Current Thinking From A Leftist

Now here’s a voice of reason……

It seems that the final days of the presidential campaign have made Erica Jong and her friends more than a little anxious.

  A few days ago, Jong, the author and self-described feminist, gave an interview to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera,
the choicest bits of which were brought to my attention by the reliably
sharp-eyed Christian Rocca, the U.S. correspondent of Il Foglio, who
published excerpts on his Camillo blog.
Basically, Jong says her fear that Obama might lose the election has
developed into an "obsession. A paralyzing terror. An anxious fever
that keeps you awake at night." She also says that her friends Jane
Fonda and Naomi Wolf are extremely worried that Obama will be sabotaged
by Republican dirty tricks, and that if an Obama loss indeed comes to
pass, the result will be a second American Civil War..

   "The record shows that voting machines in America are rigged."

"My friends Ken Follett and Susan Cheever are extremely worried.
Naomi Wolf calls me every day. Yesterday, Jane Fonda sent me an email
to tell me that she cried all night and can’t cure her ailing back for
all the stress that has reduces her to a bundle of nerves."

  "My back is also suffering from spasms, so much so that I had to see an acupuncturist and get prescriptions for Valium."

    "After having stolen the last two elections, the Republican Mafia…"   

"If Obama loses it will spark the second American Civil War. Blood
will run in the streets, believe me. And it’s not a coincidence that
President Bush recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead
against American citizens in the streets."

    "Bush has transformed America into a police state, from torture to the imprisonment of reporters, to the Patriot Act."

Wow…..

H/T: The Jawa Report

 

 

The Cult of Personality

In an effort to stem the ObamaWave, a song.

H/T InstanPundit

Tough Interviews

One wonders how upset Joe Biden would have gotten with this interviewer. But Kagan fights back….

SPIEGEL: An overwhelming majority of Europeans want to see Barack Obama become president…

Kagan: Yes, of the United States, although they would never
elect someone like that in their own countries. But I understand the
Europeans.

Tip of the hat to Neptunus Lex….

If One Way Doesn't Work, Try Another

One of the central tenets in the orthodoxy of the Left is that Bush, Republicans, the Supreme Court, and a complicit media stole, no ripped from the grasping hands of the Left, the presidential elections in 2000 and 2004. Unable to achieve redress through the legal system, unwilling to allow future elections to be controlled by the organs of the vast right wing conspiracy, and apparently unimpressed by the smallness of the achievements of the Democratic controlled Congress of the last two years, a few visionaries of the Left decided to change the model. It appears that their new model is working and will, perhaps, result in a new paradigm whose purpose is the maintenance of a permanent government whose operational philosophy is the mirror image of the worst of the European models and maybe, God forbid, the EU model.

Winds of Change has a nice post on the subject. The highlights:

When Barack Obama campaigned in Germany, John McCain’s campaign spokesman said (link):

"While Barack Obama took a premature victory lap
today in the heart of Berlin, proclaiming himself a ‘citizen of the
world,’ John McCain continued to make his case to the American citizens
who will decide this election."

That assumption that only Americans will decide the results of
America’s elections was old-fashioned, as the Obama campaign has
demonstrated by opening its doors to unlimited millions of dollars in
illegal donations, including foreign money. (Of many possible links to
support that, I’ll pick at random this recent one: (link) )

This contributes to Barack Obama’s crushing money advantage over
John McCain. How much it contributes we’ll almost certainly never know,
but apparently it confers an advantage that’s worth breaking the law
for in a big way…

To play the game in this new and more effective way requires
mainstream media cover. (At least until taboos on foreign money fade.)
Barack Obama has that.

It also requires that the supporters of his own party are willing to
go along with the new model. Apparently Barack Obama has that support
too.

With those advantages, Barack Obama can afford to aggressively suppress criticism (link). This too appears to be part of the new model.

And, as if Barack Obama didn’t already have media cover, fake hate
crime victim Republican campaign worker Ashley Todd has made his
campaign immune to charges of intimidation. Given her criminal,
inflammatory and racist false accusations, Republicans can’t say
anything credibly on this score – and Democrats aren’t excessively
troubled by Democrat pressure.

Government funded mass partisan support seems to be part of the new
model too. But even if Obama did not have enough media support to cover
ACORN – and he seemed to have ample cover –
Republican fraud, combined with unsupported accusations of partisan
bias against California Secretary of State Bowen have left Republicans
no basis to speak credibly on this issue either…

So we have a new election-winning model before us, being
demonstrated to its best advantage under ideal conditions by – I think
it has to be said – a political genius, a man who has seized and used a
decisive advantage in the money race, exactly where his side of (left,
relatively radical) politics has been so disadvantaged till now that
it’s been denied a chance to show its worth in government. Key elements
of the new model are:

• Overwhelming mainstream media support (including lack of interest in his illegal activities)
• A vast money advantage intentionally boosted to an unknowable but likely large extent by foreign and other illegal donations
• Government funded mass partisan support
• Intimidation and suppression of criticism.

