The Myth of Democratic-Stimulus Popularity

One of the most common left-wing memes over the last couple of weeks holds that Republicans are "shooting themselves in the foot" in opposing the "a popular initiative backed by a popular congress and a Democratic congressional leadership that, while not particular popular, is still more popular than they are" (via Memeorandum).

I'm not exactly sure what goes on in the minds of radical leftists. No doubt the multi-sensorial elation of the Democrats' endorphinic triumph in November has neutralized the brain's regular neural processes of reasoning for some of these folks. Or, more simply, hubristic totalitarianism by doctrine systematically ignores evidence that repudiates the hegemonic party line of the hard-left Democratic forces.

For example, Rasmussen reported Wednesday that "When it comes to the nation’s economic issues, 67% of U.S. voters have more confidence in their own judgment than they do in the average member of Congress." Well, so much for the popularity of the "Democratic congressional leadership." Indeed, as Rasmussen continues, "The new Congress fares worse on this question that the previous Congress."

And how much more popular are the Democrats than their Republican opponents? Not at all, actually, as Michael Barone points out, "Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that Democrats are currently ahead of Republicans by only 40 percent to 39 percent. Given that this generic ballot question over the years has tended to understate Republicans' performances in actual elections, one gathers that if the 2010 election for House seats were held today, Republicans would win or come close to winning a majority of seats—which is to say, they would gain about 40 seats."

On the Democratic economic program, polls have found consistent reservations with the economic stimulus package. In fact, support has been dropping like a rock as the bill's true characterization as an interest group pork-barrel spending boondoggle has taken hold in the popular consciousness.

CBS News last week reported a bare majority supporting the proposal, and the trend line was going down: "Slightly more than half the country approves of President Obama's $800 billion-plus stimulus package, a new CBS News poll finds. But support for the bill has fallen 12 points since January, and nearly half of those surveyed do not believe it will shorten the recession."

What's interesting (and certainly problematic for the Democrats, who have mounted their recovery program under a veil of stealth), is that the more people learn about the plan, the less they like it, as Pew notes: "Those who have heard a lot about the plan express the most skepticism, with 41% saying it is a bad idea compared with 28% of those who have heard only a little. This stands in contrast to the balance of opinion a month ago, when people who had heard a lot about the plan were more likely to back it than those who had heard only a little."

Leftists will cite generic poll findings, like Gallup's, that indicate a broad public backing for the measure, but these results are completely partisan, and backing for the measure among political independents "is totally flat."

Meanwhile, a campaign of political vilification is heating up on the left in the wake of Senator Judd Gregg's withdrawal as President Obama's treasury secretary-designee. Daily Kos is leading the smearing chorus: "Earlier this week we learned that the Republican Party has embraced the tactics of the Taliban, and today the insurgents have adopted another word associated with terrorists: they are "emboldened." Why? Because Judd Gregg changed his mind about heading the Commerce Department."

Apparently, the euphoria of the "Obama Kool-Aid" is wearing off and the nihilist left is reduced to equating U.S. senators of the Repubican Party with the kind of terrorist barbarians who have killed thousands of Americans over the last decade.

Thus, behold the fundamental nature of corruption and dishonesty that is the bailiwick of today's Democratic-left.

Newsweek as Journal of Opinion

It's been coming for some time now, but as the New York Times reports, Newsweek magazine is undergoing a big makeover, essentially transforming itself into a journal of opinion:

Newsweek is about to begin a major change in its identity, with a new design, a much smaller and, it hopes, more affluent readership, and some shifts in content. The venerable newsweekly’s ingrained role of obligatory coverage of the week’s big events will be abandoned once and for all, executives say.

“There’s a phrase in the culture, ‘we need to take note of,’ ‘we need to weigh in on,’ ” said Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham. “That’s going away. If we don’t have something original to say, we won’t. The drill of chasing the week’s news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable.”

Newsweek loses money, and the consensus within its parent, the Washington Post Company, and among industry analysts, is that it has to try something big. The magazine is betting that the answer lies in changing both itself and its audience, and getting the audience to pay more.

A deep-rooted part of the newsweekly culture has been to serve a mass audience, but that market has been shrinking, and new subscribers come at a high price in call centers, advertising and deeply discounted subscriptions.

As readers here may recall, the shift at Newsweek to a journal of opinion is already well underway. The magazine's still newsy and glossy, but its recent marquee essays would be right at home at the American Prospect or Washington Monthly - that is, hardline leftist outlets for big government advocacy and the culture of anything-goes nihilism.

Recall, Newsweek's big cover story last month, "The Religious Case for Gay Marriage" (which was a disaster, as I pointed out at the time).

Also, Jon Meacham's essay this week on the growth of big government, "We Are All Socialists Now," is even worse, being an essay that's founded in a degree of journalistic dishonesty that seems to have been emboldened by the election of Barack Obama.

Only time will tell if Newsweek's making the right decision.

I doubt the reading public needs more left-wing editorial sources. Other newsweeklies are making changes as well (U.S. News has gone monthly in print, but is aiming to keep a major online news presence), so we'll see how the American print media shakes out even further going ahead.

