But the lack of such works out well if you’re a manifestly unfit candidate for President who needs a ready excuse for a series of rather thunderous mistakes - from that well-known part of the Republican Noise Machine, ABC News:
We started covering Sen. Barack Obama’s inability to hire good staffers in June 2007, when he blamed staffers for some opposition research trying to link Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, to outsourcing in India; for injecting some venom in the David Geffen/Hillary Clinton fight; and for missing an event with firefighters in New Hampshire.
In December, we noted again that Obama was blaming the answers on a 1996 questionnaire on a staffer; and was blaming his touring with “cured” ex-gay gospel singer Donnie McClurkin (which antagonized gays and lesbians) on bad vetting by his staff.
Those five buck-passing incidents were apparently not enough.
Yesterday, in an interesting New York Times look at Obama’s rise in Chicago politics, we learned that in 2004 some Jewish supporters became alarmed to learn that in a questionnaire Obama refrained from denouncing Yasir Arafat, or from expressing strong support for Israel’s security fence.
Reports the Times: “In an e-mail message, Mr. Obama blamed a staff member for the oversight, and expressed the hope that ‘none of this has raised any questions on your part regarding my fundamental commitment to Israel’s security.’”
In January, during MSNBC’s presidential debate in Las Vegas, Obama was asked about a document put together by one of his South Carolina staffers that listed comments made by the Clinton campaign that some perceived to be attempting to stoke racial fires. “In hindsight, do you regret pushing this story?” asked Tim Russert.
“Our supporters, our staff get overzealous,” Obama said. “They start saying things that I would not say, and it is my responsibility to make sure that we’re setting a clear tone in our campaign.”
In February in a meeting with the Chicago Tribune, Obama was asked about an earmark that went to the University of Chicago while his wife Michelle Obama worked there.
“I don’t think that I was obligated to recuse myself from anything related to the university,” Obama said, adding, “when it comes to earmarks because of those concerns, it’s probably something that should have been passed on to [U.S. Sen.] Dick Durbin, and I think probably something that slipped through the cracks. It did not come through us, through me or Michelle, and Michelle has been very careful about staying separate and apart from any government work. But you could make a good argument that this is something that slipped through our cracks, through our screening system.”
In a March 2008 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times to answer questions about Tony Rezko, Obama was asked about the fact that Obama had told the newspaper in November 2006 that he had never been asked to do anything to advance Rezko’s business interests. But the Sun-Times had subsequently learned about a October 28, 1998 letter Obama wrote to city and state housing officials on behalf of a housing project for seniors that Rezko was working on.
The letter, Obama said, “was essentially a form letter of the sort that I did all time. And that I wasn’t, by the way, aware of.”
A reporter asked: You weren’t aware that he was associated with the project?
Responded Obama: “I wasn’t even aware that we wrote the letter. The answer that I gave at the time was accurate as far as I knew…This was one of many form letters, or letters of recommendation we would send out constantly for all sorts of projects. And my understanding is that our letter was just one of many. And I wasn’t a decision maker in any of this process.”
The Sun-Times also pointed out that in November 2006 Obama estimated that Rezko had raised somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000 for him during his political career.
But since that answer, Obama has given back almost $160,000 in Rezko-related contributions.
“The original estimate was based on, I asked my staff to find what monies they attributed to Rezko, and this was the figure given to me,” Obama said.
So, for those keeping track at home, that’s ten instances of Obama publicly blaming his staff for various screw-ups.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10!
This almost knee-jerk blaming of subordinants for anything that doesn’t come out right is a disturbing characteristic of Obama - a man who would be President has to take responsibility for what happens on his watch and even if it was the underlings who blew it, the man in charge is the guy who picked the underlings and is supposed to be keeping an eye on them.
From what we now know of Obama, he seems to be a political animal of the worst sort - everything he has done (and failed to do) has been calculated towards rising higher and higher in politics. In politics, the most worrisome sort of man is the man who wants to rise high in order to be somebody, rather than do something. Bill Clinton was like this, and we all know just how relentlessly dishonest he was (and is) - Obama is also showing this Clintonesque disregard for facts and disloyalty to subordinants, and all in the service of rising high in politics, for the mere purpose of rising high.
Obama has to be kept as far away from power as possible - he has shown himself, again and again, to be manifestly incompetant to hold the powers of the Presidency of the United States of America.
