Latest Pew Poll: Obama may LOSE both White Males & White Females

Pew has a long poll out which has most negatives on McCain dealing with his politics and most negatives on Obama dealing with his personality or personal background [it doesn't mention his controversial spouse].

However, more voters continue to say that McCain is about right in his approach to foreign policy and national security issues than say that about Obama (51% vs. 43%). The view that Obama is not tough enough on foreign policy has not receded since earlier in the year. More than four-in-ten (43%) say that Obama is not tough enough on foreign policy, which is identical to February.

And Clinton female supporters really don't like the way the media has been anti-female, rather than anti-feminist.

Pew basically has a Democrat bias, and neglects to mention the much-observed, but seldom-mentioned "Bradley Effect," which is the tendency of non-blacks to say things which do not expose them to being called bigots or racists. In California, that effect is widely believed to be what got Gray Davis elected governor.

If there is a foreign policy crisis between now and November, McCain certainly has a good chance to become POTUS #44.

Bill O'Reilly is a [fake & phony] People's Populist

Again tonight, I made the mistake of watching The Factor, the O'Reilly franchise built up over the last decade to pretend to be looking out "for YOU."

Fact is, O'Reilly points out interesting sell-outs, as an earlier generation phrased the term, of turnip-truck dropouts like McClellan, et al.

But Bill, who pretends to be looking out for YOU, interrupts Dick Morris when he posits the very credible argument that a Dem Oval Office/Both Houses of Congress administration would not only pass a "Fairness Doctrine," but also basically turn the First Amendment into a National Archive artifact. But as Dick was explaining, Bill cut him off [by saying you're much more conservative than I am] because Bill has an ego the size of Eurasia and also wants to be regarded as an Independent. Dick is several light years ahead of Showman Bill & Second-Rate Bill on the future of leftist politics, so let Dick say his piece without your silly interruptions. And if Bill theythinks he can escape the leftist Siberia that awaits him if Dems sweep the table, then he's more delusional than he appears.

But it gets worse when Bill goes on to denigrate Terry Keenan and Liz Claman on oil economics, which he knows nothing about. Bill blames the oil companies while Terry & Liz correctly point out the denial of drilling rights in ANWR on specious spurious eco-treehugger BS. And the law of Supply and Demand, which Bill hasn't heard of.

This 6'6" clown actually thinks OPEC is able to increase production at the drop of a hat. Absolutely no knowledge on a subject which he pontificates on without any inkling of what's going on.

My conservative friends say he's useful in pointing out that pitiful moral morons on the left have induced a McClellan to sell his soul for thirty pieces of silver.

But Bill has to stop interrupting people to make the next step to become a real change-artist of events like his arch-nemesis [on the right] El Rushbo, who takes him daily game, set, match.

And he's sillier than McCain if he thinks the MSM will ever accept him for anything but an entertainer with a niche.

Hitchens Drank More Dewar's Than He Ever Drank Wine

Hitchens and I used to while away a lunch into dusk at the Iron Gate Restaurant, across from the Middle East Institute where I was resident scholar.

Although this article in Slate has Chris drinking wine and being annoyed, as he is a dozen times a day from one thing or another, by the French custom of a waiter's refilling a wine glass. After living in France for two years, I can remember once being angry when a waiter did NOT refill my glass at a restaurant.

At any rate, Christopher used to drink Dewar's by the quart on my check---at the time I wasn't very well-situated---and fill his hollow legs, arms and other vesicles with the delicious Scotch without ever appearing even woozy.

The only time I ever saw him woozy was an intimate five-person Xmas dinner when he literally fell asleep at the table---after drinking wine!!!

Go figure...

Fleischer Successor Actually Even Dumber than He Looks.

Karl Rove handled the "revelations" that turnip-truck driver McLellan unveiled in a book obviously aimed at the BDS market. Rove said quite simply that a guy of such narrow gauge just wasn't even close to the decision-making process, and that when Scotty-boy says he never saw Rove consult with Libby until the Plame fiasco/made-up brouhaha, that was because Scott basically wasn't that perceptive.

Karl's most lucid point was that the Scott he knew wouldn't write that book [and I myself wonder who ghosted SM's tome for him].

Which watching re-runs of Scott's hilariously inept sessions at the White House podium, makes Karl extremely credible in that department.

NBA Finals: Pro Wrestling?

Anyone who watched the final seconds of the Laker/Spurs game knows that the refs & league officials are in the tank for LA. An almost flagrant foul by Derek Fisher on Brett Barry wasn't called & the camera caught all the action. The second-rate announcers, one of whom had not noticed that LA had only 2 seconds left on the shot clock with 5.6 left, also earlier neglected to say how many fouls were on Duncan after he was whistled. The announcing is as bad as the refereeing.

Last year, a ref was finally convicted for a horrendous infraction in a Heat game I had watched weeks before---I suspect that the whole "show" is rigged to get an LA media market into the Finals rather than a mini-market like San Antonio.

I wouldn't take my kid to an NBA game anymore---like pro wrestling, it's turning into a contact sport that isn't credible to folks who remember back when it was a game. I'll watch the Celtics play the latest edition of the Bill Laimbeer smash & grab Pistons, but if it's Pistons/Lakers finals, forget about it.

Who wants to see an unconvicted rapist ballyhooed by moral idiots and celebritards?

Barack-o & Johnny Mac Go Mano-a-Mano

John Dickerson will always have my affection because his mother, Nancy, hailed from my hometown of Wauwatosa WI, and taught in the Wauwatosa school system while I was simultaneously enrolled [or perhaps I should say, entrapped] in that school systems coils. But Nancy went on to DC and was the first really classy female TV news host[ess]. John shares her wit & good looks:

John McCain and Barack Obama have both declared that they want to elevate the tone of political discourse. Before they show us the top, though, they apparently want to explore the bottom.

Among other insights---Barack wants to keep up the persiflage against Johnny Mac in order to drown out a resurgent Hill, who can't get proper headlines even after trouncing The Anointed One in KY & WV---while he gets pictures of a crowd of 75,000 in Portland lured to the site by the fabulously popular local rock band [& a PS, Barack will say a few words afterwords]----of course, this little detail was overlooked by the MSM tribunes of the people. That would be journalism, a lost art, apparently. More JD:

As he has shifted and modified his position on meeting with foreign leaders—tweaking the conditions under which such a thing would happen and with whom, exactly, he would meet—Obama is under even greater pressure to paper over those signs of wobbliness with stout declarations.

As for showing what for to the Republicans, Obama is signaling that unlike other Democratic general election candidates, he will not let attacks go unanswered. For many in his party, that promise—quick and forceful retaliation to all comers—is the key to winning in the fall. As Michael Dukakis put it to CNN, Obama has "to be ready, to respond immediately, to take the fight to McCain, and never to let up. … You cannot let the Republicans do what they did to me and what they did to Kerry."

Ah, another victim, or even set of victims... Just the thing to get the Dem heart to go pitter pat. But Johnny Mac apparently has his own deep & unexpressed reasons for wanting to duke it out:

McCain has less reason to act tough, or so you'd think, anyway. He's toughed his way through at least three near-death experiences, not counting the several he endured during his five years as a prisoner of war. His 1,173 pages of recently released medical records, which document the punishment he's taken during his life, suggest he could almost be classified as a science experiment.

And with Democrats trying to paint him as a reckless warmonger, you might think McCain would confect a few public displays of turning the other cheek. But lately he seems on a quick trigger, as if he's the candidate who needs to prove his mettle. "I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did," he said in his response to Obama's Senate remarks.

When Bob Dole ran against Bill Clinton, he didn't mention his service and Clinton's lack of same. He didn't have to. That McCain feels he must suggests Obama has gotten deep under his skin.

John arguably deserved the Medal of Honor for staying in the torture chambers of Hanoi when he had a free ticket stateside a few months after the Commie monsters found he was the son of CINC-PAC Admiral McCain. Instead he remained four & a half years longer while human rubbish like Jane Fonda and other Hollyweirdos did their Tokyo Rose imitations. I always remember the Sports Magazine article on boxing I read as a little kid---maybe John has heard the same story---about Billy Conn & his famous fight with Joe Louis in '45 right after WWII.

There's a chance this shadowboxing will die down soon, since these candidates are still so conscious of maintaining their high-road image. Remember, there was a time when they both wanted to tour the country together debating. In that kind of show, the "who's tougher" bickering would seem small and ridiculous. On the other hand, they could travel with gloves, rope, and a bell, and stage a proper bout.

Crazy pugnacious Irishman & pure pugilist that Billy Conn was, he was way ahead on points after thrashing Joe Louis for fourteen rounds in the Heavyweight Championship bout. His cornermen told him to just ease through the last three minutes and get the belt---but Billy wanted a KO over Louis and instead got KO'd himself.

Between re-reneging on his Amnesty package under the guise of "Comprehensive Immigration," and thrusting out his chest on foreign policy, McCain might overfight a match he's probably in good position to win, despite polls that have him even with BHO. The "Bradley Effect" that worked for Gray Davis in CA will presumably keep on working all across the land. And BHO's loathsome spouse and bad youthful companions won't help him get to the Oval Office.

And Hillary will still be ten years younger than McCain in 2012.

Between cries of victim from tank commander Dukakis & "racist" from the likes of Academicide victims & Revs. Wright, Sharpton, & Jackson, it should be a three-ring circus to the conventions and beyond.

As the professor told Indiana Jones on his first archeological quest, "if I were a few years younger, I'd go along on the trip."

Barack Obama's Troubles Linked to Baleful Influence of Wife?

Christopher Hitchens had a piece around three weeks ago, as the MSM has done literally zero journalism on Michelle Obama's influence on him. This might be the time to do it because his apparent loss of traction with the general voter is going to lead the Dems down to defeat [although they'll blame it on voters in FL, voting machines in Ohio, or the CIA infecting Obama with AIDS.] Here is Christopher's prescient take on this problem:

What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright's pews, and at Wright's mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations? Even if he pulls off a mathematical nomination victory, he has completely lost the first, fine, careless rapture of a post-racial and post-resentment political movement and mired us again in all the old rubbish that predates Dr. King. What a sad thing to behold. And how come? I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama's part for Wright's views or style—he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to "Minister" Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette. All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, "Keep my wife out of it," or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse's influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.

I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she's much influenced by the definition of black "separationism" offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. I remember poor Stokely Carmichael quite well. After a hideous series of political and personal fiascos, he fled to Africa, renamed himself Kwame Toure after two of West Africa's most repellently failed dictators, and then came briefly back to the United States before electing to die in exile. I last saw him as the warm-up speaker for Louis Farrakhan in Madison Square Garden in 1985, on the evening when Farrakhan made himself famous by warning Jews, "You can't say 'Never Again' to God, because when he puts you in the ovens, you're there forever." I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can't go on much longer without an answer to the question: "Are we getting two for one?" And don't be giving me any grief about asking this. Black Americans used to think that the Clinton twosome was their best friend, too. This time we should find out before it's too late to ask.

Is Michelle as much of a moonbat nutjob as she seems? Or more so? Or maybe her low SAT scores weren't the result of a conspiracy by whitey, but simply the result of her two-digit IQ at work?

And what about the internship Michelle had with Bernardine Dohrn in '87 at Sidley Austin in Chicago [the firm took up two floors in the Amoco Bldg where I worked in the '90s]. And did Michelle infect Barry with Dohrn's rat-poison radicalism?

Or, as Bill Kass thinks, is Obama just another Daley-machine apparatchik?

The Dems are going to lose another election if they nominate him and there will be hell to pay among the autistic narcissists in Hollyweird, Academentia, and "moral idiot[s] who think that the drugs and disease in the black community are imposed by an outside conspiracy?" [Christopher H's neat sum-up of Loonatic Wright, Omarosa-lite Michelle's mentor.]

Just How Stupid is Barack Hussein Obama?

Obama is hallucinating, improper, and downright STUPID in his Memorial Day Speech in New Mexico.

To Obama, it isn't about military sacrifice---he only mentions "Fallen Heroes" without mentioning military service or death in war.

Then this clueless moron insults the really brave, hard-working military heroes who gladly put themselves in harm's way as.....you won't believe this dude....VICTIMS.

Because that's all the Dems can see.

The incredible shrinking Moyers disgraced himself on The Daily Show [Who's idea was it to invite this surrender-monkey on Memorial Day?] by portraying the American people as victims by lying outrageously---lies are the only ammunition left to the Dems---about the income differentials among Americans increasing---his figures were preposterous.

Then on C-Span, I noticed an elderly creature named Parker attest to the fact that 500,000 children have died in the Iraqi invasion---and the obliging host felt no compunction to point out that casualties in Iraq are less than 100,000 killed.

It appears that the New York Times today editorialized that the US has lost the war in Iraq, just as it appears that Al Qaeda is collapsing and there are great signs of a Shi'ite/Sunni rapprochement, though the Kurds may not yet have signed on.

The Surreality Community that is supporting the leftist psychosis [AKA, Democrat Party] is tearing itself up because of its insane focus on victimhood and identity politics----just how long are the American People going to continue to swallow such arrant BS?

At least it looks like McCain could win because the Dems are self-destructing---the wages of sin.....

Bill Kass of Chic Trib Knows Obama's Secret

Sandy Rios and Bill Kass were two Chicago "experts" on Bill O'Reilly's Show who described Obama from two absolutely opposite poles----both resolutely against!

Rios trotted out the oldie [but goodie] truisms about Obama's ultra-left loon contacts wtih loathsome traitor scum Ayers & Dohrn, etc. and said Saul Alinsky [the subject of Hillary's Wellesley grad thesis, though this was unmentioned] was at the heart of the Obamanable Showman's levitating to the top. The ultra-left MSM loves a wiggy liberal with a radical edge.

But Bill Kass brought up something that Lynn Sweet and other Chicago media types, who suddenly fell in line & made the Rezko case disappear like a David Copperfield magic trick, have SUDDENLY studiously neglected {"suddenly" used in the utmost irony in the second case].

That "SOMETHING" is the fact that Chicago is a vast Dem Empire with Repubs at the edges---Kass says what the US MSM doesn't understand is that this so-called "fresh new face" Obama puts forward is that of an OLD TIME CHICAGO MACHINE POLITICIAN.

Okay, Kass is seeing this through a Chi-town prism, and Chicagoland puts your mind in a strange part of the universe [lived there ten years before I moved to Boca].

Perhaps Kass is projecting. But given the assiduous neglect the NYT & its pilot fish have displayed towards investigating Obama's background, maybe Kass's POV deserves a follow-up.

Carter Says Clinton Must Quit

Failed Peanut Farmer probably remembers all too well Teddy K's taking the '80 nomination to the floor of the convention.

That was probably because the peanut farmer was the worst prez ever, and nobody liked the little fruitcake. Now another second-rater who is all smiles and vapid vacuous bromides. Of course, the midget from Plains wants his cafe-au-lait clone avoid a Convention Floor fight.

Hopefully, the plurality of American voters who have voted for Hillary over Obama will be recognized in a party that purports to call itself "Democrat." Caucuses in piss-ant states with a Chicago-style ward boss organization was clever, but it shouldn't get a clown the nomination for POTUS.

Clinton Wins Against McCain; McCain Beats Obama

Gallup poll results show that the Dems are encountering a difficult dilemma. Hillary will win the big Reagan Democrat bloc that Obama will not----that will be the linchpin of the '08 election. And remember the "Bradley Effect" that means even more voters will not vote for Obama than say they will. So perhaps Obama loses by five points to McCain instead of the poll's two points.

The dilemma lies in the obdurate insistence of the media, academy, Hollyweird, & other imbecilic interest groups that the ultra-left candidate, a la McGovern, must be the candidate. Who cares about winning? The danger of leftist nostrums and anodyne solutions is thankfully obviated by the self-destructive suicidal autism of the ultra-left.

And so the Dems will nominate Obama, & perhaps have Hillary as VP. If I were her, I'd pass up that position, but she must make the choice. Strangely, a Quinnipiac poll shows that a McCain/Condi ticket beats Obama/Hillary EVEN IN NY state! But that paragon of maverick insistence of going his own way, McCain will bob and weave toward the center---but he is the only Repub who might win in this year of repudiation of the feckless party that had a Tennessee MD as Senate Majority Leader & a total retard like Hastert as Speaker. 2006 was just the overture to a huge 2008 Dem victory, but their zany whacko party rules might keep them from gaining the presidency.

Thank God for the Republic!!

Wilentz on How the Dems Can't Handle the Truth

Sean Wilentz is the only halfway decent historian, okay----make that quarter-way decent---among the shrieking night-flying moonbat crowd dreaming McGovern dreams again.

Meantime, the NYT whistles past the graveyard by completely ignoring what is becoming obvious and beating the drums for Obama and positing doubts about McCain.

Wilentz doesn't mince words about Obama's vulnerabilities in the big union states like Ohio & WV which are now poised to go for McCain [as is PA after his crude characterization of hunters and Christians and "bitter .....and clinging..." to an elite audience in San Francisco where he thought, like George Allen, that he wasn't on the public record:

Obama must assume that the demographics of American politics have changed dramatically in recent years so that the electorate as a whole is little more than a larger version of the combined Democratic primary constituencies of Oregon and South Carolina. While recent studies purport to show that the white working class has, indeed, shrunk over the past fifty years, as a political matter its significance remains salient, especially in the battleground and swing states--states like Ohio and West Virginia where Obama currently trails Senator John McCain in the polls. One of the studies that affirms the diminishing proportion of blue collar whites in the electorate, written for the Brookings Institution by Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abamowitz, concludes [pdf], nevertheless, that "the voting proclivities of the white working class will make a huge difference and could well determine who the next president will be."

Politico also has the real world analysis that is lacking in cloud-cuckoo MSM fluff & puff about Obama. The smoothie Anointed One will have his nether parts waxed by McCain because he is counting on a fatuous intelligentsia, pliant media, sophomoric kiddies & of course, those other people, to form a new coalition.

We'll have to wait and see if he can get back the Reagan Democrats he insulted so roundly in SF---and those females over forty, you know, the ones THAT VOTE.

Fox Broadcast Now #1; FoxNEWS Crushing Opposition

Rupert Murdoch's Magic Touch reached another milestone as Fox won the whole shebang among broadcast networks.

For Murdoch, the wins keep on comin'. On cable, FoxNEWS has crushed CNN like a bug, although Town Drunk Turner said the opposite would happen. MSNBC has become laughably confrontational and ultra-leftist, leaching eyeballs away from its aging crew of talking heads.

The WSJ has about twice the readership of the NYT & the Journal is gaining readers as the Times hemorrhages circulation. The NY Post is doing okay.

Meanwhile cast-off NBC limped into a weak fourth place behind Fox, CBS, & ABC. And NBC will be weaker when Jay Leno skips to Fox or ABC after his contract runs out.

A Miracle: The Messiah Has a Flaw!? And AP Notices!?

AP has worshipped at the altar of Obamania for lo, unto these four months since SuperDuperCalifragilistic Tuesday in Feb. Nigh unto ceaseless were the encomia [or ums] lofted into the empyrean noting his Second Coming, as the oracles had it, of the metrosexual smoothie, whose tragic first coming had ended in Dallas in '63. And a farce this Grand Vizier, whose alarming resemblance to Keith Wilkes, former Laker, must mean something, eh?

But I digress. Sad to say, Barack [deleted] Obama has a middle name which must not be uttered. and he has a foreign policy blueprint that [also unutterably] is made up as he goes along, heedless to history, but who said eschatology has anything to do with history?

And The Anointed One's hoped-for locution partner, Ahmadodojihad of Tehran, also works for the chiliastic Day of Doom with a burning yearning inside and outside, outside in his plutonium & uranium fueled reactors that the IAEA & a feckless group called the EU[nuchs] hope to deter him from.

AP notices that this tendency to improvise on the wing might make BHO a good debater, but leaves a bit lacking in the deep-thinker department. Here's AP:

Obama has asserted for months that his willingness to sit down with foes sets him apart from Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and now McCain, the likely Republican presidential nominee, who challenges Obama on that point.

But U.S. diplomacy is not that simple and neither is his position.

THE OLD SPIN:

In a Democratic presidential debate last summer, Obama was asked if he'd meet the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea without precondition and during his first year in office.

"I would," Obama said.

Since then he has frequently reiterated his belief that no preconditions should be set.

