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Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

Lorne Gunter, National Post

Published: Monday, February 25, 2008

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter’s weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

And it’s not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona — two prominent climate modellers — the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

“We missed what was right in front of our eyes,” says Prof. Russell. It’s not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind’s effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as “a drop in the bucket.” Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to “stock up on fur coats.”

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It’s way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it’s way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

lgunter@shaw.ca

A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many others her age, she considered herself to be a very liberal Democrat, and was very much in favor of the redistribution of wealth.

She was deeply ashamed that her father was a rather staunch Republican, a feeling she openly expressed. Based on the lectures that she had participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, she felt that her father had for years harbored an evil, selfish desire to keep what he thought should be his.

One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on the rich and the addition of more government welfare programs. The self-professed objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she indicated so to her father. He responded by asking how she was doing in school

Taken aback, she answered rather haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA, and let him know that it was tough to maintain, insisting that she was taking a very difficult course load and was constantly studying, which left her no time to go out and party like other people she knew. She didn’t even have time for a boyfriend, and didn’t really have many college friends because she spent all her time studying.

Her father listened and then asked, “How is your friend Audrey doing?”

She replied, “Audrey is barely getting by. All she takes are easy classes, she never studies, and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. She is so popular on campus; college for her is a blast. She’s always invited to all the parties, and lots of times she doesn’t even show up for classes because she’s too hung over.”

Her wise father asked his daughter, “Why don’t you go to the Dean’s office and ask him to deduct a 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your friend who only has a 2.0. That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and certainly that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA.”

The daughter, visibly shocked by her father’s suggestion, angrily fired back, “That wouldn’t be fair! I have worked really hard for my grades! I’ve invested a lot of time, and a lot of hard work! Audrey has done next to nothing toward her degree. She played while I worked my tail off!”

The father slowly smiled, winked and said gently,

“Welcome to the Republican Party.”

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Obama’s Appeal Depends on Your Definition of Change

By Stuart Rothenberg

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) continues to promise change and stress his ability to unite Americans. It’s a feel-good campaign built on soaring rhetoric and good intentions.

Pardon me if all of the fawning from the national media, and the endorsements from Caroline Kennedy and Garrison Keillor, leave me less than convinced that he can bridge the deep divide that separates Americans.

Withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq won’t bring Americans together. Nor will raising taxes on the affluent or enhancing the power of organized labor to recruit more members. Even a stem-cell research bill won’t bring Americans together, though a clear majority surely supports it.

In politics, the devil is always in the details, and except in rare cases, Obama has either avoided them or, more importantly, failed to note the obvious contradictions in his message and his record.

Yes, Obama is a wonderful speaker, and his calls for change obviously resonate with many Americans. With seven out of 10 Americans agreeing that the country is headed off on the wrong track, it isn’t surprising that every candidate has talked change. No one has promised a third Bush term.

The question, of course, is what kind of change? Does Obama want to find common ground between Democrats and Republicans? Will he push issues and alternatives only with a national consensus? Or is “change” simply a value-neutral word for liberalism?

In the spring of 2005, 14 Senators tried to make Washington run more smoothly by signing an agreement for the 109th Congress that had the effect of killing Democratic plans to filibuster President Bush’s appointees to the appellate bench and eliminating a GOP strategy that would disallow filibusters of judicial appointments.

Barack Obama, who talks about changing the tone in Washington, didn’t join that “Gang of 14.”

Part of the problem with Obama’s message — and part of the reason it has so far been successful in his White House bid — is that different people read different things into his message of hope and change.

During an interview on a Washington, D.C., radio station the morning of the Potomac primary, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) talked about why he is drawn to Obama’s message of change. One didn’t need to read very hard between the lines to see that Kennedy thinks “change” means a dramatically more liberal agenda.

There is, of course, nothing surprising or wrong with this. You would expect Kennedy to support a candidate with whom he agrees.

But other voters, including some Republicans and many independents, seem to be attracted to Obama because they see him as someone who will improve the tone in Washington, bring Americans together and “get things done.”

Again, those are understandable goals. The only problem is that Kennedy’s view of Obama and the other one are all but impossible to reconcile.

If Obama satisfies Kennedy and the Democratic Party’s most liberal constituencies, it’s unlikely that he is going to bring the country together. And if Obama does truly take steps to find a middle ground between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, he certainly will disappoint his party’s base.

The reality is that half of the country leans Democratic and half leans Republican. Yes, there are some issues on which many Americans agree, but if Obama limits himself to those, he’ll have a thin agenda.

Instead, Obama is likely to strike out in a different direction from Bush. And if he thinks his communication skills alone will bring along the whole country (as he seems to), he is deluding himself. America is divided because Americans have very different views.

Obama was rated the most liberal Member of the U.S. Senate in 2007, up from the 10th most liberal Member in 2006 and the 16th most liberal in 2005. That suggests that he will follow a rather predictably liberal agenda if he is elected president later this year.

Even more telling, possibly, was a recent interview Obama gave to television anchor Leon Harris and journalist John Harris. In it, Obama tried to have things both ways.

When he was asked by Leon Harris how he reconciles his support for the D.C. gun ban, which was declared unconstitutional by a federal court last year and which bars all handguns not registered before 1976, with his statement that he has “no intention of taking away folks’ guns,” Obama launched into a confusing explanation of “conflicting traditions in this country.”

He ended his monologue by saying, “We can have a reasonable, thoughtful gun control measure that I think respects the Second Amendment and people’s traditions.” But the D.C. gun ban is based on the premise that the Second Amendment doesn’t give individuals the right to own a gun.

Maybe if Obama wraps up the Democratic nomination in the next few weeks, he’ll give all of us a better idea of what he’d really like to do as president. We can only hope so. Another eight months of soaring but empty rhetoric about bringing people together and bringing about change will leave most of America brain-dead.

Stuart Rothenberg is the editor of the The Rothenberg Political Report, and a regular columnist for Roll Call Newspaper.

IOWA CITY, Iowa – Two University of Iowa football players have been arrested on drug charges, including one felony count.

James Lee Cleveland, 19, and Arvell M. Nelson, 19, were arrested early Saturday on different charges.

Cleveland faces up to seven years in prison for tax stamp violation, a Class D felony, and two counts of unlawful possession of prescription drugs, both serious misdemeanors.

Nelson was arrested for possession of marijuana, a serious misdemeanor carrying a maximum of one year in prison.

Both players live in Hillcrest Hall on the University of Iowa campus.

According to police reports, Iowa public safety officers found marijuana in plain view on top of Nelson’s desk at 2:41 a.m. Nelson admitted the marijuana was his, according to the complaint.

About 20 minutes later, Cleveland consented to a search of his room. Police founds 21 units of oxycodone and 24 does of carisoprodol in his desk.

Cleveland admitted the pills _ for which no prescription or label was found _ were his, according to the complaint.

Oxycodone usually is prescribed for pain relief, while carisoprodol is a muscle relaxer.

Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz and Athletics Director Gary Barta left on the annual Hawkeye cruise Saturday and are unavailable for comment until March 3.

“Obviously until we get all the facts and examine what’s going on, we’ll have no comment,” said Phil Haddy, Iowa’s sports information director. “In this case or with anything legal, until we have all the facts, we’ll have nothing to say on it.”

Cleveland is a 6-foot-1,195-pound, red-shirt freshman wide receiver from Baytown, Texas. He finished second in the team in catches in 2007, with 36 for 464 yards. He started 11 games last year.

Nelson, a 6-foot-4 backup quarterback from Cleveland, Ohio, played sparingly at quarterback and wide receiver last year. A red-shirt freshman, he is expected to challenge for the starting quarterback position this spring.

The arrests were merely the latest legal troubles for Iowa’s football players:

_ Dominique Douglas and Anthony Bowman pleaded guilty to credit card fraud, an aggravated misdemeanor reduced from a felony

_ Clint Huntrods was arrested for public intoxication

_ Four players, Ryan Bain, Bradley Fletcher, Ben Evans and Lance Tillison, were arrested for drunken driving

_ Dana Brown was arrested for domestic assault

_ Three players, Ricky Stanzi, Ryan Donahue and Tyler Gerstandt, were arrested for possession of alcohol under legal age

_ Brandon Myers was arrested for interference with official acts

Nelson was also arrested last August for failure to appear after an arrest for driving while his license was suspended.

A service of the Associated Press(AP)

[props to an Iowa boy, who's library is a stones throw from me and worth the trip to visit with its seasonal displays and presentations - especially around Christmas -pf}

February 23, 2008

A Tribute to Herbert Hoover, the Anti-Fascist

By Ben-Peter Terpstra

Herbert Hoover, who had the misfortune to be in office when the stock market crashed in 1929, has taken far too much blame for the Depression, which Franklin Delano Roosevelt managed to prolong over a decade, until entry into World War II ended unemployment.

Question: Was President Herbert Hoover an insensitive isolationist? I'd say it's a question of perspective, really, of open-minded researchers looking at the whole man. But, who am I to think?

As an Australian, I admire Hoover, the young geologist/engineer. The brave Republican was also a pioneer. He worked Down Under for some time. And, thanks to men like Hoover, Australia is a relatively rich mining nation.

Indeed, if my nation's wild deserts don't break you, they will shape you. It takes character to work in extreme conditions, but Iowa's famous orphan was up to the task.

Hoover's humanitarian works in Tianjin, China, during the Boxer Rebellion, were also notable, and because the Republican's independent streak never left him, Washington's elites were evidently gob smacked, as seen below.

Herbert Hoover, (R-IA) Franklin D. Roosevelt, (D-NY)

Race: In 1924, Hoover maintains that America's anti-Japanese immigration quotas are wrong, full stop.

Race: During WWII, FDR sends Japanese families to "internment camps" while many white Germans are free to play, and travel.

Integrity: Hoover disdains anti-Semitic jokes, and stands against tricks "to smuggle fascism into America through a back door."

Integrity: Like so many Democrats, President Roosevelt adopts a fondness for anti-Semitic jokes.

War II: Hoover is not against all wars, but against Roosevelt's handling of the war, and shares John F. Kennedy's concerns.

War II: FDR often falls out with Churchill, makes a series of costly blunders, and falls in love with Stalin.

Furthermore, the International News Service reported in Berlin (March 8, 1938) that:

For the first time in his career, Reichsfuehrer Adolph Hitler today heard from an American statesman a forthright denunciation of Nazism as a practical and enduring force in world affairs.
The detractor, speaking straight from the shoulder, was Herbert Clark Hoover, thirty-first president of the United States, who spent 40 minutes in private with the Fuehrer...

The piece also noted that:

Without mincing words, Hoover bluntly informed Hitler that the United States will never become reconciled to understanding or even having the slightest tolerance for Nazism as a political and national creed.
He states further that American ideals reject the fundamental principles on which the Nazi regime is based and upon which it flourishes...

