The Map

I obsessively click on the RealClearPolitics.com electoral map every day looking for states shifting one way or another. The movement is glacial but there has been movement. The 'solid' states, states where there is a ten-point or more margin are either bright red (for McCain) or brilliant blue (for Obama). I always resented that red-blue thing. The Dems would naturally be red in my mind, to match their political philosophy. The whole red-blue nomenclature came out of the 2000 election and I always thought that the media consciously labeled the Republicans red just to deflect any connotations of socialism from their beloved Democrats.
RCP labels any state that has a less than ten-point margin, but still outside the margin-of-error as 'leaning' and uses a paler shade of blue or red to denote these states. Any states that are polling inside the margin-of-error are depicted in gray. You can click on any state to get the list of polls which are averaged to arrive at the number that determines the state's color.
There's a major weakness in RCP's mapping, though. Some of the polls that are averaged into the count were taken in the middle of August, especially in states like California or New York where the smart guys are so convinced of the outcome that there are no real polls being conducted.
But of the states where the polls are recent and done within the last few days the map shows a clear trend; the blue is washing out and becoming lighter and the red is expanding and becoming brighter. Texas, usually a slam-dunk Republican state was light red in August and has now regained its dark red hue. North Carolina has gone from gray to bright red in the last few weeks. Montana had been in the toss-up column during the pre-Palin doldrums and is now light red. Indiana has moved from light blue to light red. Ohio has moved from light blue to gray. Florida has moved from gray to light red. Missouri from gray to light red.
But the most startling shifts are in the reliably blue states. Oregon and Washington have paled to light blue. Minnesota, cursed with a Democratic senate candidate who makes Al Sharpton look like a reasonable moderate, has moved from bright blue to gray. Michigan, the Democratic disaster area undergoing an economic meltdown engineered by its Democratic governor, legislature, congressional delegation, and Senators and further propelled by the suicidal UAW has lost its blue tinge and is now gray. Virginia, a hopeful pickup in the eyes of the Obamanoids has gone from pale blue to gray, Florida from gray to pale pink. Pennsylvania has lost its blue tint and is now lingering in gray land. The most startling of all, Blue Jersey has gone pale blue.
Since the Republican convention NO state has gone from red to gray or red to blue. The trend has been all one way. Its becoming increasingly difficult to look at the map and put together a winning scenario for Obama. But think back six or seven weeks. The map looked a whole lot different. Then it was difficult to put together a reasonable scenario that elected McCain.
Maps can mislead you. Part of whats wrong with politics today is the obsession with local details and key voter groups in swing states and the inability to think that big ideas don't matter in elections. But both Obama's rise and the Palin phenomenon are exactly a result of their ideas and they both moved numbers in areas that previously were considered untouchable. This is no longer an election taking place in the swing states, this is the first national election since 1994, when Newt took congress away from the Democrats. The entire country wants to drill for oil. The entire country doesn't want their taxes to go up. The entire country heard the questions that Giuliani and Palin raised about who exactly Barak Obama was and how unqualified he was for the job of president and is now reacting to his pathetic response. The reply was to equate 'community organizer' with Jesus or Abraham Lincoln, a tack that was so offensive and phony that it highlighted the fact that they aren't able to talk about what he did as a 'community organizer'. So by default people have inserted the image of Al Sharpton and drawn their own conclusions. There is no legislative record. As they've plowed through Governor Palin's life we've gotten twenty times more information on what she did than we ever got about Obama.
I dont believe RCP's map. I think that the campaigns know better. We're starting to see McCain commercials on cable in California. I would love to see an unbiased recent poll in California. Adding in 'The Bradley Factor', the rule that black candidates poll higher than they run, which is stronger in California than anywhere else, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Obama is even shaky in California. If he can be polling within the margin of error in Oregon and Washington than there is something that people everywhere are rejecting about Obama and the rot is spreading. There is a gravity that is pulling the entire Democratic ticket down with it.
This is a shock. All this year as we looked at the ghastly McCain hijack the Republican nomination and go out of his way to insult conservatives and we saw this charismatic young guy whip the previously undefeated Clinton Crime Family my feelings were of despair. I was so disgusted with the Republican Party that I was ready to vote for a loony like Bob Barr just to send a message to the weasels who it had seemed had destroyed the party that they couldn't count on my vote automatically. It wouldn't have mattered anyhow because Obama has 25 points ahead of McCain in California. At that point the LA Times was publishing a poll every couple of days, proudly showing their beloved Obama trouncing McCain. Those polls have disappeared. The LA Times is notorious for oversampling Democrats and is spectacularly wrong ALWAYS but their lack of polls is more telling than anything else. This will not be a close election. The only way Obama can get out of this hole is not by moving a few key groups in some strategic swing states but by a KO in the fifteenth round. He's not going to win on points.

The Messiah Fades

They're blind. The libs just can't see it. They think its Palin but they are so wrong! Their decline started in Berlin, continued through their convention and then ran into the Palin shoals. Before he O-bombed in Berlin Barak The Wonderful spent a couple of months not getting why Hillary Clinton did so well after he had clinched the nomination. It wasn't some big surge of feminism or Hillary's not-so-blinding oratory that gave her forty-point victories in places like Kentucky and West Virginia; it was Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity playing The Lovely Reverend Wright every day on the radio. It was the mainstream news media obviously in the tank for Obama and not letting any of the many unanswered questions about the 'community organizer's' past be addressed. When people think community organizer they dont think Abraham Lincoln and they dont think Jesus, they think Al Sharpton. The mainstream press doesn't have anything against Al Sharpton but the mainstream voters hate Al Sharpton. The Obamanoids have not been called upon to distance himself from a radical black community that Obama was certainly a part of and now won't talk about. The biggest damage Palin has done to Obama is by going through an embarrassing and offensive level of scrutiny about everything she's ever done in her life, let alone her political career. The press has accused her of lying about being the mother of one of her kids, banning books in public libraries, firing state employees for private reasons and talking in tongues at primitive religious services. Meanwhile, we dont know anything about what Barak Obama has ever done. They don't talk about Columbia or Harvard, the 'community organizer' phase is just likened to Abraham Lincoln and Jesus and left at that, his record during his time in the Illinois State Senate seems to have disappeared except for his 175 'present' votes and one enthusiastic 'Yes' vote to teach Kindergarten kids that homosexuality is OK. Barak's record in the US Senate is similarly missing in action. And well it should be. In the ongoing national disaster generated by congressional bungling and corruption in regards to the quasi-governmental Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae the four biggest recipients of cash from the crooks who ran those two floundering institutions were Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama. What do these four names have in common? Two things. One; they were all candidates for president; two, they are all leaders of The Party That Cares, three; the press has refused to cover their involvement in a scandal that has the potential to cost trillions and bring the entire financial system crashing down. Thats not news. Sarah Palin being a high school cheerleader--Thats News!
So now, after the nauseating Charles Gibson's condescending try to belittle Gov. Palin on national TV, the Obamanoids have dialed down the attacks on Palin but have launched an add saying that McCain is out of touch because he cant use a computer. McCain can't type at all because his arms were broken-- once because he refused to shake Jane Fonda's hand when she was in North Vietnam helping her communist friends to enslave that unhappy nation.
They can attack McCain all they like but on September 11 Rush Limbaugh led off the commemoration by playing the sermon that Rev Wright gave where he screamed, "God Damn AmeriKKKa!" and explained that the attacks were "AmeriKKKa's chickensssssss coming home to roosssssssssst!" The specter of Wright and 'community organizers' like Sharpton and Jackson hangs over Obama's campaign. The threat of the Democrats laying huge tax increases onto a weak economy hangs over Obama's campaign. The public wants aggressive steps taken to find and produce energy, and especially petroleum, and Obama and the Democratic Congress' refusal to consider lifting the drilling ban is a giant sword of Damocles hanging over Barak and the entire party. If gasoline prices go up as a result of Hurricane Ike this issue will explode again in the faces of the eco-left. Obama's inability to address these three issues are making him increasingly unelectable. The polls have swung slightly in favor of the Repubs but there is reason to suspect that the polls are not showing a correct picture of what's going on. The Dems are not acting like this is a two or three point race. I think their numbers are showing states like Florida, Missouri, Indiana, Virginia and even Ohio slipping out of their grasp. I think the inside-the-campaign polls are showing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Iowa, Oregon (!) and New Jersey (!!) increasingly threatened by McCain. The last poll taken in California was before the two conventions and even then showed slippage for Obama. I think that if Obama was doing well here there would be a poll every two days on the front page of the LA Times. The reason that there isn't is the total lack of enthusiasm by Latinos for a black 'community organizer' in the mode of Jesse Jackson. Latinos are moving into the formerly all-black neighborhoods of Watts and Compton and have not been treated well by their black neighbors. I think Obama is becoming beatable in California. If he has to start worrying about California then it is all over. But what reason has Obama given Latinos, or for that matter anybody, in California or anywhere else to vote for him? None.

Barak 'Slappy' Obama

It turns out that a Community Organizer is just like Jesus and Abraham Lincoln! I'll bet Al Sharpton liked that when a half-dozen Obama surrogates simultaneously came up with that definition. But hey, The Hon. Elijah Cummings has said that even to question the sanctity of the calling of Community Organization is to be a racist. Gee, I don't want to have racist feelings towards Jesus and Abraham Lincoln, do I? I could end up in eternal hellfire without the benefit of habeus corpus! I'm perfectly willing to give the last full measure of acceptance to the explanation that for five years Barak Obama spent his time walking on Lake Michigan and composing a redux of the Gettysburg Address. Are these guys kidding? We all think of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton when we hear 'community organizer' and Obama might have stopped going to Rev Wright's whacko racist marxist lunatic asylum when the heat got turned up but he doesn't want to talk about the twenty years he hung out with his surrogate father. Do those Dems think people have stopped thinking about that just because Obama's too slippery to get pinned down by his accommodating friends in the mainstream media? Well they haven't, and he hasn't done very well since that stuff came out.
Luckily for Obama, he was running against Hillary Clinton. Even so-called conservative commentators arent very clear on how he managed to beat her. The fact is is that the Democrats were totally sick of her and her egotistical husband and didn't want to spend their entire political careers being pushed around by those arrogant sociopaths. If you look back at the stage of one of last year's pathetic and embarrassing Democratic 'debates' there was no alternative to Obama. Dodd, up to his glutious maximus in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae kickbacks? The goofy and unloved Biden? A rotund midget Governor who has the speaking style of Kurt Waldheim? Obama was cute, he sang a good song and the media fluffed over his complete lack of accomplishment and his cretinous answers at the debates.
But he's not running against the Clintons now and he's done nothing but make mistakes since he got the nomination. Big ones and little ones.
The first big mistake was the World Tour. It outlined his duplicitous sucking up to the Jews and the Jew-hating far left at the same time as his visit to Israel caught him flack from the lefties and defections from many Jews. Then he leaves the Middle East and goes to Germany and lays a great big egg. The speech sucked and contained a few phrases, 'citizen of the world' and suchlike, that McCain was happy to pin around his ears in some very effective commercials.
Then there was a dramatic upsurge in energy prices. Obama joined all true Democrats in his welcoming attitude towards high pump prices. No Drilling! No, No, No!
Inflate your tires and get a tune up. And eat cake, Dahling, its Mahvelous!
Again the libs think that their promise of these mythical vehicles which run on Greenhouse Friendly pixie dust within the next decade or two is going to mollify the people who don't understand why the stupid yutzes who wrecked the school system now want to hijack their beloved automobiles.
Then there was the Temple Of Doom in a football field. What a flop. Everybody's a victim, gloom, gloom, gloom. They tried to dump the Son Of Martin Luther King schtick and tried to do a remake of 'Leave It To Leninist Beaver'. Nothing in the way of policy at all. Nothing. How appropriate for a guy who snoozed his way through the Illinois State Senate and did absolutely nothing in his brief stint in the US Senate to not propose a single concrete program.
So he walks out of the arena and gets slammed in the face by Sarah Palin. First the Obamamedia cranks up the slime leading up to her speech, ensuring her and Giuliani a giant audeince and they both go straight for Obama's jugular. And it wasn't hard. Who is this lanky drink of water anyway? What's he ever done that qualifies him even to be an Illinois senator let alone president?
Since Palin has emerged and did her speech McCain has kept her out of the way of the press, which has ensured hysterical coverage in a build-up to going on the Sunday chat shows. BHO has gotten involved in the 'lipstick' kerfuffle, a disaster of his own making. If you want to get any woman to hate you calling her or another woman a pig and then smarmily explaining that you were 'just kidding' or 'taken out of context' is the way to do it. Then that half-wit Biden and two or three of Obama's sock-puppets came out with some more 'lipstick' lines and soon the words 'lipstick on a pig' were bouncing around the media. No matter how its discussed or how sympathetic the treatment just the story itself is a disaster for BHO.
Maybe Obama will pull himself together and present people with a program that they can believe and support. Maybe he'll pull his campaign organization together and impose some discipline. maybe he'll formulate a coherent strategy other than massive black turnout pumped up with fraudulent ballots and a few hearty MoveOn types. We're going to have a 130% turnout in black precincts this year. That is not a winning strategy as was shown after the Wright business broke and even the ghastly Hillary started wiping the floor with him. So Obama better pull himself together and stop walking into McCain's sucker punches or they'll be taking him out of the ring on a stretcher with the unlikely McCain winning forty states.

Gaffe-Bomma!

'You Can Put Lipstick on a Pig, But It's Still a Pig!'

It would be hard to imagine a more politically inappropriate and downright stupid remark for a male candidate who just defeated a female candidate for the nomination and is pitted against a compelling woman on the other party's ticket to make.
But our National Community Organizer has basically called middle class women who identify with Sarah Palin a bunch of pigs! The swing-over-to-the-trough voters. Its not sexism, its snobbery. These libs find Sarah Palin appalling! Imagine, a moose-shooting snowmobiler married to an Eskimo oil-rig roughneck who's had five kids, one of them already knocked up! PWTs, if you know what I mean. Those are the kind of people you see wandering around Washington DC pointing their digital cameras at the Lincoln Memorial, not officeholders, for God's Sake! The best thing you can say about Actual Americans is that they go home after a short time and don't have the impertinence to eat in Washington's better bistros. The thought of Dick Cheney in his little duck-hunting outfit out in the marshes ambushing ducks with his bird-shotgun is bad enough but still suitably aristocratic; the photos of Palin show her in full cammo aiming an assault weapon into the distance. It would be better to have a spread of naked pictures taken by some former boyfriend in Playboy than that assault-gun photo in the minds of your average liberals. Think of the poor mooses as the snowmobile approaches and as the little red dot from the laser-scope finds its mark...hard to imagine Dianne Feinstein or Hillary Clinton on the other end, isn't it?
Thats why they're not pigs! The color of their lipstick is not 'Mooseblood' but 'Code Pinko'.
This is the day after Obama with George Stephanopolis, in a relationship that was legitimized by the Laurence Vs Texas decision by the SCOTUS in 2003, referred to 'my Muslim religion...'
Are these guys aware that U-Tube exists and that these remarks will be seen by tens of millions without having to be filtered and 'explained' by the proper media geniuses? They also don't seem to be aware that people only see the soundbyte, 'My Muslim faith...' 'Lipstick on a pig...'
and dont give a rat's hiney about the context.
If things weren't bad enough somewhere in an undisclosed location 'Plugs' Biden has further refined the porker qualities of those lipsticked trailer broads by positing the interesting idea that if you don't support government-funded embryonic stem cell research you can't possibly be said to have any regard for children with disabilities. And that goes double for you devout Catholics. Its not religion that has humanity and compassion; everybody who's anybody knows what a crock Christianity is, its the federal government from which the manna flows!
And these remarks are just in a two-day period. Are these guys for real? If this keeps up they're going to have trouble winning in Illinois, California, Massachusetts and New York. They're already screwed in places like Minnesota and even New Jersey with this crap. How can they be so stupid?
Meanwhile, they're running against a disciplined team with a well-worked-out game plan but with enough flexibility to improvise and exploit any openings that appear. They introduced Palin and then stood back, got out of the limelight and let these idiots say things like the quote that headlines this piece. McCain is a counter-puncher, he lets Obama swing and then gets in close and nails him. All this fear and rage by the libs is misdirected against Palin, they're still completely underestimating McCain to the point where you have to wonder if Obama & Co. have taken the time to sit back and assess the nature of their opponent. They're still spewing the same lines that they were using six months ago. McCain has radically changed his tactics and they haven't budged, except to panic and get nasty. Bad for a messiah and The Party That Cares. Everybody is always calling the libs Marxists but if I was their Dialectical Materialism teacher I would flunk these idiots for not understanding the political relationship of the classes in present-day America. They're not even competent Marxists!
Now a host of Obama media workers, AKA reporters from the 'objective' media, are crawling all over Alaska thinking they can annoy and bullyrag the inhabitants all they like while they dig up dirt on a very popular figure in the state. Lets hope that the gentle inhabitants of Wassilla treat these media folk the way that any snobbish condescending elitist overdressed overpaid hostile rude outsider is always treated when they walk around shooting their overeducated know-it-all mouths off in a tavern filled with tough drunk working people who fled the lower forty-eight because they couldn't stand how their country was being destroyed by a bunch of power-mad wankers. My advice to the media is to make sure your health insurance is paid up and if a little red dot appears anywhere on your body DUCK!

The War We Won

In 1956, when the Geneva Accords went into place and the French withdrew from Vietnam a little-noticed event occurred; more than a million people fled the new government in North Vietnam. Of those that stayed millions more died or were sent to concentration camps by a regime more brutal than the hated French Colonialists had ever been.
There were people, even then, who counseled against any kind of US involvement in the region but at the time Malaya was a primitive backwater that had an active revolution of its own going on. Thailand was another impoverished agricultural society with hill tribes and old Kuomintang Army units ruling tiny local fiefdoms with a very weak government. Ditto Burma. Indonesia was already sinking into communism under Sukharno. The Domino theory, fifteen years later universally derided, was absolutely valid in this instance. Russia and China were still working in tandem. The myth of the Red Revolution was at its high tide. Mao Tse Tung was looked on in the region as the savior of the common man. This was an entire region that was about to fall into the hands of the communists. Doing nothing would have been a piece of rank madness. If there was a Cold War we were obliged to fight it wherever it was, not just in Europe. We had already stood aside and let the innocent people of the North be enslaved by a communist government and had seen the human cost. Average people didn't know anything about it, of course, but the geopolitical 'experts' in the CIA and the State Department were looking at an entire, very strategic region on the brink of falling into hostile hands.
Over the next few years it became clear that the leaders in the North were as committed to using violence to conquer the South as they were to using violence to rule the North. They armed, trained and directed groups of local recruits who became known as the Viet Cong.
The Kennedy brothers, alarmed at the deteriorating situation decided that the solution to the problem was the removal of the corrupt and ineffective leader of South Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem. Despite warnings from Vice President Johnson the Kennedys backed a coup against Diem that ensured that the US would have to either write off Vietnam and see if the Domino Theory was valid by trying it out or increasingly have to use its own military resources to keep South Vietnam from falling to the communists.
From the first the war, micromanaged by Johnson and the civilian bureaucrats at DOD, suffered from a lack of being able to define what the objective was. American troops developed innovative mobile tactics that integrated air, artillery and infantry as never before. The communists were militarily completely inferior but were able to use the fictions of Cambodian and Laotian sovereignty and the timidity and confusion of the leadership in Washington to protect their forces and supply lines from total annihilation. The American troop strength was built up piecemeal over a year and a half. The objectives were always local and limited. When the commander, General Westmoreland, asked for a larger force and permission to cross the fictitious Laotian border to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail Johnson recoiled in horror. In 1968 LBJ had a nervous breakdown in office. He resigned when he didn't want to resign. He bombed. He called bombing halts. He was seen weeping and pounding his fists on the walls. The Eastern Elite who Johnson envied and hated but who he secretly wanted to admire him more than the lightweight and incompetent Kennedy had turned against the war and were cursing Johnson for not 'ending' it; whatever that meant. Were they really so blind to what the consequences would have been to a US bug-out in 67 or 68?
It would have been a strategic disaster that would have brought great joy and encouragement to our enemies all over the world and terrified our allies into accommodation and eventual absorption by The Evil Empire.
The advent of Nixon and Kissinger changed the situation but not at once. After a year or so of irresolution similar to Johnson's Nixon determined that the Vietnam War had to be dealt with by changing the strategic reality in the entire world. Russia and China had been adversaries since 1964 and China was in the paralyzing throes of the Cultural Revolution. US foreign policy started aiming to balance and pit the two rival communist superstates against each other. Nixon also began to concentrate on training the South Vietnamese Army to take on the bulk of the fighting with US air and logistical support and by 1971 the US Force was much smaller than it had been two years earlier. Much else had changed. The NVA and the Vietcong had lost most of their former territory. The RVNs, with US air support were winning the war. It took one last flurry of violence in Christmas of 1972 to achieve a peace accord and a final US withdrawl of almost all military units. For the next two years there was an uneasy peace of sorts but as soon as Nixon fell and it was clear to everyone that sending millions of people into slavery and death was OK with the Democrats the NVA, in open and direct violation of the Paris Peace Accords, attacked using tanks and moving as a traditional conquering army. Without US support the South collapsed.
So why do I say we won? We won because during the critical twenty years that we were involved there all the countries in Asia which were in danger of falling to the communists became much more wealthy and well-developed while it became clear that life in Mao's China was almost unlivable. Russia and China became mortal enemies. We had developed the only military with operational experience and the military world noted our innovations in weapons and tactics. We had developed an officer corps filled with combat veterans who were used to working together, something that no other army in the world had. When the massacre in Cambodia and the thousands of boats filled with desperate people fleeing their 'liberators' in Vietnam filled the headlines it became certain that there would be no more gains for communism in the region. The Dominos had grown roots in those twenty years and now could stand on their own.
Communism expanded after the perceived US defeat in Vietnam. South Yemen, Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Benin, Guinea...all on the tanker route between the West and The Gulf fell to Russian/Cuban rule. The worst President in US history invited the Soviets into Nicaragua from whence they began insurgencies in Guatemala and El Salvador. Finally the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and outran their resources.
But that expansion is nothing compared to what it would have been if Robert Kennedy had won the election in 1968 and acted on his rash promise to cut and run as quickly as possible.
The people who did the heavy lifting in this business, the guys who had to do the dirty work, a large number of them draftees plucked reluctantly from America's giant 1960s sex and drug party, had no idea why they were in this dangerous jungle or scrubland instead of cruising Van Nuys Boulevard in their car after work trying to pick up chicks. It never made sense but history tells us now that what these dudes were doing was saving the world. They held the dike against the Great Flood. They did their tours and went back to their lives unless they were among the unfortunates who were killed or maimed. But no noise was made in any event. The only TV shows about Vietnam Vets show them to be losers who suffer frequent psychotic episodes or movies like 'Platoon' or 'Apocalypse Now' which portray them as murderous thugs. They were robbed of a 'thank you' from their country and ignored or ridiculed by a world that somehow had come to believe that the communists had decided to be peaceful and that opposing them militarily was a form of aggression. But in the last few years; as our forces in Iraq have been treated to the same sneering contempt and obstruction by the people who hate our country, foreign and domestic, I look at the amazing Victory that these Americans have achieved over a merciless and bloodthirsty enemy and I think of those other Americans, now completely vindicated by history, who did their duty and made more of a difference in the course of human history than almost any other group of people on earth; a difference that helped save an entire planet from slavery.

The Soggy Center

The final evening of the Republican Convention gave us a glimpse of what it would have been like if McCain had gone with his instincts and picked a candidate close to his heart. The first and second night highlighted his opponents in the primaries; Thompson, Romney and especially Giuliani. All of them gave fine and stirring speeches making you wonder how the back-of-the-pack, least popular, almost non-Republican, managed to slip by in such a short time and beat these excellent candidates to the finish line. Of course, the headliner was Palin, the best speaker of either convention giving the best-written speech of either convention with a build-up that a billion dollars worth of advertising couldn't buy. She emerged as the candidate we should have chosen for the top of the ticket. But we didn't.
So on this last night, after the opponents had stood up to honorably give their support to the nominee and the new Star Was Born on the previous nights, we had the Parade Of The Cronies.
Lindsay Grahamnesty got up and spoke. How do speakers this bad manage to get people to vote for them? It was awful. I don't remember a word he said. It was all delivered in this broken monotone. He lost the crowd's attention after a couple of minutes and just rambled on until he sputtered to a stop. Groan. This guy just radiates 'lightweight'. A good pick for Secretary Of Paper-Clip Allotments in the new administration.
Then came Ridge. This was the caliber of human who was on the 'short list' of VP choices. His selection as the VP pick would have ended the Republican Party as a political entity in this country. To steal a Monthy Python quote, "Dull, dull, dull...Oh God he's dull!" My head was spinning. I suspected that my wife had slipped some liquid codeine into my Diet Vernors so she could slip out for a fast fling with one of the Mexican yardboys. This guy made Grahamnesty seem like Cicero before the Senate. But Ridge and the equally weak Lieberman were the candidates of McCain's soggy, liberal, mosseaten heart. All the fire and truth of the previous evenings, the evenings with the real Republicans, were gone in the Dance Of The Aisle-Crossers; a ballet preformed with the dancers dressed in hidebound cliches and stomping clumsily to the rhythm of the Bi-Partisan minuet. Diaghalev meets a political Salvadore Dali, I thought my TV was going to melt and run down onto the hardwood floor from this concrete idiocy.
But they weren't done. Not by a long shot. The haymaker that would put us into a deep coma was on the way. Cindy McCain. Now, I know what you're thinking. You've all read my previous remarks that I think Michelle Obama is the O-bomb-a! Her eyes, the set of her chin, the way she moves, that's a compelling Democrat! Cindy? Not so much, but its not for lack of raw materials, its for lack of trying. She looks good, dresses sharp, she's naturally very good looking in a way that plays well on the tube...a then she spoke. She spoke for a long time I think. The syrupy platitudes rolled out like a Mississippi of mush delivered in a voice honed to forensic excellence at the Minnie Mouse Academy Of Oratory. The most memorable moment of Cindy McCain's speech for me was when my wife walked in the room, shook me and said, "Will you stop snoring!" I took a walk into the back yard to clear my head.
When I got back it was dinner time so having to set the table and lock all the cats inside (there have been some coyote kills in the neighborhood recently so we trap them inside at sundown)
prevented any further attacks of politically-induced narcolepsy and made me miss the McCain film except in passing. It looked like a typical political bio. Instantly forgettable.
And then, there he was! The Wrinkly Old White Dude. The speech chugged on and on. I guess he was hoping that the narcotizing effect of the previous speakers had numbed the audience into paralysis and we were laying there like a boatload of stunned mullets letting this drivel wash over us. He ended on a more emotional note, evoking his heroism and then launching into an upbeat rhetorical flurry but it was sad after the previous evening.
And what does this go to show? It shows that the Republican Party has incredible vitality and life but it has become the home of some of the most dull, visionless functionaries and equivocators in the universe. The McCain crowd. The Bush crowd.
So, why do I support the guy, you ask? When it came to a choice between being groovy and bi-partisan and fighting to win McCain bypassed the Ridges, Pawlentys and Liebermans and selected a candidate that sent a giant jolt of energy through the party and dealt a crushing blow to the Democrat's attempt to win the hearts and minds of the Middle. When it came to a choice between losing civily and all-out-war he chose all-out-war. He could see the sorry sight his bi-partisan friends present and he knows he needs conservatives completely on his side because we like to fight too. We've been yearning for a fight. McCain knows about strategy and he knows that once you commit yourself to a struggle this intense there is no turning back. He's a conservative whether he likes it or not. A conservative who had been a joke to the Democrats, Bush's Third Term, an old Dole-like duffer, who would be easily pushed aside had now landed some telling blows and produced in Palin a candidate who just by her mere presence is a declaration of Total War to the libs. They are more than angry. They will attack McCain with attacks that will make their eight year verbal assault on the milquetoast Bush look like timid satire. So McCain has put us onboard and then bet the farm. This election is the showdown and we have a cunning, aggressive leader who is now stepped over the line and is landing blows. Do you think that if the Dems are robbed of a victory this November in an election that made Sarah Palin into the most prominent woman in the country that they are going to be in a 'bi-partisan' mood? Add raging partisan hatred to the natural antagonism between the Executive and Legislative branches and the chances of McCain turning into a liberal Bush-Bunny are zero. He is trapped in conservatism whether he likes it or not. The most important thing to this guy is winning. He can't win without us.

Bull'S Eye!

I havent seen a speech that good since Oliver North sent Brezhnev's B-team on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee scurrying for their hidey-holes at the mad climax of Iran-Contra! Not only is she a better speaker than Barak Obama (her teleprompter malfunctioned halfway through the speech and she kept right on going!) but she managed in her speech to deliver a fatal wound to Barak Obama. For a year and a half the stumbling and incompetent Hillary campaign was never able to ask the magic question,' Who is this dude and what the fork is a 'community organizer'? But we have to be charitable to Mrs. Clinton. She only was a candidate because her husband received oral sex from a young intern in the Oval Office and lied about it under oath to a Federal Judge making her a figure of pity and obligating him to put his political machine at her disposal. She was a person with precious few accomplishments of her own; a few tedious ghost-written books, no legislative record in her brief time in the Senate and what must be the most lengthy collection of boring, nasal and idiotic speeches in the history of rhetoric. In fact, Obama's only laudable accomplishment has been the removal of the pestiferous Clintons from the national limelight FOREVER! but when BO's teleprompter broke during a speech he was reduced to stumbling ums and ahs until the problem was fixed.
But last night the stakes were high. The media uproar preceding this speech was unprecedented. The mask of journalistic ethics and unbiased fairness were discarded as the new York Slimes and MSNBC launched courageous attacks on a pregnant 17 year old and attempted to use a four-month-old Downs Syndrome baby as a football. The foaming at the mouth hysteria and the painting of Sarah palin as some kind of neo-nazi primitive cartoon character raised the stakes to a make or break level. The entire election hung on this speech. But what this media hyper-flap did was cause this speech to be viewed by more people than viewed any other speech during this long and dreary campaign.
The opening act was Rudy Giuliani. Hizzoner gave the best speech I ever heard him give. It was pure Obama-bashing and it was highly effective. At one point he mentioned the term 'community organizer' and stopped and laughed. It was obvious that as mayor he dealt with the verminous cockroaches like Al Sharpton who was a much more effective 'community organizer' than Barak Obama (he's got the burned-down Korean stores to prove it!) and had little respect for the profession of community organization. Giuliani started it off. Just what are these Hope and Change Democrats proposing to do? Who is this empty suit whose pretty speechifying has caused him to become their leader? Rudy warmed up the crowd and got them in the mood but after he left the podium. A stillness fell over the hall.
Palin emerged to a roar like no other. Neither of the Clintons or even The Obamessiah got a standing O like that thanks to the brutal media assault that Palin and her family had endured in silence. She started by simply and eloquently introducing her family. Her son on his way to Iraq in a few days, her pregnant seventeen-year-old daughter and the boyfriend-fiance who never imagined that his brief encounter with Brookey would land him on the front page of the New York Slimes and front and center on camera with the whole nation watching, all the way down to little Trig, who was passed around from family member to family member during the speech, answering the Media's phony questions about what was going to happen to this poor little mite, apparently abandoned by his mother. At one point during the speech the camera cut to the youngest daughter licking her hand and using it to lovingly smooth Trig's hair down, a scene with enough poignant warmth to cancel out the effect of a thousand column inches in the New York Slimes.
But then she moved into the attack. She savaged Obama and savaged the Democrats with a smile and a cute little Elizabeth Montgomery tweak of her nose. She ripped that phony, useless community organizer to pieces. She made a cogent, lucid case why he is not qualified to be president. She attacked the Democrats and the punches landed one after the other. Her most telling point was on energy, the issue that is going to drive this election. Lines like "the difference between a mayor and a community organizer is that a mayor has responsibilities" raised the roof as the delegates in the hall went completely insane. Wishing her son Godspeed as he deploys to Iraq and lauding America's great victory was a back-handed slap to the defeatist idiot Obama and his treasonous running dogs. The Republican ticket now has a Hero from the Vietnam War and a mother who just sent her son off to combat. The democrats?
What will be Obama's response to this attack on his resume? Probably to try to ignore it. What else can he do? Its like Kerry with the SwiftBoats or Dukakis with Willie Horton; the central core of his Hope and Change crusade has been smashed. He has to start coming up with reasons why Giuliani and Palin are wrong! He has to advance some specific policies that will advance his agenda. We're Just Like You! isn't enough anymore and if that's all they have they are going to lose the election because they're not like us at all, Palin is. Vague references to 'alternative energy' aren't going to wash against a woman who was the driving force behind a $40 billion pipeline project to bring natural gas to American consumers. The empty rhetoric has been exposed and now the Dems face a team that contains TWO major national political figures, one a better speaker than Obama and the other a man who has shown that he is ready to use aggressive and imaginative attacks to win. The ball is in the Dem's court. Smash it back boys!

Category FIVE!

If John McCain doesn't win this election he's got a job waiting for him as the head of any television network in the country. A swarm of hurricanes are headed for our coasts. wars are breaking out all over the world. The Liberals Who Dare Not Speak Their Names just finished a convention in Denver that was startling in its dullness and gloom. Fred Thompson and Joe Lieberman gave great (in the case of Thompson) and interesting (in the case of Lieberman) speeches on the first/second night of the Republican Convention. Who cares?
Sarah Palin has emerged at the behest of John McCain and the libs have gone completely bananas! The wave of insane attacks has surpassed anything I personally expected to see, and I was ready for a storm of attacks. The Left has gone completely out of its collective mind. Some people are likening this to the sneaky and covert Obama smear campaign that was directed at our First Black President and The Uppity Former First Lady tagging them as racists. BJ and Brunhilda were enraged and hurt by those charges that leaked fervently from the Opposition Research team at Camp Obama and appeared in the eager Mainstream Press daily. Maybe some of the stuff in this incredible sexist assault might have been based on a few kernels of crap that the Obamanoids might have been pushing but the frenzy of hate-filled panic has not been engineered by any campaign or with any devious intention.
The libs saw that picture of Palin pointing the assault rifle, heard about her FIVE carbon-emitting children (one of them adding to the Population Crisis herself. How disgusting!), learned of her athletic past, learned that she intentionally goes out and shoots Gaia's friendly animal citizens, and heard that she loudly and vocally is religious and anti-abortion. The libs just put their heads down and CHARGED! They didn't need talking points faxed over from the Obama campaign or snidey clues leaked through sympathetic bloggers. The libs don't need any instructions from anybody to hate Sarah Palin; she's like everything they hate rolled into one.
Which brings us to John McCain. I am going to stop referring to him as McLame from this day until the end of the election. I know how much grief he has given us conservatives in the past but the other day he swung and landed a blow against the libs that has unleashed the political debate that we have wanted to have with these dopes for years! Eight years of Bush comity are GONE! Hallelujah! This is now a Fight To The Death! There has never been such a stark and blatant attack on the liberals. They are shocked to their souls and responding to McCain's provocation in a very undisciplined and unseemly way. A way that defines them as the totalitarian creeps that they are. It is stark and clear for all to see. Recently Us Magazine ran a misty cover photo of Barak and Michelle, So much in love! This week Us Magazine is sporting a cover photo of Sarah Palin holding her recently-born youngest child with the headings emblazoned in huge type 'Babies, Lies and Scandal!' From Maureen Dowd to Chris Matthews the libs have flipped out completely; attacking her pregnant 17-year-old daughter, sneering at her mayorship as not being real experience (she never organized a single community) and just being generally enraged...the most vicious personal attacks I've ever seen. Underneath is a seething sexism that is going to spill over into the suburbs of this country. Women who don't have degrees from major universities are just a bunch of loud-mouthed trailer sluts, not fit for decent company, certainly never qualified for any kind of public office is the story-line implicit in the attacks on Palin. So why don't you PWT broads just shut up and let well-educated experts us 'help' you run your unfashionable little lives.
McCain's decision to declare Jihad on the libs has united and energized the party in a way that was unthinkable four days ago! That's seizing the initiative in my book. I'm happy to be a foot soldier in this revolution! This guy likes to FIGHT! After decades of sniveling Republican meekness in the face of these thugs and bullies I'm happy to follow somebody who likes to fight. He's already caught Obama flat-footed several times and my vision of a pathetic old Dole '96 rerun is out the window.
Can the Dems rise to this challenge? Obama didn't do very well after his initial couple of months of victories. When the Clints came back fighting he didn't change his strategy or tactics one single bit. He took the punches and won on points. Instead of moving to crush the impudent Clintons once he had it locked Obama froze and just went with the flow of events. That worked against the mortally wounded and inherently unpopular Clinton Crime Family. Its obviously the wrong stance to take against somebody who's coming at you swinging hard.
And the guy's a gambler. The entire election could hang on tonight's speech by a person McCain doesn't know very well. That's the kind of risk that most people in government can't even conceive of taking. He's the kind of a guy that I want leading my country when we have a crisis with Vladimir Putin or Ahmadinajahd. Or would you prefer the Obama/Pelosi approach? So I have completely turned around, and in that I'm not alone. The entire party is mad with delight!
The Great Battle has finally arrived. Showmaster McCain has ensured that every eyeball in America will be glued to the tube. His numbers are going to blow the Olympics and the Obamathon into the trash can of history! Is this the Kamakaze End of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party? This will not be a close election. One side is going to win. My side.

Gustav--We Hardly Knew Ya!

There was just a giant disruption in people's lives all up and down the Gulf Coast from Brownsville to Tampa. It wasn't Gustav, which was a tropical depression which briefly turned into a Category One hurricane before it broke up into a mass of rainy clouds. Bad weather, lots of rain. Bring the dog indoors and take the laundry off the line.
But the approach of this minor climatic event did not go unnoticed in the corridors of power. The geniuses who run our country would normally be indifferent to a few of their lowly constituents becoming more soggy than usual but three years ago a Category Four monster named Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and flooded a major city. The Governor of Louisiana had completely panicked as the storm approached and refused federal aid. The Mayor of New Orleans, in one of the most spectacular displays of cowardice in modern history went to pieces in a hotel room as his police force disintegrated and ran for their lives with emergency lights flashing and sirens screaming. Some of them were found in their police cars as far away as Florida in the next days. The feeble idiot in charge of FEMA spent a critical afternoon getting a massage and manicure and so wasn't available to take calls about Katrina until it was too late.
Helpless residents of old folks homes and tens of thousands of shut-ins and agoraphobics remained in New Orleans in the deadly path of the storm and either died or ended up on roofs waving desperately at the Coast Guard and Army helicopters which the hapless Bush finally sent to the stricken city.
The media, looking for a way to smack the detested Bush, accented the federal role in this catastrophic screw-up and completely downplayed the disgraceful role of the local Democratic officials in the not-so-funny comedy of governmental ineptitude. Katrina became a byword for Bush's aloof racist incompetence.
In the three years that followed we've been treated to a further display of reasons why we should be wary of government 'solutions' to urgent problems. People were parked, at taxpayer expense, in luxury hotels for years. Every house trailer built in the last fifteen years was purchased and dumped into muddy vacant lots in Arkansas and Tennessee to sink into the mire or be hauled off as scrap. There were enough of these empty double-wides to accommodate the population of New York City if the need arose but they were never used for anyone anywhere. People were handed cash-cards that some of them used to get lap-dances at strip clubs and God knows what else!
So as Gustav approached the Gulf Coast, after there being no significant storms for a couple of years. The pols panicked. No one wanted to be in the path of a political hurricane that could destroy careers and devastate political livelihoods. In Mel Brook's documentary about the functions of government, 'Blazing Saddles', the dimunitive Governor Lepetomane stands up and declares loudly, "Gentlemen! We have our phony-baloney JOBS to protect!" The watchword of modern government. The first step was to order the largest transfer of human population, at gunpoint, since Stalin ordered all the Germans out of East Prussia and Silesia. The roads were jammed leading inland from every part of the Gulf Coast for hundreds of miles. Then the media began to cite concerns about the levees in New Orleans holding up under this Category ONE assault!
Hang on a minute BabaLooey! This is THREE YEARS after Katrina and the feds have spent $160 BILLION dollars on post-Katrina fixes and those punks haven't fixed those danged levees yet? $160 BILLION dollars is ten times the amount spent on the Chunnel, the largest civil engineering project in human history. That means they had enough money to build five Chunnels, the Great Wall Of China, the Eiffel Tower and the Panama Canal and years to do it and those levees cant handle a minor tropical depression! And you guys are against waterboarding? We're just waterboarding the wrong people. Instead of abusing innocent Muslim Terrorists whoever is supposed to be fixing those levees should be the first to enjoy a session followed by the biggest money-hungry loudmouth in all of this business, that stupid cow Mary Landreau.
So Gustav spared us the Opening Night of the Republican Convention, and for that many thanks to God and Gustav. The blazing rhetoric of a Bush or even a Cheney is best enjoyed in the privacy of one's own fundraiser with the doors locked and the shades drawn, not in public where the leftist rats in the press can take a hearty swing at it. Those guys are mad since their shameless plugging of Obama's Euro Victory Tour made his poll numbers drop and they are looking for victims. A profile which Bush and Cheney fit nicely. I'll bet McCain's real upset that they dont get to show up and make Obama's point that he's just four more years of Bush. Real upset.
So, as the clouds that were Gustav spread out over Texas and Oklahoma, as they dump buckets of rain in Arkansas and Tennessee, as creeks run over in northern Mississippi and Alabama the Republicans will assemble this evening in Minneapolis, freed of their embarrassing obligation to laud the unpopular Bush, the author of the party's grievous state and bow down in tribute to the Fertility Goddess, the forty-five year old Grandma, our mistress of the Snowmobile, the Maiden Of The Oil Rig, the Working Class Heroine and The Wrinkly Old White Dude as they show up those sappy Democrats and their convention dominated by a terminal cancer victim and her two autistic children and show the libs what an upbeat, upsurge convention is supposed to be like!