"When you say preconditions, what you're really saying is, 'I'm not going to talk to you until you agree to do exactly what I want you to do,'" Obama said. "Well, that's not how negotiations take place."

Challenged by Clinton in multiple debates, Obama allowed that while he would not set preconditions, he would have "preparations" and would not rush to see certain leaders right away.

The precise difference between preconditions and preparations has not been spelled out. What's clear is that low-level talks would precede any summit, as happens now.

Clinton called him naive. She said she would not risk the prestige of the presidency by negotiating directly with countries such as Iran until they had agreed to change their ways.

Obama called that a case of old Washington thinking.

The new thinking, however, appears not to have been thought all the way through.

THE NEW SPIN:

Obama objected on CNN this week to "this obsession with Ahmadinejad" and explained guardedly: "I would be willing to meet with Iranian leaders if we had done sufficient preparations for that meeting.

"Whether Ahmadinejad is the right person to meet with right now, we don't even know how much power he is going to have a year from now," Obama added. "He is not the most powerful person in Iran."

He said he would expect "to meet with those people who can actually make decisions" in Iran on its nuclear program, its aid to terrorists and destabilization in Iraq.

He did not explain how he would get around Iran's president to other people of influence.

Similarly, prominent Obama supporters have jumped into the debate to say he has believed all along that one does not go blindly into negotiations with dictators.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, for one, is drawing distinctions between Iran and Cuba.

A veteran of semiofficial negotiations with dictators, he said Obama should be open to meeting Cuban President Raul Castro, but "I think you don't talk to Ahmadinejad. You talk to some of the moderate clerics."

On the other hand, McCain supporter James A. Baker III, former Republican secretary of state and chairman of the Iraq commission, has sounded closer to Obama on the subject of negotiating with hostile governments.

"You talk to your enemies, not just your friends," Baker said in 2006, words echoed by Obama.

Baker's commission urged engagement with Iran and Syria, without preconditions, at the level of the president or secretary of state, on the matter of Iraq. As secretary of state, Baker held many meetings with Syrians despite their listing by the U.S. as state sponsors of terrorism.

Obama's campaign is carefully picking its words on Cuba as the Illinois senator campaigns in Florida this week, mindful of the opposition by many exiles to too much liberalization of U.S. policy.

The matter of what constitutes a precondition for negotiations with Castro is one sticky point.

Susan Rice, Obama's foreign policy adviser, outlined what resembled preconditions Wednesday when she talked on the MSNBC cable network about what Cuba must do for an Obama administration to deal fully with that state.

Obama favors relaxing restrictions on family travel and remittances between the island and the U.S.

But Rice identified "concrete progress" toward true elections, the freeing of political prisoners and a free press as a requirement to "initiate a process through engagement."

That did not sound like an invitation to sit and talk any time soon.

Can it be that the Anointed One is merely a precursor?

Media tries to boost Michelorosa & Dean The Scream Machine

Editor & Publisher is an outsource of the DNC & actually believes Howard Dean, the Scream Machine, when he says that the Electoral College is "back in the days of the Pony Express."

As usual, this silly excuse of a moonbat misses several points at once. First, the EC is to give small states, like the People's Republic of Vermont, a bit more oomph in the General. Not that this atrabilious bong-puffer would notice.

Second, despite the creeping socialism & attempted takover of politics by the MSM, the USA remains a Republic and any change like the EC's abolition would require 38 states to overturn it. Not just 61 nutjobs in the Senate or 250 moonbats in the House.

I don't know how the emotionally-disturbed autocrat from Vermont got his MD license, but he is a hysterical hyperventilating Napoleon wannabe with a mouth much larger than his brain.

And Michele should stop whining about her SATs. Makes her look even stupider than her other remarks about being proud of America "for the first time." What is wrong with this libtard? Or rather what is right about her?

Here is what two strange creatures from Time-in-the-tank-for-Obama wrote about those who dare to attack Michellorosa, the Omarosa-lite crying machine on Trump's program who believes the world's against her[and note the sky-is-falling mantra every libtard employs while talking about the horrors of last year]:

“They are probably right that most Americans have a happier impression of the past 40 years. But the skies have darkened in the past year … Those who hear Michelle in person often talk about feeling that they are seeing for the first time a political figure who understands what their lives are really about.”

The article is fairly balanced but comes down mainly on her side. After noting complaints by conservatives, the writers observe: "The attacks make one wonder how those who find Michelle Obama's gritty realism out of bounds would mount a campaign in this climate. By suggesting everything is swell? By gliding silently over the battered economic landscape at home in order to talk instead only about terrorism abroad?."

Ah, if whining about SATs being a plot by "Whitey" is gritty realism, I'd like a toke of these two specimen-scribblers' bong.

Hyperventilating PMSNBC is waiting for this pair of in-the-tank hacks---they need [empty] talking heads.

Brzezinski Following Carter Into the Dying of the Light?

I worked in Georgetown Center for Strategic International Studies in the early '80s. Zbig Brzezinski was there and was always kind and gentlemanly. Henry Kissinger was also there & had neither of those qualities. So I'm a bit sad to see ZB falling into the same deferential mode toward terrorist states that his former boss, JC, has walked for quite some time now. Especially since ZB was eerily prophetic about the downfall of the USSR long before anyone else dared to even say such a thing in public.

I just saw him being interviewed by his zany daughter Mika on Morning Joe. ZB said the country with the most underutilized natural gas and energy sources in the world, implying crude oil, was Iran.

1] Iran does have vast underutilized NG reserves----partly because of its incompetence. This is a country which cannot refine its own crude and has to export it & re-import refined product.

2] The country with the highest level of underexploration and utilization is probably the USA, an energy Gulliver tied down by a thousand Lilliputian threads of EPA & Enviro-moonbats & AGW whack-jobs. Open up ANWR [the argument since the early '80s is that expanding the North Slope would take "ten Years" and therefore, let's not even do it.

3] Oberhauptfrau Bobo Boxer from California is the chief ogress in the sad story of American neglect of its energy heritage. The Shell USA Prez yesterday read the truth to the Senate Judiciary Cte and they can't handle the truth. Dick Cheney's verbal summary of Sen. Leahy was accurate & remains accurate. The clowns in the World's Oldest Deliberative Body simply blame the messengers when their own silly legislative mandates and over-regulation are at fault.

ZB ridiculed GWB for 'begging" for oil from the Saudis. Wonder what he thought of his old peanut farmer boss begging terrorist entities like Hezbollah & Hamas for the slightest sign of moderation, such as the release of kidnapped Israeli soldiers.

The silly old fool got his answer when Hamas bombarded an Israeli civilian shopping mall while the grinning moron was in the room talking with Hamas leadership. [Of course, this silly old fool pretended not to notice.]

ZB has come a long way from being the prophet of Soviet doom to a shill for a clown like Ahmadodojihad.

Hilarious!! MN Muslim School Initials Mean Tumescent Male Sexual Organ

HotAir has Ed Morrissey's story on the ridiculous violence a couple of thugs from the Tarik ibn Zayad Academy, with an acronym of "TIZA," inflicted on a visiting TV crew. A dictionary of Syrian Arabic will tell you that "tiza" in street slang is the Arabic word for "c**k" or "pr**k." I checked with a couple of Arab friends of mine living in the Middle East----one of them responded who had actually supervised two Muslim schools in the DC area and he sided with the school's need for privacy!! But this former Ambassador admitted that no Arab School would be stupid enough to ever allow others to use the acronym TIZA. He guessed it was being run by Pakistanis!

[Alert: boring etymological break]Those with a passing knowledge of Arabic who possess Hans Wehr's immense A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic will find on page 389 for those with Wehr's 1110-page compendium of Modern Written Arabic the classic word tazaayud meaning [gradual] increase, increment, growth. Closely related is the noun tazayyud meaning exaggeration [in reporting] one's own embellishments or additions, fables, yarns. From these two classical usages, the slang word "tiza" is derived, a tumescent male sexual organ with the vulgar denotation of "pr**k" or any number of other words vulgarly denoting the male sexual organ. Of course on the streets of Damascus, one can occasionally hear "tikram tizi" = honor my c**k, which is shorthand for "suck my c**k." Same-old same-o in Beirut, where I studied Levantine & Modern Written Arabic. Now that you know more than you ever wanted about street Arab slang, some questions do arise.

Maybe the dolts who run the school are Pakis? Or at least very stupid? Like the bleating local reporters now petitioning to punish the Red Star Trib reporter who broke the story for daring to investigate a case of naive publicly-funded multiculturalism gone very wrong? Or the state school sup who wants to punish the press for daring to expose her own malfeasance and utter ingenuous gullibility?

The school is financed by the MN taxpayers, but accountability doesn't seem part of the package when the school neglects to fly the American flag and a teacher reports that Muslim religious classes are being taught in a publicly-funded school. Transparency doesn't work in Minnesota administrative processes, especially educational institutions. The Teachers' Unions might be offended!

I guess being so close to Canada, MN has a watered-down First Amendment. Or maybe they consider themselves under the jurisdiction of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, itself a northern extension of Cuba's political commissars? Ms. Greiling, the state superintendent, should be interrogated by the State House or Senate for irregularities at the school. But having lived four years in Hennepin County and knowing the ways of them Wobegon folks, I know that ain't gonna happen. A nanny-state wannabe, Minnesota would be happy to join EUtopia, I would guess, if the opportunity ever presented itself.

I for one think Tom Pawlenty should do something besides suck his thumb during this complete mess-up. My guess is the bureaucrats run Minnesota, a la Brussels.

But the prize for complete inappropriate behavior goes to the thugs guarding the school. Their behavior with the TV crew certainly proved that at least in The Star of the North, government by unaccountable functionaries and judges appears to be the law of the land.
HotAir has Ed Morrissey's story on the ridiculous violence a couple of thugs from the Tarik ibn Zayad Academy, with an acronym of "TIZA," inflicted on a visiting TV crew. A dictionary of Syrian Arabic will tell you that "tiza" in street slang is the Arabic word for "c**k" or "pr**k." I checked with a couple of Arab friends of mine living in the Middle East----one of them responded who had actually supervised two Muslim schools in the DC area and he sided with the school's need for privacy!! But this former Ambassador admitted that no Arab School would be stupid enough to ever allow others to use the acronym TIZA. He guessed it was being run by Pakistanis!

[Alert: boring etymological break]Those with a passing knowledge of Arabic who possess Hans Wehr's immense A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic will find on page 389 for those with Wehr's 1110-page compendium of Modern Written Arabic the classic word tazaayud meaning [gradual] increase, increment, growth. Closely related is the noun tazayyud meaning exaggeration [in reporting] one's own embellishments or additions, fables, yarns. From these two classical usages, the slang word "tiza" is derived, a tumescent male sexual organ with the vulgar denotation of "pr**k" or any number of other words vulgarly denoting the male sexual organ. Of course on the streets of Damascus, one can occasionally hear "tikram tizi" = honor my c**k, which is shorthand for "suck my c**k." Same-old same-o in Beirut, where I studied Levantine & Modern Written Arabic. Now that you know more than you ever wanted about street Arab slang, some questions do arise.

Maybe the dolts who run the school are Pakis? Or at least very stupid? Like the bleating local reporters now petitioning to punish the Red Star Trib reporter who broke the story for daring to investigate a case of naive publicly-funded multiculturalism gone very wrong? Or the state school sup who wants to punish the press for daring to expose her own malfeasance and utter ingenuous gullibility?

The school is financed by the MN taxpayers, but accountability doesn't seem part of the package when the school neglects to fly the American flag and a teacher reports that Muslim religious classes are being taught in a publicly-funded school. Transparency doesn't work in Minnesota administrative processes, especially educational institutions. The Teachers' Unions might be offended!

I guess being so close to Canada, MN has a watered-down First Amendment. Or maybe they consider themselves under the jurisdiction of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, itself a northern extension of Cuba's political commissars? Ms. Greiling, the state superintendent, should be interrogated by the State House or Senate for irregularities at the school. But having lived four years in Hennepin County and knowing the ways of them Wobegon folks, I know that ain't gonna happen. A nanny-state wannabe, Minnesota would be happy to join EUtopia, I would guess, if the opportunity ever presented itself.

I for one think Tom Pawlenty should do something besides suck his thumb during this complete mess-up. My guess is the bureaucrats run Minnesota, a la Brussels.

But the prize for complete inappropriate behavior goes to the thugs guarding the school. Their behavior with the TV crew certainly proved that at least in The Star of the North, government by unaccountable functionaries and judges appears to be the law of the land.

Slipping You Another Mickey [Kaus, that is]

Here's Mickey on the Obamanable Showman's silly comment on why voters in Kentucky are bitterly clinging to Hillary:

Today's Obama Gaffe to Ignore: No point covering this, Mr. Halperin, sir. Move right along. Obama's our nominee. We're stuck with him. Here he explains his impending loss in Kentucky:
"What it says is that I'm not very well known in that part of the country," Obama said. "Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it's not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle." [E.A.]
Cling Alert! ... As emailer "S" notes: 1) "Last time I checked, Illinois was more 'nearby' Kentucky than Arkansas. Heck, they even touch." 2) "[I]sn't there something a tad condescending in his reference to "some of those states in the middle"? ...
P.S.: Obama also said that Kentucky Democrats are fools who let themselves get pumped full of false rumors by Fox News, or words to that effect. But he'll rally them in the fall! ...

Also on some post, Mickey shafts Alter-in-the-bag at Newsweak---who is the Obamaniac who sets trends among weak-minded MSM hacks.

O Canada Great White Weasel North, Land of the Unfree

Mark Steyn gives the White Slaves to Socialism Freezing to the north of the Greatest Land on Earth a bit of a well-deserved spanking.

Remember that Canada is the UN's favorite country, so you know how bad it is---I certainly do after many visits, a bunch of snide little loo-zers, except in the Western Provinces. Remember those 23 "normal" Canadians who tried to blow up Ottawa and the RMCP HQ in Toronto? The Canucks are begging to surrender, just show them where.

You may recall, from early last year, a riveting documentary from the British TV network Channel 4. Undercover Mosque showed preachers at some of the most "moderate" mosques in Britain urging their congregants to beat their wives, toss homosexuals off cliffs, etc. So naturally the film attracted the attention of the authorities - in this case, Anil Patani, Assistant Chief Constable of West Midlands Police:

The programme recorded preachers at the Green Lane Mosque in Birmingham making remarks that were not only bigoted and full of hate but also bordered on incitement to murder. Abu Usamah, one of the main preachers, was shown saying: “Osama Bin Laden, he’s better than a thousand Tony Blairs, because he’s a Muslim”; “Allah has created the woman, even if she gets a PhD, deficient. Her intellect is incomplete”; and advocating that homosexuals should be “thrown off” mountains. Mr Patani’s reaction? To refer the programme makers to the Crown Prosecution Service for inciting racial hatred.

He also referred the programme to Ofcom, the TV regulator, sending out a press release as he did so. Mr Patani’s press release claimed that “those featured in the programme had been misrepresented” and that it had “undermined community cohesion”. Those claims were blatantly false, as the Ofcom investigation itself made crystal clear. But why on earth did Mr Patani make them?

Well, because it's the now standard pattern among the authorities in Britain, Canada and Europe: When somebody points out certain features of Islam, go after the "Islamophobe". Mr Patani abused his position as Assistant Chief Constable to attempt to cow Channel 4 and others into silence on this issue. Channel 4 immediately sued the West Midlands Police for libel and the coppers have now settled out of court and paid a substantial sum. I wish I could do the same to my tormentors up north, but under the Canadian "human rights" regime truth is no defense. In the end, well-placed stooges like Anil Patani are a greater danger to free societies than a cheerfully straightforward hater like Abu Usamah.

Canadian Human Rights are an oxymoron, as they are inviting Muslims in to take over and want to make the landscape as acceptable as possible so they can become the Muslims' obedient serfs. Hayek is laughing in his grave, as Canada breaks new records in cowardly servile obeisance to a bunch of reactionary violent religious nuts who treat women like chattel.

And remember that quaint old song that ended "Britains never never never will be slaves."

Well, looks like Brits can be rented or even bought---for the right price. I hope their Muslim overlords are gentle.

Mickey Kaus Ridicules Girlie-Men Diplomacy

Blogginghead in this case pits two chihuahuas in the boxing ring/dogfight that has to make you wonder, what is in the bongs of these guys?

Bob Wright and new blogginghead Matt Yglesias worry that the Bushies, in tacit concert with hard-line Israelis, will blow [V] the dialectical opportunity for peace presented by Hamas' election victory. ... What I don't understand is why (as both Wright and Yglesias seem to assume) it would help if the United States now struck a "moderate" hopeful tone, giving Hamas "leeway" in order to "draw [them] in" to the peace process. Isn't that plodding State Department thinking--we send them a positive signal, they respond, etc? If we moved to be nicer to Hamas, it seems more likely that this would be the kiss of death--e.g. it would guarantee that they would become allergic to any moderation. If they're going to change, they need to do it themselves, after assessing their position in honest opposition to their enemies (Israel, and us) in a way that lets them take credit for standing up to them. By talking tough now, Bush doesn't foreclose that possibility--he enhances it, no? Today, confrontation. Manana, aufhebung! ... P.S.: Scott MacMillan makes an intriguing point about the way in which Hamas' very religiosity may allow it to compromise on territory. But I suspect they are a ways away from settling for the "Islamicization of individuals," the so-called "de-territorialized ummah." ..

Bear in mind that Scott's rosy scenario was written 2.5 YEARS ago. In it is a nugget worthy of mention:

Speaking to London's Financial Times earlier this month, an anonymous senior official in the Bush administration cited two French scholars, Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel, who have long noted that political Islam becomes less caustic the less it is repressed.

So if McCain did dither a bit on the interview that weird Amanpour spouse Rubin touts as some sort of [he was for Hamas talks before....], it was probably because the Bushies were at the time delusionally believing the "pothole" theory that running a municipality would keep Hamas out of mischief. Hamas shill & Hezbollah asset Rubin simply left out a few details of occurrences after McCain said sotto voce maybe Hamas will straighten out [from many previous terrorist incidents] after the duties of office sober them up.

Let's see, how did that work out?

Hamas evicts Fatah in a bloody mini-civil war & parades Arafat's [ridiculous] Nobel Peace Prize medal around as booty---desecrating it more than its awarding to Arafat had smudged it. [Late 2006]

Hamas begins rocketing Sderot and Ashkelon in steady barrages---two Israeli neighbor cities that have no military bases or value. [2006-2008]

Hamas kidnaps an Israeli soldier still held hostage. Involved in Israeli/Lebanon border war of 2006 against cancer bolus Hezbollah]

Hamas continues rocketing with more range after knocking down Egypt/Gaza border [late 2007] and making a run for Cairo, where they pick up longer-range rockets in what just may have been a pre-planned operation run from Damascus or Tehran [girlie-men don't think Hamas or Damascus are smart enuf to do such a thing] and get back through the fence before it is closed [by collaborators in Egypt?]

[Recently] Meets with worst-POTUS-ever Jimmy Carter and simultaneously rockets Sderot to demonstrate contempt for this energizer-bunny---though Larry King interviewed him afterwards and Jimmy wouldn't admit being dissed. [note: Carter had no other interviews on TV as even liberals are ashamed of this semi-senile girlie-boy of 83]

Obama says preconditions aren't necessary for negotiations with Hamas---although Hamas refuses to recognize Israel's existence.

Mickey had an abbreviated post. Just thought I'd fill in some details.

Pat Santy Riffs Off of Bill Shatner's Priceline

Siggy, Carl & Alfred have a nice parody of Pat M. Santy's "Dr. Sanity" blog [daveinboca pre-emptive

to everyone---JFK met WITHOUT PRECONDITIONS in Vienna in 1962 with Khrushchev, a meeting which convinced K that JFK was a lightweight who could be rolled and this led to K's decision to put missiles in Cuber, as JFK would say. No Dem ever admits this happened this way, but the Sov archives make it clear

]:

MHNN (Ann Arbor, MI)- This past week the 2008 race for the White House took an ugly turn when charges and counter charges flew in the media. After George W Bush delivered an address to the Israeli parliament. The Obama camp were up in arms at at a what they perceived was a slight that was intended to impugn their credibility. In his remarks, Mr Bush made clear that there was no negotiating with regimes who were threatening the peace of the world, a clear reference to Iran and Hamas.

