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How is Obama going to bring down costs for workers and businesses?
One thing he COULD do ( but won't ) is cut corporate income taxes- the highest in the world
A Living Lie
By Thomas Sowell
An e-mail from a reader said that, while Hillary Clinton tells lies, Barack Obama is himself a lie. That is becoming painfully apparent with each new revelation of how drastically his carefully crafted image this election year contrasts with what he has actually been saying and doing for many years.
Senator Obama's election year image is that of a man who can bring the country together, overcoming differences of party or race, as well as solving our international problems by talking with Iran and other countries with which we are at odds, and performing other miscellaneous miracles as needed.
There is, of course, not a speck of evidence that Obama has ever transcended party differences in the United States Senate. Voting records analyzed by the National Journal show him to be the farthest left of anyone in the Senate. Nor has he sponsored any significant bipartisan legislation -- nor any other significant legislation, for that matter.
Senator Obama is all talk -- glib talk, exciting talk, confident talk, but still just talk.
Some of his recent talk in San Francisco has stirred up controversy because it revealed yet another blatant contradiction between Barack Obama's public image and his reality.
Speaking privately to supporters in heavily left-liberal San Francisco, Obama let down his hair and described working class people in Pennsylvania as so "bitter" that they "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them."
Like so much that Obama has said and done over the years, this is standard stuff on the far left, where guns and religion are regarded as signs of psychological dysfunction -- and where opinions different from those of the left are ascribed to emotions ("bitter" in this case), rather than to arguments that need to be answered.
Like so many others on the left, Obama rejects "stereotypes" when they are stereotypes he doesn't like but blithely throws around his own stereotypes about "a typical white person" or "bitter" gun-toting, religious and racist working class people.
In politics, the clearer a statement is, the more certain it is to be followed by a "clarification," when people react adversely to what was plainly said.
Obama and his supporters were still busy "clarifying" Jeremiah Wright's very plain statements when it suddenly became necessary to "clarify" Senator Obama's own statements in San Francisco.
People who have been cheering whistle-blowers for years have suddenly denounced the person who blew the whistle on what Obama said in private that is so contradictory to what he has been saying in public.
However inconsistent Obama's words, his behavior has been remarkably consistent over the years. He has sought out and joined with the radical, anti-Western left, whether Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers of the terrorist Weatherman underground or pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli Rashid Khalidi.
Obama is also part of a long tradition on the left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the left, but having disdain or contempt for them as human beings.
Karl Marx said, "The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing." In other words, they mattered only in so far as they were willing to carry out the Marxist agenda.
Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the "detestable" people who "have no right to live." He added: "I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves."
Similar statements on the left go back as far as Rousseau in the 18th century and come forward into our own times.
It is understandable that young people are so strongly attracted to Obama. Youth is another name for inexperience -- and experience is what is most needed when dealing with skillful and charismatic demagogues.
Those of us old enough to have seen the type again and again over the years can no longer find them exciting. Instead, they are as tedious as they are dangerous.
Dave S. confesses to bitter religionism:
Well, I do go a-churchin’ every Sunday with a bunch of bitter folks who complain about how the government is evil and screws them over, and we yell an’ whoop it up when the preacher rails against them Italians and Jews, an’ then we …
Oops, wait a minute, that’s not me, that’s Barack Obam
Tom Vilsack - in the Clinton campaign's press release - claimed Hillary Clinton had an "understanding" of people in rural communities like Scranton, PA, because she had summered near them.
I think it's one of the reasons why they have been gravitating in small communities in rural areas across this country to Hillary Clinton, in part, because of her understanding of those who live in small towns. Her summers in Scranton helped to form her belief and understanding of folks who work hard and play by the rules.
Hillary Clinton summered throughout her childhood at her family's "cabin on Lake Winola, about 12 miles north of [Scranton]," where she "rode horses". She was just like one of the people! "Except", as one local pointed out, "they had a cabin up at the lake."
I'm not sure why the Clinton campaign thinks it is a good idea to argue that Hillary Clinton understands The People because she sometimes summered near them.
In any event, they probably won't want to mention that Hillary didn't really like going to the Scranton area that much and her Dad had to bribe her to go with a "shopping spree" at Fifth Avenue in New York City...
"As Hillary and her mother increasingly expressed mixed feelings about the prospect of another Lake Winona vacation, their objections were met with Hugh's promises of a shopping spree somewhere on the return trip.... After one summer holiday in Pennsylvania, Hugh drove to Fifth Avenue in New York and told [Clinton and her mother] they could buy whatever they wanted before the stores closed at five o'clock. Mother and daughter had only twenty-five minutes so they took off their shoes and ran."
Ahhh, so now that your boy Obama is feeding at the Abramoff trough, it's all good
Typical liberal ethics
Hey Peggy, you were pimping the Abramoff scandal constantly.
How do you feel about your boy schmoozing them for big money?
Obama takes six figures from Abramoff firm
posted at 11:04 am on April 14, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Barack Obama has pledged to end the influence of lobbyists, but that doesn’t keep him from fundraising at the offices of one of the most notoriously corrupt lobbyists in years. Newsday reported over the weekend that Obama took about $125,000 from Greenberg Traurig employees at their Miami offices last October. The firm made headlines when its biggest lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, admitted to several counts of corruption and was sentenced to prison:
Last fall, Barack Obama quietly slipped into the Miami headquarters of a major law firm scarred by the scandals of Jack Abramoff, its once-powerful Washington lobbyist who now sits in jail.
Arriving a little after 10 a.m. on Oct. 1, Obama spent the next three hours schmoozing, speaking in a video conference to branch offices and raising money at Greenberg Traurig, a billion-dollar firm with one of the biggest lobby shops here.
Obama has now raised about $125,000 from Greenberg Traurig employees — nearly half of it at the time of the event — more than from any of the other top law and lobby firms.
Symbolically, it was a starkly contradictory event: an appearance by the candidate who crusades most adamantly against lobbyists at the onetime firm of the poster child for out-of-control influence peddling.
Public anger over the Abramoff lobbying scandal led Obama to institute the ban on lobbyist money in the first place, an aide said last year.
The contributions apparently comprise the “smaller donors” that Obama likes to mention as his supposedly grassroots efforts. According to Open Secrets, Greenberg employees made 186 separate contributions to his presidential campaign, many of them in the last week of September 2007. It appears that the Obama campaign wanted the donations back-dated in order to get credit for the amounts in third-quarter fundraising figures.
Newsday says that John McCain and Hillary Clinton have also received money from Greenberg, and they’re correct. McCain has actually done better with Greenberg employees, to the tune of $142,000, and Hillary wins the gold medal with $163,000. However, among the broad spectrum of lobbyists and legal firms, Hillary has taken in $15.7 million and Obama $13.8 million. McCain comes in last at $4.2 million.
The problem isn’t so much the lobbying money. After all, lobbyists represent people with real concerns about how federal dollars get allocated. The problem is the oozing hypocrisy of politicians who demonize lobbyists on one hand and then pander to them for contributions on the other. Obama paid almost $3,000 in rental fees for that event in which he raised so much money, and he continues to shriek about lobbyists while chasing their money, claiming to represent the little xenophobic religious gun-grabbing protectionist real Americans while doing so.
Here’s how politicians can reduce the influence of lobbyists: shrink the size and scope of the federal government. When taxpayers keep more of their own money and the federal government has less power, lobbyists won’t have a reason to plague Washington or to spread money and temptation around Capitol Hill. Since Barack Obama pledges to do the exact opposite, his election would have the direct effect of making lobbyists all the more relevant, and much richer.
Maybe because you don't follow links.
What difference does it make to you then???
Democrats - war causing recession
Posted by: McQ
This is precisely why the Democrats shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the levers of power:
The growing cost to the United States of fighting the war in Iraq "is not only linked to our economic skid, but is a leading cause of it," a Democratic congressman said Saturday.
Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky linked the costly, unpopular war with the growing economic troubles - some say recession - in this country.
Yarmuth said in the Democrats' weekly radio address that the testimony this week of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker about the Iraq war served as reminder of the billions of dollars being poured into Iraq as the U.S. economy struggles.
Yeah, that's why there's a huge credit crunch and the housing bubble has burst. Got it.
Of course, I've noted the economic illiteracy which is seemingly rampant in this country, so the following comes as no surprise:
Forty-eight percent of those surveyed said a withdrawal would help the country's economic problems "a great deal" and 20 percent more said it would help somewhat. Some 43 percent said increasing government spending on health care, education and housing programs would help a great deal; 36 percent named cutting taxes.
We're doomed.
Why Orwell Matters [Victor Davis Hanson]
Here is what Sen. Obama said:
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Here is what Sen. Obama now says he said:
"So I said, 'Well, you know, when you're bitter you turn to what you can count on,' " he continued. "So people they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country or they get frustrated about, you know, how things are changing. That's a natural response."
1. Note how version #1's "cling" becomes version #2's "vote about" and "take comfort from"—as the condescending dismissal becomes empathetic understanding.
2. Note how version #1's "religion" and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" becomes version #2's "faith" and "their family and community" —as fundamentalist xenophobes now become beleaguered folks who band together against the unfairness.
3 Note how version #1's "anti-immigrant" becomes version #2's "mad about illegal immigrants" —as the nativist who opposes all immigrants, legal and illegal, now becomes understandably angry only about those coming here illegally.
4. Note how version #1's "as a way to explain their frustrations" becomes version #2's "they get frustrated about" as the misguided scape-goaters become those who react understandably to adversity.
5. Note no explanation in version #2 for version #1's "anti-trade sentiment"—and no wonder since Obama himself is embarrassed that so far he's voiced far more "anti-trade sentiment" than those he caricatured.
6. Note how version #1's "And it's not surprising then they get bitter" becomes version #2's "your'e" and "you" and "Thats a natural response", as the condescending use of the embittered and distant "they" now morphs into a kindred "you" and the quip "not surprising" becomes the sympathetic "natural."
7. Note how version #1's idiotic logic that Middle-America has only become religious or pro-gun in the last 25 years as a result of job loss is simply omitted.
8. Note how there is sudddenly no "context" for the landscape of version #1: an elite Bay-area audience that is told stories about those Pennsylvanian gun-toting zealots.
With Obama, the clarifications (cf. the Wright and Michelle contextualizations) are always more interestig than the original lapse.
04/13 08:27 AM
Pales when compared to selling satellite secrets to the Chinese via Loral- and the pardoned sleezebag Rich
what i like about obama is his authenticity.
LMAO
Off the scale on the gullibility meter
Pssst, wanna buy a Rolex....cheap???
"i still say obama said nothing wrong
OF course you don't, because your anti religion and share the same "dumfuck" elitist views that he does
YOU don't see it because you just as intolerant as he is
"A Typical Sort Of Political Flare-Up"
As the "Hey Rubes, Back Barack" tour swung through Indiana, Obama was in another town meeting defending himself again from his small town disaster [More at the Times and WaPo, and the AP is excellent]. The candidate was insightful - "I didn’t say it as well as I should have" - and displayed his keen sense of Presidential campaigns, calling the current firestorm "a typical sort of political flare-up”.
Hmm, how typical is it for a candidate to characterize a huge swath of his target voters as bigoted, gun waving religious fanatics? I'll bet that in Dem strategy sessions run by law school alums, it's pretty typical!
I'm getting a mental image of Obama during other "typical" flare-ups - sort of a "But sweetie, those jeans do make you look fat" thing, or maybe "Honestly, officer, you need to understand that some people have a very high tolerance for alcohol".
I can't believe that in all those Harvard classes they never emphasize that you can't tell the rubes what you really think of them. Surely they aren't relying on the common sense of the elitist snobs passing through to figure that out themselves? Didn't work!
MORE: James Joyner covers the waterfront, or the backwoods.
SANITIZING BARACK: NY Times readers will practically need a decoder ring to figure out what the controversy is, although if they read down far enough they should be able to piece it together [now the Times has re-written it - "cling to their guns" has moved from the umpteenth paragraph to the second]; the WaPo blog coverage is actually pretty good.
As Hugh Hewitt notes, the WaPo showed their nose for news by putting this story on page 4; this passage describing Obama's attempt to avoid the "elitist" tag is funny, especially when accurately annotated:
Obama advisers quickly sent out the full comments from the fundraiser in an effort to show that Obama, far from looking down at people, was entirely sympathetic to their situation pathetic, misdirected lives and to their distrust of (much wiser) politicians.
COVERING THE STORY: The AP has a concise lead and extended comments from Hilary Clinton and Obama supporter Evan Bayh. Here we go:
MUNCIE, Ind. - Democrat Barack Obama on Saturday conceded that comments he made about bitter working class voters who "cling to guns or religion" were ill chosen, as he tried to stem a burst of complaints that he is condescending.
By way of contrast, here was the original Times lead:
MUNCIE, Ind. — Senator Obama on Saturday rebutted criticism that has enveloped his campaign over a comment he made last Sunday that many working-class voters are angry and bitter over economic conditions in America, and he told an audience here that his words were not meant to be insulting.
Many dispirited voters believe politicians will not solve their problems, Mr. Obama argued, so they base their votes on issues like religion, gun rights or same-sex marriage rather than voting for their economic interests.
Where's the controversy? Well, the "cling to guns and religion" phrase was buried deep. Here is the new Times version, which elevates it to the second paragraph:
The Democratic nominating fight took a sudden turn with Senator Barack Obama’s comments about small-town Pennsylvania voters providing an opening for the Clinton campaign to raise anew questions about Mr. Obama’s ability to lure working-class voters.
With the Pennsylvania primary just 10 days away, Mr. Obama was forced to deal with a torrent of criticism on Saturday over his remarks to donors in San Francisco that such voters “cling” to their guns and religion because they are bitter about their economic circumstances.
Better. Let's cut back to the AP for Clinton and Bayh:
Clinton attacked Obama's remarks much more harshly Saturday than she had the night before, calling them "demeaning." Her aides feel Obama has given them a big opening, pulling the spotlight away from more troubling stories such as former President Clinton's recent revisiting of his wife's misstatements about an airport landing in Bosnia 10 years ago.
Obama is trying to focus attention narrowly on his remarks, arguing there's no question that some working class families are anxious and bitter. The Clinton campaign is parsing every word, focusing on what Obama said about religion, guns, immigration and trade.
Clinton hit all those themes in lengthy comments to manufacturing workers in Indianapolis.
"I was raised with Midwestern values and an unshakable faith in America and its policies," she said. "Now, Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it's a matter of constitutional right. Americans who believe in God believe it's a matter of personal faith."
"I grew up in a churchgoing family ...," she continued. "The people of faith I know don't 'cling' to religion because they're bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich ...
"I also disagree with Senator Obama's assertion that people in this country 'cling to guns' and have certain attitudes about immigration or trade simply out of frustration," she said.
"People don't need a president who looks down on them," she said. "They need a president who stands up for them."
One of Clinton's staunchest supporters, Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., acknowledged there was some truth in Obama's remarks. But Republicans would use them against him anyway, Bayh said.
"We do have economic hard times, and that does lead to a frustration and some justifiable anger, it's true," Bayh told reporters after introducing Clinton in Indianapolis. "But I think you're on dangerous ground when you morph that into suggesting that people's cultural values, whether it's religion or hunting and fishing or concern about trade, are premised solely upon those kinds of anxieties and don't have a legitimate foundation independent of that."
Bayh skips past the odd tension between Obama's own opposition to free trade and his apparent belief that free trade opponents are embittered economic losers; maybe Barack opposes free trade on behalf of Michelle, who is struggling to get by on only $400,000 per year.
Posted by Tom M
I think Obama agrees with you
Your post is a textbook example of why he can't be elected
Those people you call " dolts " make up a very big part of the voter pool
Insulting the electorate is just stupid politics and his statements just show he's in over his head
The McGovernization of Obama [Victor Davis Hanson]
I still believe that by August, Obama, the half-term rookie Senator, will have become the second George McGovern. Cf. his latest declaration to the Marin County faithful (coming on the heels of the crazy anti-Semitic rant of Rev. Eric Lee, a prominent LA Obama supporter):
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Let us count the ways that this is a disastrous declaration:
1. “Nothing’s replaced them”? As someone who lives in a small rural town that saw a lot of closed plants and farm depression in the 1980s, a lot has “replaced them”—explaining why for much of the last decade the national unemployment rate has been below 5%.
2. “They”. This evokes Michelle’s similar “they” (as in the “they” who raised the proverbial bar on the Obamas), and likewise suggests both hostility and a certain us/they contempt for a slice of America that the Obamas apparently know very little about—but for the first time in their lives are rapidly discovering.
