It’s odd—liberals have beaten up Sarah Palin for “wanting to ban books” because of a comment she made to the librarian in Wasilla while she was mayor, even going so far as to invent a list of books she supposedly wanted banned (scroll down to #40-43), all the while ignoring the far worse assault on free speech by Barack Obama and his campaign. I’ve been wanting to post on this for a while, but it’s been hard to keep ahead of the occurrences; for the moment, I’ll just direct you to Andrew McCarthy’s helpful rundown. He doesn’t mention everything (for example, he notes the Obama campaign’s orchestrated effort to shout down Stanley Kurtz, but fails to mention they did the same thing to David Freddoso, author of The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate), nor does he provide all the links, but it’s a good overview of the Obama campaign’s highly troubling behavior, and an excellent commentary on why we should be worried by it. For my part, I think Missouri Governor Matt Blunt is completely justified in decrying “the stench of police state tactics”; if this tells us anything about how a President Obama would respond to opposition, we should all be very worried indeed.
Category Archives: Barack Obama
A thought or two on last night’s debate
I could put up a scorecard on the first presidential debate and tell you who I thought won and why, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of point to that; in the first place, there are scads of people doing that already, and in the second place, the only thing that really matters is what the large bloc of undecided voters thought—and I’m definitely not in that category.There were, however, a couple things that occurred to me that might be worth mentioning. The first is that the real effect of these debates is in the takeaway moments; the big ones, of course, are the major gaffes and the knockout blows, and there weren’t any of those in this debate either way, but there will still be moments that stick in people’s minds. For my money, the ones from this debate will favor John McCain:
So let me get this right. We sit down with Ahmadinejad, and he says, “We’re going to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth,” and we say, “No, you’re not”? Oh, please.
(thanks to Jennifer Rubin for the text; followed, as Noam Scheiber noted, by Barack Obama letting it drop)
“You don’t do that. You don’t say that out loud.” (re: Sen. Obama’s suggestion that we should strike our enemies in Pakistan without the knowledge of the Pakistani government)“I’ve got a bracelet, too.”“John is right/Sen. McCain is right.”
On that score, I think the long-term effects of this debate will favor Sen. McCain, whatever the instant reactions might be. The other thing that occurred to me is that eight years ago, one of the things that seemed to hurt Al Gore in the debates was that he couldn’t find a consistent approach against George W. Bush—he was different every time, unlike Gov. Bush. Looking at the two candidates, I think Sen. McCain found an approach and a tone that will work for him, that he’ll be able to maintain across the debates; I’m not so sure that’s true of Sen. Obama, and neither is Byron York, at least in one key respect:
Obama was undeniably, and surprisingly, deferential to a man who in the past Obama has said “doesn’t get it.” . . .Here’s a prediction: The next time McCain and Obama meet in debate, on October 7 in Nashville, start a drinking game in which you take a big swig every time Obama says, “John is absolutely right.” I’ll bet you get to the end of the debate without ever lifting a glass.
I’ll bet York is absolutely right; but if he is, if we do in fact see a significantly different approach from Sen. Obama in the next debate (and I would argue that changing that would necessitate/create a significantly different approach), then that will have a negative effect on the Obama campaign as well.The bottom line here, I think, is that Sen. McCain put Sen. Obama back on his heels, in a reactive position, for most of the debate; I think Sen. Obama handled that pretty well, I think he was an effective counterpuncher in most instances—but I also think that if you get put in that position, you either have to get yourself back on the offensive, which he couldn’t do, or counterpunch effectively every time, or it weakens you. I don’t know what the immediate popular reaction will be, but for the long term, I think the Obama campaign has been weakened, at least a little, by this debate.
