CBS/NYT Poll Lies about Romney/Owe-bama

Here's the BS: The CBS/NYT/Quinnipiac Poll has on page 18 in a scroll session that has literally thousands of wads of info on the first 17 pages before it comes to the PARTY IDENTIFICATION %. I tried to copy & paste this info, but the creepy degenerates at CBS & the NYT paste came up gibberish. Try it yourself & see. Here's the numbers:

Florida: Dem 37%, GOP 30%, Ind 30%. Ohio Dem 37%, GOP 29%, Ind 30%. VA Dem 35%, GOP 29%, Ind 31%.

How many of the lazy dirt balls in JournOList's long fellow-traveler sheet will actually LOOK at these numbers...??? UPDATE: QED & QED!

Obama Condescends to Women; Loses their Vote!

Rich Lowry points out why Barry Soetero/Obama might be losing some of the women's vote that he led by almost 20 points just a month ago.

Almost a hundred years after passage of the 19th Amendment, the president is making perhaps the most superficial, misleading, and insulting appeal for the support of women in American presidential politics ever. It’s a wonder that his target audience doesn’t rise up as one and say, “Please, stop condescending to us.” If David Axelrod is right, what women care about most is making other people, even religious employers, pay for their birth control. They love abortion with a single-minded passion. They are so easily manipulated that they can be motivated to oppose Mitt Romney because he said innocently in a debate that his aides brought him “binders full of women” to consider for his cabinet as Massachusetts governor. They can be convinced that they are the victims of a “war on women” as long as the slogan is repeated over and over again. They can be made to believe that the Lilly Ledbetter Act is an epochal change in the balance of power between the genders, when pay discrimination has long been illegal and the Lilly Ledbetter Act merely tilts the playing field against employers and toward trial lawyers by allowing lawsuits years after alleged acts of pay discrimination. The likes of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that women were just as capable of rational deliberation as men. The conceit of the Obama campaign is that, to the contrary, they are quite susceptible to a few powerful dog whistles and unable to see beyond their gender. To paraphrase a notorious post on the Obama campaign’s Tumblr page, “Ladies vote like their lady parts depend on it."

Aside from asking if Lena is related to Stanley Ann, it gets uglier and homelier and sillier:

The twentysomething filmmaker and actress Lena Dunham captured the sensibility perfectly in an instantly mocked video likening voting for Obama for the first time to having sex for the first time. “You want to do it with a great guy,” Dunham gushes. As the conservative writer John O’Sullivan noted, if Dunham can really compare “the excitement of her first vote to losing her virginity, one can only encourage her to persevere: Sex really will get better.” Dunham’s pitch is fashioned, of course, to young, single women in particular. (One hopes that by age 35 or so, older and wiser, she will look back on the spot with embarrassment.) But single women in general are key to Obama’s coalition. He wants government to occupy an outsized role in their lives, as captured in the symbolism of his campaign. Obama was implicitly the husband of Julia, the cartoon character created to demonstrate the cradle-to-grave assistance rendered by his programs; Obama is implicitly Lena Dunham’s lover.

The more explicit image is the one of Nicholas II, who cares for his helpless victims of slavery from far above:

The czar in Russia styled himself the Great Father of the serfs. Obama is the Great Provider for the women in his coalition. He gives them material and emotional support. He helps them not have children, protects them from the depredations of their male employers, and scorns any suggestion that anyone ever have to fall back on self-reliance. The implicit picture his campaign paints of these women is one of economic powerlessness and extreme political credulity. Every public-opinion poll that shows Mitt Romney closing the gap among women is a small victory for a less-slighting view of women. Not that the Romney campaign hasn’t engaged in its own embarrassingly simple-minded courtship of female voters. Its convention was devoted to it, and — reassuringly enough — got Romney nothing. He made his strides among women with a performance in the first debate that was substantive, future-oriented, and designed to speak to the entire country rather than to narrow slivers of the electorate.

Romney has seized the initiative by taking a broad view of America & avoiding Obama's attempts to paint Mitt as some sort of deviant.

The president is increasingly incapable of the latter. The former uniter is now a divider hoping enough women buy his insipid pitch. Let’s be glad that Susan B. Anthony and the gals are spared the spectacle.

Milwaukee Mob in Vegas TV Show

Dennis Quaid & John Chiklis are two of my favorite male actors and I've been watching the interesting new show Vegas which shows the early birth of the mob's takeover of the gambling scene in Vegas. The screenplay is by Nicholas Pileggi whose book Wiseguys I read in the late '80s on a vacation in New England. Pileggi keeps inserting the Milwaukee mob into the show as the antagonist of the Chicago Mob, of which Chiklis is a loyal---or so it seems---member. As it happens, my mother's mother Nana lived up the street from the Balestrieri's and her grandkids and his kids went to school & church at St. Sebastian's Parish on 54th St. I remember my cousins telling me that they couldn't believe that the nice father to their friends the Balestrieris was the head of the Milwaukee mob. My senior year of high school, I was enamoured of a young girl named Mary, and my friend Terry Keenan and his date & Mary/me went to the Brass Rail, a glitzy nightclub/bar owned by a Milwaukee mobster named Izzy Pogrob,

First to come to mind was The Brass Rail, that controversial place on 3rd and Wells that was owned by colorful Izzy Pogrob. The Rail began as a jazz club in the 1950s but became a strip club in 1959, about eight months before Pogrob disappeared and turned up dead a day later in a Mequon field, apparently a victim of a robbery.

I heard that the bar subsequently was run by a young Detroit-based Jewish gangland type named Ivan Boesky, later to achieve a dubious immortality in the '80s.

Balistrieri married Antonina (Nina) Alioto and soon his father-in-law and Milwaukee boss, John Alioto, was grooming Balistrieri as his successor. Balistrieri had two sons, Joseph and John Balistrieri, who became lawyers and became involved in their father's business. Balistrieri had two daughters, Benedetta and Cathrine (Cootie). On December 27, 1961, at a crime family social event in Milwaukee, Balistrieri was installed as the new boss of the Milwaukee family, replacing the retired Alioto.

Alioto's was the swankiest restaurant on Hwy 100 near the country club where I caddied & later we went there when there were celebrations or funerals to be observed. Later, it turned out that Frank Balestrieri was actually trying to get with the New York mob to take over the midwest from the Chicago Mob. Milwaukee had already taken over the KCity, Detroit & Cleveland rackets & it seems that Donnie Brasco was involved in the intermediary dealings between the Bonannos and the Balestrieris. By coincidence, a couple of scenes from the Donnie Brasco movie were shot in the bar owned by my cousin and her husband at the time. Small world. Must have been the ambience...!

Why Nate Silver is Wrong....

The Telegraph has unique insight into the USA's politics, as this blog shows.

In the history of presidential elections, has there ever been such an effort by one side to poll their way to victory? While the Republicans have spoken this season about jobs and debt – willing themselves to a moral victory – the Democrats have talked constantly about how well their guy is polling in one or two states. The goal is to create a sense of inevitability, to convince the public to vote for Obama because he’s a winner and who wouldn’t want to vote for the winner? We’ve witnessed the evolution of polling from an objective gauge of the public mood to a propaganda tool: partisan and inaccurate. Step forward Nate Silver of the New York Times. Nate has been an open supporter of the President and his newspaper just endorsed Obama (although it also went for Dukakis, so it ain’t that good at picking winners). But context doesn’t matter because maths is maths and maths can’t lie – and Nate says that, according to his model, Obama has a 74.6 per cent chance of winning. You might find that figure a little odd given that on the same page you’ll see that Obama is ahead by less than 3 per cent nationally and his advantage lies in one state, Ohio. It’s even odder when you consider how it conflicts with other polls that emerged this weekend giving a virtual tie in Wisconsin and Minnesota. It’s damn near-surreal when you discover that Gallup puts Romney ahead by four points among (and this distinction is critical) likely voters. Meanwhile, Obama’s job approval rating is heading downwards. Does Nate know something that the rest of the world doesn’t? A former business and baseball analyst, Nate came to fame in 2008 when he correctly predicted the outcome in 49 of 50 states in the presidential election. Frankly, a headless chicken could have done that. It was a wave election and we all knew Virginia and North Carolina were in play. Plus Nate had access to internal Obama polls that gave him an advantage over his market rivals. Nevertheless, this success turned Nate into a star – despite his own admission that his analysis technique is not modelled exclusively for politics. In an interview about his life’s work, he wrote: But the other thing too is on the blog I mostly focus on politics. And I think elections are a really interesting thing to study and to try to predict. But I don't particularly like politics. I find some of the people involved in politics, I don't think they're the most well-rounded or pleasant people necessarily, right? So I want to broaden my focus a little bit and say, look, by being data-driven and looking at how predictions go, doing analysis from statistics and everything else, we can look at business or sports or a lot different fields or science. And there's nothing about politics in particular that my interest and skill sets are uniquely suited to. [Italics are mine.] That noise you hear is the sound of the cat being let out of the bag. Appreciating that Nate’s system is rather more generic, interpretive and partisan makes sense of its central paradox: that while the rest of us are talking about Romney’s post-debate momentum, Silver still gives the race to the President by a huge margin. Here are some of the problems with his stats. 1. Nate isn’t very good at calling close elections. In 2010, he correctly predicted the outcome of the senate elections with the greatest leads. But in the 5 genuinely close races, he got it wrong in 3. For the House elections, Nate ran this extraordinary headline: “House Forecast: G.O.P. Plus 54-55 Seats; Significantly Larger or Smaller Gains Possible.” So, this oracle predicted that the results could have been “larger” or “smaller” – how prescient. In fact, they were much larger. The Republicans took 63 seats. 2. People make their minds up at the last minute, which confuses the outcome of close elections. Historically, voters have tended to break towards challengers, and particularly Republican challengers, in the last week. 3. Nate weights polls, meaning that he picks and chooses which data sets to run through his model. He has shown particular affection for Democrat-leaning pollsters like PPP, and this bias is evident in his use of state-wide polls. Silver embraces polling organisations that other writers avoid like the plague. Apparently, the New York Times isn’t as discriminating. 4. Nate ignores polls that contradict him. So PPP is right and Gallup is wrong. 5. Politics is even riskier than baseball and “stuff happens.” As columnist David Brooks put it in a critique of Silver’s polls: “Obama turns in a bad debate performance. Romney makes offensive comments at a fund-raiser. These unquantifiable events change the trajectories of tight campaigns. You can’t tell what’s about to happen. You certainly can’t tell how 100 million people are going to process what’s about to happen. You can’t calculate odds that capture unknown reactions to unknown events.” Nor can we determine turnout – and a lot of the polling in 2012 has presumed that as many Democrats will vote today as they did back in 2008. If that’s wrong, many predictions will be confounded. Brooks’ point is really the most powerful of all. Politics is not a science and it doesn’t lend itself well to predictions. Voters lie, natural disasters happen, scandals rock the White House. No one could have predicted – including Silver – that the debates would radically transform Romney’s image in the eyes of the voter. In some cases, that transformation happened in spite of Romney losing one or two of those debates. Silver’s stardom tells us two things about the Democratic Party. The first is that its obsession with numbers is part of a cold, mechanical way of looking at politics that divides the electorate up into blocks of voters who can be cobbled together into a winning coalition. Team Obama went out of its way in the 2000s to recruit professors and statisticians who would turn politics into something like baseball: hire the best players, master all the tricks, bet and gamble your way to victory. Grand narrative is gone. In its place are talking points designed to achieve a 51/49 per cent advantage: war on women, 99 per cent etc. Second, Nate’s success shows that Democrats are panicking. Losing the war of ideas, they’re resorting to bad maths. Last night a friend posted this on Facebook: “I want Nate Silver's data made into a blanket I can cuddle up with.” Sorry, but weighted polling served up by a partisan analyst is a very false comfort.

