OBAMA WOOS GUN-TOTING GOD NUTS

Ann Coulter:

It's going to take a lot of "framing" for Democrats to recast Obama's explanation to San Francisco cafe society that gun ownership and a belief in God are the byproducts of a psychological disorder brought on by economic hardship.

It is an article of faith with the Democrats that they must fool Americans by simulating agreement with normal people. The winner of the Democratic primary is always the candidate who does the best impersonation of an American.

But then, after all their hard work making believe they're into NASCAR and God, some Democrat invariably slips and lets us know it's all a big fake-out. They're like a gay guy trying to act straight who accidentally refers to Brad Pitt as "yummy!"

Read the whole thing.

Barack and the bomber

Byron York on Barack, Ayers and Coburn:

If we’re judged by those with whom we associate, here’s a question:


Would you rather be associated with a ’60s radical who plotted to bomb the Pentagon and to this day believes, as he said a few years ago, “I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough,” or would you rather be associated with — slight pause, please — Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.)?

...

But wouldn’t Coburn be more comparable to Ayers if he, Coburn, had bombed abortion clinics in the past — and then said that he not only did not regret bombing the clinics but wished that he had done more? And then, after bombing abortion clinics and refusing to express regret, he held a political event in his home for Barack Obama, which Obama attended?

And if all that had happened, would Obama say it wasn’t a problem because Coburn had bombed those clinics a long time ago, when Obama was just 8 years old?

Do you believe that would endear Obama to voters in the Democratic primaries?

As it was, Obama used his Senate colleague Coburn to suggest that the issue was not one of violence, and radicalism, and lawbreaking, but rather a simple disagreement: Sen. Coburn and I disagree on some things, and yet we’re still friendly. Bill Ayers and I disagree on some things, and yet we’re still friendly. So what’s the problem?

That’s not quite good enough.

Tom Maguire pitches in:

As to why the association with Ayers matters, it all goes in the "Getting to Know You" file, along with the "fellow traveler" mom, the socialist dad, the "God DAMN America" minister and the embittered wife. Do we detect a pattern?

Read the rest; the longer the nominating process goes on, the more we learn about Obama. It has been a useful exercise.

Day by Day

Hillary and Obama in Small Town (Remember the culture wars? This week the Democrats sued for peace.)

Remember the culture wars? This week the Democrats sued for peace.

On Friday evening, email queues lit up everywhere with people reacting to Barack Obama's thoughts on life being nasty, bitter and short in small-town America. Time was not long ago that a Democratic candidate could have said such folk cling to guns and religion and are hostile to "diversity" with nary a peep from his party. Not now. Obama was repudiated. Crushed. Media analysis suggested the damage could last til November.

Before midnight, Hillary was paddling down Whiskey River with the boys at Bronko's. Then on Sunday evening, the white flag really went up over the culture war's battlefield.

Hillary and Obama were both at an event in Grantham, Pa., in Cumberland County. That's south of Mechanicsburg and east of Boiling Springs. John Kerry took Pennsylvania by 2.5% in 2004, but Cumberland gave George Bush 64% of its vote. Hillary and Obama were appearing on a CNN event called the "Compassion Forum." They were at a place called Messiah College. Connect the dots.


AP
Knockin' back Crown Royals with the boys at Bronko's.
Campbell Brown to Sen. Clinton: "And you have actually felt the presence of the Holy Spirit on many occasions. Share some of those occasions."

Hillary Clinton: "I have had the experiences on many, many occasions where I felt like the Holy Spirit was there with me as I made a journey . . . You know, it could be walking in the woods. It could be watching a sunset."

Hit rewind on the tape of history. It is 1992, the Republican Convention in Houston, at the Astrodome. This was the moment of arrival for the "Christian right." Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush's VP nominee, spoke to a huge throng of evangelicals about "family values." Pat Buchanan delivered his "culture wars" speech. The press corps, for whom all this was alien ground, was openly hostile to the GOP.

Shelves bend beneath the weight of books analyzing the "war" between religiously oriented cultural conservatives and secular libs. "Piss Christ" and all that. Abortion. Robert Mapplethorpe's erotic photographs banned in Cincinnati. Abortion. Gun control. Michael Moore mocking Charlton Heston. Hollywood's endless Babylon. Home schoolers. Abortion.

Though vilified, these people wouldn't go away. The exit polls for George W. Bush's victory in 2004 revealed that the No. 1 issue for most voters was "moral values." Liberal analysts furiously attacked Karl Rove for "exploiting" these sentiments.

But even Karl Rove couldn't invent God, and God and faith were everywhere in Grantham Sunday evening.

Read the whole thing.

But even as he affirms the fact that evangelical Christians are not outcasts, he explicitly affirms the fact that they are the "other."

Sen. Obama: "Religion is a bulwark . . . Somebody like myself whose entire trajectory, not just during this campaign, but long before, has been to talk about how Democrats need to get in church, reach out to evangelicals, link faith with the work that we do . . .

His advice to the Left: "Give religious reasons for your acts."

You "reach out" to groups that are not part of your group. You "reach out" to people who are not like you. In other worlds, Obama wants Evangelicals to vote for him and others on the Left, but when you come to his house, use the servants entrance and don't expect to be invited for dinner.

WELCOME FREEPERS

The Democrats and Gun Control

Imagine an election race of Pat Robertson versus James Dobson, each of them appearing at organic grocery stores and Starbucks throughout Massachusetts, with each candidate insisting that he alone deserves the vote of gay-marriage advocates. An equally silly spectacle is taking place these days in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Indiana, West Virginia and Kentucky, as Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama compete for the pro-gun vote.

...

A presidential candidate could of course swear devotion to the First Amendment, while declaring that the amendment's purpose is to protect sports reporting and book collecting. And that candidate could still support government lawsuits against publishers, local bans on newspapers, and draconian restrictions on political commentary.

Civil libertarians who supported such a candidate because of his alleged love for the First Amendment would be foolish. Civil libertarians who support Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton because of their purported fealty to the Second Amendment may be bitterly disappointed.

Read the whole thing.

Aliza Shvarts: Abortion Goo Girl Rants Against the "Patriarchal Heteronormative". )(Question: "What is Art")

Depending on who you believe a student at Yale either did or did not impregnate herself multiple times, abort, and turn the process into an art exhibit.

Jimmy's World

Jimmy Carter is the eternal striver. He did not reach the pinnacle of success as a naval officer or a peanut farmer, but he persisted and – thanks to Watergate - got elected to the presidency. There he exhibited the characteristics that got him booted from that office as soon as his first term was up.

Unwilling to fade away in comfortable and blessed obscurity, Jimmy Carter has been on a mission to restore his reputation. His shortcomings before he became president were preformed largely off-stage. No one cared because no one knew. But when he got to the White House, he managed to belly flop on center stage. For Jimmy and Rosalyn, that must have been the most humiliating experience of their lives.

Ever since, they have striven to change the country’s memories of them. First “earnest Jimmy” hammering nails with Habitat for Humanity; then the successful campaign for the Nobel Prize as the Anti-Bush. Combine that with the ceaseless chasing after violent Leftists throughout the globe as their legitimizing agent as a way of getting into the headlines and telling people that he is still relevant. Jimmy is, in a way like the Clintons. He wanted to become president not to do something but to be someone.

Jimmy Carter’s personal crusade is a litmus test. How his actions are recorded and judged will be a test of the American people. If this man is mocked, we will have passed. If he is applauded it will be a mark of our failure as a society and as a people.

Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal gets Jimmy right:

Former President Jimmy Carter has an interesting way of saying more than he intends. He lusts in his heart. He turns to his 13-year-old daughter for foreign policy wisdom. He titles a book, "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid." What Mr. Carter means to say is that he is a flesh-and-blood human being, a caring father, a missionary for peace. What he actually communicates is that he is weirdly libidinal, scarily naive and obsessively hostile to Israel.

Now the 2002 Nobel laureate is in reprise mode. "In a democracy, I realize you don't need to talk to the top leader to know how the country feels," he said over the weekend, responding to a question from an Israeli journalist who noted that Mr. Carter had been snubbed by most of Israel's top leadership and reprimanded by its president, Shimon Peres. "When I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that's the dictator, because he speaks for all the people."


Come again?

Mr. Carter is on a tour of the Middle East, the most newsworthy aspect of which is a scheduled meeting in Damascus with Khaled Mashal, the head of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. More on that below. For now, ponder what he could possibly have meant by this statement. On a charitable view, what Mr. Carter had in mind is that in a democracy it is the people who ultimately make the policy, whereas in a dictatorship it is only the dictator's opinion that counts. Or as W.H. Auden put it, "Only the man behind the rifle [has] free will."

That's not quite what Mr. Carter said, however. He said the dictator "speaks" for "all" the people, just as the people in a democracy speak for themselves. Taken at face value, this is a reflection of every dictator's conceit: that his will is also the general will, whether the people agree with him or not. This is what Fidel Castro meant when he praised Cuba's elections, in which only the Communist Party is on the ballot, as "the most democratic in the world." Perhaps Mr. Carter has harbored similar views about the relative merits of his opinion versus the people's since he was turned out of high office by 44 states.

Evil is at its most dangerous when it's smiling.

UPDATE: Welcome Freepers. Please look around. And give to FreeRepublic.

Day By Day

What Happened in Basra, Volume 3

The battle that the MSM tells us that the Iraqi government lost and Sadr won is now turning out differently.

Basra residents expressed gratitude for the actions of Nouri al-Maliki in clearing out the armed militia from the most critical city in the south, according to Agence France Presse. Far from a disaster, the military action has restored order to the city and made it safer for the residents. Residents in Umm Qasr echoed these sentiments after their liberation from the Mahdi Army:

Three weeks after Iraqi troops swarmed into the southern city of Basra to take on armed militiamen who had overrun the streets, many residents say they feel safer and that their lives have improved.
The fierce fighting which marked the first week of Operation Sawlat al-Fursan (Charge of the Knights) has given way to slower, more focused house-by-house searches by Iraqi troops, which led on Monday to the freeing of an abducted British journalist.
Residents say the streets have been cleared of gunmen, markets have reopened, basic services have been resumed and a measure of normality has returned to the oil-rich city.
The port of Umm Qasr is in the hands of the Iraqi forces who wrested control of the facility from Shiite militiamen, and according to the British military it is operational once again.

Once again, the American media got caught with its pants down and their, er, aspirations showing. They wanted the military operation to represent a breakdown of the government so badly that they reported it as a defeat even as the Iraqi Army adapted and prevailed against the militia members. They still have yet to acknowledge that the Basra and Umm Qasr operations have largely met their goals, and have driven Moqtada al-Sadr even further outside the political arena.

It does not take a military expert to figure out that the army that stops fighting and lays down its arms is not the winner. But for some reason, the MSM were too "stupid?" to figure this out? Or were they blinded by the same kind of superior wisdom that infects Obama?

Day By Day

No End in Sight (To Obama Revelations)

Victor Davis Hanson believes that the summer will be filled with Obama revealing himself for what he is: a self absorbed yuppie with an entitlement mentality.

Obama's problems are many, and they probably won't go away since they are predicated on two inescapable facts: 1) the Obamas really are out-of-touch with the experiences of most of America; that they are right when they imply that they are poorer than most candidates such as the Clintons, McCains, Edwards, Kerrys, Gores, Cheneys, Bushes, etc. does not mean that they are not fabulously better off than 95% of the rest of America that votes; 2) they could care less about redressing their lack of exposure, and so see nothing wrong in anything they've said or done—or will say or do in the future.

Rev. Wright, as we've seen recently with his latest comments about the Founding Fathers et al., won't go away, loves the publicity that follows each additional inanity, and won't be cut loose by Obama. There will be a periodic outburst every three or four weeks, and the remedy—the "discussion" on race—has already been used up. Like the Clintonian tear, you only get one shot with that mitigation. Some nut in the public arena usually says something racist about every 6 months or so, and when the next Imus or Richards sounds off, the ensuing discussion will now include Obamian contextualization.

As we saw in her spech today, Michelle won't stop—and is clueless that an Ivy-League educated, $300,000 plus salaried lawyer in a $1.6 million house, cannot be a perpetual victim by virtue of her race.

Cf. her latest sarcasm: "Now when is the last time you've seen a president of the United States who just paid off his loan debt? But, then again, maybe I'm out of touch."

This too won't pass, and expect more of her defiance all summer and autumn long to add to the existing corpus of a "mean" US that does not merit "pride" and is full of clueless unaware citizens. Most Americans have little sympathy with anyone who feels it is a hardship to pay back thousands of dollars invested in a Harvard Law degree. Their likely rejoinder to today's sarcasm: 'Well then, if you feel pinched by paying back your loans, don't give Rev. Wright $20,000." At some point, some advisor might politely suggest: "Michelle, give one—just one—sermon on the beauty and exceptionalism of the United States, and how and why it gave you, and millions of other Americans, opportunities undreamed of elsewhere. Just one speech, just one like that."

Obama himself—cf. 'typical white person', the Pennsylvania mess, and things like Wright and his church being "not particularly controversial" —likewise at 3-4-week intervals will say something that will be taken either as condescending or racialist. And in the aggregate these "conflations" shown on evening news "loops" and "snippets" by August or so will cement the growing impression of uneasiness among the American people. Race has nothing to do with it; a certain smugness everything.

The American people will forgive slips, even condescension IF they are followed by genuine apology and not repeated ad infinitum. But in this case, there will be a growing weariness, followed by anger, at the notion that a Presidential candidate thinks he can say whatever he wishes, associate with whomever he wants, and feel it's the electorate's, not his own, ensuing problem. So the rub for the Obama campaign is not simply that he has no experience outside the Ivy League and Chicago, or even that he made a Faustian bargain with the Trinity church to jump-start his career, but rather his hubris—which as we speak is bringing on nemesis.

Barack Obama, The Yuppie Candidate

Jonah Goldberg in the first yuppie candidate.

Barack Obama is finally coming into focus.

For a while now, the Obamaphiles have insisted that their candidate represents a profound break with the past. No more culture wars. No more “re-litigating the 1960s,” in Obama’s own words.

But what about re-litigating the 1980s?

There’s always been a certain cultural lag time to Barack and Michelle Obama, a kitschiness that’s hard to pinpoint. But I think I’ve got it: They’re self-hating yuppies straight out of the 1980s, which were to the Obamas what the 1960s were to the Clintons.

For those too young to remember, “yuppie” was shorthand for young urban professionals — think Michael J. Fox as Alex P. Keaton in the TV series “Family Ties” — who allegedly represented the collapse of ’60s values and the triumph of ’80s greed. Yuppies sold their souls for a BMW and a condo.

Ironically, the biggest complaints about yuppie materialism came from self-loathing liberal yuppies — like the Obamas.

The Obamas still seem stuck in that time warp, clinging to ’80s-style resentments and political assumptions. Michelle Obama is never so eloquent as when she’s complaining about the burden of student loans for her two Ivy League degrees and covering the high cost of summer camp and piano lessons for her kids on her family’s half-million-dollars-a-year income.

“Don’t go into corporate America,” she exhorted low-income working mothers in Ohio in February, even though she is a highly compensated hospital executive. She admits to being consumed with “a constant sense of guilt” over having to balance work, politics, and family. “It’s guilt, feeling guilty all the time.”

It’s telling that for the Clintons, JFK defined politics, but for Obama, Ronald Reagan is the role model. Last year, Obama admitted to admiring the Gipper’s “transformative” leadership (though not his policies). Indeed, not only did Reagan restore confidence in the nation while reducing confidence in government, he put a stake in the heart of the “Vietnam syndrome” and the blame-America-first ethos of the Democratic Party. The Reagan Revolution moved the country durably to the right — so much so that even Democrats saw the writing on the wall. Obama wants to erase that writing.

As countless commentators have chronicled, Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory stemmed from the fact that he was a “different kind of Democrat” — that is, one who understood the lessons of Reaganism, or at least claimed to, and rejected the “brain-dead policies” of the old Democratic Party. He was a pro-death-penalty free-trader who oversaw the triumph of the Reaganite welfare reform.

But it’s as if Obama spent the 1990s in some kind of Democratic Brigadoon and didn’t keep up with his party, let alone the nation. Obama, the man of the future, in fact stands athwart that history, yelling “Stop!”

This is the best way to understand his recent comments at a San Francisco fundraiser as he explained his challenge of connecting with rural and small-town voters.

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania,” he said, “and ... the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. ... It’s not surprising, then, that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

When his comments sparked a controversy, he dismissed it as a “little typical sort of political flare-up because I said something that everybody knows is true.”

But everybody doesn’t know anything of the sort. Not in this decade anyway. Obama’s merely recycling the liberal cliches of the ’80s, namely that Pennsylvania’s “bitter” voters have been duped by “wedge issues” like guns, religion, and racial resentment. New Democrats recognized that wedge issues are legitimate concerns. Old Democrats remain in denial.

“My rival in this race,” he said in 2007, “is not other candidates, it’s cynicism.” And, of course, Obama is against “division.” This treacle was once dismissed as naive idealism, a.k.a. “the politics of hope.” But the code has been broken. His real opponent is the “division” that made Reagan, the Bushes and the Clintons possible and brought politics to the center, where the country was all along.

Slate columnist Mickey Kaus has been waiting for Obama to “pivot” to the center as Clinton did in 1992. But it may be that America’s most reliably liberal senator doesn’t think he has to. He isn’t a unifier. He’s a counter-revolutionary. And waiting for him to pivot is like waiting for Godot.

When you don't think you did anything wrong, you will not make a proper apology. You will claim, as Obama did that he is misunderstood. That his words were twisted. It's the old "If I have offended anyone I apologize" non-apology.

Breaking the CFL light bulb

Thomas Sowell tells us how to clean up after a CFL light bulb breaks:

You are supposed to shut off all air conditioners or heaters, to keep them from circulating mercury vapor from the broken CFL. You are supposed to open windows and doors to air out the place.

Pregnant women and small children are supposed to leave the area while the mess is being cleaned up by someone else, wearing a dust mask and gloves.

Snob-ama Is Not Alone

Michell Malkin at Townhall:

Obama is reportedly flummoxed that his remarks have been interpreted as arrogant. After all, he was a "community organizer" who came from a single-parent home! He is The Everyman. The Uniter. The Soul-Fixer. The Vessel of All Hopes and Dreams. How could he possibly be perceived as out of touch

Read the whole thing.

I’d hesitate to say [Obama’s] a Marxist or an Elitist

Read the comments by Richard John Neuhaus

Obama Supporters In Their Own Words

Pat Buchanan wrote an article in Townhall: In Darkest Pennsylvania. I usually scroll down for the comments when I read an article because they are often interesting, amusing or instructive ... at least in what they reveal of the people who write them. Herewith is an example of someone who supports Obama:

trughes writes: Tuesday, April, 15, 2008 2:20 AM
...
So, where IS Barack wrong? Has Fox/Pravda been explaining the situation well? Is it really the immigrants that are stealing the jobs, those Pennsylvania poor could have gotten, picking grapes, pruning vineyards of a freezing morning and underpaid, or cleaning hotel rooms for minimum wage? Or is it corporate America, off-shore-ing their profits and even Social security, as we recently heard from Steigenburger from Steigliz, about Halliburton?

Where is he wrong? You say it yourself "corporate greed," but don't forget corporate welfare, passing laws to let Enron shut down plants and raise the cost of electricity.

Barak is right to say the middle of America "clings to their guns", with one conservative newspaper and Fox News pandering to their fears. It has always been true that those with limited inputs are more susceptible to fear-mongering. It is undeniable that the national news of Fox News tells Americans that they have to be afraid. That's why people who live in the backcountry are considered less well informed than the "chabils-and-brie" set. When people are less informed, they are more susceptible to fear.

If we had laws, like we used to, that prohibited biased newscasting, if Walter Cronkhite could still get a job, then those people might be better informed, they might fear less, and they might not feel their right to have a gun is their most important right.

Have you ever asked a gun-rights advocate why he wants his gun? Because he's afraid !!! But, why are the people in the rural areas more scared than the people living in cities? There's less danger. It's because they are victims of fear-mongering.

The gun-rights people feel they have to defend themselves, when that should be what a decent government does. Do Europeans feel the need to go to bed with a gun at their side? No.

In that regard, Barak is right.

In Darkest Pennsylvania

I don't read Pat Buchanan much any more but he is a good writer even when he's wrong. This time he nails it.

It was said behind closed doors to the chablis-and-brie set of San Francisco, in response to a question as to why he was not doing better in that benighted and barbarous land they call Pennsylvania.

Like Dr. Schweitzer, home from Africa to address the Royal Society on the customs of the upper Zambezi, Barack described Pennsylvanians in their native habitats of Atloona, Alquippa, Johnstown and McKeesport.

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and ... the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them.

"And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

This is the pitch-perfect Hollywood-Harvard stereotype of the white working class, the caricature of the urban ethnic -- as seen from the San Francisco point of view.

As Linus clung to his security blanket, Barack is saying, out-state Pennsylvanians, bitter at the world that has passed them by, cling to their Bibles and guns and naturally revert to ancestral bigotries against "people who aren't like them" -- blacks, gays and immigrants.

Though he sees himself as a progressive who has risen above prejudice, Barack was reflecting and pandering to the prejudice of the class to which he himself belongs, and which he was then addressing.

A few months back, Michelle Obama revealed her mindset about America with the remark that, "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country." Barack has now revealed how he, too, sees the country. The Great Unifier divides the nation into us and them.

The "us" are the privileged cosmopolitan elite of San Francisco and his Ivy League upbringing. The "them" are the folks in the small towns and rural areas of that other America. Toward these folks, Obama's attitude is not one of hostility, but of paternalism. Because time has passed them by, Barack believes, they cannot, in their frustration and bitterness, be held fully accountable for their atavistic beliefs and behavior.

Though neither mocking nor malicious, Barack's remarks are, nonetheless, steeped in condescension. Inherent in his words is that these folks in Middle Pennsylvania are in need of empathy, education, assistance and perhaps therapy.

His remarks are of a piece with his address on civil rights that liberals have compared favorably to Lincoln's Second Inaugural.

Note, from that Philadelphia address, the highlighted words.

"Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race ... as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything. ... They ... feel their dreams slipping away ... opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.

"Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism."

In Barack's mind, black anger and resentment at "racial injustice and inequality" are "legitimate." But the anger and resentment of white folks, about affirmative action, crime and forced busing are born of misperceptions -- and of "bogus claims of racism" manipulated and exploited by conservative columnists and commentators to keep the racial pot boiling and retain power, so the right can continue to do the bidding of the corporations that are the real enemy.

Barack has stumbled into the eternal failing of the left-wing populist. He cannot concede that the anger of white America -- that its right to equal justice has been sacrificed to salve the consciences of guilt-besotted liberals -- is a legitimate anger. The truth that Barack dare not speak is that reverse discrimination is pandemic and that the folks in Middle Pennsylvania have a valid grievance that ought to be addressed.

So, Barack sought in Philadelphia to redirect their anger.

"(T)hese white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze -- a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many."

Barack is not wrong here. Corporations, out of naked greed, have deserted America. And the Clinton and Bush administrations have been unresponsive to the social impact of deindustrialization. But Barack cannot concede that white Americans are today's victims of state-sanctioned racism.

A gifted candidate, Barack, after stumbling for 48 hours, has regained his footing with his witty ripostes about Hillary being "Annie Oakley" with her "six-shooter," spending her Sunday mornings "out on the duck blind."

Obama's remarks about small-town America told us little about small-town America, but a lot about Barack. He is yet another cookie-cutter liberal who has absorbed and internalized the prejudices of that blinkered breed. He is an African-American John Lindsay, the great liberal hope of the Nixon-Agnew era, of whom Frank Manckiewicz once said: He was the only populist he knew who played squash every day at the Yale Club.

How the Asians Became White

It's a MSM thing. You wouldn't understand.

The Worst Thing I've Heard Obama Say

Not all Democrats make excuses when Obama kicks them in the teeth. Here's a girl, a natural Democrat, who thinks Obama really cares, but is beginning to wonder...

Sure, many Americans in places like my hometown are angry and they do "cling'' to guns and God, though not in that order. It's connecting the two that's belittling in the extreme to the "typical white person''—to cite a phrase I chose to overlook at the time. Now, if Obama is sticking by the essence of what he said out of stubbornness or arrogance, that's one kind of problem. But if he really doesn't see why this could be a game-changer, that's worse. And though I've been pretty unrelievedly positive about the guy, it's the first thing he's said that's made me question his ability to win.

See, she still likes him, she just wonders of the people she left behind in the small town of Pennsylvania will vote for Obama. She wonders about his electability.

But why does she wonder. If she likes him, why? What is there about someone who pisses all over your girlhood neighbors that's endearing?

She actually dissects his remarks and disagrees with them, but in the end she still likes him. Is it for the same reason I'll probably vote for McCain? My vote will be a vote against the other candidate; either Obama or Hillary. Is her probable vote for Obama a vote against McCain? Perhaps. Perhaps it's a typical party-line vote. One with no real thought except for deep seated habits and prejudices.

But let's face it, most votes in this or any other country are just like that.

Bill Clinton’s German Paymasters

Via Glenn Reynolds:

DUBIOUS BOOK ADVANCES FOR POLITICIANS. As far as I can recall, the only time this was regarded as an ethical problem was when Newt Gingrich was involved.

Ah, yes, do you remember the OUTRAGE about the advance on Newt Gingrich's book? So what if a Nazi publisher pays Bill about $30 million?

Apart from the sheer mass of the Clintons’ earnings, perhaps the most intriguing revelation contained in the release of the Clinton tax data last week was that Bill Clinton received a whopping $15 million advance in 2001 for what would become his autobiography, My Life.
...
Bill Clinton is reported to have earned $6.3 million from his 2007 volume Giving, which is likewise published by Knopf. This would bring Clinton’s total income from Bertelsmann to nearly $30 million. Just how or why Bertelsmann would pay Bill Clinton $6.3 million for Giving constitutes perhaps an even greater mystery than its $15 million advance for My Life. As of this writing, just over six months after its release, the book is languishing at #1,953 on the Amazon.com sales chart.

And the Bertelsmann ties to the Nazis?

Bertelsmann had massively profited from a close collaboration with the Nazi regime, serving notably as the principal supplier of so-called “front literature” for the Wehrmacht. Heinrich Mohn, it turned out, had himself been an honorary member of the SS — an “honor” obtained by virtue of his generous financial donations to the Nazis’ elite paramilitary force. More damningly still, as Fischler and co-author Franck Böckelmann discuss in their 2004 book-length exposé of Bertelsmann, the current family patriarch, Reinhard Mohn, helped to cover up his father’s ties to the Nazi regime from the Allied occupation authorities, thus permitting the company to resume publishing after the War. Reinhard Mohn’s role in this latter connection makes the company’s subsequent pleadings of ignorance about its Nazi-era history appear particularly disingenuous.

And now for Obama:

Incidentally, a large chunk of Barack Obama’s income — far outstripping his Senate salary — is also reported to come from a book deal. In late 2004, shortly before joining the Senate, he signed a deal for three books that promised him a healthy $1.9 million in advances. This included $850,000 for what would become The Audacity of Hope. Obama’s publisher is the Crown Publishing Group, yet another division of Random House. Or in other words, Bertelsmann.