As longtime Newsweek reader, I'm simply dismayed that the route to survival for the magazine is to sell-out its credibility as an objective news source by attempting to rescue itself by pigging-backing off of Obamesssianism.

Speaking Truth to Democratic Big Government

Here's how the Los Angeles Times described the Democratic majority's economic stimulus package last week:

With Congress moving toward passage of an $800-billion-plus economic stimulus plan, big government is back. Unabashed. With a vengeance.

The stimulus is bigger than the Pentagon's entire budget. It's more than the United States has spent on the war in Iraq. And its hundreds of provisions reach into almost every aspect of American life - including workers' paychecks, local schools, digital television and modernizing medical records.

Perhaps not since the Great Depression has Congress set out to expand and redefine so dramatically the government's role in the economy, all in one bewilderingly complex blueprint.

Now, this morning's Washington Post reports that a number of top economists concur on the virtually unprecedented scale of the left's stimulus agenda:

With Congress moving closer to adopting a $820 billion stimulus package and the Obama administration poised to unveil a new bank bailout plan, economists say that the federal government is taking its biggest role in the economy in a generation.

States that once aspired to blaze trails independent from Washington are turning to it for money, banks and businesses that once decried regulation now are seeking federal capital, grants or tax cuts and individuals are looking for tax relief.

"This is a seismic shift in the role of government in our society," said Allen Sinai, chief global economist for Decision Economics. "Those who believe the government can be an effective, positive instrument for good will have another chance to try it," said Sinai, a political independent.

To reiterate Sinai's comment above, this is indeed a "seismic shift," and it foretells a major reorientation of the relationship between government and the individual in society.

Yet, there's a fundamental level of disingenuity in all of the public debate on this. People do not like identifying the ideological implications of this shift to unprecedented state expansion. When conservative commentators attacked the Democrats in 2008 as "socialist" for their big government planning, on health care, tax increases, and government regulation, the left-wing media and bloggers attacked them with an existential ferocity.

This week's cover story at Newsweek continues the essential dishonesty, "We Are All Socialists Now." Authors Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas name not President Barack Obama and the Democrats for our current shift to a European socialist state, but ... wait for it ... George W. Bush:

The U.S. government has already—under a conservative Republican administration—effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries ....

We remain a center-right nation in many ways—particularly culturally, and our instinct, once the crisis passes, will be to try to revert to a more free-market style of capitalism—but it was, again, under a conservative GOP administration that we enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years: prescription drugs for the elderly.

This is so dishonest, it's almost sick. Republicans in Congress, during last year's bailout debate, wanted to use big government to rescue markets (and base conservatives howled in disgust every step of the way). Democrats today want to use big government to expand the welfare state to levels that put the Great Society to shame.

The left, in other words, wants to nationalize markets in furtherance of its ideological and programmatic foundations. A look at the House Appropriations Committee's press release, "Summary: American Recovery and Reinvestment," with its smorgasbord of big goverment, pork-barrel spending largesse, should put to rest talk of conservatives as creating the "biggest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years." The Johnson administration created Medicare in 1965. Both parties have accepted the need to support the health care of American retirees.

But recall it was also the same "conservative GOP administration" that campaigned for an entire year, unsuccessfully, for the privatization of Social Security as the marquee program in a conservative shift to an "ownership society." The Wall Street Journal laid out the scope of the Bush administration's vision in its essay, "In Bush's 'Ownership Society,' Citizens Would Take More Risk":

President Bush's campaign to revamp Social Security is just the boldest stroke in a much broader effort: To rewrite the government's social contract with citizens that was born of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and expanded by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

In what Mr. Bush calls an "ownership society," Americans would assume more of the responsibilities - and risks - now shouldered by government. In exchange, the theory goes, they would get the real and intangible benefits of owning their own homes, controlling their retirement savings, and using tax credits or vouchers to shop for education, job training and health insurance.

The emphasis would be on the individual, supplanting a 70-year-old approach in which citizens pool resources for the common good - and government doles out benefits. In the Bush vision, the nation's social safety nets would still exist, but on a smaller scale, targeting the most needy. Others would move to private-market alternatives of their own choosing.

I have seen really nothing in the last year of economic turmoil to convince me that conservatives have abandoned the lost hopes of the Bush administration's vision for an even greater society of individualism and prosperity.

And if there's any evidence that hopes for an opportunity society have been abandoned, it's in the the priorities of the current Barack Obama administration, who has called the challenges facing the country today unequaled in history, and he's announced an unprecedented agenda for massive governmental change to avoid a "catastrophe."

So, while folks may indeed take issue with Republican craveness at Wall Street bailouts - as well as the party's larger historical capitulation to the welfare state since Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964 - at the most basic level of ideology, today's left is on the cusp of achieving it's wildest dreams of the quasi-Marxist Europeanization of American life.

It's time for a little honesty about all of this.

David Hoogland Noon, Abominable Academic Wretch

UPDATE: Some in the comments are taking exception to my reference to "Lesbian, Gays and Marriage." My bad. The blog is Lawyers, Guns and Money, and the homosexual reference to "LGM" is an inside joke in the context of a comment at this post. At issue here is David Noon's historical imcompetence. I have no clue as to his sexual orientation, and that's his business if he's some postmodern bum jockey.