Thirty years of economic history in ten minutes
The value of this video, imho, isn’t the McCain/Palin commercial at the end, it’s the sheer volume of source material, mostly from the MSM, that’s referenced here in mapping out the trail that led us to this point; some of these stories I’ve seen and posted on (here, for instance), but others were new to me.HT: The Anchoress, who has an excellent rant on the egregious behavior of the Democratic (and some of the Republican) “leadership” of Congress in this crisis:
I need to first opine that the Democrats yesterday blew my mind with their last-minute addition of 56 billion to the bail-out, their sneaky, slippery attempt to play political games with some of this money—directing it to ACORN (!) – and their subsequent attempt to lie and to blame the GOP—the president—anyone but themselves for not passing a bill which the GOP CANNOT BLOCK. We already know that Nancy Pelosi has no leadership skills except in spite and obstruction—we see she is completely out of her depths here, but Barney Frank’s behavior last night, and his disrespect toward the GOP and the President was particularly egregious in a time of crisis. He behaved like a trapped animal trying to distract the hunters toward anyone but him. Meanwhile Chuck Schumer is unusually, uncharacteristically silent; Barack Obama—except when mentioned by a press pretending he is leading—seems irrelevant to the process and to have no genuine ideas or input, or a desire to lead. All he seems capable of doing is whining about the debate while Rome falls about his ankles. McCain is quite right that the debates would be less urgent if Obama had done the Town Halls McCain had asked for—debates Obama said he’d have “anytime, anywhere” before refusing all of them. I say at this point SCREW the moderated debates that tell us nothing and insist that these candidates town-hall it and speak DIRECTLY to the people who will be most affected by all of this—that would be the ordinary folk. And do the same for Biden and Palin if they debate. And seriously, if there is a debate, it should be on economics, and energy just now, not foreign policy. Speaking of foreign policy, in the midst of all of this, Israel is asking the American president to give a green light to bomb Iran. Imagine having all that on your plate for one day! I don’t know that John McCain is the “perfect” man for the White House, but I’m pretty damn sure at this point that a man with 150 days experience in the Senate, no instincts to lead, a whiny disposition, and a frightening willingness to use the Justice Department as his private thug-corps is the guy we need in the Oval Office in there very serious times. And finally, to end the rant, Charles Krauthammer says we need a few good public hangings re this financial mess. I think—after seeing our “leadership” demonstrate that they haven’t the balls to lead without political cover—we should put them out of their miseries by demanding a few resignations from the leadership of BOTH parties, and both banking committees.
This sounds very familiar
This from a 1979 Atlantic article by James Fallows, who had been one of Jimmy Carter’s speechwriters:
Sixteen months into his Administration, there was a mystery to be explained about Jimmy Carter: the contrast between the promise and popularity of his first months in office and the disappointment so widely felt later on. Part of this had to do with the inevitable end of the presidential honeymoon, with the unenviable circumstances Carter inherited, with the fickleness of the press. But much more of it grew directly from the quality Carter displayed that morning in Illinois. He was speaking with gusto because he was speaking about the subject that most inspired him: not what he proposed to do, but who he was. Where Lyndon Johnson boasted of schools built and children fed, where Edward Kennedy holds out the promise of the energies he might mobilize and the ideas he might enact, Jimmy Carter tells us that he is a good man. His positions are correct, his values sound. Like Marshal Petain after the fall of France, he has offered his person to the nation. This is not an inconsiderable gift; his performance in office shows us why it’s not enough.After two and a half years in Carter’s service, I fully believe him to be a good man. With his moral virtues and his intellectual skills, he is perhaps as admirable a human being as has ever held the job. He is probably smarter, in the College Board sense, than any other President in this century. He grasps issues quickly. He made me feel confident that, except in economics, he would resolve technical questions lucidly, without distortions imposed by cant or imperfect comprehension.He is a stable, personally confident man, whose quirks are few. . . .But if he has the gift of virtue, there are other gifts he lacks. . . .The second is the ability to explain his goals and thereby to offer an object for loyalty larger than himself. . . .The third, and most important, is the passion to convert himself from a good man into an effective one, to learn how to do the job. Carter often seemed more concerned with taking the correct position than with learning how to turn that position into results. He seethed with frustration when plans were rejected, but felt no compulsion to do better next time. He did not devour history for its lessons, surround himself with people who could do what he could not, or learn from others that fire was painful before he plunged his hand into the flame.I worked for him enthusiastically and was proud to join his Administration, for I felt that he, alone among candidates, might look past the tired formulas of left and right and offer something new. . . .But there were two factors that made many of us ignore these paper limitations. One was Carter’s remarkable charm in face-to-face encounters. All politicians must be charming to some degree, but Carter’s performance on first intimate meeting was something special. . . . I met very few people who, having sat and talked with Carter by themselves or in groups of two or three, did not come away feeling they had dealt with a formidable man. . . .Those who are close enough to Carter to speak to him frankly—Powell, Jordan, Rafshoon, perhaps Moore—either believe so totally in the rightness of his style, or are so convinced that it will never change, that they never bother to suggest that he spend his time differently, deal with people differently, think of his job in a different way. Even that handful speaks to him in tones more sincerely deferential than those the underlings use. No one outside this handful ever has an opportunity to shoot the breeze with Carter, to talk with no specific purpose and no firm limit on time.If he persists in walling himself off from challenge and disorder, Jimmy Carter will ensure that great potential is all he’ll ever have. Teaching himself by trial and error, refusing to look ahead, Carter stumbles toward achievements that might match his abilities and asks us to respect him because his intentions be been good. I grant him that respect, but know the root of my disappointment. I thought we were getting a finished work, not a handsome block of marble that the chisel never touched.
Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter aren’t the same person, of course; but there really are some strong, and worrisome, similarities between the two of them. Like President Carter, Sen. Obama offers his person to the nation. This is not an inconsiderable gift; but for him, too, his performance in office so far shows us why it’s not enough.HT: Beldar
The Ayers/Obama campaign to radicalize education
Maybe this is why the Obama campaign tried to stop Stanley Kurtz from delving into the records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge—they didn’t want him telling people what the CAC was all about:
The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland’s ghetto.In works like “City Kids, City Teachers” and “Teaching the Personal and the Political,” Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? “I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn). . . .The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC’s first year. He also served on the board’s governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative. . . .Mr. Ayers’s defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.Mr. Ayers is the founder of the “small schools” movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to “confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.” He believes teacher education programs should serve as “sites of resistance” to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his “Teaching Toward Freedom,” is to “teach against oppression,” against America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming “guilt by association.” Yet the issue here isn’t guilt by association; it’s guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.
The fact that Ayers did plant bombs, and remains unrepentant about doing so, only makes it more of a story; this is why, before a national audience, Sen. Obama and his media subsidiary have done their best to keep it out of sight. It’s worth noting, however, that when he was just running in Chicago, Barack Obama offered his work running CAC as a major qualification for office:
The incredible shrinking Obama?
So says Rex Murphy in today’s Globe and Mail, in a fascinating analysis of Barack Obama’s appeal (and one which tracks in some interesting ways with Shelby Steele’s analysis two months ago that I noted here).HT: Hot Air
Barack Obama runs from his record
It appears that Gianna Jessen’s ad has really rattled the Obama campaign.
They’ve now come up with an ad in response (one which tries to blame John McCain for running the original ad, even though it was produced by a different organization):
There’s just one problem with the Obama campaign’s ad: his record. Here’s what he had to say on the subject when he wasn’t running for office (scroll down to p. 87):
[I]f we’re placing a burden on the doctor that says you have to keep alive a previable child as long as possible and give them as much medical attention as—as is necessary to try to keep that child alive, then we’re probably crossing the line in terms of unconstitutionality.
Personally, I agree with Yuval Levin on this one:
So a child who has been born and is living and breathing outside the womb can’t get medical care because by some legal definition he or she is “pre-viable”? That doesn’t sound like always supporting medical care to protect infants.
