Right Wing Nut House

The answer is, yes - I prefer to go down in flames, hitching a ride with the Valkyries to Valhalla rather than cheerleading for a man who would choose a woman as his running mate with such a wretched moral sense.

I have, with few exceptions, tempered my criticism of John McCain’s proposed policies during this latter part of the campaign, concentrating instead on the horse race because frankly, there are many conservatives more qualified than I and more familiar with the issues who are doing a much better job than I could in making the conservative case for McCain despite his more problematic stands on issues.

I have also, for the most part, given a pass to McCain on the question of judgment, although I think the post mortems on McCain’s campaign will reveal some monumental blunders on the economic crisis as well as their electoral strategy (where they expended limited resources).

On the question of the Palin pick, however, I have had no such qualms in supporting McCain. Marc Ambinder (no fan of Palin) explains why the Alaska governor was really the only pick McCain could make:

A Sunday morning quarterback still makes a persuasive argument for picking Palin. In this environment, the Republican candidate could only win if he consolidates his base and wins a majority of persuadable votes; the Democrat simply has to turn out Democrats. Though McCain at one point wanted to pick Joe Lieberman, he’d have cut a leg from the stool and replaced it with one that, aside from his party affiliation — independent Democrat — has no real appeal among independents anymore. One step backward and no steps forward. By the time the news began to leak out that McCain wanted Lieberman, the trail balloon was also leaky. Republican delegations made it clear that they’d walk out on McCain. We still don’t know why McCain decided that the risk wasn’t worth taking — that’s for another Draper piece — but we know that he suddenly shifted back to someone who had impressed him early on, someone who, at the time, could check the two boxes: excite Republicans and convert independents and persuadables.

Whether the vetting was complete or rushed, whether Palin and her advisers were completely forthcoming about her record…. again, wait for the Draper piece. The point here is that the choice was defensible. That almost every piece of information that has come out subsequent to the pick has hurt Palin can be interpreted in several ways: either the media was preordained to crush her spirit from the beginning, or the McCain campaign didn’t know about them, or they’ve been distorted beyond any sense of the rational.

I would add that Palin defenders have hit the nail on the head when they make the case for distortion, bias, double standards, and outright lies and rumors being printed by the MSM. The case of Palin’s belief in creationism is a perfect example. The rumor started on a site written by a Palin hater in Alaska that she believed people walked the earth with dinosaurs and that she wished to teach creationism “alongside” evolution in Alaskan schools. The rumor was printed verbatim and passed off as truth in the Los Angeles Times among other outlets.

Palin never said any such thing nor does she believe that creationism has a place in a public school curriculum. It was a lie made up out of whole cloth, swallowed by the press, and given wide distribution by liberal blogs who never bothered to check the provenance of the story. Pattericio points out that the Times never retracted one bit of the story.

Ambinder makes the same case I’ve been making since Palin was chosen; that McCain basically had no choice but to pick her. (For your Romneyites I only have one word: Mormon).

But this doesn’t negate certain facts. Palin is unready to hold high office and won’t be, in my opinion, for perhaps a year. The public isn’t buying the counter argument and her negatives are so high now she has become a huge drag on the campaign with two groups that McCain absolutely must win over if he is to win; white women and independents. Palin may have solidified the base but you don’t win too many elections getting 30% of the vote.

No doubt a large part of the problem has been the unfair treatment she has received in the media. But you can’t just explain away the voter’s unhappiness with Palin by ascribing all her negatives to media bias and manipulation. The American people are a little smarter than that.

Perhaps they sense something about her that Palin worshipers fail to see. It certainly doesn’t help Palin’s case when she makes a statement like this:

Brian Williams: Is an abortion clinic bomber a terrorist under this definition?

Sarah Palin: [Sighs] There’s no question Bill Ayres, under his own admittance, was, um, one who sought to destroy, er, our US Capitol and our Pentagon. That is a domestic terrorist. There’s no question there. Now, others who would want to engage in harming innocent Americans or facilities, that, uh, er, that would be unacceptable. Uh, I don’t know if you’re going to use the word “terrorist” there, but it’s unacceptable and, uh, um, it, er, would not be condoned, of course, on, on our watch, but [sigh] I don’t know what you’re asking is if I regret referring to Bill Ayres as an unrepentant domestic terrorist. I don’t regret characterizing him as that.

Brian Williams: I’m just asking what other categories you would put in there. Abortion clinic bombers, protesters in cities where fires were started, molotov cocktails were thrown, people died.

Sarah Palin: I would put in that category of Bill Ayres anyone else who would seek to campaign to destroy our United States Capitol and our Pentagon and would seek to destroy innocent Americans.

There is no mistaking her answer. I sought out a fuller transcript in order to ascertain her exact words as well as her full response and any follow up question asked by Williams.

Sarah Palin is refusing to call people who would bomb abortion clinics terrorists. Yes, she condemns their actions. But she is parsing the definition of terrorism so as not to offend that small, but vocal part of the conservative base who may not see clinic bombers as heroes, but refuse to place their actions in a a moral context that equates the tactics of the jihadis with the Eric Rudolphs of the world.

This is moral cowardice. The purpose of bombing abortion clinics (it hasn’t happened in a decade) is exactly the same as fanatics who set off car bombs in crowded markets; that is, to intimidate and to terrorize people.

Have Muslim fanatics set off more bombs than Christians? Of course they have. But if you are going to base a moral judgment on numbers of dead, then you are probably able to parse the moral guilt of Hitler compared to Stalin - or perhaps Hitler compared to Idi Amin. The death of innocents perpetrated for political ends, be it fewer abortions due to the terrorizing of women and fewer abortion clinics due to their destruction, or the blowing up of a marketplace to intimidate and frighten people into abandoning support for their government is terrorism. It is always terrorism. It was terrorism yesterday, it is terrorism today, and it will be terrorism tomorrow. And anyone who can’t make the moral judgment that this is so is, in my opinion, a coward - especially since if Palin had admitted that bombing abortion clinics was terrorism, she would have angered a small but significant part of the conservative base.

Don’t believe me? Here are some observations by those moral titans in the anti-abortion crowd about whether bombing clinics is terrorism:

“No, you pro-abortion baby killing fanatics are the terrorists. What is a terrorist? Someone who murders innocent people. That is YOU. You pro-abortion babykillers murder innocent children each and every day.” — Rev Donald Soitz.

