Blogs For Victory

So says Gary McCullough:

Gary McCullough, director of Christian Newswire, has called Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s attack on Focus on the Family president James Dobson a “political blunder” that could have a significant impact on Evangelical swing voters who were otherwise lukewarm towards Obama’s opponent, Sen. John McCain.

Sen. McCain’s past ambivalence towards same-sex marriage and embryonic stem cell research, McCullough wrote, had not excited the hard core of evangelicals.

“The evangelical community had been fairly unimpressed by John McCain. But Obama has shown a grave lack of political wisdom: he did not let this sleeping dog lie,” McCullough said in an opinion piece published on Christian Newswire.

Dr. James Dobson’s June 24 radio show critiqued Obama’s use of Scripture in justifying his political policies and positions. The next day Obama responded to the evangelical leader’s critique by saying that Dobson was “making stuff up,” which McCullough said was “an indirect way of calling Dobson a liar.”

McCullough said Obama’s treatment of Dobson eliminated any sympathy Obama would have received for the attacks on his religious associations, such as his long relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama’s remarks also would be perceived as an insult towards “the single, most powerful influence on evangelicals,” he claimed.

Dr. James Dobson’s radio show reaches about 1.7 million listeners.

“His mistake could prove to make the difference in November — in favor of McCain,” McCullough wrote.

No doubt about it, my Evanglical brothers and sisters haven’t been lighting bonfires for McCain – but if Obama’s plan was to turn a so/so Evangelical vote for McCain into a Bush-like GOP blowout, then its working out splendidly. Obama does have this problem – outside the highly scripted and friendly venue, he’s apt to say uber-left things which sound outrageous to everyone who isn’t a leftist (“bitter”, eg). Victor Davis Hanson, observing the massive weaknesses of Obama, notes that one of Obama’s primary efforts will have to be insulating himself from the public, his past associations, Chicago Democratic corruption, his thin resume’ and, indeed, pretty much everything there is to Obama other than his puerile “hope and change” mantra…as long as Obama can keep it vague, he’s got a solid shot at winning. McCain’s job – and ours – is to make it crystal clear.

As I’ve said before, Obama is the “un-named Democrat” of 2004 made flesh – he’s boundlessly ambitious and has a smoothness about him most actors would envy, but there’s really nothing to him. He really is the empty suit – he’s done nothing, achieved nothing, which would indicate an ability to carry the massive weight of the Presidency. But this emptiness has its advantage – you can hang on him anything you like, and the left – being made up of people who believe feelings are as important as facts – feels that Obama is the answer to all their hopes and dreams. We’ve got Obama Wan Kenobi telling us to “trust our feelings” – ’cause the facts aren’t on our side. And so – facts are anethema…we’re supposed to feel it will be good and feel good about feeling that feeling…and thus elect Obama.

In our favor is a man who is deeply rooted in the some times harsh facts of life, regardless of what he might feel at the moment. John McCain is the antidote to Obamania…the cool gust of reality to clear out the hackneyed, suffocating, mealy-mouthed platitudes of Obama.

“As Mark Twain, that greatest of American satirists and proud son of Missouri, once wrote, Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.” We may hope that our leaders and our government stand up for our ideals, and there are many times in our history when that’s occurred. But when our laws, our leaders or our government are out of alignment with our ideals, then the dissent of ordinary Americans may prove to be one of the truest expression of patriotism.”

-Barack Hussein Obama, in a speech delivered on 30 June, 2008-

So that explains Barack Hussein Obama’s close relationship with one William Ayers, whose patriotic duty (by Obama’s definition) included setting bombs and killing innocent people. Heck, according to Obama’s definition, and by Ayers’ own admission, he just wasn’t patriotic enough.

That also explains Obama’s close relationship with one Rev. “God Damn America!” Wright.

For in Barack Hussein Obama’s world, these men, and others, have demonstrated, according to Obama’s own definition, the “…truest expression of patriotism,” in spades.

An axiom that I have long held is that liberals have no chance of winning a debate in the arena of ideas, unless they are given rein to re-define the terms of that debate.

The heinous practice of killing a baby in what should be the safety of a mother’s womb, heretofore known as abortion, is now known as, “reproductive health.”

The process whereby the government confiscates wealth from productive Americans for redistribution, formerly known as “taxes,” are now known as “contributions” or “investments.”

Today, “the messiah” stated,

“…surely we can agree that no party or political philosophy has a monopoly on patriotism. And surely we can arrive at a definition of patriotism that, however rough and imperfect, captures the best of America’s common spirit.”

If Obama’s sense of ‘patriotism’ embodies his established pattern of associations with “patriotic” individuals, such as Ayers, Wright, Pfleger, and others whom he must consider “…the best of America’s common spirit,” then color me unpatriotic.

Cause I ain’t buying it.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: Proving that Democrats are about as dumb as a box of rocks, another Obama surrogate opens mouth and inserts foot:

While Barack Obama was urging supporters not to devalue the military service of rival John McCain, an informal Obama adviser argued Monday that the former POW’s isolation during the Vietnam War has hobbled the Arizona senator’s capacity as a war-time leader.

“Sadly, Sen. McCain was not available during those times, and I say that with all due respect to him,” said informal Obama adviser Rand Beers…

…”So I think,” he continued, “to some extent his national security experience in that regard is sadly limited and I think it is reflected in some of the ways that he thinks about how U.S. forces might be committed to conflicts around the world.”

I wonder if Beers thinks that Obama’s experience is “sadly limited” by the fact that he was just a kid during Vietnam? Or that he didn’t serve at all, in any capacity, this great nation he aspires to govern?

Just haven’t got time to put a good Monday AM thread together – so I’m relying on you, dear readers, to do it.

For all the talk of how the black vote or Hispanic vote might go, not much talk is expended on the white vote – but it will be at least 70% of all voters, so its going to matter, as Peter Brown notes:

It is more than a little ironic that it has taken the first African-American to win a major party presidential nomination to make clear to everyone what has been the case for more than 40 years in presidential elections: Democrats have a problem with white voters.

Suddenly, the topic du jour on television and radio talk shows, at water coolers and the most exclusive cocktail parties is how well Sen. Barack Obama can do among whites, especially the demographic group pundits call the “white working class.”

The truth is these voters have been around for decades. They’re “The Silent Majority,” “Jill and Joe Six-Pack” and “Reagan Democrats,” and whatever the name, they have given Democratic presidential candidates the back of their hands since 1964. That was the year Lyndon Johnson won in one of the biggest landslides in American history, and any demographic group he did not carry probably held its meetings in a telephone booth.

Neither Jimmy Carter nor Bill Clinton, the last Democrats to occupy the Oval Office since then, won a majority of white voters. Mr. Clinton came relatively close in 1996 and might have done so in 1992 had Ross Perot not been in the race. But focusing on those near misses overlooks the larger point: Sen. Obama, the son of a white mother and black father, could lose this election badly and still outdo the very pale — Sen. George McGovern in 1972, former Vice President Walter Mondale in 1984, former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988 and possibly Sen. John Kerry in 2004 – among white voters.

Such discussion as there has been on the subject of white voters revolves around the tired argument of whether whites have gotten enough past their racism (something inherent to white people, according to one of the more ironic leftwing opinions) to vote for Obama – but as Brown points out, the fact that Obama is a liberal and weak on national security might be far more important to his weakness amongst white voters than the fact of his skin color.

Right now, the only reason Obama has a shot is because President Bush and the GOP are so very unpopular – if President Bush’s approval rating were even 45% right now, this election would be in the bag for McCain; but its not, so Obama is ahead and still has to be considered the inside favorite to win in November. But, in the end, will the American people – forget about race – vote for someone as unqualified as Obama when he is also on the extreme end of the American left? That is the question we’ll answer in November – and while liberals are convinced that President Bush’s unpopularity will carry Obama over the finish line no matter what, I am of the opinion that Obama is as high as he’s going to get in the polls based on his now-fading aura of change and President Bush’s unpopularity. To get to a majority of the vote, Obama is going to have to show – to voters who distrust the left intensely – that he will be there man, or at least enough of there man to convince working class whites to vote for the liberal egghead over the American war hero.

It can be done, but it won’t be easy – and thus I see the November election being excruciatingly close, all else being equal from this moment in time.

Liberals have become so desperate to attack John McCain that they’ll stoop to any low.. even attacking his military service.

Gen. Wesley Clark, acting as a surrogate for Barack Obama’s campaign, invoked John McCain’s military service against him in one of the more personal attacks on the Republican presidential nominee this election cycle.

Clark said that McCain lacked the executive experience necessary to be president, calling him “untested and untried” on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” And in saying so, he took a few swipes at McCain’s military service.

“He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn’t a wartime squadron,” Clark said.

“I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.”

Get that? According to Clark, John McCain’s military service, combined with his years in the Senate doesn’t qualify him to be commander-in-chief, but Barack Obama, who never served in the military, and has barely served in the Senate is somehow qualified? Give me a break.

UPDATE: Admiral Leighton “Snuffy” Smith, USN (Ret.) issued the following statement in response to Gen. Wesley Clark’s attack on John McCain’s military service:

“If Barack Obama wants to question John McCain’s service to his country, he should have the guts to do it himself and not hide behind his campaign surrogates. If he expects the American people to believe his pledges about a new kind of politics, Barack Obama has a responsibility to condemn these attacks.”

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: Change you can believe in – if you also believe in the Tooth Fairy. Absolutely disgusting – but just the precursor to the real nastiness which will start up in about a month. Obama and his Democrats can’t run on their Carteresque proposals (and has anyone really thought through a “windfall profits tax” on oil? Its not like oil companies have to sell their oil in the United States…they’ll just sell their oil where there ain’t windfall profits taxes…if Obama wins, get ready for gas rationing ala’ Jimmy Carter!) so they are forced to make John McCain so odious that the American people will feel justified in given the White House to the manifestly unqualified Barack Obama.

Hows’ this for hypocrisy: If you don’t support Barack Obama, if you dare mention his middle name, you’re accused of fearmongering. If you support Obama, and mention his middle name, you deserve a freakin’ medal:

Barack Obama’s middle name Hussein has been used in some corners as a rallying cry to cast false aspersions against him, but in a growing movement, some of his supporters are adopting his middle name as a show of solidarity with the candidate.

The New York Times reports that those who are adding Hussein to their name tags — at least online — come from a wide variety of backgrounds, including Jews and Catholics, Hispanics and Asians; and from all over the country, from Oklahoma to Washington, D.C.
[…]
People are changing e-mail accounts and adding Hussein as their middle names on social-networking sites like Facebook, the Times reports, to deaden the effect the name “Hussein” has on some people who see it as a negative trait.

Well then, if they can call attention to it, from now on, I’ll just call him by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama.

Interesting discussion of the Holocaust and how much the average German was complicit in it over at First Things – here’s the bit I’d like to discuss:

The Holocaust may be the only universally agreed upon icon of absolute evil, but we deceive ourselves if we insist upon its utter singularity. Kershaw concludes on the sobering note: “So far, with great effort, the combination [that produced the Holocaust], which would be truly dangerous if marshaled by a powerful state entity, has been held in check. Will it continue to be?” Neither divine promise nor our knowledge of the human capacity for good and evil warrants a certain answer in the affirmative.

During the Third Reich, ordinary Germans “had many more things on their minds.” That’s a chilling phrase. We might easily say, and many do all too easily say, that during the era of slavery or during current horrors such as the genocide in Sudan or the daily killing of thousands of unborn children in the abortuaries around the country, most ordinary Americans “had many more things on their minds.” That’s a moralistic cheap shot. The truth is that we all have many more things on our minds, and necessarily so. Such as families, jobs, dealing with sickness, and warding off despair. Not to mention, for many, the distinctly unnecessary hours every day spent surfing and chatting on the blogosphere.

The Third Reich is rightly viewed as an icon of evil. This does not mean, as Ian Kershaw reminds us, that the ordinary Germans of the time are the icon of moral indifference or complicity in great evil. Then it was the Jews, the Slavs, and the gypsies. At other times, it is another class of human beings. Given the requisite mix of circumstances, which is not beyond imagination, it is an idle conceit to think that ordinary Americans would behave more nobly than did the Germans of Hitler’s day. Among any people of any time, moral courage is the exception and not the rule. There are heroes and heroines who contend against the great evils of their time, but even they must be selective. You may be devoting your life to helping the people of Sudan, but what are you doing to help prisoners of conscience in China, or to stop international sex trafficking, or to feed the hungry of Zimbabwe, or to relieve the loneliness of old people in the nursing home within an easy drive from your home? The list goes on and on.

“They had many more things on their minds.” And so do we all. Contemplating monstrous evils, such as the Third Reich, is not an occasion for preening in our supposed moral superiority but for humility, for self-examination, for renewed discernment of our duty, and for more earnest prayer for the coming of the promised Kingdom.

If you read Manchester’s The Arms of Krupp, you’ll find that average Germans slipped easily into the role of slave-master over the Slavs and Jews imported into Germany for drudge labor. While many acts of kindness were done by individual Germans for the captives, the plain fact of the matter is that most Germans didn’t act upon any sense of moral obligation towards their fellow human beings, and a very large number took extreme pleasure in their ability to dominate and harm. The question really boils down to this: do the people, on average, just follow along with their government, or does the government always tend to respond to the basic desires of the people? Did, that is, the Nazis convince the Germans to be evil (or at least turn a blind eye to it) or was the evil done by the Nazis latent in the German people from the start? My view is the latter – the evil was built in, and the Nazis just exploited it.

We all have it in us, you see? Only a routine adherence to first principles prevents any of us from slipping into varied forms of evil – and evil, of course, doesn’t require a death camp. Just to have a cold heart towards another human being is evil – and only by continuing to remind ourselves that the other person is due all the love and respect that we feel is our due prevents us from becoming cold hearted. For far too many people, this necessity of keeping on the proper track is forgotten, or left aside as inconvenient. It is much easier to separate one’s self from the evil than to stand up and be counted against it – faced with someone doing something horrible (like, say, gangsters terrorising a neighborhood) it is much easier to just close one’s eyes and walk past, pretending that it is someone else’s problem and, at any rate, why should I risk my neck for people I don’t know personally? In this attitude, of course, is the forgetfullness that if any one of us were terrorised by gangsters, we’d want the entire community to rise up as one to defend us.

There is also the second part of evil – that human desire to be on the winning side. When someone is despised, it is much easier to join those doing the despising than to join the despised. From large to small, it works the same – the Nazis despised the Jews and as the Nazis seemed to be the winners, many Germans simply wanted to be on the winning team; down at the smaller level, it could be merely joining in on some malicious gossip about someone disliked at the office. The actual effects are different, but the evil is the same.

In the end, the people are responsible for what is done in their name – there can be excuses for being under duress, but at the end of the day a government can only do what it convinces people to accept, at least in the sense of a tacit acceptance based upon silence. This does not argue in favor of the collective punishment of a nation if its leadership does wrong, but it does educate us on the need to be ever vigilant – an unguarded moment can be the ruin of a person, or of a nation. And so when someone does suggest even the slightest evil is ok because it is more convenient, that is the moment to stand firm against it – when the snake is just out of its shell, that is the easiest time to kill it…wait until it is full grown, and it becomes a much larger problem and a much larger threat.

Just a poll, of course, but as our lefties are convinced that a public opinion poll is a constitutionally valid means of determining government action, this pretty much knocks the wind out of their socialist sails:

When given a choice about how government should address the numerous economic difficulties facing today’s consumer, Americans overwhelmingly — by 84% to 13% — prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans.

Also noted in the poll is that 50% of Americans think that the government is trying to do too much – with 72% of Republicans holding this position, but only 36% of Democrats on board. Essentially, the general American distrust of government continues strong and this, in turn, opens up the prospect of a well-structured GOP campaign to use market mechanisms to deal with problems in opposition to Obama and his Democrats’ top down, tax and spend boondoggles.

They hit it out of the park, again:

Being a truly advanced white person means being able to speak with authority about pretty much any field of conversation- especially politics. In order for white people to streamline the process of knowing everything, all human beings can be neatly filed into one of two categories: People I Agree With, and People Who are Just Like Adolf Hitler…

Takes in 99% of Kos and DU commentary…

Normally not a very surprising thing for the presumptive GOP nominee, but given McCain’s strong appeal to independents and disaffected Democrats, the fact that he’s also stirring enthusiasm on the right makes Obama’s task much, much harder:

Conservatives may not be enamored of John McCain, but on subjects that are near and dear to their hearts — legal philosophy and judicial appointments — they are finding a lot to like about the Arizona senator.

Between his campaign trail rhetoric and a stable of legal advisers who are well-regarded in conservative circles, McCain is winning over converts who at one time harbored deep suspicions about his commitment to appointing reliably conservative judges.

.

It’s a surprising turn of events for a candidate who was once booed at the Conservative Political Action Conference and especially for one who played a key role in brokering the “Gang of 14” compromise in 2005, a deal that some conservatives contend undermined the Republicans’ opportunity to ban filibusters against judicial nominees.

This newfound respect is rooted in the widely-held belief that, if elected, McCain will appoint high court justices like George W. Bush appointee Chief Justice John Roberts. Former President George H.W. Bush deeply disappointed conservatives by appointing the liberal-to-moderate David Souter.

“He has attempted to make it clear he’s going to appoint judges with a demonstrated conservative record,” said Robert Alt, deputy director of the Center for Legal and Judicial studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

“I think his general approach will be very consistent with [former] President [Ronald] Reagan and President [George W.] Bush,” said Mike Carvin, a former deputy assistant attorney general under Reagan, who argued Bush v. Gore for the Bush campaign.

Added to McCain’s defense of low taxation and genuine efforts to secure greater energy resources, McCain is rapidly putting together a message which can resonate from the right to the center – and while Obama is busily disheartening his kook left base, McCain is now position to dive into the fall campaign with the ability to set the terms of the debate.