Be aware, however, that Democrats are good at hiding reports about brave Republicans. So, if you don't know about Hoover, the anti-fascist, then start looking under your floorboards.

Indeed, the Republican president's upbringing (below) is just as far off the elite's radar screen.

Herbert Hoover, (R-IA) Franklin D. Roosevelt, (D-NY)

Childhood: "Hoover was born in pinch poverty in the little town of West Branch, Iowa, where every home is humble." [1]

Childhood: Roosevelt was America’s little Lord Fauntleroy, the child of a Hudson River squire. He grew up in Hyde Park, NY.

Hobbies: “Hoover [the poor country pupil] entertained himself with sticks and tacks, strings, wires and nails and the assortment of things the village smithy leaves scattered in the shade of the chestnut tree.” [2]

Hobbies: “Franklin played with imported toys under the tutelage and protection of a governess [to the age of fourteen!], which ever is the nicest term.” [3]Then, he was off to Groton, the elite preparatory school.

Education: Hoover, the orphan, worked his way though Stanford, because he was not too proud to do laundry work.

Education: Franklin Roosevelt’s daddy dear, paid his son’s way into Harvard, living “on the Gold Coast” and then Columbia.

Even so, Democrats attacked Hoover’s wealth. Sure FDR was richer, yet, to be sure, the chattering classes didn’t want Iowa’s orphan to climb. They even blamed the job-producing pioneer for inheriting the Great Depression.

Nonetheless, some newspaper owners couldn’t stomach FDR but in Modern Times (The World from the Twenties to the Nineties) Paul Johnson (page 257) explains that:

“…their journalists loved him, forgiving him his frequent lies, concealing the fact that he took money off them from poker (which had damned Harding), obeying his malicious injunctions to give his Administration colleagues ‘a hard time.’
There were dark corners in the Roosevelt White House: his own infidelities, his wife’s passionate attachments to another woman, the unscrupulous, sometimes vicious manner in which he used executive power. None was exposed in his lifetime or for long after.”

Of course, society’s snobs were clearly jealous of Hoover’s relationship too. But why? Because he was happily married whereas FDR was living in some freaky arrangement; because Mrs. Hoover opened the doors of hospitality to the wives of black congressmen in the pre-Civil Rights era; because Hoover married in a Catholic ceremony (well before JFK became a “ground breaker”). Oh, and because good Protestant men trouble godless Democrats. And that’s the raw truth. Iowa’s favourite orphan was too Christian for them all.

---

[1] The Boy With Golden Spoon Is Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Evening Tribune (Minn), October 4, 1932, page 9.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.American Thinker (Link)Page Printed from: at February 23, 2008 – 12:35:43 PM EST

Link

February 22, 2008

Playing Politics With National Security

Earlier today, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell and Attorney General Michael Mukasey delivered a letter to Silvestre Reyes, the chairman–unfortunately–of the House Intelligence Committee. Their letter responded to a letter by Reyes on February 14 that disputed the urgency of reforming and modernizing FISA. The McConnell/Mukasey letter is devastating to those who, like Reyes, try to claim that no harm is being done by the Democrats’ stonewalling of FISA reform. The letter is lengthy and detailed; [take the link above back to the original document to read the entire letter -[f]

Here are a few excerpts:

In our letter to Senator Reid on February 5, 2008, we explained that: “the expiration of the authorities in the Protect America Act would plunge critical intelligence programs into a state of uncertainty which could cause us to delay the gathering of, or simply miss, critical foreign intelligence information.” That is exactly what has happened since the Protect America Act expired six days ago without enactment of the bipartisan Senate bill. We have lost intelligence information this past week as a direct result of the uncertainty created by Congress’ failure to act. Because of this uncertainty, some partners have reduced cooperation. In particular, they have delayed or refused compliance with our requests to initiate new surveillances of terrorist and other foreign intelligence targets under existing directives issued pursuant to the Protect America Act.

We have provided Congress with examples in which difficulties with collections under the Executive Order resulted in the Intelligence Community missing crucial information. For instance, one of the September 11th hijackers communicated with a known overseas terrorist facility while he was living in the United States. Because that collection was conducted under Executive Order 12333, the Intelligence Community could not identify the domestic end of the communication prior to September 11, 2001, when it could have stopped that attack. The failure to collect such communications was one of the central criticismas of the Congressional Joint Inquiry that looked into intelligence failures associated with the attacks of September 11. The bipartisan bill passed by the Senate would address such flaws in our capabilities that existed before the enactment of the Protect America Act and that are now resurfacing.

As we have explained in letters, briefings and hearings, FISA’s requirements, unlike those of the Protect America Act and the bipartisan Senate bill, impair our ability to collect information on foreign intelligence agents located overseas. Most importantly, FISA was designed to govern foreign intelligence surveillance of persons in the United States and therefore requires a showing of “probable cause” before such surveillance can begin. This standard makes sense in the context of targeting persons in the United States for surveillance, where the Fourth Amendment itself often requires probable cause and where the civil liberties of Americans are most implicated. But it makes no sense to require a showing of probable cause for surveillance of overseas foreign targets who are not entitled to thee Fourth Amendment protections guaranteed by our Constitution. Put simply, imposing this requirement in the context of surveillance of foreign targets located overseas results in the loss of potentially vital intelligence by, for example, delaying intelligence collection and thereby losing some intelligence forever.

It should be noted that the McConnell/Mukasey letter also blows away the claims that liberals made a couple of years ago that FISA in its original form was perfectly adequate, and didn’t require supplementation by executive order.McConnell and Mukasey probably won’t convince the woefully underqualified and doggedly partisan Reyes, but perhaps the facts they disclose will help to build public pressure on the Democrats to stop sacrificing our security against terrorist attack to the interests of their patrons in the plaintiffs’ bar.

Link 

By Margery Eagan  |   Thursday, February 21, 2008  

I’m an Obama girl and my man throttled Hillary Clinton, again, Tuesday night.

Suddenly, the impossible is real.

Suddenly, I’m nervous. Very nervous, actually.

I’m nervous because an otherwise normal grownup told me yesterday she’s watched the will.i.am (Black Eyed Peas) “Yes We Can” Obama video about 100 times and gets “weepy” every time.

I’m nervous because a longtime political type, normally quite cynical, now waxes rhapsodic about Obama’s “cool.”

“He’s elegant, controlled, the best-dressed candidate ever,” he says. Never a red tie, yellow or bright blue. No, Obama does a subdued lean charcoal gray suit with a gray or silvery tie. Everything muted, measured, fluid. “He floats onto the stage, a bit of the Fred Astaire thing going.”

Fred Astaire?

This same man, 100 percent anti-illegal aliens, fears Obama could pull a Reagan or a JFK on the Mexican border, head down there, chanting, “Tear down this wall!” or even do an “Ich bin ein Tijuana!!!”

He’s with Obama anyway.

I’m nervous because Harvard political genius Elaine Kamarck told me Hillary understands the various messes we’re in far better than Obama.

Suppose Kamarck’s right?

I’m nervous about the “O’Bambi” factor. Will the terrorists move in next door when Obama’s in the White House?

I’m nervous because Michelle Obama, about whom I just wrote a fawning puff piece, now says that until her husband’s stunning ascendancy, she’s never before been proud of America. Huh?

Barack now claims she didn’t mean it. Oh, yes she did. We all know the insufferable, holier-than-thou, Blame-America-First types who lecture the unwashed from the rarefied air of Cambridge and Brookline.

If I wanted lecturing, I’d be with Hillary.

I’m nervous because too many Obama-philes sound like Moonies, or Hare Krishnas, or the Hale-Bopp-Is-Coming-To-Get-Me nuts.

These true believers “Obama-ize” everything. They speak Obama-ese. Knit for Obama. Run for Obama. Gamble – Hold ’Em Barack! – for Obama. They make Obama cakes, underwear, jewelry. They send Valentine cards reading, “I want to Barack your world!”

At campaign rallies people scream, cry, even faint as Obama calmly calls for the EMTs. When supporters pant en masse, “I love you!” (like The Beatles, circa 1964), Barack says, “I love you back” with that deliciously charming, almost cocky smile.

Oh – I’m nervous because it’s all gone to his head and he hasn’t even won yet.

I’m nervous because it’s gone to a lot of other people’s heads as well. Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings introduced Obama last week in Baltimore and said, “This is not a campaign for president of the United States, this is a movement to change the world.”

“He walks into a room and you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere,” says George Clooney.

“I’ll do whatever he says to do,” says actress Halle Berry. “I’ll collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear.”

I’m nervous because nobody’s quite sure what Obama stands for, even his supporters. (“I can’t wait to see,” said actress/activist Susan Sarandon, declaring full support nonetheless).

I’m nervous because even his biggest fans can’t name Obama’s accomplishments, including Texas state Sen. Kirk Watson, an Obama-man who humiliated himself when MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked him about five times to name something, anything, Obama’s done. Watson hemmed. Watson hawed. Watson gave up.

I’m nervous because John McCain says Obama’s is “an eloquent but empty call for change” and in the wee, wee hours, a nagging voice whispers, suppose McCain’s right, too? Then what?

here’s another article on the same subject:   Media Start Falling Out of Love With Obama: Commentary by Margaret Carlson

February 18, 2008

America’s Three Worst Presidents

By Ari Kaufman
Presidents Day has taken a deep back seat these days on our holiday calendar to the point that not only do schools go on as scheduled, but so do many state and government offices. This is not surprising in 2008, and many revel in it. Presidents Day now celebrates all presidents, not just our greatest. That being the case, let’s “celebrate,” or at least recall, the three worst presidents in our country’s otherwise proud history. All 43 had their faults, and though mainstream media sources may not agree with my choices, many who understand history will, as a recurring theme continues. During each of these men’s short times in office, they were le for deterring progress and negatively affecting the future for America. Thankfully, two of them were followed by two of the greatest commanders in chief of all time. From the bottom:

Jimmy Carter: (1977-1981)
Few would deny Mr. Carter’s place in infamy. I will confine myself to his actual time in office, although Jimmy Carter arguably has actually been as detrimental to freedom, democracy and the American ideal as during his catastrophic tenure.

Many historians rank him around the mid 20s, some liberal publications place him even in the top 20, and some conservatives in the low 30s. But these are 1980s and 90s ratings. It no doubt takes two post-presidential decades for more complete observations, as we saw with President Reagan, and will likely see with President Bush, depending upon the successor.

One absurd decision, considered “controversial” by even his ardent supporters, was the final negotiation and signature of the “Panama Canal Treaties” in September 1977. Those treaties, which essentially would transfer control of the American-built Panama Canal to the nation of Panama, were bitterly opposed by a majority of the American public. The treaties transferred a great strategic American asset – one that nearly 30,000 men died while constructing it over a decade — to a corrupt third-world military dictatorship. Mr. Carter could not care less. America’s worst president also terminated the Russian wheat deal, which was intended to establish trade with USSR and lessen Cold War tensions. Even as a former farmer, Carter didn’t value the grain exports, which would have been beneficial to many people employed in agriculture. This embargo marked the beginning of terrible hardship for American farmers.

