Blogs For Victory

Looks like Democrats are seeing that Obama’s is on the verge of screwing up his campaign.

Polls showing McCain tied or even ahead of Obama are stirring angst among some of the Democratic Party’s most experienced operatives.

Polls showing John McCain tied or even ahead of Barack Obama are stirring angst and second-guessing among some of the Democratic Party’s most experienced operatives, who worry that Obama squandered opportunities over the summer and may still be underestimating his challenges this fall.

“It’s more than an increased anxiety,” said Doug Schoen, who worked as one of Bill Clinton’s lead pollsters during his 1996 re-election and has worked for both Democrats and independents in recent years. “It’s a palpable frustration. Deep-seated unease in the sense that the message has gotten away from them.”

Joe Trippi, a consultant behind Howard Dean’s flash-in-the-pan presidential campaign in 2004 and John Edwards’s race in 2008, said the Obama campaign was slow to recognize how the selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate would change the dynamic of the race.

“They were set up to run ‘experience versus change,’ what they had run [against Hillary] Clinton,” Trippi said. “And I think Palin clearly moved that to be change or reform, versus change. They are adjusting to that and that threw them off balance a little bit.”

Obama’s going down. I’m loving every minute of it.

Barack Obama, probably kicking himself for being so stupid in making that “lipstick on a pig” remark that was obviously a veiled attack on Sarah Palin, is out there now trying to explain what he meant and criticize McCain for distorting his words, and offering the “same old distractions.”

What really gets me about this is that Obama is acting all high and mighty as if taking words out of context to take advantage of it politically is something that a) only Republicans do, and b) something he has never done.

Now, first, I’ve seen the whole comment in context, and if you look at the reactions of the people behind Obama when he made his comment, it’s clear they knew what he meant. But, let’s just for the sake of this discussion say the remark is being taken out of context. Well, this is a strategy Obama and the Democratic Party employed multiple times during his campaign. Most notably the Democratic Party’s ad that used spliced video of John McCain in order to give the false impression that John McCain believed it would be okay if the war in Iraq lasted a 100 years or more.

More recently, was Obama’s acceptance speech at the DNC when he took what was quite clearly a joke made by McCain about being middle class if you made $5 million a year, and treated like it was said straight.

So, in this campaign, Obama has deliberately deceived by treating a joke made by McCain as if it weren’t a joke, and the DNC, on Obama’s behalf intentionally altered McCain’s words in an ad. Who is Obama to whine like a 5-year old that his own words are being used against him?

Little noted in all the hoopla surrounding Democratic smears of Governor Palin has been the rather insane intent of Obama/Biden to prosecute members of the Bush Administration should they win the White House – as noted by the editors of NRO:

So now we have Barack Obama’s plan for bringing the nation together after the election: If he gets his hands on the Department of Justice, Obama will use that power to prosecute his political opponents…

…The Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee, Joe Biden, was caught the other day assuring the party faithful that an Obama administration “will not be stopped from pursuing any criminal offence” committed by Bush administration officials. He was simply echoing the party’s standard-bearer. Back in April, Obama told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he intended to have “my Justice Department and my attorney general immediately review” any information that might be used to justify an investigation of the president or his aides. Like Biden, Obama averred that “if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated.” The Little Green Footballs blog has even turned up an Obama campaign flier about Iraq, promising to “hold accountable any perpetrators of war crimes.”

This is the lunatic left when it comes to power – this is what the Democrats invited into our political living room when they latched on to Micheal Moore and MoveOn during the 2004 campaign, and what they kept right on with when they chose Obama over Hillary. If you click on the link to the flier you will see that it does, indeed, assert that Obama will hold war criminals accountable. Now, you can think this means there will be, if necessary, a dispassionate examination of the facts and, if investigation indicates the necessity, there will be trials of all those reasonably accused of war crimes…but that is to entirely ignore the reality of the left. The left, which boosted Obama to the Democratic nomination, is already convinced that George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Condi Rice and scores of others in the Bush Administration, past and present, are guilty of war crimes – and this doesn’t even start to cover the number of US military personnel the left accuses of war crimes.

