What if a President Looked Upon a Baby as Punishment?

Don't miss the series of issue advertisments from Never Find Out, including this one, "Punished with a Baby":

Recall that Barack Obama holds the most extreme positions on abortion America, bar none.

Think about it:

What kind of America do we want our beloved nation to be? Barack Obama's America is one in which being human just isn't enough to warrant care and protection. It is an America where the unborn may legitimately be killed without legal restriction, even by the grisly practice of partial-birth abortion. It is an America where a baby who survives abortion is not even entitled to comfort care as she dies on a stainless steel table or in a soiled linen bin. It is a nation in which some members of the human family are regarded as inferior and others superior in fundamental dignity and rights. In Obama's America, public policy would make a mockery of the great constitutional principle of the equal protection of the law. In perhaps the most telling comment made by any candidate in either party in this election year, Senator Obama, when asked by Rick Warren when a baby gets human rights, replied: ''that question is above my pay grade.'' It was a profoundly disingenuous answer: For even at a state senator's pay grade, Obama presumed to answer that question with blind certainty. His unspoken answer then, as now, is chilling: human beings have no rights until infancy - and if they are unwanted survivors of attempted abortions, not even then.

How Will Barack Obama Confront Evil?

Noemie Emery compares and contrasts John McCain and Barack Obama's conceptions of and responses to evil in the world.

Questioning and confronting the nature of evil presents a fundamental challenge and responsibility for the next president, and from Emery's essay, it doesn't look like Obama's up to the task:

The idea of America as a force for morality predates the founding of the nation. The first European settlers saw America as a noble experiment, a do-over for the corrupt and compromised cultures of Europe, and a chance in an unspoiled terrain of endless abundance to start the world anew. The Puritans saw themselves as the Children of Israel in a new iteration, delivered from bondage (in Egypt and England), escaped by the way of a perilous voyage (through the Red Sea, and over the ocean), and settled at last in their own land of promise, where their work for the Lord could begin. The Puritans built a religious community that they believed would serve to the world as a model of piety, under the terms of a covenant detailed by John Winthrop in 1630 that served as a template for the next 300-plus years of American history: "He hath taken us to be His, after a most strict and peculiar manner, which will make Him the more jealous of our love and obedience. .  .  . For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us."

Emery continues, suggesting that American exceptionalism was a touchstone of bipartisan foreign policy throughout U.S. history, most recently in the presidencies of both Kennedy and Reagan. Then she notes this:

For most of our history, American exceptionalism has run in the veins of both parties, with the Democratic presidents of the first two-thirds of the 20th century being among its most noted proponents, vigorously asserting American power in the name of transcendent ideals. Franklin Roosevelt was quick to define the Axis powers as evil, and to declare, the day after Pearl Harbor, that "the American people in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory," and succeeding Democrats, such as Truman and Kennedy, would carry through on his values.

But after Vietnam, something broke in the Democrats, who took that costly miscalculation as a paradigm for crusading done anywhere, and came to believe that power was dangerous, that assertion was folly, and that patriotic displays were signs of a slavish obedience, simplistic thinking, unwarranted arrogance, and extremely bad taste. Hubert Humphrey, a Cold War liberal who ran and lost narrowly in the 1968 presidential contest, was perhaps the last nominee of his party to be wholly at home with the World War II language of righteousness and victory. In 1972, Democrats nominated George McGovern, a World War II hero who had evolved into a born-again pacifist and believed the United States had "blood on its hands." From then on, presidential elections tended to be conducted between a Republican who was an American exceptionalist and a Democrat who seemed to be less so, with the three elections in which the contrasts were least striking--1976, 1992, and 1996--being the three that the Democrats won. In 2000, though, the year of the tie, Al Gore, seen as a defense expert and hawk, was pitted against George W. Bush, who talked of a foreign policy that was "humble but strong." But by 2004, Bush had become Woodrow Wilson with bells on, and defeated John Kerry, who championed "nuance" in foreign relations and deference to international bodies and European elites.

