The failures of all conservatives for last 45 years, not just the failures of Reagan's social conservatives for the past 30 years, have led to the present circumstance.



Recent remarks by James Dobson of Focus on the Family (referred to below) concerning the culture battles/war have been picked up on by the Drive-by Media to declare victory over the supposed theocracy-seeking social conservatives in that war and to blame "radical right wingers" for recent GOP election losses.

Such is par for the course from the Left. What troubles me more is when conservatives echo such claims, especially such thoughtful ones as Sandra Wise, as in her recent "We have lost the culture wars", Words to the Wise:

Dr. James Dobson was widely criticized for recently making the statement that we have lost the culture wars. I saw him on Hannity this past week and he backtracked a little. He clarified himself by saying that we've lost the current battle, but not the war. He talked specifically about abortion, and the fact that all of the progress that had been made is currently being rolled back by the Obama administration. He believes that even partial birth abortion will be legalized again.

I think Dr. Dobson is too pessimistic and quite inaccurate concerning abortion. Yes, the odds are great that we won't be able appoint a fifth vote to reverse Roe v. Wade on the Supreme Court given the Democratic Party majorities in the U.S. Senate and the Death Cultist in the White House, but the odds favor maintaining the current five-vote majority in favor of many state restrictions that fall short of reversal of Roe.

Dr. Larry Sabato has just published a book which explains the overwhelming Democrat gains in the last election. He believes that any Democrat candidate would have won the Presidency and that it was not all about Obama as everyone thinks. Sabato explained, in an interview this morning on Fox News, how the changes in the demographics of the country affected the last election.

One, the growth of the minority population which voted overwhelmingly Democrat, and the youth vote. He pointed out that younger people tend to be fiscally conservative but socially liberal. These trends will continue and I don't see the country moving back to being conservative on social issues any time soon. In the next few years, States will continue to legalize gay marriage, as the country moves more and more towards accepting gay marriage as a civil rights issue.

I think that Dobson was right the first time. We have lost the culture wars. The battle lines were drawn in the last election and we lost big time.

I haven't read Sabato's book, but am aware that McCain led Obama post-Palin and pre-credit crunch when the moderate Republicans candidate of choice since 2000 blew the election by agreeing with his Democrat opponent to pull the TARP over our eyes.

I know that Obama won by less than overwhelming margin that could easily have been overcome with a more enthusiastic conservative base. I also know that social issues played insignificant roles in the 2008 national election dominated by the economy and the 2006 congressional elections dominated by the Iraq War.

Yes, young people are more socially liberal than the general population, but they are more pro-life than baby boomers. Yes, blacks registered in record numbers to vote for the first viable black candidate, but they are more socially conservative than the general population. Sandra, "states" are not "continu[ing] to legalize gay marriage, as the real "movement", defined by the preponderance of actual laws passed, in the country has been We the People in referenda and state legislatures passing laws and Constitutional amendments defining marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman.

No referenda by citizens of a state and only one state legislature has approved of gay marriage. Even the citizens of the deep blue states of California and Massachusetts, when given the chance, have rejected gay marriage. The only "movement" towards changing such laws is the same movement we have been losing in the courts since the 1940s, and especially since the 1960s.

Conservatives have been losing the culture wars primarily within the culture, not politics, for 50 years primarily due to non-participation of enough conservatives in the institutions of the culture, i.e. press, law, academia and Hollywood, and also due to un-elected judges and the federal bureaucracy.

When conservatives gain control of the bureaucracy or the congress/white house, we play too nice.

Social conservatives entered the political arena precisely because their free speech rights were threatened and due to abortion, etc and other laws being imposed by secularists via judges, etc thus usurping we the peoples' right to self government, Liberty.

We are happy to compete within the federalist system and the culture, in the arena of ideas and let the chips fall where they may. We came into the national political arena due to usurpation of our Liberty.

Had other conservatives helped both before and after Dobson and Reagan entered the fray, and had the political spine to fire bureaucrats and "Bork" their judges been present (albeit based not on personal smears, but rather via objections to the unconstitutional Oath violating "living Constitution" interpretation mode), we would have fared better in the culture wars.

Of course, there is much truth to the idea that Christians and other so-cons may have invested too much in the political arena. After all the main purpose of the Church is the saving of souls and even if Roe is overturned, one must still win the hearts and minds of people in states. But, we must not be doing so very badly given gay marriage votes and the deep drop in the number of abortions.

This member of We the People has not, and never will, give up on cultural battles, much less the war, and given the Obamanation we are witnessing, I suspect a GOP comeback that will be partially driven by revulsion at the far left non-values of the DC Democrats that are anathema to the traditional Judeo-Christian values a large majority (76%) of Americans still hold.

