Right Wing Nut House

With many liberals cheering them on, the Obama campaign is putting on a full court press on several fronts to silence critics and quash Conservatives attempts to publicize the candidate’s relationship with former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers.

In effect, the Obama camp is putting the entire nation on notice; screw with us and we will make your life so miserable you will wish you had never heard the name “Bill Ayers.”

I can sympathize with their frustration. Their attempts to carefully craft an image and narrative of a political moderate who could bring both sides together may not be able to stand the revelation that not only did Obama seek out radicals in his spiritual life by joining the church of a conspiracy minded bigot but also made alliances with political radicals like Ayers (and the Maoist New Party) to advance his career.

We are still waiting for an explanation from Obama why in the name of all that is good and holy did he actually seek out and ask for the endorsement of a proudly Maoist organization like The New Party? Why did he knowingly, eagerly accept volunteers from this organization to staff his campaign for his first state senate run? What possessed this self proclaimed moderate to make common political cause with a group whose goal was to remake the Democratic party and infuse it with Marxist principles?

Perhaps a better question would be why the press has failed in their responsibility to make this fact known to the public. How can it not be relevant to the debate over Obama’s claims to be a political moderate? If John McCain had sought out the endorsement of an avowedly racist organization and used their members as foot soldiers in his campaign, we could rightly question his fitness to be president. But here we have The Messiah cozying up to far left radicals and despite the fact that the information is available to anyone with a modicum of ambition to uncover Barack Obama’s murky past, (It’s right there on the New Party website ) the press seems singularly disinterested in the matter.

Bias? Perhaps. But I take the much more realistic view that most of the press is just plain lazy. This causes them to miss as much stuff about McCain as they do Obama. They are - with precious few exceptions - lazy, cynical, ideologues who don’t want to be bothered with anything that changes the revealed truth they dispense to a public they care little about and indeed, see as ignorant yahoos not worthy of their brilliance.

Conservatives have taken it upon themselves to fill the void. Enter Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons who created the most devastating ad of the political season so far, asking viewers “How much do you know about Barack Obama” and then proceeding to outline the colorful and violent career of William Ayers, terrorist. There is nothing untrue in the ad. Every fact about Ayers, every quote from him is on the record - much of it taken from Ayers’ own book! The Obama take on the ad is that it smears him by connecting him to Ayers bombings. I don’t see that at all and, in fact, the ad goes out of its way to connect Obama to Ayers in his incarnation as a professor of education at the University of Chicago.

Judge for yourself:

“Do you know enough to elect Barack Obama?” is not violating the law by asking people to vote against him. If it is a violation, then every ad ever put out by Moveon.Org would have to be pulled and the Board of Directors arrested. It isn’t even close.

But Obama decided to write the Department of Justice anyway and ask them to prosecute. They also asked Justice to prosecute Simmons.

Can the DOJ really do that? Would they do that?

Technically, they could. But in practice they almost never do. It is a damned effective strategy anyway because just the threat of a DOJ investigation is enough to scare a lot of people off - those without the deep pockets of Mr. Simmons who can’t afford the thousands of dollars in lawyers fees they would incur if Justice were to turn their legal eye in their direction.

The Obama campaign knows this which is why it is so insidious. Obama is not asking Justice to enforce the law. They are using a Justice as a club to knock their opponents out of the game and to silence critics.

In a similar manner, the gambit of using their lawyers to send letters to TV stations airing the ad is pure intimidation, nothing more. The Obama campaign can take no legal action and they know it. It is impossible to prove slander (in this case because the facts presented are all true) but again, the threat of using the legal system is usually enough to force those without the means to defend themselves against even a frivolous lawsuit to stop airing the ad.

So Obama’s campaign against broadcasters like Sinclair and donors like Harold Simmons are not serious attempts to have the Department of Justice enforce the law but rather pure hardball politics, played to the hilt by people who evidently do not mind chilling free speech when it gets in the way of their ambitions.

One can usually gauge how badly an opponents attacks are hurting a candidate by the virulence of their response. Nowhere is that more evident than in the additional campaign by the Obama camp to stifle opposition and keep the lid on the Ayers matter by, in effect, trying to shut down one of the most respected talk radio shows in America while using extraordinarily and unusually harsh language to describe a journalist.

Milt Rosenberg’s talk show on weekday nights is a must listen for those interested in politics and culture. Sophisticated, urbane, witty, and intelligent, Rosenberg can be counted on for lively conversation with guests that run the gamut from best selling authors to bloggers.

Last night. Rosenberg invited conservative journalist and intellectual Stanley Kurtz on to talk about what he had learned so far in his examination of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge documents that the University of Illinois released to the press on Tuesday. It was a foregone conclusion that the documents were going to make Obama out to be a dissembler - perhaps even a liar - about his relationship with Ayers. Despite Obama’s claims that Ayers was “just some guy in the neighborhood,” the two worked closely together, attending dozens of meetings together and even going on a retreat.

But that didn’t stop the Obama campaign from calling Kurtz a liar:

Barack Obama’s campaign hasn’t advertised this a great deal this week, but the campaign’s “Action Wire” has been waging large-scale campaigns against critics. That includes tens of thousands of e-mails to television stations running Harold Simmons’ Bill Ayers ad, and to their advertisers — including a list of major automobile and telecommunications companies.

And tonight, the campaign launched a more specific campaign: an effort to disrupt the appearance by a writer for National Review, Stanley Kurtz, on a Chicago radio program. Kurtz has been writing about Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers, and has suggested that papers housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago would reveal new details of that relationship.

The campaign e-mailed Chicago supporters who had signed up for the Obama Action Wire with detailed instructions including the station’s telephone number and the show’s extension, as well as a research file on Kurtz, which seems to prove that he’s a conservative, which isn’t in dispute. The file cites a couple of his more controversial pieces, notably his much-maligned claim that same-sex unions have undermined marriage in Scandinavia.

“Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse,” says the email, which picks up a form of pressure on the press pioneered by conservative talk radio hosts and activists in the 1990s, and since adopted by Media Matters and other liberal groups.

“It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves. At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz’s lies,” it continues.

The results were beyond the Obama’s camp expectations.

Zack Christenson, executive producer of “Extension 720 with Milt Rosenburg,” said the response was strong.

“I would say this is the biggest response we’ve ever got from a campaign or a candidate,” he said. “This is really unprecedented with the show, the way that people are flooding the calls and our email boxes.”

Christenson said the Obama campaign was asked to have someone appear on the show and the headquarters declined the request.

“He got into the files just yesterday, so we wanted to have him on to find out what he found and, if at all possible, we wanted to get the Obama campaign to get their side of the story,” Christenson said. “That’s why the uproar is kind of amazing, because we wanted the Obama campaign’s take as well to kind of balance it out.”

The show’s producer said the calls dropped off after the show’s first hour. He did not have a count of calls, but said it was “non-stop.”

Obama’s campaign has launched similar offensives against stations that have run campaign ads that it did not like.

The point is not that these Obamabots didn’t have the right to call in and complain. They most certainly did. The question is just what is it that Kurtz or Simmons, or anyone else is saying about Ayers and Obama that is untrue? The callers could not give specifics of “the smear.” The Obama camp has yet to be specific about how Kurtz is “smearing” Obama.

Apparently, Milt Rosenberg spent so much time dealing with these fanatics that Kurtz could barely get a word out (you can hear the audio here).

As I mentioned the other day, this is playing politics “The Chicago Way” - perhaps more Sicilian than South Side, “back of the yards boys.”

And the Obama campaign is using the DOJ as their own hit men.

Allow me to take off my partisan hat for a moment and try to give a coldly analytical view of the Democratic convention at the halfway point.

It seems to me that the major themes of the convention have largely been subsumed by the Clinton drama and that the more the Obama camp tries to assuage the hurt feelings of the PUMA’s, the Hillraisers, and the bitter end Hillaryites, the more they become resistant to the call for unity. Frankly, I don’t know what else the Obama people could be doing to rectify this situation. They have bent over backwards to accommodate the wishes of Hillary’s campaign and, by extension, her supporters. And all that they seem to be getting for their trouble are leaks about how “arrogant” they are and how they have been disrespectful to Hillary and her supporters.

What this has done is elevate the level of tension in the hall so that rather than coming off excited and confident, the Democrats seem hesitant and worried. And the speeches - with a couple of notable exceptions - haven’t helped matters.

True, political oratory is a lost art on both sides of the aisle and I expect the GOP convention to feature equally snooze-worthy addresses. But if you look at the major addresses so far, you can be forgiven for being a little perplexed.

The success of the Kennedy and Michelle Obama speeches can be attributed to their emotional appeal on a personal level and not to how they fit into any overall attack strategy or even how they fulfilled the particular theme of Monday evening - “One Nation.” Yes, the minor addresses did that quite nicely with a wonderful rainbow of people testifying to how the last 8 years have been detrimental to America. But no one saw those speeches unless you were watching C-Span or PBS. The Kennedy-Michelle speeches were personal triumphs and dramatic, heart tugging political theater. But what did they accomplish for the Obama campaign?

Just for contrast, look at the first night of the 2004 GOP convention. Giuliani and John McCain brought the crowd to their feet with attacks on Kerry and the Democrats. The Rudy speech had the dual kicker of 9/11 still being relatively fresh in people’s minds and the convention being held in New York City. McCain’s ringing endorsement of Bush that night contrasted with Hillary’s rather desultory unity speech last night tells the story.

I’m not the only one mystified by the first night’s speeches. James Carville, Paul Begala, and other partisan Democratic commentators also talked about the lack of a unifying message and the fact that the Democrats were wasting time by not going after McCain and the Republicans. Many lefty bloggers were also disappointed although they were effusive in their praise for Michelle Obama’s home run of a speech about her family. Again, if the goal were to capture an audience with drama and hold them, the Obama campaign succeeded. But as far as getting out a specific message and savaging the Republicans? Not so much.

They did a much better job last night but Holy Jesus someone give Mark Warner a shot of Vitamin B. Thankfully, his “Keynote” address lasted only about 15 minutes because I haven’t seen a keynoter that bad since Clinton’s 45 minute drone in 1988. I hesitate to bring up Zell Miller’s rousing killer of a speech from 2004 if only because you can’t compare apples and Sominex. Still, Warner gave an interesting speech even if it had no partisan red meat for the faithful to gnaw on. The question is was anyone in the TV audience listening after 5 minutes?

This brings us to Hillary’s roof buster. She has improved her public speaking skills enormously in the last 18 months. The transformation has been remarkable. I would say the last third of her speech was the best part of the convention so far for the Democrats and the best I’ve ever seen from her.

Josh Marshall also noticed the vast improvement:

That was quite a speech. It occurred to me as she built to the conclusion in the last few minutes, that the pre-2008 Hillary Clinton would not have been capable of that speech. That’s not a dig. But she grew incredibly as a candidate over the course of this campaign. And this was an immensely powerful delivery, and a richly woven together speech. The beginning seemed fine but not remarkable. But it slowly built into something very powerful.

But I somewhat agree with this analysis by Ron Fournier of AP that she never personalized her endorsement of Obama and that by making her support for the nominee an extension of her own campaign, she lessened its impact:

She took the high road Tuesday night because it was also her best road politically; if Obama wins, she still emerges as a central voice in American liberalism, replacing the ailing Sen. Edward Kennedy. And if Obama loses, as Hillary said he would during the campaign, she is blameless and the party can turn back to her without guilt in four years.

Behind the scenes Tuesday, the Obama and Clinton camps struck a tentative deal that would allow some states to cast votes in a roll call before somebody — possibly Clinton herself — cuts short the tally and asks the convention to nominate Obama by unanimous consent. This was her price for ending her historic bid for the presidency in a manner that, however messy, still left Obama in a stronger position than Kennedy left Jimmy Carter in 1980, when the Massachusetts senator extracted platform concessions and shrank from the traditional unity show at the final gavel.

But she did extract her price.

The bill came due Tuesday. The crowd. The applause. The promise of a vote Wednesday, and a speech laced 17 times by some variation of the pronoun “I.”

She barely mentioned Obama for the first 2/3 of her speech (3 times by my count) and then poured it on during the last third. Did her call for unity fall on deaf ears? This piece in WaPo tried to gauge reaction by interviewing a dozen or so Hillary supporters - many of whom had variations of this response:

Most delegates agreed that Clinton’s impassioned speech marked a step toward reconciliation. The crowd in the Pepsi Center stood to applaud almost every time she mentioned Obama by name.

John Burkett, a Pennsylvania delegate and staunch Clinton supporter, attached an Obama button to his shirt. A New Mexico delegate said the “H” on his shirt will be replaced with an “O” come Thursday.

The last survey I saw had about 30% of Hillary supporters saying they would either stay home or vote McCain. I think most of those started on the road to the realization that Obama is really their only choice and will vote for him in November. In the end, given history and the partisan times we live in, I would expect that 30% to fall far below 10% by election day.

One other note on the speeches. I thought that Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer was outstanding. I can see how he won in such a heavily Republican state. Very personable and likable.

The LA Times’ Peter Wallsten added that party activists “got a glimpse Tuesday of a surprising new breakout star: a jovial, round-faced warrior with a bolo tie who managed to attack Republicans while keeping a smile on his face.”

Keep an eye on Schweitzer. We’re likely to hear more from him in the future.

I’ll agree with that except any politician from a small state - Republican or Democrat - is always at a disadvantage in a national race. Not impossible to overcome but they start out behind because of a bias in the MSM against them. I might add that candidates from the deep south have the same problem.

Overall grade for the convention so far? I give it a C+. Obviously some of that was beyond Obama’s control given his problems with Hillary Clinton and her supporters. And his campaign has done everything they can, going more than halfway to meet Clinton’s concerns. But the impression I’ve gotten is that many Hillary supporters don’t want to be convinced and their tepid support is dragging down the convention a little.

The Democrats have a case to make and they are not consistently making it - too many tangents, too many other stories about Hillary, Bill, and that whole drama are distracting from what should be their main message; the country can’t afford 4 more years of a Republican in the White House. I think the country is ready for that message, will be receptive to it - if they ever get around to consistently hammering it home.

The press is to blame for stirring the pot but a good campaign will do things that take the press by the scruff of the neck and force them to cover their themes, their issues. Both Democratic and Republican candidates have been able to do this before under worse circumstances. So far, the Obama campaign has perhaps not failed but could certainly be doing a better job.

It’s not too late to turn this thing into an A+ triumph for Obama. But tonight must be a real grand slam of an evening if the country is going to be properly prepped for Obama’s big night on Thursday.

Mayor Daley couldn’t have played it any tougher.

If you anger a big shot for the Machine in Chicago, you’re likely to lose your access to the patronage wagon that rolls around the city dispensing jobs and city contracts - a catastrophic turn of events for a local pol who depends on those goodies to keep his friends and associates happy and growing fat at the public trough. And things can get rougher for you if you’re not careful.

Own a restaurant? Amazing how the health inspector shows up and, no matter how clean the place is, writes you up for having rats in the kitchen and cockroaches on the plates.

Own an apartment building? Isn’t it amazing how the city building inspector - the guy who you usually wave to as he walks by your building during his “inspections” suddenly takes a keen interest in load bearing beams and termites infesting the woodwork.

Renewing your business licence can become a bureaucratic nightmare. Or, in one famous case (to be fair, few believe this story) one alderman was giving former mayor Richard J. Daley a hard time and city plows “forgot” to plow most of his ward after a big snow storm.

Barack Obama has shown in the past that he can be as hard as nails when it comes to political combat. You might recall that during his very first run for the state senate, he hired the best election law attorney in Chicago who showed up at the elections board one fine day and proceeded to systematically challenge the signatures on the nominating petitions of every one of his rivals. In the end, he had them all thrown off the ballot thus allowing him to run unopposed in the Democratic primary which was tantamount to being elected.

It shouldn’t surprise us then to see Obama take the gloves off and try a little political kneecapping of his opponents:

Sen. Barack Obama has launched an all-out effort to block a Republican billionaire’s efforts to tie him to domestic and foreign terrorists in a wave of negative television ads.

Obama’s campaign has written the Department of Justice demanding a criminal investigation of the “American Issues Project,” the vehicle through which Dallas investor Harold Simmons is financing the advertisements. The Obama campaign — and tens of thousands of supporters — also is pressuring television networks and affiliates to reject the ads. The effort has met with some success: CNN and Fox News are not airing the attacks.

Obama has also launched his own response ad, directly addressing Simmons’ attempt to link him to domestic terror.

The project is “a knowing and willful attempt to violate the strictures of federal election law,” Obama general counsel Bob Bauer wrote to Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Keeney last week in a letter provided to Politico. Bauer argued that by advocating Obama’s defeat, the ad should be subject to the contribution limits of federal campaign law, not the anything-goes regime of issue advocacy.

Like every single 527 ad I’ve ever seen, it skirts very close to the edge of calling for the outright defeat of a candidate. The question they ask - “Do you know enough to elect Barack Obama?” - answers itself. But as far as an overt call for Obama’s defeat, it’s not there and for Obama to imply that it is smacks of simple, hardball politics.

But Obama has gone one better and has written letters to various TV stations who are airing the aid, threatening them with loss of advertising revenue as they claim to be organizing their supporters to urge advertisers not to buy ads on stations that run the piece. He certainly seems a little huffy when he says that the ads are “an appalling lie, a disgraceful smear of the lowest kind on the senator’s patriotism and commitment to the rule of law.”

Where might the lie be, Senator? Is it the part that talks about what the Weather Underground did - setting a bomb off in the capitol, attacking armored cars and killing guards? That part is certainly true. Or was it that you didn’t serve on the Woods Foundation Board with Ayers? The ad doesn’t even mention your close collaboration with Ayers on the Annenberg Challenge Project. Nor does it mention the several panels you appeared on with Ayers - one of which was set up by your own wife.

Just what part of the ad is a “lie?” You are on a first name basis with an unreconstructed radical, an unrepentant terrorist who wishes he could have done more violence than he actually did. The American people certainly have a right to know why you don’t think this singular relationship - an unheard of connection that you jaw droppingly defend - should disqualify you from being president.

How did we get to the point in this country where people like William Ayers, his equally unrepentant wife Bernadine Dohrn, and other radicals who advocated the violent overthrow of the United States government in the 1960’s and ’70’s have become “mainstream?” To be sure, Obama is not alone. Mayor Daley has defended Ayers:

“I don’t condone what he did 40 years ago, but I remember that period well,” said Daley, an Obama supporter whose father, Richard J. Daley, was a favorite target of the antiwar movement when he was mayor in the ’60s. “It was a difficult time, but those days are long over. I believe we have too many challenges in Chicago and our country to keep refighting 40-year-old battles.”

Daley sees Ayers as a bridge to the Hyde Park liberals who are always on the lookout for a candidate to oppose him and many of his cronies. It would make sense for Hizzoner to cultivate a relationship with Ayers - despite the utter contempt in which he and the vast majority of his Hyde Park neighbors hold Daley. I don’t think Hizzoner would like to hear what they call him at those UIC cocktail parties.

But it also explains how the Democratic party Machine can get close to people like Ayers, not to mention their pandering to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and that other South Side religious bigot Father Micheal Pfleger. It’s not what any of those radicals have said or done its what they can do for the party and the Machine that’s important.

But outside of Chicago, these people are political poison, rightly disgusting average Americans and calling into question the judgment of anyone who associates with them. Perhaps Obama sincerely didn’t realize that his relationship with these radicals would be such a big deal, that no one cares what Ayers did 40 years ago or that he feels the same today. If so, that kind of insularity is frightening - one more reason to question his ability for the job.

Obama has stupidly called additional attention to the Ayers issue by releasing a weak response ad that asks why John McCain is worried about what happened 40 years ago and that Obama was only 8 years old when Ayers was committing mayhem. Either he just doesn’t get the fact that it is Ayers brazen attitude that he didn’t do enough bombing back in the day that is the problem today or he thinks no one else believes it important. And the reference to how old he was when Ayers was bombing the Pentagon is just plain weird. No one is saying Obama helped Ayers bomb the Pentagon. The point, as hammered home in the ad, is that Obama calls this man a friend. Again, perhaps he just doesn’t think it important.

Of this he will no doubt be disabused shortly. The ad is running heavily in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. Unless TV stations are cowed by Obama’s hardball politics, it is likely this ad and others like it will run from now until election day. I have little doubt that the Reverend Wright will make a reappearance in the next few weeks as well, reminding the voter that despite everything that Obama says - all of his soothing platitudes and innocuous sounding tripe - this is a man who has associated with radicals for most of his adult life. And asking whether this is the kind of person we want as our next president is an absolutely legitimate exercise.

It was long past midnight on July 14, 1972 when George McGovern, a good and decent man, stepped to the podium in Miami Beach to give his speech accepting the nomination of the Democratic party for president. A genuine war hero who hated what the Viet Nam War was doing to the country, McGovern rode to the nomination on the scruffy coattails of the young, the disaffected, the grudge holders, the racialists - the entire victimhood society that now controls the Democratic party.

You knew this convention was going to be different when the Illinois delegation headed up by Richard J. Daley was summarily booted from the premises when challenged by a faction led by Jesse Jackson. Daley’s “elected” delegates did not contain enough women, minorities, or homosexuals according to the new party rules pushed through by McGovern and his revolutionaries. Humiliated, Daley vowed to show McGovern who ran the Democratic party in Illinois by barely lifting a finger for him in the general election campaign. Nixon gained nearly 60% of the vote to carry the state in November.

McGovern never knew what hit him. He thought that if he allowed the crazies who rioted in 1968 to take over the party, that he would expand the base and create an entirely new coalition of the young, the left, and minorities along with traditional Democratic allies like organized labor and the intelligentsia that would open a new era in government and politics.

What McGovern didn’t count on was backlash. He himself recognized this when he remarked “I opened the door to the Democratic party and 20 million people walked out.”

In Denver this year, graduates of that 1972 laboratory in identity politics are now firmly in control of the Democratic party. They have gone from revolutionaries to party insiders. They are in Congress, the Senate, the statehouse, and staff the numerous special pleader organizations and groups that form the backbone of the party. Barack Obama was all of 10 years old at the time. His running mate, Joe Biden, was part of that revolution, running his first campaign for the Senate on a McGovern platform and winning that fall - one of the few Democratic bright spots in an otherwise dismal political year.

The 1972 convention was an unmitigated disaster for the Democrats as every special interest group with a cause or a grudge got to debate their pet issue in full view of a national TV audience that dwindled as the convention droned on. The long windedness of the speakers, the confusion, the disorganization, the whole spectacle of long haired freaks wanting to legalize marijuana, lesbians wanting recognition, women’s rights advocates pressing for an equal rights amendment, and speaker after speaker trashing the United States for its involvement in Indochina went on long past midnight, even unto dawn on a few days.

This was the background as McGovern made his pitch to the country around 1:00 AM eastern time.

McGovern’s acceptance speech is a remarkable document. You can lift entire passages from the text and place them next to remarks made by Barack Obama and the only way you would be able to tell the difference was the more flowery rhetoric of the messiah.

This is from McGovern’s speech:

Yet I believe that every man and woman in this Convention Hall knows that for 30 years we have been so absorbed with fear and danger from abroad that we have permitted our own house to fall into disarray.

National security includes schools for our children as well as silos for our missiles.

It includes the health of our families as much as the size of our bombs, the safety of our streets, and the condition of our cities, and not just the engines of war.

If we some day choke on the pollution of our own air, there will be little consolation in leaving behind a dying continent ringed with steel.

So while protecting ourselves abroad, let us form a more perfect union here at home. And this is the time for that task.

But it is in the famous peroration of McGovern’s early morning tirade - “Come home, America” - that one is struck by how little the Democratic party has changed in their ideas and class conscious rhetoric:

From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America

From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.

From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick — come home, America.

Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward.

Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world, and let us be joyful in that homecoming, for this “is your land, this land is my land — from California to New York island, from the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters — this land was made for you and me.”

At the time, this was revolutionary. Now, it is mainstream Democratic thought. And the hard left, having clawed its way to the top of the party pyramid through sheer hard work and a dogged determination to outlast their more moderate foes are on the verge of realizing their dream of a man who talks their talk ascending to the White House.

In a very real sense, those kids in tye died shirts and bell bottoms from 1972 have indeed “Come Home.” They’re all grown up now. They are not only teachers and lawyers for special interest groups but bankers, stockbrokers, financial planners - your neighbors and friends. To one degree or another, they have made peace with “the system” they so violently opposed in their youth. But there still burns a need to “reform” that system and make it “fair” - not as a goal but as a result. There is still resentment against “the rich” and pity for “the oppressed.”

And there is still the overweening sense in their own superior ability to tell the rest of us how we should spend our money, how we should save, what we should buy, what we must eat, what we should be watching on TV or listening to on the radio - in short, an almost messianic faith in the ability of government working through their will, to make all of our lives better. We see some of this on the far right as well - busybodies who want to peak into our bedrooms or stick their nose in decisions that are none of their business. Using government for the purposes of forcing us to behave or think a certain way regardless of whether it is the right or left is just plain wrong and has no place in a free society.

But it is on the left where this impulse is the strongest. Today they seek the same top down solutions to problems - or see a government solution to something that either isn’t a problem or would curtail our freedom of choice - advocated by George McGovern in 1972. The difference is that those 1972 Democrats were outriders, amateurs trying to play a professionals game. The result was a slaughter at the polls.

But today, those kids have grown up and become professionals. They know how to run national campaigns. They have learned not to be so forthcoming in how they intend to give us “hope and change.” The more nebulous their rhetoric the better. In this, they have found the perfect vessel - Barack Obama; a man who says absolutely nothing and says it with great feeling and emotion better than anyone in American history.

If they win, we will enter an era where the majority will attempt to remake America into something more like a European social democracy. In fact, they brag about where many of their ideas come from - the failed economic models in France and Germany. Regulation of business and industry will be reintroduced. Social programs like national health insurance, top down mandated education reform, and the alphabet soup of programs for the poor will be expanded to include “the middle class” thus making more Americans more dependent on government than ever before.

I don’t mind losing if the Democrats proudly run on that kind of platform with full disclosure of how they intend to turn America into a semi-socialist state. But they don’t have the guts to do it because they know they would lose. Hence, they will continue to hide behind Obama’s soaring rhetoric that promises such a bright future but is a little hazy on the details.

George McGovern and his revolutionaries sincerely wanted to remake America because they believed what they were advocating was consistent with our democratic heritage and values. I was one of those who supported McGovern in 1972 and believed he and the rest of us would remake America into a paradise where all shared in her bounty and peace on earth would replace the endless wars and tension with the Soviet Union. Today’s left isn’t quite as idealistic. For them, it is about power and control - a far cry from the belief that we could change their world by believing in the sheer goodness of our motives.

A scant 5 years later, I realized what utter nonsense I believed when I was 18, having had my eyes opened by reading such conservatives as Hayek, Kirk, and Buckley; that government was a utility, not an engine of change; that real change occurred in men’s hearts and minds and could not be mandated by bureaucrats and pompous legislators; that the government could mitigate the effects of inequality but not cure the underlying diseases that caused it; and that there were nations that meant to do the United States harm and accommodating them only encouraged their aggressiveness.

In a fair contest between my ideology and that espoused by the McGovernites who now control the Democratic party, I would bet the farm that the American people would choose the liberty of the individual over the crushing statism offered by the other side.

Let’s hope they make the right choice in November.

Being from the Chicago area and having written about Chicago politics off and on since I began this site, many bloggers, reporters, and radio hosts have asked for my thoughts on the relationship between Barack Obama and the Chicago political Machine. Invariably, my answer is necessarily shallow and incomplete because in order to do justice to the question, many aspects of his relationship to parts of the Machine must be fleshed out while other connections must be found to the reformers and their allies. In short, there is no easy answer to the question of Barack Obama’s status as a Chicago politician and trying to pigeonhole him as Machine hack or courageous reformer just doesn’t tell the whole story.

That’s because overall, the one thing that informs Obama’s career - the one defining characteristic of his rise has been an overarching ambition to achieve high office. This has forced him to make alliances with individual Machine politicians like Illinois state Senate Leader Emil Jones and fixers like Tony Rezko. At the same time, he has kept one foot firmly planted in the reformers camp, running for the state senate out of a district that elected legendary reformer Alice Palmer while occassionally talking the talk of an anti-Machine crusader.

How does he get away with it? Obama is a very clever, very tough, very shifty politician as we have seen these past 17 months. He is both of the Machine and an outsider. And the thing that makes these seemingly disparate parts whole is the engine of his ambition. Whatever suits his plans at the moment is what determines where he comes down on an issue or a personality.

It has been fascinating to watch Obama supporters try and defend Obama’s cozying up to the Machine over the years. They refer to “building bridges” or “reaching out” to all factions in order to pass a bill. This paean to Obama in today’s Washington Post by author of the V I Warshawski crime novels Sara Paretsky that purports to “explain” Obama’s Chicago career is an example of what I mean:

Like me, Barack Obama arrived in Chicago with high ideals and a passion for social justice. Unlike me, he found that his road does lead through electoral politics. One of my novels, “Burn Marks,” shows how an idealistic person can be squeezed by the political process. In that book, my fictional president of the county board, Boots Meagher, gets involved in an arson-for-hire scheme that leads to murder and almost gets V I Warshawski killed when she investigates. At the end of the novel, after V I gets too close a look at the lengths to which some people will go to keep the right friends friendly, she gets a key reminder from an old pal: “This is Chicago, sweetheart, not Minneapolis.”

That book presents a snapshot of the most sordid aspect of Chicago and Cook County politics, but I believe that Obama has found a way of threading the needle between working with the established powers and maintaining a commitment to social justice. He ran for Congress in the 2000 primary against four-term incumbent Rep. Bobby Rush. He steered clear of the key players in the Illinois Democratic Party to run as clean a campaign as possible, and he lost resoundingly. Since then, he has built essential bridges without seeming to have lost his integrity.

“Threading a needle” is a misnomer. Obama’s “commitment to social justice” is exactly as deep as it needs to be at the moment. And if his stand on an issue like abortion or gun control causes problems, he simply changes it and then claims he never did - even in the face of quotes from speeches that make him out to be a liar. It is breathtaking. And it is shameless. But it has stood him well over the years.

And Paretsky is laughably uninformed of she believes Obama eschewed endorsements from the Machine in his 2000 race against Bobby Rush in order to run a “clean campaign.” The fact is, Rush had all the major endorsements locked up already, giving Obama, who would have killed for an endorsement from Jones, Stroger, or Daley himself, nowhere to go for major support but the weak and ineffective reformers he had been lukewarm toward for 4 years. Obama lost badly and took away a valuable lesson in defeat; next time I run I’m going to have the Machine in my corner.

Enter Emil Jones, long time Democratic leader of the state senate and the consummate Machine insider. The story of how Obama came to run for the United States Senate is revealing not only of Obama’s overweening ambition but also of his unadulterated gumption when his own career is at issue.

The story, perhaps apocryphal, has Obama walking into Jones’ office following the ascension of the Democrats to majority status in the state senate for the first time in 26 years in 2002. The way Jones tells it, Obama told Jones he had “the power to elect the next senator from the state of Illinois. Jones responded, “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?” Obama reportedly replied “Me.”

Rather than kick the young whippersnapper out of his office on his ear, Jones chuckled and spent the next year building Obama up. How did he do that?

When asked about his legislative record, Obama rattles off several bills he sponsored as an Illinois lawmaker.

He expanded children’s health insurance, made the state Earned Income Tax Credit refundable for low-income families, required public bodies to tape closed-door meetings to make government more transparent and required police to videotape interrogations of homicide suspects.

And the list goes on.

It’s a lengthy record filled with core liberal issues. But what’s interesting, and almost never discussed, is that he built his entire legislative record in Illinois in a single year.

It was Jones who attached his name to those 26 pieces of legislation. And it was Jones who also gave Obama some other high profile issues to shine on:

Jones further helped raise Obama’s profile by having him craft legislation addressing the day-to-day tragedies that dominated local news headlines.

For instance, Obama sponsored a bill banning the use of the diet supplement ephedra, which killed a Northwestern University football player, and another one preventing the use of pepper spray or pyrotechnics in nightclubs in the wake of the deaths of 21 people during a stampede at a Chicago nightclub. Both stories had received national attention and extensive local coverage.

Obama supporters never mention why Jones might have been so forthcoming in his support of this unknown state senator who had been shellacked by 30 points in his one campaign for higher office. The idea that a Machine insider would do anything for anybody without expecting something in return is ludicrous. So just what did Jones want from Obama?

Last June, to prove his commitment to government transparency, Obama released a comprehensive list of his earmark requests for fiscal year 2008. It comprised more than $300 million in pet projects for Illinois, including tens of millions for Jones’ Senate district.

Shortly after Jones became Senate president, I remember asking his view on pork-barrel spending.

I’ll never forget what he said:

“Some call it pork; I call it steak.”

Spoken like a true Chicago pol.

We see a similar pattern of behavior in his relationship with Tony Rezko, the convicted fraudster and political fixer who took Obama under his wing when he was a young attorney working at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a small but well connected law firm that was assisting Rezko and his associates with getting city and state contracts to rehab low income housing.

The relationship with Rezko is perhaps the most complex of Obama’s life. Rezko was apparently the initiator of many of the contacts between the two. While Obama mostly saw Rezko for what he was - someone who could do him a lot of good when it came time to run for office. Were the two men friends? In the tangled world of Chicago politics, it would be more accurate to say that the two were “associates.” Rezko almost certainly annoyed Obama at times with his efforts to get closer to the young man while Obama, clearly seeing electoral consequences with getting too chummy with a character like Rezko no doubt tried at times to keep him at arms length.

We see this most clearly in Rezko helping Obama acquire his mansion. It seems unbelievable but apparently, Rezko did indeed show up almost out of the blue with an offer to buy the vacant lot next door to the mansion thus making it possible for Obama to save around $600,000 on the purchase price. The sellers of the house have confirmed as much as they also confirmed that there were no other bidders on the property. This is not out of the ordinary in that Rezko was, as I said, usually the initiator of contact between the two. For his part, Obama would then use Rezko as a bundler for his political campaigns as well as using Rezko’s extensive contacts in the Chicago real estate development community to meet others who could shake the campaign money tree.

Obama used Rezko’s “generosity” in order to buy his dream home even though at the time, Rezko was being investigated for the crimes that are sending him to jail and Obama knew it. What did Rezko want in return? Continued access to Obama is certainly one price the senator paid for Rezko’s largess. There is some evidence that came out at the trial that Rezko was in contact with Washington lawmakers, trying to get them to intervene with the State Department who had denied a visa to one of Rezko’s business partners, billionaire Nadhmi Auchi. Obama denies he or anyone in his office contacted Foggy Bottom on behalf of Auchi or Rezko but such interference is common and there would be little evidence of it anyway.

So the question of why a “reformer” would be hanging around with a shady Chicago fixer answers itself; because both men found they could do each other a lot of good. For years, Rezko was Obama’s goto guy for campaign money while Obama worked diligently at the state level to steer lucrative rehab and other contracts to his associate. Perfect political symbiosis and very revealing of Obama’s working with the Machine whenever doing so would help his career.

What do the small group of dedicated Chicago reformers think of Obama? The one word that continually escapes their lips when describing Obama is “pragmatist.” On several high profile issues, Obama has indeed supported them - if rather tepidly at times. But on some key endorsements, Obama has chosen to back the Machine hack rather than the reform candidate. The case of Dorothy Tillman is instructive. A corrupt, hard nosed woman, she was famous for drawing a gun in a city council meeting. The reformers put up an excellent, well qualified candidate to run against her in the Democratic primary:

Just three months before Obama made his endorsement, the Lakefront Outlook community newspaper ran a three-part investigative series exposing flagrant cronyism and possible tax-law violations that centered on Tillman and her biggest pet project, a taxpayer-funded cultural center built across the street from her ward office that had been hemorrhaging money since its inception.

In the end, Tillman lost the election despite Obama’s endorsement, which critics said countered his calls for clean government. Obama told the Chicago Tribune that he had backed Tillman because she was an early supporter of his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign.

Tillman was also a close ally of Mayor Daley and Cook County boss John Stroger - two men who Obama absolutely needed on his side in his run for the presidency. Indeed, Obama also endorsed Daley himself, proclaiming that city hall had been “cleaned up” thanks to the Mayor’s efforts. The rank cynicism of saying that he was endorsing the man who made city hall a cesspool of corruption in the first place was visible to anyone who cared to look.

The fact that both sides in this debate over Obama’s ties - or lack of them - to the Machine have ammunition for their arguments should tell you a lot about how Obama has managed this sticky, complicated relationship over the years. But there is little doubt that he was nurtured by the Machine, cut his teeth using the tactics of the Machine - as when in his first state senate race, he had all the other candidate’s ballot petitions thrown out by challenging the signatures - and in the end, allowed the Machine to embrace him as their candidate for president of the United States. Many of his top campaign aides are connected to the Machine in one way or another. And, of course, he moved his campaign headquarters from Washington to Chicago which no doubt pleased Mayor Daley.

The biggest question I have is will this complex dance with the Chicago Machine continue if Obama wins the presidency? What’s the payoff for Daley and his cronies? To believe that those fellows support a candidate out of altruism is loony.

And maybe its time the American people started asking themselves the same question.

In choosing Senator Joe Biden of Delaware as his running mate, Barack Obama has acknowledged his own shortcomings while recognizing that the election he and his people thought a cakewalk a few months ago is now a battle royale along the lines of the 2000 and 2004 contests.

Republicans would do well not to celebrate too much over this choice. On the surface, it may appear to be a mistake - an almost comically bad selection by Obama due to Biden’s well known (and well documented) verbal gaffes. And, as Politico points out, this should worry the Obama camp:

But while Biden, 65, made strides during the primary season on curbing his legendary penchant for leaving no thought unspoken, those who have watched him (and listened to him) over the years know the Obama team will spend some sleepless nights wondering what he might say at any given moment.

Leaving that aside, Biden is a formidable presence and brings quite a bit to the table. He is, by Democratic party standards, a moderate, especially on foriegn policy where he has distinguished himself as Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Senate. He voted for the Iraq War and has consistently advocated victory in that conflict. An early and harsh critic of Administration Iraq policy (like John McCain), Biden and McCain have been seen as the biggest advocates for putting more troops into Iraq as far back as 2004. He supported Bush’s Pakistan policy until he began to run for president. He has taken a tough stance against the Russians. He has fully backed our efforts in Afghanistan.

He can be called a foreign policy realist - something he will have to abandon now that he is running with the most idealistic and naive candidate in history. But Obama doesn’t care where he stands on issues as much as his perceived “experience” overcomes his own lack of foreign policy credentials.

Domestically, he is further left but has been known as a friend of credit card companies and banks. He is very liberal on social policy (he received a 0% rating from the Family Research Council) and does well with organized labor. He got a perfect score from the liberal ADA in 2005 and 2006.

What are Obama’s expectations? What does he bring to the ticket?

Joe Biden is an attack dog, a savage puncher who brings some skills to a debate. He will more than ably fill the traditional role of a running mate by attacking McCain like there’s no tomorow while Obama preaches his hope and change mantra staying above the fray.

It is true that Biden is in love with his own voice (most senators are) and he can be very windy at times. But the Obama camp will keep him on a very short leash which will help and I expect he will also be somewhat protected from the press. This may minimize the gaffe potential.

As far as his personal attributes he is an emotive sort of fellow which plays well with most voters. He has a working class upbringing although after 36 years in the senate, he is far beyond those humble beginnings. He is a Catholic and may help shore up Obama’s working class Catholic base that Hillary won so handily in Pennsylvania and other states.

I’ve listed most of his negatives except the intangible. Joe Biden is the consumate inside the beltway, Washington insider. For Barack Obama to go before the people now offering “hope and change” is ludicrous. Also, Biden is only 7 years younger than John McCain so using his age against him is now under the bus.

But it is his ability as a back alley brawler that Obama probably chose him. His sarcasm can sometimes be too biting and at times he comes off as just plain mean. But when he smiles that huge, teeth baring grin and lets loose a torrent of invective against his opponent, he can be fearsome.

This campaign started with both men saying they wanted to elevate dialogue and stay away from personal attacks. But any student of history can tell you that this is the strategy of the loser and the winner is usually the one who is most able to portray his opponent as the devil incarnate. Negative politics is like torture; it is used because it works. And with the country still in a 50-50 split,  the candidate who can hit first and hit the hardest will probably come out on top.

This blog post originally appears in The American Thinker

Face it, friends. Forget all the media hype you’ve heard about the superiority of Obama’s campaign. Forget everything you’ve heard about what geniuses these guys are. The fact is, these fellows are not very smart. And they have proved it by jumping on a McCain gaffe without realizing they were leaping into a pool of quicksand.

First, either of these men who tries to portray themselves as a “Man of the People” or “more in touch” with average Americans should be horsewhipped. Neither of these gents has a clue how most of us live and both probably hit their knees every night thanking God they don’t. It is a distressing fact here in the first quarter of the third century of the American experiment that running for federal office is a rich man’s game and has become so for both parties. They are all out of touch with the average American which is why both campaigns have thrown up smokescreens instead of dealing with the hard issues that threaten our future.

Obama’s surprisingly aggressive attack on John McCain’s inability to remember how many houses he owns without thinking of how McCain could turn that attack and have it redound in his favor shows Obama is more concerned with appearing to “fight back” than with formulating any logical plan on how to attack his opponent. The netroots and other Democrats have been screaming at him to get tough on McCain, to respond in kind to McCain’s digs at Obama’s celebrity and haughtiness.

Just this morning, James Carville writes that Obama “needs to get mad about something:”

And my last piece of advice to Obama and his team is to just get mad about something. Obama’s campaign seems so intent on branding him as a “cool and calm” leader.

Well, voters want to see a sense of urgency and outrage in their president: Outrage over our dependence on foreign oil; outrage over our increased cost of living, health care and education; outrage over declining incomes; outrage over an endless war and an idiotic foreign policy; and outrage over our country’s loss of prestige over the last 7½ years.

To put it bluntly, Obama needs to get outraged over something other than “attacks on his patriotism.”

Is Obama capable of getting mad? His attempts to counter McCain’s non-existent charges that he isn’t patriotic came off like whining rather than outrage. Indeed, if there is one thing the Obama campaign does extremely well it’s whine.

But in piling on about McCain’s house gaffe, hitting on the twin themes of elitism and McCain being “out of touch” along with the unspoken charge that McCain is forgetful because of his age, Obama has led with his chin. Barack Obama is the very last person in America who should bring up the subject of houses - and John McCain is going to remind Americans why that is so. His campaign released this statement:

Does a guy who made more than $4 million last year, just got back from vacation on a private beach in Hawaii and bought his own million-dollar mansion with the help of a convicted felon really want to get into a debate about houses? Does a guy who worries about the price of arugula and thinks regular people “cling” to guns and religion in the face of economic hardship really want to have a debate about who’s in touch with regular Americans? “The reality is that Barack Obama’s plans to raise taxes and opposition to producing more energy here at home as gas prices skyrocket show he’s completely out of touch with the concerns of average Americans.”

Taking the house attack and turning it 180 degrees on the Democrat, the McCain campaign has come out with a blistering attack ad that savages Obama over his relationship with convicted Chicago political fixer Tony Rezko and the still unanswered questions on how Rezko helped Obama move into a house he couldn’t afford at the time.

This isn’t the only “Glass House” offensive that Obama is trying. He also has released an ad attacking McCain’s associations - specifically with Ralph Reed who was involved in the Jack Abramhoff scandal.

Talk about leading with your chin, this is incredible. First, McCain’s ties to Reed are nebulous at best, damn near invisible unless you include money raised by Reed (and we won’t get into a fight over who is donating to each campaign now, will we?).

Beyond that, trying to attack McCain associates once again highlights Obama’s own problems with people he hangs around with. And for that, we have to look no further than Barack Obama’s long term association with Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers.

Wright will no doubt make another appearance later in the campaign. I suspect the McCain strategists are holding Wright in reserve and will unleash an attack connecting Obama with his long time preacher and mentor when it will have maximum impact - sometime after the first and before the last debate.

In the meantime, the University of Illinois has done a great service to the McCain campaign by making an issue of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge records in their refusal to release them. What might have been of minor interest to the anti-Obama internet and a story for a few days on the news nets has now piqued the interest of the national media and will be big news when (if?) they are released.

What is in those documents that could be damaging to Obama? No doubt they will show the candidate had a relationship with the former terrorist that was much more than the “just some professor who lives in my neighborhood” meme that Obama was trying to push on the press a few months ago in Philadelphia during the debate. And they could reveal some ideas that Obama has about how to reform education - ideas that could be so far out in left field that exposing them to the voters might make him look even more like an extremist.

But Obama, in raising the question of McCain’s associations, has only opened up the Pandora’s Box that leads to his own much more problematic friendships. And by doing so, the Obama campaign has proved that either they are so supremely arrogant that they think their candidate invincible or they are supremely stupid and don’t quite realize what they have done.

Snowball contemplates her Veep choices

Regular readers will recall that rather than choose either Obama or McCain as my candidate, I turned instead to my pet cat Snowball as a creature I could fully get behind for president.

The wisdom of this choice becomes more and more evident as the campaign goes along. As the other candidates have sniped and snarked at one another, Snowball has stayed above the fray with that kind of quiet dignity that only cats can aspire. She has not said a word against either McCain or Obama despite the fact that both have given her plenty of ammunition. And where both mainstream candidates have given the most fodder for attack is in the way they have gone about choosing their running mate.

Have you ever seen such a parade of worthless nobodies being considered for the second highest office in the land? John Nance Garner once famously referred to the Vice Presidency as “a warm bucket of spit.” Well these fellows whose names are being bandied about for the second spot are so inept they missed the spitoon altogether. On the Democratic side you have that legend in his own mind Joe Biden, the invisible governor of Virginia Tim Kaine, and Birch Bayh’s kid from Indiana who might be chosen so that Hoosiers are fooled into thinking that Obama holds views in the mainstream of American politics and henceforth shall ever be loyal Democratic voters.

That last is pretty funny, actually. Rock ribbed Indianians aren’t fooled into buying a pig in a poke so why Obama thinks he can pull the wool over their eyes by choosing Birch’s kid only shows how elitist and ignorant he truly is.

As for McCain, well we’re still waiting for him to whittle his list down to a baker’s dozen. The guy has been all over the lot, floating non-entity after non-entity. For McCain, it doesn’t seem to matter who might be acceptable to the rest of the party as much as how big a splash he can make with his pals in the press.

Is it any wonder I’m sticking with Snowy?

In Snowball’s case, she has a problem with youth and inexperience, being all of 3 years old. But to her credit, she at first tried to reach beyond her species and attempted to unite the country by choosing a candidate that reflects the diversity in our nation.

Her first choice was untenable. Robert the Rabbit may have all the qualities necessary to be president but his pro-choice beliefs would make him unacceptable to the base. (Robert says as far as choice is concerned, he chooses to say “yes” whenever the opportunity arises.)

Marty the Mole presented even more difficulties. Marty’s penchant to dig a hole and hide at the first sign of danger mirrored exactly the national security plank of the Democrats. But since the whole purpose of Snowball’s candidacy is to offer a complete break from the past and be totally independent of either party, she reluctantly concluded that Robert might make an excellent MSHA Administrator instead.

In desperation, Snowy turned to one of her nemesis, hoping that such a move would unite the country behind her candidacy. Alas, Rocky Racoon had his heart set on being president and there were concerns among her advisors that Rocky would seek to undermine rather than help her efforts. Rocky’s own supporters made that abundantly clear by threatening to stay home on election day or soil their bedclothes on purpose just to teach us all a lesson. Needless to say, that didn’t play well with Snowball who, after enduring weeks of their threats and blather, told them all to go hang.

So in the end, Snowy turned to an old reliable - stalwart, true, but not very bright. Snowball’s choice was my other pet cat Aramis:

Aramas responds to questions about his intelligence.

At the unveiling, the press went bananas:

“Is it true you jumped on the counter and ate most of a $40 rib roast?“Tell us about the time you ran outside without permission and walloped on a poor defenseless bird.”“Is it true you have committed several acts of murder and mayhem against mice?

Aramis may not be the brightest bulb in the room. But he is loyal and loving and I wouldn’t trade him for anyone or anything else.

If only Obama and McCain could be so lucky with their choices.

Even though he was a Democrat, I’ve always liked Joe Lieberman.

He “got it” on many issues near to my heart; the trashing of our culture, the importance of Israel as an ally, our role in a dangerous world. Lieberman sees many things clearly - even though his is a huge union booster and an advocate of top down solutions to social problems.

Kicked out of the Democratic party for his apostasy on the Iraq War but still allowed to caucus with the Dems so that they could maintain their majority in the senate, Lieberman can see the writing on the wall as well as anyone. The fact is, the Democrats will almost certainly not need his vote to maintain a majority next year after the GOP loses at least 2 seats and perhaps as many as 6 in the senate. And Lieberman knows that there are several Democratic senators who covet his Homeland Security chairmanship as well as his seat on the Armed Services Committee.

This means that come 2009, the Democrats will publicly humiliate Lieberman, emasculating him by stripping him of his plum committee assignments while the liberal netroots who hate Lieberman almost as much as they hate Bush cheer them on.

Recognizing his position, it appears that Lieberman is about to throw his lot in with his good friend John McCain - if not as Vice President (many believe him to be McCain’s first choice but simply not possible under the circumstances) then as a major backer on the sidelines and possible cabinet member in a McCain Administration. Lieberman is scheduled to speak at the Republican convention:

Lieberman will deliver a speech when Republicans gather in St. Paul, Minn., to nominate McCain for president, a party official told The Associated Press on Wednesday. The official requested anonymity because a formal announcement had yet to be made.

Asked during a visit to Georgia whether he would be speaking at the convention, Lieberman smiled and said: “it’s quite possible, but I’ll let them announce it.”

Lieberman, 66, caucuses with Senate Democrats, though has been a strong supporter of the Iraq war and is a staunch backer of McCain’s presidential bid, traveling often with the Arizona senator and campaigning on his behalf during the GOP primary in states like Florida that have large numbers of Jewish voters.

As he weighs potential running mates, McCain is believed to be seriously considering choosing Lieberman, whom he counts among his closest friends, for the GOP ticket. Lieberman’s convention speaking slot doesn’t indicate either way whether McCain ultimately will choose his friend for the No. 2 slot.

Do not expect Zell Miller like fireworks denouncing liberals. Lieberman just isn’t that sort of Democrat. He is a classic liberal in the mold of a Hubert Humphrey; an optimist whose deep religious faith informs his politics as much as any evangelical Christian. Would he consider joining the Republicans in 2009? He may. But there are many on the GOP side who don’t want him. He would be by far the most liberal Republican legislator in Washington and would therefore be an embarrassment at times. Therefore, it is likely that Lieberman will remain an “independent” but may caucus with the GOP for purposes of the leadership votes and other party line matters that come before the senate.

It goes without saying that the Democrats are going to be livid with Joe. But considering the invective hurled at him by his critics already, what more can they say to hurt him?

I am always trying to be helpful to our friends on the other side, giving them the benefit of my considerable experience and wisdom in matters both personal and political. For instance (and this is a freebee); never eat lobster at a restaurant where the beasts are in a tank swimming around and you get to pick your own dinner. My reasoning is elementary; thinking about the poor creature you’ve just selected for the culinary guillotine being lowered into a boiling pot of water, screaming silent screams of agony while its meat slowly cooks in its own fat will take away your appetite pronto.

Unless you casually mention those facts to your date in which case it will be her appetite that goes south and you get to eat the lobster anyway. Or watch her facial expressions - especially after you tell her the part about the crustacean cooking in its own fat - for some rippingly amusing efforts on her part to keep from upchucking the escargot.

And yes, it’s true. I ripped the legs off grasshoppers when I was a kid.

But as you can see, I grew up to be a normal, sadistic conservative, always taking pleasure in the discomfiture and discombobulation of my political foes. I hope I will be forgiven for this minor flaw in my character in my next life (where I devoutly hope I don’t come back as a lobster) because in the here and now, I revel in it.

Of late, I have been blessed in being allowed to positively wallow in lefty angst and hysteria. The Obama campaign and their defenders have finally reached the point of no return in their efforts to smear John McCain - no return to sanity or decency.

I still think McCain is going to get slaughtered. But there is little doubt it won’t be because of any superior tactics or moral high ground claimed by the Obama campaign. The Chicago politician has proved to the world that he can get down in the gutter and root around with the worst of them. And he’s doing it with the active encouragement of the liberal netroots who are so terrified of Obama being “swiftboated” by the right that they have determined that flinging feces at McCain like little monkeys in the zoo will prove to the voter their candidate’s ability to go beyond partisanship and enter the shining new world of the political assassin and hatchet man.

To wit, there are a couple of nutroot attacks that either prove a feeling of desperation because their candidate has been screwing up royally the last month or they are misdirecting their anger at Obama for being such a doltish wimp. Either way, the conspiracy theories about McCain’s appearance at Saddleback and the provenance of the “cross in the sand” story are revealing of a hysterical bunch of smear merchants who saw their man get clobbered at a forum on religion and are scared that once again, the Great Prize is slipping through their fingers as they seem to have latched on to another candidate with feet of clay.

First up is the pitiful, head shaking meme that moved through the leftosphere yesterday like an outbreak of dysentery at Woodstock VII; the notion that McCain “cheated” at the Saddleback forum because he was not in the “Cone of Silence” that moderator Rick Warren set up to so that McCain wouldn’t hear the questions he was asking Obama.

I have only seen brief clips of Saddleback because frankly, the idea of watching two men who want to be president of the United States try to outdo each other in proving how holy they are is not exactly my cup of tea. Both men’s position on abortion bother me. Both have decided to pander to Christians; McCain can’t win without them and Obama can blow McCain out if he wins enough of them. And those who base their vote on the difference between the two in such matters are one reason politics in America is so screwed up.

No matter. Moderator Rick Warren’s “Cone of Silence” remark was evidently misplaced. John McCain had better things to do than sit in a green room for an hour awaiting his turn to walk into the Coliseum and face the lions. He was, in fact, in his car on his way to the venue when Obama was on stage. This has elicited a communal “Aha!” from the left who believe McCain did so well because he was able to crib answers to Warren’s questions since he failed the Maxwell Smart test.

Apparently, some lefties actually believed there was a real “Cone of Silence” just like on Maxwell Smart. Others stated flat out that McCain “cheated:”

I must admit that listening to McCain answer Pastor Rick Warren’s questions so quickly and glibly Saturday night at the Saddleback Faith Forum made me wonder if he somehow knew them in advance. He was so confident, so concise. But I put the thought aside as unduly paranoid — that is until Sunday afternoon. I was routinely checking my favorite election website fivethirtyeight.com and the webmaster, Nate Silver, referred to a piece in Daily Kos about the whereabouts of John McCain for the first thirty minutes of Senator Obama’s interview with Rick Warren. Was he in a cone of silence? Apparently not.

Daily Kos blogger Furiousxxgeorge wrote at 3:27 pm Pacific time the following blog:

Pastor Warren, the host of last night’s forum was just on CNN. In an interview with Rick Sanchez the pastor admitted McCain was not even at the Church for the first half hour of the event. This admission comes as a surprise to those of us who watched the event and were told many times that McCain was at the Church and in isolation.CNN says they talked to McCain’s camp and they said no one in his camp was listening. The honor system, are you kidding me?I think it is pretty clear at this point McCain did indeed know the questions in advance.

Well I don’t know about you but that cinches it for me. A Daily Kos blogger named Furiousxxgeorge says McCain cheated and who am I to disagree with such a reliable, level headed, non partisan source?

Byron York shoots back. Unfortunately for the Kossak, he has some facts at his disposal:

A few points. First of all, it appears that some commentators believe there was an actual “Get Smart”-style “cone of silence” at Saddleback. There wasn’t. Pastor Rick Warren was making a little joke when he used that phrase. But he was assuring the crowd that McCain was not hearing any of the questioning of Barack Obama.

Next, McCain, like Obama, knew the first two questions that would be asked of him — the “three wisest people” question and the “greatest moral failure” questions. Both men knew exactly what was coming at the start of the appearance. This morning I talked to A. Larry Ross, who is the media representative for the Saddleback Church, and he told me that Warren “gave both candidates the first two questions because he didn’t want them to be nervous…so they would be at ease.” Ross says that in separate phone calls with the McCain and Obama, Warren also went through the four general categories of questions and said things like, “I’ll probably ask you a question on this, or on that,” but gave no specific wording.

In addition, according to Ross, Obama knew a third specific question that Warren would ask — the one about a “president’s emergency plan for adoption.” “[Warren] felt that since that was basically asking for a commitment, he felt that it was fair to tell them in advance that he was going to ask them that,” Ross told me. So Warren told Obama, and planned to tell McCain when McCain arrived at Saddleback, but wasn’t able to because of other distractions. So according to what Ross told me, Obama actually knew one more question in advance than did McCain.

Are you effing kidding me? Obama had some of the questions in advance and still stunk up the joint? I didn’t have to see the program to know that. It’s what the Obama camp told Andrea Mitchell of NBC:

MS. ANDREA MITCHELL: Oh, absolutely. And, you know, there was the crisp, immediate, forceful response by John McCain, clearly in a comfort zone because he was with his base. And Barack Obama, taking a risk in going there but seeing an opportunity. And a much more nuanced approach. The Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context, because that — what they’re putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.

Obama’s “nuance” was apparently to duck, bob, and weave like a middleweight while Warren tried to pin him down on issues like abortion. Claiming it was “above his paygrade” may have been clever sounding but failed utterly to convince anyone that he is the only sitting senator who voted against giving life saving treatment to babies born alive as the result of an abortion.

With a position like that, I’d duck the question too.

Be that as it may, it is apparent that Obama had not only questions in advance but an excellent idea of what the range of topics would be as well. It is equally apparent that Obama either didn’t prepare adequately enough or in order not to sound like the devil incarnate, he tried to mask his true beliefs with a lot of doubletalk. End result; a clear McCain win by all accounts (even, as I show above, the Obama campaign itself).

But this is just unacceptable in some lefty quarters. And the Obama campaign, whining as it has constantly throughout the primaries about this, that, or the other thing, is showing a decided lack of sportsmanship about the whole thing; you lost, Barry - deal with it.

But they can’t. And Edmund Wright at American Thinker puts things in a perspective that even a lefty should be able to understand:

Monday, he emerged as the political “child-man,” launching a tirade in New Mexico that was almost surreal in it’s tone. The performance made Harry Reid’s whiny “oil is making us sick” speech seem almost Rambo-esque. It is simply amazing when you think about it, but the Democrat nominee is trying to win the right to face the Russians, the Iranians, Bin Laden and a plethora of complicated and tough domestic issues by claiming the Republicans are too “mean” to be elected.

This is presidential politics by way of the elementary school classroom. If 12 year olds could vote, Obama would certainly win in a landslide. Anyone who thinks a clever campaign line is “the Republicans…they’re so mean…what are we going to do” is hardly up to the task that he is asking for.

I can see it now. “Putin…he’s so mean…what are we going to do? Abudinajhad…he’s so mean…what are we going to do….four dollar gas….it’s so mean….what are we going to do.” These are not issues that you can make go away with flowery speeches and loose editing by the NBC family of networks.

That could very well be why the new Quinnipiac Poll shows Americans prefer McCain to Obama by an astonishing 2-1 margin when it comes to dealing with our newfound Russia problem.

You would think that one embarrassing line of attack that proved to be utterly ridiculous would be enough for one day. But there must be something in the air or perhaps there was a full moon because, not content to show themselves incredibly sore losers, the left decided to attack McCain by the simple, inelegant smear of calling into question a key moment in his spiritual life.

I blogged briefly about this yesterday but that was before one of McCain’s fellow POW’s confirmed that yes indeed, John McCain told him a story about a North Vietnamese guard drawing a cross in the sand on Christmas day.

What makes this attack so riotously dumb is that there is absolutely no way to “prove” a negative - that short of a letter emerging where McCain is yucking it up about putting one over on the yokels regarding his cross in the sand story, there is no way any lefty critic is going to prove McCain did not experience the event as he tells it.

Now the left is fond of saying the right is “smearing” Obama when we call into question his meager record, his lack of experience, his associations with radicals whose views are so antithetical to the mainstream that questioning him about his past becomes just another part of the vetting process for president.

But, for instructional purposes, I would say to my lefty brethren, “This is the very definition of a smear: A charge made with no proof that attacks the candidate’s character and person.”

John Kerry was smeared by the Swift Boat vets who, in the end, had only their eyewitness testimony as proof that Kerry is a weasel (we knew that already but backing up their charges is something entirely different). This is proof of a sort that can be questioned. When you’re talking about charging someone who served his country with faking his wounds, I go by the old Carl Sagan adage about UFO’s: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The vets had 30 year old memories and a bone to pick with Lickspittle Kerry for his own smearing of the American military in Viet Nam. I leave it to the reader but in my mind, it may have raised questions about Kerry but it hardly constituted proof.

The left doesn’t even have this excuse in the case of McCain’s cross in the sand. There are no eyewitnesses with a different story they can point to. There is no documentation they can print. There is no proof of any sort whatsoever that what John McCain says about the incident isn’t the God’s honest truth.

What they have is the thinnest reed of coincidence involving a similar story related by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But that hasn’t stopped our liberal friends. One example brought to you by the “In your face and like it” smear comes to us via TT Boy:

Now I don’t know if this really happened to John McCain or not. He may think it happened, I mean, c’mon he’s ninety-one and he sometimes mixes up his experiences from the Vietnam war with something that happened to him during the Spanish-American war. It happens.

The important thing is that the rubes parishioners at Rick Warren’s House of Tithing church cooed appreciatively because these are the kinds of stories that reinforce their faith much like sightings of the Virgin Mary in the gravy pan at Hometown Buffet. Take it from me ( a Catholic regardless of the restraining order), true faith is a powerful and mysterious thing that is as hard to find as, say, the clitoris. I mean there is a lot of groping and fumbling around and false starts until finally a voice whispers in your ear, “Yeah. That’s it…or at least close enough for government work”.

Stay classy, guy.

Incredibly, Andy Sullivan was roused to a fever pitch and actually posted numerous times (starting with this one) about “questions” regarding the story. Excitable Andy - always willing to accuse others of smearing Obama - can’t quite bring himself to make the psychic connection here and see himself denigrating and smearing a war hero. Two former POW’s have now come out and said McCain told them the story back when and Andy still beats the dead horse, hoping he can rouse the beast through sheer repetitive blows.

Perhaps Andy should take the baseball bat to his own noggin and knock some sense into himself. He is the laughingstock of the right at the moment and is only digging a deeper hole every time he mentions the incident. Perhaps Allah has the right slant to silence the left about this ridiculous charge:

Bob Owens googled around to see if he could corroborate McCain’s story and stumbled upon a similar incident involving former POW (and GOP senator) Jeremiah Denton. The dumbest part of all of this — aside from the fact that the nutroots is pushing it into the mainstream media, where it’ll redound to McCain’s advantage and dirty St. Barack’s hands by association — is that if he was going to make up stories to prove his devotion while in prison, surely he could do better than this. I remember some lefty (at TNR, I think) noting quite rightly after McCain’s Christmas ad came out that the specifics of it really are more a testament to his captor’s faith and humanity than to McCain’s. If Maverick wanted to dazzle believers with evidence of his own grace under pressure, he’s got material to work with. But then, this is a guy whose son was stationed in Iraq and yet who almost never mentions that fact on the trail even though it gives him moral cover in his push for a sustained troop presence. Anyway, rock on, nutroots.

To have this gift of two memes showing the left in all its glorious nuttiness and hysterical hand wringing about absolutely nothing puts a smile on this cowboy’s face. John McCain is more than likely to be thrashed by Obama come November. But as long as we have liberals to kick around and make sport of their fundamentally warped view of reality, I will not despair.