The Obama campaign immediately swung into action, attacking the President and his administration, attempting to blame all of the failure of American foreign policy on the Bush administration.

Pat Santy, former NASA psychiatrist and organic waste in space disposal expert and author of the Carnival Of The Insanities called Barack Obama and asked to sit down and talk about his foreign policy. At first Obama demurred, but when she promised not to ask any Rezko questions, he agreed. Michele Obama insisted on being present and agreed not to interfere with the session. The following is a transcript of that conversation.

Patricia M Santy (PMS)- Good morning, Barack

Barack Obama (BO)- Good morning plaaaya! Ha! That’s street talk. Michele is teaching me. She wants me to negotiate with MS-13.

PMS- Negotiate what?

BO- Hell if I know. She wants me to be sure the urban gang vote doesn’t split. If the Crips and Bloods think I’m going be tough with MS-13 negotiations, I’ll get their votes.

PMS- Are you nuts? Are you out if your mind?

BO- I can’t believe you just said that! You, a psychiatrist and therapist! How can you talk like that?

PMS- With great confidence. I am highly qualified psychiatrist with years of experience in the clinical and research communities in both the academy and field. I am more than able to distinguish what is insanity.

Michele Obama (MO)- Who the hell do you think you are, white bitch?

PMS- Michele, I agreed to allowing you to stay only if you agreed to stay quiet.

MO- Who the hell are you, white bitch! My man doesn’t have to put up with the kind of crap you are dishing out. You are just another example of why I hate white people, why I never feel at home in the white world-

BO- WOW! You stood up for me!

MO- No moron, I stood up for me. Now shut up and sit down, Kansas Wonder Bread boy.

PMS- Michele, you are nothing but a monument to affirmative action. You aren’t comfortable in a world where anyone disagrees with you and when yo can’t win an argument, you make the disagreement about race. We are here because Obama agreed to be here. You might not like what I have to say, but my disagreements have nothing to do with race. Deal with it.

MO- I’ll rip your Lilly white-

BO- Enough, Michele.

MO- Listen to me, you half white-

BO- Shut up Michele! Don’t make everything about race!

MO- I’ll cut your-

BO- Shut up Michele!

PMS- As I was saying Barack, I asked you here because of remarks you made about negotiating with Iran and Hizbollah.

BO- You know, John Kennedy sat down with Nikita Kruschev at the height of the Cuban MIssile Crisis to negotiate with the Soviets-

PMS- No Barack, he sat down with the Soviets to deliver an ultimatum. He told the Soviets our position regarding Soviet nuclear weapons in our backyard was unacceptable. There were no negotiations. We gave the Soviets a way to back away and save face, but make no mistake- Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba were never an option on the negotiating table.

BO- Look, how can negotiating, even tough negotiating, hurt?

PMS- Who taught you history, Bill Ayers? Look, negotiating with Iran would give them credibility. Would you engage in talks with David Duke and the Klan, even as they promised more racism, bigotry and violence? Do you think that’s a smart idea? Do you think we need to give the leaders of Iran, Hamas and the all the other psychos in the region credibility?

BO- You’re overstating-

PMS- Barack, foreign policy is not Price Line and you are not negotiating like William Shatner! Look what happened after every attempt at negotiations with tyrannical regimes who promised violence. Neville Chamberlain attempted to negotiate with ‘Herr Hitler.’ No matter how many pansy UN diplomats attempted to ‘negotiate,’ Rwanda, the Congo, Sierra Leonne, East Timor and Sri Lanka are now all testaments to the failure of negotiations with dysfunctional regimes. ‘Negotiations’ in Darfur have gone on for decades. Do you know how many people have been killed in the Sudan since the beginning of the negotiations? 2 million, that’s how many.

BO- Are you saying that diplomacy has no value?

PMS- Not at all! Diplomacy has great value when dealing with nations who share like minded values- and that’s why establishing democracies is so important. The more democratic a nation is, the less likely that nation will resort to violence and war to settle disputes. Democracies do not go to war with each other.

MO- If that’s so true, why do leftists hate democracy and democratic regimes?

PMS- Let me put it to you in terms you’ll understand, Michele. The left needs war and strife, because without war and strife, they would have to make actual contributions to benefit others. Bitching about democracies and freedom does not contribute to the benefit of anyone but the frauds doing the bitching. In every case, bitching is a lot easier than actually working and contributing- and if you bitch loud enough, you can convince yourself you are more relevant than you really are.

BO- Aren’t you being a bit harsh?

PMS- Am I? What good is the Code Pink ‘Breasts not Bombs’ campaign? If they had an ‘Elbows not Bombs’ campaign, who would show up Do you think the cameras would be there? Do you think the victims in Darfur and Congo and Sierra Leonne see Code Pink as credible ‘negotiators’ on their behalf? Code Pink doesn’t care about victims. If they or anyone else on the left gave a damn about victims or war or oppressed people, they would do things very differently.

MO- OK, I’m paying attention- we’re paying attention. How would you handle Iran and Hamas?

PMS- Look, I’m not here to answer that question. Iran and Hamas can be easily handled- and dealt with, once we understand their realities.

BO- And that is?

PMS- It’s very straightforward. Ideologies that espouse, promulgate and teach terror are not underwritten by border disputes, poverty, political unrest, dissatisfaction or ‘humiliation’. Hostages are not taken and held to be traded for economic aid. Planes aren’t flown into buildings in response to GDP of the free markets of the western world versus the GDP of the many tyrannies of the Muslim world. Women and children are not beaten and 13 year old girls are not raped to avenge a stalled peace process.

Here is what Bill Ayers and the hard left don’t want to discuss and they will deliberately misrepresent the real aims of those promulgating terror and violence, to avenge ‘humiliation’ and phony ‘oppression.’ The terrorists and their leftist supporters don’t want to see western values and successes brought into the Muslim world. That’s it. That is what they are fighting against. Religious freedoms, abortion rights, gay rights and human rights are anathema to the ideologies and ideologues of Iran and Hamas. Their ideologies demand the murder of those whose behavior they find offensive- usually administered in a cruel and brutal fashion. What can you say about a culture for whom ‘God in Heaven, Hitler on earth‘ is a ditty taught in schools? Do you think they’ll take a black man seriously? These are truths many on the left somehow manage to forget, mostly because they don’t want to be responsible for having to make real contributions to society. The truth is that the left and the racist, bigoted vicious and violent adversaries of freedom they embrace are not, ‘just like us.’

If the terrorists and their ‘progressive’ supporters and apologists really wanted to better the lives of hundreds of millions of oppressed people, they would use America and the west as models for success. Freedom and democracy are antithetical to hate and terrorism because freedom usurps the power of the terrorist. With out the power to instill fear and punishment, those dysfunctional leaders of Iran and Hamas are nothing. We cannot legitimize them by giving them credibility, as if they were equals. We tried that with Hitler and that didn’t turn out too well. The left knows that and doesn’t give a damn.

Obama, ask yourself a question. If you are elected as America’s first Black president, do you want to be remembered for embracing a well documented record of failed and useless negotiations with evil and dysfunctional regimes? Or do you want to be remembered as a great defender of freedom and democracy?

BO- Lots to think about.

PMS- If you have to think about it, well, that scares me.

MO- I need to read Carnival of the Insanities. I may be coming around. Damn.

In real life, Michele will never let go of her insane hatred of whitey. She is a specimen of psychotic displacement that blames whitey for her low SAT scores! That is delusional and Larry Johnson of No Quarter swears that The United Church of Christ has tapes of Michele screaming obscenities at whitey for her delusional inferiority---a job at U of Chicago Hospital doing "community outreach" at $350K a year after affirmative action got her a Princeton & Harvard Law degrees.

Oh the Oppression!

I for one can't wait 'til those tapes hit airtime, though the media & Howard Dean the Scream Machine will say they're off-limits. And racist. [Of course they're racist. Michele is a racist!]

Has Barry not morphed into "Barack" without transference from his weaker, lesser half? Or am I being off-limits?

72% Say Don't Anoint Obama Just Yet. HRC should go to the Convention

Buck Naked Politics has an elegant takedown of the current MSM rush to judgment that is trying to stampede HRC out of the Dem race & McCain out of contention for the Oval Office. Evidently Newsweak led the charge, probably Evan Thomas ["the narrative was a perfect fit, but in the end the facts got in the way" concerning the Duke lacrosse rape case] gave weasel-in-waiting Jonathan Alter the baton & summoned the lemmings into full frenzy. Here's Deb Cupples' take:

This from PEW Research Center:

"[T]he public is sending a strong message to journalists and pundits: It is too early to declare, as some already have, that the race is over.

"Fully 72% of the public - including comparable percentages of Democrats, Republicans and independents - say that journalists should not be anointing Obama as the Democratic nominee at this stage in the race. Just 20% say that journalists should be doing this."

Apparently, the 20% who support the media's ethically questionable interference with the Democratic race are people 1) who have forgotten recent history, e.g., the media's selling of the Iraq war to gullible taxpayers; or 2) who haven't yet grasped concepts like slippery slope or potential for abuse.

Or maybe they're so intensely preoccupied with seeing "their" candidate win that they don't care about how he does it or the long-term consequences of a "victory" via media fiat.

The first time I noticed Obama-friendly media calling for Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race was in February, about a week before she won Ohio's and Texas's primaries. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter led the chorus, urging Hillary to drop out without participating in Ohio's and Texas's primaries.

In other words, he wanted Hillary to step aside so that Obama could take the nomination without breaking a sweat. This reminded many people of George Bush's operatives, who told Al Gore to "move on" and "get over it," so that Bush could take the White House before Florida's recount was complete.

The day after Hillary won the primaries in Ohio (by 10%) and Texas (by 4%), the Obama campaign joined Alter's chorus -- not in a courageous, upfront way, but instead by using strong implications. Below is some text from a March 5th mass-email signed by Obama Campaign Manager David Plouffe (I'll forward the email if you email me):

"The task for the Clinton campaign yesterday was clear. In order to have a plausible path to the nomination, they needed to score huge delegate victories and cut into our lead.

"They failed.

"It's clear, though, that Senator Clinton wants to continue an increasingly desperate, increasingly negative -- and increasingly expensive -- campaign to tear us down."