The Late, not-so Great, Barack Obama

Bret Stephans tears the mask off the bizarre kleptocracy at the top of Obama's Green Crusades.

China, so recently extolled as the very model of technocratic know-how, turns out to be a country heavily populated at the top by rent-seekers and kleptocrats. Should that be surprising? Not if you think that nothing else can come from the lucrative crossroads where politically directed capital and politically connected individuals meet. This brings us to Al Gore. Earlier this month the Washington Post's Carol Leonnig reported that the former vice president's wealth is today estimated at $100 million, up from less than $2 million when he left government service on a salary of $181,400. How did he make this kind of money? It wasn't his share of the Nobel Peace Prize. Nor was it the book and movie proceeds from "An Inconvenient Truth." Instead, as Ms. Leonnig reports, "Fourteen green-tech firms in which Gore invested received or directly benefited from more than $2.5 billion in loans, grants and tax breaks, part of President Obama's historic push to seed a U.S. renewable-energy industry with public money." That's nice work if you can get it—at least if you're on the investment-management end of the deal. But what if you're on the worker-bee end? The Post story mentions one of the beneficiaries of Mr. Gore's investment acumen, Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls, JCI -1.34% which won a $299 million award from the federal government in 2009 to make electric-car batteries. Here's how that worked out: "The company has dramatically scaled back, after executives concluded demand for electric cars was far lower than the administration forecast. The factory outfitted with stimulus funds is nearly idle, and plans to build a second plant have been postponed." And so to Barack Obama. When the history of this administration is written, maybe someone will note the dissonance between the president's hip persona and his retro ideology. Here was a man who promised a "transformative" presidency. Yet when transformation came, it amounted to a two-pronged attempt to impose, from one side, a version of European social democracy by way of ObamaCare, and from the other side a version of Chinese state-directed "capitalism" by way of the stimulus. As a political matter it may have been Mr. Obama's good luck that the bankruptcy of both models became obvious only after he had gotten his way legislatively on both. Yet the president's sagging fortunes have everything to do with his buying into an ideological enthusiasm too late. In a different age, Mr. Obama would have been the guy who went out and bought an Edsel. In this age, Mr. Obama is the guy demanding that you buy an Edsel, too. That car is today called the Volt.

The USA is still in danger of re-electing this bogus fraud.

Mr. Obama might still squeak by. He has, in addition to incumbency and a vestige of likability, the benefit of a challenger who only found his stride very late in the campaign. But a second term will mean four years of spent ideas packaged in shopworn rhetoric, to be shoved down the national throat by a president with nothing politically to lose. Sound appealing?

Not to me.

I, Liberal

I, Liberal I’m sure that there could never be A man as virtuous as me. I’ve honed my precious self-esteem In ways no common man could dream! To feed my moral vanity, I preen for all the world to see; I thrust in everybody’s face The noble causes I embrace. And lest there be the slightest doubt That I’m no bitter, clinging lout, The bumper stickers on my Volt Affirm that I’m no right-wing dolt. As these credentials will attest, I am the brightest and the best – And true to my enlightened soul, Utopia shall be my goal! The planet should be mine to run; I know what’s best for everyone. My Nanny Squad will nag and scold, Until the plebes do as they’re told. My Social Justice Ministry Will outlaw inequality – With good intent unwavering, I’ll redistribute everything! I’ll be obscenely generous With subsidy and stimulus; To fund my drunken spending sprees, The fat cats’ profits I will seize! For those who fail, my heart will bleed, But woe to those who dare succeed. I vow to vanquish human greed – To each according to his need! There’ll be no want, there’ll be no war, My Welfare Corps will feed the poor. There’ll be no limit to my grace, When I control the human race! I’ll heal the Earth, I’ll low’r the Seas, My Healthcare Force will smite disease – And all will rightly worship me, The Savior of Humanity!

" Liberalism is an elite person’s psychological investment in enjoying a guilt-free affluence."

Victor Davis Hanson is perhaps the most brilliant interpreter of liberalism in America. Perched in his eyrie in California, where the isolated pockets of Portola Valley & the Berkeley hills hold tens of thousands of guilt-free libtards, VDH has an eagle's eye view of the sustained psychosis of liberalism.

Liberals believe that abstract caring allows them seclusion and cocooning in the real, material world. Private schools, tony upscale suburbs, nice Volvos and Lexus SUVs, jet travel to Tuscany, a fine Napa $100 wine, Harvard or Stanford for junior — all that reeks of privilege and exclusivity, and can prompt remorse. In some sense, Costa del Sol and Martha’s Vineyard, like John Kerry’s yacht or John Edwards’ home, are antithetical to the entire liberal value system. But if one is loudly for “pay-your-fair-share” higher taxes, or for affirmative action, or for more deficit spending, then one feels absolved from guilt over his isolated privilege — and can enjoy it without lamentation. And if one makes enough money not to worry about a few more taxes or fees, then a mind at peace is a pretty good deal. Lots of those who now reside in Portola Valley and the Berkeley hills helped to promote policies whose deleterious results fell on distant others, out of mind, out of sight, far away in Porterville and Stockton. Liberalism is an elite person’s psychological investment in enjoying a guilt-free affluence.

The base vote of the libtard ascendancy lies in union strangeholds and govt jobs.

Large percentages of the population now work for government — federal, state, or local. Millions more are divorced from the tragic world of mining or drilling where nature is unforgiving. That distance has allowed Americans in droves to disengage from both the private sector, where one either makes a profit or goes broke, and the grimy processes by which we live one more day. A San Francisco professor, a Monterey lawyer, and a Sacramento bureaucrat do not know how hard it is to raise beef, grow peaches, find and pump oil and gas, and haul logs out of the forest and into Home Depot as smooth lumber, or what it takes to build a small Ace Hardware business. The skills needed to keep a 7-Eleven viable in a rough neighborhood, I confess, dwarf those of the classics professor.

And the magical realism of libtards is amazing...!

In the elite liberal mind, there is instead a sort of progressive Big Rock Candy Mountain. Gasoline comes right out of the ground through the nozzle into the car. Redwood 2x4s sprout from the ground like trees. Apples fall like hail from the sky; stainless steel refrigerator doors are mined inches from the surface. Tap water comes from some enormous cistern that traps rain water. Finished granite counter tops materialize on the show room floor. Why, then, would we need Neanderthal things like federal gas and oil leases, icky dams and canals, yucky power plants, and gross chain saws — and especially those who would dare make and use them?

The thinking is female, and subject to extreme emotional distress...

For some, especially those who are well-educated and well-spoken, a sort of irrational furor at “the system” governs their political make-up. Why don’t degrees and vocabulary always translate into big money? Why does sophisticated pontification at Starbucks earn less than mindlessly doing accounting behind a desk? We saw this tension with Michelle Obama who, prior to 2009, did not quite have enough capital to get to Aspen or Costa del Sol, and thereby, despite the huge power-couple salaries, Chicago mansion, and career titles, felt that others had far too much more than the Obamas. “Never been proud,” “downright mean country,” “raise the bar,” etc., followed, as expressions of yuppie angst. The more one gets, the more one believes he should get even more, and the angrier he gets that another — less charismatic, less well-read, less well-spoken — always seems to get more.

Victimization, or at least silly moronic inability to understand reality, seems to permeate the way libtards think:

So do not discount the envy of the sophisticated elite. The unread coal plant manager, the crass car dealer, or the clueless mind who farms 1000 acres of almonds should not make more than the sociology professor, the kindergarten teacher, the writer, the artist, or the foundation officer. What sort of system would allow the dense and easily fooled to become better compensated (and all for what — for superfluous jet skis and snowmobiles?) than the anguished musician or tortured-soul artist, who gives so much to us and receives so much less in return? What a sick country — when someone who brings chain saws into the Sierra would make more than a UC Berkeley professor who would stop them.

