Thomas Sowell writes today:

If Barack Obama had run as what he has always been, rather than as what he has never been, then we could simply cast our votes based on whether or not we agree with what he has always stood for.

Some people take solace from the fact that Senator Obama has verbally shifted position on some issues, like drilling for oil or gun control, since this is supposed to show that he is "pragmatic" rather than ideological.

But political zig-zags show no such moderation as some seem to assume. Lenin zig-zagged and so did Hitler. Zig-zags may show no more than that someone is playing the public for fools.

Some people who see the fraud in what Obama is saying are amazed that others do not. But Obama knows what con men have long known, that their job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe. He does that very well.

And what has Senator Obama ‘always been?’ A red revolutionary radical.

 Caroline Glick writes in the Jerusalem Post:

Iran will likely be the first US adversary to test Obama. And Obama will have no idea what to do. While Obama has stated repeatedly that a nuclear-armed Iran is a "game-changer," Obama’s own rule book for international relations has no relevance for dealing with Iran’s game.

Obama views international relations as a creature of American will. If America is nice to others, they will be nice to America. But the fact of the matter is that regimes like Iran hate the US regardless of how it behaves. The only question with strategic relevance for Washington is whether the Iranians also fear the US. And Obama has given them no reason to fear him. To the contrary, he has given them reason to believe that under his leadership, the mullahs can defeat America.

AMERICA STANDS to elect its new president in times of nearly unprecedented dangers. Iran is on the threshold of nuclear weapons. Thanks to the Bush administration, North Korea now feels free to vastly expand its nuclear proliferation activities. Oil rich states like Venezuela, Russia and Iran recognize that with global oil prices decreasing, now is the time to strike before they are impoverished. And the international economic turmoil will cause Western nations to recoil from international confrontations and so embolden rogue states to attack their interests.

 Mark Steyn, fun to read and right as always, comments in part:

McCain vs. Obama is not the choice many of us would have liked in an ideal world. But then it’s not an "ideal world," and the belief that it can be made so is one of the things that separates those who think Obama will "heal the planet" and those of us who support McCainfaute de mieux. I agree with Thomas Sowell that an Obama-Pelosi supermajority will mark what he calls "a point of no return."

It would not be, as some naysayers scoff, "Jimmy Carter’s second term," but something far more transformative. The new president would front the fourth great wave of liberal annexation – the first being FDR’s New Deal, the second LBJ’s Great Society, and the third the incremental but remorseless cultural advance when Reagan conservatives began winning victories at the ballot box and liberals turned their attention to the other levers of the society, from grade school up. The terrorist educator William Ayers, Obama’s patron in Chicago, is an exemplar of that most-recent model: 40 years ago, he was in favor of blowing up public buildings; then he figured out it was easier to get inside and undermine them from within.

All three liberal waves have transformed American expectations of the state. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it. Why can’t the government sort out my health care? Why can’t they pick up my mortgage?

In his first inaugural address, Calvin Coolidge said: "I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people." That’s true in a more profound sense than he could have foreseen. In Europe, lavish social-democratic government has transformed citizens into eternal wards of the Nanny State: the bureaucracy’s assumption of every adult responsibility has severed Continentals from the most basic survival impulse, to the point where unaffordable entitlements on shriveled birth rates have put a question mark over some of the oldest nation states on Earth. A vote for an Obama-Pelosi-Barney Frank-ACORN supermajority is a vote for a Europeanized domestic policy that is, as the eco-types like to say, "unsustainable."

More to the point, the only reason why Belgium has gotten away this long with being Belgium and Sweden Sweden and Germany Germany is because America’s America. The soft comfortable cocoon in which Western Europe has dozed this past half-century is girded by cold hard American power. What happens when the last serious Western nation votes for the same soothing beguiling siren song as its enervated allies?

"People of the world," Sen. Obama declared sonorously at his self-worship service in Germany, "look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one."

No, sorry. History proved no such thing. In the Cold War, the world did not stand as one. One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people – the Barack Obamas of the day – were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity.

And the wall came down not because "the world stood as one," but because a few courageous people stood against the conventional wisdom of the day. Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterrand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire (notwithstanding its own incompetence) would have survived, and the wall would still be standing. Sen. Obama’s feeble passivity will get you a big round of applause precisely because it’s the easy option: Do nothing but hold hands and sing the easy-listening anthems of one-worldism, and the planet will heal.

To govern is to choose. And sometimes the choices are tough ones. When has Barack Obama chosen to take a stand? When he got along to get along with the Chicago machine? When he sat for 20 years in the pews of an ugly neo-segregationist race-baiting grievance-monger? When he voted to deny the surviving "fetuses" of botched abortions medical treatment? When in his short time in national politics he racked up the most liberal – i.e., the most doctrinaire, the most orthodox, the most reflex – voting record in the Senate? Or when, on those many occasions the questions got complex and required a choice, he dodged it and voted merely "present"?

