D.O.A.

As they used to say on "ER" back when anyone was watching it, "Okay, I'm calling it."

Stick a fork in Senator McCain, folks. He's done. I began this campaign back in February by predicting that Obama would beat McCain 40 states to 10. It may be closer than that...slightly...but when all is said and done, I'm still predicting a landslide. And the Republican establishment will have nobody to blame but itself. McCain was a terrible candidate from the git-go who inspires nobody. Even now, less than a month out from the election, I have no idea what the raison d'être of his campaign is. As best I can tell, it's "I want to be president. And I'm not Barack Obama." Unfortunately for him (and for the country), that's not nearly enough.

All McCain has to offer is squishy, centrist palaver that fails to differentiate him much from either Bush or Obama. His main solutions to the economic disaster are merely lighter versions of Obama's socialism. He's never once made a solid public case for the fact that Democrats are knee deep in the current crisis, and that the disaster can be easily traced back to Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and Bill Clinton. Instead he's sat there dumbly while Democrats (who've held the Congress for the last two years) amazingly pin a meltdown on their watch to free market economics.

The fact is, McCain deserves to lose. He's not a conservative. He's really not even a Republican. For all the "maverick" talk, he's always been a moderate Democrat in Republican garb. For years he was the media's favorite Republican-bashing Republican, and he let it make him think that their favor would extend to a run against an actual Democrat. He was spectacularly wrong.

At root, the whole evening is summed up best by Andrew McCarthy, writing at National Review Online's "The Corner," and I think it also summarizes the whole campaign:

We have a disaster here — which is what you should expect when you delegate a non-conservative to make the conservative (nay, the American) case. We can parse it eight ways to Sunday, but I think the commentary is missing the big picture.

Here's what Obama needed to do tonight: Convince the country that he was an utterly safe, conventional, centrist politician who may have leftward leanings but will do the right thing when the crunch comes.

Now, as the night went along, did you get the impression that Obama comes from the radical Left? Did you sense that he funded Leftist causes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars? Would you have guessed that he's pals with a guy who brags about bombing the Pentagon? Would you have guessed that he helped underwrite raging anti-Semites? Would you come away thinking, "Gee, he's proposing to transfer nearly a trillion dollars of wealth to third-world dictators through the UN"?

Nope. McCain didn't want to go there. So Obama comes off as just your average Center-Left politician. Gonna raise your taxes a little, gonna negotiate reasonably with America's enemies; gonna rely on our very talented federal courts to fight terrorists and solve most of America's problems; gonna legalize millions of hard-working illegal immigrants.

McCain? He comes off as Center-Right .. or maybe Center-Left ... but, either way, deeply respectful of Obama despite their policy quibbles.

Great. Memo to McCain Campaign: Someone is either a terrorist sympathizer or he isn't; someone is either disqualified as a terrorist sympathizer or he's qualified for public office. You helped portray Obama as a clealy qualified presidential candidate who would fight terrorists.

If that's what the public thinks, good luck trying to win this thing.

This was way too important an election--and Obama was way too dangerous a potential president--to have left this in the hands of John McCain. I shudder to think at the price the country--and my family--will pay for this mistake.

Wall Street Greed

An excellent comment from Doug Wilson on the current financial mess, and the role of (and consequences for) greed:

I am preaching on Psalm 49 tomorrow, and I will be going after [the issue of greed]. But whenever politicians go after it, all they do is create regulatory mechanisms for the next round of greedy businessmen to manipulate at will. The very best way to address business greed in the public sector is to insist that the greedists, and those foolish enough to do business with them, be required to eat their own cooking.

Capitalism in good times and safety net socialism in hard times is not capitalism. Capitalism is not riding the bubble until it bursts, and then to suddenly discover the need for government intervention "from time to time." Graspers and grabbers need to be hit a whole lot harder than the Feds will ever hit them. Yeah, greed on Wall St. was a big problem. Let gravity deal with it.

If you were at the casino playing blackjack, and the casino had an unwritten policy of giving you all your money back if you lost your life savings, would you be more likely or less likely to go all-in on that 15 you were dealt?

Proper, capitalistic risk assessment did not cause this catastrophe. Government guaranteed, risk-free speculation did.

Is That Supposed To Be Bad?

Today Barack Obama accused John McCain of launching "Swift boat-style attacks" on him for pointing out (and thank goodness somebody has) Obama's cozy relationship with unrepentant, America-bombing terrorist Bill Ayers.

I've heard other Democrats use this as a pejorative as well--"Swift-boating." My question is, what do they mean by "Swift boat-style attacks?" I assume they must be referring to the media campaign in the 2004 election by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In case you've forgotten, that was the humongous group of hundreds of veterans who personally served with John Kerry in Vietnam, who witnessed his actions there and pointed out that he was systematically lying about his experiences. How is this somehow a slam against what McCain is doing?

Judging by what the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth actually did, I must assume that when Obama accuses McCain of launching "Swift-boat style attacks," what he's actually condemning is "telling the truth about my past, possibly using massive numbers of actual witnesses," since that's precisely what the Swift-boat veterans did with John Kerry.

Democrats have also tried this with the infamous Willie Horton ad that George Bush 41 ran against Michael Dukakis in 1988. Invocation of the name "Willie Horton" is now supposed to make us gasp with horror at the dirty politics Bush supposedly employed. In reality, Dukakis was running on his supposedly stupendous prison reform program in Massachusetts, and the ad pointed out that part of Dukakis' program involved giving weekend passes from prison to extremely dangerous criminals. One of those criminals was Willie Horton, who'd been convicted of robbery and murder after stabbing a boy 19 times and leaving him to bleed to death in a trash can. Horton had been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for that crime (and Dukakis opposed the death penalty, by the way.) Dukakis "innovative" system gave Horton at least ten weekend passes from prison. While on one of those weekend passes, Horton (not all that surprisingly) broke into the home of a young couple, raping the woman twice and binding, gagging, and stabbing her fiancée. The whole episode lasted over seven hours.

Every single word of the ad was absolutely true (though wildly understated considering the magnitude of the crime), and in reality, the prison furlough program was and is an utter blight on Dukakis' record, certainly disqualifying him as any kind of "justice reformer" as he was trying to claim at the time. So how is it that the phrase "Willie Horton" is now somehow seen as a slam on Bush 41 and Republicans? It ought to stand as a monument to the everlasting shame of liberal notions of criminal rehabilitation.

Incidentally, as far as the supposed "racist" component of the Horton ad, here's a little trivia question: do you know who was the first person to bring up the prison furlough issue against Dukakis? That's right. It was that noted racist Al Gore, running against Dukakis in the Democratic presidential primaries that year.

So instead of somehow being cowed by claims of "Swift-boat attacks," I hope Republicans will have the guts to stand up and say, "Oh, you mean factual attacks in which the truth is told? Where the candidate's proven historical activities and associations are actually brought into the forefront by lots of people with impeccable credentials and the candidate is held responsible for them despite pronounced media silence? Yes, that is exactly what we're doing."

What Else Are You Not Hearing?

Here's a story published by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics in July, well before the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They give the highest cumulative donations from Freddie and Fannie to political coffers over the last 20 years, from 1989 to 2008.

Of course, this is a bi-partisan problem, as we are continually told. Here are the top four recipients of Fannie and Freddie's political largesse since 1989:

1. Dodd, Christopher J
D-CT
$133,900

2. Kerry, John
D-MA
$111,000

3. Obama, Barack
D-IL
$105,849

4. Clinton, Hillary
D-NY
$75,550

In other words, Barack Obama, after three whole years in the Senate, has had more money showered on him by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than all but two other people in the entire 535-member Congress. Dodd has been in the Senate since 1981 and is the longest-serving senator in Connecticut history. Kerry's been in the Senate since 1985. Obama has nearly equalled both in just three short years of drinking out of the Freddie and Fannie spout.

Hmmm. I wonder how it is that in the middle of a presidential campaign where the primary issue has become a financial catastrophe initiated by the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, nobody in the media seems to mention that on a per-year basis, Barack Obama is more in the pockets of both than any other memeber of Congress by far?

But at least we're getting to the bottom of that important "what magazines does Sarah Palin read?" story.

Foreign Policy Experience

Regardless of what one thinks of Sarah Palin (and while I'm inclined to like her, I'm waiting for the debate to see if she's got what it takes to lead the country), it's time to put to bed this canard about "foreign policy experience."

Liberals and the media hold up so-called "foreign policy experience" as the Holy Grail of the presidency--except when they're trying to elect someone with absolutely none of it (see: Clinton, Bill). But all that the vaunted "foreign policy experience" really means is "worships at the altar of the U.N. and pays obeisance to the Council on Foreign Relations and the massive State Department bureaucratic apparatus."

The best foreign policy president of my lifetime was Ronald Reagan, and it was always the same knock against him: "no foreign policy experience" (and a governor to boot). I would argue that it was Reagan's very lack of such "experience" that allowed him to win the Cold War, since entanglement in the State Department miasma leads to an utter inability to distinguish good from bad, up from down, and black from white. It's no coincidence that most Secretaries of State are mamby-pamby functionaries so lost in nuance that they can't see what's straight in front of them and almost always wind up unable to even distinguish a dictator from an elected president. They are always the very definition of squishy moderate (or, in some cases, outright Leftist), even if that wasn't the case when they were appointed. Mere proximity to the foreign policy apparatus of the nation turns them into chess players with no moral clarity or big picture. (See Powell, Colin; Albright, Madeleine; Christopher, Warren; Eagleburger, Lawrence; Baker, James; Muskie, Edwin; Vance, Cyrus; Kissinger, Henry; Rogers, William, etc. etc. ad nauseum. There's not one single person on that list I'd want to be president.)

In the modern era, probably the epitome of the "foreign policy experience" president was Richard M. Nixon. He's the one who opened relations back up with the Chicoms (propping that regime up for another 35 years and counting) and established the policy of detente with the Soviet Union (which the State Department functionaries hallowed), a series of endless treaties and maintaining a "balance of power" where the U.S. tacitly agreed to never try to actually win the Cold War. Thankfully, Reagan, who had never been blinkered by the State Department establishment and wasn't crippled by what the liberals called "foreign policy experience" came in with his own policy of "we win, they lose." Needless to say, all hell broke loose among the establishment foreign policy wonks. Every step along the way they whined as this "cowboy" with no foreign policy experience called the Russkies on the carpet, walked out of summits, amped up weapons systems, and ultimately put 'em out of business.

George H.W. Bush was another so-called "foreign policy president" having been CIA director and an ambassador, as well as a former director of the Council on Foreign Relations. A proponent of the so-called "New World Order," he's the one who actually tried to prop the Soviet Union back up at the last minute before their collapse and help Gorbachev maintain his power. He also stopped short in the Gulf War despite the advice of many around him, leaving hundreds of thousands of Kurdish rebels who'd helped us in the war to be exterminated by Saddam Hussein, as well as leaving Saddam in power to be dealt with again later, the repercussions of which we're still dealing with on a daily basis.

So in my estimation, "foreign policy experience" ain't' worth a hill of beans. Give me someone with simple moral clarity a thousand times over the experienced, amoral wonks like Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon and the like. This isn't brain surgery; most times all that's required is to know right from wrong.

(Most of these thoughts I first posted the other day over at A Better Country.)

The Peace Of Angels

I saw this photo and caption at CNN.com from today's bailout hearings:








Rep. Barney Frank speaks today as Sens. Charles Schumer and Christopher Dodd confer. (Getty Images)



Oh yeah, they'll fix it.

A Tour Of The Liberal Heart

"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm - but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves." -- T.S. Eliot

[HT: Doug Wilson]

Cheap And Unavailable

Presumably the authors of this story (nor the doltish politicians who trumpet this kind of thing) can see the connection here. From today's South Florida Sun-Sentinel, in a story headlined "Many South Florida gas stations on 'E' as shortages continue":

Despite state officials this week assuring motorists there's an adequate supply of gasoline statewide, scattered gas stations in South Florida on Thursday continued to grapple with shortages in the wake of Hurricane Ike.

And then in a later paragraph:

Last Friday, before Ike struck the Gulf Coast and headed toward Houston's refineries, the wholesale price of gas spiked for many gas retailers. In turn, gas stations quickly increased prices, which triggered a slew of price-gouging complaints in Florida. Earlier this week, state Attorney General Bill McCollum opened an inquiry into the gouging allegations, sending subpoenas to several gas suppliers and dealers.

For what it's worth, lest anyone think I'm a partisan, Bill McCollum is a Republican, as is Governor Charlie Crist. They're also both idiots. Neither has wasted a chance to jump on the air this week to beat his chest over gasoline "price gouging."

But, of course, if the market had been allowed to set the price of gasoline rather than addled politicians doing it, there would be no gas shortage in Florida. Higher prices would've provided more incentive for quickly moving gas to Florida. And higher prices would have encouraged many motorists to merely use enough gas to get to wherever they were going, rather than rushing to fill up the tank with artificially cheap gas. Instead, once again, politicians get to portray themselves as virtuous, holding the line on prices for gasoline that a lot of stations don't actually have.

The good news is, it's cheap. The bad news is, you can't get it.

[For more in the same vein, see my old posts "A Cautious Defense of Price Gouging" and "Hot Gas."]

price gouging gasoline Bill McCollum Charlie Crist Florida Hurricane Ike Sun-Sentinel

Oh, The Humanity

From what I'm hearing, things are very bleak right now on Texas' decimated gulf coast. Not that I'm hearing much. Doesn't it seem strange that less than five days after an entire American city was virtually wiped out, we're hardly hearing anything about it? We're still getting more coverage of Katrina three years later (witness the media frenzy as Hurricane Hanna was approaching Louisiana a few weeks ago) than we're getting of a current disaster area.

Where is Anderson Cooper crying in the floodwaters and demanding governmental compassion for the victims? His entire career was built on standing around in the Katrina aftermath emoting for the victims, yet I can't even find anything about Hurricane Ike at the website for Anderson's program. Where is Sean Penn in his rowboat and flack jacket?

Could it be that, because Galveston doesn't have a big jazz music community and the kinds of activities that people who listen to NPR consider "cultural," the elites simply don't care? (By the way, I've been to New Orleans. And I can tell you that New Orleans' main "cultural activity" is vomiting elaborate frozen drinks.) Could it be that because there is no rioting and looting in the streets in Texas and nobody is having press conferences demanding that FEMA "do more?" that the press has lost interest? Could it be that because nobody needs to wear a flack jacket, and folks there are simply going about the business of digging out that the media thinks it's boring? Is it possible that there are victims that the media elites thinks are hip, and others they don't really care much for? Might, perhaps, the gulf coast of Texas simply not have the kind of demographic makeup that elicits the pious paternalism of the mainstream media?

I'll look forward to that Hollywood telethon for Galveston that I'm sure will be coming up soon, like the one that was carried on NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, MSNBC, CNBC, BET, and Pax after Katrina. Perhaps noted philanthropist Kanye West can get bailed out long enough to appear on the show and tell us that George W. Bush doesn't care about white people.

Hurricane Ike Galveston Texas gulf coast Sean Penn Anderson Cooper Gulf Coast Hurricane Katrina New Orleans

It's Not Fair Unless You Spot Us More Points

I predicted some months ago that John McCain would lose in a 40 state landslide. My reasoning was sound--no candidate wins because voters are voting against someone else. They need to be inspired to vote for you, and John McCain inspires virtually nobody. I didn't know a single person who was jazzed about McCain's candidacy. The best reaction I got from anyone was, "I guess I'll vote for him. He's the lesser of two evils." But Sarah Palin has proved to be a complete game-changer. In my opinion, neither McCain nor his team could have been smart enough to foresee the ultimate reaction to her. They decided to poke a hole and ended up hitting a gusher. Nobody still is inspired by McCain. That remains true. But it turns out that a whole bunch of people are being inspired by Sarah Palin.

As a result, liberals are now starting to wring their hands about a possible Obama loss. One recent example that caught my eye is from that Harvard political scientist and Brookings Institution Fellow Adam McKay (perhaps better known as the director of the avant-garde art house films "Anchorman" and "Talladega Nights.") As Glenn Beck likes to say, reading this will make blood shoot out of your eyes. Writing in the Huffington Post (warning: there's some salty language in the article, despite McKay's normally patrician sensibilities), McKay sputters:

Something is not right. We have a terrific candidate and a terrific VP candidate. We're coming off the worst eight years in our country's history. Six of those eight years the Congress, White House and even the Supreme Court were controlled by the Republicans and the last two years the R's have filibustered like tantrum throwing 4-year-olds, yet we're going to elect a Republican who voted with that leadership 90% of the time and a former sportscaster who wants to teach Adam and Eve as science? That's not odd as a difference of opinion, that's logically and mathematically queer.

....So what is this house advantage the Republicans have? It's the press. There is no more fourth estate. Wait, hold on...I'm not going down some esoteric path with theories on the deregulation of the media and corporate bias and CNN versus Fox...I mean it: there is no more functioning press in this country. And without a real press the corporate and religious Republicans can lie all they want and get away with it.

One wonders what it would actually take to get Barack Obama elected if they don't feel that they can do it now. All of the major networks have been completely in his pocket for several years now (just ask Hillary Clinton's supporters), he's received almost no questioning over his questionable personal associations (like Tony Rezko and Bill Ayers), and he has an entire cable news network (MSNBC) entirely devoted to annointing him the new Messiah. And still liberals think it's not enough.

In 2004, Newsweek's Evan Thomas (a liberal; his grandfather was Socialist Party of America leader Norman Thomas) said, "The media, I think, want [John] Kerry to win...that's going to be worth maybe 15 points." Of course, Kerry still lost, and one wonders how wide the margin would have been had he not had the media doing his bidding 24/7 heading into the election. Now ask yourself this: is the media less supportive of Obama than they were of Kerry, or more?

The fact that polls are even showing this thing as close are utterly astounding. You have a clearly charismatic candidate running against a 73-year-old personality hole, at a time when the incumbent president is one of the least popular in history, with a declining economy, an unpopular war, and the entire apparatus of the mainstream media and entertainment industry behind him, and he's tied--at best.

I don't know whether it's sad or amusing, but how much more clear could it be that the reason these people don't seem to be able to win national elections is that they live in a parallel universe? In this universe, the wall to wall media worship of Obama somehow isn't pro-Obama enough, and their man would run away with it if somehow he could just get some good coverage. It couldn't be that the American people have utterly rejected, time and time again, the "progressive" vision.

John McCain Sarah Palin Barack Obama media bias Huffington Post Adam McKay Tony Rezko Bill Ayers Evan Thomas

Cloak And Dagger

Read this little line from TIME Magazine a couple or twenty times and see if you can get your mind around it:

Her daughter's pregnancy is beyond her control, but the fact that she did not inform McCain's team about it until a day before he offered her the job has chagrined even her Republican backers.

In other words, TIME magazine sees potential scandal in the fact that Sarah Palin only told the McCain campaign about her daughter's pregnancy when they came to talk to her about being on the ticket, after which McCain, who knew all the facts, then went ahead and named her the veep candidate.

It's an outrage! As we all know, telling them about the situation before the nomination--when they actually approached her--isn't enough. Three months ago, she was supposed to send a postcard to the McCain campaign announcing that the rabbit had died, just in case they were interested.

Of course, this is TIME simply making stuff up. There are no "Republican backers" who are "chagrined" that Palin fully disclosed the situation to McCain when things got serious. I haven't talked to a single human being who has been miffed about the internal timing of Palin's notifying McCain of the pregnancy. Notifying him the day after the nomination is a problem. Notifying him the before the fact is how it's supposed to....oh, forget it. I can't even finish this paragraph. This is utter idiocy.

Bristoling With Fairness

Pointing out liberal media bias is so easy it's almost not even fun anymore. It's like shooting fish in a barrel, or winning a stuffed animal by guessing the over/under on Ann Wilson's weight. (Hint: always take the over.)

Nonetheless, certain blatant incidents of it still need to be pointed out, if for no other reason than that it acts as an encouragement for all of America outside of New York and D.C. to keep the mute button on.

We live in a country where we now know (and knew within a couple of days) every possible detail about Sarah Palin's daughter, her daughter's pregnancy, the boyfriend of the daughter (even the guy running out into the street to wash your windshield can tell you that his name is Levi and he plays hockey), and even the scurrilous rumors that Sarah Palin's baby was actually her daughter's. (Incidentally, this sounds about like how a liberal would conceive a cover-up: Sarah Palin will cover for her pregnant daughter by pretending the baby is actually hers, while simultaneously announcing to the world that her daughter is pregnant. Why, it's brilliant! I see the maleficent, plotting genius of the Bush years will be continuing through a McCain presidency.)

But while we know every detail of 17-year-old Bristol Palin's pregnancy, virtually no mainstream news organization is willing to ask any questions at all about the Muslim school Barack Obama attended in Indonesia (unless, of course, it's to quickly jump in to say, "No, it's not as bad as you think! There was no actual dynamiting taking place!). Of course, there was actual dynamiting taking place with Obama's friend William Ayers, yet the only questions asked him about the Ayers association have come from Bill O'Reilly and the hated Fox News. Have you seen Bill Ayers on the cover of people magazine or on the front page of your local newspaper lately? Why would you? He's only a self-identified communist and one of the leaders of the Weathermen who participated in terrorist bombings in the U.S.--and is a guy with whom Obama has a longstanding friendship. Ayers was quoted in the New York Times (on September 11th, 2001, no less, if you can believe that) as saying, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." This is a friend of Barack Obama's.

Keep in mind, Obama is his party's presidential candidate. Bristol Palin is the daughter of the other party's vice-presidential candidate. Yet how much would you say you know about Barack Obama's formative years, or the friends he keeps, that you learned in the mainstream media? How many of you could pick Barack Obama's friend Bill Ayers out of a lineup?

And, of course, as my friend Brad points out, none of this is even to mention the fact that the media sat on the John Edwards love child story for nearly a year, including while he was still a viable, active presidential candidate.

Barack Obama Sarah Palin Bristol Palin William Ayers media bias Weathermen John Edwards

What To Make Of It All?

The fact that Sarah Palin is a woman and a mother has drawn questions from both the political Left and the Right. Of course, the questions from the Left cannot be taken seriously on this; the utter, disingenuous hypocricy of liberals asking, "But how will she take care of little Trig?" is nothing but risible. The fact that she didn't have his brain sucked out of his body already puts Mrs. Palin up 1-0 over the liberals in the Caring About Trig department.

On the right (particularly among Christian conservatives), the questions are more pressing and thoughtful, and deserve real answers. If you're interested in that question from a biblical perspective, I've found some of the things Doug Wilson has written over the last few days to be enormously helpful.

From a piece listing some of the pros and cons, Wilson writes from the con side:

One of the central lies of pop feminism has been the enticing fiction that "you can have it all." You can have a thriving family, and a career in academic physics, and be a sexpot, and have a fascinating and exciting life with numerous parties to go to, just like in the movies. In fact, just like in the movies -- because the movies have been celluoid shills for the pop feminists on this one. You can do anything you want in the movies, and to generate this impression you don't even need special effects. But it ain't true in real life, as numerous women have discovered....[W]hen the false promises of feminism are set before young girls, quite a few of them can seriously screw up their lives, and in the last go around with feminism, quite a few of them did. So put this con under the heading of role model problems.

He also lists quite a few "pros," including:

File this next one under the heading of "husbands of accomplished babes." I speak as an expert here. Feminism is not the only heterodox gender-idea we have to deal with. There is a significant stream within conservative Christian circles that is more Muslim than Christian. In my writing on family, I have called this error masculinism, the counterpart to feminism. This selection of Sarah Palin enables us to address that problem. The Bible does not teach that a woman's place is in the home. It teaches that a woman's priority is the home. If a woman accomplishes a great deal outside the home without surrendering the priority of the home, there is nothing whatever unbiblical about it.

This post caught me by surprise, and actually made me choke up (if you can believe that coming from your grizzled, emotionless correspondent).

And this post is also essential reading from a biblical perspective. This situation offers Christians a real, beautiful occasion for some thinking. What a great chance to build a more biblical worldview. Let's not let it slip away.

Sarah Palin Doug Wilson

Heart Doesn't Heart Sarah Palin

One of the traditional rituals of the election season is some old classic rock song being used by a Republican candidate, followed by the old, grizzled, nearly forgotten performer of said classic rock song coming out of the woodwork to demand that the candidate stop using it since he/she hates the candidate and the candidate's conservative politics. (See: Tom Scholz, John Cougar Mellencamp, Jackson Browne Mellencamp, Bruce Cougar Springsteen nearly every year, et. al. ad nauseaum.)

This year, someone decided to play the old Heart song "Barricuda" at the Republican National Convention because apparently Sarah Palin's high school basketball playing nickname was "Sarah Barracuda." Predictably, within about 10 minutes, sisters Ann (see photo above) and Nancy Wilson halted their between-puppet-shows set at Six Flags to demand that the Republicans stop using the song, and to announce that Sarah Palin does not speak for American women.

This leads me to wish to say to "Barracuda" singer Ann Wilson: have another pork chop. And be glad anyone is still listening to your song.

Back From Vacation

Man, did I pick a bad time to go away. Anything happen while I was gone?

So much to post about, so little time. Hopefully we can get caught up on a few things this week.

Veepstakes

On the Palin pick: the short answer is, I like it.

McCain is a terrible candidate. He at least needed a running mate who wouldn't hurt him with conservatives. She doesn't. And she's far easier on the eyes than Joe Lieberman.

Hey, it's only the veep. But as veeps go, I think Sarah Palin is an inspired choice. And Joe Biden...um...isn't. It gives McCain some "new and fresh" zing that he deseperately needs. For the moment, I'm still standing by my prediction that McCain will get slaughtered. He's just a terrible, terrible choice (see link above). But it's getting more interesting.

On another note, if I'm Joe Biden, I think I'm going ahead and punching Barack Obama after this kiss.

Huh. Weird.

O b a m a - B i d e n

O s a m a - Bin Laden

I'm just saying. Visually, you have to admit it's odd.

Do You Have John Edwards In The Can?

Well, I see that John Edwards, finally feeling the weight of public pressure after Rabe Ramblings blew the lid off his illegitimate child scandal yesterday (okay, maybe there were some other people reporting it too), has now admitted an affair with Rielle Hunter, but insists he's not the baby's father.

So let's think this through a little bit.

First, the media. Will they admit now that they were utterly wrong all along to be suppressing this story? It's the headline story at every media outlet right now--even the Los Angeles Times. Will they apologize to the National Enquirer? Why did Edwards find the allegations compelling enough to respond to, while the media didn't even find them compelling enough to report in most cases?

Second, what about baby-faced liar John Edwards? He denied the affair for months and now admits he was lying the whole time. But he claims the child is not his. Is he lying again? The evidence is strong that he is. Edwards claims that the baby could not be his because the math doesn't work out with the baby's birth on February 27, 2008. He says the affair ended before he could have been the father. He also, according to ABC, made a special point of saying that the affair took place before his wife's cancer recurrence.

Elizabeth Edwards' cancer reoccurred in March 2007. Assuming normal gestation, this child would have been conceived in May 2007. If that child belongs to John Edwards, he's the world's biggest cad, and as a politician he knows this. It's over for him. So he claims that the affair ended in 2006. That's convenient if it's true. Yes, it makes him a jerk who cheated on his wife, but at least he's not a complete jerk who cheated on his dying wife.

But does that claim withstand even a moment's scrutiny? If the affair ended in 2006 as he claims, why was John Edwards in his "former" mistress's hotel room at 2am a couple of weeks ago, which he now admits? Why was he photographed in his former mistress's hotel room holding some other guy's baby? Why didn't his wife know about it, as he also admits to ABC? And if it's important to him that we know his wife didn't have terminal cancer when he had the affair, did she have less terminal cancer when he decided to visit his former mistress in California last month?

And perhaps the biggest question: as a trial lawyer worth tens of millions of dollars, is this really the best this clown can come up with?

UPDATE (5:31pm): Edwards has now released a public statement. It's a lot of fun. Here's a sampling:

Although I was honest in every painful detail with my family, I did not tell the public. When a supermarket tabloid told a version of the story, I used the fact that the story contained many falsities to deny it. But being 99% honest is no longer enough.

Get it? John Edwards is 99% honest! Why, that's almost perfectly honest! The only thing he lied about was cheating on his dying wife. He's only a little bit of a liar. 99% honest is a wonderful thing. Is that kind of like how his mistress was only a little pregnant?

In the course of several campaigns, I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric and narcissistic.

Gee, you don't say. I think that comes as a stunning surprise to all of us. How much did that haircut cost again?

If you want to beat me up – feel free. You cannot beat me up more than I have already beaten up myself.

Oh, I'll bet I can. Self pity is a nice note to strike when you've just been busted cheating on your dying wife and lying about it, though. And his statement still contains no explanation for why he was in Rielle Hunter's hotel room 2:40am only 2 1/2 weeks ago if the affair ended in 2006, and he says he will answer no more questions on the issue.

Well, I beg to differ, because I think the missus is going to have quite a few questions. "No, honest, honey. I broke it off two years ago, just like I told you then."

John Edwards Rielle Hunter illegitimate child media silence baby-faced liar

Radio (And TV And Print) Silence

I saw a hilarious ad on television the other day from Media Matters, the leftwing organization devoted to discovering conservative bias in the media. They were making the claim that....wait for it....the mainstream media was favoring John McCain over Barack Obama. But for the rest of us who are not experiencing feverish delusions, can there still be any doubt about the pronounced leftward bias of the media?

For the vast majority, this issue was settled long ago. But if there are still any holdouts, I offer to you as irrefutable proof, the mainstream media's utterly astounding handling of the story about John Edwards' illegitimate child. That is to say, they haven't handled it. At all. And yet, Edwards has been busted dead to rights.

Of course, the MSM's excuse is that the story was originally broken by the National Enquirer and so, they sniff, it's not worthy of them. The only problem is, whether it was the Enquirer or not, the story is, by all appearances, actually true. Former (and possibly future) vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, who was one of the three major Democratic presidential candidates, whose wife is terminally ill with cancer, has apparently fathered a child out of wedlock with a woman named Rielle Hunter. He even allowed a political crony to take the blame for him last December when the story first started dribbling out. Yet the story is utterly ignored by the mainstream media.

Let's imagine for a moment. Imagine that it's Dick Cheney. Or Mike Huckabee. Or Mitt Romney. Or any of a hundred other Republicans. Does the media hold back on the story? Do we not even see any of the "we're not reporting it as true, we're reporting it as something people are talking about" or the "can you believe this horrible smear campaign?" stories they've become famous for? Not a chance.

So why the total media blackout? The L.A. Times even ordered its reporters not to blog on the subject. Slate magazine is among the few liberal outlets arguing for sanity.

John Edwards Rielle Hunter illegitimate child media silence

Eating The Eggs While Killing The Chicken

I noticed in Slate that Christopher Hitchens has written an appreciation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer (who died over the weekend) who exposed the atrocities of the Soviet gulag in the 20th century. Of course, Solzhenitsyn was a great man and a true hero. But there's an irony in Hitchen's eulogy. He writes:

This is a kind of fortitude for which we do not have any facile name. The simplest way of phrasing it is to say that Solzhenitsyn lived "as if." Barely deigning to notice the sniggering, pick-nose bullies who followed him and harassed him, he carried on "as if" he were a free citizen, "as if" he had the right to study his own country's history, "as if" there were such a thing as human dignity.

The irony is that these "as ifs" were produced by Solzhenitsyn's strong Christian faith. Hitchens' belief system not only has no basis for producing such behavior, but none for even consistently praising it. Hitchens, in his radical atheism, believes that human life is nothing but the product of energy, time, and chance. We are, at bottom, nothing more than atoms banging together. Yet he lauds Solzhenitsyn for living "as if" there were such a thing as human dignity. If Hitchens believes there is such a thing, he didn't get that from his atheism--and is actually being inconsistent with it.

The irony is that, while Hitchens commends Solzhenitsyn's stand against the gulag, it was the gulag that was produced by Hitchens' atheism. Solzhenitsyn's stand on human dignity was produced by the Christianity that Hitchens hates, which views people not only as if they had inherent value, but as actually having it.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn Christopher Hitchens