Sensing Danger, Obama Plays The Race Card

Based on recent polling data, it increasingly appears as though Barack Obama’s recent trip overseas was not the success that many in the media made it out to be in its immediate aftermath.

New polls released this week show McCain pulling to a statistical dead heat with Sen. Obama and gaining ground in several key swing states.

Obama must sense the tide turning, because on Wednesday he shamelessly took a page from the Sharpton/Jackson playbook and used his race to attack John McCain and the GOP.

Here’s what Obama said:

“Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, ‘He’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name.’ You know, ‘He doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”’

Of course, we all know what Obama was implying when he made this statement.

When questioned on the meaning of this statement, Obama’s campaign gave this weak explanation:

“He was describing that he was new to the political scene. He was referring to the fact that he didn’t come into the race with the history of others. It’s not about race.”

Yeah, right. The Obama campaign must think that we’re all pretty stupid.

With the media finally taking the Senator to task on his opposition to the surge and the surprising news that the U.S. did not dip into a recession but rather experienced modest economic growth in the second quarter, it would appear the Obama is adjusting his tactics.

Running as a post-racial candidate who transcends the boundaries of typical racial stereotypes, helped Obama in the primaries. However, abandoning that, in order to call his opponents racist, is a sure sign that the candidate of “change” is really just another typical, Democratic politician.

In addition, this statement flies in the face of yet another foundation of the Obama campaign, this being Obama’s promise to use “hope” rather than “fear” when promoting his agenda. But “fear” seems to be Obama’s weapon of choice, as he tells his supporters that McCain and the evil, racist GOP will attempt to convince the American people to vote against Obama because of his skin color. Of course this is nonsense, and Obama has absolutely no examples with which to back up such a ludicrous theory.

What are you basing this prediction on Senator?

This week Sen. McCain released an ad, which featured Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton, in a effort to show that Sen. Obama is running more as a celebrity, powered by young fans who have an emotional connection with the senator due to his soaring rhetoric, rather than as a serious policy advocate with the experience and knowledge to lead.

Senator Obama was quick to criticize the ad saying that we should be having a debate on the issues, rather than focusing on perpetually intoxicated starlets.

If Obama really believes this, then he should put the money where his mouth is and agree to the joint town hall meetings that Sen. McCain has proposed.

So far the Obama campaign has been almost exclusively style as opposed to the substance that people should expect from candidates running for our nation’s highest office. Then again style may be the way to go, when you’re running a candidate whose energy policy consists of telling people to keep their tires inflated.

Obama’s recent proclivity for race-baiting, suggests that many folks are beginning to realize this and are taking a second look at this unknown political entity.

-Dan Joseph

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'08 Polls Mirror 2004

Remember when John Kerry was arrogantly overconfident about his chances of winning the 2004 election? What a summer it was. Check these out. Compare the numbers from late July. Bush didn't even have a consistent lead until late August.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/bush_vs_kerry_hth.html

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/us/general_election_mccain_vs_obama-225.html

Just remember. Three months is an eternity in presidential elections.

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Obama Makes Play For Germany's Electoral Votes

Barack Obama essentially apologized to Europeans on behalf of the US today for bringing Democracy to a backwards part of the world.


"I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we've struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We've made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions."

Ironically, it was the German government, in bed with Saddam economically and still unwilling to use their NATO troops in combat situation in Afghanistan who owe the world an apology.

The last thing this nation and the rest of the world needs is for America to adopt European socialism. Do some research and you'll quickly see that the economic fortunes of most Western European nations have lagged well behind those of the United States over the last 30 years.

Like many young people I know in this country, Europe is enamored with Obama for three reasons:

1. He speaks well

2. He's not White

3. He views America less as a force for good in the world and more as a nation that should bow to the demands of the rest of the globe.


Not smart.

These are just words, and Obama's eloquent delivery means no more than that of a talented musician or gifted thespian. Look at his record if you need more proof of this.

We'll see if the polls continue to tighten in the aftermath of the Obama trip. I believe that there will not be a signifigant bump, but I could be wrong.

This isn't a reality show people and the Germans swooning should not give you hope, but should instead give great pause to those who are interested in having the Commander-In-Chief work in the interests of the American people.

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Obama Can't Admit He Was Wrong On The Surge

In his half a term as a United States Senator, Barack Obama has only had to cast one important foreign policy vote. He blew it.

Barack Obama's vote against the president's successful "surge strategy" speaks volumes about how this "different" kind of politician would approach issues of the up most importance while in office. He would approach them like a typical politician.

Had Obama had his way, the war in Iraq would probably be lost. While Obama can't say that this is what he wanted, the primary support on which he relied from his left-wing base, insisted that he oppose any policy that might turn the situation in Iraq around, in favor of immediate withdrawal.

Now, I don't believe that Barack Obama wants to lose a war. He's a smart guy, and I'm sure that in his heart he knows that American success in Iraq is essential and that a stable democracy in the center of the Middle-East would be a huge help to the United States in fighting the War on Terror. However the Senator has been painted into a corner by his strongest supporters, for whom the only acceptable position on Iraq is one in which American soldiers are all brought home immediately regardless of the consequences.

Once again, Obama is smart enough to know that the path in Iraq that is most beneficial to American interests in one in which there is some kind of long term American presence in that nation.

Obama has made it so that if he fulfills his promise of complete withdrawal and then tensions once again flare up in the region, US forces would have to return to Iraq for a third gulf war. No one wants that.

In opposing the surge, Obama put his own interests ahead of those of the nation he hopes to lead. In refusing to admit that he was wrong in his assertion that the surge would fail, we see the Democratic standard bearer doing the exact same thing that the current president was mercilessly criticized for by Democrats.

The Democrats were so gung-ho in their effort to get George W. Bush to admit that he made mistakes in his prosecution of the Iraq war. Where are they now?

Barack Obama will counter such criticism by pointing out that he opposed the war in the first place, which is meaningless considering that no one cared what a backbencher Illinois State Senator thought about such matters in the wake of 9/11 and that there is no way to tell whether his opposition to the war was based on strategic knowledge of the region or was simply a knee-jerk anti-war reaction, which was common in the area that he represented.

Once again however, Democrats seem to want to debate the reasons that we went in to Iraq, reasons that have been repeatedly analyzed, rather than talking about how to win.

As we see the candidate of change is only interested in it if it's change that helps him become president. The change brought about by the surge doesn't do that.

-Dan Joseph

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The Greatest Liberal Lie Ever Told

By Doug MacEachern

Poor, pitiable Henry Waxman.

The end of the Bush (Hitler) administration is coming to a close, and still the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has not accomplished the defining mission of his life, which is to see Vice President Dick Cheney frog-marched in chains from the White House.

The Beverly Hills Democrat is still trying. Waxman has demanded White House records involving meetings between Cheney and his former chief of staff, Scooter Libby in which they discussed former CIA employee and Vanity Fair cover girl Valerie Plame and her implausibly famous husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
And he wants to see any notes President Bush might have written down as he prepared the 2003 State of the Union address that included the famous 16 words: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Unfortunately for Waxman, nobody really cares anymore.

The White House and the Justice Department really don't care. Bush has claimed executive privilege regarding any Cheney interviews, and Attorney General Michael Mukasey has "cooperated" by turning over a few redacted transcripts collected by former special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

Waxman is fuming over Bush's refusal. But executive privilege as a tool of presidents has a lengthy history that rarely gets overturned by courts unless the matter involves a criminal investigation (see: Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton). Long after George W. Bush is gone, psychiatrists still will have the nation on a couch trying to figure out the "Plame Affair." My analysis is that it constitutes the best example available of the nation's search, once the Iraq war went bad, for an answer to the question, "How did the Dope dupe us?"

The hard answer, the one Henry Waxman, et al, will never accept, was that he didn't.

The invasion of Iraq didn't happen because New York Times reporters failed to ask tough questions of Bush in 2002 and 2003. But if you follow their coverage of Democratic demigod Barack Obama, you will notice that Times reporters still have tough-question issues.

It didn't happen because Bush characterized Saddam Hussein as "an imminent threat" - a phrase that (if you look really hard) you can track to obscure references by Condoleezza Rice and Cheney, perhaps once each. But not only did Bush not use such a phrase, he argued that the nation should not wait until a threat was imminent before it acted.

But the invasion did happen, in significant part, because the U.S. - and every intelligence service in the world that spied on Iraq - believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. We subsequently learned he did not have WMD . . . except for the 550 tons of yellowcake uranium recently shipped from Iraq to Canada, where it will be concentrated for use in nuclear reactors.

The uranium had been in Iraq since prior to 1991. It appears that the International Atomic Energy Agency knew about the uranium stash prior to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. And, in fact, a few reporters here and there have written about its existence since 2003. It wasn't really a secret (although, clearly, the Bush administration never used it as a response to its war critics). Rather, it was just a part of the WMD story that no one seemed interested in.

It didn't fit the template of a prewar Iraq that had completely dismantled its nuclear-weapons program since, with a bit of enrichment, the 550-ton yellowcake stash could provide Saddam enough material for dozens of nuclear weapons.

Where did it come from?

Do you suppose it came from . . . Niger?

That would be the country in Africa to which Bush almost certainly alluded in his 2003 speech.

It also is the country that Wilson visited, at the urging of his wife, Val Plame, who is on record dropping his name to fellow CIA officials as someone who might help knock down rumors that Saddam had sought yellowcake there.

So Wilson went to Niger and sipped sweet mint tea with former Nigerien officials he knew there.

Wilson came back and made competing claims about what he learned. In his infamous New York Times op-ed piece, he claimed his trip knocked down Bush's contentions about Saddam's interest in Nigerien yellowcake. But according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, Wilson reported to the CIA that an Iraqi delegation had tried to buy 400 tons of yellowcake in 1998 and that another delegation had come knocking a year later. The Intelligence committee report identifies the leader of a 1998 delegation to Niger, as it happens. It was Wissam al-Zahawie, Saddam Hussein's top expert in negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency regarding his nuclear program.

But, alas, no one is really interested in yellowcake much anymore. No one but poor, ignored Henry Waxman.

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Pelosi’s Failed First Term

As the end of Nancy Pelosi’s first term as House Speaker approaches, there is little doubt that her peers will reelect her to that position when the 111th Congress convenes in 2009. Pelosi is incredibly fortunate that it’s her fellow Democrats and not the American people who decide whether she deserves another term, because at this point she has failed to deliver on any of the major promises that her party made to the voters who put her in power.

Incredibly, Pelosi has not only failed to deliver on her promises to independent swing voters, but also to her far-left base. One would expect that the nation’s first female Speaker, hailing from San Francisco, would be on the fast track to sainthood with the far-left at this point. Alas, these finicky voters, who make up roughly 15% of the American electorate, are as upset with Pelosi as the Republicans are.

Demagoguery is nothing new when it comes to politicians trying to get elected, but Pelosi took a real chance when she promised voters that the Democrats had "...a commonsense plan to help bring down skyrocketing gas prices” when campaigning in 2006.

Since then gas prices have gone up nearly two dollars a gallon.

We are still waiting to hear the Democrat’s plan.

The truth is that since she took office, Pelosi has done everything she possibly could to keep gas prices high.

Most recently, in what seems to be little more than a knee-jerk reaction to the President, she stubbornly continues to oppose drilling in ANWR and in coastal regions.

Over the last week, we’ve seen that even symbolic gestures by the federal government suggesting that it is open to increased domestic exploration can lower the price of oil.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for Nancy Pelosi to come up with an explanation, especially one palatable to independent voters, as to why she is opposed to such action.

On her left, Pelosi is struggling to explain why she was thwarted in her attempts to ensure failure in Iraq. Had she rallied Democrats in favor of the President’s surge strategy, she would at least be able to say that she helped bring about needed change in the Iraq policy. But the left was always invested in defeat and surrender, cleverly disguised as a Democratic desire for a “new direction”.

Now, not only is the far-left enraged that she could not achieve a full withdrawal from Iraq, but her opposition to the surge has allowed the right to label her as yet another Democrat who never had any interest in winning the conflict in the first place. In the long term, this adds yet more evidence to the increasingly widespread view that Democrats are weak when faced with adversity in the foreign policy arena. As we have seen since the end of the Vietnam War, this label has a tendency to stick.
Pelosi is either delusional or is yet to realize that the pendulum is swinging towards the GOP on both the Iraq issue and on the steps need to be taken to lower prices at the pump.

Pelosi is essentially immune from any political consequences this time around since the GOP has little chance of regaining control of the House of Representatives this cycle. However, Pelosi’s refusal to work towards solutions to our nation’s biggest problems, and instead spend her capital on repeated attempts to make political gains at the expense of an unpopular administration, could very well hurt Barack Obama in the fall.

Either way, it is nearly impossible for anyone, on either side, to spin Pelosi’s first two years wielding the gavel, as anything other than an abject failure.

-Dan Joseph

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Nah. Drilling Will Never Work.

Bush Says Drill, Drill, Drill — and Oil Drops $9!
By Larry Kudlow


In a dramatic move yesterday President Bush removed the executive-branch moratorium on offshore drilling. Today, at a news conference, Bush repeated his new position, and slammed the Democratic Congress for not removing the congressional moratorium on the Outer Continental Shelf and elsewhere. Crude-oil futures for August delivery plunged $9.26, or 6.3 percent, almost immediately as Bush was speaking, bringing the barrel price down to $136.

Now isn’t this interesting?

Democrats keep saying that it will take 10 years or longer to produce oil from the offshore areas. And they say that oil prices won’t decline for at least that long. And they, along with Obama and McCain, bash so-called oil speculators. And today we had a real-world example as to why they are wrong. All of them. Reid, Pelosi, Obama, McCain — all of them.

Traders took a look at a feisty and aggressive George Bush and started selling the market well before a single new drop of oil has been lifted. What does this tell us? Well, if Congress moves to seal the deal, oil prices will probably keep on falling. That’s the way traders work. They discount the future. Psychology and expectations can turn on a dime.

The congressional ban on offshore drilling expires September 30, so that becomes a key date. A new report from Wall Street research house Sanford C. Bernstein says that California actually could start producing new oil within one year if the moratorium were lifted. The California oil is under shallow water and already has been explored. Drilling platforms have been in place since before the moratorium. They’re talking about 10 billion barrels worth off the coast of California.

There’s also a “gang of 10” in the Senate, five Republicans and five Democrats, that is trying to work a compromise deal on lifting the moratorium. So it’s possible a lot of action on this front could occur much sooner than people seem to think.

So I repeat: Drill, drill, drill. Deregulate, decontrol, and unleash the American energy industry. Those hated traders will then keep selling oil as the laws of supply and demand and free markets keep working.

Bravo for Bush. Bravo for the traders.

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Robbing Peter To Pay Rev. Wright

With the political climate the way it is, if George Bush said the sky is blue and Barack Obama insisted that it was Orange, more people would agree with Obama. So when Sen. Obama tries to steal Evangelical Christians away from the GOP by essentially supporting Bush's Faith Based initiative, he's making a smart political calculation.

Support for the Bush policy is good politics on the surface, but when you look at the minor tweaks that Obama wants to make to the policy, the shallow and deceptive trademarks of Obama's campaign shine through.

First he wants to change the name. The program would now be called "The Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships."

This meaningless new nomenclature is typical of the senator whose entire campaign is about words and posing himself as being different from Bush even when the policy is essentially the same. Again, the sky isn't really orange, but from now on we're going to refer to the color "blue" as "orange", because we need change so badly.

Next, he wants to divert more of the federal money to "inner city" religious organizations. Of course no-one should be fooled by this clever name change. "Inner-city" is politically correct code for "black churches." The left-wing, America hating, black liberation theology, associated with these churches is not limited to Trinity United and Rev. Pfleger. It is widespread and unapologetic.


Whether Obama realizes it or not, this change would pour money into churches such as Trinity United, allowing them to help the poor and downtrodden but resulting in an increase in their congregation's strength and numbers, allowing them more opportunity to spread their ignorant ideology.

Obama also says that churches that discriminate against certain people because their lifestyle does not fit in with the religion's laws and theology, should not receive government money, however he seems to have no problem with churches that preach racism and spout divisive political rhetoric directly from the pulpit, getting taxpayer dollars.

The Faith Based Initiative is a terrific idea. Churches and religious groups around the nation are far better equipped to help our nation's poorest citizens than the federal government has ever been.

This play by Senator Obama is a smart one, but once again it should remind everyone, especially Evangelical Christians, that Barack Obama's view of religion is far different than that of your typical pious American.

Finally, to cap off his political posturing, Obama once again repeated the Democratic mantra that "Change comes not from the top down, but from the bottom up" In the long run, it's this concept which poses the greatest threat to all aspects of our nation's prosperity and innovative nature.

-Dan Joseph

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