And some people think liberal bias doesn’t exist in colleges?

There’s a distrubing story out of my home state of Massachusetts, that the chaplain of UMass-Amherst attempted to offer college credits to students for campaigning for Barack Obama.

My opposition to a young, charismatic African American candidate who campaigned on hope and change was dubbed by that candidate’s supporters as racism.

The candidate I’m referring to is not Barack Obama, it’s Deval Patrick. The parallels betwen the two candidates campaigns are uncanny… even the reactions by their supporters are virtually identical, as Kimberly recounts that her opposition to John McCain was immediately dubbed as being a form of racism.

Just yesterday, I was stopped in the parking lot by a couple of liberals because of my McCain-Palin bumper sticker. One said, “You’re a racist because you’re voting for McCain!” I replied, “No, I’m a Republican and I’m voting for the Republican candidate. I wouldn’t vote for Obama if he was white.” That stopped them in their tracks. Of course, it also gave me a wonderful opportunity to talk with them about Obama and McCain.

Make no mistake about it… Recent stories about the role of racism in the campaign are merely a preemptive strike to explain why Obama will lose in November, as well as an attempt by the media to invoke white guilt amongst undecided voters so that they will vote for Obama to “prove” they aren’t racists.

This attempt by the media to make a vote for Obama a vote against racism is hardly a new thing. When Deval Patrick was campaigning for the Democratic nomination for governor in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe, in their endorsement of Patrick, said,

Patrick doesn’t often explicitly address his race in the campaign. But his positive reception […] has been a good sign that this state can move beyond its reputation as old, cold, and closed.

Deval Patrick, despite his warm rhetoric on the campaign trail about change and hope, has become perhaps the most incompetent governors of Massachusetts since Mike Dukakis (who has also been playing the race card for Obama) and the jury is still out on who will ultimately prove to be the worst.

It’s worth noting that despite Deval Patrick’s overwhelming victory in 2006, his approval ratings are down the toilet, and he’s abandoned many campaign promises, like property tax relief.

Deval Patrick is a prime example that a well-given speech is no substitute for genuine leadership. It was no suprise to me that Hillary defeated Obama in Massachusetts, despite Deval’s endorsement. The Democrat voters of Massachusetts were already duped once — they weren’t about to fall for it again.

Barack Obama would be a horrible president regardless of whether he is black, white, male or female. he is the most inexperienced and unqualified presidential candidates for a major party in history. But his image won over the left-wing base of the party, and he’s the candidate the party as whole has to offer in November. I am very confident the people of America won’t be fooled the same way so many in Massachusetts were back in 2006.

This election shouldn’t be about race. It should about who is ready to lead. The answer to that one is clearly John McCain.

RightWingSparkle offers her analysis of the state of the campaign:

The polls are back where they were before the conventions. McCain and Obama are in a statistical tie. Even when the polls show Obama up by 2 or 3 points, I’m not worried. Why? Because all indications should have him up by 15 points at least and he can’t break that 50% mark and stay there.

[…]

Obama is running on the Democratic ticket with an unpopular Republican administration in power, gas prices out of control, and the economy in trouble. He should be riding the polls at 17 points at least.

I would add, that another relevant example would be AL Gore in 2000. If things were as great in the late 1990s as Democrats say they were, Al Gore should have won in a landslide…

Or at least, he would have won his home state.

With all the factors that should be contributing to a substantial lead for Obama, we still have a race that is virtually tied nationally, with blue battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania running neck and neck.

Are Democrats feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse? Privately, I’m sure many are. After nominating the most unqualified and inexperienced presidential candidate in history, it shouldn’t be too difficult, even for a partisan Democrat, to think maybe they should have gone with a leader with a strategy, not an orator with a teleprompter.

It also appears that enthusiasm for Obama is dwindling. In the battleground state of Wisconsin, Obama and McCain both recently held rallies in the same venue, and McCain drew a significantly larger crowd than Obama. The Obama campaign is downplaying the significance publicly.. but they have to be concerned.

Good times ahead.

Kevin Hassett takes an in depth look at the financial crisis and concludes not only that only are Democrats, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, largely to blame, but that John McCain “was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.”

The Jawa Report has a very lengthy post detailing the connections between a PR firm connected to the Obama campaign that appears to be behind a number of the false smears against Sarah Palin.

The Union Leader in New Hampshire has a great editorial pointing out how Barack Obama’s attacks on John McCain in recent weeks have had no resemblance to the truth.

In the past few weeks, Obama has thrown so many false accusations against John McCain that just keeping track of them has become difficult. And these aren’t innocent errors. They are deliberate distortions of the sort Obama has always said he reviles.

On Thursday, Obama said of McCain, “He has consistently opposed the sorts of common-sense regulations that might have lessened the current crisis.” That’s entirely untrue.

As The Washington Post pointed out in an editorial on Friday, McCain in fact has supported many new regulations of financial institutions, including some that Obama opposed. “In 2006, he pushed for stronger regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — while Mr. Obama was notably silent,” The Post wrote.

And why, perhaps was Obama silent on that issue? He was only taking hundreds of thousands in donations from Fannie Mae and Freddia Mac… but you probably didnt’ hear about that from Obama..

