Right Wing Nut House

Leave it to Bob Greene, an old Chicago Trib columnist, to wonder in this CNN piece what the world would have been like if former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka had run for the Senate in 2004.

Greene has always had a unique point of view. This made him one of America’s great columnists in my opinion as well as an entertaining author. He wrote one of the best sports books ever published with Hang Time: Days and Dreams with Michael Jordan which was not only touching and funny but captured the real essence of perhaps the greatest athlete of the 20th century (yeah, yeah, yeah - so sue me. Maybe I’ll write a column explaining why some day.)

He doesn’t write columns anymore since being fired for a fling with a school age girl, revealed in 2002. And he’s apparently a kind of roué about women in general. But there is no questioning his talent. The man is a writer.

But Greene is spot on in making the point that an Obama-Ditka race would have been one for the ages. And I submit further that even if Ditka hadn’t won, it may very well have affected the 2008 race in very important ways.

The 2004 GOP primary was an expensive affair that year with eventual winner, businessman Jack Ryan (husband of actress Jeri Ryan - Seven-of-Nine in Star Trek Voyager and also a star of Boston Legal) defeating now perennial joke of a candidate Steve Oberweiss.

The Obama campaign was probably not directly involved in the effort to out the Ryan child custody files through a lawsuit filed by the Chicago Trib. But there is little doubt they were the ones who put the original bug in the ears of the press about some pretty strange stuff in those records - stuff they knew would sink Ryan.

The Wikpedia entry on the matter illustrates why anyone who trusts Barack Obama and believes him to be a different kind of politician should have their head examined:

As the campaign progressed, the lawsuit brought by the Chicago Tribune to open child custody files from Ryan’s divorce was still continuing. Barack Obama’s backers emailed reporters about the divorce controversy, but refrained from on-the-record commentary about the divorce files.[8] On March 29, 2004, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Schnider ruled that several of the Ryans’ divorce records should be opened to the public, and ruled that a court-appointed referee would later decide which custody files should remain sealed to protect the interests of Ryan’s young child.[9] A few days later, on April 2, 2004, Barack Obama changed his position about the Ryans’ soon-to-be-released divorce records, and called on Democrats to not inject them into the campaign.

In other words, after Obama knew the files were going to be released anyway, he piously proclaimed that Democrats “should not inject them in the campaign.”

What an effing tool.

At any rate, the files contained sexual dynamite:

On June 22, 2004, after receiving the report from the court-appointed referee, the judge released the files that were deemed consistent with the interests of Ryan’s young child. In those files, Jeri Ryan alleged that Jack Ryan had taken her to sex clubs in several cities, intending for them to have sex in public. The decision to release the files generated much controversy because it went against both parents’ direct request, and because it reversed the earlier decision to seal the papers in the best interest of the child. Jim Oberweis, Ryan’s defeated GOP opponent, commented that “these are allegations made in a divorce hearing, and we all know people tend to say things that aren’t necessarily true in divorce proceedings when there is money involved and custody of children involved.”

It should be noted that Jeri Ryan made a point of continuing to support Jack’s candidacy - even though they were divorced. She made numerous appearances at his side and had nothing but praise for him when she was interviewed.

But the state GOP - who didn’t care for Ryan much anyway - knew he was dead meat and forced him to withdraw. Their problem? No one else wanted to step in and take Ryan’s place. The party asked two former Illinois governors, two state senators, and several wealthy businessmen - all turned them down.

But then a movement started to ask former Chicago Bears Coach, and one of the most popular celebrities in Illinois, Mike Ditka to save the GOP’s bacon. If he had accepted, would it have changed history?

A lot of people in Illinois thought Ditka had a pretty good chance to win, had he accepted the invitation to run. Remember: four years ago, Obama was a relative unknown. He was back in the state senate after having been defeated badly in a 2000 primary in which he sought to run for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Ditka, on the other hand, was one of the most famous– and in many, many places, beloved– people in the state of Illinois. He was controversial, yes, but that’s what his admirers liked about him. He was instantly recognizable in every corner of the state– he would have drawn enormous crowds to rallies. Mike Ditka, the icon, against Barack Obama, the novice?

“I am who I am,” Ditka told me. “People know that.”

Had Ditka run and won, there isn’t a way in the world that Obama would have been in the race for the White House now. And history would have been completely rewritten.

Greene may be overstating Ditka’s chances. Da Coach may very well have been a walking, talking gaffe machine whose ignorance of national issues would have made his candidacy problematic to say the least. Some of us were shuddering over the fact that every press appearance would have been white knuckle time. And make no mistake. Ditka is very, very conservative - a far cry from the usual Illinois Republican winner who tend toward the more moderate conservatism in the tradition of a Jim Thompson or Jim Edgar. Da Coach’s in your face style may have proved just too much for many people.

But stranger things have happened in politics. Ditka himself isn’t sure he could have beat Obama:

But what if Ditka had chosen to oppose Obama four years ago– and what if he had defeated Obama and been elected to the U.S. Senate?

“It would have been interesting, I’ll tell you that,” Ditka said over the phone. From our journey on the campaign road I had called him in Chicago, to see if he, too, had thought about what might have been.

“I don’t know what would have happened if I had run,” Ditka, 69, said. “I really don’t. Could I have beaten him? Maybe. Maybe not.”

Greene makes the excellent point that Obama was a relative unknown 4 years ago and a race against an icon like Ditka would have been close.The Democrat’s usual advantage in Cook County would have been considerably blunted. Any Democrat running statewide must come out of that county with at least 57% of the vote in order to overcome the GOP’s huge advantage downstate. No doubt Ditka would have done better than any other GOP candidate in Chicago where he is almost a God to many of the working class whites. Who knows? He may have even made inroads in the African American community. The point being, Obama would have been hardpressed to win enough votes in Cook County to win a statewide race.

As it was, the GOP committed political Hari Kiri and chose Maryland resident Alan Keyes (another walking, talking gaffe machine) to run when Ditka turned them down. Keyes was seen as a carpetbagger and made a series of fantastically inapt statements that doomed his candidacy.\

Now here is where I think a Ditka-Obama race would have changed history even if Ditka had lost:

Obama ran the most successful Senate campaign for a non-incumbent in 2004, and was so far ahead in polls that he soon began to campaign outside of Illinois in support of other Democratic candidates. He gave large sums of campaign funds to other candidates and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and sent many of his volunteers to work on other races, including that of now-Congresswoman Melissa Bean who defeated then-Congressman Phil Crane in that year’s election. Obama and Keyes differed on many issues including school vouchers and tax cuts, both of which Keyes supported and Obama opposed.

Because he was so far ahead, Obama was able to campaign for several Democratic Senate and House candidates around the country while doling out money from his campaign to other races. This greased the skids with several important politicians in some vital states that Obama ended up winning in his brutal primary race against Hillary Clinton.

Might he have had those politicians in his corner if he hadn’t been able to leave Illinois? If Obama had been forced to spend every dime he raised and campaign in Illinois down to the wire in order to beat Ditka, would he have been able to beat Hillary Clinton?

That is a question that must remain in the realm of the counterfactual. We will just never know.

A fascinating discussion on the internets today about conservatism. It dovetails nicely with my post from yesterday  and with J.R. Dunn’s great blog post in American Thinker where JR talks about conservative elites and how out of touch they are with the heartland:

We need to know the precise reasons why too many of the core commentators of our movement turned on Sarah Palin. That is the only way that we can discover if the situation can be salvaged. What we’ve heard so far is only part of the truth, at best. The response to Palin by such figures as Brooks, Frum, Brookhiser, Buckley, Parker, and Noonan (Krauthammer and Will have been considerably more rational, if still mistaken) has been the farthest thing in the world from reasoned. It has been vicious and feral. People do not react to a merely disagreeable political figure in this manner. All the individuals I mentioned, including Krauthammer and Will in this case, have attacked the McCain/Palin ticket with more ferocity than they have Barack Obama, the most socialist presidential candidate since Henry Wallace. This requires an explanation.People react that way only to threats. We have to know precisely why the conservative elite is threatened by a successful conservative governor to the point that they have completely lost their bearings. The reasons we’ve heard so far are nonsense — you don’t call a woman a “cancer” because she says “like” too much or wears flashy shoes. If these questions are not answered, then we will be obliged to formulate our own.

My opinion is no mystery to readers of this site — that the urban conservative crowd is frightened of Palin because she represents a threat to the standard model of conservatism constructed since the wilderness years of the 1930s, in which a highly-educated and well-connected East Coast coterie led a much larger, less-informed heartland contingent. This, like it or not, is elitism. By their very nature, elites tend to corrode over time. And Sarah Palin, through the very fact of her showing up, has revealed this to be the case in our circle. She upset the enclave conservative applecart, and now they are angry — a lot angrier than they have been at any lefties in recent memory.

Well, applecarts are made for upsetting — they must be knocked over from time to time, to assure against smugness, arrogance, and decay. You can’t simply decry events like this — you have to learn from them. That is what our little elite is refusing to do. And that tells us all we need to know.

What JR is talking about is what Ross Douthat of The Atlantic Monthly calls a Conservative “Cocoon:”

Just to clarify: Sarah Palin’s Alaska is not the conservative cocoon. Neither is Tim Pawlenty’s Minnesota, or Mike Huckabee’s Arkansas, or any other place out in flyover country where a populist conservative became a popular and successful governor. The cocoon is the constellation of mutually-reinforcing conservative institutions - think tanks and advocacy groups, talk-radio shows and websites - that can create the same echo-chamber effect that the liberal media has long produced, and that at times makes it difficult for the Right to grapple with reality. The cocoon is the place where it took an awfully, awfully long time for conservatives to admit that the post-2004 crisis in Iraq wasn’t just a matter of an MSM that wouldn’t report the good news. The cocoon is the place where conservatives persuaded themselves, in defiance of most of the evidence, that the reason the GOP lost Congress in 2006 was excessive spending, and especially excessive pork. And today, the cocoon is the place where conservatives are busy convincing themselves that Sarah Palin’s difficulties handling high-profile media appearances aren’t terribly important, that her instincts are more important than her grasp of national policy, and that the best way to defeat Barack Obama is to start with the lines that Palin has used on the stump - Ayers, anti-Americanism and ACORN - and take them to eleven.So when I say that a populist conservatism needs elites, what I really mean is that it needs elites who can step outside this cocoon and see national politics more clearly - whether they work for conservative outlets, MSM outlets, or something else entirely. This is not, I repeat not, a matter of listening to Beltway conventional wisdom instead of the practical wisdom of the heartland. It’s a matter of recognizing political realities, instead of denying them outright - whether you’re in DC, New Hampshire, or Wasilla. The Sarah Palin who ran for statewide office in Alaska appeared to understand this, which is why she seemed like such a promising figure to me months before McCain selected her: As governor, she was conservative and pragmatic, right-of-center and

anti-ideological. The trouble is that since she’s burst on to the national stage, she’s entered a right-wing world that’s bent on, well, cocooning her - telling her how great she is regardless of whether she gets up to speed on policy and handles Katie Couric’s questions, feeding her lines that appeal primarily to the segment of the electorate that’s already in conservatism’s corner, and calling out anyone who criticizes her as a cocktail-swilling elitist.

Mark Steyn has a slightly different take on this “cocoon.” In fact, Steyn was responding to Ross Douthat’s post explaining why the grassroots “need” elites. Douthat (whose recent book The Grand New Party lays out a conservatism that is more populist and thus able to appeal more to America’s working class) wrote above that Steyn misunderstands his idea of a “cocoon” but I’ll let you decide.

Steyn:

Yet, in contrast to other industries, our chattering classes are uniquely concentrated in Ross Douthat’s DC/NY corridor. Isn’t this a little odd? And doesn’t it pose particular problems for Republicans? Conservative elites live in liberal jurisdictions - and, way out back in the “conservative cocoon”, it gives them the whiff of absentee landlords, who enrich themselves on the strength of various holdings in ramshackle colonies but have no desire to spend much time there. Whatever one feels about what Ross Douthat calls the “conservative cocoon”, it elects conservative mayors, conservative school boards, conservative road agents, conservative state reps, and conservative governors: it’s the only place to go to experience conservatism as applied in practice. On the other hand, Mr Douthat’s aforementioned corridor will once in a while elect a Michael Bloomberg or a Christie Whitman, and that’s it: conservatism remains strictly a theoretical proposition.That’s why the metropolitan sneers about the size of Wasilla were extremely ill-advised, and not just because of the implication that the mayors of, say, New Orleans, San Francisco or Detroit are therefore more qualified to be in the White House. If it weren’t for small towns, suburbs and rural districts, there would be no conservative government at all. With a few exceptions (such as Vermont), “blue states” mostly turn out to be red states with a couple of big blue cities (Pennsylvania, for example, or even California). Almost by definition, an effective conservative executive - the kind you might want in the White House - can only come from flyover country.

So, when a conservative pundit mocks Wasilla, he’s mocking conservatism as it’s actually lived, as opposed to conservatism as a theoretical fantasy playground for the purposes of cocktail-party banter.

I think Steyn is being slightly unfair to Ross - especially at the end of his missive where he skewers the East Coast elites:

As for Sarah Palin, I think she could use a fewer sharper moose gags, but I’m not sure David Brooks is the go-to guy for that. And, to return to his Charlie Rose “Barack is the mountain” shtick, any PBS-watching inbred stump-toothed knuckle-dragging plaid-clad mountain man not yet face down in the moonshine or enjoying a bunk-up with his sister might think that Mr Brooks’ bizarre metaphor gives the game away: the “conservative cocoon” is somewhere you drive through en route to the hiking trip.

So what gives? Is Douthat right? Has conservative media - blogs, talk radio, and the small but influential mags like NRO and Weekly Standard - created an “echo chamber” where our supposed intellectual betters on the coasts can step outside this “cocoon” and tell us the “political truth” about Palin or any other conservative?

Or are JR and Steyn on the button? Are our “elites” out of touch with real conservatives in flyover country and they are simply scared of looking like rubes to their liberal friends?

Allow me to referee this dispute and call a foul on both sides while awarding points to both sides as well. (And if that makes me a straddler, so be it. I happen to believe that both sides make excellent points.)

The roots of this dispute are as old as conservatism itself; elites (the best among us rising as a result of their own talent and efforts) versus what we might call “the levelers” - those more egalitarian conservatives who distrust any aristocracy be it the result of birth or one’s own efforts. For lack of a better label, let’s term these conservatives “populists” (although many would probably reject that label because its historical baggage).

The friction between the two sides is obvious. What has brought it to the fore now is distrust. There is more trust in a roomful of thieves today than there is in a room full of conservatives. And Palin is the focal point where both sides seek to measure the other’s conservative bona fides. The populists see most criticism of Palin coming from elites as signs of squishiness. They believe (rightly) that the elites have no idea how embattled they feel. To many in the heartland, this race has been a nightmare what with the government of George Bush abandoning all pretense that they were conservative and resorting to rank socialism to deal with the financial crisis.This, coupled with a mainstream media so obviously in the tank for Obama along with a fierce rejection of conservatism by many of their friends and neighbors has literally upended the world the populists knew just a few short years ago.

And into this collapsing world come their supposed betters telling them they are wrong about Palin. The elites simply cannot fathom why the populists would latch on to Palin and invest so much of their loyalty and admiration.

Palin represents the future to these populists. She’s like the first born of a monarch - all the hopes for future happiness and success rests on her shoulders. If McCain goes down, the heartland has Palin to look forward to. This attitude has caused the populists to overlook or ignore some of Palin’s obvious shortcomings - something that the elites cannot do, being “realists” who can “step outside the conservative cocoon” and see things as they “really are.”

By damning Palin along with the liberals, the elites come off as “piling on” - something more akin to betrayal than a simple disagreement about politics. So the elites are insensitive while the populists are oblivious. And Palin?

My personal belief is that if the elites would give her six months or a year in Washington in a McCain administration, she would be more than ready to take over if worse came to worse. She has proven to be tough, smart, and possessing good political instincts. But the elites have a point when they say that she simply is not up to speed on national issues now nor will she be before inauguration. And using her as an attack dog is not the best use of her talents. She articulates a fine conservative vision in language that all Americans can understand and embrace. And when she looks into a camera, she is pure magic - a gift that any politician in America would kill for.

So is this really a set to about Palin? Or is there something a little deeper at work tearing at both elites and populists? At bottom, I think the elites blame the base for what could very well be an electoral disaster while the populists are all set to lay the blame for any election disappointments at the feet of the elites for what they see as a betrayal of conservatism itself in its hour of need.

And at this point, I see no way over the wall that is beginning to separate these two strains of conservatism that need each other if the movement is going to resurrect itself following what may be shaping up as a disaster of historic proportions.

 This blog post originally appeared in The American Thinker

Maybe the press is right. Maybe this is, indeed the right’s “Days of Rage.” And much of that anger is directed squarely at the GOP candidate for president.

John McCain not only isn’t a very good conservative. He isn’t a very good candidate. He may not even be a very good man but I don’t know him well enough to say one way or another. Fact is, I have not concentrated much on McCain this campaign. This has driven two or three of my commenters batty who believe I should be writing encomiums to “my” candidate rather than savaging Obama.

Do they fear the power of my pen to damage Obama? Um, probably not although no doubt my views hold sway among that all important voter subset of angry, old, middle aged fat men going deaf. I just wish they’d shut the f**k up and let me write what I want to write and if they don’t like it, they are free to go elsewhere. Few things raise my hackles in this world more than someone telling me what I should be writing about.

Frankly, McCain’s campaign is holding less and less interest for me the further he falls behind. By election day, I may be so disinterested, I might not even vote, although no doubt my obligations as a citizen will eventually overcome the sheer tedium I feel about what is rapidly becoming the most boring campaign of my lifetime.

What is really beginning to engage my mind and hence, my pen, is the state of conservatism. Last summer, I started what I was hoping to be a series of articles on “What Ails Conservatism.” I managed exactly one entry in the series and have yet to come back to it. I hope to do so now that fall has arrived and the distractions (and opportunities for successful procrastination) are somewhat limited.

But questions like that are for another day. Right now, it is simply a matter of acknowledging the obvious and observing the crack up from a safe distance.

The schism, as has long been predicted, is occurring between libertarian conservatives and more traditional, “family values” conservatives. The glue that held the two sides together - Iraq and the War on Terror - has weakened as a result of the winding down of the Iraq war, the fading of Afghanistan as an issue, the fecklessness of the McCain campaign, the economic crisis, and finally, the prospect of utter and complete defeat - an electoral wipeout of truly historic proportions.

I find myself caught between the two sides; not entirely comfortable with the libertarians and rejecting many of the social issues near and dear to the traditionalist’s heart. Perhaps I can call myself a classic conservative but I have yet to see a definition of that animal that I can latch on to. Am I a Burkean? A Kirkean? A Buckleyite?

My head hurts.

For me then, labels aren’t very important. All I know is it will probably be vital that conservatives find a way to reconstitute and revitalize the “movement” to fight the new president and congress when they invariably propose to revolutionize and in some cases perhaps, radicalize the country. Until then conservatives have trained their gunsights not only on Obama and the Democrats, but also on other conservatives who have proven themselves to be less “pure” than they. Apparently, criticism of Sarah Palin has become a litmus test for many regarding how conservative one truly is, as Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker have found to their surprise and chagrin.

Noonan, who was working for the conservative cause when most of her critics were but a gleam in their father’s eye or “still in is short pants” as we used to say is now seen as an elitist and an apostate because she fails to see the brilliance of the Palin pick for Vice President and believes that Palin herself might be less than ready to assume high office if worse came to worse. She has been exposed to the full throated howls of rage from the unhinged internet right as well as the more rational chidings from many bloggers who see a flash of hypocrisy in her criticism:

Noonan’s initial position — that Palin represents some sort of existential threat to the left — was over-the-top, and I said so at the time. It seemed that Noonan had been caught up in the irrational exuberance that swept away many conservatives, particularly those trapped in the bubble that was the Republican convention, during the heady days of early September. Except that Noonan may not have believed what she wrote.

Noonan’s current position — that Palin epitomizes what’s wrong with conservatives - fares no better. She begins by citing Edmund Burke’s admonition that writers owe their readers their judgment, and that they betray their readers if they present what may or may not be their opinion. Ironically, this is precisely the betrayal of Noonan’s initial column on Palin.

In her latest column, Noonan argues that Palin has not been sufficiently thoughtful in her public statements during the seven weeks she’s been on the campaign trail. “She doesn’t think aloud,” Noonan complains, “she just says things.” But in the home stretch of this campaign, have Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or John McCain been any more thoughtful than Palin? Noonan doesn’t make that case, and I doubt it’s there to be made.

Instead, Noonan asserts that Palin doesn’t really understand the “tinny” lines she’s been “throwing out” to crowds. But Noonan does not provide a basis for concluding that Palin doesn’t understand what she’s saying or that her lines are appreciably more tinny than those of her counterparts in this election. If Palin were as dense as Noonan suggests, it’s doubtful that she could have held her own (or better) with Biden in a 90 minute debate, a performance that Noonan praised.

I don’t agree with Noonan at all about Palin. I thought at the time and still believe she was not only McCain’s only real choice but, in the end, an excellent pick. Despite the attempts to “Quaylize” her, she has proven to be much tougher than anyone thought as well as being blessed with an innate intelligence that will serve her well in the future. (It is a matter of fact and record that Biden’s gaffe-a-day campaign has gotten a monumental pass from the press since Palin’s entry. Can you imagine any candidate for high office spelling out that famous “3 letter word J-O-B-S” and having that kind of stupidity just disappear down the rabbit hole?)

Ready for high office? Not now. Probably not on inauguration day. But give Sarah Palin 6 months to a year in Washington as Vice President and I guarantee you that not only will she be ready, she will become a formidable force in a McCain administration.

Columnist Kathleen Parker has come under attack for similar views to Noonan on Palin and was amazed and frightened at the vitriolic response. Her naivete was touching and charming while also being a little puzzling. How clueless and out of touch with the modern conservative movement can you be that you are unfamiliar with this strain of nuttiness that floats just below the surface of the conservative base? Here live the beasts and “knuckledraggers” I call them who are constantly on the lookout for any deviation from their own extraordinarily narrow and ignorant view of conservative gospel, ready to pounce and devour those unfortunates who express views even slightly at odds with their own.

Parker crossed them and paid the price. What she doesn’t understand is that the crack up of the conservative movement has opened old wounds relating to elitism vs. populism, secularism vs.religiosity, and the resurrection of anti-intellectualism that conservatives from Kirk, to Buckley, to Kristol, to Reagan all fought with varying degrees of success.

Parker uses her column yesterday to skewer conservatives who dared take off after Christopher Buckley for his endorsement of Barack Obama for president:

What does it mean that the right cannot politely entertain dissenting opinions within its ranks? What, if anything, does it portend that Buckley The Younger has bolted from the Right, even resigning from the family flagship?

Some have opined, ridiculously, that Buckley — son of the famous William F. Buckley (WFB) — was merely seeking attention. Christo, as family and friends call him, has written more than a dozen acclaimed books, one of which, Thank You for Smoking, became a movie. In 2004, he won the Thurber Prize for American Humor for No Way to Treat a First Lady. For 18 years he edited a magazine, Forbes Life, and otherwise seems to be doing all right.

Other critics have surmised that Buckley’s “betrayal” was a publicity stunt for his newest novel, Supreme Courtship (which I reviewed for National Review). When you’re as funny and write as well as Buckley, you don’t have to resort to stunts. You are the stunt.

So why did he do it?

Because he had to. It’s in his genes.

True believers of whatever stripe too often forget that the men and women who create movements are first and foremost radicals. Great movements are not the result of relaxing afternoons musing along the Seine but emerge from flames of passion ignited by injustice.

What planet has Parker been writing her columns from over the last decade? There hasn’t been “polite” debate within the conservative movement or between ideologies for a very long time. Besides, I’m with the knuckledraggers on this one; Buckley is a tool.

It is painfully obvious Buckley is either uninformed about what Obama stands for and what kind of a man he is or he doesn’t care. But if he is going into this endorsement of Obama knowing everything the rest of us know, it is indeed a sorry statement on Buckley’s basic beliefs.

I understand the attraction to Obama for some conservatives. On a very superficial level, he is a true inheritor of the “optimism gene” that any political movement in America needs to succeed. He says all the right words. He makes all the right allusions to our history as an exceptional people.

But given the disconnect between his past radical associations and the anti-American, anti-western, anti-conservative beliefs of the Wrights, Ayers, Meeks, and Khalidi’s in his past and present, Obama’s words become suspect and hence, he literally can’t be trusted with the legacy of Reagan, Kennedy, FDR, and Teddy Roosevelt. Those men didn’t see America as the problem in the world. They didn’t see the wealthy as villains or evil. They all correctly saw the free market as the engine of liberty and social justice.

Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Buckley represent a conservatism that is unfamiliar to me; disconnected from politics, answerable not to a set of principles but rather a personal muse who whispers in their ear what seems to be a polyglot collection of the classically liberal notion of a ruling intellectual aristocracy and the classically conservative precept of an expansive, everyman bonhomie .

This conflict will almost certainly, eventually, lead to huge disappointment in Mr. Obama - if they are intellectually honest enough to recognize it when it happens. Sullivan is so far in the tank for Obama that he will no doubt be a true believer to the end as Obama will try to take us over the cliff. Buckley, I have hopes, will eventually see the light although by then, it won’t do him much good with his erstwhile friends on the right.

The left, of course, is responding to this internecine warfare with tremendous gloating and glee. That’s fine. They have the right to get satisfaction out of our discomfort. But sooner than they realize, they may be questioning the commitment of their own leader to their core beliefs and principles.

And that’s because I have hope that Obama’s most glaring demonstrated weakness - his inability to make up his mind - will “Carterize” his presidency and turn his own base against him in the end. With virtually every single controversial issue in Obama’s political career, he has frozen like a deer in headlights by either voting “present” or, as in the Senate, finding someplace else to be when the issue came to a vote. His tortured, illogical, explanations for where he actually stands on issues like partial birth abortion, immigration, gun rights, campaign finance, and host of others proves that perhaps the GOP’s best hope with the coming Democratic majority may lie in Obama’s fear in forcing people dislike him.

Not much to hope for but in this bleak campaign season, it may be the best we can expect.

I owe those precious few of you - those who were civil, who took the time to read and think before posting, and who were unfailingly polite - an explanation of why, finally, I have decided to disallow comments on this site.

Long time readers know I have been back and forth on this issue for probably a year. I’ll shut them down for a week or so but then after some of you email me asking that they be reestablished, I break down and do it.

I’ve tried moderated, unmoderated and semi-moderated (lots of words in the spam instructions), But each time I would reestablish comment privileges, the same reasons that made me stop them in the first place would rear up and bite me in the ass.

Look. I know I have a temper. I know I fly off the handle. I know I have a thin skin. I know I am not a very pleasant person. I know all of these things.

And I get worse when comments are allowed.

I am an emotional, passionate, person with strong opinions. After 4 years of blogging, I know the kinds of people who prowl the internet - many of them even more unpleasant than I am. Perhaps I should be writing a diary instead of a blog. Some would probably argue that’s a good idea. That way, I wouldn’t have to deal with people who could care less what I write - the ideas, the arguments, the threads of logic - and say whatever they want in response to whatever they think I am saying (or, more obtusely, what they believe I should be saying).

And if the feedback I got was intelligent, respectful, and open to the give and take, parry and thrust of debate then this blog would be a joy. Alas, such is not the case. That’s just the way the internet is.

I have indeed had spirited debates with some commenters over the years. But the fact is, I’m tired of the bull, tired of the insults, tired of the flaming, tired of the whole damn thing.

I will no doubt receive criticism for this - probably deserved. But I know 2 prominent bloggers who reached the same place that I am now - one quit blogging altogether and the other stopped allowing comments.

Since I am not going to give up the blog, option B would seem to be my only alternative.

It’s been a devastating 24 hours for the man the world has come to know as “Joe, the Plumber.” Just yesterday morning, he was the toast of the political world, appearing on Good Morning America and being interviewed by Katy (don’t call me a journalist) Couric. He appears in a new John McCain ad, conservatives have embraced him as an entrepreneurial icon, and the apparel industry is going nuts with every manner of Joe the Plumber T-Shirts (For just $35.95 plus shipping, you can own this “Joe the Plumber is my Homeboy “T” in black, navy blue, or ten other colors.)

But this was before the minions of our political savior decided that Joe the Plumber must die.

Well, not literally, I suppose. Rather, they set out to kill his name - a careful, deliberate, gleeful campaign to assassinate, smear, and destroy his name in order to lay the icon low. The problem is that this icon is just an ordinary American citizen whose own mother would now probably disown him after the left and the national press have unearthed a frightening amount of information - some of it not very flattering - about his life.

A tax lien, a question of whether he is working legally (there is a a debate whether he actually needs a license to perform residential work), a divorce - it is enormously disconcerting to see the kind of information you can dig up on someone if you know your way around a search engine or two.

And the dumpster diving press must have temporarily re-assigned the smelly, stinking reporters who have been rummaging in Sarah Palin’s trash in Alaska the last 6 weeks. They probably welcome the change in scenery although I imagine the stench in which they are now wallowing in Holland, Ohio smells pretty much the same. From the looks of what they’ve been able to dig up, they sure seem to know their way around a sh*t hole.

For those in the upper echelons of the garbage sniffing media, it is important to get the smear out - even if you are unsure whether the crap you are dealing out is actually, like, you know, true and stuff.

Example: Huffpo:

You see, Joe Wurzelbacher is apparently related to Robert Wurzelbacher. Who is the son-in-law of (are you ready…?) Charles Keating!

Yes, that Charles Keating. The Charles Keating of the Keating 5 Scandal. For which John McCain was reprimanded by the United States Senate, for his involvement in attempting to illegally influence government regulators. The Charles Keating who John McCain has been trying to avoid have mentioned. So, he basically mentioned it 24 times.

[snip]

Mind you, I thought it odd when John McCain first brought up Joe Wurzelbacher’s but then never referred to his last name again. I thought perhaps he’d forgotten it. Or it was too hard to pronounce. Apparently though there was a better reason for him to quit saying the name “Wurzelbacher” 24 times. If only Sen. McCain (R-AZ) had remembered the pesky Tivo, where you can rewind.

Now, in fairness, John McCain might not have known than Joe Wurzelbacher was from that same Wurzelbacher family. He might have thought it was just some regular Wurzelbacher. And who knows, maybe they’re not even related?

Get that? All of this smear by association, all of this information about Joe splashed all over the pages of the #1 liberal website in America, and then “Who knows, maybe they’re not even related…”

Pardon me for my stupidity (which many on the right and left have been noticing lately) but shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t you like, sorta first, ascertain the truth and THEN print the smear?

Just asking…

At any rate, there has been a lot of pixelated poison being dished out by our good friends on the left. Some of it is even true, although the relevance of anything relating to Joe the Plumber’s personal and professional life escapes me. Last time I looked, all Joe did was ask Obama a question. And no matter what they dig up about poor Joe (they have only scratched the surface of his sex life - I assume that stuff will be out before long), it doesn’t change what Obama said about “spreading the wealth” one iota.

They can smear Joe from now until the 2012 election but it doesn’t change the underlying reason that they need to smear him: Obama revealed just a little bit too much of his real philosophy.

For more than a year, Obama has survived largely by uttering the most banal, the least offensive pablum that, falling on the ears of the young and less sophisticated voters, has proved to be as soothing a balm as has ever been applied to the American electorate. But in that one moment, after many months of obfuscation, obtuseness, and just plain lying about his positions on the issues, Obama let slip the concept of redistributing the wealth. Every taxpayer regardless of their education or sophistication knows full well what “redistribution” means to them - higher taxes. Obama can swear on a stack of Korans between now and election day that he will only tax the rich. But that single phrase - “spread the wealth” - has damaged if not destroyed his credibility on taxes.

So in essence, this entire smear campaign by the Obamabots on the left is really for naught. They might kill Joe the Plumber’s iconic status. But they will never be able to whitewash what Obama said.

There are some who take this smearing of Joe to be an example of what America under Obama will be like - dissent stifled, opponents destroyed. I’ve got news for my friends on the right - we’d be doing the same thing in their shoes.

I don’t know what information the righty blogs and media would be digging up and plastering all over the net if McCain had responded to a question by Joe on the economy and made some stupid statement in response. All I am certain of is that we would be doing it. I know I would. I have no doubt I would be republishing all the stuff the rightysphere dug up on poor Joe and do it with a clear conscience. “He asked for it by getting himself involved…” would be my rationalization. And those honest enough to ask themselves whether they would participate in such a campaign - to switch places mentally with the left -should think long and hard before they answer in the negative.

I would hasten to add that such an attack by the right on Joe would no doubt have s lot less resonance than smears against Joe by the left now, given the mainstream media’s curious inability to get off their knees and take a respite from their Obama worship long enough to play this little media scenario exactly the same way they are playing it today. Joe would be trumpeted to the skies as an “Everyman,” anything negative in his past would be buried, while McCain’s dumb comment would be highlighted continuously.

If life were fair, this is the way it would be today only it would be Obama’s comment on “spreading the wealth” that would be shown over and over again on every cable TV news channel and become the subject of long, thoughtful pieces in the New York Times. But life isn’t fair and conservatives, more than anyone else, know this. It’s written on the first page of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Handbook: “Life in a world dominated by a liberal media, liberal intelligentsia, liberal culture, and a liberal educational system will never be fair for members of the VRWC. GET USED TO IT.”

Joe might not be “fair” game. But he is game nonetheless. It is a fact in this age of polarized and poisonous politics that it hardly matters who gets caught in the crossfire. What matters is that anyone who gets in the way or who inserts themselves into this great, gaping maw of political media that can build you up, lionize you, and destroy you in less time than it takes to digest your breakfast, is by definition, part of the story.

I’m sorry for Joe. I admire his ambition and the fact that he works hard all day and comes home at night, taking care of his 13 year old son on his own.I agree that he is an iconic figure. He wants a better life for his kid and himself. And he has the right idea of what government’s role in America should be.

And he doesn’t deserve the disapprobation and calumny being heaped upon him by the rabid dog left, the Obama campaign, and the media. But in this case, as well as other cases like Joe’s, “deserve” has got nothing to do with it.

The debate last night was not a blowout but frankly, McCain never came close. He made a couple of good points about education, scored best with his pointed questions (that Obama never answered) about Ayers and ACORN, and had a couple of other nice moments. (I am not sure that McCain gained any support with his eye rolling, sneering, head shaking, and unmanly giggles. Those things matter to many people and I believe we might see over the next 24 hours that voters were turned off by his reactions.)

But it was hopeless from the start for McCain. This race is pretty much on cruise control now with Obama comfortably (not decisively) ahead. As long as Obama didn’t show up drunk, he accomplished what he had to accomplish at the debate.

McCain needed Obama to show up drunk. He didn’t.

Last May, when it appeared that Obama had the nomination wrapped up, I wrote a post predicting how the race in the fall would unfold:”Party Like it’s 1980 All Over Again” wasn’t breaking any new ground nor was it necessarily prescient. Democratic strategists had been predicting for months that the mood of the country and the trends were all breaking their way and that the November election had an excellent chance of being a “change” election.

But what really resonated with me back then and what recalled similar feelings from 1980 was the nature of the matchup between McCain and Obama; untested and relative unknown versus incumbent (experience). The way the 1980 race developed, people were unsure of the unknown commodity until after the one debate held between Carter and Reagan. When Reagan showed himself to be a reasonable alternative to the status quo, the floodgates opened and he won going away.

I believed then and believe now that Obama’s comfortable 6-8 point lead will mushroom in the next 3 weeks and make election day a holy living hell for the GOP with a landslide in both the popular vote and electoral college for Obama and a sweeping away of many Republican stalwarts in the House and Senate. It will be an historic repudiation of Republicans and will place the party in a position where it will probably spend a decade or more in the wilderness.

Can this scenario be avoided? McCain must find a way to keep it close enough that he doesn’t drag 2-3 additional senate candidates down with him thus handing the Democrats a filibuster proof majority in the senate. I am at a loss as to how he might do this except my sense of the moment is telling me (and the polls somewhat confirm) that most of his attacks on Obama have backfired and he has lost support because of them. Would a “take the high road” campaign where he spends the last three weeks as a wise man/Cassandra, warning of the dangers of “Creeping Socialism” and an abandonment of classic American values work? No one knows but it’s something he hasn’t tried so perhaps it is worth looking into.

If McCain is a lost cause, it is time for the Republicans to perhaps look to salvaging what they can from the disaster. And that means fighting like hell for the filibuster in the senate. It is potentially the only brake on Obama and the Democrats and given how the far left is licking its chops at the prospect of radically changing the economic and social landscape of America, it might have come to the point that we start thinking about shifting focus from the presidency to the senate.

Many of those races are extremely close but the GOP has one advantage in many of them; incumbency. If McCain really goes off the deep end, there’s nothing much that can be done. But if he can keep the presidential race about where it is now, Republicans will lose 5-7 seats and the filibuster will be safe.

Despite what Karl Rove is saying,, it appears to me that Obama has indeed “closed the sale” and is writing up the order. It is at this point that many salesmen have additional temptations to offer the customer. A car salesman might inquire whether the customer wants rustproofing or an extended warranty? A shoe salesman will ask if the customer wants shoe polish or a shoe tree.

Obama will be asking the voter from here on out whether they wish a 60 seat majority in the senate. And it could be that only John McCain is in a position to help the voter turn Obama down.

UPDATE

First, apologies for the slow loading. It should clear up in a few minutes.

Second, I apologize to those of you who came here expecting to read Republican boilerplate or GOP cheerleading. I am a conservative and nominal Republican. But first and foremost, I consider myself a writer. As such, my goal is giving an honest appraisal of what I believe based on 30 years of watching, reading, and writing about politics as well as working on a few campaigns.

You may disagree with my analysis based on other facts and a different reading of history. That’s fine and wonderful. But if you are going to take me to task for “not helping” McCain or “being too pessimistic” I am sorry but you made a wrong turn somewhere. Might I suggest that you visit the RNC website, McCain.com, or perhaps The Corner? There you will get all the spin you could possibly hope for and all the cheerleading your heart desires.

If you want my honest opinion, then thank you for reading. If you think this blog exists to shill for Republicans or for any other reason than an outlet for my take on the news and world events, then I am sorry to disabuse you of that notion.

It’s not that I was completely unaware of the fact that the internet is largely populated with people who need help in telling the difference between a fork and a spoon. Or whose idea of great literature is See Spot Run (I always cry at the end too.) Or whose notions of sublime cinema run the gamut from The Flintstones (That Barney Rubble. What an actor.) to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. (Man, I so wanna be kewl like Spicoli.)

After all, I’ve been blogging 4 years and I’ve seen it all. And writing 1500-2000 word essays everyday as I do, you eventually get used to people not reading what you write, or not understanding what you write, or not being able to read what you write and simply say any old thing the pops into their empty heads in the comments. It’s a pet peeve but I am gradually getting to the point where I understand that it’s not really these people’s fault. They are products of an age where taking the time to read and digest anything longer than a People magazine profile on “The Sexiest Man Alive” just isn’t done. The effort is better spent playing World of Warcraft or downloading classic porn or watching reruns of Charmed. (Man that Alyssa Milano is so hot.)

Thankfully, about a third of us have the cognitive and reading comprehension skills to thrive in this milieu of ideas. And someday, we shall rule the world. To those of you who actually read what I write, took the time, and made the effort to comment intelligently (even though most of you disagreed with me), thank you. You know who you are.

And no, it’s not you. Or you. Or the two thirds of you commenting on my much linked post from yesterday. For you - even if you agreed with me - I say, don’t worry. The world will always need dental assistants, telephone solicitors, dish washers, burger flippers, and government workers. I’m sure that someday, you will find a place where your rather unique, um, skills will be utilized to the fullest.

Give blood recently?

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

Tonight, I’ll welcome back American Thinker’s Political Correspondent Rich Baehr to the second chair to discuss the state of the race as of today. Rich will have to share the chair tonight with my very special guest Stephen Green, drunkblogger extraordinaire, of Vodkapundit. Steve will be tippling tomorrow night while blogging the debate live at PJ Media.

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.”

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

Pardon the slow loading of the page. My little hosting company got overwhelmed by the Instalanche and Hot Air explosion.

Do you want to know why the race card — or at least the 21st century manifestation of it — is the most powerful, most effective political weapon in America?

There is no response possible. There is no answer to an African-American’s charge that what you are saying, or hinting, or thinking, or wishing, or unconsciously dreaming is racist.

Any attempt to defend yourself gives credence to the charge. Ignoring the smear is tantamount to an acknowledgement of guilt.

One may ask why all of a sudden Obama himself, his campaign, his surrogates, and his sycophants in the press are throwing the race card around with such abandon? Why the speeches, statements, editorials, op-eds, columns, and blog posts taking McCain to task for “allowing” or “enabling” or “causing” or “encouraging” racism to rear its ugly head at political rallies?

The answer is simple; use it or lose it when it comes to the race card. Short on specific charges of mass hate being whipped up at McCain political events while long on scurrilous, baseless, smears, Black legislators, columnists, and luminaries have taken up the tactics of the Night Rider in order to terrorize people into keeping their mouths shut while casting nauseating aspersions on the GOP candidate for president and his supporters.

Yeah, I know exactly what I’m saying. And the people I’m saying it to royally deserve it. I am fully aware of the history involved. I am using the term “Night Rider” deliberately and for full, unmitigated effect. For if we cannot call out these besmirches of the democratic process and put them in their place (another loaded phrase that I am fully cognizant of its history and meaning and am using deliberately), then they will have been allowed to get away with a smear so calumnious in its form and implication that the very nature of American elections will be altered and free speech as we know it and understand it will be gone.

I am not going to let that happen without a fight. And if I have to throw political correctness to the winds and compare the tactics of African Americans who play the race card with those of their mortal enemies, then so be it.

Congressman John Lewis - perhaps at the behest of Obama himself - donned the white robes and hood in order to let loose this, the most vicious and unprincipled attack on an American politician I have seen in quite a while:

“George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights,” said Lewis, who is black. “Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.”

At bottom, it is not credible to believe that John Lewis thinks for one second that John McCain’s tactics ape those of George Wallace and could lead to the deaths of innocents. If he does, then he makes himself out to be an idiot. And John Lewis is no fool. He is not only a man who fought for civil rights (and has the physical scars to prove it) but he was a savvy enough pol to advance the cause in the face of the most stringent and violent opposition.

Since Lewis can no more believe that McCain is using the tactics of Wallace than I believe in a flat earth, that makes his “critique” of the McCain campaign a lie - a deliberate, careful, decision by Lewis to bear false witness. And he has done it knowing full well the effect it will have on decent people everywhere.

Even Obama found Lewis’s lies too much and distanced himself - slightly- from the implication that McCain was the reincarnation of Wallace. In effect, Obama embraced Lewis’s lie while separating himself from the Wallace implication. He did it by agreeing with Lewis’s critique but piously giving McCain the benefit of the doubt that he was not possessed by the spirit of George Wallace.

“Sen. Obama does not believe that John McCain or his policy criticism is in any way comparable to George Wallace or his segregationist policies,” said the campaign statement.”

“John Lewis was right to condemn some of the hateful rhetoric that John McCain himself personally rebuked just last night.”

Right? Wrong? Which is it Obama? It certainly appears that Obama wants the benefits accrued by Lewis smearing McCain and his supporters without the baggage associated with its more problematic implications.

Lewis himself backtracked slightly from his original statement but still lied through his teeth:

“My statement was a reminder to all Americans that toxic language can lead to destructive behavior,” he said. “I am glad that Sen. McCain has taken some steps to correct divisive speech at his rallies. I believe we need to return to civil discourse in this election about the pressing economic issues that are affecting our nation.”

I guess there’s “toxic language” and then there’s the race card. No double standard there, Congressman.

If it were only Lewis advancing this meme of McCain and his supporters being racist pigs, one might conclude that the Congressman was some kind of loose cannon, firing off on his own accord and not part of any concerted effort to outrageously brand the Democrat’s political opponents as Kluxers.

Ah, but the sheets that terrorize need not only be hiding white faces. Here’s Adam Sewrer writing in The American Prospect, equating calling Obama a “socialist” with racism:

The hysterical accusations of socialism from conservatives echo similar accusations leveled at black leaders in the past, as though the quest for racial parity were simply a left-wing plot. Obama may not actually be a socialist or communist, but his election would strike another powerful blow to the informal racial hierarchy that has existed in America since the 1960s, when it ceased being enforced by law. This hierarchy, which holds that whiteness is synonymous with American-ness, is one conservatives are now instinctively trying to preserve. Like black civil-rights activists of the 1960s, Obama symbolizes the destruction of a social order they see as fundamentally American, which is why terms like “socialism” are used to describe the threat.

This phenomenon extends beyond Obama’s candidacy. The conservative explanation for the mortgage crisis falls neatly into this narrative, too; the country is at risk because Democrats allowed minorities to disrupt the natural social order by becoming homeowners. Never mind that this defies all data, logic, and history, the narrative resonates because it allows Obama, a living symbol of black folks rising above “their station,” to become a focus for conservative economic anxieties.

At least this guy comes by his blithering ignorance honestly. Unlike Lewis whose calculated smear was meant to damage the McCain campaign with moderates and more conservative Democrats, Sewrer’s twisted, tortured analysis starts from the bogus premise that “hysterical” accusations of socialism against Obama are rooted in a historical narrative that has white people denigrating “the otherness” of Blacks who dare to seek power and influence and that when the crowds shout “socialist” they really mean “n***er!”

I have made it clear that I do not believe Obama is a socialist. Others, either because they don’t understand the term or because they see Obama’s far left redistributive ideas and efforts at reform as “creeping socialism” disagree with me.

Whatever epithets hurled at Malcolm X or Dr. King in the past — however people viewed their problematic associations with individuals who were committed to overthrowing the government of the United States — have nothing to do with Republicans today trying to keep America “white.” It is a baseless, thoughtless, ignorant charge made by someone so intellectually besotted with identity politics that history itself gets turned on its head in service to this false and capricious theme. Did Mr. Sewrer ever dream for one moment that people might actually be sincere in their belief that Obama’s stated policies (not to mention his past and present associations with true radicals and communists) are a indicative of a form of “stealth socialism?”

People of good faith - an animal rare indeed in this race - can argue the merits of such a position. But Sewrer isn’t interested in good faith, he is interested in advancing his racialist worldview where nothing else matters save a reading of history and our present politics through the broken kaleidoscope of his own black bigotry. It is probably emotionally satisfying but as a talisman of truth, it hardly stands up to rigorous scrutiny.

The thought that there are some people who might actually believe Obama is a socialist never crossed his mind because in his narrow, intellectual construct there is race, and then there is race, and if you run out of those, you always have race to fall back on. There is no history, only race. There is no American narrative that doesn’t place race front and center. This is where our obsession with identity politics has led us: A skewing of history and politics so profound that playing the race card becomes an easy shortcut to silencing one’s opponents no matter what argument they advance.

If you can’t beat ‘em, gag ‘em.

So when Mr. Sewrer plays the race card - as he does in his article - he does it with a clear conscience. Put simply, the fool doesn’t know any better. But there are fools, and then there are coldly calculating bigots who take more pleasure than people like Lewis in throwing race in our faces (Lewis, after all, was only playing dirty politics) while gleefully setting crosses afire all across the political landscape.

There is no other way to describe this Les Payne column in Newsday except political terrorism:

Palin’s bland ferocity lends itself easily to vitriol of the type that inflames half-wits. A bald-pated Florida sheriff, one Mike Scott, got carried away under the swoon last week in Estero, Fla., in introducing Palin. Stressing Obama’s middle name, Sheriff Scott paced the stage, in violation of police rules, while inciting the crowd in his full uniform adorned with colorful patches, stars and medals befitting a grand wizard of some mystic order of white knights.

At Clearwater, Gov. Palin lathered up the crowd herself. “You’re going to have to hang on to your hats,” Palin told the rally, according to The Washington Post, “because from now until Election Day it may get kind of rough.” Linking Sen. Obama to a reformed radical of the ’60s, Palin shrieked her signature smut line, “he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

“Kill him!” a man in the crowd reportedly responded to Palin’s rabble-rousing. Her related attacks on the media had already whipped a frenzy among the crowd of about 3,000. Tempers rose to a boil when she blamed Katie Couric’s questions for tripping her up as a seeming dimwit. The Post wrote, “Palin supporters turned on reporters … waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. … One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African-American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

I have written twice about the incredibly exaggerated reports of “rage” at McCain campaign events. Payne goes a step further by equating a sheriff uttering the sacrilege of Obama’s middle name with a Kluxer.

Who’s the ignoramus here? A sheriff (who was fully within his rights to be at a political rally dressed as he was despite what Payne infers) who dared mention The Messiah’s middle name while introducing Palin to the crowd? I’ve seen the video of this event and the use of “Hussein” got a roar from those assembled. But was it because he used the candidate’s middle name or was it because of the context he used it in?

After saying that “there were three kinds of people in the world; those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happen, Sheriff Scott threw the crowd a piece of raw meat when he said “On election day, let’s leave Barack Hussein Obama wondering what happened.”

Was the crowd roaring because of the use of “Hussein” or was it due to the punchline - a pretty damned effective one if you ask me.? Only your psychic knows for sure. If the crowd roared because of Scott’s allusion to victory on election day, it destroys Payne’s entire narrative of the event - including Scott as another Republican closet Kluxer. (What an extraordinary personal smear by Payne).

No matter. Never stop a bigot when they’re on a roll. Scott’s use of “Hussein” was out of line because John McCain believes that saying Obama’s real name is wrong. I agree.

But the implication is that he is Muslim not that he is black so how Payne and his racialist cohorts can twist what is clearly a tweak at Obama’s father and the idea that Obama is a closet Muslim is a mystery. Except that when you are playing the race card, even giving a weather report can be construed as racist.

I think it a smear to use Obama’s middle name and I wish Scott and other McCain supporters would realize it and stop it. It is questionable hardball politics not racial bigotry. And Payne mindlessly repeats the false notion that the crowd at the event and other McCain/Palin rallies was “angry” or hateful. Payne was obviously too lazy to watch the videos himself. They were happy. They were excited. And for people like Payne to take out of context the mouthings of one or two idiots at a rally attended by thousands is absolute lunacy.

I see absolutely no difference at Obama rallies when he or Biden tosses the rhetorical red meat out into the crowd. The roar becomes deafening. People are laughing and whooping it up. When Bush or McCain is mentioned, they are booed. This is politics. And anyone who would deliberately construe malice or unreasonable emotions by referring to Bush/Palin gatherings as “angry mobs” or intimate anything unusual at all is a liar - or a simple minded fool.

These hooded riders of the night might obscure their false, misleading, and vile calumnious rhetoric with pious words designed to horrify decent Americans and equate voting for John McCain with voting for a racist. But they are trying to terrorize voters into supporting Obama by smearing his opponent with the most nauseating, the stickiest label one can slap on to a candidate in American politics.

Take off your hoods and look in the mirror, those of you - all of you - who are shamelessly and so easily playing the race card. It is all of you who are playing with fire, not McCain. By your words, you are stifling free expression by trying to intimidate people you disagree with through a false and wholly misleading narrative.

And I submit that this is infinitely more dangerous than your fantasies and lies about McCain whipping up a racist mob.

It is the very early morning of November 5, 2008. Despite all the predictions and polls, John McCain and Barack Obama are locked in an extremely close race for President of the United States. McCain made a furious comeback over the previous 3 weeks following the last debate where Obama fumbled several answers while looking tired.

McCain’s momentum propelled him back into the race and in a furious last minute charge that involved spending more than $25 million in combined campaign and Republican National Committee ad money that last weekend surged to within just a few points of Obama by election day.

Now, at 6:00 AM the following day, the race hangs on the results in just one state; Ohio. McCain leads by nearly 50,000 votes but suddenly, Ohio’s Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner announces that several thousand McCain absentee ballots have been disqualified while additional thousands of votes in Cuyahoga county were “discovered” to have not been counted. After several more hours of confusion - which included the discovery of more uncounted votes in heavily Democratic counties by the Secretary of State - McCain’s lead is gone and Obama is declared the winner of Ohio and the election.

Of course, this scenario is not credible, is it? No Secretary of State would act so brazenly, right?

Meet Jennifer Brunner, Ohio’s real life Secretary of State whose actions in the lead up to this election have been so shamefully partisan - violating both federal and state law in the process - that it is doubtful any result on election day from Ohio is going to be accepted as credible.

Coupled with the outrageously illegal registration activity of ACORN and the shockingly illegal actions of the Obama campaign itself and what you have is an effort to not only “count every vote” but also steal as many votes as will be necessary for Obama to win the state on election day.

Strong stuff. But here’s former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and Ken Klukowski writing in the New York Post:

A perfect example is Ohio. Last Monday the Ohio Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, interpreted Ohio law to allow for people to register to vote and cast an absentee ballot on the same day.

(As the three dissenters noted, this directly contradicts Ohio’s Constitution, which requires that a person register to vote 30 days in advance of actually casting that vote. But the Ohio Supreme Court is the last word on Ohio state law.)

So now the Obama campaign is using buses to take tens of thousands of people to go register and cast same-day votes. Some media reports say that the Obama camp hopes to get hundreds of thousands of votes this way.

Secretary Brunner, incredibly, got around the provision that one had to be registered 30 days before being able to vote with the following bit of Orwellian doublespeak.

Soren Dayton:

The first thing she did was issue an advisory opinion allowing people to register and vote on the same day, during the “overlap” between the beginning of early voting (35 days out) and the end of registration (30 days out). This was a reversal of the 2006 precedent. Republicans asked how someone could register and vote on the same day when Ohio statute says that you have to be registered 30 days before voting. She answered that when you vote by no-fault absentee you aren’t voting. Your vote occurs on election day when it is counted, not on the day you cast it.

Dayton links to a conservative student organization site - Palestra - that has been following this early voting in Ohio. Correspondent Shelby Holiday’s revelations are pretty shocking:

One of the biggest issues? These voters didn’t need to show ID or proof of residency in order to cast their ballot.

We witnessed dozens of homeless people being driven to the polls, and none of them had to prove that they were Ohio residents. In fact, one man I spoke with was about to hop on a Greyhound bus to go back to Chicago.

We have been trying for a week now to get a comment from the Secretary of State to see how she plans on verifying the residency and identification of all these early voters. Despite numerous phone calls and emails, we have yet to be granted even just a ten minute interview.

Who I did speak with was the Director of the Franklin County Board of Elections. When I asked him what would prevent the homeless man from voting in Illinois just weeks after he cast a ballot in Ohio, he told me that their voter checks are “just county-to-county, we do not do state by state.”

One “voter” reportedly said he was voting for Obama because of his “thug thizzle.” This was just before he boarded a Greyhound bus back to Chicago.

In addition to this invitation to fraud invented by Brunnner, she also - once again in violation of state law - prevented Republicans from monitoring this early voting.

Dayton again:

The second thing she did was to issue an advisory opinion advising county election officials that Ohio law does not require that partisan election observers be allowed to observe registration and voting. This is contrary to the practice on election day and a reversal of the 2006 precedent. Two of the largest counties, Montgomery (containing Dayton) and Franklin (containing Columbus), did not allow Republican election observers to enter the polling place. Media, however, were allowed.

Liberals especially cheered this ruling, believing that GOP election monitors “intimidate” minorities and young people in order to keep them from voting. Given the problems with out of state voters and other irregularities that occurred during this 6 day “Golden” period where people can register and vote on the same day, anyone halfway concerned with free and fair elections just might have welcomed election monitors in order to prevent obvious fraud. But Democrats do not appear to care very much about the “fair” part in elections and instead wish to be “free” to violate the law with impunity.

Another insult to the integrity of our election system was Brunner’s attempt to prevent thousands of McCain absentee ballots from counting.

Dayton again:

Brunner also tried to throw out absentee ballot applications sent out by the McCain campaign because the campaign added an extra check-box to the application. This time, the GOP won in court. Clearly Brunner was not protecting everyone’s right to vote. If that was her interest, she would have applied the same lax standards to the McCain campaign’s applications that she applies to absentee voting.

Thank the Lord for small favors. And it appeared very briefly that Republicans had won a stunning court victory on Thursday when a US District Judge ruled that Brunner must verify the registrations by checking them against the motor vehicle and social security databases. She was also ordered to share the information on how to verify registrations with Ohio’s 88 county registrars.

But a federal appeals court struck down the district judge’s ruling:

Brunner argued that it would take two to three days to create the necessary computer programs, and that nothing in the Help America Vote Act required her to do what the district court ordered. The appeals court agreed in a split decision.

“With less than a month until the election, and less than two weeks until the beginning of counting absentee ballots, the secretary cannot be required to undertake the extensive reprogramming and other changes to the election mechanics without complete disruption of the electoral process in Ohio,” the majority said in its opinion. “The irreparable harm to the voting public caused by the district court’s order is equally clear.”

No word on the “irreparable harm” done to the integrity of the election process by Brunner, Obama, and the rest of the Democrats in Ohio.

Then, of course, there are the vastly more entertaining antics of ACORN in Ohio. One must give credit where credit is due. ACORN should win some kind of award for its spectacular creativity in finding new ways to game the system and flood it with false, forged, and illegal voter registration applications.

First, it is important to recall that the Obama campaign funneled more than $800,000 to ACORN and then tried to hide it by designating it as payment to “Citizens Services, Inc.” for work such as $310,000 for “Stage, Sound, and Lighting.” Michelle Malkin looked deeper into this fraud and found some startling facts:

For your information: The New Orleans building that houses CSI also houses multiple chapters of ACORN and the SEIU– as well as the 527 group Communities Voting Together.

And for your information: A tipster points to shady business by CSI -detected by Maryland Democrat Al Wynn, of all people. His team, which filed an FEC complaint over the matter, linked several suspicious outfits used by his primary opponent to one address: 1024 Elysian Fields in New Orleans. That’s the address of CSI and ACORN.

As we’ve seen in Ohio, the Obama campaign apparently bussed in people to register and vote illegally during Ohio’s early voting period. The close connection between the Obama campaign and ACORN begs the question of whether activities like this coupled with ACORN’s registration shenanigans are a coordinated effort to set the stage on election day for the most massive fraud in the history of the United States - fraud that would make any 19th century election where votes were bought and sold look on the up and up.

Some of the outrageous actions of ACORN in Ohio were detailed in this Cleveland Plain Dealer article:

Yesterday two Ohio voters came forth and claimed that although they had made it clear they were already registered to vote, ACORN canvassers encouraged them to sign up several times. One of those was Christopher Barkley of Cleveland, who estimates that he registered to vote “10 to 15″ times after ACORN relentlessly pursued him.

“I kept getting approached by folks who asked me to register,” Barkley said. “They’d ask me if I was registered. I’d say yes, and they’d ask me to do it [register] again. Some of them were getting paid to collect names. That was their sob story, and I bought it,” he said.

The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections has thus far subpoenaed at least three people as part of a wider inquiry into potential voter fraud by ACORN. The community organization looks to register low-income voters, that tend to overwhelmingly vote Democratic.

Lateala Goins, who was subpoeaned along with Barkley and others, said, “You can tell them you’re registered as many times as you want - they do not care. They will follow you to the buses, they will follow you home, it does not matter.”

Also subpoenaed was Freddie Johnson, who filled out voter registration cards a total of 72 times over the course of 18 months..

The ACORN spokesman in Ohio insists “that his group has collected 100,000 voter registration cards, and only about 50 were questionable.” How this is possible when one poor guy was harassed to sign up 72 by times by ACORN makes one wonder what other lies and frauds the far left Democratic partisan group is capable of.

There is much more. And the sad fact is nobody - not ACORN (who wouldn’t care anyway), Ohio election officials at every level, Republicans, non-partisan observers - knows just how many false, forged, or illegal registrations were dumped into Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s lap. No one knows how many early voters voted illegally. No one knows how many Republicans were discouraged from voting by absentee ballot thanks to Brunner’s original ruling on the matter. No one knows the extent of cooperation between the Obama campaign and ACORN in Ohio. And no one knows if any of this will affect the outcome of Ohio’s presidential election.

There are other states where ACORN and the Democrats have been playing fast and loose with registration and early voting. Over the next weeks and until the election, American Thinker will look at many of these states and detail the attempts to hijack the democratic process in service to Barack Obama’s presidential ambitions.

No doubt we will hear much from authorities in the coming weeks who finally appear to be aroused to the threat ACORN poses to the integrity of the election and are carrying out numerous investigations in 11 states across the country.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker