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Scott Johnson’s “Ten Theses on President-Elect Obama”
Mostly the things that Obama did right in his campaign — right, at least, from the tactical standpoint.

These four points, however, need to highlighted:

7. The campaign gave new meaning to the term “hoist on his own petard.” Obama’s incredible fundraising prowess outside the system of public financing should kill McCain-Feingold on practical grounds after it should have been killed on constitutional grounds.

8. Despite his thoroughgoing liberalism, Obama did not run as a liberal. Liberals can run successfully for president under camouflage donned for the occasion. The camouflage will be accorded respect and deference by the press like that accorded the Emperor’s new clothes.

9. Senator McCain ran a flawed, weirdly constrained but honorable campaign against Barack Obama under circumstances that were aggravated from the difficult to the impossible. No other Republican candidate could have overcome them or run a more successful campaign.

10. The substantially enhanced Democratic majorities in Congress stand poised to pass a raft of legislation that ranges from the destructive to the abominable and the tyrannical. It will serve as an early challenge to the judgment of President Obama, and to the efficacy of the loyal opposition.

[I've fixed two or three typs.]

About Number 9:
Jennifer Rubin’s “Top Thirty Errors That Doomed McCain”

Johnson’s Point Seven, about McCain Feingold, belongs on Rubin’s list as well, so make that “Thirty One Errors”.

So, here we go:

The amazing thing is, that although reporting has been overwhelmingly favorable for Obama, although even comics are profoundly pro-O and anti-America, although Obama has enormously outspent McCain, the polling is still running neck and neck.

That means two things:

First, a huge chunk of the American people are not buying the hype, and are deeply suspicious of The One, because many of the folks who will be voting for McCain regard him as a left-wing Democrat. They (we) long for a real small-government Republican. I mean, our rallying cry has been “McCain -08: because I love my Country more than I hate John McCain.” If there were a real SGR candidate, and a real open press, Obama would have already conceded.

Second, the other huge chunk of the American people are, in Stalin’s immortal phrase, “useful idiots”. The worst thing is, the very worst thing, is that many of them are well educated, well-meaning people whom I deeply respect and even count as friends in other ways.

I’m sorry, folks, but even if McCain wins, this last indicates that the American body politic is rotten. There is no way, no way in hell, that Obama should ever have made it to the national stage. One of Daley’s Congresspuppets, yes. Beyond that — The American people have shown, conclusively, that they bloody well deserve whatever happens next.

John McCain wants you to give him the oar to the canoe. He plans to use it to fend off some of the big rocks along the way, but he’s not really going to paddle, and we’re going to continue to drift downstream towards the roaring waterfall of socialism.

B. Hussein Obama also wants the oar. He plans to paddle like mad for the waterfall, because, he says, that will get us away from those rocks as quickly as possible.

The idea that anybody should paddle us towards the shore, so that we can get out and buy our own canoes from that canoe store and paddle them ourselves, or stand in the shallows and fish, or open up our own store, or go to the lodge for a hot shower and a nice steak, or go hiking or god forbid hunting, is apparently totally out of the question.

[Moved to its own post from the entry below.]

“In what kind of nation, do the media investigate critics more than candidates?”

Rick at Classical Values investigates the media’s investigation of, yes, Joe the Plumber. Plenty of links, all the best quotes.

Rick asks a lot of great questions, including:

…Why is [the] private life of an aspiring small business owner of more interest than Barack Obama’s drug dealer?

Or for that matter, B. Hussein Obama’s political mentors, teachers, and associates?

Rick comments:

The way they have done a complete, invasive background check on this citizen is shocking. While few of us would withstand close scrutiny, what annoys me the most is that the dirt-digging has been done by the news media, and they have now essentially sicced the bureaucrats on this guy.

Rick ends with another question:

Well then, suppose I were to ask a question about my inability to ask a question? Something like this:

Senator Obama, if I were to ask you a tough question, why would my personal lifestyle be considered more worthy of investigation than yours?

Nah, I’d better not ask.

Wouldn’t want to be subject to an investigation.

Read the whole damning thing. Follow Rick’s links.

And ask yourself the question, “Why should I want this guy and his friends to be in control of my life? Why should I want to give this guy and his friends my banking and health care records? Why should I have to hesitate for even a second as to whether or not it’s safe to ask B. Hussein Obama what he plans to do with my life, once I hand him the keys?”

McCain gags and appears to grab at Hussein's ass.

This is a frame grab from this video, which makes it clear that the apparent ass-grab is a result of camera angle. The expression, however, appears to be authentic.

Via Pharyngula, whose readers seem to think McCain is expressing his uncontrollable man-lust.

I am generally not a fan of this kind of shot, in service to any candidate, because if you continuously photograph anybody who is not a corpse or a robot, you will catch them out in embarrassing poses and expressions. Nevertheless, funny is funny, fair is fair.

Here’s my other favorite untended self-cartoon, of the glueball-wormening Goreacle His Own Self:

[Via Uncyclopedia, although at the time, this image was everywhere. Speaking of the Uncyclopedia, read this on Political Advertising.]

Classical Values asks us to compare the hatred and intolerance displayed by supporters of McCain and Obama:

First, an Obama supporter braves a McCain mob to ask the questions, “Do you think Obama is a terrorist? Why did McCain stand on a stage with him?” :

[YouTube link.]

My questions: “Do you think McCain is a racist warmonger? Why did Obama share a stage with him?”

[If there is any one notable characteristic of the effort to discredit McCain among his own supporters, it's the utter failure to recognize that every criticism raised by Obamites applies ten or hundredfold to their own candidate.]

Next, a video that’s been going around of rowdy McCain fanatics disrupting the lives of peaceful, tolerant Manhattan dwellers:

[YouTube link.]

Bloodthirsty Warmonger McCain with sharp teeth, bloody mouth.

More anti-McCain/Palin violent outrage at Michelle Malkin.

Vanishing Point:

[Youtube link.]

Thelma and Louise:

[YouTube link.]

In one, a loner who’s never hurt anyone rams a bulldozer blockade set up by the very authorities who have given him no other choice but abject surrender, and dies in a huge fireball witnessed by dozens of fans.

In the other, two women who have killed a man [admittedly in self defense], blown up an oil tanker, and robbed a convenience store, drive off a cliff, witnessed only by the one law officer on their side and a few of his colleagues. Rather than showing us the crash, the screen fades to white, leaving us the illusion that they are flying to freedom.

Essay question:
Which ending is emblematic of the fate of the nation if John McCain is elected, and which belongs to B. Hussein Obama?

Bonus Question:
Is it better to end up like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, two handsome and charismatic murdering robbers who charge out into a hopeless gun battle with the Bolivian Army? [Embed disabled.]

Edwin Leap says the most important thing you will read today:

…The modern emergency department is a kind of social sciences laboratory.  In fact, about 30 years into the existence of the specialty of emergency medicine, I feel comfortable saying that we have shown.with remarkable precision that the more radical social revolutions of the 20th century were shameful, stunning failures.  And the reason I can say it is not based on carefully designed studies, or because I’ve observed it from the comfort of the ivory tower of academia, but because I, and many others like me, treat the casualties of those social revolutions day, after day, after day.  Some examples, you ask?

• Drug use is normal, good, relaxing and enlightening.
• Sex is natural and anyone who tries to limit sex is an old fashioned prude
• The way to fix poverty is to give services, food and money to them, so that they will feel compelled to improve themselves
• Families can be defined in any way, family integrity is over-rated and men are entirely unnecessary for a proper home!
• Religion is an impedance to modern thought, and we need to be liberated from it by the clear, crystal light of pure science.

The mantra of ‘free love’ that began in the 60’s wasn’t about liberation; it was about enslavement to the desires of those who started it and who wanted no restraint on their behavior.
…
Do you know why I see children who are anxious and afraid? Do you know why children seek each other out for sex, and have children of their own at such young ages? Because they are terrified. Why is that? They lack the peace of safe and stable families. They lack the boundaries and discipline, born of love, that proper families give. They want the protection, wisdom, affection of a man and woman, together for the long haul. Without those things, we see what we do in the ER; teen mothers, teen fathers, irresponsible parents shifting sexual alliances from week to week, month to month, moving in with lovers and moving away from them.

Read the whole thing. I excerpt here only the barest whiff of the rotting corpse he wants taken off life support.

As noted in comments there, ERs have a huge selection bias. Also, I believe there’s a big difference between condemning bad behavior socially, and punishing it with the law. Sure, drugs are bad, but the War on Drugs is even worse, because it deprives even the sober of their freedom.

Nevertheless, the attitudes Leap describes are real. My generation, the hippie generation, the peace and love and grooviness generation, is to blame, and we will go down in history as social traitors who destroyed, in only one or two generations, the richest, freest, most powerful nation that has ever been.

===

I cannot resist adding: Obama and his party whole-heartedly embrace the attitudes and policies Leap excoriates. The eyes of Palin, her running mate, and their party leaders, are clouded by decades of socialist, feel-good pap, but they dimly perceive the truth (McCain, of course, survived years of the tender, loving instruction of Obama’s idols), and they are struggling, however weakly, to campaign on the twin pillars of liberty and duty.

I was completely tickled by the nomination of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as Senator John McCain’s running mate, simply because it so obviously threw both the press and the Obamessiah campaign into such a tizzy. I have not laughed so hard and so long in a long time, as I did watching CNN “cover” the announcement last Thursday.

It’s hard not to let that good humor spill over into outright approval, particularly since her acceptance speech said many things I agree with, particularly Palin’s attacks on her opponents.

Still:

I don’t want “an advocate in the White House”.

I just want you creeps to stay out of my way.

Billy Beck, helping me keep things in perspective.

And, in the midst of entirely-justified conservative and even libertarian howling about the hypocrisy of the Obama campaign, and the socialist/liberal camp generally, The Daily Show reminds us that politicians are all lying, hypocritical thugs who do not deserve the power to tell us how to live our lives:

Via The Agitator, and do read the comments there.

A man armed with a semiautomatic handgun walked calmly into the McCain campaign field office in Stratham, New Hampshire at around 3:05 PM this afternoon.

…then he had a nice chat with one of the campaign volunteers there, picked up some yard signs and bumper stickers, and drove to the grocery store to grab a few things for dinner.

[via MassBackwards]