Tags: Barack Obama, liberal lies
May 13th, 2008 at 09:16am
Mark Noonan
It just keeps rolling in, to the dismay of leftists who presumed that they’d be able to run on defeat in Iraq:
FORWARD OPERATING BASE DELTA — Iraqi Police in Wasit Province have made significant capacity gains in recent months to improve security for the citizens of Iraq.
Their planning ability has greatly improved and their effectiveness increases daily, said Col. Peter Baker, commander of the 214th Fires Brigade.
Much of the improvement is due to the actions of Maj. Gen. Hannin al-Ameer, the provincial director of police, appointed in September.
“He is very competent,” Baker said. “He has taken a large force and made immediate and long-term improvements – not an easy task for a unit of that size.”
One significant turning point for the force happened during the late-March Shia uprising: the firing of 134 Iraqi Policemen – both troopers and officers – from IP Emergency Response Unit 4, said 1st Lt. Lynette Jefferson, a platoon leader for the 511th Military Police Company, attached to the 214th FB, of Fort Drum, N.Y., the unit responsible for training Iraqi Policemen.
“It was due to a variety of circumstances,” she said. “Some had militia ties, some weren’t coming to work and some just weren’t doing their jobs.”
“The flare-up in early March was an opportunity for [Hannin] to assess the quality of his forces,” Baker said. “It had a huge positive effect on the force.” The leadership of the unit was changed as well, not because of corruption, but to improve the unit, Jefferson said.
“The current leadership is more disciplined and training-focused,” she said. “They’re taking their jobs more seriously.”
The other thing the left wants to run on is high gas prices - in that, we’re just waiting for the inevitible collapse in oil futures, but that might not happen until after the election. Sad for the left, that their hopes for victory have always been pinned on hopes for American defeat. Too bad for the left - they bet against our military, and against our people and their ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Guess we now know why they want a nation of government-dependent parasites….easier to control.
Tags: Iraq
May 13th, 2008 at 05:10am
Mark Noonan
Here is the speech. John McCain says that climate change is real and we must act now to solve the problem. As for its reality, I’m still not convinced; as for acting now, I’m entirely unconvinced we need to do anything drastic. But, I’m also not the guy running for President. As a political observer, however, I’m well aware of Lincoln’s maxim - a generally held opinion, whether well- or ill-founded, cannot be lightly set aside. In my view, the acceptance of climate change and its human genesis is an ill-founded opinion, but it is generally held. It can be argued against, but it cannot be lightly set aside. In other words, the environmentalist whackos have won the climate change debate in the public square (by lies and slander, it goes without saying, but won it they have), and now we just have to work within the agreed framework.
Given that we are going to have at least some generalised effort to reduce green house emissions, the only question for we conservatives is just what sort of effort we’ll have - our choices run “onerous burden on economy” to “massive, America-killing government boondoggle”. McCain’s plan tends towards “onerous burden on economy”, while Hillay and Obama gravitate towards killing America - and when we take the whole McCain economic picture (ie, he’ll keep taxes low), it is clear that whatever the merits of McCain’s plan, it will be less damaging to America - even at its worst - than anything Hillary or Obama would do. Meanwhile, if we can show that serious efforts are being made to reduce green house emissions, we can steal environmentalist thunder and prevent anything worse from being done. All of this, plus McCain gets to position himself in the center, which is vital for his election prospects in November.
We can hate this program and do something nasty to our own side over it, or we can just live with it - and come up free market mechanisms which will take care of any adverse economic effects…and then just wait for global warming to be shown (by a failure of temperatures to rise) to be the hoax we’ve all suspected it to be all along. Meanwhile, we might actually get some excellent, new energy technologies and any reduction of pollution is always a good thing.
Tags: cap-and-trade, Climate Change, global warming, John McCain
May 13th, 2008 at 12:41am
Mark Noonan
‘Cause he started it, himself- from NRO’s The Corner:
Who Started the “Hussein” Business?
I didn’t know this until I read Bret Stephens’ WSJ column yesterday. Who said the following?
“Well, I think if you’ve got a guy named Barack Hussein Obama, that’s a pretty good contrast to George W. Bush.”
Answer: Barack Hussein Obama.
Bret recounts:
Sometime before Barack Obama’s middle name slipped into the realm of the unmentionable, it was supposed to be a selling point of his candidacy. “Well, I think if you’ve got a guy named Barack Hussein Obama, that’s a pretty good contrast to George W. Bush,” Mr. Obama told PBS’s Tavis Smiley on October 18, 2007. “If you believe that we’ve got to heal America and we’ve got to repair our standing in the world, then I think my supporters believe that I am the messenger who can deliver that message.”
Of course, that must be before someone in the Obama camp poll-tested “Hussein” and found it to be political poison - from that point, it became an act of pure evil to mention Obama’s middle name. Well, I’m not having any of that - its his name, and there’s an end on it. If Obama is ashamed of it, he should let us know. For the record, my name is Mark Edward Noonan, and you can do with it anything you like as I’m proud of the whole thing: “Mark” for St. Mark; “Edward” for my grand-uncle Edward Diggins; “Noonan” for my family, which stretches back into the mists of Ireland.
Tags: Barack Hussein Obama, Barack Obama, liberal lies
May 12th, 2008 at 07:04pm
Mark Noonan
They really want her out of the race over there in liberal-land:
The New Republic
Family Ties
by Jeff Sharlet
Hillary Clinton’s evangelical cabal.
Post Date Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Lost in the hysteria over Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s remarks is the fact that the current race offers a rare snapshot of the three great strands of American political religion. It’s ironic that Wright occupies center stage, since, in the twenty-first century, his is by far the weakest of these–a progressive Christianity which stretches from the Social Gospel to black liberation theology, a big tent of liberal and left religion that’s not very crowded anymore. John McCain’s problem pastor, a Texas pulpit-pounder named John Hagee, stands in for a more familiar faith: populist fundamentalism, a crowd-pleasing mix of hellfire and the kind of prosperity preaching that encourages followers to ante up to the Lord in both spirit and dollars. And then there’s Hillary Clinton’s religion: the third strand of political faith, the least understood and arguably the most powerful.
Clinton, an evangelically inclined Methodist, is by far the most religiously rooted and theologically astute of the three candidates, a Christian intellectual schooled in the cold war religion of Reinhold Niebuhr’s post-leftist years. Don Jones, her youth pastor and a lifelong spiritual mentor, calls the faith he instructed her in then and which they still share a third way between old-school fundamentalism and liberal Christianity. It’s not centrism, though; Jones describes it in terms of Burkean conservatism, after the eighteenth-century reactionary philosopher’s belief that change should be slow and come without the sort of “social leveling” that offends class hierarchy.
That’s the crux of the conflict between the progressive Christianity that’s broad enough to encompass both Jeremiah Wright and Jimmy Carter, and the elitist variation long embraced by Hillary: The former dreams always, if imperfectly, of challenging power, while the latter works to reaffirm it. Clinton’s faith is not the liberal version of Christianity that Democratic leaders have traditionally invoked–instead, her version, exemplified by her alliance with a shadowy network of powerful conservative Christians, is steeped in the kind of establishmentarianism that she has otherwise tried to distance herself from throughout the primary season.
I didn’t know we had an “evangelical cabal” in America - certainly not one which embraces Hillary Clinton. This is really getting rather weird, isn’t it? I can understand why lefties don’t like her, but why does the round peg of Hillary’s liberalism have to be fitted into the square hole of evangelical Christianity? Is it that lefties really cannot ever admit to themselves that one of their own might be wrong? Is it that if you are on the left, error (as defined by the left) is proof that you are actually of the right?
Of course, we do have the example of fascism before us - a clearly leftwing ideology (founded by the Italian socialist leader Benito Mussolini) was somehow translated into a right-wing phenomena merely because the left didn’t want to confront the fact that Fascism was a merely nationalist form of garden variety socialism. Now the left doesn’t want to confront the fact that Hillary Clinton - a leftwing liberal if there ever was one - is one of theirs…so, she’s being recast as a closet Republica, closet conservative and closet evangical religious right nutcase…part of a “cabal” designed to do evil in the world.
These people really are sick - and I mean really, mentally ill. We can’t trust them with power - no more than we’d trust a denizen of the lunatic asylum with power. Until the left gets a grip on reality, they can’t be trusted with so much as a burnt out match.
Tags: Hillary Clinton, liberal lies
May 12th, 2008 at 11:14am
Mark Noonan
Very clear and very concise:
CNN’S WOLF BLITZER: “All right, do you have any doubt about Senator Obama’s commitment to maintain a very supportive role for the United States as far as Israel is concerned?”
SEN. LIEBERMAN: “I have no doubt about that. But here’s what I want to say. Senator Obama has said he would sit down without condition with Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran. That not only gives prestige to a terrible America- and Israel-hater, but it also threatens our allies in the region.
“Look, I’ll give you another example. This is an indirect step that can undermine our position in the Middle East. Earlier this year, Senator Kyl and I introduced a resolution in the Senate, which called on the administration to impose economic sanctions on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that is training and equipping Iraqis that are going back into Iraq and killing American soldiers, hundreds of them. … Senator Obama did not [support it]. He said it was saber-rattling. It was the exact opposite of that. It was economic sanctions. It had nothing to do with the military.”
BLITZER: “I think what he said, it would give a green light to the Bush administration to consider military action. Something like that.”
SEN. LIEBERMAN: “No way. It was the exact opposite of that. I don’t question Senator Obama’s commitment to the security of the state of Israel. I’m saying when it comes to dealing with enemies, both in the Middle East and around the world, Senator McCain has more experience, more balance, knows when to be tough, knows when to be soft.”
Its good that Lieberman points this out - think about it: in an attempt to bring non-violent pressure on the Ahmadinejad regime, Obama de-facto sided with Ahmadinejad on the apparant theory that President Bush is the greater threat to peace than the man who is sending forth his minions to murder Americans and Iraqis, and who had threated our ally, Israel, with complete destruction. This is a clear indicator that Obama subscribes to the lunatic left position that President Bush is some out-of-control war monger - with the flipside being that of course Ahmadinejad will be reasonable, just as soon as there is an American President who will be nice to him.
Democrats say that the election of McCain - a long term and very strong critic of many Bush Administration policies - will just be a third Bush term. The real strength of this accusation actually stems from the fact that Senator McCain and President Bush - unlike Senator Obama - wish for the United States to win in Iraq, not Iran’s Ahmadinejad. If “third Bush term” means “victory in the war” then, yes, I think that all patriots desperately want a third Bush term. But, of course, such accusation is nonsense - indeed, we movement conservatives are girding ourselves, once we elect John McCain, to fight him on several issues. McCain isn’t “our” man, meaning he’s not the conservatives’ choice…but he is the patriots’ choice, and we’re going to back him - if for no other reason - than the fact that he wants America to win. Fortunately, there is more than just the war to back McCain on - and, equally unfortunately, its not just the war which makes us want to defeat Obama - his creeping socialism and economic illiteracy coupled with his extraordinarily high tolerance for corruption on his side leaves us worried that he’ll not only lose the war, but wreck the nation and hand the ruins over to corrupt cronies of the Democratic establishment.
Vote McCain ‘08: quite honestly, America needs McCain to be President in 2009.
Tags: Barack Obama, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Joe Lieberman, John McCain
May 12th, 2008 at 09:22am
Mark Noonan
While Obama is figuring out what sort of decor he wants in the White House, Hillary still refuses to go quietly into the night:
Those who thought the Democratic presidential nomination was finished might have walked out of McKinley Middle School Friday night believing U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton still has a fighting chance.
Former president Bill Clinton said the naysayers “want half of you to stay home” on Election Day. But, he said, if West Virginians turn out for his wife “in big, big numbers, your neighbors in Kentucky will be energized and try to follow your performance.”
West Virginia’s primary election is Tuesday, while Kentucky’s follows that by one week.
The former president spoke to about 400 people in a hot gymnasium, starting about 90 minutes late. A spokeswoman said Clinton was late because he insisted on shopping at the Blenko glass factory in Milton for Mother’s Day gifts.
Clinton reportedly found plenty of gifts, and he also found an enthusiastic crowd, not yet ready to hand the Democratic nomination over to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.
“Bill and Hillary Clinton have a great commitment to West Virginia, and this state loves them,” said Marie Prezioso, the state party’s national committeewoman, who has committed to Hillary Clinton as a super delegate.
St. Albans resident Jim Canterbury, a House of Delegates candidate, said he wants a president who knows how to be tough, and the New York senator fits that bill.
“I think it’ll be great to have a woman as president,” he said. “I think she’s proven to be quite a fighter.”
Everyone knows that Hillary will crush Obama in the West Virginia primary - but to keep her hopes alive at all, she’ll need a very high turnout as a way of telling the Democratic powers that be (and, of course, the super delegates) that while the elite and the MSM have settled on Obama as the nominee, Democratic rank and file (who will be vital in November) have yet to take to Obama. We’ll have to see if she can pull it off, and change the dynamics of the race just one more time.
