It’s not a secret or a surprise that people on both sides of the political aisle try to drive stories and common themes, but one of the things that’s especially amusing about the Left is the willingness of Democratic talking heads and lefty bloggers to mindlessly parrot verbatim the talking points handed down by their campaign, in the hopes of driving particular words into the | Read More »
A man with Barack Obama’s record has no business being President of the United States. Can Obama be trusted to administer the vast (and, in recent weeks, rapidly expanding) federal power to distribute jobs, favors and resources with restraint and honesty and respect for the taxpayer? Or will he deliver money, jobs and power into the hands of left-wing radicals, panhandling “community organizers” and sleazy | Read More »
In Part I of this series on the “Integrity Gap” between the two national tickets, I looked at Governor Sarah Palin’s record of integrity in public office – her battles against corruption and wasteful spending, even by the powers controlling her own party in her home state of Alaska – even when she was putting her career at risk. As I explained, integrity is not | Read More »
II. Barack Obama: The Greasy Pole Note on sources: You can follow the links here, as I’ve linked to sources for nearly all the factual assertions, and mark additional sources with an asterisk *. Where appropriate I’ve indicated sources whose credibility I was uncertain of, but have generally tried to avoid citing much in the way of rumor. Fairly late in the game in assembling | Read More »
B. The Extremists To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway | Read More »
C. ACORN The left-wing group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a national umbrella group of, well, community organizers, sits at the intersection of Obama’s ties to extremists and his ties to machine politics. ACORN is indisputably Sixties-style “New Left” in its orientation, pursuing what Sol Stern describes as an agenda of “undisguised authoritarian socialism.” The group has both money and foot soldiers, | Read More »
D. The Machine Chicago politics, of course, have been famously corrupt and totally dominated by the Democratic machine since beyond living memory. (In Illinois at the state level, corruption is endemic and bipartisan: “four of the last nine governors have been indicted on charges of corruption, and three were convicted”). This is the city where top aides to Mayor Daley were convicted in May 2006 | Read More »
E. The Favor Factory With the expansion of federal intervention in the economy that will inevitably follow the current financial crisis – ranging from the $700 billion financial industry bailout to the $25 billion auto industry bailout to the federal government investing billions directly in major banks – there will be even more opportunities than usual for the next Administration to use federal dollars to | Read More »
F. “New Politics” In OId Wineskin Obama’s supporters like to shift the conversation away from his record at all costs and focus on his campaign. One of the principal themes of that campaign has been his commitment to “a ‘new politics for a new time’ shorn of partisanship and division,” exemplified by a higher standard of integrity in campaigning, what John Dickerson of Slate called | Read More »
I’ll cover this in more detail in a few days in Part II of my series on the Integrity Gap between the two tickets, but as the evidence mounts+ of the involvement of the left-wing community organizer group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in extensive voter fraud across multiple states, Barack Obama has tried to minimize his involvement with ACORN and the | Read More »
From the annals of silly, and perhaps revealingly silly, arguments – an email from the Obama campaign following last night’s debate repeats a line he’s used before: I will fight for the middle class every day, and — once again — Senator McCain didn’t mention the middle class a single time during the debate. It’s true that Senator McCain didn’t use the words “middle class.” | Read More »
Who won this one? Well, it depends where you stand, where you think the candidates stand, what they were trying to accomplish and whether you saw the first debate. The elephant in the room for those of us who follow these things carefully – and for the candidates – was Obama’s recent surge in the polls. Obviously that colors everything, in the sense that it | Read More »
UPDATE: I can’t resist. Via Constant Reader Rod_Patrick in comments, check this video out: Stop digging, guys. – Moe Lane In light of the mounting common-sense evidence of the total implausibility of Barack Obama’s claim to have not known that Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were not just terrorists but nationally famous terrorists when he worked with Ayers in the mid-1990s (including funnelling millions of | Read More »
Stanley Kurtz has been doing tremendous work on Obama’s ties to Bill Ayers lately, but his examination of Obama’s Chicago years doesn’t end there. Given the sharp contrast presented by the first debate – when John McCain called for across the board spending cuts to tighten our collective belts for the coming recession, while Obama’s effort to answer the same question found him launching into | Read More »
Kevin has linked to a great CNN piece that explodes some of Barack Obama’s untruths about the depth of his ties to unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. You should go watch the video, which is excellent and includes new reporting quoting Alice Palmer, the leftist state senator who Obama succeeded in office. The Obama camp and its media allies have used two main rhetorical strategies | Read More »
I have previously discussed at length the extent to which the public mood has focused on the issue of integrity in this presidential election. If anything, the recent credit crisis has heightened that concern – frankly, the public doesn’t understand the crisis and isn’t convinced the candidates do, either, but wants reassurance that the next President will be above outside influence in dealing with its | Read More »
UPDATE: Looks like they are voting anyway and at last check, the House is all but set to vote the deal down. Hold on to your seatbelts, folks. So, the word just came down that the Senate will not vote on the bailout package until Wednesday night. House Republicans should refuse to vote on the deal until the ballots are cast in the Senate. And | Read More »
I had thought out in advance a week ago or more what John McCain needed to do tonight. But for better or for worse (in a macro sense, for McCain, probably worse) the financial crisis and McCain’s decision to double down on getting a deal done in DC, followed by his unsuccessful game of chicken aimed at getting Obama to postpone the debate, has totally | Read More »
Gregory: “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” Holmes: “That was the curious incident.” In politics, actions speak louder than words, and inaction sometimes speaks even louder. With John McCain leaving the campaign trail to go to Washington to | Read More »
Here’s the state of play as I write. Bush and Capitol Hill Democrats are hammering out an agreement to, in essence, bail out financial institutions and possibly other companies that hold bad debt, mainly mortgage-backed securities. Pretty much everybody on all sides agrees that the bailout proposal stinks to high heaven and is a fundamental violation of everything conservatives believe in and everything liberals believe | Read More »
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