Finally, we come to a small subset that simply does not like America’s wealth and capitalism, supremacy overseas, and ubiquitous global culture — or at least believes that anything not his own must be far better (an oikophobia or hatred of one’s own household). He bores us with lectures on the wonderful EU, the superior La familia romance of Latin America, the “it takes a village” values of Africa, or the Cairo speech mythologies of the Middle East. Because America is so affluent, it allows so many the luxury to dream of how our wealth is so ill-gotten — as long as quiet others in the shadows ensure that life remains pretty good in San Francisco and Madison. Contrarianism is an innate characteristic, but one indulged without risk, only when the larger tribe is safe and secure.

And the final absurdity is the campaign waged by the First Moron:

In short, twenty-first century elite liberalism has become a psychological condition, not a serious blueprint on how to solve real problems. The president knows that — and so without ideas has been reduced to name-calling and sermons on Big Bird.

VDH has truly hit the nail on the head. The libtard disdain for those who make their living by manual labor or prying natural resources out of the environment is a psychological nutjob condition, period. And any such condition must cease promoting desk jobs over sweat equity, or tumble into a complete end-condition of indebtedness.

AP "Racism Survey" Cooked to Produce Racist Answers?

The WSJ has a James Taranto article that taunts AP for putting out such a silly unintelligent internally-biased survey/poll.

How does the AP read the minds of Americans and quantify this "prejudice" that nobody else can recognize? Here's the explanation:

The AP developed the surveys to measure sensitive racial views in several ways and repeated those studies several times between 2008 and 2012. The explicit racism measures asked respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements about black and Hispanic people. In addition, the surveys asked how well respondents thought certain words, such as "friendly," ''hardworking," ''violent" and "lazy," described blacks, whites and Hispanics. The same respondents were also administered a survey designed to measure implicit racism, in which a photo of a black, Hispanic or white male flashed on the screen before a neutral image of a Chinese character. The respondents were then asked to rate their feelings toward the Chinese character. Previous research has shown that people transfer their feelings about the photo onto the character, allowing researchers to measure racist feelings even if a respondent does not acknowledge them.

The "explicit racism" part of the survey, which is available online, doesn't measure prejudice so much as it propagates stereotypes. If a guy at a dinner party blurts out, "Hey, do you think black people are lazy and violent?" your first thought probably won't be that the other guests must be racist. Yet the designers of this survey impute racism to others when it is they who are raising these stereotypes. The "series of statements" with which participants are asked to agree or disagree are ones that presuppose a left-multiculturalist worldview. Example: "Irish, Italians, Jewish, and other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without special favors." That the researchers regard this as an antiblack sentiment tells you a lot about their political attitudes but nothing about the racial attitudes of survey participants. (Back in 2010, we dissected a survey that used the exact same language to impugn the Tea Party as racist.)

AGW Created Frankenstorm?

NPR is a government-subsidized radio network that is a propaganda outlet for the Dimmo-rat Party. And now that Sam Champion is preoccupied with his husband in a recent he-he marriage, the hardy perennial of anthropogenic global warming is trotted out by another useful idiot at NPR. Why are those Polar Bears disappearing and the summers hotter & winters colder?

The science of climate attribution is very exciting and full of cool, new ideas. It has already provided us with first steps towards more precision in understanding how climate change is changing climate now, already. For hurricanes, however, sticking to the science means it is still hard to point to an individual storm and say, yes! Climate change! A more reasoned approach is to take the full weight of our understanding about the Earth and its systems and go beyond asking if any particular event is due to global warming or natural variability. As Kevin Ternbeth of NCAR says "Nowadays, there's always an element of both."


Actually, the hurricanes of '31,'37 in the Keys of Florida & the huge storm of '38 that is bigger than Frankenstorm all occurred during the Great Depression, which was at a low point of industrial activity during the 20th century. And the average temp of Mother Earth has stayed the same since 1998. Go put those facts into the AGW sugar machine & see what you come up with....

Without GOP Senate, Shumer promises gridlock

The WSJ has a very scary article about Dem Senate obstruction unless the GOP wins the senate majority Romney needs...

Obama the Amateur

Obama's overweening arrogance & self-esteem make him a politician who sucks:

As president, Obama has shown himself to be inept in the arts of management and governance. He has failed to learn from his mistakes and therefore repeats policies, both at home and abroad, that don’t work. He invariably blames his problems on those he disagrees with and is so thin-skinned that he constantly complains about what people say and write about him. He is a strange kind of politician who derives no joy from the cut and thrust of politics, but who clings to the narcissistic life of the presidency. The qualities that define him — his arrogance, his sense of superiority, and his air of haughtiness — have been on full display as Obama has sought a second term. In the debates and during the final weeks of the campaign, Obama has been prickly and defensive. His cheap shots at Romney (for instance, he mocked Romney for using the phrase “binders full of women”) and his use of the derisive word “Romnesia” have made Obama appear unpresidential, small and unserious. Obama has always had scorn for anyone who disagrees with him. That was particularly obvious in the first debate. “In debates, I watch body language more than content,” Stuart Spencer, the famous political consultant who ran Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns, told me. “That’s where it’s at in debates. And Obama came across as arrogant and preachy. He has a personality that hates to be questioned. He has to be right and have answers all the time. Even in his facial expressions, he was looking at Romney as ‘you fool.’ That was not a winning debate strategy.” By all accounts, Obama doesn’t find joy in being president. Like Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, he is an introvert who prefers his own company to that of others. I interviewed a former State Department official who told me: “While I was in the room, he’d get phone calls from heads of state, and more than once I heard him say, ‘I can’t believe that I’ve got to meet with all these congressmen from Podunk city to get my bills passed.’ ”

The article is by Edward Klein, author of the NYT bestseller, The Amateur. Hit the link above for more adjectival reassurance.

Giants Win World Series in Sweep

The SF Giants swept the Detroit Tigers after being down the first two games against Cincinnati in SF & then sweeping Cincy in Cincy in three to win the NLCS, then was down three-one to the hated Cardinals & won the next three to take the NL pennant. Here's more:

Marco Scutaro singled home the tiebreaking run in the 10th inning, and the San Francisco Giants beat the Detroit Tigers 4-3 on Sunday night to complete a four-game sweep and win their second World Series title in three years. Ryan Theriot , who went hitless for St. Louis in Game 7 of last year's Series, singled softly into right field off Phil Coke opening the 10th. Brandon Crawford sacrificed, nearly bunting the ball past Coke. Angel Pagan struck out and Scutaro singled into short center field as Theriot slid home ahead of Austin Jackson 's throw. Pablo Sandoval , who hit three homers in Game 1, was selected Series MVP. He was 1 for 5 in Game 4, dropping his Series average to .500 (8 for 16). Santiago Casilla got the final out of the ninth for the win, and Sergio Romo struck out the side in the 10th for his third save, freezing Triple Crown winner Miguel Cabrera with a called third strike to end it. The Giants ran out of the dugout and bullpen to celebrate between the mound and second base. Of the 24 teams to take 3-0 Series leads, 21 swept and three won in five games. Delmon Young hit a tying home run off Matt Cain in the sixth. Cabrera and San Francisco's Buster Posey homered, marking the first time both reigning batting champions went deep in the same Series game. San Francisco's Brandon Belt hit an RBI triple off the right-field wall in the second inning following a ground-rule double by Hunter Pence . But on a night when the wind was gusting to right field at up to 25 mph, Cabrera put Detroit ahead for the first time in the Series with a wild-blown, two-run drive in the third. Cabrera's drive, on an 86 mph breaking ball, sailed over Pence, who thought he would catch it but ran out of room in front of the right-field wall on the cool, blustery night. It drove Jackson, who had walked with one out, and ended Detroit's 20-inning scoreless streak. San Francisco had not trailed since losing Game 4 of the NL championship series, when the Giants fell into a 3-1 series deficit against St. Louis. With a light rain falling, Scutaro reached on a chopper to third leading off the sixth and, one out later, Max Scherzer hung an 82 mph breaking ball. Posey drove it down the left-field line, where it stayed a few feet fair and landed a couple of rows over the wall for a 3-2 lead. That advantage didn't last long. Young sent an opposite-field, no-doubt drive into the right-field stands in the bottom half, setting off cheers among the crowd of 42,152, with many fans waving white rally towels. Andy Dirks followed with a single and Jhonny Peralta hit a drive that Gregor Blanco caught against the wall in left. After watching Barry Zito , Madison Bumgarner and Ryan Vogelsong each allow one run or none in the first three games, Cain gave up three runs and five hits in seven innings with five strikeouts and two walks. Scherzer, pitching on nine days' rest, gave up three runs and seven hits in 6 1-3 innings, struck out eight and walked none. After he left with a runner on second and one out in the seventh, lefty Drew Smyly retired Brandon Crawford on a flyout and righty Octavio Dotel induced a groundout from Angel Pagan . Smyly, Dotel and Coke combined for 2 2-3 innings of hitless relief before the 10th. Jeremy Affeldt followed Cain and struck out four in a row before Peralta hit a ninth-inning drive to center that the wind carried and was caught by Pagan on the warning track Casilla relieved and hit Omar Infante with a pitch, breaking his left hand. Danny Worth ran for Infante and Gerald Laird hit into a forceout. Sandoval was 1 for 5, dropping his Series average to .500 (8 for 16). He also made a nimble play to throw out Quintin Berry on a bunt to third. Detroit's Prince Fielder was hitless in four at-bats, dropping to 1 for 14 in the World Series (.071) and 1 for 25 (.040) against right-handers in the postseason. Detroit has lost seven straight postseason games. On a 44-degree night, fans bundled up at Comerica Park and some players wore caps with earflaps during batting practice. Detroit scratched catcher Alex Avila , playing with a sore right arm since he was hit by a foul tip in the opener, and replaced him with Laird. Infante moved up to eighth in the batting order. San Francisco started Ryan Theriot at designated hitter instead of Hector Sanchez . NOTES: Ann Romney, wife of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, attended the game.

Media owned Sports Illustrated pointed out Ann Romney, but ESPN, owned by ABC-TV, did not. The legacy alphabet networks are all plumping for the bankruptcy of the USA.

Obama Approval Rating Plunges 7% in Three Days

Gallup has a slide bar that measures Obama's approval rating. From Oct 24-26th, it cratered from 49 to 42%. Check the link out for the fact you won't be reading in the legacy MSM.

David Axelrod On 2012 Campaign: Trajectory Of Race Is Set

Axelrod, the ultimate con man, is leading a parade of scumsuckers like Nate Silver of the NYT & other journalist cadres in an elaborate disinformation campaign, with HuffPuff just one of the many participants gulled into this parade of fools. The big legacy polls oversample Dems by 10% in the swing states [and elsewhere] to get that 2-3% edge and then call it an "arc" or "trajectory" to perhaps keep a few hundred thousand GOP or Indies on the edge of voting from showing up before or on November 6th. As a Dem staffer in many Dem POTUS, Senate, & House races way back in the day, it was already a way to discourage Republicans and Independents from showing up to vote.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Jacques Barzun Dead at 104

Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present is on my bed table, one of the magnum opera of the last half-century. Here's more:

Over seven decades, Barzun wrote and edited more than forty books touching on an unusually broad range of subjects, including science and medicine, psychiatry from Robert Burton through William James to modern methods, and art, and classical music; he was one of the all-time authorities on Hector Berlioz. Some of his books—particularly Teacher in America and The House of Intellect—enjoyed a substantial lay readership and influenced debate about culture and education far beyond the realm of academic history. Barzun had a strong interest in the tools and mechanics of writing and research. He undertook the task of completing, from a manuscript almost two-thirds of which was in first draft at the author's death, and editing (with the help of six other people), the first edition (published 1966) of Follett's Modern American Usage. Barzun was also the author of books on literary style (Simple and Direct, 1975), on the crafts of editing and publishing (On Writing, Editing, and Publishing, 1971), and on research methods in history and the other humanities (The Modern Researcher, which has seen at least six editions). Barzun did not disdain popular culture: his varied interests included detective fiction and baseball. [12] His widely quoted statement, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” was inscribed on a plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame.[13] He edited and wrote the introduction to the 1961 anthology, The Delights of Detection, which included stories by G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, Rex Stout, and others. In 1971, Barzun co-authored (with Wendell Hertig Taylor), A Catalogue of Crime: Being a Reader's Guide to the Literature of Mystery, Detection, & Related Genres, for which he and his co-author received a Special Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America the following year.[14] Barzun was a proponent of the theatre critic and diarist James Agate, whom he compared in stature to Samuel Pepys.[15] Barzun edited Agate's last two diaries into a new edition in 1951 and wrote an informative introductory essay, "Agate and His Nine Egos".[16]

Here's where I come in...

From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun Jacques Barzun continued to write on education and cultural history after retiring from Columbia. At 84 years of age, he began writing his swan song, to which he devoted the better part of the 1990s. The resulting book of more than 800 pages, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, reveals a vast erudition and brilliance undimmed by advanced age. Historians, literary critics, and popular reviewers all lauded From Dawn to Decadence as a sweeping and powerful survey of modern Western history, and it became a New York Times bestseller. With this work he gained an international reputation.[17] The book introduces several novel typographic devices that aid an unusually rich system of cross-referencing and help keep many strands of thought in the book under organized control. Most pages feature a sidebar containing a pithy quotation, usually little known, and often surprising or humorous, from some author or historical figure. In 2007, Barzun commented that "Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing."[18] In his philosophy of writing history, Barzun emphasized the role of storytelling over the use of academic jargon and detached analysis. He concluded in From Dawn to Decadence that "history cannot be a science; it is the very opposite, in that its interest resides in the particulars."[19]

With Barzun's passing, an entire age has been eclipsed and the human race is worse off by far now that the barbarians have conquered us all. R.I.P.

How Mao Slaughtered 10% of China's Population

Mao Zedong is often praised by young, feckless youths as a great man who built China from almost nothing to a world power. The PRC is still the world's only high-functioning Communist state. But here is a touch of the cost:

It is difficult to look dispassionately at some 45 million dead. It was not war that produced this shocking number, nor natural disaster. It was a man. It was politics and one man's vanity. The cause was famine and violence across rural China, a result of Mao Zedong's unchecked drive to turn his country rapidly into a communist utopia and a leading industrial nation. The dead were in effect victims of Mao's determination, at the end of the 1950s, to push the Soviet Union off its perch as leader of the world communist movement following Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin. Khrushchev had boasted in May 1957 that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States as the world's leading industrial and agricultural power within 10 years. Mao sought a similar goal for China, but over a much shorter period. In "Tombstone," Yang Jisheng quotes the words of Mao, which became a rallying call: "go all out, aim high, and achieve greater, faster, better and more economical results in socialist construction."

Mao made Hitler look like a dime-store dictator.

In 1958, Mao launched the "Great Leap Forward," a manic and coercive mobilization of China into "Peoples Communes"—giant collective farms and administrative units. Almost overnight, China was transformed into 26,000 communes. Armies of peasants, prisoners and city dwellers were dragooned to build vast power and irrigation projects that were either not completed or were improperly constructed and failed. The countryside was militarized and regimented into work battalions and work brigades.

Hit the link above for the mass crimes of the twentieth century's greatest genocidal maniac---although Stalin and Hitler are not far behind....

Immature Obama Turns Off Women

26-year old Lena Dunham thinks she's funny:

Lena Dunham lost her innocence when she voted for Barack Obama, or so the 26-year-old actress-directrix claims in a creepy new ad for the campaign. "Your first time shouldn't be with just anybody," Dunham--no relation to Stanley Ann, as far as we know[?!?]--tells the camera. "You want to do it with a great guy." She plays off that ambiguous antecedent for a wearisome 63 seconds. Her own "first time," she explains, was in 2008, with Obama, "someone who really cares about and understands women. . . . My first time voting was amazing. It was this line in the sand: Before I was a girl, now I was a woman." "My first time voting was amazing." An especially odd statement: "[It's] also super uncool to be out and about, and someone says, 'Did you vote?' and [you say], 'No, I didn't feel--I wasn't ready.' " The Washington Examiner's Joel Gehrke notes that Dunham seems to be mocking sexual innocence: "If a girl's not ready, she's not ready. The president, who has two daughters, surely understands that." Slate's L.V. Anderson notes that Dunham was 22 in 2008, which means she was eligible to vote four years earlier. Why didn't she? Anderson suggests Dunham's 2004 reticence was a product not of modesty but of hypergamous selectivity: "I'd rather lose my voting virginity to Barack Obama than John Kerry, too." He has the hat to this day. The ad occasioned widespread mockery from conservatives, which lefties have answered in a seethingly defensive manner. Our favorite such response is from Amanda Marcotte, also of Slate, an extreme feminist and onetime John Edwards campaign aide. She calls the criticism "unhinged," "crazy" and "frothing" and begins with an exegesis of the ad:

[Dunham] means first time voting, but of course the joke is that it sounds like she's talking about your first time having sex. Dunham's considerable charm drives the joke home.

How many feminists does it take to change the country? THAT'S FUNNY!!!! Is this sort of thing really going to motivate the "youths" to go to the polls and cast ballots for Obama? Color us skeptical, but what do we know? We haven't been a youth in some years. It does seem to us, however, that it's unlikely to help the president with the vast majority of voters who are a decade or more removed from puberty.

Barack Obama, Mitt Romney Campaigning Furiously In Ohio, A Sign Of Things To Come

Obama is clearly panicking as the race in Ohio narrows to statistical insignificance. And the outside polls from the legacy MSM all oversample Dems at the expense of the GOP & Indies. A level playing field would discourage the emotional misfits in the Dem insane clown posse & perhaps they might not go to vote. But given the Dem's long history of ballot-stuffing and voting by the dead, the Obama crew would be able to make up for the layabouts and slackers, or at least most of them, because there really are millions of them out there.

Suburbs Swing to Romney

Michael Barone believes that the momentum has swung even further toward Mitt Romney as the gender gap disappears before an astonished and panicky Obama's eyes.  Or rather the gap for women, as men favor Romney by five percentage points over the spindly POTUS and soon to be Prez-Emeritus.  Here's Mike:

The list of target states has certainly not been fixed. Barack Obama's campaign spent huge sums on anti-Romney ads to create a firewall in three states that the president won narrowly in 2008 -- Florida, Ohio and Virginia. But post-debate polling shows Romney ahead in Florida and tied in Virginia.
National Journal's Major Garrett reported last week that Obama strategist David Plouffe omitted Florida and Virginia in a list of key states but mentioned Ohio, Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. Obama carried the latter three by 10, 10 and 12 points in 2008.
So much for the firewall. In addition, polling shows Romney ahead in Colorado, which Obama carried by 9 points last time, and the race closing in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, which Obama carried by 14, 10 and 16 points.
That tends to validate my alternative scenario that Mitt Romney would fare much better in affluent suburbs than Republican nominees since 1992, running more like George Bush did in 1988. The only way Pennsylvania and Michigan can be close is if Obama's support in affluent Philadelphia and Detroit suburbs has melted away.
This also helps explain why Romney still narrowly trails in Ohio polls. Affluent suburban counties cast about one-quarter of the votes in Pennsylvania and Michigan but only one-eighth in Ohio.
A pro-Romney affluent swing is confirmed by the internals of some national polls. The 2008 exit poll showed Obama narrowly carrying voters with incomes over $75,000. Post-debate Pew Research and Battleground polls have shown affluent suburbanite Romney carrying them by statistically significant margins.

