The media has been in a frenzy claiming that a few isolated hecklers at campaign events was evidence that the McCain campaign, and especially Sarah Palin, was ginning up anger by recounting Barack Obama's past alliances with former terrorists and bigoted pastors.

Especially eschewed as execrable was the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee's assertion that Obama's domestic alliances and foreign policies were "dangerous." The media went wild.

The next day, in response to a statement by an American citizen that said she was "scared" for Obama to be Commander in Chief, the ever timid of the opprobrium of the politically correct media, tone deaf John McCain defended Obama as non-scary. The media's designated most experienced foreign policy expert, the Democrat's VP nominee, begs to differ:

"Mark my words," the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.

So what else is new about a newly elected Democrat being tested? Nothing, It's the norm.

With respect to JFK, I would point out that he later admitted his mistake in meeting with Khrushchev without preconditions and that his weak performance and failure in the Bay of Pigs invited and led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Thankfully, the anti-Communist WWII vet that vowed to bear any burden in the cause of Liberty passed his test.

Not so for his successors.

President Lyndon Johnson allowed the Russian and Chinese communist backed Vietcong safe haven in North Vietnam and let Walter Cronkite drive him from office. He failed the test.

President Jimmy "inordinate fear of communism" Carter saw the Russians invade Afghanistan and back communist insurgents around the globe, as he abandoned the Shah of Iran under pressure from a "religious man [he] could deal with", the Ayatollah Khomeini launched the radical Islamist Revolution. He failed the tests.

President Bill Clinton treated terrorist attack after terrorist attack, including the clear act of war in the 1998 African Embassy bombings, as crimes for law enforcement to handle after the fact. Osama bin Laden cited Clinton's failures as showing America was a "paper tiger" that could be defeated and began planning the 911 attacks with operatives inside the United States as early as 1998.

Biden does not say that America would be so tested under a Republican President McCain. History is on Biden's side.

President Richard Nixon went after the safe havens in Cambodia and his "Vietnamization" strategy had essentially won the war before the post-Watergate Democrat congress intentionally lost the war in 1975.

Iran released American hostages they had held for 444 days within minutes of the 1980 Inauguration of President Ronald Reagan. Russia never tested Reagan. They surrendered without a shot.

As noted above, 911 was already planned before the Inauguration of President George W. Bush with UBL's most vivid recent memory of America presidents being Clinton's inaction and one of two partial exceptions to this rule:

Reagan's abandonment of Lebanon after the Marine killing bombing in Beirut and Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait test of President George H.W. Bush.

The former was remote in time and was not the same kind of test, given that the US placed the troops in country as peacekeepers.

The latter, however, does bear examination.

Most historians say that Saddam did not think he was testing Bush 41. Most agree that Saddam thought we had winked at the idea of the invasion.

I would say that UBL cites our refusal to finish the job in Iraq in 1991 as evidence that we were a weak horse unwilling to kill the king we struck.

Back to Bush 43. Immediately upon taking office he faced a belligerent Saddam, and al Qaeda. In February 2001 he told then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that he was "tired of [the USA] swatting at flies [in Afghanistan]" and directed her to have the CIA to plan removal of the regime.

That plan was placed on his Oval Office desk on September 10, 2001 and was the basis for the quick victory that deposed the Taliban, thus removing the safe haven from our enemies.

Libya surrendered without a shot and after several years of emboldening of the enemy by bushlied congressional democrats Kerry, the enemy and our allies got the message after the 2006 election that Bush was different. They saw the spine, intel poured in and the surge won the war.

Bush had to do this virtually alone, except for a minority of congressional republicans led by John McCain and one democrat, Joe Lieberman.

Yet now, Biden pleads for the kind of support for a besieged America under an Obama, that he and the rest of the democrats, especially including Obama (who Biden himself once denounced for voting to cut-off funds for the troops ala Vietnam), denied America under President Bush.

You need not worry Joe, should, by some ACORN miracle this neophyte gets the nukes.

Remember Bosnia, Kosovo and the Desert Fox bombing of Iraq under President Clinton? Speaker Newt Gingrich led the overwhelming majority of Republicans in vocally supporting Clinton.

So don't question our patriotism!

I am sure you agree that it is dangerous to be tested. Thanks for affirming one of the three main rules of life:

Death Taxes Democrat party weakness invites aggression

One of the reasons I left your party in 2000 (should have been years earlier) is when I realized that there was absolutely no reason for a foreign enemy to fear a Democrat.

