A tsunami from the Left- and more change than you really want
Even though we're about to win the Iraq war (if a President Obama doesn't effectively surrender before we can close the deal), the war has thoroughly soured the nation on George W. Bush. Sheer "Bush fatigue" (remember "Clinton fatigue?")is working against the incumbent party, as it always does after a two-term presidency. Just when gasoline prices are returning to normal (I paid less than $2.50 a gallon here in Des Moines last night), we're apparently about to fall into the recession on the brink of which we've been tottering, it seems, forever. And the collapse of Wall Street has set off the greatest economic crisis since the '30's.
This always figured to be a Democratic year. If the Republicans had nominated anybody but John McCain, it would have been obvious for months that we were headed for a Democratic landslide of historic proportions. Given the collapse of the markets, we may be anyway.
People want to believe in Barack Obama- not because he's Barack Obama, but because they see him as the alternative to something they no longer feel that they can believe in.
There has been a great deal of nonsense spoken and written about Obama; the wingnuts (the right-wing equivalent of the moonbats) have spread all manner of stupid and counterproductive lies and exaggerations about him. He is not a Muslim, nor was he a student in a madrassa. Nor is he personally a Marxist- even though for twenty years he attended a church whose minister is a passionately anti-American adherent of a theology that is Marxist to the core; even though that minister baptized his children; even though Obama borrowed a line from one of his sermons to provide the title of his first book- and even though Obama's claim that he was unaware of the extreme anti-Americanism of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright until it became a public scandal lacks any shred of credibility. One of the side affects of overstating the very legitimate reasons we have to be worried about an Obama presidency is that, when the slanders are discredited, people tend to falsely believe that the legitimate concerns they overstate have also been discredited.
Both the slanders and their ineffectiveness are strongly reminiscent of the kind of nonsense Democrats have been engaging in with regard to George W. Bush over the course of the past eight years. Bush-hatred, of course, is a turnoff, and has been more of a liability for Bush's opponents who engage in it than it has been for Bush himself. The Left, of course, have been incapable of learning that lesson; regrettably, their spiritual counterparts on the Right are unlikely to be better pupils.
But there can be no doubt that understandable disdain for the rhetoric of the lunatic fringe has prevented conservatives from communicating the simple truth that Barack Obama's history contains legitimate grounds for concern- and that his efforts to address that concern have often been little more than bare denial coupled with convoluted and not particularly credible explanations of his past positions.
Obama's philosophy, worldview, and rhetoric are that of an extreme left winger. He should be taken at his word, of course, when he says that he believes that babies who survive attempts at abortion should indeed receive medical assistance in their battle to survive. That does not change the fact that his explanation for having twice voting against a bill that would have required as much do not entirely pass either factual or logical muster (the bill was amended to change its language to language Obama has said he would have voted for- and he voted against it anyway). The explanation may or may not be accepted as a valid description of his reasoning at the time; that's a judgment call. Even accepting his reasoning doesn't mean that it's anything like an adequate excuse for voting the way he did- or lying about it afterward.
With the help of the media, of course, the Obama campaign has succeeded in creating the impression that any concern about his ideology is a smear- and tarring even McCain and Sarah Palin with the false charge that they have smeared Obama themselves. It's amazing, for example, how NPR's Ray Suarez not only has openly claimed that concerns about Obama's radical ideology are merely disguised racism, but in the process even openly lied about Sarah Palin, claiming that she has somehow exploited the absurd claim that Obama is a Muslim!
But then, we've been hearing that anybody who disagrees with Obama is a racist for some time. Get ready to hear it for the next four years. Only now you can add the to-criticize-Obama-is-to-smear-him meme that the Democrats and their allies in the media seem to have effectively sold the American people in these closing days of the campaign.
And the moonbats actually defend it! How is this for fanatical, malicious, religiously bigoted advocacy of a bizarre premise defensible only by the most tortured imaginable logic? Get used to it; you're going to be hearing such nonsense repeated in tones of breathless urgency for the next four years.
But people are buying it. Normal people. Reasonable people. Why? I think the explanation is simple. There is precedent for just such a phenomenon. It's reminiscent of the one of the best misremembered moments in American history. It happened at a moment in many ways very similar to the present one.
People on the Right especially tend to forget that before his election as president Ronald Reagan had a record ever bit as extreme as Barack Obama's. Over the decades he had taken some truly outrageous positions. But to his frustration, Jimmy Carter was utterly unable to gain any traction by citing them- even though Reagan had in many cases repeatedly stated them to reporters, even though accounts of those statements had repeatedly been published, and even though Reagan's having held them was documented as completely as anyone could ever desire.
The reasons were twofold. First, people wanted to vote against Carter, and for Reagan- and that predisposed them to disbelieve even the well-documented truth about the latter's past. And secondly, the positions were often so outrageous that people honestly found it hard to believe that Carter was telling the truth in ascribing them to Reagan! Most importantly, they didn't want to believe that Reagan was the extremist his own words painted him as being.
Perhaps it was the early stages of the Alzheimer's Disease that eventually took his life which enabled Reagan- apparently with a clear conscience- to deny over and over again ever having taken those positions, despite having repeated them over and over throughout his public career.
The most famous moment of the 1980 campaign came when Carter had just finished accurately taking Reagan to task for just such an extreme position: opposing Medicare. Interestingly, after telling Carter, "There you go again," this time Reagan didn't deny the charge. He simply spun it- not very plausibly, but plausibly enough to satisfy anybody who wanted badly enough to be satisfied.
The same thing is happening in this campaign.
Of course, the moonbats have been active this election cycle, too, spreading their usual poison. Many have unusually vicious; others have simply been the garden- variety lies of usual Bush-was-AWOL/Florida-in-2000-and-Ohio-in-2004-were-stolen/Bush-knew-Saddam-had-no-WMD's variety. John McCain never either predicted a hundred year war in Iraq, nor called for us to wage war there that long; McCain- a genuine hero, admired by his fellow POW's for refusing early repatriation offered because his dad was a the Navy's commander in the Pacific- was not distained by them as "The Canary" for breaking under torture; Sarah Palin, and not her daughter, is Trig's mother; neither Sarah Palin nor her husband are members of the Alaska Independence Party; Sarah Palin never called dinosaurs "Satan's lizards;" Palin never asked for prayer that she might be protected from "witchcraft" (though a visiting African pastor offered such a prayer at her church), etc. Needless to say, these get a pass from the media- and most people are barely aware of them.
Even Barack Obama agrees that it's outrageous to compare John McCain to George Wallace- and, in all fairness to Obama, I seriously doubt that he endorses leftist curmudgeon Jack Cafferty's claim that only a racist would vote for John McCain in this election.
But the fact remains that the wingnuts have not done the Republican ticket a favor with their own. legitimately malicious smears. They have done yeoman service in establishing a climate in which absurdities by Obama partisans in the media like Suarez can actually get traction among reasonable people.
On November 4, the American people are going to react the same way they did in 1980, I fear. They will dismiss the legitimate concerns many of us have about Obama and his fellow McGovernites, and hand them not only the presidency but in all probability a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress for the next four years.
The Wall Street Journal has done an excellent job of warning us about what we're likely to end up with as a result. Add to the drumbeat that to disagree with the Great Leader Obama is to be a racist and the already well-established Obamaite pattern of trying to intimidate the Glorious Leader's critics, and the American people are apt to discover over the course of the next four years that the change they voted for is a great deal greater than they imagined.
This always figured to be a Democratic year. If the Republicans had nominated anybody but John McCain, it would have been obvious for months that we were headed for a Democratic landslide of historic proportions. Given the collapse of the markets, we may be anyway.
People want to believe in Barack Obama- not because he's Barack Obama, but because they see him as the alternative to something they no longer feel that they can believe in.
There has been a great deal of nonsense spoken and written about Obama; the wingnuts (the right-wing equivalent of the moonbats) have spread all manner of stupid and counterproductive lies and exaggerations about him. He is not a Muslim, nor was he a student in a madrassa. Nor is he personally a Marxist- even though for twenty years he attended a church whose minister is a passionately anti-American adherent of a theology that is Marxist to the core; even though that minister baptized his children; even though Obama borrowed a line from one of his sermons to provide the title of his first book- and even though Obama's claim that he was unaware of the extreme anti-Americanism of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright until it became a public scandal lacks any shred of credibility. One of the side affects of overstating the very legitimate reasons we have to be worried about an Obama presidency is that, when the slanders are discredited, people tend to falsely believe that the legitimate concerns they overstate have also been discredited.
Both the slanders and their ineffectiveness are strongly reminiscent of the kind of nonsense Democrats have been engaging in with regard to George W. Bush over the course of the past eight years. Bush-hatred, of course, is a turnoff, and has been more of a liability for Bush's opponents who engage in it than it has been for Bush himself. The Left, of course, have been incapable of learning that lesson; regrettably, their spiritual counterparts on the Right are unlikely to be better pupils.
But there can be no doubt that understandable disdain for the rhetoric of the lunatic fringe has prevented conservatives from communicating the simple truth that Barack Obama's history contains legitimate grounds for concern- and that his efforts to address that concern have often been little more than bare denial coupled with convoluted and not particularly credible explanations of his past positions.
Obama's philosophy, worldview, and rhetoric are that of an extreme left winger. He should be taken at his word, of course, when he says that he believes that babies who survive attempts at abortion should indeed receive medical assistance in their battle to survive. That does not change the fact that his explanation for having twice voting against a bill that would have required as much do not entirely pass either factual or logical muster (the bill was amended to change its language to language Obama has said he would have voted for- and he voted against it anyway). The explanation may or may not be accepted as a valid description of his reasoning at the time; that's a judgment call. Even accepting his reasoning doesn't mean that it's anything like an adequate excuse for voting the way he did- or lying about it afterward.
With the help of the media, of course, the Obama campaign has succeeded in creating the impression that any concern about his ideology is a smear- and tarring even McCain and Sarah Palin with the false charge that they have smeared Obama themselves. It's amazing, for example, how NPR's Ray Suarez not only has openly claimed that concerns about Obama's radical ideology are merely disguised racism, but in the process even openly lied about Sarah Palin, claiming that she has somehow exploited the absurd claim that Obama is a Muslim!
But then, we've been hearing that anybody who disagrees with Obama is a racist for some time. Get ready to hear it for the next four years. Only now you can add the to-criticize-Obama-is-to-smear-him meme that the Democrats and their allies in the media seem to have effectively sold the American people in these closing days of the campaign.
And the moonbats actually defend it! How is this for fanatical, malicious, religiously bigoted advocacy of a bizarre premise defensible only by the most tortured imaginable logic? Get used to it; you're going to be hearing such nonsense repeated in tones of breathless urgency for the next four years.
But people are buying it. Normal people. Reasonable people. Why? I think the explanation is simple. There is precedent for just such a phenomenon. It's reminiscent of the one of the best misremembered moments in American history. It happened at a moment in many ways very similar to the present one.
People on the Right especially tend to forget that before his election as president Ronald Reagan had a record ever bit as extreme as Barack Obama's. Over the decades he had taken some truly outrageous positions. But to his frustration, Jimmy Carter was utterly unable to gain any traction by citing them- even though Reagan had in many cases repeatedly stated them to reporters, even though accounts of those statements had repeatedly been published, and even though Reagan's having held them was documented as completely as anyone could ever desire.
The reasons were twofold. First, people wanted to vote against Carter, and for Reagan- and that predisposed them to disbelieve even the well-documented truth about the latter's past. And secondly, the positions were often so outrageous that people honestly found it hard to believe that Carter was telling the truth in ascribing them to Reagan! Most importantly, they didn't want to believe that Reagan was the extremist his own words painted him as being.
Perhaps it was the early stages of the Alzheimer's Disease that eventually took his life which enabled Reagan- apparently with a clear conscience- to deny over and over again ever having taken those positions, despite having repeated them over and over throughout his public career.
The most famous moment of the 1980 campaign came when Carter had just finished accurately taking Reagan to task for just such an extreme position: opposing Medicare. Interestingly, after telling Carter, "There you go again," this time Reagan didn't deny the charge. He simply spun it- not very plausibly, but plausibly enough to satisfy anybody who wanted badly enough to be satisfied.
The same thing is happening in this campaign.
Of course, the moonbats have been active this election cycle, too, spreading their usual poison. Many have unusually vicious; others have simply been the garden- variety lies of usual Bush-was-AWOL/Florida-in-2000-and-Ohio-in-2004-were-stolen/Bush-knew-Saddam-had-no-WMD's variety. John McCain never either predicted a hundred year war in Iraq, nor called for us to wage war there that long; McCain- a genuine hero, admired by his fellow POW's for refusing early repatriation offered because his dad was a the Navy's commander in the Pacific- was not distained by them as "The Canary" for breaking under torture; Sarah Palin, and not her daughter, is Trig's mother; neither Sarah Palin nor her husband are members of the Alaska Independence Party; Sarah Palin never called dinosaurs "Satan's lizards;" Palin never asked for prayer that she might be protected from "witchcraft" (though a visiting African pastor offered such a prayer at her church), etc. Needless to say, these get a pass from the media- and most people are barely aware of them.
Even Barack Obama agrees that it's outrageous to compare John McCain to George Wallace- and, in all fairness to Obama, I seriously doubt that he endorses leftist curmudgeon Jack Cafferty's claim that only a racist would vote for John McCain in this election.
But the fact remains that the wingnuts have not done the Republican ticket a favor with their own. legitimately malicious smears. They have done yeoman service in establishing a climate in which absurdities by Obama partisans in the media like Suarez can actually get traction among reasonable people.
On November 4, the American people are going to react the same way they did in 1980, I fear. They will dismiss the legitimate concerns many of us have about Obama and his fellow McGovernites, and hand them not only the presidency but in all probability a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress for the next four years.
The Wall Street Journal has done an excellent job of warning us about what we're likely to end up with as a result. Add to the drumbeat that to disagree with the Great Leader Obama is to be a racist and the already well-established Obamaite pattern of trying to intimidate the Glorious Leader's critics, and the American people are apt to discover over the course of the next four years that the change they voted for is a great deal greater than they imagined.
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