). He also shot down the idea of opening up the strategic oil reserves; he pointed out that opening up the reserves might help some in the (very) short term; it would not do anything about the future crunch and would just cause another problem by depleting the reserves. Where has this guy been for the last 3-4 years?!

I guess that knowing that you’re pretty much done in the job can be liberating, and allow you to say what you want. Hopefully he keeps it up through the end of his term, because that presser today was must see TV!

 

There are many reasons to distrust the Democratic Party, among them their penchant for tax increases, governmental interference and growth, and their tendency to support social engineering as good policy. But the issue that gives people the most pause with the Democrats is their seeming fundamental fumbling with foreign policy. The last two Democratic administrations have presided over the loss of Iran to Islamic extremists, the loss of valuable secrets to the Communist PRC, and the complete boondoggle of building nuclear reactors in North Korea in exchange for their “abandoning” their pursuit of nuclear weapons.

This morning on Fox & Friends we were treated to another shining example of the obtuseness of Democrats in the field of foreign policy. Gov. Bill Richardson (D-NM) was being asked by host Steve Doocy about the recent Iranian missile tests and the prospects of actually sitting down and negotiating with Iranian President Ahmadenijad. In answer to the inquiries, Gov. Richardson goes into this speech about how we should negotiate with Iran, but not with their President; according to Richardson, we should be talking to the “moderate” clerics in Iran, and besides Ahmadenijad is not looking too strong in the next Iranian presidential elections!

To which I say, WTF!?! This is just the type of foolishness you can expect from Democrats in the realm of foreign affairs, and it would be funny if it weren’t so serious. In what world does Mr. Richardson live, where the presidential politics of Iran even matter? Does he not understand how things work in Iranian politics? And who are these “moderate” clerical plenipotentiaries that he expects to negotiate with?

In case Gov. Richardson doesn’t understand, there are no free elections in Iran, so their presidential elections do not matter. The President does not run anything in Iran, the Guardian’s Council does, and no one is even going to be on the ballot unless the Council allows it. And you can bet that anyone serving as President of Iran is but a mouthpiece for the Council; that person is no more independent of the Council than Quisling was independent of the Nazi Party. So worrying about upcoming Iranian presidential elections is a waste of time and energy, because whoever occupies that office is still the puppet of the Council.

As for the idea that there are “moderate” clerics for us to talk to, that is laughable. There may be some moderate clerics in Iran; as a matter of fact I am pretty sure there are some. The only thing is, they don’t sit on the Guardian’s Council, and they damned sure are not the highest cleric in the land! You can talk to a million moderate clerics, but that will not do you any good so long as the Guardian’s Council exists. They are the only group of clerics in Iran whose voices matter, and they are committed to the Islamic Revolution launched by Ayatollah Khomeini and have actively worked to export their revolution all over the region. And these are the people we are supposed to be negotiating with?

This is what makes the Democrats so dangerous in foreign policy; they see everything as analogous to our political system. You see it when they urge endless jawboning when action is urgently necessary, and you see it when a person who should know better puts his faith in a change of the President in a country ruled by a council of twelve clerics! They fail to realize that these foreign governments don’t work like ours, and mostly are not interested in working with us! Iran is not interested in negotiating with us; they are interested in our ultimate destruction and in their ascendance to the position of primary power in the Middle East. Nothing else really matters to them, and the quicker the Democrats figure that out the better off they will be. Then they can have a say in the foreign policy of the United States that makes sense, and is not diametrically opposed to our national interests.

God help us if these people get their hands back on the foreign policy apparatus of the United States, because they are a disaster waiting to happen.