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Thomas Lifson
Small signs emerge that at least some members of the liberal media are not buying into the Obama campaign. Binyamin Appelbaum of the Boston Globe, for example. An alert reader led me to this commentary on NPR by the normally liberal Scott Simon.
Posted at 09:05 AM | Email | Permalink
Rick Moran
I wondered how the Democrats were going to cut McCain down to size when it came to national security because it is obviously Obama’s biggest and most glaring weakness. It isn’t that Obama only has a little experience in foreign and defense affairs – he has none. Zero. Nada. Zilch.
The American people thought a president could get away with being ignorant about foreign affairs with Clinton and later a Texas governor with zero foreign policy credentials because the cold war was over and it appeared that we would have little need for a president who could handle a military crisis.
But then 9/11 occurred and things changed. Now the need to have at least some credentials on foreign and defense policy would seem to be a large factor in winning the election.
So Obama and his campaign were in a quandry. How to overcome the foreign and defense experience deficit with the voter? Easy. Slime your opponent’s military experience as John McCormick of the Weekly Standard Blog details:
On CBS’s Face the Nation this morning, Obama surrogate Gen. Wesley Clark said of John McCain: “I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.”The McCain campaign responded with a statement from Admiral Leighton “Snuffy” Smith:If Barack Obama wants to question John McCain’s service to his country, he should have the guts to do it himself and not hide behind his campaign surrogates. If he expects the American people to believe his pledges about a new kind of politics, Barack Obama has a responsibility to condemn these attacks.Clark’s attack is a bit like saying that JFK’s boat getting sunk wasn’t a qualification to become president in 1960. Can you imagine the outrage if someone said that Clark’s getting shot four times in Vietnam didn’t count as a qualification for the presidency?When choosing a commander-in-chief, most voters do take into account the courage and heroism that candidates displayed while serving their country.
As the McCain camp points out, Obama lacks the courage to attack McCain’s record himself, leaving it to political generals to do the damage for him. Clark is also being disingenuous. He knows full well McCain is not basing his qualifications for CIC solely on his military record. The Arizona senator has nearly a quarter century of experience being at the center of every single major debate on foreign and defense policy. Obama can’t hold a candle to that kind of deep, nuanced knowledge of the issues so he sends his surrogates out to slime McCain.
And that’s not all, liberal blogger John Aravosis went Clark several steps lower in the gutter and pronounced McCain “disloyal” for making a propaganda statement when he was being held prisoner and routinely tortured – as all American POW’s were.
You can’t get much lower than this:
Yes, we all know that John McCain was captured and tortured in Vietnam (McCain won’t let you forget). A lot of people don’t know, however, that McCain made a propaganda video for the enemy while he was in captivity. Putting that bit of disloyalty aside, what exactly is McCain’s military experience that prepares him for being commander in chief? It’s not like McCain rose to the level of general or something. He’s a vet. We get it. But simply being a vet, as laudable as it is, doesn’t really tell you much about someone’s qualifications for being commander in chief. If McCain is going to play the “I was tortured” card every five minutes as a justification for electing him president, then he shouldn’t throw a hissy fit any time any one asks to know more about his military experience. Getting shot down, tortured, and then doing propaganda for the enemy is not command experience. Again, it’s not nice to say say, but we’re not running for class president here. We deserve real answers, not emotional outbursts designed to quell the questions.
Again, throwing up the strawman of McCain’s military experience – in this case smearing him in the process – only serves to obscure the Obama campaign’s real and serious problems with the fact that the candidate is an amateur compared to McCain when it comes to experience in dealing with the complex and nuanced world of foreign affairs.
The idea that Aravosis, one of the biggest slime merchants in Washington whose real claim to fame is “outing” gay Republicans without their consent simply because they disagree with his far left homosexual agenda, is the most outrageous notion I’ve seen in a while.
I respond in detail to Mr. Aravosis here.
Hat Tip: Ed Lasky
Thomas Lifson
A lot of unrepentant 60s radicals — the type of people who used to reject electoral politics as a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee — are supporting Barack Obama. Maybe they have all matured, mellowed and decided to work within the system. Or maybe they see Obama’s rhetorical shift toward the center as nothing but lip service. Daniel Flynn of City Journal compiles an amazing list that goes beyond the familiar names already in the press, like Dohrn and Ayers:
Progressives for Obama resembles a Who’s Who of SDS luminaries. In addition to Hayden, Rudd, and Davidson, the group includes Bob Pardun, SDS’s education secretary during the 1966-67 school year; Paul Buhle, a radical professor who has recently attempted to revive SDS; Mickey and Dick Flacks, red-diaper babies who helped craft 1962’s Port Huron Statement, a seminal New Left document; and SDS’s third president, Todd Gitlin. Age and experience have mellowed some of the SDSers in Obama’s camp. Gitlin, for instance, has evolved into a respected Ivy League professor and milquetoast liberal. But others still glory in a past that can only damage Obama’s future. The aging New Left still practices a therapeutic politics that places a higher value on feelings of personal liberation than on restrained pursuit of political aims.
Rick Moran
Sure looks that way although the fault may lie with an organized attempt by Obama activists to silence blogs that disagree with their candidate.
The key to the shutdowns is found in the corner of every Google “Blogspot” blog. Blogspot is the widely used publishing platform Google offers free of charge to people who wish to blog. In the upper right hand corner of every Blogspot blog is a button you can click if you find the subject matter offensive.
Simon Owens of Bloggasm explains:
A “Flag Blog” link sits at the very top of every free Blogspot account. If a person finds objectionable content on a Blogspot site or suspects it’s publishing spam, he or she can click on the link and it will send a notice to Google requesting “human review.”I spoke to several of the bloggers who had accounts locked and every single one was convinced that it was Obama supporters who had flagged the blogs in some kind of concerted effort to silence them. But when I asked for specific evidence of this, most simply pointed out that only anti-Obama blogs were targeted – a fact that is certainly suspicious but not especially conclusive.The incident highlights the often-contentious relationship between online Hillary and Obama supporters. Popular sites like Digg.com have consistently posted anti-Hillary links and popular liberal blog Daily Kos experienced a “boycott” a few months ago when several Hillary supporters left the site.A blogger who uses the pseudonym “GeekLove” (she wouldn’t agree to a phone interview and wouldn’t tell me her real name) said to me via email that when her blog, Come A Long Way, was shut down she thought it was a fluke as well.“I also felt a little bit humiliated that someone would think to characterize my Blog as ‘spam,'” she said. “I had no idea why it would be ‘spam’ I assumed it was just some sort of mistake. I did think it was an isolated incident. I requested the Blogger review. I then went to the Hillary Clinton Forum, a place I frequently participate in on line discussions, and I saw Nobama‘s post ‘Blogger just shut down my NObama Blog!!‘ Then when other Blogger blogs were affected, I knew it was more than coincidence.”
So this is probably not Google’s doing – entirely. Let’s see how long it takes them to allow access for these bloggers to their own sites.
From my own experience with Google and my website that was shut down three times, I believe that Google takes such action at times to annoy conservative bloggers and perhaps try and get them to quit. Other conservative bloggers who have used Blogspot could probably relate their own horror stories. Bottom line: Google is guilty until proven innocent in my eyes and whether they deliberately shut down some of these blogs knowing full well they were not spam is a question we will probably never know the answer to.
Posted at 11:34 AM | Email | Permalink
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen declares that Barack Obama is ” ‘likable enough’ — in fact, so much so that he is the most charismatic presidential candidate I have seen since Robert F.Kennedy.” Well, even though I’ve never spoken with Obama, I don’t like him very much (I did testify with him [and a few others] once about a bill he’d sponsored on voter intimidation, but at the time he didn’t impress me as unlikable, just a little intellectually lazy) .
Thoughts Of A Conservative Christian
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