The number of women has drastically changed in the last three weeks:

In particular, college-educated women seem to have swung toward Romney since Oct. 3. He surely had them in mind in the foreign policy debate when he kept emphasizing his hopes for peace and pledged no more wars like Iraq and Afghanistan.
My other alternative scenario was based on the 1980 election, when vast numbers of voters switched from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan after their single debate one week before the election. In that debate, the challenger showed he had presidential stature and the incumbent president seemed petulant and small-minded.
We saw an even more vivid contrast between challenger and incumbent in the Oct. 3 debate. In the next two debates, Obama was definitely more focused and aggressive. But Romney held his own, and post-Oct. 16 polling showed him improving his standing even though many debate watchers thought Obama won on points.
What we may be seeing, as we drink from the fire hose of multiple poll results pouring in, is a slow motion 1980. 

Of course, 1980 was the signal year when Ronald Reagan crushed Jimmy Carter just as Mitt Romney appears poised to crush Barack Obama when a last minute avalanche of voters decided to go from Democrat to Republican and amaze the so-called pundits.   On the next day, amusingly, the idiotic newsie corps like Ike Pappas found that the number of homeless had gone from almost zero reported during Carter's misrule to huge numbers under Reagan.  Some things never change, and I'm certain the insane clown posse will repeat its mindless idiocy.

The Gallup tracking poll, whose procedure for designating likely voters makes it very susceptible to shifts in the balance of enthusiasm, has been showing Romney ahead by 5 to 7 points.
That suggests that since the Oct. 3 debate Republicans have been consistently more motivated to vote than at least temporarily disheartened Democrats.
That's a factor to keep in mind while assessing polls in old or new target states. Some have samples more Democratic in party identification than in the exit poll in 2008, when Democrats were enthused and Republicans downcast.
The usual caveats are in order. Exogenous events could affect opinion (Libya seems to have hurt Obama). The Obama ground game is formidable. Voters that switched to Romney could switch back again.
And if there is a larger reservoir of potentially changeable voters than in 2004, there was an even larger reservoir back in 1980, when Carter attracted white Southerners who now are firmly in Romney's column.
Mechanical analogies can be misleading. Just because Romney has gained ground since Oct. 3 does not guarantee that he will gain more.
But also keep in mind that Romney gained not just from style but from fundamentals. Most voters dislike Obama's domestic policies and are dissatisfied with the sluggish economy. And now they seem to believe they have an alternative with presidential stature. 

This may be whistling past a graveyard, but the Barone barometer of large weather systems approaching has worked for forty years now.

 

Jennifer Rubin of WaPo: The Unmaking of a President

Jennifer regularly drives the insane leftist Clown Posse of the WaPo readership even loonier than usual with her trenchant commentary:

There is nothing so revealing or, frankly, pathetic as the president of the United States, who has studiously avoided serious news interview shows, going on the Jay Leno show to tell women that Republicans don’t understand that “rape is rape.” It is a window into the mindset of a candidate and a campaign that is pulling its hair out over the gender gap and thinks the way to solve it is to treat women like quivering children. Obama is right to panic. The Associated Press reports:

Less than two weeks out from Election Day, Republican Mitt Romney has erased President Barack Obama’s 16-point advantage among women, a new Associated Press-GfK poll shows. And the president, in turn, has largely eliminated Romney’s edge among men. Those churning gender dynamics leave the presidential race still a virtual dead heat, with Romney favored by 47 percent of likely voters and Obama by 45 percent, a result within the poll’s margin of sampling error, the survey shows. After a commanding first debate performance and a generally good month, Romney has gained ground with Americans on a number of important fronts, including their confidence in how he would handle the economy and their impressions of his ability to understand their problems.

The Obama rhetoric is now nearly unintelligible. (“Romney quickly distanced himself from the remark about rape by Republican Richard Mourdock,” the AP article said. “But Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the incident was ‘a reminder that a Republican Congress working with a Republican President Mitt Romney would feel that women should not be able to make choices about their own health care.’ ” What?!) The collapse of Obama’s winning coalition from 2008 is evident on multiple fronts. Michael Barone tells us that the affluent suburbs are trending toward Romney. “A pro-Romney affluent swing is confirmed by the internals of some national polls. The 2008 exit poll showed Obama narrowly carrying voters with incomes over $75,000. Post-debate Pew Research and Battleground polls have shown affluent suburbanite Romneycarrying them by statistically significant margins.” Even young voters are problematic for Obama. A GOP insider affiliated with a superPAC cracks, “Check out the ads they’re running targeting kids in Ohio right now. They’re basically saying, ‘Get off your lazy a-- and X-box and go out and vote, so rich people don’t steal your money later.’ ” No wonder the president is now drawing in the RealClearPolitics average the support of (you guessed it) 47 percent of the voters. He’s systematically eliminating those parts of the electorate that want a mature, problem-solving moderate. He was that candidate in 2008; now, as reflected in his frenetic appeals to fear (“not one of us”) and envy he’s become, metaphorically, a pol with as much appeal as a state senator in a blue state with a heavily Democratic electorate. Obama — The One, the leg-tingler — is now a crass pol from Chicago once again.

Yes. The magic 47% that Romney was overheard saying of the feloniously obtained video of Boca evening dinner remarks is all the Pickininny Prince is going to get this election. Boo hoo too.

Lying Eff-Up Obama Says Libya Eff-Ups Unimportant

Owe-bungler insists

"The election has nothing to do with four brave Americans getting killed and us wanting to find out exactly what happened," Obama said in an interview with KUSA, the NBC affiliate in Denver. "Nobody wants to find out more what happened than I do. But we want to make sure we get it right, particularly because I've made a commitment to the families impacted as well as the American people, we're going to bring those folks to justice," he said in one of several interviews with local TV stations in battleground states that he sat for Friday afternoon at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington. Pressed twice during the KUSA interview, Obama wouldn't address a Friday report suggesting that the Americans in Benghazi asked for more assistance as the Sept. 11 attack was taking place, and instead stressed that his administration is engaged in a thorough investigation. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the military didn't send forces in during the attack on the U.S. Consulate because there was "no real-time information" to act on. "You don't deploy forces into harm's way without knowing what's going on" and military brass "felt we could not put forces at risk in that situation," he said.

This specimen of cafe-au-lait human rubbish is juking and jiving like some dude playing street ball in Harlem. To him, the four dead Americans are just "bumps in the road."

Ah, The Wonders of Communism

Cuba & North Korea show what family dictatorship can do for a land, using Marxist principles...!

Kim Strassel on Obama's Flip-Flops

Link to Obama flip-flops: With 10 days until the election, Barack Obama's latest strategy is to claim that his opponent has developed "stage 3 Romnesia." Mitt Romney, the argument goes, is conveniently forgetting his real agenda, flipping his positions to better appeal to the electorate. Since Mr. Romney's conservative base would surely disagree, this raises the question of whether the president isn't himself suffering from a psychological malady that experts call "projection."

*** "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program"—Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama, June 2003. "I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter"—President Obama, August 2009.

*** "Leadership means that the buck stops here. . . . I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America's debt limit"—Sen. Barack Obama, March 2006. "It is not acceptable for us not to raise the debt ceiling and to allow the U.S. government to default"—President Obama, July 2011.

Here's a TRIPLE flip-flop-flip, or whatever they call it:

*** "I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages"—Obama questionnaire response, 1996, while running for Illinois state Senate. Associated Press "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage"—Sen. Obama, November 2008, while running for president. "It is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married"—President Obama, May 2012.

Here's more Obamanesia:

*** "We have an idea for the trigger. . . . Sequestration"—Obama Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew in 2011, as reported in Bob Woodward's "The Price of Politics." "First of all, the sequester is not something that I've proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed"—President Obama, October 2012.

More from the serial liar:

*** "If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election"—Sen. Obama, 2007. "We've made the decision not to participate in the public financing system for the general election"—Sen. Obama, June 2008.

More from the First Impostor:

*** "I will never question the patriotism of others in this campaign"—Sen. Obama, June 2008. "The way Bush has done it over the last eight years is . . . [he] added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back. . . . That's irresponsible. It's unpatriotic"—Sen. Obama, July 2008. "I don't remember what the number was precisely. . . . We don't have to worry about it short term"—President Obama, September 2012, on the debt figure when he took office ($10 trillion) and whether to worry about today's $16 trillion figure.

On health care, from the First Prevaricator:

*** "[Sen. Hillary Clinton believes] that . . . if the government does not force taxpayers to buy health care, that we will penalize them in some fashion. I disagree with that"—Sen. Obama, Jan 2008, opposing the individual mandate for health insurance. "I'm open to a system where every American bears responsibility for owning health insurance"—President Obama, June 2009, supporting the individual mandate.

The Great Apologizer Denies His Apologies:

*** "Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times when America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive"—President Obama, April 2009, in France. "We have at times been disengaged, and at times we sought to dictate our terms"—President Obama, April 2009, in Trinidad and Tobago. "Nothing Governor Romney just said is true, starting with this notion of me apologizing"—Barack Obama, October 2012, on whether he went on a global apology tour.

The Liar-in-Chief sounds off again:

*** "The problem with a spending freeze is you're using a hatchet where you need a scalpel"—Sen. Obama, September 2008. "Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years"—President Obama, January 2010.