Kerry had once served as lieutenant governor under Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, who in 1988 had run against George Bush's father in a classic campaign derided by critics as simple-minded but was based on a series of symbols relating to the concepts of evil, of force used against evil, and of America's mission and role in the world. One symbol the Bush campaign seized on was Dukakis's veto of a bill requiring teachers to lead students in public schools in the Pledge of Allegiance, which Dukakis saw as protecting a right of dissent, but others saw as a tacit endorsement of the belief that the country did not deserve having allegiance pledged to it. Another issue was crime, symbolized by a program Dukakis defended in which convicts ostensibly serving life sentences without parole were allowed out on unsupervised furloughs, in the course of which one murderer had raped a young woman and stabbed and beaten her fiancé--Dukakis refused to apologize or talk to the victims, though he had met often with prisoners and their families, leaving the impression he had a hard time telling the difference between predators and prey. He compounded this impression in the second presidential debate when, asked if he would support the death penalty if his wife should be murdered, he replied calmly, "I've opposed the death penalty .  .  . I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime." In the words of Roger Ailes, then the communications director for the Bush operation, "He became the defense attorney for the murderer and rapist of his wife." The public decided it preferred a prosecutor. Obama's meandering response to the question of evil at the Saddleback Forum seemed in some ways a Dukakis answer, unwilling to commit to the use of force in the containment of evil, and unsure of where moral lines lie.

John McCain betrays no similar doubts. "I know of no other country in the world with the generosity of spirit and the concern for fellow human beings as the United States of America, and I think that goes back to the very beginnings," he told a public service forum at Columbia University on September 11, 2008. "We are the only nation in the world that really is deeply concerned about adhering to the principle that all of us are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain rights. And those we have tried to bring to the world." But McCain was no longer speaking for all the Americans, as a candidate uttering those beliefs would once have been. The pollster Scott Rasmussen in the course of the 2004 election discovered a deep partisan divide on the issue of American exceptionalism. "Bush voters agree, by an 83-to-7 percent margin, that America is generally fair and decent," Michael Barone summarized Rasmussen's findings. "Kerry voters also agree but only by 46 to 37 percent. Fully 81 percent of Bush voters believe that the world would be a better place if other countries were more like the United States. Only 48 percent of Kerry voters agree. Almost all Republican voters believe in American exceptionalism. Only about half of Democratic voters do."

This explains the campaign of John Kerry, who tried to run both as the heroic vet and as the protester who had called out his country for sinister actions. When criticized for the latter, he complained (as had Dukakis) that Republicans were questioning his patriotism, which was not really the case. Anyone running for president must love his country, in that he wishes the best for it, and wants it to prosper. The question is whether Kerry and Dukakis were American exceptionalists, who believed in the civil religion of greatness and mission. And there is reason to think they were not.

Is Obama a patriot, like Dukakis and Kerry, in that he wishes the best for his country, and would do his best for it? Certainly, yes - the doubts about him involve his qualifications and his ideas, not his intentions. Is he an American exceptionalist, in the tradition of the Roosevelts, Reagan, and Kennedy? Probably not. On much of the evidence, he seems to share the beliefs of that half of his party who define the country in terms of its flaws and shortcomings, see force as a problem, and are embarrassed by patriotic displays. His wife has called the country a "mean" one, and said it had done nothing to give her pride in it until her husband had started to rise in the polls. He sees the country's tale less as a glorious effort to fulfill a great destiny than as a catch-up effort to atone for failures, which have always been numerous: "What makes America great has never been its perfection, but the belief that it can be made better," he has said, never quite saying it is good in this moment, or good when compared with what others were doing, or that it ever can be quite good enough....

Obama's notorious speech in Berlin reinforces these elements: Hope can solve anything, values are relative, and power has nothing to do with the ultimate end. Berlin was saved, he says, because "Germans and Americans learned to work together and trust each other less than three years after facing each other on the field of battle." In fact, the Germans had little chance to do otherwise: They tried to conquer the world, were bombed into rubble, were occupied, and then faced being overrun by the Soviet Army. Good and evil are relative: "The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love." But it was only one superpower that caused all the problems, that "liberated" the countries conquered by Hitler by conquering them in turn; that tried to starve Berlin, and force the West into submission, that put up the Wall, put up the barbed wire, and shot those who tried to escape. And, of course, hope conquers all: "People of the world--look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one."

