Mitt Romney Can Win

It seems weird for folks to have to say it, but Mitt can still win this.

Mort Zuckerman weighs in, at U.S. News, "Romney Can Still Overcome Obama's Dishonest, Divisive Campaign" (via Memeorandum):

The problem for Mitt Romney right now is that he has put his entire candidacy at risk to the point where he may not even qualify for the dismissive equation of Barack Obama that Marco Rubio formulated for the Republican faithful: "Our problem is not that he's a bad person. Our problem is that he's a bad president." Is Romney also "not a bad person, just a bad candidate"? With his "47 percent" remarks at a Republican fundraiser in May, he has given his opponent evidence to initiate a new line of attack.

Voters can forgive a candidate who stumbles in the heat of an election, trapped by "gotcha" questions from journalists, being quoted out of context in cunning TV attack commercials, and in the Twitter age, failing to appreciate that nothing that is said is secret anymore. We all know the game, and Romney has demonstrated that he is not perfect at this game.

The same can be said of President Obama. As a candidate, he ran a brilliantly smooth and targeted campaign four years ago, but even he misspoke, as they say, in what he thought was a private meeting of San Francisco liberals. When the polls suggested he wasn't appealing to rural voters, his response was to blame them for not seeing how different he was from the likes of Bill Clinton and George Bush, who had let them down. "You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," he said. "It's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration."

This week, Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, dismissed the condescension as something from the mythic past, not to be compared to the furor over Romney's "47 percent" remark. Yet even now, fully armored and protected by four years of 24/7 press scrutiny and an army of verbal bodyguards, the president stumbles. "You didn't build that" still rankles the millions of taxpayers who have concluded that in making their way they've not had much help from the government and a lot of hindrance.

The trouble with Romney—and for Romney—is that he has etched an unappealing sketch of himself. For independent voters, he made too many flip-flops in policy to appease the right. Indeed, he had an uncanny knack for offering an easy target for his opposition: "I like being able to fire people," "I'm also unemployed," "I'm not concerned about the very poor," and "Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs." He seems to be living in another world, referring to middle income as being in the range of "$200,000 to $250,000," when the median income is more like $50,000. By the way, after four years of Obama's economic stewardship, that figure represents a dramatic decline of 10 percent and, in fact, is a strong point to Romney's case against the administration.

Such careless remarks have made it easy for the Obama campaign to get away with a program that pits "the millionaires and billionaires" against the people. It is a dishonest, divisive campaign. It's discouraging of enterprise. It does the opposite of uniting the country to deal with the current economic crisis.

Read it all at the link.

Romney still has a chance. It's going to take some focus and adjustments, but he still has a chance.

The Left vs. the Liberals

From Sean Wilentz, at the New York Review:

Michael Kazin’s new book about American leftists and their impact on the nation over the last two centuries presupposes, as its subtitle suggests, that this impact has been enormous. But Kazin is a judicious scholar without bluster, a professor of history at Georgetown, and coeditor of Dissent, and his assessments are carefully measured. Kazin concedes that radical leftists have often been out of touch with prevailing values, including those of the people they wish to liberate. He concludes that American radicals have done more to change what he calls the nation’s “moral culture” than to change its politics.

And yet, even as Kazin tries to avoid romanticizing the left, his book leaves unchallenged some conventional leftist conceptions about American politics and how change happens. These conventions begin with a presumption about who controls American political life, what C. Wright Mills called the “power elite,” an interlocking directorate of wealth and bureaucracy at the top. Kazin refers to this directorate interchangeably as the “establishment” or the “governing elite.” Unless challenged by radicals, this elite, in his view, is slow to right social wrongs; but without the support of the elite’s more enlightened elements, the radicals remain in the political wilderness.

Occasionally—as with the abolition of slavery, the rise of the New Deal, and the victories of the civil rights movement—momentous changes supported by radicals have indeed come to pass. Yet Kazin argues that the liberal components of the governing elite have supported major reforms strictly in order to advance purposes of their own. Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans, he writes, embraced emancipation only halfway through the Civil War, when it became clear that doing so “could speed victory for the North” and save the Union, their true goal. Franklin D. Roosevelt endorsed labor’s rights only when he needed to court labor’s votes.

Even when they are successful, Kazin writes, the radicals—“decidedly junior partners in a coalition driven by establishment reformers”—end up shoved aside as the liberals enact their more limited programs and take all of the credit. Prophets without honor, the leftists return to the margins where they and later radicals dream new and bigger dreams until another social movement jars the establishment.

Some radical historians—most famously the late Howard Zinn—have described this pattern as a chronicle of thoroughgoing oppression. In their view, the reforms initiated by radicals have practically always turned into swindles, orchestrated by clever rulers to preserve and even reinforce their power. Kazin, who also despairs about the current state of the left, has a more positive view of liberal reformers and their reforms: the Emancipation Proclamation and the Voting Rights Act, he insists, were important political advances and not establishment ruses. But a basic pattern still holds for Kazin as it does for Zinn: radicals challenge the privileged; liberals co-opt them, claiming the glory. In effect liberals are the enemies of fundamental political change.

Most of American Dreamers consists of crisp and useful summaries of nearly four decades’ worth of historical research about American radicals and radical movements, including Kazin’s own work on the amorphous populist strain in American politics. For Kazin, the left consists of anyone who has sought to achieve, in his words, “a radically egalitarian transformation of society.” The definition embraces an enormous array of spokesmen and causes, and Kazin’s account runs from the abolitionists and workingmen radicals of the Jacksonian era through a succession of socialists, women’s suffragists, Greenwich Village bohemians, and civil rights protesters, down to today’s left-wing professoriat.

There's a lot more at the link.

If the left consists of folks looking for "a radical egalitarian transformation of society," one might think Barack Obama would fit the bill. But as the essay points out, Kazin treats Obama as a mainstream centrist Democrat.

That will be an interesting question in the years and decades ahead, the degree of Obama's left-wing radicalism. But read the whole thing. According to Wilentz's thesis, traditional anti-Communist social democrats have contributed much more toward that radical transformation that Kazin hopes to achieve than he's able to recognize. And for historians the key will be to sort out exactly what kind of Democrat this president is. He's not a neo-liberal in the Bill Clinton mold, and indeed, in ideological pedigree Obama's way more radical than President Lyndon Johnson ever was, even if he fails in achieving as lasting change as the great Texas Democrat did. But we could have four more years of this president, and as a lame duck he could tear off the mask and govern from the full-throated ideological radicalism that his upbringing and pedigree indicate. He promised a radical transformation, and he's off to a damn good start, to the detriment of liberty and traditional decency of the American political system.

President Obama Won't Explain Why Libya Consulate Wasn't Better Protected

President Clusterf-k, via Buzzfeed:

The Left is All About Hate

From Ron Radosh, "Why There Cannot Be a Decent Left: An Answer to Richard Landes":

Last week, I wrote a column challenging Professor Richard Landes of Boston University to respond to the critique I wrote of his own arguments against Judith Butler. In that article, I argued that well-meaning men of the Left like Prof. Landes should give up trying to tell people like Butler that the reasons for their hostility to Israel contradict the humanist values of the Left. I argued that it is a fool’s errand trying to save the Left from itself; that in today’s world, what defines being on the Left are precisely the kind of positions Landes and others disdain....

I discussed Landes’ argument with my friend David Horowitz, and he e-mailed me a thoughtful response with which I mainly concur. Horowitz writes:

The distinction he makes between a demotic Left and a revolutionary Left is fairy dust. Yes there have been and still are a handful of decent but impotent people on the Left whose political weight is non-existent. Whatever happened to the Euston Manifesto? What are the leftwing publications, organizations, recognized spokesmen who are defending Jews and Christians and even gays and women against the Islamo-Nazis? Were the same even calling them Nazis, which is what they are (and yes, the Nazis themselves were leftists)?

There is a fundamental snobbery and arrogance evident in the postures of the so-called demotic mini-Left. The leftists actually have a monopoly on all the values that we associate with human decency, equality, liberty, etc. But these values were actually instituted and made into a global force by conservatives — American conservatives who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and created a political system to make those values real. Judith Butler doesn’t act out of good intentions. She acts out of the same emotion that motivates the Left generally, which is hate. Henry James described them all in describing the feminist heroine of his novel The Bostonians: “It was the usual things of life that filled her with silent rage, which was natural enough, inasmuch as to her vision almost everything that was usual was iniquitous. … The most secret, the most sacred hope of her nature was that she might some day … be a martyr and die for something.” Or as Marx — who is the inspiration for all leftists — put it: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” That is the true voice of leftism. What the demotic mini-Left is about is sentimentality.andes and others disdain.

Continue reading.

Pat Condell: We Don't Give a Damn About Your Islamic Outrage

Via Linkmaster Smith:

PREVIOUSLY: "Egypt's Mohamed Morsi Dictates U.S. Foreign Policy to the Obama White House."

Egypt's Mohamed Morsi Dictates U.S. Foreign Policy to the Obama White House

They say that voters don't vote foreign policy. In presidential elections pocketbook issues dominate, and especially in a year like this. And so far, it's not clear that the Republicans have won over the electorate on the jobs crisis (so we might be stuck with another four years of this Obama-Democrat calamity). But there's a lot more on our collective plate this year, and that's the standing of the United States as the continued leader of the free world. The evidence on the Libya attack is so overwhelming now that the White House can no longer cover it up. And we know that the Obama administration's foreign policy toward the Arab world has failed, our relations with and standing in the Muslim world has literally exploded in great balls of fire before our eyes. And the kick in the teeth is still to come when Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi meeets with President Obama to lay down the law on how the United States is to deal with the Middle East. I hope Obama's been practicing his bow, because he's going to be bending low before the Muslim Brotherhood chief, deeper than any head of state to which he's kowtowed thus far. Americans need to take a good hard look at what's going down and then ask themselves if 2012 isn't one of those elections in which history shall be the final judge. Obama promised a fundamental transformation in 2008. He's kept his word and continues to deliver the goods, bringing down Uncle Sam every step of the way.

At the New York Times, "Egypt’s New Leader Spells Out Terms for U.S.-Arab Ties":

CAIRO — On the eve of his first trip to the United States as Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi said the United States needed to fundamentally change its approach to the Arab world, showing greater respect for its values and helping build a Palestinian state, if it hoped to overcome decades of pent-up anger.

A former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mr. Morsi sought in a 90-minute interview with The New York Times to introduce himself to the American public and to revise the terms of relations between his country and the United States after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, an autocratic but reliable ally.

He said it was up to Washington to repair relations with the Arab world and to revitalize the alliance with Egypt, long a cornerstone of regional stability.

If Washington is asking Egypt to honor its treaty with Israel, he said, Washington should also live up to its own Camp David commitment to Palestinian self-rule. He said the United States must respect the Arab world’s history and culture, even when that conflicts with Western values.

And he dismissed criticism from the White House that he did not move fast enough to condemn protesters who recently climbed over the United States Embassy wall and burned the American flag in anger over a video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad.

“We took our time” in responding to avoid an explosive backlash, he said, but then dealt “decisively” with the small, violent element among the demonstrators.

“We can never condone this kind of violence, but we need to deal with the situation wisely,” he said, noting that the embassy employees were never in danger.

Mr. Morsi, who will travel to New York on Sunday for a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, arrives at a delicate moment. He faces political pressure at home to prove his independence, but demands from the West for reassurance that Egypt under Islamist rule will remain a stable partner.

Mr. Morsi, 61, whose office was still adorned with nautical paintings that Mr. Mubarak left behind, said the United States should not expect Egypt to live by its rules.

“If you want to judge the performance of the Egyptian people by the standards of German or Chinese or American culture, then there is no room for judgment,” he said. “When the Egyptians decide something, probably it is not appropriate for the U.S. When the Americans decide something, this, of course, is not appropriate for Egypt.”

He suggested that Egypt would not be hostile to the West, but would not be as compliant as Mr. Mubarak either.

“Successive American administrations essentially purchased with American taxpayer money the dislike, if not the hatred, of the peoples of the region,” he said, by backing dictatorial governments over popular opposition and supporting Israel over the Palestinians.

He initially sought to meet with President Obama at the White House during his visit this week, but he received a cool reception, aides to both presidents said. Mindful of the complicated election-year politics of a visit with Egypt’s Islamist leader, Mr. Morsi dropped his request.

Well, yeah. Bowing, in the White House, before the leader of the Arab terrorist world might not have gone over too well with the American public. That's something that even the Obama-enabling media wouldn't be able to conceal.

Things are not right in the world. There has never been as much groveling in our foreign policy, and now a two-bit terrorist lackey is dictating America's foreign policy on the Middle East. It's a disgrace of epic proportions, the mother of all clusterf-ks. May Americans take notice, for the survival of the republic is in their hands.

More at Big Government, "Obama to Condemn Christian Filmmaker Before United Nations" (via Memeorandum).

PREVIOUSLY: "David Horowitz on Libya Attack: 'One of the Most Disgraceful Moments in the History of the American Presidency...'"

RELATED: From the Western Center for Journalism, "Egypt’s New President Keeps Useful Idiot Obama On Short Muslim Brotherhood Leash."

IMAGE CREDIT: The Looking Spoon.

Unmasking Obama — Washington Examiner, 'The Obama You Don't Know'

I hope this gets wide coverage, "The Obama you don't know."

And Doug Ross has a summary, "Unmasking Obama: A Special Report." Also, Theo Spark has the Fox News video, "Fox News Reports Barry Soetoro's Manufactured Past."

Conservative partisans will know most of the story, as will progressive fever swamp nihilists, who've working diligently to obfuscate and suppress the truth. It was a the biggest scam and sham on this country history when the African Marxist interloper was first elected. But we know who Obama is now. If Americans elect this man again they deserve the descent to decline that he's bequeathing the country.

Say your prayers. And keep fighting against this extreme leftist abomination.

End of Summer Rule 5

September 22, the last day of summer, today.

It's hot out in the O.C., but fall is upon is and the leaves will be falling and we'll be bundling up in the evenings before you know it.

First, thanks to Proof Positive for the linkage.

And I'm linking Bob Belvedere, even though I don't see his Saturday Rule 5 posted yet. He's got a lot of great content and worth checking out.

Plus, at The Other McCain, "OMG! @ParisHilton Gets Wrongly Tagged ‘H8R’ for Talking About Gay Sex." I posted on that as well, ICYMI, "Paris Hilton Apologizes for Slamming Homosexual Men as Disgusting Pervs Probably Infected With AIDS."

And speaking of disgusting pervs, The Daley Gator's got your O'Biden coverage, "Joe (Captain Gaffetastic) Biden On Cheerleaders: “The Stuff They Do On Hard Wood, It Blows My Mind”."

Some bona fide Rule 5 at Randy's Roundtable, "Thursday Nite Tart: Andi Muise." And at Pirate's Cove, "If All You See…is a planet killing dog, you might just be a Warmist."

More Rule 5 from our friend Odie, "I Love Blonds ~ OR ~ Rule 5 Woodsterman Style." (Very nice Rule 5 indeed!)

Also at Eye of Polyphemus, "Sonja Bennett." And from EBL, "Rule 5 Twitter Retweet."

I'll have more later.

Meanwhile, it turns out Chicago Ray's taking an indefinite retirement from blogging: "Gone Fishin' Indefinitely."

That dude's old school, been blogging for a long time. He'll be back. He's a patriot. You don't quit the fight when so much is on the line, our culture, our civilization, our decency.

Add your links in the comments to be added at the updates.

Have a great last day of summer! (Or first day of fall, but enjoy it nevertheless.)

PHOTO CREDIT: Ms. Brooke on Facebook.

Famke Janssen!

Turns out she's starring in a new movie, "Taken 2."

Ms. Janssen makes the "X-Men" films. She's so fabulous. I'm looking forward to watching her new film.

Man Jumps Into Tiger's Den at Bronx Zoo, Gets Promptly Mauled by 400-Pound Siberian Beast

Well that was smart.

The tiger chewed off his foot.

At the New York Post, "Bx. Zoo tiger mauls 'suicidal' monorail jumper."

And the New York Daily News nails it, "ZOO-ICIDE: Man mauled after leaping 17 feet into Bronx Zoo tiger den in crazed bid to kill himself."

The dude, David Villalobos, is recovering. I suspect the tigers are okay as well. Don't mess with those suckers, that's for sure.

Obama Tops Romney on Medicare

Americans see Social Security and Medicare as earned benefits, not handouts. Folks in many cases have paid decades of taxes to support the system. By the time they reach retirement they expect to cash out. So conservative proposals to shore up the system always face stiff headwinds, not because we don't need reform either. Even if reforms won't effect current retirees, folks still think changing the structure of benefits will gut the nature of the entitlement. We had a debate on this in 2005, when President Bush sought to restructure Social Security and Medicare. So it's no surprise that Romney/Ryan haven't been getting much support here. USA Today has some numbers on that, "Romney fights on Medicare but Obama retains advantage." And Paul Ryan got booed yesterday at the AARP convention:

Bowing to the Mob

From Mark Steyn, at National Review, "Government-funded film critics do grotesque damage to freedom of speech":

I see the Obama campaign has redesigned the American flag, and very attractive it is too. Replacing the 50 stars of a federal republic is the single “O” logo symbolizing the great gaping maw of spendaholic centralization. And where the stripes used to be are a handful of red daubs, eerily mimicking the bloody finger streaks left on the pillars of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi as its staff were dragged out by a mob of savages to be tortured and killed. What better symbol could one have of American foreign policy? Who says the slick hollow vapid marketing of the Obama campaign doesn’t occasionally intersect with reality?

Continue reading.

More at Director Blue.

PHOTO CREDIT: Instapundit.

Paris Hilton Apologizes for Slamming Homosexual Men as Disgusting Pervs Probably Infected With AIDS

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Epidemic of Child Sex Abuse at Spirit Lake Sioux Indian Reservation

At the New York Times, "U.S. Is Taking Over Spirit Lake Sioux's Social Services":

SPIRIT LAKE INDIAN RESERVATION, N.D. — The man who plays Santa Claus here is a registered child sex offender and a convicted rapist. One of the brothers of the tribal chairman raped a child, and a second brother sexually abused a 12-year-old girl. They are among a number of men convicted of sex crimes against children on this remote home of the Spirit Lake Sioux tribe, which has among the highest proportion of sex offenders in the country.

Federal officials are now moving to take over the tribe’s social service programs, according to members of the tribe, government officials and documents. The action comes after years of failure by government and tribal law enforcement officials to conduct proper investigations of dozens of cases of child sexual abuse, including rape.

While members of the tribe say that sexual violence against children on the reservation is common and barely concealed, the reasons for the abuse here are poorly understood, though poverty and alcohol are thought to be factors. The crimes are rarely prosecuted, few arrests are made, and people say that because of safety fears and law enforcement’s lack of interest, they no longer report even the most sadistic violence against children. In May 2011, a 9-year-old girl and her 6-year-old brother were killed on the reservation after being raped and sodomized.

“It bothers me that it is so accepted, that it is considered so normal. It’s lawless,” said Molly McDonald, who was a tribal judge until March, handling juvenile cases.

Continue reading.

President Obama, You Invited the Muslim Brotherhood to the White House?

Sean Hannity was running this clip on his show last night, and it's devastating:

And see Daniel Greenfield, "Obama’s Muslim Brotherhood Foreign Policy."

The Surge in Afghanistan Ends With Whimper

The New York Times has the MSM angle, "Troop ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan Ends With Mixed Results."

But see the utter truth at AoSHQ, "September 17, 2012: The Day We Gave Up In Afghanistan."

Folks like Diana West, and later Pamela Geller, argued long ago that we should get out of Afghanistan. Americans weren't fighting to win but attempting to build a nation not ready for democracy. And that was during the Bush years. Under Obama there was hope that we'd finally make some progress, but it's been a half-hearted policy there from the beginning of this administration.

Here's West's analysis from the other day:

Sniping over withdrawal dates is no substitute for grown-up discussion of the utterly and completely failed COIN strategy of nation-building on the backs of the US military, of strapping leftist, Kum-bay-a theories of "world peace" to the body armor of Americans and Australians and Brits and the rest, and sending them out into the IED-mined field of jihad. Really get to the know the people, said their commanders. Take off those ballistic glasses, and protect them from everything that can hurt them, said the generals. And dump hundreds of millions of dollars down the drain while you're at it.

The defective linchpin of this "strategy" is that there exists an imaginary Islam to which Americans and other Westerners must show fealty in order to win hearts and minds of "good" Islam, thus isolating the "bad" Islam of the fighting enemy. This is a defilement of reality that requires the widespread and permanent corruption of the thought process itself. The main result of this brainwashing has been to bring, as chronicled in this space for years now, the US military under the rules of Islam in our increasingly desperate efforts to win Afghan "hearts and minds."

I'm a bit of a wild-eyed optimist on democracy promotion, frankly. But even the best intentions will be for naught if you're just going through the motions, looking toward the next presidential election. And that's what happened during the Obama years. It's been an enormous case of moral bankruptcy, but then again, that's the story of the entire record of this administration.

Hope and Change Lies With Us, Not the Government

From Mayor Mia Love (via Instapundit):

Progressives despise strong independent women like Mia Love.

Yes, they hate her with blinding rage, the freaks. They make me sick.

Evidence Shows Americans Becoming Increasingly Polarized

This is an awesome piece from Jonathan Haidt and Marc Hetherington, at the New York Times, "Look How Far We’ve Come Apart."

Check the link for the entire entry. I'm not so big on the "coming together" thesis that concludes the article, because that will inevitably lead to bigger government, but here's the last bit for a quick quote in any case:

The few months after Election Day offer us the largest window we’re likely to have in the next four years to make any of these changes. Averting the fiscal cliff — the automatic spending cuts and tax increases scheduled to take effect in 2013 if a deal isn’t reached before then — will clearly be the top priority during those months. But if our leaders manage to avert catastrophe, and even more pressingly, if they don’t, will they then turn their attention to bridging our political canyon? Or were they just blowing smoke in our eyes when they said that America is about “what can be done by us, together.” If ever there was a need for us all to “come together for the sake of our country,” our “united America,” it is now. Whatever our ideological differences, can we at least agree to push our leaders, after the election, to get their house in order?

Dan Senor Interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer

Also interviewed is Jane Harman, who used to represent the South Bay area in Congress.

Dan Senor is the Jewish neoconservative that Maureen Dowd slurred in her recent piece at the New York Times. Progressive Israel-bashers, the moral reprobates, defended Dowd, which I wrote about here, "Walter James Casper III: Jewish 'Neocons' Should 'Stop Whining' About Being Slurred as 'Puppet Masters' for Bush/Cheney War Cabal."

'Seriously, Mitt F-ked This Election Away Long Ago...'

I linked my recent PJ Media post previously, but go back and read the comments if you've got the time. Those little right-wing fever swamp trolls weren't pleased, but I especially loved the "Tokyo Rose" comparison. That one's a keeper.

But back in the real world, "DSpeicher" left this comment at my post from Wednesday on the Fox News battleground states poll:

But it's going to turn around. Any day now. You'll see. Seriously, Mitt effed this election away long ago. This election should have been a cake walk, but it's been one own goal after another. Romney's campaign has to be the most inept and poorly run campaign in the long, sad history of inept and poorly run campaigns. Romney's got a bunch of amateurs running his campaign and they are handing the election over to Obama. The whole thing is just profoundly sad. An absolute disgrace.

I'll have more, but ICYMI from yesterday, "Mitt Romney's Path to Victory is Narrowing."