If all that were not tragic enough, the main conflict between human rights and U.S. interests came in Carter’s dealings with the Shah of Iran. Though Carter’s presidency was marked by several major crises, the final year of his term arguably was his worst. It was dominated by the Iran Hostage Crisis, during which the United States struggled to rescue diplomats and American citizens held hostage in Tehran, paving the way for the rise of Radical Islam now threatening the free world.

The Shah had been a strong ally of America since World War II. He was also friendly to the Jews of Israel, an idea subsequently non-existent in Iran for more than three decades now. Al Qaeda and the Taliban did not exist and Radical Islam lacked a major state sponsor. Shah Reza Pahlavi was one of the “twin pillars” upon which U.S. strategic policy in the Middle East was built.

When the Iranian Revolution broke out, the Shah was overthrown, and the U.S. did not intervene. The Shah, in permanent exile, was refused entry to the United States by the Carter administration, even on grounds of medical emergency. Nearly a year later, Washington relented and admitted the Shah into the U.S. Gaining strength and confidence, Iranian militants seized the American embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans hostage.

The Shah died a few months later in Egypt, but the hostage crisis continued, dominating the last year of Carter’s presidency and putting his misguided policies on display for the world to see, embarrassing America in the process. Carter’s response was to do nothing at first. He simply stayed inside the White House. Then he attempted a rescue he closely managed, which failed. (Contrast this to President Bush after 9-11, though he was still criticized in the press). The redeeming factor in this telling ordeal was Carter’s crushing defeat by Ronald Reagan in the presidential election.

The hostages were released on January 20, 1981 moments after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the 40th President of the USA. Carter’s greatest achievement was leaving office.

James Buchanan (1857-1861)
Slavery persisted deep into the 19th century, and more than 600,000 brave young American men lost their lives in order to abolish the cruel practice and preserve the Union. Democrats were in charge of America leading up to the beginning of hostilities in April 1861, and bear a special historical responsibility. Of course, on campus there is a noticeable gap in studying party’s history during the last half of the 19th century, which academics also underplay when discussing the casus belli of the War Between the States. The worst among a bad lot of Democrat presidents, ranked at the bottom of several ranking lists, was the man who preceded Abraham Lincoln and left the country in ruins, Pennsylvania-born Democrat(ic) President James Buchanan – the only man who was a bachelor when elected to the presidency.

Though Franklin Pierce, who served directly prior to Buchanan, was just as disastrous (as was this entire era of Democratic politics), during Mr. Buchanan’s administration the Union broke apart, and as he left office, the only Civil War in US history was 39 days away.

The country was divided in the middle of the 19th century. Not divided in the ‘red state, blue state’ way that today’s emotional media decries, but divided over the serious issue of slavery. Violence was everywhere, with abolitionists murdered in Kansas having their murders avenged by radical northerners in Virginia, lynchings and so on.

What did Mr. Buchanan, apparently learning nothing from the failures of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that led to this tipping point, do? He kept to the Democrat status quo, asserting that slavery should be a matter for individual states and territories to decide for themselves. The Southern slaveholders, largely Democrats, approved. His opponent in the 1856 presidential election, Senator John C. Fremont, literally the first Republican presidential candidate, argued that the federal government should prevent slavery from spreading into the new western territories. Buchanan won the election, although he failed to get a popular majority over Fremont and former president Millard Fillmore, candidate from the erstwhile Know-Nothing party.

Buchanan, still ignoring common sense and appeasing evil, decided to end the troubles in Kansas by urging the admission of the territory as a slave state, endorsing a proslavery constitution. In his inaugural address, he even encouraged the Supreme Court’s forthcoming Dred Scott decision, which ruled that Congress had no power to keep slavery out of the territories.

Republicans won the House in 1858, but every significant bill they passed fell before Southern votes in the Senate or a Presidential veto. The Federal Government thus reached a stalemate, and sectional strife then forced the Democratic Party into Northern and Southern wings, each nominating its own candidate for the Presidency.

When the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln, it was a foregone conclusion that he would be elected. The South advocated secession. Like the Democrats 150 years later in dealing with Islamic terrorists, Buchanan hoped for compromise or diplomacy, but secessionist leaders did not want compromise. He sat idle as the furor of the situation spiraled out of control, naively believing that the Constitution did not give the president power to act against seceders.

In March 1861 he retired to his Pennsylvania home Wheatland, where he died seven years later, leaving his successor to resolve the frightful issue facing the nation.
Even the White House website seems to concur:

“Buchanan grasped inadequately the political realities of the time. Relying on constitutional doctrines to close the widening rift over slavery, he failed to understand that the North would not accept constitutional arguments which favored the South. Nor could he realize how sectionalism had realigned political parties: the Democrats split; the Whigs were destroyed, giving rise to the Republicans.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969)
I will avoid discussing LBJ’s adventures in foreign policy. Like Mr. Carter, his presidency was so full of mishaps there is not enough space to cover them all, and Johnson’s foreign policy was particularly contentious. Rather, I will focus on his long lasting social policies which have had lasting, regressive, deadly effects.

Lyndon Baines Johnson’s policies laid the groundwork for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Inner cities and black America have been relegated to poverty and lack of incentive to succeed as a direct result of Johnson’s socialist policies. Many contemporary historians may consider LBJ a “progressive pioneer” but I see a different story.

Johnson was sworn in as our 36th president at Love Field in Dallas, roughly 100 minutes after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963. LBJ was preceded by a romantic figure cut down in Johnson’s home state.

Though he was elected in 1964, the GOP may have aided that victory with a somewhat polarizing candidate in Arizona senator, Barry Goldwater. The Republican nominee had a great record of supporting civil rights, but Goldwater opposed certain preferences in the bills that became the Civil Rights Act. His vote against it ultimately led to a 44 to 6 state triumph for LBJ in the general election. Johnson benefited greatly from a profound expansion in liberal control over much of the mainstream press, Hollywood, and academia, a process that, of course, continues today.

Not remembered much in current history textbooks or the media of today, was that in the 1920s Republicans proposed anti-lynching legislation, reflecting back to Civil War times when Democrats, including founders of the KKK, had been involved in this horrific act. The legislation passed the House , an opposition speech was given by a Democrat Congressman from Texas named Lyndon B. Johnson, but was killed by the Democrat-controlled Senate. Finally in 1939 it passed the Senate.

LBJ and the Southern wing of the Democratic Party persisted in supporting anti-black positions. Consider, as LBJ’s term neared:

- In 1956, Democrats expressed their opposition to the desegregation decision of Brown v. Board of Education in the “Southern Manifesto.” One hundred members of Congress, all Democrats, signed the manifesto.

- In 1957, REPUBLICAN President Eisenhower authored a Civil Rights Bill, hoping to repair the damage done to blacks and their civil rights by Democrats for nearly a century. Passage of the bill was blocked by Senate Democrats.

- In 1959, Eisenhower authored a Voting Rights Bill, again, in an effort to undo the disenfranchisement of blacks by Democrats through poll taxes, literacy tests, and threats of violence by the KKK. And once again, passage of the bill is blocked by Senate Democrats.

But then, following the JFK assassination:
– In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is the law originally authored by Eisenhower in 1957. Democrats, including Senator Robert Byrd (a former KKK member), filibustered the bill. Once the filibuster was overcome, a larger percentage of Republicans voted for passage than did Democrats.

- In 1965, Congress passed, and President Lyndon Johnson signed into law, the Voting Rights Act of 1964. This is the law originally authored by Eisenhower in 1959. A filibuster was prevented, and passage of this bill also enjoyed support from a greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats. Johnson, of course, is now president and gets “credit” for this legislation — authored by Republicans, designed by Republicans to undo a century of damage done by Democrats, and voted for by a greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats.

- This was followed by the Great Society programs designed to eliminate poverty and racism.

At this point, the media and academic elite began using a powerful combination of information control and revisionist history to engineer a massive electoral shift. Falling for the blandishments of the Democrats and their media allies, blacks, once exclusively Republican, began voting Democrat in numbers greater than 90 percent, the actual consequences of Johnson’s Great Society were disastrous for blacks, discouraging initiative, encouraging a sense of entitlement and victimhood, and creating a permanent dependency class. Until 1965, 82% of black households had both a mother and a father in the home — a statistic on par with or even slightly higher than white families.

After 1965 (the year the Democrats and President Johnson decided it was time to stop oppressing blacks and start “helping” them), the presence of black fathers in the home began a precipitous decline; today, the American black out-of-wedlock birthrate is at 69%.

Unlike its socialist cousin (the New Deal), the Great Society emerged in a period of prosperity. Johnson presented his goals for the Great Society in a speech at an elite liberal public university, the University of Michigan, in May 1964. So-called “do-gooder liberals,” having little faith in their common man, loved its aims. The elitist “White Guilt” (see Shelby Steele’s book of the same name) resulted in terrible impacts.Socialism clearly makes individuals worse. Incalculable damage has been done to the black family by the neo-socialist policies begun under Johnson, which are a perverted form of what Eisenhower wisely began a decade prior. And for that, even ignoring the Vietnam adventure, LBJ goes down as one of our three worst presidents of all time.

Ari Kaufman is a military historian for the Indiana War Memorials Commission and an Associate Fellow at the Sagamore Institute for Policy Research.

Although I agree with many of the points in this article, John at Powerlineblog.com does not.  -pf

Link to original article below

The Dumbing Of America
Call Me a Snob, but Really, We’re a Nation of Dunces

By Susan Jacoby
Sunday, February 17, 2008; B01

“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today’s very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble — in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an “elitist,” one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just “folks,” a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.”) Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country’s democratic impulses in religion and education. But today’s brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book — fiction or nonfiction — over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book “Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter,” the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their “vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen.” But these zombie-like characteristics “are not signs of mental atrophy. They’re signs of focus.” Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.

Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.

I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time — as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web — seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.

No wonder negative political ads work. “With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information,” the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. “A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching.”

As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible — and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University’s Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate — featuring the candidate’s own voice — dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.

The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.

People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping “I’m the decider” may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio “fireside chat” so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, “they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin.”

This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today’s public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it “very important.”

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism — a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.

There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. (“Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture,” Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a “change election,” the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.

info@susanjacoby.com

Susan Jacoby’s latest book is “The Age of American Unreason.”

Link to Boston Globe Article

JEFF JACOBY

What would JFK do?

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | February 17, 2008

IN 1963, John F. Kennedy was murdered in Texas by a fervent admirer of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. In 2008, a large Cuban flag emblazoned with the image of Che Guevara, Castro’s brutal henchman, is prominently displayed in a Barack Obama campaign volunteer office in Houston.