Notice that Plouffe lacked the intestinal fortitude to actually say "Hillary has no chance, she should drop out." That's likely because such an absurd and arrogant-sounding pronouncement (coming from a campaign official) would have inspired fierce criticism of Obama, himself.

Subtlety aside, the phrase "increasingly desperate" made the Obama campaign's message clear to all who had received Plouffe's email: Hillary should drop out.

From a win-at-any-cost perspective, it seems logical that Obama wanted Hillary to drop out before the last primary in June. If she were to quit, she would have no chance of pulling ahead in the popular vote. Some super-delegates might commit to (or switch to) Hillary if she has the popular-vote lead in June.

Of course the Obama campaign wanted Hillary to drop out weeks ago, and his supporters in the media unabashedly tried to push her out.
Obama, himself, remained oddly silent for more than three weeks after Plouffe made the campaign's position clear. During Obama's silence, the Hillary-should-drop-out message swelled to a thunderous crescendo in the media.

After the absurd talking point had become an accepted part of our national discourse (i.e., after damage was done), Obama finally stepped up and publicly said that he's fine with Hillary's staying in the race. This he did during a March 30th speech.

In short, Obama represented himself as a reasonable guy who wanted to see the rest of America's Democratic voters have a say -- another example of the clashing of image and reality.

The rancid whipped cream on the sundae: most media failed to notice the clash between Obama's March 30th speech the campaign's March 5th stance (as evinced in David Plouffe's email).

It reminds me of the false racism-accusations that were hurled at Hillary before primaries in South Carolina and North Carolina (states with heavy African American populations). Nobody from the Obama campaign publicly accused Hillary of racism. Instead, they relied on prominent supporters (like Rep. James Clyburn) to hurl the accusations for them.

And Obama sat silently on the bleachers with his hands in his pockets, where they would remain unstained by the flying mud.

That's how Obama's campaign has repeatedly played the game: indirect attacks, technicalities, misleading statements, and hypocrisy.

Are those the sort of tactics that we want a president to employ? Haven't we already seen enough damage from the current White House occupant's use of such tactics?

So we know Obama is very clever as his strategy for working hard in caucus states toppled Hillary after a more-or-less atandoff on Super Tuesday. Then our minders-who-know-better activated the Thundering Herd mechanism, the winks & nods up and down the line were exchanged, Plouffe dropped his double-clutch-shuffle on March 5th and by March 30th, the Golden Boy graciously allowed that HRC could and should stay in the race----but wait. HRC activated her flurry of big wins and Rush Limbaugh's Operation Chaos was appearing to take close states like Indiana into the Clinton camp. So it was time to win the argument by condescension, always the liberals last refuge.

Now it is simply demode for Hillary to stay in and she is "failing to get the message." She fell out of style, yet persists her pantssuit parade of victories [in states that really don't count, note the libtards, who disdain White Americans who live in mountainous landscapes or warm climates outside California.] Plus Michigan and Florida don't count, by fiat from the DNC Doyen Gov. Dean the Scream Machine.

However, don't you see it's inevitable that Obama will win because "nobody" wants to continue the "failed" policies of the last seven years? [Except the surge is working now and the economy is showing signs of a recovery from what may have been a hiccup, but was characterized by the Krugboy e-con phalanx as a "full-fledged recession."]

Each time they lose, the libtards go back to the drawing boards to figure out how to con the American people into accepting a lot of questionable balderdash. They kinda know that about 20 different polls over the last decade show that the American people consider themselves conservative over liberal at a 5 to 2 rate [the same rate that Hillary won WV, oops, that happened long long ago.]

How do you get an essentially conservative base not to vote for McCain or possibly even con them into voting Obama?

Inevitability may not work, guilt-tripping is always tricky, but Mordor is busy in its mines and forges trying to craft new weapons for another onslaught on the Hobbits.

Footnote: On the question of Hillary's dropping out of the race, Fat Teddy went to the 1980 Convention 700 Delegates Behind and fought Carter tooth and nail for the nomination. So Puh-leez give the woman a chance.

Druze in Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Egypt

Dienekes is a website about genetic and other relationships that I go to frequently. Along with GNXP, another one I visit & where I just picked up on a book that is called The Horse, the Wheel & Language, another one of my peculiar obsessions. Dienekes has a nice piece on the Druze, a small sect in the fighting in Lebanon & an Arabic-speaking ally of Israel. Which is why the authors of the piece on the Druze are Israeli.

My Lebanese uncle was a Druze from Allei above Beirut and we had often had long talks about the Arab world when I was a teen-ager---perhaps that was the reason that after joining the State Dept and being offered a job in the political section in Paris after two years in Lyon, I made a weird decision to turn it down for Arabic language studies.

I studied Arabic in Beirut & served in the State Dept. My uncle's many talks with me had been a bit of Druze oral tradition. For what it's worth [he didn't practice taqqiya with me as far as I know], he said that the Druze didn't consider themselves as "Arabs" though they spoke Arabic. In my study of the Druze [very informal while I lived in the Middle East], I found that some of their doctrine derived from the Fatimid Shi'a dynasty in Egypt, and that reincarnation was among the beliefs which differentiated them from mainstream Islam. [Also, FWIW, the ruling sect of the Alawites of Syria hold reincarnation, it is said, as a secret teaching.]

Also for what it's worth, my aunt's grandson just got a full scholarship to Northwestern U. journalism school, one of the best in the USA. The whole family is either very smart or, on the female side, very naive.

As an aside, I was lucky enough to visit Yemen many times while living in Jeddah and afterwards when working for Amoco. I even made a land journey to Sana with Ambassador Pickering & other American nomads. During this madcap adventure, we encountered some Yemeni Jews who told us that there were 5000 of their co-religionists living in villages in the North Yemen royalist stronghold never conquered by the socialists. We reported this and it was duly noted---the prevailing lore had been that the Jews had been evicted from Yemen completely & had gone to Israel. For the Australian genetic traces mentioned in the article, the Yemenis had a sea-faring tradition, since somewhat recently degraded, long ago which proselytized Indonesia [Aceh in Sumatra as early as 1000AD] and may also have hit Australia & picked up some Australoids as slaves. Yemenis were slavers from Zanzibar south to Kuwait & the Indian sub-continent. Serendib was the island of Sri Lanka discovered by Yemeni sailors, tradition has it.

FWIW Just some anecdotal stuff from my family & travels. And I have read a couple of Carleton Coon's writings on the region which l found very useful for the Arabian Peninsula. The oral traditions there are very strong & while political officer in the Embassy, I had traveled in Saudi Arabia to many provinces bringing back tidbits of strange anecdotal & anthropological data which I hope to share in other posts.

Obama's "Tuzla Moment" Outed on Videotape

The Obamanable Showman has the MSM wrapped around his finger, but there are REAL journalists out there, like Ed Driscoll, who are able to pursue stories like the ink-stained wretches of yore. And Andrew Malcolm of the LAT also has some honest blood left in his veins. Let's see how far this anecdote of Obama in the lion's den of Detroit automakers, a fraud on a level with James Rubin's defection to Obama from Clinton. Here's Malcolm:

Is this another Bosnian sniper incident, where a Democratic candidate for president describes a scene involving some personal courage, but later videotape shows that maybe perhaps it wasn't really quite all like that exactly?

Sen. Barack Obama, the leading Democratic candidate for his party's nomination, is very fond of telling receptive audiences the story about how last May he walked right into the automotive lion's den of Detroit and told those industrialists they were going to have to shape up, change the way they do things and start making more fuel-efficient vehicles to protect our environment.

"And I have to say," the straight-talking Obama tells his chuckling followers, "that when I delivered that speech, the room got really quiet. [Laughter] Nobody clapped."

Well, in honor of Obama's return campaign visit back to Michigan this week, someone -- perhaps Republicans, perhaps someone closer to home politically -- assembled videotape of Obama's oft-told tale and spliced it side by side with videotape of that actual Detroit speech.

You'll never guess what. The room wasn't quiet at all. Obama, in fact, got a loud round of applause. And at the end of his address the camera's view of him at the podium is partially blocked because the audience of local businesspeople and automotive executives was rising to give him a standing ovation.

There were no departure ceremonies after the speech because of sniper reports. Far too dangerous for that. It was all he could do then to duck his head and just run for the vehicles. See for yourself below.

Read the whole take, including Robert Reich trying to extricate himself from one of his many preposterous lies in his "Autobiography." Driscoll is a mini-Drudge with brains.

The First Time as Tantrum, the Second Time as a Fairy Tale

Rich Lowry recounts the twice-thousand told tale of 1968. I had the dishonor of hosting one of the miscreants, a fellow named Mark Rudd, back in 1969 in my apartment in Ann Arbor, where he smoked all my ganga while dropping nuggets like "No fault on the left," and "Dare to cheat, Dare to win." Later, I went to Cornell at the invitation of Chip Marshall to organize for SDS & was there for two weeks before I realized that these dudes were total cons whose reason for inviting me was to get possession of my VW microbus. They wanted me to work in a factory in Syracuse while they cavorted around the state of New York. But I digress.

The Columbia protests were led by Mark Rudd, whose idea of a bon mot was "Up against the wall, motherf-----!" From Columbia's relationship to a Pentagon-affiliated think tank and its plan to build a gym on a city park, Rudd's compatriots concluded that the school was irredeemably militaristic and racist. They occupied university buildings and took a dean hostage before being cleared out (none too gently) by the cops.

Elsewhere, university officials gave in to their tormenters, most notoriously at Cornell a year later. When black students occupied a university building - ostentatiously arming themselves - and demanded that disciplinary action against three black students be dropped, the faculty initially stood its ground. When the students escalated their threats, the faculty reversed itself in a signal act of cowardice.

The parents against which the students rebelled - as represented by the college administrations - buckled. College presidents who were the finest flowering of post-World War II liberalism gave in to the radicalism, politicizing American higher education and trashing its standards. "The maturation of the student protest movement turned out to be part of the infantilization of the American intelligentsia," Kimball writes.

The freedoms fought for in the student revolt soon curdled into the opposite: free speech became speech codes; sexual liberation became the regime of sexual harassment; civil rights became quotas. Meanwhile, Mark Rudd and a fringe of the New Left spun off into the Weather Underground, which took the destructive spirit of the campus protests to its logical conclusion in a campaign of terrorist bombings. Jonah Goldberg reminds us in his book "Liberal Fascism" that the radical left committed roughly 250 attacks from September 1969 to May 1970.