Tags: Democratic Nomination, HillBama, West Virginia Primary
May 12th, 2008 at 04:16am
Mark Noonan
Sherman Frederick in the Las Vegas Review-Journal figures it cuts both ways for the Democratics:
Democrats bristle at talking about this in plainer terms. They say Sen. Hillary Clinton has found her base — the “working class.” That’s why she won in the Rust Belt primaries. That’s her great hope in Kentucky and West Virginia.
But calling Clinton’s strategy one of kowtowing to the “working class” doesn’t quite say it, does it? Isn’t this just old-fashioned racism within the Democratic Party?
When Hillary strategists say they are winning the “working class,” they don’t mean they are winning working people with a household income of, say, less than $50,000. All the exit polls show quite clearly that lower middle-class people who work split between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Clinton. The difference is generally skin color. Hillary wins the lion’s share of the “working-class” white Democrats. And, sadly, as Hillary’s campaign has become meaner and more to the point, that margin has become bigger.
The Clinton racism strategy first became apparent in Nevada, when her struggling campaign began to publicly talk about her “Hispanic firewall” against Obama among the rank-and-file in the Culinary union. It hit the national consciousness soon thereafter when former President Bill Clinton, after Hillary lost the South Carolina primary, dismissed Obama’s big win as a race-inspired victory akin to Jesse Jackson’s success in that state years ago.
The record clearly shows that Hillary’s campaign was the first to use Obama’s race against him. The strategy gained an unexpected boost when Sen. Obama’s former pastor, the egomaniacal Rev. Jeremiah Wright, cribbed the Obama spotlight only to show the world that racism could be a black thing, too. The opportunistic Clinton campaign shamelessly took full advantage of the tension. They not only raised questions about what the Wright debacle meant for an Obama presidency, they slyly positioned Hillary, like a latter-day George Wallace (the Alabama governor, not the very funny Las Vegas comedian), as the “working-class” candidate…
…The “superdelegate” whisper campaign goes something like this: Hillary is better built to win in November. Obama is soft and elitist. He’s a dangerous unknown quantity. But most importantly, Mr. and Mrs. Democratic Insider Superdelegate, look at the voter numbers in key states. Forget about pledged delegates, wins and losses and overall popular vote. Look deep into the numbers of the key states Democrats must win in November.
Do you see those “working-class” numbers? Those are Hillary people. Those are the people who will win the White House for Democrats this fall. Those are the people who count because, faced with a choice between Obama and Sen. John McCain, “working-class” Democrats will vote for McCain.
It’s a disgusting display for which Democrats ought to be alarmed and ashamed. The remedy is this: Stop calling Hillary’s base the “working class” and start calling it what it is.
I’m not so sure about this - about the concept that Hillary’s appeal to working class white voters is evidence of lingering racism, or Hillary’s playing up to it. I believe that Obama would be one of the very worst Presidents we’ve ever had - he might even redeem Jimmy Carter from the basement of Presidential legacies…but I don’t go telling black friends that they are fools for voting Obama. I understand it - its akin to the way Catholics went nuts for JFK in 1960, even though JFK (a) wasn’t much of a Catholic and (b) even though he wasn’t a very good candidate as far as actual qualifications for office go. But white support for Obama amongst black Americans can be traced in large measure to pride over one of their own doing well, opposition to Obama doesn’t necessarily stem from racial animosity, overt or covert. Opposition to Obama stems from, in my view, his elitism and his arrogant condescension to average Americans - Wright was damaging to Obama, but “bitter” was far more so…what Wright said was what Wright said, and thus Obama could distance himself, at least to a degree, form it…but Obama’s comment about bitter Americans clinging to God and guns, that was out of his own mouth, and let all of us know what he really thinks about us.
Sherman’s view - that Hillary has played an ugly, race-based political calculation - may be true in the narrow sense; for all we know, Hillary did decide to make a covert play to race, but even if Hillary hadn’t done so, I think that working class white people - who are a lot smarter than most political elites - especially liberal elites - give them credit for - would have been turned off to Obama by Obama’s own words.
Tags: black vote, blue collar vote, Democratic Nomination, HillBama, race card
May 12th, 2008 at 12:57am
Mark Noonan
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