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.

 

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

 From the Telegraph:

The [Warner Brothers] studio has temporarily blocked the release of the DVD version of the 1987 film Hanoi Hilton, which will feature an interview with John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, about his imprisonment in Hoa Lo prison during the war.

The film, which gave a favourable portrayal of US prisoners, will now be released on November 11 – a week after the election.

Warner Brothers’s decision is likely to raise suggestions that it did not want to aid Mr McCain’s campaign by highlighting his wartime acts. The Republican candidate, who was a Navy pilot, was tortured during his imprisonment after being shot down over North Vietnam in October 1967.

Barry Meyer, the company’s chairman and chief executive, last month attended a fundraising dinner for Barack Obama, Mr McCain’s Democratic opponent.

The move has angered Lionel Chetwynd, the film’s writer and director, who is a well-known conservative.

"Finding someone in Hollywood who says they don’t want to affect the election is like finding a virgin in a brothel," Mr Chetwynd told the New York Times.

The film-maker also complained that other film studios were willing to release and promote films with potential for political influence. W, a biopic of President George W Bush directed by Oliver Stone, is set to be released on Friday.

From Power Line:

We’ve noted many times that John McCain was one of the prescient legislators who saw the dangers posed by the runaway Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae and tried to do something about the problem. Until now, though, I’d never seen this letter of May 5, 2006, signed by McCain and 19 other Senators, that couldn’t have been clearer about the dangers posed by the Democrats’ reckless treatment of Fannie and Freddy, and the need to take action to protect the taxpayers and the economy. It’s hard to see how any warning could be more spot-on. Click to enlarge:

Among the more prescient observations:

We are concerned that if effective regulatory reform legislation for the housing-finance government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) is not enacted this year, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole. …

Today, almost half of the home mortgages in the U.S. are guaranteed by these GSEs. They are mammoth financial institutions with almost $1.5 Trillion of debt outstanding between them. With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would pay this debt if Fannie or Freddy could not? …

It is vitally important that Congress take the necessary steps to ensure that these institutions benefit from strong and independent regulatory supervision, operate in a safe and sound manner, and are primarily focused on their statutory mission. More importantly, Congress must ensure that the American taxpayer is protected in the event either GSE should fail.

 Via Human Events. One thing I hadn’t realized is that McCain’s reform legislation was passed through the Senate Banking Committee, but was not able to gain majority support on the Senate floor. All twenty Senators who signed the letter calling attention to the urgency of reforming Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were Republicans. After May 2006, the Democrats continued to use Fannie and Freddy as their private slush funds until the inevitable collapse, which McCain had warned against so eloquently, occurred.

For some inexplicable reason, John McCain seems unable to claim the credit he deserves for being one of the few politicians in Washington who saw the present crisis coming and tried to do something about it. He is even more unable to vigorously and unambiguously put the blame where it belongs: on the Democratic Party. Which is one of the principal reasons why, as everyone expects, he will lose in November. 

 Investor’s Business Daily tells it straight:

Right now it looks like the U.S., which built the mightiest, most prosperous economy the world has ever known, is about to turn its back on the free-enterprise system that made it all possible.

It isn’t only that the most anti-capitalist politician ever nominated by a major party is favored to take the White House. It’s that he’ll also have a filibuster-proof Congress led by politicians who are almost as liberal.

Throw in a media establishment dedicated to the implementation of a liberal agenda, and the smothering of dissent wherever it arises, and it’s no wonder panic has set in.

What is that agenda? It starts with a tax system right out of Marx: A massive redistribution of income — from each according to his ability, to each according to his need — all in the name of "neighborliness," "patriotism," "fairness" and "justice."

It continues with a call for a new world order that turns its back on free trade, has no problem with government controlling the means of production, imposes global taxes to support continents where our interests are negligible, signs on to climate treaties that will sap billions more in U.S. productivity and wealth, and institutes an authoritarian health care system that will strip Americans’ freedoms and run up costs.

All the while, it ensures that nothing — absolutely nothing — will be done to secure a sufficient, terror-proof supply of our economic lifeblood — oil — a resource we’ll need much more of in the years ahead.

The businesses that create jobs and generate wealth are already discounting the future based on what they know about Obama’s plans to raise income, capital gains, dividend and payroll taxes, and his various other economy-crippling policies. Which helps explain why world stock markets have been so topsy-turvy.

