Connect The Dots....Presto, Obama is Indicted For Rezko Crimes

Patrick Fitzgerald may spring the trap. After his failed expedition to nail Karl Rove, he may be close to having odious creep Tony Rezko blow former state treasurer Giannoiulias, Governor Blagojevich, and Senator Barack Obama. Barack has so far been immunized by the MSM from the many crimes he knowingly participated in during the NORMAL COURSE of Chicago politics! Here's some of the gooood stuff:

1) Michael Sneed in her Sun Times column 10/10/08 had the following tidbit:

Sneed hears rumbles political fund-raiser/fixer Tony Rezko, who is now singing sweetly to the feds from his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, has been talking about his “dealings” with a Chicago bank, which has political connections.

(2) We just spoke with someone well-connected in Chicago politics who told us that the bank Sneed is talking about has to be Broadway Bank, which is owned by the politically-connected Giannoulias family. We were told that Sneed’s column confirms rumblings people we know heard independently that Tony Rezko is giving up the Giannoulias family to Patrick Fitzgerald — Rezko and the Giannoulias family are as close and tied together as anyone in Chicago could be. If Rezko is turning on them, then Rezko is going to give up Governor Rod Blagojevich and Obama too.

We don’t want to end up in cement shoes for implying anything here, but if you live in Chicago for any length of time, you hear rumors about Broadway Bank, the Giannoulias family, and insert Tony Soprano references here. Kapeech?

(3) So, Rezko is singing about the Giannoulias family and its longtime “business dealings” in Chicago, which would interest someone like Fitzgerald and the Justice Department, who have had a long ambition to crack Soprano-style business dealings in Chicago (the city known for Al Capone hasn’t changed much, really). The next plate to drop in this will be Fitzgerald then leaning on the Giannoulias family to give up someone bigger than them, who Fitzgerald once discussed in terms of hoping “he has the morals to do the right thing”, to paraphrase. We now believe that person Fitz was talking about is Barack Obama.

(4) The Giannoulias family was involved with Obama as far back as his first state senate campaign in 1996. It has been long rumored here in Chicago that Obama obtained a sweetheart deal on his first town home here in Chicago — which he could not have afforded otherwise — and guess who the financing came from for that house? We’ve been told it was Broadway Bank, the Giannoulias bank. Now, this sets up a scenario where the Giannoulias family helps Obama with his campaign finances and gets him deeper in their pocket with his sweetheart mortgage deal (for the first home he owned that he could not afford) – all in exchange for quid pro quo to be determined later.

(5) One favor political Chicago claims Obama did for the Giannoulias family was in 2006 when, out of the blue, 29 year old Alexi Giannoulias, with no experience, and without ever having voted before, decides to run for State Treasurer of Illinois. Also out of the blue, Barack Obama endorses Alexi Giannoulias for State Treasurer. This was a SHOCK to everyone in Chicago — and Giannoulias would have never become State Treasurer without Obama’s help. In political circles here, it has always been believed that this endorsement was bought years ago with that sweetheart mortgage deal Broadway Bank arranged for Obama to buy his town house.

(6) So, the Tony Rezko sweetheart deal was not the first magic home loan Obama ever received to buy a house he could not afford.

Now we can rest assured that even a force of nature like Fitzgerald will be stopped in his tracks if a criminal like Obama is elected POTUS. This trumps the pitiful attempt by the MSM to smear Palin for any Troopergate ethical flaws.

Obama is an ethical sewer.

UPDATE Here's more on the story as it creeps into the national discourse. Obama's multiple chicanories in Chicago politics may yet break through the ceiling of MSM indifference to anything except smears of McCain & Palin. Wouldn't that be something?

Dodd Should Be Investigated By His Own Committee!

The WSJ rightly suggests that mammoth hypocrite and serial crook Chris Dodd is the biggest fraud inside the Beltway. His daddy was a Senator too and back then when the Senate had SOME ethics and self-esteem [not the collection of bloated aggrandized egomaniacs it is today], his daddy was censured for using campaign funds illegally.

The seed didn't fall far from the tree.

Is Obama So Popular Because He's Not a Black Redneck?

Thomas Sowell's book Black Rednecks and White Liberals is one I want to read. Here is an old WSJ article on why Obama might be so popular---he has no black redneck in his pedigree, only African [and East Coast African, not the Kongo Coast which was the source of many unwilling black slave immigrants]. Here's Sowell:

The culture of the people who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" before they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement, as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity. That culture had its own way of talking, not only in the pronunciation of particular words but also in a loud, dramatic style of oratory with vivid imagery, repetitive phrases and repetitive cadences.
Although that style originated on the other side of the Atlantic in centuries past, it became for generations the style of both religious oratory and political oratory among Southern whites and among Southern blacks--not only in the South but in the Northern ghettos in which Southern blacks settled. It was a style used by Southern white politicians in the era of Jim Crow and later by black civil rights leaders fighting Jim Crow. Martin Luther King's famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 was a classic example of that style.

But Sowell notes that the difference between the Scotch-Irish and the blacks has widened as the S-Is assimilate into the broader "Northern" culture while blacks continue to confuse authenticity with some sort of ebonics and a criminal subculture based on resistance and resentment of "The Man," e.g., an adult participation in the middlebrow or highbrow culture which Obama is fully at ease with. More Sowell:

While a third of the white population of the U.S. lived within the redneck culture, more than 90% of the black population did. Although that culture eroded away over the generations, it did so at different rates in different places and among different people. It eroded away much faster in Britain than in the U.S. and somewhat faster among Southern whites than among Southern blacks, who had fewer opportunities for education or for the rewards that came with escape from that counterproductive culture.

Nevertheless the process took a long time. As late as the First World War, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania. Again, neither race nor racism can explain that--and neither can slavery.

The redneck culture proved to be a major handicap for both whites and blacks who absorbed it. Today, the last remnants of that culture can still be found in the worst of the black ghettos, whether in the North or the South, for the ghettos of the North were settled by blacks from the South. The counterproductive and self-destructive culture of black rednecks in today's ghettos is regarded by many as the only "authentic" black culture--and, for that reason, something not to be tampered with. Their talk, their attitudes, and their behavior are regarded as sacrosanct.

The people who take this view may think of themselves as friends of blacks. But they are the kinds of friends who can do more harm than enemies.

When Obama gave a speech last month at U of Miami, my daughter was amazed to see a couple dozen American blacks stand up in the audience and interrupt Obama, waving placards denying BHO's "authenticity" in colorful patois. These were UM students she thought, who cannot accept the kind of invitation Obama is making to the American people.

I don't support Obama and believe he is terribly compromised by the choices he made to get to the top---Ayers, Wright, Rezko, et al.---but he is not part of the self-destructive black redneck culture that Sowell rightly describes as "a major handicap."

And liberals appear to be content to allow the black rednecks a tiny slice of the American Pie, and really seem to prefer their self-exclusion from full participation in the exercise of their freedoms.

Polls Too Close to Call, Says Zogby

John Zogby used to be called "the most dependable pollster by in-the-tank, over-the-hill libtard journalists like Mark Shields. Now as he utters wisdom while scrawny chests are being thumped on the far-left lunatic fringe because of a 10-point Gallup lead, it is useful to remember that in 2000, Gore had ten points on GWB at the beginning of October. Here's John:

Zogby said the race mirrors the 1980 election, when voters didn’t embrace Ronald Reagan over then-President Jimmy Carter until just days before the election.

“The Sunday before the election the dam burst,” Zogby said of the 1980 tilt. “That’s when voters determined they were comfortable with Reagan.”

Now voters are wrestling with two senators with opposite resumes - Obama, at 47, the unknown, and the established 72-year-old McCain.

Zogby said he’s still hearing from moderates and non-partisan voters - what he calls “the big middle” - who are still shopping for a candidate.

“It still can break one way or the other,” Zogby says.

Of course, if McCain closes the gap and wins a squeaker, the Dems have 10,000 lawyers ready to challenge in every battleground state. The ambulance chasers have nothing to do since their hair-and-makeup pretty boy got outed with Rielle Hunter. But Sarah Palin appears to have given McCain a bump after her great TV performance last Friday, which showed a tired and phony Biden making points, but losing in the authenticity game and just plain good TV presence on Palin's part. She's a real human being, not an inside-the-Beltway confection who's sold and rented his soul/support a thousand times for conflicting causes. Read Camille Paglia, who supports Obama, but likes Palin too. Looks like the undecideds are still up in the air:

The latest poll numbers may reflect the bump that McCain received after his running mate, Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin sparred with Obama’s running mate, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden during the first and only vice presidential debate last week.

The poll shows that the two White House contenders have no problem attracting support from their own parties.

Obama is winning 84 percent of the Democratic Party support and McCain has 85 percent of the GOP support, but Obama has the edge among sought-after Independent voters.

He leads McCain among independents, 48 percent to 39 percent, according to the poll.

Obama also has support from a slightly higher percent of conservative voters than McCain gets from liberal voters, but the advantage is small, according to the poll.

Right now the economic jitters rule and Obama has a boost from that even though the Dems were more responsible for causing the meltdown. The average voter just thinks, throw the bums out.

But putting both Houses of Congress and the White House in the hands of the same party is always dicey.

In the case of the far-left weirdos running the two Houses now, especially Dingy Harry "The war is already lost" Reid, the damage to the economy and to American education and healthcare could be catastrophic.

Dem Panic About What the NYT and MSM are trying to hide on the Ayers Connection

The WaPo/NYT DNC Talking Points are becoming strident, the NYT going so far as to call any reference to the Ayers/Obama connection "race-baiting."

Of course, Bill Ayers is white, but to Bob Herbert, everything is race-baiting except adoration of the Golden One.

Seriously, the anecdotal evidence that Bernardine Dohrn was Michelle Robinson's "mentor" at Sidley & Austin law firm is strong, but the NYT and Chicago "media/DNC hacks" haven't turned over that rock.
Michelle induced her then boyfriend Barry Hussein-O the next summer to intern under Dohrn and get the full dose of how to quietly overturn society Saul Alinsky style. They were both young Harvard Law students & sho' nuff, the paralegal Dohrn [she had a law degree, but was a convicted felon] introduced the newlyweds to her spouse/lifepartner Ayers who got BHO the chairmanship of the Annenberg Project worth $150 million to subvert school kids by teaching them to be revolting.

I met Ayers and soon-to-be-dead Diana Oughton at an SDS meeting in Ann Arbor. Columbia SDSer Mark Rudd stayed in my apartment and told me "Dare to cheat, dare to win."

I'll bet Obama has that advice in his head constantly.

And McCain smells that rat in Obama's underwear.

I Love Camille Who Loves Sarah Palin

Camille Paglia has an entire Salon series on Obama & McCain, drenched in good common sense. But her best language is for Sarah:

Yes, both Todd and Sarah Palin, whom most people in the U.S. and abroad had never even heard of until six weeks ago, have emerged as powerful new symbols of a revived contemporary feminism. That the macho Todd, with his champion athleticism and working-class cred, can so amiably cradle babies and care for children is a huge step forward in American sexual symbolism.

Although nothing will sway my vote for Obama, I continue to enjoy Sarah Palin's performance on the national stage. During her vice-presidential debate last week with Joe Biden (whose conspiratorial smiles with moderator Gwen Ifill were outrageous and condescending toward his opponent), I laughed heartily at Palin's digs and slams and marveled at the way she slowly took over the entire event. I was sorry when it ended! But Biden wasn't -- judging by his Gore-like sighs and his slow sinking like a punctured blimp. Of course Biden won on points, but TV (a visual medium) never cares about that.

The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality.

And where is all that lurid sexual fantasy coming from? When I watch Sarah Palin, I don't think sex -- I think Amazon warrior! I admire her competitive spirit and her exuberant vitality, which borders on the supernormal. The question that keeps popping up for me is whether Palin, who was born in Idaho, could possibly be part Native American (as we know her husband is), which sometimes seems suggested by her strong facial contours. I have felt that same extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness billowing out from other women with Native American ancestry -- including two overpowering celebrity icons with whom I have worked.

One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is "dumb." Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can't see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism -- the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.

As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. Furthermore, I have spent virtually my entire teaching career (nearly four decades) in arts colleges, where the expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts takes a hundred different forms. Finally, as a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English -- beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.


Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. But I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse -- which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant.

Even if she disappears from the scene forever after a McCain defeat, Palin will still have made an enormous and lasting contribution to feminism. As I said in my last column, Palin has made the biggest step forward in reshaping the persona of female authority since Madonna danced her dominatrix way through the shattered puritan barricades of the feminist establishment. In 1990, in a highly controversial New York Times op-ed that attacked old-guard feminist ideology, I declared that "Madonna is the future of feminism" -- a prophecy that was ridiculed at the time but that turned out to be quite true. Madonna put pro-sex feminism on the international map.

But it is now 18 years later -- the span of an entire generation. The instabilities and diminishments for young women raised in an increasingly shallow media environment have become all too obvious. I had grown up in a vibrant pop culture with glorious women stars of voluptuous sensuality -- above all Elizabeth Taylor, sewn into that silky white slip as the vixen Manhattan call girl of "Butterfield 8." In college, I feasted on foreign films starring sexual sophisticates like Jeanne Moreau, Anouk Aimée and Catherine Deneuve. Sex today, however, has become brittle and superficial. Except for the occasional diverting flash of Lindsay Lohan's borrowed bosom, I see nothing whatever that is worth a second glance. Pro-sex feminism has worked itself out and, like all movements, has degenerated into clichés. And even Madonna, with her skeletal megalomania, looks like a refugee from a horror movie.

The next phase of feminism must circle back and reappropriate the ancient persona of the mother -- without losing career ambition or power of assertion. Betty Friedan, who had first attacked the cult of postwar domesticity, had long warned second-wave feminists such as Gloria Steinem about the damaging exclusion of homemakers from their value system. The animus of liberal feminists toward religion must also end (I am speaking as an atheist). Feminism must reexamine all of its assumptions, including its death grip on abortion, if it wishes to survive.

The hysterical emotionalism and eruptions of amoral malice at the arrival of Sarah Palin exposed the weaknesses and limitations of current feminism. But I am convinced that Palin's bracing mix of male and female voices, as well as her grounding in frontier grit and audacity, will prove to be a galvanizing influence on aspiring Democratic women politicians too, from the municipal level on up. Palin has shown a brand-new way of defining female ambition -- without losing femininity, spontaneity or humor. She's no pre-programmed wonk of the backstage Hillary Clinton school; she's pugnacious and self-created, the product of no educational or political elite -- which is why her outsider style has been so hard for media lemmings to comprehend. And by the way, I think Tina Fey's witty impersonations of Palin have been fabulous. But while Fey has nailed Palin's cadences and charm, she can't capture the energy, which is a force of nature.

Bravissima!!!

Read her four pages of beautiful language deconstructing both the vapid dorkwads running our country and the liberal elites, who want to race Neville Chamberlain to retire the Guinness Cup for quivering craven cowardice in the face of socialists and socialist wannabes like Chavez, Putin, and the violent reactionaries in Iran. Thank God there's no Hitler yet, but Putin is just a couple of years from his own Enabling Act.

EU-nuch Schadenfreude at US Troubles Boomerangs

WSJ has a great editorial on how we're all in this boat together. The EU-nuchs might be rooting for Obama, but when he puts up tariffs and trade barriers to satisfy his union constituents, the US will informally abandon the globalization carousel that Clinton jumped on with NAFTA and GWB will begin to look good after a couple of years of stagflation and flight capital from the US and EUnuchland to other markets---emerging ones like Chna & India, perhaps.

I'm reading Fareed Zakaria's book The Post-American World and it posits that the US will be more of primus inter pares than a financial superpower. And the dollar will no longer be the reserve currency.

Who will write the American Recessional?

Rage Rage Against the Dying of The Light

Julian Barnes is my wife's favorite author and has given me several of his books to read, Flaubert's Parrot, et al... I prefer Martin Amis and Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose non-fiction is even more engrossing than Barnes' elegant prosody on the human condition.
Now this atheist turned agnostic has written a book, reviewed by Garrison Keillor, on death. In the review, Keillor notes:

....The brain is a lump of meat and the soul is merely “a story the brain tells itself.” Individuality is an illusion. Scientists find no physical evidence of “self” — it is something we’ve talked ourselves into. We do not produce thoughts, thoughts produce us. “The ‘I’ of which we are so fond properly exists only in grammar.” Stripped of the Christian narrative, we gaze out on a landscape that, while fascinating, offers nothing that one could call Hope. (Barnes refers to “American hopefulness” with particular disdain.)

Yep, that's it. The Nihilists' credo since as far back as the latest version of a wish for suicide, usually projected by an "intellectual" onto the society around him/her. The excuse for despair....why not try suicide by cop if you're not as brave as Virginia Woolf, who put rocks in her pockets before walking into a river until her hat floated?

And those parochial Americans, 85% of whom profess a belief in God! Goodness, another reason to end it all!

I often recall Gandhi's answer to a question about Jesus. "I like your Christ, I just don't like your Christians..." The Mahatma obviously never met our agnostics and atheists, who totally surpass Christians in lack of likability!

Dumb Swede Knocks US Literature

Charles McGrath is the editor of the NYT Book Review section and gets his Irish up about the twaddle exhaled by a member of the Nobel Lit nominating committee. This Mr. Engdahl emitted a brain fart to AP that American lit won't be considered as we are "too sensitive to trends in [our] own mass culture." OTOH, "Europe is still the center of the literary world."

This is especially hilarious since a prominent Swedish "intellectual" was asked to comment on Swedish culture in a Davos Forum a couple of weeks ago and admitted that she didn't think there was one! Of course, Brits laughed because two Swedish twins had just tried to kill themselves by running onto the M6 Motorway outside London. [Sorry, no links to either.] Of course, a famous American writer was invited to dine with the Swedish committee after winning a prize [I think it was Steinbeck] and recalled that almost all the conversation concerned bizarre jokes about the Swedes and the Norwegians---he had never heard about that rivalry, but anyone from Minnesota or Wisconsin hears dozens of Swede/Norwegian jokes---proof of Sweden's cultural superiority over our parochial American insularity.

This Swedish guy has got to be worthy of a South Park episode.

Petraeus Book Reveals Underbelly of Democrat Lies

Tell Me How This Ends is Linda Robinson's balanced take on the Iraq War, now that it appears that the US has won, although the Iraqi people are still saddled with a second-rate lawyer Al Maliki to lead them out of the political woods. Is Al Maliki an Adenauer whom the Americans reviled for his all-politics-is-local political trudging at a snail's pace? Or a treacherous ethnarch for the Shi'ite majority? Linda is skeptical, and she also takes shots at Gen. Jay Garner, whose college try is derided by an anecdote telling Sunni Sheiks that they are on their own. This wasn't Garner's fault, and he did have a 200-man team of Middle East experts and American Arabists [of which he was one] on his side. But as Cobra II has Rumsfeld saying to his aides: "We need some fresh thinking and threw out Garner and installed an American Proconsul with no experience, the Eurocentric Bremer [who thought the Baath was the equivalent of the Nazi Party and tossed out the wheat along with the chaff].

The punch paragraphs of the review:

Petraeus had brought together leading civilian and military thinkers to produce a new version of the Army’s counterinsurgency manual. The document’s central theme was political rather than military: A counterinsurgency can succeed only if it makes the government legitimate in the eyes of its citizens. This requires economic aid, governance reform, improvement in basic services and the like. And it requires an act of understanding, even empathy: “Knowing why an insurgent movement has gained support,” the manual states, “is essential in designing a counterinsurgency campaign.”

Petraeus proceeded to implement his strategy with relentless focus (and those 30,000 extra troops). A correct strategy forcefully executed will take you a long way — but not all the way. As we know now, Petraeus’s arrival in Iraq coincided with the fateful decision of Sunni tribal sheiks to stand up to the extremists of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who had worn out their welcome by, for example, throwing acid in the faces of women deemed insufficiently veiled. Thanks to the “Anbar Awakening,” as it was called, 100,000 Sunni men joined the fight against extremism. The fallback position among Democrats, which Joe Biden articulated last month on “Meet The Press,” is that it wasn’t the surge that worked, but the Awakening.

Robinson makes it clear that this simply isn’t so. She describes in exacting detail the tactics used by field officers in some of the most terrifying battlegrounds of Iraq. When the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry Regiment of the First Cavalry Division was assigned in late 2006 to Ameriya, in western Baghdad, the commander, Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl, moved his headquarters out of the base camp and into a local police station. He and his staff officers had read up on “battalion-led counterinsurgency,” and were eager to put its precepts into effect. Kuehl began building contacts with local sheiks, and spreading money around by paying for trash pickup and road repair. Then he began “clearing” operations against insurgents. The cost was high: 14 deaths in May alone.

Robinson lingers on the heroic self- discipline of officers who denied their men the catharsis of revenge, knowing that they were fighting for the sympathies of civilians. And finally, that discipline paid off. In late May, a local sheik called Kuehl to say that his tribesmen would be going after an Al Qaeda cell. When the sheik called back in a panic to ask for help, Kuehl joined the fight. His men weren’t sure which Iraqis to shoot at, but the battle went well, and later Kuehl reached an understanding with the commander of the tribal force: he promised to pay the Sunnis, many of them former insurgents, if they submitted to fingerprinting and agreed to work with the Iraqi Army. When Petraeus learned of the deal, his only advice was, “Do not let our Army stop you,” and “Do not let the Iraqi government stop you.” [my emphasis above]

To see certifiable brain farts from Obama and Biden on this issue go unchallenged by the MSM and to listen to a total fraud like Dingy Harry Reid say "The war is lost" reminds me of the total betrayal of the American Elites of the US Armed Forces.

American is not filled with EUnuchs and political payback will be dear.

A new Reagan is out there somewhere slouching toward Washington to be inaugurated.

Polls---Latest Evidence of Flimflammery

Somebody's Wrong says RCP as SurveyUSA in Minnesota gives Norm Coleman a 10 point lead while the Red-Star Tribune, assisted by far-right pollsters [!?!] from Princeton, gives al franken a 10 point lead.

Gee, I guess the art of taking polls to get the result you want is rising, or rather descending, to a new level.

As far as I'm aware, SurveyUSA has no affiliation.

The Red-Star Tribune is a little to the left of George Soros, admirably depicted on SNL last night as plotting to short the US dollar and then throw it into chaos, as he did the British pound in the early '90s. He's still under indictment for fraud in the EU, but the Red-Star Trib has the First Amendment protections it will not afford talk radio if Obama is elected.

Barney Frank is a Criminal Who should be Investigated

Barney Frank's "husband" was a senior functionary at Fannie Mae. Read Fox for how two faggots started the snowballing effect of bad mortgages that ended up destroying elements of Wall Street and American financial credibility. Here is the punchline/lede:

Although Frank now blames Republicans for the failure of Fannie and Freddie, he spent years blocking GOP lawmakers from imposing tougher regulations on the mortgage giants. In 1991, the year Moses was hired by Fannie, the Boston Globe reported that Frank pushed the agency to loosen regulations on mortgages for two- and three-family homes, even though they were defaulting at twice and five times the rate of single homes, respectively.

As this is real journalism, it won't appear in the MSM, whose Friday edition of the NYT DNC Agitprop puts the entire blame on SEC Chair Christopher Cox.

And McCain evidently can't string enough sentences together to make a paragraph on that as part of his talking points.

So we have a serial-RICO scheme party electing its candidate for POTUS.

Maybe John McC should snooze for the next month and get Palin to make the points he should have been making long ago.

Some maverick.

Biden Lives Down to Expectations

Wizbang borrows from Ace and has a few mismouths from terminal blowhard Biden. Notes one commenter on Wizbang:

Biden is simply a non-starter. FWIW, I went to physical rehab in Boca this AM & about seven of the very well-educated 20-ish therapists [3 were lotus eaters from CA] were avidly discussing the debate [something I never saw happen after the BHO/JMcC tussle last week] and the only person who wasn't impressed with Sarah was a thirtyish dude who sets my gaydar off.... The women were all saying Sarah was "somebody you could talk to at the kitchen table." And to top it off, a thirty-something black gentleman named Khalid mentioned that Palin had "more executive experience," which kinda floored me.

And I'm a Cubs fan, so that's hard to do!

But I digress. Here aren Ace's Points:

1. TAX VOTE: Biden said McCain voted "the exact same way" as Obama to increase taxes on Americans earning just $42,000, but McCain DID NOT VOTE THAT WAY.
2. AHMEDINIJAD MEETING: Joe Biden lied when he said that Barack Obama never said that he would sit down unconditionally with Mahmoud Ahmedinijad of Iran. Barack Obama did say specifically, and Joe Biden attacked him for it.

3. OFFSHORE OIL DRILLING: Biden said, "Drill we must." But Biden has opposed offshore drilling and even compared offshore drilling to "raping" the Outer Continental Shelf."

4. TROOP FUNDING: Joe Biden lied when he indicated that John McCain and Barack Obama voted the same way against funding the troops in the field. John McCain opposed a bill that included a timeline, that the President of the United States had already said he would veto regardless of it's passage.

5. OPPOSING CLEAN COAL: Biden says he's always been for clean coal, but he just told a voter that he is against clean coal and any new coal plants in America and has a record of voting against clean coal and coal in the U.S. Senate.

6. ALERNATIVE ENERGY VOTES: According to FactCheck.org, Biden is exaggerating and overstating John McCain's record voting for alternative energy when he says he voted against it 23 times.

7. HEALTH INSURANCE: Biden falsely said McCain will raise taxes on people's health insurance coverage -- they get a tax credit to offset any tax hike. Independent fact checkers have confirmed this attack is false

8. OIL TAXES: Biden falsely said Palin supported a windfall profits tax in Alaska -- she reformed the state tax and revenue system, it's not a windfall profits tax.

9. AFGHANISTAN / GEN. MCKIERNAN COMMENTS: Biden said that top military commander in Iraq said the principles of the surge could not be applied to Afghanistan, but the commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force Gen. David D. McKiernan said that there were principles of the surge strategy, including working with tribes, that could be applied in Afghanistan.

10. REGULATION: Biden falsely said McCain weakened regulation -- he actually called for more regulation on Fannie and Freddie.

11. IRAQ: When Joe Biden lied when he said that John McCain was "dead wrong on Iraq", because Joe Biden shared the same vote to authorize the war and differed on the surge strategy where they John McCain has been proven right.

12. TAX INCREASES: Biden said Americans earning less than $250,000 wouldn't see higher taxes, but the Obama-Biden tax plan would raise taxes on individuals making $200,000 or more.

13. BAILOUT: Biden said the economic rescue legislation matches the four principles that Obama laid out, but in reality it doesn't meet two of the four principles that Obama outlined on Sept. 19, which were that it include an emergency economic stimulus package, and that it be part of "part of a globally coordinated effort with our partners in the G-20."

14. REAGAN TAX RATES: Biden is wrong in saying that under Obama, Americans won't pay any more in taxes then they did under Reagan.

Wizbang goes on to parse and comment on Ace's 14 Biden booboos:

Now, several of those are fairly subjective -- the "Biden said McCain's/Obama's plan would do X, when it would do Y" kind of things. So I'll ignore those. Instead, let's look at the ones that are readily verifiable:

#2. Obama is on record as saying he would meet with Iran's Ahmenijad in his first year, without preconditions. Biden said he never said that. So Biden's mouth loses.

#3. Biden has been over the top about offshore drilling -- up until last night. Biden Bullshit again.

#5. Biden has also been a staunch opponent of ANY more coal power, and my Biden Bullshit Detector went off when he said he had long backed clean coal. Nice to know it's occasionally right.

#8. Palin's restructuring of the taxes Alaska imposes on oil companies was NOT a "windfall profits" tax, and to characterize it as such is either stupid or a blindly partisan lie. Of course, in Biden's case, the two are not mutually exclusive.

#9. Biden simply got it wrong on Afghanistan.

#10. A Biden lie by omission. Yes, McCain has championed deregulation in a lot of areas, but McCain's efforts to put MORE regulation and oversight on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are thoroughly documented -- as are the fierce fight Democrats put up to stop any such moves.

#11. Once again, Biden shows that the more confident he sounds, the less likely he is to be telling the truth. Biden voted AGAINST the first Iraq war, voted FOR the current war (but didn't really mean it), put forth a plan for partitioning Iraq that united nearly everyone in saying that Biden's plan was idiotic, and voted AGAINST the surge strategy that McCain championed.

#13: I dunno about this one, but it sounds right -- the specifics are too easily checked and disproven. And unlike Biden, I'm willing to give the assemblers of this list a bit of leeway when it comes to giving specific answers.

There. There's eight confirmed (well, seven confirmed and one highly probable) places where Joe Biden was clearly talking out of his ass.

And as Wizbang notes, Biden did all this out-of-his-most-productive-orifice craphole while looking calm, professional, semi-succinct, and semi-presidential----the CBS & CNN polls are almost certainly ringers, as the integrity of CBS wallows around where NBC was before it swirled around the porcelain before disappearing into its rightful destination.

Palin did a workmanlike job and as far as her on-screen body-language performance, she was to Biden what Reagan was to Carter in the '80 debate or what JFK was to Nixon in the '60 debate----a winner in the human being department.

Good View of Europe's Descent into The Maelstrom

Bruce Bawer is the author of While Europe Slept and has a terrific article in Pajamas Media on how EU-nuchland and its choirboy chorus of castrati in the US is steadfastly ignoring the creeping advance of Islam as it infects inner cities in the Midlands & Yorkshire dales and the banlieux of Paris, not to mention a couple of hundred other French cities where thousands of cars were torched a summer ago by rioting reactionary nutjobs who are as French as couscous & kebabs. [Of course, EU-nuchs in high positions in govt & media are also ignoring "Vlad the Empoisoner" Putin on the energy front, but that's a subject for another day.]

I was a US diplomat who learned Arabic to a high level of proficiency in reading & speaking and was posted to two Arab countries where I served as a political officer. One of them is no longer a country [Lebanon, which was a member of the Arab League until it was hijacked by Hezbollah, an Iranian Shi'ite group of militias with no real "Arab" ties] and might serve as an object lesson of what happens when a political system breaks down—the majority becomes a slave to a violent reactionary militant minority. [As a footnote, when western travellers reached remote parts of the Sanjuk of Al Quds in the late 18th c., the use of the wheel had been abandoned/forgotten & natives used the native American travois to haul their produce to whatever markets existed, this 5000 yrs after their forebears had invented the wheel!]

The other, Saudi Arabia, has a family whose profession was robbing caravans on pilgrimages to Mecca before a religious zealot named Wahhab made a pact with them to be Koran & sword to a land totally asleep for centuries. They haven’t changed a bit between the ears, though they profess otherwise, and are basically a rentier economy. And instead of pilgrimage caravans, they hold up EU-nuchland and the US for trillions in oil money derived from technology we virtually handed them while saying sorry for the invasion of your privacy.

I've visited every Arab League member save Djibouti, Iraq, and Libya [and was invited to the latter two, but declined!] I've visited Pakistan in three of its four provinces, including Azad Kashmir and have visited Indonesia for several weeks. Although Obama is listed as a Muslim on a school form his father, a Mr. Soetoro, filled out, I discount this as not counting much because when I was there [perhaps at the same time Barry Soetoro was in an Islamic school, there was nothing toxic about the local brand of Islam, which lay in dormition. It's not a real issue, although BHO was sponsored for Harvard Law by a fellow who later switched his name to Khalid Mohammed [LNU]. And Louis Farrakhan's brand of islam, which young Barry was exposed to, is basically a self-help program with anti-Semitic overtones. Being in the Million Man March doesn't make BHO a bad dude.

I simply resent the ostrich-like posture of the left, so afraid to offend noisy new arrivals and so eager to discount or mock loyal Americans with a legitimate concern that their Constitution and Bill Of Rights will slowly, as the EU-nuch representative from Sweden to a conference Bawer attended said, disappear from neglect and forgetting how the US became the greatest country in the world.

Which it will remain unless and until it is hijacked by high-minded highbrows who disdain the hard-working majority of Americans and pander/cater/submit to the screeching riffraff [Sarkozy called them "racaille," a variation of canaille, who reflect what one belle etudiante francaise held up on a placard during the student strikes a few years ago "No matter how much you give us, it will never be enough and we'll demand much much more."

Pretty much sums up the mentality of the left.

As Donald Trump noted yesterday, the only silver lining in the US meltdown is that oil prices are slumping and will continue to slump until we wring out the bloated inflammation that infests the US economic GI tract.

Carter/Clinton began the Avalanche

Terry Jones sums up how Clinton conspired to inflate Fannie-Freddie into a Ponzi Scheme and brought down the entire Wall Street superstructure balanced on bad loans. Here's how Carter started the process and Clinton piled up enough to begin the makings of a cascade:

While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities, it was Clinton who supercharged the process. After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie's and Freddie's rules.
In so doing, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash to markets, made loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and money to political allies. This potent mix led inevitably to corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse.
Despite warnings of trouble at Fannie and Freddie, in 1994 Clinton unveiled his National Homeownership Strategy, which broadened the CRA in ways Congress never intended.
Addressing the National Association of Realtors that year, Clinton bluntly told the group that "more Americans should own their own homes." He meant it.
Clinton saw homeownership as a way to open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class.
Though well-intended, the problem was that Congress was about to change hands, from the Democrats to the Republicans. Rather than submit legislation that the GOP-led Congress was almost sure to reject, Clinton ordered Robert Rubin's Treasury Department to rewrite the rules in 1995.
The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, "made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder." Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another.
Loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else.
"Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group and race, to rate banks on performance," wrote Howard Husock, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute.
But those rules weren't enough.
Clinton got the Department of Housing and Urban Development to double-team the issue. That would later prove disastrous.
Clinton's HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, "made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis," the liberal Village Voice noted. Among those decisions were changes that let Fannie and Freddie get into subprime loan markets in a big way.
Other rule changes gave Fannie and Freddie extraordinary leverage, allowing them to hold just 2.5% of capital to back their investments, vs. 10% for banks.
Since they could borrow at lower rates than banks due to implicit government guarantees for their debt, the government-sponsored enterprises boomed.
With incentives in place, banks poured billions of dollars of loans into poor communities, often "no doc" and "no income" loans that required no money down and no verification of income.
By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed nearly half of the $12 trillion U.S. mortgage market — a staggering exposure.
Worse still was the cronyism.
Fannie and Freddie became home to out-of-work politicians, mostly Clinton Democrats. An informal survey of their top officials shows a roughly 2-to-1 dominance of Democrats over Republicans.
Then there were the campaign donations. From 1989 to 2008, some 384 politicians got their tip jars filled by Fannie and Freddie.
Over that time, the two GSEs spent $200 million on lobbying and political activities. Their charitable foundations dropped millions more on think tanks and radical community groups.
Did it work? Well, if measured by the goal of putting more poor people into homes, the answer would have to be yes.
From 1995 to 2005, a Harvard study shows, minorities made up 49% of the 12.5 million new homeowners.
The problem is that many of those loans have now gone bad, and minority homeownership rates are shrinking fast.
Fannie and Freddie, with their massive loan portfolios stuffed with securitized mortgage-backed paper created from subprime loans, are a failed legacy of the Clinton era.

And then Fannie-Freddie got looted by the likes of Raines [$90 million], serial criminal Gorelick[$75 million] and Jim Johnson[tens of millions].

And of course, BDS requires that it was all GWB's fault, as brain-dead Pelosi said just before the vote!.

Sadly, the solidly Dem core constituency is too stupid or sunk in utter corruption to be influenced---a self-inflicted penal colony.

Maybe enuf independents will figure out what went on.

Sabathia To Dodgers Who Will Ditch Slacker Manny?

The NY Post has an interesting article on CC Sabathia, who can write his own ticket and should get the NL MVP just for making the compleat difference for the Brew Crew to get to the playoffs. He's a free agent with cred, unlike the dreadlocked Ramirez who has demonstrated that once he gets five years in the bank, it's a day off whenever he wants it and not running out groundballs.

CC is Joe Torre's type of guy, a team player who loves the Left Coast and the Dodgers should take the occasion to buy five years of high performance rather than slackerball.

Manny is Tyrell in spikes---all about Manny.

Can McCain rise to the challenge?

Victor Davis Hanson sums up the quandry facing the country.

The stage is set for someone to play Washington, Lincoln, or Churchill. An entire generation of leadership is failing, as the world watches aghast.

Paulson was more or less discredited when the word that when the FedNY Bank was considering a bailout of AIG, which Goldman Sachs had a $20 billion stake in, the only non-govt. participant in a closed meeting was the Chairman of Goldman, who succeeded Paulson in the job. Two weeks later, AIG got an $80 billion line of credit from Paulson. Hmmm........

Frank and Dodd are, as Hanson notes, for all intents and purposes what I would call "unindicted co-conspirators" and should be under investigation by the FBI [while not forgetting Obama advisors Raines & Johnson].

GWB is in hedgehog mode, and is remiss in that when he proposed reforms in '04-05, he didn't go to the country against the utterly corrupt DNC mafia that was using FanFred as an ATM. Instead, he courted "popularity" by plumping for Social Security reform, and was drowned out by a corrupt old bitch in the House who said he was trying to wreck SS. The same corrupt hag is now the worst Speaker in US history and demonstrates why Congress has a 10% approval rating, soon to plunge to low single digits.

As a WSJ writer noted yesterday, Chile worked its way out of its collapse using the U of Chicago economist Milton Friedman's nostrums.

Is a "workout" rather than a "bailout" the answer?

Can McCain rise to the challenge?

Serial Moron Al Gore Takes Aim at Coal

The WSJ outs the criminal conspiracy that the Dems are hatching with the greenie tree-hugger mafia to shut down the construction of new clean coal plants. The USA is the Saudi Arabia of coal, with enuf to sustain economic prosperity in an environmentally friendly fashion for the next century---if the Leftist Luddites can be stopped. Their obvous goal is a nihilistic destruction of any advanced industrial development and they are the ghost in the economic machine conspiring to throw an iron bar into its gears:

The greens loathe coal because of greenhouse gases -- and have succeeded in making new coal plants nearly impossible to build. More than 60 have been canceled in the last year alone. Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius is waging a high-profile campaign against new coal plants in Kansas, and only last week Joe Biden seemed to endorse a coal ban.

Perhaps James Hansen has also paid Mr. Gore a visit at Walden Pond. The NASA scientist and influential global warming swami recently testified on behalf of the "Kingsnorth Six," Greenpeace activists who caused £30,000 of criminal damage at an English coal utility while attempting to shut it down. Mr. Hansen argued they had a "lawful excuse" because of the imminence of climate doom; they were acquitted. Coming from figures who hold the public trust, such rhetoric is wildly irresponsible, not least for the fanaticism and even violence it could incite.

Mr. Gore's blessing is even more bizarre because it defeats the cause that it claims to champion on its own terms. New U.S. coal plants use modern scrubbing technology, which means less traditional air pollution. They're also far more efficient -- that is, they get more energy out of the same amount of coal (i.e., carbon) compared to older models. Often this results in power companies mothballing parts of a more carbon-intensive fleet.

Of course, the WSJ is either naive or tongue-in-cheek if they don't read between the lines and discern the nihilistic anarchists' recipes for the poisonous brew that witless crones like Pelosi and Sebelius in Kansas lap up like the bitch-puppies they are.

Gore is a guy who got a D+ in the only science grade investigative journalists can glean from his college transcripts!

Gore is leading another "childrens' crusade" into certain criminality, such as the insanity in the UK.

And Gore is proving again what a great favor the state of Florida [guided by Swamp-Thing Reno in her exportation of Elian Gonzales to the People's Paradise of Cuba] did for the USA did to keep this blundering fool from the presidency.

God bless and thank Florida for Now and Forever Amen!

NYT Parallel Universe in Sarah Chronicles

TV in the NYT is part of the stern nanny mentality and feminist universe guiding the NYT this era. Take for instance the 9/21 article in the Arts & Leisure section on "Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles" and its comparison of the TV heroine "who is to a hockey mom what a hyena is to a potted fern" to another Sarah. Read the link for the so-called evangelical tone of the series to be elucidated, but the clueless aspect comes at the end of the article.

Ms.Bellafante notes that "the name of the Skynet brain [Skynet is trying to exterminate the human race & convert the planet to cyborg rule, ed. note] is not geopolitically neutral: it's called the Turk. So the machine endangering mankind is symbolically Ottoman."

Perhaps, but perhaps also the screenwriters might have a more playful trope in mind. The name of the guy who knocks on the door of an aspiring NFL candidate-player in the middle of the night in training camp to inform him to pack up and get out because he's been cut from the team: "The Turk."

It's been 100 years since the demise of the Ottoman Empire, counting from the "Young Turk" movement. The NFL cuts happen weekly. It's a better metaphor for what Skynet's brain is trying to accomplish.

Some NYT editor in that girlie-paper might know this, but I doubt it.

Hope-O-Crisy or How Obama Helped Create the Meltdown

Sen. Jim Demint os S.C. has a dynamite video that has great graphics and greater logic demonstrating the reason that FanFred led to an utter catastrophe through Democrat RICO schemes.

Here's the lead of a New York Times story on Sept. 11, 2003: 'The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.'

'These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,' said Rep. Barney Frank, then ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. 'The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.'

Barney is the chief culprit and kept blocking reform all along when other proposals were made to stop a Ponzi pile of rubbish paper from toppling----Barney should be frog-marched in shackles except he'd enjoy it too much! No one else would enjoy hard time in a penitentiary as much as Mr. Frank.

Seriously, Chris Dodd's father was a crook & was censured by the Senate; Chris is a crook & is given broad authority to create a RICO government oversight program. Can you imagine how much will be skimmed off the top by these serial legalized felons?

Harry "The War is Lost" Reid competes with the two above for stiff sentences in a Fed facility raking sandtraps, and Pelosi should be sent to that WV camp where Martha Stewart cooled her heels for a few months. In a world where Dems were accountable and when people like Dodd actually were penalized for malfeasance, this would be fair and balanced.

Hope and 'small change' are all we're going to get from a Dem administration, which will rob the 'rich' to pay off their own investment bank partners at Goldman Sachs. And pocket much of the rest.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were just warm-up exercises for the heist of the millenium.

'Nuff Said. Don't Put the Foxes in Charge of the Chicken Coop

Here's the lead of a New York Times story on Sept. 11, 2003: 'The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.'

'These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,' said Rep. Barney Frank, then ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. 'The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.'

Now we see this perv specimen of Elmer Fudd telling Lou Dobbs to stop interrupting him when Dobbs politely pointed out some Dem responsibility for the Meltdown of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Dobbs and Frank should be frog-marched off to prison in shackles---or at least censured like Dodd's father was when peculation and criminal malfeasance were actually accountable offenses in the Senate.

Just Asking Why Biden Gets a Pass While Palin is Getting Red-lined

This morning I got a box of books from my parents' house basement. I came to a book I enjoyed in grad school by the famous [leftist]writer James Agee and opened the book randomly to page 212. I thought to myself, the area code for Manhattan. Noting the top lines underlined by myself long ago, I read:

"[I do] not accuse or despise journalism for anything beyond its enormous power to poison the public with the... delusion that it is telling the truth.........The very blood and semen of journalism...is a broad and successful lying. Remove this form of lying and you no longer have journalism."

Which succinctly sums up what every thinking individual has known for quite a while now in this election season.

The signs of adherence to some sort of mass psychosis are starting to pop up in the "highbrow" publications. The New Yorker had an article on Alec Baldwin in which he whined that calling his 11-year old daughter "a selfish little pig" might hurt his chances for the high office he believes he is qualified for, though he intends to offer himself to the people anyway. If he fails, perhaps he could be appointed to an appropriate post.
Ditto, Chris Matthews, who believes he can beat Senator Spector in PA due to his wide name recognition & reputation. The MSM treat these two as serious, without any serious speculation by their writers as to the possible drawbacks they could bring to a ticket with them on it.

James Fallows is pushing The Atlantic's credibility more than a bit and The Atlantic should have cashiered Andrew Sullivan immediately on the question of the candidate's pregnancy. [This strange specimen of morphing from conservative to fleck-mouthed Robert Fisk took a few days off with his 'husband' to let things cool down.]

Drudge, Fox, and the Wall Street Journal try to stem the hemorrhaging, but no indication of any sense of non-partisan neutrality at all is evident on the left side of the spectrum, which is about 90% now of the national media. But high-handed entitlement and presumption of infallibility pervade a lot of Dem politicians. Watching Lou Dobbs interviewing Barney Frank on CNN this afternoon, Lou tried to correct him when Frank inaccurately claimed that Reagan was the primary cause of the problem today when he started deregulating the markets.

When Dobbs interjected that Carter actually was the first to do so, Frank indignantly exclaimed that Dobbs was breaking the rules for a civil conversation! Dobbs for once appeared chastened and instead of continuing to contest the out-and-out partisan misrepresentations of Frank towards the Repubs, denying any Dem wrongdoing, Lou meekly backed down.

I know Lou was loaded for bear on the fact that Barney Frank impeded any investigation of FanFred's flagrant disregard of all known rules of lending a couple of years ago and its outrageous use of FanFred as an ATM for high-ranking Dems like Raines, Johnson, and Gorelick. That would have been partisan, I suppose, in BFrank's parallel universe.

And Hank Paulson was treating Chris Dodd, who has been outed as the biggest beneficiary in Congress from FanFred donations, as a respectable senior statesman. Chris also got a sweetheart loan from Countrywide that has not been noted by anybody in the mainstream media. Of course, FanFred donated $109,000 to its number two favorite Congressional beneficiary, a Senator starting his first term named Barack Obama. Good grief, it took nine years for Dodd to get $130K!
[The fact that Chris Dodd's daddy was censured by the Senate for dipping into campaign funds in the '50s has never been brought up, even though it's obvious that this apple fell very close to the tree!]

Double Standard

Just to natter on a bit, it's quite evident that a compleat and total double standard is in play with the mainstream media in regard to this election. The facts are that Obama has never been vetted about a number of serious associations. If his resume weren't so thin, thinner than the other three candidates, the little we know about him would be troubling.

He has kept his transcripts hidden from his years at Columbia U. No Problem, says the press.
His senior thesis on Soviet relations has "disappeared." Not a peep of questioning by the NYT or any NY based media.

His attitude toward his mother was so conflicted that he did not go to her deathbed in 1996 because of "scheduling problems." Not a problem for the sycophantic press.

His Chicago relations with a convicted felon like Rezko who largely raised the financing for his run for the State Senate [the records for which "have been lost," hasn't raised any eyebrows among the watchpuppies in the national media[the Chicago local media are virtually part of the Daley Machine or in fear of its retribution].

An unconvicted felon [by his own admission], Bill Ayers, made Obama the chair of a $100 million [how did this SDS mad bomber get that kind of money?] "project" called The Annenberg Challenge. Not a shred of curiosity since Sean Hannity made this relationship front and center [and earned five public rebukes from Obama, a rare occurrence]. The press ain't interested.

Ditto for a notorious racist pastor whose affiliation with anti-Semites like Farrakhan go back a long way[and who got a mysterious $10 million "line of credit" upon retirement----nothing for Letterman to joke about there.

Okay, just another day at Rick's bar in the moral sewer of Chicago politics. But Obama probably was at The Million Man March and HAS NEVER BEEN QUERIED about this.

The interviews of Obama by Brian Williams & Charlie Gibson were puff-balls that Obama didn't need to respond to seriously. Couric was the only one who made a [half-hearted] attempt to draw him out on some serious issues. When Palin was nominated, BHO did do an interview with Bill O'Reilly, but B O'R did not get beneath the smooth carapace of this slick hustler.

Then BHO went on the unwatched MSNBC counterpart's show and was showered with metaphorical confetti in an embarrassing demonstration of why the interviewer should have stayed on ESPN.

McCain/Palin Standard

To sum up what everyone knows, it's completely obvious there is another standard for McCain and especially Sarah Palin, where gotcha questions are the rule. t's getting clearer every day, if not completely obvious, that the media is setting up a very high standard for McCain and extremely high for Sarah Palin, where gotcha questions are the rule. Indeed, her unavailability to the press is being treated as high treason. The "delusion" Agree talked about then is now becoming evident in the media's self-referential decision to move beyond being a referee to becoming the home-team zebra and that team is Obama/Biden.

In fact, the NYT article on Ms. Iseman was almost certainly libelous and under UK law would probably be actionable. But the entire phalanx comprised of Hollyweird/TV/Academicide/Educational & other Unions's leftish foot soldiers and celebritards are marching lockstep to accomplish the goal of Eastern & Left Coast elites, with nary a twinge of conscious or sign of compunction.

The Palin Derangement Syndrome surpasses even the hyperventilating hysteria of the BDS loons & with almost no substance behind ridiculous speculations and false assertions. This is an election that is turning into a food fight.

As for Biden, he keeps making endless silly mistakes, much like Obama's "57 states" remark, on a near-daily basis. [Personal note: My wife served as an LA under a left-wing Dem Senator [who will remain unnamed] who regarded Joe Biden as an amiable second-rater. He has risen to prominence by being re-elected many times, just like Alaska's Ted Stevens or WV's Harry Byrd.]

We don't know much about Palin, but her admittedly thin resume is on the executive side of the separation of powers and she deserves more than the instant disdain the media poured on her. Bill Clinton to his credit says that he "gets" why Palin is popular, as she is authentic, the first such candidate ever in the last five decades. Hillary remains silent.

Unless you count Geraldine, who was authentically dizzy......or ditzy, in a likable way.

Oprah has shown that she is more of a black than she is a female. The list of out-and-out media partisanship is becoming longer every day. The unwatched Emmys demonstrated how "inappropriate remarks" have morphed into "standard DNC talking points" across the entire spectrum.

There is no Zola, or Whittaker Chambers, or even McCarthy [Joe or Gene] to stand up and say things are wrong. Not on the right anyway, as Mitch McConnell sidles over to the insufferable ["The war is already lost"] Senator Majority Leader who in turn misrepresents McCain's conversation with him.

If John McCain should possibly win, there will be a million DNC paid lawyers scurrying under rocks and across the 50 states to look for Repub iniquity.

Maybe the terrorist honored by the UN yesterday is right about the USA. Let's work to make the Iranian mini-me monster wrong.
UPDATEToday Obama said that someone else will be responsible for the Medltdown Mess in "40 days."

Is it just me under a delusion that the new president isn't sworn in until January 20th, almost four months from now? That's almost 120 days. GWB will be president until then and "responsible," unless BHO AKA Soetoro has never read the Constitution.

The MSM just swallows anything this no-CV fraud puts out there.

Crony Capitalism As Perfected by the Democrats

"Crony Capitalism" is the bugbear of a free market economic system, as this extremely lucid, cogent, well-written narrative of how we got from prosperity to a looming WTC collapse [metaphorically speaking]:

In the past couple of weeks, as the financial crisis has intensified, a new talking point has emerged from the Democrats in Congress: This is all a "crisis of capitalism," in socialist financier George Soros' phrase, and a failure to regulate our markets sufficiently.
Well, those critics may be right — it is a crisis of capitalism. A crisis of politically driven crony capitalism, to be precise.
Indeed, Democrats have so effectively mastered crony capitalism as a governing strategy that they've convinced many in the media and the public that they had nothing whatsoever to do with our current financial woes.
Barack Obama has repeatedly blasted "Bush-McCain" economic policies as the cause, as if the two were joined at the hip.
Funny, because over the past 8 years, those who tried to fix Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the trigger for today's widespread global financial meltdown — were stymied repeatedly by congressional Democrats.
This wasn't an accident. Though some key Republicans deserve blame as well, it was a concerted Democratic effort that made reform of Fannie and Freddie impossible.
The reason for this is simple: Fannie and Freddie became massive providers both of reliable votes among grateful low-income homeowners, and of massive giving to the Democratic Party by grateful investment bankers, both at the two government-sponsored enterprises and on Wall Street.
The result: A huge taxpayer rescue that at last estimate is approaching $700 billion but may go even higher.
It all started, innocently enough, in 1994 with President Clinton's rewrite of the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act.
Ostensibly intended to help deserving minority families afford homes — a noble idea — it instead led to a reckless surge in mortgage lending that has pushed our financial system to the brink of chaos.
Subprime's Mentors
Fannie and Freddie, the main vehicle for Clinton's multicultural housing policy, drove the explosion of the subprime housing market by buying up literally hundreds of billions of dollars in substandard loans — funding loans that ordinarily wouldn't have been made based on such time-honored notions as putting money down, having sufficient income, and maintaining a payment record indicating creditworthiness.
With all the old rules out the window, Fannie and Freddie gobbled up the market. Using extraordinary leverage, they eventually controlled 90% of the secondary market mortgages. Their total portfolio of loans topped $5.4 trillion — half of all U.S. mortgage lending. They borrowed $1.5 trillion from U.S. capital markets with — wink, wink — an "implicit" government guarantee of the debts.
This created the problem we are having today.
As we noted a week ago, subprime lending surged from around $35 billion in 1994 to nearly $1 trillion last year — for total growth of 2,757% as of last year.
No real market grows that fast for that long without being fixed.
And that's just what Fannie and Freddie were — fixed. They became a government-run, privately owned home finance monopoly.
Fannie and Freddie became huge contributors to Congress, spending millions to influence votes. As we've noted here before, the bulk of the money went to Democrats.
Dollars To Dems
Meanwhile, Fannie and Freddie also became a kind of jobs program for out-of-work Democrats.
Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson, the CEOs under whom the worst excesses took place in the late 1990s to mid-2000s, were both high-placed Democratic operatives and advisers to presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Clinton administration official Jamie Gorelick also got taken care of by the Fannie-Freddie circle. So did top Clinton aide Rahm Emanuel, among others.
On the surface, this sounds innocent. Someone has to head the highly political Fannie and Freddie, right?
But this is why crony capitalism is so dangerous. Those in power at Fannie and Freddie, as the sirens began to wail about some of their more egregious practices, began to bully those who opposed them.
That included journalists, like the Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot, and GOP congressmen, like Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, whom Fannie and Freddie actively lobbied against in his own district. Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., who tried to hold hearings on Fannie's and Freddie's questionable accounting practices in 2004, found himself stripped of responsibility for their oversight by House Speaker Dennis Hastert — a Republican.
Where, you ask, were the regulators?
Congress created a weak regulator to oversee Freddie and Fannie — the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight — which had to go hat in hand each year to Capitol Hill for its budget, unlike other major regulators.
With lax oversight, Fannie and Freddie had a green light to expand their operations at breakneck speed.
Fannie and Freddie had a reliable coterie of supporters in the Senate, especially among Democrats.
"We now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years," wrote economist Kevin Hassett on Bloomberg.com this week.
Buying Friends In High Places
Over the span of his career, Obama ranks No. 2 in campaign donations from Fannie and Freddie, taking over $125,000. Dodd, head of the Senate Banking panel, is tops at $165,000. Clinton, ranked 12th, has collected $75,000.
Meanwhile, Freddie and Fannie opened what were euphemistically called "Partnership Offices" in the districts of key members of Congress to channel millions of dollars in funding and patronage to their supporters.
In the space of a little more than a decade, Fannie and Freddie spent close to $150 million on lobbying efforts. So pervasive were their efforts, they seemed unassailable, even during a Republican administration.
Yet, by 2004, the crony capitalism had gone too far. Even OFHEO issued a report essentially criticizing Fannie and Freddie for Enron-style accounting that let them boost profits in order to pay their politically well-connected executives hefty bonuses.
It emerged that Clinton aide Raines, who took Fannie Mae's helm as CEO in 1999, took in nearly $100 million by the time he left in 2005. Others, including former Clinton Justice Department official Gorelick, took $75 million from the Fannie-Freddie piggy bank.
Even so, Fannie and Freddie were forced to restate their earnings by some $3.5 billion, due to the accounting shenanigans.
As we noted, those who tried to halt this frenzy of activity found themselves hit by a political buzz saw.
President Bush, reviled and criticized by Democrats, tried no fewer than 17 times, by White House count, to raise the issue of Fannie-Freddie reform. A bill cleared the Senate Banking panel in 2005, but stalled due to implacable opposition from Democrats and a critical core of GOP abettors. Rep. Barney Frank, who now runs the powerful House Financial Services Committee, helped spearhead that fight.

Terry Jones wrote this excellent piece for Investor's Business Daily and promises more elucidation as this unravels further.

And Dennis Hastert adds another notch on his pistol as Turncoat Democrat Mole Extraordinaire.

Carter has already retired the cup as Feckless Ninny POTUS of the twentieth century. Bubba Jeff was merely an "enabler," Mr. Cross-Addicted to Chicanery of every sort, kind and specimen.

But Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson and Chris Dodd should be frog-marched in shackles across the floor of the NYSE.

Barney Frank should too, but he would probably enjoy it!!!

Last, but not least. Jamie Gorelick now has the distinction of being intimately involved in causing the two greatest American disasters of this decade: 9/11 with her hobbling of the counter-terrorism efforts of the CIA/FBI through her "firewall..."

And now, the Great Meltdown of 2008, for which this consummate swindler in a pantsuit helped stoke the fire at Fan/Fred while skimming $75 million as her share of the Dem RICO scheme.

Shackles are too good for her---bring back the electric chair! If it was good enough for the Rosenbergs, it's good enough for this 21st century equivalent!

Palin Outs Obama as 'Community Organizer' Right out of Alinsky Playbook

IBD has an excellent editorial on Saul Alinsky's "rules for radicals" that Hillary Clinton did her thesis on at Wellesley and Obama soaked through his skin nursing grievances at Columbia. Actually, it started with Marx on economics and Nietzsche on ressentiment and continues to this day through traitors like Bill Ayers who somehow got $100 million for The Annenberg Project and persuaded Barack Obama to be its chair.

Barack is a sort of Stealth-CheGuevara---a specimen of a sportsman connoisseur radical sneaking into the presidency under the radar by following the Chicago-tough Alinsky's road rules. Of which IBD gives a handy-dandy summary:

• Rule: "Rub raw the resentments of the people; search out controversy and issues." In the mortgage meltdown, for instance, Obama vows to prosecute "predatory lenders" for "abusing" minority borrowers. He's also stoking class resentment by painting Wall Street and other executives as villains.
• Rule: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." In an ad to woo Hispanic voters, Obama demonized Rush Limbaugh by falsely claiming he made racist statements against immigrants.
• Rule: "A mass impression can be lasting and intimidating." This explains why Obama moved his acceptance speech to a football stadium and bussed in 85,000 supporters. Alinsky's son was so impressed, he praised Obama for learning his father's "lesson well."
• Rule: "Multiple issues mean constant action and life" for the cause. This is why Obama never harps on one issue, as Hillary did with health care. His platform is packed with grievances from "economic justice" to "reproductive justice" to "environmental justice."

But thanks be to God there's some people who are on to Obama's trickster head fakes:

Obama is following almost to the letter the blueprint for socialist revolution drafted by the father of community organizing.
While Alinsky may help him behind the scenes, however, he becomes a liability when brought out of the shadows. Sarah Palin proved this in St. Paul when she ridiculed his community organizing. Within hours, Obama surrogates whined about how just bringing up the phrase was racist code for "black."
No, it's code for communist. And McCain should make that point instead of legitimizing such radicalism, as he did recently when he said, "I respect community organizers; and Sen. Obama's record there is outstanding" — which contradicted his running mate.
There's nothing to respect about such anti-American radicals, even if they have traded their tie-dye for business ties.

Alinsky of course, dedicated his book to his patron "saint:"

Obama doesn't look or talk like an angry radical. He speaks in measured tones and is rarely seen out of business attire. That, too, is borrowed from Alinsky's playbook. "Don't scare" the middle class, he guides urban revolutionaries in his 1970s manual, "Rules for Radicals" (which he dedicated to mankind's "first radical, Lucifer").

"Dare to cheat, dare to win" is what my houseguest at an Ann Arbor SDS conference told me in '69, a guy named Mark Rudd who was the chief agitator at Columbia U. in '68 and made the cover of Time magazine.

I'll bet that could be Obama's motto in '08, one he learned while he was [ostensibly, as we have no transcript or thesis] at Columbia U. during the Reagan years---his own little Communist renaissance in the making.

Sarah should ask him about his mystery days on Morningside Heights---maybe he was just a ghost hanging out, a sort of Shining...........

Hitchens Compares Obama to Dukakis

Christopher H. is evolving into one of the most astute analysts of the American Political Condition, analogous to a mild but irritating disease, of presidential elections repeating themselves:

Why is Obama so vapid and hesitant and gutless? Why, to put it another way, does he risk going into political history as a dusky Dukakis? Well, after the self-imposed Jeremiah Wright nightmare, he can't afford any more militancy, or militant-sounding stuff, even if it might be justified. His other problems are self-inflicted or party-inflicted as well. He couldn't have picked a gifted Democratic woman as his running mate, because he couldn't have chosen a female who wasn't the ever-present Sen. Clinton, and so he handed the free gift of doing so to his Republican opponent (whose own choice has set up a screech from the liberals like nothing I have heard since the nomination of Clarence Thomas). So the unquantifiable yet important "atmospherics" of politics, with all their little X factors, belong at present to the other team.
The Dukakis comparison is, of course, a cruel one, but it raises a couple more questions that must be faced. We are told by outraged Democrats that many voters still believe, thanks to some smear job, that Sen. Obama is a Muslim. Yet who is the most famous source of this supposedly appalling libel (as if an American candidate cannot be of any religion or none)? Absent any anonymous whispering campaign, the person who did most to insinuate the idea in public—"There is nothing to base that on. As far as I know"—was Obama's fellow Democrat and the junior senator from New York. It was much the same in 1988, when Al Gore brought up the Dukakis furlough program, later to be made infamous by the name Willie Horton, against the hapless governor of Massachusetts who was then his rival for the nomination.
By the end of that grueling campaign season, a lot of us had got the idea that Dukakis actually wanted to lose—or was at the very least scared of winning. Why do I sometimes get the same idea about Obama?.......

Dukakis was famously done in by William "Billy" Bulger, the Democratic Mass State Senate Chair, brother of the still-on-the-lam Whitey, who alerted the Bush campaign about Boston Harbor's long-standing pollution problem after Duke had promised years before to fix it. And Bolger helped elucidate the Horton furlough affair again for Bush's operatives after another fellow-Dem, the then-clubfooted Al Gore [who has graduated to mental quadraplegic], pointed out the problem.

Bulger ["Billy"] was subsequently made president of UMass, whose Boston campus lies just up the beach where his brother Whitey used to bury his girlfriends once he got tired of them. Just another memorable milestone in big city Dem political machines. Sort of like Obama's alma mater in politics, the Cook County Crime Spree run from the mayor's office?

I wonder which Democrats might be trying to trip up The Magic Negro, as the Los Angeles Times called him?

Hmmm....... A real puzzle.

Anyway, as always....Hitchens gives the reader an interesting perspective on American politics---sort of an amped-up Economist writer with a memory like an elephant.
UPDATE
By a strange coincidence, my wife called from Cape Cod and informed me just a few minutes ago that my father-in-law has a roommate in his recovery room in a rehab center. The roommate is a former high-ranking member of the Boston Police whm my wife had a very revealing conversation with this evening. This gentleman, who has to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, told my spouse that William "Billy" Bulger knew everything that"Whitey,"Billy's serial killer brother on the Top Ten Most Wanted list by the FBI, was up to and that not only convicted FBI Boston Special Agent Connelly, but other agents even above Connelly in seniority---"all the way to the very top"---helped protect Whitey, because Billy "had the goods on" so many prominent Mass politicians and FBI Agents that if Whitey was harmed, Billy would bring down the Mass Democrats [including possibly Kerry & Kennedy] and some highly-placed Repubs as well. FWIW, but Mass politics is as seamy and dirty as Chicago machine politics, though I doubt as many murder victims have gone without justice in Chicago, due to Whitey's nasty habit of killing young women. Since they were hookers or drifters, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Someone, someday, is going to write a sequel to Black Mass, a book that outlines the incredible all-embracing corruption that thrives in the Boston political machine, including among some national political personae. According to this source, Gov. Dukakis was so clean and "straight," they couldn't trust him and he had to go. Hence, ratting out "Duke" to GHWB would benefit the Mass Dems, some compromised FBI agents, and who knows whomelse!?! Stranger than fiction, some of the stuff my wife told me---hearsay, but mind-boggling.

Axelrod Caught Astroturfing Smear Video on YouTube

Roy Robison at the National Defense Examiner has the best summary of the Axelrod smear job on Palin unmasked:

A series of videos designed to spread lies about the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, Governor Sarah Palin has been connected to a professional Public Relations firm. Those videos also share production qualities used in pro-Obama videos produced by Obama media campaign strategist David Axelrod.
Axelrod is considered by many to be a master of planting campaign messages on the internet to look like they did not originate from an organized campaign, a practice know as “astroturfing” (because of the fake grass-roots nature of the message). The smear videos have been connected to a professional PR firm, the kind of firm Axelrod would turn to in order to disseminate his message. No direct evidence of such a link has been established but to do so would be very difficult for any outside investigation.
Company employees and family members of Winner & Associates have been connected to the placement of these videos on Youtube. In addition, they have been shown to have sent notice of these videos to the fringe left-wing websites, the Democratic Underground and Daily Kos. Those smear machine websites then urged their readers - hundreds of thousands of them - to spread word about the smear videos.
Bloggers at the website “The Jawa Report” have used their collective investigative talent to expose the smear campaign. Normally, the blog specializes in tracking down and stopping sources of internet-based Islamic extremism, also known as jihadist propaganda. The bloggers recently turned their abilities to finding the source of the Palin smear videos. They present strong evidence linking Winner & Associates to the videos including an email from one of the postings that is assigned to the domain name for the company's website.
The “Jawans” also compared the smear videos to videos known to have been produced by David Axelrod's media company in support of the Obama campaign. The Jawa Report presents strong evidence that the female voice-over used in the smear videos is the same voice used in all of the Obama campaign videos from Axelrod's company. In addition, the investigators who routinely review jihadist videos for clues have determined that the video and production quality of the smear videos was high and likely done by a professional production company, not a “grassroots” effort.
The connections provide a clear, although yet to be fully proven, scenario. Based upon the evidence it appears that Axelrod likely orchestrated the smear campaign providing his media company resources to create the smear videos for the PR firm which launched the viral campaign. It was all meant to look like it came from some where other than the Obama campaign, a prime example of “astroturfing”.

Update: With in minutes of the revelation of this information at The Jawa Report the smear videos were taken down by the poster on Youtube. Anticipating this, the Jawans made a copy and reposted it.

Click on the link to see the pernicious video.

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda....Dems Collapse FannieMae/FreddieMac to Cause Panic

Bloomberg has the most cogent description of how a Dem party-line vote to stop reform of the FanFred Ponzi Scheme was headed by criminals like Rangel and Dodd [oh, yeah, Obama was #2 on the FanFred donations list].

Hitchens on Bernard-Henri Levi [And Vice Versa]

BHL is a well-known French intellectual---a sort of new Raymond Aron or Henri Servan-Schrieber---who has become more than just another dreary bore on the French left.

This article has enough meat for more than just gnawing. I do like Hitchens' pointing out "Orwell’s remark that it’s not enough to be antifascist; one must also be in principle antitotalitarian."

The same paper has a clown named Victor Navasky claim that evidence that the Rosenbergs were guilty isn't important, but that government is to blame. With "useful idiots" like Navasky around, it is comfortable to see that the US can support a totalitarian even when he lies about the USG----oh, BTW, this clown is editor of The Nation & on the CSJ Pulitzer Committee, in case you ever believe Pulitzers might be awarded for actual investigative reporting.

Rangel, Bernhardt & other NY Women Exhibit Palin Derangement Syndrome

Rangel says Sarah Palin is "disabled," adding insult after the injury of robbing taxpayers of his due taxes on many different residences and illegal use of same for political goals. Of course, there was another Vice Presidential Candidate who had no foreign policy experience, and as a President was disabled---FDR!!!

Sandra Bernhardt & Woody Allen, renowned incestuous child molester both weigh in among others to spew their various versions of nonesensical over-the-top verbiage---the word Sarah would use---to disgrace themselves and ruin what little cred feminazis had in remaining in the gas tank.

Thunder-Muffin RINO Brooks Inveighs [Again] About Sarah Palin

David Brooks is desperately eager to prove to his NYT paymasters & PBS that he is taken with Sarah Palin & along with other Upper West Side stalwarts of the RINO elite [Frum, Noonan, Murphy, et al.] isn't taken with this small town Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington trope.

The elitists favor sophistication, but the common-sense folk favor simplicity. The elitists favor deliberation, but the populists favor instinct.

This populist tendency produced the term-limits movement based on the belief that time in government destroys character but contact with grass-roots America gives one grounding in real life. And now it has produced Sarah Palin.

Palin is the ultimate small-town renegade rising from the frontier to do battle with the corrupt establishment. Her followers take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite. The feminists declare that she’s not a real woman because she doesn’t hew to their rigid categories. People who’ve never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.

Look at the condescension and snobbery oozing from elite quarters, her backers say. Look at the endless string of vicious, one-sided attacks in the news media. This is what elites produce. This is why regular people need to take control.

And there’s a serious argument here. In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

But Brooks is having none of it. He now has become a true RINO standard bearer, another Lincoln Chafee or Chuck Hagel and spends the rest of his column in a soft-shoe Bush-Derangement-Syndrome rant. All of which points out the DNC talking points about Sarah Palin's inexperience.

He is a true Upper West Sider in his absolute silence about the colossal inexperience of Barack Obama, whose resume is, if anything, thinner than Palin's. On energy issues, Palin is truly the most knowledgeable governor. Not a word from Thunder Muffin. On most issues, Barry is woefully untested, and cannot participate in town hall meetings with McCain because he is routinely flummoxed without a teleprompter. Obama needs to shout fire in a crowded room about the economy, hoping it will sink further. Why not note that, Thunder Muffin?

While noting the condescension and snobbery, TM joins it in his unreasoned rejection of Palin---let's face it, he's probably a closet-sexist himself or perhaps diligent about keeping his unracist credentials burnished and buffed.

How else to explain not a word about the colossal hoax that is Barack Obama & his invisible resume---the magic negro, as the Los Angeles Times famously put it---and BHO's long-time associations with racists and criminal leftists [Ayers, Dohrn, et al.]?

Thunder Muffin wants to keep his NYT day job something fierce.

Laura Ingraham versus Conservative Elitist David Brooks

Laura has my vote on this eloquent encomium to to populist good sense of the American voter:

In today's New York Times, David Brooks launches a critique of Sarah Palin, essentially concluding that her populist appeal is dangerous and ill-conceived. He yearns for the day when "conservatism was once a frankly elitist movment," one that stressed "classical education, hard-earned knowledged, experience, and prudence." Brooks, like a handful of other conservative intellectuals, believes Palin "compensates for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness."

Well, at the risk of appearing brash, let me say that I am glad to see my old friend finally pushed to the point where he has to make an overt defense of elitism, after years of demonstrating covert support for elitism. We conservatives who believe Governor Palin represents a solid vice-presidential pick should be extremely comfortable engaging this issue.

Brooks's main argument against Palin is that she lacks the type of experience and historical understanding that led President Bush to a 26 percent approval rating in his final months in office. Yet the notion that the Bush Administration got into trouble because it didn't have enough "experience" is absurd. George W. Bush was governor of Texas for six years. His father was president. His primary advisors on matters of foreign policy were Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell. In 2000, it could hardly have been possible to find a more experienced team to head up a GOP administration. Brooks's notion that the Bush Administration was "the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice" is simply ludicrous. Does anyone believe that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld count as "anti-establishment"?

Laura deconstructs the Brooks/Frum/Noonan/Murphy mindset slowly & with devastating sarcasm:

Of course, we could also consider the Nixon Administration. Who had more experience than Richard Nixon? How'd that work out? What about George H.W. Bush? How did his administration do? What about Herbert Hoover — who had vast experience both in terms of dealing with foreign countries during World War I and in terms of dealing with the U.S. economy as secretary of Commerce? How did he do? The truth is that Brooks's basic claim — that experienced leaders are necessarily better than inexperienced leaders — simply doesn't hold water.

Laura has got the bit in her teeth and the woman makes an excursion through the last thirty-five years to demonstrate the feckles Bobbsey-Twin sameness of the Republican and Democrat elites:

Now let's look at the broader issue of elitism versus populism. For Brooks to be right, his elites have to make better policy judgments than average Americans. But he overlooks the fact that in America we have a particularly bad elite, an elite that holds most Americans in contempt and has no sympathy for the history and traditions that make us great. And that elite has been wrong on issue after issue for most of the last 40 years. Who was more right about the Soviet Union, the elites or the people? Who was more right about the need to cut taxes in the 1970s, the elites or the people? Who was more right about the need to get tough on crime, the elites in black robes with life tenure, or the folks cheering for Dirty Harry? Who would Brooks trust to decide critical issues regarding the War on Terror today, the voters or the inside-the-Beltway types who lose sleep over tough interrogation tactics? Elites — particularly our American elite — are much more likely to go for the latest fad, for seek to apply whatever notion is currently trendy in the salons of Europe. To find true Burkean conservatism in this country — to find citizens who are both respectful of our country's traditions and anxious to see our country remain a world leader — you have to turn to the voters.

Laura enunciates the central truth in American politics today---Flyover Country is the Real America which keeps arrogant mindless lemming-like group-think from morphing the USA into another satrapy of the EU-nuch mandarinate's Hyper-Nanny authoritarian statist monster that is destroying that continent demographically, spiritually, and politically:

The truth is that it is no longer possible to govern this country through a conservative elite. We have a radical elite, an elite that believes in climate change, gay marriage, unrestricted abortions, and the United Nations. We have an elite that intends to make massive, liberal changes to every aspect of American life. This elite ruins almost everything it touches — from the schools, to the media, to the universities. Giving more power to the elites means watching the United States become more and more like Europe.

We've al seen what EU-nuch appeasement and self-referential inversion has done to that continent---an outward based economy which taxes its citizens to support vast programs that destroy the family, the church and any semblance of national cohesion:

Populism rests on two great insights. First, it understands that the people (taken as a whole) are often wiser and more prudent than the elites. Average people are almost always respectful of tradition, while elites tend to act like an angry mob trying to tear down the old idols. Second, populism understands that it's not enough to actually have the right policy ideas, you have to have the will to take on the elites who will try to prevent those ideas from going into place. In order to get anything accomplished, the GOP is going to have to use public opinion to override the objections of liberals, including liberals in the media.

Does Sarah Palin have the political skills to successfully govern this country from a populist perspective? It's far too early to say. She is certainly the most promising such figure to come along since the elites were denouncing Ronald Reagan. And therefore we should all wish her well. It is silly to criticize her at this early stage until we know a lot more about her abilities as a leader. I am glad to say that her instincts appear to be sound.

To me, Sarah Palin's instincts, like those of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, are far sounder than the epigonies GHWB & his well-meaning, but feckless son GWB. Her great heart is conjoined with charisma and the ability to communicate that matches Reagan in timing and nuanced understatement. She reminds me of a young Teddy Rooseveldt who burst onto the national scene in 1900 under much the same circumstances to pull Republican chestnuts out of the fire.

I don't know if she's Rushmore material yet, but her spectacular debut augurs a brilliant career if she can avoid the slings and arrows aimed by the pygmies and Uruk-Hais of the ultra-left degenerates while ignoring the sneers of the New Yorkey Brooks/Noonan/Frum triad.