“We have shed the blood of the innocent in the womb, and we are now reaping it in the streets.” — Rev. Flip Benham, Operation Rescue

Ever since then, whenever someone brings up a terrorist attack carried out by Islamic fundamentalists, you are expected to practice the Fairness Doctrine and give appropriate lip service to the “Christian” attacks on abortion clinics in order to demonstrate that neither side is beyond reproach. Of course, there is something to be said about the fact that when “Christians” attack, they are not supported by a body of religious figures that can be recognized as a legitimate authority, are wholly condemned by the Christian community both far and wide, and are doing so not for religious reasons but because in their minds these abortion clinics are clinics of death where babies are daily being killed and thus their existence means the continued death of another child. Somehow it’s hard to generate the same feelings against someone who wants to preserve life as it is to generate against someone who uses planes as torpedoes. But I digress.

Perhaps the most telling thing about how absurd this argument is are the simple numbers. A simple glance indicates that, across America, there have only been 168 attacks against abortion clinics since 1982, the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) Bureau reports. These attacks come with surprisingly little casualties, and most attacks are rather measured in property damage, rather than human lives lost. Therefore to run it on average, every year there will be six or seven abortion related attacks across America, with a marginal increase in these numbers in Canada and Australia (one in Australia’s history, for example).

Moral equivalency between jihadis and Christians is not, cannot be based on comparative body counts but only on the intent of the attacker - the only possible moral context you can place any attack on innocents. Palin’s parsing is an ignominious example of a politician who would rather pander to the extreme of her base instead of taking a clear, unambiguous moral stand against political violence. She should be condemned for this by those on the right who claim moral ascendancy over the rest of us due to their religious beliefs as well as any thinking conservative who cares about the moral standing of our candidates.

As right wing America continues to tear itself apart, picking at ancient scabs that long since should have healed over but were actually hidden by the smallest of band-aids, a creeping anti-intellectualism - long a significant part of the conservative underbelly - has emerged and is making its presence felt in a most obnoxious way.

This anti-intellectualism manifests itself not only in disparaging those comparatively few conservatives who make their living as academics or who are ensconced at one of the many right leaning think tanks. What I am railing against is an anti-intellectualism that seeks to stifle independent thinking, analysis that runs counter to the “accepted wisdom,” and generally, a way of looking at the world that employs the empirical rather than the emotional to describe what is happening.

This schism cleaves along fault lines as old as the republic itself; populists vs. elites, urban vs. rural, the schooled vs. the unschooled, even to some degree, science vs. faith. For three decades, differences between these groups were papered over by all sides being able to unite around the dominant conservative personality of the last 50 years: Ronald Reagan. Even after he left office - and post mortem - Reagan’s ideas held sway over the conservative movement, uniting libertarian conservatives, fiscal conservatives, social cons, crunchy cons, and Main Street conservatives behind a set of rock ribbed principles; free markets, low taxes, smaller government, and a strong defense.

Reagan is gone, his coalition is now in tatters, his ideals have been betrayed by the greed and a quest for power by the not very conservative Republicans in Congress, and the right has turned in on itself in frustration and fear.

It is that fear that I believe is driving this war against intellectuals; or perhaps it’s more accurate to refer to them as the “thinking class.” The unreasoning, inexplicable hatred directed against Barack Obama goes far beyond any reasonable opposition to his policies - not when people seem to be trying to convince themselves that an Obama presidency would be the “end of America as we know it.” I have no special powers to peer into the souls of men so I will forgo the leftist twaddle about racism being a factor in much of this fear. Rather, it is the belief that change is indeed coming if Obama is elected and that all of us, to one degree or another, fear the very idea of change.

But this fear of Obama has so unsettled many conservatives that any words spoken or written that don’t paint him as the devil incarnate, or damn his policies as the second coming of Karl Marx, or express the widespread view among many conservatives that he will trample the constitution, stifle all dissent, surrender to al-Qaeda, and impose socialism on us - gives the anti-intellectuals the idea that anyone who deviates from their “truths” is an Obama supporter and deserving of being cast into the outer darkness.

This is nuts. And beyond that, we now have gradations of conservatism where the anti-intellectuals judge one’s beliefs based on much of the list above. Apparently, if you don’t subscribe to some of the more ridiculous notions listed, you are not a “real” conservative and thus leave yourself wide open to being viciously attacked for being “soft” or “squishy.”

But the real litmus test for the anti-intellectuals to determine whether one is a “true” conservative or an effete, east coast, egg headed fake, is how one views Sarah Palin. This is their Ur issue and they will brook no analysis that doesn’t paint her as “everywoman” for the masses and the second coming of Ronald Reagan.

There is something truly pathetic in this notion of Palin as Reagan or Palin as populist savior, not to mention judging someone’s depth of belief in conservatism based on this extraordinarily narrow criteria. And when conservative apostates like Peggy Noonan cross the line in the sand drawn by the anti-intellectuals and criticize Mrs. Palin for any number of her obvious faults, they are drummed out of the conservative movement without regard to what they have accomplished in the past or how necessary it is to have differing viewpoints on any number of issues and personalities.

In yesterday’s American Thinker, Jan LaRue unloads on Peggy Noonan for expressing the view that Sarah Palin is a poor choice for Vice President:

The political infants are “dropping their G’s” … No one can say mothers and fathers, it’s all now the faux down-home, patronizing-infantilizing-moms and dads.” You expect Ms. Noonan’s ruler will reach G-less Joe Biden, who flunked a first-grade spelling bee the day before when he told a campaign crowd: “It’s about what Barack said, ‘jobs-a three-letter word-j-o-b-s-jobs.’” But Joe escapes without so much as a glare. It’s time to get scratchin’ on Palin.

Noonan doesn’t know “where Palin stands.” So when Palin tells us every day for seven weeks that she’s for protectin’ the unborn; cuttin’ taxes and spendin; savin’ marriage; drillin’ here; winnin’ in Iraq; keepin’ our military strong; kickin bad boys outta Washington, you betcha, Noonan is clueless.

LaRue goes on to elucidate the real problem with Noonan:

If Noonan’s heart needs healing, she should get herself out among the over-flowing crowds of “Joe-Six Pack” common folks who sense some “Reaganite” magic in Palin. The second-hand scrutiny of Palin’s impact from a pundit’s perch among Manhattan’s mainstream media doesn’t cut it. In other words, get the heck out of Noonanville.

I don’t agree with Noonan’s entire critique of Palin. I happen to think she was an acceptable choice given the circumstances. Whether she is “ready” to be Vice President is another question. When LaRue ticked off where Palin stands I wanted to scream. For a year now, the Thinking Class has been demanding that Obama go beyond talking points and pretty speeches and tell us what he believes. LaRue is confusing campaign boilerplate with evidence that Palin has thought more than superficially about any of those issues.

How would she cut taxes? Specifically, what spending cuts is she advocating? How do we proceed in Iraq? What about entitlements? What about Pakistan? Iran?

We are informed by the anti-intellectuals that this doesn’t matter, that her innate common sense and ability to communicate is all that is required. Why think deeply about anything? That way lies trouble. Who knows? You might end up with views that differ from the base.

Noonan’s complaint is echoed by many of us who like Palin, believe that she has potential, but don’t see any real curiosity or concern beyond laying out oatmeal when we are demanding prime rib. It’s not that she isn’t smart, or capable. She is behind the learning curve and has no hope of catching up anytime soon.

While Noonan’s complaints about Palin have gotten her in trouble, the real cause of anger directed at her seems to be caught up in this notion that somehow, pundits like Noonan, David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, and others are “elitists” who look down their noses at conservatives in flyover country and dismiss their Palin worship as ignorant.

Some of their comments left on LaRue’s article are telling:

It just goes to show that the Republican Party (Notice I said “Republican Party” and not “Conservatives”.) has its share of snobby, inside-the-beltway elites and Peggy Noonan is clearly one of them.

Sarah Palin is EXACTLY what Washington needs and the snobby elites (even in her own party) will try anything to keep her out.

Peggy Noonan the Queen of the upper class American Elitists, like Marie Antoinette: “If there be no bread, let them eat Sarah Palin”.

I wouldn’t pay a nickel to read Noonan’s latest platitude-riddled “can’t we all just get along” opus. With the Palin selection, Noonan revealed herself to be a craven, insecure seeker of the approval of the pedgreed Washington elite.

I keep getting a whiff of something these days that I can’t quite identify. It seems to be blowing westward on the wind, and the odor is originating inside the beltway in Washington, DC. I swear it reminds me of something out of third or fourth century Rome? The stink smells of purple trimmed togas and silk slippers, and I swear that I caught the distinct smell of a litter being bourn the other day.

I don’t agree with some of what Noonan writes - moreso in the case of David Brooks and Kathleen Parker. But I don’t cherry pick what I disagree with and ignorantly employ terms like “elitist” and “snob” to describe why I am in opposition to her ideas. These are simple minded code words - like “racist” - that are designed not to critique ideas but to shut off debate. And while you’re at it, define “elitist.” Is it simply someone who lives east of the Appalachians who you disagree with about Sarah Palin?

Obama is an elitist because he has demonstrated a belief that he is in a special class of Americans and that he shares this high status with the monied, the powerful, and other liberals who actually believe that the rest of us are sheep to be led around by the nose. I see no animus towards the base in Noonan’s critical views of Palin nor is she necessarily demonstrating that her perceptions are superior to anyone else’s. (She and Parker have responded to the hysterically over wrought criticism and hate directed against them in such a way that it is apparent they have not been exposed to the internet much.)

She has given an honest assessment of a politician. You are free to disagree with her. But it is mindless hogwash to somehow see Noonan’s attitude toward Palin as the product of any elite position or snobbish, in-crowd, get-along-go-along bonhomie with coastal liberals. In its own way, that view is as arrogant as as any belief shared by the left about you, and I, and all the ordinary Americans out here in flyover country.

I’ve got news for the anti-intellectuals. Conservatism is in flux. There is going to be a debate over where we go from here both ideologically and politically.

If you want to be part of this debate, you better learn that not everyone agrees with what your idea of “conservatism” might be and that those who disagree with you are not “elitists” or “snobs” or “soft” or “squishy” but simply think differently than you. Will you engage in the debate and try to convince people that they are wrong and you are right? Or will you continue to ignorantly skewer people who, at bottom, want the same thing that you do; a healthy, vibrant conservative movement with room for many different points of view and a belief in its primacy as a way to live and govern.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, A huge truck bomb detonated outside of the building housing our Marines located near the Beirut Airport and leveled the structure killing 241 American servicemen.

In a sobering column in today’s Wall Street Journal, Robert F. Turner draws a straight, undeviating line from that bombing to the attacks on 9/11 and shows how Osama Bin Laden took the measure of America and found it wanting while Congress seized powers previously reserved to the executive and emasculated our intelligence apparatus:

During a 1998 interview with an ABC News reporter in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden declared that this withdrawal proved Americans can’t accept casualties. It was obviously a consideration in his decision to order the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But the conventional wisdom, that those deadly attacks resulted from “an intelligence failure,” doesn’t tell the full story.

A major reason we failed to detect the 9/11 attacks in advance was because, beginning in the 1970s, Congress launched a major public attack on the intelligence community. Mr. Biden, for example, was one of 17 senators to vote on Oct. 2, 1974, to make all covert operations (even espionage in some cases) unlawful. In 1986, he bragged in a New Republic interview that he’d personally blocked planned covert operations during the Reagan administration simply by threatening to leak them. (That statement calls to mind John Jay’s observation, in Federalist No. 64, that because Congress could not be trusted to keep secrets, the Constitution left the president “able to manage the business of intelligence as prudence might suggest.”)

In 1978, Congress continued its intrusion into presidential powers by enacting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), making it a felony for intelligence professionals to monitor communications between foreign terrorists abroad and individuals within the U.S. without first getting a special warrant. But in a unanimous opinion, the appellate court established by FISA observed that every court to decide the issue had held the president has “inherent authority” under the Constitution “to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information,” adding: “We take for granted that the President does have that authority . . .”

Congress failed to anticipate in FISA the dangers posed by a terrorist like Zacarias Moussaoui — which is why FBI agents were unable to examine the contents of Moussaoui’s laptop computer and perhaps prevent the 9/11 attacks. Michael Hayden, then Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), later expressed his “professional judgment” that had these legal constraints (FISA) not existed “we would have detected some of the 9/11 al Qaeda operatives in the United States” prior to the attacks, and “we would have identified them as such.”

It is hard to overestimate the damage done by liberal Congressional Democrats over the last 30 years to our intelligence capabilities. They not only put up walls between our foreign and domestic spy agencies but also created a mindset that deliberately destroyed our “Humint” or human intelligence capability. Carter’s DCIA Stansfield Turner fired 800 covert agents and turned our intelligence efforts toward satellites and other electronic methods of intelligence gathering - a move that is costing us dearly to this day.

Turner’s “Halloween Massacre” prevented us from employing enough assets in the old Soviet Union during a crucial period of the cold war. Beyond that, our inability to infiltrate al-Qaeda and other radical Muslim groups no doubt contributed to our ignorance about Osama Bin Laden’s motives and plans - a direct cause of the 9/11 tragedy. People like Michael Scheurer who managed the Bin Laden desk at the CIA during the 90’s, has commented that our inability to get into the mind of the terrorist - only possible using Humint sources - was a huge obstacle to successfully dealing with him.

Then when ex-CIA agent Philip Agee outed several European CIA chiefs of station, the left made him a hero - which is strange when you consider the crocodile tears the left shed over the “outing” of Valerie Plame. When liberals became so concerned about keeping the names of our CIA personnel secret, they never revealed. Lionizing Agee who, some believe, got the Athens station chief murdered following the publication of his name, has been disappeared from the Plame narrative. In fact, the entire previous 35 years of liberal objections, liberal interference, liberal bashing, liberal paranoia, and liberal hate of the CIA has been flushed down the memory hole - all just so that they could weep about poor little Valerie Plame and her machinations to undercut the policy of the elected president of the United States.

Such inconsistencies and hypocrisy would get in the way of  liberals appearing to be concerned about national security - at least at election time.

The leaks coming from liberals ensconced in the CIA and DIA over the last 8 years have been damaging and astonishingly partisan. This is a consequence of liberals in Congress doing the same thing with impunity. If they don’t like something the intel people are doing, they run to the press. If they discover a secret that, if outed, could be politically useful to them, they blab it.

They have emasculated, politicized, railroaded, terrorized, and caused confusion and dispiritedness in our intelligence community for more than 30 years. Some of our best and brightest analysts and agents retire early rather than deal with the constant leaking that makes their jobs next to impossible to perform.

The patriots who serve without public recognition in our intelligence agencies deserve better.

Much of this blog post originally appears in The American Thinker 

My latest column at PJ Media is up and I am sure you are going to love it. Judging by the comments left already, I am going to be even more popular with the conservative base than I am already - if that’s possible.

What’s it about? It’s an article that refers to Obama as “Lucifer” and bemoans the loss of freedoms we would have seen if John McCain had lost the election. But of course, McCain is going to win in a landslide so we don’t have to worry. I look at Obama’s nefarious plans to nationalize the snack food industry which will force Frito-Lay to cook all their snacks in mink oil as well as his probable cabinet appointments that include William Ayers as Secretary of Domestic Terrorism and Jeremiah Wright as Special Assistant to the President for Anti-Americanism.

I also delve into what agenda the new Republican majority in the House and Senate will take up once President McCain takes ofice.

I also include a paragraph or two on the best, most painful way we can execute elite conservative traitors like Peggy Noonan, Mark Frum, and Christopher Buckley. You won’t want to miss that one.

Finally, I look at Obama’s trip to Hawaii to see his seriously ill grandmother which, as we all know, is just a stunt, that he doesn’t hold any love for her whatsoever, and that his real reason for going to Hawaii is to personally fight off the courageous suit trying to force Obama to come clean about his Indonesian (or is it Kenyan?) birth by that lover of puppies, kittens, and even the occassional Jew Andy Martin.

A sample:

[A]uthenticity intruded yesterday on this little Kabuki dance we call a presidential campaign. With less than two weeks to go in the campaign and the race still considered close by many, Barack Obama is flying 5,000 miles to Hawaii in order to visit the woman who took care of him and taught him so much during his formative years.Madelyn Payne Dunham, Obama’s maternal grandmother, lies seriously ill in her home following what the Honolulu Advertiser has learned was a fall resulting in a broken hip several weeks ago. The 85 year old former bank vice president suffers from osteoporosis and has weakened considerably over the last few months. She was discharged from the hospital early this week and by some reports, is sinking.

So there’s something for every one in this piece - well, everyone with half a brain anyway.

At the risk of being seen as “not helping” John McCain and “giving up,” allow me to take you on a little tour of the electoral battlefield today.

If there are any sharp objects within reach, I suggest you move them. Better yet, put them under lock and key. I am about to crack open the gates of hell and give you a peek at what’s inside.

As “The Dead March from Saul” plays on my headphones, I am forced to report that John McCain is approaching “Dead Parrot” status in the race for the presidency. The campaign is trying to convince us that John McCain is actually alive and still breathing while all other signs point to him being an ex-presidential candidate.

Don’t trust the polls? I wouldn’t either. In fact, a good case can be made that almost all the polls are undercounting Obama’s support and the Illinois senator is even further ahead than the polls indicate. (Read this piece by conservative political guru Michael Barone on polls.) This is because there seems to be a truly remarkable and historic dynamic at work in America. Early voting in states like NC, FL, and Ohio have shown extraordinary turnout among African Americans and the young, voting for Obama by huge margins (Pew has this early voting 58-34 for Obama while Zogby gives Obama a 21 point lead nationwide among early voters.)

Is this a trend? Can the votes of these early birds tell us anything? There isn’t much history so we can’t be sure. But since most early voters appear to be Democrats, that may say something significant about who is excited about this race.

You stunned him just as he was waking up!

Regardless, it would appear that the models that pollsters are basing their horse race numbers on may be flawed thus not giving us a true picture of Obama’s support. If you read this excellent piece by Nate Silver on his blog 538, you get a good sense of how accurate the daily tracking polls are performing, their pluses and minuses and a little history of the polling company. Nate concludes that the Gallup poll that tracks likely voters using the increased African American and youth turnout in their model (Gallup LVII) is probably as accurate a daily indicator as you can get. In that poll, as of yesterday, Obama had expanded his lead to 10 points.

I hasten to add that historically, the youth vote doesn’t seem to materialize on election day and African Americans only make up around 11% of the electorate. But in 2004, after the left spent about $60 million on a massive get out the vote drive for younger voters, turnout in the 18-24 category surged 16% to around 47% of that age group. With the possibility that the 2008 election will see some kind of breakthrough in the youth vote (some analysts are projecting based on primary participation a 60% turnout) and a huge surge in African American votes, Obama could tip some close races in red states and make this race an electoral landslide.

He’s not dead. He’s just resting.

Indeed, the numbers are very bleak for John McCain in states that he absolutely must hold to reach 270:

Colorado: Obama +5 (Rasmussen)
Georgia: McCain +2 (GQR)
Missouri: Obama +5 (Rasmussen)
Missouri: McCain +1 (Suffolk)
North Carolina: Obama +7 (PPP)
North Carolina: Obama +3 (Rasmussen)
Virginia: Obama +10 (Rasmussen)
Virginia: Obama +6 (Survey USA)

These are all polls conducted in the last three days. In addition, older polls show Obama up in Iowa (+13 by Survey USA), Nevada (+5 by Rasmussen), and New Mexico (+13 and +7 by Rasmussen and Survey USA respectively). Also, Obama is within 2 points in Indiana and a virtual dead heat in North Dakota.

These are all red states won by George Bush in 2004. McCain trails by more than 7 points in every single blue state. Where can McCain make up the difference? He is slightly behind in both Ohio and Florida - a loss of either one of those states would doom him. But a loss of just two of any of the 10 states listed above would also kill his campaign.

With two weeks to go, McCain will be scrambling just to hold on to formerly safe red states like IN and NC. Historically, when a candidate is forced to defend territory that should have been in the bag at this late date, he is finished.

The internals for McCain are just awful. Pew measures not just raw numbers of support but also issues and candidate qualities as well as voter attitudes. These are many of the same things that a campaign’s internal polling seeks to discover. Let’s take a look at what John McCain has been reading recently with his morning coffee:

Obama’s gains notwithstanding, a widespread loss of confidence in McCain appears to be the most significant factor in the race at this point. Many more voters express doubts about McCain’s judgment than about Obama’s: 41% see McCain as “having poor judgment,” while just 29% say that this trait describes Obama. Fewer voters also view McCain as inspiring than did so in mid-September (37% now, 43% then). By contrast, 71% of voters continue to think of Obama as inspiring.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Oct. 16-19 among 2,599 registered voters interviewed on landline phones and cell phones, finds that McCain’s age also has become more of an issue for voters. Roughly a third (34%) now says that McCain is too old to be president; in the Sept. 9-14 survey, just 23% said this. At this stage in the 1996 campaign, about as many voters (32%) said Republican candidate Bob Dole was too old to be president.

[snip]

A steadily growing number of voters say that McCain has been too personally critical of Obama: 56% say that now, up from 42% in mid-September. By contrast, just 26% say that Obama has been too personally critical of McCain, which is largely unchanged from mid-September (28%).

In recent weeks, McCain has lost support across the board. Most notably, he now trails Obama decidedly among political independents (51% to 33%). Yet he also has lost support among some voting blocs that previously had been strongly in his corner, including white evangelical Protestants and white men. McCain continues to lead Obama among older white men, but even here his margin over Obama has narrowed since mid-September; McCain now leads among white men age 50 and older by 54% to 38%, down from a 27-point lead in mid-September.

Losing independents by 18 points is significant. Indies were supposed to be one of his strongest supporters. In fact, given the disparity in party registration, McCain would need gain well over 50% of independents in order to come out ahead.

Finally, what about all those Democrats who supported Hillary Clinton who were supposed to go for McCain?

Among Democrats, Barack Obama is now winning 88 percent support, comparable to John Kerry in 2004 or Al Gore in 2000. And there are a couple of points’ worth of undecideds left in there, so it’s possible that Obama could scrape up against the 90 percent number on election day.

By contrast, John McCain is winning the support of just 85.3 percent of Republicans, well down from Bush’s 93 percent in 2004 and 91 percent in 2000. There are some undecideds in there as well, so his numbers should improve some, but McCain is likely to underperform Bush by several points.

Is there any good news for McCain at all?

Yes there is. Pew shows 23% of voters undecided (although 61% expect Obama to win). This large number is due to the fact that Obama has not quite “closed the sale:”

For all of Obama’s current success, however, there are some signs of vulnerability for his candidacy that could present opportunities for McCain. First, while somewhat more voters see Obama as well-qualified than did so in mid-September, only about half (53%) say this trait describes him; 72% say McCain is well-qualified. Second, swing voters continue to represent nearly a quarter of the electorate (23%). Notably, swing voters are less likely than all voters to say that McCain would continue Bush’s policies. They also express far more confidence in McCain than Obama to handle national security issues.

“He’s not dead - he’s pining for the fjords.”

A bolt of lightening from overseas could still make this a race. But it appears unlikely - unless al-Qaeda wishes to take a hand in the contest at which point all bets are off.

As long as I’m in the process of ruining your day (and mine), let me give you some background on how the House and Senate races are shaping up. You may wish you stayed in bed.

From the Democracy Corps (Jim Carville’s Think Tank):

The latest congressional battleground survey by Democracy Corps and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, part of our weekly tracking of the most competitive Republican House seats, finds that Democratic candidates have improved their standing and taken the lead, even closing in on the Republicans in the bottom tier of supposedly toughest seats. With our finding last week that Democratic incumbents have surged in the most marginal Democratic seats, Democrats are poised to make stunning gains on a battlefield that is still expanding at the Republicans’ expense.

In the top tier of races, the 20 most vulnerable Republican seats, Democratic candidates are beginning to pull away, doubling their 4-point lead from last week to 8 points. Meanwhile, Democrats in the next two tiers remain within striking distance, trailing their Republican opponents by just 2 points in the second tier and 3 points in the third and holding the Republicans under 50 percent in both.[1] The result in Tier 2 is unchanged from a week ago, but the Democrats’ deficit in Tier 3 has been cut in half since last week and has closed a remarkable 13 points since we first surveyed these districts two weeks ago. Seats that once appeared out of reach are now very much in play. We will bring more Republican seats into our next survey.

The Blogging Caesar is a little less pessimistic. He bases his totals on races where the probability of a pickup is “strong” - which translates into a lead of 16% or more. Right now, he has the Democrats at a projected +12 with another 20 races he designates as “Weak” or “Moderate GOP Hold.” (In 2006, the Democrats defeated 15 Republicans who had received 55% or more of the vote in 2004. That would translate as a “Moderate GOP Hold” in Caesar’s calculations.)

Just how long could Obama’s coattails be? The young may be more willing to split their vote but African Americans could tip the scales in a couple of dozen of these races. As for independents, they are polling more liberal this time around and with a decided animus toward the GOP. I haven’t taken a really close look yet at most of these competitive House race (that’s my task over the weekend) so I can’t really give a good guess as to just how many seats the GOP will lose. It will almost certainly end up being a minus 20 net loss and perhaps more if the trends we’ve seen continue.

The Senate, if possible, looks even bleaker. Three seemingly safe incumbents are fighting for their political lives including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Georgia’s Saxbe Chambliss, and Roger Wicker of Mississippi who won the special election to fill Trent Lott’s seat. All three are “Weak GOP Holds” at the moment. if you include the 8 GOP seats that are now listed as “Strong Democrat Gains,” you have the Dems with a net gain of 11 seats and the loss of the filibuster.

(If you haven’t subscribed to Election Projection, I strongly urge you to do so. Caesar is top notch and non-partisan.)

Despite what you might think, I get no pleasure out of being the bearer of bad tidings. And I might add that you will note there is not one link to a “MSM” site. These are all respected professional polling and analysis sites. While a Nate Silver may be a Democrat, his professional reputation depends on accurate information and spot-on analysis. And Pew Research has proven to be accurate and reliable forecaster in the past.

As in 2006, I will pull no punches these last weeks. If you come to this site, you will get my honest opinion based on the best, the most professional analysis available. And right now, it appears that my worst fears are being confirmed and that the 2008 election may very well go down in history as a transformative moment - a point in time when the nation made a collective decision to veer left in its policies and politics. And given the rout in the House and Senate that the GOP appears to be headed for, it will be a very long time before the party will be able to get its act together and challenge the Democrats again.

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

Tonight, Jazz Shaw of The Moderate Voice and Midstream Radio will be my guest. We’ll look at the race as it stands today and talk about what kind of country we are likely to be if Obama is elected.

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.

What’s so bad about “spreading the wealth?”

That question has been put to me by more than one of my liberal friends since Obama told Joe the Plumber that’s what he intended with his tax policies. It’s a fair question and to answer it, we must look at the most enduring principles in American history - our foundational beliefs that define who we are and why we are an exceptional nation and people.

Our nation was founded on the rock of life, liberty, and property. These three principles are immutable. They are not only enshrined in the Constitution to one degree or another, they are part of our national DNA. They are every American’s birthright.

The more religious among us believe that two of these rights - life and liberty - are granted to us by God at birth. I would go a step further and say that our very birth as humans defines these rights. No God is necessary to confer what is ours by right of being born.

Advocating for the natural rights of man have fallen out of favor with many on the left in recent years. It screws up their entire worldview to have to deal with the fact that even a baby who comes into the world in North Korea possesses these rights the moment the child draws its first breath. And it is an uncomfortable truth for them to have to deal with the idea that it is government - and only government - that is capable of taking those rights away.

That North Korean baby is born with exactly the same rights to life and liberty as any American child. This is self evident, as Jefferson said. Twisted strands of logic that seek to deny this fact notwithstanding, the real difference between liberals and conservatives on this issue is how does one define “liberty.”

For 220 years, liberty in America has been a constantly evolving concept, becoming more and more inclusive and expansive as our revolution and drive for constitutional government began the first real age of the common man. And the engine of change that drove this concept has been the possession of private property being the guarantor of liberty.

Few governments on earth have taken such an expansive view of private property rights. Superficially, we tend to see “property” as land, or a house, or our private possessions. But over the years, we have expanded that definition to include exigencies that our Founders could never envision. We now recognize intellectual property - artistic creations, patented ideas, etc. - which has grown in importance as the world has become more global in commerce and exchanges of culture. This website is my property despite it having little, if any, intrinsic value.

And, of course, our money is our property. Except that there are many on the left who either don’t recognize that fact, or seek to undermine the entire concept of private property altogether in order to “share the wealth.”

Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic:

But let’s get back to this apparently controversial phrase–which, I gather, is going to remain prominent in McCain’s campaign rhetoric over the next few days. What, exactly, is so awful about “spreading the wealth”?

Government performs certain essential functions, from education to national defense. It must raise money to do that. Charging everybody the same tax rate might sound simple. But it would actually impose a much harsher burden on the poor, since they end up spending much–if not all–of their incomes on the basic necessities of life, such as food, clothing, and shelter. As one famous 18th century philosopher argued,

“It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expen[s]e, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

Another rationale for progressive taxation is the fact that random chance has profound effects on everybody’s financial well-being. (A guy named John Rawls once wrote a thing or two about this.) Mandating economic equality–i.e., carrying out a truly socialist agenda–would obviously be wrong. But there are compelling moral and economic arguments for asking the fortunate to pay a little more in taxes, in order to blunt the influence of chance on people’s lives.

Among other things, it’s not clear how long a capitalist society would even survive without at least some redistribution, given the likelihood that–without it–the poor would get poorer and the rich would get richer.

Cohn has thrown up a gigantic strawman - that conservatives don’t support “progressive” taxation. There may be a few conservatives out there who, in the real world, actually oppose the idea of the rich paying more in taxes than the middle class. If there are, they are not taken seriously nor should they be.

But there is a reason Cohn erects that very large, very ugly scarecrow. It is to avoid calling attention to his attack on private property; the idea that forced altruism is a legitimate reason to take an American citizen’s hard earned money (property).

There is nothing “moral” about paying taxes. We pay taxes, as Cohn points out, so that government can provide those things that we, as individuals, are unable to provide for ourselves. Cohn is silent about what percentage of our property should be taken by our local government, our state government, or our national government (and therein lies another difference between the left and the right), but let us agree that Cohn is correct and that we must grant government the right to reach into our pockets and take what is necessary to defend us, to keep us safe, and to protect us from the depredations of our neighbor.

(I doubt whether Cohn would agree with my statement above about citizens granting the government any such right - but of course, that is what makes us exceptional as a nation. In America, it is the people who inform government what it’s powers are, not the other way around.)

It is not within the rights granted by the people of the United States for government to force people to be charitable. Altruism at the point of a gun defeats its purpose and abjures the idea that money is property and that taking a citizen’s property and giving it to another without consent is inimical to those rights that have been a part of America since our founding.

We consent to fund social welfare programs because we recognize that for the good of all, the poor must be fed and clothed and given a helping hand in order to become productive members of society (I realize this is a fantastical notion and that social welfare programs have, in fact, accomplished exactly the opposite - making people more dependent on government. But we’re talking theory here, not reality.) But when the left talks of “spreading the wealth,” they are not talking about those who possess the least amount of property among us. They are talking about funding programs that benefit the middle class - people who have but just not quite as much as others.

There is no “moral” component to this arrangement. There is no compact between the people and government to “spread the wealth.” Liberals may wish this were so but then there are those pesky private property rights which should be inviolate but that have been under attack recently and the very concept of any property being “private” has actually been questioned:

The New York Times following the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision:

The Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday that the economically troubled city of New London, Conn., can use its power of eminent domain to spur development was a welcome vindication of cities’ ability to act in the public interest. It also is a setback to the “property rights” movement, which is trying to block government from imposing reasonable zoning and environmental regulations. Still, the dissenters provided a useful reminder that eminent domain must not be used for purely private gain.

Note the use of quotes for the term property rights, as if the words had no meaning outside of a few mossbacks who actually take the Constitution at its word.

With this mindset, it becomes easy to justify the government forcing citizens - rich or otherwise - to become philanthropists. And that is exactly what liberals are seeking; a transfer of property from one class to another in the name of what their idea of a “just society” might be.

There is no difference between taking a slice of your house and giving it to someone else - deserving or not - and taxing you for the same purpose. This is why the left uses “moral” arguments to advance their case when the moral parameters of the issue surrounds the very notion of private property instead of some civic certitude that it is “immoral” to oppose the seizing of such property.

If the government wishes to fund middle class entitlements - that is, property seized from those better off and given to those who may have less but are capable of taking care of themselves (the very definition of “spreading the wealth”), a conundrum arises that cannot be addressed by any moral argument about some citizens “deserving” or being “entitled” to have the government reach into their neighbor’s pocket who, either through his own efforts or Mr. Cohn’s “chance,” have more property. Once we start down that road, there will be no limit, no brake on what the many will be able to demand from the fewer.

Why are the American people so resistant to the idea of “spreading the wealth?” Because they realize better than liberal elitists that eventually, the hand of government will be reaching into their pocket, seizing their property, in order to fund the next egalitarian scheme from Washington. There is a fine old tradition of opposing “leveling” schemes in America. And “spreading the wealth” smacks of such nonsense. It is against the concept of private property for it to be appropriated by the government for other than utilitarian purposes. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, train the tragically uneducated, give the poor the tools to become productive taxpaying citizens with a job and hope for the future. It is part of the compact we live by as Americans that this has become a vital function of government. (At what level of government these services are best offered may be debated - not their necessity.)

So we are not talking about denying government assistance to those who can’t live without it. We are talking about taking from those who have and giving to those who don’t have quite as much. There is a huge, fundamental difference that escapes our friends on the left because to them, private property is determined by what the government allows you to keep not what citizens allow the government to take.

It is why liberals are opposed in principle to “giving” a tax cut. They’ve got it all wrong. The government doesn’t have the right to “give” the taxpayer anything. It’s the taxpayer’s property to begin with. How can government “give” what they don’t possess? A tax cut simply allows a citizen to keep more of his property that was never within the government’s purview to decide its provenance.

This has been sort of a free wheeling, stream of consciousness essay that allowed me to clarify my thinking about what is really at stake here when we are looking at what almost certainly will be a lurch to the left this coming election. Even if McCain can pull it out, we are going to have the most liberal Congress since at least the early 70’s and perhaps going farther back than that.

Aside from fighting the reimposition of the Fairness Doctrine, I see fighting to protect private property rights - and all that concept encompasses - as the preeminent job of conservatives for the next few years.

If you visit the site everyday, you are aware that it has been loading more and more slowly recently. Increased traffic due to the election plus some other long standing issues with the site finally convinced me it is time to change hosting companies.

Many thanks to Blogs About Hosting for their years of putting up with me crashing their server whenever I was lucky enough to get a link from Glenn Reynolds or Hot Air. I have used Blogs About since I got off Blogspot. They designed and hosted this site for nearly 4 years and were always there when I needed them.

But times change. A redesign of the site is coming and I thought it would be a good time to make a change. As of today, the excellent company Hosting Matters will be our new home here at the House. Hopefully, their excess server capacity will solve all of the slow loading issues we’ve been experiencing plus serve as a platform for future growth.

Sounds like a little “Hope and Change” but what do I know?

A few days ago, I wrote a much maligned post entitled “If Elected, Obama will be My President.” You would have thought I killed Santa Claus judging by the reaction to that piece. People misunderstood my granting legitimacy to whoever the next president is as a blanket endorsement of his policies. I wrote no such thing, of course. People read into the piece whatever they wanted to and reacted accordingly. Even my pledge to back Obama’s play in a foreign crisis - something all patriots should do when the safety of the country is at stake - was seen as a betrayal.

The point is very simple - too simple for some who seek to complicate matters by ascribing the absolute worst possible motives to Obama and fear his coming administration as medieval peasants feared the appearance of a comet. Ignorance of history and a lack of common sense has caused many on the right to go stark raving, around the bend, screw loose, bat out of hell nutzo.

Obama will not turn America into a Marxist state. There will be no gulags or prison camps where conservatives and Obama regime opponents will be rounded up and sent for re-education (even though there is a sizable subset of Obama supporters who would no doubt crave such treatment of righties).

Obama will not cancel future elections, initiate Soviet style restrictions on free speech (more on the Fairness Doctrine later which, btw, is hardly “a Soviet style restriction”), make us stand in line for toilet paper, or place his smiling visage on 10 story high office buildings in order to perpetrate a cult of personality (I think).

Obama will not “take away” your guns, close churches, shutter conservative newspapers, shut down Fox News, darken conservative blogs, or take any other actions that would smack of dictatorship or authoritarianism.

Holy Christ! We just went through 8 fricking years of listening to the left babble on about all of this crap and now we have to read this kind of garbage from conservatives? Will you listen to yourselves? We have stood shoulder to shoulder these past 8 years laughing at, belittling, screaming about, and pointing a finger of shame at the left for saying many of the exact same things about Bush that you are already saying about Obama.

The exact. Same. Things.

Right down to and including the growing meme - fed and given life, to his eternal shame, by John McCain - that the coming election is about to be “stolen.”

Yes, there are enormous problems with bogus voter registrations in several states. But the kind of conspiracy to turn those bogus registrations into fraudulent votes on a nationwide basis being touted by my conservative friends is just not logical or even feasible. A reasonable person can question whether ACORN and the Obama campaign are in cahoots to steal Ohio. That I will grant because the bulk of the problems seem to be concentrated in the Buckeye state. But an entire election? That would take a conspiracy of gigantic proportions involving dozens of people, perhaps hundreds. History shows that even conspiracies involving a handful of people are rarely successful. And the more people involved, the harder to maintain security.

Vigilance yes, Investigate the fraud, certainly. But let’s not go off half cocked and blame the coming landslide on Democrats cheating. I know how you can turn thousands of fake registrations into fraudulent votes. But you can’t do it by signing up “Mickey Mouse” or “Dick Tracy” to vote. The Democrats already have tried and true methods of cheating and they hardly need ACORN to show them the ropes. And to accomplish something like this on a nationwide scale would require an enormous effort. Hard to see how you could keep an effort of that magnitude from the the watchful eyes of Republicans much less the authorities.

But an Obama-ACORN effort to game the system in Ohio (with help from the usual suspects in unions) should be stopped. There the possibility of vote stealing and ballot box stuffing is real. Much can be accomplished when you have a rabidly partisan Secretary of State as Ohio does in Jennifer Brunner. But in order to steal a national vote, you would need a dozen or more Brunners - some of them Republicans - working for Obama. It just isn’t logical or reasonable.

Obama is a far left liberal, that’s for sure. His policies would aggrandize government at the expense of the individual. His foreign policy will weaken us and, I believe, place us in greater danger as well as making the world much more dangerous place.

There will be a supreme effort to nationalize the health insurance industry (not the health care industry - not yet anyway). And I’ve got news for my conservative friends - John McCain would be forced to do pretty much the same thing. The Democratic Congress is going to make Obama’s health insurance ideas into law. Or, in the unlikely event McCain is elected, they will pass something almost equally abhorrent and send it to him, daring him to veto something that 70% of the country wants.

All of this about Obama is true. But Obama’s agenda is liberal boilerplate - the same crap they’ve been advocating for 30 years. It isn’t communism. It isn’t socialism (Obama is not going to guillotine the rich and throw their money to the peasants in order to “spread the wealth.”). In fact, Obama’s and the Democrats’ ideas are egalitarian in nature. They can be traced to the Utopian movements of the 19th century and early progressives of the 20th century who saw government as something that could be “perfected” scientifically.

We conservatives know the folly of believing in such nonsense. We also know what this “tinkering” means; threats to private property rights, threats to individual liberty, threats to the free market, threats to the civic values that we believe are essential in order to ensure a just and moral society.

We will fight these threats with every ounce of our strength and through whatever means we have at our disposal. But we will do it free from the fear that Obama and the Democrats want to turn the US into a Soviet style state or destroy the Bill of Rights.

Bringing back some form of the Fairness Doctrine (it won’t be called the “Fairness Doctrine” I assure you - probably something innocuous like “Broadcasting Bill of Rights” or some other Orwellian formulation) will be fought tooth and nail - and not just by bloggers. You are talking about gigantic corporations who would be adversely affected. They are not just going to take the reimposition of a Fairness Doctrine lying down. We will have powerful allies in this fight that we all know is coming. There will probably be some Democrats of good conscience who join us as well.

But is the Fairness Doctrine a communist plot? Is it socialism run rampant? We existed as a nation for nearly 40 years with its draconian restrictions and I didn’t hear too many conservatives claiming we were living in a totalitarian state because of it. Besides, unless the government wants to hire a million monitors for the internet, it is extremely unlikely that any such restrictions would ever trickle down to blogs and other news websites. The lefties would be up in arms if they were forced to give any bandwidth to conservatives so one would think the internet will remain free of any such nonsense as long as both sides would be affected.

An Obama presidency means there will be changes, not revolution. Liberal pablum is not the same as Marxist dialectic. Equating liberalism with Marxism ignores the history of liberalism in America and its sometimes salutary effect on society. Yes, it has been wrongheaded, stubborn in its refusal to deal with reality, class conscious, weak in the face of tyrants, and too eager to turn to the national government to solve local problems. It has also been almost sublime in its effect on some of our most intractable problems having to do with race, sex, and the social structure of America - problems, I might add, that we conservatives have either ignored or accepted as “the way things are.”

Liberalism is the yin to conservatism’s yang. We need each other and can’t make America a better place without the constant tug and pull of conflict between the two ideologies. What in many countries is a source of revolution, our war of ideas with liberalism and theirs with conservatism makes us both better. It forces us to come up with new approaches to solving problems in order to compete in the marketplace of ideas. This is a free market that Obama, no matter what his proclivities, cannot shut down.

No doubt we will be angry at many of the changes attempted by Obama. But change is what all elections are about. America stands still for no one, no ideology, no group of people. We always have one foot in the future. And if the American people choose this lurch to the left, it will be up to us to come up with the ideas and the principals to show them a better way.

After all, 2012 is just 4 short years away. And that’s the great thing about politics in America: There’s always another election.

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.