Obama has been widely compared to JFK, most notably by the late president’s brother and daughter. President Kennedy, a stalwart anticommunist, despised Castro and his gang of totalitarian thugs. But when word broke last week that Obama’s supporters in Houston work under a banner glorifying Che, the campaign’s reaction was to brush it off as an issue involving volunteers, not the official campaign. After two days of controversy, the campaign issued a statement calling the flag “inappropriate” and saying its display “does not reflect Senator Obama’s views.” Would JFK have reacted so mildly?

In December 1962, Kennedy offered a blunt summary of the Castro/Che record. “The Cuban people were promised by the revolution political liberty, social justice, intellectual freedom, land for the campesinos, and an end to economic exploitation,” he said. “They have received a police state, the elimination of the dignity of land ownership, the destruction of free speech and a free press, and the complete subjugation of individual human welfare.” Eleven months later, in a speech intended for delivery on the day he was assassinated, Kennedy regretted that Castro’s “Communist foothold” in Latin America had “not yet been eliminated.”

Were he alive today, it’s hard to imagine JFK feeling anything but contempt for those who extol a dictatorship that has been crushing freedom and human beings for nearly 50 years. And it would surely pain him that so many of the cheerleaders are members of his own party.

The lionizing of Che, a sociopath who relished killing and acclaimed “the pedagogy of the firing squad,” is not just “inappropriate.” It is vile. No American in his right mind would be caught dead wearing a David Duke T-shirt or displaying a poster of Pol Pot. A celebrity who was spotted with a swastika-festooned cap or an actress who revealed that she had gotten a tattoo depicting Timothy McVeigh would inspire only repugnance. No presidential campaign would need more than 30 seconds to sever its ties to anyone, paid staffer or volunteer, whose office was adorned with a Ku Klux Klan banner. Yet Che’s likeness, which ought to be as loathed as any of those, is instead a trendy bestseller and a cult favorite.

A few years ago the New York Public Library gift shop sold Che wristwatches. These it described as “featuring the classic romantic image of Che Guevara, around which the word ‘revolution’ revolves.” But Che’s idea of revolution was anything but romantic. What he cherished was hatred and murder: “Hatred as an element of struggle,” he wrote in 1967, “unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.” It was a sentiment he expressed repeatedly – and lived up to.

With Che at his side, Castro toppled Fulgencio Batista in January 1959. “As soon as they had seized power,” notes “The Black Book of Communism,” a magisterial survey of communist crime in the 20th century, “they began to conduct mass executions inside the two main prisons, La Cabana and Santa Clara.” As chief prosecutor of the new regime, Che oversaw the bloodbath, ordering hundreds of executions in the first months of 1959. Those he killed, “The Black Book” records, included “former comrades-in-arms who refused to abandon their democratic beliefs.”

Like totalitarians of every stripe, Che didn’t scruple at the death of innocents. “Quit the dallying!” he ordered Jose Vilasuso, a conscientious government lawyer who was seeking evidence against several prisoners. “Your job is a very simple one. Judicial evidence is an archaic and secondary bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! We execute from revolutionary conviction.”

Time magazine once called Che the “Brains of the Cuban Revolution,” and saluted his “icy calculation, vast competence, high intelligence, and . . .perceptive sense of humor.” A better description comes from journalist Humberto Fontova, who observes in “Exposing The Real Che Guevara” that Che was for Castro what Heinrich Himmer was for Hitler and Lavrenty Beria for Stalin – “the snarling enforcer.” Fittingly, a massive drawing of Che adorns the headquarters of Cuba’s secret police in Havana.

That this sadistic thug’s face also adorns the office of a US presidential candidate’s supporters is appalling and disgraceful. That the candidate couldn’t bring himself to say so is even worse.

Jeff Jacoby’s e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

Although I disagree with Steyn’s final statement (that Hillary might regret her movement from a Goldwater Republican to a Democrat) this is another good article about the rise of Obama.

My favorite segment of this article needs to be understood in context of this week’s news (if you caught it on conservative media – you certainly didn’t see the story reported in the mainstream media). An Obama office just opened in Houston where they proudly displayed a flag celebrating the life and times of Che Guevara. Read more about Che in this Slate article here. But below is the Steyn segment I’m talking about in this post:

Behind the desks of the perky gals answering the phones were posters of Che Guevara and Cuban flags. Needless to say, the news reporters were either indifferent to this curious veneration or too sensitive to mention it, and it was left to the right-wing extremist Roy Rogers fascists of the blogosphere to point it out.

Dancing around the channels on Saturday AM I found a 3 hour series on the Roman Empire… I highly recommend the series if you can catch it – I found it on the Military Channel in the upper digital empire… Interestingly the series (narrated by Sam Waterston) also talks about the history of “climate change” driving “barbarians” south from what is now Russia to the Black Sea area. hmmm…

Variation of a theme, I’m posting a quote from a Clinton now Obama supporter, Maya Angelou:

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

More clearly said, “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it”. We, generally speaking, not only have forgotten history but don’t even know it. I’ve read that Winston Churchill has been dropped from the list of recommended historical figures for teachers in English secondary schools. We need to think and teach more about the past in order not to repeat it. Is it too late?

I’m not writing here to condemn the Obama supporters displaying the Che flag, only to paraphrase Steyn’s question, do they really know the history of Che? -pf

Link to original article

You Say You Want a Revolution
Political worshippers of the new Messiah.

By Mark Steyn

These days, Obama worshippers file two kinds of columns. The first school is well represented by Ezra Klein, the elderly bobbysoxer of The American Prospect:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.

Er, okay, if you say so. I got a bit bored halfway through and switched over to the Golden Girls rerun. But to each his own. Still, it seems to me that Barack Obama is the triumph of flesh, color, and despair over word — that’s to say, he offers an appealing embodiment of identity politics plus a ludicrously despairing vision of contemporary America (sample: “Trade deals like NAFTA ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart”) that triumphs over anything so prosaic as a policy platform. Mrs. Clinton, the earthbound wonk, is reduced to fulminating that this race is about “speeches versus solutions.” But a lot of Democrats seem to have concluded that Hillary’s the problem, and Obama’s speech is the solution.

On the other hand, if you’re running for president not as an unexceptional first-term senator with a thin resume but as the new Messiah, the new Kennedy, the new Gandhi, the new Martin Luther King, you can’t blame folks for leaping ahead to the next stage in the mythic narrative. Around the world, a second instant sub-genre has sprung up in which commentators speculate how long it will be before some deranged Christian-fundamentalist neo-Nazi gun-nut deprives America of its fleeting wisp of glory. Setting a new standard for fevered slavering Obama-assassination porn, Earl MacRae warned Canadians in the Ottawa Sun this week:

To be black and catapulting towards the presidency on charm, intellect, and popularity is unacceptable to the racist paranoid and scary in America the beautiful… They do not want to hear that he is a better American than they are, these right-wing extremist fascists in the land of America who no doubt believe it’s God’s will Barack Obama not get to the White House, no method of deterrence out of bounds, in their zealotry to protect and perpetuate Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Mom’s apple pie, and the cross of Jesus in every home.

And you can’t protect and perpetuate Roy Rogers without a Trigger. By this point, Mr. MacRae wasn’t so much warming to his theme as typing up his first draft for Miramax: “Barack Obama is waving his arms. The crowd is cheering. I see the image I don’t want to see. I see the image that is the terrible sickness in the great republic. I see Barack Obama one minute smiling, the people crying his name. I see Barack Obama grab his chest and his eyes widen and his mouth opens and the crowd screams as Barack Obama, black candidate for the presidency of the United States of America, falls to the ground dead, an assassin’s bullet inside him.”

Er, okay. But would it help if I made you a nice cup of chamomile tea and you lie down in a darkened room for half an hour? Right now Obama’s more at risk of being taken out by traces of polonium-210 left in his hotel by a Clinton operative than by Roy Rogers saddling up for Jesus. Every president is a target for assassination, though George W. Bush is unique in having been the subject of explicit murder fantasies by so many non-right-wing non-extremist impeccably reasonable artists (the British movie Death Of A President; the novella Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker) and even the occasional straightforward exhortation: “On November 2, the entire civilized world will be praying, praying Bush loses,” wrote Charlie Brooker in London’s Guardian in 2004. “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?”

Well, wherever they are, they’re probably saying: “Why bring us into it? When ol’ Lee Harvey decided it was time for JFK to get assassinated, he didn’t sit around whining, ‘John Wilkes Booth, where are you now that I need you?’ Get off your butt and do it yourself, you big Euro-ninny.” Ah, but for the armchair insurgents of the western Left, the vicarious frisson is more than delicious enough. Anything else would interfere with dinner plans.

The Bush-assassination fantasies are concocted by his political opponents and at least arise from his acts — invading the world; slaughtering 14 million Iraqi civilians or whatever it’s up to by now; shredding the constitution. By contrast, the Obama-assassination porn is written by his worshippers and testifies to one of the most palpable features of the senator’s campaign — its faintly ersatz quality, its determination to appropriate Camelot and every other mythic narrative. A few days ago, a local news team went to shoot some film at the Houston campaign headquarters for Obama. Behind the desks of the perky gals answering the phones were posters of Che Guevara and Cuban flags. Needless to say, the news reporters were either indifferent to this curious veneration or too sensitive to mention it, and it was left to the right-wing extremist Roy Rogers fascists of the blogosphere to point it out.

Do Obama’s volunteers even know who Che is? Apart from being a really cool guy on posters and T-shirts, like James Dean or Bart Simpson, I doubt it. They’re pseudo-revolutionaries. Very few people in America want a real revolution: Life is great, this is a terrific country, with unparalleled economic opportunities. To be sure, it’s a tougher break if you have the misfortune to be the victim of one of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs or a decrepit inner-city grade school with a higher per-student budget than the wealthiest parts of Switzerland. But even so, to be born a U.S. citizen is, as Cecil Rhodes once said of England, to win first prize in the lottery of life. Not even Obama supporters want real revolution: They’re messy, your cities get torched, the economy collapses, much of your talent flees. Ask the many peoples around the world for whom revolution means not a lame-o Sixties poster above your desk but the carnage and horror of the day before yesterday.

Poor mean vengeful Hillary, heading for a one-way ticket on the oblivion express, has a point. Barack Obama is an elevator Muzak dinner-theater reduction of all the glibbest hand-me-down myths in liberal iconography — which is probably why he’s a shoo-in. The problems facing America — unsustainable entitlements, broken borders, nuclearizing enemies — require tough solutions not gaseous Sesame Street platitudes. But, unlike the whose-turn-is-it? GOP, Mrs. Clinton’s crowd generally picks the new kid on the block: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. I wonder if Hillary Rodham, Goldwater Girl of 1964, ever wishes she’s stuck with her original party.

© 2008 Mark Steyn

Link to original article
February 15, 2008, 0:00 a.m.

The Next Great Awakening
Obama 2008’s messianic fervor won’t last

By Charles Krauthammer

There’s no better path to success than getting people to buy a free commodity. Like the genius who figured out how to get people to pay for water: Bottle it (Aquafina was revealed to be nothing more than reprocessed tap water) and charge more than they pay for gasoline. Or consider how Google found a way to sell dictionary nouns — boat, shoe, clock — by charging advertisers zillions to be listed whenever the word is searched.

And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a silver-tongued freshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, you need only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.

This kind of sale is hardly new. Organized religion has been offering a similar commodity — salvation — for millennia. Which is why the Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revival with, as writer James Wolcott observed, a “salvational fervor” and “idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria.”

“We are the hope of the future,” sayeth Obama. We can “remake this world as it should be.” Believe in me and I shall redeem not just you but your country — nay, we can become “a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest.”

And believe they do. After eight straight victories — and two more (Hawaii and Wisconsin) almost certain to follow — Obama is near to rendering moot all the post–Super Tuesday fretting about a deadlocked convention with unelected superdelegates deciding the nominee. Unless Hillary Clinton can somehow do in Ohio and Texas on March 4 what Rudy Giuliani proved is almost impossible to do — maintain a big-state firewall after an unrelenting string of smaller defeats — the superdelegates will flock to Obama. Hope will have carried the day.

Interestingly, Obama has been able to win these electoral victories and dazzle crowds in one new jurisdiction after another, even as his mesmeric power has begun to arouse skepticism and misgivings among the mainstream media.

ABC’s Jake Tapper notes the “Helter-Skelter cultish qualities” of “Obama worshipers,” what Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times calls “the Cult of Obama.” Obama’s Super Tuesday victory speech was a classic of the genre. Its effect was electric, eliciting a rhythmic fervor in the audience — to such rhetorical nonsense as “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. (Cheers, applause.) We are the change that we seek.”

That was too much for Time’s Joe Klein. “There was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism … ,” he wrote. “The message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.”

You might dismiss the New York Times’ Paul Krugman’s complaint that “the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality” as hyperbole. Until you hear Chris Matthews, who no longer has the excuse of youth, react to Obama’s Potomac primary victory speech with “My, I felt this thrill going up my leg.” When his MSNBC cohosts tried to bail him out, he refused to recant. Not surprising for an acolyte who said that Obama “comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament.”

I’ve seen only one similar national swoon. As a teenager growing up in Canada, I witnessed a charismatic law professor go from obscurity to justice minister to prime minister, carried on a wave of what was called Trudeaumania.

But even there the object of his countrymen’s unrestrained affections was no blank slate. Pierre Trudeau was already a serious intellectual who had written and thought and lectured long about the nature and future of his country.

Obama has an astonishingly empty paper trail. He’s going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can’t possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran’s Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs and that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war — with the hope, I suppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in American prestige would compensate for the chaos to follow.

Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.

© 2008, The Washington Post Writers Group

Link
Powerlineblog

February 14, 2008

Not serious about energy policy either

In a post below, John shows once again that congressional Democrats are not serious about national security. They would rather pander to their radical base and, it would appear, to their trial lawyer financiers than authorize measures through which the government can obtain the intelligence needed to fight terrorism.

As Ben Lieberman of the Heritage Foundation demonstrates, the Democrats aren’t serious about energy policy either. Both gasoline prices and oil company profits are high. Thus, House Democrats propose to raise taxes on oil companies. But, according to Lieberman, oil companies already pay their fair share of taxes. In fact, their effective tax rate of 37 percent is slightly higher than that of large corporations in general.

More importantly, the proposed tax hike would tend to produce even higher gasoline prices. It would do so in part by discouraging investment in new domestic drilling for oil and natural gas, thereby tending to decrease supply as demand continues to grow. In addition, any new tax on gasoline, whether at the pump or at the producer level, will raise the cost of this product to consumers. Furthermore, says Lieberman, the Democrats’ proposal would undermine our energy security by providing a competitive advantage to OPEC and other non-U.S. suppliers whose imports are not subject to most of the bill’s provisions.

The Democrats should understand this. As Lieberman reminds us, they tried something very similar in 1980. during the Carter administration, when they imposed a “windfall profit tax” on oil companies. According to the Congressional Research Service, this tax “reduced domestic oil production from 3 to 6 percent, and increased oil imports from between 8 and 16 percent.”

To make matters worse, the Dems would use the new revenue generated from the tax increase to subsidize alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power. Lieberman notes that, even after decades of tax breaks, alternative energy provides only a small fraction of America’s energy needs. Solar energy, for example, provides only 3 percent of our electricity due to its high cost and unreliability. And the Department of Energy estimates that the overall percentage of electricity attributable to renewable sources is not likely to increase even by 2030. In short, the forms of energy the Democrats want to subsidize are the sources of the future, and likely always will be.

The federal government has a dismal record of picking winners and losers among energy sources. Yet the Democrats persist in seeking to raise taxes on what works and subsidizing what doesn’t. They simply aren’t serious.

It’s been less than a month and I still miss Rudy.

He was probably the most misunderstood candidate in the race and would have made a great president, especially given our times.  The republicans that villified his candidacy and the media that marginalized him did the nation a dis-service.

I read today that he’s returned to his law firm based out of Manhattan and Houston.  I’m still hoping he wins McCain’s trust for a high level cabinet position such as Homeland Security. 

Rudy filling the VP slot would only provide additional fodder for those who pushed him aside.  The way he ran his campaign can be taken as a measure of the man – clean, prudent and optimistic about America’s continued potential.  And he “finished” with a surplus.  May God continue to Bless one of Amercia’s finest: Rudolph William Louis Giuliani.

chart below from Pew Research

Link

Obama’s first coming

IT was early 1994 when Nelson Mandela gave a speech in a slum outside Cape Town and spoke in grand terms of a new beginning and how when he was elected president every household would have a washing machine.

People took him literally. A few months later he became South Africa’s first black president. That’s when clerks in department stores in Cape Town had to turn people away demanding their free washer and dryer.

Having spent some time as a reporter in South Africa watching the Mandela presidency I was reminded of that story this week when I travelled with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on the campaign trail.

How does a cult figure, in the eyes of some something akin to a messiah, make the transition to a political front runner – president even – where disappointment will soon crush what seemed to be a journey to a promised land?

Looking into the faces of a more than 16,000-strong crowd in a basketball stadium in Hartford, Connecticut this week, the Mandela magic I’d seen before was there too. Black and white, and the youth; they appeared in a state close to rapture watching Obama speak. Here and there one could see women crying and the some men wiping away tears too.

It was not the promise of a washing machine, of course. Mandela was heading a Rainbow Revolution – a new governing coalition. The sense of renewal in those heady days in South Africa in the mid-’90s was palpable. A political and cultural boil was being lanced. There was relief and joy. Cape Town in those days was humming.

In the US today there are echoes of that Rainbow Revolution. Through the media and on the streets people are getting a bit giddy over Obama. In this man they are projecting a new course – one that he says he will lead – where the US buries the culture wars, charts a new course in bipartisan politics and heralds a new dawn for America.

After more than seven years of the Bush administration and when 70 per cent of the populace think America is on the wrong course, there’s little wonder that the hunger for something new is real and fertile ground to till for a politician.

But Obama is part politician, part cult. Supporters wearing T-shirts with an Andy Warhol like pop-art image of his face testify to that. But then they – him – were once easy to dismiss until people realised Obama’s charisma was being matched by one of the most sophisticated ground operations ever seen. It is one that is outsmarting the Clinton machine. He’s marrying inspiration and cult with old-fashioned political grunt.

One would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by Obama on the stump. It’s not so much by what he says but it’s the way the crowds respond to his words. When 16,000 people, without prompting, start shouting some of his keynote phrases as he delivers them, you know something special is going on.

The atmosphere at his events is such that one wonders if Obama is about to walk out with a basket with some loaves and fishes to feed the thousands.

And therein lays the danger for Obama. The Obama shuttle has made it into orbit but at some point he’s going to have to land this thing back on Earth.

From unlikely presidential candidate to this week starting to edge out Hillary Clinton as frontrunner, Obama commands grass roots support that is enormous and still gaining strength. Across the US this week Obama laid to rest any lingering doubts about his appeal. He won states in the east, the south, the west and in the middle. All demographics from gender and race voted for him. He tied, if not came out ahead of, Clinton on Super Tuesday when 22 states voted.

He’s easily outgunning Clinton on fund-raising with a sophisticated online network. Last month he raised a record busting $US32 million, $US27million of which came from online donations. In 48 hours after Super Tuesday he raised $US7 million, forcing Clinton to lend her campaign $US5 million.

The Clinton camp is now on the defensive and in an extraordinary turnaround started calling him the “establishment” candidate.

But the danger remains for Obama in managing the cult-like fervour. Obviously, he’s no messiah and lofty expectations of his supporters is something that Obama is also acutely aware of. In stockmarket parlance, Obama’s share price is soaring on expected future earnings. Clinton, 20 years in the public eye, is like the industrial conglomerate: steady share price and reliable dividends. Think of Obama as Google and Clinton as General Electric.

The problem for high-flying stocks is that any bad news can cause the share price to drop sharply. So far Obama has played the bad news extraordinarily well. What turned out to be a shock loss in New Hampshire to Clinton last month might have taken the wind out of his sails but in fact it only galvanised his supporters more: they bought more Obama “stock”.

The campaign revealed this week that the biggest fund raising day in that whopping $US32 million month was the day after Obama lost New Hampshire. To be fair, the cult-like status of Obama is a function of a personality that simply resonates with anyone who meets him: buckets of charisma and charm. And aware of managing expectations, not only for his campaign but what might be beyond, he constantly refers to the challenges ahead.

“We can do this,” he told ecstatic supporters on Tuesday night. “It will not be easy. It will require struggle and sacrifice. There will setbacks and we will make mistakes.”

But then Obama, in the next sentence, in attempt to appeal to more voters out there, didn’t even mention the Democratic Party but instead his “movement” saying: “I want to speak directly to all those Americans who have yet to join this movement but still hunger for change: we need you. We need you to stand with us, and work with us, and help us prove that together, ordinary people can still do extraordinary things”.

Well known political journalist Joe Klein of Time magazine, who was travelling on the campaign plane this week with Obama, too, wrote of a nagging concern about this kind of rhetoric of inspiration over substance, noting “there was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messiahnism”.

In his Super Tuesday speech Obama said “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for”, attempting to make the case the time was now to get some “change” in Washington: a post-partisan world where politicians reach across the aisle for the common good. “This time can be different because this campaign for the presidency of the United States of America is different,” he said. “It’s different not because of me. It’s different because of you.”

As Klein notes, this is “not just maddeningly vague but also disingenuous: the campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to inspire.

“Rather than focusing on any specific issue or cause – other than an amorphous desire for change – the message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.”

I hear that too in the voices of Obama’s staff constantly, themselves referring to this “cult of Obama”.

“Even if he doesn’t go all the way, and I’m not being defeatist, I’m so thrilled to be a part of this and see the size of the crowds turning out,” one staffer tells me.

Some of the craving Obama has inspired is because of a level of authenticity. Where once Bill Clinton said he smoked dope but didn’t inhale, Obama admitted in his first book Dreams From My Father that in his younger days he did drugs. Once this was the kind of admission meaning political death in US but not anymore, it seems.

“Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man … I got high (to) push questions of who I was out of my mind,” Obama writes.

In the book, Obama acknowledges that he also used cocaine as a high school student but rejected heroin. “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though,” he writes. Even with these admissions, perhaps because of them, the Senator has become something of a Teflon-coated performer in the media: it has infuriated the Clintons. Bill Clinton has tried to peg him back with some attacks, but to no avail. They complain, with some justification, that Obama is getting easier treatment in the press than Hillary Clinton.

But that’s the nature of the insurgent candidate and a somewhat vested interest in seeing a contest where the front runner is under siege.

Now Obama is not an insurgent. I’d venture to call him a favourite in this race now. The next nine statewide contests through February are, given the demographics, likely to go Obama’s way. He may well build an unstoppable momentum. And then the giddiness might evaporate and be replaced with something else. In marketing they call it post-purchase disappointment. If he gets the Democratic Party’s nomination another test begins anew: how to turn the narrative which is all about striving for what is possible, to one where people are suddenly asking how are you actually going to do it?

There was a story on the History Channel tonight about the little ice age from the 14th to the mid 19th centuries. This was first shown in 2005. It shows scientists studying the demise of the Norsemen of Greenland (which was really green) and some theories on sun spot activity being the source.

A balance in all dialog is necessary – it has never been my intent to diminish the value of conservation of natural resources. It has always been my intent to show Al Gore to be a dangerous man for creating hysteria were there should be study. The story below is just another of the series of articles that I find interesting that support my point.  -pf

Link to Powerlineblog story

February 9, 2008

Global Cooling Alert

When Scott and I wrote “The Global Warming Hoax” in 1992, a group of Danish scientists had just published a paper that compared solar energy output (as measured by sunspot activity) to global temperatures, and found a striking correlation. No surprise there: just about all energy on earth comes from the Sun. Investors’ Business Daily recalls that research and notes that the Sun has been quiet lately:

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

[Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council] reports no change in the sun’s magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere. ***

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada’s Carleton University, says that “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.”

Patterson, sharing Tapping’s concern, says: “Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth.”

I suspect that many global warming alarmists are well aware that time is running out for them. If nothing is done and global temperatures decline in coming years–as they inevitably will, the only question is when–the alarmists will have been refuted. On the other hand, if they succeed in pushing through industry-destroying caps on carbon emissions around the world, and especially here in the U.S., they will take credit for the cooling when it comes, claiming it as vindication of their theories.

In that context, the 2008 election shapes up as very important. I don’t worry too much about John McCain’s acknowledged lack of economic expertise, as his instincts on the economy are generally conservative. But McCain badly needs to educate himself on the debate currently raging over the climate. “Global warming” represents the Left’s most ambitious power grab since the fall of Communism, and if a Republican President doesn’t stand it its way, who will?

If McCain is looking for a sensible energy policy, he might start with these recommendations from the Science and Environmental Policy Project:

Our policy recommendation is to phase out natural gas (methane) for electric power generation (now about 20% in US and 40% in UK), replace it with coal/nuclear, and use gas as a clean transportation fuel (in the form of Compressed Natural Gas — CNG) for buses, trucks, and all fleet vehicles. In the US case it would cut oil imports by 30%. Further cuts would come from the use of plug-in and hybrid-electric cars.

There is lots of good work being done in climate science, a discipline that is still in its infancy. There are also plenty of creative proposals for how to address our energy needs. But if the Republican Party mindlessly signs on to the fake-science of anthropogenic global warming, those ideas will never see the light of day.

Someone please get the word to John McCain.

Return to the Article

February 07, 2008

John McCain’s CPAC Speech

John McCain
ARLINGTON, VA — U.S. Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign today released the following remarks by John McCain as prepared for delivery:

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. It’s been a little while since I’ve had the honor of addressing you, and I appreciate very much your courtesy to me today. We should do this more often. I hope you will pardon my absence last year, and understand that I intended no personal insult to any of you. I was merely pre-occupied with the business of trying to escape the distinction of pre-season front runner for the Republican nomination, which, I’m sure some of you observed, I managed to do in fairly short order. But, now, I again have the privilege of that distinction, and this time I would prefer to hold on to it for a while.

I know I have a responsibility, if I am, as I hope to be, the Republican nominee for President, to unite the party and prepare for the great contest in November. And I am acutely aware that I cannot succeed in that endeavor, nor can our party prevail over the challenge we will face from either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama, without the support of dedicated conservatives, whose convictions, creativity and energy have been indispensable to the success our party has had over the last quarter century. Many of you have disagreed strongly with some positions I have taken in recent years. I understand that. I might not agree with it, but I respect it for the principled position it is. And it is my sincere hope that even if you believe I have occasionally erred in my reasoning as a fellow conservative, you will still allow that I have, in many ways important to all of us, maintained the record of a conservative. Further, I hope you will grant that I have defended many positions we share just as ardently as I have made my case for positions that have provoked your opposition. If not, thank you for this opportunity to make my case today.

I am proud to be a conservative, and I make that claim because I share with you that most basic of conservative principles: that liberty is a right conferred by our Creator, not by governments, and that the proper object of justice and the rule of law in our country is not to aggregate power to the state but to protect the liberty and property of its citizens. And like you, I understand, as Edmund Burke observed, that “whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither . . . is safe.”

While I have long worked to help grow a public majority of support for Republican candidates and principles, I have also always believed, like you, in the wisdom of Ronald Reagan, who warned in an address to this conference in 1975, that “a political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency or simply to swell its numbers.”

I attended my first CPAC conference as the invited guest of Ronald Reagan, not long after I had returned from overseas, when I heard him deliver his “shining city upon a hill” speech. I was still a naval officer then, but his words inspired and helped form my own political views, just as Ronald Reagan’s defense of America’s cause in Vietnam and his evident concern for American prisoners of war in that conflict inspired and were a great comfort to those of us who, in my friend Jerry Denton’s words, had the honor of serving “our country under difficult circumstances.”

I am proud, very proud, to have come to public office as a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution. And if a few of my positions have raised your concern that I have forgotten my political heritage, I want to assure you that I have not, and I am as proud of that association today as I was then. My record in public office taken as a whole is the record of a mainstream conservative. I believe today, as I believed twenty-five years ago, in small government; fiscal discipline; low taxes; a strong defense, judges who enforce, and not make, our laws; the social values that are the true source of our strength; and, generally, the steadfast defense of our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which I have defended my entire career as God-given to the born and unborn.

Those are my beliefs, and you need not examine only my past votes and speeches to assure yourselves that they are my genuine convictions. You can take added confidence from the positions I have defended during this campaign. I campaigned in Iowa in opposition to agriculture subsidies. I campaigned in New Hampshire against big government mandated health care and for a free market solution to the problem of unavailable and unaffordable health care. I campaigned in Michigan for the tax incentives and trade policies that will create new and better jobs in that economically troubled state. I campaigned in Florida against the national catastrophic insurance fund bill that passed the House of Representatives and defended my opposition to the prescription drug benefit bill that saddled Americans with yet another hugely expensive entitlement program.

I have argued to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, to reduce the corporate tax rate and abolish the AMT. I have defended my position on protecting our Second Amendment rights, including my votes against waiting periods, bans on the so-called “assault weapons,” and illegitimate lawsuits targeting gun manufacturers. I have proudly defended my twenty-four year pro-life record. Throughout this campaign, I have defended the President’s brave decision to increase troop levels in Iraq to execute a long overdue counterinsurgency that has spared us the terrible calamity of losing that war. I held these positions because I believed they were in the best interests of my party and country.”

Surely, I have held other positions that have not met with widespread agreement from conservatives. I won’t pretend otherwise nor would you permit me to forget it. On the issue of illegal immigration, a position which provoked the outspoken opposition of many conservatives, I stood my ground aware that my position would imperil my campaign. I respect your opposition for I know that the vast majority of critics to the bill based their opposition in a principled defense of the rule of law. And while I and other Republican supporters of the bill were genuine in our intention to restore control of our borders, we failed, for various and understandable reasons, to convince Americans that we were. I accept that, and have pledged that it would be among my highest priorities to secure our borders first, and only after we achieved widespread consensus that our borders are secure, would we address other aspects of the problem in a wa y that defends the rule of law and does not encourage another wave of illegal immigration.

All I ask of any American, conservative, moderate, independent, or enlightened Democrat, is to judge my record as a whole, and accept that I am not in the habit of making promises to my country that I do not intend to keep. I hope I have proven that in my life even to my critics. Then vote for or against me based on that record, my qualifications for the office, and the direction where I plainly state I intend to lead our country. If I am so fortunate as to be the Republican nominee for President, I will offer Americans, in what will be a very challenging and spirited contest, a clearly conservative approach to governing. I will make my case to voters, no matter what state they reside in, in the same way. I will not obscure my positions from voters who I fear might not share them. I will stand on my convictions, my conservative convictions, and trust in the good sense of the voters, and in my confidence that conservative principles still appeal to a majority of Americans, Republicans, Independents and Reagan Democrats.

Often elections in this country are fought within the margins of small differences. This one will not be. We are arguing about hugely consequential things. Whomever the Democrats nominate, they would govern this country in a way that will, in my opinion, take this country backward to the days when government felt empowered to take from us our freedom to decide for ourselves the course and quality of our lives; to substitute the muddled judgment of large and expanding federal bureaucracies for the common sense and values of the American people; to the timidity and wishful thinking of a time when we averted our eyes from terrible threats to our security that were so plainly gathering strength abroad. It is shameful and dangerous that Senate Democrats are blocking an extension of surveillance powers that enable our intelligence and law enforcement to defend our country against radical Islamic extremists. This election is going to be about big things, not small things. And I intend to fight as hard as I can to ensure that our principles prevail over theirs.

Senator Clinton and Senator Obama want to increase the size of the federal government.

I intend to reduce it. I will not sign a bill with earmarks in it, any earmarks in it. I will fight for the line item veto, and I will not permit any expansion whatsoever of the entitlement programs that are bankrupting us. On the contrary, I intend to reform those programs so that government is no longer in that habit of making promises to Americans it does not have the means to keep.

Senator Clinton and Senator Obama will raise your taxes.

I intend to cut them. I will start by making the Bush tax cuts permanent. I will cut corporate tax rates from 35 to 25% to keep industries and jobs in this country. I will end the Alternate Minimum Tax. And I won’t let a Democratic Congress raise your taxes and choke the growth of our economy.

They will offer a big government solution to health care insurance coverage.

I intend to address the problem with free market solutions and with respect for the freedom of individuals to make important choices for themselves.

They will appoint to the federal bench judges who are intent on achieving political changes that the American people cannot be convinced to accept through the election of their representatives.

I intend to nominate judges who have proven themselves worthy of our trust that they take as their sole responsibility the enforcement of laws made by the people’s elected representatives, judges of the character and quality of Justices Roberts and Alito, judges who can be relied upon to respect the values of the people whose rights, laws and property they are sworn to defend.

Senator Clinton and Senator Obama will withdraw our forces from Iraq based on an arbitrary timetable designed for the sake of political expediency, and which recklessly ignores the profound human calamity and dire threats to our security that would ensue.

I intend to win the war, and trust in the proven judgment of our commanders there and the courage and selflessness of the Americans they have the honor to command. I share the grief over the terrible losses we have suffered in its prosecution. There is no other candidate for this office who appreciates more than I do just how awful war is. But I know that the costs in lives and treasure we would incur should we fail in Iraq will be far greater than the heartbreaking losses we have suffered to date. And I will not allow that to happen.

They won’t recognize and seriously address the threat posed by an Iran with nuclear ambitions to our ally, Israel, and the region.

I intend to make unmistakably clear to Iran we will not permit a government that espouses the destruction of the State of Israel as its fondest wish and pledges undying enmity to the United States to possess the weapons to advance their malevolent ambitions.

Senator Clinton and Senator Obama will concede to our critics that our own actions to defend against its threats are responsible for fomenting the terrible evil of radical Islamic extremism, and their resolve to combat it will be as flawed as their judgment.

I intend to defeat that threat by staying on offense and by marshaling every relevant agency of our government, and our allies, in the urgent necessity of defending the values, virtues and security of free people against those who despise all that is good about us.

These are but a few of the differences that will define this election. They are very significant differences, and I promise you, I intend to contest these issues on conservative grounds and fight as hard as I can to defend the principles and positions we share, and to keep this country safe, proud, prosperous and free.

We have had a few disagreements, and none of us will pretend that we won’t continue to have a few. But even in disagreement, especially in disagreement, I will seek the counsel of my fellow conservatives. If I am convinced my judgment is in error, I will correct it. And if I stand by my position, even after benefit of your counsel, I hope you will not lose sight of the far more numerous occasions when we are in complete accord.

I began by assuring you that we share a conception of liberty that is the bedrock of our beliefs as conservatives. As you know, I was deprived of liberty for a time in my life, and while my love of liberty is no greater than yours, you can be confident that mine is the equal of any American’s. It is a deep and unwavering love.

My life experiences in service to our country inform my political judgments. They are at the core of my convictions. I am pro-life and an advocate for the Rights of Man everywhere in the world because of them, because I know that to be denied liberty is an offense to nature and nature’s Creator. I will never waver in that conviction, I promise you. I know in this country our liberty will not be seized in a political revolution or by a totalitarian government. But, rather, as Burke warned, it can be “nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.” I am alert to that risk and will defend against it, and ta ke comfort from the knowledge that I will be encouraged in that defense by my fellow conservatives.

You have heard me say before that for all my reputation as a maverick, I have only found true happiness in serving a cause greater than my self-interest. For me, that cause has always been our country, and the ideals that have made us great. I have been her imperfect servant for many years, and I have made many mistakes. You can attest to that, but need not. For I know them well myself. But I love her deeply and I will never, never tire of the honor of serving her. I cannot do that without your counsel and support. And I am grateful, very grateful, that you have given me this opportunity to ask for it.

Thank you and God bless you.

John McCain, a U.S. Senator from Arizona, is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

Link to townhall page

Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Seven Reasons To Support The GOP’s Nominee
As of this morning, McCain has earned 615 delegates and 4,220,296 votes; Romney 268 delegates and 3,497,341 votes, and Huckabee 169 delegates and 2,232,530 votes.(If we were using West Virginia rules, we’d get the Huck folks to revote right now and get one of the GOP candidates to 50%.)

Senator McCain has a clear path to the nomination, Romney a very uphill battle, and Huck is fighting for 2012 at this point and for a win in a major vote outside of the south. Certainly they should all stay in through the primaries ahead because it isn’t over and because our side needs the excitement of a campaign in such key falls states as Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania to keep the MSM from turning 100% of its attention on to growing the Obama phenomenon. They ought to be scheduling three man debates in every state, making their points and taking every opportunity to look ahead to the fall.

At the same time, Romney and Huckabee ought to begin to note Senator McCain’s lead and urge their followers to recognize that if they cannot come back they and their followers will have to come in and join the party’s eventual nominee. Senator McCain would do well to make a similar statement though his lead is significant and his collapse unlikely. Putting Humpty Dumpty together again cannot wait for St. Paul. Each of the three need to strike some common chords again and again, beginning with why the GOP needs to retain the White House, regardless of who its nominee is.

There are seven reasons for anyone to support the eventual nominee no matter who it is: The war and six Supreme Court justices over the age of 68.

Folks who want to take their ball and go home have to realize that even three SCOTUS appointments could revolutionize the way elections are handled in this country in a stroke, mandating the submission of redistricting lines to court scrutiny for “fairness.”

“It is undeniable that political sophisticates understand such fairness and how to go about destroying it,” Justice Souter announced in his diseent in Veith v. Jubilerer, the Pennsylvania redistricting case in which the Court declined by a vote of 5 to 4 to immerse itself in the details of the partisan redistricting of Pennsylvania.

If Democrats control the White House and gain even one of the five seats held by the center-right majority of current justices, this and many other crucial issues are up for legal grabs. When activist judges are more than willing to rewrite rules of long-standing, periods of exile should never be self-imposed “for the good of the party.” Exiles can go on a very long time indeed. Ask the Whigs.

They can go on indefinitely when enforced by courts.

The GOP as well is the party committed to victory in Iraq and the wider war. A four year time-out would be a disaster, a period of time in which al Qaeda and its jihadist off-shoots would regroup in some places and continue to spread in others. Iran, even if punished in the months before November, would certainly continue and accelerate its plans under the soft pleadings of a President Obama or Clinton 2.0.

These aren’t the years to wish a pox on your primary opponents’ heads beyond June.

I don’t expect the principals to let up on each other in the two months ahead, and I am especially looking forward to the Ohio and Texas votes.

But it is very possible to play full contact politics without the threat of going home if your team loses. The stakes in the fall are far too high for that.

Link 

Conservatives and liberals rally behind an unqualified candidate.

4 February 2008

On the eve of Super Tuesday, the Hillary Clinton–Barack Obama race resembles the closing minutes of a football game: Team Clinton has a small lead, but Team Obama has the ball—and the momentum. Some of that momentum derives from an extraordinary, if unspoken, mésalliance that has emerged in recent months between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. Their hostility to the Clintons brings them together. In the words of liberal columnist Jonathan Chait, “The Right was right about the Clintons.”

This comes as music to the ears of the old-time liberal warhorses who never forgave Bill Clinton for his strategy of triangulation. They despised his defiance of liberal orthodoxy on welfare reform, trade, and crime, and during the Monica Lewinsky scandal defended him only on the grounds of partisan allegiance. For their part, grateful Republicans have been happy to have their hostilities confirmed across the aisle since, if only in retrospect, it justifies the way they overplayed their hand in impeaching President Clinton. Both Left and Right seem to agree that the centrism of the 1990s produced a debauched decade. Through the alchemy of politics, these two versions of partisanship have ignited the “post-partisan” campaign of Barack Obama.

Obama has drawn praise from the New York Post and from numerous conservative heavyweights, including former Reagan speechwriter Jeffrey Hart, National Review editor Rich Lowry, former education secretary and radio host Bill Bennett, and former George W. Bush aide Peter Wehner. They have praised Obama’s graceful manner, stunning speaking abilities, and transracial appeal. Like John McCain, Obama seems to transcend partisan squabbling. Conservatives may also have a covert motive for admiring Obama, namely, their sense that a candidate who has neither been thoroughly vetted by an adoring press nor ever tested in a partisan election fight may be the weaker Democrat come November.

But if nothing else, the appeal of Obama and McCain—one too young, the other too old, to have been Baby Boomers—speaks to twentysomethings’ almost palpable disdain for the rancor of Sixties-era partisans in both parties. This appeal would seem to settle the debate over whether political polarization represents the broad view of the electorate, or is rather a product of the two parties’ increasingly ideological positions. Karl Rove and MoveOn.org notwithstanding, it turns out that the “mythical middle,” as Marcos Moulitsas once dismissed it, wasn’t just a transient phenomenon of the 2006 election. Swing voters will choose the next president.

Obama’s achievements in reaching out to moderate voters are largely proleptic: words aren’t deeds. And while he has few concrete achievements to his name, he does have a voting record that hardly suggests an ability to rise above Left and Right. In 2005, his first year in the Senate, the man who made a specialty of voting “present” in the Illinois State Senate refused—despite repeated entreaties—to join a bipartisan agreement among 14 senators not to filibuster President Bush’s judicial nominees. After his first two years in the Senate, National Journal’s analysis of roll call votes found that he was more liberal than 86 percent of his colleagues, and his voting record has only grown more liberal since then. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action now gives him a 97.5 percent rating, while National Journal ranks him the most liberal member of the Senate. By comparison, Hillary Clinton, who occasionally votes with the GOP, ranks 16th. Obama is such a down-the-line partisan that, according to Congressional Quarterly, he voted more often with the Democrats than did the party’s majority leader, Harry Reid.

This is the record that appeals to Ted and Caroline Kennedy and the aging MoveOn.org boomers who have long nursed hopes for a renewal of Camelot. But now as then, a charismatic political personality carries more dangers than benefits. The “politics of meaning,” which emerged from the Kennedy years and has now resurfaced with Obama as its empty vessel of hope, is doomed to disappoint because it asks more from politics than politics can deliver. In symbolic confirmation that Obama’s candidacy is as much about the liberal past as about the country’s future, the Grateful Dead, which disbanded years ago, has announced that it will reunite to perform a concert for him.

The banality of Obama’s campaign is exceeded only by his unwillingness to challenge liberal orthodoxy. In the recent Hollywood debate, he insisted, contrary to the evidence, that the problem with American education was that it was underfunded. But education funding has increased dramatically over the last 20 years to no good effect, as student performance on content-based tests continues to decline. In the same debate, Obama at first waffled in response to an African-American woman’s question about the effect of illegal immigration on working-class wages. But finally, in an echo of those who once saw fear of crime as simply an expression of racism, he insisted that complaining about the effects of illegal immigrants on working-class wages and neighborhoods was a form of “scapegoating.”