3. “They cling to guns or religion”. This is revealing for two reasons: one, Obama has been trying to finesse his position on guns to appeal precisely to gun owners and thus we start to see that his repositioning is cynical to the core; two, “cling to religion?” No rural Pennsylvanian clings to religion more than Obama himself, who for 20 years sat silent in the pews, while a hate-spewing minister damned his country and most everyone else. The question is not why Pennsylvanians “cling to their religion”, but why do the Obamas still cling to the Trinity Church that seems far more extreme than anything I’ve seen in rural America.
4. “antipathy to people who aren't like them”—as in the case of Rev. Wright’s views of Jews, whites, Italians, or Americans in general? In short, Obama accuses rural Pennsylvanians of a racism that they haven’t expressed while contextualizing the racism that his own Rev. Wright has.
5. “Anti-immigrant sentiment”? As in wishing that drivers’ licenses are not issued to those here illegally, or that we insist that those who immigrate to the U.S. do so legally?
6. The worst hypocrisy, of course, is Obama’s charge that these small towns in Pennsylvania express “anti-trade sentiment.” It was not George Bush or John McCain, but Barack Obama himself who tried to salvage Ohio by demagoguing NAFTA and opposing a free-trade agreement with Columbia. His entire campaign is predicated on showing more anti-trade sentiment that the Clintons.
7. Let me get this straight: Obama goes to the Bay Area to an affluent liberal enclave to give a condescending take on the supposed poor fools that he is currently trying to court. This is not just hypocritical, but abjectly stupid. All of Pennsylvania surely is asking today what is so hip and sophisticated about the Trinity Church and Rev. Wright?
So here we have the essential Obama, a walking paradox between the postmodern hip-Ivy-Leaguer who sneers at middle-class America’s supposed prejudices and parochialism, while at the same time courting an anti-Enlightenment, prejudicial demagogue like Jeremiah Wright. For free trade or anti-free trade? For 2nd-amendment rights or not? Post-religious or pious and fundamentalist? For public campaign financing or not? A uniter of various groups or someone who sees America in terms of “they”? Straight-talking or someone who evokes "context" to explain away the inexplicable?
Again, we will see more and more of these condescending statements of the Michelle Obama strain, more and more of Revs. Wright, Meeks, Lee and others peddlers of division like them, and more and more clues to a long hostility to Israel—in what will eventually become the most disastrous chapter in recent Democratic history.
And pundits keep wondering why Hillary won't give up?
04/11 08:58 PM
Obama Needs a History Lesson [Stephen Spruiell]
So says a reader:
I am surprised that a man of Mr. Obama's intellect and insight was not aware that well before any industrial decline, Pennsylvanians were into guns and religion.
I was talking about the implications in the general election.
He's not gonna win in PA- and his comments now could make it a landslide for Hillary
He's now unelectable.
It's one thing to bring up concerns, it's another to essentially call the people with those concerns rednecks or dumbfucks
Religious fundamentalism is different than average people who value faith in their lives
DO you think they will support someone who thinks their faith is based on bitterness.
The whole point is that the liberal way is to try and establish that there is crisis and only they can solve it- witness Michelle's statement: " Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. “Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime"
Meanwhile, we have the highest standard of living of any country. We have a huge problem with the number of people trying to get into our country.
You don't get it either
What good can come from a conversation that starts with " you cling to religion because you're bitter"????
That " conversation " will go over well with a rich SF audience- it will be his death knell with average Americans
The honesty comes in with him openly discussing his elite disdain for non elites.
Do you think it's " honest " to say people only have faith as a result of bitterness
That type of honesty is a death blow for a pol.
Your guy is toast
Barack and Michelle's view of America
By Soren Dayton Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama — Comments (24) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
On April 6th, at a fundraiser in San Francisco, Barack Obama said, previously covered by Redstate here:
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
The McCain campaign responded:
It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking. It is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans.
This hints at a fundamental lack of respect for Americans. Barack Obama will inevitably apologize or back away from this statement, made to rich San Francisco liberals. But I urge you to consider what he meant in the context of things said by his wife.
Read on.
Michelle Obama was profiled in The New Yorker. Compare this paragraph to the sentiment that Barack expressed above:
Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. “Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime.
Earlier on Redstate, we posted a video of Michelle Obama speaking in South Carolina.
This is a partial transcript:
We don't like being pushed outside of our comfort zones. ... Sometimes it is easier to hold on to your own stereotypes and misconceptions. It makes you feel justified in your ignorance. That's America.
Consider this statement in the light of Obama's statement that started this off. "Sometimes it is easier to hold on to your own stereotypes and misconceptions. It makes you feel justified in your ignorance." Certainly when talking to rich San Francisco liberals about people who "cling to guns or religion".
Now, it could be that there is good politics to this. Obama did, after all, say this in a San Francisco fundraiser. Michael Barone noted the other day that:
In the latest survey, 64 percent say America is basically fair and decent, and 22 percent say it is unfair and discriminatory. ... As one might expect, blacks tend to think America is unfair and discriminatory rather than fair and decent, by a 47 percent to 37 percent margin. ... while Democrats are split (49 percent to 36 percent).
He notes that "this split among Democrats is a permanent problem for the party."
The question that this raises is where is Barack Obama on these questions. Until today, all that could be said was that Barack surrounds himself with people like his wife and his pastor who traffic in this negative view of America. But with this statement, we must now wonder if he also does, at least in front of some audiences. And whether that is reconcilable with a message of "hope" or "reconciliation."
If he does, the contrast with John McCain will be extraordinary.
The gospel according to Barack
Barack Obama's San Francisco remarks drip with contempt for the concerns of the average American. According to Obama, the beliefs and concerns of the average (small-town, Rustbelt) American are symptoms of embitterment and psychic damage. For this average American, even religion is a function of embitterment and false consciousness. Obama and his fellow congregants in the church of Jeremiah Wright have that true religion. In small-town Pennsylvania they have something that needs Obama's ministrations. Obama exudes arrogance and disdain.
This past February, Michelle Obama delivered a speech at a hastily assembled UCLA rally. It is a remakable document to which only Hugh Hewitt devoted the attention it deserved. Michelle Obama presented her husband as the only candidate who stood to cure our sick souls. Her claims on his behalf only made express the implications of his own more soothing rhetoric.
In the wake of Barack Obama's remarks to the San Francisco Democrats last Sunday, Michelle Obama's preaching of the gospel according to Barack is revelatory:
Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your division. That you come out of your isolation. That you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual; uninvolved, uninformed.
We can only pray that our fellow Americans find the gospel according to Barack Obama to be too good for us.
Posted by Scott at 7:20 AM | Permalink | E-mail this post to a friend |
April 11, 2008
Obama Spins Furiously
Knowing that he was busted on his elitist disparagement of "small town" voters in San Francisco, Barack Obama cleverly tried to echo the same themes, but in more palatable form, in a speech in Indiana tonight:
"People don't vote on economic issues because they don't expect anybody is going to help them," Obama told a crowd at a Terre Haute, Ind., high school Friday evening. "So people end up voting on issues like guns and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. They take refuge in their faith and their community, and their family, and the things they can count on. But they don't believe they can count on Washington."
Note the difference between what Obama said in an unguarded moment in San Francisco, and the cleaned-up version he tried to sell tonight. San Francisco:
So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Indiana:
So people end up voting on issues like guns and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. They take refuge in their faith and their community, and their family, and the things they can count on.
In Obama's cleaned-up version, religion ("faith") becomes something small town people "can count on," along with community and family, rather than something they "cling to" on account of being "bitter," along with guns and hatred of immigrants and others "who aren't like them." That's a nice try, I guess, but it's hard to believe it will fool anyone.
Posted by John at 10:07 PM | Permalink | E-mail this post to a friend
You don't get it.
The wost part is the " they turn to guns or religion...racism " line.
He's just mouthing the "dumbfuck" mantra that the dems have been using for years
The right to carry guns is a right guaranteed by the Constitution and has nothing to do with bitterness.
Ascribing faith and a result of only bitterness is idiotic. You may not think so and many on this board don't either, but a large majority of the country are self defined by their faith. To tell them that their faith is only caused by bitterness is not only incredibly stupid- especially for a politician- but very revealing of Obamas character.
This was a colossal mistake. I think he will get the nomination still, but I think it kills any chance of him being elected.
IT really points out the fact that he's just not ready for prime time
Michael Yon talks about the changes in Iraq
Posted by: McQ
Well, he's not Juan Cole, but he'll have to do. Unlike Cole, he can at least say this:
I may well have spent more time embedded with combat units in Iraq than any other journalist alive. I have seen this war - and our part in it - at its brutal worst. And I say the transformation over the last 14 months is little short of miraculous.
