TOBY PETZOLD

Dan Collins said I had to read this, so I did. Of Barack Hussein Obama, Michael Knox Beran writes:

His charisma is grounded in empathy rather than authority, confessional candor rather than muscular strength, metrosexual mildness rather than masculine testosterone. His power of sympathetic insight is said to be uncanny: “Everybody who’s dealt with him,” columnist David Brooks says, “has a story about a time when they felt Obama profoundly listened to them and understood them.” His two books are written in the empathetic-confessional mode that his most prominent benefactress, Oprah, favors; he is her political healer in roughly the same way that Dr. Phil was once her pop-psychology one. The collectivist dream, Obama instinctively understands, is less scary, more sympathetic, when served up by mama (or by mama in drag).

My greatest concern now is that the deconstructions of this unqualified liar will become so numerous and varied that they will merely add kindling to the fire of his fascination —and make Obama the indispensable man of the age. Are we Americans far enough removed from the sinister influences of Big Media? Can someone such as The One —as McCain is now said to be calling him— really wield that much power over the minds of enough people to seize the most powerful office in the world? The contempt of the Democratic Party for this country deeply alienates me when I can bear to think of it. Their choice strikes me as nothing short of anti-American.

Peter Wehner unloads on the Eleven Percenters’ Democratic half with respect to the success of the surge in the War for Iraq. The Democrats, he concludes:

have compounded their initial bad judgment about the surge with reckless obstinacy. As ethno-sectarian violence in Iraq rapidly declined, as al Qaeda absorbed tremendous military blows, and as political accommodation and legislative achievements have emerged, Democrats, rather than welcoming the progress, grew agitated. They embraced with religious zeal the belief that the Iraq war was lost; they therefore viewed the success of the surge as a terribly inconvenient development, one they sought to deny to the point that they looked silly and out of touch. Worse, Democrats acted as if they had a vested interest in an American defeat.

Rarely has a political party been so uniformly wrong, in such an obvious way, on such an important matter. And when Americans cast their vote on November 4, they should carefully consider how Barack Obama and the entire Democratic party fought ferociously and relentlessly to undermine a policy that has worked extraordinarily well and may yet prove to be among the most successful military plans in modern times.

Not only are the Democrats defeatists, but they have nominated an unqualified liar for the ostensible reason that he —and not Hillary— will act on his promise to them to end the war. But now that the war has already been won in large measure because of a commitment to victory and to political stability that Obama repeatedly denied our military could ever accomplish, what is he to say? Who knows? No one cares because it isn’t what he has to say that’s so damned mesmerizing, but how he says it. It’s all so Kennedyesque and wonderful and epochal in its significance.

Enjoy telling our troops in Iraq that they have accomplished nothing. Make a mockery of the very idea of leadership by turning this little junket of yours into a Big Media suckfest. Go and give us a speech on peace before a Prussian war memorial, Barry. Who says you have no sense of humor?

Thanks to Charles Johnson, have a look at what the Village Voice’s Nat Hentoff is saying about the unqualified liar Barack Obama (emphases mine):

But after abandoning his pledge to abide by public financing, this apostle of cleansing the political culture is now going after the high rollers. As the July 3 New York Times reported, “Last week, the Obama campaign collected about $5 million at an event featuring celebrities in Los Angeles. The evening began with a dinner at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for more than 200 people who had contributed $28,500 per couple, or raised $50,000.” Then there is the current furor among a rising number of Obama contributors with wallets far below the $50,000-a-pop crowd about his change on the “compromise” FISA Amendments Act of 2008 that passed the House and Senate, and has been signed by the grateful president.

The flimflam candidate had assured his faithful enthusiasts that he would filibuster this bill (which will immunize the telecommunications companies that enabled the president to break the law in his once-secret warrantless wiretapping) that turned our privacy rights upside down and out.

Now, by dismissing the scores of lawsuits against these companies from Americans wanting to know whether they’ve been ensnared in this giant government-spun Web, the president and such supporters as Obama will have made it close to impossible to conduct meaningful investigations of the intricate nexus of the ways these telecommunications giants can collect leads to Americans with no connections to terrorism — and could continue to so long as they’re assured by a future lawless administration that national security demands breaking another law.

Barack Hussein Obama is now embarking upon a world tour that will be accompanied by the sort of world-class Big Media attention that only a visit to these shores by the Pope himself would garner. (John McCain, by contrast, has been to Iraq at least seven times that I know of and has received almost no publicity for it.) So it is clear to anyone with any modicum of intellectual honesty that the stampede to get this unqualified liar elected will utterly crush any doubts raised about his political integrity. These next few months —as Hentoff and Johnson and you and I will come to learn— will not be about honest examinations of Obama’s positions and beliefs, but about pushing the anti-American and internationalist Leftist agenda of post-racial this and post-partisan that. There is a danger in what is unfolding right now that is being ignored by the major networks and papers because of the general lack of courage demonstrated by an overwhelmingly white, liberal, and yankee propaganda community that doesn’t want to upset The Narrative.

