Left Tries a Bit of Swiftboating

What is “Swiftboating?” According to Wikipedia it has become a general synonym for “smear campaign.”

But originally it arose out of the successful campaign of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to impugn the claims made by Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) about his military record, and the Democrats’ fury when they realized that they had been skunked.

In other words, Swiftboating occurs when the other guys call in question the veracity of the claims of your guy about his military service.

So the current flap about whether Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) actually prayed as he claimed during his captivity in North Vietnam is a clear Swiftboat campaign. Democrats want to discredit McCain’s claim to religiosity and bravery in his POW captivity.

And the argument that his story about a prison guard tracing a cross in the ground was cribbed from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is likewise a Swiftboating.

Politics ain’t beanbag, as they say.

But the Gulag Archipelago claim is easy to check. According to John McCain’s site the cross incident took place in 1971 or thereabouts. According to Wikipedia The Gulag Archipelago ws published in English in 1973. So that’s all right.

But really, lefties. Can’t you put yourselves in the shoes of others at all? Can’t you get that everybody in politics is in the business of questioning other peoples’ character? You do it and we do it. We all do it because it works.

Obama's "Pay Grade"

Our liberal friends do a pretty good job obfuscating the line between law and morality when they oppose “legislating morality.” And they talk a good line about the separation of church and state. As if. As if faith and law and morality can be safely separated into neat little boxes.

So when Pastor Rick Warren questioned Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) on abortion at his Saddleback Civil Forum he carefully played the liberal game, asking Sen. Obama:

I know this is a very complex issue. 40 million abortions. At what point does a baby get human rights in your view?

Warren is asking where the secular law steps in and says, OK, at this point the right to choose is trumped by the right to life and now the state will protect this person’s life and will sanction anyone who interferes with its right to life.

This is a difficult question for a liberal to answer. I’ve asked it of liberal women in the past, and they really can’t deal with it. That’s because the liberal line on abortion carefully avoids confronting the issue. There aren’t any liberal sound bites available to help them out.

Sen. Obama is a presidential candidate, so he knows how to duck.

Well, I think that whether you are looking at
it from a theological perspective or a scientific
perspective, answering that question with specificity,
you know, is above my pay grade. But let me just speak
more generally about the issue of abortion because this
is something obviously the country wrestles with.

Pretty neat, eh? He’s not prepared to deal with the issue in the way that Warren frames it, and the only way that a pastor can frame it without falling into the traps that liberals have set up regarding the separation of church and state.

Notice the Ali Shuffle. He is not being asked for a theological perspective or a scientific perspective. He is being asked a political question. Where would you as president come down on this? Where would you draw the line?

Obama’s evasion illustrates why the recent pro-life activism recently has been about drawing the line in law. Born Alive Act? Partial Birth Abortion Act? Is it ok to kill the baby just before it’s born? Just after? We keep asking: where would you draw the line, liberals? And they don’t like it.

In my view there are two issues here. There is the legal line: cross that and you break the law. But the more important one is the moral line. We are going to have abortion, and there will be abortions on the legal side of the line. But such abortion should be safe, legal, and shameful. To coin a phrase.

A Look at the Obama Economy

You think? After three years of a lackluster Obama administration a resurgent Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) starts her presidential campaign with the rousing war cry “it's the economy, stupid.”

That's what James E. Carter & James C. Miller III think. They look back from 2011 and a lackluster economy.

Drawing heavily from his 59-page Blueprint for Change, the new president and former freshman legislator called upon Congress to increase federal spending by more than $300 billion annually and to shift more of the tax burden onto “the rich.”

Ah yes. Works every time it's tried. Tax the rich to feed the poor.

Only this isn't the Middle Ages in which feed grain taken from the rich landowners might possibly help the poor. Today we are talking about taking the investment money of the rich--money that could be invested with entrepreneurs to create jobs--and sluice it away on government programs, the programs that have done so much to turn the working class into the non-working underclass.

The combination of profligate spending and higher tax rates created a substantial drag on the economy. It didn’t help that President Obama has presided over one of the most protectionist administrations in decades. Three years into his presidency, Obama has yet to sign a single free-trade or trade-liberalization agreement. That, plus his efforts to “fix” and “renegotiate” the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), have cast a pall over prospects for significant growth in international trade.

Oh well, at least it kept the rich from making too much money.

That's the liberal line. But usually--almost always--it is the poor that suffer most when the economy turns south. That's because people with power and people with money have the resources and the power to take care of themselves in a downturn.

Even liberals have the power and the resources to take care of themselves. But the working poor, the folks with marginal skills and marginal finances get hammered.

But then Democrats like Sen. Obama really don't really care about bitter God-and-guns working class people any more. They prefer voters to stay on the liberal plantation, depedent on liberal programs for everything.

Let them learn Spanish, says Marie-Antoinette Obama.

Protect the Government University from Bigots!

You gotta love the fun that columnist Mike S. Adams is having with the administration of the University of Toledo.

The bosses at UT don’t like the idea of a Christian African American university administrator, Crystal Dixon, expressing opinions in an opinion piece in the local newspaper that would be considered un-diverse by the well-known House Un-Liberal Activities Committee.

And rightly, the administration of the University of Toledo has terminated Crystal Dixon before it gets hauled up before the House Un-Liberal Activities Committee.

Because, in the vital work of eradicating un-liberal thinking in the university, you cannot be too enthusiastic. Hate speech might break out anywhere, at any time, and provoke the end of diversity as we know it.

But, amazingly, Adams has called for President Jacobs of the University of Toledo to resign. He gives the curious reason that Crystal Dixon has been fired for disagreeing with the policy of the university to lobby the state legislature to provide partner benefits for gay employees at the university.

This is odd. Everyone knows that the First Amendment specifically excludes as protected speech any words by an uppity Christian African American that disagrees with the policy of a government university. Even so, Adams writes the following unbelievable statement:

Constitutional rights are given to individuals to protect them from governments. They are not given to governments to protect them from individuals.

This is heresy. Everyone knows that the Constitution was clearly intended to protect progressive government university officials from the religious bigotry of their employees.

Is there no justice?

Dems and Their Special Interests

The way our Democratic friends tell it, Big Oil and Big Drug are evil special interests.

But Big Green and Big Ed are noble activists and teachers. And Big Labor is just out to help working people.

It all depends on your point of view.

But Thomas Sowell takes a dim view of Sen Barack Obama’s plan to bring an end to secret ballots in union representation elections.

Labor unions have a problem. Union-represented workers in the private sector amount to less than 10 percent of the workforce and going down every year. That’s a problem—for unions, at least.

Since unions are losing the game under the current rules, their obvious answer is to change the rules. Specifically, they want to do away with secret ballots when the government conducts elections to determine whether the workers in a particular company or industry want to be represented by a union.

Sen. Obama supports the end of secret ballot elections for unions.

“I will make it the law of the land when I’m President of the United States,” Barack Obama has said to the AFL-CIO.

I wonder what the American people will think of that when the issue actually comes up on the radar?

Then there’s Big Green. Environmentalists are fanatically opposed to exploration and production of hydrocarbon resources. And so are the Democrats. Well they were, until yesterday, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi allowed as how she might allow a vote on oil drilling.

There’s no doubt that Americans want to conserve the environment. But they are not prepared to sacrifice the present to the future, whatever rich trust-fund environmentalists may say.

Then there’s education. Democrats are united in opposing reform of education through relaxation of the monopoly of union teachers.

Even the Congressional Black Caucus dares not vote for vouchers or any other form of school choice that the teachers’ unions oppose. Better to let a whole generation of black children be trapped in failing schools that employ union teachers.

Someday, the dam is going to break on all this special-interest politics. But that day is not yet. But at least we have Thomas Sowell to witness today’s errors, crimes, and injustices and to point with audacious hope to a better day for America.

How's Your Soft Power Today?

Back in the good old days the lilberal Joseph Nye regaled us with the importance of “soft power.” That’s the power of words and of culture and of diplomacy. Much nicer than the brutality of evil Bush-Cheney-neocon “hard” power which was such a disaster in Iraq.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is a perfect poster boy for the idea of “soft” power. Until now.

The thing about power is that power is power. It’s not kumbaya time in the old world or even in the new world. Not yet. Maybe not ever. There are still thug dictators and there are still Russian bears, and there are still politico-revolutionary regimes like Iran.

So when the Russians start a march through Georgia (the one next to the Black Sea) the liberal “soft” power doctrine looks pretty lame.

It makes things really hard, as Jonah Goldberg writes, for a candidate that falters once he gets off the script.

After the 2004 election Democrats and lefties decided they were outraged by the successful “swift-boat” campaign that successfully attacked Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) credentials as a war veteran. It is clear that the “Obama off the script” meme that conservatives are pushing is a campaign in the same category. Liberals are suddenly going to wake up one morming and realize that their candidate has been skunked by the eevil Republican off-the-script campaign. Or the eevil McCain “celebrity” campaign.

And they will declare that it is worse than McCarthyism.

But the fact is that Democrats are wrong on national defense. Soft power won’t do the job. Exquisitely scripted candidates won’t do the job. Inexperienced candidates won’t do the job.

It’s a dangerous world out there, full of thug dictators and power-mad revolutionaries. Our job is to stop them. And that takes power. Hard power.

Life without Newspapers Will Be Just Fine

Life is rough for the folks in the metropolitan newspaper business, and some people (OK, most of us) are ready to gloat.

Be careful what you wish for. That’s the message of Debra J. Saunders, the conservative columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Yes, fewer reporters mean fewer biased stories about lesbian immigrants fighting an unsympathetic establishment. But there also won’t be as many stories about sanctuary city policies gone bad, the latest zany law out of San Francisco City Hall or the growing bite that public employee pension systems are taking out of city and county services.

It’s natural for the folks watching their privileged newspaper industry collapse around them to imagine like Napoleon: “Apres moi, le deluge.” Or darkly warn, like David Copperfield’s boss Mr. Spenlow at the monopolistic Doctors Commons in early 19th century Britain: “Touch the Commons, and down comes the country.”

But the awful truth probably is that things will be just fine. One of the telling things about the news business is that the reporters had to unionize to keep their jobs. This suggests that there is pleny of talent out there ready to report the news. It suggests that in the natural order of things reporters and columnists would come and go, and nobody would make a career out of it.

You have to have a guild in order to keep the amateurs out.

In the future we are likely to see lots of unpaid or nearly-unpaid journalists writing the news.

And maybe that will be better than the current setup. For all the pompous insistence by the MSM that only professional journalists can speak truth to power, the truth is that the MSM behaves like puppy-dogs towards the powerful until the moment that there is blood in the water.

I expect that unpaid journalists will be a lot more courageous in speaking truth to power—and that will mean government employees and government employee unions in the future—than the current incumbents, dependent as they are on advertising revenue from controversy-shy corporations.