Obama attacked McCain for having a top financial advisor who supported a deregulation bill a few years ago. Yet two top Obama financial advisors, with whom he met on Friday to help him form his response to the current troubles on Wall Street, supported the same bill, which was signed by President Clinton.

Also last week, Obama released a Spanish-language ad that portrayed McCain as anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic and tried to link him to immigration policies that were not his own as well as some choice Rush Limbaugh quotes that appeared to insult Mexicans.

Anyone who has followed the immigration debate knows that McCain is the most pro-immigration Republican on the national stage and that he is not in the least anti-Hispanic. To pull quotes from Rush Limbaugh, who has completely different immigration views than McCain and who opposed him on that issue for years (and still does) is completely disingenuous. The ad is so bad that even The New York Times called it “misleading.”

And you know if the New York Times is willing to concede Obama is a big fat liar, than you know it’s one hell of a whopper he was trying to pull.

There’s also this one here, relating to the ad McCain put out a couple weeks ago that Obama decried as false, when it in fact was true.

Obama’s campaign also accused McCain of lying when McCain’s campaign ran an ad saying that Obama supported sex education for kindergarteners. But the bill in question, which Obama supported in the Illinois state Senate, did indeed change state law to allow sex education for kindergarteners.

Katherine, over at our McCain blog, is encouraging people to contact FactCheck.org to get them to admit their original assessment of the McCain ad was indeed wrong, and calling for CNN to retract their statements on the ad as well.

Could Obama’s negativity and lies backfire on him? Indeed they could.

Obama has said that he won’t attack John McCain’s motives, only his policies. But he has repeatedly attacked McCain’s motives, suggesting that he has been bought off by oil companies and lobbyists.

Obama’s greatest strength as a candidate, aside from his oratorical skill, has long been his apparent sincerity and decency. Voters attracted to him think of him as that rarest of things: an honest politician. He has claimed himself that he would never engage in the sort of deceptive politicking that he says has tainted Washington for so long.

Yet here he is violating his own professed standards. This is not the Barack Obama so many voters in New Hampshire and elsewhere thought they knew. But it is the real Barack Obama. For despite his rhetoric, he is in fact campaigning so dishonestly that even The Washington Post and The New York Times have called him on it. Which means that he is in practice no different from those regular politicians against whom his entire campaign has been built.

Barack Obama has been encouraged by his party in recent weeks to step up his attacks…. unfortunately for Obama, his heeding this call forces him to contradict his self-made brand of a new kind of politics. His so-called politics of hope and change now appear to be the politics of fear, lies, and the same old politics as usual.

Barack Obama claims to be the candidate of change and hope. Well, how can he claim to such a candidate when he sees political opportunity, not in the hopes of America’s future, but the calamities of the America’s present?

Republicans denounced an e-mail message that Senator Barack Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, sent to supporters on Friday that used the fiscal crisis as fodder for a fund-raising appeal and accused Senator John McCain of lying.

“With Wall Street in crisis and families struggling, Barack offered a solid plan to strengthen the middle class, including tax cuts for nearly all Americans,” Mr. Plouffe wrote in the message. “John McCain continued the same old politics — lying about Barack’s plan and offering more of the same George Bush policies, including more tax breaks for Big Oil and no solutions for working families.”

Alex Conant, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, called the fund-raising plea “the definition of political opportunism.”

“It raises serious questions about Obama’s judgment when millions of Americans are losing their jobs and savings, and his response is to ask for a campaign contribution,” Mr. Conant said in a statement. He added that “the crisis on Wall Street should be a bipartisan call for government reform, not a selfish call for political contributions.”

It’s become painfully obvious to me that the Obama campaign is panicking. After John McCain’s post-convention bounce, we saw a drastic shift in tone from Barack Obama. He’s gone from saying nothing substantive about himself, to saying absolutely nothing truthful about John McCain. His entire persona has changed. He’s gone from largely positive in his rhetoric to almost entire negative. He accuses McCain of taking his words out of context, even though he was guilty of doing the same thing numerous times before, and has continued to do so. When liberal networks like ABC and CNN are evening calling an Obama ad false for taking Rush Limbaugh’s words out of context, any objective person can conclude that Obama is running one of the slimiest campaigns we’ve ever seen.

Charles Rangel, who is already under a dark ethical cloud, managed to make an even bigger ass of himself today, by calling Sarah Palin “disabled.”

Already under fire for his tax troubles, Manhattan Congressman Charles Rangel really put his foot in his mouth on Friday.

In a CBS 2 HD exclusive interview Rep. Rangel called Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin “disabled.”

The question was simple. Why are the Democrats so afraid of Palin and her popularity.

The answer was astonishing.

“You got to be kind to the disabled,” Rangel said.

That’s right. The charman of the powerful House Ways & Means Committee called Palin disabled — even when CBS 2 HD called him on it.

CBS 2 HD: “You got to be kind to the disabled?

Rangel: “Yes.”

CBS 2 HD: “She’s disabled?”

Rangel: “There’s no question about it politically. It’s a nightmare to think that a person’s foreign policy is based on their ability to look at Russia from where they live.

Republicans think Rangel’s comments are insulting as well as shocking.

“Charlie Rangel’s comments are clearly disgraceful,” Rep. Peter King, R-Long Island, said. “This is just another liberal Democrat who can’t accept an independent woman running for president.”

Charles Rangel is a disgrace and an embarrassment.