• IN THIS SECTION

June 11, 2008

Exclusive: Wednesday, June 11

Presidential Watch

CLICK HERE to see two inexplicably confused public statements by Barack Obama.

Humorous parody of the "Obama Presidency in Review." - GO HERE.

See a CNN exclusive report on Obama's political tactics in Chicago - CLICK HERE.

Two Cheers for Obama - Not bad for a socialist.

Deroy Murdock, NRO.com

Senator Barack Obama finally captured the Democratic presidential nomination on Tuesday. For this, he deserves two cheers from Americans from coast to coast.

First, Obama secured this country's chief domestic priority for 2008: denying Senator Hillary Clinton the presidency. Obama has earned the eternal gratitude of millions of relieved Americans who understand how calamitous a Hillary Clinton administration would have been. She combines ruthless ambition, a pathological sense of entitlement, and the ethical restraint of Richard Nixon's "White House plumbers" unit.

Add Clinton's staggering tactlessness to her thirst for funny money (e.g., disgraced fundraisers Norman Hsu, Charlie Trie, Johnny Chung), missing legal documents, abused FBI personnel files, politically motivated IRS audits, stolen antiques, and the multifarious wrongdoing that defined the Clinton White House. Obama has spared America another four to eight years of official lawlessness. For this he merits abundant applause.

So why two cheers and not three? Despite his enormous appeal, Obama is an over-the-cliff-and-tumbling-into-the-canyon-Left, big-government, tax-hiking spendthrift. Read article.

Obama's Ties to "Arafat Toady," Rashid Khalidi

Ed Morrissey, Infidels Are Cool.com

Rashid Khalidi, a Yasser Arafat toady, got $75,000 through Obama and Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers from the Woods Foundation, and later Khalidi returned the favor by hosting a fundraiser for Obama. Obama "lavished praise" on Khalidi in 2003 when the former PLO functionary took a job at Columbia University, according to an LA Times article last year. It's hardly ancient history, and Khalidi is hardly an acquaintance. Read article - View Daniel Pipes VIDEO.

Obama's "Victory" and Blank Slate Politics

Bill Mazoorsky, PhD, NMJ.us

One thing that was going for Barack Obama this endless primary reason, what justified his entire and only claim to the presidency was the belief that he embodied a new type of a politician, the one above politics. Never mind the oxymoronic and improbable premise of such a formulation - this is what his near-worshippers and supporters went for. It must be clear to everyone by now, except for his most hard-core acolytes, that his candidacy represents nothing of the sort.

He is not merely a regular politician (those of us who value politics realize that there is nothing inherently detrimental about having a political mind and savvy), but a ruthless and unprincipled demagogue who will go to any length to get into a seat of power. I am not speaking about political pragmatism, a useful and necessary virtue in a politician. There is a difference between pragmatism and opportunism; there is a difference between pragmatism and pandering and there is a difference between pragmatism and demagoguery.

I genuinely would like to know (and I am sure I am not the only one) what Barack Obama actually believes in. As the picture of his past in Chicago becomes more and more clear, the question of his principles or the lack thereof rises to the fore. Starting in the University of Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park in the 1990's, he positioned himself closely to the leftists groups and figures, both black and white. As he entered the national scene, particularly in his presidential bid, he switched to the most innocuous and vaporous rhetoric that so appealed to his educated supporters and the youth. Read article.

Black lawmakers emotional about Obama's success

Josephine Hearn, Politico.com

At least five African-Americans before Obama have mounted serious campaigns for president. The first was then-Rep. Shirley Chisholm in 1972. The most successful was the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who won 30 percent of the delegate votes at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. The Rev. Al Sharpton made a notable run in 2004, as did former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun. Republican Alan Keyes campaigned in 1996 and 2000.

But only Obama, because of either ability or timing, has succeeded in clinching a major party nomination.

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), son of the one-time presidential contender, said Obama's victory overwhelmed him.

"I cried all night. I'm going to be crying for the next four years," he said. "What Barack Obama has accomplished is the single most extraordinary event that has occurred in the 232 years of the nation's political history. ... The event itself is so extraordinary that another chapter could be added to the Bible to chronicle its significance." Read article.

Historic First Or Carter Redux?

IBD Editorials.com

Barack Obama is the first African-American presidential candidate of a major political party. It is a historic accomplishment. Unfortunately for us, it's his only accomplishment.

As Martin Luther King might put it, we have been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. But having taken another giant step towards true equality and a genuinely color-blind society, we hope Sen. Obama and John McCain will be treated equally in the press.

We hope that attacks on Obama's leftist and quasi-Marxist positions and associations will not be deflected as racist criticisms. The heat he will face in this campaign is nothing compared with what he would face on the world stage.

After the last balloon is popped, what we have is a 46-year-old freshman senator who has spent three years in the U.S. Senate, two of them running for president. As we have noted, his policy is basically to raise taxes at home and to surrender to our enemies abroad.

His choice of friends, associates, pastors and churches bespeaks a lack of judgment that gives us pause as to who will fill important positions in the government and his cabinet. Read article.

McCain & Sharansky

Editorial, NY Sun.com

When our Ira Stoll reviewed Natan Sharansky's latest book, "Defending Identity," for these pages last week, he concluded by writing, "Mr. Sharansky's last book, 'The Case for Democracy,' was famously endorsed by Mr. Bush, who gave Mr. Sharansky the Medal of Freedom. If the next American president reads this latest book by Mr. Sharansky on the interplay between identity, democracy, and freedom, it could be more important than any CIA or State Department briefing in understanding the foreign policy horizon."

It turns out the chances that the next president will read Mr. Sharansky's book are higher than they were last week. For in Washington this week, the former prisoner of conscience in the Soviet Union presented a copy of the book to Senator McCain, who promised to read it in one night.

As Mr. Sharansky recounted the meeting yesterday during a visit to The New York Sun, Mr. McCain began by remarking that Mr. Sharansky's nine years in the Soviet Gulag had been different from Mr. McCain's five and a half years in North Vietnam, because Mr. McCain knew that the North Vietnamese would, for propaganda reasons, forbear killing him, while Mr. Sharansky had to be prepared to die. Read article.

When in Israel ...

The Editors, NRO.com

We've all heard of confirmation conversions, when a judicial nominee supposedly changes his tune to get confirmed for the bench. Barack Obama appears to have had a nomination conversion. Within a day of becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, he changed his feathers on the Middle East.

Obama had been unclear lately about how serious he thinks the Iranian threat is. At AIPAC, he was unmistakable: "There's no greater threat to Israel or to the peace and stability of the region than Iran. The danger from Iran is grave and real and my goal will be to eliminate this threat." When Sen. Clinton offered similar assurances back in May, Obama denounced her as using "language reflective of George Bush" and spat that she was practicing "cowboy diplomacy." But Obama's words at AIPAC might have been taken for Bush's own: "Iran armed with a nuclear weapon poses a grave threat to the security of the world."

The AIPAC version of Obama is eager to pressure the Iranians. During the primaries, Obama inveighed against the Kyl-Lieberman resolution that urged that Iran's infamous Islamic Revolution Guards Corps be declared a terrorist organization, empowering the U.S. to deploy financial sanctions or other actions against it. Obama's campaign mercilessly criticized Hillary Clinton for supporting this "saber-rattling" and "blank check" for war. At AIPAC, Obama mentioned none of that, saying the Qods force of the IRGC has "rightly been labeled a terrorist organization" and calling for boycotting firms associated with the IRGC.

We're always ready to welcome converts, but suspect that the real Obama is the one we knew until Wednesday, who has been smearing every American act to push back against our enemies in the Middle East as naked belligerence, who has spent months defending unconditional diplomacy as a keystone of American foreign policy, and has surrounded himself with left-wing foreign-policy advisers. Read article.

Stealing the Election From Obama?

Cliff Kincaid, AIM.org

On Saturday night, Arianna Huffington will be signing copies of her book, Right is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe.

She is insisting, of course, that the "lunatic fringe" is on the political right.

Conference participants were provided copies of The Nation magazine, In These Times, The American Prospect, and Ms. Magazine.

An official conference exhibitor, Adbusters magazine, provided a special "Media Democracy Issue" paying tribute to Dan Rather, Amy Goodman, Arianna Huffington, and others. Rather, forced out of CBS News after he faked the news against President Bush, is portrayed as someone who believes that the news is a "public trust." Rather is speaking to the conference on Saturday night.