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all for verification links may be accessed, including Reagan's own words on abortion and the culture war.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

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

<a href="http://technorati.com/claim/hmudi89dnv" rel="me">Technorati Profile</a>

Originally Posted by Gamecock on Monday, May 28, 2007 10:33:38 AM

Originally published by Mike "gamecock" DeVine as Charlotte Law and Civil Rights Examiner for Examiner.com

What is the big hurry in “declaring” the winner of North Carolina’s electoral votes in the presidential election? Especially since the outcome will not slow down the transition of President-Elect Barack Obama?

The day after the election, AP reported:

“In the unofficial returns, Obama led Republican John McCain by 13,746 votes. Gary Bartlett, the state elections director, said Obama should be considered the unofficial victor. Bartlett said an estimated 40,000 provisional ballots still must be counted, but based on experience, the outcome is not likely to change when the State Board of Elections certifies the results on Nov. 25.”

Electors don’t meet until December 15th, the Joint Session of Congress to count the votes isn’t until January 6th and Inauguration Day isn’t until January 20th.

The Tar Heel state’s election official responsible for carrying out the law gives the AP license to report what “should” be, based on “experience”? After Florida 2000? And just what is the “experience” Bartlett relies upon: that “history suggests that “about 65%” of provisional ballots will be eligible.

The math: Sixty-Five percent of 40,000 equals 26,000, which just happens to be about twice as many votes John McCain needs to win North Carolina.

On Wednesday, the AP and Charlotte Observer (in none of these stories would any actual reporter attack their name to such incompetence) declared “Obama's bid to win North Carolina – now only symbolic” with provisional ballots “holding up” a decision.

What happened to McCain’s “bid”? And how dare those voters hold up a rush to coronate Obama by voting provisionally?

And the outcome is “only” symbolic? If symbolism didn’t matter to Bartlett and his agent, the Associated Press, there would have been no rush to judgment on Friday:

“The Associated Press declared Obama the winner after canvassing counties in North Carolina to determine the number of outstanding provisional ballots. That survey found there aren't enough remaining ballots for Republican John McCain to close a 13,693-vote deficit.”

Clearly AP should replace Johnny, as in “Johnny can’t count.”

Symbols matter, and the AP, aided and abetted by a North Carolina government official, has prematurely foisted a symbol they prefer upon the history books.

That is, until their “history” was examined by DeVine Law.

And this does not even account for all the millions of absentee ballots. For that story check fellow Charlotte political examiner, Caleb Howe.

It seems the process is being carried out and reported by monkeys that don’t want to see or hear anything they don’t want to say about the only bid they care about, i.e. Obama's bid.

Mike DeVine’s Examiner.com and Charlotte Observer columns.

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

[For links to AP stories cited in this article see original story at Examiner.com]

“Small businesses should be making business decisions, not tax decisions.”

So declared John McCain’s friendliest vanquished rival for the Republican presidential nomination during a campaign rally in Charlotte last week that skewered Barack Obama for change small businesses can’t believe in.

Former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee minced no words in his condemnation of changes the Democratic presidential nominee proposes that would raise taxes on small businesses.

Adam Barrington, an ordained minister and former homeless shelter administrator (pictured right with Huckabee), served as our eyes and ears during the McCain-Palin rally last Wednesday at Hef’s Bar & Grill:

“[Huckabee delivered] a general stump speech for McCain, but the one thing that stuck out was [that] he talked about how small businesses are going to get screwed under Obama.  He talked about a mom and pop pizza place…that employs 45 people… [that], with rising energy and fuel costs [and] their profit margins…shrinking, [would] have to lay people off to pay their tax bill (under Obama’s tax plan).”

Huckabee’s indictment of Obama’s policies concerning existing businesses comes on the heels of Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher’s concerning disincentives to start new businesses. When confronted by Joe, the junior Senator from Illinois declared that it was “good for everybody” to “spread the wealth around.”

One wonders how much wealth won’t be available for spreading around if Obama has his way, since he would:

1) allow the Bush income tax rate cuts to expire in 2010, costing families of four making as little as $60K, up to $2000 per year;
2) raise the level of income against which Social Security Payroll (FICA) taxes apply;
3) increase the “death tax”; and
4) increase income and capital gains taxes for families earning more than $250K per year.

Most jobs in this country are created by small businesses. Obama touts his policies as friendly to small business since “most” would not be affected by numbers (3) and (4) above, never mind the devastating effect of number (2) on them. But Obama’s law changes would apply to more than half of all income produced by such businesses, earned by the very ones that are the large job producers.

All of the above is proposed amidst an unprecedented financial crisis and negative GDP growth, despite Obama’s admission that he would consider suspending his tax law changes, IF the economy was bad.

If?

One is reminded of his criticism of President Clinton’s capital gains tax cuts during a debate last spring with Hillary Clinton in which, despite being informed by moderator Charlie Gibson that revenues increased after the rate cuts, Obama still favored higher rates due to concerns of “fairness”. What is “fair” about such policies that result in less wealth to spread around and less revenue to the government was not addressed.

By contrast, John McCain would lower the U.S. corporate tax rate, which is one of the highest in the industrialized world; make the Bush tax rate cuts permanent and lower the capital gains rate.

Calvin Coolidge famously said that “The business of America is business.”

One would hope!

But the results of this examination conclude that if we want more business, we had best hope we don’t get the tax “fairness” changes Obama believes in.
 

Originally published by Mike DeVine, as legal editor for The Minority Report

Want to force the Drive-by media to cover Obama's rejection of the wisdom of America's Founding Fathers and our Constitution that produced the greatest nation on Earth?

Then Obama should be the keynote star speaker at every McCain-Palin campaign event. Play tapes of his anti-American screeds.

One has to question whether many voters that are up for grabs will immediately understand, given our woeful education system partially taken over by socialists that control the schools, Obama's contempt for American exceptional-ism and the import of his words:

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples.

So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.

But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical.

It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.

It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted.

One of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change and in some ways we still suffer from that.

......

Maybe I’m showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way.

You just look at very rare examples during the desegregation era the court was willing to for example order changes that cost money to a local school district. The court was very uncomfortable with it. It was very hard to manage, it was hard to figure out. You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time.

The court’s just not very good at it and politically it’s very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally. Any three of us sitting here could come up with a rational for bringing about economic change through the courts.

McCain should play Obama's voice over the loud speakers at every stop and then deconstruct his words as revealing a man that could not, in good faith, uphold the required Oath to "preserve, protect and defend" the precious document he trashes as "fundamentally flawed" above.

Obama sees the Constitution as only a negative document. It is, in that it limits government, but it also positively protects Liberty in so doing.

Obama loves government power, not Liberty for We the People and sees the Warren Court as not having gone far enough! Under a constitution written from the Marxist dreams of his once-met Kenyan "father" (Another Messiah's with no birth certificate and questions about his father, but this one photo-shopped a fake one and dreams of an atheist Kenyan Father while studying at the knee of a Hawaiian.), not only would a Warren Court let off a murderer that wasn't read his "Miranda rights", it would make the government a conviction-proof robber of your wealth to spread around the 'hood like a piece of the action by him as Boss/Godfather.

The U.S. Constitution is the oldest ongoing governing document on earth. The Liberty it unleashed has produced the marvel of what man can accomplish in the history of the world. How five percent of the world's population can create such great technological progress and share it. How the poor here would be considered upper middle class most places since the 1830's. How it set the stage for the only nation to fight a war and then eliminate slavery on moral grounds. How it is the magnet for the dispossessed and even put up a Statue of Liberty to beckon them.

How we produced enough wealth to build a defense strong enough to defend against enslaving megalomaniacs and be responsible for the greatest explosion of free peoples in history, within and beyond our borders in a benevolence unheard of by previous empires.

And as Colin Powell said before he lost his way, the only land we asked for from the liberated was enough to bury the dead that died for their liberty.

Obama considers that Constitution to be fatally flawed because it limits the power of government to control us.

My God! The miracle of the document is how it limits the government so that the potential of free human beings is unleashed.

Obama doesn't understand that the "negative" document is under girded by a Declaration of Independence that sees our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (especially including the right to keep the fruits of our labor as private property), as Creator-God given. He doesn't understand, or doesn't care, that the secret to why we have so much wealth that he would like to spread to favored groups as pieces of the action is the incentive of the right to private property. God knows he admitted that the question of when humans get the right to life is above his pay grade.

No, Obama hates the Constitution and would rather July 4, commemorate a Declaration of Dependence on his government. How can he take the Oath? Especially on a Bible that contains within the other great pillar of our exceptionalism, i.e. Judeo-Christian values.

No, this is not a claim that he is a Muslim. In fact, this rooster could name many Muslims that I would happily vote for President given their love and allegiance for The Founders and the Constitution and their advocacy of our shared values.

But Obama, like many that attend Christian churches, has a different view. Let his own words indict his contrary world view.