**********

One of the more amazing things about blogging is that hopelessly obtuse left-wing buffoons can be found in both the depths of the online fever swamps and in what we'd presume to be the refined halls of academe.

It turns out that Dave Noon, of Lesbians, Gays and Marriage (aka LGM) and the University of Alaska Southeast, resides in both places, moving back and forth between each in a manner not unlike a three-toed sloth.

Both Dave Noon and Robert Farley, his similarly dull blogging cohort at LGM, have written poorly-formed essays attacking David Horowitz and Ben Johnson's Party of Defeat. As I've shown in a series of posts at this blog, these two struck out wildly in their attempts to take down Horowitz and Johnson, and in fact their efforts were so bad as to raise serious - even disqualifying - questions of academic competence (and of moral grace as well, for example here).

Noon in particular has had a weird obssession with American Power, and he's gotten to calling me unflattering names like "AmericaneoClown," a perverted version of my online handle. Yet, his tune's changing a bit, in that he's now feigning a faux-elitist detachment in his more recent attempts to smear my reputation. This turn is evident in Noon's latest response to one my recent essays, "Continuing Partisan Debate on Iraq." In that entry I noted Noon's scandalous dishonesty in making historical assertions completely divorced from reality - I mean really, I was literally was shaking my head in a kind of abject disbelief that this man would make such hare-brained claims.

Well, he's done it again. And, frankly, after a while it seems Noon's cluelessness just kind of blurs together into a supreme concerto of imbecilic accomplishment.

In the comments to the post above, Noon writes, "Weber's book, for example, makes nothing close to the argument you claim it does ..."

The reference is to Eugen Weber's, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s, and my description suggesting that it ...

... examines the collapse of national morale in interwar France that contributed to the country's utter collapse in the face of German power in 1940 (not unlike the evaporation of outrage and resolve among the American left since 9/11).

While Noon asserts the book "makes nothing close to the argument you claim it does," he also alleges that I'm "dishonest" (clearly a tit-for-tat play, since I've proved how well the adjective describes his own pseudo-historical project), and then asks with indignation, "Have you even read these book [sic]?", while admitting he has not!

Okay, let's think about this for a minute: I suggested that Weber's book on interwar France "examines the collapse of national morale" that contributed to the "country's utter collapse" in the face of Nazi expansionism in 1940.

Now, looking at my personal copy (which I did not have in front of me when I wrote the original post), the book jacket describes interwar French culture as follows:

Caught between the memory of a brutal war won at frightful cost and fear of another cataclysm, France in the 1930s suffered a failure of nerve...

Turning to page 6 in the introduction, we have this passage:

In rueful retrospect, the 1920s were l'après-guerre, lively and optimistic. The 1930s are distinctly l'avant-guerre: increasingly morose and ill at ease. Contemporaries varied in their perceptions. A few clear-sighted ones seem to have seen war coming since the negotiations at Versailles. More sensed it in the middle thirties, when German rearmament kicked off in deadly earnest and Hitler began to break with treaties that his country had freely signed. By 1936, when the French stood by while German troops reoccupied the Rhineland, France, in some French eyes, began to lose the next war. Internal peace was also badly troubled when the exaltations and anxieties of the Popular Front spurred talk of civil war that might outmatch the bloody war in Spain.

So, we can see, now that I've gone to the source to support my previous comments on the book in a blog post, Dave Noon doesn't know WTF he's talking about. Not only that, the passage above explicitly rebuts Noon's unhinged claim - in the narrow sense, at least - that there's never been a book based on the thesis that a minority party (or coalition of minor parties, as in the French case) that "bears responsibility for taking the country to the brink of ruin" (again, I stress the narrow sense, as to give Noon room to breathe).

But that's not all. Looking further at Weber's book, we see the following passage on page 244, from chapter 9, "The Nightmare of Fear":

Through most of the 1920s the French talked softly and carried a small stick. Their army was understaffed, undermanned, underpaid, and overrated. Their foreign policy pretended first that Germany could be forced to execute the provisions of Versailles, then that it didn't matter if they didn't. One thing no one bothered to pretend was that force existed to be used. As a Communist deputy eager to cut military expenditure asserted, "You don't want any more victgories. It follows that you're building an army to prevent defeat." Renaud Jean was right: The conquering, offensive doctrines that caused so many deaths between 1914 and 1918 had been discarded. Soldiers had learned that enemy fire kills. They distrusted the offensive doctrines of the prewar Staff College, the emphasis on vitalism and will, the prediliction for charges with the bayonet. The dominant doctrine was now that "the power of the defensive constitutes the most important and least questionable lesson of the war." Prudence, protection, avoidance of risk: The army would be ready, but to do nothing much. Was that why, in February 1932, the former Ministry of War became the Ministry of Defense?

Anyone with the slightest inkling of 20th century French history knows that the fall of France to Hitler's armies, in less than three weeks from the start of the German invasion on May 10, 1940, is one of the most ignominious military defeats in modern history.

Unfortunately, Dave Noon, an historian by formal training, does not know this history, and he's admitted to not even reading Weber's research.

