When Obama says he’ll “restore America’s reputation” what it really means is that people who hate America will be delighted by his election. Why so many Americans don’t see it that way astounds me.
Via Mark Steyn.
Elections
“My Muslim Faith”
Ha. Of course it is just a slip. Whatever. Not worth writing about. Dum de dum. No. Of course not.
The black helicopter crowd will say, “ah ha! see! I told you so!” But I shun such silliness. Even though he has two Muslm fathers and his middle name is Hussein, I believe he is actually a Christian, just like Jeremiah Wright, the Pastor who meant so much to him for so many years until political expediency required Obama to fling his spiritual father under the bus.
Nonetheless, even though it is not really important, the Quayle-O-Meter is setting off bells, whistles, sirens, circus calliopes, flashing lights, disco balls, strobes and rotating police-car beacons. It always does that for a jackpot-sized gaffe.
No need to ask what would happen if McCain or Palin had said this.
Though it is pretty funny to think about.
Obama fails the Quayle Test almost every day.
And the MSM, by definition, fails it too.
As I described during the last election, we are witnessing an abusive and unprincipled monopoly hacking out its last, dying coughs.
Faster, please.
(Meanwhile, of course, the MSM is committed to its primary task: Trying to find a way to destroy Gov. Palin.)
Conrad Black Summarizes Obama’s Plans to Kill You with Taxes
Obama is proposing one of the greatest tax increases in world history, entirely on the wealthiest 40% of the U.S. population — who already contribute more than 100% (yes, you read that correctly) of the U.S. government’s personal income tax revenue. He is disguising it behind a welter of largely fictitious refundable tax credits. The increased tax on people of substantial income will be paid out to people who pay small amounts of tax or none at all.
No part of this familiar process is a “tax-cut,” which is how it has been presented.
The top tax-rate and the tax on capital gains and dividends would all rise by a full third, estate taxes would be raised to 45% and social-security payroll taxes would be raised for families earning over $250,000 a year. The Obama claims that all this would keep taxes at 18.2% of GDP, and would cover his vast spending plans, are nonsense.
From this. RTWT. Good to see Mr. Black is able to write from prison. He is a good writer and a smart guy.
(Incidentally, I have a friend who worked on the trial and was there every day, on behalf of another party in the case. His conclusion: Black was guilty and the jury got it right. Black, like everyone who I have ever met or worked with who was convicted of a crime says he was not guilty.)
The Enemy Commits All Its Forces to the Main Front
In this post I said that Palin’s speech had left the Donks and their stooges in the MSM who do their dirty work, temporarily stunned, but they would come back like the cornered rats they are, with a massive effort to destroy Gov. Palin. I expected that they would come up with something major by now, but their initial digging seems not to have unearthed much. I was forwarded two pretty trivial emails this weekend that seemed to be initial “feelers”. Both purported to be revalations about Palin by individuals who knew her, but both were pretty weak. And so far Obama’s campaign has seemed to be unsure of how to respond.
Some concrete evidence is emerging of what must be the most massive and desperate effort to counterattack an enemy with momentum since the Nazis before Kursk. Beneath the layers of slimy water, a vast, foul beast is stirring. The MSM is taking its experienced reporters off of coverage of terrorism and devoting them to try to find something, anything, to use against Gov. Palin. (Via Instapundit.) These people have their priorities, and getting Barack Obama elected is the top priority of them all.
They don’t need much. Just something that sounds plausible and damaging and they will repeat it over and over until the election. I am amazed they haven’t started their barrage of garbage yet. But as Jonathan once told me years ago, about another class of purported professionals, long before anyone ever thought of blogs, “these guys are usually either corrupt, overworked or incompetent, and frequently all three”. For the MSM add: Smug, Arrogant, Utterly Ignorant of Real America outside of LA/NYC/DC and usually Lazy. So, they have failed to accomplish anything for several valuable days, just as they failed to anticipate that Gov. Palin might be picked as VP, even though it has been talked about for many months prior to the event.
But stay tuned. They will either find or fabricate their “story” soon.
Wait for a front-page, above the fold story in the New York Times this week, which will be the cue for the whole loathesome, yapping pack. That is my guess.
UPDATE: A comment on the (always good) Right Coast has an angle that the Donks may become desperate enough to try: “Jesus was a community organizer, and Pontius Pilate was a governor.” It does fit in with the whole Barack-is-the-Messiah schtick.
The Country Mouse and the City Mouse
In an earlier post, Jonathan sums up Palin as a “frontierswoman.” This seems to me to be true, but she also represents an old tension – between the city and the country. The distinction between Moscow and pretty much all the rest of Russia seems to be awfully important to the few Russians I know; a similar tension exists between Paris and rural France, Prague and (especially) Moravia. One of the commuting families at U.T. in the seventies split because, the husband explained, his wife could not imagine not living on one of the coasts. (Not surprisingly, similar commutes began happening here: if Austin’s the sticks, how much more are the hinterlands.) Some people identify with a city and some with the city. I can hardly complain about such self-definitions, since I’ve always felt the powerful pull of place; it’s a key part to the identity of many of my family and friends. Those of us from flyover country speak of it with some irony, but also with pride: all intensified and sometimes defensive because we feel others say it with disdain.
If, as one wit put it, McCain/Palin gets all the votes of brides pregnant on their wedding days (maybe add in the grooms), then if we can add the votes of those with strongly felt country roots, the favored Obama/Biden ticket will need to resurrect all those dead voters Acorn was finding. How well this plays out depends on how many understand these two and, on the other hand, how many can’t. They are hardly typical of “Jesusland” but in important ways they represent it. Plain talking, for instance, arises from the Puritan plain style, echoed in the American middle west & west. (And embodied in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books my mother gave every grandchild.) We speak with a tough wit, but, aren’t ironic about duty, loyalty, resilience, perseverance, active engagement, hard work. We don’t consider them ambiguous; we assume they just are, in themselves, good.