Obama Ignites Ideological War

UPDATE: Commenters have pointed out an error in my reading of Ambinder's passage on "Americans" aren't terribly upset by it (Obama's ideological redistributionism).

My bad.

Now acknowleging that, Ambinder's still focusing on the wrong thing, which is that Obama's clearly stating he favors economic redistribution. Focus on the forest, folks.

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Today's online buzz surrounding Barack Obama's 2001 statements on Chicago's WBEZ public radio is shaping up to be a much-needed discussion of the ideological underpinnings of election 2008.

First, of course, the Obama camp has denied the candidate's arguing for economic distribution. But what I'm finding interesting is how pundits are focusing on the legal argumentation rather than the underlying socio-economic basis of Obama's statements. See Marc Ambinder, for example, on the "old ideological wars":

"Socialist" ... "redistributive" ... These are 20th century words with 20th century connotations; indeed, the point of Obama's relfection was that the most progressive - most liberal - court of the era could not bring itself to violate a core American principle and could not extend the sphere of justice to the economy. Obama wasn't simply making a technical point about jurisprudence and history; he was expressing a liberal positivist's lament about the court's reluctance in one specific case - San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez - which dealt with education funding.

Conservatives find it absurd that Americans are about to elect the most liberal president of the modern era and aren't terribly upset by it; but in capitalizing on this particular argument of Obama's, the Republicans are rearguing whether some form of economic redistributions from white people to black people was necessary - even though Obama never really made the point.

Who among the conservative establishment isn't "terribly upset" that Barack Obama's the most far-left Democratic nominee in American history?

Rush Limbaugh? Nope, couldn't be him. How about GOP Senator George Voinovich? Nope, he must have lost the memo. Couldn't be John McCain, either, right?

CHRIS WALLACE (Fox News): But you did it indirectly, so let me ask you for some straight talk. Do you think that Senator Obama is a socialist? Do you think that his plans are socialism?

JOHN MCCAIN: I think his plans are redistribution of the wealth. He said it himself, "We need to spread the wealth around." Now, that's one of...

WALLACE: Is that socialism?

MCCAIN: That's one of the tenets of socialism. But it's more the liberal left, which he's always been on. He's always been in the left lane of American politics.

WALLACE: But, Senator, when we talk...

MCCAIN: So is one of the tenets of socialism redistribution of the wealth? Not just socialism — a lot of other liberal and left wing philosophies — redistribution of the wealth? I don't believe in it. I believe in wealth creation by Joe the Plumber.

People don't want to use the "s-word" in American politics. The U.S. stood against the advance of socialism in its historic ideological struggle against Marxist-Leninist ideology and Soviet totalitarianism. In Latin America today, there's one of the strongest shifts to popular socialist regimes in recent decades. Some even indicate that a worldwide alliance of socialism and Islam is on the march to topple American imperial domination.

It's not only disingenuous to argue that conservatives aren't worried about Obama's socialism, it's outright journalistic malpractice to assert that there's no economic class analysis in Obama's 2001 public radio statement.

Barack Obama couldn't have been more clear:

I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.

Note something here: The issue is not whether the U.S. lacks the development of democratic socialist traditions (we do); it's not whether both Democrats and Republicans in fact advocate policies that often align the U.S. with social democratic policies found in other advanced industrial nations (they do); and it's not whether Republicans have run out of ideas, and are scraping the bottom of the barrel in reaching frantically to smear the Democratic nominee as radical (they haven't gone far enough).

The issue today is how far Barack Obama will take the United States to the far-left of the ideological spectrum, in both policy and culture.

Because the United States' founding political orientation is center-right, and because the U.S. never had a feudal background and no feudal order was overthrown in 1776, the election of Barack Obama - and his agenda of expansive government expenditures, taxes, regulations, racial-redistribution, and foreign policy multiculturallism - will take the country farther to the left than at any time in American history. Whether Americans choose to call it socialism or not, an Obama presidency portends an even more divisive period of political history than we've seen under the last eight years of Republican rule.

Barack Obama maintains a socialist-ideological sensibility in the objective sense, as demonstrated by his repeated statements on economic redistribution and "spreading the wealth."

Leftists should quit playing around the words like "liberal" and "progressive" and forthrightly embrace the socialist label. If Obama can help leftists do that, it'll be the most honest thing he's done all year.

Obama and Wright: He Never Complained Once

It's probably too late for this, but the National Republican Trust is on the right track:

Ben Smith notes:

The ad is exactly what many conservatives have been hoping would air for months: A Jeremiah Wright highlight reel, with a voice-over describing the pastor's long relationship with Obama.

"For 20 years, Obama never complained, until he ran for president," says the ad, which labels Obama, "too radical, too risky."

John McCain has stuck to his words in not attacking Barack Obama on racial issues.

Meanwhile, nothing is beneath the radical left's attacks on the GOP ticket ... absolutley nothing.

Obama Camp Pushes Back on Economic Redistribution

Here's the audio from Barack Obama's 2001 legal argument in favor of expanding the civil rights revolution to economic redistributionism:

It turns out that Cass Sunstein, an Obama advisor and professor of law at Harvard, is leading a push-back from the Obama camp:

A top legal advisor to Barack Obama, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, said today that Obama's 2001 remarks on "redistributive change" -- pushed hard on the right today -- are being misinterpreted, and that he was actually articulating "conservative" legal principles, and that the then-law professor's "law-speak" was being misinterpreted.

Obama's remarks came in a long interview on civil rights and Constitutional law with two other law professors on the Chicago public radio station WBEZ in 2001. (The full transcript is here, and audio is here.) Sunstein argued that Obama is discussing redistribution in a relatively narrow legal context: The discussion in the 1970s of whether the Supreme Court would create the right to a social safety net -- to things like education and welfare. He also noted that in the interview, Obama appears to express support for the court's rejection of that line of argument, saying instead that the civil rights movement should aim for the same goals through legislative action.

"What the critics are missing is that the term 'redistribution' didn’t man in the Constitutional context equalized wealth or anything like that. It meant some positive rights, most prominently the right to education, and also the right to a lawyer," Sunstein said. "What he’s saying – this is the irony of it – he’s basically taking the side of the conservatives then and now against the liberals."

I'll tell you what: Listening to the audio, and just from my political science background, which includes teaching black politics, I can tell this is a bunch of baloney.

It's common for rights activists to argue for fulfilling the promise of "forty acres and a mule."

As for Obama's legal argument, apparently it's uncontroversial, notes Ann Althouse:

Let me tell you that, in this radio interview from 2001, Obama is making the most conventional observation about the limits of constitutional law litigation: The courts will recognize rights to formal equality, but they hesitate to enforce those rights with remedies become too expensive or require too much judicial supervision and they resist identifying rights to economic equality. Such matters are better handled by legislatures, and courts tend to defer to legislatures for this reason.

Obama was not showing disrespect for constitutional law in any of this. More radical law professors would criticize the courts for not engaging in more expansive interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause and for failing to provide much more expensive, invasive remedies. He did not do that. He accepted the limits the courts had recognized and advised against the unfruitful pursuit of economic justice in the judicial forum. It's a political matter. That is a moderate view of law.

It may be a moderate view of the law, but it's a considerably radical view of the political-economy of rights.

Obama Called for Economic Redistribution in 2001

Barack Obama, in phone call to a Chicago WBEZ public radio program in 2001, forcefully advocated the economic redistribution of society's product as a corrective to the unrealized promise of the civil rights movement:

You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil-rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it, I’d be okay, but the Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society...

I think, the tragedies of the civil-rights movement was because the civil-rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.

Ironic now, isn't it, that the very civil and voting rights movement that gave blacks the right to vote and run for office has now resulted in the nomination and pending election of a transparently socialist nominee for president of the United States.

This story's currently the lead entry at Memeorandum.

This is not a hoax. Power Line has links to the audio.

This is a big story, but if America's really ready for a socialist revolution, as top leftists advocate, with media backing, then we should see little public backlash.

Change we can believe in ... big change!

Democratic Values in West Hollywood

Here's Sarah Palin hanging in effigy in West Hollywood:

As Captain Ed notes:

Let’s say someone created an effigy of a certain national political candidate and placed a noose around its neck, and then put the effigy on display for the neighbors to see this Halloween. What kind of reaction would you expect to see? People would start screaming about the Jena 6 and the latent racism of the American voter, and would assume that the neighborhood was located in a red state where people bitterly cling to their guns and religion.

Oh yeah, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and all the other "blood of martyrs" activists would be all over the airwaves decrying Republican Jim Crow.

Democrats (and West Hollywood gays), of course, get a pass: It's all "good, clean fun."

More Democratic values on display.

Democratic Values on Display at Denver Obama Rally

I've got a new regular visitor from the leftosphere, James at Brain Rage, who apparently applauds the politics of gutter video-attacks like the one found in "Red, White and MILF."

With all due respect, that's not parody but demonization.

In fact, with the current shape of political polarization in campaign, '08, I don't think there's anything that's out of bounds nowadays, absolutelty nothing. For example, via Looking at the Left, look at this young girl below - who can't be more than 8 or 9 years-old - who is wearing a t-shirt with the Democratic donkey screwing the GOP elephant from behind (via Memorandum):

If you check the link, there's also a guillotine mounted on the back of a van, emblazened with the slogan, "Bush Whacker":

This van and trailer circled the area of the rally. I got the impression the driver would delight in the thought of Harry Ried as Robespierre, and the heads of Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, and Joe the Plumber getting real blood instead of red tape on the guillotine.

Well, yeah, considering what a prominent leftist journalist and blogger once wrote about President Bush:

May his war-crimes prosecutor be Iraqi; may his judge be American; and may he die in the Hague.

This is today's Democratic-left. This is not some fringe-movement of the party; this is the base. I write a new post every day on some new political outrage, smear, or over-the-top demonization of the GOP. The depths just keep getting lower, and lower...

These are Barack Obama's people, and don't tell me a girl with a donkey-style Democratic mascot ass- f**king the GOP is satire. I'm tired of the left's hand-waving unseriousness.

Do you send your children to school dressed like this? Would you even send them out in public like this?

Behold the difference between a liberal and a conservative, a difference of fundamental, monumental, importance.

Look out for 2012, folks, because the election's already started, by the looks of the culture wars already sweeping the nation. Obama's not even elected yet, amazingly.

The True Meaning of Gutter Politics

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A Democratic Electoral Revolution?

Markos Moulitsas, of Daily Kos fame, has a new essay up at Newsweek, "We Say We Want A Revolution":

On Nov. 4, Barack Obama will be elected as the next president of the United States. The real excitement won't come from watching that foregone conclusion come to pass. No, the big question is, will Democrats nationwide simply "win" the night—or will they deliver an electoral drubbing so thorough that it signals the utter rejection of conservative ideology and kills the notion that America is a "center-right" country?

The theme of the essay is a kinder, gentler version of a series of Kos posts with the recurring message of "Break Their Backs," which includes this menacing tone:

This isn't about winning. It's about destroying the conservative movement, and their dangerous incompetence has given us an historic opportunity to deliver a killing blow.

Destroying? Killing?

This man's not nice, which is why I'm glad that this year - in the event of an Obama election - will represent a temporary diversion from the longer-term foundations of the nation as the very center-right polity that Moultisas so detests.

Notice how Kos saves his demonizing language for the mouth-foaming partisans at his blog (not Newsweek readers). There's good reason for that: Most Americans do not abide by the kind of rank polarization and demonization that is standard fare among the far left-wing netroots.

Indeed, in the event of an Obama presidency, the Democrats will need to find a way to suppress the most radical elements of their coalition, so as not to alienate the broader electorate, which is generally conservative, as Jon Meacham explains:

It is easy—for some, even tempting—to detect the dawn of a new progressive era in the autumn of Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency....

But history, as John Adams once said of facts, is a stubborn thing, and it tells us that Democratic presidents from FDR to JFK to LBJ to Carter to Clinton usually wind up moving farther right than they thought they ever would, or they pay for their continued liberalism at the polls. Should Obama win, he will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal—a perennial reality that past Democratic presidents have ignored at their peril. A party founded by Andrew Jackson on the principle that "the majority is to govern" has long found itself flummoxed by the failure of that majority to see the virtues of the Democrats and the vices of the Republicans.

The pattern has deep roots. FDR had a longish run (from 1933 to 1937), but he lost significant ground in the 1938 midterm elections and again in the largely forgotten wartime midterms of 1942. After he defeated Barry Goldwater in 1964, LBJ had only two years of great success (Ronald Reagan won the California governorship in 1966) before Vietnam, and the white backlash helped elect Richard Nixon in 1968. Jimmy Carter lasted only a term, and Bill Clinton's Democrats were crushed in the 1994 elections. The subsequent success of his presidency had as much to do with reforming welfare and managing the prosperity of the technology boom as it did with advancing traditional Democratic causes.

Republican presidents, too, are frequently pulled from the right to the center....

So are we a centrist country, or a right-of-center one? I think the latter, because the mean to which most Americans revert tends to be more conservative than liberal. According to the NEWSWEEK Poll, nearly twice as many people call themselves conservatives as liberals (40 percent to 20 percent), and Republicans have dominated presidential politics—in many ways the most personal, visceral vote we cast—for 40 years. Since 1968, Democrats have won only three of 10 general elections (1976, 1992 and 1996), and in those years they were led by Southern Baptist nominees who ran away from the liberal label. "Is this a center-right country? Yes, compared to Europe or Canada it's obviously much more conservative," says Adrian Wooldridge, coauthor of "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America" and Washington bureau chief of the London-based Economist. "There's a much higher tolerance for inequality, much greater cultural conservatism, a higher incarceration rate, legalized handguns and greater distrust of the state."

This "tolerance for inequality" and distrust of the state" - as well as all the other elements of American conservatism - are exactly the foundations of American society that the Kos revolution hopes to overturn. In foreign affairs, the Kosocrats seek the destruction of Israel and Kos himself said he wanted to see American private contractors in Iraq dead and on the cover of every newspaper in the country.

I'm convinced that Kos and his netroots-brethren are radically out of the mainstream of American society.

More importantly, I'm convinced that Barack Obama - who has welcomed the support and has even openly cooperated with Daily Kos - is also well outside the mainstream of the American political culture, and an Obama administration will push an extreme-liberal policy agenda of tax hikes, spending windfalls, economic stimulus, spread-the-wealth redistributionism, universal health care, infrastructure investment, fairness doctrine, global warming legislation, restrictions on gun rights, abortion on demand, embryonic stem cells, foreign importation of prescription drugs, union card-check voting, trade protectionism, precipitous Iraq withdrawal, ban on domestic wiretapping, opposition to mandatory prison sentences for sex offenders, sex-education for kindergartners, race-based affirmative action, expanded welfare entitlements, radical education pedagogy, and enemy appeasement diplomacy with no preconditions (and more).

This is a policy agenda not of the America I know, and come the revolution, I'll be relentlessly fighting in resistance to the Kospierre-Obama program of domestic and internationalism radical-leftism.

Michele Bachmann's Heart is Right

Here's Michele Bachman's campaign ad buy explaining her choice of words while appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews on October 17:

Once again our nation is at a crossroads, and it’s a time for choosing. We could embrace government as the answer to our problems, or we can choose freedom and liberty.

I may not always get my words right, but I know that my heart is right. Because my heart is for you, for your children and for the blessings of liberty to remain for our great country.

Unlike Captain Ed, I don't think Bachmann made a mistake, or if she did, it was in underestimating the extemist reaction on the left-wing to simply speaking truth to power on Barack Obama's radical associations.

Elizabeth Hasselbeck and Sarah Palin at GOP Rally

Here's video footage of two of my favorite women in American politics right now, Elizabeth Hasselbeck and Sarah Palin:

At one point, Hasselbeck says of the media, "instead of the issues, they are focused on her wardrobe," a reference to the media's hypocrisy surrounding the RNC $150,000 outlay for Palin's new campaing clothing.

Don't miss Palin's speech as well, where she defends her wardrobe, here (via Memeorandum).

Recall too that while the RNC spent $150,000 for a wardrobe that Sarah Palin would return (and perhaps give to charity), the DNC spent $5.3 million just for the stage, lighting, and construction costs for the Acropolis-themed podium and stage-backdrop at Mile High Stadium for Obama's August 28 nomination acceptance speech.

No media bias this election, right?

See also, "Palin and Hasselbeck Blast 'Ridiculous' Wardrobe Story" (via Memeorandum).

Obama Declares War on Conservative Values

Debbie at Right Truth's got a great essay up, "Barack Obama Declares War":

Senator Barack Obama has declared war - on everything important to Conservative Americans.

Don't believe me???

There's example after example at the post, but this part is crucial:

AMERICAN CULTURE: Barack Obama has basically declared war on American culture, in favor of multiculturalism as put forth by the United Nations. "An informal survey of more than two dozen U.N. staff members and foreign delegates showed that the overwhelming majority would prefer that Sen. Barack Obama win the presidency, saying they think that the Democrat would usher in a new agenda of multilateralism after an era marked by Republican disdain for the world body."

Conservatives who are skeptical of the United Nations said they are not surprised by the political tilt. “The fact is that most conservatives, most Republicans don’t worship at the altar in New York, and I think that aggravates them more than anything else,” said John R. Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “What they want is the bending of the knee, and they’ll get it from an Obama administration.” (continue reading at Washington Post, hat tip Malignant Liberal Idiocy).

That sounds about right, and we can see it in this article, "At the U.N., Many Hope for an Obama Win."

The First Metropolitan Machine Candidate

Recall my earlier post, "Loving America Means Having Small-Town Values."

Well, apparently the Democratic campaign is sensitive to charges that Barack Obama's an "urban" candidate, so they've come up with a new line: Obama's the first metropolitan candidate in American history (via Memeorandum):

Republicans, looking to frame Sen. Barack Obama as a candidate outside the mainstream, recently settled on a new tack: deriding him as an out of touch and corrupt urbanite.

At the GOP convention last month, Rudy Giuliani -- the former mayor of quite a large city -- chided the Democratic nominee for minimizing Sarah Palin's experience as mayor of tiny Wasilla, Alaska: "I'm sorry that Barack Obama feels that her home town isn't cosmopolitan enough." The rest of Sen. John McCain's campaign hammered Obama as a product of the "Chicago political machine." And two weeks ago, Palin hailed "pro-America" small towns at a stop in North Carolina.

Many Obama partisans detected a vague racial appeal in the anti-urban framing. But the attacks also highlighted an overlooked aspect of the Illinois senator's rise: that in a country forever in thrall to its frontier and small-town heritage, he is the rare White House contender who really is a creature of the big city.

This raises two questions: Is Obama's ascent a further sign -- on top of volatile gas prices, plummeting home values in the exurbs and recent population upticks even in Baltimore and Newark -- that our cities are back and that the country is making peace with its non-agrarian side? And would a big-city president address as never before the problems of our urban cores -- blighted housing, shoddy public transit, dismal schools?

Obama partisans answer both questions in the affirmative -- with a key qualifier. The Democratic nominee, they say, should be viewed less as the first urban candidate in a long time than as the first metropolitan candidate -- a semantic distinction suggesting that the urban resurgence has a ways to go.

The article continues by discussing how American history shows increased urbanization, and says we haven't had a truly big-city candidate since Democrat Al Smith in 1928.

But even the Washington Post can't deny Obama's roots in Chicago's one-party machine poltics:

Obama grew up in Honolulu and Jakarta and has spent his entire adult life in big cities -- college in Los Angeles and New York, law school in Boston (okay, Cambridge) and 20 years in Chicago, the iconic American city, on which Obama settled as his home and launching pad. As a community organizer, he helped public housing residents take on City Hall; he married a native Chicagoan; and his campaign is based in a Michigan Avenue tower.

His style is as urbane as American politics get -- blazers with no tie, the slow stride across the stage. His political base is even more urban than is typical for a Democrat, while he struggles with rural voters despite playing up his mother's Kansas roots. One of the first interest groups he met with after securing the Democratic nomination in June was an alliance of bicycling advocates. Yet Obama has hardly adopted the sort of agenda we've come to expect from urban candidates -- much to the consternation of some of his supporters. With his organizer background, he could have cast himself as a knight riding to the rescue of cities neglected by Republican administrations. Instead, he has adopted the framing increasingly favored by many mayors and urban-policy types -- promoting America's cities based on their strengths, not their failings.

The fact is, Barack Obama is a classic big-city pol, and he'll take his radical community organizing model right into the White House, providing entrée to a long line of scurrilous associates and unrepentant domestic terrorists.

I laid out an analysis along these lines in "Barack Obama and Chicago Machine Politics," where I link to the awesome essay from the Chicago Tribune's John Kass, "A Presidential Debate, the Chicago Way."

Kass indicates that Obama's roots on big-city machine politics is not something he wants to talk about, and this is why Democratic activists are redefining what it means to be urban versus rural in America today.

If there aren't really any heartland voters anymore, then Obama's not radically out of the mainstream of American political-culture after all. This is the biggest postmodernist scam of recent months in a Democratic election campaign of Orwellian proportions.

Barack Obama is an old-fashioned, big-city, tax-and-spent, race-conscious, left-wing machine politician.

The Democratic Party establishment and the pro-Obama mass-media will do anything they can to get folks to believe otherwise.

Obama Funding Scam Gets MSM Scrutiny, Finally

I noted last night, in "Obama's Criminal Fundraising Machine," the paucity of mainstream press coverage of Barack Obama's campaign finance irregularities.

There is a big page-one Washinton Post story out today, so maybe we'll see a little more attention to this in the days ahead:

Sen. Barack Obama's record-breaking $150 million fundraising performance in September has for the first time prompted questions about whether presidential candidates should be permitted to collect huge sums of money through faceless credit card transactions over the Internet.

Lawyers for both the Republican and Democratic parties have asked the Federal Election Commission to examine the issue, pointing to dozens of examples of what they say are lax screening procedures by the presidential campaigns that permitted donors using false names or stolen credit cards to make contributions.

"There is so much money coming in and yet very little ability to say with certainty that you know who is giving it," said Sean Cairncross, the Republican National Committee's chief counsel.

While the potentially fraudulent or excessive contributions represent about 1 percent of Obama's staggering haul, the security challenge is one of several major campaign-finance-related questions raised by the Democrat's fundraising juggernaut.

Concerns about anonymous donations seeping into the campaign began to surface last month, mainly on conservative blogs. Some bloggers described their own attempts to display the flaws in Obama's fundraising program, donating under such obviously phony names as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and reported that the credit card transactions were permitted.

Obama officials said it should be obvious that it is as much in their campaign's interest as it is in the public's interest for fake contributions to be turned back, and said they have taken pains to establish a barrier to prevent them. Over the course of the campaign, they said, a number of additional safeguards have been added to bulk up the security of their system.

In a paper outlining those safeguards, provided to The Washington Post, the campaign said it runs twice-daily sweeps of new donations, looking for irregularities. Flagged contributions are manually reviewed by a team of lawyers, then cleared or refunded. Reports of misused credit cards lead to immediate refunds.

In September, according to the campaign, $1.8 million in online contributions was flagged, and $353,000 was refunded. Of the contributions flagged because a foreign address or bank account was involved, 94.1 percent were found to be proper. One-tenth of one percent were marked for refund, and 5.77 percent are still being vetted.

But clearly invented names have been used often enough to provoke an outcry from Republican critics. Donors to the Obama campaign using false names such as Doodad Pro and Good Will gave $17,375 through 1,000 separate donations, with no sign that they immediately tripped alarms at the campaign. Of more concern, Cairncross said, are reports that the campaign permitted money from 123 foreign nationals to enter its accounts.

The article minimizes the significance of the improper donations, as just "1 percent" of Obama's haul. The problem is that no one knows for sure how much of the Obama war chest was generated by Democratic money bundlers, wealthy individuals using infinite aliases, or corrupt foreign funnelling Third World money into an American presidential election.

As Captain Ed notes:

[Stanley] Mosk never thinks to ask the one question that has already occurred to conservative bloggers. What makes the Obama campaign different from online retail operations? After all, we have spent almost 15 years buying and selling products and services on the Internet, and retailers know how to protect themselves and their customers. They employ a system that compares the billing information on the order to the information in the credit-card system — and when they don’t match, the sale gets denied. Credit-card companies have gone an extra step in recent years by adding a security code to protect against fraudulent use.

The McCain campaign apparently uses these systems to prevent fraud. Why doesn’t Team Obama? That’s the pertinent question. Systems have existed for years to prevent exactly the kind of fraud that has occurred in Obama’s fundraising. Why did Team Obama deliberately avoid using them?

Why?

The Obama team's running an underground finance operation, as I reported in my Pajamas Media piece, "Obama’s Fundraising Fraud."

The Obama campaign finance scandal is one of the stories that wouldn't have seen the light of day without the conservative blogsphere breaking it wide open.

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UPDATE: See also, Bradley Smith, "Obama's Huge Haul Should End This Fight," who notes:

Obama's epic fundraising should put to rest all the shibboleths about campaign finance reform - that it is needed to prevent corruption, that it equalizes the playing field, or that tax subsidies are needed to prevent corruption.

I touched on this in my piece, "Obama’s Fundraising Fraud."

Obama's Media: The Return of the Partisan Press

Partisans of both sides routinely rail away at mass media bias, particularly when a critical news cycle focuses unwanted attention on a favored candidate.

But election 2008 will go down in history as the turning point in American's return to a partisan press.

It turns out that studies of press coverage of the election find that Democratic nominee Barack Obama enjoys a more than 2-to-1 advantage in favorable election coverage in the news (via Saberpoint):

The media coverage of the race for president has not so much cast Barack Obama in a favorable light as it has portrayed John McCain in a substantially negative one, according to a new study of the media since the two national political conventions ended.

Press treatment of Obama has been somewhat more positive than negative, but not markedly so.

But coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable - and has become more so over time. In the six weeks following the conventions through the final debate, unfavorable stories about McCain outweighed favorable ones by a factor of more than three-to-one -- the most unfavorable of all four candidates - according to the study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

For Obama during this period, just over a third of the stories were clearly positive in tone (36%), while a similar number (35%) were neutral or mixed. A smaller number (29%) were negative.

For McCain, by comparison, nearly six-in-ten stories studied were decidedly negative in nature (57%), while fewer than two-in-ten (14%) were positive.

This survey lays out the analysis fairly neutrally, with its stress on the balance of positive versus negative reporting - yet, that seems like a distinction without a difference (note only 14 percent of coverage in the last period was positive for McCain).

Michael Malone comes out directly to announce the end of an era of objective news reporting in the United States.

The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer ... nothing, nothing I've seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.

Note, too, this vignette from a reader at Instapundit (via PoliGazette):

Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. people cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working.

America today has a partisan press favoring the Democratic Party. In its conclusion a review of press bias in recent American history, the Colorado Springs Gazette notes:

The pretense of objectivity, long a part of our country's Fourth Estate, has been sacrificed at the altar of Obama. A majority of mainstream journalists have given up on the illusion of objectivity. They want the Democrats to win, they don't have the time or energy for fairness, and they'll give their professional lives for the cause if necessary. And that's OK. The genie has emerged from the bottle and she's never going back. At least Americans see her and know her better than ever.

Lefty commentators reponsing to this will tote-up numerous examples of how the press has been "unfair" to Obama, but one or two anomolous examples of critical reporting can't shake loose the fact that the mass media has abandoned its role as a non-partisan watchdog for the public good.

This is a shame not just for citizens hungering for balanced news on the state of the nation, but for the survival of Democratic legitimacy as well.

The Shape of the Race, 10-26-08

Dan Riehl's not throwing in the towel on a McCain victory, and he discounts elite media opinion on an Obama blowout:

This race is still close....

Don't tell me what some inside the beltway, alleged all-stars want to do. And the last thing anyone wants to do is get caught up in polling in an election with so many variables and unique challenges. It's hard to find a reasonable number of polling firms who agree precisely from one day to the next on a single result.

There is only one opinion that matters - the opinions realized as the votes of the American people scattered across the breadth and width of America's great Heartland. When those are cast and counted, I'll contemplate the future of this great nation. But until November 4th, frankly, none of us can really say.

Like me, Dan's ready to go down with the ship, and there have been a couple of recent polls showing a tightening in the election, for example, the recent IBD/TIPP survey:

Contrary to other polls, some of which show Obama ahead by double digits, the IBD/TIPP Poll shows a sudden tightening of Obama's lead to 3.7 from 6.0. McCain has picked up 3 points in the West and with independents, married women and those with some college. He's also gaining momentum in the suburbs, where he's gone from dead even a week ago to a 20-point lead. Obama padded gains in urban areas and with lower-class households, but he slipped 4 points with parents.

IBD/TIPP has a history of accuracy, although this poll finds youth voters going 53-43 for McCain over Obama, and that just doesn't sound right (and could be a signal of larger problems with the sample).

Yet, an Associated Press-GfK poll this week also found McCain and Obama essentially deadlocked heading into the final two weeks of the election.

The poll, which found Obama at 44 percent and McCain at 43 percent, supports what some Republicans and Democrats privately have said in recent days: that the race narrowed after the third debate as GOP-leaning voters drifted home to their party and McCain's "Joe the plumber" analogy struck a chord.

Both of these polls may very well be outliers from the main trend in dozens of surveys this last couple of weeks which have found Barack Obama ahead by high single-digits, and in some cases by double-digit margins.

That said, recall that it's a 50-state election, and we have to look at the shape of the race across the battlegrounds. Here's Andrew Romano with a nice run-down:

The important number to watch ... is how many electoral votes (EVs) Obama is collecting in states where he averages more than 50 percent support - i.e., states he'd win even if every single undecided voter breaks for McCain. As of today, the Illinois senator is topping 50 in all of the Kerry states (252 EV) plus Iowa (7), New Mexico (5), Colorado (9) and Virginia (13) - for a grand total of 286 EVs, or 16 more than he needs to win. What's more, there are signs that Ohio might be breaking his way as well. The three polls that were in the field this week--Big10 Battleground, CNN/Time and Quinnipiac--show Obama leading McCain 53-41, 50-46 and 52-38, respectively. Note that all of Obama's numbers start with a "5."

As with national polls, states averages lag behind events. So there's a chance that McCain could still catch up - or be catching up right now. That said, there's simply no evidence so far that "the presidential race has tightened." In fact, much the opposite. Like the rest of you political junkies, I'll be staying tuned to see whether something changes. But I won't let any single poll - however "close" - "shock" me into believing a storyline that's not supported by the stats.

Romano relies heavily on the left-leaning Nate Silver for his analyis, although it's hard to quibble with the numbers in the toss-up states, where McCain's clearly been struggling in states that went to the GOP in 2004 and 2000.

That said, a good number of insightful conservatives are simply looking ahead to the future of the Republican Party - how it will rebuild, who will be frontrunners in 2012, and how long will the party be in the wilderness?

See also my earlier essays, "The Shape of the Race, 10-16-08," and "The Shape of the Race, 10-1-08."

Obama's Criminal Fundraising Machine

I published an in-depth background analysis on this year's collapse of the post-1974 campaign finance regime at Pajamas Media yesterday, "Obama’s Fundraising Fraud."

It turns out that not only has Barack Obama violated his pledge to fund his campaign with public money, new revelations also indicate he's now running one of the dirtiest presidential campaigns in American history:

As Scott Mirengoff at Powerline reported on Thursday, the Obama campaign refuses to screen credit card contributions for potential fraudulent transactions, and thus any individual could make unlimited contributions using infinite aliases.

It turns out, for example, that credit card companies deploy a variety of security measures to guarantee the processing of electronic transactions. For campaign giving, the key safeguards are vendor address verification, country of residence, and proof of citizenship. We now know that Obama operatives at the campaign’s website have disabled the security settings on vendor identity to expedite online donations, gifts that then speed through to fund election activities that would be flagged as illegal under normal FEC reporting standards.

Allapundit at Hot Air has shown that, as the news of Obama’s open-access credit card procedures went viral across the conservative blogosphere, readers conducted dozens of “experiments” to see if the Obama campaign would accept their money. In no time, the Obama campaign was accepting money from the likes of “JarackBoe BOamabiden” and “Nodda Realperson.” It’s unlikely that these donations will be flagged as fraudulent once the original credit card transactions clear. Thus, while amassing its illegal campaign-contributions war chest, the Obama campaign brazenly flouts the federal election regulations enacted during an earlier reform era of “hope and change.” Meanwhile, the pro-Obama liberal press looks the other way, partnering with the very corruption and duplicity the media industry has attacked during eight years of Republican power in Washington.

Make no mistake, the Democratic nominee may now be running the biggest underground finance operation since President Nixon deployed the “plumbers” as his key operatives for CREEP in 1972.

After a week of reporting across the conservative blogosphere, the mainstream press still refuses to investigate the story.

As Hindrocket notes:

Maybe after the campaign is safely over someone will be interested enough to find out how much of Obama's record campaign fundraising was criminal. Ten percent? Twenty? Fifty? On some other planet, with different reporters and editors, one might expect this to be a significant news story. Of course, in the world we live in, our reporters are too busy covering Sarah Palin's shoes and hair stylist to have time to notice that Barack Obama's entire campaign may be based on a foundation of criminal fraud.

See also, "Obama Campaign Runs Afoul of Finance Rules."

Outrage! Journalist Has Temerity to Ask Biden Real Questions

Joseph Biden, in an interview this week with Barbara West, of WFTV-Channel 9 in Orlando, Florida, became visibly angered by West's line of questioning, after she asked if Barack Obama would "spead the wealth":

WEST: You may recognize this famous quote, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” That’s from Karl Marx. How is Sen. Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?

BIDEN: Are you joking? Is this a joke? ... Or is that a real question?

The Obama camp immediately cancelled a a follow-up interview with Jill Biden.

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ADDED: Ann Althouse takes issue with the Obama campaign:

Ha ha. Wow. You don't usually get questions like that. Biden can't believe it. But, you know, Biden handles it perfectly well. I don't see him losing his cool. He's fine. Good questions. Good answers. Ah, but what is lame is cutting off all future interviews with the station. Pussies!

**********

West responded to criticism of her interview:

We are given four minutes of a satellite window for these interviews. Four precious minutes. I got right down to it and, yes, I think I asked him some pointed questions. These are questions that are rolling about right now and questions that need to be asked. I don't think I was rude or inconsiderate to him. I think I was probing and maybe tough.

Daily Kos has posted West's e-mail for readers, "In case you want to drop Barbara a line..."

Yeah, just like folks wanted to drop Joe the Plumber a line, and there's the pattern: Ask Obama and his team an honest question, and you'll be hounded like a carrier of the plague.

What is this country coming to?

Obama's Assault on the Second Amendment

Via Cap'n Bob:

There is so much at stake in the coming weeks for these constitutionally-guaranteed rights. Keep this in mind as you look at this nice portrait of my favorite pistol - and be sure to vote with this in mind.

See also, "NRA Plans a Wider Ad Assault on Barack Obama in Battleground States;" "Obama and the Attempt to Destroy the Second Amendment;" and "Obama's Second Amendment & 'Clinging to Your Guns'."

Obama to Rekindle LBJ's Foreign Policy!

Melanie Phillips, with her usual aplomb, concisely lays out the danger of a Barack Obama administration in foreign affairs:

Obama thinks world conflicts are basically the west’s fault, and so it must right the injustices it has inflicted. That’s why he believes in ‘soft power’ — diplomacy, aid, rectifying ‘grievances’ (thus legitimising them, encouraging terror and promoting injustice) and resolving conflict by talking. As a result, he will take an axe to America’s defences at the very time when they need to be built up. He has said he will ‘cut investments in unproven missile defense systems’; he will ‘not weaponize space’; he will ‘slow our development of future combat systems’; and he will also ‘not develop nuclear weapons,’ pledging to seek ‘deep cuts’ in America’s arsenal, thus unilaterally disabling its nuclear deterrent as Russia and China engage in massive military buildups....

Obama dismisses the threat from Islamism, shows zero grasp of the strategic threat to the region and the world from the encirclement of Israel by Iran, displays a similar failure to grasp the strategic importance of Iraq, thinks Israel is instead the source of Arab and Muslim aggression against the west, believes that a Palestinian state would promote world peace and considers that Israel – particularly through the ‘settlements’ – is the principal obstacle to that happy outcome. Accordingly, Obama has said he wants Israel to return to its 1967 borders – actually the strategically indefensible 1948 cease-fire line, known accordingly as the ‘Auschwitz borders’.

There's more at the link, and when you're finished there, check out Daniel Larison, who sees the reincarnation of LBJ's liberal containment in an Obama presidency:

The people worried about the second coming of Carter ought instead of be more concerned about an administration more like LBJ’s, in which we would all probably agree that an excess of hawkishness rather than the lack of it was the central flaw.

Larison blogs at the American Conservative, the home of unpatriotic conservatives "at war with America":

They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation's enemies.

I genuinely doubt Obama will send hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops into foreign hostilities to fight our new "Cold War" against radical Islam!

But you've got to love those paleocons - they do know how to spice up an otherwise slow blogging night!

Who Are We to Question God's Plan?

Today's Wall Street Journal features the story of Parker Carden and his family of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Parker was diagnosed prenatally with a rare genetic abnormality of the kidneys that can kill an infant in the first year ("autosomal recessive polycystic kidney disease").

The Parker family was faced with the question on whether to terminate their pregnancy, a decision so traumatic that it nearly cost them their marriage. Advanced prenatal genetic testing, which provided the Parker family with the early diagnosis for their son, "allows parents to take on the role of gene police," according to researcher Evelyne Schuster, who's quoted in the Wall Street Journal article.

In other words, prenatal tests allow families to obtain an abortion and avoid the prospect of bringing into the world a seriously, even catastrophically, ill child.

The Parkers refused to do this, and Jennifer Carden explains her family's decision at her blog, "Our Family Whirlwind":

Things get better everyday and we are blessed that Parker is in our lives. He has taught us more compassion and love than we have ever known. He makes great strides everyday and no one...NO ONE... can put a cap on his potential. Not doctors, idiots commenting on-line about the article, or anybody else. Who are we to question God's plan for us individually, us as a family, or Parker's path. What I know is that our family is full of love and admiration for each other. Parker is such a sweet and loving boy. Thank you God for letting us be his parents. No matter what happens, God gives us the strength to get through our days together. I love my children more than anything in the world. I have four great boys-all special in their own individual way. I have a great husband who supports us and allows me to stay home to raise our children and give more time to Parker.

Parker Carden is now 20 months old. His kidneys function at about 60 percent of normal range. He will be confined to a wheelchair before he can walk. But he has the immortal love of his family, and the protection of God.

This is one powerful story of family commitment and strength, shared in a time when values of life, faith, and family are at risk more than any other time in history.

Michele Bachmann and the Conservative Future

GOP Representative Michele Bachmann, from Minnesota's 6th District, has lost a double-digit lead to Democratic challenger Elwyn Tinklenberg following her appearance on Hardball with Chris Matthews on October 17.

A new poll finds Elwynn with a slight, statistically-insignificant lead over Bachmann, 45-43 percent.

Bachmann's under fire for criticizing the Democratic nominee, saying, for example, "the people who Barack Obama has been associating with are anti-American, by and large." The ensuing left-wing backlash has engulfed her campaign and put her political career in jeopardy.

As noted, I made a contribution to Bachmann's reelection campaign the other day.

I've been moved by the controversy surrounding, as I see Bachmann as an embattled foot-soldier in the culture wars following September 11, 2001, which have now reached manic pitch on the eve of the presidential election.

Bachmann's been eviscerated by the netroots left and its allies in the liberal press corps, and she's taped a new campaign advertisement saying, "I may not always get my words right but I know that my heart is right because my heart is for you, for your children and for the blessings of liberty to remain for our great country."

This is not the big "apology" some folks on the left were anticipating, and I'm glad: Bachmann's got nothing to be ashamed of, and no need to apologize:

• When the Senate Majority Leader, a Democrat, gets up to the podium and proclaims, "The Iraq war is lost!" in an effort to counteract any positive consequences of an upcoming change in strategy, is that pro-American?
• When "Jihad Jack" Murtha scores a propaganda victory for Jihadists who are killing our soldiers by unjustly and without evidence labelling Marines "cold blooded murderers," is that likewise pro-American?
• When an entire party, in the name of politics, tries to undermine the efforts of our troops in harms' way during wartime, is that pro-American?
• When Obama's long-time self-confessed mentor and pastor of over 20 years stands in the pulpit and screams, "G*D DAMN AMERICA!" is that being pro-American?
• When another long-time Obama Associate, William Ayers, bombs the pentagon and other targets, and later regrets only that he didn't cause more murder and mayhem, is that also pro-American?

But notice the video above, which features Bachmann in a congressional district debate in November 2005. During the talk Bachmann proclaims that "not all cultures are equal," to which the Huffington Post responds:

One comment she has never explained came during a debate she had while running for Congress the first time in November 2005. Prompted by a question on the rioting in France and Europe at the time, Bachmann said "not all cultures are equal, not all values are equal," letting it be known that she thought that people of the Muslim faith had an inferior culture to that of the United States and the West.

She held forth on the European unrest, referring to a generation of unassimilated Muslim French youth addicted to cable television, led in her imagination by al Jazeera to wreak havoc. Yet it was Bachmann who seemed entranced by cable news. Her knowledge of what was actually happening in France seems to have come entirely from a FOX news-style script. In fact, the unrest was no jihad, had nothing to do with religious faith or Muslim culture or al Jazeeera. It was more akin to the riots in the U.S. for expanded civil rights in the 1960s or those that followed from the Rodney King police beating in Los Angeles in 1991. The European riots came after two suburban youth were killed in a police chase. The unrest centered on decades of discrimination that had manifested itself, for example, in school acceptances and hiring practices and police force racial profiling.

Actually, that's not quite accurate.

In fact, Bachmann pretty much nails the analysis, and Huffington Post is spinning Bachmann's comments as a purportedly earlier example of beyond-the-pale extremism.

Note, for example, Robert Leiken's analysis in, "Europe's Angry Muslims," from the July/August 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs:

Jihadist networks span Europe from Poland to Portugal, thanks to the spread of radical Islam among the descendants of guest workers once recruited to shore up Europe's postwar economic miracle. In smoky coffeehouses in Rotterdam and Copenhagen, makeshift prayer halls in Hamburg and Brussels, Islamic bookstalls in Birmingham and "Londonistan," and the prisons of Madrid, Milan, and Marseilles, immigrants or their descendants are volunteering for jihad against the West. It was a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent, born and socialized in Europe, who murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam last November. A Nixon Center study of 373 mujahideen in western Europe and North America between 1993 and 2004 found more than twice as many Frenchmen as Saudis and more Britons than Sudanese, Yemenites, Emiratis, Lebanese, or Libyans. Fully a quarter of the jihadists it listed were western European nationals - eligible to travel visa-free to the United States.

Also, here's Robert Spencer rebutting the notion that "the unrest [of 2005] was no jihad, had nothing to do with religious faith or Muslim culture":

Why have the riots happened? From many accounts one would think that the riots have been caused by France’s failure to implement Marxism....

One might get the impression from this that France is governed by top-hatted, cigar-smoking capitalists, building their fortunes on the backs of the poor, rather than by socialists and quasi-socialists who have actually strained the economy by spending huge amounts of money on health and welfare programs. Nor does the idea that the rioting has been caused by economic inequalities explain why Catholics and others who are poor in France have not joined the Muslims who are rioting. Of course, all the news agencies have either omitted or mentioned only in passing that the rioters are Muslims at all. The casual reader would not be able to escape the impression that what is happening in France is all about economics — and race.

Compare Spencer to Bachmann's intitial comments in the video:

I just want to say only in France, only in France could you have suburban youth rioting because the welfare benefits aren't generous enough. And that's... That's what they're telling us now is happening there. And only in France could that happen.

Representative Bachmann is more attuned to France's "Muslim street" than are her detractors on the radical left.

And that's why I've contributed to her campaign, and I hope others will as well (go to Bachmann's campaign page, here).

Michele Bachmann's fighting the fight conservatives need to wage. She's now a bit chastened by the backlash, but as the comments in her new advertisment indicate, she's sticking to "what's right in her heart."

That's a stand for traditional values, a stand for ideals, and a refusal to cave to intense political pressures from nihilist moral relativists.

Unfortunately, two-thirds in the Minnesota National Public Radio poll disagree with Bachmann's comments on Barack Obama's radical associations, for more reasons than I can discuss here.

Thus, in the microcosm of American politics that is Minnesota's 6th congressional district, we're seeing the battle for the conservative soul unfold in miniature, at the level of an individual GOP policy-maker beseiged by the hordes of moral equivalence who're now emboldened by the prospects of a Barack Obama administration, a candidate who will represent the very values against which Bachmann's so courageously warned.

The Economic Consequences of Obama

Here's the powerful new anti-Obama ad from Let Freedom Ring:

See also, Investor's Business Daily, "The Audacity of Socialism."