Given that one man with courage makes a majority as God spews the lukewarm out of his mouth, how was this rooster so blind to his maverick kinsman standing there all along?

[See also links to campaign 2008 columns thru January after New Year's Eve predictions]

Originally appeared as Race 4 2008’s Rooster missed Dawn, but here goes…

Mike Gamecock DeVine:

1 - Southerners and Christians (including Catholics and Evangelicals) astound the Left by failing to establish the first theocratic “impose our views” State in the United States. Instead, judges in Massachusetts establish a Secular Darwinist, Man-Made Global Warming Church theocracy in the Bay State, joining the non-Christian theocratic City-State in San Francisco. Christians whose churches were invaded and taken over for group orgies with Mayoral consent in the city by the Bay are welcomed with open arms by the ecumenical Muslim-Chaldean coalition in Baghdad.

2 - Pakistan fails to devolve into anarchy.

3 - The Taliban fails to take over Afghanistan.

4 - The MSM fails to report the above and continues to refuse to report the late 2007 US victory over al Qaeda in Iraq.

5 - Chelsea Clinton continues press blackout of nine year old reporters from Scholastic America and expands same to include ten-year olds from Nickelodeon.

6 - Bill Clinton finally utters Hillary’s name at a campaign stop in Chicago on February 4, 2008; loses his voice and suffers a myocardial infarction soon thereafter; is hospitalized at University of Chicago Medical Center; and is served with summons charging him with the crime of bigamy and assault and battery with a stogie by a Nurse Ratched.

7 - Colts defeat Redskins in Super Bowl.

8 - LSU defeats Ohio State for mythical BCS college football championship. Refuses Appalachian State challenge.

9 - Lakers defeat Celtics for NBA championship.

10 - Neither Huckabee nor McCain will win SC GOP primary.

11 - Obama wins Democratic Party nomination.

12 - Obama loses election to the GOP nominee.

13 - Mike Gamecock DeVine is vilified for refusing to predict who the GOP nominee, and next President of the United States, will be.

The Huckabee discovered middle class squeeze that the GOP must address

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Remember who took the beating in Jena

Justin Barker, not his attackers, suffered a premeditated assault

MIKE DEVINE

Special to the Observer

"Look at the tape"!

Thus ESPN's John Saunders admonished those who bemoaned supposed racial disparities in NBA foul calls, based on a study of newspaper box scores by a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

How does one stand in judgment of NBA officiating apart from visual examination of available video recordings of the events in question? That's what Saunders wondered, and so should we.

What if Justin Barker's beating had been caught on tape? Would Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have been able to make the "freeing" of the Jena 6 into the 21st-century equivalent of Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"?

Not likely.

Last month, thousands of people demonstrated in the streets of the small town of Jena, La., to decry the supposed disparate treatment of blacks and whites by high school administrators and law enforcement. Why should the Jena 6 have been released? Because of rope nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree months before the beating, we are told.

Fight or lynching?

Most legal definitions of lynching call it a premeditated assault on one person by two or more others -- which is exactly what befell Barker. Yet press reports have described the beating as a "schoolyard fight."What about the supposed disparate treatment based on race?

The three noose hangers were isolated in an alternative school for a month. They were not expelled, but neither were those responsible for sending Barker to the hospital four months later. Barker was not one of the noose hangers, so his attackers apparently convicted him of a separate crime -- walking while white.

Protesters object that the Jena 6 were initially charged with assault and battery with intent to kill. They argue that Barker's same-day release from the hospital and attendance at a school ring ceremony that night ruled out intent to kill.

I don't know if there was intent to kill Barker. Prosecutors rarely have direct evidence of intent, such as a verbal or written confession, but circumstantial evidence is often presented.

A person can be killed from being kicked in the head. Being knocked unconscious is evidence of at least an aggravated assault. The fact that one person is assaulted by six can also be seen as evidence of intent.

That Barker was tough enough to survive the blows, and that he was so determined to receive a ring signifying his hard work to achieve his diploma, speaks volumes about his character and strength.

Indeed, Barker has much more in common with "Bloody Sunday" beating victim John Lewis than do his attackers. His attackers have more in common with the law enforcement officers who beat Lewis on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., during a civil rights march in 1965.

Projections of racism

Hardly a week passes that mainstream media outlets do not present academic studies of racial disparities as "news." These stories imply that white racism is responsible for mortgage loan turndowns, improper traffic stops, disparate educational discipline or excessive criminal charges.