[Caveat: Given your recent rhetoric and votes, as well as Bill and Hillary's statements, it appears that you three might be able to avoid a test. See if you can get Obama to step down. Or do you want us to be tested?]

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns

Race 4 2008

"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson

Originally published by Mike DeVine as Legal Editor for The Minority Report

Following the 1994 Republican takeover of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years, network anchors explained the historic event as one of "angry white males" having a childish temper tantrum. This election season, an overtly in the tank for liberal Democrats media is raising the spectre of anger incitement pre-emptively to thwart a Gov. Sarah Palin(R-AK) and Joe the Plumber inspired Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) energized base that threatens to overwhelm another leftist Democrat presidential nominee at the ballot box, or inspire an assassination.

The occasions for the present incarnation of evil right wingers have been isolated shoutings of "terrorist", "muslim" and/or "Arab" by hecklers at Palin rallies. (The Secret Service, after a review of campaign rallu audio tapes, debunked Obama's debate lie that someone shouted "kill him", which Palin heard but refused to denounce.) The media and Democrats have variously alleged that McCain campaign recitations of Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) past alliances with Weather Underground Marxist terrorist William Ayers, Black Muslim Louis Farrakhan and Kenyan Arab Odinga cousin Marxists are incitements, but has chosen not to feature the vile hecklers of Palin wearing obscenity words on T-Shirts and shouts of "warmonger" at McCain to suggest their lives are in danger.

But lets consider the drive-by media's "coverage" of angry words from angry white people directly associated with the Democratic Party leadership and the Obama campaign, shall we? (Obama and other authentically black definers frequently refer to the old Jim Crow "one drop rule" that classified any person as "Black" for legal purposes if they had at least 1/17th "negro blood" coursing through their veins. I apply that standard here for purposes of identifying angry whites.)

Consider how many of the following non-Secret Service refuted quotes could be considered incitements to violence; how many would not be known but for talk radio and the alternative media and how many have been credibly denounced, if denounced at all, by the Obama campaign:

1) Don't get snippy - Albert Gore

2) Selected not elected - all Democrats but Sen. Joe Lieberman and former Sen. Zell Miller, 24/7 for seven years and counting

3) [On 911] America's chickens coming home to roost - Rev. Jeremiah Wright

4) [On 911] I wish we (Weather Underground terrorist bombers) had done more - Ayers

5) Bushlied! (or cricket chirping silence) - all Democrats but Lieberman and Zell, 24/7 for five years and counting

6) He [President Bush] betrayed this country! He played on our fears! - Gore

7) Death of a President [movie depicting the assassination of President Bush]

8) America must stop air raiding villages and killing civilians in Afghanistan - Obama

9) Dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and never batted an eye - Wright

10) Compares American soldiers at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot - Sen. Dick Durbin

11) Marines guilty of murder in Iraq - Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA)

12) American soldiers terrorize families in the dark of night - Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)

13) Abu Ghraib opened under new management - Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA)

14) Hitler was a great man. Jews have a gutter religion. Obama is The Messiah - Louis Farrakhan (honored by Obama's church and always referred to with the honorific of "Minister" by Obama)

15) Israel will be wiped off the map - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

16) I would sit down with Ahmadinejad without preconditions - Obama

17) America is a down right mean country - Michelle Obama (may be an exception to the one drop rule, but we believe in affirmative action when identifying dangerous angry words that could incite violence)

18) Whites vote for Hillary in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia because they are bitter clingers to antipathy towards people that aren't not like them - Obama

19) God damned America. America invented AIDS to kill blacks in a world ruled by greedy white people. - Wright (to standing ovations at Obama's church)

20) Never been proud of America until 2008 - Michelle Obama

21) We need fundamental change in America. – Obama

Think any of the above could incite violence? The drive-bys aren’t interested.

Think Obama “clearly” doesn’t share the extremist views of his allies, as beltway conservative pundits George Will and Charles Krauthammer conclude? Clearly Obama does share the obvious conclusion of their anger, i.e. “fundamental change”, even if his rhetoric is delivered in a temperamentally calm manner.

And speaking of beltway conservatives:

22) Obama is a Mountain of strength that can't be moved - Brooks

23) Palin is a cancer on the GOP – Brooks

24) Problem that Republicans will have is that they will have a very angry base in 2009 and 2010, which isn’t the best way to attract [moderates]. – DaveG at race42008.com

25) I still don't know what [Palin] stands for. - Peggy Noonan

26) Sarah Palin is out of her league and should step down [as Republican Vice-Presidential nominee]. - Kathleen Parker

And finally, this gem from Ross Douthat, who, along with Brooks, Kristol and other beltway conservatives, advocated a McCain nomination for eight years, yet now are a part of the defeatist chorus:

27) And if I were Hanson or Levin or Steyn I'd be devoting a little less time to ritual denunciations of heretics and RINOs, and at least a little more time to figuring out how to build the sort of ship that will make the rats of the DC/NY corridor want to scramble back on board, however much it makes you sick to have them back. Who knows? It might just be the sort of ship that swing-state voters will want to climb on board as well.