The First Prevaricator:

*** "So if somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant, they can, it's just that it will bankrupt them"—Sen. Obama, January 2008, on his plans to financially penalize coal plants. "Now is the time to end this addiction, and to understand that drilling is a stop-gap measure, not a long-term solution"—Sen. Obama, August 2008. "Here's what I've done since I've been president. We have increased oil production to the highest levels in 16 years. Natural gas production is the highest it's been in decades. We have seen increases in coal production and coal employment"—President Obama, October 2012.

Promises, Promises:

*** "If I don't have this done in three years, then there's going to be a one-term proposition"—President Obama, 2009. "We've got a long way to go but . . . we've come too far to turn back now. . . . And that's why I'm running for a second term"—President Obama, October 2012.

Can Israel Attack Iran By Itself?

Philip Giraldi is a [former?] partner of my friend Vince Cannistraro, whom I wrote a couple of pieces for half-a-decade ago. Here is his assessment of the real risks that Israel faces if it undertakes a go-it-alone attack on Iran's nuclear facilities:

The US media and even some Pentagon spokesmen have suggested that Israel cannot do the job alone, but the problem is much larger than that, leading to the question whether Israel can do it at all. Israel has over 400 fighters, but many of them are configured to establish air superiority over an opponent by shooting down opposing aircraft and disabling air defense facilities on the ground. They are fighters supporting ground operations first with a limited secondary capability as bombers. Israel has no dedicated bomber force but it does have an estimated 125 advanced F-15I and F-16I’s, which have been further enhanced through special avionics installed by the Israel Aircraft Industry to improve performance over the types of terrain and weather conditions prevailing in the Middle East. The planes are able to fly long range missions and very capable in a bombing role but they do have their limitations. It is generally agreed that any attempt to destroy the hardened and well-defended Iranian nuclear sites would require use of the United States-provided GBU-28, a five thousand-pound laser-guided smart bomb that can be directed to the target. The GBU-28 is regarded as accurate and able to penetrate deep into a target, which is why it has been described as the “bunker buster.” Exact performance specifications of the weapon are classified, but it is believed to be able to penetrate twenty feet of reinforced concrete. Whether that would be enough to take out the expected Iranian targets at the research centers in Natanz and Fordow, the heavy water facility at Arak, and the operating reactor at Bushehr is unknown and some analysts have opined that it might require multiple hits on the same spot to do the job. As Bushehr, the most accessible target of the three, is an active reactor, an attack would release considerable contamination.

Hit the link and read the intended and expected consequences and remember that war is well-known for nasty unintended or unforeseen consequences.

Noonan: Obama a Petulant Child or Manchurian Candidate?

Peggy Noonan makes the point in her WSJ OpEd that the Denver debate October 3rd was a turning point in the POTUS campaign----perhaps THE TURNING POINT---because the nation saw Obama in a different guise:

We all say Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. But it's all still Denver, Denver, and the mystery that maybe isn't a mystery at all. If Cincinnati and Lake County go for Mitt Romney on Nov. 6 it will be because of what happened in Denver on Oct. 3. If Barack Obama barely scrapes through, if there's a bloody and prolonged recount, it too will be because of Denver. Nothing echoes out like that debate. It was the moment that allowed Mr. Romney to break through, that allowed dismay with the incumbent to coalesce, that allowed voters to consider the alternative. What the debate did to the president is what the Yankees' 0-4 series against the Tigers did at least momentarily, to the team's relationship with their city. "Dear Yankees, We don't date losers. Signed, New Yorkers" read the Post's headline. America doesn't date losers either. Why was the first debate so toxic for the president? Because the one thing he couldn't do if he was going to win the election is let all the pent-up resentment toward him erupt. Americans had gotten used to him as The President. Whatever his policy choices, whatever general direction he seemed to put in place he was The President, a man who had gotten there through natural gifts and what all politicians need, good fortune. What he couldn't do was present himself, when everyone was looking, as smaller than you thought. Petulant, put upon, above it all, full of himself. He couldn't afford to make himself look less impressive than the challenger in terms of command, grasp of facts, size. But that's what he did. And in some utterly new way the president was revealed, exposed. All the people whose job it is to surround and explain him, to act as his buffers and protectors—they weren't there. It was him on the stage, alone with a competitor. He didn't have a teleprompter, and so his failure seemed to underscore the cliché that the prompter is a kind of umbilical cord for him, something that provides nourishment, the thing he needs to sound good. He is not by any means a stupid man but he has become a boring one; he drones, he is predictable, it's never new. The teleprompter adds substance, or at least safety.

Everyone in the country with a brain larger than a peanut knew that the POTUS was great at using his 'community organizer' skills at talking to folks one-on-one or extemporaneously to a small group of less than a dozen people. And the same GOP observers saw that as far as policy and Haute Politique were concerned, Obama was lost without a teleprompter.

A great and assumed question, the one that's still floating out there, is what exactly happened when Mr. Obama did himself in? What led to it? Was it the catastrophic execution of an arguably sound strategy? Perhaps the idea was to show the president was so unimpressed by his challenger that he could coolly keep him at bay by not engaging. Maybe Mr. Obama's handlers advised: "The American people aren't impressed by this flip-flopping, outsourcing plutocrat, and you will deepen your bond with the American people, Mr. President, by expressing in your bearing, through your manner and language, how unimpressed you are, too." So he sat back and let Mr. Romney come forward. Mr. But Romney was poised, knowledgable, presidential. It was a mistake to let that come forward!

We all saw Romney simply outclass Obama in every way, shape or form. Except Obama and the numbnut arrogant creeps on the far left, and even Kos & some of them had to admit Barry had flunked his orals.

Was it the catastrophic execution of a truly bad strategy? Maybe they assumed the election was already pretty much in the bag, don't sweat it, just be your glitteringly brilliant self and let Duncan the Wonder Horse go out there and turn people off. But nothing was in the bag. The sheer number of people who watched—a historic 70 million—suggests a lot of voters were still making up their minds. Maybe the president himself didn't think he could possibly be beaten because he's so beloved. Presidents are always given good news, to keep their spirits up. The poll numbers he'd been seeing, the get-out-the-vote reports, the extraordinary Internet effort to connect with every lonely person in America, which is a lot of persons—maybe everything he was hearing left him thinking his position was impregnable. But maybe these questions are all off. Maybe what happened isn't a mystery at all. That, anyway, is the view expressed this week by a member of the U.S. Senate who served there with Mr Obama and has met with him in the White House. People back home, he said, sometimes wonder what happened with the president in the debate. The senator said, I paraphrase: I sort of have to tell them that it wasn't a miscalculation or a weird moment. I tell them: I know him, and that was him. That guy on the stage, that's the real Obama.

Obama is the ultimate man behind the curtain. And so clueless that he reportedly came away from the Denver debate believing, before the reviews came in, that he had done a bang-up job and was terrific. Self-awareness & the resultant political acumen seems to be utterly absent in this clown.

Which gets us to Bob Woodward's "The Price of Politics," published last month. The portrait it contains of Mr. Obama—of a president who is at once over his head, out of his depth and wholly unaware of the fact—hasn't received the attention it deserves. Throughout the book, which is a journalistic history of the president's key economic negotiations with Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama is portrayed as having the appearance and presentation of an academic or intellectual while being strangely clueless in his reading of political situations and dynamics. He is bad at negotiating—in fact doesn't know how. His confidence is consistently greater than his acumen, his arrogance greater than his grasp.

Although he meant it to be a hagiography, David Maraniss' book hints at this again and again. The essential dishonesty of Obama is exposed in his first book, absurdly called Dreams of My Father, which is riddled with inaccuracies and outright prevarications. It turns out that, behind the facade of the bright young cafe-au-lait gentleman purporting to the the Black Messiah, is somewhat of a cross between a street hustler and a carny barker. No transcripts of his GPA or copies of his senior thesis, all sorts of misrepresentations [Editor of the Harvard Law Review instead of President, a faineant position of Chairman Emeritus of a busy board; not one example of his writings in the HLR; the bogus claim that he was a 'professor' at UChicago Law School when his qualifications were laughed out of contention by the hard-headed Chicago Law Profs on the Board and only outside pressure from the Board of Regents got him a classroom as a 'Visiting Lecturer.']

He misread his Republican opponents from day one. If he had been large-spirited and conciliatory he would have effectively undercut them, and kept them from uniting. (If he'd been large-spirited with Mr. Romney, he would have undercut him, too.) Instead he was toughly partisan, he shut them out, and positions hardened. In time Republicans came to think he doesn't really listen, doesn't really hear. So did some Democrats. Business leaders and mighty CEOs felt patronized: After inviting them to meet with him, the president read from a teleprompter and included the press. They felt like "window dressing." One spoke of Obama's surface polish and essential remoteness. In negotiation he did not cajole, seduce, muscle or win sympathy. He instructed. He claimed deep understanding of his adversaries and their motives but was often incorrect. He told staffers that John Boehner, one of 11 children of a small-town bar owner, was a "country club Republican." He was often patronizing, which in the old and accomplished is irritating but in the young and inexperienced is infuriating. "Boehner said he hated going down to the White House to listen to what amounted to presidential lectures," Mr. Woodward writes. Mr. Obama's was a White House that had—and showed—no respect for Republicans trying to negotiate with Republicans. Through it all he was confident—"Eric, don't call my bluff"—because he believed, as did his staff, that his talents would save the day. They saved nothing. Washington became immobilized. Mr. Woodward's portrait of the president is not precisely new—it has been drawn in other ways in other accounts, and has been a staple of D.C. gossip for three years now—but it is vivid and believable. And there's probably a direct line between that portrait and the Obama seen in the first debate. Maybe that's what made it so indelible, and such an arc-changer. People saw for the first time an Obama they may have heard about on radio or in a newspaper but had never seen. They didn't see some odd version of the president. They saw the president. And they didn't like what they saw, and that would linger.

Although he has been buoyed by a fawning and uncritical press slinging allegations of 'racism' at any opposition to policies poorly planned and executed, the problem with Obama is that he believes his own positive rave reviews and that's all he looks at. This is classical behavior by bad actors in Hollywood, which uncritically laps up the crumbs from Barry's table. Worse are the professors, seething with hate and disdain and consumed with what Tony Judt calls a "grid of suspicion"...that..."reveal [its] true meaning only when decoded by the initiated." And Obama evidently was the callow receptacle of this dime-store watered-down marxist tripe and twaddle---which he swallowed whole in Columbia, Harvard Law & marinated in racial animosity, as a side fillip to a wholly half-baked dinner of happy horseshit. Here's an example of staple liberal progressive nonsense:

Viewed through the lens of history, Obama represents a new type of 21st-century politician: the Progressive Firewall. Obama, simply put, is the curator-in-chief of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society. When he talks about continued subsidies for Big Bird or contraceptives for Sandra Fluke, he is the inheritor of the Progressive movement's agenda, the last line of defense that prevents America's hard-won social contract from being defunded into oblivion. Ever since Theodore Roosevelt used executive orders to save the Grand Canyon from the zinc-copper lobbies and declared that unsanitary factories were grotesque perversions propagated by Big Money interests, the federal government has aimed to improve the daily lives of average Americans. Woodrow Wilson followed up T.R.'s acts by creating the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission and re-establishing a federal income tax. Then, before the stock market crash in 1929, the GOP Big Three of Harding-Coolidge-Hoover made "business" the business of America, once more allowing profiteers to flourish at the expense of the vulnerable. Enter Franklin Roosevelt, a polio victim confined to a wheelchair and leg braces. His alphabet soup of New Deal programs – the CCC and TVA and WPA – brought hope to the financially distraught, making them believe that the government was on their side. Determined to end the Great Depression, Roosevelt was a magnificent experimenter. Credit him with Social Security, legislation to protect workers, labor's right to collective bargaining, Wall Street regulation, rural electrification projects, farm-price supports, unemployment compensation and federally guaranteed bank deposits. The America we know and love today sprung directly from the New Deal.

This is the standard narrative that I got back at the U of Michigan while getting an MA in history and which has been regurgitated for decades to getting passing grades---when the progressive school doesn't abandon "grades" as some sort of "grotesque persrsion propagated by Big Money interests" that the wealthy Romney represents....Douglas Brinkley is the narrator of the narrative sequence above and is a publicity whore who lives by projectile vomiting whatever liberal progressive cause is center-stage at the moment. Obama is the apotheosis of this creature---one who lives on disinformation dumped into the top of an empty head during undergrad years, slurped up in grad school like pig swill, and finally reprocessed as fine mouth spew as a politician or "historian." Check the link on Brinkley and judge for yourself whether he is due for a 12 step program or if a stay in a mental institution might supplement the incarceration he may end up serving. Or maybe just cut back on caffeine? This interview is the one which ended with the 'president' telling the interviewers that Romney is a "bullshitter." To the truly inexperienced wet-behind-the-ears Obama, Mitt represents all that Barry was taught to hate and despise in undergrad & Law School and later on the streets of Chicago where he was a young lawyer representing ACORN. Obama seems a tool of his instructors and handlers and monitors, unable to veer much from their guidance. Does he truly believe that Boehner, who graduated from a bar with 11 siblings, is a 'country club Republican' any more than his frequent times on the links make him a country club Democrat? If so, this sad little man is one of the shallowest presidents in our history and doesn't deserve re-election.

POLITICO posts approving news bit about BHO's filthy mouth

A hack named Slack has a ridiculous piece about the First Potty-Mouth in one of the adoring pieces this Dimmo-rat on-line hack-sheet ran yesterday. Here's the hack-Slack ends his sycophantic approval---or rather sort of the dog that didn't bark [if Romney said this about The Won, it would be above the fold on the NYT & the lead story on Bri-boy Williams' Evening News]:

That's some frank language from Obama, who has a genuine disdain for GOP challenger Mitt Romney, as POLITICO's Glenn Thrush has reported. It's also a much more direct way of saying Romney has been hit with a case of "Romnesia," and has seemingly forgotten what he has stood for in the past.

And this jumped-up pickininny has cut the deficit in half and got the unemployment rate down to 5%, while passing a health-care law the jug-eared freak never mentioned in his campaign. Pot, meet kettle.

Obama Credibility Damaged

The WSJ has a column by Dan Henninger:

Less than 14 days before the vote, Gallup has Mitt Romney leading the president by three points and in Rasmussen he's up four. This paper's poll brought Mr. Romney from chronically behind to even. Yes, 270 Electoral College votes will decide the race, but with the whole nation watching the same events, one has to ask whether what we're seeing is Mitt Romney's rise or Barack Obama's decline. It is conventional wisdom that incumbency breeds advantages. But incumbency also brings burdens, and the Obama candidacy looks like it's buckling beneath one: Of the two candidates, the president is held to a higher standard of behavior. There have been only two events that could be said to have caused significant movement by voters in the campaign. One was the Oct. 3 Denver debate in which Mitt Romney disinterred political skills that stunned the incumbent and woke up a sleeping electorate. Race on. The other is Benghazi. The damage done to the Obama campaign by the Sept. 11 death in Benghazi of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three American colleagues has been more gradual than the sensation of the Denver debate, but its effect may have been deeper. The incumbent president has a credibility gap. The phenomenon of a credibility gap dates to the Vietnam War and the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. The charge then was that LBJ wasn't leveling with the American people or Congress about Vietnam. The credibility gap was hardly the only thing that caused LBJ to withdraw from the 1968 election, but it eroded support for his presidency. Credibility gaps can be unfair things. They generally involve difficult foreign affairs in which presidents possess information and realities never revealed to the general public, presumably for its own good

Dan has more to discredit the Clown Posse in charge in the White House:

The credibility gap was hardly the only thing that caused LBJ to withdraw from the 1968 election, but it eroded support for his presidency. Credibility gaps can be unfair things. They generally involve difficult foreign affairs in which presidents possess information and realities never revealed to the general public, presumably for its own good. That may be what this White House believes about Benghazi. But it is also true that only this White House knows why it allowed the Benghazi disaster to drip though the news from September into October, with no credible account of the attack, even as reporters for newspapers such as this one got the story out. In time it was no surprise that people began to ask: Was the White House hiding something about an event of enormous gravity to protect the president's candidacy? For much of the American electorate, that would be cause to start marking down a presidency. Joe Biden didn't help in the Oct. 11 veep debate (a month after the event) when he off-loaded responsibility on the intelligence services. Days later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to take responsibility at a conference in Lima, Peru. That didn't still the doubts. Rather than hold a traditional press conference like presidents past, Mr. Obama on Oct. 18 talked at length on TV to Jon Stewart, a one-man press pool, who asked the president to clear up discrepancies in the administration's account—"the perception that State was on a different page than you." At this point, the answer hardly mattered. The discomfort over presidential credibility on Benghazi put the Obama candidacy in a six-week downdraft. Barring an October surprise, nothing similar is affecting the Romney campaign.

Obama has made himself into a littler Golden Boy than that one at the beginning of that Raiders of the Lost Ark movie in the middle of the jungle, where he belongs:

Even by the standards of our celebrified culture, Barack Obama's personalization of the American presidency has been outsized. He and his political team sought this aura. Hillary and the rest of the cabinet receded, while he rose. In Monday's debate, Mr. Obama stumbled into a summation of his status: "This nation, me, my administration." L'etat, c'est me. Until now, it worked. Despite an awful economy, the president's likability numbers held firm. Many wanted to believe in this larger-than-life president. His clumsy handling of Benghazi, however, has opened a gap in the president's credibility. What else can explain Mitt Romney ascending in polls to equality with the president on foreign policy and terrorism before the last debate? The discomfiture over Benghazi has spilled into other parts of his campaign. Among my top five events of the 2012 election will be that fellow in the town-hall debate who said, "I'm not that optimistic," and asked the president to address what he's doing about "everyday living" in America. He was asking the president he voted for why he should still believe. Mr. Obama diverted into telling him about ending Iraq and killing bin Laden. Instead of presidential assurance, he got talking points. His weird, persistent vagueness about the shape of a second-term agenda has sown doubt about the economy going forward. Only now is that agenda being revealed, more or less, with a 20-page pamphlet, "The New Economic Patriotism." A new Obama ad urges viewers to "read it."

Fat chance.

It may be that voters think both candidates have stretched the truth, but credibility is the coin of a presidency. The political cost of devaluing that coin is higher for an incumbent seeking a second term and higher still for this one. Two weeks from Election Day, Barack Obama has been shown in Benghazi to be a president with feet of clay. It may well take him down.

The committed leftists and plantation types who will vote for him automatically might whine afterwards, but Romney will be a better POTUS of the USA.

Time "Poll" Has 273 Dems to 206 GOP

Swampland is an apt name for the raw sewage Time Inc. puts out as "factual" numbers.

Dem,273 GOP,206

The pdf last page tells of Time's serial dishonesty. Is there anyone on the Romney side to point out this oversampling of Democrats?

Debate Over! Now the Real Race Begins

Obama is a condescending patronizing oaf and this silly writer thinks it is a plus? Wow, a TV screenwriter with an Emmy! HuffPuff shows its depth in this clown who thinks that Ozzie & Harriet never existed and Mad Men is a wonderful depiction of America in the sixties and seventies. That's the Alinsky party line for the Dems, who think throwing enough mud at a good and decent man who gives $4 million to charity----while buffoon gaffer Biden gives less than $200 is absolved from any need to help others, Except of course, by raising taxes and redistributing income. It's the Eurotrash way and how's that working out...???

WTF? 12,000 Year Old Temples Featured Feasts Flooded by Beer

Gobekli Tepe or "Potbelly Hill" in Turkish is nine miles from Urfa, the birthplace of Abraham. Its discovery has turned the world of archeology and cultural history upside down. Pace the Stalinist V. Gordon Childe, who "invented" the Neolithic Revolution out of whole cloth [hunter/gatherer, agriculture, religion, temples, priesthood, kings, warfare, feudalism], we now find that hunter/gatherers invented religion about three millennium before agriculture as an organized activity around which towns and cities were built, then yadda yadda yadda. Here is a National Geographic special which reveals Gobekli Tepe, solely a site for worship, as only one of a number of towns along the contemporaneous Euphrates River---these towns were sadly overlapped by water by a number of Turkish dams along the Euphrates... The utterly amazing fact is that there are large monuments UNDER Gobekli's HUGE pillars, half as high as Stonehenge 7000 years LATER, that date approximately to 15,000 years ago, before or during the LGM [Last Glacial Maximum]. In other words, some sort of temple worship, or merely great feasts that accompany the death of a notable, existed 7000 years BEFORE the organized growing of wheat & barley. As you will note, the feasts may have attracted many participants because of beer, fermented in animal skins, as clay pottery was still even for GT, a thousand or two thou years in the FUTURE. The mind reels... Here and Here and Here are more links to this AMAZING and MIND-BLOWING site.

Surprise: WaPo/ABC Poll Oversamples Democrats

The Washington Post/ABC Poll came down to a 1% lead for Romney despite the fact that the respondents described themselves as 34% Dem, 29% GOP & 32% Indie. The big legacy dinosaurs just can't stop cheating, but act as though they are above reproach. And of course, the airhead teleprompter readers will call the margin statisically insignificant. Watch the indignation on Nov. 6th when Romney gets 51 or 52% of the vote and squeaks through to an electoral victory... However, I actually respect Charlie Cook and his analysis does give me shivers....

Bob Schieffer Debate Moderating: CBS Anchor Stays Above The Fray, Criticized For Letting Debate Stray From Foreign Policy

Schieffer showed his left-wing bias just very slightly, compared to Crowley & Raddatz. Lehrer was the best moderator, letting Obama get 48 minutes while Romney took full advantage of his own 44. Like Lehrer, however, Schieffer tried gently to get the two protagonists, or perhaps in this debate, antagonists, back on track. The debates count for little in the final analysis.



One thing is clear. Obama & his Chicago Mafia Advisors erred in putting the emphasis on the character defects and shortcomings of Romney. Mitt did doing a great job of showing how huge an effect Obama's own ridiculous record of economic doldrums bordering on recession has been to lessen the long-term national security of this country.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Obama as Dithering Bully, Romney as Knowledgable Businessman

It was the cool under-the-table policies of Obama's predecessor that tracked Osama Bin Laden and this four-foot-ten wunderkind doesn't know diddly about foreign policy. Romney was just behind BHO and on domestic economics, China, trade policies, currency manipulation----he made Obama look silly.

Decency & George McGovern

George was a decent man who lived in a Japanese-style ryokan not far from where we lived in DC. Here's James Taranto and a WSJ analysis of how George was so decent that he led the Democrats into a diversity-niche that is destroying it politically:

George McGovern, who died yesterday at 90, and Barry Goldwater make for a nifty historical parallel. Both were U.S. senators who became their parties' nominee for president. Both were men of principle, or ideologues if one views them unfavorably. Both got trounced in the general election by the other party's flawed incumbent, largely because voters saw them as too extreme. But both had long-lasting effects on the ideological outlooks of their respective parties. Without Goldwater, it's often argued, there would have been no President Reagan. We'd add that without McGovern, there would have been no President Obama. McGovern helped move his party to the left on defense and social issues, but of particular importance was the influence he wielded over his party's presidential nomination process, described in his New York Times obituary: He . . . became the chairman of a Democratic Party commission on delegate selection, created after the fractious 1968 national convention to give the rank and file more say in picking a presidential nominee. What became known as the McGovern commission rewrote party rules to ensure that more women, young people and members of minorities were included in delegations. The influence of party leaders was curtailed. More states began choosing delegates on the basis of primary elections. And the party's center of gravity shifted decidedly leftward. Though the rules were not written specifically to help Mr. McGovern win the nomination, they had that effect. One might say McGovern reinvented the Democratic Party by putting identity politics at its center--by encouraging members to think of themselves first in terms of sex or age or skin color (or, later, by sexual orientation). E pluribus, multis. In the 1973 book "Sexual Suicide," George Gilder speculated that such an approach "would find its reductio ad absurdum in a President who is an exact ethnic and sexual composite of the American demography--some kind of multiracial hermaphrodite from Kansas City." When Gilder wrote that, Barack Obama was 12.

This was the beginning of the end of Democratic dominance.

McGovernism has never proved sufficient to win an election for the Democrats. Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama both made gauzy promises to unify the nation, and Bill Clinton, 20 years after volunteering for the McGovern campaign as a law student, ran as a centrist. This year, however, Obama is being forced to try. With a record that is both lousy and divisive, he has little alternative but to attempt to construct a majority via appeals targeted to electoral subgroups. One of the words most associated with McGovern is "decency." "Everybody noticed George S. McGovern's decency," writes political scientist Bruce Miroff in a Times op-ed remembrance. Robert F. Kennedy called him 'the most decent man in the Senate.' " In case you didn't get that, Miroff adds: "Mr. McGovern, who died early Sunday at the age of 90, was a decent man." At The New Republic's website, the lefty author Rick Perlstein writes that McGovern's "unlikely victory" for the 1972 nomination "seemed to vindicate an abiding liberal fantasy, which President Obama sometimes seems to share: that if you just show yourself to be decent enough, the skeptics cannot help but come around." Stipulating that McGovern was thoroughly decent and Richard Nixon far from it, it seems to us that Obama personifies a different liberal fantasy, namely the delusion that left-wing politics and decency are one and the same thing. This moral vanity leads the left to excuse, or even not to notice, indecent behavior on the part of their own. It is the reason Obama's re-election campaign has been less McGovernite than McCarthyite (and we don't mean Gene).

Rick Perlstein and I shared a conversation online about five years go when his outstanding book on the 1968 campaign came out. I told him about my six months on McCarthy [Gene's] National Staff and my adventures at the Chicago Convention.

A mild example comes from the Hill: "President Obama on Friday mocked Mitt Romney's recent efforts to appeal to centrist voters, telling supporters at a Virginia rally that his Republican rival is suffering from 'Romnesia.' "- Such juvenile wordplay may be worthy of Mother Jones's David Corn, who came up with "Romnesia" a few months ago, or of MoveOn.org ("General Betray Us"), or of Tailgunner Joe, who used to mock Arkansas's William Fulbright as "Senator Half Bright." Barack Obama does not regard it as beneath the dignity of the office with which he has been entrusted. Would George McGovern have approved this message? Barack Obama did. In a more sinister vein is a new Obama ad touting Obama's bailout of General Motors and Chrysler and aimed at Ohio. The ad is highly misleading: It criticizes Romney for penning an op-ed titled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" but doesn't note that GM and Chrysler did in fact go bankrupt.

As a Michgander by education at Ann Arbor, I appreciated the fact that Romney upbraided Obama tonight for once again trying to pull the wool over the eyes of union stiffs in Toledo & other plants in Ohio, but the liberal trio of Raddatz, Schieffer & Matthew Dowd on CBS ignored this fundamental lie by Obama.

But that's within the bounds of ordinary political tendentiousness. What's shocking is the words that appear on the screen at the end of the ad, over a silhouette of the Buckeye State: MITT ROMNEY. NOT ONE OF US. If a Republican candidate for dogcatcher in Bugtussle, Ky., said Barack Obama was NOT ONE OF US, every liberal journalist in America would be demanding to know if Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner agreed. No one is asking that of Barack Obama. Then again, he's already answered. The ad begins with the president's voice: "I'm Barack Obama, and I approved this message." "Journalists need to do more than call the play-by-play this election cycle," declares the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof. "We also need to blow the whistle on such egregious fouls calculated to undermine the political process and magnify the ugliest prejudices that our nation has done so much to overcome." This, of course, was in a 2008 column titled "The Push to 'Otherize' Obama." And here's a YouTube compilation of MSNBC's Chris Matthews and some Turkish dude complaining that Obama's critics were trying to portray him as "not one of us." Have any lefties criticized the Obama campaign for not only trying to "otherize" Romney but actually using the phrase NOT ONE OF US? We put out a query on Twitter the other day, and the only examples anyone came up with were a tweet from the Washington Post's Karen Tumulty (" 'Not one of us' has a specific, ugly history in US politics. Bad place for the Obama campaign to go"), whom we hadn't thought of as especially left-wing. Tumulty follows up with an article today.

Tumulty is old enough to flip off the mainstream media, the same one sycophantic Dowd is trying to join as a TV commentator.

You see how the logic works here. It's OK for us to "otherize" you, because, well, we're us, the good people, and therefore to say that you're NOT ONE OF US is a simple statement of fact. Plus, loosing isn't an option. "There's safety in numbers / When you learn to divide," Peter Gabriel observed in his catchy 1980 tune "Not One of Us." Obama certainly hopes that's true, and in that sense he is a disciple of McGovern, with his bean-counting approach to politics. But if McGovern were alive, he would strongly disapprove of the ugly turn the Obama campaign has taken. He was, after all, a decent man.

Yes, but this stellar member of the Greatest Generation, who flew 35 flights over Germany in B-24 [the usual "25 & a wake-up" wasn't enough for this war hero], is part of a dying breed. Civility is a lost art and this country is going to be the worse for losing that classy tone.