October 26, 2008
Things to come
Mark Levin brings up an important point, too little discussed since it raises fundamental and unsettling issues. Is the meteoric and unusual rise of Barack Obama a harbinger of something quite ominous?
I honestly never thought we'd see such a thing in our country - not yet anyway - but I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places. [...]There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama's name on it, which adorns everything from Obama's plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama's name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff. [...]
Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it's $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich." The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class). And so it is that the middle class, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved — for its own good and the greater good. The "hope" Obama represents, therefore, is not hope at all. It is the misery of his utopianism imposed on the individual.
This hit me hard this morning due in part to a conversation just yesterday with my barber, a naturalized U.S. citizen who grew up in the ruins of postwar Germany. He remembered asking his parents why they supported Hitler, and that they could not or would not explain. He left Germany for the freedom of the USA as soon as he could, and expected that freedom to continue unabated. As both a citizen and a small business owner, now he's unsure what's about to happen. So are we all.
Obama isn't Hitler - instead, he's a leftist technocrat who thinks he knows best for all of us. The question is, why do the voters want so fervently to be sheep for an all-controlling shepherd?
Corroboration: Michelle Malkin says Levin's commentary is a must-read. Indeed.
October 22, 2008
Shabby, deliberate
The mass media's pile-on directed against Alaska governor Sarah Palin continues, including this week's outright fabrication by CNN.
The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger summarizes the cognitive disconnect pretty well.
The abuse being heaped on Sarah Palin is such a cheap shot.The complaint against the Alaska governor, at its most basic, is that she doesn't qualify for admission to the national political fraternity. Boy, that's rich. Behold the shabby frat house that says it's above her pay grade.
Congress has the lowest approval rating ever registered in the history of polling (12%!). She isn't the reason polls are showing people want the entire Congress fired, with many telling pollsters they themselves could do a better job. [...]
By not bothering to look very deeply at the details beneath either candidate's governing proposals, the media have created a lot of downtime to take free kicks at Gov. Palin. My former colleague, Tunku Varadarajan, has compiled a glossary of Palin invective, and I've added a few: "Republican blow-up doll," "idiot," "Christian Stepford wife," "Jesus freak," "Caribou Barbie," "a dope," "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party," "liar," "a national disgrace" and "her pretense that she is a woman."
If American politics is at low ebb, it is because so many of its observers enjoy working in its fetid backwash.
Remember, the piling on isn't an accident, it's a deliberate strategy. Don't be fooled.
October 21, 2008
Finance lessons
Here are two political ads with important reminders about who bears heavy responsibility for the current financial industry lockdown. Hint: it isn't the current GOP candidate.
Watch, listen, learn.
October 19, 2008
Observing the delicate
The presidential race is down to just a little over two weeks. No one knows at this point who will come out on top, although the Obama camp sure wants to make it look inevitable. (Remember, that's a strategy.)
The thing that's surprised me the most over the past two weeks has been the finicky flight of some name-brand members of the conservative punditocracy, not over a lack of conservative stringency by candidate John McCain, but due to their apparent distaste over the plainspoken campaign style of Sarah Palin.
Amusingly, their flight to the DC/NYC highbrow tall grass has also been coupled with squeals of offended sensibilities when their rightist colleagues with more insight and fortitude have counter-attacked. It reminds me of the "free speech" types who can't stand the notion that their ideas would attract competing speech and then cry "oppression," etc.
Mark Steyn has a few pertinent thoughts about the situation.
If it weren't for small towns, suburbs and rural districts, there would be no conservative government at all. With a few exceptions (such as Vermont), "blue states" mostly turn out to be red states with a couple of big blue cities (Pennsylvania, for example, or even California). Almost by definition, an effective conservative executive - the kind you might want in the White House - can only come from flyover country.So, when a conservative pundit mocks Wasilla, he's mocking conservatism as it's actually lived, as opposed to conservatism as a theoretical fantasy playground for the purposes of cocktail-party banter. [...] A township that digs its own wells and plows its own roads is less susceptible to the beguiling notion that everything necessary in life is a mysterious "government service" to be provided by faceless bureaucrats far away.
Kathryn Jean Lopez has related observations.
[It] has become increasingly clear that there are people who just can’t stand Palin, and there are people who simply love her. And the “can’t stand” crowd seems to be dominated by talking-head and editorial-page types, and the “simply love” crowd tends to be regular Janes and Joes (Six-Pack and otherwise), and those — like talk-radio hosts — who hear from them daily. [...]As for those on the Right who reject Palin, I don’t think elite talking heads reject Palin because they reject, reflexively, the voice of the grassroots. I don’t accuse them of disliking, disapproving of, or downright hating Palin for any other reasons than the ones they enumerate — but I do think they might be missing why it is that her candidacy resonates and why that energy is much desired: A winning coalition has to be of and with the people who live outside Washington and New York. In this, Palin serves as an important reminder, perhaps, to northeastern conservatives.
Conservatism is not a fringe movement. Nor is it an elite movement. Nor is it a Washington movement. (It’s certainly not a New York movement.) Sarah Palin represents that. Here is a woman who hasn’t spent her life going to Heritage Foundation working groups or Manhattan Institute luncheons — and yet she gets it. In this respect, she is a conservative success story — she is a living, breathing, executive example of how widespread and adaptable a movement we are. Even in the most remote state of the Union.
Apparently more than the Washington bureacracy needs reform.
October 11, 2008
Meme alert
Note the weekend meme being pushed by Obama's media allies: Republican "anger."
It seems to have started with a story at Politico.com, and now spreads to other channels, even in offhand comments today on Fox News. Next, according to the Drudge Report, two leftie columnists at the New York Times will pick it up this weekend as well.
Keep in mind that there's not much truth here, just another talking point after the failure to stick of the recent charges of GOP racism.
What is happening is that team McCain is behind, the clock is running out, and they've decided, after a long time dithering, to try a strategy of hard fouls and hoping that their opponents will miss the free throws. It's a long shot, but far from stoking uncontrolled "anger."
October 07, 2008
Debate II
Two thirds through this "debate," and both candidates are a morass of pandering incoherence on the economy. This is thin stuff to sway undecided voters either way.
Tom Brokow is adding no value and the audience questions even less so.
October 05, 2008
Bitter days are here
The presidential campaign has entered the final, intense 30 days. As you watch and listen for the next four weeks, keep these comments about the media from the omniscient Instapundit in mind.
Media bias used to mean that they would slow-walk stories that reflected badly on their candidate; now they just flat out ignore them, or even try to shoot them down. They're not just in the tank, they're functioning as arms of the campaign, and Obama's strategy shows that he knows that and is relying on it.
This weekend's case in point: the Associated Press cries racism when Sarah Palin reminds voters of Barack Obama's lengthy association with unrepentent 1960s terrorist William Ayers.
As scholar Stanley Kurtz has noted, that association is in fact long-held and important in the story of Barack Obama's rise to prominence. Nothing about it is "racially tinged" but that's the murky depth to which the traditional media has descended.
It'll get worse. Hang on.