The first two elements are key. The second two elements,
despite being perhaps more inflammatory, are peripheral. They merely
leverage a great advantage in what one candidate can get away with…

None of this should be taken to imply that the Republican Party doesn’t deserve a merciless electoral beating this year.

It’s just that the Republicans are being beaten not only by the economy and their own numerous weaknesses and missteps but also
by a masterfully implemented new model, one that they not only have no
answer to but that they complacently assumed couldn’t exist, because
the new model is a global model, and the Republican Party hasn’t thought globally till now.

The new model is also in at least one aspect of its key elements an illegal
model, and while the Republican Party has not historically lacked ardor
for both criminal actions and the greatest possible money advantage
(see: Richard M. Nixon), it’s been thinking small compared to what the
global financial / electoral battle-space requires. It’s been able to
imagine stealing an election, and wanting to. But it’s never imagined
The Big Steal.

Read the rest here.

One can only hope that post-election,some brave blogger, or (unlikely) a msm outlet will undertake the massive task of linking contributors to credit card numbers (before the data is scrubbed) in an effort to understand from whence and from whom the hundreds of millions of dollars came from.I’ll bet the electorate will be surprised.

But before we go, Remember this?:

In November 2007, Obama answered "Yes" to Common Cause
when asked "If you are nominated for President in 2008 and your major
opponents agree to forgo private funding in the general election
campaign, will you participate in the presidential public financing
system?"

Obama wrote: "In February 2007, I proposed a novel way
to preserve the strength of the public financing system in the 2008
election. My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a
fundraising truce, return excess money from donors, and stay within the
public financing system for the general election. My proposal followed
announcements by some presidential candidates that they would forgo
public financing so they could raise unlimited funds in the general
election. The Federal Election Commission ruled the proposal legal, and
Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has already pledged to accept this
fundraising pledge. If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively
pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly
financed general election."

What changed? Meantime, the msm diverts our attention with this kind of dreck.

I’d say the model is working.

Back Taxes Bad For Me, But Not Thee

A brief case study:

Joe the plumber gets investigated and savaged by the media big boys/girls.

Charlie Rangel, D-NY, no habla espanol.

David Paterson (governor of NY) has a chief of staff that is depressed.

Which of the three is, in the relative scheme, least culpable?  Which of the three has been most investigated by the media?

Hatin' Palin

Let’s let Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal have a few lines in this blog about Sarah Palin. Yeah, he’s a conservative, but the anti-Palin hysteria being pumped out by our so-called objective media is persistent, ubiquitous and scurrilous. Take it away, Mr. Henninger:

The abuse being heaped on Sarah Palin is such a cheap shot.

The complaint against the Alaska governor, at its most basic, is
that she doesn’t qualify for admission to the national political
fraternity.

Boy, that’s rich.

Behold the American political system, circa 2008.

Sarah Palin didn’t create the conditions that have led to a U.S.
Congress with the lowest approval rating ever registered in the history
of polling. She isn’t the reason opinion polls are showing people want
the entire Congress fired, with many telling pollsters they themselves
could do a better job.

Sarah Palin didn’t design a system of presidential primaries whose
length and cost ensures that only the most obsessional personalities
will run the gauntlet, while a long list of effective governors don’t
run.

These rules have wasted the electorate’s time the past three
presidential elections by filling the debates with such zero-support
candidates as Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Al Sharpton, Duncan Hunter,
Chris Dodd, Joe Biden (8,000 total votes), Wesley Clark and Alan Keyes.

Out of this process has fallen a Democratic nominee who entered the
U.S. Senate in 2005 fresh off a stint in the Illinois state
legislature, with next to no record of political accomplishment. He may
be elected mainly because, in Colin Powell’s word, he is
"transformational." One may hope so.

By not bothering to look very deeply at the details beneath either
candidate’s governing proposals, the media has created a lot of free
time to take free kicks at Gov. Palin. My former colleague, Tunku
Varadarajan, has helpfully compiled a glossary of Palin invective, and
I have added a few: "Republican blow-up doll," "idiot," "Jesus freak,"
"Caribou Barbie," "a dope," "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party,"
"liar," "disabled," and "her pretense that she is a woman."

If American politics is at low ebb, it may in large part be because
so many of its observers are at their personal best working in its
backwash.

The primary discomfort with Gov. Palin is the notion that she
doesn’t have enough experience to be president, that Sen. McCain should
have picked a more seasoned figure. Really? Let’s try an opinion poll
question:

If as Joe Biden suggests the U.S. is likely to be tested by a
foreign enemy next year, who of the following would you rather have
making decisions in the Oval Office: Nancy (of Damascus) Pelosi, John
Edwards, Harry Reid, Joe (the U.S. drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon)
Biden, Mike Huckabee, Geraldine Ferraro, Tom DeLay, Jimmy Carter or
Sarah Palin?

My pick? It would be Palin, surely the most grounded, common-sense person on that list of credentialed U.S. politicians…

I hope Sarah Palin stays in the game. She has exposed enough
cultural fissures in American politics to occupy strategists full-time
until 2012.

We know from what happened to her that there is now a left-to-right
elite centered in New York, Washington, Hollywood and Silicon Valley
whose worldview is defined by their shared point on the Bell Curve. It
seems only yesterday that the most critical skill in presidential
politics was being able to connect to and talk to people in places like
Bronko’s Bar or Saddleback Church. That’s a skill I suspect Barack
Obama will never learn. As to representing America’s vital interests in
London, Paris, Tehran or Moscow, Sen. Obama and Gov. Palin appear to be
at more or less the same starting point.

Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of "Saturday Night Live" who
lives on the forward wave of American life, gave his view of Sarah
Palin this week to EW.com: "I think Palin will continue to be
underestimated for a while. I watched the way she connected with
people, and she’s powerful. Her politics aren’t my politics. But you
can see that she’s a very powerful, very disciplined, incredibly
gracious woman. This was her first time out and she’s had a huge
impact. People connect to her." (emphasis mine)

If you google ‘hate sarah palin’ you’ll get about 2,350,000 hits. If you do another search for ‘joe biden gaffe’, you’ll get about 814,000 hits.The great unwashed electorate is being swamped with media attacks on Palin.

Yet not one major media figure has tried to pin Biden down on the multiple mis-statements he has made during this campaign. If you look at Joe’s Wikipedia entry, you’ll see that he has been a United States senator since 1972….for 36 years. He has served on the Senate Foreign Relations committee for years. Yet he states that the US and France kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon. He’s either lying or he doesn’t know what he said. And that’s just one curious statement out of many.

Where’s the outrage? Where’s the balance? Where’s the objectivity?

Remember?

One of the central tenets of the Obama candidacy is that the alternative, 4 more years of a Bush administration, is unacceptable to democrats in particular and the nation as a whole. McCain has apparently been ineffective in rebutting the claim, which the Obama team knows is false, and which the voters apparently believe. Such short memories.

Remember this?

John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, has
repeatedly and personally asked Senator John McCain, the
independent-minded Arizona Republican, to consider being his running
mate, but Mr. McCain has refused, people who have spoken to both men
said Friday…

Word of Mr. Kerry’s personal entreaties, and Mr. McCain’s flat
refusal, may bring an end to the persistent, and at times fevered,
speculation among Democrats and others about the potential of a
bipartisan ticket, with the two friends and Vietnam veterans matching
up against President Bush and Vice President Cheney, neither of whom 0f
fought n that war.

Mr. McCain’s testy relationship with
President Bush, whom he ran against in 2000 for the Republican
nomination, fueled the speculation, even though Mr. McCain has
repeatedly denied being interested in the job.

If we voters can’t remember the salient details of the last election, a scant 4 years ago, and accept direction by media campaigns that are, at best, only half-truths, then we get what we deserve.

 

Hubris, Part II

Via the good people at Maggies’ Farm, a further report on the behavior of "That One". The gulf between the plumber and the community organizer seems to widening…..

Hubris

This kind of stuff is probably not a good idea…..

Finally – An Adult Speaks

From a righty blogger….excerpts here, but follow the link to the full post:

You can talk about “voter fraud” and “stealing elections” all you
want but the fact remains that if Obama is certified by the electoral
college and the House of Representatives as President of the United
States, that ends the discussion in our republic. There is no more
important aspect of democracy than the minority accepting the will of
the majority. The constitution gives the minority certain protections
against getting steamrolled by the majority. But it doesn’t give the
minority the right to torpedo the legitimacy of the winner.

This
is more than a question of “fair play” or being a “sore loser.” The
Constitution says we have only one president at a time. Given the
importance of that office, it is stark raving lunacy to seek to destroy
the man occupying it.

The fact that the Democrats and the
left have acted like 2 year olds the last 8 years doesn’t mean that if
Obama is elected we should throw the same infantile tantrums and look
for ghosts in the machine – or accuse the opposition of foul play
without a shred of physical proof, only the paranoid imaginings whipped
up by people who knew exactly what they were doing – undermining the
legitimacy of the elected leader of the United States government…

But when push comes to shove and crisis erupts somewhere in the world
involving American interests – and no president in recent memory has
escaped such a challenge – I plan on backing my president’s play. I may
give voice to skepticism about the path he chooses. This is our right
and duty….

But there was also a recognition that the will of the majority was,
in the end, respected and granted legitimacy. This included recognizing
that there was only one president and that even if we disagreed with
him, that didn’t mean he was an impostor. The fact that the 2000
election was so close (and the results confirmed by a consortium of independent media
who took the time to recount the Florida votes several different ways
proving that Bush did indeed win the state) no doubt was frustrating
for the losers. But the idea that after 8 years the left could never
get over the results and indeed, showed a derangement toward the
president even after a still close but decisive win in 2004 proves that
it is up to us on the right to bring our politics back to a rough
equilibrium so that we can work together in these perilous times.

I plan on doing just that – while still skewering my political opponents with as much zest and glee as I can muster.

Amen, brother!