One of Mr. Bookworm’s colleagues asked for my opinion of the “10 Things” list MoveOn.org did attacking John McCain. I fired off an email in response that is not polished (and is a little disorganized), but I think it hits the main points. What do you think?
1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has “evolved,” yet he’s continued to oppose key civil rights laws.
As for voting against MLK day, so what? Personal federal holidays had always been about Presidents. This vote involved jettisoning a 150 year tradition to accord a signal honor to someone who was not an elected leader. That MLK was a man greatly to be respected did not make him a President, and there was no good reason to turn precedent on its ears. I wouldn’t have voted for it either, not out of a lack of respect for MLK, but because it was stupid political posturing. That it’s now become a political hot potato is something entirely different.
As for the “key civil rights laws,” that’s a bit disingenuous to say the least. The first law referenced is one to make it easier for employees to sue their employers – it’s a plaintiff’s attorneys rights law. As for affirmative action, I am deeply opposed to affirmative action. I believe that (a) it is un-American to have preferences and racial quotas and that (b) it is harmful to minorities who either end up in institutions that destroy them because they are not prepared for the place or, if they are prepared, their qualities go unrecognized because people assume – and why shouldn’t they? – that they achieved their position only through affirmative action, not merit.
The disproportionate number of minority children in prison might be better addressed, as Bill Cosby and even Barack Obama concede, by examining much of minority culture, which honors thugs, dishonors education, and sees it as selling out to try to achieve through the system.The government can only do so much, and it’s worth noting that, up until Johnson’s Great Society legislation, black crime rates were dropping and black incomes going up. (Keep in mind that this is separate from the horrors of Jim Crow. This is simply examining statistics about blacks. See John McWhorter’s Losing the Race : Self-Sabotage in Black America which, I believe, discusses these statistics.) [More...]
Every time I get a small glimmer of hope that John McCain will grow a set I find that he defers to some inner sense that inexplicably turns the knife in the back of the Republican Party base. You know the group, the one that will stay home if McCain continues his ill advised tour of bone headed concessions to court a leftist constituency that will no doubt vote for the Dems come November.
Countless times we think of a John McCain presidency and we are reminded that despite the left’s warnings that he is Bush the 3rd, Republicans think of him quite differently, as liberal light; the maverick Republican the left loves to quote when he turns bad on the right.
So when it was announced that John McCain is slated to meet with pro-illegal immigrant apologists La Raza on July 14th, Republicans once again are reminded that John McCain is no better that the rest of the Republican “moderates” that sold out the party base in 2006 if not much earlier. In fact John McCain is part of that group that led to sweeping Republican defeats in 2006. I blame him just as much as I blame others who lost their way.
The good or bad of it however is that I am not alone. John McCain doesn’t have to worry about me. He has to worry about people like me. The people that won’t be sitting at the water cooler countering the enthralled giggles of messianic Barack Obama supporters. He has to worry about the people that won’t be contributing money to his underfunded campaign. And sadly, the people that won’t be getting behind him to help drive any fleeting momentum into something bigger.
I personally think this campaign is John McCain’s to lose and that is exactly what he is setting out to do. God help us. If that is the reality in 2008 he need only look in the mirror one last time. He can think to himself, “well you tried my friend, but not hard enough. At least you were a maverick one last time”
B. Hussein Obama did something that no one else has ever done. He has visited an impressive 57 states! He is the only person in the world who has ever visited 57 of the United States and considering the fact that there are only 50 of them, that is quite a feat.
I am sure that he meant to say 47 states and it sure appears that way given the context. However, he said it and it is out there for everyone to see. If John McCain had made an error like this the nutroots would be talking about how senile he is and that he is too dangerous to have near the nuclear buttons.
The Kos kids would be hammering him as a demented old fool and say that this shows he is too old to be president.
So can we ask if Obama’s mind is gone, if his brain function is not good, if he is mentally sound enough to be president?