Rarely are we presented with the name of any white person who actually unlawfully discriminated against a black person. No, we are told it's "institutional" racism.

This all occurs in a culture in which being labeled a racist is the greatest fear of most whites in the legal, religious and business institutions I am familiar with.

It makes me wonder if the purveyors of the racism charge are projecting their own racism, or that of their own institutions, onto others.

Mike

DeVine

Little did I know when I escaped the fires of Hell that is the intellectually and morally bankrupt Vile organization known as the Democratic Party in 2000, how much the, new to me, yet Grand Ole Party needed me.

The latest example of why is analyzed in haystack's Living With The Left. 'Stack's subject is a column by Charles Krauthammer, a conservative thinker whose columns were instrumental in my conservative epiphany and whom I respect so much that I refer to him as "The Master."

But, alas, Charles is not immune to beltway disease and its hallucinatory side effects, as per recent history, the relative importance of character vs. "positioning", and what it means to "survive."

I should admit that The Master does state early on that Hillary would only be better than "her Democratic rivals." This is akin to saying that if one is to be tortured, it’s better to be tortured for only five minutes than for ten. That said, Charles still does much whistling past the graveyard.

Literally. Especially the graves of those Americans and others that are dead today because of the "pragmatism" of Clintonism.

To get to the point, Charles engages in some ill-founded hope when he de-claims as per Mrs. Bill Clinton:

Her liberalism is redeemed by her ambition; her ideology subordinate to her political needs.

Yes, Charles, her POLITICAL needs. See poll numbers. See risk aversion. See unwilling to fight a war longer than 72 hours. Her pragmatism stops there, not as to what's bet for the country. It’s what is best for Hillary. And given that her election would be interpreted by her as a repudiation of a strong America abroad (despite the fact that it has kept us safe since 911), she can be counted on to appease enemies.

NO ENEMY OF THE UNITED STATES WOULD HAVE ANY REASON TO FEAR HER. THE PAPER TIGER WOULD BE RESURRECTED.

The bigger point he goes on to make here is that we have lived with this before (Bill) and while none of us could ever bring ourselves to vote for her, we'll certainly be no worse off for losing to her all the same...given the actions of the GOP over the last 7 years.

We couldn't be worse off if Hillary and a Dem congress were in power the last 7 years? Is you crazy man?!!

Would Gore's attorney general have rounded up the 900+ visa overstays from Arab and Muslim countries soon after 911, thus pre-empting the planned follow up attacks? Would a Democrat president have been 1/10th as aggressive as Bush in the war on terror at home and abroad?

Not NO, but HELL NO!

And as to this "we've lived with this before," crap. Yes, we "lived" with and "survived" Buchanan, Johnson, Harding, LBJ and Carter. What does that mean? The ground is still here and we call it America? Is all we want to do is "survive."?

Meaningless drivel.

On Iraq, for example, she talks like someone who knows she may soon be commander in chief and will need room to maneuver in order to achieve whatever success might be possible.

What you mean Charles is that she continually lies. The enemy has figured the Dems' "talk" out. They know its all talk, unless we mean a cruise missile killing a night watchman.

On Iran, Clinton has been pilloried from the left for supporting a completely anodyne resolution designating Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization. This would trigger serious economic sanctions that would greatly complicate its ability to operate.

Whoopee, some sanctions. Been there.

And look what Clinton unveiled this week: a modestly government-subsidized, personal retirement account. True, it is yet another big-government middle-class entitlement. Yes, she ignores the looming Social Security crisis. On the other hand, establishing a universal, portable, personal retirement account (though without the government subsidy) is something conservatives have long and devoutly sought.

Yes, Charles, and the last time a Clinton made a similar promise (see middle class tax cut), we didn't get it until a republican was elected and gave it to us eight years later.

Character, Charles. She has none. Don't be fooled by what comes out of the mouth. We have a history.

Even Clinton's response to a debate question on torture -- "As a matter of policy it cannot be American policy, period" -- is elegantly phrased to imply an implacable opposition to torture, and yet leave open the possibility that in extreme circumstances a president would do what she had to do, i.e., authorize torture, regardless of the express policy.

I do believe Hillary would torture people. I see the effects on her husband, the bimbo eruptions she intimidated, and the military officials she wouldn't let don their uniforms in the East Wing.

Clinton rarely falters. Always careful, always calibrated, always leaving room for expediency over ideology. That's Clintonism, of both marital flavors. Gender sensitivity prevents me from calling her the consummate needle-threader. Consider her instead Columbus' match as the Great Navigator.

Rarely falters Charles? Again, is you crazy?

She is walking talking falter.

The Disciplined Campaign or Are you Smarter than a 2nd Grader?

haystack says:

The idea of 4 or 8 more years of a White House full of Clintons may be hard to accept, but facing the prospect and understanding what it's going to be like might just be enough to get the GOP factions in line to keep it from being so.

True, 'Stack, but Charles doesn't do that in his column. What Charles does is play down what she is due to hope in pragmatism.

'Stack continues:

Thus far, none in the field have done anything of significance to make that happen. Until one of them stands up to rein in all this angst and frustration with the party, Krauthammer's premonitions just might come to pass.

What could one do now to keep it from being so?

We will nominate Fred Thompson. There will be a campaign in which we lay out the stark differences with Hillary. Rather than swallow her "positioning", we will run ads of her actually speaking and show her actual votes, and see if we all want a Gallup poll driven positioner in chief during a time of war.

I'm betting that we won't, since we never have.

It is Hillary that needed to be doing something the last 7-15 years to make her election a viable possibility by not embracing McGovernism.

She didn't.

People, just because people in DC say 2008 will be a "bad environment" and that we can't win, doesn't make it so. I've been thru all these yakyak cycles before.

You see, things will actually happen between now and Nov. 2008, including, incredibly, a presidential campaign.

And the first thing that just happened is this call to arms column.

Can't never could do nothing!

Conservatism wins every time it’s tried.

Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
The HinzSight Report
The Minority Report
Race 4 2008
http://www.win-the-war.com/

[WARNING TO INSIDE THE BELTWAY CONVENTIONAL WISDOM CONSERVATIVES: THIS BLOG IS NOT ABOUT JOHN EDWARDS OR MOVEON.ORG]

Adam C's REDHOT SC: Black Voter Outreach emphasized some positive for the GOP results of a recent survey of Black South Carolinians.

That's good, and I'm not surprised given Republican Governor Mark Sanford's public color blind treatment of Blacks as adults, as opposed to the condescending pandering by the Democratic Party's presidential nominees and the national Democratic Party who treat them like helpless children.

But let's also look at a very disturbing cold hard fact:

The report notes that only 45 of the more than 650 respondents in the survey identified themselves as Republicans...which is statistically insignificant from a polling perspective ...

45 republican blacks out of 650.

Let that sink in.

As a 20 year SC activist Democrat mostly in SC, converted to the GOP based on conservative principles, I reject pandering to Blacks. They can and should be won over to our side based on the truth and results of our policies and principles.

But I think that message could be more effectively delivered by a black person, and more specifically a black man.

Call me crazy, but don't accuse me of pandering when I say that we must put a Black man on the ticket in 2008. Preferably J.C. Watts, but Steele would also be good.

I do not advocate watering down our message. Heck, I'm for beefing it up.

Many here at RS have objected to my idea by comparing it to democrat party affirmative action quotas.

I reject that charge.

The VP slot is often, if not always, used to better get the message across to some constituency, whether it be regional or ideological.

Blacks are a constituency that we have been unsuccessful in reaching. We need to reach them and we have qualified black men that can do it.

I used to hate hearing fellow democrats calling all republicans racist when I was a democrat and I hate it all the more now.

J.C. Watts on the ticket would destroy that charge. No one exposed to Watts in a campaign would be able to believe that he is anyone's fool, and he can reach the Black values and war hawk voters we deserve.

Moreover, we would have a chance at destroying the intellectually and morally bankrupt and useless party the National Dem party has become.

Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
The HinzSight Report
The Minority Report
Race 4 2008
http://www.win-the-war.com/

This past week is Exhibit A for why I totally disagree with Newt and Rush (if he is serious) on the odds that Hillary or any Democrat will be elected president in 2008.

Every candidate running for the Democratic Party nomination for President has made statements revealing their weakness on defense. Unlike past Democrat losers they haven't tried very hard to hide their appeasement views. They have been fooled by the MSM and the 2006 election to think that a majority of Americans favor defeat in Iraq and a return to treating terrorism as a law enforcement problem.

This past week an anonymous Senate Democrat stated that since they didn't like to call Generals liars in public, that they would leave it to outside groups like MoveOn.org.

But they couldn't help themselves.

This is not the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton.

Rather, it is the Democratic Party born in the 1972 McGovern revolution; resentfully restrained in the 1990's by a DLC Clinton; enraged by Florida 2000; and emboldened by a sycophantic MSM and MSM polls into thinking the rest of America has finally come around to their historical world view that the retreat from Vietnam was one of America's greatest hours.

They will suffer the fate that McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis and Kerry suffered.

I had been growing sick of hearing the MSM and even some conservative beltway pundits marvel at Hillary's discipline and that she was positioned as a moderate on national security.

They must think Americans are stupid. Before Hillary destroyed her campaign by calling General Petraeous a liar on film this week, Hillary voted against funding the troops this year and has taken a baker's dozen positions of the war.

Her flip flops make Romney look like the Rock of Gibraltar.

2006 was not the devastating rebuke of Republicans or conservatism that many think it was. 2006 was a Year Six grievance election in which we lost a historically low number of seats. The reason we lost majorities is due to the fact that our movement is so young that we had not yet built up large enough majorities to sustain. Moreover, the Dems won by running rhetorical conservatives.

Americans were not making a decision on a Commander in Chief that wished to lose a war, and if Democrats and Republicans really believed that Americans wanted to lose they would have stopped Bush from fighting the war by now.

They haven't and they won't.

I spent 20 years in the Democrat Party knowing that we would lose every election due to being rightly perceived as weak on defense. Only after the victory over the USSR, and then only with Perot's help and a Clinton that campaigned to the right, did a Dem capture the CINK job.

No majority of voters are going to trust these Dem weenies to defend them.

Not going to happen.

Iraq or no Iraq, Americans understand that no Democrat president would have taken the steps that have been taken under this republican president to prevent further attacks.

They are willing that the President check library records if it means 3000 live.

Their will be a campaign in 2008. Inattentive voters will pay attention at that time, and just as the early polls that re-elected Carter, and elected Mondale and Dukakis were shown to be false msm coverage indicators, so will those that show Hillary or Obama being Inaugurated be shown to be irrelevant.

This past week was no surprise to me.

I knew that eventually Bill would be gone from Chappaqua long enough for Hillary to get overconfident and reveal who she really is.

A pacifist appeasing rude loather of the military.

The same Hillary that didn't allow Officers to war uniforms in her White
House office or in her presence.

The Dems will make sure we win the presidency in 2008.

Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
The HinzSight Report
The Minority Report
Race 4 2008
http://www.win-the-war.com/

...this vignette is a perfect example of why the GOP lost its majority in Congress

[This blog is not a hit piece on McCain. I'm an issues guy. This is a hit piece on spineless Republicans. I am a Republican. No elected Republican, no not ONE, has adequately repudiated the Democrats' behavior in the Petraeus hearing]

But this vignette is a perfect example of why the GOP lost its majority in Congress despite the conservative views of a majority of Americans; why the American people have not risen up against unpatriotic attacks on President Bush and the troops for the past four yours; and why it has taken so long for President Bush and the troops to finally break thru and get more Iraqis to join the fight against the extremists lest they find themselves at their mercy if "friends respected by McCain" gained enough power to abandon the fight.

On Powerline:

John McCain was "feeling it" during his blogger phone conference today. And why not? The domestic political climate with respect to Iraq seems to have improved, and he's doing better in virtually every poll.

McCain began by calling on the Democrats to repudiate the aspersions cast by Moveon.org on the patriotism and integrity of General Petraeus. McCain reminded us that he repudiated what he considered attacks on the patriotism of Max Cleland and John Kerry. Later in the call, he declined an invitation to come down hard on the Democrats' conduct during the hearings this week. McCain said he wants to maintain a respectful relationship with the war critics in Congress, but added that they seem to have made up their minds.

Hillary, Wexler, Reid, Lantos, Hagel, Boxer etc, all called the General a liar.

Move On was supposed to serve as "cover" for Dems who didn't want to call the General a liar in public. But the Dems plus Hagel couldn't help themselves.

So now, elected Republicans serve as the substitute cover for the Dems in Congress. It’s not enough to call on Dems to repudiate Move on.

The Dems themselves need to be bluntly repudiated by elected Republicans.

Is it too much to ask that we have at least one patriotic party that will challenge unpatriotic statements by elected representatives?

Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
The HinzSight Report
The Minority Report
Race 4 2008
http://www.win-the-war.com/

I am not easily shocked by the outrageous things Democrats say about our war efforts and haven't been since the birth of bushlied 72 hours after our invasion of Iraq.

But I'll never forget the dropping of this rooster's jaw when, soon after the third free election in Iraq some two years ago, Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.) stated that he feared America's eventual withdrawal from Iraq would be seen as a SUCCESS.

That's right, he craves that America's effort in Iraq be seen by the world as failure, even if it isn't.

So it must be his worst nightmare that America is increasingly seen as winning the war, even by liberal reporters that previously opposed the invasion and that have called for our withdrawal for over two years.

The punch to Okinawa Jack's gut came today:

BAGHDAD (AP) - The top American commander in Iraq said Wednesday he was preparing recommendations on troop cuts before he returns to Washington next month for a report to Congress, and believes the U.S. footprint in Iraq will have to be "a good bit smaller" by next summer.

But he cautioned against a quick or significant U.S. withdrawal that could surrender "the gains we have fought so hard to achieve."

Gen. David Petraeus said the "horrific and indiscriminate attacks" that killed at least 250 Yazidis, an ancient religious sect, in northwestern Iraq Tuesday night were the work of al-Qaida in Iraq. That would bolster his argument, he said, against too quickly drawing down the 30,000 additional U.S. troops deployed in the first half of the year.

Read the whole AP report here.

The only thing more important than winning is that our winning be widely understood so as to deter would be potential future enemies and encourage would be potential future allies, so as to make America safer.

The Democrats who have painted themselves into a corner where American victory is bad news for them will soon face the prospect of insisting that a successful American general calling for troop reductions in the wake of victory is a liar and that while they favor troop reductions, that Americans must see their withdrawal as humiliating defeat.

One wonders if they will hire Hollywood to stage a fake helicopter scene from Baghdad.

Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer

The Minority Report
www.hinzSightreport.com
www.race42008.com
www.win-the-war.com

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

The GOP is so obsessed with being liked and admired by the inside the beltway elitists in the media that they forgot to hammer away at the Dem's desire to subsidize illegals with legal's tax money.

The Dem Party is virtually an enemy of the Country in whose legislature they serve whether the issue is war or immigration, but the GOP would rather play hall monitor and impress the press corps with a focus on the minutia of Robert's Rules of Order.

Earth to GOP: The People's House can change the rules by majority vote. Let them pass anything and denounce them for it loudly and bluntly and in moral terms that make them mad.

Expose the appeasing, open border socialist world citizens that they are.

Rather then put the American people to sleep over parliamentary Leviticusism.

Earth again to GOP: The American people agree with us on substance, so preach it.

Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
The HinzSight Report
The Minority Report
Race 4 2008
http://www.win-the-war.com/

See links to audio here and here.

I don't think I have to explain what a sea change this is in Iraqi thinking, especially given our abandonment of them in 1991 and the 24/7 promise to al Qaeda calls for abandonment for the last 3 years by the leadership of the Democratic Party and most elected DC Democrats.

What I may need to remind some here of is who is most responsible for this sea change.

President George W. "the Liberator" Bush is responsible. He has never wavered in his commitment to keep faith with the millions of Iraqis that voted and that risk their lives daily fighting with our American and Coalition forces against al Qaeda and other forces of extremism that desire to defeat us and the forces of moderation in the Middle East.

Newt Gingrich said it best today on FNS when he challenged Russ Feingold and others in the appeasement party when he said that the left wing of the Democratic Party wants the United States to lose in Iraq, without a thought to our friends in Iraq who would be slaughtered if we left precipitously. He seemed to be trying to guilt the Dems into supporting the war, or more likely, painting the image of the mean-spirited Dems in the minds of viewers.

Critics of the Commander in Chief can carp about this or that, but it is Bush's will made America's will that is more responsible for the good news from Iraq today than any surge or change in strategy.

Like JFK said, America does things not because they are easy, but because they are hard, and our work in Iraq would have been no less hard no matter the generals, armchair or retired, we had listened to in 2003 (even if Turkey had not betrayed us).

The fact is that just by staying the course, we have broken thru the minds of many Iraqis.

Not leaving is what matters most. Showing the world that America can take a tough fight is what matters.

America never lacked for the troops to stick it out whether it was Patton's troops in WWII; MacArthur's in Korea; ours and South Vietnam's in 1973-75; ours in 1991 or ours in Somalia.

But the difference now and for the last 4 years is that we have a CINC that shares the spine that won in 1776 and since when we had to win.

George W. Bush has convinced Iraqis that we are there to stay and in so doing has enabled and inspired them to join us against the extremists in their midst.

Americans and Iraqis and many freedom loving Arabs and Muslims will forever be grateful that George W. Bush passed this way.

Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
The HinzSight Report
The Minority Report
Race 4 2008

Originally submitted for publication to

http://www.win-the-war.com/