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John McCain's Final Debate Hope Against Barack Obama
Tweet Share on Facebook October 15, 2008 Comment (22)What does John McCain need to do in tonight's debate? Oh, it's quite simple.
He needs the A Few Good Men moment, where through the mere power of his words he induces Barack Obama to damn America, embrace terrorists (domestic or otherwise), raise taxes on everyone or make some other statement so jaw-dropping that some significant portion of the 50.1 percent of Americans prepared to cast their ballots for the Democrat wonder what they were thinking. (Never mind that it was the older, angrier, more militarily experienced, I-can't-believe-I-have-to-sit-here-and-listen-to-this-young-snot character who cracked in that movie.)
McCain needs to so dominate Obama that the electorate wonders how it could ever have considered the junior senator from Illinois presidential. Preferably Obama would either be left a blubbering mass or simply withdraw from the election in his closing statement.
Oh, and McCain has to do so while not appearing negative or angry.
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California Animal Cruelty Could be Cured by Proposition 2
Tweet Share on Facebook October 14, 2008 Comment (46)Leave it to California to once again lead the way on one of the most important social issues of our time. This time, it's animal cruelty in factory farming. Next month, Californians will have the opportunity to ameliorate conditions for the millions of factory-farmed animals in that state. At factory (mass production) farms, animals from chickens to pigs and veal calves are crated in tiny spaces where some of them spend their entire suffering lives (more on that later.)
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Liberals Wrong About Cindy McCain's POW Experience and PTSD
Tweet Share on Facebook October 14, 2008 Comment (16)The latest issue of Marie Claire magazine carries an interview I had with Cindy McCain, and left-wing commentators are having a field day over comments she made about her husband's POW experience. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann was particularly exercised, calling McCain's comments "a mendacious attack on the troops" and "callous."
So what was her offensive comment? Here's the interview transcript:
MC: You met your husband after his POW days. To what extent is that still with you—or is it a part of history?
CM: My husband will be the first one to tell you that that's in the past. Certainly it's a part of who he is, but he doesn't dwell on it. It's not part of a daily experience that we experience or anything like that. But it has shaped him. It has made him the leader that he is.MC: But no cold sweats in the middle of the night?
CM: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. My husband, he'd be the first one to tell you that he was trained to do what he was doing. The guys who had the trouble were the 18-year-olds who were drafted. He was trained, he went to the Naval Academy, he was a trained United States naval officer, and so he knew what he was doing.Sorry, but I fail to see how this disparages soldiers or makes light of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
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Barack Obama's Ad Campaign Goes From Puerto Rico to a Video Game
Tweet Share on Facebook October 14, 2008 Comment (4)Is it really possible that Barack Obama's presidential campaign has so much money that it just doesn't know where to spend it all?
I was in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, over the weekend and was bombarded with Obama ads (apparently John McCain wants to tax my health benefits while Barack Obama wants to give everyone tax cuts). They came, to the best of my recollection, either on cable news networks or during football games, so I can only assume that they were national ads (rather than air time bought in a territory without a vote in the election), but nevertheless, it was notable.
But then again, Puerto Rico is at least a real location. The picture below comes from the video game Burnout Paradise (hat-tip to TPM), and yes, the Obama campaign paid for that billboard space. Talk about money to burn.
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Obama Supporters May Spew More Hate Than McCain Backers
Tweet Share on Facebook October 14, 2008 Comment (224)My Creators Syndicate column for this week has kicked up some controversy. In it I compile a list of ways in which liberals and Barack Obama supporters seem ready to suppress speech they don't like. A standard meme of mainstream media last week was that John McCain crowds were seething with hate—based on the responses of one or two people in the crowd. That's in line with mainstream media journalists' stereotype of right wingers: They're all haters. But you can find at least as much seething, and I suspect more, on the left. Obama supporters have planned to lob molotov cocktails at McCain events, for example. Or consider the instances in Michelle Malkin's roundup or Patterico's description of an ugly Obama rally. Or read this entry on Andrew Malcolm's Los Angeles Times blog.
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Barack Obama Needs to Be Careful of Liberal Tendencies
Tweet Share on Facebook October 14, 2008 Comment (6)Lib-err-al! Lib-err-al!
It's been 20 years since Republican crowds mocked Michael Dukakis with that chant. Some vacuous conservative commentators have had whole careers blaming everything that is wrong in America on leftist conspirators.
But today, it's maybe not so bad to be a liberal once again.
The masters of Wall Street, and the average American's 401(k) account, are being rescued by classically liberal economics.
The best and most honorable of liberal causes—civil rights for African-Americans—may be nearing fulfillment, with a black presidential candidate leading in the polls in mid-October.
Mercy! A liberal columnist for the New York Times just won the Nobel Prize for economics.
As the biographer of two great liberal icons—Clarence Darrow and Tip O'Neill—I might, you suspect, be happy that the pendulum has swung back toward the left.
But my work on Darrow and Tip, and my experience as a White House reporter during the Clinton and Bush years, fill me with foreboding. The more I study American history, the more I am firmly convinced that the American ideal is, at its core, libertarian.
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Election Questions: McCain's New Economic Plan, Pennsylvania's Status, and North Carolina
Tweet Share on Facebook October 14, 2008 Comment (5)A couple of questions that befuddle me with three weeks to go in the election:
- John McCain is unveiling a new economic plan today (Barack Obama gave his latest economics speech Monday). According to television reports, the McCain plan is aimed at senior citizens. Can anyone think of an instance where an October policy proposal vaulted someone from behind to victory in a presidential race?
- Pennsylvania is frequently referred to as a tossup state. Joe Biden and Sarah Palin were each there over the weekend and McCain was there today. Yet there hasn't been a poll showing McCain with a lead there in a month; and there hasn't been a poll there this month showing Obama with less than a double-digit lead. How exactly is this a tossup state? Is the racist factor/Obama Appalachian problem really so powerful?
- North Carolina? Really? My friend Doug Heye has a pretty good rundown on this in NRO, but still—North Carolina?
Post your answers below.
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Rape, Murder, and Mutilation: Happy Columbus Day, University Style
Tweet Share on Facebook October 14, 2008 Comment (5)PALO ALTO, CALIF.—Arriving here for a stint at the venerable Hoover Institution on Stanford's campus, I was treated to a celebration of Columbus Day, university style. Written in colorful chalk descending the steps of the Meyer Library was "Columbus Day Celebrate His Death." In fact, all over the sidewalks that crisscross the central campus were similar festive messages: "Happy Rape, Mutilation and Murder Day," "Celebrating Genocide Since 1492" (written over a picture of the explorer), and—my personal favorite—"Celebrating Murder for 615 Years."
Using simple subtraction, 615 years ago brings us to 1393, which doesn't ring any bells with me. But 516 years ago would have been 1492. Maybe someone's time would be better spent in class.
Meanwhile, nearby there was a voter registration booth with a kind lady pushing absentee applications for swing states. She'd just registered two students and said business was brisk. Given the large banners celebrating black pride and—what else?—"Columbus Indigenous Peoples Day" hanging behind her, it's not hard to guess which presidential candidate is intended to benefit most.
If Bush infamously declared he was "a uniter, not a divider," perhaps Obama can claim to be the "uniter of dividers." Although for Stanford's radicals, division might be an overly complicated computation.
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Wall Street Bailout: The End of Free Markets?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 14, 2008 Comment (8)Is Monday's stock market surge (following massive worldwide intervention by the U.S. and European governments) proof that the so-called free market isn't so free anymore? Is it proof the free market will fail left to its own devices?
In his announcement of a $250 billion bank stock purchase deal, President Bush insisted that the move was "not intended to take over the free market but to preserve it".
Oh yeah? Normally, I'm a believer in allowing the free market to function. But not when a president has an addiction to spending that clobbers that of the most heroin-dependent druggie on the planet. The free market cannot function when unwinnable wars costing $10 billion per month are launched. The free market cannot function when banks, unfettered by regulation, offer billions of dollars in mortgages to clients who cannot repay them.
By mistake, President Bush finally did something right this week by pushing through part of the $700 billion bailout, er, recovery package. But it was only by mistake. This president has done more to wreck the U.S. economy and its financial system than any prior president and, let's hope, any future president could possibly do.
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Barack Obama, John Lewis, John McCain, and Despicable Relationships
Tweet Share on Facebook October 14, 2008 Comment (68)On Saturday, Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and icon of the civil rights era, lashed out at John McCain for "sowing seeds of hatred" and compared the GOP candidate to a racist.
"During another period, in the not-too-distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate," Lewis said. He added:
