Month: July 2008

Andy Borowitz nails it:

The liberal blogosphere was aflame today with new accusations that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) is trying to win the 2008 presidential election.

Weigel has a smart post on Clark and the Democratic reaction, while Jonathan Martin explains why the story refuses to die.

Jonathan Zasloff defends Obama’s faith-based maneuvering:

Progressives have been partnering with faith-based groups long before George Bush claimed to be born-again. The biggest difference with Bush was twofold: 1) he suggested that he would funnel money to faith-based groups for programs involving active proselytization, which is unconstitutional; and 2) he actually used the program to support groups in order to generate support for Republicans, which might have been illegal.

Obama made it very clear that he would do no such thing: he’s no more a "Christianist" than any policy wonk who contracts with faith-based social services providers to provide social service. So what’s new? The fact that he is saying it, that he is out front with it, that he is sending a cultural signal that he embraces it. In that sense, it is both good policy and good politics. And as the Beliefnet story makes clear, it puts McCain in a box because for him to do something similar would be transparently opportunistic.

Some on the right seem to be amused or shocked that I used the term "Christianist" to describe Obama’s faith-based politics.

But I’ve used that term with respect to Obama many times before, and in so far as he is happy to have government fused with religious groups’ social services, he is. He doesn’t use his faith to discriminate against and marginalize minorities, but he does use it to justify big government paternalism. He’s not as bad as Bush-style Christianism, but he’s not in a different category either. If Obama could get religious institutions supportive of the Democratic party at the grass roots, he’d be thrilled, and his TUCC experience shows exactly that. There’s liberal Christianism and conservative Christianism. I prefer my Gospel and my politics distinct – for the sake of each.

Now we have confirmation that the US has adopted torture techniques used by the Chinese Communists in the 1950s, it may be worth listening to Milt Bearden:

Operationally, the torture story has already had a chilling effect in keeping CIA officers off the streets and out of the back alleys of a dangerous world. There is a deep and realistic concern that they could be captured and tortured themselves.

Old hands will recall the case of the CIA Beirut station chief, William Buckley, taken hostage in Beirut in 1984 by Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad, and held until his death there in 1985. An operational assignment to Beirut after the Buckley affair was a personal security nightmare — but the heightened concerns were limited to that rough neighborhood. CIA officers could still do abroad what they did best — move around and understand, perhaps as well as any, the lay of the land.

Today, for CIA officers, and literally all U.S. officials abroad, much of the world resembles Beirut in the mid-1980s. A look at any U.S. embassy must be through crash barriers and razor wire. These serve not only to keep America’s adversaries out, but to keep American officers in, crippling the intelligence and any foreign-policy missions at the worst possible time.

“So let’s sum up what America would look like in an age of Obama.

To start there would be no more driving SUVs. No more Rush. For God’s sake absolutely no driving your SUV while listening to Rush. No more eating whatever you want. Definitely no keeping your home as warm or as cool as you prefer. No capital gains cuts because they are unfair. Your guns will be banned. And if you have a different opinion on global warming? All those lofty supporters of rights for terrorists are going to strip every oil executive in America of theirs in a heartbeat, live and in living color. Is anyone paying attention here?

Today the targets are talk radio, oil, SUVs, or guns or debates on global warming and so on. But what about tomorrow and the day after that and the day and years after that? What freedoms will next be targeted with that deadliest trademark of an Obamalander — moral superiority? What do we have when the sole purpose of the government as run by the chilling principles of Obamaland is to "use the political process" to remove freedoms large and small one by one by one?

Someone needs to speak it plainly.

The word is fascism," – Jeffrey Lord, American Spectator.

Obama’s Hispanic support is remarkably strong in the latest Gallup poll:

Some political experts assumed Obama’s struggle to attract widespread Hispanic support in the primaries would carry over into the general-election campaign against the Republican candidate. But Hispanics have become a reliable Democratic voting bloc, and have so far shown little difficulty in transferring their loyalties from Clinton to Obama. Obama continues to lead McCain by about a 2-to-1 margin among Hispanic voters, as he has since March. Hispanic voters could be crucial in key swing states such as New Mexico, Colorado, and Florida.

They’re all obviously terrorists:

Steve Waldman looks at the differences between Obama and Bush.

Is it not a rather fantastic historical irony that the torture techniques that the North Vietnamese used against McCain that forced him to offer a videotaped false confession … are now the techniques the Bush administration is using to gain "intelligence" about terror networks.

How is it possible to know that everything John McCain once said on videotape for the enemy was false, because it was coerced, and yet assert that everything we torture out of terror suspects using exactly the same techniques, is true? In fact, McCain at least knew somewhere that his own government knew he existed, that there were procedures to eventually release him, that he was on someone’s radar. The average prisoner at Gitmo or in the other parts of the detention program believes that no one will ever save him, that he could be disappeared for ever, that there are no procedures for his eventual release and no government to remember him. If McCain uttered lies on tape to stop the torture, why would an Islamist tell the truth?

Nothing more accurately exposes the classic moral error of the Bush administration and its enablers in war crimes. If the enemy tortures, it defines their moral evil and all intelligence gleaned from such coercion is self-evidently false propaganda. If we do it, it isn’t wrong, and it leads to good intelligence.

Got that? And these people have the gall to describe their ideological opponents as moral relativists.