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.

Barry, when the only thing that would validate your position on the War for Iraq, insofar as you could be said to have one, is the sudden escalation of violence there, particularly aginst our troops, it would be best for you to come to terms with reality and tell the hippies in your party to shut up and sit down. The war is won —if we choose to leave there on terms that serve our wider strategic interests in the region. If we withdraw in such a way that reawakens the hostile elements in Iraq just because you want to keep to some arbitrary date (a “date certain,” indeed), then you will have squandered what has been won at great cost for mere political purposes. Nobody oughta give a damn what your anti-military/anti-war party says about what Iraq really is and what we’re accomplishing there because all Iraq has ever been to you is a fundraising cause. Lots of Democrats supported the war in the beginning because Iraq had been festering for years. Even Bill Clinton knew Iraq was a danger —and officially endorsed regime change in Iraq as the policy of this country. But you’re to the left of them all. You’re supposedly better than them all because of your “superior” judgement —but that’s garbage and you know it. Right now, because of your lack of judgement and your lack of integrity, you are allowing yourself to be bullied by the anti-war Left for fear of offending them when you know that we have succeeded in Iraq. Your judgement is apparently inferior to those you have long insulted as incompetent. What are you going to be saying to the troops? Are you going to look them in the eye and tell them that they haven’t accomplished anything and that their sacrifices have been for naught? Do you have any optimism to share with a country thats democratic and free market future owes itself to our efforts there? I doubt it. But you’ll be sure to dispense platitudes like the soft soap of your ideology. The Eurofreaks will eat it up and the nauseating propagandists travelling with you will coo and moan at your every utterance, but maybe there’s just enough of us still here in America who won’t buy your lies and are ready to call you on them every time.

So, let’s have it, tough guy. Let’s see you shock and awe the Democratic Party with the news they haven’t bothered to hear —which is that we have succeeded in Iraq and have made a better world possible because of it. But let them down easy, Barry. You’re finally going to have to say something that matters. Don’t flub your lines.

What an amazing Wimbledon final! Thanks to both of you guys for such a great match and for being such gentlemen.

The Left Coaster bloglord Steve Soto writes:

Obama needs to attack McCain’s perceived strengths and turn them into at least a net zero if not a liability. For guidance, see what Rove did to Kerry with the Swifties and then envision what Obama should do to McCain on national security and terrorism.

My old friend sees Obama attacking McCain’s military experience as a Rovian strategy (which, in Democratic circles, has lost little of its supernatural power to stupefy), but this is wrong for a very simple reason: John McCain didn’t come home from Viet Nam and slander America’s military; John Kerry did. I don’t know why Soto hasn’t figured this out yet, but it’s very clear. Americans don’t like people who slander the military, even when it’s a veteran. That’s why people have been kicking Wesley Clark’s idiotic ass all over creation the past several days. Americans know when someone’s a suckass sack of it.

The Swift Boat Veterans told the truth and shared their opinions about Kerry and it destroyed him. There is no plausible parallel in McCain’s life. The American People overwhelmingly perceive that McCain is a real patriot. Thus, when the cosmopolitan and better-than-you Barry Hussein Obama sends in the clowns to attack McCain, it stinks in the nostrils of real Americans. They simply won’t have it.

Please note again that Obama has done nothing but fuck up ever since he secured the nomination —and yet he continues to be shielded by a compliant press. Why is this happening? Because Big Media are afraid to be perceived as picking on Obamessiah. Because they are, for that reason, moral and intellectual snatches.

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.

Only two months ago, Tim Russert asked Barack Obama:

“What has the controversy over Reverend Jeremiah Wright done to your campaign?”

To which the junior Senator from Illinois said:

Well, obviously it’s distracted us.  I mean, we ended up spending a lot of time talking about Reverend Wright instead of talking about gas prices and food prices and the situation in Iraq.  And so it, it’s, it wasn’t welcome.

The attention that’s been paid to the issue of Jeremiah Wright is a function of how little we know about this man who presumes to seek the Presidency before his time. There’s no actual reason to suppose that Obama would have anything specific to say about energy or food inflation or a war he doesn’t understand, anyway, so where else should the country’s curiosity run?

But, you know, I think that the American people understand that when I joined Trinity United Church of Christ, I was committing not to Pastor Wright, I was committing to a church and I was committing to Christ.

I don’t know how to believe this statement. Where would one begin, Senator? The American People don’t “understand” anything about your religious choices because they don’t even know you. Do you understand that? The American People’s understanding of you as a religious person of any kind consists of watching you get busted belonging to a radical anti-American church and then —subsequent to Russert’s question here, having owned and disowned Wright— leaving that church altogether when it became too much of a “distraction.” What kind of man abandons his church for political gain? Why, the very same kind of man who would join a church for political gain.

And it is a wonderful church.  It’s a member of the United Church of Christ, a denomination that dates back to the battles around abolition.  It has lived out, I think the, the social gospel by dealing with poverty and providing shelter to the homeless and, and working on critical issues that make me very proud.  And, as a consequence, when Reverend Wright, who married me and baptized our, our children, when he made those statements, or I learned of those statements that I found so objectionable, I, I felt that they didn’t define him. 

“Or I learned of those statements”? This is a subliminal word-tool he’s using to provide a temporal space between all of the bigoted crap Wright was spewing and himself. See, he’s absolved of any responsibility for adhering to such rhetoric because he just happened to have become informed of these “objectionable” outbursts only later. Is this a lie that he really hopes to sustain? If it is ever shown that Obama was in attendance when Wright was holding forth on the evils of America —which would be pretty much any time, I suspect— then the baptist will have drowned his messiah right there on the Chicago River.

And so I spoke in Philadelphia about these issues and tried to construct, you know, a, a conversation about issues of race.  But when I saw, this week, him come out and speak in a way that was just as divisive, that didn’t explain or apologize, but rather worsened some of the comments that he had made previously, I felt it was very important to make clear that that’s not who I am, that’s not who I stand for.  I don’t think it represented well the church or the African-American church.  And I had to make a clear statement.  Hopefully we’ve been able to put it behind us.

Not a chance, gasbag. Then again, now that NBC’s integrity quotient has sustained a devastating loss, it’s possible that your abettors on that network —as well as similarly-minded hacks elsewhere in Big Media— will help to paper over your despicable lack of religious authenticity and keep marketing you as a religion unto yourself.

Did anybody catch John McLaughlin this past weekend? He totally went off about how Barack Hussein Obama would not be the first black President! No. That distinction belongs to Warren Gamaliel Harding. Ha, ha. I don’t think I’d ever heard that before, but McLaughlin was as serious about it as he could be. Who knew? An old girlfriend of mine used to say that Beethoven was a blackamoor of some kind, but I was never too sure. We’re all very muttly, anyhow, so who should keep score? Not me: I’m a mutt myself.

My favorite Harding quote is actually from his father. I read it in some book in college and can’t remember exactly how it went, but Harding’s dad basically said that if Warren had been born a girl, he would have been “in the family way” early and often. Apparently, our 28th President was quite the swordsman. Or, as they say these days, a slut.

Race is interesting. Scientists keep denying it, but people keep buying it. Maybe they’re both right.

Now that the point of Hillary’s candidacy is moot, let a hundred post mortems bloom on how she lost and to what extent the Obama campaign used its manipulation of Big Media to make their man into some sort of demigod at her expense. What a disaster for the Republic! Hillary ran a poor campaign in many ways that her superior intelligence, command of the facts, and strength of purpose could not overcome. But the passes Big Media continues giving to Obama on the hollowness of his rhetoric and his many Quayle-worthy gaffes were rarely extended to Hillary. Her remarks on “hard-working white Americans” and June of 1968 were picked apart as though they were the final proof of her racism and the murderous intent of her soul. Who helped beat that horse for the past five months? Why, it was the very same liberals in Big Media who condemned Bill Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro as racists! Racists?! It doesn’t get much more perverse than that, but what are mere reputations worth when we must all make the mad, headlong dash into post-racial/post-American harmony with Obama Soter?

I don’t like Leftist demagogues. I don’t like the new ethos that says I must accept the nonsense of this candidacy lest I be branded a racist. Barack Hussein Obama is a mile wide and an inch thick. Why is that not more widely recognized? Because Big Media is in love. And we know what love is.

Hillary Rodham Clinton would have been the better choice for her party by far. Once McCain wins this November, I hope she makes it a point to remind the hippies of their stupidity.

I regard Hillary Rodham Clinton as a hero to her party and to our Republic. She is doing all she can to stop the madness of this choice her party has made tonight. I am proud of my vote for her a few months ago and I hope she becomes the next Majority Leader of the United States Senate —where she will very probably shine. And where I can abuse her from time to time for being a yankee liberal.

I’ve had Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” in my head all day.

It must be some measure of Ellas McDaniel’s power that he actually owns a particular beat. Thank you, sir. You are an American treasure.