Obama Can't Make The Sale

It's obvious something has gone badly wrong with the Obama campaign. A lot of people who would normally be enthusiastic Democrats are not on board with the campaign of Hope and Change. What has gone wrong? The reason is very obvious but it hasn't appeared in any well-thought-out editorial or lengthy think-piece in any magazine. No learned academic has pondered the scene and come up with the answer.
The answer is simple; in the upside-down PC world that we live in the negative aspects of black culture and how government policies have fostered and encouraged those negative aspects have created a deep resentment in many groups who are now being asked to support Barak Obama without any acknowledgment of their feelings.
The 'uprising' in Los Angeles in 1991 is a good example. The press glorified the scum who took to the streets to loot and vandalize and terrorize the peaceful members of the community. Criticism of the thugs who perpetrated this crime wave was not allowed. Sanctimonious 'black leaders' grabbed the microphones to inform us that these poor victims were only acting out after years of terrible discrimination. The policemen who were acquitted of assaulting Rodney King, a drunken thug on PCP who was actively attacking the officers who came to back up the helpless female CHP officer who pulled King over for his wild, erratic driving, were charged a second time for the same offense (isn't there something in the Constitution about that. I guess they were tried under our 'Living Constitution!) and retried by a kangaroo court and given harsh sentences. In the first trial the DA wasn't able to put the violent, hate-filled maniac of a victim on the stand because his presence would have made the case for the officers even more graphically. When King took the stand in the second trial he was obviously tranked-out to the max and barely able to speak. The penalty for the rest of us was to be subjected to years of preaching based on a severely edited videotape which cut out any indication that King was stoned and violent.
We all watched the shots of jubilation in the black community as the incredibly, obviously guilty of a vicious, violent double murder OJ Simpson was set free by a racist jury after a stomach-turning 'defence' that aimed at stirring up racial hatred. It was disgusting and vile.
How do you think the KKKoreans who had their homes and businesses burned and looted in the 1991 riot felt about the delightful religious musings of The Right Reverend Wright? They can be joined by every kid who went to a high school with a large number of blacks and watched the administration look the other way while people were bullied and intimidated. When I was a kid I lived in a suburb of Philadelphia. Many of the people in that suburb had fled a formerly livable city that had become an urban nightmare filled with violence, garbage and broken windows. How do they feel about Obama and Wright?
The Latino vote is always held to be a sure Democratic plus, but dont be so sure this year. Relatively recent immigrants might remember their first days in AmeriKKKa's inner cities and how they were treated by their black neighbors when it comes time to pull the lever for the Candidate Of Hope.
How many white kids with 1400+ SAT scores and 4.0 GPAs were refused admission to universities while black kids with 1100 SATs and 3.0 GPAs were admitted? Civil service and large corporations...same story.
And, for the last forty years, while all of this has been going on we've been treated to a litany of complaints that there is a higher proportion of young black men in prison because of white racism. A total lie. We've watched black criminals in high office like Adam Clayton Powell, Marion Barry, William 'refrigerator' Jefferson and Kwame Kilpatrick be treated with kid gloves, ignored and then re-elected by the same black community as they sneer at the 'white legal system'. We've watched lying loudmouth bullies like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton receive huge payoffs from cowardly corporations in exchange for racial 'peace'. Al Sharpton was caught lying to try to get a local sheriff and two of his men thrown in prison for raping and assaulting a black girl; a 'crime' that never happened. Does Obama have any criticism of these paragons? I haven't heard it.
Throughout all this the media has inundated us with a stream of anti-white racial abuse by these clowns with no ability by anyone with a conflicting view to speak up. When Bill Cosby said a few words against the prevailing PC wisdom he became an instant non-person. Only one view on race is acceptable in this country and those who leave the reservation become pariahs.
So now Obama is 'just like us' is he? He sat there for twenty years listening to that lying Marxist crackpot Wright as he spewed his febrile 'Black Liberation Theology' at the top of his lungs and ponied up big contributions and dedicated earmarks of taxpayer dollars to help the 'community service' projects of that hate-filled racist maggot and others like him. But there are thousands of Wrights and Farrakhans preaching in the black community. The New York Times might find them thought-provoking but the lower middle class voters who Obama and Co. are now trying to reach are not so well-disposed to being called murderous, redneck, racist crackers who spend all their time conspiring to wreck the aspirations of poor, downtrodden black people.
Of course the granola-eating upscale white hippies who support Obama send their kids to safe, clean private schools and live in gated communities or well-guarded luxury apartment buildings and are able to look at all this with the proper perspective; we need to do more to end racism and become a unified nation. White racism, that is. Black racism doesn't exist in their world. The press can pontificate about a hidden racist vote; 'The Bradley Effect' , where people tell the pollster they might vote for the Media Approved black candidate and then in the voting booth revert to their AmeriKKKan racist roots. Learned academics can appear on TV and tell us how far we still have to go, piously rolling their eyes skyward and asking, "Is America Ready?"
America will be ready to vote for Obama when he tells us why he sat in that church for so long. Why he called us 'bitter clingers'. Why he supports reparations for slavery. What he feels about Al Sharpton.
All of a sudden the black faces in the TV shot behind Obama at speeches have disappeared. The Democratic Convention was Negro-free on the Prime-Time podium, except for the Candidate and his wife who was in drag as June Cleaver. The story line has changed to 'We're Just like You'. The PR campaign has shifted gears. Its too late.