The world rarely stands as one. You can, as Reagan and Thatcher did, stand up. Or, like Obama voting "present," you can stand down.

Nobody denies that, in promoting himself from "community organizer" to the world’s president-designate in nothing flat, he has shown an amazing and impressively ruthless single-mindedness. But the path of personal glory has been, in terms of policy and philosophy, the path of least resistance.

Peggy Noonan thinks a President Obama will be like the dog who chases the car and finally catches it: Now what? I think Obama will be content to be King Barack the Benign, Spreader of Wealth and Healer of Planets. His rise is, in many ways, testament to the persistence of the monarchical urge even in a two-century old republic. So the "Now what?" questions will be answered by others, beginning with the liberal supermajority in Congress. And as he has done all his life he will take the path of least resistance. An Obama administration will pitch America toward EU domestic policy and U.N. foreign policy.

Thomas Sowell is right: It would be a "point of no return," the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America. For a vigilant republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens, it would be a Declaration of Dependence.

 

 From Little Green Footballs:

Former FBI informant Larry Grathwohl infiltrated the Weather Underground and helped prevent several bombing attacks by the group. In this clip from the 1982 documentary No Place to Hide, Grathwohl describes a Weather Underground meeting at which the terrorists discussed the need to murder at least 25 million people—those diehard American capitalists who would resist “reeducation.”

 

 

I asked, “well what is going to happen to those people we can’t reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?” and the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated.

And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers.

And when I say “eliminate,” I mean “kill.”

Twenty-five million people.

I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.

And they were dead serious.

Concerning Obama’s membership of the extreme left New Party, this from ‘the corner’ of the National Review:

New Party: Where’s the Press?   [Stanley Kurtz]

In "Something New Here," I laid out Barack Obama’s ties to the far-left New Party. Blogger Trevor Loudon, of New Zeal, did the pioneering work on this issue. Today, Loudon has posted good quality scans of New Party documents and pictures confirming Obama’s membership. We’ve seen most of this information before (although only recently), but never so clearly.

With all its lengthy background pieces, has the New York Times ever noted that Barack Obama was endorsed by, and was a member of, the New Party? What about theWashington Post? Has any major television network, any national news magazine, or any major daily newspaper ever mentioned that Barack Obama was endorsed by, or was a member of, the New Party? If any such outlet has ever mentioned that fact, have they ever gone on to explain in any depth exactly what the New Party was? For example, have they laid out the extremely close ties between the New Party in Chicago and ACORN? Especially with issue of Obama’s ties to ACORN so much in the news, isn’t this a major story right now?

Can any blogger out there answer these questions? I repeat: Has any major television network, any national news magazine, or any major daily newspaper ever mentioned Barack Obama’s membership in, or endorsement by, the New Party, and then gone on to explore and explain what the New Party was, including its ties to ACORN? Isn’t the membership of a major party nominee and currently favored candidate to become president of the United States in a third party a major news story? Is it not the height of press irresponsibility to ignore this fact?

Now some folks might be disturbed by Obama’s New Party membership and/or endorsement, and some may not. But isn’t this something the American people are entitled to know and decide on for themselves?

Concerning our entry immediately below: 

 If John McCain wasn’t silenced by his self-esteem and imprisoned in his own propriety, this is the sort of speech he could make to win the election:  

‘I have to tell you about an extremely serious development. I and Senator Obama have been confidentially informed by US intelligence that IRAN WILL HAVE A NUCLEAR BOMB by this coming February. We are asked not to make this specific threat public, on the grounds that we would be spreading alarm, but it is too serious to keep from you, and Americans and the whole world ought to be alarmed. It is more than likely that Iran will use its nuclear bomb against Israel. If it does, an international crisis will instantly arise comparable to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor…’

He would then go on to say in explicit terms that whoever is Commander-in-Chief when this happens will need to be someone who has already been tested in crisis, not someone who thought that Iran is a small country that can be talked out of developing and using nuclear weapons, who wants to disarm America of its own nuclear defense, and has no experience whatever of international crises or military engagement.  

For all his mistakes and weaknesses, John McCain has one great strength. He is a military man who understands international conflict, and can and would shoulder the responsibility of America, the world’s only superpower and defender of freedom,  to oppose the aggression of evil powers, with force when necessary.  

As we do not believe that there is a god to save us, we can only look to our fellow man, and the only man in a position to avert this threat – by becoming Commander-in-Chief – is John McCain.  If he is President, Iran will hesitate. If Obama is President, Iran will not hesitate.

Can John McCain comprehend what is happening and what he should do about it?

If he cannot, we should be more than alarmed. We should be terrified.         

All too ominously the signs point to a clean sweep for the Democrats. They will probably command both Congress and the White House.

The pundits say, almost unanimously, that  the reason why most voters will put power into the hands of the Democratic Party is the economic crisis.  If this is so, the irony is heavy. The crisis was fundamentally caused by the Democrats. Pursuing their ideology, they insisted, and legislated to ensure, that people who couldn’t afford mortgages be given them. When the red lights started flashing, both President Bush and John McCain (amongst other Republicans) warned that measures must be taken to prevent impending disaster, but Democrats voted against the bills that were presented to avert it. Among the most guilty of the Democrats were Chris Dodd, Barney Frank – and Barack Obama.

And the Democrats are going to be voted into power primarily to fix the economy? Seems so!

But do most voters know that the Democrats – including, most importantly, Obama himself – are the first and chief cause of the economic collapse? Surely, if they knew, they wouldn’t hire the thieves to guard the treasure, the arsonists to protect the house?

So if they they do not know, who is to blame for that?

First, obviously, the media. This presidential election is a dark chapter in the history of the MSM. They have deliberately withheld essential information about the Democrats’ culpability for the sub-prime collapse and Barack Obama’s  communist training and ties.

But the one person who could have by-passed the media by using his opportunities to spread the information to tens of millions of people in his convention speech and the presidential debates, and did not do so; who could and should have done it fully and clearly and insistently and convincingly, is John McCain. He did not even vaunt his own prescience and efforts to avert the calamity, let alone point his finger at the guilty men. He was too nice, too scrupulous, too respectful to do what urgently needed to be done to save America. This is a destructive kind of hubris. He esteems his own moral superiority more than he desires the freedom and prosperity of his country!  Instead, batting his eyelashes like a starlet, and opening wide his goody-goody eyes, he tell us not to fear an Obama presidency – even though he has noticed of late (too late?), with the help of Joe the Plumber, that Obama’s economic policy is ‘socialistic’.

So he too bears a terrible responsibility for what is now likely to come about: the unimpeded enactment of socialist policies which can only make the economy worse.

Jillian Becker

October 2008

 Obama speaks of a WIND OF CHANGE blowing through America.  In February 1960 the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan  made a speech in which he said that the WIND OF CHANGE was blowing through Africa. 

We are not accusing Obama – or his speech-writers –  of plagiarism. He can leave that to his veep, who notoriously plagiarized a speech by the British Labor Party leader, Neil Kinnock. 

What we want to point out is this: the Wind of Change that blew through Africa was an ill wind that brought no African country much good. Barely a single one is more prosperous than in Macmillan’s day, even among the few that became more democratic.  In sheer numbers, far more Africans are exposed now to civil war, invasion, oppressive government and profound impoverishment than in the 1960s.  Some populations have experienced, or are even at present experiencing, genocide; some, massacre on a vast scale; some, in considerable numbers, actual starvation.  

 One can only hope that Obama’s Wind of Change is not the same wind. 

From the National Black Republican Association:

Obama claims he cares about poor blacks, but a Boston Globe report exposed how for eight years Obama supported slum projects in Chicago.

Poor blacks living in rat and roach infested apartments condemned Obama for not caring about them.

Cynthia Ashley, a fourteen-year resident said: "No one should have to live like this, and no one did anything about it."

Anthony Frizzell a twenty-year resident said: "In the winter I can feel the cold air coming through the walls and the sockets."

Sharee Jones who has lived for years with the rats said: "You could hear them under the floor and in the walls, and they didn’t do nothing about it."

Paul Johnson who helped organize a protest against Obama said: "Of course he knew. He just didn’t care."

Showing he just didn’t care, Obama wrote letters on Illinois Senate letterhead supporting government loans for slum projects.

Obama coauthored the Illinois law that gave tax breaks to his slum lord friends, including now convicted felon Tony Rezko who helped Obama buy a million-dollar house.

As a US Senator, Obama worked to increase federal subsidies for his slum lord pals who donated more than $175,000 to Obama’s campaigns with Rezko raising another $200,000.

While running for president, Obama is promising to create a fund that gives his slum lord buddies $500 million a year. This is outrageous.

According to the (leftist) Guardian newspaper, the WHOLE WORLD – not just the multitude of disgusting tyrannies but the (comparatively) free countries – want the socialist radical Barack Obama to become President of the United States, because they hate America as it is, and hope that he will change it. All those unhappy lands want America to be more like themselves, and correctly see that Obama is the man to make it so. 

Too many Americans care too much what the envious world thinks of them, so this may be a reason for some millions to vote for the change that will make America more liked by the rest of the world. Good-bye, last best hope!

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

 I hold with them who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To know that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

– Robert Frost