“God DAMN America !”

by Beth Gilinsky, Action Alliance Network, November 2, 2008

 

Gary Cooper in High Noon

Once upon a time there was an America that wasn’t embarrassed to be like a Gary Cooper or Joel McCrae character: big and straight-talking; at times a little rough around the edges but so quick to smile you felt like the sun was coming out after a rainstorm. It was a loyal America that cherished not only ideals as vast as liberty, justice, equality under the law, and victory over Evil, but also things as basic as a summer afternoon’s baseball game — or any game — where the playing field was level. 

It was a strapping, Big Blue Sky America of adventurous kids who grew into can-do adults who still got goose-bumps at the first notes of “Stars and Stripes Forever” because it symbolized the greatness that was still within us. This was an America where a man’s handshake was his word and he knew he loved his country, and that plus an unbeatable Constitution created the most miraculous and magnanimous nation ever. Of late it seems a memory, but it was there and it is still to be found in America ’s heartland if one only takes the time to look.

Educators, Hollywood, and the media have for decades so dumbed down language and ideas, debased standards, and depressed the sweetness and beauty of life for much of our citizenry that many Americans are convinced now that patriotism means having to say you’re sorry – in every foreign country and at every opportunity — for America. They have been convinced that America is so rotten that no one should be able to examine the credentials of a man laden with activities and items open to question since this man espouses this new, “enlightened” version of America . We are being lead to believe that someone’s virtue is beyond question because he espouses the fashionable “virtue” of “blaming America first”. Because he consistently questions America we, perversely, can no longer question him.

If we don’t wake up in the next 24 hours, the man beyond investigation will be entrusted as Commander in Chief of our military forces, appoint heads of the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security and other agencies, and will have access to any piece of information, classified or not. Barak Obama evidently deems as insignificant the Constitutional and security concerns of American voters, because he has refused to have released his records from Occidental College and Columbia College and Harvard, his selective service registration, his medical records, his Illinois State Senate schedule, his law practice’s client list, a certified copy of his original birth certificate and an embossed, signed paper Certification of Live Birth, any Harvard Law Review or University of Chicago scholarly articles he published, or even a record of his Baptism. This does appear to be a man of deliberate and planned secrecy.

This, combined with his disquieting associations with extremists and plans to meet without preconditions with dictators troubles those of us who have not fallen for everything Obama. We are weary of being instructed that we should not question anyone’s patriotism. Well, many question the patriotism of Obama’s associate, Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers. We also wonder why Obama skirts the issue of his relationship with former PLO operative Rashid Khalidi and presides over a campaign that remains mum on the sources of many of the millions of dollars raised for this most expensive election ever.

Barak Obama sat for twenty years, was married by, had his children Baptized by, and was a friend of a vicious hater, the Rev. “God DAMN America !” There is no possible explanation for Obama’s continued presence in Rev. Wright’s sphere but one: he liked what he was hearing. If you are voting for Obama, you must also find the words “God DAMN America !” an idea, the new form of “patriotism”, you can live with comfortably.

When you go to the polls on Tuesday, please follow the words of Martin Luther King and judge Barak Obama not on the color of his skin but on the content of his character, as well as on the quality of his associations, the soundness of his policies and ideas. Meeting without preconditions with human rights abusing dictators who are giving weapons of mass destruction to terrorist organizations that label America the Great Satan is not sound foreign policy. If you vote for Barak Obama, you are in essence asserting that American and Allied leaders should have met with Adolph Hitler before the war, with no preconditions.

Joe the Plumber asked a simple question of Barak Obama and an Ohio Party hack suddenly approved a records investigation on him. Can you also live with this comfortably? Is this the kind of America you want where, if you ask a question of the “anointed one” the state opens an investigation into your past? Can you really say you care about our basic rights and not question why this occurred and its implications for America in an Obama Presidency? Why are those who even dare utter Barak Obama’s middle name, “Hussein,” branded as bigots by his admirers? Is it to silence them? Today there may be one Joe the Plumber, but after Election Day, we may all become Joe the Plumbers.

If you are voting on Tuesday and cannot discern between America and the dictatorships in different countries where people are tortured and beaten by their governments, women are gang raped by dictators, dissidents are incarcerated for years without trial, and young children are strapped with bombs and sent to blow themselves up, then either you have not seen enough of the world Barak Obama so wants us to meet with and apologize to or you yourself have been so desensitized and confused by the media bias and “entertainment” industry violence you are no longer able differentiate between a basically decent but at times flawed America and those horrific regimes and tyrants exerting daily their perverted form of barbaric cruelty. And before you leave to vote, ask yourself if, in a couple of years you might possibly find yourself looking in the mirror and wondering, “What was it about the words ‘God DAMN America’ that I found so convincing? How could I have cast my vote to hurt the country that really was so good to me?”

Voter Information Sheet for Tuesday (hand out at polling places)

by Bill Levinson

The Word document is formatted to fit on a single page, for distribution at polling places tomorrow. Please feel free to copy and circulate. Be sure to obey your state’s regulations regarding the distance you must keep between yourself and the polling place when you hand out partisan material.

election_day
Captain (USN, retired) John McCain
A lifetime of service to our country

Barack Obama
A lifetime of service to his personal ambitions

(1) Has vowed to destroy the coal industry with carbon taxes—a position supported by his running mate Joseph Biden, who vowed “No new coal plants.”
(2) Will be tested with an international crisis similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis (the closest the U.S. and USSR ever came to nuclear war), again per Joe Biden.
(3) Launched his political career in the home of Weather Underground members Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.
(4) Committed “voter suppression, harassment, and intimidation” during the Nevada caucuses, per a letter from Hillary Clinton’s campaign counsel.
(5) Misused tax exempt church resources by giving a speech with campaign-related content at the United Church of Christ’s 2007 Synod in Hartford.
(6) Refused to “reject” the endorsement of the prominent racist, anti-Semite, and Catholic-hating bigot Louis Farrakhan until Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton backed him into a corner during a nationally televised debate.
(7) Accepted a testimonial from Michael Pfleger, who mocked Hillary Clinton’s tears while exulting that “There were a whole lot of white people crying.”
o Obama’s fellow churchgoers gave this hate speech a standing ovation.
(8) Accepted a testimonial from Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright.
o The Obamas belonged to Wright’s church for 20 years, during which time it published blood libels of both the U.S. and Israel (false accusations of developing the AIDS virus and an Arab-specific “ethnic bomb” respectively) and other forms of hate speech.
(9) Solicited and accepted the endorsement of MoveOn.org, which:
o Welcomed anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic hate speech at its now-disgraced Action Forum
o Published a derogatory photo-manipulation of Pope Benedict
o Published a defamatory insult to General David Petraeus
(10) Endorsed Al Sharpton and his National Action Network in April 2007.
o The NAN, while under Sharpton’s leadership and supervision, shouted racial and anti-Semitic epithets at a Jewish-owned store in Harlem (Freddy’s Fashion Mart) that one of Sharpton’s deranged followers then set on fire.
o See also the Crown Heights riots and Tawana Brawley for Sharpton’s long record of inciting hatred of white people, and especially Jews.
(11) Endorsed Black Nationalism in “Dreams From My Father”
o Belittled a Black classmate for having a white girlfriend
o Spoke of the need to “show loyalty to the Black masses”
(12) Welcomed the most vicious imaginable anti-Semitic and ageist hate speech at his official campaign site (over which his campaign exercises editorial control)
(13) Supports live birth abortion (infanticide) per his vote in the Illinois State Senate

Barack Obama’s pastor called upon God to damn America.
God BLESS America, McCain ‘08

(Copies paid for by the user, not authorized by any campaign)

Thoughts on the instinct of self-preservation or, Why I still, even now, believe John McCain will be moving to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on January 20

Thoughts on the instinct of self-preservation or, Why I still, even now, believe John McCain will be moving to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on January 20

Posted By Roger Kimball On November 3, 2008 @ 7:21 am In Uncategorized | 146 Comments

[UPDATE: Alas, the story about Michelle Obama’s taste in champagne and caviar turns out not to be true: see [1] here. I regret the mistake. I also take this occasion to correct a couple of typos readers have graciously called my attention to.]

I know, I know: Michelle Obama has placed a large order for [2] Bolly, Iranian caviar, and lobster to be delivered to the servants’ entrance on January 20, but she’ll have plenty of time to redirect the order. Will she need to? Not if you ask Nancy Pelosi, most pollsters, anyone remotely affiliated with The New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, etc., etc. It’s not just the conventional wisdom, it’s the weight of the Zeitgeist: Obama must win, indeed, if you read the script, he already has won. The whole tedious election thing is really just a formality, a public ratification of a reality that has already been achieved by acclamation.

Maybe so, maybe so. Obamamania is a more powerful hallucinogen than I’d reckoned on. I [3] once compared it to Beatlemania, but it affects middle-aged men (witness Chris Matthews and his leg) as well as pubescent females. A few months ago, [4] Mark Steyn admitted that whenever he heard an Obama speech, he startedto giggle. I know how he felt. The combination of earnest presentation and utter vacuousness is amusing, like an precocious eight-year-old dressed in a suit and tie pretending to give a speech. (”Obama,” [5] Thomas Sowell recently observed, “has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else.”)

I stopped giggling some time ago, not because I think Obama is any less preposterous, but because I saw that this was a case in which–history is full of melancholy examples–the preposterous was colluding with the the rough currents of naked political power. The Chicago machine politics out of which Obama rose to prominence. The radical, violence-saturated ideas of  Obama’s colleague Bill “the bomber”  Ayers. The equally radical racialist ideas of Rev. Jeremiah “God-damn America” Wright, in which Obama and his wife were steeped for more than 20 years. The influence of organizations like ACORN, which notoriously specializes in voter fraud and yet [6] still enjoys public funding.

Such things made me realize that Obama’s preposterousness was nevertheless a worrisomely  effective political force. Will he prevail tomorrow? Against the odds, I continue to have my doubts. Why? Various commentators have enumerated some reasons. John Podhoretz, for example, provided [7] ten plausible reasons for thinking McCain might win. And there are all the little hints, cracks, adumbrations, and anomalies in the polls. Team Obama is braying publicly. Privately, I suspect, they are concerned.

They should be. Yes, they might win. Having vastly outspent McCain–in some key states the ratio was reported to be something like[8] 20-1 in television ads–and (let us acknowledge) having also smoothly outcampaigned McCain, Obama has reason to feel confident.

Nevertheless, I continue to think McCain can pull victory from the jaws of defeat. Why? Not because of any complex statistical alchemy but for the simple old fashioned reason that I do not believe the instinct for self-preservation has been entirely bred out of the American electorate.

I understand that larger and larger swaths of America are turning purple if not blue as affluence coupled with tertiary education and cultural relativism transform more and more people into latte-drinking, NPR-listening, global-warming hysterics who regard Karl Rove as an evil genius and Sarah Palin as an anencephalic breeding machine on skis.

I understand that. Even so, the current financial meltdown (and whose fault was that, [9] Barney Frank?), like the prospect of hanging in a fortnight, has done wonders to concentrate the mind. The world, many people are beginning to realize once again, is a dangerous and unpredictable place. Bad things can happen. And in the great existential lottery that assigns everyone his chit, to be born an American–black or white, rich or poor–is to have pulled a very enviable number indeed.

I think a lot of people understand that, even though they may not wish to mention it at their Obama rally or while signing a “U.S.-Out-of-Guantanamo” petition. A lot of them get a little thrill proclaiming their solidarity with Obama–”Hey, I’m voting against the awful legacy of slavery by helping to elect the first black candidate in history!” Never mind that Obama, the child of a Kenyan father an a white American woman, has no more to do with the “legacy of slavery” than does Barbra Streisand–it’s the symbol of the thing! Obama looks the part, and he does so (as [10] Joe Biden observed before he became the pick for VP) in a way that is “clean and articulate,” i.e. not scary.

Of course, there are many, many people who are die-hard Obama supporters. But on the other side are not just knuckle-dragging right-wing throwbacks like me. There are also, I suspect, many, many people who worry about Obama’s offhand comment to Joe the Plumber about “spreading the wealth around.” When the shouts of Change! Yes We Can! Change! are not ringing in their ears, they wonder about politicians setting an arbitrary limit to individuals’ prosperity and then using the awesome mechanism of state power to prevent them from rising higher.

Despite Obama’s reassurances about a tax-cut for the little guy, they worry when a [11] 2001 interview surfaces and Obama can be heard criticizing the “essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers and the Constitution” regarding things like “the redistribution of wealth.” If Obama wants to remove such “essential constraints,” can he in [12] good faith place his hand on the Bible and swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States”?

Judges must swear to administer the law “without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich.” But [13] Obama is on record saying he thinks judges should empathize with and give preference to the disadvantaged. In an Obama administration, we’ll have to start chipping off the blindfolds from the figure of Justice that adorns so many court houses. I think that will give many people pause.

Americans who worry as much about energy costs as they do about their carbon foot-print will also be given pause by [14] Obama’s promise–recorded in an interview last January, but only recently released–to “bankrupt” the coal industry with greenhouse gas taxes if they dare to build any more coal-fired plants. How is that playing, I wonder, in Pennsylvania?

Many Americans, I say, look around at the world at large and they worry. They cast an anxious eye on a newly rampant, nuclear-armed but also imploding Russia. When Russian invaded Georgia this summer, John McCain instantly condemned the act. Obama–what did he do? [15] He began by saying there was fault on both sides and they recommended turning the problem over to the U.N.

But Russia isn’t the only international problem. There is Venezuela, for example. Hugo Chavez has made no secret of his ambition to topple “the [16] American empire“. There is Iran, with its nuclear ambitions and wild anti-Israel rhetoric, there is Islamic terrorism. There is a long and growing list.

Many Americans will be thinking about such contingencies and asking themselves: Whom would I pick in a crisis? In the privacy of the voting booth, I suspect many people–even, perhaps, some who sport an Obama button–will ponder such questions and conclude that Obama makes a great celebrity but is just too big a gamble to entrust with the future of our country.

The instinct for self-preservation is a simple, primitive force, difficult to eradicate or even blunt. We’ll see tomorrow to what extent ACORN, moveon.org, and their allies have been able to supplant it with the lemming instinct.

Couric Delivers One Last Pre-Election Fawning Obama Interview

 

Couric Delivers One Last Pre-Election
Fawning Obama Interview

     Just as with all his previous interviews with the broadcast network anchors, Barack Obama had nothing to fear from his final pre-election sit-down, this time with CBS’s Katie Couric, who laughed along with him about being a “nervous wreck” on election day, raised Jeremiah Wright not to press him about Wright’s incendiary anti-American rants but to ask if the McCain campaign had given its “approval” to a state party to raise the topic, and concluded by fawning: “If things go your way on Tuesday and you become this nation’s first African-American President, what will that mean to you personally?”

     In the excerpts from the interview conducted Sunday in Columbus, Ohio and aired on Monday’s CBS Evening News, Couric posed four questions, starting with “fears that perhaps an unbridled, unchecked, filibuster-proof Democratic majority will overreach and move the country too far to the left. How can you assuage people’s concerns about that?” Instead of hitting him on how much the decision by the McCain campaign and the news media to drop Wright helped him avoid a subject that would have hurt in swing states, she treated Republicans as the miscreants:
     “The Pennsylvania Republican Party is starting to run an ad in that state which features your former minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, saying quote, ‘God damn America.’ Do you think they would have run that ad without the approval of the McCain campaign?”

     [This item, by the MRC’s Brent Baker, was posted Monday night on the MRC’s blog, NewsBusters.org: newsbusters.org ]

     Sunday’s CBS Evening News plugged the interview with a clip of Couric asking Obama about Zeituni Onyango, whom the Times of London late last week found living in a Boston housing project: “You have an aunt who’s been living in this country, apparently illegally, for four years and you campaign says ‘any and all appropriate laws should be followed.’ So, would you support her being deported to Kenya?” Times of London article: www.timesonline.co.uk

     A CBSNews.com posting with interview video and a transcript does not have that question, but does have several others not aired Monday night, including: “What did the McCain team do in the course of this campaign that made you the angriest?” See: www.cbsnews.com

     The questions aired in the first half of the hour-long Monday, November 3 CBS Evening News (Washington, DC’s CBS affiliate did not air the second half, but Couric did not say more of the interview would air in that second half hour):

     # Let’s talk about single-party rule for a moment. Some critics describe it as all accelerator and no brakes. There are fears that perhaps an unbridled, unchecked, filibuster-proof Democratic majority will overreach and move the country too far to the left. How can you assuage people’s concerns about that?

     # What are you most afraid of on election day? (“Aren’t you going to be a nervous wreck?” And: “Or maybe not sleeping much on Monday night?”)

     # The Pennsylvania Republican Party is starting to run an ad in that state which features your former minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, saying quote, “God damn America.” Do you think they would have run that ad without the approval of the McCain campaign?

     # If things go your way on Tuesday and you become this nation’s first African-American President, what will that mean to you personally?