But don’t take our word for it. One hundred economists, five Nobel winners among them, have signed a letter noting just that:

"The prospect of such tax-rate increases in 2010 is already a drag on the economy," they wrote, noting that the potential of higher taxes in the next year or two is reducing hiring and investment.

It was "misguided tax hikes and protectionism, enacted when the U.S. economy was weak in the early 1930s," the economists remind us, that "greatly increased the severity of the Great Depression."

We can’t afford to repeat these grave errors.

Yet much of the electorate is determined to vote for the candidate most likely to make them. If he wins, what we consider to be a crisis in today’s economy will be a routine affair in tomorrow’s.

 There used to be a Degrees of Comparison joke – whether just or unjust I don’t know – that went like this: stupid, stupider, Shirley MacLaine.

I think it would be just to revise it as: stupid, stupider, John McCain.

Here he is, boring, repetitive (nattering on about ‘reaching across the aisle’ and ‘maverick’ , over and over again, as if anybody cares), and way behind in the polls, and he will not use the vast arsenal of ammunition available to him against his red revolutionary radical opponent who has spent his life consorting with terrorists, crooks, jihadis, corrupt politicians, has lied over and over again, is without any qualification for the presidency, is a terrifying threat to the freedom and safety of Americans, and is one of those most to blame for the present economic catastrophe affecting the entire globe.  

Many conservatives suspected that the choice of McCain as Republican candidate was a bad mistake. Now we can be sure of it. The only reason to vote for him is to keep Obama – far, far worse – out of power. But McCain himself is refusing to use the only tactics that might, even at this late stage, achieve that  end:  

Power Line quotes a Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter: 

Struggling to contain an emotional fire his own campaign kindled, Republican presidential nominee John McCain spent much of a town hall meeting in Lakeville on Friday trying to cool his supporters’ growing hostility toward Democrat Barack Obama.

Responding to repeated questions about Obama’s truthfulness and personal background, McCain urged backers at a packed gym at Lakeville South High School to be "respectful" toward his opponent.

McCain found himself in the odd and uncomfortable position of defending an opponent who is pulling away in many polls at the end of a week when he and running mate Sarah Palin stepped up their own attacks against Obama – often inspiring outbursts at raucous rallies, complete with cries of "terrorist" and "off with his head."

The Minnesota gathering lacked that kind of harshness, but sustained booing greeted many of McCain’s attempts to discourage the crowd’s fear and anger. Of the 21 questions posed to McCain during 45 minutes of give-and-take, one-third challenged him to take on Obama more aggressively, with a few making incendiary comments.

Late in the town hall meeting, Gayle Quinnell of Shakopee called Obama "an Arab." Taken aback, McCain shook his head and, taking the microphone from her, said, "No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues." …

McCain repeatedly tried to dial down his supporters’ antipathy toward Obama. "I will fight, but we will be respectful," he said. "I admire Senator Obama" – as the crowd booed loudly – "I want everyone to be respectful. … I don’t mean you have to reduce your ferocity, just be respectful."

 "Off with his head"? I don’t think any Presidential candidate has ever faced a monolithic wall of establishment hostility comparable to what John McCain confronts this year. Nor has any political party been the subject of such an unrelenting campaign of vilification as the Republicans have sustained over the past five or six years. I don’t doubt that the establishment will succeed in dragging their candidate across the finish line next month. What will happen after that is anybody’s guess. 

 Kimberly A Strassel writes in the Wall Street Journal:

And now, America, we introduce the Great Obama! The world’s most gifted political magician! A thing of wonder. A thing of awe. Just watch him defy politics, economics, even gravity! (And hold your applause until the end, please.)

To kick off our show tonight, Mr. Obama will give 95% of American working families a tax cut, even though 40% of Americans today don’t pay income taxes! How can our star enact such mathemagic? How can he "cut" zero? Abracadabra! It’s called a "refundable tax credit." It involves the federal government taking money from those who do pay taxes, and writing checks to those who don’t. Yes, yes, in the real world this is known as "welfare," but please try not to ruin the show.