Well, fuck The Narrative. I got the New Narrative, hippies: no crypto-Muslim black nationalist commies in the White House.

Ever. 

On the Power Line, Paul Mirengoff posts on the following remark that Barack Hussein Obama made in a speech earlier this month in Colorado:

We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.

What is he talking about? As Mirengoff puts it:

I’m not suggesting that Obama would actually try to establish a domestic security force as powerful as our current military, only that deep-down it appears he wouldl [sic] like to do something of the kind.

I don’t like Barack Hussein Obama. I regard his nomination as a danger to this Republic and I urge all real Americans to reject him utterly.

Oh, and if you plan on buying a gun to protect yourself and yours, I recommend that you do it sooner rather than later. If there’s anything a police state can’t tolerate, it’s an armed citizenry.

Charles Krauthammer pegs Barry Hussein Obama as the phoniest bastard of the past week:

In last week’s column, I thought I had thoroughly chronicled Obama’s brazen reversals of position and abandonment of principles — on public financing of campaigns, on NAFTA, on telecom immunity for post-Sept. 11 wiretaps, on unconditional talks with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — as he moved to the center for the general election campaign. I misjudged him. He was just getting started.

Last week, when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, Obama immediately declared that he agreed with the decision. This is after his campaign explicitly told the Chicago Tribune last November that he believes the D.C. gun ban is constitutional.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton explains the inexplicable by calling the November — i.e., the primary season — statement “inartful.” Which suggests a first entry in the Obamaworld dictionary — “Inartful: clear and straightforward, lacking the artistry that allows subsequent self-refutation and denial.”

“Swiftboating” is another word the Democrats use that doesn’t mean what they think it means. Who knows how their minds work? At this point, it must be said that they’ve gone soft because they aren’t really thinking through their support of this charlatan, but feeling it. It’s an embarrassment because most of them do not have the intellectual integrity to hold their man accountable for his many major renegings of the past three weeks. They’re just giving him a pass on everything because they are his bitches. He owns their sorry hippie asses and is making no secret of that in how he now behaves.

The whole thing, as Bill Clinton said, is a fairy tale.

Regarding Barry Hussein Obama’s latest lie —this time about Iraq— ABC News’ Rick Klein writes:

There’s been lots of speculation this week about whether Sen. Barack Obama has an Iraq problem. He does now.

His comments Thursday, saying that he will “continue to refine” his plan to withdraw combat troops from Iraq inside of 16 months, seems likely to leave the campaign on the defensive on this issue for days or weeks.

And it increases the likelihood that his trip to Iraq later this month will not turn out like Obama wants it to.

Well, Barry doesn’t even want to go to Iraq, but McCain has apparently shamed him into it. This horseshit about “refining” his position on the withdrawal of our troops makes Obama just another lying hack politician. Klein concludes:

Obama’s migration to the political center has been well-documented, and is already a frame McCain is building around his candidacy. But Iraq — this is qualitatively different, an issue that lives on a higher plane, since opposing the war was the rationale for his candidacy in the first place.

Being opposed to the war may have been a major selling point, but let’s not lie about Obama’s candidacy. He is where he is because of his race. Period. The Leftists have taken over the Democratic Party and have installed an absolute fucking clown on their Presidential ticket for the sake of identity politics.

Obama’s nomination is the final proof of the Democratic Party’s contempt for their own country.

Yesterday, Obama’s surrogate, Wesley Clark, told Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation that McCain’s service in the Viet Nam War was nothing too relevant to his leadership. Here’s part of their exchange (emphases mine):

SCHIEFFER: Well you, you went so far as to say that you thought John McCain was, quote, and these are your words, “untested and untried,” And I must say I, I had to read that twice, because you’re talking about somebody who was a prisoner of war. He was a squadron commander of the largest squadron in the Navy. He’s been on the Senate Armed Services Committee for lo these many years. How can you say that John McCain is un- untested and untried? General?

CLARK: Because in the matters of national security policy making, it’s a matter of understanding risk. It’s a matter of gauging your opponents, and it’s a matter of being held accountable. John McCain’s never done any of that in his official positions. I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in Armed Forces as a prisoner of war. He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in Air- in the Navy that he commanded, it wasn’t a wartime squadron. He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say, ‘I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk? What about your reputation? How do we handle it-’

What is he even talking about? What an absolute fucking idiot. What part of Obama’s experience in foreign policy and wartime diplomacy does this dolt hold above McCain’s decades of real experience? Where is the evidence of Obama’s superior judgement? Clark’s “argument” is an embarrassment to stupidity itself. 

Not to be outdone, another of Obama’s surrogates, former NSC member Rand Beers, told a public audience today that McCain’s experience as a POW works against him:

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

“Sadly, Sen. McCain was not available during those times, and I say that with all due respect to him,” said informal Obama adviser Rand Beers. “I think that the notion that the members of the Senate who were in the ground forces or who were ashore in Vietnam have a very different view of Vietnam and the cost that you described than John McCain does because he was in isolation essentially for many of those years and did not experience the turmoil here or the challenges that were involved for those of us who served in Vietnam during the Vietnam war.”

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

McCain spent five years in captivity as a POW in North Vietnam.

It’s hard to imagine a reason why Obama would send these idiots out into the world on his behalf to question the relevance of John McCain’s service in the Viet Nam War. Is Obama somehow trying out a line of attack to suggest that McCain is somehow unfit or unsound because of his years of isolation as a prisoner of war? If so, it’s an amazingly dirty angle to take for someone who has a lot to prove to the veterans of Middle America.

Let’s wait for the backlash and the inevitable disavowals. 

UPDATE: Oops! I didn’t realize that Obama has already disavowed Clark’s idiocy. Andrea Mitchell says:

Here’s a statement from Obama spokesman Bill Burton on Wes Clark’s controversial comments about McCain’s military service. “As he’s said many times before, Senator Obama honors and respects Senator McCain’s service, and of course he rejects yesterday’s statement by General Clark.”

It will not be enough to be factually correct about Barack Obama’s incompetence to defeat him this November; it may be only just enough to damage him irreparably —day by day and by all means necessary. Smug conservative writers and strategists need to forget about the latest flip-flop and concentrate on those areas of Obamessiah’s character and judgement that are most amenable to question and doubt.

Obama reminds me a little bit of Ross Perot. Both of his campaigns were mediaphobic (except for the CNN infomercials) and stage-managed until they started to break down in a major way because of his over-weening sense of self. The nut came out and stayed. With Obama, I don’t think there is a nut; there’s only a lack of conscience and an outsized ego. And with an ego like his, the key to bringing him down is to get him to over-correct in its defense since he has no actual humility. But we’ve only got four months to go. There’s a lot to be done to ensure that the absurdity of Obama’s candidacy never succeeds on Election Day.

Word on the street is that Bill Clinton hates him some Barack Obama (emphasis mine):

It has long been known that Mr Clinton is angry at the way his own reputation was tarnished during the primary battle when several of his comments were interpreted as racist.

But his lingering fury has shocked his friends. The Democrat told the Telegraph: “He’s been angry for a while. But everyone thought he would get over it. He hasn’t. I’ve spoken to a couple of people who he’s been in contact with and he is mad as hell.

“He’s saying he’s not going to reach out, that Obama has to come to him. One person told me that Bill said Obama would have to quote kiss my ass close quote, if he wants his support.

“You can’t talk like that about Obama - he’s the nominee of your party, not some house boy you can order around.

That’s hysterical. Is it true? I don’t know. But I think that what Hillary attempted to do before she finally conceded —once the desperation had became incumbent upon her— is something that Bill can still do himself: serve the public good by attacking Obama, who is a charlatan and demagogue. In fact, I hope he winds up endorsing McCain, which would be a proxy gesture for Hillary since she obviously regards him as better qualified to be President than Obama.

And, then, Joe Lieberman will have to surrender the crown for Most Disloyal Democrat ever to the Big Dog. In the annals of partisan repudiation, what could compare? TR running against Taft? I would love to see Clinton do this. His ego almost demands it: he can still have a third term if HRC decides to run again in 2012.

A lot of people I read have been linking to Joseph A. Palermo’s ham-handedness at today’s Huffington Post because it is so monumentally stupid:

Jon Stewart and The Daily Show should be mindful whenever Obama is the target of their satire that they don’t end up regurgitating Republican talking points. The Daily Show is far more influential than it was four years ago when Bush still had millions of people duped. The producers should be careful when poking fun at Obama not to provide fuel for the right-wing slime machine. Poke fun at Obama all you want, but do it in a way that also reveals the Republicans’ mendacity and hypocrisy.

Palermo’s fear of what his party has done is so fragrant that he needs someone to follow him around to clear the stink lines emanating from his head. Threatening Jon Stewart with the disapproval of the Obamatons? Giving Stewart directions on how to criticize Obama?  What a childish head-zealot. There are three things I will never understand: veganism, scat, and liberals who don’t notice liberal bias in Big Media. I mean, Jee-zus.

Oh, and I don’t want to let a single calendar month between now and November go by without my explicit request that the Democratic Party apologize to me for permitting this nonsense. What have you done to my former party? The one that Bill and Hillary Clinton invited me into before the Big Dog’s lies became too much and I went into protest voter mode until 11 September 2001. You Eleven Percenters are crap to me and I have zero respect for the Democratic Party for this effrontery. Is Obama in any way remarkable on the merits? Look at someone like Ted Kennedy. That’s a guy you can really get a hate-on for. I once had a boss who would routinely excuse himself with newspaper in one hand and his spit-cup in the other to go “take a Ted Kennedy.” Love him or hate him, the man inspires genuine reaction and occupies a large place in our lifetimes. In mine, I’ve never known an America without Ted Kennedy —and I’m pushing forty! What claim on History and Americanism can Obama make? Very little. He showed up without warrant and the idiots went to drooling. I don’t like him. I don’t trust him. And it’s hard to respect people who think he is qualified to be the most powerful man in the world in this season of his life. Maybe another season. Fine. But Obama will have to lose much if ever hopes to win again.