It must be kept in mind that the genesis of the current anti-war left is actually a group called ANSWER – a front group for a hardcore communist outfit which went so far, once upon a time, as to praise the Chinese communist government for carrying out the massacre in Tienamen Square in 1989. These people started to fire up the paranoid conspiracy theories about 9/11 and about post-9/11 US actions literally within days of 9/11. It started small and absurd, but it grew and grew and via groups like MoveOn, it became mainstream.

One can try to dismiss this, but if you do you’ll be ignoring where the anti-war story comes from – it comes from the same line of thought, going right back to the Korean War, which accused America of all manner of war crimes. Back during the Korean War we were accused of torturing prisoners, murdering civilians, war profiteering, using chemical weapons, waging an unjust war, occupying a nation unjustly, interfering in an internal conflict, etc, etc, etc,…so, too, were we accused during the Vietnam war and now we’re accused of this during the War on Terrorism – the lies are half a century old but this is the first time they’ve wormed their way into power inside a major American political party.

Its not that Obama and Biden are kooks – not in the sense of being creator kooks; they are receptor kooks. People who simply don’t have the knowledge and wisdom to see through a con job. Schooled in the concept that America is wrong and that the weaker side must always be the just side, Obama and Biden (as with most liberals) lack that BS detector non-liberals have. This would all be a rather funny joke save for the fact that there really might be a President Obama who will be told by some lefty appointed to the DoJ that the evidence indicates war crimes by, say, Donald Rumsfeld. Obama won’t be able to counter the argument and he’ll go forward with the criminal prosecution of people who’s only crime is that they are hated by the left.

It is because of this sort of thing that I advocate – heck, I beg – honorable Democrats to wake up, smell the coffee and jettison the left. Yes, you might have to split your party and lose an election…but you might lose, anyways, and if you lose while getting rid of the kook left, you’ll at least be able to mount a credible opposition to the conservative GOP and you will, in the by and by, obtain power again. Failure to purge the left from the Democratic party will result in one of two equally unpleasant outcomes for liberals: permanent marginalization, or civil war if the left manages to start prosecuting conservatives for being conservative. We here on the right are going to do our part – we’re going to work for McCain/Palin; what will you Democrats do? Tie yourselves forever to people who hate America, or cut them loose?

Mark Hemmingway over at NRO’s The Corner:

So let me get this straight, in one day:

* Joe Biden, intentionally or not, insinuates that Sarah Palin doesn’t care about special needs kids because of conservative objections to stem cell research (and the objections of Biden’s own religion, natch).

* Biden asks a guy in a wheel chair to stand-up in front of a large crowd of people. An honest mistake and I actually feel bad for Biden on this one, but it’s not exactly the kind of campaign tableaux you’re aiming for.

* Long time Obama associate and unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers releases a bizarre statement via cartoon saying “I don’t violent resistance is NECESSARILY the answer.”

* Barack Obama (again, intentionally or not) compares the opposing female vice-presidential candidate to a pig, at a time when she’s become a figure of public sympathy because of scores of vile, baseless attacks on Palin and her family by Obama supporters.

Now that’s a finely tuned campaign! Keep up the good work guys!

One doesn’t want to get ahead of one’s self and I won’t be the first person to assert with certainty on a blog that the wheels are coming off the cart for Obama, but this is pretty grim.

And you also start to remember that Obama lost the big State primaries and really only secured a first-ballot nominating majority by grace of superdelegates who stampeded to Obama in a typical display of the liberal herd instinct.

Perhaps Obama isn’t as great a guy as people first thought?

