Category: 2008 Election

I have a new polling plugin, so I’m going to try this sucker out.

[poll=2]

[poll=3]

Your feedback is appreciated.

… and I’m already tired of this election year.  Tired because I find myself defending John McCain, and I don’t even really like the guy.  McCain is pretty far from being a classical liberal I could really get behind, and tends to fall more into the category of “National Greatness” conservative, who are open to a lot more state meddling in things the state ought not meddle in than I’m comfortable with.

But there are more crazy claims about McCain circulating out there than I can shake a stick at.  The first is that he’s anti-gun, and no better than Hilly or Obama.  Brady gives McCain a career rating of 17%.  Obama and Hillary both have 100% ratings, as did John Kerry.  The other is that McCain is a socialist. Other than Ron Paul, McCain’s federal budget is the lowest of any remaining Republican candidate.  McCain is not in favor of socializing 7% of the US economy in the same manner Obama would.  I think McCain on fiscal matters will be a significant improvement over Bush, let alone Obama or Hillary.

To my mind, campaign finance reform is his biggest sin, and there were a lot of other folks, including Fred Thompson and President Bush, and five members of the Supreme Court, who all took their turn to drop their dookie into the constitutional swimming pool.

But given that I’m the only person in the gun blogosphere who is thinking, “McCain!  Why did it have to be McCain!?!?” but still planning to vote for him regardless, and encouraging others to do so as well, I find myself wondering if the more apt analogy is Han Solo telling Chewbacca, “Get in there, you big furry oaf! I don’t care what you smell!”

… be very afraid:

“He walks into a room and you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere,” George Clooney told talk show host Charlie Rose.

“I’ll do whatever he says to do,” actress Halle Berry said to the Philadelphia Daily News. “I’ll collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear.”

If it was just vapid Hollywood stars who liked this guy, I wouldn’t be that worried, but it’s enough people that I’m beginning to fear the prospect of an Obama presidency more than a Hillary presidency. Is this fervent and religious devotion to Obama among the young a product of schools long ago hijacked by the left?

I don’t like Hillary Clinton, and I despise her politics.  I was initially rather irrationally happy to see Americans thumb their noses at her.  But no one really likes Hillary Clinton all that much, even the people who vote for her.  Lacking any real mandate, she’d be limited to what she can accomplish as President.

If Obama sweeps into office on a wave of near religious devotion, at the risk of invoking Godwin, I can’t help but thinking about the other times this has happened.  I’m not at all making the comparison of Obama to Hitler, or suggesting he’s going to burn down Capitol Hill to create a pretext, but just the kind of blind devotion I’m seeing in Obama supporters leads to that kind of thing, and if this is the road our young people want to go down, they need to spent more time learning history, with a skeptical eye toward human nature.

Hat tip to War on Guns for the link.

Daniel Ortega likes him.  For those of you who didn’t grow up during the cold war, and think Ortega is a line of taco products:

Ortega led a Soviet-backed government that battled U.S.-supported Contra rebels before he lost power in a 1990 election. He returned to office last year via the ballot box.

Now all we need is an endorsement from Hugo Chavez.

Victor Davis Hanson has a pretty good read up here:

I was watching on television last week both Barack Obama and his wife Michelle speak about the supposedly depression-like conditions in the US, and a people strapped by students loans, near hungry, and without hope of betterment. Neither said anything of substance, though both were engaging, effective speakers. Still, never has so much talent been invested in saying so little.

If you were to believe them, we are in a sort of “It’s A Wonderful Life,” Frank Capra-era housing depression, not a boom-and-bust cycle where for the last five years, rival television shows proliferate on “flipping” houses (in which strapped investors and rookies borrow against rising equity to put in granite counters and stainless steel appliances for quick flip sales).

I am sincerely hoping that Americans begin to see through the flowery rhetoric soon, because the message Obama is pushing, very eloquently, is one of 1930s America.  It’s not a message for the 21st century, and I hope voters will soon see that.

Found via Instapundit.

UPDATE: Actually this was via Clayton Cramer.  I opened it up to blog, and forgot where I got it from, and somehow recalled it was Insty, I guess since he links VDH so often. Either way, it’s what happens when you have about 100 blogs on the RSS feed.

This bit about his tax proposal:

Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has not endorsed either Senator Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. But on Thursday, February 14, he is trying to rush Obama’s “Global Poverty Act” (S.2433) through his committee. The legislation would commit the U.S. to spending 0.7 percent of gross national product on foreign aid, which amounts to a phenomenal 13-year total of $845 billion over and above what the U.S. already spends.

Given that this is a GOP activist oriented site, I should link to the actual bill as well.  I’m not in favor at all of tying spending to GDP levels.  Spending on foreign aid should be geared toward our national and international interests.  I don’t see any reason to do something like this. The article also points out, this is part of the UN Millennium Development Goal, which also includes restricting small arms and light weapons.  This bill doesn’t implement that, but it does call into question what other parts of the UNMDG Obama likes.

I’m not as sure about that as this Wall Street Journal article, but the article brings up a lot of good points:

Whatever else, Barack Obama isn’t talking sunshine in America. He’s talking fast and furious. People not yet baptized into Obamamania may start to look past the dazzling theatrics to see a vision of the United States that is quite grim and could wear thin in the general election.

There may indeed be a Message B for the fall in the Obama drawer. This week’s speech, like a televangelist’s, may be designed to drive small contributions. The Web-site version ends with an appeal to donate to “this historic moment.” I suspect, though, that it is the core of the Obama campaign, now or later.

Odds are that he will ride it to the nomination among Democrats for whom America can never quite escape the Depression. Hillary Clinton can only offer what she’s got — a clear-eyed ambition to get, and use, Democratic power.

Everything in life has a top — stocks, football teams and political phenoms, as she well knows. Though down, Hillary ought to suck it up for Ohio and Texas and hope the Obama wave starts to break. On current course, it will.

Read the whole thing.

Via Instapundit

Uncle has a small tome up about how the Republicans managed to shrink their tent, and places the blame on George W. Bush.  That is, I think, a quite an appropriate place to put the blame.  Bush has not been a good thing for the Republican coalition, and as Mike Huckabee can tell you, you can’t win with just evangelicals.  The interesting thing about McCain is that it wasn’t the economic conservatives that are turning out and voting for him, it’s former veterans and hawks.  The economic conservatives liked Romney, which should tell you how beat up they felt under Bush.

I don’t think there’s any part of the Republican Party that doesn’t feel stepped on, except for the peace through strength crowd, and they seem to be the ones putting McCain over the top.  Even Huckabee was an act of dissatisfaction among evangelicals, because other than lip service, what did Bush really accomplish for them?  Of course, lip service is better than we small l libertarians got.

While it is sometimes necessary to remove gangrenous limbs, Bush seems to think a nice prescribed blood letting was a better treatment, and we’re seeing how well that has healed the patient.