My latest column is up on PJ Media. In it, I look at the Gallup poll that shows 91% of Americans are not satisfied with the way things are going in the US. What about that 9% that thinks otherwise – 16 million adults?

A sample:

Really now, who are these 16 million optimists?

I didn’t have far to go to find some. They are all over the blogosphere commenting on what they really believe is going on in America. To a few of us, this isn’t just a manufactured crisis; it’s a plot — a dastardly plan to torpedo John McCain’s candidacy. The media is in cahoots with the Democrats to suppress all the good news, not to mention burying the polls showing McCain far ahead and George Bush beloved of our countrymen. The economy really isn’t all that bad, Iraq is virtually a paradise of peace and tranquility, who needs health insurance when we’ve got emergency rooms that won’t turn anyone away, and Republicans are going to take back the House and Senate.

I wish I could say that I made all that up but I didn’t. Such comments have appeared on this site from time to time and if you peruse the comment sections on other blogs, you know I write the truth (the bit about health insurance was actually uttered by a GOP House candidate in my district). Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt. And reality these days can be tough to accept, especially if you’re a partisan Republican.

So I would guess that the overwhelming majority of that 9% of us who are satisfied with how things are going in America simply don’t want to accept that we have bitten into a gigantic crap sandwich and we’ll be on a steady diet of crapola for the foreseeable future.

Read the whole thing.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show,, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, Jazz Shaw of The Moderate Voice and Midstream Radio is multi-tasking, moderating the comments over at Hot Air while joining me in the second chair to take a look at the upcoming Townhall and talk about why this is probably McCain’s Gettysburg.

The show will air from 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

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The McCain campaign is perplexed, bothered, and bewildered of late. Despite Barack Obama’s past associations with radical bombers, nauseating racial bigots, and anti-semitic Palestinians, the media doesn’t seem to want to expose the extent of those relationships nor ask tough questions as to how the views of these extremists might have shaped or impacted his own.

We can – and in many cases we should – chalk this up to a shameless bias on the part of the media toward Barack Obama and the Democrats. But something much simpler is at work, something that makes any attack on Obama by McCain using his radical associations as a backdrop to question his judgement an exercise in futility.

The voters don’t care.

America did not invent the fine old custom of tar and feathering crooked, lying, corrupt charlatans and riding them out of town on a rail (the English have been doing it for 800 years). But the mood of the American voter is so outraged at the financial crisis we are in that if I were a Congressman campaigning at home, I’d steer clear of pillow and asphalt factories for a while.

The fact is, the economy is of such overriding concern, all else in the campaign pales in comparison. The voter simply doesn’t want to hear about Ayers, Wright, Rezko or any other problematic Obama friendship. Nor, I suspect, are they keen to relive the Keating 5 fiasco or read about any other manufactured McCain association by the press.

This piece this morning by Peter Yost of the AP is a stretch – a laughably ridiculous attempt to equate John McCain’s tangential relationship to a group that later assisted in training El Salvadoran death squads with Obama’s close, personal, association with William Ayers. Yost is sticking out his tongue and saying “neener, neener, neener,” hoping that the reader will nod their head and say “By Jiminy! McCain hung around with terrorists too!”

The problem is, Yost destroys his own case in the body of the piece:

The U.S. Council for World Freedom was part of an international organization linked to former Nazi collaborators and ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America. The group was dedicated to stamping out communism around the globe.

The council’s founder, retired Army Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, said McCain became associated with the organization in the early 1980s as McCain was launching his political career in Arizona. Singlaub said McCain was a supporter but not an active member in the group.

“McCain was a new guy on the block learning the ropes,” Singlaub told The Associated Press in an interview. “I think I met him in the Washington area when he was just a new congressman. We had McCain on the board to make him feel like he wasn’t left out. It looks good to have names on a letterhead who are well-known and appreciated.

“I don’t recall talking to McCain at all on the work of the group,” Singlaub said.

McCain says he resigned from the group in 1984 and asked to have his name removed from the letterhead in 1986. Singlaub also had this to say about McCain’s “involvement:”

“I don’t ever remember hearing about his resigning, but I really wasn’t worried about that part of our activities, a housekeeping thing,” said Singlaub. “If he didn’t want to be on the board that’s OK. It wasn’t as if he had been active participant and we were going to miss his help. He had no active interest. He certainly supported us.”

Compare McCain’s “involvement” with these nuts to Obama’s working relationship with Ayers, their friendship going back 20 years, and Obama’s clear desire to implement the radical educational agenda of Ayers when he was president of the Annenberg project. There is absolutely no symmetry here – none. And yet Yost, being a good little AP hack, tries to create some out of whole cloth.

But this is a digression from the reality of what is going on in America – the America not visited much by candidates and certainly not commented on by anyone in the mainstream media.

The America of ordinary, hard working people is fearful. And why shouldn’t they be? If they’re like me – barely able to grasp what the hell is going on in the financial markets – they nevertheless know that it is unprecedented and that some very smart people are extremely worried. When 60% of us believe we are headed for a 1930’s style depression, catcalls from candidates about who their friends might be simply doesn’t resonate. People have much bigger worries on their minds.

Admittedly, there are precious few of these “wise men” who are warning of a worldwide depression. A severe downturn, yes. Perhaps even an altering of the international financial system that would not be favorable to the United States. But soup lines and massive deflation are not currently foreseeable – not as long as the Fed is able to pump hundreds of billions of dollars at will into the banking system in order to keep it afloat until some semblance of confidence and order return to the markets.

How long can that go on? From Richard Fernandez’s site, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writing in the Telegraph:

During the past week, we have tipped over the edge, into the middle of the abyss. Systemic collapse is in full train. The Netherlands has just rushed through a second, more sweeping nationalisation of Fortis. Ireland and Greece have had to rescue all their banks. Iceland is facing an Argentine denouement. The US commercial paper market is closed. It shrank $95bn last week, and has lost $208bn in three weeks. The interbank lending market has seized up. There are almost no bids. It is a ghost market. Healthy companies cannot roll over debt. Some will have to sack staff today to stave off default. As the unflappable Warren Buffett puts it, the credit freeze is “sucking blood” out of the economy. “In my adult lifetime, I don’t think I’ve ever seen people as fearful,” he said. We are fast approaching the point of no return. The only way out of this calamitous descent is “shock and awe” on a global scale, and even that may not be enough.

In the first full trading day following the bailout, stocks lost 370 points. Yes, there are alarmists out there (Paul Krugman, please go on a nice, long vacation. I hear Bellvue has some padded rooms with wonderful views.). But when Warren Buffet gets nervous, the American people who are fearful don’t appear quite so stupid and naive, now do they?

The bottom line is that attacks on character are being ignored at the moment by the voter. All they want to hear is what each candidate will do to protect them from this financial storm that is sinking so many huge and seemingly indestructible companies. The thinking goes, “If Lehman Brothers can go under, am I next?” In a free country, people have a very proprietary sense of their own money and how safe it is.

They don’t have to be told things could get a lot worse. They sense it, as a deer might sense a wolf nearby. It can’t smell the wolf but it senses danger nevertheless. Voters may not entirely understand the ins and outs of international finance, but they sense their money, their livelihoods are in peril.Hence, all other issues of the campaign – the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran, education, abortion, gun rights – the whole mish mash of topics that have been fought over and discussed in this campaign now take a seat at the back of the bus as the voter wants his questions answered on the economy.

Hugh Hewitt seems optimistic that if McCain can keep hammering Obama on Ayers while showing the voters how disasterous an Obama presidency would be for the economy, he might still pull it out:

As more details emerge on the Obama-Ayers connection (here’s a short story  from 1997 on Ayers that features both Obamas and which suggests that Michelle Obama organized the program that featured both Ayers and her husband), the Obama talking heads are hysterical with outrage, which is a clear signal to Team McCain to keep digging and swinging on the subject of Obama’s judgement. Just who, after all, does he intend to staff the 3,000 executive branch jobs with?  Who will be at Defense and Justice and Treasury and State?. 

The message also has to be targeted at the reality that the dizzying declines in the markets cannot be arrested and reversed with tax hikes and unemployment benefit extensions.  Even as people shudder at the rapid decline in their savings and retirement accounts, they have to be trusted to know that anti-growth polices of the sort being pushed by Obama will simply drive business, jobs and growth overseas.  A tax hike agenda of the sort pushed by Obama right now is economic suicide, and John McCain has to forcefully say so.

If raising taxes and extending unemployment is what it is going to take to keep voter’s money safe, they would be willing to vote for the devil himself. Obama might not have good ideas on what to do about the crisis. But that isn’t the point. It comes down to who the voters believe. And the sad fact is John McCain, as a member of the party in power in the White House, has about as much credibility on the economy as my pet cat Snowball.  

I wish it were otherwise. The more we find out about Obama’s relationship with Ayers the more I am troubled. Even more troubling has been a systematic campaign by Obama and his handlers to minimize and even lie about this relationship at every turn. Despite yeoman work done by David Freddoso and Stanley Kurtz of The National Review on how Obama helped Ayers try and implement some frighteningly radical educational ideas on the unsuspecting parents and schoolchildren of Chicago, it appears that it will all go for naught. The voter sees the effort by the McCain campaign to attack Obama on his radical associations as “just playing politics.”

And that is something they don’t want to see. They are hopping mad and scared. That’s a combination that Obama is having little trouble exploiting to his own advantage.

It appears this first Sunday in October that John McCain and the Republicans are in deep trouble; that the Democrats, riding a wave of disgust and revulsion among voters over what they have been told is a financial crisis wholely the fault of the last 8 years of incompetence and mis-management, appear poised to take anywhere from 6-8 senate seats and more than 20 House seats away from the GOP. Meanwhile, John McCain slips further behind in key states and a pall of gloom has descended over the GOP professional class.

The political pros I am in contact with are extremely pessimistic about McCain’s chances at this point and are alarmed at the prospect that the Democrats could slaughter the GOP in the Senate. These are no-nonsense people who have been in the business of for many years. They are familiar with the ups and downs of a campaign and are not wont to panic at the first downturn in their candidate’s numbers.

To understand their concern, we must look at history. For a candidate to be down 8 points nationally 4 weeks before the election means he would have to make up 2 percentage points a week from now until November 4 in order to overcome that deficit. (Note: As a candidate’s national numbers rise, there is a corresponding rise in state numbers although, as we shall see shortly, that isn’t always necessarily enough to win.) That doesn’t sound like a lot to overcome until you begin to consider that the number of undecided voters this late in the campaign is limited. Hence, as undecideds begin to break, the candidate who is trailing must win a very large percentage of them in order to catch up.

The fact is, there are few examples of a candidate being as far behind this late in the campaign who are able to overcome and win in the end. Humphrey was 11 points down a month before the election and then began a blistering attack on Nixon that was almost enough to overtake him. Gerald Ford was 10 points down to Jimmy Carter and made a valiant charge that came up short.

Notice anything about those examples? The candidate who was behind made it close but was never able to overcome the entire deficit. I fully expect McCain to come back somewhat in the national polls – especially now that it appears he will attack Obama with everything but the kitchen sink – but history is telling us it won’t be enough.

The problem McCain has is that he must play defense in too many states while his opportunities for flipping some blue states are few and getting fewer. Pennsylvania is a good example. Just a few short weeks ago, McCain appeared to be on the rise in the Keystone state, with some polls showing him within the margin of error. But the last 2 weeks have been disasterous. McCain now trails by 15 and 12 points in the two most recent polls and it appears that PA is now beyond reach.

One of my correspondents said that organized labor is pouring massive amounts of money and people into Michigan – resources McCain cannot possibly match – which is why he has pulled his own advertising in the state. The RNC will continue to run ads and it is possible that Palin will be dispatched to show the flag every once and a while. But Michigan also appears at this point to be a poor target for the McCain camp and they will concentrate more resources in Wisconsin and perhaps Minnesota.

As for defense, it is pretty depressing. Obama has surged ahead in Virginia, Colorado, and New Mexico while drawing virtually even in North Carolina (!) and Nevada. Florida and Ohio look especially bad considering that if McCain can’t win either of those two states, we are probably looking at a 375+ electoral vote landslide.

Iowa is another red state where McCain appears to be headed for defeat. Missouri is very close. West Virginia may be in play. The upshot is that Obama has the money, the resources, the 527’s, the unions, and an extremely angry base hungry for Republican blood. John McCain is being buried by the economic crisis and an inability to convince the electorate that Obama’s inexperience, naivete, and radical associations should disqualify him from the presidency.

There are two more debates where Obama may slip up. That’s just about all McCain has at this point I think. There is also the possibility that some outside force might intrude on the campaign; a foreign crisis of some kind would shift the race from one that is largely about the economy to one that would highlight national security. But I think that a much more remote possibility than Obama saying something stupid that would remind people what a rookie he truly is.

There is a real chance that McCain’s attack on Obama’s radical associations will backfire and he will fall further behind. If that happens, election day will see a triumphant Democratic party with the presidency, a veto-proof senate, and much larger margin in the House.

In short, conservatives worst nightmare would be upon us; an ultra liberal president who can do anything he wants. And judging by what we know of Obama, he will attempt to remake America in the image of a European social democracy.

A brave new world, indeed.

The Kingston Trio’s Nick Reynolds with his trademark tenor guitar.

Nick Reyonolds, a founding member of The Kingston Trio, one of the most influential musical groups in modern history, died on Thursday in San Diego. He was 75.

His obituary will show that Reynolds, Bob Shane, and Dave Guard started the trio in the late 1950’s, achieving their first success with the recording of the tragic folk tune Tom Dooley in 1958, and subsequently hitting the top of the charts with a series of albums that changed the face of American music and paved the way for such artists as Peter, Paul, and Mary, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Simon and Garfunkel, and a host of other folk-rock artists whose music influenced generations of Americans.

“The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta. . . . From Odetta, I went to Harry Belafonte, the Kingston Trio, little by little uncovering more as I went along,” Bob Dylan once said.

Reynolds typically handled the middle part of the trio’s scintillating three-part harmonies, sometimes adding bongos, congas and other percussion accents. Although the group’s music generally shied away from the politicized content of such forebears as Woody Guthrie and the Weavers, its commercial breakthrough in the late 1950s represented a clean-cut alternative to the sexualized rock ‘n’ roll of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and others that had American teens in its grip. And it helped set the stage for folk-rooted protest singers such as Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul & Mary.

“It really started with the Weavers, in the early ‘50s,” Reynolds said in a 2006 interview, referring to the New York-based quartet that included Pete Seeger. “We were big fans of theirs, but they got blacklisted in the McCarthy era. Their music was controversial. Suddenly, they couldn’t get any airplay; they couldn’t get booked into the big hotels, nothin’.

“We played their kind of music when we were first performing in colleges. But when we formed the trio . . . we had to sit down and make a decision: Are we going to remain apolitical with our music? Or are we going to slit our throats and get blacklisted for doing protest music? We decided we’d like to stay in this business for a while. And we got criticized a lot for that. . . . If Bob Dylan or Joan Baez had come out at that time, they’d have been dead in the water. But four or five years later, [their music] became commercially viable.”

Purists will debate whether or not Reynolds and the Trio were actually “folk” artists in the “traditional” sense of the term. In truth, the boys themselves realized their rather unique position in the folk firmament and never tried to be anything other than that which they presented themselves; first class entertainers and popularizers of the folk genre.

In addition to the Kingston Trio, the “Folk Revival” that brought to the fore artists like Pete Seeger and The Weavers, Harry Belafonte, The Chad Mitchell Trio, The Limelighters, and dozens more hit college campuses in the late 50’s and early 60’s. But it was one song by the Kingston Trio that brought the revival to the Moran house and forever after made folk music a part of our family.

The story, first told around family campfires, is that my father, who never listened to music on the radio if he could help it, evidently heard the Trio’s Charlie and the M.T.A. – about as close to a political protest song the Trio ever got – and brought home the album it was on, The Kingston Trio “At Large.” My father had already taken a liking to Belafonte’s husky-voiced calypso stylings so exposing us to the more traditional folk music sung by the Kingston Trio (named after Kingston, Jamaica because an earlier incarnation of the group sang calypso numbers) was an easy sell.

One of our number (there would eventually be 10 of us) became so enchanted with the music being sung by the Trio that he lobbied my parents for a guitar the next Christmas. My brother Jim was all of 11 years old when he found a cheap Silvertone under the tree but he quickly mastered the three or four guitar chords that allowed him to play many of the songs on that album as well as learn a few other favorites gleaned from the sudden appearance in the house of folk songbooks, that all to this day, form the basis of my own love for music.

There is no doubt in my mind that the music of the Kingston Trio and other folk artists brought our family closer together. Through the years, we welcomed into our family artists like The Clancey Brothers and Tommy Makem (who, as I explain here, helped us all discover our Irish heritage), the Chad Mitchell Trio, Gordon Lightfoot, Bob Dylan, as well as older, less well known folkies like Paxton, Blind Lemon, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Houston, Cisco, and Monroe. Their versions of the ancient work songs, drinking songs, shanties, love songs, protest songs, and songs of natural and man made disasters became a staple at family gatherings for the last half a century.

So the death of Reynolds has meaning for me beyond the normal mourning I might feel at the passing of a familiar figure from my youth. It is, in fact, like experiencing the death of a relative, someone who has walked beside me most of my life and who gave me an enormous amount of joy and a feeling of closeness with my family.

Reynolds and Bob Shane started a “fantasy camp” later in life where my brother Jim met the guys and actually performed with them. At the camp, he met a couple of other folk artists and they started a trio of their own – “Chilly Winds.” With more than 146,000 YouTube viewings of their performances, the group proves how the music of The Kingston Trio and other folk artists of the “revival” period have endured.

For in truth, many of the songs played by Chilly Winds and the Kingston Trio are as much a part of the American soul as the events and people they celebrate. Our national consciousness is plugged into this music and a large part of what makes us unique can be found in the richness and diversity of our folk music. From the Delta blues to the Scotch-Irish traditionals, the Cajun experience, the old Negro spirituals, and even popular music that has stood the test of time and become part of the American folk songbook like Tenting Tonight and other Civil War standards – all of these and music from other countries, other cultures have immeasurably enriched the American experience and have formed the background and rhythm of our family’s life.

A whole new generation of Morans have been exposed to the music of my youth and have embraced it as willingly and as lovingly as their fathers and mothers did. This is why the music of Nick Reynolds, the Kingston Trio, and other folk artists will never disappear; these timeless classics, when heard or sung together as a family, ensure that the bonds that make life worth living are strengthened beyond measure and allows us to share the common heritage we all claim by birthright as Americans.

UPDATE

It is an honor to welcome members and posters of The Kingston Crossroads who are probably the only group of people whose love of folk music exceeds my own.

Now, pay no attention to my brother Jim who is a Humphrey liberal (as opposed to an Obama liberal or a Noam Chomsky liberal) and while generally a sensible fellow, nevertheless usually is able to drive me to distraction with his political views. Here on this site you will find rational, reasoned critiques of American politics. The fact that those critiques come mostly from other people, however, shouldn’t deter you from perusing some of my more entertaining spittle flecked rants that target both so-called “conservatives” who struggle mightily to achieve a 19th century consciousness and modern day liberals who struggle mightily to achieve sentience.

As for Jim – yes, he was 11 years old at one time in his life. He may have even been 10 years old at one point but the evidence for that is suspect, coming as it does from recently discovered diaries excavated from a site in Northridge. Far more likely – Jim sprang fully growed with a Martin in one hand and a glass of Chivas in the other, holding forth on Chaucer (or Jacqueline Susanne) while strumming the Martin with his toes and swilling the Chivas through his ear and singing Jug of Punch with a perfect brogue.

A talented man, there…

UPDATE II

My brother Jim emails with some corrections:

Great job, but

a) the fantasy camp was a John Stewart project that Nick agreed to be a part of.

It had to be that way. In the 2nd configuration ofthe original group, Reynolds played tenor guitar (an odd instrument that few people have) and sang tenor parts (hard) and Stewart played banjo (hard) and lead guitar (hard) and sang the more complicated harmonies high and low. Bob Shane played rhythm guitar strumming (he did it VERY well, but faking it is easy) and he sang leads and melodies (best voice in the group, some say in the whole folk revival) – so the fantasy element was essentially to be Bob Shane, sing the lead, and strum three chords.

Shane actually tended to avoid the camp for the first few years, popping in only occasionally and incognito during the shows. He was always leery of anything Kingston that he didn’t control and that even vaguely threatened the integrity of his touring group (of which he was a part until 2004 and that still tours, now with no original members). In the last few years, Shane has come to every show, sits front row center, beams like a proud father, and sings along from the audience on every song – and these are 3 1/2 to 4 hour shows.

b) the wire services made on unbelievable gaffe, repeated everywhere and included in the quotation in your piece, about Nick singing the “middle range”. Nick sang the HIGH harmonies, the tenor parts, and it is his voice that soars above the others on songs like Tom Dooley.

Most Trio fans aren’t aware of how often Nick sang midrange – maybe 12 or 15 songs out of 300 recorded (then Shane would do the high part). MTA is one of those songs. Nick sings lead and melody on the chorus. The high voice is Shane’s.

I missed the fantasy camp error and decided to leave the midrange thing alone, even though it started with LA Times writer Randy Lewis. People seldom pay attention to retractions, however prominently placed. It’s the first impression that a piece makes – and Nick getting all the attention now (including on CNN and George Stephanopoulous and elsewhere) is what counts.

My jaw hit the floor when I heard Biden say this:

Here’s what the president said when we said no. He insisted on elections on the West Bank, when I said, and others said, and Barack Obama said, “Big mistake. Hamas will win. You’ll legitimize them.” What happened? Hamas won. When we kicked—along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, “Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know—if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.”
Now what’s happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel.

Wha? Who? Kicked Hezb’allah out of where? Urged we send who into what? This is really an incredible gaffe – far more serious than anything Sarah Palin has ever said anywhere.

Let’s allow a “Foreign Policy Insider” quoted at The Corner, to try and untangle this web of lies, misstatements, and downright loony contentions:

Well, Hezbollah’s been there since the early 1980’s of course, blossoming throughout the 1990’s to become now over a third of the population of Lebanon with 2 cabinet members, a host of parliamentarians, and schools, clinics, and basically an entirely separate governance infrastructure in all of southern Lebanon and elsewhere. I suppose the throwing out of Hezbollah was the dismal and failed Israeli campaign of 2006 which dislodged nothing? Or was it Israeli’s occupation of Southern Lebanon from 1982 – 1999? Don’t remember an Obama position on NATO replacing Israeli occupation then. As for NATO going in after the 2006 debacle, well, I’m the one who rounded up 8,000 French and Italians and a few thousand other Euros to go into Southern Lebanon along with an assortment of others in August 2006 and while working that issue for about 40 straight days I don’t remember a peep from Biden or Obama about NATO - which wouldn’t be budged despite our intense pressure in Mons. So, we went straight to Rome and Paris. Que sera, sera.

In any case, he was all bluff and bluster and too bad she didn’t have time during debate prep to get his very mixed record on foreign policy stuff, he’s as good as he is bad at foreign policy and that is just a comment on his mastery, not on his policy positions…which have been more bad than good.

Allow me to add a few things. First, Hezb’allah may have only two cabinet ministers but they control the entire opposition bloc of 11 ministers in the 30 seat government. They currently control 62 of the 128 member Lebanese Parliament. Now for the meat of Biden’s claims.

Of course, no one “threw Hezb’allah out of Lebanon.” They have been there all along as the expert above notes. The Lebanese people threw the Syrians out of Lebanon, with no help from liberal Democrats like Biden and Obama, but with a great big behind the scenes lift from France and the US. It was we who put the bug in King Abdullah’s ear to lobby the Syrians to get while the going was good as the French worked directly on Baby Assad. The combination worked wonderfully and the Syrians left in a hurry – after a couple of million Lebanese took to the streets in a breathtaking show of defiance to tyranny and love of freedom.

Joe Biden – or any rational human being on this planet anyway – never recommended that NATO be dispatched to “fill the vacuum.” It is a lie. If it had been proposed. Colin Powell would have been laughed out of the room – something we should do to Biden at this point because he compounded his gaffe by evidently believing that not having NATO as a buffer between Israel and Hezb’allah – an absolute impossibility mind you – led to the ascension of Hezb’allah in Lebanon as a political power.

Where has Biden been for the last 20 years – at least since the Taif Accords were signed in 1989 which gave Hezb’allah a free hand in the southern part of the country and then pressuring the Lebanese government to formally designate them as “the resistance” to Israel? Hezb’allah’s rise is directly related to Iran’s funding of their proxy to the tune of around $250 million a year.

It is unbelievable to me that no one – not one single story in the press that I’ve read about the debate last night (I haven’t read them all so there may be some analysis I’ve missed) – has seen fit to mention this monumental gaffe, this horible misstatement of history, misreading of the situation in Lebanon, and the out and out lie that he and Obama recommended NATO troops move in after Syria was kicked out. This gaffe should be the headline that comes out of the debate; “Chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee is a Buffoon.” Instead, it slides by and Palin is called out for mispronouncing the name of our commanding general in Afghanistan.

Unbelievable.

UPDATE

Michael Totten – who has been to Lebanon several times and knows the people and politics as well as any journalist in America – writes in Commentary this morning:

What on Earth is he talking about? The United States and France may have kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon in an alternate universe, but nothing even remotely like that ever happened in this one.
Nobody – nobody – has ever kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon. Not the United States. Not France. Not Israel. And not the Lebanese. Nobody.
Joe Biden has literally no idea what he’s talking about.
It’s too bad debate moderator Gwen Ifill didn’t catch him and ask a follow up question: When did the United States and France kick Hezbollah out of Lebanon?
The answer? Never. And did Biden and Senator Barack Obama really say NATO troops should be sent into Lebanon? When did they say that? Why would they say that? They certainly didn’t say it because NATO needed to prevent Hezbollah from returning-since Hezbollah never went anywhere.
I tried to chalk this one up as just the latest of Biden’s colorful gaffes. Did he mean to say “we kicked Syria out of Lebanon?” But that wouldn’t make any more sense. First of all, the Lebanese kicked Syria out of Lebanon. Not the United States, and not France. But he clearly meant to say Hezbollah, not Syria, because he correctly notes just a few sentences later that Hezbollah is part of Lebanon’s government. He wasn’t talking about Syria. He was talking about Hezbollah all the way through, at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of his outlandish assertion.

Taking a second look at it, Michael may be right – that Biden is so clueless he actually meant Hezb’allah and not Syria. This coupled with his rather strange answer on Pakistan’s stability, that it is somehow within the power of the US president to affect what is happening on the ground in Pakistan beyond doing what the Bush Administration has been doing since 2001, calls into question the depth of Biden’s knowledge about any foreign policy issue.

Hat Tip: Ed Lasky

This blog post originally appeared in The American Thinker

No, she’s not smoother than Joe Biden. She was not the better debater (she lost badly on points). She doesn’t have the depth of knowledge, the experience, the ease with “Washington speak” that Biden demonstrated – especially in foreign policy.

But Sarah Palin has something Joe Biden and every other politician in America would give their right eye to possess – the innate ability to look a camera straight in the lens and make a connection with the hearts of ordinary Americans.

Palin proved the one thing she had to prove; she belongs on The Big Stage. She might not be the brightest star in the firmament intellectually. But when she spoke, there was authority and confidence behind the words that belied every nasty thing written and spoken about her over the last few weeks. In fact, her performance made the McCain campaign handlers look like idiots. What the hell have they been doing hiding this woman for all this time? Are they nuts? I’m not the only one who underestimated this woman. The McCain people have as well. And at least I have an excuse – I’m ignorant. They’re supposed to know her, know her strengths and weaknesses.

There was a point with about 20 minutes to go in the debate where something happened that I never thought remotely possible; she took over the stage and dominated it with her personality. I believe they were talking about education and as the words poured out in that Midwestern twang, her eyes twinkled and that 100,000 watt smile lit up the hall, she turned on the charm and sincerity, and the stage suddenly shrank while Biden appeared a mere appendage to the broadcast.

She was totally at ease, referring some of her remarks to the moderator Gwen Ifill (who I thought bent over backwards to be fair – no doubt a consequence of her becoming a target after it was revealed she was writing a book partially about the Obama campaign) and nodding and looking at Biden on occasion. She did it effortlessly and without art or artifice. Biden sensed what was happening but couldn’t do anything. She was in charge, period. It was at that point, that I thought she might not be ready to be president from day one but that someday, she will be on a similar stage as a nominee for president of the Republican party.

The left is screaming tonight, trying to make believe that nothing has changed, that Palin is still a dunce, still out of her league. I would suggest they rerun the last hour and half and watch with a little more of an objective mind. She stood toe to toe with Biden (sometimes – other times she avoided direct combat) and bloodied him but good a couple of times. A boxing analogy would be the heavyweight champion boxing a middleweight. The lighter fighter might be getting pounded here and there but when getting in close, scores repeatedly with good body punches.

And, of course, the crowd is always with the underdog. Despite Biden’s competent performance, Palin will probably be narrowly declared the winner in tomorrow’s polls. Even her bitterest foes must acknowledge her ability to connect with ordinary people. That is a gift that any liberal only dreams of being able to do. For the left, it is not about connecting to average Americans. It is about average Americans acknowledging the liberal’s superior intellect and judgement and letting them run our lives. Unfortunately, in such times as these, that appears to be what the people are about to do.

I must confess that before the debate I was prepared for Mrs. Stumblebum – a female Gerald Ford tripping over her words and embarrassing herself on foreign policy questions. What I got was a composed, collected candidate who may have been deficient in the depth of her answers but nevertheless demonstrated a basic knowledge and familiarity with the issues. The nuances of instability in Pakistan might escape her (something an American president can do little about at this point anyway). But she had absolutely no trouble identifying why Ahmadinejad is an enemy of anyone who loves civilization and why it is of paramount importance that he not get his hands on nuclear weapons.

So I was wrong about her as far as how badly she would do. Not the first time I’ve been wrong on this blog and it won’t be the last. The question of the hour is does this change the race in any way? Will it kick start the McCain campaign and start a much needed comeback?

My sense is that it has stopped the bleeding but that the way back for McCain will not be through anything that Sarah Palin can do. She may have stopped the exodus of independents and women from the McCain camp but as far as winning any of them back I am just not convinced that a Vice Presidential candidate – no matter how well she performs in a debate or how she connects with ordinary voters – is up to that challenge.

For McCain to get back in the race, he must do it himself. Many Republicans are urging McCain to throw the kitchen sink at Obama – Ayers, Wright, Rezko, the Chicago Machine – the whole shebang of radicals, shady characters, and questionable associations. Obama can easily brush that kind of attack aside as an act of desperation by McCain. What he can’t brush aside is his record, or rather his lack thereof. McCain needs to go hard after Obama on the question of experience. It’s his best shot and he can bloody him at the remaining debates if he consistently hits that note. McCain must show that electing Obama is a risk. And in these uncertain times, that’s one thing the United States cannot afford.

My good friend Kender of Kender’s Musings has run into a spot of bad luck and is asking for help.

Knowing Kender, it is killing him to go public with his problems. And knowing how proud he is, I know he is devastated over having to ask for our help at this low point in his life.

The guy is a marvel – what he has to overcome on a daily basis is…well he wouldn’t want me to write about it so I won’t. Suffice it to say, the guy lives the word courage 24 hours a day.

And as I told him last night – who else but your friends and readers should be helping you…THE GOVERNMENT? Anyone who knows Kender knows full well that’s all I had to say to get him to put his request for help up on his blog.

Many of you are probably familiar with Kender if you visit this site – he’s been on my radio show a couple of times, most recently he was on my 9/11 Memorial Show. He is funny, passionate, witty, opinionated, loud, obnoxious and a bane to liberals and trolls all across the blogosphere. For someone like that, can’t you see your way clear to dropping a few bucks in his tip jar?

Please go to his site and donate generously.

Won’t you help my friend in his hour of need? I am counting on all of you.

Thanks.

ed.

Note: If you don’t want to donate via Paypal, you can click on my Amazon donation button on my left sidebar and give that way. I will pass your donation on to Kender along with your email addy so he can thank you.