Ah, the troubles a person can get into when he tries to be both Catholic and liberal:

Bishop of Madison Robert C. Morlino and Archbishop of Denver Charles J. Chaput have responded to Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Joseph Biden’s characterization that the point when life begins is a religious belief, criticizing him for “flawed moral reasoning,” confusing the Catholic faithful and confusing the differences between faith and natural law.

In a Sunday interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Sen. Biden had said that he is “prepared as a matter of faith to accept that life begins at the moment of conception” but would not impose that belief on anyone through law. He claimed that to do so would be “inappropriate in a pluralistic society.”

Bishop Morlino made impromptu remarks in his Sunday homily, saying he had thrown away his prepared homily “for other considerations.”

Explaining that his point was not “to speak against Democrats,” but to address people who “claim to be Catholic,” he discussed Sen. Joseph Biden and Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s remarks about abortion.

“They are roughly my age… so that means that Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Biden were educated just about the same time I was,” he noted.

Stating he could not speak to the exact details of Pelosi’s Catholic education, Bishop Morlino said “I have to believe that she was taught that abortion was always wrong.”…

…Turning his remarks to Sen. Biden, Bishop Morlino said he and the senator shared as their hometown Scranton, Pennsylvania.

“I am positive of what Sen. Biden was taught in Scranton. And it’s the same thing that I was taught,” he declared.

…Sen. Biden doesn’t understand the difference between “religious faith and natural law.”

“Any human being — regardless of his faith, his religious practice or having no faith — any human being can reason to the fact that human life from conception unto natural death is sacred,” he argued. “Biology — not faith, not philosophy, not any kind of theology — Biology tells us, science [says], that at the moment of conception there exists a unique individual of the human species.”

“It’s not a matter of what I might believe. What my faith might teach me,” he said.

“Sen. Biden has an obligation to know that. And he doesn’t know it.”…

…Again insisting he wasn’t speaking about Democrats or even pro-life issues, he said his focus was upon the “awareness of faith, the catechesis that every Catholic should have.” He asked his listeners to make sure they themselves really understand what the Catholic faith teaches, through the Pope and the bishops.

“Prominent Catholics should not be violating the separation of church and state” by “teaching the wrong thing.” Rep. Pelosi and Sen. Biden, he said, are “doing precisely that.”

“If Republican candidates were doing precisely that, I would speak out with exactly the same determination,” he countered.

The Bishop’s rebuke to Biden (and Pelosi) is necessary as the program of the Democrats is to muddy the issue of Catholic teaching on life issues in order to be able to make a credible bid for Catholic votes, and most especially the votes of Catholics who regularly attend Mass, and may end up deciding the election this year. Democrats have to muddy the waters because a clear and concise statement of Democratic beliefs – ie, support for federally funded abortion on demand – would immediately be identified by devout Catholics as wrong (and you think that everyone already knows this? No, they don’t – go poll your friends and find out how many of them know that prior to the partial-birth ban an abortion could legally be performed right up to the moment of birth…quite a lot of people believe that an abortion is only legal in the first trimester…the Culture of Death is deft with its propaganda and the MSM is not about to really tell the tale of abortion). So, out go Biden and Pelosi to absurdly claim that there is dispute about what pro-life means for Catholics and that belief in life begins at conception is a theological assertion rather than a biological fact.

The Bishop is also correct that this is a massive violation of the separation of Church and State – with two elected officials high up in the United States government presuming to speak authoritatively on Catholic teaching. It is not for elected officials to proclaim Catholic dogma, but for the Bishops of the Church in union with the Bishop of Rome. Everyone should be just as outraged by this as they would be if the Pope were to, say, try to tell us what level of taxation we should impose in the United States. Of course liberals won’t get this at all because the believe that the issue of separation of Church and State is summed up in a ban on the mention of religion in the public square – but take this as a teaching moment, liberals, and understand what is really going on here.

John Fund reports that the Obama/Democrat Smear Machine set up camp in Wasilla, Alaska almost immediately after she was picked as McCain’s running mate.

Democrats understand Sarah Palin is a formidable political force who has upset the Obama victory plan. The latest Washington Post/ABC Poll shows John McCain taking a 12-point lead over Barack Obama among white women, a reversal of Mr. Obama’s eight-point lead last month.

It’s no surprise, then, that Democrats have airdropped a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers into Anchorage, the state capital Juneau and Mrs. Palin’s hometown of Wasilla to dig into her record and background. My sources report the first wave arrived in Anchorage less than 24 hours after John McCain selected her on August 29.

And we’ve seen what their attempts to dig up dirt have produced…a lot of lies that have been quickly debunked by the facts.

Conventional wisdom says that the race for the presidency will be decided by the independents…

Well, according to Gallup, John McCain is now trouncing Barack Obama in support from the political middle, and also gained 5-point bump from Democrats after the Republican National Convention.

John McCain’s 6 percentage-point bounce in voter support spanning the Republican National Convention is largely explained by political independents shifting to him in fairly big numbers, from 40% pre-convention to 52% post-convention in Gallup Poll Daily tracking.

By contrast, Democrats’ support for McCain rose 5 percentage points over the GOP convention period, from 9% to 14%, while Republicans’ already-high support stayed about the same.

The surge in political independents who favor McCain for president marks the first time since Gallup began tracking voters’ general-election preferences in March that a majority of independents have sided with either of the two major-party candidates. Prior to now, McCain had received no better than 48% of the independent vote and Obama no better than 46%, making the race for the political middle highly competitive.

It’s quite obvious that Obama’s best days are behind him. His biggest liability in the general election is the fact that his meteoric rise in the Democratic primaries were fueled by ironclad adherence to left-wing positions. As the campaign has progressed, we’ve seen Obama try to tip-toe towards the center, with claims of being a uniter who can work with members of both parties. His record, of course, contradicts his new moderated image makeover, and people are seeing that all the wonderful things Obama claims to be (an agent of change, a reformer, opponent of earmarks, etc.) John McCain and Sarah Palin actually are… and have a record to prove it.

UPDATE: A bump, not a bounce? McCain maintains 5-point lead in Gallup tracking poll.

Brought front and center into the public square by Governor Palin, this is an issue I’ve long cared about:

Concerned Women of America (CWA) of New York has launched a new international project that aims to reduce the abortion rate for babies diagnosed with Down syndrome, which reportedly stands at 90 percent. The project was developed in consultation with major Down syndrome groups in the United States.

According to a CWA of New York press release, the project makes available a free informational brochure titled “When you’ve learned that your baby may have Down syndrome … There is help and hope!”

The brochure offers reassurance to families facing a prenatal Down syndrome diagnosis and informs them of resources and support groups to help them and their baby. It features the photographs of children and young adults with Down syndrome along with their family members.

“The brochure features the faces of a number of children and adults with Down syndrome,” Anne F. Downey, Esq., State Director for CWA of New York, said in a press release. “Each of the persons featured in the brochure came to me in a special way and has his or her own wonderful story to tell. In the photos you can see the joy that these young people and their family members have. Just looking at them, you can see that there truly is help and hope.”

The organization says the brochure helps OB/GYN doctors and others to provide expectant mothers with clear information, as recommended by a December 2007 bulletin from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG).

This issue means a lot to me because I have a close family member who is autistic – the sort of person once upon a time shoved into a lunatic asylum, and these days aborted. But a person, indeed – and someone who loves, and strives and who had hopes and dreams. The Culture of Death has tens of millions of victims, but none strike the heart as much as the “defective” children killed simply because they don’t meet an idealized conception of what a human being should be. We are tasked to rejoice in all things – and while someone may look at a Down’s Syndrome baby and wonder what there is to rejoice about, I have learned recently that there really is a joy to be found in all things, including the hardest trials of life.

The worst aspect of the Culture of Death is the way it kills joy and hope – the Culture of Death takes a baby and calls it a problem, something – according to Barack Obama – we don’t want to “punish” young girls with. A baby, however, is a joyful thing, and all life comes with great hope. Governor Palin and her husband (and, apparantly, her whole family) understand this and thus have welcomed their Down’s Syndrome child…and he’ll grow up and have the life he’ll have and when his mortal span is done, he’ll go home and live eternally in happiness. Happy child, rendered nearly incapable of the ability to sin while he lives! But not at all incapable of love! Rejoice – his inheritance will be cured at the cross, his future is assured; or so the Palin’s (and I, as it turns out) believe. Where, then, is there to turn for sadness in the child? At the fact that he’ll take some extra care and devotion from his family? Rejoice – there is a chance for all to serve, and to live out the gospel.

The point here is that negativity doesn’t really get one anywhere. To sign on to despair and death as the supposedly easier alternative is to actually take the harder road, and the road with no happiness at the end of it, and no recompense for the trials one suffers – and even in killing the unborn child, all one has done is exchanged one burden for another, without the benefit of doing the right thing and at least feeling secure in the knowledge of having done right, when it was seemingly easier to do wrong. The people of Concerned Women aren’t hoping for more Down’s Syndrome babies – but they understand that to kill the problem doesn’t solve the problem, and doesn’t help those who are doing the killing. We need a rebirth of a spirit of love, joy and sacrifice in this world – and a fine place to start will be with the most helpless among us.

Joe Biden, the one who was supposed to bring foreign policy credentials to Obama’s ticket, likes to take credit for any undeniable display of progress in Iraq, but the one actual proposal he had for Iraq, that ridiculous partition plan, would have made situations in Iraq worse, and Iraqi leaders opposed it.

On Sunday, when Mr. Biden was asked about the current progress in Iraq, he managed to take the lion’s share of the credit: “I’m encouraged because they’re doing the things I suggested . . . That’s why it is moving toward some mild possibility of a resolution.” But we should be grateful that Iraqis did not do as he suggested. Mr. Biden’s frustration with the looming Iraqi civil war in 2006 and early 2007 was understandable. The U.S. was on the verge of total defeat and Iraq was at risk of collapse. But Mr. Biden’s plan would have inflamed Iraq’s already volatile situation.

Biden may have foreign “experience”, but he clearly doesn’t have the judgment.

The Boston Globe’s Political Intelligence blog notes that OBama is back to his old habit of using someone else’s words as his own.

Campaigning in Terre Haute, Ind. on Saturday, Barack Obama, mocking claims by John McCain and Sarah Palin that they will challenge their Republican Party if elected, got off a pretty good line. “Maybe what they’re saying is, ‘Watch out George Bush,'” Obama said with sarcasm, according to NBC News. “Except for economic policies, and tax policies, and energy policies, and health care policies, and education policies, and Karl Rove-style politics — except for all that, we’re really going to bring change to Washington! We’re really going to shake things up!”

It wasn’t Obama’s line, though. It came from Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles, whose cartoon Friday featured these words along with a drawing of McCain and Sarah Palin in front of the White House: “Watch out, Mr. Bush! With the exception of economic policy and energy policy and social issues and tax policy and foreign policy and Supreme Court appointments and Rove-style politics, we’re coming in there to shake things up!” (See the cartoon here.)

Of course, Barack Obama has been caught plagiarizing before, and given pathetic excuses for it as well.

Sen. Barack Obama said today that he should have given credit to his friend, Deval Patrick, when he used language very similar to some previously spoken by the Massachusetts governor in 2006.

“I was on the stump, and, you know, he had suggested that we use these lines,” Obama said at a news conference a few minutes ago. “I thought they were good lines. I’m sure I should have [given him credit], didn’t this time.”

Obama became a bit defensive when asked by a reporter whether his words were his own.

Obama has also “borrowed” from John Edwards.

And of course, there’s Joe Biden, who knows all about plagiarism…