Modred Wins - The Last Kennedy To Leave Congress

When JFK became President in 1961, it was compared in the press with the second coming of Camelot. The Kennedy clan have been at or near the center of American politics for the last 60 years. But JFK and Bobby both fell to assassins' bullets and the remaining Kennedys - Ted, Kathleen, Joseph and Patrick, all seemed to have came out of the shallow end of the gene pool. That said, all used their name and family ties to get elected to Congress, not to mention skip past a homicide charge or two. But if Camelot was introduced to America in 1961, Modred has ultimately proven the winner in 2010. First came the turn over of the Kennedy ancestral senate seat to a Republican who campaigned on a platform of killing Ted Kennedy's "life work." And now, the last Kennedy holding federal political office has read his political obituary on the wall. Patrick Kennedy, the mercurial, drug addled son of Ted and the eight term representative from Rhode Island, has announced that he will not seek reelection.

Thus ends Camelot. All Hail Modred. . . . See, fairy tales do have happy endings.

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In Massachusetts, National History Is Made Yet Again

Tonight history was made. In the words of the AP, there has been, in Massachusetts, an "Epic Upset." It deserves to be put in context.

In 1773, it was at Boston that the colonists warned the government of its overreach with the Tea Party.

In 1775, the people of Massachusetts ignited the Revolutionary War at Lexington and Concord.

In 1952, the Kennedy clan took hold of Massachusetts politics, gaining a Senate seat that the clan would not relinquish until the death of Ted Kennedy in 2009.

John F. Kennedy, who would later become President, was very much a moderate Democrat, strong on defense and conservative on fiscal matters. He instituted one of the first income tax reductions and he involved us in the Vietnam War. Teddy was not even a pale shadow of his brother, JFK. Yet so strong was the Kennedy hold on Massachusetts that Teddy, a man expelled from Harvard for cheating and a man responsible for homicide in the case of Mary Jo Kopechne, was still able to get elected to his older brother's Senate seat and retain it by wide margins in every election thereafter. Unlike JFK, Teddy made a name for himself as a far left ideologue and a true child of the anti-war 60's.

In 2004, Ted Kennedy was directly involved in getting Massachusetts law changed so that an interim election would have to be held to seat a new Senator if a seat became open. Ted expected John Kerry to win the Presidency and wanted to insure that the Republican Gov. Mitt Romney would not be able to appoint a Republican to serve out the term.

In 2008, with Democrats outnumbering Republicans three to one, Obama won Massachusetts by a 26 point margin and Democrats took full control of all branches of Congress, including a bare 60 vote supermajority in the Senate. By 40 seats in the House and 1 seat in the Senate, Republicans became utterly irrelevant to whatever the left wanted to do.

On 20 Jan. 2009, Obama was inaugurated, kicking off a period of far left governance for the first time in America's history. It was a year that saw Obama and the Democrats make a massive effort to move America far to the left.

On Aug. 25, 2009, Ted Kennedy died, leaving his Senate seat open and his "life's work" of instituting socialism and, more particularly, European style government controlled health care in America, near completion.

On 8 Dec. 2009, Scott Brown won the Republican primary for Teddy's seat. He ran explicitly on a plank opposing the socialist programs and profligate spending of Obama. On Dec. 19, Coakley polls gave her a 20 point lead over Brown. No one gave him a chance of winning and Coakley did not bother to campaign.

On 1 January 2010, the Democrat-controlled Congress was within weeks of passing a monstrosity under the rubric of health care reform.

On 18 Jan. 2010, with Coakley down in the polls, President Obama himself came to Massachusetts to remind the formerly faithful Democrats of the state that his plans for America where on the line in this election.

And now, on 19 January 2010, 237 years after the most famous act of rebellion in our history, 235 years after starting the Revolutionary War, 58 years after turning control of a Senate seat to the Kennedys, 4 years after Ted created the special election hoist for his own petard, one year after voting Obama into office by a landslide, and with Obama's entire plans for moving our country far to the left completely on the line:

MASS ELECTS REPUBLICAN BROWN TO THE SENATE BY 5 POINTS (OUTSIDE THE MARGIN OF FRAUD, ACORN, & SELECTIVE RECOUNTS)


That is a 31 point swing to the right in Mass. politics in the space of one year. The people of Massachusetts have given their verdict in a referendum on Obama. They have broken the far left's stranglehold on our federal government and ended their ability to ram through their far left agenda, working fundamental changes to America and its economy. The people of Massachusetts did so by breaking with their own tradition of being perhaps the Democrat's most reliable stronghold - a fact that will reverberate through our body politic long into the future.

This act of near rebellion by Massachusetts foreshadows and portends a backlash of massive proportions against the Democrats in 2010 unless they make a 180 degree change in their current trajectory. Massachusetts, in an incredible twist of irony - given a chance to have their say today thanks to the partisanship of Ted Kennedy himself - has once again rebelled against overreach of an arrogant, oppressive and overreaching national government. Let Freedom ring.

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Howard Fineman & More Racial Rewriting Of History

There is little more grotesque in its complete ignorance of history than listening to a left wing ideologue wax disingenuously on race in America. Today, its Howard Fineman telling us why Harry Reid - whom I defended below - should be forgiven for his "light skinned, negro dialect" comments on Obama:

Republicans don’t want to engage in a long, drawn-out discussion of who’s more committed to equality in this society, and who has done more politically for the African-American community in the last, oh, say, 40 years or so, because that’s an argument and a discussion Republicans are going to really look bad in, and they don’t want to continue it. Yes, Harry Reid made a very unfortunate remark, and, yes, it’s troublesome, but if you attempt to put the Republican party next to the Democratic party, it’s not only African-Americans who are going to look with the Democratic party with favor on questions of race relations but everybody else in the society pretty much, too.

What an utterly scurrilous man. Republicans would love a dialogue on race and equality. I personally have been screaming about it for years. The far left that controlls all aspects of the Democrat Party today is committed to anything but equality. To the contrary, what they practice is a form of paternalistic racism and what they seek is to use permanent victim class status to achieve political power. It is time once again to trot out a piece I wrote a year ago on the history of race and equality in America, updated with some information pointed out by a reader, O' Bloody Hell.

. . . Here are some facts, some of which you might not be aware:

- The Republican Party - the party of Abraham Lincoln - was borne in 1854 out of opposition to slavery.

- The party of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan was, as Jeffrey Lord points out in an article at the WSJ, the Democratic Party. Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) is the only living member of the Senate who was once a member of the KKK.

- The 13th (abolishing slavery), 14th (due process for all citizens) and 15th (voting rights cannot be restriced on the basis of race) Amendments to the Constitution were enacted by Republicans over Democratic opposition.

- The NAACP was founded in 1909 by three white Republicans who opposed the racist practices of the Democratic Party and the lynching of blacks by Democrats.

- The 1940 Republican Party Platform included the following:

We pledge that our American citizens of Negro descent shall be given a square deal in the economic and political life of this nation. Discrimination in the civil service, the army, navy, and all other branches of the Government must cease. To enjoy the full benefits of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness universal suffrage must be made effective for the Negro citizen. Mob violence shocks the conscience of the nation and legislation to curb this evil should be enacted.

- In fairness, it was the Democrat Harry Truman who, by Executive Order 9981 issued in 1948, desegregated the military. That was a truly major development. My own belief is that the military has been the single greatest driving force of integration in this land for over half a century.

- It was Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican Governor of California appointed to the Supreme Court by President Eisenhower, also a Republican, who managed to convince the other eight justices to agree to a unanimous decision in the seminal case of Brown v. Board of Education. That case was brought by the NAACP. The Court held segregation in schools unconstitutional. The fact that it was a unanimous decision that overturned precedent made it clear that no aspect of segregation would henceforth be considered constitutional.

- Republican President Ike Eisenhower played additional important roles in furthering equality in America. He "proposed to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and signed those acts into law. They constituted the first significant civil rights acts since the 1870s." Moreover, when the Democratic Governor of Arkansas refused to integrate schools in what became known as the "Little Rock Nine" incident, "Eisenhower placed the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control and sent Army troops to escort nine black students into an all-white public school."

- The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was championed by JFK - but it was passed with massive Republican support (over 80%) in Congress and over fierce opposition from Democrats who made repeated attempts at filibuster. Indeed, 80% of the vote opposing the Civil Rights Act came from Democrats. Women were added to the Act as a protected class by a Democrat who thought it would be a poison pill, killing the legislation. To the contrary, the Congress passed the Act without any attempt to remove the provision.

- Martin Luther King Jr. was the most well known and pivotal Civil Rights activist ever produced in America. His most famous speech, "I Had A Dream," was an eloquent and stirring call for equality. Rev. King was a Republican.

- "Bull" Connor was a Democrat.

. . . Nothing that I say here is to suggest that racism and sexism could not be found in the Republican party or among conservatives at any point in American history. But if you take any period in history and draw a line at the midpoint of racist and sexist attitudes, you would find far more Republicans than Democrats on the lesser side of that line. And you would find a much greater willingness on the part of Republicans, relative to the time, to effectuate equality. That was as true in 1865 as in 1965 - and in 2008.

Sometime about 1968, the far left movement emerged as a major wing of the Democratic Party. This far left wing hijacked the civil rights movement and made it, ostensibly, the raison d'etre of their wing. Gradually, the far left has grown until it is now the dominant force in Democratic politics. . . .

The far left fundamentally altered the nature of the Civil Rights movement when they claimed it as their own. They imprinted the movement with identity politics, grossly distorting the movement's goal of a level playing field for all Americans and creating in its stead a Marxist world of permanent victimized classes entitled to special treatment. The far left has been the driver of reverse racism and sexism for the past half century. That is why it is no surprise that, with the emergence of a far left candidate for the highest office in the nation, Rev. Jeremiah Wright should also arise at his side and into the public eye preaching a vile racism and separatism most Americans thought long dead in this country. Nor is it any surprise that the MSM, many of whom are of the far left, should collectively yawn at Obama's twenty year association with Wright. Wright is anything but an anamoly. To the contrary, he is a progeny of the politics of the far left.

The far left did not merely hijack the civil rights movement, they also wrote over a century of American history, turning it on its head. That is why Bob Herbert [Howard Fineman], quoted above, is able to wax so eloquently while spouting the most horrendous of deceits. The far left managed to paint the conservative movement and the Republican Party as the prime repositories of racism and sexism. The far left has long held themselves out as the true party of equality. They have done so falsely as, by its very nature, identity politics cements inequality. Beyond that truism, the far left has for decades played the race and gender cards to counter any criticism of their policies, to forestall any reasoned debate and to demonize those who stand opposed to them. They continue to do so through this very day.

For example, Obama has attempted repeatedly to play the race card so as to delegitimize criticism of his policies. And today we have the Governor of New York calling the McCain camp racist for belittling the executive experience one could expect to be gleaned from the position of "community organizer." Apparently, according to Gov. David Patterson, "repeated use of the words 'community organizer' is Republican code for 'black'." What Gov. Patterson is doing is the well worn trick of taking any criticism of something pertaining to one of the victim class and recasting it as an illegitimate attack on the victim class itself. These tactics, which the left has used with incredible effectiveness in the past, have done incalculable harm to our nation over the decades. . . .

Mr. Fineman, it is not that the right does not want to debate this issue. The truth is you and your ilk will never willingly engage in such a debate. I can assure you, any number of us on the right would jump at the opportunity to have such a debate. The right has the facts, you have labels and a rewrite of history that will not stand up to the least of scrutiny. You are not the heirs to MLK, and little to anything for which the left has stood for over the past several decades can be called equality.

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A Primer For Obama On Negotiating With Iran

Is Barack Obama "both a dangerously naive amateur, and a leftist posing as a liberal?" That's the verdict of Barry Rubin as he discusses the history and pitfals of negotiating with Iran as well as the uses and limitations of negotiations as a tool of foreign policy.
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This from Barry Rubin writing in the Jerusalem Post:

Engagement doesn't always produce marriage. In the US-Iran case, for example, diplomatic engagements have been repeatedly disastrous. Yet many think the idea of engagement was just invented and never tried.


President John Kennedy pressed Iran for democratic reforms in the early 1960s. The shah responded with his White Revolution, which horrified traditionalists, provoking them to active opposition. One of them was named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

President Richard Nixon urged Iran in the early 1970s, under the Nixon Doctrine, to become a regional power, since America was overextended in Vietnam. The shah embarked on a huge arms-buying campaign and close alliance, stirring yet more opposition and fiscal strain, further contributing to unrest.

In the late 1970s president Jimmy Carter pushed Iran to ease restrictions. The result was the Islamist revolution. Next, Carter urged the shah not to repress the uprising, which helped bring about his downfall.

After the 1979 revolution, Carter engaged the new regime to show Khomeini that America was his friend. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who today advises Barack Obama, met Iranian leaders. Teheran interpreted this engagement as an effort to subvert or coopt the revolution, so Iranians seized the US embassy and took everyone there hostage.

The Reagan administration secretly engaged Iran in the mid-1980s to help free those hostages. Result: a policy debacle and free military equipment for Iran.

In recent years there has been a long engagement in which European states negotiated for themselves and America to get Teheran to stop its nuclear weapons drive. Iran gained four years to develop nukes; the West got nothing.

. . . There have, of course, been successful engagements - but not with Iran, Syria or the PLO. The most successful was Egypt's turnaround by Nixon and Henry Kissinger. A partial success was changing Libya's behavior.

In those two cases, American power, not compassion, achieved success. Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat ("America holds 99 percent of the cards") knew they were weak and needed to stop America from hitting them hard.

ENGAGEMENTS, OF course, have effects other than direct success. One is to buy time for someone. But for who? If one party subverts other states, builds nuclear weapons, demoralizes the other's allies and sponsors terrorism during talks while the other side... just talks, the first side clearly benefits far more.

Secondly, if one side gets the other to make concessions to prove good faith and keep talks going, that side benefits. Keeping engagement going becomes an end in itself as the weaker side uses a diplomatic version of asymmetrical warfare to make gains.

Finally, while using talks to de-escalate tensions apparently benefits everyone, matters are not so simple. By talking, a stronger side can throw away its leverage. The weaker side does not have to back down to avoid confrontation.

So engagement without pressure or threat benefits the weaker side. If the stronger side is eager to reach agreement, the weaker side has more leverage. The advantage is transferred from the strongest side to the most intransigent one. Here, Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hizbullah have the upper hand.

SEN. OBAMA doesn't understand these points. He favors direct presidential diplomacy with Iran, without preconditions. A normal liberal concept of foreign policy is alien to him. What he should be saying is:

"America must be strong to protect its interests, values and friends against ruthless adversaries. But if America is strong, it can also be flexible. Let us engage countries and leaders by telling them clearly our demands and goals.

"Once Iran understands the United States will counter its threats of genocide against Israel, involvement in terrorism against Americans, and threats to our interests, it may back down. If Iran gives up its extremism, we are ready to offer friendship.

"But if Iran remains extremist, we will quickly abandon engagement and never hesitate to respond appropriately."

This way, a leader shows he knows how to use both carrots and sticks.

But Obama has never said anything like this. He has no concept of toughness as a necessary element in flexibility, nor of deterrence as a precondition to conciliation. Nor does he indicate that he would be steadfast if engagement failed. He defines no US preconditions for meeting or conditions for agreement. He offers to hear Iran's grievances, but says nothing about American grievances.

Radical Islamists interpret this strategy as weakness - of which they will take full advantage.

THAT'S WHY Iran, Syria and Hamas favor Obama. Thus spoke Lebanese cleric Muhammad Abu al-Qat on Hizbullah's Al-Manar television on May 10: "The American empire will very soon collapse... This won't happen as a result of war... An American Gorbachev will surface in America, and he will destroy this empire." (Translation by Memri)

Islamists and radicals want Obama because they understandably expect him to play into their hands. By the same token, more moderate Arab regimes and observers are horrified.

Obama is so scary and is accused of appeasement not because he wants to meet enemies in person, but because he doesn't want to meet them in struggle. He doesn't know how international politics works through power, threats, deterrence, self-interest and credibility. He doesn't comprehend that totalitarian ideologies cannot be moderated by apology or weakness.

Whatever you think of Sen. John McCain, he understands these basic concepts. That's why he's a centrist who can be trusted to protect American national interests. Whatever you think of Sen. Hillary Clinton, she understands these basic concepts. That's why she's a liberal who can be trusted to protect American national interests.

And that's why Obama is both a dangerously naive amateur, and a leftist posing as a liberal.

Read the entire post.

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"Senator, You're No Jack Kennedy"

The title of this post is from a memorable quote from the late Sen. Lloyd Bensten, eviscerating Dan Quayle during a VP debate. But it could equally be the words of James Piereson, the author of a book on JFK, Camelot and the Cultural Revoltion, as he responds to those on the left who equate Barack Obama to JFK. Indeed, as he notes, the progressives of today have nothing in common with the hawkish liberals of old.
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This from Mr. Pierson in an e-mail posted at the NRO:

. . . Theodore Sorenson, JFK's close aide and speechwriter, has said recently that Barack Obama is the natural successor to President Kennedy because of his skills as a speaker and his message of "hope and change." This idea has been augmented by endorsements of Obama by Ted and Caroline Kennedy.

. . . From the standpoint of ideas and philosophy, there is little in Obama to remind us of JFK. Kennedy was a firm cold warrior who believed in the American mission in the world. His memorable inaugural address was entirely about foreign policy and the cause of liberty. Kennedy, in fact, tried to run to the right of Richard Nixon in 1960, blaming the Eisenhower administration for a "missile gap," the embarrassment of the Castro revolution next door, and the downing of a reconnaissance aircraft over the Soviet Union in May, 1960. He brought up comparisons to Chamberlain, Munich, and "appeasement." On the domestic front, while JFK is viewed as a hero of the civil rights movement, in fact he came around gradually to support a civil rights bill in 1963. Kennedy was in fact a cautious politician, unwilling to get too far ahead of public opinion on this critical issue.

The reason that JFK left such a powerful imprint on the liberal movement had little to do with his actual policies, which were generally centrist. President Kennedy’s legacy was more cultural than directly political: he spoke beautifully, (thanks to Sorenson) he drew on images from literature and classical culture, he was a young president in the midst of a burgeoning youth culture, he was a highly attractive man, he had a beautiful family, he was rich, he was an author, he hung around with Harvard professors and Hollywood stars and starlets. He practiced the old politics but with a decidedly new cultural approach. Lyndon Johnson was much more of a liberal in terms of policy, but his cultural persona (in contrast to Kennedy's) was of the old school.

This latter fact is the reason that some observers seen Sen Obama as the new incarnation of JFK. He seems culturally to be of an avante garde, like JFK, though his policies internationally and domestically have little in common with the late President's. This says less about Sen Obama or about JFK than about contemporary liberalism, which is far more concerned with style and one's posture toward the world than about actual policies.

Read the entire post. Just to add, in his three years in office, JFK oversaw a vast expansion of our military involvement in Vietnam, the attempt at a coup in Cuba with the Bay of Pigs invasion, repeated failed assassination attempts of Fidel Castro, and the assassination of South Vietnam's President, Diem. It would be hard to find a more complete contrast between two individuals on foreign policy than Obama and JFK.

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Obama and Peace In Our Time

For some months, as regards Iran in particular, I've been making the argument that Obama's foreign policy resembles and portends to be every bit as disastrous as Neville Chamberlain's (see here, here, here, here). Indeed, Neville Chamberlain's choice to talk with Germany and seek peace in the late 30's missed the last real opportunity to stop, at then minimal cost in blood and gold, a war that ultimately claimed near 60 million lives and destroyed Europe's economy for decades. As I wrote two weeks ago, Obama needs to be asked "What makes you think your plans to hold talks with Iran under the current circumstances . . . would be any less ill advised, counterproductive and disastrous than the attempts to find a middle ground with Hitler in the 30's?" At any rate, Ed Morrisey and others are now making similar analogies to Chamberlain in the wake of Obama's recent speech in which he claimed his foreign policy was in line with that of FDR, Truman and Kennedy.
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This from Ed Morrisey at Hot Air:

. . . On foreign policy, Obama said, it was a recognition that the US should talk to its enemies, in the same manner as FDR, Truman, and Kennedy did. At the time, I noted the strange claim and its complete ignorance of history, and today, Jack Kelly continues the history lesson for a constitutional scholar who clearly skipped 20th-century history:

. . . Our enemies in World War II were Nazi Germany, headed by Adolf Hitler; fascist Italy, headed by Benito Mussolini, and militarist Japan, headed by Hideki Tojo. FDR talked directly with none of them before the outbreak of hostilities, and his policy once war began was unconditional surrender.

FDR died before victory was achieved, and was succeeded by Harry Truman. Truman did not modify the policy of unconditional surrender. He ended that war not with negotiation, but with the atomic bomb.

Harry Truman also was president when North Korea invaded South Korea in June, 1950. President Truman’s response was not to call up North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung for a chat. It was to send troops.

Perhaps Sen. Obama is thinking of the meeting FDR and Churchill had with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in Tehran in December, 1943, and the meetings Truman and Roosevelt had with Stalin at Yalta and Potsdam in February and July, 1945. But Stalin was then a U.S. ally, though one of whom we should have been more wary than FDR and Truman were. Few historians think the agreements reached at Yalta and Potsdam, which in effect consigned Eastern Europe to slavery, are diplomatic models we ought to follow. Even fewer Eastern Europeans think so.

When Stalin’s designs became unmistakably clear, President Truman’s response wasn’t to seek a summit meeting. He sent military aid to Greece, ordered the Berlin airlift and the Marshall Plan, and sent troops to South Korea.

Given the importance that Obama places on this approach to foreign policy — he seldom fails to mention it as an example of the “change” he’ll bring to Washington — one wonders why the media hasn’t pressed him on this rationalization. Obama isn’t merely saying that he’ll reinstitute diplomatic relations with Iran, which would emulate our relations with the Nazis and the Japanese prior to Pearl Harbor. Obama wants to have meetings without preconditions with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has publicly spoken of his desire to annihilate a key ally of the US, as well as Hugo Chavez, Raul Castro, and any number of thugs and tyrants. When did FDR, Truman, and Kennedy do that? Answer: never.

As I pointed out on Wednesday, even diplomatic contact didn’t help FDR with Japan and Germany. The Japanese used diplomatic negotiations as a stalling maneuver to get its Imperial Navy in place to destroy our Pacific Fleet in 1941. Our diplomatic relations with the Nazis only encouraged America Firsters and Nazi sympathizers like Charles Lindbergh to claim that Hitler had no animus towards the West and that he could be a bulwark against Bolshevism.

Maybe Obama could ask the Czechs how well unconditional talks worked for them during Munich. Neville Chamberlain insisted on holding peace talks to avoid war in Czechoslovakia, which could have defended itself as long as it held the fortifications in the Sudetenland long enough for Britain and France to beat Germany from the rear. Instead, Chamberlain carved up Czechoslovakia without its permission, and six months afterward, Hitler swallowed the rest of it whole. FDR, meanwhile, remained steadfastly neutral diplomatically until 1939, when he began clandestine support for the UK.

Negotiations with tyrants almost always leads to appeasement, which only postpones war until the tyrant is strong enough to wage it most effectively. It results in many more deaths and far more destruction because it gives the initiative and the timing to the tyrants, while building their credibility at home. . . .

That’s what Obama’s “new approach” to foreign policy promises. It’s Neville Chamberlain without the umbrella. It certainly isn’t FDR or Truman.

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Obama Is Not JFK

Tomorrow, Obama has stated that he will address race and his two decades of close association with Rev. Jerimiah Wright during a speech in Philly. I have seen several commentors on other blogs say they expect this to be Obama’s Kennedy – Catholic speech moment. It cannot possibly be.


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Tomorrow, Obama supporters are hoping that their candidate - already compared to JFK by many in the press - will assuage the national consciousness about racism in the same way JFK did on the issue of his Catholic faith. But JFK's issue with Catholicism and Obama's issues with racism are fundamentally different.

John F. Kennedy was baptized a Catholic at his birth. Unlike Obama, who made a conscious decision to join Rev. Jerimiah Wright and Trinity United Church as an adult, JFK’s religion was simply a part of his inheritance. Obama's adult choices reflect upon his judgment and character in a way JFK's Catholicism never reflected on JFK.

At issue with JFK in 1960 was the question of whether his Catholicism would dictate how he would lead America on social issues and the issue of religious freedom. JFK had to give assurances that as President, he would make decisions based on what he felt was best for America, not on the basis of Catholic dogma. There was no inherent dissonance between his religion and his duties as President. As he put it in his 1960 speech, "I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic."

The situation with Obama is quite different. The central promise of his candidacy lies in his promise to be a post racial candidate who can heal the black white divide and, indeed, all other divides. It is a utopian promise indeed – and it is in direct contradiction to the fact that he has spent twenty years in a close relationship with a man who is an ardent, anti-American and divisive racist. It is in direct contradiction to the facts that he described Rev. Wright as a mentor on spiritual and secular matters, and that one of Obama's central themes - the audacity of hope - is based on a racist sermon given by Rev. Wright.

There is inherent dissonance between those facts and Obama's carefully crafted persona. I simply do not see how this can be "contained" with anything approaching intellectual honesty. What Obama cannot say is "I am the post racial candidate for President who happens also to have a decades long relationship with a man I chose as my pastor and whose raison d’etre is racism and claims of victimization by whites and jews."

As I said, I will wait for the speech. But all I expect from Obama is pure dissimulation. More and more, I am convinced that he is nothing more than an incredible con man.

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Sex Scandal Retrospective

Eliot Spitzer . . .

and the diamond rated girls of Emporer Club VIP . . .



have swallowed the news cycle, as Don Surber wryly puts it. You can find much more here and here. There is nothing I can add to it, really, beyond putting it in some perspective.

With his pants around his knees, Eliot joins the club of recent and not so recent politicians in America who have made the scandal sheets and provided untold fodder for our nation's stand up comedians. And in appreciation for the sheer entertainment value, today we induct NY Governor Eliot Spitzer into America's well catlogued pantheon of politicians whose biggest crime was thinking with the little guy . . .
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Republican Senator Larry Craig, convicted of propositioning an undercover officer in a men's room, is refusing to leave the Senate. He stands (so to speak) accused of practicing stall tactics.




2004: NJ Governor Jim McGreevey earned his 15 minutes of fame and ridicule when he hired his unqualified gay lover, Israeli Golan Cipel, as New Jersey's Homeland Security Advisor.



2004: When someone on then Senatorial candidate Obama's side got the divorce records of Republican candidate Jack Ryan made public, the "swinging" sex scandal therein catapaulted Obama to the spot of odds on favorite to win the Illinois Senate race, seven to nine.








1998: President Bill Clinton and the world's most famous man gobbler.











1995: The National Organization of Women claimed their first and only high profile victim when that got Oregon Sen. and notoious womanizer Bob Pack'n wood (R-OR) to resign over a sexual harassment scandal involving allegations from 29 different women - all former campaign workers or employees.



NOW would begin and end their concern for sexual harassment victims with Packwood, studiously ignoring serial womanizer Bill Clinton four years later. As to Senator Packwood, the joke at the time was that his favorite pick-up line was: "Wan'na help me make a motion on the floor?"


1990: The uncloseted Barney Frank (D-MA) was not above ordering up some take-out in the person of male prostitute Steve Gobie. Then Frank let him move in. Gobie not only moved in, but started a gay prostitution ring from Frank's apartment when Frank was not at home. Frank probably saved his career by reporting it to the Ethics Committee before the scandal broke publicly.


1988: Presidential candidate Gary Hart (D-CO) dared the press to find out anything about his alledged womenizing. They caught him with the lovely Donna Rice on a yacht called The Monkey Business. You can't make this stuff up. At least his taste in women was first class . . . or in today's lingo, seven diamonds.


1983: Gerry Studds (D-MA) and Dan Crane (R-IL) suffered a literary-esque punishment, censured for bending over a few paiges.



1981: Jon Hinson (R-MS) blew several things in 1981, his political career being one of them.





1980: Rep. Robert Bauman (R-MD) - was busted while soliciting sex from a 16-year-old male prostitute. He actually stood for reelection. I remember listening to local D.J. Johnnie Walker at the time who claimed that when Bauman was told on election day that he was behind his challenger several points, his response was "No problem. I love to come from behind."






1976: Wayne Hays (D-OH) hired Elizabeth Ray as his secretary. She later admitted that "I can't type. I can't file. I can't even answer the phone.'"






1974: Wilbur Mills (D-AR), the powerful House Ways and Means Committee Chairman and a 38 year member of the House, lost it between the bottle and Argentinian stripper Fanne Foxe.

1969 - Teddy Kennedy driving back from a party with Mary Jo Kopechne takes a turn into literary history with:




President Lyndon Johnson - no, he didn't have a sex scandal. But this is a photo of him on the first day after taking over the presidency, calling the White House janitorial staff to come up to the Oval Office and do something about the unusual stains on his desk.

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Are Obama's Foreign Policy Positions "Mainstream?"

Washington Post reporter Karen DeYoung writes today characterizing Obama's foreign policy positions as "mainstream." Are they?

Update: And is Obama ready to lead in a foreign policy crisis? (Heh)



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Please tell me if any of these Obama foreign policy pronouncements or positions sound mainstream to you:

1. Meet personally and without preconditions with the leaders of our major enemies, including Iran and North Korea. Presumably those countries will be recharacterized as the Axis of Lunch Guests.

One wonders what JFK would think of how Obama is using his words? JFK didn't exactly meet with Castro to work things out in the worker's paradise. The last world leader to meet without preconditions with his opposite number under similar facts as we face today was Britain's Neville Chamberlin. And as I recall, that didn't work out too well. Nobody has called Chamberlin's policy "mainstream" since the days of the Anshluss.

Update: This is hilarious. The Conservative Cat has a true test for Obama to prove his ability to sway America’s enemies with his rhetorical and negotiating skills.

2. Unilaterally withdraw from NAFTA, a treaty with our major trading partners, unless they agree to renegotiate it (or so he publicly maintains). This is true cowboy diplomacy of a style that the left keeps telling us is a Bushian anomaly.

3. Withdraw our forces in the middle of a war we are winning in Iraq and in which we are fighting against our two major Mid-East threats, al Qaeda and Iran. The last time this was mainstream was with the Copperheads during the Civil War.

4. To take the use of atomic weapons off the table as a viable option for our defense, something not done by other Presidents and, indeed, something very much at odds with the recommendations of our former NATO leadership.

5. Unilaterally reduce our stock pile of nuclear weapons. Obama believes that we need to "reduce our own nuclear stockpiles" in order to have the moral authority "to pressure other countries to give up nuclear technology." I am scratching my head trying to come up with the last time the sophmoric doctrine of moral relativism was relied on as the philosophy to drive our "mainstream" foreign policy.

6. Refuses to vote for any bill that could be seen as authorizing the President to use or threaten to use force against Iran. Teddy Roosevelt said that in matters of foreign policy, we should walk softly and carry a big stick. Obama would have us on our knees with only a toothpick wrapped in celophane kept in a zippered pocket. That hasn't been mainstream since Jimmy Carter tried that technique while our embassy personnel were being held hostage for 444 days - by Iran.

7. Violate the territorial integrity of a nuclear armed ally, Pakistan, if he has "actionable intelligence" about terrorists. In all fairness, it is unclear whether Obama is talking about sending in the Marines or the Predator drones. That said, announcing his intention as official policy could destabilize the Pakistani government - something that most President's would find counterproductive in defining their "mainstream" foreign policy.

8. He would grant a right of habeus corpus to terrorists and foreign fighters. This would amount to a sea change in U.S. policy. It would turn the war on terror into the criminal investigation of terror. Lincoln suspended habeaus corpus for American citizens during the Civil War. Obama is going to extend it to people captured on foreign battlefields and who are not Americans.

9. And who knows, perhaps the views of Obama's foreign policy team - Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Malley, Samantha Power and Susan Rice - might not be too "moderate" either.

After considering the above, I can only wonder how far to the left must be Ms. DeYoung's own views of an appropriate foreign policy for the U.S. if she can characterize Mr. Obama foreign policy proposals as "moderate." That's Kos and George Soros territory. It most certainly would not be considered "mainstream" by "moderate republicans."

Update: Speak of the devil. You will note in Par. 9 above that Susan Rice is part of Obama's foreign policy team. I have to give her very high marks for being candid about Obama's preparedness to run our country's foreign policy in times of crisis, when the "phone rings at 3 a.m.:"



I rest my case.

Update: No, I don't rest yet. New evidence just in -- if you haven't seen this, follow the links to this brutal BBC interview with another of Obama's foreign policy team, Samantha Power (former member, after the Hillary is a "monster" comment). Its chock full of NAFTA-esque moments as Powers tells the Beeb that Obama has no hard plans to pull out of Iraq once he's elected.

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