Yon, in my experience reading him, is not an apologist for anyone. He truly has always given "the good, the bad and the ugly" about Iraq. And initially, as he will forthrightly tell you, there was much more bad and ugly than good. But, as he sees it, that's not the case today. Some of the good he's seeing:
The U.S. military is the most respected institution in Iraq, and many Iraqi boys dream of becoming American soldiers. Yes, young Iraqi boys know about "GoArmy.com."
[...]
Iraqis came to respect American soldiers as warriors who would protect them from terror gangs. But Iraqis also discovered that these great warriors are even happier helping rebuild a clinic, school or a neighborhood. They learned that the American soldier is not only the most dangerous enemy in the world, but one of the best friends a neighborhood can have.
As all of us who served in the military learned early on during overseas deployments, we can be very effective representatives of our country in a good and positive way. Discipline, code of conduct, the warrior spirit and compassion do mix. And that is what Yon is talking about.
He also obliquely points to the death of a meme that was believed throughout the third world of dictatorships prior to Iraq. The "paper tiger" myth is dead along with a whole bunch of AQI.
Some people charge that we have merely "rented" the Sunni tribesmen, the former insurgents who now fight by our side. This implies that because we pay these people, their loyalty must be for sale to the highest bidder. But as Gen. Petraeus demonstrated in Nineveh province in 2003 to 2004, many of the Iraqis who filled the ranks of the Sunni insurgency from 2003 into 2007 could have been working with us all along, had we treated them intelligently and respectfully. In Nineveh in 2003, under then Maj. Gen. Petraeus's leadership, these men - many of them veterans of the Iraqi army - played a crucial role in restoring civil order. Yet due to excessive de-Baathification and the administration's attempt to marginalize powerful tribal sheiks in Anbar and other provinces - including men even Saddam dared not ignore - we transformed potential partners into dreaded enemies in less than a year.
Then al Qaeda in Iraq, which helped fund and tried to control the Sunni insurgency for its own ends, raped too many women and boys, cut off too many heads, and brought drugs into too many neighborhoods. By outraging the tribes, it gave birth to the Sunni "awakening." We - and Iraq - got a second chance. Powerful tribes in Anbar province cooperate with us now because they came to see al Qaeda for what it is - and to see Americans for what we truly are.
Soldiers everywhere are paid, and good generals know it is dangerous to mess with a soldier's money. The shoeless heroes who froze at Valley Forge were paid, and when their pay did not come they threatened to leave - and some did. Soldiers have families and will not fight for a nation that allows their families to starve. But to say that the tribes who fight with us are "rented" is perhaps as vile a slander as to say that George Washington's men would have left him if the British offered a better deal.
Yon points to the initial mistakes made by the US in Iraq. And he's never been shy about calling them that. But he also points out, despite the claims that we've stuck stubbornly to a single strategy and never changed it, that we did indeed change our strategy to take advantage of a second chance we were given, and that has paid handsome dividends. Had we not recognized our folly and continued to marginalize the powerful tribal sheiks in Anbar and elsewhere, then the strategy critique would have some legs. As it is, and as Dexter Flikins remarked about in his Charlie Rose interview, we now have a commander taking over in Anbar province who is replacing a unit that has suffered no casualties there during their tour - in Anbar.
Yon also takes the political opposition to task:
Equally misguided were some senators' attempts to use Gen. Petraeus's statement, that there could be no purely military solution in Iraq, to dismiss our soldiers' achievements as "merely" military. In a successful counterinsurgency it is impossible to separate military and political success. The Sunni "awakening" was not primarily a military event any more than it was "bribery." It was a political event with enormous military benefits.
COIN is a melding of the political and the military - it has to be. I still think we need to have a political surge, but you can't understand counterinsurgency doctrine without understanding how much the political and military work hand-in-hand.
Part of the "bad"?
The Iraqi central government is unsatisfactory at best. But the grass-roots political progress of the past year has been extraordinary - and is directly measurable in the drop in casualties.
Indeed. For the most part the local and regional reconciliation process is continuing apace and it is at a national level that the functions of government need to be focused upon. Yon's correct when he says to this point the central government is unsatisfactory, but given its recent action in Basra, the laws it has recently passed and the budget it is working, there is at least hope that is enroute to being better.
This leads us to the most out-of-date aspect of the Senate debate: the argument about the pace of troop withdrawals. Precisely because we have made so much political progress in the past year, rather than talking about force reduction, Congress should be figuring ways and means to increase troop levels. For all our successes, we still do not have enough troops. This makes the fight longer and more lethal for the troops who are fighting. To give one example, I just returned this week from Nineveh province, where I have spent probably eight months between 2005 to 2008, and it is clear that we remain stretched very thin from the Syrian border and through Mosul. Vast swaths of Nineveh are patrolled mostly by occasional overflights.
We know now that we can pull off a successful counterinsurgency in Iraq. We know that we are working with an increasingly willing citizenry. But counterinsurgency, like community policing, requires lots of boots on the ground. You can't do it from inside a jet or a tank.
Yon and I disagree on this point. A) it isn't politically feasible. B) the force we presently have can't support it. I know that a guy who has spent the time Yon has spent in Iraq and seen it go from a debacle to chance for success wants to do what is necessary to win.
I see this is where the ISF steps up and begins operations in areas they're presently not operating - such as the Syrian border. There are enough well trained ISF units, by Gen. Petreaus' own tally, which can take up that fight and many others. I want to see them do that as there is no better teacher than doing the job.
But I do understand his desire, although I disagree with the method. We need to explore every way, short of more troops, to ensure success in Iraq.
Yon's final line is important:
Over the past 15 months, we have proved that we can win this war. We stand now at the moment of truth. Victory - and a democracy in the Arab world - is within our grasp. But it could yet slip away if our leaders remain transfixed by the war we almost lost, rather than focusing on the war we are winning today.
This is where we are. To the politicans - I don't care if you opposed the war from the beginning. I don't care if you changed your mind and oppose it now. The bottom-line is we have the chance to win it and help establish something the Arab world has never seen and something which has the potential to spread, make the region more stable and make the world more peaceful. And if you blow it because of unthinking populist ideology, it'll forever be on your head.
You're a f'n idiot
Just a thought
Funny how all the entities that vow to destroy Israel are victims in your warped self loathing world
Iran is getting pressure because of their nuclear weapons program. They didn't develop the program in self defense
Funny how you value self defense except when it comes to Israel. Hamas and Iran call for the state to be eliminated and you say "right on brother"
Rockets rain down and you say " well they deserve it " while overlooking the atrocities Hamas and Iran have committed in the attempt to destroy Israel
The Holocaust Declaration
By Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- On Tuesday, Iran announced it was installing 6,000 more centrifuges -- they produce enriched uranium, the key ingredient of a nuclear weapon -- in addition to the 3,000 already operating. The world yawned.
It is time to admit the truth: The Bush administration's attempt to halt Iran's nuclear program has failed. Utterly. The latest round of U.N. Security Council sanctions, which took a year to achieve, is comically weak. It represents the end of the sanctions road.
The president is going to hand over to his successor an Iran on the verge of going nuclear. This will deeply destabilize the Middle East, threaten the moderate Arabs with Iranian hegemony and leave Israel on hair-trigger alert.
This failure can, however, be mitigated. Since there will apparently be no disarming of Iran by pre-emption or by sanctions, we shall have to rely on deterrence to prevent the mullahs, some of whom are apocalyptic and messianic, from using nuclear weapons.
During the Cold War, we prevented an attack not only on the U.S. but also on America's allies by extending the American nuclear umbrella -- i.e., declaring that any attack on our allies would be considered an attack on the United States.
Such a threat is never 100 percent credible. Nonetheless, it made the Soviets think twice about attacking our European allies. It kept the peace.
We should do the same to keep nuclear peace in the Middle East. It would be infinitely less dangerous (and therefore more credible) than Cold War deterrence because there will be no threat from Iran of the annihilation of the United States. Iran, unlike the Soviet Union, would have a relatively tiny arsenal incapable of reaching the U.S.
How to create deterrence? The way John Kennedy did during the Cuban missile crisis. President Bush should issue the following declaration, adopting Kennedy's language while changing the names of the miscreants:
It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear attack upon Israel by Iran, or originating in Iran, as an attack by Iran on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon Iran.
This should be followed with a simple explanation: "As a beacon of tolerance and as leader of the free world, the United States will not permit a second Holocaust to be perpetrated upon the Jewish people."
This policy -- the Holocaust Declaration -- would establish a firm benchmark that would outlive this administration. Every future president -- and every serious presidential candidate -- would have to publicly state whether or not he supports the Holocaust Declaration.
It is an important question to ask because it will not be uncontroversial. It will be argued that the Holocaust Declaration is either redundant or, at the other extreme, provocative.
Redundant, it will be said, because Israel could retaliate on its own. The problem is that Israel is a very small country with a small nuclear arsenal that could be destroyed in a first strike. During the Cold War, both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. created vast and invulnerable submarine fleets to ensure a retaliatory strike and, thus, deterrence. The invulnerability and unimaginably massive size of this American nuclear arsenal would make a U.S. deterrent far more potent and reliable than any Israeli facsimile -- and thus far more likely to keep the peace.
Would such a declaration be provocative? On the contrary. Deterrence is the least provocative of all policies. That is why it is the favored alternative of those who oppose a pre-emptive attack on Iran. What the Holocaust Declaration does is turn deterrence from a slogan into a policy.
It is, of course, hardly certain that deterrence would work on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other jihadists. But deterrence would encourage rational Iranian actors, of whom there are many, to restrain or even depose leaders like Ahmadinejad who might sacrifice Iran's existence as a nation in order to vindicate their divine obligation to exterminate the "filthy bacteria" of the Jewish state, "this disgraceful stain (on) the Islamic world."
For the first time since the time of Jesus, Israel is the home of the world's largest Jewish community. An implacable enemy has openly declared genocidal intentions against it -- in clear violation of the U.N. charter -- and is pursuing the means to carry out that intent. The world does nothing. Some, like the Russians, are literally providing fuel for the fire.
For those who believe that America stands for something in the world -- that the nation that has liberated more peoples than any other has even the most minimal moral vocation -- there can be no more pressing cause than preventing the nuclear annihilation of an allied democracy, the last refuge and hope of an ancient people openly threatened with the final Final Solution.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
C
* Adventures In Identity Politics
Money doesn't grow on trees, but gasoline might
* Energy and Environment
Researchers have made a breakthrough in the development of "green gasoline," a liquid identical to standard gasoline yet created from sustainable biomass sources like switchgrass and poplar trees.
Reporting in the cover article of the April 7, 2008 issue of Chemistry & Sustainability, Energy & Materials (ChemSusChem), chemical engineer and National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER awardee George Huber of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMass) and his graduate students Torren Carlson and Tushar Vispute announced the first direct conversion of plant cellulose into gasoline components.
In the same issue, James Dumesic and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison announce an integrated process for creating chemical components of jet fuel using a green gasoline approach. While Dumesic's group had previously demonstrated the production of jet-fuel components using separate steps, their current work shows that the steps can be integrated and run sequentially, without complex separation and purification processes between reactors.
While it may be five to 10 years before green gasoline arrives at the pump or finds its way into a fighter jet, these breakthroughs have bypassed significant hurdles to bringing green gasoline biofuels to market.
"It is likely that the future consumer will not even know that they are putting biofuels into their car," said Huber. "Biofuels in the future will most likely be similar in chemical composition to gasoline and diesel fuel used today. The challenge for chemical engineers is to efficiently produce liquid fuels from biomass while fitting into the existing infrastructure today."
For their new approach, the UMass researchers rapidly heated cellulose in the presence of solid catalysts, materials that speed up reactions without sacrificing themselves in the process. They then rapidly cooled the products to create a liquid that contains many of the compounds found in gasoline.
The entire process was completed in under two minutes using relatively moderate amounts of heat. The compounds that formed in that single step, like naphthalene and toluene, make up one fourth of the suite of chemicals found in gasoline. The liquid can be further treated to form the remaining fuel components or can be used "as is" for a high octane gasoline blend.
"Green gasoline is an attractive alternative to bioethanol since it can be used in existing engines and does not incur the 30 percent gas mileage penalty of ethanol-based flex fuel," said John Regalbuto, who directs the Catalysis and Biocatalysis Program at NSF and supported this research.
"In theory it requires much less energy to make than ethanol, giving it a smaller carbon footprint and making it cheaper to produce," Regalbuto said. "Making it from cellulose sources such as switchgrass or poplar trees grown as energy crops, or forest or agricultural residues such as wood chips or corn stover, solves the lifecycle greenhouse gas problem that has recently surfaced with corn ethanol and soy biodiesel."
Beyond academic laboratories, both small businesses and Fortune 500 petroleum refiners are pursuing green gasoline. Companies are designing ways to hybridize their existing refineries to enable petroleum products including fuels, textiles, and plastics to be made from either crude oil or biomass and the military community has shown strong interest in making jet fuel and diesel from the same sources.
"Huber's new process for the direct conversion of cellulose to gasoline aromatics is at the leading edge of the new ‘Green Gasoline' alternate energy paradigm that NSF, along with other federal agencies, is helping to promote," states Regalbuto.
Not only is the method a compact way to treat a great deal of biomass in a short time, Regalbuto emphasized that the process, in principle, does not require any external energy. "In fact, from the extra heat that will be released, you can generate electricity in addition to the biofuel," he said. "There will not be just a small carbon footprint for the process; by recovering heat and generating electricity, there won't be any footprint."
The latest pathways to produce green gasoline, green diesel and green jet fuel are found in a report sponsored by NSF, the Department of Energy and the American Chemical Society entitled "Breaking the Chemical and Engineering Barriers to Lignocellulosic Biofuels: Next Generation Hydrocarbon Biorefineries" released April 1 (http://www.ecs.umass.edu/biofuels/). In the report, Huber and a host of leaders from academia, industry and government present a plan for making green gasoline a practical solution for the impending fuel crisis.
"We are currently working on understanding the chemistry of this process and designing new catalysts and reactors for this single step technique. This fundamental chemical understanding will allow us to design more efficient processes that will accelerate the commercialization of green gasoline," Huber said.
False Assumptions of Statism, 2008 version
posted at 10:20 am on April 9, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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In June 2004, Hillary Clinton outlined the statist philosophy in a speech to a San Francisco audience when she explained that “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” In 2008, that task has fallen to Michelle Obama. In an appearance in Charlotte yesterday, Mrs. Obama made it just a little more specific (via Instapundit):
Should she become first lady, she said she’d focus on family issues.
“If we don’t wake up as a nation with a new kind of leadership…for how we want this country to work, then we won’t get universal health care,” she said.
“The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”
This statement should make clear exactly what either Democrat represents. Both Hillary and Obama want to extend the power of the federal government over choices that have nothing to do with their Constitutional mandate. Both want to spend more money and expand systems that already fail to operate efficiently and deliver on their promises. And both want Americans across the board to give up more of their income to pay for bigger bureaucracies.
Neither of these candidates are moderate, center-left politicians. They’re both statists, and they both make the same basic mistake of all statists.
First, it assumes a “pie” of static proportions. That’s only true in statist systems. In a free-market economy, real expansion of wealth can and does occur. The best way to lift the standard of living across all economic strata comes from private enterprise and not public bureaucracies. The latter saps investment capital by rerouting funds from the markets which generate wealth into government, which not only consumes wealth but offers unresponsive and inefficient services in return. Those services kill competition in those industries, since the government supplies the services for “free” — even though the actual costs skyrocket through massive inefficiencies.
Want an example? Look at the VA. For that matter, look at the education system Mrs. Obama wants to expand. We have increased federal spending on education by 58% since 2000 (after inflation), and no one in their right mind would argue that education has improved 5.8%, let alone 58%. We’ve increased VA spending by 59%, and few would argue that we have received our money’s worth from that.
In fact, American families will pay $4,000 more per household in taxes this year than in 2003, the highest level since the last year of the Clinton administration. We have already given more of the “pie” for government expansion. If that was the solution, then the Democrats should be arguing for a continuation of the Bush administration, which has expanded federal spending by 30% after inflation in just seven years.
We’re paying more and getting less. Obviously, the statist model doesn’t work very well — but the Obamas and the Clintons want to convince voters that the solution is even more government confiscation of capital for the purposes of redistributing it even less efficiently. Small wonder, with as little daylight as there is between the two Democrats, that the primary campaign has come down to which candidate is less honest about their intentions.
Nobody knows the trouble she's seen
Paul Mirengoff wrote about Michelle Obama's description of her financial travails in "Michelle Obama sucks it up." On the basis of Ms. Obama's performance before a group of six women around a table in the basement playroom of the Zanesville Day Nursery, Paul adjudged Ms. Obama to be "a depressing speciman of a post-modern class of victim -- demanding, whining, self-absorbed, self-pitying, and infantile."
Ms. Obama's grievance tour continued yesterday in North Carolina, where she discussed the hardships of paying for educations at Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard Law School:
Obama told the crowd that when she and her husband left law school, the monthly payments on their school loan debt was more than their monthly mortgage payment. She said they only got out of that debt when Barack Obama wrote his two books, "The Audacity of Hope" and "Dreams from My Father."
And that's not all:
Michelle Obama said each time her husband exceeds expectations in the presidential race, the standard changes.
"They tell you to raise money, you raise money," she said. "They tell you to build an organization, and you build an organization.
"And you work hard and you reach that bar. Sometimes you surpass the bar and you look around and all of a sudden the bar has moved. The bar has changed on you and you wonder what happened."
No doubt Reverend Wright can explain it to her.
Dems' Attacks on McCain Grow Increasingly Bizarre
We may be in for the dirtiest Presidential campaign in memory. There doesn't seem to be any limit to how far the Democrats will go to smear Republican nominee John McCain, or any limit to how dumb they think voters are. Exhibit one: Senator Jay Rockefeller's downright weird condemnation of McCain in an interview with his hometown newspaper, the Charleston Gazette:
He's a fighter pilot. He flies at 35,000 feet and drops laser-guided bombs, missiles. He was long gone when they hit. What happened down there, he doesn't know.
That's unkind, because that's fighting for your nation and that's honorable. But you sort of have to care what goes on in the lives of people. ... and he never gets into those subjects.
Rockefeller should have apologized for the military and historical ignorance he betrayed; he did in due course issue a standard, non-apology apology, in which he regretted his "wrong analogy" and said that he had only meant to suggest that McCain doesn't care about "real people." I suppose that's because McCain's never gone through tough times, like Michelle Obama.
Last night, Howard Dean issued his latest mean-spirited and, this time, incomprehensible attack on McCain:
John McCain is so wrong on Iraq, he can't even get the basic facts about the situation on the ground correct.
Today, as he was questioning Gen. David Petraeus, he again confused the difference between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
At least five times as a candidate John McCain has stated that Iran (a Shiite nation) is supporting Al-Qaeda (a Sunni group) in Iraq. This is not some minor mistake, but a significant gaffe. He clearly does not understand the sensitive political dynamics in that region of the world.
What's worse is that he's done it at important times when you'd expect him to be at his best -- he did it today in the Senate while questioning the commander of American forces in Iraq, and he did it on a recent trip to the Middle East. ***
We just can't afford someone who just doesn't understand Iraq -- it's too dangerous.
I had read the entire transcript of yesterday's proceedings in the Senate Armed Services Committee, and had no idea what Dean was talking about. Dean, of course, doesn't quote the offending exchange in his email--a fact which seems telling, to say the least. I went back and re-read McCain's questioning of Petraeus and Crocker, and this is the only exchange that Dean could possibly be referring to:
MCCAIN: There are numerous threats to security in Iraq and the future of Iraq. Do you still view Al Qaida in Iraq as a major threat?
PETRAEUS: It is still a major threat, though it is certainly not as major a threat as it was, say, 15 months ago.
MCCAIN: Certainly not an obscure sect of the Shiites overall...
PETRAEUS: No.
MCCAIN: ... or Sunnis or anybody else.
Al Qaida continues to try to assert themselves in Mosul, is that correct?
Dean apparently wants to twist this question into a suggestion that al Qaeda is a Shiite sect--a confusion that Petraeus evidently didn't share. In fact, McCain was obviously contrasting al Qaeda with the Sadrists, the subject of his immediately preceding question, by noting that in the global scheme of things, the Sadrists are an obscure sect compared to al Qaeda. The idea that the Democrats would try to criticize McCain on this exchange--without, of course, quoting it so that readers can see how bogus their attack is--is just one more in a long series of indications of how low the Dems are willing to stoop to defame McCain. It's going to be a long summer and fall.
Pinocchiobama
by Erick Erickson
Barack Obama seeks to portray himself as a new type of politician. He wants to lead us, he says, with hope for the future, change in the present and repudiation of the past eight years so that America can exchange the failed policies of the last eight years for those of the past one hundred years, He seeks, if you will, to transcend politics. But if you were to take an objective look at Obama, you could reasonably conclude that Obama transcends politics by making the typical politician appear more honest. With each passing day, a new lie springs forth from Obama’s mouth causing university professors and ivy league graduates to faint at the non-truth that affirms their world view.
In 1996, Barack Obama’s campaign responded to a questionnaire by indicating that Obama favored bans of the manufacturing and selling of guns, opposed parental notification of abortions for minors, and opposed the death penalty. When asked about that, Obama threw his campaign staff under the bus, claiming the staff had sent in the questionnaire. He issued a blanket denial that he had ever held those positions. Except that is not true. As RedState noted, a review of the actual document shows “that [Obama] reviewed the answers closely enough to revise some of the answers in his own handwriting.”
Continued
On Afghanistan, Barack Obama claims to be the only politician willing to re-engage the Taliban. He faults the Bush Administration for depleting the number of military personnel in Afghanistan and claims we need to increase the number of ground forces to 92,000 troops, something Obama says the Bush administration is opposed to. Funny how Secretary of Defense Robert Gates offered the exact same policy prescription and number of troops back in 2007.
On Iraq, Obama accuses John McCain of wanting a one hundred year war in Iraq. Speaking on MSNBC’s Hardball, Obama said, “John McCain got upset today apparently because I had repeated exactly what he said, which is that we might be there [Iraq] for 100 years if he had his way.” Only, that is another lie. As RedState documented, the Washington Post’s FactCheck, the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s nonpartisan FactCheck.org, and the Columbia Journalism Review all report Obama’s words were grossly misleading. The Annenberg Public Policy Center called Obama’s statement a “serious distortion to the point of rank falsehood.”
Obama’s latest lie is, to the paragons of political virtue, perhaps his worst. Campaigning in Pennsylvania, Obama is running a television ad in which he says, "I’m Barack Obama. I don’t take money from oil companies or Washington lobbyists, and I won’t let them block change anymore." That’s not exactly true. First, no candidate can take money from oil companies; corporations are prohibited from giving money. Corporations can, however, give a maximum contribution of $5,000.00 to a candidate via a political action committee (“PAC”). Obama has not received that $5,000.00. Instead, he has taken in $213,000.00 from individuals who work for oil companies. While Chevron could have only given him $5,000.00 through its PAC, Obama took in $9,500.00 from Chevron employees. That $213,000.00 total from oil company employees does not even include the money from lobbyists Obama took but claims he did not take.
Whether lying about his resume, quitting smoking, or what he did or did not know about Reverend Wright, Barack Obama is telling the truth on one issue: he is not your typical politician. A typical politician could never have told as many lies as Barack Obama and been given a free pass by the traditional media.
Here are a few other blogger-generated stories you’d never hear about if you relied on the traditional media. Click the name of the state for the full story:
More 'Distortion,' 'Rank Falsehood,' 'Seriously Misleading' and 'Outright Lying' From Obama
By California Yankee
WHY ISN"T OBAMA MAN ENOUGH TO APOLOGIZE?
This morning on the “Today” Show, Barack Obama claimied he never leveled the dishonest attack that John McCain supports a 100-year war in Iraq:
MEREDITH VIEIRA: “Senator, both you and Senator Clinton have said Senator McCain favors 100 more years of war in Iraq. On Sunday in The New York Times, Frank Rich wrote, ‘really, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of themselves for libeling John McCain.’ That in fact he never said he wanted a 100 more years of war, he just felt American troops should be a long-term presence, the way they are in Japan and South Korea. So are you willing to admit that you've distorted his statements?”
SEN. OBAMA: “No. That's not accurate, Meredith. We can pull up the quotes on Youtube. What John McCain was saying was, that he was happy to have a potential long-term occupation in Iraq. Happy may be overstating it -- he is willing to have a long-term occupation of Iraq, as long as 100 years, in fact he said 10,000 years, however long it took.” (Barack Obama, NBC’s “Today,” 4/8/08)
Like Obama said, “we can pull up the quotes on Youtube.” Well, YES WE CAN. Those YouTube quotes, in Obama's own words, show Obama’s dishonest smear against McCain and that Obama lied on the Today Show:
The Petraeus Effect
April 8, 2008; Page A20
As General David Petraeus briefs Congress this week on Iraq, it's clear his surge has achieved remarkable results. The most crucial is that the U.S. can no longer be defeated militarily in Iraq, which could not be said a year ago. The question now is whether Washington will squander these gains by withdrawing so quickly that we could still lose politically.
Sixteen months after President Bush ordered the change in strategy, the surge has earned a place among the most important counteroffensives in U.S. military annals. When it began, al Qaeda dominated large swaths of central Iraq, Baghdad was a killing zone, Sunni and Shiites were heading toward civil war, and the Iraqi government was seen as a failure.
[The Petraeus Effect]
AP
A U.S. soldier on patrol in Mosul, northwest of Baghdad.
The Washington consensus – as promoted by the James Baker-Lee Hamilton Iraq Study Group – portrayed retreat as the only option. "This war is lost," declared Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in April, thus telling U.S. soldiers they were risking their lives for nothing. As late as September, Hillary Clinton had the nerve to lecture General Petraeus in a Senate hearing that "the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief."
Today, al Qaeda has been cleared from all but the northern reaches of Anbar and Diyala Provinces, Iraqis feel safe enough to resume normal lives, Sunni sheikhs are working with coalition forces, and the long process of Sunni-Shiite political reconciliation has begun. The surge seized the offensive from the enemy so rapidly that it deserves to be studied for years as an example of effective counterinsurgency.
Yes, this progress has also required some luck and Iraqi help. Al Qaeda in Iraq overplayed its hand with a brutality that turned the Sunnis against them. Four years of war had made Iraqis tired of violence, and Sunnis began to understand that they couldn't win a civil war against the Shiites but could use the Americans as leverage to negotiate a better bargain. Some 90,000 Sunnis are now working with the U.S. as part of the "Sons of Iraq" movement.
[David Petraeus]
None of this would have been possible, however, if Iraqis had not seen that the U.S. was committed to protect them. General Petraeus and his chief deputy, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, pursued a strategy that secured the population while going on offense against al Qaeda. U.S. and Iraqi troops moved into neighborhoods and lived among Iraqis, who in turn began to supply valuable intelligence about the terrorists. Faster than even the surge's architects hoped, the strategy led to far less violence.
While Democrats still claim political progress is possible only if the U.S. leaves Iraq, the surge has proved the opposite. Better security required a larger U.S. presence, which in turn has made Iraqis feel more secure about compromise. The political progress has been especially significant at the local level, with greater cooperation from tribal leaders and local councils, most Sunnis saying they'll participate in provincial elections this fall, and more oil money flowing to the provinces from Baghdad.
Much remains to be done, of course, and a premature U.S. withdrawal would put these gains at risk. Al Qaeda must still be swept from Mosul and upper Diyala, with the same U.S.-Iraqi troop strategy that worked in Baghdad. Terrorist entry routes West of Mosul from Syria also need to be stopped. And as we've learned in the last two weeks, Iraq Security Forces aren't able by themselves to impose a monopoly of force on Basra and the Shiite South.
Iraqi troops have made progress as a fighting force, but they still require U.S. help for the toughest operations. Though poorly planned, the Basra offensive showed that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is finally willing to fight Shiite gangs. The U.S. media have portrayed the battle mainly as an intra-Shiite feud and thus another example of budding "civil war." But the fight is also about Iran's attempts to stir trouble and weaken the Maliki government in favor of Iran's allies.
The U.S. has been reluctant to help in Basra, which has been British turf as part of the coalition. But the U.S. has a national interest in resisting Iranian influence, and Basra is a crucial front in that effort. As for the Brits, their failure to engage in counterinsurgency has left the Basra vacuum to be filled by Iranian-backed "special groups." The British made the same strategic mistake that former U.S. Iraq commanders George Casey and John Abizaid made in 2006 in Baghdad. The U.S. will have to deploy one or more brigades to Basra to help the Maliki government assert its control.
* * *
The five U.S. surge brigades are scheduled to return home in July, and one question Congress should ask General Petraeus is whether that pace makes him uneasy. He's under enormous Pentagon pressure, especially from the Army, to send those troops home. But if, say, three brigades could help solidify the surge's gains by staying another few months, the General should say so. One of Mr. Bush's mistakes in this war has been deferring too much to Pentagon brass who have always had one eye on the Iraq exit.
Americans are understandably impatient with the war, but we have sacrificed too much, and made too much progress in the last year, not to finish the task. The surge has prevented a humiliating military defeat, and now is the time to sustain that commitment to achieve a political victory.
Smoking turbans: Evidence of Iran in Basra
By TigerHawk at 4/06/2008 03:01:00 PM
Via Glenn Reynolds, the Times of London is reporting that Iranians on the ground in Basra directed operations against the Maliki government and the United States in the recent fighting there, and that General David Petraeus is going to cite it in his forthcoming Congressional testimony. Glenn suggests that this is "[a]nother thing that Nancy Pelosi doesn't want to hear about, I suspect," which is manifestly true. However, she did predict it last week in her preparation of the media battlespace, no doubt as part of her broader effort to destroy the interest of the media in the substance of the general's testimony:
Although powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr agreed to a ceasefire after six days of fighting, Pelosi wondered why the U.S. was caught off guard by the offensive and questioned how the ceasefire was achieved, saying the terms were "probably dictated from Iran.”
It is not risky to speculate that Pelosi had some advance notice of the general's most persuasive arguments for staying the course. In any case, she seems to have missed the point: If the Iranians have put this much skin in the Basra game, surely they would not have "dictated" a ceasefire if they were not worried about the outcome.
The real question is how the surrender branch of the Democratic party (is it really only a branch?) will persuade American voters that they can both retreat in the face of a direct military confrontation with Iran -- of all countries -- and nevertheless be relied upon to defend and assert the national interest of the United States.
Whoremongers [Mark Steyn]
Over in the Geraghtistan province of the National Review ummah, Jim asks:
How did we reach the point where Air America calls Hillary a 'whore'?
Indeed. Randi Rhodes agrees with Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro on everything - abortion, health care, climate change, you name it. Yet the first is "a f***ing whore" and the second is "David Duke in drag" merely because they disagree on which Democratic senator would make the best president. The people applying these deranged epithets to the Clintons are in large part the very same people who spent the Nineties applying equally deranged epithets to anyone who disagreed with the Clintons.
There's something rather heartening about this for those of us on the right who've beey there really is nothing personal about it. You can be a chickenhawk warmonger racist homophobe mysogynist Bush shill or a pro-feminist pro-gay pro-black icon of progressive politics for a generation, but, if you cross the likes of Randi Rhodes, you're all the same and you merit the same four-letter words and KKK slurs. The left's Discoursometer is like one of those shower units where the slightest nudge turns it to scalding.
Ed Driscoll notes the difference in tone.
The point is what happens next in Iraq
Your brooding over whether the action was warranted isn't relevant. The point is what happens now
Were you glad that Sadr wasn't wiped out?
Do you find joy in defections from the IA?
YOu seriously are an idiot
The it I referred to was your thought processes
Basra offensive a key step towards reconciliation?
posted at 5:20 pm on April 5, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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The hand-wringing over the Basra operations launched by Nouri al-Maliki may have missed the bigger picture, according to an analysis by the AP. Maliki’s efforts to rein in rogue Shi’ite militias have been received with enthusiasm from Kurds and Sunnis in Iraq and have strengthened efforts at national reconciliation. Leaders of both groups have issued statements of support for the Iraqi Army operations to regain control of the nation’s second-largest city:
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s faltering crackdown on Shiite militants has won the backing of Sunni Arab and Kurdish parties that fear both the powerful sectarian militias and the effects of failure on Iraq’s fragile government.
The emergence of a common cause could help bridge Iraq’s political rifts.
The head of the Kurdish self-ruled region, Massoud Barzani, has offered Kurdish troops to help fight anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia.
More significantly, Sunni Arab Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi signed off on a statement by President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and the Shiite vice president, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, expressing support for the crackdown in the oil-rich southern city of Basra.
Al-Hashemi is one of al-Maliki’s most bitter critics and the two have been locked in an acrimonious public quarrel for a year. Al-Hashemi has accused the prime minister of sectarian favoritism and al-Maliki has complained that the Sunni vice president is blocking key legislation.
On Thursday, however, al-Maliki paid al-Hashemi a rare visit. A statement by al-Hashemi’s office said the vice president told al-Maliki that “we can bite the bullet and put aside our political differences.”
The operation received public support from Sunni lawmakers who earlier pulled out of Maliki’s government. Their departure set off alarms in Washington, where American lawmakers openly criticized Maliki for allowing his government to become too sectarian. The Accordance Front has now broadly hinted that it may rejoin the government now that Maliki has finally “adopted a correct approach to the militia problem.”