Ever wonder why the newspaper you pick up is so devoid of substance when it comes to Barack Obama? Do you often find your self scratching your head in wonderment when the talking heads on MSNBC or CNN do one puff piece after another on the Junior Senator from Illinois; rarely explaining anything relevant about the substance behind the empty promises?
Now we know why. Catch this video of the juvenile girls in the press corp salivating over getting a clear view to Obama’s crotch to take a picture. (h/t Michelle Malkin, Hot Air).
Yeah, this group of “professional journalists” is going to tell me who I should vote for. Not!
My kids used to go to a wonderful little private school. It was a stretch to afford it, but I felt the benefits outweighed the burden. Then the tuition went up, and up, and up. So we left. The wonderful little private school is now precisely like all the other private schools in our area, in that it has two classes of students: rich kids and kids on financial aid. (We joke that the students are made up of the kids of the investment bankers and the kids of their chauffeurs.) The middle income families have gone into the public schools.
Most rich people who care about politics are on the Left, and the Democrats have also mastered internet fundraising better than the Republicans. As a result, it is a given, for the foreseeable future, that in every important race the Democrats will have more money than the Republicans.
Just as the private schools in my community are for rich kids and their subsidized school mates, so too is the Democratic party for the very, very rich and their downtrodden buddies in select urban areas. The middle income families (and those shading high and shading low in that middle, too), have gone to the Republicans or, sadly, collapsed into complete political inertia.
The question remaining is whether, just as more money in the home buys the better quality private schools, more money in the political arena will guarantee the rich party a numerical advantage at the polls.
An Islamic convert facing terrorism charges was re-arrested after trying to walk out of his own trial Tuesday – saying simply that “I’m outta here” – after telling the court he wouldn’t recognize Canadian law.
The 20-year-old, who can’t be identified because he was underage at the time of his arrest two years ago, had been released on bail. But he spent last night in jail, and his legal future is unclear.
I have a question here. We have bent and invented a lot of rules for the sake of catching and holding terrorists. Security certificates ensure they can be held for amazingly long periods of time without charge, etc, yet, we still can’t name a 17 year old suspect? Don’t you think the public has a right to know?
A Toronto Muslim preacher told The Globe that the suspect had been coming to Friday prayers, saying that he’d rather return to jail than live in a non-Islamic household.
“He said ‘In jail, I can at least pray,’” Aly Hindy, imam of the Salahuddin Islamic Centre in Scarborough, said in an interview.
“I said ‘Don’t do this!’” Mr. Hindy said. He added that he counselled the young man to pray in secret, but tensions between the suspect and his father had reached a boiling point.
The family did not comment.
Mr. Hindy added that the young man is “confused” and that “lots of young people, they need guidance.” The young man had lately been expressing an interest in circumcising himself, the imam said, consistent with his understanding of what the Prophet Abraham had done.
A self-described Islamic fundamentalist, Mr. Hindy has appeared as a proposed bail surete for a variety of individuals facing national-security-related proceedings. The imam said that nothing in Islam calls for Muslims to disregard the Canadian criminal-justice system.
Another question… How come we haven’t arrested Hindy, if he’s a fundamentalist? And more importantly, why the hell is he allowed to be a surety for other terrorists?
Former Disaster in Chief Jimmy Carter was on Jay Leno May 7th, (Leno must be having a “has-been” week), when he indicated that the delegates from Florida and Michigan must not be seated because those states broke the rules of the DNC. I actually happen to agree with this position but I agree because it was the rule and the states knew what would happen if they broke it. Carter does not particularly care about the rules as much as he cares how this will affect Barry Obama (who Carter has hinted at preferring). Carter does not want to let Hillary get any closer and he does not want the number of delegates needed to win to increase. He also does not want super delegates added because that would increase Hillary’s chances. Carter also warned about super delegates changing the will of the people:
He warned of a disaster if party insiders try to wrest the nomination from the candidate with the largest number of votes and state victories.