In fact the world has never stood "as one," so it has never faced a challenge of any description, and has never done a thing for its suffering people, in Berlin or anyplace else. During the Cold War, the world was as two (or sometimes it seemed at sixes and sevens) and Berlin was saved only when one side beat the other, after more than four decades of testing and tension, by the threat and the pressure of force. Berlin was saved because Truman sent in the Air Force, because Kennedy was willing to risk war over Cuba, and because Reagan went ahead with his defense buildup and missile deployment, while liberals screamed every step of the way. Hope can do wonders, but the American military has been a more reliable agent of human deliverance. "Conflict-resolution theory posits there are no villains, only misunderstandings," writes Victor Davis Hanson, but military history suggests otherwise. The Berlin speech was marked by "reoccurring utopian assumptions about cause and effect--namely, that bad things happen almost as if by accident, and are to be addressed by faceless, universal forces of good will." This has not been the view of America's heroes, who have always believed that evil exists, and the United States exists to confront it. How will America--and the world - fare with a president who rejects this tradition? We may be about to find out.

How does all of this play out in foreign policy? Recall Melanie Phillips' comments earlier:

Obama thinks world conflicts are basically the west’s fault, and so it must right the injustices it has inflicted ... the real source of evil in the world is America....

There are, alas, many in the west for whom all this is music to their ears. Whether through wickedness, ideology, stupidity or derangement, they firmly believe that the ultimate source of conflict in the world derives at root from America and Israel, whose societies, culture and values they want to see emasculated or destroyed altogether. They are drooling at the prospect that an Obama presidency will bring that about. The rest of us can’t sleep at night.

This is why an understanding of traditional notions of American exceptionalism is crucial to the occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Tyranny of Liberalism

Via Maggie's Farm, James Kalb has a new book out, The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command.

For a sample of the thesis, see Kalb's excerpt from First Principles:

“The tyranny of liberalism” seems a paradox. Liberals say that they favor freedom, reason, and the well-being of ordinary people. Many people consider them high-minded and fair to a fault, “too broadminded to take their own side in a quarrel,” too soft to govern effectively. Even the word “liberal” suggests “liberty.” How can such an outlook and the social order it promotes be tyrannical?

The answer is that wanting freedom is not the same as having it. Political single-mindedness leads to oppression, and a tyranny of freedom and equality is no less possible than one of virtue or religion. We cannot be forced to be free or made equal by command, but since the French Revolution the attempt has become all too common and the results have often been tyrannical.

Tyranny is not, of course, what liberals have intended. They want government to be based on equal freedom, which they see as the only possible goal of a just and rational public order. But the functioning of any form of political society is determined more by the logic of its principles than the intentions of its supporters. Liberals view themselves as idealistic and progressive, but such a self-image conceals dangers even if it is not wholly illusory. It leads liberals to ignore considerations, like human nature and fundamental social and religious traditions, that have normally been treated as limits on reform. Freedom and equality are abstract, open-ended, and ever-ramifying goals that can be taken to extremes. Liberals tend to view these goals as a simple matter of justice and rationality that prudential considerations may sometimes delay but no principle can legitimately override. In the absence of definite limiting principles, liberal demands become more and more far-reaching and the means used to advance them ever more comprehensive, detailed, and intrusive.

The incremental style of liberalism obscures the radicalism of what it eventually demands and enables it always to present itself as moderate. What is called progress—in effect, movement to the left—is thought normal in present-day society, so to stand in its way, let alone to try to reverse accepted changes, is thought radical and divisive. We have come to accept that what was inconceivable last week is mainstream today and altogether basic tomorrow. The result is that the past is increasingly discredited, deviancy is defined up or down, and it becomes incredible that, for instance, until 1969 high school gun-club members took their guns to school on New York City subways, and that in 1944 there were only forty-four homicides by gunshot in the entire city.

Human life is harder to change than are proclaimed social standards. It is easier to denounce gender stereotypes than to make little boys and little girls the same. The triumph of liberalism in public discussion and the consequent disappearance of openly avowed nonliberal principles has led the outlook officially established to embody liberal views ever more completely and at the same time to diverge more and more from the permanent conditions of human life. The result has been a growing conflict between public standards and the normal human understandings that make commonsense judgments and good human relations possible.

The conflict between public standards and normal understandings has transformed and disordered such basic aspects of social life as politics, which depends on free and rational discussion; the family, which counts on a degree of harmony between public understandings and natural human tendencies; and scholarship, which relies on complex formal rules while attempting to explain reality. As a consequence, family life is chaotic and ill-tempered; young people are badly instructed and badly raised; politics are irrational, trivial, and mindlessly partisan; and scholarship is shoddy and disconnected from normal experience. Terms such as “zero tolerance” and “political correctness” reveal how an official outlook deeply at odds with normal ways of thinking has become oppressive while claiming to have reached an unprecedented level of fairness and rationality.

There's more at the link.

Jeffrey Goldberg's Relativist Extremism

Jeffrey Goldberg provides an excellent example of the contrast between those who take seriously the threat to the West from global Islamic terrorism and those who discount the danger in favor of a moral-relativist strategic epistemology.

At issue for Goldberg is the alleged cabal of Jewish extremists behind the political documentary movie, "Obssession: Radical Islam's War Against the West":

If you read Goldberg's essay, he lays out not so much a criticism of the movie itself, but of the temerity of the movie's backers and cast to adopt an attitude of Western exceptionalism.

Goldberg's project is to focus on the background of the film's producers as Likud-backing totalitarians, and then to throw out the red-herring of Nazi Germany's industrial-scale extermination:

The tragedy of "Obsession" is not that it is wrong; the tragedy is that it takes a serious issue, and a serious threat - that of Islamism - and makes it into a cartoon. Its central argument is that the "Islamofascism" of today is not only the equivalent of Nazism, but worse than Nazism. This is quite a thing for a Jewish organization to argue. One of the featured speakers in "Obsession" is a self-described "former PLO terrorist" named Walid Shoebat, who argues on film that a "secular dogma like Nazism is less dangerous than Islamofascism is today."

With the exception of Stalin's murder of tens of millions in the Soviet Union, there's never been anything like the industrial killing of Hitler's Reich. And what the Soviets made up in pure scale is not matched in Hitler's program a racial eliminationism.

But for Goldberg to lay it out as he does is really a ploy to cut off discussion of the genuine existential danger that radical Islam poses to the West.

The point for Goldberg really isn't to debate the legitimate threat of global jihad to the survival of the Western democracies, but to preempt criticism of Barack Obama:

The film is meant to suggest that Obama will provide aid and comfort to Islamism, or is an Islamist himself. There is not one shred of proof on this planet that Barack Obama is anything other than an Israel-supporting Christian. Yes, he went to party with Rashid Khalidi. So did I. Does that make me a member of Hezbollah?

I actually have another idea for a film: I would call it "Obsession" as well, but it would be about the poor souls who believe that Obama is a radical Muslim, that Israel has a right to expel Arabs from its lands, and that America should declare war on all of Islam.

Actually, this is not what the film says at all.

The opening credits declare that the film is not directed at the great majority of Muslims worldwide who are peaceful and abhor terrorism. Viewers can judge for themselves if folks like Carolyn Glick are extremists, but to take such a narrowly partisan view of an issue of great importance, to dismiss it with the same cartoonishness that he decries, shows Goldberg as no more than a blind partisan hack intent to demonize his alleged demonizers, and to dismiss as conspiracy the deep, underlying sympathy that Barack Obama holds for those who have long committed themselves to the destruction of the United States.

Obama's Matter-of-Fact Radicalism

John McCain went after Barack Obama's redistributionism on the campaign trail today:

John Hinderaker at Power Line suggests McCain doesn't quite capture Obama's "matter-of-fact radicalism," and adds:

Not too many years ago, a Presidential candidate who explicitly advocated taking your money and giving it to someone else, on the theory that you have too much and it would be nice if he had more, would have been a dead duck. Whether most Americans now understand either the terrible unfairness or the social and economic consequences of Obama's leveling instinct is not so clear.

Actually, I think they're deeply tired of government mismanagement (both Democratic and Republican, but the GOP will take the heat), extreme partisanship, and are worried about the economy; folks see in Barack Obama a savior.

Americans say they don't want economic redistribution, but then support a candidate who'll be the farthest to the left in history, and one who's repeatedly said he'd "share the wealth."

It's hard to explain, except in the context of the extraordinary environment of this election season - a "once in a century" context of crisis and change.

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.

**********

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.

**********

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."