The Kurds have even more practical goals in mind. Moqtada al-Sadr opposes the annexation of Kirkuk to Kurdish control in the north, while Sadr’s enemies in Basra have a strong alliance with the Kurds. Seeing Sadr reduced or eliminated as a political entity suits them, and they have even offered Kurdish troops for the Basra push to ensure success.
Far from fracturing the polity of Iraq, Maliki’s efforts against the militias has built confidence that his government wants to move away from sectarianism. The Kurds and Sunnis see encouraging signs in Maliki’s operations, as do Maliki’s other Shi’ite allies. In fact, national reconciliation will not be possible until the Baghdad government takes action against the militias and enforces central control over Iraqi security — which requires Maliki to do what he’s doing right now in Basra.
Well, at least your admitting that progress is being made- that progress from total denial.
The point is that reality has very little to do with it
I guess the surge wasn't a plan right? It just sorta happened w/o any planning, right?
Did you even bother to read the article I posted? Ti acknowledged the problems w/ the Basra fight, but went on the suggest that for a first effort of a newly organized army, it was very good- and that the problems that surfaced could be dealt with.
In what other battle in history is the force that was forced to declare a cease fire the victor?? If it was such a rout, why would Sadr want to stop fighting?
The analysis was from a general who was against the war from the outset.
You didn't address my larger point- if you truly want to get out of Iraq, you better hope the IA does better. Despite what they say now, billary or obama are not going to just pull out all troops
The problem with you and all the mindless libs is that your predilection to root against anything this administration does has reached pathological proportions
Your reflexive stance is to root for our enemies
OBAMA'S STRIKE-FORCE PROBLEM: "If his policies on the war will not be all that different from McCain's, he should stop ridiculing McCain for saying openly what his own people are saying behind closed doors. To some extent this is the result of a drawn out primary. Once the general election begins, the press will no longer give Obama a free pass on his vague statements about Iraq (the free ride may already be over). Perhaps Obama will take the opportunity to make his long-awaited pivot to the center--but that will strip the Democrats of their favored line of attack against McCain: that he would continue the war indefinitely while they would end it. Not so, apparently."
UPDATE: Related item here.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Is calling McCain a warmonger the way to spread hope and unity? Note the contrast with how McCain reacted when his introducer savaged Obama a few weeks ago. Obama, however, doesn't seem able to stand up to the haters on his own team. More at Hot Air, including an explicit comparison between McCain's behavior and Obama's. It seems especially unfair -- as well as unhinged -- to be calling McCain a warmonger when Obama's people are, sotto voce pushing similar plans for a long-term presence.
MORE: Okay, I linked this Ed Morrissey post on the Obama/McCain "warmonger" issue above, but this bit is worth quoting separately:
Contrast this with John McCain’s reaction to the introduction given him by Bill Cunningham in Ohio. When McCain found out that Cunningham repeatedly used Obama’s middle name in the preceding speech, he didn’t wait for the media to ask about it. He apologized, repudiated the comments, and promised to conduct a high-road campaign. And that was just for using Obama’s actual middle name.
Does Obama believe in reciprocity? Apparently not. Obama lets his surrogates do the namecalling at his events, and then comes on stage himself to blather about setting a new tone in politics and uplifting the level of discourse in DC. He has a fabulous start on it thus far, having his campaign events serve as a springboard for slurs against McCain — a man with one son already in this conflict and another about to begin a tour shortly.
Obama heralds himself as the candidate of change. So far, we’re just seeing the same tired, hysterical anti-war rhetoric coming from his events, delivered by a classless Air America host. If Obama wants to embrace that, then voters will understand which candidate talks about changing the level of discourse, and which candidate actually works to change it. Just as with most of Obama’s policies, it’s all talk and no action.
Really, he's not even close to living up to the rhetoric.
What you liberal fools don't realize is that you're rooting for the wrong thing
If you want to bring troops home and wind down our involvement, you'd root for the IA to become competent enough to maintain order with only our air support
No matter what billary and obama say, they won't just pull troops out and be responsible for the bloodshed
Instead, you fall back to SOP and root against anything that looks like progress in Iraq
The Basra Model
The tough stand of Iraq's army, with U.S. air support, could be America's way out. But will we give them the munitions and armor they need?
Apr 3, 2008 | Updated: 6:10 p.m. ET Apr 3, 2008
The outcome of the Battle of Basra is still unclear. But as things stabilize in that critical city—the southern gateway to Iraq's oil wealth—Basra may well turn out to be Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Kasserine Pass. That notorious battle, which took place in Tunisia in late February 1943, marked the first large-scale encounter between untested American troops and the battle-hardened Germans. The Americans, to put it mildly, did not do well. But they quickly fired incompetent commanders, adjusted in tactics, and never lost another major battle. In Basra the nascent Iraqi Army—also riddled with incompetence and self-doubt—actually came out looking better against Iraq's well-established militias than the American Army had 65 years earlier against the entrenched Nazis, says retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey. "At Kasserine we got our asses kicked. These people didn't," McCaffrey says.
Despite a spate of early grim assessments of Basra in the U.S. media, U.S. military observers on the ground in Iraq are more sanguine, says McCaffrey, who has long been a critic of the war. Yes, Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia has held on to its weapons and much of its turf. But Iraqi forces appear to be largely in control of the city and its ports, and Basra is still mostly calm. Even more important, the Iraqi security forces have remained mostly intact. Rather than bolting or deserting in droves, as happened so many times in the past, only in relatively small numbers did some Iraqis desert to the other side, McCaffrey told me. That's a big step forward. "On balance it appears as if the Iraqi security forces for the first time stepped up, largely independently of the United States, and tried to establish law and order in the most important city in the country save Baghdad," says McCaffrey, who recently canvassed top U.S. military commanders in Iraq.
If McCaffrey's assessment of the Battle of Basra holds—and we won't really know for months whether it does—it suggests something even more important. With proper equipment, artillery, armor and medical evacuation (medevac) units—and the United States acting as its air force—the Iraqi Army could actually begin to develop enough competence to permit a larger drawdown of American ground forces soon. If so, the Iraqi security forces will need a lot more help. Currently they have only a handful of light armored vehicles, three C-130 transport planes, and none of their own medevac units. Washington, for understandable reasons, has been reluctant to fully equip an army that for a long time was thought to be a cover for Shiite militia sympathizers or a breeding ground for civil war. But a success in Basra—a Shiite-dominated national army willing to bloodily suppress Shiite militias—might put many doubters in Congress and in the Pentagon over the threshold. As Meghan O'Sullivan, who recently retired as President Bush's deputy national security adviser, told me Thursday, "This is a bit where we'd like to see things go in the future. A year and a half ago we'd be talking about [the Iraqi government] sending a force from somewhere in the north and them not showing up."
There is another lesson here as well. If the Iraqi Army proves to be somewhat able to act on its own, and the central government gains the legitimacy it has been so sorely lacking, an actual U.S. exit strategy could begin to emerge. Indeed, it is even possible to imagine a bipartisan consensus on bringing the country to stability—and leaving. Currently the Democrats in Barack Obama's camp and the Republicans led by John McCain could not be further apart. Obama has decided Iraq is a lost cause and called for a pullout of one to two brigades a month. McCain has indicated he would stay indefinitely.
Much of the reason for that huge divide—apart from the politics of getting elected president—is the fact that post-surge U.S. troops remain on the front lines in Baghdad. Even with the planned drawdown to pre-surge levels of 140,000 troops or so, whoever becomes president in 2009 will find that the political will in this country for maintaining such a large U.S. ground force in Iraq is extremely limited. With 4,000 dead and counting, our nation can't stomach many more casualties. And the strain on the U.S. Army in terms of long deployments is almost unbearable. But if the U.S. role could quickly devolve to air support, equipping, advising and training, then we could achieve both Obama's goal of a swift ground pullout and McCain's goal of a long-term U.S. stabilizing presence.
The U.S. air support role has been emerging for some time. Washington has little intention of allowing the Iraqi national government to create a full-scale air force. According to the Congressional Research Service, the Bush administration asked for more than $1.7 billion for new military construction in Iraq in fiscal '07, a huge jump from the $200 million it requested for fiscal '06. Much of that money is being spent on U.S. air bases like Balad, north of Baghdad. "One of the issues of sovereignty for any country is the ability to control their own airspace. We will probably be helping the Iraqis with that problem for a very long time," the then-base commander, Brig. Gen. Frank Gorenc, told me when I was last there two years ago this month. Whatever you think about the start of the Iraq war, if the Iraqi Army starts performing, a practicable bipartisan pullout strategy could start to take shape.