Category: Politics

Aside from suffering the slings and arrows from the Clinton campaign, Barak Obama hasn’t had to face much criticism. In fact, Clinton criticism borders on insane stalker criticism like this in the Washington Times this morning;

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday went after Sen. Barack Obama as inexperienced on matters of national security and as a politician with no record of accomplishment.

The New York Democrat said it was time to “get real” that only she has the credentials to face Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

“That is all we’re asking for, we’re asking to compare our records, we’re asking to compare our years of service … our ideas, our solutions,” Mrs. Clinton said yesterday as her husband called Texas and Ohio make-or-break elections.

She’s probably right that she’s more qualified than Obama to face down McCain, but she still hasn’t come to grips with the fact that no one wants her as President and her sex has nothing to do with it.

But as Obama gets closer to becoming the crowned nominee, the Republicans can begin to level their (metaphorical) guns in his direction. According to Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal this morning, that’s already begun ;

John McCain also took on Mr. Obama, with the Arizona senator declaring he would oppose “eloquent but empty calls for change that promises no more than a holiday from history and a return to the false promises and failed policies of a tired philosophy that trusts in government more than people.”

Mr. McCain, too, raised questions about Mr. Obama’s fitness to be commander in chief. Mr. McCain pointed to Mr. Obama’s unnecessary sabre-rattling at an ally (Pakistan) while appeasing our adversaries (Iran and Syria). Mr. McCain also made it clear that reining in spending, which is a McCain strength and an Obama weakness, would be a key issue.

Mr. Obama had not been so effectively criticized before. In the Democratic contest, John Edwards and Mrs. Clinton were unwilling to confront him directly or in a manner that hurt him. Mr. McCain was rightly preoccupied by his own primary. On Tuesday night, things changed.

With his wife under fire for her ill-considered remarks that up until now America hasn’t given her anything to be proud of, now Obama will have to defend his naive babbling about our foreign policy, which up until now has been a mirror image of his domestic policy – just the opposite of what we’ve been doing all along.

But, while Obama has focused his entire campaign on preaching feelings to moon-eyed groupies, he hasn’t been able to project any measurable depth of knowledge about the issues. Also in the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger recounts one of Obama’s lost opportunities to rise to a level of competance;

One of Obama’s most disappointing moments was his comment, in a January debate, on reversing the black dropout rate. His answer could have been phoned in from the teachers union: after-school programs, summer-school programs, more money. He did say something about absent fathers. It fell to Hillary Clinton to suggest more schools like the Eagle Academy in the Bronx, an all-male charter started by the 100 Black Men organization. Embarrassing.

If Obama can’t even understand the politics of his own party, how can he be expected to pull together Democrats and Republicans as he claims he can every night on my TV screen? When Obama doesn’t have to share the spotlight with other Democrats, when he’s alone facing America, I suspect the color will drain from the mugs of those moon-eyed groupies rather quickly.

Using the true definition of the term “swiftboat” in the context of the John Kerry incident is something like shooting yourself in the foot by not being forthcoming, this week we’ve watched the Obamas swiftboat themselves.

Michele Obama self-centered and out of touch with America for about 26 years, apparently, announced she can finally be proud of America because we (Democrats) want change. Well, Democrats really don’t want change – they just want to fleece America and expand their already decrepit social programs. Just like they did in 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2004, they want to elect an empty suit to the White House. That’s not change.

But as far as the statement Obama made, Bob Parks at Outside the Wire says she identifies this change race much more than she’d care to admit;

Michelle Obama was gushed over by the media, that is, until yesterday. Now she’s struck a nerve with many Americans, and the collective judgment, like it or not, may be a little more unforgiving. As she’s too proud to clarify her statement, some of us will try to explain it.

While most in the mainstream media are pussyfooting around the subject, Michelle’s lack of pride in America comes down to race. In the introduction to her 1985 senior thesis “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community”, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson wrote…

“My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.”

Another Michele (Malkin) decides that the remark comes from shallower depths than race;

Unlike Michelle Obama, I can’t keep track of the number of times I’ve been proud—really proud—of my country since I was born and privileged to live in it.

[…]

Mrs. Obama’s statement was met with warm applause from other Barack supporters who have apparently also been devoid of pride in their country for their adult lifetimes. Or maybe it was just a Pavlovian response to the word “change.” What a sad, empty, narcissistic, ungrateful, unthinking lot.

I’m just seven years younger than Mrs. Obama. We’ve grown up and lived in the same era. And yet, her self-absorbed attitude is completely foreign to me. What planet is she living on? Since when was now the only time the American people have ever been “hungry for change?” Michelle, ma belle, Barack is not the center of the universe. Newsflash: The Obamas did not invent “change” any more than Hillary invented “leadership” or John McCain invented “straight talk.”

I tend to agree more with Plumb Bob Blog‘s posited explanation that they’re just Leftists regurgitating the same tired platitudes that they’ve been fed since their high school days;

The Obamas clearly belong to that small set of leftists who believe the Sweet Land of Liberty we all grew up in is an international disgrace. We’ve heard plenty of this sort of talk over the years, only seldom packaged as “hope.” It becomes clear, listening to Michelle, that the hope they’re expressing is the hope that the nation will finally abandon its defense of true liberty and human dignity, and join the quasi-Utopian international community of multiculturalists, who find America disgusting but allow the Sudan to sit on the UN’s Commission on Human Rights. It’s the hope of the radical few, not of traditional America.

Their race is just a convenient, unassailable vehicle from which to throw out their vacuous chants.

Lucky for the Obamas, that crap plays well among Democrats who want to be liked by everyone and don’t want to put too much thought into their politics beyond 10 second explanations that can’t be allowed to be disputed (which is why Democrats resort to name-calling and shouting after 20-seconds of a discussion). Everyone who disputes what either Obama says can be easily pigeon-holed into the racist category (clap dust from hands here).

But the American electorate isn’t fooled as easily as those dopey Democrats who stare mooneyed at the pair of Obamas. Especially when there are landmines like this from VanHelsing at Moonbattery;

In his autobiographical Dreams from My Father, Obama writes of a father figure named Frank who apparently influenced him profoundly with his “hard-earned knowledge.” He acknowledges the words of wisdom “Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self” shared with him before he set off for college. This advice included not to “start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit.”

This Frank guy in the Black Power dashiki is Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA, which received subsidies from the Soviet Union to advance its goal of destroying America from within.

Now it’s time for the Republicans to shoot themselves in the foot by staying away from elections the way we do so Idiot Democrats get elected with 43% and 49% of the electorate.

All day yesterday I was bombarded with multi-lingual reports of Castro’s resignation. Telemundo mentioned it every 30 seconds during their news hours and Fox mentioned almost as much. But, hinestly, I don’t think it means anything. Did anyone see Uhaul vans pulling up to Castro’s residence to make room for a new leader? Fidel castro isn’t moving physically or politically from Cuba’s repressive government. In his near-fifty years of running Cuba into the ground, he’s needed the support of hundreds, if not thousands, of fellow Cubans to the island’s population under his thumb. At the moment the current system collapses, those people, who really wield the power Castro exercised, are the folks who’ll be jailed and punished – they can’t allow the current system to fail in a crash. They certainly remember Honnecker of East Germany, Ceausescu of Romania and Saddam Hussein.

The whole point of the boycott against Cuba was to protest Castro’s seizure of private US industry – that hasn’t changed. Why would our policy toward Cuba change when US industry still hasn’t been reimbursed for their losses? Of course, the Washington Post had no trouble finding people to write irrelevant opinions about the issue, like Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist, who makes the typical, ignorant argument;

A lot of what will happen after the inauguration in 2009 will depend on the attitudes of the small group of radical American-Cuban Republicans who have been holding Washington hostage to their extremely radical anti-Castro policies.

Um, how can a “small group” hold the rest of the country’s policy hostage? Except maybe in Palestine. The policy against Castro’s Cuba has remained steadfastly in place over the last forty-five years because it’s what all Americans support – well, all thinking Americans, anyway. It’s only a small minority who want to to pander to the Communist dictator. A small minority who never admits to their anemic numbers.

Another worthless opinion that the Washington Post offers is Bill Emmot, a British journalist who calls the embargo “the absurd and counter-productive economic embargo that America has imposed on Cuba for all these decades”. Funny, but one goal of the embargo was to contain Cuba’s military expansion in the reason and except for a few forays during Democrat administrations (Johnson – Bolivia, Vietnam and Carter – Africa, Central America), Cuba was constrained because they lacked economic strength.

But, no, there’ll be no real change in Cuba as long as there are hundreds of communists who still value their necks and they still have all of the guns. Investors Business Daily concurs (h/t Babalu Blog);

Raul may permit some economic freedom, but he remains a doctrinaire Marxist and will do so only if it serves the state. Real reform, however, is not about tactics. It’s about giving rights to people. Castro’s exit and Cuba’s transition to a family dynasty with a large fortune should not be mistaken for real democracy.

Raul’s vision for Cuba is an economy like China’s because it’s the only way he can protect himself and the rest of the communists from the Cuban people both inside and outside of Cuba. Anyone celebrating Castro’s resignation has no memory of events over the last twenty years.

“Under the tax code, they can pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes on $50 million dollars, than a teacher, or a nurse, or a truck driver in Parma pays on $50,000. That’s very discouraging to people.” Thus spake her inevitableness. Which is, of course true, what it ignores, though is the fact that Fifty Million is a THOUSAND times fifty thousand, so even if the “evil rich” (How is it, by the way, that the Clinton’s riches aren’t evil?) paid a mere 10% that would be FIVE MILLION dollars, that is, one hundred times the fifty thousand dollar salary of the teacher, nurse (BTW, what nurse makes that little?)and/or truck driver that Clinton mentions in her comments.

Make no mistake about it, even with lower taxes, the rich, (Those Evil bastards) shoulder the lion’s share (and that of several other large animals) of the nation’s tax burdens. This is just one more misrepresentation of the facts that the Clinton’s are infamous for…