And here’s audio of another statement by Sen. Obama on the issue:
The truth here is that
Barack Obama defended infanticide in the Illinois statehouse. He voted against protecting children who survive abortions—viable children were left to die in a Illinois hospital and he would not take legislative action to make that a clear criminal act.
In other words: Sen. Obama, Gianna Jessen isn’t lying—you are. Which is odd, because doesn’t the Left always tell us that pro-lifers are “extremists” who are “out of touch” and “out of the mainstream”? If that’s so, why wouldn’t you stand by your vote and your record, instead of running from it?
Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, and Chicago schools
Via Hugh Hewitt, I’ve found an interesting piece on Barack Obama’s relationship with the Ayers family and his involvement in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The author, Steve Diamond, is a California law professor and no conservative—more like a Naderite liberal, by the sound of it—but he expresses considerable concern over authoritarianism in the global labor movement and its links to authoritarian movements and tendencies in the political arena. Per the author’s expressed wishes, I won’t excerpt the piece here—I’ll simply recommend you read it, and consider the ramifications of the answer he offers to the question “Who ‘sent’ Obama?” It offers an interesting angle on the Obama campaign’s efforts to suppress any inquiries into the details of the Annenberg Challenge.
Did Barack Obama try to manipulate Iraq?
So says Amir Taheri in an article in the New York Post:
WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence. According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July. “He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington,” Zebari said in an interview.
The McCain campaign, in the person of Randy Scheunemann, had this to say:
At this point, it is not yet clear what official American negotiations Senator Obama tried to undermine with Iraqi leaders, but the possibility of such actions is unprecedented. It should be concerning to all that he reportedly urged that the democratically-elected Iraqi government listen to him rather than the US administration in power. If news reports are accurate, this is an egregious act of political interference by a presidential candidate seeking political advantage overseas. Senator Obama needs to reveal what he said to Iraq’s Foreign Minister during their closed door meeting. The charge that he sought to delay the withdrawal of Americans from Iraq raises serious questions about Senator Obama’s judgment and it demands an explanation.
The Obama campaign defended their candidate by saying that
in fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a “Strategic Framework Agreement” governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office.
As a defense, that leaves much to be desired, since it essentially confirms Taheri’s report; they tried to split hairs over which agreement they were talking about and used the word “rush” instead of the word “delay.” It’s nothing more than spin, and pretty thin spin at that. What’s more, it may have been a mistake, as it provoked a rebuttal from Taheri in which he analyzed and dismantled the Obama campaign’s response.Technically speaking, Sen. Obama acted in violation of the Logan Act which “prohibits any private citizen or party from negotiating with a foreign power in matters of national policy or military action”; this has led to a few people asking if he should be prosecuted, though wiser heads have correctly said that criminalizing political conduct is a bad idea and should be avoided (even if Joe Biden didn’t get the memo). That said, his actions clearly merit some sort of censure or rebuke from the Senate, and call into question not only his judgment but his political integrity. Personally, I find the latter more disturbing than the former; Pete Hegseth, on the other hand, takes the opposite view:
I believe, rather, that the underlying naivety of Obama’s overtures is the more disturbing lesson to be distilled from this discovery.It’s not just that Sen. Obama doesn’t believe in the mission in Iraq, it’s that he still doesn’t get it (to plagiarize from the senator himself). Fundamentally, he doesn’t understand the mission in Iraq, what it takes to win a war, or the ramifications of the outcome of this war for the U.S.’s enduring national security. He just doesn’t get it.In Obama’s world, foreign-policy contorts to meet domestic politics, and commanding generals accommodate arbitrary political timelines. From his perspective, facts on a foreign battlefield exist to the extent they comport with his judgment, rather than his judgment comporting to facts on a foreign battlefield.Despite recognizing security gains in Iraq, Sen. Obama continues to declare the surge a strategic failure because it hasn’t created necessary political progress—an assertion that has been patently false for some time now. Nonetheless, Senator Obama won’t adjust his stance before the election because, as Taheri so aptly points out, “to be credible, his foreign-policy philosophy requires Iraq to be seen as a failure, a disaster, a quagmire.” . . .Once again, Sen. Obama and his fellow Democrats continue to insist that they know better than generals. They won’t let the facts get in the way of a good political narrative. Taheri’s article is the latest crack in the facade of Sen. Obama and his fellow travelers, and signals their flip, naïve, and self-serving approach to strategic objectives on the battlefield.
This is an explosive story. In considering all this, I can’t help thinking of the howls we’d be hearing if such a charge were laid against a Republican—and I’m not alone in that:
Obama should be compelled to provide some basic facts: who was present, what record of the meeting exists and what precisely was he communicating to the Iraqis. If we had an independent, truly adversarial press (that is one not adversarial just towards one candidate), they would be screaming for this plus access to those present at the meeting. Can you imagine if John McCain were accused of asking a foreign government to accelerate or retard progress on a matter of national security because of the upcoming election?That may or may not be what happened here. But it is time to start asking hard questions.
Obama, Prince of Denmark: To drill or not to drill
I’ve been meaning to post on this for a while now: amid the posturing and the squabbling over offshore drilling, there was an interesting contradiction in Barack Obama’s acceptance speech a few weeks ago that few people have caught but that’s worth pointing out. I suspect the reason so few people have caught it is that it takes someone in the energy business, like The Thinklings‘ Bill Roberts, to see it:
Tonight, Obama said that drilling is a “stopgap measure”, not a solution. Right after that he said he’s going to promote clean-burning Natural Gas.Which is great, because the company I work for explores for and produces natural gas.But that’s where it gets weird: to get to natural gas you have to drill for it. And there are trillions of cubic feet of it in the outer continental shelf (OCS) that we’ve all been arguing about all this time.It gets even more complicated: It’s extremely common to get BOTH natural gas and oil out of the same wellbore.Sometimes natural gas is on top of the oil, kind of like a “cap” (and water is often under the oil—oil floats on water). So many wells produce all three products—water, gas, and oil. Sometimes the gas is dissolved in the produced oil and is separated when it gets to the surface.But, bottom line—it makes no sense to say no to drilling while simultaneously touting natural gas.I realize this is probably boring to many of you, but because I work with people who do the work to find the darn stuff, I found that to be a pretty interesting comment.
What this shows is that, like most of us (including Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the leadership in Congress), Sen. Obama doesn’t really know much about energy production and the issues related to it. That’s hardly surprising, but it does mean that at a time when energy prices are a major concern in our economy—and when, as John McCain and Sarah Palin have both pointed out more than once, oil and gas imports are a major foreign-policy concern—the Democratic presidential candidate is offering policy prescriptions in this critical area that are based not on actual knowledge of that area but rather on ideology and political convenience. Thus we see him doing things like “saying no to drilling while simultaneously touting natural gas,” just because he doesn’t know enough to know that he’s contradicted himself.This is one of the things which makes Sen. McCain’s choice of Gov. Palin so striking. She’s taken flak from both sides of the aisle for not being broadly and deeply versed in foreign policy and matters of national security, and he’s taken flak for choosing a nominee who lacks that kind of understanding; and there’s no question that she has a lot to learn in that area, and that the wisdom of choosing her as the VP nominee will depend to a considerable extent on her ability to do so quickly. That said, however, what she does have that’s far harder to find is a broad and deep understanding, both at the political level and at the down-and-dirty practical level, of the energy industry, energy policy, and all its manifold ramifications. She knows how to address these issues, and she’s managed to do so without ending up in Big Oil’s pocket, which is probably almost as valuable. At a time when energy policy is critically important both domestically and internationally, when the GOP nominee for President is already more than qualified to handle national-security issues but is not conversant with energy issues, I think Gov. Palin’s expertise in this area is a powerful qualification—and a pointed contrast to the ignorance on the Democratic ticket.