If the fall of France, and the comprehensive social decay that led to it, is not a "moral collapse," I don't know what is. Recall too, that the comparison to the American left following the September 11 attacks is completely appropriate. The political and ideological base of today's Democratic Party can only be described as rooting for America's enemies over these last few years. Blinded by an insane hatred for George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the entire administrative apparatus - from the Defense Department, to State, Justice, and beyond, the left's done everything that a political opposition possibly could do - short of blowing up Capitol Hill (knock on wood, Bill Ayers, yo!) - to stab American foreign and defense policy in the back. In the case of top Democratic Party officials, the partisan war on American foreign policy began within months after Congress approved a resolution authorizing the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime. For the antiwar hordes in the streets and online, opposition to a forward response to aggression against the U.S. began almost as soon as bodies were being recovered at Ground Zero. " MoveOn.org opposed Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, the campaign to rout the Taliban from power. And in 2003, Columbia University professor Nicholas De Genova, before a crowd of 3,000 students and faculty, called for "a million Mogadishus" when announcing his opposition to the Bush administration's build-up to Iraq. The examples go on and on, ad infinitum.

Dave Noon, and not to mention Robert Farley and the rest of the whacked nihilist crew at LGM, cheers such ignorant anti-Americanism as some cool postmodernist philosophy of righteous repudiation of this country's culture, tradition, and strength.

Noon, ostensibly a professional academic historian, gives his field of training a bad name; and the rest of his allied dunderheaded intellectual poseurs should refrain from commenting on the scholarly issues of the day, as those with genuine professional acumen haven't the time to sweep up after their all too frequent unhinged (and not unembarrassing) pseudo-academic implosions.

Sarah Palin Confirms 17 Year-Old Daughter Pregnant

Breaking news has it that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's 17 year-old daughter Bristol is pregnant. Here's Katherine Seelye's report:

The 17-year-old daughter of Gov. Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate, is five months pregnant, Senator McCain’s campaign advisers announced today.

The daughter, Bristol, plans to marry the father, the campaign said.

In a statement, Mrs. Palin said: “Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows that she has our unconditional love and support.”

The announcement was intended to counter rumors by liberal bloggers that Mrs. Palin had claimed to have given birth to her fifth child in April when, according to the rumors, the child was her daughter’s.

Groups that oppose abortion rights had been thrilled with Mr. McCain’s selection of Mrs. Palin, the governor of Alaska, as his running mate, partly because of her opposition to abortion. It is not clear how social conservatives will respond to the latest news.

The campaign intends to cast this as the kind of situation that ordinary American families face.

The McCain campaign says it was aware of her daughter’s pregnancy before it named her as the running mate on Friday.

It's still early, but some initial reaction on the left is cautious. Here's Steve Benen, for example:

Now, there are different schools of thought on this, but I'm very much inclined to think a politician's kids are entirely off-limits for public scrutiny. Bristol Palin's pregnancy has no political relevance whatsoever.

What's interesting is that had the leftist conspiracy mongers not jumped to attack Governor Palin with the most insane rumors imaginable, the Democrats might have been able to make a case of conservative inconsistency in the promotion of family values.

Now, however, Bristol Palin's pregancy and pending marriage to the father look even more likely to endear McCain-Palin to average American household members who share similar everyday challenges in raising functional, healthy families.

My blessings go out to Governor Palin and her loved ones.

**********

UPDATE: This comment from Denise-Mary at Amy Proctor's is a more powerful response to the news of Bristol Palin's pregancy than anything I could say:

If these candidates, McCain-Palin, previously did not have all of my respect, they do now. Palin's straightforward statement effectively quashes any further discussion on the topic. Further, McCain apparently stated he knew of Bristol's pregnancy, and chose Palin as his running mate anyway. My hat's off to both of them. Choosing to keep her child is the most personal decision a young woman can make, and now that she's in the spotlight, will require phenomenal courage.

Of course there will be those who "trash" her and "family values." To those I would say: is not compassion a "family value?"

By the way, I'm a 56-year-old former Dem, female, who aborted a child decades ago. That child still haunts my heart, and will until the day I die. Kudos to Bristol, Palin, and McCain.

Also, unprincipled left-wing allegations of McCain's dishonesty on prior knowledge of the pregnancy are already flying, although even some of the most ruthless neocon-bashers are hestitant the smear the Palins, so caution may indeed to the norm with this, even on the left.

Obama's Veep: The Perfect Accompaniment of Lies and Deceit

Barack Obama officially launched Democratic convention week with the selection of Delaware Senator Joseph Biden as his vice-presidential running mate.

No matter who he picked, Obama would have received both praise and censure. With Biden, it's clear that Obama's deeply concerned about his lack of experience in foreign affairs. Biden, a member of the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, has served in Washington for 35 years. The obvious hope is that Biden will provide ballast on international affairs, and he might help Obama negotiate the political attack culture that's central to electoral battles.

I'm not sure I can add a whole lot of incisive analysis on Biden's assets or liabilities. Lots of folks have already weighed in, and we'll have a full week of near-exclusive focus on the Democratic Party, with all types of interesting analyses.

I can say that the first thing that always pops into my mind when Biden's in the news is his disastrous plagiarism scandal from the 1988 presidential primaries.