The victims of academicide pile up year after year and matriculate bearing delusions indoctinated into their uncritical minds by spurious purveyors of academentia. But after the mayhem not reported by the compliant leftist electronic and print media, there was and remains a happy ending:

If the academics gave in, another segment of the parents resisted. They were the Nixon voters, reacting against the disorder and cultural radicalism with which liberalism became identified. Republicans held the White House for 28 of the next 40 years, and the alternative history of the 1960s is the rise of the right. Even now, with Barack Obama dogged by his association with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, the Democratic Party's challenge is to free itself from the taint of 1968.

And while I dabbled in SDS, I also met Ayers and his beautiful consort Diana Oughton, who shortly thereafter immolated herself in a Greenwich Village basement making a bomb to attack Fort Dix across the Hudson. He was a dork-wad, she didn't deserve a wretch like him who now prospers purveying academicide nostrums to unsuspecting victims at UofIllinois Chicago. My friend Rashid Khalidi got me an Academic Associate Card at the University of Chicago, a respectable institution. But whether they are genuine humanists like Rashid or loathsome loo-zer parasites like Ayers, the left remains slouching toward Bethlehem.

Michael Yon on Iraq---Libtards Beware

Michael Totten has a review of Michael Yon's new book on Iraq. It should be of interest to people who want to know why the liberal-fascist media in the USA suddenly went silent after Gen. David Petraeus instituted the famous surge, with the brave backing of the president & John McCain.

Read this for another reason that John McCain should be president and the liberal-fascist media in the US confronted in its ongoing battle AGAINST American national security.

Bush Hits Democrat Lawyers Who Like Terrorist Defendants to Plea-Bargain

Jamie Rubin is signaling Obama that he wants to defect from Hillary's campaign and jump on board the Obama soul train to another State Dept job like the one the Clintons gave him---nifty trick if he can do it & this little Post article is a good start.

Of course, lil Jamie Rubin is CNN's Iran-luvin' ditz Amanpour's hubby & what McCain said to him in Rubin's self-promoting little Sky News interview TOOK PLACE JUST shortly after the Hamas victory. Hamas had not started its terrorist operations when lil Jamie asked McCain the question. Also, "have to deal with them one way or another" hardly amounts to "talking without preconditions." McCain implied both retaliation &/or back-door dealing, not sit-down negotiations. This silly "pure hypocrisy" charge is pure hyperventilating hyperbole.

Typical for leftists to read way too much into Rubin's self-promoting two minutes with McCain---that interview was literally in the winter of 2006 just after Hamas was elected and before Hamas started its civil war with Fatah, two details Rubin conveniently leaves out. Context is everything and this is just an amateurish self-hype agitpreppie operation by Rubin picked up by gullible lefties [excuse tautology].

The underlying fact Bush pointed out in the Knesset [though he didn't name the gullible lefty, everyone knows Obambi is the target] is that Democrats like Obama "can't handle the truth," as they're all a bunch of second-rate trial lawyers unable to figure out that bad people are not defendants whom you can plea-bargain into good behavior.. .

Or forgive with a promise of good behavior on their part. The underlying fact is that bad people like Hamas & Hezbollah are 'splodin' dudes who HAVE TO BE STOPPED with more than chats around the negotiating table.

In Rubin's two minutes of Davos face-time, McCain said "deal with" and "one way or another" which could mean taking them down if they keep rocketing Israeli civilians. No "pure hypocrisy" there, two years later when McCain is a declared candidate & Hamas has definitively declared itself a terrorist entity. Rubin simply inflates the importance & ignores the context of the interview.......not that those little "details" will stop gullible lefties from taking the bait. Rubin is cadging for a job in the Obama administration, and this little balloon is his way of getting Obama's attention that he wants to defect from Hillary.

But more seriously, Bush & McCain should keep attacking on the line of leftist gullibility & bring in Pelosi with her ridiculous burka plucking the hem of terrorist-chieflet Bashar Assad's robe in Damascus. That is what borders on treason, as Syria is a declared supporter of international terrorism & supports Hezbollah and Hamas, allowing Khaled Mashaal and Ibn Mugniyah to reside in Damascus . Gee-mah Carter has already blazed the trail that Obama wants to follow....the feckless presidential disaster is a useful reminder to voters that Dems haven't got a clue on national security.

And of course Obama keeps floating like a butterfly on these national security issues without being called to account by non-journalist Obamaniacs in the MSM. Taking both sides of an issue and instinctively defending culprits and mass-murderers are another set of Democrat bad habits that Bush & McCain should keep pointing out.

Lou Dobbs Bats Down Two Obama Shills/oops, Commentators

Lou Dobbs has two of the CNN "commentators," a fellow named Toobin who wrote a second-rate book on SCOTUS & a fellow named Schneider, who rarely has an insight, but always lets you know whom he is in the tank for [always a Dem, in this case Obama]. Tonight they were both yammering about how soon the inevitability of the superdelegates' shift to Obama means it's already over.

Dobbs quite correctly called them on this simple recitation of Obama's talking points. You may or may not like Hillary, but the silliest joke in DC is that the Democrat Party is pretending to be Democratic, while brokering and jockeying in full public eye. Dobbs then said that journalists are simply not doing their jobs by simply letting the Dems job according to their silly arcane party rules without at least examining the underlying premise that FL & MI are being screwed by a scream machine named Dean.

Dobbs out and out called the decision to deprive both states of delegate votes "stupid." Dobbs asked why the working-class Dems in Michigan, a union state behind Hillary, should feel compelled to vote a ticket that deprived them of any say-so in choosing the nominee because of an autocratic dwarf named Dean.

Toobin is a meat-head and simply smiled and dodged. Schneider was man enough to at least admit that Dobbs has a point. The Democrat Party rules are by no means "Democratic" and if every vote is counted, Hillary may come out on top.

Then Toobin remembered his instructions and divined that May 31st is the magic day for deciding MI & FL. I prefer to follow Camille's caustic comment closely, she's usually right:

I'm puzzled by the optimism of so many commentators and Democratic functionaries who are prophesying Hillary's graceful withdrawal by mid-June. Is there anything in the Clintons' tawdry history to support such a thesis? Why wouldn't they play smiley-face rope-a-dope now and smash-mouth alley-and-ambush fisticuffs right to the bitter end -- meaning the convention in August? It's now or never for Ms. Hill.

She's right and that's why I'll be surprised if Hillary drops out before the Convention. Fat Teddy in '80 stayed in the race going onto the Convention Floor against the peanut-farming disaster in the White House. FT was 700 votes behind.

Maybe someone should ask Teddy what Hillary should do. He's shameless, but maybe even he would squirm to be reminded. Although most of his frontal lobes might have been eaten away by now & that memory could be gone.

Camille on Hillary: A Busted Flush or Lucrezia Borgia?

Camille Paglia blames the Clintons as she accurately notes the fight to the finish ethos of their constituencies:

I'm puzzled by the optimism of so many commentators and Democratic functionaries who are prophesying Hillary's graceful withdrawal by mid-June. Is there anything in the Clintons' tawdry history to support such a thesis? Why wouldn't they play smiley-face rope-a-dope now and smash-mouth alley-and-ambush fisticuffs right to the bitter end -- meaning the convention in August? It's now or never for Ms. Hill. Even if Obama loses this fall, there's no guarantee whatever that she would win the Democratic nomination in 2012. That hoss will have been around the rodeo way too many times. The infusion of fresh new blood into the party -- especially women governors -- has already started. Who will want to resurrect all those 1990s mummies?

But of course, Camille forgets that Teddy the Fat went all the way to the Dem Convention in 1980 in a hopeless uphill fight against the worst sitting-president of the twentieth century. Teddy was 700 delegates behind and STILL took the fight to the floor.

Camille also forgets that Hillary's constituency, which Obama derides as "bitter & clinging to guns & religion" regards her stand-up feisty stance as exactly what to do when surrounded by the elitist Academentia/Hollyweird/MSM that they also despise. Why should Hillary back down and lose her trademark gutsy spunk? She's not ruining her brand, but reinforcing it with the Dems who may just nominate her in '12.

But Camille does have a point in that Hillary herself has back pages worthy of a Catherine d'Medici re Vince Foster's strange suicide & her rapid cover-up of his personal papers, even forcing the Secret Service out of his office after his body was found along the GW Parkway:

my interest was piqued last year by claims that Foster was shattered by the role he had played three months earlier in the outrageous order for federal agents to attack David Koresh's ranch at Waco, Texas, producing a conflagration that led to 76 deaths, including 21 children. Why has the Waco fiasco been forgotten? It triggered the worst case of domestic terrorism in U.S. history, the 1995 revenge bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

The slaughter of a religious cult may have unhinged the relatively idealistic Vince Foster, but to Hillary and Janet Reno [remember Kimba Wood, Bill's first choice for AG, the playboy bunny who didn't pass Hillary's muster?], the Koresh slaughter & Foster suicide were just water under the bridge and over the Niagara of their backstairs plotting & scheming.

Thankfully, their ham-handed handling of Elian Gonzales so angered Florida voters that Al Gore honestly lost that state in '00. Even GWB has been a better president than the unctious buffoon Gore-bot would have made. But I digress.

Female governors to the contrary notwithstanding, there are few female contenders down the road who might aspire to the presidency. In the meantime, the Dems might bribe Hillary with Harry Reid's job in the Senate. She couldn't do worse than Harry, who has been a total wash-out.

Why Democrats May Still Blow it: Some Timeless Truths

George Will was the author of this great review in the NYT Sunday Book Review section on Nixonland---but I started reading the review without noting the critic & toward the end inside on page 10, I thought to myself, this piece is much deeper and broader in perspective than the usual attitudinal and often sophomoric apercus most books on politics rate in the NYT.

Nixon's greatest crime in the eyes of the left was the shattering of "The Solid South" whose Democrat conservatism anchored the Dems from their Marxist demons in Academicide, some Unions, and the electronic & print media. Without the anchor, 1972 occurred and the loons were nominating Chairman Mao & Archie Bunker at the Dem convention. But Nixon's inner demons matched the Dems' spectacular outer demons and the Watergate expurgation began---aided by a media fueled with Nixon-hatred [which I heartily shared in at the time].

The author of Nixonland, Rick Perlstein, did write a very good book on Barry Goldwater in 2001 He eviscerates and excoriates the preening elitism of the liberal ascendancy at the Goldwater debacle, with clowns like Richard Hofstadter & James Reston getting their insides examined like the entrails of a Roman goat sacrifice. Someone forgot to tell the American people that the liberal hegemony would lead to the "end of ideology" prophesied by Daniel Bell. [Of course, that "end" would be the petrified, ossified nostrums of the ultra-lib left encased in the National Archives.] And so Nixon came in '68 while the Dems spun apart like Roman candles in the sky in Chicago. Hubert Humphrey betrayed by his protege Gene McCarthy was just one of the many back-stabbings in the party, while outside the Dems, bomb-makers and throwers like Bill Ayers & Diana Oughton were killing others and themselves. But Perlstein's book is a boomer book, as Will so eloquently notes:

Do we need another waist-deep wallow in the 1960s, ensconcing us cheek by jowl with Frank Rizzo and Eldridge Cleaver, Sam Yorty and Mark Rudd, Lester Maddox and Herbert Marcuse and other long-forgotten bit players in a period drama? Do we need to be reminded of that era’s gaseous juvenophilia, like Time magazine’s celebration of Americans 25 or younger as 1967’s “Man of the Year”: “This is not just a new generation, but a new kind of generation. ... In the omphalocentric process of self-construction and discovery,” today’s youth “stalks love like a wary hunter, but has no time or target — not even the mellowing Communists — for hate.”

Even back then, the Time "Man of the Year" was an exercise in narcissism---just as the one of '06 was a mirror on the cover. Indeed, though Perlstein is "a man of the left," he unconsciously exposes [and often consciously subjects] his father's generation to the scorn it deserves. But he makes the same mistake that most leftie libs do with their southpaw brains:

Perlstein repeatedly explains Nixon’s or other people’s behavior as arising from an Orthogonian resentment of Franklins, including establishment figures as different as Alger Hiss and Nelson Rockefeller. Nixon “co-opted the liberals’ populism, channeling it into a white middle-class rage at the sophisticates, the well-born, the ‘best circles.’” By stressing the importance of Nixon’s character in shaping events, and the centrality of resentments in shaping Nixon’s character, Perlstein treads a dead-end path blazed by Hofstadter, who seemed not to understand that condescension is not an argument. Postulating a link between “status anxiety” and a “paranoid style” in American politics — especially conservative politics — Hofstadter dismissed the conservative movement’s positions as mere attitudes that did not merit refutation. Perlstein, too, gives these ideas short shrift.

As the pollster Samuel Lubell had already noted before the 1952 election, “the inner dynamics of the Roosevelt coalition have shifted from those of getting to those of keeping.” Perlstein keenly sees that some liberals “developed a distaste” for the social elements they had championed, now that those elements were “less reliably downtrodden” and less content to be passively led by liberal elite

Hence, the Silent Majority actually came into existence as a backlash against the constant "toryhood of change" that Kevin Phillips coined as the chief conceit of liberalism---we know better and those poor backwards folks "bitter & clinging to religion & guns" must be put in their place---confined to a media limbo or black hole where no energy is emitted. But now I'm cruising into the '60s hyperbole that Will accuses Perlstein of partaking. Here's a few examples of why the Silent Majority, which still exists though the media does not admit it does, came into being:

The masses bought television sets and enjoyed what they watched. But Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (and formerly Adlai Stevenson’s administrative assistant) declared television a “vast wasteland,” thereby implicitly scolding viewers who enjoyed it. When New York was becoming a lawless dystopia, with crime, drugs and homelessness spoiling public spaces, August Heckscher, the patrician commissioner of parks under Mayor John Lindsay, sniffily declared that people clamoring for law and order were “scared by the abundance of life.”

A Newsweek cover story on Louise Day Hicks, who led opposition to forced busing of school children in Boston, described her supporters as “a comic-strip gallery of tipplers and brawlers and their tinseled overdressed dolls ... the men queued up to give Louise their best, unscrewing cigar butts from their chins to buss her noisily on the cheek, or pumping her arm as if it were a jack handle under a truck.” Perlstein deftly deploys such judgments to illustrate what the resentful resented.

Then Will goes on a two-page rant on the dozens of mistakes, misquotes, misunderstandings and poor writing techniques that Perlstein employs, though we all know about George's fussy side. Will does his best work on demolishing the substance of Perlstein's thesis, thus and so:

he has a gift for penetrating judgments, for example, that Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California because he provided “a political outlet for the outrages that, until he came along to articulate them, hadn’t seemed like voting issues at all.”

Perlstein’s thesis is that America became Nixonland because of “the rise of two American identities” in the 1960s — actually between 1964, when Johnson won 61.1 percent of the vote, and 1968, when the combined votes for Nixon and George Wallace were 56.9 percent. Perlstein says Nixon’s legacy is the “notion that there are two kinds of Americans.” On one side of the barricades are “values voters” and other conservatives who are infuriated by the disdain of amoral elites conservatives consider (in the brilliantly ironic phrase that Perlstein appropriated from Kevin Phillips) a “toryhood of change” determined to supervise their lives. On the other side are Hofstadterian liberals who feel threatened by these nincompoops who have been made paranoid by their status anxieties.

“How did Nixonland end?” Perlstein asks in the book’s last line. “It has not ended yet.” But almost every page of Perlstein’s book illustrates the sharp contrast rather than a continuity with America today. It almost seems as though Perlstein, who was born in 1969, is reluctant to let go of the excitement he has experienced secondhand through the archives he has ransacked to such riveting effect.

1968 was the most exciting year of my own particular life, and it appears that Perlstein has a Don DeLillo gene that makes me want to buy his book [I have a dozen already on the '68 election, when I was six months on Gene McCarthy's National Staff in 10 states---plus at the Hilton during the Chicago Convention, when I shower fish and ashtrays in a tear-gas stupor fueled by Dewar's, onto the Chicago Police 15 floors below, an episode recounted on pp.307-309 in THWhite's The Making of the President, 1968. Tom Brokaw's bland pablum-prose gives a corporate journalist recitation of events---Perlstein sounds like an antidote to such time-clock punching history.

And yet George Will is correct. Since at least Gerry Ford & probably back to Nixon himself, who adopted Keynsian economics and price controls, the middle has been the refuge of both parties. And all the fireworks now are rhetorical---nobody is getting killed by bombs in Greenwich Village basements, stickups of Brink's Vans in Nyack, or bullets into MLKJr & RFK.

The past recollected in tranquillity, as Wordsworth notes and Will would agree with, gives us lessons. History never repeats itself, but usually rhymes.

2008 is exciting, but there will never be another 1968.

John McCain a "Distraction" for Obama?

Rich Lowry thinks Obama may be pushing this elitist thing a bit too far, and here's Rich's excellent take on the subject:

After his blowout win in North Carolina last week, Obama turned to framing the rules of the general election ahead, warning in his victory speech of "efforts to distract us." The chief distracter happens to be the man standing between Obama and the White House, John McCain, who will "use the very same playbook that his side has used time after time in election after election."

Ah, yes, the famous distractions with which Republicans fool unwitting Americans. Ronald Reagan distracted them with the Iranian hostage crisis, high inflation and unemployment, gas lines and the loss of American prestige abroad. Then, the first George Bush distracted them with the notion of a third Reagan term, as well as the issues of taxes, crime and volunteerism. After a brief interlude of national focus during two Clinton terms, another Bush arrived wielding the dark art of distraction.


Forget "bitter"; Obama must believe that most Americans suffer from an attention-deficit disorder so crippling that they can't concentrate on their own interests or values.

Obama has an acute self-interest in so diagnosing the American electorate. His campaign knows he's vulnerable to the charge of being an elitist liberal. Unable to argue the facts, it wants to argue the law -- defining his weaknesses as off-limits.

The campaign can succeed in imposing these rules on the race only if the news media cooperate. Newsweek signed up for the effort in a cover story that reads like a 3,400-word elaboration of the "distraction" passage of Obama's victory speech. "The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968," it says, through "innuendo and code." McCain "may not be able to resist casting doubt on Obama's patriotism," and there's a question whether he can or wants to "rein in the merchants of slime and sellers of hate."

The Washington Post & Newsweek are part of the same company. Can all the other corporate elements also be rolled by Obama, such as NBC & its lowly cable audience with few eyeballs? Rich thinks the rulebook is simple enough to follow for these Obamaniacs to follow, and he spells them out in case Brian Williams gets brainlock:

Here are the Obama rules in detail: He can't be called a "liberal" ("the same names and labels they pin on everyone," as Obama puts it); his toughness on the war on terror can't be questioned ("attempts to play on our fears"); his extreme positions on social issues can't be exposed ("the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives" and "turn us against each other"); and his Chicago background too is off-limits ("pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy"). Besides that, it should be a freewheeling and spirited campaign.

Democrats always want cultural issues not to matter because they are on the least-popular side of many of them, and want patriotic symbols like the Pledge of Allegiance and flag pins to be irrelevant when they can't manage to nominate presidential candidates who wholeheartedly embrace them (which shouldn't be that difficult). As for "fear" and "division," they are vaporous pejoratives that can be applied to any warning of negative consequences of a given policy or any political position that doesn't command 100 percent assent. In his North Carolina speech, Obama said the Iraq War "has not made us safer," and that McCain's ideas are "out of touch" with "American values." How fearfully divisive.

Kevin Phillips famously called the Democratic Establishment a "toryhood of change," meaning elitists who wished to manipulate the electorate for change in which they would have a large stake in the profits and benefits---people like FDR & Averell Harriman & Adlai Stevenson, professed idealists who were still capitalist profiteers or at least headed elites with money on their mind. Or so that's my take on what Kevin meant.

Identity politics is fraught no with so many First Amendment exceptions such as "hate crimes" and other vaporous weirdness that Obama may con the MSM, who are part of the "toryhood," to go along for the ride. The country will be diminished if the First Amendment is whittled away and such abominations as "The Fairness Doctrine" and defining categories as "hateful" begin to shrink our political freedoms.