My arrogant opinions about politics, culture, science fiction, and whatever else I feel like talking about.

Obama: the New Kerry?

        In "Best of the Web Today," James Taranto brilliantly slams Democratic Party hypocrisy (by the way, the whole BotWT is unusually good, go read it all):

        We agree with Kristol: McCain's service in Vietnam is far from sufficient reason to elect him president.  But Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean went further, issuing a statement disparaging McCain:

        While we honor McCain's military service, the fact is Americans want a real leader who offers real solutions, not a blatant opportunist who doesn't understand the economy and is promising to keep our troops in Iraq for 100 years.

        ABC's Jake Tapper notes that Dean sang quite a different tune four years ago:

        "The real issue is this," Dean said in March 2004, when endorsing formal rival Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., "Who would you rather have in charge of the defense of the United States of America, a group of people who never served a day overseas in their life, or a guy who served his country honorably and has three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star on the battlefields of Vietnam?"

        It almost seems unsporting to call attention to this inconsistency.  After all, does anyone think Dean, who himself never joined the service, really believed what he was saying about the importance of military experience back then?  Then again, when he and many other Democrats made this argument on Kerry's behalf, they insulted the voters' intelligence.  We think they owe the voters an apology.

        The description "blatant opportunist" really did fit Kerry in 2004. When he returned from Vietnam, he slandered his fellow veterans as vicious murderers and rapists.  Decades later, when he thought it would be to his political advantage, he tried to hype himself as a hero, and then slandered the veterans who called attention to this inconsistency.

        By contrast, so far as we know, McCain is uncomplicatedly a war hero, and being a war hero is certainly a point in his favor. Still, we hope he will not follow Kerry's lead and base his whole campaign on his service to the country 40 years ago.  We suspect he knows better. And if John McCain opens his convention speech by saluting and saying "reporting for duty," we'll eat our hat.

        We have the hat to this day. We have the hat.

        OOH!  Good Shot, Sir!  But this leads me to meditate upon a similarity between Obama and Kerry: the bubbles they live in.

        In 2004, Kerry really thought he could get away with presenting himself as a war hero.  The fact that he'd tried to dodge the draft by getting an exemption to go to graduate school; the fact that he'd done his best to avoid combat service, and only ended up inland because he was trying to imitate JFK; the fact that he got out of Viet Nam as fast as possible, using the 'three Purple Heart rule'; the fact that one of those Purple Hearts was phony, and another probably so; and above all, the fact that he'd slandered the military in his role as spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War — all this never occurred to him as a probable minus.  Heck, he probably saw his VVAW work as more patriotic than his service in Viet Nam.  And his constituents in Massachussetts probably did too.  Kerry never had to deal with people who despised him as a traitor.

        Now, Barack Obama is trying to present himself as above partisanship, a healer of racial divisions, and a man who belongs to a not particularly controversial church.  If he hadn't spent all his adult life dealing with people who agree with him on these things, he might have known that Pastor Wright's views would come back to haunt him, and 100% liberalism isn't 'non-partisan.'  Those positions will make him the worst candidate in the race, in the view of many, including probably me.

        I'd go on, but the thought of an Obama vs. McCain race is too much to blog about without getting vomit all over the keyboard.

---

        Please, Lord, give me the chance to vote for Monica Lewinsky's ex-boyfriend's wife for President!

Posted by: saintonge at 22:09 | link | comments
culture, liberals, democrats, ignorance, incomprehension, wishful thinking, john kerry, our new messiahâ„¢

ANOTHER OBAMA SPEECH CONTRADICTION — BUT IT HURTS MCCAIN TOO

        Cliff May notes Obama's position on job loss is ludicrous: it's OK to lose your job to an illegal immigrant, but bad to lose it to a foreign factory.

        But isn't McCain in favor of illegal immigration too?  I wonder if he'll have sense enough to change?

        Hmm, Maybe I will have to decide whether to vote for Monica Lewinsky's ex-boyfriend's wife for President.

Posted by: saintonge at 19:56 | link | comments

SOME SENSE ON HELLER

        "Liberals" are usually in favor of "gun control," (although "disarming citizens" is a more honest expression than "gun control").  I don't quite see what is liberal about keeping people from owning weapons for self-defense and overthrowing tyranny, but pass that by.  Quite a few, however, seem to be whining over the fact that the Roberts court may find a general right to self-defense in the Constitution, and that this may result in a general restriction on "gun control" laws.  The "liberals" lament that five Supremes might not construe the Constitution "strictly," by which they mean 'come down in favor of finding "gun control" laws constitutional.'

