TOBY PETZOLD

If John McCain would simply describe Barack Obama as a socialist, wouldn’t that almost compel a public discussion of what that word means? I don’t think some people know what’s involved. “Spreading the wealth around” may sound like a great idea to a teenager who’s working for minimum-wage, but to the 40 year-old businessperson who hired this kid to stock the shelves, it’s worrisome to consider that taxes and employee-related costs are going up. As they say, poor people never gave anybody a job —unless you count jobs created by the social necessity of cleaning up after these same people’s mistakes. At that sort of job creation, the social, intellectual, and economic underclasses excel.

The Obamatons are becoming ever more explicit in their grand schemes for the post-Republican, post-American paradise of Obama’s socialist state. They are beginning to bully and cheat in broad daylight. They are, like the terrorists they sympathize and associate with, becoming emboldened. And to what end? To disincentivize work? To undermine the bases of competition and self-worth? To suppress political dissent for the sake of the “common good”? Well, there’s one for you and nineteen for me. Think that’s fanciful? Did you ever think you would see the economic events of the past six weeks? Neither did I.

As before, when Obama very self-consciously denounced Jeremiah Wright and so was allowed to walk away from that particular history and alliance unscathed by public opinion, it is happening again with the renewed efforts at hanging Bill Ayers around the Unqualified Liar’s neck. Barack Obama is not being made to answer for anything. It is not expected that he would stand and deliver a justification for his life of ideological anti-Americanism. Why is that? Why are there so many millions of my fellow-citizens who do not value knowing the most basic things about a man whom they have ordained to be the President of the United States?

The desire for “change” is apparently so great in this country that the majority of us are determined to ignore things about Obama’s life that would have destroyed any other candidate. There’s no way to deny that, if John McCain were found to be a long-time associate of an abortion clinic bomber, he would be ruined. Yet Obama’s extensive ties to Bill Ayers are deemed irrelevant. It is an outrageous frustration of the simple principle of a common standard.

When Obama made his egomaniacal tour across Europe, it was common to hear and read news analysts confuse appearance with reality, everywhere claiming that the few hours Obama spent in this country or that were all that was needed to make him “Presidential.” Not make him appear to be Presidential but, in fact, to be Presidential.

Similarly, by having done nothing more than to assert his rejection of hateful garbagemen like Wright and Ayers, Obama has somehow expiated the sin of those associations; as though there were some incantatory power in the tenor of his voice that makes things so simply by being invoked. I see this as evidence of a diabolism that exists where novelty presumes to reset the proper order of things; the more conservative paradigm that made the pursuit of middle-classness a worthy goal in America now stands to be swapped with a totalitarian idealism and serf mentality. Americans are not naturally communistic, but the stock falls or morphs, so who knows what we are, anymore? Do we really no longer believe in our individualism inside of the great plurality? I can’t stand to think it.

I don’t want the New Socialism in America. I don’t want some arrogant demagogue and liar saying what’s what, either. I want a well-regulated free market where things like ethics, standards, and citizenship matter. I want us to remain a country —not just some fungible ”idea.”

No. That One.

Incidentally, I thought Brokaw sucked and, therefore, the “debate” sucked.

Onward to victory, President McCain!

Over at the Free Republic, joanie-f has an interesting post about Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and the politics of mortgages (emphases mine):

In the list of 354 lawmakers who have received contributions from the two mortgage giants since 1989, Barack Obama has collected the second highest dollar figure – behind only fellow leftist Christopher Dodd (D-CT). Recall, also, that Senator Obama has been in Washington for only three-plus years. So, despite the fact that this list includes the total of all of Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s contributions to these 354 lawmakers since 1989 (for the last nineteen years), Barack Obama has managed to eclipse all but one of his fellow senators/congressmen, some of whom have been on the Hill six times as long as he.

And democrats in total collected the large majority (57%) of those monies.

Let’s see: Franklin Raines and James Johnson, in addition to both being chairmen of Fannie Mae at one time or another, are now both major Obama supporters. Raines is one of his economic advisers —and Johnson was originally tasked to head up Obama’s Vice Presidential vetting committee until his dirty dealings with Countrywide forced him to stand aside. What sort of political debt was Obama repaying when he chose Johnson to serve in such a position of trust? What sort of advice on the mortgage lending crisis is Obama getting from someone who is widely seen as the epitome of the white-collar criminal supposedly depredating that industry? And Obama thinks he has points to score off McCain?