Republicans, swing voters, and moderate Democrats are entitled to know why a man who has never been to Iraq and who, aside from a brief trip to London, has barely been abroad as an adult, is ready to guide us internationally. Obama’s foreign-policy pronouncements might well be treated with derision if they came from a man with less poise and grace. As befits someone whose stock-in-trade is speeches that appear to dissolve deep-seated differences in a bath of good-think, he has deep faith in the UN and proposes a summit between the U.S. and the leaders of Islamic nations to discuss ways to “bridge the gap between us.” Obama, who never refers to anything so clear-cut as radical Islam or jihadism, says that he “wants to ask them to join our fight against terrorism.” He insists that Sunni tribal chieftains turned against al-Qaida in the Anbar province of Iraq because Democrats won the 2006 election, even though the chieftains’ shift took place months before the election. When violence broke out in Kenya after its recently contested election, he referred to his Kenyan grandmother as proof of his foreign-policy credentials, but failed to mention the tribalism—endemic to much of the African and Islamic world—that had produced a string of massacres.

It’s when Obama tries to show that he can also be tough that he most fully reveals his limitations. He both insists that Pakistan be governed more democratically and proposes to insert Special Forces into tribal Waziristan, if necessary without the cooperation of Islamabad. Such a move would destabilize a Pakistan rent by ethnic hostilities and already in danger of disintegration. As with Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis, Obama’s unstable mix of high-blown rhetoric and would-be bellicosity invites our enemies to misjudge us. In the wake of Bush’s naivety about Iraq and about the Islamic world’s supposed yearning for liberty, Obama, who is more at home with grand pronouncements than with facts on the ground, represents a gigantic gamble.

It will be ironic if in the name of post-partisanship we manage, with the contrivance of both Left and Right, to elect Oprah’s candidate, a man with a narrowly partisan record who has never demonstrated a capacity (rhetoric aside) either to lead or to govern. Only Clinton derangement syndrome can explain the alliance of so many otherwise thoughtful people of both parties who speak well of the candidacy of a man with scant knowledge of the world who has never been tested and has never run anything larger than a senatorial office. The question that we need to ask is whether this man—who candidly admits, “I’m not a manager”—can manage the vast apparatus of the federal government. Will packaging be enough to deal with our problems?

In 1965, appalled by the unearned adulation for mayoral candidate John Lindsay (who was also considered a future president), Robert Moses warned: “If you elect a matinee idol mayor, you’re going to have a musical comedy administration.” And that’s just what New York got. Substitute “president” for “mayor,” and you can anticipate what might be coming.

Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal and a professor of history at the Cooper Union for Science and Art.

Best of the Web Today – February 4, 2008

By JAMES TARANTO

More ‘Accountability Journalism’
In June we noted that the Associated Press had embraced a new idiom called “accountability journalism.” The AP’s Ron Fournier explained that the venerable wire service, long known for its just-the-facts style of reporting, now aimed to be “provocative,” telling readers not only what happened “but why it happened,” “what it might mean,” and “what it might reveal about the people who presume to be our leaders,” who “sometimes” are “just plain wrong.”Yet he promised the AP would somehow do this without editorializing or becoming partisan. How well has it done? Here are a few examples.

An AP dispatch yesterday explained the differences in the two political parties’ processes for selecting convention delegates via presidential primaries. A key distinction is that many states’ Republican primaries are winner-take-all–that is, whichever candidate gets a plurality of the vote is allotted the state’s entire slate of delegates. The Democrats, by contrast (along with Republicans in some states), divide up delegates proportionately. The result is that a strong second-place showing is worth more to a Democrat than to a Republican.Here is how the AP’s David Espo sums this all up in his lead paragraph:

When it comes to presidential primaries, Democrats and Republicans play by different rules. One party likes to share. The other, not so much.

Nope, nothing partisan there. Then there’s a piece by the AP’s Calvin Woodward that actually defends congressional earmarks. It starts off in a similarly cutesy style:

Earmarks are only pork when someone else is feasting on them. On your plate, they’re veggies. They are the train that takes you to visit Aunt Betty, or the health clinic down the street, or the waste treatment plant that makes your water safer to drink. They’re not all bridges to nowhere. They’re also bicycle trails to somewhere. If John McCain is true to his rhetoric in the Republican presidential campaign, he would take a broad ax to spending that voters, upon closer examination, might wish were cut in a more discerning way.

Woodward goes on to list a series of earmarks he considers to be worthy:
This actually is a useful news story, a corrective to the most outrageous earmark examples typically offered by foes. Woodward’s conclusion is this:

Pork haters like McCain say an agency with its eye on the national interest and an objective way of looking at a region’s needs should decide on such spending, not members of Congress currying local–sometimes very local–favor. But McCain’s spending plan does not make such distinctions between waste and worthy. In his accounting, if it’s an earmark, it’s bad and it’s gone.

This is a very shallow analysis that seems designed to paint the Republican front-runner as both simple-minded and uncaring. He’s against abused children and the Red Cross! In truth, though, there is a strong argument that even these “worthy” earmarks should be anathema, not only to limited- government conservatives but to welfare-state liberals as well.

To understand why, imagine that Sen. Hillary Clinton is facing a tough re-election bid and needs to court voters in upstate New York. She slips into an appropriations bill an earmark allocating federal money to provide free health insurance to every man, woman and child in Schenectady, N.Y. Would this not be a betrayal of her welfare-state ideals? After years of arguing that health care should be a universal right, she suddenly (in this hypothetical example) is treating it as simply a goodie to be given out in exchange for votes.

How does this differ from local congressmen allocating money for gang prevention in Monterey, Calif., and hospital equipment in Oneonta, N.Y.? What makes abused children in St. James, Mo., more worthy of federal assistance than those down the road in Rolla? Woodward says that earmarking lawmakers justify the practice by insisting “they know their district’s priorities better than Washington could.” But if their chief concern is with local priorities, maybe they should run for City Council or state Senate.

One more example of the AP’s colorful but not terribly detached reporting comes from economics writer Jeannine Aversa:

In a shower of pink slips, U.S. employers cut jobs last month for the first time in more than four years, the starkest signal yet that the economy is grinding to a halt if it hasn’t already toppled into recession.

The headline refers to “a Pink Slip Blizzard,” which directly contradicts the lead paragraph (a shower is an event of short duration, while a blizzard is prolonged). Aversa further explains:

Conditions are deteriorating, according to the latest employment snapshot by the Labor Department, which showed nervous employers slicing payrolls by 17,000.

We checked the Bureau of Labor Statistics press release, and it didn’t say anything about employers being “nervous” or indeed give any clue at all to their emotional state. Moreover, the BLS characterizes the 17,000-job loss as a “small” one, and it’s hard to argue with that. It amounts to less than 1 in 8,000 of the total 138.1 million nonfarm jobs in the country, and it isn’t enough to affect the unemployment rate.

So how did a small decline in employment in one month turn into a “blizzard”? When in doubt, blame global warming.

Media to Clinton: We Blame Ourselves
Here’s a revealing blog entry from New York Times reporter Katharine Q. Seelye:

The negative coverage of Bill Clinton over the past couple of weeks seems to have hurt his standing with the public. A new survey finds that fewer voters these days like the idea of the former president being back in the White House. Forty one percent of registered voters told the latest Pew Research Center survey that they disliked the idea of Mr. Clinton back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which could happen if his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, is elected president. In October, 34 percent of voters disliked the idea.

Why does Seelye attribute Mr. Clinton’s declining popularity to “negative coverage” rather than to his own off-putting behavior? More to the point, can you imagine a New York Times reporter beginning a story, “The negative coverage of George W. Bush over the past few years seems to have hurt his standing with the public”?

As the article below documents reasons why the Kennedy endorsement of Obama should not be given the banner of ”Camelot”, this cartoon suggests how misleading Teddy Kennedy is being, leaning on the mantle of his older brother.

There are those who can conclude JFK’s policies would put him right of center of today’s political masses, not to the extreme right were Obama and Teddy reside.  JFK believed very much in a strong Military, was a tax cutter and wanted us to “ask not, what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”  

I don’t think it sounds like either Hillary or Obama; how about you?   -pf

 

Media Swallows Kennedys’ Arrogant Presumption

By Froma Harrop

Are we done worshipping the Kennedys yet? And what do you mean by “we”?

That was quite a spectacle — the commentariat gushing superlatives over the alleged power of Ted and Caroline to deliver liberals to Barack Obama. Half the electorate wasn’t even born when the sainted John F. Kennedy was assassinated — and few have any idea who Ethel is. Though the Kennedy brand is in steep decline, the wave of conformist opinion still thinks this endorsement is very big.

Americans fought a revolution to free themselves from ruling families. Thomas Paine wrote that “we cannot conceive a more ridiculous figure of government than hereditary succession, in all its cases, presents.”

Nonetheless, the Kennedys fancy themselves liberal kingmakers, and the media swallow their presumption whole. “The torch is passed,” the chroniclers scribble, as candidates beg Kennedys for their “prized endorsements.”

JFK was indeed a charismatic figure, but the more we learn about his Camelot in Washington, the less perfect it sounds. (One might with the dissection of the 1960 election) Daughter Caroline was adorable, but could someone please explain her cosmic significance today?

The career of dynasty elder, Ted Kennedy, meanwhile, is headed for a disgraceful end. The Massachusetts senator has been caught in a sneaky plot to kill a clean-energy project in Nantucket Sound. Seems he doesn’t want to see wind turbines from his waterfront estate. “Don’t you realize — that’s where I sail!” he famously said.

The heck with his constituents, who live with some of the foulest coal-burning plants in the country. The heck with the United States, trying to free itself from foreign oil. The heck with the planet, threatened by global warming. Environmentalists now boo at the Kennedy name — not that many in the media have noticed.

In 1994, the family parked Ted’s troubled son Patrick in a Rhode Island congressional seat. Patrick recently condemned a wind farm proposal for his state — with references to “monster windmills.” You see, making any New England waters safe for wind turbines would undercut Dad’s efforts to keep them off his Hyannisport horizon.

Patrick moves in and out of rehab over pills and booze. In 2000, he shoved a security guard at Los Angeles International Airport. Later that year, he “trashed” a leased sailboat, according to the vessel’s owner. In the wee hours two years ago, he crashed his car into a barrier near the Capitol building. One wishes Patrick luck in recovery, but doesn’t his district does deserve a fully functional representative?

A new Obama ad shows the Illinois senator flanked by Patrick and Ted, with Caroline spouting the same sort of vacuous platitudes that (sadly) have characterized his own speeches. Obama is better than any of these people, and the spot emphasizes what’s missing in his campaign: substance.

In a non-romantic look at the family, “The Dark Side of Camelot,” author Seymour Hersh described John’s 1960 strategy as follows: “He made his mark not in the Senate, where his legislative output remained undistinguished, but among the voters, who responded to Kennedy as they would to a famous athlete or popular movie star.”

Sound familiar?

The Obama campaign has, with justification, criticized Hillary Clinton’s candidacy as another example of dynastic politics. But now that Obama is playing adopted son of the Kennedy clan, that argument falls apart. As for Clinton, her trolling for the endorsements of other family members lacked dignity. And she missed an opportunity to dismiss the Kennedy mystique as so much hot air.

The idea of political dynasties insults a free people. Why this obvious point gets lost in the glowing and lazy reportage of the Kennedy endorsements beats me.