        Jack Balkin is having none of this.  As a "liberal," he's in favor of gun control.  As an honest man, he acknowledges that if you take the idea of a "living Constitution" seriously, you have no honest complaint about conservative justices inventing a right you don't like.  If this means that states can't ban guns till a liberal majority gets appointed to the court, he'll live with that.  That's the rules liberals themselves made for constitutional "interpretation."

        Also, Douglas Kmiec suggests the Supremes operate sensibly for a change.  In cases like this, where the Court hasn't ruled before, then instead of voting on their opinions, and then researching it, they should research first, and then vote.  If they did so, they'd find that the vast majority of scholars agree that the 2nd Amendment protects an individual right.  This would also increase respect for the Court, by showing it isn't playing politics.  Alas, it will never happen, because the Court plays politics as a matter of routine, but at least it shows the kind of thing we ought to be doing.

---

        Hmm, Maybe I will have to decide whether to vote for Monica Lewinsky's ex-boyfriend's wife for President.

Posted by: saintonge at 17:42 | link | comments
liberals, hypocrisy, reality, government policy, whiners, gun control, the courts

OBAMA'S FAILURE

        As you know if you pay any attention to politics (and don't restrict your information to whatever The New York Treason thinks you should be allowed to know), Sen. Barack Obama took a major hit over the remarks his minister and spiritual advisor, Jeremiah Wright, has made over the years — remarks well summed up in the phrase "God damn America."  On Monday, St. Patrick's Day, Sen. Obama made a major speech, trying to explain his views on race and Wright.  Did it work?

        I think the most revealing reaction to Obama's speech was this essay by Michael Crowley in The New Republic.  Crowley knows the speech had to reach white Americans, and he senses — I think correctly — that it failed.

        But Crowley doesn't understand why it failed.  He calls Obama's speech "brilliant."  In fact, it was politically stupid.  Obama doesn't understand the whites he needs to reach, and neither does Crowley.

        Here's an excerpt from the speech:

        In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community.  Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race.  Their experience is the immigrant experience — as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch.  They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor.  They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.  So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time. . . .

        Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze — a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.  And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns — this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding. . . .

        In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination — and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past — are real and must be addressed.  Not just with words, but with deeds — by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations.  It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

        Now, take out the stuff that's personal, that comes from Barak Obama's own life, and what do you have there?  Standard liberal boilerplate is all that I can see.  There's nothing there that Hubert Humphrey couldn't have endorsed when he ran for the presidency, forty years ago.  But Humphrey lost, and in those last forty years, only two Democrats were elected president — and both were Southerners who could pass themselves off as not very liberal.

        Here's a part of Crowley's take on the speech:

        [Obama's] target audience was working class white voters — Reagan Democrats with a historic tendency to let racial prejudice and fear override their other social and economic interests, and whose view of Obama the Jeremiah Wright controversy threaten to permanently warp.

        'Oh, those stupid working-class white folk, who just don't understand their own best iterests!  If they'd just do what we liberals told them to do, they wouldn't be in this fix!'  Jimmy Carter got elected by pretending not to be as liberal as he was.  He lost to Reagan because the charade was exposed.  Bill Clinton got elected by moving away from liberalism, and got re-elected by keeping some distance between himself and the mainstream of the Democatic party.  Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry lost by plunging themselves into that mainstream.

        Obama's appeal was that he was different, a break from the past, someone who could move us forward.  This speech, and the twenty-year affiliation with Jeremiah Wright, show that he's just the past dressed in a new package.  Now that we've gotten a glimpse inside that package, he looks to me like just another doomed liberal.

---

        Hmm, Maybe I will have to decide whether to vote for Monica Lewinsky's ex-boyfriend's wife for President.

Posted by: saintonge at 04:47 | link | comments

Good Observation

        Rand Simberg observes Democrats treating each other like Republicans.

        I have to admit, I'm meanspirited enough to enjoy the sight.

Posted by: saintonge at 14:51 | link | comments (1)
politics, democrats, hillary clinton, our new messiahâ„¢

Today's Pointless Hysteria

        You can file this one under 'answering your own question.

Saturday, March 01, 2008 "Why are the letters 'NIG' on the child's pajamas?" Asks a commenter — "Tom" — on my post about the new Hillary Clinton commercial, the one that shows several children sleeping and then Clinton taking a national security phone call in the middle of the night. You can see the commercial at the link, and the pajamas in question are on display during seconds 11 and 12. On pausing, staring, and thinking, I believe these are pajamas that say "good night" all over them, but the letters "NIG" are set apart by a fold in the fabric.

        Endlessly more here, but my advice is drop it, Ann.

        *Sheesh*, and she's usually so sensible.

Posted by: saintonge at 01:33 | link | comments
stupidity springs eternal, hillary clinton, our new messiahâ„¢