And even there, he has a contrary view.

“I’m rooted in the Christian tradition,” said Obama, who has declared himself a Christian. But then he adds something that most Christians will see as universalism: “I believe there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people.”

Falsani correctly brings up John 14:6 (and how many journalists would know such a verse, much less ask a question based on it?) in which Jesus says of Himself, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” That sounds pretty exclusive, but Obama says it depends on how this verse is heard. According to Falsani, Obama thinks that “all people of faith — Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, everyone — know the same God.” (her words)

If that is so, Jesus wasted his time coming to Earth and he certainly did not have to suffer the pain of rejection and crucifixion if there are ways to God other than through Himself.

Here’s Obama telling Falsani, “The difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and proselytize. There’s the belief, certainly in some quarters, that if people haven’t embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior, they’re going to hell.” Falsani adds, “Obama doesn’t believe he, or anyone else, will go to hell. But he’s not sure he’ll be going to heaven, either.”

Here’s Obama again: “I don’t presume to have knowledge of what happens after I die. When I tuck in my daughters at night and I feel like I’ve been a good father to them, and I see that I am transferring values that I got from my mother and that they’re kind people and that they’re honest people, and they’re curious people, that’s a little piece of heaven.”

Any first-year seminary student could deconstruct such “works salvation” and wishful thinking. Obama either hasn’t read the Bible, or if he has, doesn’t believe it if he embraces such thin theological gruel.

Obama can call himself anything he likes, but there is a clear requirement for one to qualify as a Christian and Obama doesn’t meet that requirement. One cannot deny central tenets of the Christian faith, including the deity and uniqueness of Christ as the sole mediator between God and Man and be a Christian. Such people do have a label applied to them in Scripture. They are called a “false prophet.”

I hope some national journalist or commentator with knowledge of such things asks Obama about this and doesn’t let him get away with re-writing Scripture to suit his political ends.

Obama is not one of us.

I actually have sympathy for Obama and his father-, and mother-(she was a Marxist, too) challenged childhood. No one gets to pick their parents.

But we do get to accept or reject our nation's heritage, a heritage, that in his case, provided him with a good life, liberty, including, education and the pursuit of happiness, including great wealth.

He explicitely rejects what produced that great life.

He rejects the Father of our Country.

We that embrace that George Washington and his fellow Founders of this nation and Framers of the Constitution, and who love the actual United States of America with its glorious history, must reject Obama and the America he would found, or reap the whirlwind.

Vote McCain-Palin!

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns

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

A Piece of the Action

Co-authored by Mike DeVine, Legal Editor and Pilgrim

Whether its Obama as Da' Boss:

<OBJECT class=BLOG_video_class id=BLOG_video-d8ccf639d4c9dbf4 height=266 width=320 contentId="d8ccf639d4c9dbf4">Cooperate, and we'll cut you in.</OBJECT>

Or Obama as Godfather:

"One day I will come to you and ask you to do me a favor." - Marlon Brando (scratching his face with his middle finger) as Don Corleone in The Godfather

The Obama family syndicate only makes offers you can't refuse, and it won't matter whether his favor to you was "a hit" on the occasion of his daughter's wedding or a Newport on the occasion of an ACORN voter registration drive.

Michelle says Barack will make you work. Obama says your children must learn Spanish lest you embarrass the nation during your next trip to Paris. You can no longer drive your SUVs and eat all you want and expect the rest of the world to say, "OK."

Naw, naw, naw, this is post-God damned America. From now on it will be the Chicago Way with Pelosi and Reid as made-family members.

And what is Obama's way? The Boss does favors for those that make the demanded protection money pay-offs. For the rest, he clears the field.

When faced with non-Maryland-carpetbagger political opponents in Illinois, he got them thrown off the ballot via petition challenges or post-leaked divorce files filled with bitter spousal hearsay.

Dare to utter a disparaging word on radio about his cronies and pals that lived lives when he was eight years old? WGN-AM gets deluged with irate callers denouncing blasphemy. Final field sweeping will be his Maid Nancy's task with the "Fairness Doctrine" as the broom.

All criticisms are deemed racist, actionable hate-speech, even if you were America's First Black President named Clinton.

Ask a spread-the-wealth stuttering-admission producing question on a rope line? Prepare for the full-court MSM anal exam.

And btw pal, check here to join the union. The location of secret ballots is a secret.

Under what Michael Barone dubbed <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=YjUwZWIwZTNhY2Y0YTFkYzFmZTIyZWUwZWNkYjk4ZGM=">The Coming Obama Thugocracy</a>, there is but one Boss that can cut you in on a piece of the action. All of the action is government sponsored. make your pay-off (vote for Obama and accept membership in a family approved group) and you will get your piece, so long as that piece is less than $250K.

Sell your soul to Fannie Mae and Barney Frank and maybe you can get a bigger share.

As for the rest, your wealth will be spread around. Obama picks winners and losers much like Fannie picked winners and we all lost except Franklin Raines.

But don't mistake Obama for Robin Hood, who took back from the rich government what was stolen from his formerly Merry Men and Women (aka We The People).

No, Obama is the Sheriff of Nottingham. In most territories ruled by one boss, said boss took same by force in the beginning or was handed same by a fearful mob.

Fear is a great enemy of Liberty. Raines happened under Liberty, but, contrary to Obama and the Democrats' lie, we lost thanks to bad government policies, not due to greedy white people as CEOs.

We will suffer the consequences of those policies and our own affluent society, debt-driven moral irresponsibility, but the remedy isn't to shuck Liberty and what remains of our virtue, for a Boss.

Listen to one <a href="http://www.redstate.com/diaries/pilgrim/2008/oct/19/straight-talk-from-ayaan-about-the-free-marke/">Ayann Hirsi Ali</a>, that has lived under bosses abroad:

<blockquote>In the course of history, the search for perfect societies--that is, the failure to acknowledge human imperfection--almost always ended in one or another form of theocracy, authoritarianism, or violent anarchy. But for those who seek to work with human flaws of every stripe, and to increase the sum total of individual happiness, the free market, combined with political freedom, is the best way.</blockquote>

Under free market capitalism, there is much more action and many more winners with bigger pieces of the action.

We are at a crossroads. Obama has told his people to get in our faces. He doesn't want us to see any face but his face. The face we have been waiting for?

No.

What we must do now is look in the mirror and then look at the ground. The era of passing paper back and forth is over. The democrats have kept us from doing the real wealth creating work that relates to the ground, for 30 years.

The land, dear Scarlett is the only thing that lasts. And I don't mean a house substituting for a post-tech bubble stock. Live in your house (even if you rent) and dig into the ground again America.

Dig for oil and natural gas, and dig the foundations for new oil refineries and nuclear power plants. Want to plant a wind mill? That's cool too.

That is the path to prosperity.

Resist fleeing in fear into the arms of a Godfather or a Boss, not even The One.

Why settle for a piece of the action when you can take action and keep the pieces.

Vote McCain-Palin.

Mike DeVine’s <a href="http://gamecock.blogtownhall.com/default.aspx">Charlotte Observer columns</a>

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

 

 

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

Powell is better at following orders than making decisions

[This column assumes that Colin Powell will endorse Barack Obama this morning on Meet the Press. That he hasn't already endorsed John McCain justifies his denunciation in any event.]

Colin Powell’s story of heroism as a soldier; personal story of achievement and message of conservative America values amidst derision as an Uncle Tom from the liberal Democrat Civil Rights crowd; and service under President Ronald were exemplary.

He was great at following orders in Vietnam; President Reagan’s orders as National Security Advisor and President George H.W. Bush’s orders during the first part of the 1991 Gulf War.

But when President Bush asked for his advice as Saddam Hussein’s army was fleeing a liberated Kuwait, he lost his way. At that moment, he rose above his pay grade and failed President Bush 41 and America.

Today, we are told, he is poised to endorse a man who considers making a decision on when a baby is entitled to human rights is above his pay grade.

Of course, lawyer Obama has decided, by his actions, that a baby has no right to life while in the womb and no right to life-saving treatment outside the womb if it survives attempted murder at the hands of an abortionist. Millions have perished due this notion thanks to Obama’s ideological lawyer allies that wear robes.

Powell’s decision to let Saddam remain in power in 1991 caused hundreds of thousands of adults and children to lose their lives and was a major rationale for Osama bin Laden’s conclusion that America did not have the stomach to win wars that require more than the 13-week period given TV pilots or that require more than 150 patriots sacrifice their lives.

In fact, his famous “Powell Doctrine” that states we should not go to war unless we can win quick with overwhelming force actually invites aggression that can’t be defeated Powell’s way.

As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs he had famously vowed, when asked about his military strategy against the Iraqi army in the Persian Gulf War of 1991:”First we’re going to cut it off, then we’re going to kill it.”

He failed to do so.

In 1991, when Saddam Hussein’s army was fleeing Kuwait, Colin Powell advised his Commander in Chief to let Saddam survive.