Fortunately, Sigmund, Carl and Alfred have provided some nice links to refresh our memories of Biden's ignominious debut in presidential politics. Here's this, from the Washington Post:

Democratic presidential candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr., a U.S. senator from Delaware, was driven from the nomination battle after delivering, without attribution, passages from a speech by British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock. A barrage of subsidiary revelations by the press also contributed to Biden's withdrawal: a serious plagiarism incident involving Biden during his law school years; the senator's boastful exaggerations of his academic record at a New Hampshire campaign event; and the discovery of other quotations in Biden's speeches pilfered from past Democratic politicians.

It turns out that the Biden's Kinnock klepto-moment was not an isolated incident. Here's more from Sigmund, Carl and Alfred:

In 1965 Biden plagiarized while writing a paper as a student at the Syracuse University Law School in a legal methods course which he failed because of that copied paper. Such “stressless scholarship” as it is euphemistically called has become all too common in the modern Internet era with countless cheatsites and “research services” offering to sell students papers on topics from A to Z.

Biden’s case demonstrates that student plagiarism is nothing new. Only the methods of cheating have changed. Today, cheating has gone digital with the proliferation of Internet based paper filing and distributions systems, but the principles—or lack thereof—are the same. And as the Biden case illustrates, getting caught for such academic dishonesty may have serious ramifications for one’s political career. Joe Biden’s failed bid for the Democratic ticket is a case in point.

“Stressless scholarship” may seem like a pretty good idea at the time that many students make that decision to ‘crib’, copy, or dowload a paper off the Internet, but in Biden’s case the plagiarism of his student days came back to haunt his bid for the democratic presidential nomination like a spectre from his past.

In an article entitled “Biden’s Belly Flop”, Newsweek printed Joe Biden’s yearbook picture from his college days and a copy of his law school transcripts with the big “F” in his transcripts circled. Biden was given a chance to repeat his legal methods course, and above the “F” his retake grade of 80% was eventually penciled in. Being a repeat offender when it came to plagiarism made things much, much worse for Biden than they might have been otherwise in his failed bid for the Democratic presidential ticket in 1987.

Senator Biden’s plagiarism of a speech by British Labor Party leader Neal Kinnock took place at a campaign stump at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. In closing his speech, Biden took Kinnock’s ideas and language as if they were his very own inspired thoughts, prefacing Kinnock’s ideas with the phrase “I started thinking as I was coming over here . . . “. Little did Biden suspect that video footage of this speech would be spliced together with footage of Kinnock’s speech in an “attack video” which would be distributed by members of the Dukakis campaign.

Making the headline news in the New York Times, and the evening news on TV, the video was a stab in the back for Biden by his democratic competitor, and although he insisted that “I’m in this race to stay. I’m in this race to win,” the resulting publicity surrounding his unacknowledged use of Neal Kinnock’s speech was what eventually forced him out of the race. Name recognition was no longer a problem for Biden, but not the kind of name recognition which would assist his campaign for the democratic presidential nomination. His name was now a byword for plagiarism. His situation became a classic example of plagiarism for high school teachers and college instructors across the nation lecturing on the evils of unacknowledged source use.

You know, "Biden" really is a "byword" for plagiarism. When the Delaware Senator ran for the Democratic nomination this year, the Kinnock controversy was always front and center for me - and that's the case even though Biden appears as an otherwise good man.

But let me close with one more quote, from Tom Bevan at Real Clear Poliltics, who shares this passage on Biden's character from Peggy Noonan:

The great thing about Joe Biden during the Alito hearings, the reason he is, to me, actually endearing, is that as he speaks, as he goes on and on and spins his long statements, hypotheticals, and free associations--as he demonstrates yet again, as he did in the Roberts hearings and even the Thomas hearings, that he is incapable of staying on the river of a thought, and is constantly lured down tributaries from which he can never quite work his way back--you can see him batting the little paddles of his mind against the weeds, trying desperately to return to the river but not remembering where it is, or where it was going. I love him. He's human, like a garrulous uncle after a drink.

More on Biden, of course, will be forthcoming. Obama's pick, for me, is a classic "birds of a feather" selection. Biden's plagiarism is a perfect accompaniment for Obama's presidential campaign of lies and deceit, seen now in the Illinios Senator's abortion and Annenberg scandals.

It's not a good sign, however, that Obama's running-mate is already being attacked as "racist," and that prominent left-wing bloggers are distressed at the pick, with one saying "I'm going to try and come around to believing I should vote for this ticket. It won't be easy."

Ignominy Strikes Obama Camp in Saddleback Aftermath

I've never seen anything like it.

The latest controversy has it that Barack Obama did so poorly at Saturday's Saddleback civil forum that left-wing commentators and members of the Obama entourage have made allegations of cheating against John McCain. I first saw the story at Newsbusters, which noted that NBC's Andrea Mitchell suggested to her colleague the possibility of McCain cheating by overhearing Pastor Rick Warren's interview with Obama. Betsy Newmark responded to the Newsbusters piece:

These guys are so full of themselves and their guy's miraculous abilities that they can't imagine John McCain would actually come off as more forceful and prepared than Obama. So they have started whispering that McCain, with his superhuman powers, somehow escaped the "cone of silence" to overhear the questions.

Mitchell also seems to be missing how illuminating that whispered accusation is. They're at the same time revealing how badly they think their guy did; how impossible it seems to them that their guy could do worse than the old guy; and how little they think of Rick Warren and the Saddleback Church.

I wonder if they even realize how insulting to Rick Warren that accusation is. They're basically saying that the respected pastor allowed one of the guys to cheat. And that John McCain, who knows something about honor, went along with that cheating. And that Pastor Warren has perpetuated a cheat on the American people by saying that McCain couldn't hear the questions ahead of time.

The New York Times also covers the controversy, but indicates ultimately that McCain did not overhear Obama speaking (the sequence of interviews was decided by coin toss).

Michael Goldfarb puts all of this in perspective:

Now we know why the Obama campaign has been so reluctant to put their candidate on the same stage as John McCain. The difference between the two last night was striking. While Senator Obama punted on questions of great importance to the American people, and sidestepped even simple questions about whether the United States must defeat evil, John McCain offered the straight talk voters expect of a candidate for President. Senator McCain's responses reflected his long record of bipartisanship, the anecdotes accumulated from a lifetime of service to this country, and the depth of his experience on matters of national security.

The Obama campaign, shocked that John McCain would have the temerity to upstage their celebrity candidate on national television, is now struggling to find an explanation. According to Andrea Mitchell's reporting earlier today on Meet the Press, the only explanation the Obama campaign could come up with was foul play:

“The Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context, because what they are putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well-prepared.”

The facts are that Senator McCain was in a motorcade led by the United States Secret Service and held in a green room with no broadcast feed. If the Obama campaign really believes that Senator McCain had some unfair advantage, our offer of weekly town hall forums remains on the table - anyplace, anytime.

Obama backers must be absolutely freaking that their man is barely treading water in public opinion (the race was tied at 44 percent as of Friday).

I've read the spin across the leftosphere all weekend, which suggested McCain couldn't answer a straight question at Saddleback Church. But if the latest allegations of dishonesty are any indicator, it was Obama who was stumped, and it's now perfectly clear who really took home the trophy on Saturday.

Obama's Postmodern World

Jonah Goldberg argues that Barack Obama resides in a world where words have no fixed meaning:

Asked to define sin, Barack Obama replied that sin is "being out of alignment with my values." Statements such as this have caused many people to wonder whether Obama has a God complex or is hopelessly arrogant. For the record, sin isn't being out of alignment with your own values (if it were, Hannibal Lecter wouldn't be a sinner because his values hold that it's OK to eat people) nor is it being out of alignment with Obama's — unless he really is our Savior.

There is, however, a third possibility. Obama is a postmodernist.

An explosive fad in the 1980s, postmodernism was and is an enormous intellectual hustle in which left-wing intellectuals take crowbars and pick axes to anything having to do with the civilizational Mount Rushmore of Dead White European Males.

"PoMos" hold that there is no such thing as capital-T "Truth." There are only lower-case "truths." Our traditional understandings of right and wrong, true and false, are really just ways for those Pernicious Pale Patriarchs to keep the Coalition of the Oppressed in their place. In the PoMo's telling, reality is "socially constructed." And so the PoMos seek to tear down everything that "privileges" the powerful over the powerless and to replace it with new truths more to their liking.

Hence the deep dishonesty of postmodernism. It claims to liberate society from fixed meanings and rigid categories, but it is invariably used to impose new ones, usually in the form of political correctness. We've all seen how adept the PC brigades are celebrating free speech, when it's for speech they like.

Obama gives every indication of having evolved from this intellectual soup. As a student and, later, a law school instructor, Obama was sympathetic to Critical Race Theory, a wholly owned franchise of postmodernism. At Harvard, Obama revered Derrick Bell, a controversial black law professor who preferred personally defined literary truths over old-fashioned literal truth. Words are power, Bell and Co. argued, and your so-called facts are merely myths of the white power structure....

The Obama campaign has a postmodern feel to it because more than anything else, it seems to be about itself. Its relationship to reality is almost theoretical. Sure, the campaign has policy proposals, but they are props to advance the narrative of a grand movement existing in order to be a movement galvanized around the singular ideal of movement-ness. Obama's followers are, to borrow from David Hasselhoff — another American hugely popular in Germany — hooked on a feeling. "We are the ones we have been waiting for!" Well, of course you are.

In Berlin two weeks ago, Obama's speech was justified solely by the fact that he was giving it. He offered no policy and — not being a president — really had no reason to be there other than to tell people, essentially, "now is the moment." He informed the throbbing masses, bathing in his charisma the way hippies wallowed in the mud at Woodstock, that the greatest threat facing the world is the possibility we might allow "new walls to divide us from one another." Nuclear war? Feh. No, walls, walls are the danger. Of course, these new walls aren't real. Some might even say they're just words.

But not Barack Obama.

That reminds me of Alice in Wonderland:

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - that's all.'

See also, Victor Davis Hanson, "An Elegant Farce: Obama’s ‘Conversation’ About Moral Equivalence."

Image Credit: The People's Cube

The Left's Fundamental Dishonesty

I've commented on the lack of "divine soul" on the left recently, for example, when writing about the radical demonization campaigns against Tim Russert and Jesse Helms.

One aspect found among many left-wing activists and commentators is a blatant disregard for the ideals of truth and fair play. It turns out that Daily Kos is applauding the underhanded tactics of Code Pink operatives in forging fake press passes to gain access to President Bush's 4th of July citizenship ceremony:

Here's how the Kos author describes his collaboration with Medea Benjamin, a Code Pink co-founder:

Early this morning I found an unusual email from Medea Benjamin waiting for me in my inbox. It seems that last week when she was arrested in Florida, they confiscated her Global Exchange press pass, and could I make her another one?

Ever since I figured out how to duplicate Medea's press pass for other members of CodePink, I have been doing so with her blessing.

A look at the Global Exchange website reveals the group as a progressive action lobbying organization, not a news media outlet. That's probably close enough to "journalism" for the postmodern nihilists in our midst.

Hat Tip: LGF

Think Progress Lies About McCain - Again!

I've become increasingly convinced of the left's fundamental dishonesty - that is, it appears untruthfulness is a core component of radical left-wing ideology.

I frequently expose the left's anti-intellectualism in my writing (see, for example, "Barack Obama, the Netroots, and the "Vital Center" of American Politics"), but extreme mendacity is also a common characteristic of many of those in the left blogosphere.

The proposition is illustrated with reference to Think Progress, the left-wing blogging project editied by Faiz Shakir. Earlier this year Think Progress falsely accused John McCain of plagairism, and was forced to issue an apology.

Also, in April, Gateway Pundit called out Think Progress for its scurrilous Iraq reporting, " 'Think Progress' Publishes Misleading Troop Withdrawal Post."

So it's no surprise that Think Progress is at it again, with a post attacking John McCain as out of touch on gasoline prices.

Patterico has a nice takedown of the accusations:

Think Progress has a post titled McCain: I ‘Don’t See How It Matters’ That I Don’t Know The Price Of Gas. Wow, that sounds pretty bad. Let’s take a look:

In a telephone interview with the Orange County Register earlier this week, John McCain acknowledged he was unaware of the price of gas.

Jeez. That’s really awful. But let’s take a look at the actual exchange that Think Progress is citing:

WICKSOL: When was the last time you pumped your own gas and how much did it cost?

MCCAIN: Oh, I don’t remember. Now there’s Secret Service protection. But I’ve done it for many, many years. I don’t recall and frankly, I don’t see how it matters.

Later in the interview, McCain says:

I’ve been on the campaign trail for so long I don’t remember when I last filled up my own gas tank, but I certainly did for many, many, many years and I understand the difficulties and challenges that it poses for the people of California and my home state of Arizona.

Think Progess cites this as evidence of “McCain’s cluelessness about gas prices.”

But McCain isn’t saying he doesn’t know the price of gas. He is saying that he doesn’t remember the last time he pumped his own gas, and how much it cost then.

So, does John McCain know the cost of a gallon of gas in America? Yes, he does. Here’s a news story from June 18:

“The price of a gallon of gas in America stands at more than four dollars. Yesterday, a barrel of oil cost about 134 dollarsm” said McCain.

Again, that McCain quote is from June 18 — six days before the O.C. Register interview that Think Progress uses to claim McCain doesn’t know the price of gas.

This Think Progress post is a lie. At best, the story is that McCain doesn’t remember the last time he pumped his own gas. Even that is a non-story, since nobody pumps their own gas while on the campaign trail. Someone ask Obama when he last pumped his own gas.

Of course, not all lefty bloggers spread crude falsehoods to advance their political agenda. Still, the leftist project is so intellectually and morally bankrupt that even the mainstream media has made bashing liberals a regular pastime.

Related: Don't miss the comments at the Think Progress post, where one of the readers writes:

Did he really pump his own gas for many, many years? I highly doubt it since self service pumps weren’t around until the late 70’s early 80’s. By that time he was married to Cindy and I’m sure the servants filled the cars in that household. If McCain pumped his own gas it would have been for just a couple of years and then it was still possible to go into service stations that offered either self serve or full service options. I truly doubt he has ever gotten out of a limo or car and pumped his own gas.

The "early 1970s" would be more accurate, but who cares about accuracy when you can smear Cindy McCain as "First Junkie."

June 3, 2008: Barack Obama Makes a Different Kind of History

I'm watching CNN right now. I felt a profound moment of history earlier as Wolf Blitzer announced that Barack Obama had won enough pledged delegates to secure the Democratic presidential nomination:

Sen. Barack Obama has clinched the Democratic nomination for president, according to CNN estimates, making him the first African-American in U.S. history to lead a major-party ticket.

Obama picked up a slew of superdelegate endorsements on Tuesday. Those endorsements, combined with the delegates he's projected to receive from South Dakota's primary, will put him past the 2,118 threshold, according to CNN estimates.

Obama will claim victory during a speech in St. Paul, Minnesota, according to prepared remarks released by his campaign.

"Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States," he's expected to say.

Obama's achievement is personally bittersweet for me, a victory that feels enormously anticlimactic, if not ominous.

I recall in 1988, as a young Democratic Party idealist, I watched Jesse Jackson's "Common Ground" address to the Democratic National Convention. I thought Jackson said more about the fundamental issues facing the country than any other candidate in the race that year.

While I did not like Michael Dukakis, I believed George H.W. Bush to be an American patriot and a fundamentally decent man. Yet, above the two, I felt that Jackson's eloquence rose to the heights of the great civil rights leaders of the past - even to the standards of Martin Luther King, Jr. After the Reagan years, its seemed to me - as a young man - that the country was moving too far to the right, and that the concerns of the disadvantaged were being swept aside in the tide of a morning-in-America political realignment.

When G.H.W.B. was elected, I saw him as my president, my national leader (there was no demonization of the enemy in my heart), and I believed the country was in good hands - and that perhaps indeed a "kindler, gentler" America might pull back from what many argued was the "greed-is-good" phenomenon of the earlier decade.

But in 1992, after the recession of the time, when many people spoke of an "economic depression," I welcomed the "pulse of morning" that was the promise of William Jefferson Clinton.

Yet by the end of that decade I felt betrayed. The man who had evinced so much vitality and hope, who showed that anyone in America might succeed and attain the most powerful leadership position in the world, betrayed the stature of the office through the dirt and dishonesty of a sexual liaison with a young White House intern.

When Al Gore lost the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, I was not bitter. I saw the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore as legitimate, and I expected that the Democrats would have a shot at returning to the presidency in 2004.

But then we were attacked, on September 11, and for all my shock of the violation of the American mainland, I did not view the war on terror in partisan terms - I believed deeply that the country would rally to a cause greater than the individual, that the fabric of unity in nation would guide us to meet a larger challenge than anything my generation has faced before.

But that did not happen. Hard-left partisans showed little if any support for our deployment in Afghanistan, and I learned the hard way the true nature of the domestic fifth column, in seeing the anti-American attacks on the United States, with calls for "a million Mogadishus." I personally spoke out, at campus "war forums" (actually, antiwar rallies), in solidarity with the Bush adminstration on regime change in Iraq. Since that time I've never wavered in my support for the deployment nor for our troops in the field. Over the past five years, as even some of the most eloquent war supporters threw in the towel, or leaned close to admitting defeat, I never lost hope that our cause was right and just, and that the United States would prevail.

Instead, I have been radicalized by the radicals, and in my teaching and blogging I've resisted - forcefully and relentlessly - the antiwar nihilism on the left, and I have held firm in my unflinching belief that Americans would win, that our troops would take it from Baghdad's Euphrates to the streets of Basra and Fallujah, that we would fight, in the alleys, in the fields, and on the pockmarked highways of death, with their improvised explosive devices. We would never surrender.

So, now, on June 3, 2008, I feel this moment in history has no greater significance than a validation that we have indeed overcome. Today is, more importantly, unlike the day, on June 6, 1944, that Americans embarked on the D-Day invasion of Europe, to liberate the continent from the grips of Nazi totalitarianism. Americans then were united in the cause of a world free of the jackboots of oppression. And we did emerge victorious then, through ups and downs, through setbacks and near defeats, to end the spread of Nazi expansionism and genocide.

I do not see that kind of history in the electoral campaign today. The Democrats today are the party of defeat, and as the netroots hordes have beaten the drums of ignomious retreat, the contenders for the party's nomination have pandered remorselessly to the hell that is far left-wing Bush-hatred, Lieberman derangement, and Israel-bashing anti-Semitism.

The country that the left identifies as the contemporary manifestation of world evil is not the world in which I live. The country denounced as a hopeless abomination of hatred and repression is not the nation to which immigrants from around the world scratch and kick to make it to our shores, to join the great democracy that is the last best hope of freedom. That world that the left identifies as an unmitigated evil is foreign to my identity and sensibility, to my ideal of America as the bastion of universal opportunity.

No, June 3, 2008, is unlike that day, almost sixty-four years ago, when our people had a purpose. I see in Barack Obama, in his claim that "this is our moment," as pulling the country irretrievably into a netherworld of amorphous "change," hand-held by the soulless armies of 60s-era radicalism, and by the domestic bombers and black liberationists who populate the flag-crushing backwater of far left-wing multicultural jacobinism.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have now given their speeches. She won't concede, while he calls for a new America of ambiguous "forward movement" to some of partisan transformation.

So, in this historic moment, while I'm genuinely astounded in this nation's ability to open the doors of oppportunity to those who for so long were oppressed under the weight of real racist reaction and gender discrimination, there is little inside me that suggests we are seeing a new Reaganite affirmation of a "city on a hill" or a Clintonian promise of a new "pulse of morning." Instead, it seems that Obama and his hordes represent the new vanguard of the proletariat, who will seek to move this country far away from its historic roots in a political culture of anti-aristocratic egalitarianism and individualism, to a neo-collectivist regime, with higher taxes, regulation, and anti-Republican war-crimes prosecutions at home, combined with foreign policy surrender and unconditional diplomatic appeasement abroad.

That's my take on things. As always, I'll have more later.