More Political Humor

Below is a compilation of humorous cartoons, jokes, video and audio clips that highlight some of the issues we have talked about in the past 2 weeks.

Enjoy..............or not!

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The cannibal was walking through the jungle and came upon a restaurant operated by a fellow cannibal. Feeling somewhat hungry, he sat down and looked over the menu.

*** Tourist: $5
*** Broiled Missionary: $10.00
*** Fried Explorer: $15.00
*** Baked Democrat or Grilled Republican: $100.00

The cannibal called the waiter over and asked, 'Why such a price difference for the Politician?'

The cook replied, 'Have you ever tried to clean one? They're so full of crap, it takes all morning.'

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Some Get it, Some Don't

I was talking to a friend's little girl, and when I asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up, she said she wanted to be President some day.

Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, 'If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?'

She replied, 'I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people.'

'Wow - what a worthy goal,' I told her. 'You don't have to wait until you're President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I'll pay you $50. Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food or a new house.'

She thought that over for a few seconds because she's only 6. And while her mother glared at me, the little girl looked me straight in the eye and asked, 'Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work and you can just pay him the $50?'

And I said, 'Welcome to the Republican Party.'

Her folks still aren't talking to me.

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The following video clip highlights reasons why some are voting Democrat and although this makes fun of democrats, it occurs with both sides. This just pokes fun at some of the topics we have discussed.

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In this last audio clip from Howard Stern, we get a real sense at how educated some of our public is that will be voting this year.

http://www.bpmdeejays.com/upload/hs_sal_in_Harlem_100108.mp3

Pro Abortionist Obama

Let’s look at Barack Obama’s pro-abortion stance and see why he is referred to as the most extreme pro-abortion candidate to have ever run on a major party ticket.

There is an excellent review and summary at the following site: Public Discourse - Obama's Abortion Extremism, by Robert George

Some of the highlights in the article are that he supports legislation that would repeal the Hyde Amendment. This amendment protects pro-life citizens and their tax dollars from having to pay for abortions that are not necessary to save the life of the mother and are not the result of rape or incest.

Obama has also promised that "the first thing I'd do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act" (known as FOCA). This piece of legislation would create a federally guaranteed "fundamental right" to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, including, as Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia has noted in a statement condemning the proposed Act, "a right to abort a fully developed child in the final weeks for undefined 'health' reasons."

Obama’s voting record showed that he opposed the ban on partial-birth abortions when he served in the Illinois legislature and condemned the Supreme Court decision that upheld legislation banning this heinous practice. He has referred to a baby conceived inadvertently by a young woman as a "punishment" that she should not endure. He has stated that women's equality requires access to abortion on demand. Appallingly, he wishes to strip federal funding from pro-life crisis pregnancy centers that provide alternatives to abortion for pregnant women in need. There is certainly nothing "pro-choice" about that.

Obama, despite the urging of pro-life members of his own party, has not endorsed or offered support for the Pregnant Women Support Act, the signature bill of Democrats for Life, meant to reduce abortions by providing assistance for women facing crisis pregnancies. In fact, Obama has opposed key provisions of the Act, including providing coverage of unborn children in the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), and informed consent for women about the effects of abortion and the gestational age of their child. This legislation would not make a single abortion illegal. It simply seeks to make it easier for pregnant women to make the choice not to abort their babies. Here is a concrete test of whether Obama is "pro-choice" rather than pro-abortion. He flunked. Even Senator Edward Kennedy voted to include coverage of unborn children in S-CHIP. But Barack Obama stood resolutely with the most stalwart abortion advocates in opposing it.

In an act of breathtaking injustice which the Obama campaign lied about until critics produced documentary proof of what he had done, as an Illinois state senator Obama opposed legislation to protect children who are born alive, either as a result of an abortionist's unsuccessful effort to kill them in the womb, or by the deliberate delivery of the baby prior to viability. This legislation would not have banned any abortions. Indeed, it included a specific provision ensuring that it did not affect abortion laws. (This is one of the points Obama and his campaign lied about until they were caught.) The federal version of the bill passed unanimously in the United States Senate, winning the support of such ardent advocates of legal abortion as John Kerry and Barbara Boxer. But Barack Obama opposed it and worked to defeat it. For him, a child marked for abortion gets no protection-even ordinary medical or comfort care-even if she is born alive and entirely separated from her mother. So Obama has favored protecting what is literally a form of infanticide.

Obama has co-sponsored a bill-strongly opposed by McCain-that would authorize the large-scale industrial production of human embryos for use in biomedical research in which they would be killed. In fact, the bill Obama co-sponsored would effectively require the killing of human beings in the embryonic stage that were produced by cloning. It would make it a federal crime for a woman to save an embryo by agreeing to have the tiny developing human being implanted in her womb so that he or she could be brought to term. This "clone and kill" bill would, if enacted, bring something to America that has heretofore existed only in China-the equivalent of legally mandated abortion. In an audacious act of deceit, Obama and his co-sponsors misleadingly call this an anti-cloning bill. But it is nothing of the kind. What it bans is not cloning, but allowing the embryonic children produced by cloning to survive.

Decent people of every persuasion hold out the increasingly realistic hope of resolving the moral issue surrounding embryonic stem-cell research by developing methods to produce the exact equivalent of embryonic stem cells without using (or producing) embryos. But when a bill was introduced in the United States Senate to put a modest amount of federal money into research to develop these methods, Barack Obama was one of the few senators who opposed it. From any rational vantage point, this is unconscionable. Why would someone not wish to find a method of producing the pluripotent cells scientists want that all Americans could enthusiastically endorse? Why create and kill human embryos when there are alternatives that do not require the taking of nascent human lives? It is as if Obama is opposed to stem-cell research unless it involves killing human embryos.

Obama is a radical pro-abortion extremist with a public record supporting this conclusion. Although the media and left-wing fanatics try to portray him otherwise, the truth is clear for those who really care.

Anyone who values the life of unborn children cannot justify voting for Obama. They can rationalize their decision and their vote, but they cannot justify it based on any of the known facts.

Declaration of Dependence

I think Mark Steyn has summed up a Barak Obama presidency very succinctly in this partial commentary written recently.

A vote for a Barack Obama-Nancy Pelosi-Barney Frank-ACORN supermajority is a vote for a Europeanized domestic policy that is, as the eco-types like to say, "unsustainable."

More to the point, the only reason Belgium has gotten away with being Belgium and Sweden Sweden and Germany Germany this long is because America is America. The soft comfortable cocoon in which Western Europe has dozed this last half-century is girded by cold, hard American power. What happens when the last serious Western nation votes for the same soothing beguiling siren song as its enervated allies?

"People of the world," declared Sen. Barack Obama sonorously at his self-worship service in Germany, "look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one."

No, sorry. History proved no such thing. In the Cold War, the world did not stand as one. One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people - the Barack Obamas of the day - were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity. And the wall came down not because "the world stood as one" but because a few courageous people stood against the conventional wisdom of the day.

Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterrand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire (notwithstanding its own incompetence) would have survived and the wall would still be standing. Mr. Obama's feeble passivity will get you a big round of applause precisely because it's the easy option: Do nothing but hold hands and sing the easy listening anthems of one-worldism, and the planet will heal.

To govern is to choose. And sometimes the choices are tough ones. When has Barack Obama chosen to take a stand? When he got along to get along with the Chicago machine? When he sat for 20 years in the pews of an ugly neo-segregationist race-baiting grievance-monger? When he voted to deny the surviving "fetuses" of botched abortions medical treatment? When in his short time in national politics he racked up the most liberal - i.e., the most doctrinaire, the most orthodox, the most reflex - voting record in the Senate? Or when, on those many occasions the questions got complex and required a choice, he dodged it and voted merely "present"?

The world rarely stands as one. You can, as Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher did, stand up. Or, like Mr. Obama voting "present," you can stand down.

I think Mr. Obama will be content to be King Barack the Benign, Spreader of Wealth and Healer of Planets. His rise is, in many ways, testament to the persistence of the monarchical urge even in a two-century-old republic. So the "Now what?" questions will be answered by others, beginning with the liberal supermajority in Congress. And as he has done all his life, Mr. Obama will take the path of least resistance.

An Obama administration will pitch America toward EU domestic policy and United Nations foreign policy. Thomas Sowell is right: It would be a "point of no return," the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America. For a vigilant republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens, it would be a Declaration of Dependence.

If a majority of Americans want that, we holdouts must respect their choice. But, if you don't want it, vote accordingly.

Spread the Wealth

Yes, Obama does believe that redistribution of wealth should be the policy of the country.

This form of socialism is the most radical philosophy that any presidential candidate in recent memory has ever advocated.

Obama’s plans will eliminate the initiative and drive of individuals that have made this country great. His policies will provide more handouts to individuals who do not want to work hard, take risks, or invest in their own futures. Obama’s political philosophies will create a more dependent society that believes they are entitled to more and more without any personal responsibility.

In his own words: YouTube - Obama Bombshell Redistribution of Wealth Audio Uncovered

Obama’s comment to Joe “the plumber” was not a slip of the tongue. It was an indication of what his radical beliefs really are and the media was fortunately not able to suppress the information as they have with so many other issues.

Our country and our government should take care of those who cannot care for themselves, but this is a very small percentage of the population.

Obama is an unaccomplished socialist ideologue who has been propped up by the media elite in an effort to hide the truth.

The new Obama mantra will read:

Ask not what your country can do for you; DEMAND IT!!

Obama's character or lack thereof

In the following opinion journal of the WSJ, the author gives another example of one of Obama’s associations that he is now distancing himself from for political purposes. Obama and Acorn - WSJ.com

Choosing your friends, acquaintances, business partners etc. speaks to your character. When you continually have to distance yourself from them as Obama repeatedly has done, it says a lot about who he really is. All the fancy words and “star” treatment cannot change who he really is!

Here is the reposted opinion article:

At the recent Emmy Awards, historian Laura Linney averred that America's Founders had been "community organizers" -- like Barack Obama. Too bad they aren't like that any more. Mr. Obama's kind of organizers work at Acorn, the militant advocacy group that is turning up in reports about voter fraud across the country.

Acorn -- the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- has been around since 1970 and boasts 350,000 members. We've written about them for years, but Acorn is now getting more attention as John McCain's campaign makes an issue of the fraud reports and Acorn's ties to Mr. Obama. It's about time someone exposed this shady outfit that uses government dollars to lobby for larger government.

Acorn uses various affiliated groups to agitate for "a living wage," for "affordable housing," for "tax justice" and union and environmental goals, as well as against school choice and welfare reform. It was a major contributor to the subprime meltdown by pushing lenders to make home loans on easy terms, conducting "strikes" against banks so they'd lower credit standards.

But the organization's real genius is getting American taxpayers to foot the bill. According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), Acorn has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, Acorn's American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the Acorn Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an "affordable housing" provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to Acorn.

All this money gives Acorn the ability to pursue its other great hobby: electing liberals. Acorn is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real.

The Michigan Secretary of State told the press in September that Acorn had submitted "a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications." Earlier this month, Nevada's Democratic Secretary of State Ross Miller requested a raid on Acorn's offices, following complaints of false names and fictional addresses (including the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys). Nevada's Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said he saw rampant fraud in 2,000 to 3,000 applications Acorn submitted weekly.

Officials in Ohio are investigating voter fraud connected with Acorn, and Florida's Seminole County is withholding Acorn registrations that appear fraudulent. New Mexico, North Carolina and Missouri are looking into hundreds of dubious Acorn registrations. Wisconsin is investigating Acorn employees for, according to an election official, "making people up or registering people that were still in prison."

Then there's Lake County, Indiana, which has already found more than 2,100 bogus applications among the 5,000 Acorn dumped right before the deadline. "All the signatures looked exactly the same," said Ruthann Hoagland, of the county election board. Bridgeport, Connecticut estimates about 20% of Acorn's registrations were faulty. As of July, the city of Houston had rejected or put on hold about 40% of the 27,000 registration cards submitted by Acorn.

That's just this year. In 2004, four Acorn employees were indicted in Ohio for submitting false voter registrations. In 2005, two Colorado Acorn workers were found to have submitted false registrations. Four Acorn Missouri employees were indicted in 2006; five were found guilty in Washington state in 2007 for filling out registration forms with names from a phone book.

Which brings us to Mr. Obama, who got his start as a Chicago "community organizer" at Acorn's side. In 1992 he led voter registration efforts as the director of Project Vote, which included Acorn. This past November, he lauded Acorn's leaders for being "smack dab in the middle" of that effort. Mr. Obama also served as a lawyer for Acorn in 1995, in a case against Illinois to increase access to the polls.

During his tenure on the board of Chicago's Woods Fund, that body funneled more than $200,000 to Acorn. More recently, the Obama campaign paid $832,000 to an Acorn affiliate. The campaign initially told the Federal Election Commission this money was for "staging, sound, lighting." It later admitted the cash was to get out the vote.

The Obama campaign is now distancing itself from Acorn, claiming Mr. Obama never organized with it and has nothing to do with illegal voter registration. Yet it's disingenuous to channel cash into an operation with a history of fraud and then claim you're shocked to discover reports of fraud. As with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, Mr. Obama was happy to associate with Acorn when it suited his purposes. But now that he's on the brink of the Presidency, he wants to disavow his ties.

The Justice Department needs to treat these fraud reports as something larger than a few local violators. The question is whether Acorn is systematically subverting U.S. election law -- on the taxpayer's dime.

Australia is not afraid to point out the obvious

As we finished out this week talking about media bias, let's take a look at how one of our allies sees us and compare it to what our liberal-biased media shows.

These cartoons from Australia clearly illustrate what most of us already know but what no left-leaning individual will usually admit.

It is nice to see one of our Allies point out the obvious since our liberal biased media suppresses most of this.

The truth can be very humorous and sad all at the same time.

We are in for a very bad 4 years if Obama gets elected. The bright side (if there is one) will be that it should be a landslide victory for republicans in 4 years if this happens!

More on Media Bias

Mainstream media is biased toward the liberal democrats.

I am happy that a few reporters are willing to stand up for the truth.

A reader sent me the following link that correlates very well with today’s topic of media bias. This particular author is a hard-core democrat on most issues, but he honestly assesses this situation as reporters should.

The original link is here, but the article is reposted for convenience.

http://www.ldsmag.com/ideas/081017light.html

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card

Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:
I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.
The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay?

They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)
Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?
Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.
If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina, and is used here by permission.

The Media-Obama Connection

Yes, it’s true. The mainstream media is biased and backing Obama.

It is refreshing to see a reporter on a reputable editorial staff publish an article highlighting the issue.

It will likely be discredited and not widely published but I’ll do my part.

The original link is News Flash: The Media Back Obama - WSJ.com

Its activist role has been the single constant in this eternal election.
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

Both time and events have dimmed those defining moments that early on revealed the difference between the two presidential aspirants. Not only did the financial crisis arrive but so, in her uproarious way, did Sarah Palin. Tuesday's debate between two candidates paralyzed by caution altered nothing. It was a relief, of course, not to hear about Sen. McCain's record as a "maverick" -- a word that would, in a merciful world, be banned from public discourse for the next decade. It was too much to expect Barack Obama to spare us further recitals of the McCain-Bush connection.

The single constant in the eternal election remains the media, whose activist role no one will seriously dispute. To point out the prevailing (with honorable exceptions) double standard of reporting so favorable to Mr. Obama by now feels superfluous -- much like talking about the weather. The same holds true for all those reports pointing to Mr. Obama's heroic status outside the United States -- not to mention the cascade of press analyses warning that if he fails to win election, the cause will surely be racism.

None of this means that the media's role will go unremembered -- who will forget MSNBC news, voice of the Obama campaign? Never has a presidential election produced more fodder for the making and breaking -- or tainting -- of reputations.

The same is true of news sources making far greater claims to fairness. So it was only slightly startling to read a New York Times forecast (Sept. 22) about the presidential debate to come in which reporter Katharine Q. Seelye declared, " . . . Mr. Obama should expect Mr. McCain to question his credentials for the job at every turn -- and to distort his views, as Mr. Romney insisted he did."

That first debate brought the usual legions of commentators -- among them CNN foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour. John McCain, she pointed out, had stumbled over Ahmadinejad's name, and as he was supposed to be the expert on foreign policy, it made her giggle.

"That's not fair -- people make mistakes all the time," Anderson Cooper shot back. But Ms. Amanpour, whose capacity for sustained levels of bombast is one of the wonders of the world, was having none of it.

She would go on to raise the theme so central to the Obama campaign, and held, as revealed truth, by the politically progressive everywhere -- that the U.S., fallen low in the eyes of the world, is now in dire need of moral salvation. Everywhere she went in America, Ms. Amanpour declared, she found "desperate Americans" -- desperate, that is, about the low esteem in which the country was held, desperate to have a president who would lift America up.

Mr. Obama could not have said it better himself. He is the leading exponent of the idea that our lost nation requires rehabilitation in the eyes of the world -- and it is the most telling difference between him and Mr. McCain. When asked, in one of the earliest debates of the primary, his first priority should he become president, his answer was clear. He would go abroad immediately to make amends, and assure allies and others in the world America had alienated, that we were prepared to do all necessary to gain back their respect.

It is impossible to imagine those words coming from Mr. McCain. Mr. Obama has uttered them repeatedly one way or another and no wonder. They are in his bones, this impossible-to-conceal belief that we've lost face among the nations of the world -- presumably our moral superiors. He is here to reform the fallen America and make us worthy again of respect. It is not in him, this thoughtful, civilized academic, to grasp the identification with country that Mr. McCain has in his bones -- his knowledge that we are far from perfect, but not ready, never ready, to take up the vision of us advanced by our enemies. That identification, the understanding of its importance and of the dangers in its absence -- is the magnet that has above all else drawn voters to Mr. McCain.

Sen. Obama is not responsible for the political culture, but he is in good part its product. Which is perhaps how it happened that in his 20 years in the church of Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- passionate proponent of the view of America as the world's leading agent of evil and injustice -- he found nothing strange or alienating. To the contrary, when Rev. Wright's screeds began rolling out on televisions all over the country, Mr. Obama's first response was to mount a militant defense and charge that Rev. Wright had been taken out of context, "cut into snippets." This he continued to do until it became untenable. Then came the subject-changing speech on race. Such defining moments tell more than all the talk of Sen. Obama's association with the bomb-planting humanist, William Ayers.

These sharp differences between the candidates as to who we are as a nation may not seem, now, as potent an issue for voters as the economy, but they should not be underestimated. This clash -- not the ones on abortion or gay marriage -- are the root of the real culture war to play out in November.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

Stark Contrast

Earlier in September after McCain announced Palin as his VP pick, the candidates did something that was not well-publicized by the mainstream media.

Maybe it is because it demonstrates the stark contrast in how the candidates view life and their support for every child, both born and unborn.

You’ll remember Obama’s comments about punishing his daughter with an unwanted pregnancy.

"Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old," he said. "I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. I don't want them punished with an STD at age 16, so it doesn't make sense to not give them information."

I don’t think any of us need to wonder what Obama would do if his daughter was not only pregnant with a baby, but pregnant with a Down’s Syndrome child.

His voting record is very clear on how he values life.

Regardless of how you feel about sexual education and what should or should not be taught in schools, Obama's statement clearly demonstrates his feelings toward life and his statements reveal his true heart. His statements about "understanding" both sides of the abortion issue are certainly diminished when he makes such cold and abhorrent remarks when discussing a fellow human being and really shows he has no intention of displaying any goodwill to pro-lifers.

I’d be willing to bet that neither he nor his wife would embrace life like the following event from McCain/Palin demonstrates.

September 9, 2008

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Kurt in Pittsburgh, hello, sir. Nice to have you on the EIB Network, and how about the Steelers defense?

CALLER: How about those Steelers, huh?

RUSH: How about that?

CALLER: Hey, listen, Rush, longtime listener, first-time caller, one of those Bible, family, gun clingers from western Pennsylvania.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: And I wanted to share a story with you. A week ago last Saturday we went to the Palin-McCain rally in Washington, Pennsylvania, was the day after he announced her, and we have a five-year-old daughter with Down syndrome, and we made a sign that said: “We Love Kids with Down Syndrome.” So when they pulled in in their bus the sign did catch their, McCain and Palin and the rest of their family, it caught their eye, we could tell, they gave us a thumbs-up from the bus, so we were all excited just by that –

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait. Who gave you the thumbs up, McCain and Palin?

CALLER: McCain, Palin, Cindy McCain, we could see them from the bus. We were in a position where we had eye contact with them –

RUSH: Oh, cool!

CALLER: My wife was holding our daughter.

RUSH: Very, very, very cool.

CALLER: It was really cool, Rush. I was like, “Wow, that’s awesome,” because I love Governor Palin and so I thought that’s really neat. So then we moved around as the bus was getting ready to pull out, we kind of positioned ourselves so we could just wave them on and a Secret Service agent came up to us and said, “Hey, can you come with us?” I was like, “Do we have a choice?”

RUSH: (laughing) You shouldn’t have worried. It’s not the Clinton administration.

CALLER: Right. So we accompanied them up the hill, we went right to the bus, where it was, and Governor Palin, Senator McCain, Cindy, Todd Palin, they’re all standing there. We’re in this inner circle with just us and them, and the Secret Service agent, and they came right up to us and thanked us for coming out, said they loved our sign, and Governor Palin immediately said, “May I hold your daughter?” and our daughter Chloe, who’s five, went right to her, and I have some pictures I’d love to send you maybe when I’m done here, but Governor Palin was hugging Chloe, and then her little daughter brought their baby Trig who has Down syndrome from the bus, he was napping, and Chloe went right over and kissed him on the cheek, and my son Nolan who’s nine, he thanked her.

RUSH: This is amazing.

CALLER: I will send you all the stuff, Senator McCain was talking to my son, and we thanked him for his service, and he asked my son if he wanted to see the bus, and we were hanging out and it was very surreal. I felt like we could have had a pizza and a beer with them, they were so warm.

RUSH: You know what? I want to put you on hold. I want Snerdley to give you our super-secret, known-only-to-three-people here, e-mail address.

CALLER: I will send you everything, Rush.

RUSH: And then could you send us these pictures? Would you mind if we put them on the website?

CALLER: I would be honored, and my main thing is they are warm, kind, genuine people, and they represent the best of this country.

RUSH: That’s right. And when you send these pictures, make sure you identify them. I mean, we’ll know Palin and McCain, of course. Identify yourselves.

CALLER: I will, I will identify everybody in the picture, Rush, and God bless you for being a beacon of hope and truth in this country.

RUSH: Oh, no, no. It’s nothing, it’s nothing. You’re doing the Lord’s work.

CALLER: Well, we’re very blessed and I want people to know what a blessing it is to have a child with Down syndrome. These kids, they’re angels.

RUSH: That’s the thing. There’s always good to be found in everything that happens. It may be a while before it reveals itself.

CALLER: Absolutely.

RUSH: Right, and when she hugged my daughter I said, here’s the difference, this candidate embraces life and all its limitless possibilities.

RUSH: All right.

CALLER: That’s what she is.

RUSH: Terrific, okay, I gotta run here, but I’m going to put you on hold.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you, Kurt. I really appreciate it.

END TRANSCRIPT

Jay Post's article in Real Clear Politics

From one of my favorite web sites, here is the editorial from a couple of weeks ago and reposted here. This political race has taken many ups and downs and I firmly believe it is still very very close. Palin's appearance on SNL this past weekend certainly reinvigorated some voters as she has a way of connecting with people.

This particular piece was written by Jay Post describing Obama’s predicament. RealClearPolitics - HorseRaceBlog - Obama On His Heels

Obama On His Heels

This campaign has taken a surprising turn since the Democratic convention. Everybody is still talking about the Republican vice-presidential nominee.

Who would have predicted this just two weeks ago?

When I say everybody is talking about Governor Palin, I mean everybody. It's not just that Palin has excited the Republican base and intrigued the press corps. She's also gotten the notice of Barack Obama. The Democratic nominee has singled Palin out for criticism on earmarks in general and the "Bridge To Nowhere" in particular.

This is peculiar. Typically, a presidential nominee does not criticize his opponent's veep. This becomes doubly peculiar when we consider that just a week ago the Obama campaign indicated plans to ignore Palin altogether:

• 
  The Obama campaign has no silver bullet to use against the Palin (sic). Instead, Obama has decided to largely avoid directly engaging her and will instead keep his focus largely on John McCain and on linking the Republican ticket to President George W. Bush. The Obama campaign will leave Palin to navigate the same cycle of celebrity that Obama has weathered, and the same peril that her nascent image will be defined by questions and contradictions from her Alaska past.


The reason for the change must be what the ABC News/Washington Post poll found - a huge swing toward McCain-Palin among white women. This is a very important voting bloc, as the following chart makes clear:

The GOP improved it's showing among white men by 17 points between 1996 and 2004. Among white women it improved by 16 points. This is how an 8.5-point Republican defeat transformed into a 2.4-point Republican victory.

The ABC News poll that set tongues wagging has McCain up 12 among white women - about the same margin as the final result in 2004. I had been inclined to write those results off, as I figured a post-convention poll like that is not indicative of where the race is heading.


However, the course correction of the Obama campaign inclines me to believe that there might be something going on here. On September 4th, his campaign said that it was not planning to directly criticize Palin. On September 8th, it released an ad directly criticizing her. You don't do that kind of 180 unless something is up.

The Obama campaign's decision to attack is a risky one. Negative campaigns are always tricky, but this one is especially so. To some degree, Palin has been treated unfairly since her debut as McCain's vice-president. What the McCain campaign wants to do is tie all criticisms of Palin to the unfair ones, and ultimately remind people of how Hillary Clinton was treated. Team McCain is especially eager to do this for anything that comes out of Obama's mouth - hence the "lipstick on a pig" spot, which in turn induced a response from Obama.

We can assign winners and losers in this little skirmish; we can decide who has truth on his side and who does not. But that misses the point. Here we have yet another day when the focus is on the GOP's youthful, smiling, attractive, witty, female vice-presidential nominee. And for yet another day our ears are filled with the sounds of the Democratic nominee decrying how unfair the Republicans are - as if only one side hits below the belt.

Ultimately, I'm not a huge believer in the importance of "winning" news cycles. I do think, however, that the battle for the news cycle is an exhibition of a campaign's ability to move its message. And it has become clear that the McCain campaign is better at this. This "lipstick on a pig" incident will probably not affect a single vote - but it shows that the McCain campaign is ready and able to defend any real gains it might have made among white women. Once again, it's doing a better job getting its message across.

Nobody would have predicted this on June 3rd. That was the day Obama boldly stood in the Xcel Energy Center and proclaimed an exciting new moment in American politics. Meanwhile McCain, sweating profusely, stood in front of a green screen and gave a rambling, disjointed speech. The contrast in messages was stark. Three months later, it's just as stark - but now it's Obama that's sweating and McCain that's exciting. What a turnaround.

Sportsmen and Gun Owners for McCain

As an avid hunter and outdoorsman, this presidential election carries some very important implications for gun owners.

The reality is that a very strong showing on November 4th by the democrats could produce a veto-proof majority in the Senate. We have not seen this since the 95th Congress of 1977-79 when the democrats held 61 seats.

If this majority occurs, a Democratic president will have a very easy 4 years and a Republican president could have an extremely difficult tenure.

The key issue for sportsmen and hunting in general is who the new president will select as Secretary of the Interior, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, chief of the U.S. Forest Service, director of the National Park Service and the director of the Bureau of Land Management. The most important of these positions is the Fish and Wildlife Service Director.

Statistics released in August showed that 90 percent of sportsmen polled are registered to vote and 82 percent of these stated they vote in most every presidential election, making these individuals targets by every potential presidential candidate. In 2004, nearly 2 to 1 of these sportsmen voted for Bush over Kerry.

Data released from the FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System showed nearly 1 million checks were performed in August (which is higher than most months) indicating potential fear of restrictive gun control laws if Obama is elected.

During McCain’s 4 terms in the US Senate, he has largely voted in line with the NRA and other advocacy groups. McCain has supported the Lawful Commerce in Arms Act protecting gun makers and dealers from frivolous lawsuits, he opposed the so-called ban on assault weapons, and he opposed the Brady Act which mandated the 5-day waiting period.

As a Senator in Illinois, Obama supported a ban on all types of semiautomatic firearms, supported tighter restrictions on firearms in general, and opposed legislation that would have shielded citizens from criminal prosecution if they violated local restrictions by using a handgun for protection in their own homes. As a US Senator, Obama voted to allow firearms manufacturers and dealers to be targeted with liability lawsuits and he has continually spoken out against semiautomatic firearms. That is until this election campaign when he is now backtracking once again to garner votes. Obama has continually taken verbal jabs at semiautomatic firearms with high-capacity magazines all while stating he supports firearms for hunting and protection. Illinois remains among the most restrictive states toward gun owners.

Some of Obama’s comments include:

“I’m a believer in homeowners having a firearm to protect their home and their family. It’s hard for me to find a rationale for having a 17-clip semiautomatic.”

“I don’t hunt myself, but I respect hunters and sportsmen, but I don’t know of any self-respecting hunter that needs 19 rounds of anything. You don’t shoot 19 rounds at a deer, and if you do, you shouldn’t be hunting.”

McCain has steadfastly supported his absolute stance on the right of individuals to own all types of firearms. He has done this even in front of audiences that supported gun restrictions.

After the Virginia Tech shooting a reporter asked McCain if he supported magazine size limitations. He responded; “I don’t think that’s necessary at all” and went on to restate his position saying, “I strongly support the Second Amendment, and I believe the Second Amendment out to be preserved—which means no gun control.”

On or before the November election, Hunters and sportsmen need to ask these questions of the potential candidates:

What is the attitude toward American gun owners?

Will their attitude be friendly and receptive, grudgingly tolerant, mildly adversarial, or openly hostile?

Will he be receptive to logical counter-arguments to emotional, one-sided diatribes if and when another firearm related tragedy occurs and the agenda-driven media demands more gun control?

Regarding sportsment and gun related issues and based on his public comments, his voting record, political history, and long-standing affiliations, Senator McCain should be the overwhelming favorite of this election.

I encourage all hunters and sportsmen to think long and hard before casting a vote for Obama!

A Seasonal Love Story

A Love Story

I will seek and find you

I shall take you to bed and have my way with you

I will make you ache, shake & sweat until you moan & groan

I will make you beg for mercy, beg for me to stop

I will exhaust you to the point that you will be relieved when I'm finished with you

And, when I am finished, you will be weak for days

All my love,

Signed,

The Flu



*****Now, get your mind out of the gutter and go get your flu shot!

Video Games Improving Health

A recent study published in Pediatrics found that there may be some very beneficial uses of video games. Compliance with treatment protocols in some cancer patients has been positively influenced by the use of video games.

The game is called Re-Mission and is a product of HopeLab, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating innovative interventions for young people with chronic diseases.

Re-Mission is rated for teen use and can be obtained free from their website.

This game, Re-Mission, has been out for a couple of years, and the next product in the pipeline is Ruckus Nation, a program intended to target obesity.

How being a video slug can help someone lose weight seems counter intuitive until you understand the concept (Dancing Craze).

This interactive game has wearable motion sensors that make your virtual character come alive as you dance yourself.

Other articles related to video games and health can be seen at the following sites:
Battling Illness One Joystick at a Time.
2008 Games for Health Conference.

The 1-shot myth

Here’s another example of what the drug companies told us initially has proven to be inaccurate and this comes as no surprise to most physicians.

The Chickenpox vaccine was originally touted as a one shot deal. But it now looks like chicken pox cannot be tamed in one shot.

After reviewing ten years of data on more than 11,000 recipients of the vaccine, researchers have discovered that the immunization actually fades over time.

Most physicians were skeptical from the beginning and voiced our concern that by giving the shot to young kids, it would wear off during adolescence when we know the risk of complications from chickenpox is far worse.

So now they found that 9.5% of the individuals experienced “breakthrough disease,” as reported by the New England Journal of Medicine last year.

Although the breakthrough cases were typically milder, a booster shot will likely be recommended by most acadamies.

The US Centers for Disease Control has already recommended that children 12 and under receive two doses of the vaccine.

Children 13 years of age and even adults who have not had the disease can be given two doses four to eight weeks apart.

The Prostate Controversy

Another new controversy in medicine has reared its head. Is PSA screening for prostate cancer really worth it?

Prostate cancer is diagnosed in more than 218,000 U.S. men of which about 28,000 die of it.

This makes it the most common cancer and second-leading cancer killer among men.

In a new report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine the results conclude that the testing leads to so much unnecessary anxiety, surgery and complications that doctors should stop testing elderly men

A panel that sets government policy on preventive medicine said that the evidence that the test reduces the cancer's death toll is too uncertain to endorse routine use for men at any age, and that the potential harm clearly outweighs any benefits for men age 75 and older.

This 16-member U.S. Preventive Services Task Force published the new guidelines and felt with sufficient certainty that the risk of being harmed exceeded the potential benefits starting at age 75

More and more studies are confirming that just doing more tests, using more drugs and performing more procedures is only driving up health-care costs and exposing patients to the risks of unneeded treatment.

The thought process in the United States that more is always better, and if a test is available we should use it, is being questioned.

This recent guideline is very contentious but is being praised by the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society while being criticized by several Urological groups and physicians.

Because it is not clear precisely what PSA level signals the presence of cancer, many men experience stressful false alarms that lead to unnecessary procedures and surgical biopsies to make a definitive diagnosis?

Since the task force issued its previous recommendations in 2002, at least eight new studies have been published and among them was a large Swedish review that found that men age 65 and older who were treated for prostate cancer were no more likely to survive than those who were not.

Other studies have noted that prostate cancer death rates have plummeted in many countries after they instituted widespread PSA screening.

Setting an age cutoff remains controversial among many groups and patients should be evaluated individually; but insurance companies need some guidelines to avoid paying.

Two large studies are underway in the United States and in Europe to answer the question of whether screening reduces mortality.

Until then, the controversy lingers on and hospitals such as Floyd that offers the free yearly screening with more than 800 participants will have to make their own decision.

Changes in Licensing

Each state institutes its own rules for medical licensing. Recently, Indiana has made some notable changes.

Applicants now may have a maximum of only three attempts to pass each step of the exam, rather than the five previously. However, the Board did change from seven to ten the number of years applicants have to attain a passing score.

After bringing together the Medical Licensing Board (MLB), ISMA and the IU School of Medicine, the consensus of the interested parties was that three attempts at each step of the USMLE were adequate.

The switch from seven to 10 years was done to show the Board's understanding of life situations that may cause a qualified applicant to postpone completion of all three steps.

The parties felt that by having the rule set at seven years, more qualified physicians were excluded from licensure than any under-qualified physicians being prevented from practicing in Indiana – which was the intent of the rule.

So from now on, three strikes and you’re out.

Evolution of the Liberal

As another funny Friday rolls around, I found the following evolutionary article sent to me quite humorous.

Maybe Evolution does have some validity!

EVOLUTION:
Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in the winter.
The two most important events in all of history were:

1. The invention of beer, and
2. The invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer, and the beer to the man.

These facts formed the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups:
1. Liberals.
2. Conservatives.

Once beer was discovered, it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That's how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to BBQ at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement.

Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live off the conservatives by showing up for the nightly BBQ's and doing the sewing, fetching, and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement.

Some of these liberal men eventually evolved into women. The rest became known as girlie-men.

Some noteworthy liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, the invention of group therapy and group hugs, the evolution of the Hollywood actor, and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide all the meat and beer that conservatives provided.

Over the years, Conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass.

Modern liberals like imported beer (with lime added), but most prefer white wine or imported bottled water. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu, and French food are standard liberal fare. Another interesting evolutionary side note: most of liberal women have higher testosterone levels than their men. Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are liberals. Liberals invented the designated hitter rule because it wasn't fair to make the pitcher also bat.

Conservatives drink domestic beer. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, athletes, Marines, and generally anyone who works productively. Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.

Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to govern the producers and decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the liberals remained in Europe when conservatives were coming to America. They crept in after the Wild West was tamed and created a business of trying to get more for nothing.

Here ends today's lesson in world history.......

It should be noted that a liberal may have a momentary urge to angrily respond to the above before forwarding it.

A conservative will simply laugh and be so convinced of the absolute truth of this history that it will be forwarded immediately to others

Another Obama Viewpoint

Here is another writer pointing out some “inconsistencies” noted in the Obama campaign and his actions. It can be found at this site Mother, May I Sleep with Treacher?: Barack Obama: Jerk? and is also referenced in this editorial: Best of the Web Today - WSJ.com

Barack Obama: Jerk?

My initial reaction to Bacongate was, "Well, it's just another gaffe. Obama couldn't possibly be dumb and mean enough to call Palin a pig." Yeah, she mocked him during her convention speech, but it was all about his record (or lack thereof) and soaring rhetoric. Which isn't nice, perhaps, but that stuff is fair game in a political campaign. Could he really be so thin-skinned and self-serious that he'd start hitting back with personal insults?

At first I thought it was a mistake for the McCain camp to demand an apology. As I told my close personal friend Glenn Reynolds, I thought they should have said something like:
"We're pleasantly surprised by Senator Obama's newfound sense of humor, and look forward to watching it develop over the coming weeks and months."

You know, rise above it, while still reminding everybody that Obama is a stiff, humorless, gaffe-prone scold.

But now I'm having second thoughts. I think he meant exactly what the crowd obviously thought he meant, because it fits a clear pattern of behavior.

Putting aside the astonishing smear campaign against Palin, which is definitely not grassroots, just look at some of Obama's past antics. In no particular order:

What was the Obama camp's initial reaction to Palin's announcement?

"Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency. Governor Palin shares John McCain's commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush's failed economic policies -- that's not the change we need, it's just more of the same." Yeowtch! And her palmprints on the podium were still warm. (Quite a contrast to McCain's ad, less than 24 hours earlier, congratulating Obama on his achievement.) But then, later that same day, Obama walked it back:

"I think that... campaigns start getting these hair triggers and the statement that Joe and I put out reflects our sentiments," he said, according to the pool report, apparently criticizing his staff for going overboard, as he did occasionally in the primary.

So he's not the hostile, panicky jackass. It was his staff's fault. Yes We Can... Pass the Buck!

Speaking of McCain's congratulatory ad, which as far as I know is unprecedented, how did Obama return the gesture? By finally going on The O'Reilly Factor, after months of begging by O'Reilly, on the night of McCain's speech. Your opponent goes out of his way to show some class on your big day, and you thank him by trying to steal his thunder?

After Bill Clinton, ahem, swallowed his pride and endorsed Obama at the DNC, what song did they play afterward? "Addicted to Love." Classy!

During a campaign event last April, Obama emphasized a point about Hillary by scratching his cheek. With his middle finger. Innocent, offhand gesture? I thought so at first. Now I'm not so sure.

The "dirt off your shoulder" thing. At first I thought it was funny, and I like that Jay-Z song, but in retrospect the gesture seems -- much like Jay-Z -- arrogant and deeply unpleasant. And based on what we've seen from Obama over the past week, it's obviously delusional. Not only can't he brush the dirt off his shoulders, but he's piling even more on them as he digs this deep, deep hole.

And to go beyond mere jerkiness: What's up with putting out an "Obama Action Wire" to try to shut down a Chicago radio station for talking about his ties with William Ayers? If Ayers is just a guy in Obama's neighborhood, why launch thousands of phone calls and e-mails at the station, all spouting the same talking points? You can download an MP3 of the show in question here. It's one thing for MoveOn or Kos or Media Matters (at the risk of redundancy) to do that kind of crap, but this came from the official campaign site. Does it bother anybody else that a presidential candidate is openly trying to stifle dissent? Doesn't Obama know that as president, he would be criticized every minute of every day? Does he plan to shout them all down?

But hey, I could be wrong. These could all be coincidences and/or innocent mistakes. Maybe it's everybody else's fault. Maybe he isn't really throwing rocks and hiding his hand.

P.S. And before you start? In the words of the immortal Harvey Keitel: "I didn't make a statement. I asked a question."

P.P.S. A couple of other examples people have pointed out: Obama ignored the fact that Palin is the governor of Alaska and called Wasilla "Wasilly" (which was what triggered her "community organizer" comeback, which in turn apparently triggered his ongoing meltdown), and he called that female reporter "sweetie." Again, those both can be passed off as innocent mistakes until you fit them into this pattern of behavior. I guess for his fans, it doesn't count as rude, immature behavior as long as he has a serious look on his face.

P.P.P.S. Mocking McCain's war injuries and alienating everybody older than Obama would certainly qualify. Either it's on purpose, which goes way, way beyond jerkiness, or they didn't do a simple Google search to learn why McCain has trouble using a computer keyboard, which means they're panicky idiots.

Posted by Jim Treacher at September 10, 2008 01:35 PM

More Obama Scandal

Andrew McCarthy posted an article on National Review Online The Corner on National Review Online and refers to the original article posted in NewsMax Newsmax.com – Secret, Foreign Money Floods Into Obama Campaign by Ken Timmerman concerning the apparent illegal campaign contributions to the Obama campaign.

The contributions that are in question can be verified on a search of the Federal Election Commission website. Presidential Campaign Finance

None of these apparent illegal activities should surprise anyone as Obama’s character and his associations have always been questionable and he continually has to distance himself from some of his closet friends because of their radical statements, actions, and backgrounds.

Corruption, scandal, radical left-wing ideas is what comes with a vote for Obama.

That is not a change we need.

The Democratic Blame Game

As I have stated before, there is enough blame to go around for all those in congress, but it is frustrating when the Democrats continually point fingers at Republicans for the current financial turmoil. Luckily in this internet age, we have factual evidence that shows the Democrats should carry more of the blame.

Nancy Pelosi’s grandstanding on the House Floor last week as she blamed Republicans for the financial turmoil and accused them of refusing to allow regulation was more likely a calculated way to shift the blame and attention away from where it should lie.

In this eight-minute video on YouTube the facts are obvious about which party wanted changes and which party did not.

In 2004 Chairman Rep. Richard Baker (R-La.) predicted the collapse of Fannie Mae if nothing was done and he called for more regulation, something Democrats claim Republicans never wanted.

The leftist York Times also got it wrong when it accused Republicans of engaging in “free markets-above-all ideology” as President Bush had called for more oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in his first year as president.

You will hear Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) state; “We do not have a crisis at Fannie Mae and in particular Freddie Mac under the outstanding leadership of Frank Raines.”

And you do recall that it was Raines (Obama's Economic Advisor) who took close to $100 million in “compensation” from Fannie Mae during his tenure as its chief executive officer.

Then in 2004, Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) called the investigation that found illegal activity at Fannie Mae a “lynching,” referring particularly to the fact that both Clay and Raines are African American. Talk about “race-baiting”!

The democrats who wanted this rescue bill rushed through congress were likely doing it in an effort to cover up the multitude of wrong decisions they have made which contributed to the crisis.

Even the statement from Bill Clinton on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Sept. 25 indicated the problems with the Democratic Party. Clinton said, “I think the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress, or by me when I was president, to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

Barney Frank is another worthless Democrat who was pegged perfectly by the The Wall Street Journal when they correctly noted in a Sept. 10 editorial, “[Frank’s] record is close to perfect as a stalwart opponent of reforming the two companies, going back more than a decade. The first concerted push to rein in Fan and Fred in Congress came as far back as 1992, and Mr. Frank was right there, standing athwart. But things really picked up this decade, and Barney was there at every turn.”
The Democrats should be carrying a lot of the responsibility for this mess as they continually were the opponents to reform all while being there for the handouts and big payments. Help for the little guys has never been their objective.

Personal responsibility is not in their vocabulary!

Oabama's past is very worrisome

Here is another lengthy but well layed out commentary on Obama. The ability of Obama to work cooperatively with both parties is certainly not indicated in his past.

The original Op-ed is at this link but reposted here.
Obama's Leftism - WSJ.com

His inexperience as well as his radical left viewpoints is not a change we need.

The Democratic nominee is nowhere near as moderate as he sounds.
By JOSHUA MURAVCHIK

Introducing himself to the nation at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama spoke not only of his black father, "born and raised in a small village in Kenya," but of his white mother, "born in a town ….in Kansas" to a father who "worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression" before enlisting in military service "the day after Pearl Harbor." What brought them together was "a magical place, America," he said, adding, "I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage ….. knowing that …... in no other country on earth, is my story even possible."

Not only was Mr. Obama the real, living embodiment of America's racial diversity. He was a dazzling presence, outshining the party's nominee with his look, stage presence, oratorical mastery and the brilliance of his rhetoric. Nor was that all. This avatar of reconciliation talked of transcending divisions not just racial but political and ideological. He spoke lovingly of country and movingly of God and family in a way that had eluded the Democrats since their sharp turn to the Left when the party nominated George McGovern in 1972.

In the speech's highlight, Mr. Obama said:

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. ….. We worship an "awesome God" in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Four years later, Mr. Obama is the Democratic nominee, and even his occasional shrill attacks on his opponent seem to have chipped away little of the cornerstone of his own candidacy: the promise to bring us, all of us, together. Can he do that? Is he well-suited to raise the curtain on a new postpartisan, postideological era?

From his record in office, it would hardly seem so. Nonpartisanship does not just mean Democrats coaching Little League, lovely as that is, but cooperating with members of the other party in developing compromise solutions to national problems. The Senate has a particularly rich tradition of such bipartisanship, but Mr. Obama appears never to have participated in it. On the contrary: according to Congressional Quarterly, which measures how often each member votes in accordance with or at variance from the majority of his own party, Mr. Obama has compiled one of the most partisan of all voting records.

Last year, for example, the average Senator voted with his own party 84% of the time; Mr. Obama voted with his party 96% of the time. In the prior two years, his number was 95%, making him the fourth most partisan member of the Senate. And not just partisan, but also highly ideological. In 2007, according to the National Journal, Mr. Obama's voting record made him "the most liberal Senator." Throughout his Senate career, according to Americans for Democratic Action, the dean of liberal advocacy groups, Mr. Obama voted "right" 90% of the time. Actually this is misleading, since ADA counts an absence as if it were a vote on the "wrong" side. If we discount his absences, Mr. Obama voted to ADA's approval more than 98% of the time.

This touches directly on the question of what, beyond the platitudes of unity, hope and change, Mr. Obama himself believes in. His voting record is one indication. Another is his intellectual evolution.
* * *
Abandoned by his father when he was still too young to remember him and then sent at age 10 by his mother to live in Hawaii with her parents, who enrolled him in a prestigious prep school, Mr. Obama spent much of his teen years searching for his black identity. Late in his high-school career he found a mentor of sorts in Frank Marshall Davis, an older black poet. According to Herbert Romerstein, former minority chief investigator of the House Committee on Internal Security, FBI files reveal Davis to have been a member of the Communist Party not only in its public phase but also when it officially dissolved and went underground in the 1950s.

According to Mr. Obama, Davis told him that a white person "can't know" a black person, and that the "real price of admission" to college was "leaving your race at the door." Perhaps influenced by this, he reports that at college, "to avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets."

Despite Mr. Obama's tone of self-mockery, the passage discloses the milieu in which he immersed himself. In this light, it is not surprising that, upon graduation, he decided on a career as a "community organizer," even if it was none too clear to him what exactly that meant. As he confesses in his early memoir "Dreams from My Father" (1995):

When classmates ….. asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly. Instead I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House. ….. Change in the Congress. ….. Change in the mood of the country. ….. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. ….. I'll organize black folks.

Thanks to a grant from a left-wing foundation, he was hired by a small group of white protégés of Saul Alinsky, the original apostle of "community organizing." Alinsky's institutional base was the Industrial Areas Foundation, which he called a "school for professional radicals" and whose goal he announced to be "revolution, not revelation." As Mr. Obama himself would put it, there were "two roles that an organizer was supposed to play ….. getting the Stop sign [and] the educative function. At some point you have to link up winning that Stop sign ….. with the larger trends, larger movements." In other words, "community organizer," to Mr. Obama and his colleagues and mentors, was a euphemism for professional radical.

It was in the course of trying to mobilize churches for political protest that Mr. Obama met Jeremiah Wright. When the controversy surrounding the pastor arose this year, Mr. Obama denied being present when Mr. Wright delivered his most incendiary sermons, commenting that he was like "an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don't agree with." But this was evasive. By Mr. Obama's own testimony, the reason other ministers directed him to Mr. Wright was that Mr. Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ was steeped in politics.

Thus, Mr. Obama writes that Mr. Wright had "dabbl[ed] with liquor, Islam, and black nationalism" before returning to Christianity and studying, among other things, "the black liberation theologians." Whoever and however many these theologians may have been, Mr. Wright invoked only one on the church's Web site. "The vision statement of Trinity United Church of Christ," in Wright's words, was "based upon the systematized liberation theology that started in 1969 with the publication of Dr. James Cone's book, Black Power and Black Theology."

What was that theology? Here are two tiny snippets of Cone's thought: "Christianity and whiteness are opposites," and "there will be no peace in America until whites begin to hate their whiteness." In addition to a cross superimposed on a map of Africa, the Web site declares: "We are an African people, and remain 'true to our native land,' the mother continent, the cradle of civilization." It defines Trinity as, among other things, "a congregation committed to the historical education of African people in diaspora, a congregation committed to liberation." When Mr. Obama joined the church in the 1980s, it did not yet have a Web site, but he tells of a brochure that, while condoning the pursuit of income, warned congregants against the "psychological entrapment of black 'middleclassness.' " The liberationist music was playing back then, too.

At Trinity, Mr. Obama attempted to enlist Mr. Wright in his protest campaign, and the pastor sought to recruit Mr. Obama to the church. Evidently both succeeded, though at the time Mr. Obama says he was so far from religion that he "could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly." But when he began to participate in Trinity's services, he discovered he was not unique in his ambivalence. Of the other congregants, he would observe:

Not all of what these people sought was strictly religious. ….. It occurred to me that Trinity, with its African themes, its emphasis on black history, [was] a redistributor of values and circulator of ideas. Only now the redistribution didn't run in just a single direction from the schoolteacher or the physician ….. to …... the sharecropper or the young man fresh from the South. ….. The flow of culture now ran in reverse as well, the former gang-banger, the teenage mother, had their own forms of validation—claims of greater deprivation, and hence authenticity.

The first time Mr. Obama attended services at Trinity, Mr. Wright delivered a sermon (it was titled "The Audacity of Hope") whose theme was: "white folks' greed runs a world in need." Twenty years later, when it was revealed that Mr. Wright's church had honored Louis Farrakhan, that Mr. Wright had traveled with Mr. Farrakhan to visit the Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi, and that in his sermons Mr. Wright had beseeched God to "damn America," charged the U.S. government with inventing the AIDS virus in order to kill black people, and claimed that Israel and South Africa had colluded to invent an "ethnic bomb" to kill blacks and Arabs while leaving whites unharmed—when all this was revealed, Mr. Obama, under pressure from the Hillary Clinton campaign, declared himself "shocked" at Mr. Wright's vitriol. But in truth not only was he aware of Mr. Wright's views, they were what had drawn him to Trinity church in the first place.

* * *

Mr. Obama left Chicago after three years to attend Harvard Law School. As he would explain, "I had things to learn…..., things that would help me bring about real change." After graduating with honors in 1991, he returned to the Windy City to join the small law firm of Judson Miner, an activist who had been attorney to Mayor Harold Washington.

Within three years of his return, he also became deeply involved with Bill Ayers, a former leader of the so-called Weather Underground. This leftist terrorist group, akin to the German Baader-Meinhof gang or the Italian Red Brigades, specialized in bombing government buildings. Ayers later wrote boastfully that he had personally carried out an attack on the Pentagon. Ayers's wife and closest collaborator was Bernardine Dohrn, whose views were so extreme that they seemed to cross a line from ultraleftism to Satanism. At a meeting of the Weather Underground, she hailed the murders then recently committed by Charles Manson's demented followers. "Dig it, first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach!" she exulted, giving a three-fingered salute to signify a fork.

After the pair emerged from hiding in 1980, a court dismissed the main charges against Ayers on the grounds that the government had used an illegal wiretap. He pleaded guilty to possessing explosives, but served no time. The net outcome inspired him to gloat that he was "guilty as hell and free as a bird." Dohrn served seven months. Then they both went respectable, but without changing their views. Ayers posed for a picture stomping on an American flag, and in 2001 he told the New York Times: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."

The details of Mr. Obama's association with Ayers remain somewhat shrouded because both Ayers and Dohrn have refused to discuss it, while Mr. Obama and his spokesmen have prevaricated about it. When, during one of the televised primary debates, George Stephanopoulos asked about his connection to Ayers, Mr. Obama replied:

This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know, and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense.

Later, Mr. Obama's campaign manager, David Axelrod, added: "Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school." If this is true, Ayers's children must be slow learners, since they are 31 and 28, while Mr. Obama's are 9 and 6. But Mr. Obama's own reply, though less bald-faced than Mr. Axelrod's, was thoroughly disingenuous. Thanks to the meticulous investigations of the left-leaning blogger Steven Diamond (globallabor.blogspot.com), the story of Mr. Obama and Ayers's collaboration has been seeping into the public record despite extraordinary efforts to seal it.

After escaping punishment for his crimes, Ayers received degrees in education and became an advocate of school reform in Chicago. In particular, he propounded a "radical" project in the late 1980s that was inspired by New York City's disastrous experiment decades earlier in "community control." Ayers's project was championed by a coalition called the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, or ABC's; according to Mr. Diamond, one member of the "alliance" was the Developing Communities Project, the group for which Mr. Obama worked as an organizer. If so, then it is likely that the two met back then, since the DCP was a tiny organization and Mr. Obama was most likely its representative.

In any event, in 1994, when the philanthropist Walter Annenberg put up $500 million to help the nation's public schools, Ayers submitted a grant proposal that secured $50 million for an entity called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The word "challenge" signified that the recipients were required to find double the amount in matching funds; this they did, disposing altogether of some $160 million.

The ostensible purpose of the project was to reinvigorate Chicago's flagging decentralization project. Ayers devised a structure made up of three connected elements, of which the main two were the Collaborative, or operational center, and the Board, with overall financial control. Ayers named himself to head the Collaborative; Barack Obama, apparently by Ayers's choice, became chairman of the Board.

So it is conceivable that the two met as late as 1994, but this hardly seems likely. Would anyone yield control of the purse to someone he did not already know well and trust thoroughly? And what exactly were Mr. Obama's credentials in the field of school reform, unless he had been active in the ABC's with Ayers in the 1980's? At the very latest, the two must have met sometime after Mr. Obama returned from Harvard in late 1991 or early 1992, well before he was chosen to chair the board in 1995.

For the next four to five years, the two worked together to raise the matching funds and disburse small grants to local organizations pushing the reform program. It could only have been an intimate partnership. When Mr. Obama decided to run for the state senate, his first fund-raising event was held in the home of Ayers and Dohrn. In 1997, Ayers published a book about juvenile justice, "A Kind and Just Parent," which Mr. Obama blurbed as "a searing and timely account." The two also served together on the board of the leftist Woods Fund from 1998 until 2001.

This is what is now public about the relations between Mr. Obama and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. There may be much more, so far successfully hidden by all concerned; but even these facts suggest that Ayers was among Mr. Obama's closest collaborators.

* * *

Mr. Obama's turn to electoral politics signified no change in his basic ideological orientation. As his wife, Michelle, put it: "Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He's a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change." ("I take that observation as a compliment," Mr. Obama said as late as 2005.)

Mr. Obama's target was a legislative seat held by Alice Palmer, who had decided to make a run for the U.S. Congress. She introduced Mr. Obama in Democratic Party circles as her anointed successor. (After a later falling-out, the two would dispute whether her support had amounted to a formal endorsement or merely, as she claimed, "an informal nod.") Like others among his mentors or patrons, Ms. Palmer, too, was a radical, a member of the executive body of the U.S. Peace Council, the least disguised of Soviet front organizations. She had made multiple pilgrimages to the Soviet Union, and in 1986 attended the 27th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, telling the party paper on her return that the Soviets "plan to provide people with higher wages and better education, health and transportation, while we in our country are hearing that cutbacks are necessary in all of these areas." According to a later story in the same paper, Ms. Palmer visited Moscow again the following year to attend the World Congress of Women sponsored by another Soviet front organization.

In his campaign for the Illinois senate, Mr. Obama was endorsed by the New Party, a coalition of socialists, Communists and other leftists. According to the newsletter of the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, whose members were said to constitute 15 percent of the Chicago New Party, "Once approved, candidates must sign a contract with the NP [which] mandates that they must have a visible and active relationship with the NP." Apparently, Mr. Obama signed such a pledge. After winning the primary (unopposed because his lawyers had succeeded in knocking all three opponents off the ballot), he appeared at a New Party membership meeting to voice his thanks.

Entering the national political scene eight years later, Mr. Obama did not, to be sure, appear as a radical, but he still bore the earmarks of the world in which he had been immersed for 20 years. He called himself "progressive," a term of art favored by veterans of the hard New Left, like Tom Hayden, as well as by old-time Communists. Early this year his wife, Michelle, lacking his tact, would kindle controversy by saying that his success in the presidential primaries made her feel proud of her country for the first time. The comment, a faux pas that she was soon at pains to explain away, flowed logically from her view, expressed in her standard stump speech, that our country is a "downright mean" place, "guided by fear," where the "life . . . that most people are living has gotten progressively worse."

This year, Mr. Obama appeared before the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network (whose official slogan is "no justice, no peace") to seek its support. The candidate praised Mr. Sharpton as "a voice for the voiceless and ….. dispossessed. What National Action Network has done is so important to change America, and it must be changed from the bottom up." Given Mr. Sharpton's long career of reckless racial demagogy, it might seem shocking that a mainstream candidate should be seeking his blessing, but in this, at least, Mr. Obama was not unique: all of the 2008 Democratic aspirants did so. He did, though, strive to separate himself from the pack:

If there is somebody who has been more on the forefront on behalf of the issues that you care about and has more concrete accomplishment on behalf of the things you're concerned about, then I am happy to see you endorse them. I am happy to see you support them. . . . But I am absolutely confident that you will not find that, because there is nobody who has stood fast on these issues more consistently each and every day, than I have. That is something that I know.

As it happened, Mr. Sharpton, a consummate wheeler-dealer, kept his options open for a while. But other radicals, soft and hard, rushed to embrace Mr. Obama, often waxing rapturous in their support. Robert Borosage and Katrina vanden Heuvel enthused in The Nation that Mr. Obama's was "a historic candidacy," from which "new possibilities will be born." Michael Lerner wrote in Tikkun that the "energy, hopefulness, and excitement that manifests [sic] in Obama's campaign" was reminiscent of "the civil-rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement, and the movement for gay liberation." Most remarkably, Tom Hayden himself joined the chorus by breaking a New Left taboo against "red-baiting" and laying bare some of Hillary Clinton's own far-left history—this, in retaliation for the Clinton campaign's revelations about Mr. Obama's radical background.

* * *

Even after declaring his candidacy, and despite a certain inevitable sidling rightward, Mr. Obama still reflected the presuppositions of a radical worldview. In one notable remark, he said of voters in economic distress that in their desperation they "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." Chastised for his condescension, he responded: "I said something that everybody knows is true." This was elitism of a very specific kind—the mentality of the community organizer, according to which people in the grip of "false consciousness" need to be enlightened as to the true nature of their class interests, and to the nature of their true class enemies.

The same suppositions are again evident in Mr. Obama's stances on international issues. Iraq, as he sees it, is only a symptom. "I don't want to just end the war . . . I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place." And what would that mindset be? In a 2002 speech that he frequently cites, he said the war resulted from

the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors . . . to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne ….. the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income ….. the arms merchants in our own country ….. feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.

In this litany of global perfidy, the issues of Saddam Hussein's murderous dictatorship, of American security, of the future of freedom, shrink to inconsequentiality next to the struggle of the oppressed against their American capitalist overlords.

When it comes to Iran, Mr. Obama has acknowledged that the regime presents a problem. But his actions—he opposed the Kyl-Lieberman amendment designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization—as well as his rhetoric imply that the greater danger emanates from George W. Bush (who is allegedly seeking "any justification to extend the Iraq war or to attack Iran"). Likewise on defeating terrorism, where he rejects the America-centric focus that Bush has given to the issue; instead, in the words of his aides, Obama's main goal is to "restore ….. our moral standing"—that is, to put an end to our aggressive ways.

Even the events of 9/11 could not shake Mr. Obama from the mindset that the enemy is always ourselves. The bombings, he wrote, reflected the underlying struggle—between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together; and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us.

In this reading, the lessons to be learned from the actions of Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta are that we must accept multiculturalism at home and share our wealth abroad.

* * *

In sum, Mr. Obama comes to us from a background farther to the left than any presidential nominee since George McGovern, or perhaps ever. This makes him an extremely unlikely leader to bridge the divides of party, ideology or, for that matter, race. If he loses, it will be for that reason (though many will no doubt adduce different explanations, including of course white racism, to which every GOP victory since Nixon's election in 1968 has been attributed).

And if he wins? Without a doubt, it will be a thrilling moment. But the enduring importance of that landmark event will depend on the subsequent effectiveness of his presidency. If his tenure—like that of, say, Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter—should end by inviting scorn, then it may open as many wounds as it heals. On the other hand, it is not unimaginable that he may rise to the challenge of the office and govern from the center, as he will have to do to succeed. This, however, would truly involve reinventing himself, a task for which his intellectual and ideological background furnishes few materials.

With his sharply partisan speech to the Democratic national convention in late August, Mr. Obama appeared to zag to the left after months of zigging toward the center in hopes of winning over independent voters, which had stirred cries of alarm among some of his leftist supporters. Others among them, however, were and are nothing fazed. As The Nation's Robert Dreyfuss explained, they "put their faith in the Senator's character and innate instincts." Heaven help us, they are probably right.

Mr. Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This article appears in the October issue of Commentary.