Fast forward to the bushlied era in September of 2006, former Secretary of State Powell wrote that “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”

In response, I wrote that the Conservative World Beginning to Doubt Moral Basis of Colin Powell’s Acts and Omissions. An excerpt:

Colin Powell, in a rare departure from Armitage-aided anonymous leaks to the press attacking his Commander-in-Chief, released a public letter he sent to John McCain opposing President Bush’s request that Congress clarify the meaning of vague language in Common Article III, as pertains to prisoners of war, and, as recently ordered by a brain dead Supreme Court, to illegal terrorist enemy combatants as well, prohibiting “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”The letter reads in part: “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” Powell observed. “To redefine common article 3 [of the Geneva convention] would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk.”

We are not “re-defining” the treaty. The treaty does not define “outrages”, “humiliating”, or “degrading.” Powell would allow anti-American World Court judges to define those terms to imprison American interrogators of Khalid Sheik Mohammad who extracted information that saved thousands of lives.

If an American criminal statute contained such language, the law would be thrown out for vagueness. One must be fairly put on notice concerning prohibited conduct for which one may be lose their liberty.

Powell’s policy would leave our military, CIA and innocent civilian lives at risk and have allowed Al Qaeda to have carried out many more terrorist acts inside the United States.

The public letter from Powell comes on the heels of years of silence despite his having information that could have prevented Scooter Libby from being indicted.

What happened to Colin Powell?

Any world that doubts the moral basis of our fight against terrorism has much larger problems that can be addressed by leaving in place litigation inviting vague language in a treaty.

Any student of the history of war teaches that you don’t strike the King unless you intend to kill him. Didn’t he learn anything from our own failures in Korea and especially the Vietnam War that he fought in and which Obama’s ideological allies lost via liberal democrats in the 1975 Congress?

Any man, whether its Louis Farrakhan or Colin Powell, that could endorse Barack Obama for President over John McCain, has lost their moral compass and good judgment. In Farrakhan’s case, he never had it. In Powell’s case, it appears he lost his after The Gipper left Washington.

His behavior in his last days in office and weeks and months after leaving the State Department, were despicable betrayals of the public trust with his leaks and defeatist rhetoric.

Let’s make sure we win one more for The Gipper. Reject Powell’s latest bad advice and elect John McCain, a man who learned the lessons of Vietnam.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns

“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

"Game Changer", this year's ubiquitous word of evidence of the extreme laziness and lack of curiosity of most in the media, is the latest incarnation of this theory. Everytime I hear it is like the sound of fingernails scratching a blackboard.

This theory, while also subscribed to by a large percentage of conservative pundits who worship at the feet of their poll obsessed Beltway idols, is actually an election outcome explanation advanced by the Left for more than 30 years, in the Drive-by Media and the national Democratic Party, to serve three inter-related purposes:

a) Prevent modern day liberalism from being discredited due to its proven failed policies;

b) Prevent modern day liberalism from being blamed for Democrat election defeats; and

c) Establish TV events as the causes of election outcomes so as to enhance the importance of television election coverage and increase viewership.

Conservatives that appear regularly on TV naturally fall into the trap as it enhances the perceived importance of their own work. But even those that don't earn a living via television fall into the trap out of brainwashed ignorance and laziness. At root, such a theory and view is an insult to average Americans, treating them as fickle in making this very important decision.

I say the theory is poppycock.

First of all the theory and the obsessive use of the term "game changer" (as in "gravitas" in 2000) this season, perfectly fits Rush Limbaugh's description of the increasingly non-mainstream, and increasingly impotent, media, as like those engaged in a drive-by shooting.

Its easy to report an event. Much harder to report on complicated human beings and trends that would require actual work to discern the trend, especially when the "trend" is against one's modern day liberal substitute for religion.

The theory is also inextricably tied to polling that invariable shows republicans trailing before the conventions; getting a bounce after their convention; then "falling behind" until 24-72 hours before Election Day, when, miraculously, the media usually gets the winner right, at the last moment (7 out of the last 10 the winner has been the GOP and always is when the Dems nominate a leftist).

All bumps in their polls are always tied to events...that occur on TV, i.e. usually debates or campaign gaffes.

Polling is an art, not a science, and the artists are mostly liberals. Its mostly a scam, obviously, when one looks at their samples of dems and repubs.

I think the scam began in the late 1960s with a non-election "report" from a man I don't hate, i.e. Walter Cronkite. The man who was deemed the most trusted man in America and that signed off every evening news broadcast with the declaration, "and that's the way it is," told us that the Communist North Vietnamese had defeated the armed forces of the United States.

That was not the way it was. And in slandering the US military he also drove a president from office and gave voice to those that would ensure defeat and subsequent genocide at the hands of 1975 congressional democrats.

I look back now and see that we, as a nation, have been betrayed on many levels by the media, as long ago as the 1950s after they inherited a monopoly thanks to the spectrum limiting technology of analog TV to three liberal networks, but I digress.

Reagan did not beat Carter in a landslide because he cocked his head and said "There he goes again." He didn't win a landslide against Mondale because he wouldn't "hold his relative youth and inexperience against him." Dukakis didn't lose 40 states because he looked funny helmeted in a tank.

In all of the above cases, modern day liberalism's vessel lost because it is anathema to the values and principles of 60%+ Americans and because liberal policies are proven failures, domestically and as weak on defense.

What enemy of the United States would fear any of the above, John "international test" Kerry, or Barack "no preconditions for a summit with Iran's President" Obama"?

Not one.

People may finally decide late in the game, for whom to vote, and, of course, there are events everyday that a lazy liberal "post hoc ergo propter hoc" illogical media may try and pass off as logical fact.

But people accumulate knowledge over time. Events occur that are filed away as they try and get a feel for the candidate and especially, to determine how that person's policies will affect their family, in their safety from attack and in their pocketbooks. They also see if they share their values and have the character to be worthy of the job. Everyone weighs these factors in differing ways.

What comes across as the height of arrogance, both from liberal and conservative "journalists" is that while they scoff at the idea that they would make their own decision on some isolated campaign event, they are knee-jerk is insisting that most voters do, or at least that a significant portion do, always having a poll close by to "prove" it.

More poppycock.

Americans know that they vote on Election Day. Most, unlike me and other politics obsessed people that includes the media, understanding that, don't pay much attention to politics until close to that day, knowing from elections past that they can discern the best candidate in time.

I think a lot of conservatives are simply acting human in their acceptance of poll obsession and this false theory. Laziness is not the complete explanation. Heck, everyone does it.

But no, I think the main reason is the fear of the unknown, coupled with the desire to be the first to know, even if it means a reckless announcement of gloom and doom with the added wicked joy of being the first to announce the bad news. Get over it children. It wears off.

People get insecure as so many around them "know" the outcome. Forget that many have "known" based on polls in April, July and yesterday and have switched whom they "knew" would win multiple times.

Any fool can read a poll an extrapolate it out and think they know. What we really need are people like Andrew Jackson in media and the blogosphere, who said

"One man with courage makes a majority."

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns

Race 4 2008

As usual the mainstream media, and that includes Fox News, misses the big story while they act out their roles on "game-changers" and their historically ignorant and discredited "Debate Moment" theory of Presidential election outcomes.

The game changer is not a debate moment. Its that liberals rarely win this game.

But they did manage to miss a major gaffe by Obama and the major message he sent that puts him in the unelectable liberal category.

America saw a man that thinks that plumbers, and, by implication, those small business owners economically equal to and better off than plumbers, should pay higher taxes. That he says 95% of taxpayers will get a tax cut loses its power when middle class people that think themselves akin to plumbers or better off, see that Obama puts them in the 5% that will get a tax hike.

Then, Obama contradicts himself by saying that the plumber is too poor to be subject to a fine for not providing health care. Clearly he was flustered by McCain demanding he state the amount the government would fine small business owners for not buying government prescribed health care for employees.

So, as he often does, when corner like a rat by a cat, Obama lied.

His tax plan and health care plans both consider one rich at the same income level.

Obama will always have trouble getting a low price for plumbing services given his desire to plumb the depths of their profits to spread their hard earned wealth around to others that didn't crawl thru the mud to fix pipes, but the leak in his message that he is a champion of the middle class is now huge flood that can't be plugged at any price.

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

Originally published by Mike DeVine, the Legal Editor for The Minority and HinzSight Reports

I had been considering doing a post-mortem on the recent two-week debate over the Paulson Panic Prevention Bill that was finally signed into law late last week. Given my exhaustion (and the recently announced retirement of alter ego Cockstradamus until after the election)from reading enough pages to have re-read Tolstoy’s War and Peace and having written five columns in 12 days that resembled Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, it was a great joy to me that an executive with one of the largest Banks in America (who also happens to be a close friend) wrote the following me after I requested he identify three issues he wanted addressed refuting Obama and Democrat positions on the great issues of the day, with facts, that he considered not being effectively addressed by the McCain campaign or the media.

My friend shares much of our (conservative segment of the GOP) frustrations with the campaign and the past eight years and echoes many of my own thoughts, but he brings more of an insider’s perspective on the current state of banking affairs, as well as an outsider’s perspective, not being a blogger or columnist.

He shall remain anonymous, but given that this is only the first of a series of columns featuring my friend’s thoughts and desires, and given that my offer to try and address concerns that would “float his boat”, I will refer to him as “Boata”:

IT'S THE ECONOMY, STUPID

The Dem mantra is 'We can't afford another eight years of the failed Bush economic policies', and McCain will not refute it - and neither will Bush Jr!

Here's the truth of the matter:

It started under Carter, and it accelerated under Clinton. The so called noble idea was that home ownership should be expanded from 60% to at least 70%. Through PR pressure and arm twisting on lending institutions by the government, the fear of being labeled as discriminatory by Jesse Jackson or other extortion thugs, and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), requirements for mortgage loans relaxed.

The CRA has various methods and penalties to persuade lending institutions to make available a certain percentage of their portfolio for 'affordable housing' (and they still do - Countrywide just received a directive to make loans to applicants with credit scores of 500-580! If nothing is done it will happen again).

Urban communities that no bank would seriously consider lending to were now badges of honor. Credit scoring, financials, current job, etc. - these were no longer paramount. This was doubly encouraged because Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae would buy these loans so the lending institutions didn't really have to worry.

GSE's hold approximately 50% of the nation's mortgage loans. In fact, the GSE's were established under the theory that by buying loans, packaging, and reselling them as investment instruments (CDOs, Auction Rate, etc.), they would be freeing up more cash for lending institutions to make more loans so everyone could own a home! On top of this, ARMs were invented and pushed as an easy way to afford a loan - the catch of course is that they are extremely risky and irresponsible. If you can't afford a fixed rate loan, you shouldn't be contemplating adjustables, but many lenders started pushing them to increase their commissions. Ditto for sub primes.

This is where the 'greed' comes in that Wall Street is accused of. On Bob Brinker's Moneytalk show yesterday, he had a NY Times economist on who posited this as the big reason the lenders and the GSEs hit hard times. He is right about the snowball effect, but how it started he is not (after all, he works for the NY Times). It started for the aforementioned political reasons.

Now it really gets complicated! With tried and true institutions failing or struggling, lending amongst themselves starts to dry up. Companies that depend on short-term lending for the regular business of stock and supply start freezing up because creditors don't have the money or fear default. This credit crunch is the fear that prompted the federal bailout (rescue) last week.

Prior to all this, both Bush and McCain tried to rein in the GSE's and their excesses, but the attempt fell on deaf ears in Congress - yet neither of them will explain this to the public. Former Fannie CEO Franklin Raines and his successor should be investigated for hiding the true dire financial situation there, but they won't be because the Dems hold sway in both houses and the Republicans have no backbone. The Republicans are complicit in the whole situation also because the sub prime lending really ramped up after the turn of the century. They raised no protests or red flags (outside of a few like McCain) for fear of being called racists or 'evil, rich Republicans'.

Lastly, Obama and Pelosi's continued hammering of the eight years of a failed Bush economic policy' is a non sequitur - they're two separate things. I blame the Bush Administration and the House Republicans for acting like drunken Democrats in spending even more, and adopting pork and earmarks as their own, but this is not the reason for the crisis.

However, this gives the Dems the ammunition they need; they would have done better to take the heat up front and do what's right. So the reason we are where we are all boils down to this: Republicans didn't have the gumption to stand up for what they believe when they finally gained the power to make REAL CHANGE!

I trust that Boata, like most of us in the conservative movement, is encouraged by the McCain campaign’s post-bailout bill signing, fact-laden refutations of and attacks against Obama and the democrats that echo much of the above, as well his the McCain ad that began running during the bailout bill debate that features the NYT praising McCain’s Fannie-Freddie 2005-6 reform attempts, and Bill Clinton’s assessment of blame against the democrats in congress (2003-2008), including the Obama-occupied, filibuster threatening Senate.

Gamecock echoes Boata’s call for McCain-Palin to show America that they represent real change for the economy.

[Despite the lack of a complete post-mortem following up on my econ columns (see my archive) opposing the bailout – albeit as a close call given the GOP improvements – especially given post-bailout market disasters here and abroad, I deem it appropriate to heed Boata’s desire for shorter columns and less self-congratulatory pajama geek echo chamber chatter! – I will address the other issues on a blog this week concerning Big Government central planning Bernanke-Paulson’s attempt to force Wachovia to be split in two, rather than let the free market and the legal system sort out the claims of Wells Fargo and Citibank.]

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