Elections

Flyover Humor

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Iowahawk has a Midwestern perspective on Joe; he now speaks as that other beleagured Midwesterner, Hyde Park’s leading resident, in  I am Bill.   Thanks, Iowahawk.

We’re going to  need all the Zucker and  Iowahawk they can create during  the next few years.        Even great genius of this kind is  uneven (Zucker’s new movie is).   But at the top of their game,  they  make my day – or week.   National treasures, they restore  proportionality; the  serious-minded transcendentalists thought that was a great poet’s task, but  my vote is for  comedy.

Israelis Support John McCain

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…most of them do, anyhow. Polls show that 70% of Israelis would vote for McCain if they were eligible to vote in the U.S. election.

And some of them are. There are an estimated 40,000 Americans residing in Israel who are eligible to cast absentee ballots, and many of them will be voting in swing states. The chairman of Republicans Abroad in Israel predicts a 75% vote for McCain, although other reports show a large number of undecideds.

From a Weekly Standard article via Soccer Dad:

We respect war heroes in Israel, especially those like McCain who were POWs,” notes Mitchell Barak, managing director of the Jerusalem-based Keevoon Research, Strategy & Communications. “We see Obama fantasizing about how he wants to sit down and talk to the terrorists, and he loses a lot of Israelis right there. He comes off as unrealistic and insensitive to the existential challenges facing the Jewish state, and as naïve.”

Naïve, indeed. It’s a theme that popped up frequently when I mentioned Obama’s name. Obama lacks experience. Obama doesn’t understand how to deal with terrorists in general, and radical Islamic terrorists in particular. Obama thinks a court of law is the right forum for dealing with terrorists. Obama thinks the U.N. is a dandy place to solve difficult problems. Obama would have happily lost the Iraq war. Obama would cede regional hegemony to the Iranians. And so on.

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You Should Be Ashamed!

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Mickey Kaus is a Liberal who will actually try to find out the facts. Kudos to him for that.

But he does occasionally descend into Left wing incoherence. A prime example is a short post entitled Ride My See-Saw. (Click on this link, and scroll down to the post at the 1:21 PM mark.)

Mr. Kaus is taken with the concept of “vertical ticket splitters”, people who don’t automatically cast all of their votes for one party. He attributes their motivation for doing this to guilt. People might vote for Obama in this election, but then carefully cast their remaining votes for Republicans because they feel guilty about…

Well, I’m not really sure why anyone feels guilt. Mr. Kaus seems to think that the bad feelings all flow from racism.

“M suggested that voters (especially white, swing voters) who don’t vote for Obama may feel guilty about it and compensate by voting for Democrats in downballot races (Senate and Congress). But the converse of this theory is equally interesting–voters who do pick Obama, may compensate or hedge for what they feel is a bold, guilt-expiating risk by picking Republicans downballot.”

(snip)

“…more people will be vertical ticket splitters because of the presence of Obama, who is not only an African American candidate–whom you might feel guilty about not picking–but a relatively unknown candidate whom you might want to hedge against, especially if you voted for him to avoid feeling guilty about not picking him (and then felt guilty about that).”

(An attempt was made to keep the original emphasis intact. The above is how Mr. Kaus wants you to see his work.)

This seems extremely odd to me. If someone is a racist, then by definition they genuinely believe that a person’s race disqualifies them in some way. Makes the minority candidate unable to do a decent job simply because of their heritage, so to speak.

Seen in this light, it becomes obvious that racists are not going to be effected in any way by guilty feelings. Why would anyone, racist or otherwise, feel guilty about voting for what they see as the more capable choice? If anything, racists would feel pride in voting for their prejudices because they would think that they are acting for the greater good. So why go on and on about how racists would feel guilt?

The constant harping on racism from the Left during this election appears to me to have two root causes.

It seems to me that one cause is pure projection from Liberals. They are going to vote for Obama not because they genuinely believe him to be the best qualified for the job, but due to some bizarre self loathing. White guilt, if you will. Since guilt is the most powerful motivator when they make their political choices, it seems obvious to them that everyone else must also have simmering pools of white hot shame bubbling just beneath the surface. If people just listened to the voice in their heads that said they must make up for being a piece of crap, then everyone would make the same choice. The correct choice!

The other is a cynical attempt to manipulate swing voters, a propaganda effort to make the Bradley Effect work for the Democrats. If swing voters can be convinced that they will be perceived as racists by voting for anyone other than Obama, maybe a significant percentage will vote for the candidate that they would otherwise feel is too inexperienced to handle the job. Pretty much force people to vote for the least qualified candidate.

I must confess, dear reader, that it makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable to climb up on my analyst’s couch and try to plumb the mental depths of complete strangers. Not only am I obviously unqualified, it also strikes me as the height of arrogance to even try. But I feel justified since the Left in general, and Mr. Kaus specifically, are not constrained to keep to their area of expertise.

To close, I would have to say that the only people who should be feeling guilty are the Liberals who scream “Racism!” at the drop of a hat. Have they no shame?

(Hat tip to Glenn.)

Obama, the Democrats, and the Economy

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As I pointed out in the post below this one, “the economy” cannot be separated from security and foreign policy issues. Security and foreign-policy disasters can easily lead to economic devastation, and voters would do well to bear this in mind.

But in this post, I’d like to talk about the economy per se. This is the first part of a long post; it will be extended within the next couple of days.

I think that an Obama administration, combined with a Democratic-controlled Congress, would do grave and long-lasting damage to the American economy. Several specific points:

1)Energy. The Democrats, and the vast array of “activists” whom they enable, have demonstrated hostility to all practical forms of energy production and distribution. This is not just a matter of oil & gas drilling: as we have discussed many times on this blog, the U.S. electrical system faces a problematic future. There is every likelihood that, under a Democratic administration/Congress:

a)The building of new coal plants would go from “difficult” to “impossible”
b)The building of nuclear plants would continue to be virtually impossible
c)Even the building of new natural-gas-fired plants would be severely delayed by environmental lawsuits and regulatory maneuvering based on the CO2-is-a-pollutant theory.

Solar and wind, beloved of Democrats, have their uses, but they also have their limitations. I see no evidence that either Obama or the Dem Congressional leadership has any interest in understanding the technical and economic factors that govern the extent to which these technologies can be practically employed. The intermitant nature of wind and usable sun, the difficulty of storing electricity, the supply-chain constraints which govern the large-scale introduction of any new technology–there is much less interest in these things than in the glib repetition of catch-phrases. And even the use of environmentally-blessed technologies will be greatly inhibited by environmentalist protests against the transmission lines required to connect these systems to the cities that need their power. These activists would, of course, gain great impetus from a Democratic administration.

Obama talks a lot about the middle class. The existence of a large and affluent middle class is enabled by widely available and reasonably priced energy, especially electricity. If electric rates are driven up by a factor of 2X or 3X, as is entirely possible with Democratic policies, there will be not only a direct effect on consumers, but an effect on virtually all workers as U.S. businesses–especially manufacturing businesses but also things like data centers–become less competitive.

Lenin once remarked that “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification.” Our present “progressives” seem more interested in de-electrification. Where the New Deal (and the Soviets) wanted to build hydroelectric dams, today’s “progressives” are, for the most part, more interested in destroying them.

Remember, electrical infrastructure is a long-leadtime item, and if we dig outselves into a deep hole in this matter, it will take a long, long time to dig ourselves out.

No one should kid themselves that because gasoline prices are on a downtrend at the moment the gas-price problem is solved. Even if economic stagnation in the U.S. persists for a long time, a recovery in the Far East will drive demand–and, absent new supply, prices. Drilling in the U.S. is important not only for gasoline and diesel supplies but for supplies of natural gas–this commodity also comes from wells, and often from the very same wells that produce oil. This is something that Nancy Pelosi, with her apparent belief that natural gas is not a fossil fuel, does not appear to grasp.

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Important Reading

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Ralph Peters on some of the foreign policy and national security issues at stake in this election.

Those planning to cast their votes based primarily on economic issues should consider: there is a strong link between national security and the economy. If we have multiple terror attacks of the 9/11 scale (or higher), the economy will be in shreds. If the Iranians close the Straits of Hormuz, gasoline prices will soar. If the Russians bully Western Europe with sustained natural gas shortages, the result could be an actual global depression.

(via Maggie’s Farm)