Ken Fallin

For his next trick, the Great Obama will jumpstart the economy, and he’ll do it byraising taxes on the very businesses that are today adrift in a financial tsunami! That will include all those among the top 1% of taxpayers who are in fact small-business owners, and the nation’s biggest employers who currently pay some of the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world. Mr. Obama will, with a flick of his fingers, show them how to create more jobs with less money. It’s simple, really. He has a wand.

Next up, Mr. Obama will re-regulate the economy, with no ill effects whatsoever! You may have heard that for the past 40 years most politicians believed deregulation was good for the U.S. economy. You might have even heard that much of today’s financial mess tracks to loose money policy, or Fannie and Freddie excesses. Our magician will show the fault was instead with our failure to clamp down on innovation and risk-taking, and will fix this with new, all-encompassing rules. Presto! …

And just watch the Great Obama perform a feat never yet managed in all history. He will create that enormous new government health program, spend billions to transform our energy economy, provide financial assistance to former Soviet satellites, invest in infrastructure, increase education spending, provide job training assistance, and give 95% of Americans a tax (ahem) cut – all without raising the deficit a single penny! And he’ll do it in the middle of a financial crisis. And with falling tax revenues! Voila!

Moving along to a little ventriloquism. Study his mouth carefully, folks: It looks like he’s saying "I’ll stop the special interests," when in fact the words coming out are "Welcome to Washington, friends!" Wind and solar companies, ethanol makers, tort lawyers, unions, community organizers – all are welcome to feed at the public trough and to request special favors. From now on "special interests" will only refer to universally despised, if utterly crucial, economic players. Say, oil companies. Hocus Pocus!

And for tonight’s finale, the Great Obama will uphold America’s "moral" obligation to "stop genocide" by abandoning Iraq! While teleported to the region, he will simultaneously convince Iranian leaders to peacefully abandon their nuclear pursuits (even as he does not sit down with them), fix Afghanistan with a strategy that does not resemble the Iraqi surge, and (drumroll!) pull Osama bin Laden out of his hat!

Tada!

You can clap now. (Applause. Cheers.) We’d like to thank a few people in the audience. Namely, Republican presidential nominee John McCain, who has so admirably restrained himself from running up on stage to debunk any of these illusions and spoil everyone’s fun.

We know he’s in a bit of a box, having initially blamed today’s financial crisis on corporate "greed," and thus made it that much harder to call for a corporate tax cut, or warn against excessive regulation. Still, there were some pretty big openings up here this evening, and he let them alone! We’d also like to thank Mr. McCain for keeping all the focus on himself these past weeks. It has helped the Great Obama to just get on with the show.

As for that show, we’d love to invite you all back for next week’s performance, when the Great Obama will thrill with new, amazing exploits. He will respect your Second Amendment rights even as he regulates firearms! He will renegotiate Nafta, even as he supports free trade! He will …

 In the 1960s the New Left undertook to change the Western World to be more like the totalitarian East by embarking on ‘the long march through the institutions’.  A target institution would be infiltrated and subverted, turned if possible, or discredited. The prize targets were the media, the universities, local government, the police, national parliaments. Philanthropic organizations like Amnesty International and the charitable foundations were among the easier targets to take over or exploit. Slowly but steadily, taking advantage of the freedom they were dedicated to destroying, the red revolutionaries succeeded. 

To see how the trick was worked on a comparatively small scale, look at the ‘Chicago Annenberg Challenge’.  A respectable charitable foundation was asked for funds for educating the disadvantaged. All-too-innocent trustees responded generously, since that is what they were entrusted to provide funds for. But the people who received and would administer the funds were far left ideologues, among them one William Ayers, a leading and active member of a terrorist organization who escaped being sent to prison through a legal nicety.  He appointed  BARACK OBAMA to head the beneficiary organization. The funds, granted in good faith, were misdirected, not to education – though it looked as if that’s what they were being used for – but to indoctrination. So the far left ideologues brought off another political scam.  The appointment advanced Obama on his personal long march.  

(Here’s a link to an article explaining how Ayers was responsible for the appointment of Obama to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. )

The hands of the subversives are firmly on many of the levers of power. And now the most desirable and essential destination of the long march is within their reach: the presidency of the United States of America. 

Make no mistake about it: whatever Barack Obama says to get himself there, however he seems to be ‘moving to the centre’ and distancing himself from his political origins,  he is a creature of the Revolutionary Left. His policies and his appointees will prove it if he gets there. 

It seems likely that the man who wins the presidential race gets the booby-prize. The new president’s task would daunt Hercules.

The difficulty of guiding and protecting America, leading the West, and keeping guard over the whole seething world at this point in human affairs should be too formidable for any man or woman of normal intelligence to think of tackling it.

Either both candidates have a measure of self-confidence in their capabilities amounting to almost lunatic self-delusion, or both are astonishingly blind to what they’d be undertaking.

America is in the grip of an economic crisis that no man and his dogs can save it from. Only time and free economic activity can eventually restore confidence and prosperity. But both candidates propose regulation: one of them full-blown socialism. Their remedies can only make the crisis worse. The winner will be blamed and damned for that, but even if he should decide not to regulate, blame and cursing is what he’ll get.

The world is threatened by the dark regressive force of militant Islam; by proliferating nuclear arms in the hands of evil men; by an aggressive Russia and the rising power of Communist China; and by the slow but steady pre-emptive capitulation of an ignominious Western Europe to all these threats. One candidate seems not to grasp the reality of the dangers, and might even have sympathy with the ideologies behind them. Neither candidate could bring himself to warn Islam, or the evil despots, or Vladimir Putin, or the Chinese potentates, that America is willing to use its military might to force them to change their ways. Without that threat and a manifest resolution to carry it out, nothing will stop them.

While we fall ever deeper into debt with China; while Russian warships cruise the Caribbean and Russian arms and technology strengthen our enemies in South America and the Middle East; while every day Islam advances further until it can overwhelm us; our Don Quixote in the White House will go to war against the weather. Some will praise him for that, no doubt, until real disaster ruins him and them.

In the light of all this, competing for the presidency looks very like competing for the captaincy of the Titanic.

If one of the candidates should suddenly see clearly what he will be confronted by if he wins, he might do everything he can to hand the victory and the burden to the other. Perhaps John McCain is doing just that. It’s the only plausible explanation for his failure to use the potent ammunition he’s got against Barack Obama, to defeat him in the contest for the dreadful job of leading us to shipwreck.

Jillian Becker

October 2008

 In addition to all his other mistakes or careless lies, Biden misrepresented facts about the constitution, which he seems not to know much about despite his decades in the Senate. 

This from Power Liine:

This isn’t what’s conventionally described as a gaffe, and it won’t swing any votes, but last night Joe Biden garbled the Constitutional role of the Vice President. I wanted to read the transcript before commenting; here was Gwen Ifill’s question:

Governor, you mentioned a moment ago the constitution might give the vice president more power than it has in the past. Do you believe as Vice President Cheney does, that the Executive Branch does not hold complete sway over the office of the vice presidency, that it it is also a member of the Legislative Branch?

Here is Biden’s answer, in full:

Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history. The idea he doesn’t realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that’s the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.

And the primary role of the vice president of the United States of America is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there’s a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit.

The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress. The idea he’s part of the Legislative Branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive and look where it has gotten us. It has been very dangerous.

 For a man of Biden’s experience, this is a surprising series of misstatements. First of all, he gets wrong one of the most basic facts about the Constitution: Article 1 establishes the legislative branch, not, as Biden said, the executive branch. This is not exactly an obscure fact… 

Second, it simply isn’t true that the Constitution treats the Vice President only as a member of the executive branch. The Vice President is mentioned in Article II as part of the executive branch, but he is also given legislative powers by Section 3 of Article 1, which establishes the Senate:

The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.

Vice President Cheney’s "bizarre notion" is in keeping with the plain text of the Constitution.

Finally, Biden misstated the Vice President’s role in the Senate. It isn’t true that he "preside[s] over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there’s a tie vote." The Constitution contemplates that the Vice President will be the full-time President of the Senate, replaced by a President pro tempore "in the absence of the Vice President." It’s true that the Vice President only gets to vote in case of a tie; but, of course, that’s the only time it matters.

If Joe Biden were a high school student taking a test on the Constitution in a government course, he would get a C or a D. Some would say his mistakes were minor, and, as I said, they certainly won’t swing any votes. But it is distinctly odd that a man who has been in the Senate for more than three decades doesn’t understand the Constitutional role of the Vice President with respect to that body.