An article in the magazine "Adbusters" goes further, examining "Israel's Architecture of occupation" against the Palestinians. Israel is depicted as a government that has taken Palestine away from its rightful owners while former President Jimmy Carter is portrayed as a wise statesman for calling the Israeli policy toward Gaza a crime and atrocity and for meeting with the terror group Hamas, which backs Obama for president. Read article.

Iraq and the Election

Online WSJ.com

This spring, the Iraqi army routed insurgents in three of their most important urban strongholds. These gains follow the success of the surge in crushing al Qaeda in the Sunni triangle, meaning that we are at last on the verge of winning in Iraq and securing a strategic victory in the Middle East. Question: Is this emerging victory - achieved at a cost of more than 4,000 American lives - something we are prepared to abandon after November?

The good news in Iraq is increasingly undeniable, even to the media. In March, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered Iraqi troops to retake the southern Shiite city of Basra from Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. After a shaky start, the city has now been liberated from Sadrist goon squads, and it is mostly peaceful. "The presence of the Iraqi army has made people safe, not 100%, but 90%," a Basra barber told the Washington Post. The army is pursuing the Sadrists in their last redoubt, Amarah, while other radicals have followed Moqtada to Iran.

For three consecutive weeks, the number of violent incidents have been at their lowest level since the spring of 2004. The number of U.S. combat fatalities last month, 19, was the lowest of the entire war, and Iraqi military and civilian deaths are also sharply down. In the first five months of this year, 4,500 insurgent weapons caches were found, compared to 6,900 for all of 2007. These numbers have sometimes moved in the wrong direction and may do so again, particularly during major combat operations. But the trend is unmistakably positive.

We are winning in Iraq. Indeed, we can now say with certainty that we will win, as long as we don't repeat our earlier mistakes and seek to draw down too soon. This is the improving Iraq that the next U.S. President will inherit, and it is the heart of the Iraq debate Americans should have in November. Read article.

The Arrogance of Obama's Leftist Supporters

David Limbaugh, David Limbaugh.com

It's interesting that the main people pushing Obama in the name of unity and civility are the same ones brutally trashing Hillary (and Bill) Clinton. They seem to have no sense of their own hypocrisy in defending the Clintons yesterday for far greater misconduct than that for which they are mercilessly excoriating them today in their editorials and so-called news reporting.

The hypocrisy and absence of self-reflection of this group -- mostly the mainstream media and the leftist cabal of the Democratic Party -- is born of its profound arrogance. This arrogance is also evident in the striking incoherence of their assumption that Obama can be a unifying force while working to change America in ways that are repugnant to a large plurality, if not a majority, of Americans.

You have to recognize that something about this group is just not natural when its members, such as MSNBC's Chris Matthews, can say without embarrassment that Obama sends shivers up his leg or when swooning crowds of supporters faint in his presence.

The group's obliviousness is demonstrated in its stunning state of denial over Obama's virtual free fall since the revelations about his associations with such unsavory characters as Tony Rezko and William Ayers and his longtime membership in a Christian church whose pastors and theology seem more race-oriented than Christ-centered.

You would think these fawning zealots would take notice of the backlash against Obama since he issued his outrageously divisive critique of small-town America as embittered gun- and Bible-clingers. But their Obama-intoxication blinded them to seeing anything other than that Obama still had an insuperable lead in the delegate count. Read article.

SFChron: Obama is a ‘Rare Kind of Attuned Being,' a ‘Lightworker'

Warner Todd Huston, American Conservative Daily.com

Well, I have come to the conclusion that Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle just threw away the last tiny shred of credibility he might have had left by dreamily imagining that Barack Obama is so omniscient, so "ethereal" and so messiah-like that he isn't a "normal" human being.

Maybe Mark thinks he might be an alien from another planet, some trans-dimensional traveler, or maybe an angel come down in human form to lead us sheep into the promised land? I'm not exaggerating either. In his latest piece he calls Obama a "Rare Kind of Attuned Being," a "Lightworker," he says he is "ethereal" and "magical" - hello Rush Limbaugh - and feels that Obama is "not really one of us" in the "normal way." Morford and those who feel like him have lost all touch with reality and the sickness is spreading.

I think that columnist Morford is off his medication, or maybe he's just drunk, or perhaps he fell on his head recently? Or perhaps Shirley MacLaine came down off the mothership and stole Mark's computer... something freaky is going on there in San Francisco, anyway. Or maybe what makes me think something weird is in the air out there is just that Morford's latest editorial is one of the most amazing examples of the wild eyed ranting of the most whacked out Obamessiah believers yet to show up in print instead of just on the nutrooter blogs. Instead of appearing in a purportedly legitimate newspaper, this is the fodder for the fantasy land of a Coast to Coast with George Noory. Instead of serious political discussion, this sort of thing belongs on Jerry Springer. Read article.

America's Racist Left: Instead of merely ignoring the problems of African Americans, socialists and progressives actively contributed to them.

Daniel J. Flynn, NRO.com

If Barack Obama becomes America's first black president, he will fit nicely into a radical narrative that places leftists always and everywhere combating bigotry, shattering stereotypes, and advancing race relations. Indeed, merely to oppose him, as the Clintons, Geraldine Ferraro, and the voters of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Indiana have discovered, is to invite charges of "racism" from his enthusiastic supporters - a trend that is sure to increase now that the contest has ceased to be an intramural one.

But history rarely conforms to the scripts that ideologues write. Racism, as important to understanding the American past as class divisions are to understanding European history, stains the history of homegrown radicals just as it stains the history of the nation which those radicals sought to change so radically. The American history that the Left lambastes is the American Left's history, too.

"There can be no doubt that the negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race," Victor Berger, long the Socialist Party's lone congressman, contended. "You know that capitalism never examines the color of the skin when it buys labor power," the party's national committeeman from Texas complained. When socialists acknowledged racial discrimination, they paternalistically counseled black Americans to abandon their selfish "personal" struggle for the "universal" struggle of the class war, which, when won, would magically solve all problems. Read article.

Power at any cost

Father Raymond J. De Souza, National Post.com

Whatever else he might accomplish, Senator Barack Obama has prevented the restoration of the Clintons. That alone is cause for rejoicing.

How did he do it? It was partly about him, but mostly about her. Many have remarked that in the identity-politics world of the Democratic Party, the first credible black candidate trumped the first credible woman candidate.

That is largely true, but it is not a phenomenon of the Democratic Party alone. Americans as a whole are eager to give their support to blacks who manifest aspirations of racial harmony. Consider the last 25 years. The most popular comic: Bill Cosby. The most popular athletes: Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods. The most popular talk-show host: Oprah Winfrey. The most popular general: Colin Powell. Obama demonstrated the same holds true in politics.

Yet a freshman senator with an ultraliberal voting record does not win the nomination without deep weakness in the competition. Obama became the chosen instrument for those who fervently wished to prevent the Clintons from coming back. In this race, being the not-Clinton was as important as being black. Read article.

Brave New World

Micah Sifry, Townhall.com

The "Stop Hillary Clinton" group on Facebook is a million people strong. Democratic Senate candidate Al Franken was stung by a blogger - Michael Brodkorb - who unearthed damaging details about Franken's business tax filings. Conservatives are discussing John McCain's conservative bona fides. Videos, emails, talking points, petitions - everything but the kitchen sink - is flying at politicians these days.

It's a whole new ball game out there.

We've lost count of all the national figures who have been impacted by online activism. Millions of small donors, people giving less than $200 per donation, have flooded into the presidential campaign process. Far more people are making, watching and sharing online content-from blogs to videos-than are visiting the candidates' own websites. And well more than half the electorate, especially the young, are relying on the internet for political information, rather than traditional news sources like newspapers or TV.

Try to imagine Barack Obama beating Hillary Clinton without the Internet. It's like imagining Ronald Reagan without television. Just on YouTube alone, his videos have been viewed nearly 50 million times, four times as many as Clinton and twelve times as many as McCain. He's approaching 900,000 friends on Facebook, again vastly outpacing the other candidates. Without the internet, there's no way that Obama's campaign would have already surpassed 1.5 individual donors at this stage in the cycle. Read article.

Print This E-mail This

Share It: