A cast of hundreds: Who isn’t an Obama foreign policy adviser?!

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/07/18/a-cast-of-hundreds-who-isnt-an-obama-foreign-policy-adviser/

Hussein Speaks On Nat’l Security, About “The Bomb” That Fell On Pearl Harbor

http://patdollard.com/2008/07/hussein-speaks-on-natl-security-about-the-bomb-that-fell-on-pearl-harbor/

Hussein Embarks On World Tour- To Reach Voters In His Backyard?

http://patdollard.com/2008/07/obama-embarks-on-world-tour-%E2%80%94-to-reach-voters-in-his-backyard

Hussein’s Greatest Admirer – Himself

http://patdollard.com/2008/07/husseins-greatest-admirer-himself/

Obama is Just Another Politician

By Bruce Walker

Barack Obama is just another politician.  That is the increasingly obvious fact of the presidential campaign.  He runs to the center to win the election.  He breaks his campaign pledge on public financing when it helps him.  Obama plans an open air speech in Denver;  how is the substance of that speech going to be different than an indoor speech?  Everything is for image.  Everything is for style.  Everything is for political gain.

Has the senator proposed a single really new idea?  Has he taken a single really courageous position?  If we had learned that Obama walked out of Jeremiah Wright’s church, that would have been something — but, of course, he never raised the slightest peep during his long membership at Trinity.  If we had learned that Obama took on the power Daley Machine in Chicago, that would have been something — but, of course, Obama endorsed Mayor Daley, boss of the longest running political machine in America, for re-election.  If we had learned that Obama rejected a single lunacy of the Left — global warming, constitutional rights for captured terrorists, no drilling in ANWR, anything! — that would have been something, but, of course, Obama has walked lockstep with every Leftist whim as long as he has been in the public eye.  He panders to one group in the Democrat nomination and then panders to another group in the general election.  He is just another politician.

Is he an honest politician?  Well, he lied about what he had known about Trinity Church in Chicago.  He was closely connected with convicted felon, Tony Rezko.  Obama is well entrenched in Chicago politics which is owned by Boss Daley.  He brings his daughters on a television program and, in less than one day, he “regrets” his decision.  He tells San Francisco audiences about rural folks clinging to religion, but then backtracks at once.  Can anyone name a presidential nominee who, this early in his career, was caught in more half-truths and outright lies?  Can anyone name a politician who became more honest after winning the White House?  He is just another politician.

What we do know about his pre-Washington career is not good.  As a state legislator, he voted “present” often.  Obama “explains” this by pointing out, no doubt correctly, that this was a legislative trick designed to allow the official voting “present” to try to work out a deal behind closed doors — he assures us that this is an old tradition in Illinois politics.  It probably is.  But is that what we want in a leader?  Is that what we want in our new Messiah?  Or does this say something else about Obama?  Does it say that he is just another politician?

What we know about the mind of Barack Obama today is not encouraging.  There are gaping holes in his basic knowledge of history, government and economics.  He said that Arabic was the language of Afghanistan.  He said that the United States has 57 states.  He said that Canada has a president, instead of a prime minister. He doesn’t understand the Joint Chiefs of Staff do not convey his orders to the command structure. But this sort of profound ignorance never affects candidates who appeal to emotion and not to intellect, which is to say, most politicians.  And Barack Obama is nothing more than another politician.

Or, perhaps, he is more like another door to door salesman.  He charms the housewife, flatters the homeowner, promises what wonderful things his very common products will do, makes his sale, and moves to the next front door.  Whether his vacuum cleaner works or his food processor breaks down in a month is not his concern.  What matters are his sales figures — his polls numbers, his votes in primaries or elections, and his electoral victories.  He is just another politician.

The irony of all this is that in 2006 many Republicans left their party in disgust, and many other voters joined them, because too many Republicans had become just politicians.  Americans in general felt the same way.  Congress, the ranch for politicians, has now the lowest rating it has ever had in history — and that takes some doing! — yet Americans appeared poised to elect the most typical and ordinary member of that highly unpopular body, a friend of the most corrupt political machine in America, a man who is virtually all glitz, hype and image and has virtually no substance.

So a nation trying desparately to free itself from the manacle of pure, crass, common politics is about to embrace as its Messiah (or, perhaps, in Muslim parts of America, its Prophet), one of the most typical politicians to be nominated to high office in our lifetime.  What is in the biography of Obama, besides state legislator?  Lawyer!  (And his wife is a lawyer too .) Well, that sure separates him from a lot of other cynical politicians in Washington.  He might have been a member of the law firm of Clinton, Clinton, Nixon and Obama –  a law firm of very political politicians.

Barack is a vast yawn, much more than most presidential candidates in recent memory.  Bob Dole was a genuine war hero, as was George H. Bush and as was John Kennedy.  John McCain is a man of great courage as a POW.  Ronald Reagan made fame and fortune before entering politics.  Hubert Humphrey took on Democrat racists in 1948.  Eisenhower commanded armies.  Even Carter attended the Naval Academy and learned at the knee of Hyman Rickover, a great patriot.  Heck, even George McGovern flew a B-17 in the Second World War.  Nearly every man who has run for president in the last forty years had something in his biography besides “politician.”  Everyone, that is, except for Obama.  More than any candidate in modern history, Barack Obama is nothing more than another politician.

Barack’s Disgraceful Global Phony-Ops

James Lewis
Barack Obama has never been President, but he plays one on TV. The TV newsies find this utterly world-shaking, which is why the three major networks are sending their prime-time anchors along with the President of the World, Senator Barack Obama. John McCain took four foreign trips in the past year, and nobody even noticed.

Obama’s narcissism swells to global proportions even as the American voters are beginning to notice something very fishy about this rookie from Illinois. Barack’s triumphal European victory lap, four months before the American election, doesn’t pass the smell test either, and the premature Hosannas by the liberal newsies confirms what our noses are telling us.

This is a weird, weird, candidacy.

As the Times of London writes,

“… for all the adoring throngs that are likely to greet the Democratic contender and the eight foreign leaders he will meet, the trip is aimed at voters back home, where Mr Obama’s youth and inexperience have raised significant doubts that he has the gravitas, grit and sure-footedness to be their next commander-in-chief.

“The 12,000-mile whirlwind tour, extraordinary for its timing midway through a general election campaign and the international media frenzy it is attracting, will take Mr Obama to Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, Germany, France and Britain as he seeks to bolster his national security credentials – one of his greatest electoral liabilities.”

And UK Times columnist Gerard Baker writes,

“You have to go back to the Beatles’ first US tour to find a transatlantic trip freighted with the sort of pregnant excitement that attends the one Barack Obama is about to make next week.”

But Charles Krauthammer hits the nail on the head with this headline:

“Obama’s Ego Exceeds His Achievements.  …

“Americans are beginning to notice Obama’s elevated opinion of himself. There’s nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

“Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times.”

I thought John Kerry was embarassing when he ran as a real Vietnam combat vet, based on his three months making home movies in the Mekong Delta. Nobel Peace Laureate Al Gore has been bringing the blush of shame to my cheeks, with his Prophet-of-Doom act, based on an obvious scientific fraud that is finally beginning to be called what it is.

But Barack Obama is going to make us all feel completely embarassed in front of any sensible people left in the world, as he rips off his fake Ronald Reagan act at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

This is disgusting. Obama looks like a pompous fool.

No, scratch that: Obama is a pompous fool.

James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com/

Posted at 01:00 AM | Email | Permalink

The inconvenient truth about Gore

Ethel C. Fenig

And now let’s take an inconvenient truth tour of the home Al Gore returns to after a long, hard day on the do as I say not what I do lecture/media circuit, courtesy of Peter Schweizer, writing in USA Today.

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up. Even the Bush administration is using green energy for some federal office buildings, as are thousands of area residents.

But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences.

Are Facts Obsolete?

Are Facts Obsolete?

By Thomas Sowell
| 7/18/2008

In an election campaign in which not only young liberals, but also some people who are neither young nor liberals, seem absolutely mesmerized by the skilled rhetoric of Sen. Barack Obama, facts have receded even further into the background than usual.

As the hypnotic mantra of “change” is repeated endlessly, few people even raise the question of whether what few specifics we hear represent any real change, much less a change for the better.

Raising taxes, increasing government spending and demonizing business? That is straight out of the New Deal of the 1930s.

The New Deal was new then but it is not new now. Moreover, increasing numbers of economists and historians have concluded that New Deal policies are what prolonged the Great Depression.

Putting new restrictions of international trade, in order to save American jobs? That was done by Herbert Hoover, when he signed the Hawley-Smoot tariff when the unemployment rate was 9 percent. The next year the unemployment rate was 16 percent and, before the Great Depression was over, unemployment hit 25 percent.

One of the most naive notions is that politicians are trying to solve the country’s problems, just because they say so – or say so loudly or inspiringly.

Politicians’ top priority is to solve their own problem, which is how to get elected and then re-elected. Barack Obama is a politician through and through, even though pretending that he is not is his special strategy to get elected.

Some of his more trusting followers are belatedly discovering that, as he “refines” his position on various issues, now that he has gotten their votes in the Democratic primaries and needs the votes of others in the coming general election.

Perhaps a defining moment in showing Mr. Obama’s priorities was his declaring, in answer to a question from Charles Gibson, that he was for raising the capital gains tax rate. When Mr. Gibson reminded him of the well-documented fact that lower tax rates on capital gains had produced more actual revenue collected from that tax than the higher tax rates had, Mr. Obama was unmoved.

The question of how to raise more revenue may be the economic issue but the political issue is whether socking it to “the rich” in the name of “fairness” gains more votes.

Since about half the people in the United States own stocks – either directly or because their pension funds buy stocks – socking it to people who earn capital gains is by no means socking it just to “the rich.” But, again, that is one of the many facts that don’t matter politically.

What matters politically is the image of coming out on the side of “the people” against “the privileged.”

If you are a nurse or mechanic who will be depending on your pension to take care of you when you retire – as Social Security is unlikely to do – you may not think of yourself as one of the privileged. But unless you connect the dots between capital gains tax rates and your retirement income, you may fall under the spell of the well-honed Obama rhetoric.

Mr. Obama is for higher minimum wage rates. Does anyone care what actually happens in countries with higher minimum wage rates? Of course not.

Economists may point to studies done in countries around the world, showing that higher minimum wage rates usually mean higher unemployment rates among lower skilled and less experienced workers.

That’s their problem. A politician’s problem is how to look like he is for “the poor” and against those who are “exploiting” them. The facts are irrelevant to maintaining that political image.

Nowhere do facts matter less than in foreign policy issues. Nothing is more popular than the notion that you can deal with dangers from other nations by talking with their leaders.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain became enormously popular in the 1930s by sitting down and talking with Hitler, and announcing that their agreement had produced “peace in our time” – just one year before the most catastrophic war in history began.

Mr. Obama may gain similar popularity by advocating similar policies today – and his political popularity is what it’s all about. The consequences for the country come later.

Thomas Sowell is a nationally syndicated columnist.

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