Friday, November 2, 2012
OPRAH MAY TIP THE SCALES FOR MITT ROMENY IN 2012 JUST AS SHE TIPPED THE SCALES FOR OBAMA IN 20008
!!!!
No wonder Oprah is a billionaire. Fool me once, Barack, shame on you! Fool me twice shame on me!
Need we say more! Last election Oprah brought in approximately 5% of the vote for Obama.
Now she knows exactly what she is doing by being with Mittt and Ann. She is saying that Mitt is a marvelous man, and Ann is an excellent woman. They are now friends and, right before the election...she is really endorsing and supporting Mitt.
What happened? She dropped Obama because the man has no character. He didn't even call her and thank her after he won the election! He used her and all other moneyed and connected people in Chicago to advance his ambition.
No wonder Oprah is a billionaire. Fool me once, Barack, shame on you! Fool me twice shame on me!
Need we say more! Last election Oprah brought in approximately 5% of the vote for Obama.
Now she knows exactly what she is doing by being with Mittt and Ann. She is saying that Mitt is a marvelous man, and Ann is an excellent woman. They are now friends and, right before the election...she is really endorsing and supporting Mitt.
What happened? She dropped Obama because the man has no character. He didn't even call her and thank her after he won the election! He used her and all other moneyed and connected people in Chicago to advance his ambition.
AFTER TUESDAY THE POLLS WILL NOT BE WORTH JOHN GARNER'S BUCKET OF WARM SPIT
!!!!
November 2, 2012 |
All the signs say it’s Romney
By Wes Pruden
Four days out, it looks like Romney.
October has come and gone with no surprise, with
just a slow, plodding accumulation of signs and portents suggesting that
“the One” who has come will soon be gone.
The polls are tight and the numbers are steady, but it begins to feel like 1980 again, when a tight race between President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan broke open over the last weekend. His own pollsters went to Mr. Jimmy and Miss Rosalynn on Monday morning to tell them that “the numbers just aren’t there.”
If President Obama has taken such a meeting, there’s no hint of it. Both the Obama and Romney camps naturally predict victory, but the president’s men are a little more emphatic than their numbers warrant, which suggests they may be working hard to keep hope alive.
Mr. Obama will close his campaign Monday where it all started, with a rally in Des Moines after stops in Wisconsin and Ohio. The attention he’s paying to states he had locked up a fortnight ago tells a lot about how the campaign ends. Iowa can contribute only six votes to what the president expected would be a landslide.
The president has been to Iowa 11 times this year; Mr. Romney will make his 14th visit with a rally in Dubuque on Saturday. He will close on Monday in New Hampshire, fighting for four electoral votes. It may be a poetic way to end a long and contentious marathon, but sentiment has nothing to do with it. Neither man would be struggling in the dying hours of the campaign for nickels and dimes if the race were a settled issue.
The latest Iowa polls show an exceedingly tight race: A Marist poll, out Thursday, gives the president a 6-point lead, and a poll by the University of Iowa of the day before shows the president ahead only by 42.7 percent to 41 percent. Fighting for fractions is no portent of a landslide.
Nevertheless, some wise heads say they see the signs of a dramatic and decisive break toward the challenger. The important swing states, particularly Ohio, may have swung. Dick Morris, the campaign consultant turned pundit who invented Bill Clinton in Arkansas and in two presidential campaigns, has turned caution aside to speak of landslide, though he calls it a vote of “historic proportions.”
The campaign has reached a tipping point and it goes back to the first debate. “Reasonable voters saw that the voice of hope and optimism and positivism was Romney while the president was only a nitpicking, quarrelsome, negative figure,” he says. “The contrast does not work in Obama’s favor.”
Indeed. The Obama campaign spent a hundred million dollars on television advertising to paint Mitt Romney as an evil Wall Street villain, lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills, making the kids’ dog ride on the roof of the car. He was the kind of villain who would shoot Big Bird and serve it for supper with imported champagne. Then came the first debate, revealing Mitt Romney as an ordinary rich guy with beer and hamburger tastes like the rest of us. The president revealed himself spoiled and petulant, in a pout for his teleprompter and barely able to hide his irritation at having to answer questions like any other candidate. It’s been uphill for him since.
Mr. Romney slowly overtook the president in the polls, and has held a small but consistent advantage since. Over the past week, by the reckoning of the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Romney has led in 19 of 31 national surveys, the president in only 7. Mr. Romney’s percentage has been above 50 percent in 10 of those polls, Mr. Obama's in none.
“It comes down to numbers,” Karl Rove, the genius of George W. Bush’s two successful campaigns, writes in the Wall Street Journal. “And in the final days of this presidential race, from polling data to early voting, they favor Mitt Romney.”
Soon enough none of these numbers, accurate or not, will matter. We’ll vote and that will settle it. Only one prediction here: The electoral college, as it nearly always does, will follow the popular vote, and national popular vote will outperform the polls.
The polls have been skewed by fear. The mainstream media has been relentless with its message, abetted in ways large and small by the Obama campaign, that only bigots, churls and haters would vote against a black incumbent. This is the ultimate racism, that a failed black incumbent can’t be held to account like a failed white incumbent.
Numbers can lie, of course, but if President Obama pulls this one out, the numbers have told a whopper.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
The polls are tight and the numbers are steady, but it begins to feel like 1980 again, when a tight race between President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan broke open over the last weekend. His own pollsters went to Mr. Jimmy and Miss Rosalynn on Monday morning to tell them that “the numbers just aren’t there.”
If President Obama has taken such a meeting, there’s no hint of it. Both the Obama and Romney camps naturally predict victory, but the president’s men are a little more emphatic than their numbers warrant, which suggests they may be working hard to keep hope alive.
Mr. Obama will close his campaign Monday where it all started, with a rally in Des Moines after stops in Wisconsin and Ohio. The attention he’s paying to states he had locked up a fortnight ago tells a lot about how the campaign ends. Iowa can contribute only six votes to what the president expected would be a landslide.
The president has been to Iowa 11 times this year; Mr. Romney will make his 14th visit with a rally in Dubuque on Saturday. He will close on Monday in New Hampshire, fighting for four electoral votes. It may be a poetic way to end a long and contentious marathon, but sentiment has nothing to do with it. Neither man would be struggling in the dying hours of the campaign for nickels and dimes if the race were a settled issue.
The latest Iowa polls show an exceedingly tight race: A Marist poll, out Thursday, gives the president a 6-point lead, and a poll by the University of Iowa of the day before shows the president ahead only by 42.7 percent to 41 percent. Fighting for fractions is no portent of a landslide.
Nevertheless, some wise heads say they see the signs of a dramatic and decisive break toward the challenger. The important swing states, particularly Ohio, may have swung. Dick Morris, the campaign consultant turned pundit who invented Bill Clinton in Arkansas and in two presidential campaigns, has turned caution aside to speak of landslide, though he calls it a vote of “historic proportions.”
The campaign has reached a tipping point and it goes back to the first debate. “Reasonable voters saw that the voice of hope and optimism and positivism was Romney while the president was only a nitpicking, quarrelsome, negative figure,” he says. “The contrast does not work in Obama’s favor.”
Indeed. The Obama campaign spent a hundred million dollars on television advertising to paint Mitt Romney as an evil Wall Street villain, lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills, making the kids’ dog ride on the roof of the car. He was the kind of villain who would shoot Big Bird and serve it for supper with imported champagne. Then came the first debate, revealing Mitt Romney as an ordinary rich guy with beer and hamburger tastes like the rest of us. The president revealed himself spoiled and petulant, in a pout for his teleprompter and barely able to hide his irritation at having to answer questions like any other candidate. It’s been uphill for him since.
Mr. Romney slowly overtook the president in the polls, and has held a small but consistent advantage since. Over the past week, by the reckoning of the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Romney has led in 19 of 31 national surveys, the president in only 7. Mr. Romney’s percentage has been above 50 percent in 10 of those polls, Mr. Obama's in none.
“It comes down to numbers,” Karl Rove, the genius of George W. Bush’s two successful campaigns, writes in the Wall Street Journal. “And in the final days of this presidential race, from polling data to early voting, they favor Mitt Romney.”
Soon enough none of these numbers, accurate or not, will matter. We’ll vote and that will settle it. Only one prediction here: The electoral college, as it nearly always does, will follow the popular vote, and national popular vote will outperform the polls.
The polls have been skewed by fear. The mainstream media has been relentless with its message, abetted in ways large and small by the Obama campaign, that only bigots, churls and haters would vote against a black incumbent. This is the ultimate racism, that a failed black incumbent can’t be held to account like a failed white incumbent.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
| November 2, 2012 | SHARE |
Thursday, November 1, 2012
WHAT WOULD BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA'S MADATE BE IF HE WERE TO WIN NEXT TUESDAY?
!!!!
Win or Lose, Obama Sure Is Lost
Seth Mandel
| @SethAMandel
11.01.2012 - 4:40 PM
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/11/01/win-or-lose-obama-sure-is-lost/
11.01.2012 - 4:40 PM http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/11/01/win-or-lose-obama-sure-is-lost/
Alana asks
a very good question: Is an election on big ideas even possible when
Barack Obama is one of the candidates? Another way of asking this would
be: What would Barack Obama’s mandate be if he wins?
It’s not an easy question to answer. He can certainly argue that, while he’s not proposing any serious plans or policies, he would at least protect the public from Mitt Romney, who would strive to outlaw whatever it is they like. But, like his accusation that Romney would ban abortion, the claims are made up out of whole cloth, and therefore easily debunked.
And that explains why the president looks so lost. I am not among those who think Obama’s visit to the areas affected by Hurricane Sandy elevated him much above his challenger, in part because it’s been so long since he acted presidential that he just looks so out of place everywhere people are trying to do serious work. This is not to take any credit away from him for the federal services provided to victims of the storm, but his press conference and appearances with Chris Christie did not seem to be much to his benefit. Christie was lively, authoritative, empathetic, and always prepared with important information. Obama read names of mayors off a paper in front of him, expressionless and monotone, as if he were standing not in front of a disaster area but a green screen. Michael Bloomberg correctly asked the president to please stay away from New York City, where he would only be a burden, due especially to the traffic congestion caused by road closures, mass transit suspensions, and the malfunctioning crane at 57th Street.
Obama has built his firewall around Ohio this election, which is why someone more popular than the president—Bill Clinton—is currently there on his behalf. Where do you campaign if you have nothing to say? How do you draw a large crowd without large ideas?
This gets to another problem with the election. If Obama wins, it might very well be because Romney ran out of time to catch him, for the polling trends are much kinder to the challenger than the incumbent. Which means that his so-called “kill Romney” strategy, in which the president’s campaign sought to bury Romney early on with the politics of personal destruction that even included whipping up attacks on Romney’s religion, will be credited with making the difference.
It’s possible, also, that the campaign will pat itself on the back for its Big Bird, binders, and birth control attacks. Which brings me back to Alana’s post and her discussion of the Lena Dunham ad. Dunham’s sharp HBO show, which deserves the praise it has received, has been lauded by social conservatives as well as liberal Millennials tired of entrusting their pop culture depictions to those outside their own generation.
Whether you think the show is intended to be literal or just sly social commentary, the characters are aimless. Which is why it’s so appropriate to see Dunham cut an ad for the aimless president she supports. But Obama isn’t a Millennial having too much fun in Brooklyn to settle down. He’s the president of the United States and he’s asking for a second term. Even if he’s not quite sure why.
It’s not an easy question to answer. He can certainly argue that, while he’s not proposing any serious plans or policies, he would at least protect the public from Mitt Romney, who would strive to outlaw whatever it is they like. But, like his accusation that Romney would ban abortion, the claims are made up out of whole cloth, and therefore easily debunked.
And that explains why the president looks so lost. I am not among those who think Obama’s visit to the areas affected by Hurricane Sandy elevated him much above his challenger, in part because it’s been so long since he acted presidential that he just looks so out of place everywhere people are trying to do serious work. This is not to take any credit away from him for the federal services provided to victims of the storm, but his press conference and appearances with Chris Christie did not seem to be much to his benefit. Christie was lively, authoritative, empathetic, and always prepared with important information. Obama read names of mayors off a paper in front of him, expressionless and monotone, as if he were standing not in front of a disaster area but a green screen. Michael Bloomberg correctly asked the president to please stay away from New York City, where he would only be a burden, due especially to the traffic congestion caused by road closures, mass transit suspensions, and the malfunctioning crane at 57th Street.
Obama has built his firewall around Ohio this election, which is why someone more popular than the president—Bill Clinton—is currently there on his behalf. Where do you campaign if you have nothing to say? How do you draw a large crowd without large ideas?
This gets to another problem with the election. If Obama wins, it might very well be because Romney ran out of time to catch him, for the polling trends are much kinder to the challenger than the incumbent. Which means that his so-called “kill Romney” strategy, in which the president’s campaign sought to bury Romney early on with the politics of personal destruction that even included whipping up attacks on Romney’s religion, will be credited with making the difference.
It’s possible, also, that the campaign will pat itself on the back for its Big Bird, binders, and birth control attacks. Which brings me back to Alana’s post and her discussion of the Lena Dunham ad. Dunham’s sharp HBO show, which deserves the praise it has received, has been lauded by social conservatives as well as liberal Millennials tired of entrusting their pop culture depictions to those outside their own generation.
Whether you think the show is intended to be literal or just sly social commentary, the characters are aimless. Which is why it’s so appropriate to see Dunham cut an ad for the aimless president she supports. But Obama isn’t a Millennial having too much fun in Brooklyn to settle down. He’s the president of the United States and he’s asking for a second term. Even if he’s not quite sure why.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
JACK WHEELER'S DESCRIPTION OF BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA
!!!!
Jack Wheeler is a brilliant man who was the author of Reagan's strategy to break the back of the Soviet Union with the star wars race and expose their inner weakness. For years he wrote a weekly intelligence update that was extremely interesting and well structured and informative. He consults(ed) with several mega corporations on global trends and the future, etc. He is in semi-retirement now. He is a true patriot with a no-nonsense approach to everything. He is also a somewhat well-known mountain climber and adventurer. Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
Jack Wheeler
The
O-man, Barack Hussein Obama, is an eloquently tailored empty suit. No
resume, no accomplishments, no experience, no original ideas, no
understanding of how the economy works, no understanding of how the
world works, no balls, nothing but abstract, empty rhetoric devoid of
real substance.
He has no real identity. He is half-white, which he rejects. The rest of him is mostly Arab, which he hides but is disclosed by his non-African Arabic surname and his Arabic first and middle names as a way to triply proclaim his Arabic parentage to people in Kenya . Only a small part of him is African Black from his Luo grandmother, which he pretends he is exclusively.
What he isn't, not a genetic drop of, is 'African-American,' the descendant of enslaved Africans brought to America chained in slave ships. He hasn't a single ancestor who was a slave. Instead, his Arab ancestors were slave owners. Slave-trading was the main Arab business in East Africa for centuries until the British ended it.
Let that sink in: Obama is not the descendant of slaves, he is the descendant of slave owners. Thus he makes the perfect Liberal Messiah.
It's something Hillary doesn't understand - how some complete neophyte came out of the blue and stole the Dem nomination from her. Obamamania is beyond politics and reason. It is a true religious cult, whose adherents reject Christianity yet still believe in Original Sin, transferring it from the evil of being human to the evil of being white.
Thus Obama has become the white liberals' Christ, offering absolution from the Sin of Being White. There is no reason or logic behind it, no faults or flaws of his can diminish it, no arguments Hillary could make of any kind can be effective against it. The absurdity of Hypocrisy Clothed In Human Flesh being their Savior is all the more cause for liberals to worship him: Credo quia absurdum, I believe it because it is absurd.
Thank heavens that the voting majority of Americans remain Christian and are in no desperate need of a phony savior.
His candidacy is ridiculous and should not be taken seriously by any thinking American.
Jack Wheeler is a brilliant man who was the author of Reagan's strategy to break the back of the Soviet Union with the star wars race and expose their inner weakness. For years he wrote a weekly intelligence update that was extremely interesting and well structured and informative. He consults(ed) with several mega corporations on global trends and the future, etc. He is in semi-retirement now. He is a true patriot with a no-nonsense approach to everything. He is also a somewhat well-known mountain climber and adventurer. Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
He has no real identity. He is half-white, which he rejects. The rest of him is mostly Arab, which he hides but is disclosed by his non-African Arabic surname and his Arabic first and middle names as a way to triply proclaim his Arabic parentage to people in Kenya . Only a small part of him is African Black from his Luo grandmother, which he pretends he is exclusively.
What he isn't, not a genetic drop of, is 'African-American,' the descendant of enslaved Africans brought to America chained in slave ships. He hasn't a single ancestor who was a slave. Instead, his Arab ancestors were slave owners. Slave-trading was the main Arab business in East Africa for centuries until the British ended it.
Let that sink in: Obama is not the descendant of slaves, he is the descendant of slave owners. Thus he makes the perfect Liberal Messiah.
It's something Hillary doesn't understand - how some complete neophyte came out of the blue and stole the Dem nomination from her. Obamamania is beyond politics and reason. It is a true religious cult, whose adherents reject Christianity yet still believe in Original Sin, transferring it from the evil of being human to the evil of being white.
Thus Obama has become the white liberals' Christ, offering absolution from the Sin of Being White. There is no reason or logic behind it, no faults or flaws of his can diminish it, no arguments Hillary could make of any kind can be effective against it. The absurdity of Hypocrisy Clothed In Human Flesh being their Savior is all the more cause for liberals to worship him: Credo quia absurdum, I believe it because it is absurd.
Thank heavens that the voting majority of Americans remain Christian and are in no desperate need of a phony savior.
His candidacy is ridiculous and should not be taken seriously by any thinking American.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
WE'VE GOT GUYS DEAD!
!!!!
http://www.theblaze.com/
Retired Lt. Col.: My Sources Say Obama Was in the Room Watching Benghazi Attack Happen
http://www.theblaze.com/
Retired Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer said Saturday he has sources
saying President Barack Obama was in the room at the White House
watching the assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya unfold.
Two unarmed U.S. drones were dispatched to the consulate and recorded the final hours of the attack, which killed U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
“This was in the middle of the business day in Washington, so everybody at the White House, CIA, Pentagon, everybody was watching this go down,” Shaffer said on Fox News’ “Justice with Judge Jeanine.” “According to my sources, yes, [Obama] was one of those in the White House Situation Room in real-time watching this.”
Shaffer served as a senior operations officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan in 2003 and wrote a book critical of the policies there. The U.S. government purchased the entire print run for $47,000 in an attempt at censorship just before its 2010 publication, claiming it contained classified material.
Shaffer said the question now is what precisely Obama did or didn’t do in the moments he saw the attack unfolding. The CIA reportedly made three urgent requests for military backup that were each denied.
“He, only he, could issue a directive to Secretary of Defense Panetta to do something. That’s the only place it could be done,” Shaffer said.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last week the military did not intervene because they did not have enough information about what was happening on the ground.
Col. David Hunt, a Fox News military analyst, said the military could have had jets in the air within 20 minutes and forces on the ground within two hours.
“The issue is always political with the White House, but the secretary of defense gives the order, has to be approved by the White House, they wouldn’t pull the trigger, and it’s disgraceful,” Hunt said. “We’ve got guys dead.”
Two unarmed U.S. drones were dispatched to the consulate and recorded the final hours of the attack, which killed U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
“This was in the middle of the business day in Washington, so everybody at the White House, CIA, Pentagon, everybody was watching this go down,” Shaffer said on Fox News’ “Justice with Judge Jeanine.” “According to my sources, yes, [Obama] was one of those in the White House Situation Room in real-time watching this.”
Shaffer served as a senior operations officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan in 2003 and wrote a book critical of the policies there. The U.S. government purchased the entire print run for $47,000 in an attempt at censorship just before its 2010 publication, claiming it contained classified material.
Shaffer said the question now is what precisely Obama did or didn’t do in the moments he saw the attack unfolding. The CIA reportedly made three urgent requests for military backup that were each denied.
“He, only he, could issue a directive to Secretary of Defense Panetta to do something. That’s the only place it could be done,” Shaffer said.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last week the military did not intervene because they did not have enough information about what was happening on the ground.
Col. David Hunt, a Fox News military analyst, said the military could have had jets in the air within 20 minutes and forces on the ground within two hours.
“The issue is always political with the White House, but the secretary of defense gives the order, has to be approved by the White House, they wouldn’t pull the trigger, and it’s disgraceful,” Hunt said. “We’ve got guys dead.”
Saturday, October 27, 2012
OH, SAY CAN YOU SEE, HOW SICK IS OUR NATION?
!!!!
Syndicated columnist
"We're going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video," said Hillary Clinton.
No, not the person who made the video saying that voting for Barack Obama is like losing your virginity to a really cool guy. I'll get to that in a moment. But Secretary Clinton was talking about the fellow who made the supposedly Islamophobic video that supposedly set off the sacking of the Benghazi consulate. And, indeed, she did "have that person arrested." By happy coincidence, his bail hearing has been set for three days after the election, by which time he will have served his purpose.
These two videos – the Islamophobic one and the Obamosexual one – bookend the remarkable but wholly deserved collapse of the president's re-election campaign.
You'll recall that a near month-long attempt to blame an obscure YouTube video for the murder of four Americans and the destruction of U.S. sovereign territory climaxed in the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden's bald assertion that the administration had been going on the best intelligence it had at the time. By then, it had been confirmed that there never had been any protest against the video, and that the Obama line that Benghazi had been a spontaneous movie review that just got a little out of hand was utterly false. The only remaining question was whether the administration had knowingly lied or was merely innocently stupid. The innocent-stupidity line became harder to maintain this week after Fox News obtained State Department emails revealing that shortly after 4 p.m. Eastern, less than a half-hour after the assault in Benghazi began, the White House situation room knew the exact nature of it.
We also learned that, in those first moments of the attack, a request
for military back-up was made by U.S. staff on the ground but was
denied by Washington. It had planes and Special Forces less than 500
miles away in southern Italy – or about the same distance as Washington
to Boston. They could have been there in less than two hours. Yet the
commander-in-chief declined to give the order. So Glen Doherty and
Tyrone Woods fought all night against overwhelming odds, and died on a
rooftop in a benighted jihadist hell hole while Obama retired early to
rest up before his big Vegas campaign stop.
"Within minutes of the first bullet being fired, the White House knew these heroes would be slaughtered if immediate air support was denied," said Ty Woods' father, Charles. "In less than an hour, the perimeters could have been secured, and American lives could have been saved. After seven hours fighting numerically superior forces, my son's life was sacrificed because of the White House's decision."
Why would Obama and Biden do such a thing? Because to launch a military operation against an al-Qaida affiliate on the anniversary of 9/11 would have exposed the hollowness of their boast through convention week and the days thereafter – that Osama was dead, and al-Qaida was finished.
And so Ty Woods, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith and Chris Stevens were left to die, and a decision taken to blame an entirely irrelevant video and, as Secretary Clinton threatened, "have that person arrested." And, in the weeks that followed, the government of the United States lied to its own citizens as thoroughly and energetically as any totalitarian state, complete with the midnight knock-on-the-door from not-so-secret policemen sent to haul the designated fall guy into custody.
This goes far beyond the instinctive secretiveness to which even democratic governments are prone. The Obama administration created a wholly fictional storyline, and devoted its full resources to maintaining it. I understand why Mitt Romney chose not to pursue this line of argument in the final debate. The voters who will determine this election are those who voted for Obama four years ago and this time round either switch to the other fellow or sit on their hands. In electoral terms, it's probably prudent of Mitt not to rub their faces in their 2008 votes.
Nevertheless, when the president and other prominent officials stand by as four Americans die and then abuse their sacrifice as contemptuously as this administration did, decency requires that they be voted out of office as an act of urgent political hygiene.
At the photo-op staged for the returning caskets, Obama et al seem to have been too focused on their campaign needs to observe even the minimal courtesies. Charles Woods says that, at the ceremony, Joe Biden strolled over to him and by way of condolence said in a "loud and boisterous" voice, "Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?" One assumes charitably that the vice president is acknowledging in his own inept and blundering way the remarkable courage of a man called upon to die for his country on some worthless sod halfway across the planet. But the near-parodic locker-room coarseness is grotesque both in its inaptness and in its lack of basic human feeling for a bereaved family forced to grieve in public and as crowd-scene extras to the political big shot. Just about the only formal responsibility a vice president has is to attend funerals without embarrassing his country. And this preening buffoon of pseudo-blue-collar faux-machismo couldn't even manage that.
But a funny thing happened over the next six weeks: Obama's own cue balls shriveled. Biden had offered up a deft campaign slogan encompassing both domestic and foreign policy: "Osama's dead, and General Motors is alive." But, as the al-Qaida connections to Benghazi dribbled out, leak by leak, the "Osama's dead" became a problematic boast and, left to stand alone, the General Motors line was even less credible. Avoiding the economy and foreign affairs, Obama fell back on Big Bird, and binders and bayonets, just to name the B's in his bonnet.
At the second presidential debate, he name-checked Planned Parenthood, the General Motors of the American abortion industry, half-a-dozen times, desperate to preserve his so-called gender gap. Yet, oddly enough, the more furiously Obama and Biden have waved their binders and talked up Sandra Fluke, the more his supposed lead among women has withered away. So now he needs to enthuse the young, who turned out in such numbers for him last time. Hence, the official campaign video (plagiarized from Vladimir Putin, of all people) explaining that voting for Obama is like having sex. The saddest thing about that claim is that, for liberals, it may well be true.
Both videos – the one faking Obamagasm and the one faking a Benghazi pretext – exemplify the wretched shrinkage that befalls those unable to conceive of anything except in the most self-servingly political terms. Both, in different ways, exemplify why Obama and Biden are unfit for office. One video testifies to a horrible murderous lie at the heart of a head of state's most solemn responsibility, the other to the glib shallow narcissism of a pop-culture presidency, right down to the numbing relentless peer-pressure: C'mon, all the cool kids are doing it; why be the last holdout?
If voting for Obama is like the first time you have sex, it's very difficult to lose your virginity twice. A flailing, pitiful campaign has now adopted Queen Victoria's supposed wedding advice to her daughter: "Lie back and think of England." Lie back and think of America. And then get up and get dressed. Who wants to sleep twice with a $16 trillion broke loser.
©MARK STEYN
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Published: Oct. 26, 2012 Updated: 4:39 p.m.
Mark Steyn: Benghazi bungle requires act of urgent political hygiene
Syndicated columnist
"We're going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video," said Hillary Clinton.
No, not the person who made the video saying that voting for Barack Obama is like losing your virginity to a really cool guy. I'll get to that in a moment. But Secretary Clinton was talking about the fellow who made the supposedly Islamophobic video that supposedly set off the sacking of the Benghazi consulate. And, indeed, she did "have that person arrested." By happy coincidence, his bail hearing has been set for three days after the election, by which time he will have served his purpose.
These two videos – the Islamophobic one and the Obamosexual one – bookend the remarkable but wholly deserved collapse of the president's re-election campaign.
You'll recall that a near month-long attempt to blame an obscure YouTube video for the murder of four Americans and the destruction of U.S. sovereign territory climaxed in the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden's bald assertion that the administration had been going on the best intelligence it had at the time. By then, it had been confirmed that there never had been any protest against the video, and that the Obama line that Benghazi had been a spontaneous movie review that just got a little out of hand was utterly false. The only remaining question was whether the administration had knowingly lied or was merely innocently stupid. The innocent-stupidity line became harder to maintain this week after Fox News obtained State Department emails revealing that shortly after 4 p.m. Eastern, less than a half-hour after the assault in Benghazi began, the White House situation room knew the exact nature of it.
"Within minutes of the first bullet being fired, the White House knew these heroes would be slaughtered if immediate air support was denied," said Ty Woods' father, Charles. "In less than an hour, the perimeters could have been secured, and American lives could have been saved. After seven hours fighting numerically superior forces, my son's life was sacrificed because of the White House's decision."
Why would Obama and Biden do such a thing? Because to launch a military operation against an al-Qaida affiliate on the anniversary of 9/11 would have exposed the hollowness of their boast through convention week and the days thereafter – that Osama was dead, and al-Qaida was finished.
And so Ty Woods, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith and Chris Stevens were left to die, and a decision taken to blame an entirely irrelevant video and, as Secretary Clinton threatened, "have that person arrested." And, in the weeks that followed, the government of the United States lied to its own citizens as thoroughly and energetically as any totalitarian state, complete with the midnight knock-on-the-door from not-so-secret policemen sent to haul the designated fall guy into custody.
This goes far beyond the instinctive secretiveness to which even democratic governments are prone. The Obama administration created a wholly fictional storyline, and devoted its full resources to maintaining it. I understand why Mitt Romney chose not to pursue this line of argument in the final debate. The voters who will determine this election are those who voted for Obama four years ago and this time round either switch to the other fellow or sit on their hands. In electoral terms, it's probably prudent of Mitt not to rub their faces in their 2008 votes.
Nevertheless, when the president and other prominent officials stand by as four Americans die and then abuse their sacrifice as contemptuously as this administration did, decency requires that they be voted out of office as an act of urgent political hygiene.
At the photo-op staged for the returning caskets, Obama et al seem to have been too focused on their campaign needs to observe even the minimal courtesies. Charles Woods says that, at the ceremony, Joe Biden strolled over to him and by way of condolence said in a "loud and boisterous" voice, "Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?" One assumes charitably that the vice president is acknowledging in his own inept and blundering way the remarkable courage of a man called upon to die for his country on some worthless sod halfway across the planet. But the near-parodic locker-room coarseness is grotesque both in its inaptness and in its lack of basic human feeling for a bereaved family forced to grieve in public and as crowd-scene extras to the political big shot. Just about the only formal responsibility a vice president has is to attend funerals without embarrassing his country. And this preening buffoon of pseudo-blue-collar faux-machismo couldn't even manage that.
But a funny thing happened over the next six weeks: Obama's own cue balls shriveled. Biden had offered up a deft campaign slogan encompassing both domestic and foreign policy: "Osama's dead, and General Motors is alive." But, as the al-Qaida connections to Benghazi dribbled out, leak by leak, the "Osama's dead" became a problematic boast and, left to stand alone, the General Motors line was even less credible. Avoiding the economy and foreign affairs, Obama fell back on Big Bird, and binders and bayonets, just to name the B's in his bonnet.
At the second presidential debate, he name-checked Planned Parenthood, the General Motors of the American abortion industry, half-a-dozen times, desperate to preserve his so-called gender gap. Yet, oddly enough, the more furiously Obama and Biden have waved their binders and talked up Sandra Fluke, the more his supposed lead among women has withered away. So now he needs to enthuse the young, who turned out in such numbers for him last time. Hence, the official campaign video (plagiarized from Vladimir Putin, of all people) explaining that voting for Obama is like having sex. The saddest thing about that claim is that, for liberals, it may well be true.
Both videos – the one faking Obamagasm and the one faking a Benghazi pretext – exemplify the wretched shrinkage that befalls those unable to conceive of anything except in the most self-servingly political terms. Both, in different ways, exemplify why Obama and Biden are unfit for office. One video testifies to a horrible murderous lie at the heart of a head of state's most solemn responsibility, the other to the glib shallow narcissism of a pop-culture presidency, right down to the numbing relentless peer-pressure: C'mon, all the cool kids are doing it; why be the last holdout?
If voting for Obama is like the first time you have sex, it's very difficult to lose your virginity twice. A flailing, pitiful campaign has now adopted Queen Victoria's supposed wedding advice to her daughter: "Lie back and think of England." Lie back and think of America. And then get up and get dressed. Who wants to sleep twice with a $16 trillion broke loser.
©MARK STEYN
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Report: Help in Benghazi was Available, Waved Off
They wanted to aid the diplomats at the consulate but were told to
“stand down”; they ignored those orders and made their way to the
consulate and brought back the remaining diplomats, minus the
ambassador, who was already dead. Then they took more fire at the CIA
annex–this was where Woods and Doherty were killed by a mortar shell at 4
a.m., nearly seven hours after the initial assault began. But their
urgent cries for help were not answered. Griffin writes:
Assuming this account is accurate, it is downright mystifying–and alarming–that in spite of real-time knowledge about the assault as it was happening, and the presence only a short flight time away of considerable military resources, someone in the government (one wonders who?) decided to limit the response to sending 22 lightly armed personnel from Tripoli. Someone at a senior level needs to be held to account for this failure.
In fact, at least one member of the team was on the roof of the annex manning a heavy machine gun when mortars were fired at the CIA compound. The security officer had a laser on the target that was firing and repeatedly requested back-up support from a Specter gunship, which is commonly used by U.S. Special Operations forces to provide support to Special Operations teams on the ground involved in intense firefights. The fighting at the CIA annex went on for more than four hours — enough time for any planes based in Sigonella Air base, just 480 miles away, to arrive. Fox News has also learned that two separate Tier One Special operations forces were told to wait, among them Delta Force operators.This would seem to directly contradict Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s contention that the Pentagon knew too little about what was going on to scramble military forces. As does this tidbit from Griffin’s article: “Fox News has learned that there were two military surveillance drones redirected to Benghazi shortly after the attack on the Consulate began. They were already in the vicinity. The second surveillance craft was sent to relieve the first drone, perhaps due to fuel issues. Both were capable of sending real time visuals back to U.S. officials in Washington, D.C.”
Assuming this account is accurate, it is downright mystifying–and alarming–that in spite of real-time knowledge about the assault as it was happening, and the presence only a short flight time away of considerable military resources, someone in the government (one wonders who?) decided to limit the response to sending 22 lightly armed personnel from Tripoli. Someone at a senior level needs to be held to account for this failure.
Friday, October 26, 2012
GUARD YOUR KITCHEN SINK, WITH YOUR LIFE IF NECESSARY
!!!!
It's the season of the October surprise.
If you see a woman in red it's probably Gloria Allred, the Los Angeles lawyer for scorned women just arrived from hell with their furies and long memories. Mzz Allred promised the president she had a doozie for this October. The doozie so far looks like only bitter recriminations of a scorned floozie, but the October surprise season is still young.
Mzz Allred is peddling the story of a contentious divorce of 25 years ago, and paints Mitt Romney as the villain of the piece because he testified for the husband about the value of stock shares in the settlement, which the wife agreed to and later decided she didn't like.
This tastes like pretty thin soup, something the National Enquirer might have found in a musty bound volume in the basement of the court house. Husbands and wives have been known to shout in Divorce Court. That's about the value of a kitchen sink. You heave it over the side and hope it hits somebody. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.
The origin of the October surprise lies in the 1968 campaign, when Lyndon Johnson announced a "peace breakthrough" in Vietnam and halted the bombing of North Vietnam to guarantee an end of the war and "co-incidentally" assure the triumph of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The veep got a little bounce but Richard Nixon won by a margin of less than a percentage point.
Four years later, the Vietnam war was still alive and well and Mr. Nixon and George McGovern were fighting it out over who could end it. On Oct. 26, just 12 days before the November election,
Henry Kissinger, the president's national-security guru, announced that "peace is at hand." Peace, such as it was, would wait for three more years, but Mr. Nixon won 49 states and defeated Mr. Magoo by 20 points. The president would have won, anyway, but "peace is at hand" might have contributed to the landslide.
In late October 1980, the Iranian government and President Jimmy Carter announced that it wouldn't release the American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran until after the November election. This was not much of a surprise, but it fed fevered speculation in Washington that the Reagan campaign had made a secret deal with Iran to delay their release to avoid giving Mr. Carter the happy surprise. There was actually a January surprise, when the hostages were released minutes after Mr. Reagan took the oath of office. The controversy over what had happened lasted for years, but two congressional investigations concluded there was no deal, and best of all, we didn't have to give the hostages back.
The vultures were not finished. Caspar Weinberger, the defense secretary for Ronald Reagan, was accused of criminal complicity in a deal to send missiles to fight Saddam Hussein, which he opposed, and a special prosecutor with not much to show for his investigation pursued Mr. Weinberger after he left office, and indicted him on the eve of the 1992 election, hoping to prevent George H.W. Bush's re-election. Mr. Bush was defeated and gave Mr. Weinberger a full pardon the day before he left office.
Since then, the October surprises have become smaller stuff. On the eve of the 2000 election there was the news that George W. Bush had been arrested for drunk driving 24 years earlier, when he was young and callow. He won anyway. Eight years after that, The Associated Press discovered that Barack Obama's aged Aunt Zeituni Onyango was living in Boston as an illegal immigrant from Kenya. Her nephew won anyway.
This year the October surprises, such as they are, are -- so far -- even less consequential. Donald Trump promised something about Barack Obama's college transcripts if the president would release them for a $5 million contribution to his favorite charity. A man went to the Romney campaign with "proof" that Mr. Obama scored cocaine hits in college and the Romney campaign told him to get lost.
All we've seen this year are frail skeletons from closets long since abandoned, and Gloria Allred's well-done nothingburger from an ancient divorce proceeding. She should stick to chasing more promising ambulances. One of them might have a kitchen sink inside.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
| October 26, 2012 | SHARE |
Throwing the kitchen sink
By Wes Pruden
If you've got a nice kitchen sink, guard it well. A
surrogate for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney (or someone pretending to be)
could be lurking in the shrubbery under the kitchen window, plotting to
scavenge something to throw into the campaign.
It's the season of the October surprise.
If you see a woman in red it's probably Gloria Allred, the Los Angeles lawyer for scorned women just arrived from hell with their furies and long memories. Mzz Allred promised the president she had a doozie for this October. The doozie so far looks like only bitter recriminations of a scorned floozie, but the October surprise season is still young.
Mzz Allred is peddling the story of a contentious divorce of 25 years ago, and paints Mitt Romney as the villain of the piece because he testified for the husband about the value of stock shares in the settlement, which the wife agreed to and later decided she didn't like.
This tastes like pretty thin soup, something the National Enquirer might have found in a musty bound volume in the basement of the court house. Husbands and wives have been known to shout in Divorce Court. That's about the value of a kitchen sink. You heave it over the side and hope it hits somebody. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.
The origin of the October surprise lies in the 1968 campaign, when Lyndon Johnson announced a "peace breakthrough" in Vietnam and halted the bombing of North Vietnam to guarantee an end of the war and "co-incidentally" assure the triumph of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The veep got a little bounce but Richard Nixon won by a margin of less than a percentage point.
Four years later, the Vietnam war was still alive and well and Mr. Nixon and George McGovern were fighting it out over who could end it. On Oct. 26, just 12 days before the November election,
Henry Kissinger, the president's national-security guru, announced that "peace is at hand." Peace, such as it was, would wait for three more years, but Mr. Nixon won 49 states and defeated Mr. Magoo by 20 points. The president would have won, anyway, but "peace is at hand" might have contributed to the landslide.
In late October 1980, the Iranian government and President Jimmy Carter announced that it wouldn't release the American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran until after the November election. This was not much of a surprise, but it fed fevered speculation in Washington that the Reagan campaign had made a secret deal with Iran to delay their release to avoid giving Mr. Carter the happy surprise. There was actually a January surprise, when the hostages were released minutes after Mr. Reagan took the oath of office. The controversy over what had happened lasted for years, but two congressional investigations concluded there was no deal, and best of all, we didn't have to give the hostages back.
The vultures were not finished. Caspar Weinberger, the defense secretary for Ronald Reagan, was accused of criminal complicity in a deal to send missiles to fight Saddam Hussein, which he opposed, and a special prosecutor with not much to show for his investigation pursued Mr. Weinberger after he left office, and indicted him on the eve of the 1992 election, hoping to prevent George H.W. Bush's re-election. Mr. Bush was defeated and gave Mr. Weinberger a full pardon the day before he left office.
Since then, the October surprises have become smaller stuff. On the eve of the 2000 election there was the news that George W. Bush had been arrested for drunk driving 24 years earlier, when he was young and callow. He won anyway. Eight years after that, The Associated Press discovered that Barack Obama's aged Aunt Zeituni Onyango was living in Boston as an illegal immigrant from Kenya. Her nephew won anyway.
This year the October surprises, such as they are, are -- so far -- even less consequential. Donald Trump promised something about Barack Obama's college transcripts if the president would release them for a $5 million contribution to his favorite charity. A man went to the Romney campaign with "proof" that Mr. Obama scored cocaine hits in college and the Romney campaign told him to get lost.
All we've seen this year are frail skeletons from closets long since abandoned, and Gloria Allred's well-done nothingburger from an ancient divorce proceeding. She should stick to chasing more promising ambulances. One of them might have a kitchen sink inside.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
Monday, October 22, 2012
GEORGE McGOVERN. R.I.P.
!!!!
George McGovern, who died yesterday at 90, and Barry Goldwater make for a nifty historical parallel. Both were U.S. senators who became their parties' nominee for president. Both were men of principle, or ideologues if one views them unfavorably. Both got trounced in the general election by the other party's flawed incumbent, largely because voters saw them as too extreme.
But both had long-lasting effects on the ideological outlooks of their respective parties.
Without Goldwater, it's often argued, there would have been no President Reagan. We'd add that without McGovern, there would have been no President Obama.
McGovern helped move his party to the left on defense and social issues, but of particular importance was the influence he wielded over his party's presidential nomination process, described in his New York Times obituary:
One might say McGovern reinvented the Democratic Party by putting identity politics at its center--by encouraging members to think of themselves first in terms of sex or age or skin color (or, later, by sexual orientation). E pluribus, multis.
In the 1973 book "Sexual Suicide," George Gilder speculated that such an approach "would find its reductio ad absurdum in a President who is an exact ethnic and sexual composite of the American demography--some kind of multiracial hermaphrodite from Kansas City."
When Gilder wrote that, Barack Obama was 12.
McGovernism has never proved sufficient to win an election for the Democrats. Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama both made gauzy promises to unify the nation, and Bill Clinton, 20 years after volunteering for the McGovern campaign as a law student, ran as a centrist. This year, however, Obama is being forced to try. With a record that is both lousy and divisive, he has little alternative but to attempt to construct a majority via appeals targeted to electoral subgroups.
One of the words most associated with McGovern is "decency." "Everybody noticed George S. McGovern's decency," writes political scientist Bruce Miroff in a Times op-ed remembrance. Robert F. Kennedy called him 'the most decent man in the Senate.' " In case you didn't get that, Miroff adds: "Mr. McGovern, who died early Sunday at the age of 90, was a decent man."
At The New Republic's website, the lefty author Rick Perlstein writes that McGovern's "unlikely victory" for the 1972 nomination "seemed to vindicate an abiding liberal fantasy, which President Obama sometimes seems to share: that if you just show yourself to be decent enough, the skeptics cannot help but come around."
Stipulating that McGovern was thoroughly decent and Richard Nixon far from it, it seems to us that Obama personifies a different liberal fantasy, namely the delusion that left-wing politics and decency are one and the same thing. This moral vanity leads the left to excuse, or even not to notice, indecent behavior on the part of their own. It is the reason Obama's re-election campaign has been less McGovernite than McCarthyite (and we don't mean Gene).
A mild example comes from the Hill: "President Obama on Friday mocked Mitt Romney's recent efforts to appeal to centrist voters, telling supporters at a Virginia rally that his Republican rival is suffering from 'Romnesia.' "-
Such juvenile wordplay may be worthy of Mother Jones's David Corn, who came up with "Romnesia" a few months ago, or of MoveOn.org ("General Betray Us"), or of Tailgunner Joe, who used to mock Arkansas's William Fulbright as "Senator Half Bright." Barack Obama does not regard it as beneath the dignity of the office with which he has been entrusted.
In a more sinister vein is a new Obama ad touting Obama's bailout of General Motors and Chrysler and aimed at Ohio. The ad is highly misleading: It criticizes Romney for penning an op-ed titled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" but doesn't note that GM and Chrysler did in fact go bankrupt.
But that's within the bounds of ordinary political tendentiousness. What's shocking is the words that appear on the screen at the end of the ad, over a silhouette of the Buckeye State: MITT ROMNEY. NOT ONE OF US.
If a Republican candidate for dogcatcher in Bugtussle, Ky., said Barack Obama was NOT ONE OF US, every liberal journalist in America would be demanding to know if Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner agreed. No one is asking that of Barack Obama. Then again, he's already answered. The ad begins with the president's voice: "I'm Barack Obama, and I approved this message."
"Journalists need to do more than call the play-by-play this election cycle," declares the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof. "We also need to blow the whistle on such egregious fouls calculated to undermine the political process and magnify the ugliest prejudices that our nation has done so much to overcome." This, of course, was in a 2008 column titled "The Push to 'Otherize' Obama." And here's a YouTube compilation of MSNBC's Chris Matthews and some Turkish dude complaining that Obama's critics were trying to portray him as "not one of us."
Have any lefties criticized the Obama campaign for not only trying to "otherize" Romney but actually using the phrase NOT ONE OF US? We put out a query on Twitter the other day, and the only examples anyone came up with were a tweet from the Washington Post's Karen Tumulty (" 'Not one of us' has a specific, ugly history in US politics. Bad place for the Obama campaign to go"), whom we hadn't thought of as especially left-wing. Tumulty follows up with an article today.
Then there was this comment in a Daily Kos thread (quoting verbatim):
Even this weak and swiftly rationalized-away expression of discomfort met with hostile responses from defenders of the foul ad, such as this one (again quoting verbatim):
You see how the logic works here. It's OK for us to "otherize" you, because, well, we're us, the good people, and therefore to say that you're NOT ONE OF US is a simple statement of fact. Plus, loosing isn't an option.
"There's safety in numbers / When you learn to divide," Peter Gabriel observed in his catchy 1980 tune "Not One of Us." Obama certainly hopes that's true, and in that sense he is a disciple of McGovern, with his bean-counting approach to politics.
But if McGovern were alive, he would strongly disapprove of the ugly turn the Obama campaign has taken. He was, after all, a decent man.
By JAMES TARANTO
George McGovern, who died yesterday at 90, and Barry Goldwater make for a nifty historical parallel. Both were U.S. senators who became their parties' nominee for president. Both were men of principle, or ideologues if one views them unfavorably. Both got trounced in the general election by the other party's flawed incumbent, largely because voters saw them as too extreme.
But both had long-lasting effects on the ideological outlooks of their respective parties.
Without Goldwater, it's often argued, there would have been no President Reagan. We'd add that without McGovern, there would have been no President Obama.
McGovern helped move his party to the left on defense and social issues, but of particular importance was the influence he wielded over his party's presidential nomination process, described in his New York Times obituary:
He . . . became the chairman of a Democratic Party commission on delegate selection, created after the fractious 1968 national convention to give the rank and file more say in picking a presidential nominee.
What became known as the McGovern commission rewrote party rules to ensure that more women, young people and members of minorities were included in delegations. The influence of party leaders was curtailed. More states began choosing delegates on the basis of primary elections. And the party's center of gravity shifted decidedly leftward.
Though the rules were not written specifically to help Mr. McGovern win the nomination, they had that effect.
One might say McGovern reinvented the Democratic Party by putting identity politics at its center--by encouraging members to think of themselves first in terms of sex or age or skin color (or, later, by sexual orientation). E pluribus, multis.
In the 1973 book "Sexual Suicide," George Gilder speculated that such an approach "would find its reductio ad absurdum in a President who is an exact ethnic and sexual composite of the American demography--some kind of multiracial hermaphrodite from Kansas City."
When Gilder wrote that, Barack Obama was 12.
McGovernism has never proved sufficient to win an election for the Democrats. Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama both made gauzy promises to unify the nation, and Bill Clinton, 20 years after volunteering for the McGovern campaign as a law student, ran as a centrist. This year, however, Obama is being forced to try. With a record that is both lousy and divisive, he has little alternative but to attempt to construct a majority via appeals targeted to electoral subgroups.
One of the words most associated with McGovern is "decency." "Everybody noticed George S. McGovern's decency," writes political scientist Bruce Miroff in a Times op-ed remembrance. Robert F. Kennedy called him 'the most decent man in the Senate.' " In case you didn't get that, Miroff adds: "Mr. McGovern, who died early Sunday at the age of 90, was a decent man."
At The New Republic's website, the lefty author Rick Perlstein writes that McGovern's "unlikely victory" for the 1972 nomination "seemed to vindicate an abiding liberal fantasy, which President Obama sometimes seems to share: that if you just show yourself to be decent enough, the skeptics cannot help but come around."
Stipulating that McGovern was thoroughly decent and Richard Nixon far from it, it seems to us that Obama personifies a different liberal fantasy, namely the delusion that left-wing politics and decency are one and the same thing. This moral vanity leads the left to excuse, or even not to notice, indecent behavior on the part of their own. It is the reason Obama's re-election campaign has been less McGovernite than McCarthyite (and we don't mean Gene).
A mild example comes from the Hill: "President Obama on Friday mocked Mitt Romney's recent efforts to appeal to centrist voters, telling supporters at a Virginia rally that his Republican rival is suffering from 'Romnesia.' "-
Such juvenile wordplay may be worthy of Mother Jones's David Corn, who came up with "Romnesia" a few months ago, or of MoveOn.org ("General Betray Us"), or of Tailgunner Joe, who used to mock Arkansas's William Fulbright as "Senator Half Bright." Barack Obama does not regard it as beneath the dignity of the office with which he has been entrusted.
In a more sinister vein is a new Obama ad touting Obama's bailout of General Motors and Chrysler and aimed at Ohio. The ad is highly misleading: It criticizes Romney for penning an op-ed titled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" but doesn't note that GM and Chrysler did in fact go bankrupt.
But that's within the bounds of ordinary political tendentiousness. What's shocking is the words that appear on the screen at the end of the ad, over a silhouette of the Buckeye State: MITT ROMNEY. NOT ONE OF US.
If a Republican candidate for dogcatcher in Bugtussle, Ky., said Barack Obama was NOT ONE OF US, every liberal journalist in America would be demanding to know if Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner agreed. No one is asking that of Barack Obama. Then again, he's already answered. The ad begins with the president's voice: "I'm Barack Obama, and I approved this message."
"Journalists need to do more than call the play-by-play this election cycle," declares the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof. "We also need to blow the whistle on such egregious fouls calculated to undermine the political process and magnify the ugliest prejudices that our nation has done so much to overcome." This, of course, was in a 2008 column titled "The Push to 'Otherize' Obama." And here's a YouTube compilation of MSNBC's Chris Matthews and some Turkish dude complaining that Obama's critics were trying to portray him as "not one of us."
Have any lefties criticized the Obama campaign for not only trying to "otherize" Romney but actually using the phrase NOT ONE OF US? We put out a query on Twitter the other day, and the only examples anyone came up with were a tweet from the Washington Post's Karen Tumulty (" 'Not one of us' has a specific, ugly history in US politics. Bad place for the Obama campaign to go"), whom we hadn't thought of as especially left-wing. Tumulty follows up with an article today.
Then there was this comment in a Daily Kos thread (quoting verbatim):
The "Not One of Us" tagline at the end is very powerful, but also slightly disturbing, given that Obama's had to put up with all the "otherness"Kenyan-Muslim/un-American"exotic" crap since 2007.
Then again, I suppose that's the whole point of using that phrase.
Even this weak and swiftly rationalized-away expression of discomfort met with hostile responses from defenders of the foul ad, such as this one (again quoting verbatim):
I tend to encourage courtesy over rudeness on most occasions, which this is not.
We are in a fight that must be won. Not won at all costs, but as loosing isn't an option, I'm willing to go to the mat with counter-tactics that are effective. And calling out BS and divisiveness and lies is necessary. And citing the 'otherness' of the super-rich and super-entitled is necessary. The super-rich are mostly 'other'.
Like me, Obama had one foreign-born parent. Mine happened to be from Canada, but he was foreign-born. There are millions and millions of us with foreign-born parents.
But there are not millions and millions of us as rich as the Romneys. Those are the true 'others', which I think the Obama ad captures very well.
There are many adoptable cats and dogs being rescued around the country. You can save a life by adopting one.
You see how the logic works here. It's OK for us to "otherize" you, because, well, we're us, the good people, and therefore to say that you're NOT ONE OF US is a simple statement of fact. Plus, loosing isn't an option.
"There's safety in numbers / When you learn to divide," Peter Gabriel observed in his catchy 1980 tune "Not One of Us." Obama certainly hopes that's true, and in that sense he is a disciple of McGovern, with his bean-counting approach to politics.
But if McGovern were alive, he would strongly disapprove of the ugly turn the Obama campaign has taken. He was, after all, a decent man.
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