An attempt by so-called Democratic superdelegates to override the popular vote “would be an almost unacceptable thing,” Carter told Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show.”
If a candidate has a clear edge in votes, state-by-state wins and delegates claimed at caucuses and primaries, “I can’t imagine that the superdelegates would go against them,” Carter said. “It would be a catastrophe for the party.” WBAL
This is the flaw in their process. First of all, the super delegates are allowed, by their rules, to select who they want. The party has done this before and selected someone who was not the popular candidate (Adlai Stevenson). Secondly, even if they go with the will of the people, the standard should not be the will of the people as a whole or the will of the people of a state but should be defined to the will of the people in a particular Congressional District. This standard would apply to elected super delegates who are in the House. The Senators represent an entire state so they will need to decide how to vote.
For example, in Maryland there are eight Congressional Districts, five of which have Democrats for their representatives. Obama won the state and if we apply Carter’s standard (and the standard of Obama supporters) then he should get all five super delegates. However, Clinton won one of the five (as well as the three headed by Republicans) so Obama should get four and Clinton one. This is how the will of the people is demonstrated. Their wishes are expressed by their Representatives. If we group all people together by state or as a country then the wishes of the people are not truly expressed.
The fact that Democrats want to do this does not surprise me because they do not care about the will of the voter unless they lose to a Republican (then there are voting problems and people were disenfranchised). The establishment is worried about one thing and one thing only and that is losing the black vote if they select Clinton over Obama. They are worried that Obama will not win the general election because he cannot carry the white vote in sufficient numbers. But, they are stuck with him unless they want to risk losing the black vote, a demographic they cannot win without.
If the Democrats cared about the will of the people they would let the people of Florida and Michigan have a say in the process. Instead, the Democrats have disenfranchised all those people who will probably remember this when it is time to vote in the general election. I agree with Rush Limbaugh. All the people in those states should register as Republicans because we will let your votes count.
In any event, the Democrats have painted themselves into a corner and they will end up getting bloodied before they can get out of that corner.
It will be so much fun to watch them beating themselves to death.
Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found.
Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person’s tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.
:
If your beliefs don’t justify gaps in status, you could be left frustrated and disheartened, according to the researchers, Jaime Napier and John Jost of New York University. They conducted both a U.S.-centric survey and a more internationally focused one to arrive at the findings.
“Our research suggests that inequality takes a greater psychological toll on liberals than on conservatives,” the researchers write in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, “apparently because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive light.”
Yeah, pretty much. Except the term “rationalization” seems to me to have been pre-selected as a pejorative one, and this could have a skewing effect even on an educated mind in discerning how all this stuff works.
To my way of thinking, the liberals are doomed to be gloomy, or at the very least perpetually confused. Their world view is full of contradictions.
Let’s start with the perception that there is socioeconomic inequality and that we have to do something about it. By now, it should be no secret to anyone that liberals tend to be secular. Their ranks have been swelled with atheists — not the agnostic kind, passively deprived of faith, humbly awaiting evidence of the Almighty to help make up his own mind about things. But the forceful, pugnacious kind. The kind who says “It is a simple matter of logic that there is no God, for I have decided there isn’t one.” And who further “proves” that anyone who doesn’t agree with him is an idiot.
There is, of course, a residual “Old Guard” of liberals who believe in a Higher Power, or at least go through the motions of so believing. But to them, this is a decidedly private thing. It’s not a truism of the cosmos, because they are adamant that someone else’s perception that the one true deity is Allah, or Gaea, or Ganesh, or chaos — these are all equally valid. And lest anyone start to think otherwise, let us get one thing straight here: A private article of belief is a decidedly inferior one. Their more public articles of belief are clearly meant to reign supreme. Single-payer healthcare is the way to go…we’re too civilized to “torture” our detainees…a woman has a right to choose…and if you think otherwise, you are an indecent person. If I’m a liberal and I believe in God, other people who believe in other gods, or no god at all, are all okay. Private article of belief. But I think we need to emit less carbon, and on that point if you disagree you are a sub-human Bush-loving knuckle-dragging red-state so-and-so…the more denigrating adjectives I can toss in, the better liberal I become. In fact, one can’t help but wonder if I’m going to be demoted or defrocked or spanked at the next liberal meeting if I fail to put in certain adjectives.
“Next order of business: The wooden paddle is for Liberal Bob. Liberal Bob, you were seen arguing with a Bush-toady in your cubicle at work on Thursday afternoon, and although you called him a thug and a fascist and a Nazi and a Freeper and wingnut, a you neglected to call him a chickenhawk. Now step up here, and grab your ankles.”
Their man-made codes and taboos and proscriptions are universal and brook no deviance…sealed shut with not a single loophole. That does not apply in any way to the “religious” dogma embraced by “religious” liberals. The Pope says abortion is wrong — how many pro-choice Catholics do we have, just under the Capitol dome, rolling their eyes, clearing their throats, shuffling nervously and staring at the ground? So it’s pretty well decided by now in liberal-land. Religion doesn’t exist, for the most part. And where it does, it doesn’t really count.
Now, just tuck that away for a minute and consider this:
The dirty little secret about liberals, is that each one of the ones capable of deep, philosophical thinking, is engaged in a highly secretive process of contemplating the costs of their policies. The inconveniences. The “drawbacks,” if you will. This stops, abruptly, at the great cloakroom doors that are locked shut behind them. They treat their ideological peers, in effect, with exactly the same courtesies and senses of discretion, that their fellow Americans have consistently been asking of them — said fellow Americans being consistently denied this. Liberalism loves to air America’s dirty laundry to the rest of the world, but it will not air dirty liberal laundry to the rest of America.
Think about all the liberal policies that have a downside, and how the liberals address that downside. They always address it with dismissal. They don’t even debate it. Abortion results in dead babies…you aren’t allowed to think of them as “babies.” Gun control deprives law-abiding citizens of their constitutional right…that right simply doesn’t exist. Waterboarding isn’t torture…yes it is. We need to know what these captured terrorists know…you aren’t allowed to call them “terrorists,” they’re “detainees.”
Global warming isn’t the end of the world…yes it is, we have scientists, and don’t you dare question them because you’re not a scientist. Okay, well these scientists over here disagree…well they don’t count because they’re “dirty.”
See the pattern? Liberals won’t debate the downsides of the policies they have in mind for us. They always dismiss. They always lecture us that we should be looking at the matter under review, only from one side — the side most beneficial to what they want to put in place. All other perspectives don’t count. The liberal will be drummed out of the liberal-club if he brings up those other perspectives, and also, by extension, if he allows you to even think on them for awhile.
The trouble is, that liberals don’t follow their own instructions here. They do think about the downside…in the privacy of their own craniums. A lot of liberals are poor — and a lot of liberal policies are most injurious to our poor. If you live in a rural area with distant neighbors and a lengthy response time from emergency services, that might not even be available…not being able to have a gun, hurts. If you make minimum wage and your employer’s profit margins are slender, and you’ve got a lot of colleagues who also make minimum wage…when your employer is suddenly forced to pay all of you another buck fifty an hour, just the ones he wants to keep on-board before he sends the rest home…that hurts. When your child is in a failing school district and you can’t apply for a voucher to move him somewhere else…that hurts.
So liberals have to sacrifice things for their own failed policies. And they aren’t allowed to talk to anyone about that, except for other liberals. Who will tell them, to coin a phrase, to “move on.”
Now, think about the implications of all this. There is no God; and if there is one, He doesn’t really count for anything. But even though God doesn’t really count for anything, we still have all these pain-in-the-ass rules that cost us a lot, and hurt us a-plenty. And like any rule from God, we aren’t allowed to deviate from those rules, to think about breaking them, to speak out against them. Worst of all, though, these rules did not come from God. They came from nameless, faceless, anonymous fellow liberals…who are not held accountable for their effects. Nor do they feel those effects, since these nameless faceless liberal mortal leaders are all richer than snot.
So sum it up. There is no God. There are rich people and poor people, and we liberals are here to close up that “wealth gap” — by being the very worst offenders, because when the richest among us make up new rules that hurt the poorest among us, it’s our place to tolerate it. Clearly, we believe in authority when it suits us to do so. But what authority is offended when rich people are richer than poor people? Not God, since He doesn’t exist and doesn’t count. And not the actual mortals we obey, the rich liberals. You don’t see them writing extra checks to the Treasury after tax season because they weren’t taxed enough. So the biggest problem in life that’s supposed to shame everybody, really doesn’t even offend anyone, but we have to pretend that it does, so we can fix it, since it’s our fault if it stays broken, but nothing we do will have any effect on it, and if we do manage to fix it we can’t take credit for it, but of course we’re never gonna fix it. And in the meantime, we should be really angry about it.
Hell yeah. I’d be unhappy too. There’d be something terribly wrong with any liberal who was not unhappy. I mean, worse than just being plain-ol’ liberal. Liberalness is both causative of, and symptomatic of, a most exquisite unhappiness.
Despite stories of his explosive temper, there is absolutely no doubt that McCain has been playing it nice so far in this election season. It’s easy to do right now, of course, with Obama and Hillary acting as his surrogates against each other. They sling the mud so he doesn’t have to. Nevertheless, now that it looks as if Obama will be the last mud-soaked man standing, McCain’s nice policy is finally going to start paying off.
Indeed, Obama’s spinners must be yoga masters considering how far they have to stretch to make their case [that the Clintons are racists]. Betsy Reed, of the left-wing magazine The Nation, cites the Clinton campaign’s reference to Obama’s past drug use (raised most prominently by black Clinton surrogate Bob Johnson) and Bill’s belittling of Obama’s claims of anti-war purity as a “fairy tale” as examples of invidious racial politics.
Huh? Bill Clinton’s marijuana use was an issue in 1992, and in 2000 the press went bonkers over allegations that George W. Bush had used drugs long ago. So why should it be racist to mention Obama’s even more significant drug use? Likewise, the use of the phrase “fairy tale” wasn’t racial. Even Hillary’s entirely valid, but now-infamous, observation that it was Lyndon Johnson, not Martin Luther King Jr., who secured passage of the Civil Rights Act can be described as racist only if the standard for racism is reduced to anything that hurts Obama. Dubbing inconvenient truths as “racist” is poisonous to U.S. politics. Which is why I have so little sympathy for the Clintons, because it was the Clintons themselves who mainstreamed crying racism (or sexism, or, in the case of Chinese fundraising scandals, anti-Chinese sentiment) in response to criticism.
For McCain to be Mr. Nice Guy will help defuse — or, indeed, expose the invidious game playing behind — any charges of racism that will be raised against McCain no matter what he says about Obama. Given the mindset on the Left, absent an abject declaration that Obama is God, everything McCain says will be viewed through racism colored glasses.
Others are thinking the same thoughts about the McCain approach. Lee Cary, writing at American Thinker, sees McCain positioning himself always to throw powerful counter-punches. He’s strong enough to take or deflect the first hit, but that leaves him an opening to come back with feigned ingenuousness to keep the American public focuses on Obama’s many, many faults. In other words, McCain, to defeat the dangers inherent in fighting a bad candidate who just happens to be black will have to employ an iron hand/velvet glove approach to this election cycle. Let’s hope that McCain’s years of military disciplinary stand him in good stead, in case his first instinct is to come out swinging.
Every time I get a small glimmer of hope that John McCain will grow a set I find that he defers to some inner sense that inexplicably turns the knife in the back of the Republican Party base. You know the group, the one that will stay home if McCain continues his ill advised tour of bone headed concessions to court a leftist constituency that will no doubt vote for the Dems come November.