It seems that while the leftist whites plus Michelle are angry at all things American, conservative and Palin, many beltway moderate-conservative pundits see a Reaganite conservative Palin as cancerous, but not a "heretic"? Go figure.

Yet, they calmly insult the social conservatives and neo-cons with which Reagan, Newt and Dubya fashioned a winning three-legged stool, and so avoid the "angry" label?

Not here they don't. They presume unto themselves immunity from being labeled divisive within their echo chamber and yell foul when anyone defends the cancer.

What do these admittedly diverse pundit critics have in common, Douthat asks elsewhere seeking to establish credibility in diverse numbers? All of the right leaning critics are harsh critics of at least one aspect of Reaganism, whether its Brooks' social liberalism; Bruce Bartlett's foreign policy "realism" or Douthat's fiscal liberalism.

They find in Palin, Reagan re-born, and truth be known, the blue-blood country-clubber Rockefeller's never liked Reagan, resented the infusion of the yahoo Christians, and were content as a minority eating scraps from former Speaker Tip O'Neil's table.

So, we see double-barreled, unprompted, real anger by those on the right and the left that announce the Reagan Era over, against conservatives, and especially its most authentic vessel, the Governor of Alaska.

We see dour faces on the conservative beltway pundits except when they allow themselves to climb the Obama-Mountain and get carried away with the America needs fundamental change chanter/worshippers of Farrakhan's Messiah.

What do we see in Palin, and increasingly in McCain?

Optimism and Joy at what America has been, is and can be. We see a love for a God blessed America that, when given the opportunity to elect an unabashed, unapologetic conservative, does so every time with conservative Democrat votes, to boot, producing large majorities as the lukewarm independent rats the beltway pundits want to capture remain wallowing in the spew from God's and America's mouth.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." - The Chief Justice

Race 4 2008

"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson

Originally published By Mike DeVine, as Legal Editor for The Minority and HinzSight Reports

"This new information about Barack Obama's relationships with ACORN and William Ayers raises a lot of questions." - (insert TV political talking head's name here)

Wrong.

The information coming out now, during the "attentive voter season" before Election Day, answers all the questions voters have before they vote every four years.

Does this candidate share the Judeo-Christian values that have defined our Nation and have served us so well for so long? Does he have the character worthy of occupying the most powerful position on Earth? And would enemies of the United States fear that he would aggressively defend us?

To listen to TV talking heads, even those named Hannity and Gingrich, from whose Thursday night discussion I culled the above paraphrase, no questions are ever answered. Rather, what are, in deed, revelations, only reveal to a brain dead media another line of questioning that Obama could theoretically trump with some glib retort, on their television shows. For you see, if questions are ever definitively answered, there would no reason to tune in and listen to them any more!

Moreover, even our conservative pundits, like ourselves if we don't be careful, can be just as guilty of elitist tunnel vision as liberals. Add to that, the all too common, "the world was just invented this election cycle", of so many of the poll-obsessed yutes in the blogosphere, egged on by a media that sells the idea that past election losses by, leading in the polls until the end, Democrats were decided by debate moments or clever ads late in the campaign, and you witness the rampant defeatism of so many conservatives for whom McCain can never attack aggressively enough.

I heard all this from 1980-1988 and 2000-2008. Absent a known leftist and a Perot, we win.

The only slightly credible argument advanced by the defeatists is that Obama is not a "known" leftist. But even on this, a certain kind of elitism blinds the defeatist.

The defeatist knows Obama is a far left appeasing, Marxist that is unfit for the office of President of the United States. He sees it oh so clearly and, due to historical ignorance, allows his emotions to be manipulated by polls. Moreover, and more importantly, he thinks that the average, mostly inattentive for the past four years, mostly non-political potential voter, does not see Obama for what he is, and that he won't see Obama for the extremist he is unless John McCain and Charlie Gibson say exactly what the defeatist thinks ought be said in just the way our defeatist hero wants.

I say, get over yourselves.

One mistake the defeatists make is that they watch the news in a different way than the average voter. We political junkies watch news reports about the Obama revelations to see how the media spins the revelations. The average voter, on the other hand, sees and hears the revelations. They are new to the average voter. And they are about the business, NOW, of getting attentive to make their choice on Election Day. They know that they get to vote on that day. They have lived through other election days and remember that they made the right choice then. They will this time.

The now attentive voters were already jolted into noticing Obama by the God-damned America sermons Obama sat thru for 20 years. Their common sense prevents any glib excuses to drown out the din of his pew-parked butt on that matter, nor on the fact of the new video of Farrakhan dubbing him the Messiah. They understand that it would not be appropriate for any candidate to hang with a less competent Timothy McVeigh that got off on a legal technicality and serve on boards to craft an "education reform" on radicalism short of bombing government buildings in Oklahoma, just because they were wetting diapers in the 90s. Same with Ayers.

The public sees and hears, just like us. Yes, we saw and heard months ago. It’s our life. These "swing" voters have real lives. They had real lives in the past as well, and looked up just in time to see what we knew and elect Reagan twice, Bush 41, and Bush 43 twice.

Why? Because they saw that Mondale would raise taxes; abandon the conservative economic policies that were working; and not be feared by the USSR. They saw that Dukakis would do the same and that he didn't share our values with respect to crime, criminals and the appropriateness of the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance by school children. That Gore lacked character as revealed by his three characters and would abandon Bill Clinton's Reaganite economic policies and that Kerry would turn over US sovereignty to Kofi Annan.

They saw the liberal and rejected the liberal, just in time.

This past week these people, wracked by economic crisis, saw a slick lawyer that claimed he never represented the far left ACORN vote fraud community organizers as a lawyer.

Gamecock asked the question months ago if it were too much to ask Obama to name one client and one member of a community he organized. We already knew that he tried to hide the hopelessly audacious racist pastor/mentor praying in a church basement as he announced his candidacy. We, and even the usually inattentive American, have seen the wife he can't hide preach her un-proud of America cynicisms.

And this week we found out why Obama has never volunteered a satisfied client because his clients are vile. But more than that, this is not a case of a lawyer defending a criminal as part of his duty to the bar in our justice system. No. This is a case of his representation of his ideological brethren.

He was caught in a flat out lie could not possibly have been un-covered because of the "whole truth" compilations of appellate case reporting going back to US Reporter Volume One from 1790!

Obama is listed in federal reports as a lawyer for ACORN. For the non-legal, do you recall seeing those endless rows of identically bound thick volumes in courtrooms and law libraries? Those are books of ALL of the opinions of appellate cases in all courts of the United States and the states. They cannot be refuted.

Obama is caught in a brazen lie. And the beauty of it is that the lie ties him to not only ACORN, but also to Ayers "education" minutes on Annenberg, Obama's book review of Ayers book, and all the lies about their supposedly neighbor waving a neighbor thru a stop sign in the morning relationship. An ad of Obama and the nervous crowd laughter when he said teaching sex ed in grammar school and kindergarten is "the right thing to do" is on the air.

Palin has been attacking Obama for all this and for what it says about Obama in explicit terms. McCain has ads up doing the same, one of which has Bill Clinton blaming the dems in congress for the Fannie Mae caused economic crisis. Palin is all over the Obama votes against saving babies that survive abortions.

And, for all you ostriches, Rush, Levin and others played numerous clips this week of McCain himself calling out dems by name, including Obama for the crisis.

In short, the questions are being answered before our eyes and yet so many politically correct TV talking heads continue with the refrain that Obama needs to answer questions. One wonders if these people asked that question after the confession in To Kill a Mockingbird as the credits rolled after The End!

Obama's actions of the past 20 years are the answers, not any non sequiturs he might belch out during a "debate.'

No amount of psychoanalysis will change what he DID. No words from his mouth will make it all ok for him to hold the nukes for four seconds, much less four years.

Defeatist poll obsessors, lend me your ears!

The American people can connect the dots, and are, in fact doing so now. They can see through the voice-overs by a liberal in the tank media they viscerally distrust.

There is nothing new under the sun. The conversations on conservative websites I frequent are the same as I had with nervous nellies in quadrennial Leap Year Octobers past while a Republican, and the flip-side of too confident libs when I was democrat and knew that the gray-haired old lady in the second row of the Baptist choir was a better predictor of the aftermath of Election Day than the latest hurling from Gallup.

And hey, Newt and Hannity, don't let answers to questions pass you by. And hey, fellow members of the conservative chattering class: Lower your snobbish noses a bit and you will see the knowing looks in the eyes of the non-chatterers, as Obama's 20-year mask is removed just in time for Halloween.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns

Race 4 2008

By Mike DeVine

As I get up off my knees from thanking Nature’s God for our first and latest Treasury Secretaries, I see the current state of economic affairs in dimes not spared, gardens not grown and three non-filing stations near my Carolina home.

I ran out of gas today when none of the three closest stations to my home were selling any. But I didn’t run out of food despite the fact I don’t grow it and no brother asked me if I could spare a dime.

1929 it ain’t, and, despite our problems, it won’t be, unless We the People commit historical mass suicide and turn the Indispensable Nation’s affairs over to Nancy, Harry and Barack’s 21^st Century version of Herbert Hoover.

Given that Obama and Pelosi have not learned the lesson of the Quaker State’s first oil well and our delivery from riding Donkeys, it should not surprise us they from the party of that stubborn like a mule donkey, have also failed to learn the lessons of Hoover, for they want to repeat his post-1929 crash trade tariffs and tax hikes.

The Hoovercrats blame the current financial crisis on a lack of regulation, despite the fact that it was Clinton Era regulations that directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to guarantee mortgage loans to credit risky borrowers in the name of fighting supposed “institutional white racism.” So the loans flowed, egged on by an overabundance of non-salaried realtors and loan officers whose universe of potential customers were mostly credit challenged. The Hoovercrats now label the fruits of their regulations, “predatory lending” and were successful in enacting a major bailout of ARM mortgagees a few months ago.

For their part, McCain-Palin are out there blaming the Housing/Credit Crunch driven financial market crisis on “corruption on Wall Street.” This is too simplistic an explanation and too shallow a justification for “more regulation”.

While I would denounce Michael Douglas’s “greed is good” declaration in the movie Wall Street, greed is, and always has been since Eve bit the apple. And our system has been and is the best at channeling same for good and mitigating the bad as has ever existed.

The fact is that no amount of regulation can prevent speculative bubbles in a free society. And the alternative to a free society is the biggest bubble of all: tyranny and its attendant deprivation that makes one long for our relatively puny bubbles.

This is a basic lesson from that early Babylonian garden: without free choice, there can be no real prosperity. The Founders understood that for wealth to be created, people would have to risk failure, with the prize for success being to get to keep the fruits of one’s labor.

After man left gardens and started hiring them out to Winn Dixies, it became necessary for government to grow, so the argument of big vs. small government is moot. The issue is how big and whether governed by basic principles or moral hazard.

Clearly, Fannie and Freddie guaranteed too large a percentage of mortgage loans and their failure, combined with other factors including a weak dollar and high energy prices, has caused a crisis that we remain in the midst of. But I am confident that President Bush’s genius at Treasury, Henry Paulson, who lately has eschewed Sunday rest, based on Christ’s adage that the Sabbath was made for man, and not vice versa, to do the yeoman’s work of adjusting the Hamilton edifice for a changing world.

But one thing has not changed, as evidenced by the recent spectacular rise in the dollar: The United States is THE indispensable nation. The world can’t thrive without selling their wares here and investing their money here. The rise in the dollar started soon after Putin over-reached in Georgia. A dying mafia nation flush with lottery oil money counted on western euro weenies to counsel their eastern neighbors on surrender. But Bush put the US military on land and sea in Russia’s path to Tbilisi while the former slave states flew their Presidents to the Caucasus to give Putin the middle finger.

Russia’s stock market crashed. But they have Ossetia and the North Pole.

The world is voting with their money on America, while the Hoovercrats want to take money from Americans while denying them their own oil on the hope for a wind driven alchemy even Merlin the Magician couldn't conjure.

President Bush twice tried to get Congress to limit Fannie and Freddie. Pelosi refused.

John McCain tried to do the same. John McCain wants to drill offshore. Obama does not. McCain wants you and the businesses you work for and shop at to keep more of the fruits of their labor. Obama wants to raise taxes.

One day, the USA will fall. Greece and Rome fell. Eventually we will fall, and eventually I will die. But I’m not throwing my body in front of a semi to hasten the day.

For the world, we are too big to fail, but for Obama, despite the role of non-accountability in the current crisis, wants to sell the idea that the government should ensure no one can fall. The last great such experiment ended with a wall falling near where his campaign began its descent in Berlin. For Pelosi and Obama, the government is still too small to satisfy their gargantuan egos. But they are blind to America’s greatness, greatness too big to indulge their historical ignorance.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns

Legal Editor for The Minority and HinzSight Reports

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." - The Chief Justice

Race 4 2008

"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson