Phyllis Chesler, Pajamas Media.com

 

Ah yes, my people, my nation, my burden, my glory, my J Street. The Jews of J Street have named themselves after an imaginary street in Washington, DC, a suitable name for the kind of imaginary but dangerous human engineering projects they have in mind both for America and for the Middle East. The J Street Jews would rather die at Ahmadinejad’s hands as long as a Democrat is voted into the White House than to live if a Republican gains control of the White House.

 

Hence, their alleged strong-arm tactics against The Conference of Presidents whom they allegedly forced to dis-invite Governor Palin as a speaker.

 

Democrats, including the liberal Jewish Democrats, are unable and unwilling to work with Republicans, who are, after all, also Americans. They would rather stand with a genocidal and nuclear Ahmadinjad than with Republicans. Even when there are no risks involved. No “sit ins,” no “act ups,” no “act outs,” no hoped-for shedding of blood. C’mon, the event is not the storming of Evin Prison in Tehran–it is a peaceful rally outside the UN. Well, maybe that’s why the Jewish left/liberals are not interested.

 

However, I do urge you to attend a rally, which has been called for Thursday, September 25th, at 5:30 pm, outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel. A number of high-profile anti-Zionist Christian groups (The American Friends Service Committee, Mennonite Central Committee, Quaker UN Office, Religions for Peace, and the World Council of Churches-UN Liaison Office) have invited Ahmadinejad to speak.

 

According to Women United/Code Red, (www.925rally.org), in addition to themselves, the Jewish Action Alliance, Amcha, Stand With Us, Center for Security Policy, the Catholic League, the Traditional Values Coalition, the Alliance of Iranian Women and over 20 other organizations of all faiths and political affiliations will hold an interfaith rally to “counter this betrayal, to protest Ahmadinejad’s presence,” etc. Women United have invited Governor Sarah Palin to speak. Read article.

 

Aryeh Spero, Human Events.com

 

Many Jews remain angry over the disinviting of Gov. Sarah Palin by the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations from a rally they are sponsoring in front of the UN -- a rally protesting the policies of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his appearance as a speaker in front of the General Assembly. For many, this disinvitation has become the final verification that Jewish organizations choose liberalism and what is best for the Democrat Party rather than what is in the best interest of America, the Jewish People, and Israel.

 

When word got out that Sarah Palin had been invited, Hillary immediately bolted. No doubt, her thought of being in direct comparison on a stage with the charismatic Sarah Palin was too great a test for her. Hillary understood that the meaty and heartfelt words of Sarah Palin would have overshadowed her tedious platitudes. Having been just humiliated by six months of Obama, she wasn’t ready once again to be humiliated by The Other Woman.

 

Once Hillary pulled out, there was tremendous pressure from liberal organizations within the Conference, and the staffers of those organizations, to revoke Palin’s invitation. They foresaw and feared an historic sea change taking place at the rally, before their eyes, when the world would see a crowd of Jewish people enthusiastically chanting “Sarah, Sarah!” This direct connection that Sarah Palin, a woman from and of the people, would have had with a Jewish audience was something the liberals had to stifle. It certainly could have made a difference in the election and perhaps have provided the impetus for the long awaited shift among many Jews from Democrat to Republican. Read article.

 Kevin Hassett, Bloomberg.com

 

Enough cards on this table have been turned over that the story is now clear. The economic history books will describe this episode in simple and understandable terms: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded, and many bystanders were injured in the blast, some fatally.

 

Take away Fannie and Freddie, or regulate them more wisely, and it's hard to imagine how these highly liquid markets would ever have emerged. This whole mess would never have happened.

 

It is easy to identify the historical turning point that marked the beginning of the end.

 

Back in 2005, Fannie and Freddie were, after years of dominating Washington, on the ropes. They were enmeshed in accounting scandals that led to turnover at the top. At one telling moment in late 2004, captured in an article by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison, the Securities and Exchange Comiission's chief accountant told disgraced Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines that Fannie's position on the relevant accounting issue was not even ``on the page'' of allowable interpretations.

 

In 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: If Fannie and Freddie ``continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,'' he said. ``We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.''

 

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

 

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

 

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000. Read article.

Andy Martin, ContrarianCommentary.com

 

Nailing down the relationship between "mad bomber" William Ayers and Barack Obama has been the greatest challenge of the 2008 presidential campaign. William Ayers has been the mastermind behind Barack Obama's rise to power in Chicago. Obama continues to deny the truth.

 

It can be said without fear of contradiction, a vote for Barack Obama is in reality a vote to put William Ayers in de facto control of the U. S government. Ayres has designed an Obama campaign structure, which is based on Ayers' theories of Maoist revolution.

 

William Ayers is an admittedly unrepentant violent revolutionary who waged war against every American and who today is still scheming to wage war against the United States. This time he wants his headquarters to be in the Oval Office of the White House.

 

William Ayers is the mastermind behind the rise to power of Barack Obama. He has been since 1988. Read article.

 

Burt Prelutsky, Townhall.com

 

Sometimes I think I may be developing ulcers, and it has nothing to do with the way that the New York Yankees are performing this year or with eating spicy food. It has everything to do with America’s left-wingers. I could probably learn to accept their being on the wrong side of every single issue, but it’s their lies and evasions that get my innards rumbling like an espresso machine.

 

Has the MSM once mentioned the influential role that the late Saul Alinsky played in the lives of leading Democrats, and how he helped turned the party so far to the left that if men like Harry Truman and John Kennedy came back to life, they would assume the Soviet Union had won the Cold War?

 

Saul Alinsky, who died in 1972, at the age of 63, was a Chicago Marxist. Among his many books was one titled “Rules for Radicals,” in which he explained to his acolytes, “The most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired results.” It took Alinsky 11 words to paraphrase Karl Marx’s far more succinct “The ends justify the means.”

 

Alinsky, by the way, dedicated that particular book to Lucifer, whom he coyly referred to as “the first radical.”

 

The reason I’m bringing up Alinsky 26 years after he wound up in a place where he could personally autograph his book for Beelzebub is because his disciples are still very much with us. For instance, he just happened to be the subject of Hillary Rodham’s senior honors thesis at Wellesley College. It was such a glowing homage that, in 1968, a most appreciative Alinsky offered her a job in Chicago, but Ms. Rodham, as we all know, had bigger fish to fry. However, when she became America’s First Lady, the White House asked Wellesley to restrict access to the paper, and Wellesley wisely obliged, just as Princeton did when the Obamas requested that Michelle’s racist screed be removed from circulation.

 

But it wasn’t just young Ms. Rodham who had a connection to the late, unlamented Saul Alinsky. Thirteen years after the Chicago radical died, a group of his most devoted disciples hired 24-year-old Barack Obama to be a community organizer in South Chicago. Read article.

Victor Davis Hanson, Pajamas Media.com

 

The race unfortunately has been framed the last two weeks by Democrats as one of Obama versus Palin. That will stop as Obama realizes he loses should it continue. Nevertheless, the comparison of the respective experiences of a McCain and Obama is so much in favor of the former, that it requires no discussion. So I turn to Palin, given the charges that she is unfit and clueless.

 

Is Palin Tough?

 

I have been asked by many why I have such confidence in a rookie Alaskan governor, given the rigors of the campaign to follow.

 

The point is this: I think it is much harder for a mother of three or four in an out-of-the-way Alaskan town to get elected to city council and the mayorship, then take on the entire Republican establishment and get elected governor than it is for a Barack Obama to emerge from Chicago politics into the Illinois state house and later Senate. The qualities that allowed a Palin to succeed without the power spouse, the identity politics, the Ivy-League cache, the fawning New York editors and DC insider-press will ensure she does not implode on the campaign trail—and won’t in office either.

 

Barack Obama, in contrast, on numerous occasions has complained how tiring, how hard, how unfair, how racist the campaign has turned out to be; Palin never. I could not imagine Obama doing his hope and change thing in the Senate while holding a one-year-old and checking on four more children at home. And I wager shooting a moose or trying to navigate a snowmobile in the chill is a little harder than shooting baskets in one’s down time or offering riffs to the fainting at a Beverly Hills get together or Presidio Heights fundraiser. Read article.

 

Ralph Peters, NY Post.com

 

I KNOW Sarah Palin, and so does my wife.

 

Neither of us ever actually met the governor of Alaska, but we grew up with her - in the small-town America despised by the leftwing elite.

 

One gal-pal classmate of my wife's has even traveled from New York's Finger Lakes to Alaska to hunt moose with her husband. (Got one, too.) And no, Ms. Streisand, she isn't a redneck missing half her teeth - she's a lawyer.

 

The sneering elites and their mediacrat fellow travelers just don't get it: How on earth could anyone vote for someone who didn't attend an Ivy League school? And having more than 1.7 children marks any woman as a rube. (If Palin had any taste, her teenage daughter would've had a quiet abortion in a discreet facility.)

 

And what kind of retro-Barbie would stay happily married to her high-school sweetheart? Ugh. She even kills animals and eats them. (The meat and fish served in the upscale bistros patronized by Obama supporters appears by magic - it didn't really come from living things. . .)

 

Palin has that hick accent, too. And that busy-mom beehive 'do. Double ugh! Bet she hasn't even read Ian McEwan's latest novel and can't explain Frank Gehry's vision for a new architecture. She and her blue-collar (triple ugh!) husband don't even own a McMansion, let alone an inherited family compound on the Cape. Read article.

Victor Davis Hanson, JWR.com

 

Many of the things that Barack Obama did to soar past Hillary Clinton during the primaries are now causing him problems as the general-election race tightens.

 

Obama once ran successfully as a novel political outsider. He posed as a politically correct critic of discrimination of all sorts. As an idealist tired of the old Washington doublespeak, Obama mesmerized thousands with sermons against incumbent dinosaurs.

 

Obama's own sense of sainthood was only strengthened when he wowed swarms in front of European monuments, and stepped out on a Democratic National Convention stage replete with Greek columns.

 

But the loftier the moral expectations Obama created, the more the disappointment grew when they couldn't possibly be met.

 

Take Obama's signature "hope and change" mantra. It was a natural rallying cry. Either a Bush or Clinton has been in the White House for the last 20 years. Voters were unhappy with the current president — and yet apparently didn't want another Clinton. Meanwhile, the economy has been rocky, and much of the American public has grown tired of our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

Obama's change was aimed against long tenure in Washington — or so he hammered away at Hillary Clinton for nearly a year. But then suddenly he picked as his vice-presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden, the consummate Washington insider. That attempt at balance was understandable, but it only seemed to legitimize opposition charges that Obama himself valued long D.C. experience — and was no less calculating than any other politician.

 

Next Obama attacked outsider Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin for her own unfamiliarity with national government. Fair enough. But again, that tactic still bothered voters: Wasn't the Alaskan governor a fresh — and welcome — face just like first-term Sen. Obama? And wasn't Biden a stale old-timer in Washington — and if so, as suspect as veteran John McCain? And, come to think of it, wouldn't it have been better to have the experienced candidate at the top of the ticket, balanced by the outsider at the bottom, rather than vice versa? Read article.

Arnold Ahlert, Polical Mavens.com

 

With their reprehensible attacks on Sarah Palin, the mainstream media have further demonstrated their grim determination to get Barack Obama elected. Such overt bias is troubling enough, but there something worse: if Barack Obama does become president, how can we trust the same media to be watchdogs of his administration?

 

We can’t.

 

Unless “President” Obama did something so overtly, publicly, “unspinnably” wrong, is there any doubt the MSM would cover for him? He is STILL the least vetted presidential candidate in modern history. The unexamined holes in his biography, from his Columbia University years, his medical records and his Illinois State Senate schedule, to his largely unexplored associations with former terrorists, a racist preacher, and a convicted felon, are a testament to the media’s calculated and willful disinterest in providing ordinary Americans the truth about their anointed candidate.

 

With an Obama presidency, such machinations would not only continue, they would get worse. Read article.

 

David Reinhard, Politican Mavens.com

 

I don’t mind rough-and-tumble political ads, but I mind them when they (a) come from someone who tells one and all that he — his elevated self — rejects the old politics and (b) his old-style politics campaign ads traffic in flat-out lies and distortions. Enter Barack Obama and his new Spanish language ad “Dos Caras” (”Two Faces”).You can see the ad here and read The Washington Post’s story on the ad here. Here’s The Post’s run-down and translation of the ad:

 

“They want us to forget the insults we’ve put up with, the intolerance,” the television ad’s announcer says in Spanish as a picture of Rush Limbaugh appears onscreen with quotes of him saying, “Mexicans are stupid and unqualified” and “Shut your mouth or get out.” “They made us feel marginalized in a country we love so much,” the ad continues. “John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces. One that says lies just to get our vote and another, even worse, that continues the failed policies of George Bush that put special interests ahead of working families.”

 

The ad is worth checking out, but then go to ABC’s Jake Tapper fact-check of the ad. There you’ll get the particulars of how the allegedly high-minded Team Obama takes the low-road of lashing John McCain to Rush Limbaugh on the immigration reform issue — in point of fact, Limbaugh opposed McCain’s immigration reform efforts — and ripping Limbaugh quotations out of context.

 

I’d be particularly interested in hearing from Obama fans, after they’ve watched Obama’s ad and read Tapper’s fact-check as to why this ad is not just old-politics slime from “The One.” Read article.

Phyllis Chesler, Pajamas Media.com

 

Ah yes, my people, my nation, my burden, my glory, my J Street. The Jews of J Street have named themselves after an imaginary street in Washington, DC, a suitable name for the kind of imaginary but dangerous human engineering projects they have in mind both for America and for the Middle East. The J Street Jews would rather die at Ahmadinejad’s hands as long as a Democrat is voted into the White House than to live if a Republican gains control of the White House.

 

Hence, their alleged strong-arm tactics against The Conference of Presidents whom they allegedly forced to dis-invite Governor Palin as a speaker.

 

Democrats, including the liberal Jewish Democrats, are unable and unwilling to work with Republicans, who are, after all, also Americans. They would rather stand with a genocidal and nuclear Ahmadinjad than with Republicans. Even when there are no risks involved. No “sit ins,” no “act ups,” no “act outs,” no hoped-for shedding of blood. C’mon, the event is not the storming of Evin Prison in Tehran–it is a peaceful rally outside the UN. Well, maybe that’s why the Jewish left/liberals are not interested.

 

However, I do urge you to attend a rally, which has been called for Thursday, September 25th, at 5:30 pm, outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel. A number of high-profile anti-Zionist Christian groups (The American Friends Service Committee, Mennonite Central Committee, Quaker UN Office, Religions for Peace, and the World Council of Churches-UN Liaison Office) have invited Ahmadinejad to speak.

 

According to Women United/Code Red, (www.925rally.org), in addition to themselves, the Jewish Action Alliance, Amcha, Stand With Us, Center for Security Policy, the Catholic League, the Traditional Values Coalition, the Alliance of Iranian Women and over 20 other organizations of all faiths and political affiliations will hold an interfaith rally to “counter this betrayal, to protest Ahmadinejad’s presence,” etc. Women United have invited Governor Sarah Palin to speak. Read article.

 

Aryeh Spero, Human Events.com

 

Many Jews remain angry over the disinviting of Gov. Sarah Palin by the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations from a rally they are sponsoring in front of the UN -- a rally protesting the policies of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his appearance as a speaker in front of the General Assembly. For many, this disinvitation has become the final verification that Jewish organizations choose liberalism and what is best for the Democrat Party rather than what is in the best interest of America, the Jewish People, and Israel.

 

When word got out that Sarah Palin had been invited, Hillary immediately bolted. No doubt, her thought of being in direct comparison on a stage with the charismatic Sarah Palin was too great a test for her. Hillary understood that the meaty and heartfelt words of Sarah Palin would have overshadowed her tedious platitudes. Having been just humiliated by six months of Obama, she wasn’t ready once again to be humiliated by The Other Woman.

 

Once Hillary pulled out, there was tremendous pressure from liberal organizations within the Conference, and the staffers of those organizations, to revoke Palin’s invitation. They foresaw and feared an historic sea change taking place at the rally, before their eyes, when the world would see a crowd of Jewish people enthusiastically chanting “Sarah, Sarah!” This direct connection that Sarah Palin, a woman from and of the people, would have had with a Jewish audience was something the liberals had to stifle. It certainly could have made a difference in the election and perhaps have provided the impetus for the long awaited shift among many Jews from Democrat to Republican. Read article.

 Kevin Hassett, Bloomberg.com

 

Enough cards on this table have been turned over that the story is now clear. The economic history books will describe this episode in simple and understandable terms: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded, and many bystanders were injured in the blast, some fatally.

 

Take away Fannie and Freddie, or regulate them more wisely, and it's hard to imagine how these highly liquid markets would ever have emerged. This whole mess would never have happened.

 

It is easy to identify the historical turning point that marked the beginning of the end.

 

Back in 2005, Fannie and Freddie were, after years of dominating Washington, on the ropes. They were enmeshed in accounting scandals that led to turnover at the top. At one telling moment in late 2004, captured in an article by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison, the Securities and Exchange Comiission's chief accountant told disgraced Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines that Fannie's position on the relevant accounting issue was not even ``on the page'' of allowable interpretations.

 

In 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: If Fannie and Freddie ``continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,'' he said. ``We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.''

 

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

 

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

 

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000. Read article.

Andy Martin, ContrarianCommentary.com

 

Nailing down the relationship between "mad bomber" William Ayers and Barack Obama has been the greatest challenge of the 2008 presidential campaign. William Ayers has been the mastermind behind Barack Obama's rise to power in Chicago. Obama continues to deny the truth.

 

It can be said without fear of contradiction, a vote for Barack Obama is in reality a vote to put William Ayers in de facto control of the U. S government. Ayres has designed an Obama campaign structure, which is based on Ayers' theories of Maoist revolution.

 

William Ayers is an admittedly unrepentant violent revolutionary who waged war against every American and who today is still scheming to wage war against the United States. This time he wants his headquarters to be in the Oval Office of the White House.

 

William Ayers is the mastermind behind the rise to power of Barack Obama. He has been since 1988. Read article.

 

Burt Prelutsky, Townhall.com

 

Sometimes I think I may be developing ulcers, and it has nothing to do with the way that the New York Yankees are performing this year or with eating spicy food. It has everything to do with America’s left-wingers. I could probably learn to accept their being on the wrong side of every single issue, but it’s their lies and evasions that get my innards rumbling like an espresso machine.

 

Has the MSM once mentioned the influential role that the late Saul Alinsky played in the lives of leading Democrats, and how he helped turned the party so far to the left that if men like Harry Truman and John Kennedy came back to life, they would assume the Soviet Union had won the Cold War?

 

Saul Alinsky, who died in 1972, at the age of 63, was a Chicago Marxist. Among his many books was one titled “Rules for Radicals,” in which he explained to his acolytes, “The most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired results.” It took Alinsky 11 words to paraphrase Karl Marx’s far more succinct “The ends justify the means.”

 

Alinsky, by the way, dedicated that particular book to Lucifer, whom he coyly referred to as “the first radical.”

 

The reason I’m bringing up Alinsky 26 years after he wound up in a place where he could personally autograph his book for Beelzebub is because his disciples are still very much with us. For instance, he just happened to be the subject of Hillary Rodham’s senior honors thesis at Wellesley College. It was such a glowing homage that, in 1968, a most appreciative Alinsky offered her a job in Chicago, but Ms. Rodham, as we all know, had bigger fish to fry. However, when she became America’s First Lady, the White House asked Wellesley to restrict access to the paper, and Wellesley wisely obliged, just as Princeton did when the Obamas requested that Michelle’s racist screed be removed from circulation.

 

But it wasn’t just young Ms. Rodham who had a connection to the late, unlamented Saul Alinsky. Thirteen years after the Chicago radical died, a group of his most devoted disciples hired 24-year-old Barack Obama to be a community organizer in South Chicago. Read article.

Victor Davis Hanson, Pajamas Media.com

 

The race unfortunately has been framed the last two weeks by Democrats as one of Obama versus Palin. That will stop as Obama realizes he loses should it continue. Nevertheless, the comparison of the respective experiences of a McCain and Obama is so much in favor of the former, that it requires no discussion. So I turn to Palin, given the charges that she is unfit and clueless.

 

Is Palin Tough?

 

I have been asked by many why I have such confidence in a rookie Alaskan governor, given the rigors of the campaign to follow.

 

The point is this: I think it is much harder for a mother of three or four in an out-of-the-way Alaskan town to get elected to city council and the mayorship, then take on the entire Republican establishment and get elected governor than it is for a Barack Obama to emerge from Chicago politics into the Illinois state house and later Senate. The qualities that allowed a Palin to succeed without the power spouse, the identity politics, the Ivy-League cache, the fawning New York editors and DC insider-press will ensure she does not implode on the campaign trail—and won’t in office either.

 

Barack Obama, in contrast, on numerous occasions has complained how tiring, how hard, how unfair, how racist the campaign has turned out to be; Palin never. I could not imagine Obama doing his hope and change thing in the Senate while holding a one-year-old and checking on four more children at home. And I wager shooting a moose or trying to navigate a snowmobile in the chill is a little harder than shooting baskets in one’s down time or offering riffs to the fainting at a Beverly Hills get together or Presidio Heights fundraiser. Read article.

 

Ralph Peters, NY Post.com

 

I KNOW Sarah Palin, and so does my wife.

 

Neither of us ever actually met the governor of Alaska, but we grew up with her - in the small-town America despised by the leftwing elite.

 

One gal-pal classmate of my wife's has even traveled from New York's Finger Lakes to Alaska to hunt moose with her husband. (Got one, too.) And no, Ms. Streisand, she isn't a redneck missing half her teeth - she's a lawyer.

 

The sneering elites and their mediacrat fellow travelers just don't get it: How on earth could anyone vote for someone who didn't attend an Ivy League school? And having more than 1.7 children marks any woman as a rube. (If Palin had any taste, her teenage daughter would've had a quiet abortion in a discreet facility.)

 

And what kind of retro-Barbie would stay happily married to her high-school sweetheart? Ugh. She even kills animals and eats them. (The meat and fish served in the upscale bistros patronized by Obama supporters appears by magic - it didn't really come from living things. . .)

 

Palin has that hick accent, too. And that busy-mom beehive 'do. Double ugh! Bet she hasn't even read Ian McEwan's latest novel and can't explain Frank Gehry's vision for a new architecture. She and her blue-collar (triple ugh!) husband don't even own a McMansion, let alone an inherited family compound on the Cape. Read article.

Victor Davis Hanson, JWR.com

 

Many of the things that Barack Obama did to soar past Hillary Clinton during the primaries are now causing him problems as the general-election race tightens.

 

Obama once ran successfully as a novel political outsider. He posed as a politically correct critic of discrimination of all sorts. As an idealist tired of the old Washington doublespeak, Obama mesmerized thousands with sermons against incumbent dinosaurs.

 

Obama's own sense of sainthood was only strengthened when he wowed swarms in front of European monuments, and stepped out on a Democratic National Convention stage replete with Greek columns.

 

But the loftier the moral expectations Obama created, the more the disappointment grew when they couldn't possibly be met.

 

Take Obama's signature "hope and change" mantra. It was a natural rallying cry. Either a Bush or Clinton has been in the White House for the last 20 years. Voters were unhappy with the current president — and yet apparently didn't want another Clinton. Meanwhile, the economy has been rocky, and much of the American public has grown tired of our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

Obama's change was aimed against long tenure in Washington — or so he hammered away at Hillary Clinton for nearly a year. But then suddenly he picked as his vice-presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden, the consummate Washington insider. That attempt at balance was understandable, but it only seemed to legitimize opposition charges that Obama himself valued long D.C. experience — and was no less calculating than any other politician.

 

Next Obama attacked outsider Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin for her own unfamiliarity with national government. Fair enough. But again, that tactic still bothered voters: Wasn't the Alaskan governor a fresh — and welcome — face just like first-term Sen. Obama? And wasn't Biden a stale old-timer in Washington — and if so, as suspect as veteran John McCain? And, come to think of it, wouldn't it have been better to have the experienced candidate at the top of the ticket, balanced by the outsider at the bottom, rather than vice versa? Read article.

Arnold Ahlert, Polical Mavens.com

 

With their reprehensible attacks on Sarah Palin, the mainstream media have further demonstrated their grim determination to get Barack Obama elected. Such overt bias is troubling enough, but there something worse: if Barack Obama does become president, how can we trust the same media to be watchdogs of his administration?

 

We can’t.

 

Unless “President” Obama did something so overtly, publicly, “unspinnably” wrong, is there any doubt the MSM would cover for him? He is STILL the least vetted presidential candidate in modern history. The unexamined holes in his biography, from his Columbia University years, his medical records and his Illinois State Senate schedule, to his largely unexplored associations with former terrorists, a racist preacher, and a convicted felon, are a testament to the media’s calculated and willful disinterest in providing ordinary Americans the truth about their anointed candidate.

 

With an Obama presidency, such machinations would not only continue, they would get worse. Read article.

 

David Reinhard, Politican Mavens.com

 

I don’t mind rough-and-tumble political ads, but I mind them when they (a) come from someone who tells one and all that he — his elevated self — rejects the old politics and (b) his old-style politics campaign ads traffic in flat-out lies and distortions. Enter Barack Obama and his new Spanish language ad “Dos Caras” (”Two Faces”).You can see the ad here and read The Washington Post’s story on the ad here. Here’s The Post’s run-down and translation of the ad:

 

“They want us to forget the insults we’ve put up with, the intolerance,” the television ad’s announcer says in Spanish as a picture of Rush Limbaugh appears onscreen with quotes of him saying, “Mexicans are stupid and unqualified” and “Shut your mouth or get out.” “They made us feel marginalized in a country we love so much,” the ad continues. “John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces. One that says lies just to get our vote and another, even worse, that continues the failed policies of George Bush that put special interests ahead of working families.”

 

The ad is worth checking out, but then go to ABC’s Jake Tapper fact-check of the ad. There you’ll get the particulars of how the allegedly high-minded Team Obama takes the low-road of lashing John McCain to Rush Limbaugh on the immigration reform issue — in point of fact, Limbaugh opposed McCain’s immigration reform efforts — and ripping Limbaugh quotations out of context.

 

I’d be particularly interested in hearing from Obama fans, after they’ve watched Obama’s ad and read Tapper’s fact-check as to why this ad is not just old-politics slime from “The One.” Read article.

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