Thomas Sowell, Townhall.com

 

To find anything comparable to crowds' euphoric reactions to Obama, you would have to go back to old newsreels of German crowds in the 1930s, with their adulation of their fuehrer, Adolf Hitler. With hindsight, we can look back on those people with pity, knowing now how many of them would be led to their deaths by the man they idolized.

 

The exultation of the moment can exact a brutal price after that moment has passed. Nowhere is that truer than when it comes to picking the leader of a nation, which means entrusting that leader with the fate of millions today and of generations yet unborn.

 

Barack Obama is truly a phenomenon of our time-- a presidential candidate who cannot cite a single serious accomplishment in his entire career, besides advancing his own career with rhetoric.

 

He has a rhetorical answer for everything. Those of us who talk about the threat of Iran are just engaging in "the politics of fear" according to Obama, something to distract us from "the real issues," such as raising taxes and handing out largesse with the proceeds.

 

Those who have studied the years leading up to World War II have been astonished by how many people and how many countries failed to see what Adolf Hitler was getting ready to do. Read article.

Henry Mark Holzer, FrontpageMag.com

 

The Obama campaign has recently ridiculed John McCain for his supposed unfamiliarity with computers, and his alleged inability to type. Whatever the truth of this not-so-thinly veiled attempt to portray the Republican candidate as a fossil out of touch with the contemporary scene, the Democrats have yet again denigrated McCain’s (and other POWs') suffering in Hanoi, which was the cause of most of the Senator’s physical ailments.

 

Much of that suffering was caused by a torture treatment called “the ropes.” Read article - see drawings.

Thomas Bell, Telegraph.co.uk

 

John McCain was shot down and badly wounded while bombing a Hanoi power station on his 23rd mission over North Vietnam in 1967. He was a prisoner for over five years.

 

Because Mr McCain's father was commander of all American forces in the Pacific theatre, the Vietnamese called him "the prince".

 

Tran Trong Duyet, the commandant of Hao Lo prison in Hanoi from 1968-73, recalls Mr McCain "as a typical child of a traditional military family. He was conservative and faithful to his country's policy of the Vietnam war".

 

Like many Vietnamese, Mr Duyet is grateful to Mr McCain for the role he played in the 1990s - restoring trading and political relations between the countries.

 

"I would like to say that if John McCain is elected president I hope he will further improve the relationship between Vietnam and the United States," said Mr Duyet.

 

"And as a friend I want to wish him good health and good luck in the presidential election," he added. Read article.

 

Guy Benson, Townhall.com

 

Thirteen months ago, John McCain’s presidential campaign wheezed into New Hampshire on life support. The candidate was forced to travel on commercial flights and carry his own luggage. His staff slashed dramatically, McCain sometimes relied on individual supporters to provide transportation to and from events. Despite the adversity, McCain shook up the race by eking out a victory in the Granite State after weeks of grindstone campaigning on a “no surrender” platform.

 

This alarmed some conservatives who bitterly opposed his positions on a number of key issues. Yet Mitt Romney never managed to beat the Arizona senator in the clutch, and McCain ran away with the nomination. It was a remarkable political comeback story.

 

The party’s conservative base, however, continued to grumble about McCain’s triumph, with some vowing to stay home in November. Today—in what may amount to an even more remarkable reversal of fortune than McCain’s primary resurgence—that same base is turning out in record numbers to attend McCain rallies, enthusiastically chanting his name, and mobilizing at the grassroots level to ensure an election day win. The reason: Governor Sarah Palin. Read article.

 

Joseph Epstein, Online WSJ.com

 

Today, class, we shall take up the oxymoron, the figure of speech in which two contradictory words appear in conjunction. Here are some prime examples: amicable divorce, congressional ethics, definite maybe, military justice and Jewish Republican. Jewish Republicans may be rarer than Jewish coal miners. Let's face it, no one gazing at the crowd of the Republican convention in St. Paul last week would have mistaken it for Sam and Becky Lebowitz's grandson's bar mitzvah party.

 

The reason it is so difficult for Jews to vote for Republicans is largely historical. The GOP for many years seemed the party of the large corporations, the excluding country clubs, the restricted neighborhoods -- all institutions dedicated to keeping Jews out -- so that even now the Republican Party is associated, in the minds of Jews of a certain age, with anti-Semitism.

 

I have Jewish friends who believe in free markets, are deeply suspicious of big government, view the general bag of leftist ideas as callow if not dangerous, yet would sooner tuck into a large plate of pigs' feet than vote for a Republican for president. They just can't bring themselves to do it. Read article.

 

Rich Lowry, NY Post.com

 

A turning point in the presidential race came when the McCain campaign ended its candidate's habitual informal interactions with the press. The area of the campaign plane where a couch was installed so the Arizonian could hold court with journalists was cut off with a dark curtain, marking the end of an era.

 

Since 2000, John McCain had thrived on his irrepressible chattiness with the press, talking about anything reporters wanted for as long as they'd listen. The press loved the access and avoided "gotcha" coverage, letting McCain explain any seeming gaffes. The arrangement worked beautifully - until McCain became the GOP nominee.

 

Suddenly, he didn't get the same old courtesy from reporters, and he had to go about the grim business of driving a daily message. With the end of the running bull sessions, a trial separation began with the press that became a divorce that became a feud.

 

The enduring scandal of the McCain campaign is that it wants to win. The press had hoped for a harmless, nostalgic loser like Bob Dole in 1996. Read article.

 

Aaron Klein, WND.com

 

The official campaign website of Sen. Barack Obama has completely scrubbed a series of user-generated blog postings on the candidate's site by a former top Communist activist who is an associate of former Weathermen terrorist leader William Ayers.

 

The move has raised questions regarding Obama's relationship with the deleted blogger, Mike Klonsky, who runs an education organization that was founded by Ayers and that received a substantial grant from a group directed by Obama.

 

Klonsky served with Ayers and Ayer's wife, former Weathermen terrorist Bernadine Dohrn, in the Students for a Democratic Society group, a major leftist student organization in the 1960s that later splintered, with Ayers and Dohrn leading a more activist approach with the Weathermen. Klonsky reportedly favored less aggressive tactics, promoting the philosophy that young workers possessed the potential to be a revolutionary force to overthrow capitalism.

 

In the 1970s, Klonsky became a top Communist activist and leader of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party. He reportedly identified as a Maoist, and traveled in 1977 to Beijing, where he held friendly meetings with the Chinese leadership. Read article.

 

David Limbaugh, David Limbaugh.com

 

In the next few weeks, we're going to hear a lot of hot air from Joe Biden as he tries to recapture the spotlight from Sarah Palin. One thing I doubt we'll hear from him is that rare sensible gem he uttered a few years ago about Democrats and people of faith. But he would do well to remember his fleeting words.

 

Biden said: "We have too many elites in our party who look down their nose on people of faith. ... That's the big problem with my party."

 

You can say that again, Joe. But next time, you ought to try listening to your own words instead of just talking to hear your head rattle.

 

If Biden was sincere, why won't he take issue with liberals in the media and elsewhere who routinely demonstrate their contempt for Christians?

 

Whether it's Whoopi Goldberg hyperventilating about the separation of church and state, Charlie Gibson distorting Sarah Palin's views on the intersection of faith and governance, or Obama himself disparaging small-town Christians for their unashamed reliance on the Bible, liberals just don't get it. For them to occasionally pretend they do just adds insult to injury.

 

On "The View," Goldberg asked John McCain, "So if you believe in the separation of church and state, did it not give you a moment of pause that Sarah Palin ... (does) not have the same beliefs as you do about these things?" Read article.

 

Michael Gerson, Washington Post.com

 

Seldom has there been a larger contrast between the style of a candidate and the strategy of his campaign.

 

Barack Obama is cool, firm and permanently unruffled. It is precisely this quality of steadiness that has made him seem a credible prospective president with the thinnest of résumés.

 

But Obama's campaign is rootless, reactive and panicky. At every stage since securing the nomination, it has seemed fearful of missteps and unsure of its own organizing principle. So it has invariably adopted the Democratic conventional wisdom of the moment.

 

Obama's first major decision was his running mate. He could have reinforced a message of change and moderation with a Democratic governor who wins in a Republican state, or reached for history by selecting Hillary Clinton. But his choice came soon after Russia invaded Georgia, and the conventional wisdom demanded an old hand who knew his way around Tbilisi. When the Georgia crisis faded, Obama was left with a partisan, undisciplined, congressional liberal at his side. This has served to undermine Obama's message of change -- and has allowed Sarah Palin to pilfer a portion of that appeal. Read article.

 

Col. Bob Pappas, USMC, Ret., Gulf1.com

 

Now that Governor Sarah Palin is the first Republican woman to be a Vice Presidential candidate, the media is having a field day. Surprised? One shouldn't be because it is given that this culture war is not, never was, nor ever will be about having a woman as President. The real issue is that media elite believe they and their pseudo intellectual cohorts have the right and responsibility to select and impose a secular empty religionist, sexually perverted abortionist, and andro-hating "feminazi" on an unwilling public; and they are still wrong.

 

So, when an attractive, witty woman with conservative values, pro-life, hunter, mother of five, a proven agent of wholesome change in state government and political breath of fresh air, has in one leap ascended to the status of Vice Presidential candidate thanks to some brilliant thinking on the part of McCain and his people, liberals hate it and conservatives love it. Why this last? Because she is one of the people, one of us, one who represents core American values and we identify with her. She is in part, the female fulfillment of the movie: "Mr. Smith goes to Washington."

 

They want "Change?" Well, change is coming, and it isn't what they had in mind. Read article.

 

Avrohom Shmuel Lewin, The Jewish Press.com

 

In a meeting with Jewish supporters in Arizona three weeks ago, Republican Presidential candidate John McCain promised Jewish leaders "I will not let you down...I will never let Israel down."

 

"I am not going to let you down. I will not let Israel down" That was the message and pledge that Republican Presidential candidate John McCain gave Jewish supporters in Arizona August 26th when he met with them at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix. Farley Weiss who is 2nd VP of the National Council of Young Israel, National VP of the ZOA and President of Young Israel of Phoenix later told The Jewish Press that "Senator McCain told us that although he is first and foremost an American but America is a very strong ally of Israel and he will strengthen that strong Israel-USA relationship. "I won't let Israel down," he said.

 

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