The mainstream media, and most of our leadership in Washington, would have us believe that this mortgage crisis (eventually scheduled to blossom into a full-fledge economic earthquake) occurred as the result of a combination of greed on the part of the banking/mortgage industry and ignorance on the part of prospective low-income homeowners.

That, however, is not the case. The mortgage crisis is the result of a purposeful, newly required relaxing of underwriting standards, largely foisted by our government on the banking/mortgage industry in the name of ‘ending discrimination’, and in spite of warnings from respected economists that such underwriting relaxations could lead to unprecedented defaults.

It was the regulators, not the banks, who relaxed these standards - at the behest of ‘community organizers’ and ‘progressive’ political activists.

Not everyone should own a house. Not everyone should own a car. Not everyone should go to college. Not everyone can keep a job or avoid the drink or take care of much beyond himself. We are not equally entitled to a certain outcome —which is another way of saying that we are. People get what they deserve. There are accidents and accomplishments that define us in the midst of multitudes as either cyphers or ones, but the State cannot lay its claim on you or me in the end if we choose against it. The America I love is the one I choose to embrace and know as a free man —not the one the degenerate Left believes must be imposed from above and worshipped in the manner of worms.

UPI’s Martin Sieff writes about Sarah Palin’s big solo debut on ABC News:

Charles Gibson of ABC News was out for blood and inherently applied a double-standard compared with the kid gloves George Stephanopoulos used on Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois on Sunday night.

Gibson was out to embarrass Palin and expose her presumed ignorance from the word go. By contrast, when Obama referred to his “Muslim faith” on Sunday and did not correct himself, Stephanopoulos rushed in at once to help him and emphasize that the senator had really meant to say his Christian faith.

As a matter of fact, Stephanopoulos was incorrect to have made the “correction.” I saw the interview myself. Either he misunderstood what Obama said because of a lapse in hearing or because of Obama’s usual convolutions —or because he believed that Obama was speaking aright from some unconscious place of hidden truth and was prompting the very junior Senator from Illinois to revise his unfortunate confession to an audience breaking fast before church.

Go back and watch it. Obama didn’t need Stephanopolous to save him; he needed him to keep tossing them softballs like the Obamafied beeyotch he is.

It occurred to me a while ago that Obama’s motto of “Yes We Can” (appropriated and translated from Cesar Chavez’s “Si Se Puede”) is actually something of a restatement of the term affirmative action. The affirmative declaration yes and the potential for action inherent in can (plus the ever-present royal we that Obama so often employs) now makes perfect sense when taken altogether. He is saying to his followers, in effect:

“Affirm by your actions this moment in history. This is the moment we have all been waiting for. The world has been waiting for me —and I am become a symbol of America returning to its best traditions, which is the promise of America not as an actual country with a historical culture of its own, but as an idea that transcends nationhood and makes us all citizens of the world.”

Obama being the First Citizen, naturally.

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.

Before I call it a night, I just want to say here that I loved George Carlin and that I am sorry to hear of his death. He was an extremely thoughtful and principled guy, so far as I know, and a total riot. My Daddy and brothers and I used to love his HBO specials. Man, I’d love to see some of those again. I guess they’re already out there in one form or another. Anyhow, Carlin was a great comedian and a great American and I am glad that he shared his love of words —and his understanding of the human condition— with all of us.

Jonah Goldberg has some very interesting thoughts on Black Liberation Theology and the meaning(s) of Progressivism. About Obama, he writes:

He may use the phrase Social Gospel the same way he (and so many others) uses the word “progressive,” i.e. in near total ignorance or indifference to its actual historical connotations. For example, when Obama held a rally at the University of Wisconsin, Madison he proclaimed “where better to affirm our ideals than here in Wisconsin, where a century ago the Progressive movement was born?” Obama seemed not to know or to care that the University of Wisconsin Progressives were almost all racists and eugenicists who might have thought — at minimum — that his parents should have been barred from having children.

I often remark to the so-called “progressives” I come across that they are abusing the term. The Progressives of the Twentieth (and, now, the Twenty-first) Century may both be Big Government socialists at heart —but you can’t marry these people today to what the former group believed in: White Protestant Civilization and American exceptionalism. Progressives today are secular humanists who despise the “Christianists” and are repulsed by patriotism or excessive caucasoidalism. So why are they recycling progressive? Is it really so bad to be thought of as a liberal?

One of the jobs Obama claims as part of his curriculum vitae is “community organizer.” What the hell does that even mean? It sounds like a euphemistic way of saying “shit-stirrer.”

I don’t like what’s happening inside the Democratic Party. I think they’ve gone plum loco. Why couldn’t they have gone with a nominee whom America actually knows?