The News After Obama Wins The Election

Late Show - Sen. Barack Obama

Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton on Saturday Night Live

Joe Biden in Primary Debate Hilarious

Jay Leno's Mash-Up Interview With Palin

Letterman's Old Man McCain Jokes

Hugh Downs - Why Obama will lose.

It's time to throw my hat in the ring as regards predicting
theelection results. So here it is: Barack Obama will be defeated.
Seriously and convincingly defeated. Not due to racism, not due to the
forces of reaction, not even due to Karl Rove sending out mind rays
over the national cable system. He will lose for one reason above all,
one that has been overlooked in any analysis that I've yet seen.
Barack Obama will lose because he is a flake. I'm using the term in
its generally accepted sense. A flake is not only a screwup, but
someone who truly excels in making bizarre errors and creating
incredibly convoluted disasters. A flake is a "fool with energ y", as
the Russian proverb puts it. ("A fool is a terrible thing to have
around, but a fool with energy is a nightmare".)

Barack Obama is a flake, and the American people have begun to see it.
The chief characteristic of a flake is that he makes choices that are
impossible to either understand or explain. These are not the errors
of the poor dope who can't grasp the essentials of a situation, or the
neurotic who ruins things out of compulsion, or the man suffering
chronic bad luck.

The flake has a genius for discovering solutions at perfect right
angles to the ordinary world.20It's as if he's the product of a totally
different evolutionary chain, in a universe where the laws are
slightly but distinctly at variance to ours. When given a choice
between left and right, the flake goes up -- if not through the 8th
dimension. And although there's plenty of rationalization, there's
never a logical reason for any of it. After awhile, people stop
asking.

Obama's rise has been widely portrayed as a kind of millennial Horatio
Alger story -- young lad from a new state on the outskirts of the
American polity, a member of once-despised minority, works his way by
slow degrees to within arm's length of the presidency itself. That's
all well and good -- we need national myths of exactly that type.

But what has been overlooked is the string of faux pas marking each
step of Obama's journey, a series of strange, inexplicable actions,
actions bizarre enough to require some effort at explanation, through
such efforts have rarely been offered. It's as if the new Horatio made
it to the top by stepping into every last manhole and open trapdoor in
his path. And we, the onlookers, the voters who are being asked to put
this man in the White House, are supposed to take this as the normal
career path for a successful chief executive.

What are these incidents? I'm sure many of you are way ahead of me,
but let's go to the videotape.

Here's a young man who graduated from Columbia with high marks, with a
choice of position
s anywhere in the country. He comes from a state
generally held to be a close match to Paradise. One, furthermore, that
can be characterized as the most successful multiracial society in the
world, with harmonious relations not only between whites and blacks,
but also Japanese-Americans and native Hawaiians as well. To top it
off, a state controlled in large part by a smoothly-functioning
Democratic machine. So where does he choose to go?

To Chicago. One of the windiest, coldest, most brutal cities in the
country. One that is also infinitely corrupt in a sense that Hawaii is
not. One that remains one of the most racist large cities in the U.S.
(Cicero, Al Capone's old stomping grounds, a suburb that is
effectively part of the city, is completely segregated to this day.)
It would be nice to learn which of these aspects most attracted young
Obama to the city. But if you'd asked at the beginning of the
campaign, you'd still be waiting.

And what does he do when he reaches the city? Why, he joins a cult.
Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church has been turned inside out
since the videotaped sermons appeared early this year, without anyone
ever quite explaining exactly what Obama was thinking of when he
joined up in the first place. Street cred, so it's claimed. But there
are a plethora of black churches that would have provided him that
without the taint of demented racism that Wright's church offered.

Obama apparently had to swear an oath
of belief in "black liberation
theology" when he joined the church. (It is the little touches of that
sort that make it a "cult", and not simply a "church".) Did the
thought of his caree r ever cross his mind? Didn't he realize that
church would inevitably cause him trouble somewhere down the line?
That he'd be required to repudiate it and its ideas eventually? We can
ask -- but we won't get an answer.

Back at school, Obama got himself named editor of the Harvard Law
Review. This is a signal achievement, no question about it. The kind
of thing that would be mentioned about a person for the rest of his
life, as has been the case with Obama. But then... he writes nothing
for the journal.

Now, let's get this straight: here we have one of the leading
university law journals in the country, one widely cited and read.
Entire careers in legal analysis and scholarship have been founded on
appearances in the Review, including some that have led to the highest
courts in the country. Yet here's an individual who, as editor, could
easily place his own work in the journal -- standard practice, nothing
at all wrong with it. But he fails to do so. And the explanation?
There's none that I've heard. We can go even farther than that, to say
that there is no explanation that makes the least rational sense.

We follow Obama down to Springfield, where as a state legislator, he
voted "present" over 120 times. What this means, as far as I've
been
able to discover, is that he voted "present" nearly as much as he
voted "yes" or "no".

Now, statehouses work very simply: a member approaches his colleagues
and asks them them to vote for his bill. Some comply, some do not.
Some ask, "Is it a good bill?" and some don't. Either way, they
customarily, except in unusu al circumstances, vote "yes' or "no". All
except for Barack Obama. And how did get away with it? How did mollify
his colleagues? How did he square himself with the party bosses? Echo
answereth not.

(A good slogan could be made of this: "You can't vote present in the
Oval Office." I hereby commend it to the McCain campaign.)

We turn eagerly to learn what his term in the U.S. Senate will reveal,
only to be disappointed. But it's not surprising, really. After all,
he was only there for 143 days.

And there lies one of the keys to Obama's rise. David Brooks pointed
out in a recent New York Times column that Obama spent too little time
in any of his positions to make an impact one way or another. This is
what saved him from the normal fate of the flake: he was never around
long enough for his errors and strange behavior to catch up with him.

But a presidential campaign is a different matter. A man running for
president is under the microscope, and can't duck anything, as many a
candidate has had reason to learn. If Obama is a flake in the classic
mode, now is when it would come out.=2
0And has it?

The case could be made. Here we have a campaign with everything going
for it -- the opposition party in a shambles, a seriously undervalued
president, the media in the candidate's pocket, the candidate himself
being worshiped as nothing less than the new messiah. And yet the
results have compr ised little more than one fumble after another.

First came the Wright affair. Obama apparently thought he was above it
all -- a not-uncommon phenomenon with flakes -- and allowed the
revelations to take on a life of their own before bothering to
respond. Even then, his thoughtful and convincing explanation (that he
hadn't been listening for twenty years) did little to settle the
crisis, which instead guttered out on its own after nearly crippling
his campaign. Even months afterward it threatens to pop back up at any
time. The latest word is that Wright -- now a deadly enemy of his
onetime protÃ(c)gÃ(c) -- has written a book. I can't wait.

Obama learned his lesson, and confronted the next threat immediately,
tackling The New Yorker cover with the avidity of a man having
discovered zombies in the basement. A development that could have been
defused with a chuckle and a quip (the customary method is for the
politician to ask the cartoonist for the original) was allowed to
explode into a major issue. The campaign's relentless attacks on one
of the oldest liberal magazines extant merely perplexed the country at
large. After all, any Rep
ublican has had to endure far worse.

Almost simultaneously, the birth certificate saga was unfolding. On no
reasonable grounds, the campaign blew off requests for a copy of the
document, at last releasing it through one of the least reputable
sites on the Internet, and so badly copied that literally anything
could be read into it -- and was. I'm not one of those who believes
that Obama was actually born in Indonesia/Kenya/Moscow/the moon, but I
still have plenty in the way of questions, almost all of them arising
from how the matter was handled. Well played.

The latest pothole (or one of them, anyway) involves Jerome Corsi's
"The Obama Nation". Corsi has been given the full New Yorker
treatment, with the campaign hoping to avoid John Kerry's "error" in
not challenging Corsi's 2004 book, Unfit for Command. What Obama
missed was the fact that Kerry's major problem was not with Corsi but
with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who were disgusted with
Kerry's hypocrisy in running as an experienced military veteran, and
set out to take him down. Corsi's effort dovetailed with the veteran's
campaign and to a large extent was swept up with it. No such campaign
is in operation against Obama. The smart method of an swering Corsi
would have been to allow the media to handle it, instead of drawing
attention to the book and raising it to level of an issue. This
appears to be a real talent for the Obama campaign.

We could go on. The victory tou
r of Europe, and the speech in which
Obama declared himself "citizen of the world", a trope guaranteed to
focus the attention of Middle America. His inept handling of Hillary,
in which he wound up appearing frightened of the opponent he'd just
beaten. Allowing Hillary (and her husband there, what's-his-name) a
starring role in the Democratic convention is not a solution any sane
individual would be comfortable with -- much less a roll-call vote.
This threatens the near-certainty of turning the entire affair into
BillandHillarycon, with the nominee winding up as a footnote. But it's
all of a piece with the campaign Obama h as waged up until now.

We've never had a flake as president. We've had drunks, neurotics,
cripples, louts, and fools, but never a career screwup. (I except
Jimmy Carter, whose errors arose from sincere, misguided goodwill.)
And I don't think we're going to get one now. Another three months of
flailing, incompetence, and a collapsing image will do little to
assure voters concerned with terrorism, the oil crunch, a gyrating
economy, and a bellicose Russia. (Anyone doubting that Obama will go
exactly this route can consider the Saddleback church fiasco, which
unfolded as this piece was being wrapped up. Evidently, the campaign
goaded NBC news personality Andrea Mitchell into al l but accusing
John McCain of "cheating" by failing to take his place within the
"cone of silence" during Obama's part of the program. The grotesque
element here is that Oba
ma's people and much of the liberal
commentariat -- including Mitchell -- apparently believe that the
"cone of silence", a gag prop for the old Get Smart! comedy series,
actually exists and was in use at Sad dleback.)

Many of us have dealt with flakes at one time or another, often in
settings involving jobs and careers, and not uncommonly in positions
of some authority. We all know of the nephew, the fiancÃ(c), the
boyfriend, whose whims must be catered to, whose reputation must be
protected, who must be constantly worked around if anything at all is
to be accomplished, always at the cost of time, money, efficiency, and
personal stress.

In the fullness of time, we will inevitably see such a figure in the
White House. But not this year, and not this candidate. Such acts of
national flakery occur only when there's no real alternative. In this
election, an alternative exists. Whatever his shortcomings, nobody
ever called John McCain a flake.

Sarah Palin's Videologs (Obvious Satire)

Victor Davis Hanson BEATS UP on Pat Buchanan

http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2008/06/victor-davis-hanson-beats-up-on-pat.html

Pat Buchanan is a racist, anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, and worse than all that he gives conservatism a bad name. In 1991 William Buckley wrote a long essay called "In Search of Anti-Semitism" for National Review magazine. In it, he took on two fellow conservatives: Joseph Sobran, who had been an editor at National Review, and Pat Buchanan, whose columns and remarks about Jews and the Middle East had taken on a nasty edge. Buckley said he found it "impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it…"

So I truly enjoy when someone takes Buchanan on, especially when that person mercilessly exploits Buchanan's inferior intellect and "interesting" recollection of historical fact. Victor Davis Hanson does the job so well below::

Reply to Patrick J. Buchanan
Pseudo-Historian, Very Real Dissimulator
by Victor Davis Hanson
PajamasMedia.com

Patrick J. Buchanan got upset that I wrote a column about the World War II revisionists, especially his book, and that of Nicholson Baker’s on the allied “crimes” of bombing German cities. I produce his column by paragraph and then comment in brackets.

In attacking my book “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World,” Victor Davis Hanson, the court historian of the neoconservatives, charges me with “rewriting … facts” and showing “ingratitude” to American and British soldiers who fought World Wars I and II.

[In dealing with Mr. Buchanan, one must accept at the beginning two caveats. First, as is his style, he will always resort to ad hominem attacks in lieu of an argument. Thus note at the very beginning his sneering “court historian of the neoconservatives.”
Second, Buchanan unfortunately is neither a reliable journalist nor an historian, and thus simply cannot be trusted to report accurately what is written. He says I charge him with “rewriting… facts” (note those convenient three dots). I did not charge him with rewriting facts, but simply advancing a thesis contrary to them: “Questioning the past is a good thing, but rewriting it contrary to facts is quite another.” (emphasis added)
And I didn’t just criticize Buchanan’s book, but in a brief 750 word newspaper column lumped it together with the novelist Nicholson Baker’s (Human Smoke) equally critical attack on the allies in World War II — both as signs of the sorry state of historical revisionism that has sprung up in the climate of the Iraq war.
Writing a book whose theme is that the allies, and especially the British, unwisely and unduly pressured Hitler, and therefore were culpable for much of the carnage of World War II, again, does not “rewrite… facts”, but simply ignores them. And, yes, it does indeed serve to lessen the enormous sacrifices that American and British soldiers endured to stop a monstrosity like National Socialism, whose doctrine of racial hatred and territorial expansion logically led to a German government attacking by 1940 most of its neighbors, to the east, west, north and south, and eventually, in industrial fashion, murdering 6 million Jews.
Much of Hitler’s madness was outlined well in advance in Mein Kampf. By the late 1930s his harsh treatment of the Jews was a harbinger of things to come, once his own power was consolidated and Germany free from outside objection.]

Both charges are false, and transparently so.

Hanson cites not a single fact I got wrong and ignores the fact that the book is dedicated to my mother’s four brothers who fought in World War II. Moreover, the book begins by celebrating the greatness of the British nation and heroism of its soldier-sons.

[Within a 350-word critique devoted to the theme of his book, I cited his misreading of the Versailles Treaty (see below), and his special pleading that serves to exculpate Hitler’s Nazi government. Again, the thesis of Buchanan’s’ book is not based on facts, but can only be advanced by contradicting them. And it has a disturbing habit of mechanically at times praising those who are his natural targets—or supposedly naive victims—of the book, as if that allows him to further denigrate their wisdom and sacrifice.]

Did Hanson even read it?

[Unfortunately I did read it, and was appalled by his absence of logic—hence the column.]

The focus of “The Unnecessary War” is on the colossal blunders by British statesmen that reduced Britain from the greatest empire since Rome into an island dependency of the United States in three decades. It is a cautionary tale, written for America, which is treading the same path Britain trod in the early 20th century.

[This is as ludicrous as it is disingenuous. By 1939 the British Empire was in financial straits, its global economic position long displaced by the industrial power and growing population of the United States, and its empire an increasing economic drain. Its so-called decline had begun at the end of the nineteenth century, and was confirmed, not created, by World War II. Despite the cast-off and occasional warning about Hitler’s cruelty, the book accepts that there was nothing intrinsic within National Socialism as practiced under Hitler that would necessarily have led to war, and indeed a number of legitimate grievances that would justify Hitler’s own preemptive wars.]

Hanson agrees the Versailles Treaty of 1919 was “flawed,” but says Germany had it coming, for the harsh peace the Germans imposed on France in 1871 and Russia in 1918.
Certainly, the amputation of Alsace-Lorraine by Bismarck’s Germany was a blunder that engendered French hatred and a passion for revenge. But does Teutonic stupidity in 1871 justify British stupidity in 1919?

[Again, Buchanan misleads. I wrote that Versailles was less harsh than the treaties imposed on the defeated by Germany — and less harsh than what Germany had planned for the allies. 1871 was not a matter of “Teutonic stupidity”, but the logical result of German aggression and carefully thought-out punishment.]

Is that what history teaches, Hanson?

[Again, Buchanan is not truthful. I argued the problem was not Versailles, but the inability or the unwillingness of the allies to promote and foster German postwar democracy, occupy the country and thereby remind the German people that they had not been “stabbed in the back” in foreign territory, but militarily defeated on the battlefield and in full retreat when their generals sued for peace. That would have had a powerful effect in reminding the German people that neither Jews nor socialists had caused their defeat, but the madness of invading France, and the futility of fighting Russia, France, Britain, Italy, and the United States all at once.]

In 1918, Germany accepted an armistice on Wilson’s 14 Points, laid down her arms and surrendered her High Seas Fleet.
Yet, once disarmed, Germany was subjected to a starvation blockade, denied the right to fish in the Baltic Sea, and saw all her colonies and private property therein confiscated by British, French and Japanese imperialists, in naked violation of Wilson’s 14 Points.
Germans, Austrians and Hungarians by the millions were then consigned to Belgium, France, Italy, Serbia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland and Lithuania, in violation of the principle of self-determination.
Germany was sliced in half, dismembered, disarmed, saddled with unpayable debt and forced, under threat of further starvation and invasion, to confess she alone was morally responsible for the war and all its devastation — which was a lie, and the Allies knew it.

[France, Britain, and Italy did not accept the 14 Points, and thus it was never an official allied position. Germany knew that when it discovered that Wilson could not speak for the allies, given the late entry of the United States into an ongoing allied effort. Germany lost two large slices of territory, about 13 percent of it European landmass, land once annexed from France by its invasion of 1870, and areas in what would become Poland that had been annexed by Prussia during the aggrandizement and long unification of the Germany. Much, though not all, of the returned territory had been won through coercion by imperial Germany in a series of wars, and was given back following plebiscites. As I wrote, the treaty was “flawed” by our modern sensibilities, but by the standards of the times, far less punitive than what Germany herself customarily demanded from the defeated. France did not invade Germany in 1870, 1914, or 1940, but by May 1940 found itself for the third time in seventy years with a German army advancing on Paris.]

Where was Hitler born?
“At Versailles,” replied Lady Astor.

[Buchanan’s citation of the quip of the aristocratic hostess Nancy Witcher Langhorne as an authority on Versailles is revealing and gives his game away — a woman known for her virulent anti-Semitism, pro-Hitler appeasement, and close correspondence with another kindred soul in Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. Her slurs about Czechoslovakian refugees, prejudice toward Catholics, lunatic pronouncements on slavery and blacks, and reprehensible slanders of British soldiers proved her to be unhinged — but apparently earns a citation of wisdom from Buchanan.]

As for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Germany imposed on Russia in 1918, is Hanson aware that the prison house of nations for which he wails, which was forced to disgorge Finland, the Baltic republics, Poland, Ukraine and the Caucasus, was ruled by Bolsheviks?
Was it a war crime for the Kaiser to break up Lenin’s evil empire?

[This is surreal and reveals Buchanan’s lack of even a simple grasp of history. Lenin had been in power for a little over a few weeks when negotiations with Germany began in November and December 1917 — and only a few months when the treaty was signed in March 1918. His “evil empire” was in fact the centuries-long imperial Russia of the Tsars. Yes, imperial Germany did want Russia to “disgorge” land — so that it in turn might gorge upon them. That’s why the Kaiser seized much of the Ukraine, the Baltic States, and Belarus. Many on Buchanan’s list of free states “disgorged” in fact in the last year of the war came under sway of the German empire as virtual dependencies.
In short, Germany demanded and until defeated got its hands on a great deal of Russian territory, ninety percent of her coal, and much of Russian industry — a greed that severely hampered its efforts to transfer manpower and material to the Western front in 1918. Note that Buchanan omits my mention of Germany’s plans for Western Europe in the event of its victory, which we know from post-World War II archives would have made the Versailles treaty tame in comparison.]

Two years after Brest-Litovsk, Churchill himself was urging Britain to revise Versailles, bring Germany into the Allied fold and intervene in Russia’s civil war — against Lenin and Trotsky.

[Now Buchanan is praising the Churchill he serially damns as the fool who had prompted World War II. What Churchill was trying to do was exactly what I stated in my essay — incorporate Germany into the family of Western nations — something impossible not because of Versailles, but because a defeated German army in November 1918 retreated from foreign territory and reentered the fatherland, promulgating the myth that it had never been beaten, when in fact it was within days of annihilation by an advancing allied army that included over a million American soldiers.]

As for my thesis that the British war guarantee to Poland of March 31, 1939, was the “Fatal Blunder” that guaranteed World War II and brought down the British Empire, Hanson is mocking:
“Buchanan argues that, had the imperialist Winston Churchill not pushed poor Hitler into a corner, he would have never invaded Poland in 1939, which triggered an unnecessary Allied response.”
First, Hanson should get his prime ministers straight. It was Neville Chamberlain who issued the war guarantee to Poland after the collapse of his Munich accord. Churchill was not even in the Cabinet.

[Buchanan, again, cannot honestly reproduce quoted material. Pace Buchanan, note that I did not write “Prime Minister” Churchill — and for precisely the reason that he was not Prime Minister in September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. But the very reason that the British turned to the “imperialist” Churchill in extremis in May 1940 was because he was on record in the British Parliament and in public life since 1932 for restoring British military preparedness, and, from at least 1936, enlightening British naïve rightists about the sinister nature of Hitler’s National Socialism. Yet Churchill is the veritable villain of Buchanan’s book, not the maniacal Hitler.]

Second, Hansen implies that I portray Hitler as a misunderstood victim. This is mendacious. Hitler’s foul crimes are fully related.

[(a) Hanson, not Hansen. (b) Hitler’s crimes are mentioned in the customary Buchanan disclaimer fashion; but if they were “fully related,” they would make it impossible to empathize with a psychopath whose polices ended logically in the Holocaust.]

Third, was it moral, Hanson, for Britain to promise the Poles military aid they could not and did not deliver, thus steeling Polish resolve to resist Hitler and guaranteeing Poland’s annihilation?

[Now this is a strange contortion. The Poles were already steeled since they had known first hand German aggrandizement since 1914, had seen what Hitler had done in the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and knew well the futility of appeasement. A militarily weak Britain and morally bankrupt France are to be faulted for not attacking in the West in September 1939, but applauded for at least declaring war on Hitler and finally apprising him that his aggression would no longer be treated with rhetoric but now with armed resistance. ]

Was it wise, Hanson, for Britain to declare a world war on the strongest nation in Europe over a town, Danzig, where the British prime minister thought Germany had the stronger claim?

[This is ludicrous. Danzig was a mere “town”? In fact, Britain declared war because for years Hitler had serially violated all of its WWI and international agreements, dismembered Czechoslovakia, and revealed the true nature of Nazi global aggrandizement as outlined years before in Mein Kampf.]

What were the consequences for Poland of trusting in Britain?
Crucifixion on a Nazi-Soviet cross, the Katyn massacre of the Polish officer corps, Treblinka and Auschwitz, annihilation of the Home Army, millions of brave Polish dead, half a century of Bolshevik terror.

[This is reprehensible. Now British military weakness is blamed for Auschwitz, rather than the innate sinister nature of Nazism? Does Buchanan believe that had Britain not tried to stop Hitler, the death camps would have never occurred? Does he know of the prewar Nazi precursors to the Final Solution, the geneses of which were clear from Germany’s own treatment of its chronically ill and mentally disturbed?]

And how did Churchill honor Britain’s commitment to Poland?
During trips to Moscow, Churchill bullied the Polish prime minister into ceding to Stalin that half of his country Stalin had gotten from his devil’s pact with Hitler, and yielded to Stalin’s demand for annexation of the Baltic republics and Bolshevik rule of a dozen nations of Eastern and Central Europe.

[Churchill distrusted Stalin, but by 1943 understood that a weak British Empire had no leverage at all against Stalin’s 400 divisions. Again in hindsight Churchill can be made to look illiberal, but given the realities of the times, there was no one more suspicious of the ally Stalin, or more sympathetic to the Poles.]

Was it worth 50 million dead, Hanson, so Stalin, whose victims, as of Sept. 1, 1939, were 1,000 times Hitler’s, could occupy not only Poland, for which Britain went to war, but all of Christian Europe to the Elbe?

[How odd that the allies are indirectly blamed for the Holocaust, as if its seeds were not innate to Nazism. Most credit Stalin with the atrocious crime of killing 20-30 million of his own, versus Hitler’s 6 million. How that translates in “1,000 times” I am not sure — except by the misleading qualifier “by Sept.1 1939.” But here Buchanan engages in hindsight. In 1939, Britain knew of no other means — not political, not diplomatic, not economic — of stopping Hitler from absorbing all of Europe, an agenda of aggression clear from 1936 onward.]

Churchill was right when he told FDR in December 1941 it was “The Unnecessary War” and right again in 1948, when he wrote that, in Stalin, the world now faced “even worse perils” than those of Hitler.

[This is disingenuous. The aggregate of Churchill’s writings make it clear that he felt the war had been unnecessary only on the grounds that he felt, rightly I think, that it could have been prevented by standing up to a then weak Hitler in 1936, which would have humiliated the Nazis and perhaps even led to a change of government or at least a sort of containment of Nazism. And note Churchill’s choice of word “perils.” Churchill did not think, as implied by Buchanan, that Hitler was any less evil than Stalin, only that the Red Army and the resources of the Soviet Union gave it the potential to become far more dangerous than a much smaller Nazi empire.
Both World War II and the Cold War were necessary. And while the Soviet government was a vile and evil entity, millions of Red Army soldiers were not communists, but brave patriots who did much to stop the Wehrmacht, and, yes, by their efforts did save allied lives. Again, they fought for a horrendous government, but the motivation for many was not global communism or Comrade Stalin who had butchered millions of their families and friends, but to rid German soldiers from the soil of Mother Russia.]

So, what had it all been for?

[World War II — forced upon, not the fault of, the allies — was worth it. It ended fascism and Nazism, liberated thousands from death camps and starvation in forced labor compounds, led to a new democratic Europe, prevented the extinction of European Jewry, and reformed a once serially bellicose Germany that had attacked France three times in 70 years. Today’s Europe and Japan are proof of our grandfathers’ achievement.]

Historian Hanson should go back to tutoring undergrads about the Peloponnesian War and the Syracuse Expedition.

[I guess Mr. Buchanan believes that working as a political operative in Richard Nixon’s White House is better training for history than formal study of classical languages and history. I think his ancient Greek citation is a vague reference to my support for the removal of Saddam Hussein and the effort to foster constitutional government in Iraq. But once more, Buchanan reveals his ignorance of history. The Syracuse expedition, as he calls it, was a case of a democratic Athens attacking a larger and democratic Syracuse and its Sicilian allies at a time when its adversary Sparta was not beaten. When I last looked the United States had not expanded its war on radical Islam by invading democratic India.
And the last time I had any notice of Buchanan himself was when his American Conservative“Victor Hanson: Portrait of an American Traitor” ) to review A War Like No Other, and wrote an incoherent rant about Iraq rather than the book in question.
I stand by everything I wrote about Patrick J. Buchanan’s book, and find his latest effort further confirmation of his delusional views about both past and present.] magazine asked the so-called “War Nerd” (who once “daydreamed” of burning down my vineyard [which in fact later mysteriously experienced a roadside brushfire], cf. his

A German view

The commentary below is circulating on the internet and provides an
historical context for us to view the current rising tide of militant Islam.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.


A German's point of view on Islam.
A man whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II
owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many
German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our
attitude toward fanaticism.


Very few people were true Nazis 'he said,' but many enjoyed the
return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was
one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So,
the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we
knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the
end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in
a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.'
We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that
Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of
Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified
assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless
fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish
the spectra of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of
Islam. The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in
history.

It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one
of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who
systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout
Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an
Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor
kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is
the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape
victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is that the
'peaceful majority', the 'silent majority', is cowed and extraneous.

Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live
in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the
murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were
irrelevant.

China's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese
Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.


The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a
warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way
across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the
systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by
sword, shovel, and bayonet.


And, who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it
not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving'?


History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all
our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated
of points:

Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence.
Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up,
because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and
find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will
have begun. Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians,
Rwandans, Serbs, Afghanis, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis,
Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the
peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.


As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the
only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.


Lastly, at the risk of offending, anyone who doubts that the issue
is serious and just deletes this email without sending it on, is
contributing to the passiveness that allows the problems to expand.
So, extend yourself a bit and send this on and on and on! Let us
hope that thousands world wide, read this -think about it - and
send it on.




--
Dipl. Ing. Dan Tal
Lazaretska 13
81108 Bratislava
Slovakia

Jackie Mason '08 Vlog 24 Obama's Fraud

Hillary isn't the only fake running for President. Hillary may be the biggest, but McCain has had his moments and now, Barack tries his hand at insulting our intelligence with this Rev. Wright controversy. I didn't comment on it 2 weeks ago when it first broke, but since he went on the View, I couldn't hold back anymore. Seeing Barbara Walters fawning over him, while he again spins more lies, I knew I had to say something. Hillary tells big lies, he just lies incrementally.

Pat Condell: The Religion of Fear

Pat talks about Fitna the Movie, Geert Wilders' film about the Quran.

Alan Keyes and Barack Obama -- debate #2

October 21, 2004
Alan Keyes and Barack Obama -- debate #2

Alan Keyes and Barack Obama -- debate #1

October 12, 2004
Alan Keyes and Barack Obama -- debate #1

Wafa Sultan stirs up controversy

The Muslim is an irrational creature: Wafa Sultan

Wafa Sultan is no stranger to controversy. A psychologist, living in the U.S., Sultan was born in Syria. She is the Arab World's worst nightmare, and I have seen her on Al Jazeera and other Arabic channels make minced meat out of her detractors.

This time, she may have gone too far, as she had Al Jazeera apologizing for her comments (hey, Al Jazeera, what happened to your unbiased, independent reporting????) and withdrawing the program on which she appeared from reruns. What makes it even worse is that the people talking to her lose all credibility when they begin blaming her statements on "zionist influences". This argument is getting a bit stale and irrelevant; and I am disappointed to see that Al Jazeera will go down the tubes like other cable networks whose strings are pulled by special interest groups.
Here's the report from Israel News.
Al-Jazeera apologizes over 'Barbarian Muslims' remark
Syrian-American psychologist's unprecedented attack on Islam stirs row in Arab world. Qatari satellite network rushes to apologize, cancel reruns.
"The al-Jazeera network deeply apologizes for the fact that one of its programs' participants degraded Islam and the monotheistic faiths on her own initiative. The channel extends its apology to all its viewers for the offensive remarks and has canceled both reruns of the program," the network said in a statement.
Here is what Sultan said: "All the religions and faiths have been subject throughout history to criticism and insults, and this helped to develop and amend them over time. The only faith which beheads those who oppose it – is destined to turn into terror and tyranny.

"This is the situation of Islam from its beginning to this day. It has sentenced its critics to prison terms, and those who escaped custody were killed. The Danish cartoons have managed to drop the first brick in the wall and open a window, through which the sun rays will be able to enter after a long period of darkness."

She went on to say that "the Danish newspaper implemented its right for freedom of expression. The freedoms are the holy of holies in the West, and there is nothing which supersedes them.

"And I say, if Islam was not what it is, these cartoons would not appear. They did not come from an empty space, and the cartoonist did not make them up from his sick mind. They were an expression of what he is familiar with."
Describing the illustrations, Sultan continued, "The Muslims' barbaric reaction added to the value of these cartoons. It simply proved their rightness: The Muslim is an irrational creature, and the things he learned overpower his mind and inflame his feelings. That is why these remarks have turned him into an inferior creature, who cannot control himself and respond to events in a rational way."
Sent by Zionist intelligence?

Tala’at Ramih, an Egyptian Islamic writer and researcher, who clashed with Sultan on the program, responded with astonishment: "God forbid! These are all one hundred percent lies. It appears that the American and Zionist intelligence have already begun creating people hostile to their nation in this way." (he lost me at "God")

The program's host, Faisal al-Qasim, asked her, "Why is the freedom of expression in the West holy only when it comes to humiliating Muslims? Can they talk about the Holocaust? Can they talk about Christianity? Cinemas have been torched in the West for talking about Christianity."

Sultan fought back: "I live in America and I never heard of one cinema being torched here. Where do you get these reports from? You should criticize your beliefs in the same way the Christians criticize their beliefs."

The debate quickly moved to the events in Gaza, which have already been compared to a holocaust in the Arab world. (Never mind that the word "holocaust" was improperly translated from the hebrew "shoah" which didn't imply the nazi massacre)

"When a person detonates himself he becomes a terrorist, but when a people and an entire state are destroyed it's human?" the host asked.

Sultan replied, "Why are they angry about what is happening in Gaza. The Koran has already told them, 'Kill or get killed.' So they kill and get killed. What is wrong with that? They want to die as shahids (martyrs). They want to meet their black-eyed virgins. Israel helps them meet them, so what's wrong with that? (sorry Wafa, that was not a good response; you can do better than this)

"If you want to change things, you must reexamine your terror studies; honor the other's right to live; preach love, peace and coexistence to your children. When you do that, the world will respect you, see you differently and portray you differently."

Later in the debate, Sultan condemned both the Palestinians and the Israelis "in the same way" and complained about Hamas' choices. She spurned the Holocaust denial in Europe.

The popular television program caused great anger against al-Jazeera, which was expressed in other media outlets. "It sparked a new scandal by hosting Sultan, who is known for her hostility towards Islam and the Muslims. She cursed the divine religion, attacked the Koran and scorned the prophet's honorable way," the London-based Arabic-language newspaper al-Jazeera wrote. (when are these people moving into the 16th century?)

"Al-Jazeera's silence is unforgivable," a Jordanian newspaper wrote. "This network leads the normalization campaign with the Zionist enemy and is the only one which hosts the official spokespersons of the enemy's army and government." Al-Jazeera chose to apologize, and according to one report, even warned the host not to let Sultan take part in the program again. But this might not be enough. (these people are hopeless, truly hopeless)

"This apology is weak, lacking and unacceptable, and does not compare to the level of harm which appeared on the screen," a special committee declared, demanding that the Qatari network publish a clearer apology and devote an entire program to discuss this issue. (I guess there are no news that are more worthy to cover than this.)

Environmental Hysteria Exemplified

Watch Penn and Teller manage to convince hundreds of leftists to sign a petition to ban water.

Muslim School Funded by Minnesota Tax Dollars/Run by Imams with help from MAS

Muslim School Funded by Minnesota Tax Dollars/Run by Imams with help from MAS

I wonder where the ACLU is on this this one? There is a charter school in Minneapolis that is run by Imams, has a central carpeted prayer space where there are regular prayer services, and serves halal (kind of Muslim Kosher) food in its cafeteria. Well except during Ramadan, when the student body is encouraged to fast from sunrise to sunset. This is not a religious school according to the school's leaders but a cultural school. But this school, funded by tax payer dollars "walks like a religious school, squawks like a religious school....

The Muslim American Society of Minnesota is also involved in the running of this school. This hate group is also a big fan of Hamas. Last June Joe Kaufman reported about the Minnesota MAS

The Minnesota chapter of MAS, the chapter that Ellison addressed, has striven to uphold the Ikhwan legacy, by propagating materials authored by past Brotherhood leaders, like Hassan Al-Banna (Egypt MB founder), Sayyid Qutb, and Syed Abul Ala Maududi (Pakistan MB founder). Within these works, which are located via the group’s “Online Library,” one finds heated discussions about waging jihad, what MAS-Minnesota terms “holy battle,” against non-Muslims. One reads, “A Muslim must always worship Allah and wage jihad until death in order to reach his ultimate goal, although the goal is invisible and it takes a long time to achieve. Therefore the steadfast Muslim will achieve this goal either through a lifetime of effort or through sudden death as a martyr… Regularly make the intention to go on jihad with the ambition to die as a martyr. You should be ready for this right now, even though its time may not have come yet.”

As well as verses about murderous jihad, one discovers on MAS-Minnesota’s website a general obsession the group has with regard to Jews, including an entire section devoted to the “STONING TO DEATH OF JEWS AND OTHER DHIMMIS.” Some anti-Semitic statements on the site [there are too many to repeat] include:

* “The Holy Prophet (and through him the Muslims) has been reassured that he should not mind the enmity, the evil designs and the machinations of the Jews, but continue exerting his utmost to establish the Right Way in accordance with the Guidance of the Quran.”
* “In view of the degenerate moral condition of the Jews and the Christians, the Believers have been warned not to make them their friends and confidants.”
* “If you gain victory over the men of Jews, kill them.”
* “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say, ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’”
* “May Allah destroy the Jews, because they used the graves of their prophets as places of worship.”

Additionally, MAS-Minnesota’s website contains laudatory declarations towards Hamas. In an article on the site, entitled ‘Priorities of The Islamic Movement in The Coming Phase,’ Hamas is described as a “steadfast, brave, aware Islamic resistance movement.” It goes on to say, “Hamas is an embodiment of the Palestinian People’s belief in its Muslim and Arab origins, and a testimony that this people is still alive and will never die and that its jihad will be carried on by pure hands and clean hearts until victory is achieved with the will of Allah.” The piece was written by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an individual that has been banned from the United States, due to his support for suicide bombings

Katherine Kersten tells us more about Minnesota's tax dollars at works;

Are taxpayers footing bill for Islamic school in Minnesota?

By KATHERINE KERSTEN, Star Tribune

March 8, 2008

Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA) -- named for the Muslim general who conquered medieval Spain -- is a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights. Its approximately 300 students are mostly the children of low-income Muslim immigrant families, many of them Somalis.

The school is in huge demand, with a waiting list of 1,500. Last fall, it opened a second campus in Blaine.

TIZA uses the language of culture rather than religion to describe its program in public documents. According to its mission statement, the school "recognizes and appreciates the traditions, histories, civilizations and accomplishments of the eastern world (Africa, Asia and Middle East)."

But the line between religion and culture is often blurry. There are strong indications that religion plays a central role at TIZA, which is a public school financed by Minnesota taxpayers. Under the U.S. and state constitutions, a public school can accommodate students' religious beliefs but cannot encourage or endorse religion.

TIZA raises troubling issues about taxpayer funding of schools that cross that line.

Asad Zaman, TIZA's principal, declined to allow me to visit the school or grant me an interview. He did not respond to e-mails seeking written replies.

TIZA's strong religious connections date from its founding in 2003. Its co-founders, Zaman and Hesham Hussein, were both imams, or Muslim religious leaders, as well as leaders of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota (MAS-MN).

Since then, they have played dual roles: Zaman as TIZA's principal and the current vice-president of MAS-MN, and Hussein as TIZA's school board chair and president of MAS-MN until his death in a car accident in Saudi Arabia in January.

MAS-MN came to Minnesotans' attention in 2006, when it issued a "fatwa," warning Muslim taxi drivers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport that transporting passengers with alcohol in their baggage is a violation of Islamic law.

Journalists whom Zaman has permitted to visit TIZA have described the school's Islamic atmosphere and practices.

"A visitor might well mistake Tarek ibn Ziyad for an Islamic school," reported Minnesota Monthly in 2007. "Head scarves are voluntary, but virtually all the girls wear them." The school has a central carpeted prayer space, and "vaguely religious-sounding language" is used.

According to the Pioneer Press, TIZA's student body prays daily and the school's cafeteria serves halal food (permissible under Islamic law). During Ramadan, all students fast from dawn to dusk, according to a parent quoted in the article.

In fact, TIZA was originally envisioned as a private Islamic school. In 2001, MAS-MN negotiated to buy the current TIZA/MAS-MN building for Al-Amal School, a private religious institution in Fridley, according to Bruce Rimstad of the Inver Grove Heights School District. But many immigrant families can't afford Al-Amal. In 2002, Islamic Relief -- headquartered in California -- agreed to sponsor a publicly funded charter school, TIZA, at the same location.

TIZA claims to be non-sectarian, as Minnesota law requires charters to be. But "after-school Islamic learning" takes place on weekdays in the same building under MAS-MN's auspices, according to the program for MAS-MN's 2007 convention. At that convention, a TIZA representative at the school's booth told me that students go directly to "Islamic studies" classes at 3:30, when TIZA's day ends. There, they learn "Qur'anic recitation, the Sunnah of the Prophet" and other religious subjects, he said.

TIZA's 2006 Contract Performance Review Report states that students engage in unspecified "electives" after school or do homework.

Publicly, TIZA emphasizes that it uses standard curricular materials like those found in other public schools. But when addressing Muslim audiences, school officials make the link to Islam clear. At MAS-MN's 2007 convention, for example, the program featured an advertisement for the "Muslim American Society of Minnesota," superimposed on a picture of a mosque. Under the motto "Establishing Islam in Minnesota," it asked: "Did you know that MAS-MN ... houses a full-time elementary school"? On the adjacent page was an application for TIZA.

In addition to the issues raised by TIZA's religious elements, there are reasons to be concerned about the organizations with which it is connected.

Islamic Relief-USA, the school's sponsor, is compared to the Red Cross in several TIZA documents. In 2006, however, the Israeli government announced that Islamic Relief Worldwide, the organization's parent group, "provides support and assistance" to Hamas, designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist group.

Meanwhile, MAS-MN offers on its web site "beneficial and enlightening information" about Islam, which includes statements like "Regularly make the intention to go on jihad with the ambition to die as a martyr."

At its 2007 convention, MAS-MN featured the notorious Shayk Khalid Yasin, who is well-known in Britain and Australia for teaching that husbands can beat disobedient wives, that gays should be executed and that the United States spreads the AIDS virus in Africa through vaccines for tropical diseases.

Yasin's topic? "Building a Successful Muslim Community in Minnesota."

TIZA has improved the reading and math performance of its mostly low-income students. That's commendable, but should Minnesota taxpayers be funding an Islamic public school?

Pat Condell: Appeasing Islam

Pat Condell talks about Europe's cultural suicide and espouses two books on the appeasement of Islamic extremism in Europe, While Europe Slept by Bruce Bawer and Londonistan by Melanie Phillips.

Obama and Carter and Israel

Obama and Carter and Israel
By Roman Brackman
Mortimer B. Zuckerman, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of US News & World Report and a supporter of Israel, in his January 30, 2008 MSNBC interview stated that he did not yet know who among the three leading presidential candidates, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, is best for Israel. It is common for candidates to proclaim their strong support for Israel. Obama is no exception. On February 25, 2008, in a closed-door meeting with several members of Cleveland‘s Jewish community, Obama said:

I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt pro-Likud approach to Israel, then you're anti-Israel, and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel[i][1]


Obama did not say how friendly to Israel his policy would be if Israelis elect a Likud government. Obama expressed his sympathy for Palestinians, stating: "Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people. I hope for loosening up aid restrictions to the Palestinian people."[ii][2]

Senator Edward Kennedy endorsed Obama in a highly emotional speech. Earlier "Kennedy was the keynote speaker at a gala dinner for the Arab-American Institute that was sponsored in part by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia." He was greeted "with enthusiastic applause." Among the guests was Congressman James Moran, a Democrat from Virginia, who had earlier declared that "without the support of the Jews, America would not have gone to war in Iraq." Moran was also "greeted "with enthusiastic applause and a standing ovation." One of the guests, Charlotte Kates, a Rutgers University law student and a leader of the National Student Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement, declared:

Israel is an apartheid colonial-settler state. I do not believe that apartheid colonial-settler state has a right to exist.[iii][3]


John Kerry also endorsed Obama. During the 2004 election campaign he also proclaimed his commitment to Israeli security. But in a speech at the Arab-American Institute in October 2004 he declared:
I know how disheartened Palestinians are by the Israeli government's decision to build the barrier, thus increasing the hardship of the Palestinian people. We do not need another barrier to peace.[iv][4]


Paul Krugman in his column "Don't Rerun That ‘70s Show" starts it by asking: "Will the next president be the second coming of Jimmy Carter" and he ended his column with quoting Carters "words of uplift" at the start of his administration: "let us create together a new national spirit of unity and trust."[v][5] Sounds familiar? Like Carter, Obama promises to terminate polices of the "oldWashington insiders."

The next prominent endorsement of Obama will probably come from the former President Jimmy Carter. While Obama promises to end our "nightmare" in Iraq and offers the hope for a change, Carter used to promises to heal the nation of "Vietnam and Watergate traumas." Carter presidency was Israel's nightmare.[vi][6] Carter and the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko issued the October 1, 1977 Joint Soviet-American Declaration that declared "terms of settlement" of the Arab-Israeli conflict and offered joint "guarantees" to implement these terms. This was an ultimatum. Carter initially described the statement as "an achievement of unprecedented significance," but when confronted with an uproar of protests in the United States and in Israel, he attempted to explain it as an "innocuous document." On October 5, 1977 Carter told a group of Jewish members of Congress who had visited him:

I'd rather commit suicide, political or otherwise, than hurt Israel![vii][7]


The press reports declared that Carter's statement was "strong," and that it underscored Carter's "unwavering dedication to the security of Israel." The statement was strong, in fact much too strong to be real, especially in view of Carter's ever-escalating hostility towards Israel. If anything, it had all the earmarks of a "reaction formation" - that is, the outwardly strong expression of a strong, but hidden, opposite impulse. Carter presented himself to the American public as a "born-again Christian" and often spoke of his closeness to God. It is worthwhile to consider Ernest Jones's observation:

God-complex types vary according to the particular God with whom the person identifies himself, and that in the West, the most common identification is with Christ. With this Christ type there invariably goes an anti-Semitic tendency.[viii][8]


On November 6, 1977 The New York Times Editorial stated:

The confrontation now brewing between Carter and the Jews seems transcend any single issue relating to the Middle Eastnegotiations. What is unspoken is the further fear of a revival of anti-Semitism and of the charge of ‘dual loyalty.'[ix][9]


In 1976 election 87% of the Jewish vote went for Carter but his presidency turned out to be Israel's nightmare.[x][10]

Probably, it is a wishful thinking to expect liberal American Jews to abandon their ossified devotion to the Democratic Party and hold their noses while voting in 2008 election for the Republican John McCain, a strong supporter of Israel and the best defender of the Free World, which, like Israel, faces the threat of the radical Islam. Obama's mesmerizing, glib and meaningless protestations of support for Israel makes him Carter's copycat.

Obama seemed to channel Jimmy Carter when he used the term separation barrier to describe the security fence or security barrier (as this system of defense is almost universally called). His use of the term separation barrier evokes the type of racist imagery that Carter directly evokes when he accuses Israel of becoming an apartheid state. It is also a term than tends to be used by those who are not supporters of Israel. Obama used this terminology in his podcast from Israel. For a man who uses words as he does -- as weapons -- this is significant. This is, by the way, the same trip that Robert Wexler said generated "love for Israel" for Obama.

In glibness, Carter has a strong competitor. In a speech to 350 Jews, who paid $1,000 per person to break bread with him at a fundraising dinner in Toronto, Clinton declared:

If Iraq came across the Jordan River I'd grab a rifle and fight and die for Israel.


350 gullible Jewish donors rewarded this glib statement with wild applause. A newspaper headline read, "G.I. Bill - Bubba: I'd fight and die for Israel." [xi][11] Clinton‘s eight-year involvement in what he used to call "peace process," but later renamed into a "political process," did much harm to Israel. Clinton wrestled exorbitant concessions from Ehud Barak whom Israelis kicked out of office and elected Ariel Sharon, at that time the leader of Likud, in the greatest landslide in Israeli history. But many Jews still believe that Clinton was friendly to Israel.

Media reports often point to an amazing phenomenon of Barack Obama's sudden emergence from obscurity to the prominence of front runner in 2008 presidential election. Explanations for this phenomenon began to emerge. Paul Krugman in his column "Hate Springs Eternal" states, "The Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality."[xii][12] D. Murphy, one of the readers, wrote, "Cult of personality, indeed. Barack Obama has style, but no substance. He has been in national politics only a couple of years."[xiii][13] Sue Roupp, another reader, wrote, "Senator Barack Obama's campaign reminds me of a series of revival meetings. There's the charismatic speaker who uses emotional words to raise the audience to fever pitch, followed by conversion to his ideas and the passing of the hat. Supporters, who wrap themselves in these emotional promises, find that it works for a while. But then it grows quiet, and looking around, the converts see the revival tent has moved on and everyday life intervenes. Where is the crucial thinking here about how to get out of Iraq? To help the economy? To solve the health care crisis? There's just the emptiness of the emotional words, ringing hollow in the air.[xiv][14] Nevertheless, millions of dollars keep dropping into Obama's "hat."

David Brooks in his column "When the Magic Fades" describes the "phases of Obama-mania - fainting at rallies..., experiencing intense surges of hope-amine, the brain chemical that fuels euphoric sensations of historic change and personal salvation." This affliction at some point comes to a predictable end, which David Brooks calls "Osama Comedown Syndrome" - the afflicted come to realize that most of Obama's "hope-mongering is vaporous" and "Obama's hype comes from exaggeration of his powers and his virtues...."[xv][15] Nathaniel Hernandez in his article "Statue of Obama as Jesus Stirs Ire, Attracts Buyers" provides David Cordero's explained that his sculpture of Senator Obama "wearing Jesus' robes and a neon blue halo" was "a response to what I have been witnessing and hearing is that Barack is a sort of a potential savior that might come and absolve the country of all its sins."[xvi][16] The most striking example of this ridiculous hype was exposed on the TV screen when Obama in the middle of his speech suddenly interrupted it to blow his nose. The converted audience responded by a wild applause.

Obama's often repeated promises to end the culture of corruption by the "old Washington insiders" reminds one of the old TV documentaries about a family of baboons living on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. The aging father of the family sits on the top of a hill watching the peaceful scene. Suddenly a lonely Baboon appears. As he walks along the shore toward the family its members become visibly agitated. Two baboons confront the stranger to protect their aging father. The stranger bares his teeth and the two baboons run for their lives while the stranger chases the aging father away and takes possession of all the females in the family. This story must have been repeated for thousands of years.
[i][1] Jerusalem Post , February 26, 2008

[ii][2] New York Post, March 24, 2007, p.17

[iii][3] New York Post, July 9, 2003, p. 2.

[iv][4] Jewish Week, February 13, 2004, p. 28.

[v][5] New York Times, February 22, 2008)

[vi][6] See Roman Brackman "Jimmy Carter Provocateur-in-Chief" (1980) - Chapter VI "I'd Rather Commit Suicide, Political or Otherwise, Than Hurt Israel" and "Israel at High Noon"(2006) - Chapter 9 "Israel's Nightmare: The Carter Presidency'

[vii][7] New York Times, October 6, 1977

[viii][8] Ernest Jones, M.D., Psycho Myth, Psych-History, Op. sit. Volume Two, pp. 263-64.

[ix][9] New York Times, November 6, 1977

[x][10] Roman Brackman "Jimmy Carter Provocateur-in-Chief" (1980) - Chapter VI "I'd Rather Commit Suicide, Political or Otherwise, Than Hurt Israel" and "Israel at High Noon"(2006) - Chapter 9 "Israel's Nightmare: The Carter Presidency'

[xi][11] New York Post, August 2, 2002, pp. 1-6.

[xii][12] The New York Times, Op-Ed column February 11, 2008

[xiii][13] The New York Times, Letter to the Editor, February 13, 2008)

[xiv][14] Ibid

[xv][15] The New York Times, February 18, 2008, p.A25, David Brooks, "When the Magic Fades"

[xvi][16] The New York Sun, April 4, 2007, p.6

2008 Democratic National Convention Agenda

> JUST RELEASED:
>
> 2008 Democratic National Convention Agenda
>
> 7:00 pm Opening flag burning
>
> 7:15 pm Pledge of Allegiance to the U.N.
>
> 7:20 pm Ted Kennedy proposes a toast
>
> 7:25 pm Nonreligious prayer and worship with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton
>
> 7:45 pm Ceremonial tree hugging
>
> 7:55 pm Ted Kennedy proposes a toast
>
> 8:00 pm How I Invented the Internet - Al Gore
>
> 8:15 pm Gay Wedding - Barney Frank presiding
>
> 8:35 pm Ted Kennedy proposes a toast
>
> 8:40 pm Our Troops are War Criminals - John Kerry
>
> 9.00 pm Memorial service for Saddam and his sons - Cindy Sheehan and Susan Sarandon
>
> 10:00 pm "Answering Machine Etiquette" - Alec Baldwin
>
> 11:00 pm Ted Kennedy proposes a toast
>
> 11:05 pm Collection for the Osama Bin Laden kidney transplant fund - Barbra Streisand
>
> 11:15 pm Free the Freedom Fighters from Guantanamo Bay - Sean Penn
>
> 11:30 pm Oval Office Affairs - William Jefferson Clinton
>
> 11:45 pm Ted Kennedy proposes a toast
>
> 11:50 pm How George Bush Brought Down the World Trade Towers - Howard Dean
>
> 12:15 am "Truth in Broadcasting Award" - Presented to Dan Rather by Michael Moore
>
> 12:25 am Ted Kennedy proposes a toast
>
> 12:30 am Satellite address by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
>
> 12:45 am Nomination of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Nancy Pelosi
>
> 1:00 am Ted Kennedy proposes a toast
>
> 1:05 am Coronation of Hillary Rodham Clinton
>
> 1:30 am Ted Kennedy proposes a toast
>
> 1:35 am Bill Clinton asks Ted to drive Hillary home

"SLEEPWALKING INTO A NIGHTMARE!"

"SLEEPWALKING INTO A NIGHTMARE!"

"Good evening.

I just want to talk to you from the heart for a few minutes tonight, and share with you where I think we are.

I think it is very stark. I don't think it is yet desperate, but it is very stark. And if I had a title for tonight's talk, it would be 'Sleepwalking Into a Nightmare', 'cause that's what I think we're doing.

I gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute recently, at which I gave an alternative history of the last six years, because the more I thought about how much we're failing, the more I concluded you couldn't just nitpick individual places and talk about individual changes because it didn't capture the scale of the disaster.

And I had been particularly impressed by a new book that came out called 'Troublesome Young Men', which is a study of the younger Conservatives who opposed appeasement in the 1930s and who took on Chamberlain. It's a very revealing book and a very powerful book because we tend to look backwards and we tend to overstate Churchill's role in that period.

And we tend to understate what a serious and conscientious and thoughtful effort appeasement was and that it was the direct and deliberate policy of very powerful and very willful people. We tend to think of it as a psychological weakness as though Chamberlain was somehow craven. He wasn't craven. Chamberlain had a very clear vision of the World, and he was very ruthless domestically.

And they believed so deeply in avoiding war with Germany that as late as the spring of 1940, when they are six months or seven months into the war, they are dropping leaflets instead of bombs on the Ruhr, and they are urging the British news media not to publish anti-German stories because they don't want to offend the German people. And you read this book, and it makes you want to weep because, interestingly, the younger Tories who were most opposed to appeasement were the combat veterans of World War I, who had lost all of their friends in the war but who understood that the failure of appeasement would result in a worse war and that the longer you lied about reality, the greater the disaster.

And they were severely punished and isolated by Chamberlain and the Conservative machine, and as I read that, I realized that that's really where we are today. Our current problem is tragic. You have an administration whose policy is inadequate being opposed by a political Left whose policy is worse, and you have nobody prepared to talk about the policy we need. Because we are told, 'if you are for a strong America , you should back the Bush policy even if it's inadequate', and so you end up making an argument in favor of something that can't work. So your choice is to defend something which isn't working, or to oppose it by being for an even weaker policy.

And this is a catastrophe for this country, and a catastrophe for freedom around the world. Because we have refused to be honest about the scale of the problem.

Let me work backwards. I'm going to get to Iran , since that's the topic, but I'm going to get to it eventually.

Let me work back from Pakistan . The dictatorship in Pakistan has never had control over Wiziristan. Not for a single day. So we've now spent six years since 9/11 with a sanctuary for Al-Qaida, and a sanctuary for the Taliban, and every time we pick up people in Great Britain who are terrorists, they were trained in Pakistan .

And our answer is to praise Musharraf, because at least he's not as bad as the others. But the truth is Musharraf has not gotten control of terrorism in Pakistan . Musharraf doesn't have full control over his own government. The odds are even money we're going to drift into a disastrous dictatorship at some point in Pakistan . And while we worry about the Iranians acquiring a nuclear weapon, the Pakistanis already have 'em. So why would you feel secure in a world where you could presently have an Islamist dictatorship in Pakistan with a hundred-plus nuclear weapons? What's our grand strategy for that?

Then you look at Afghanistan . Here's a country that's small, poor, isolated, and in six years we have not been able to build roads, create economic opportunity, wean people off of growing drugs. A third of the Afghani GDP is from drugs. We haven't been able to end the sanctuary for the Taliban in Pakistan . And I know of no case historically where you defeat a guerrilla movement if it has a sanctuary. So the people who rely on the West are out bribed by the criminals, outgunned by the criminals, and faced with a militant force across the border which practiced earlier defeating the Soviet empire and which has a time horizon of three or four generations. NATO has a time horizon of each quarter or at best a year, facing an opponent whose time horizon is literally three or four generations. It's a total mismatch.

Then you come to the direct threat to the United States , which is Al-Qaida. About which, by the way, we just published polls. One of the sites I commend to you is AmericanSolutions.com. Last Wednesday we posted six national surveys, $428,000 worth of data. We gave it away. I found myself in the unique position of calling Howard Dean to tell him I was giving him $400,000 worth of polling. We have given it away to Democrats and Republicans alike. It is fundamentally different from the
national news media. When asked the question, "Do we have an obligation to defend the United States and her allies?" the answer is 85 percent yes. When asked a further question "Should we defeat our enemies?" - it's very strong language - the answer is 75 percent yes.

So the complaint about Iraq is a performance complaint, not a values complaint.

When asked whether or not Al-Qaida is a threat, 89 percent of the country says yes. And they think you have to defeat it, you can't negotiate with it.

So now let's look at Al-Qaida and the rise of Islamist terrorism. And let's be honest: What's the primary source of money for Al-Qaida? It's you, re-circulated through Saudi Arabia . Because we have no national energy strategy, when clearly, if you really cared about liberating the United States from the Middle East, and if you really cared about the survival of Israel, one of your highest goals would be to move to a hydrogen economy, and to eliminate petroleum as a primary source of energy.

Now that's what a serious national strategy would look like, but that would require an actual change.

So then you look at Saudi Arabia . The fact that we tolerate a country saying no Christian and no Jew can go to Mecca, and we start with the presumption that that's true, while they attack Israel for being a religious state, is a sign of our timidity, our confusion, our cowardice, --- that is stunning!

It's not complicated. We invited Saudi Arabia to come to Annapolis to talk about rights for Palestinians when nobody said, "Let's talk about rights for Christians and Jews in Saudi Arabia . Let's talk about rights for women in Saudi Arabia ."

So we accept this totally one-sided definition of the world, in which our enemies can cheerfully lie on television every day, and we don't even have the nerve to insist on the truth. We pretend their lies are reasonable. This is a very fundamental problem. And if you look at who some of the largest owners of some of our largest banks are today, they're Saudis.

You keep pumping billions of dollars a year into countries like Venezuela , Iran and Saudi Arabia , and Russia , and you are presently going to have created people who oppose you, who have lots of money. And they're then going to come back to your own country and finance, for example, Arab study institutes whose only requirement is that they never tell the truth. So you have all sorts of Ph.D.'s who now show up quite cheerfully prepared to say whatever it is that makes their founders happy - in the name, of course, of academic freedom. In this context, why wouldn't Columbia host a genocidal madman? It's just part of political correctness. I mean, Ahmadinejad may say terrible things; he may lock up students, he may kill journalists, he may say, "We should wipe out Israel ," he may say, "We should defeat the United States ," but after all, what has he done that's inappropriate? What has he done that wouldn't be repeated at a Hollywood cocktail party or a nice gathering in Europe ?

And nobody says, 'this is totally, utterly, absolutely unacceptable'.

Why is it that the number-one threat in intelligence movies is always the CIA? I happened the other night to be watching an old movie, 'To Live and Die in L.A. ', which is about counterfeiting. But the movie starts with a Secret Service agent who is defending Ronald Reagan in 1985, and the person he is defending Ronald Reagan from is a suicide bomber who is actually, overtly, a Muslim fanatic. Now, six years after 9/11, you could not get that same scene made in Hollywood today.

Just look at the movies. Why is it that the bad person has to be either a right-wing crazed billionaire, or the CIA as a government agency? Go look at the 'Bourne Ultimatum'. Or a movie like the one that George Clooney made, which was an absolute lie, in which it was implied that if you were a reformist Arab prince, the CIA would kill you. It's a total lie. We actually have SEALS protecting people all over the world. We actually risk American lives protecting reformers all over the world, and yet Hollywood can't bring itself to tell the truth because (a) it's ideologically opposed to the American government and the American military; and (b), because it's terrified that if it said something really, openly, honestly truthful about Muslim terrorists, they might show up in Hollywood, and somebody might be killed as the Dutch producer was killed. They're cowards.

And so we're living a life of cowardice, and in that life of cowardice we're sleepwalking into a nightmare.

And then you come to Iran . There's a terrific book. Mark Bowden is a remarkable writer who wrote 'Black Hawk Down', has enormous personal courage. He's a Philadelphia newspaper writer, actually got the money out of the Philadelphia newspaper to go to Somalia to interview the Somalian side of 'Black Hawk Down'. It's a remarkable achievement. Tells a great story about getting to Somalia , paying lots of cash, having the local warlord protect him, and after about two weeks the warlord came to him and said, "You know, we've decided that we're very uncomfortable with you being here, and you should leave."

And so he goes to the hotel, where he is the only hard-currency guest, and says, "I've got to check out two weeks early because the warlord has told me that he no longer will protect me." And the hotel owner, who wants to keep his only hard-currency guest, says, "Well, why are you listening to him? He's not the government. There is no government." And Bowden says, "Well, what will I do?" And he says, "You hire a bigger warlord with more guns," which he did. But then he could only stay one week because he ran out of money.

But this is a guy with real courage. I mean, imagine trying to go out and be a journalist in that kind of world, OK? So Bowden came back and wrote, 'Guest of the Ayatollah', which is about the Iranian hostage action of 1979, which he entitled, 'The First Shots in Iran 's War Against America .' So in the Bowden world view, the current Iranian dictatorship has been at war with the United States since 1979. Violated international law. Every conceivable tenet of international law was violated when they seized the American Embassy and they seized the diplomats. Killed Americans in Lebanon in the early '80s. Killed Americans at Khobar Towers in '95 and had the Clinton administration deliberately avoid revealing the information, as Louis Freeh, the Director of the FBI, has said publicly, because they didn't want to have to confront the Iranian complicity.

And so you have an Iranian regime which is cited annually as the leading supporter of state terrorism in the world. Every year the State Department says that, "It's an extraordinary act of lucidity on the part of an institution which seeks to avoid it as often as possible."

And you have Gen. Petraeus come to the U.S. Congress and say publicly in an open session, "The Iranians are waging a proxy war against Americans in Iraq ."

I was so deeply offended by this, it's hard for me to express it without sounding irrational. I'm an Army Brat. My dad served 27
years in the infantry. The idea that an American general would come to the American Congress, testify in public that our young men and women are being killed by Iran , and we have done nothing, I find absolutely abhorrent.

So I'm preparing to come and talk today. I got up this morning, and a friend had sent me yesterday's Jerusalem Post editorial, which if you haven't read, I recommend to you. It has, for example, the following quote: "On Monday, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said, 'The problem of the content of the document setting out joint principles for peace-making post-Annapolis has not been resolved. One of the more pressing problems is the Zionist regime's insistence on being recognized as a Jewish state. We will not agree to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. There is no country in the world where religious and national identities are intertwined.'

What truly bothers me is the shallowness and the sophistry of the Western governments, starting with our own. When a person says to you, "I don't recognize that you exist," you don't start a negotiation. The person says, "I literally do not recognize" and then lies to you. I mean the first thing you say to this guy is "Terrific. Let's go visit Mecca . Since clearly there's no other state except Israel that is based on religion, the fact that I happen to be Christian won't bother anybody." And then he'll say, "Well, that's different."

We actually tolerate this. We have created our own nightmare, because we refuse to tell the truth. We refuse to tell the truth to our politicians. Our State Department refuses to tell the truth to the country. If the President of the United States, and again, we're now so bitterly partisan, we're so committed to red-vs.-blue hostility, that George W. Bush doesn't have the capacity to give an address from the Oval Office that has any meaning for half the country. And the anti-war Left is so strong in the Democratic primary that I think it's almost impossible for any Democratic presidential candidate to tell the truth about the situation.

And so the Republicans are isolated and trying to defend incompetence. The Democrats are isolated and trying to find a way to say, "I'm really for strength as long as I can have peace, but I'd really like to have peace, except I don't want to recognize these people who aren't very peaceful."

I just want to share with you, as a grandfather, as a citizen, as an historian, as somebody who was once speaker of the House, this is a serious national crisis. This is actually 1935 or 1936, and it's getting worse every year.

None of our enemies are confused. Our enemies don't get up each morning and go, "Oh, gosh, I think I'll have an existential crisis of identity in which I will try to think through whether or not we can be friends while you're killing me." No; our enemies get up every morning and say, "We hate the West. We hate freedom. We will kill them all"

They would not allow a meeting with women in the room. I was once interviewed by a BBC reporter, a nice young lady who was only about as anti-American as she had to be to keep her job. Since it was a live interview, I turned to her halfway through the interview and I said, "Do you like your job?" And it was summertime, and she's wearing a short-sleeve dress. And she said, "Well, yes." She was confused because I had just reversed roles. I said, "Well, then you should hope we win." She said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well, if the enemy wins, you won't be allowed to be on television."

I don't know how to explain it any simpler than that. Now, what do we need?

We need first of all to recognize this is a real war. Our enemies are peaceful when they're weak, are ruthless when they're strong, demand mercy when they're losing, show no mercy when they're winning. They understand exactly what this is, and anybody who reads Sun Tzu will understand exactly what we're living through. This is a total war. One side is going to win. One side is going to lose. You'll be able to tell who won and who lost by who's still standing. Most of Islam is not in this war, but most of Islam isn't going to stop this war. They're just going to sit to one side and tell you how sorry they are that this is happening.

We had better design grand strategies that are radically bigger and radically tougher and radically more honest than anything currently going on, and that includes winning the argument in Europe , and it includes winning the argument in the rest of the world.

And it includes being very clear, and I'll just give you one simple example because we're now muscle-bound by our own inability to talk honestly. Iran produces 60 percent of its own gasoline. It produces lots of crude oil but only has one refinery. It imports 40 percent of its gasoline. The entire 60 percent is produced at one huge refinery.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan decided to break the Soviet empire. He was asked: 'what's your vision of the Cold War?' He said, 'Four words: we win; they lose.' He was clearly seen by The New York Times as an out-of-touch, reactionary, right-wing cowboy from California who had no idea what was going on in the world. And eleven years later the Soviet Union disappeared, but obviously that had nothing to do with Reagan because that would have meant he was right. So it's just a random accident the Soviet Union disappeared.

Part of the war we waged on the Soviet Union involved their natural gas supply because we wanted to cut off their hard currency. The Soviets were desperate to get better equipment for their pipeline. We managed to sell them, through third parties, some very, very sophisticated American pipeline equipment, which they were absolutely thrilled to buy, and thought they had pulled off a huge coup. Now, we weren't playing fair. We did not tell them that the equipment was designed to fail; to blow
itself up. It was in the software that ran the equipment, and they never detected it. One day in 1982, there was an explosion in Siberia so large that the initial reflection on the satellites looked like it was a tactical nuclear weapon. One part of the White House was genuinely worried, and the other part of the White House had to calm them down. They said, "No, no, that's just our own equipment blowing up."

In the 28 years since the Iranians declared war on us, in the six years since 9/11, in the months since Gen. Petraeus publicly said they are killing young Americans, we have not been able to figure out how to take down a single refinery. Covertly, quietly, without overt war. And we have not been able to figure out how to use the most powerful Navy in the world to simply stop the tankers and say, "Look, you want to kill young Americans, you're going to walk to the battlefield. You're not going to ride in the car, because you're not going to have any gasoline."

We don't have to be stupid. The choice is not cowardice or total war. Reagan unlocked Poland without firing a shot, via an alliance with the Pope, with the labor unions, and with the British. We have every possibility, if we're prepared to be honest, to shape the world. It'll be a very big project. It's going to require an effort much closer to the effort we put into World War II than it is to anything we've tried recently. It will require great effort, real intensity and real determination. We're either going to do it now, while we're still extraordinarily powerful, or we're going to do it later under much more desperate circumstances after we've lost several cities.

We had better take this seriously, because we are not very many mistakes away from a second Holocaust. Three nuclear weapons is a second Holocaust. Our enemies would like to get those weapons as soon as they can, and they promise to use them as soon as they can.

I suggest we defeat our enemies, and create a different situation long before they have that power.

Thank you."
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich

In election 2008, don't forget Angry White Man

In election 2008, don't forget Angry White Man







Gary Hubbell February 9, 2008




There is a great amount of interest in this year's presidential elections, as everybody seems to recognize that our next president has to be a lot better than George Bush. The Democrats are riding high with two groundbreaking candidates -- a woman and an African-American -- while the conservative Republicans are in a quandary about their party's nod to a quasi-liberal maverick, John McCain.

Each candidate is carefully pandering to a smorgasbord of special-interest groups, ranging from gay, lesbian and transgender people to children of illegal immigrants to working mothers to evangelical Christians.

There is one group no one has recognized, and it is the group that will decide the election: the Angry White Man. The Angry White Man comes from all economic backgrounds, from dirt-poor to filthy rich. He represents all geographic areas in America, from urban sophisticate to rural redneck, deep South to mountain West, left Coast to Eastern Seaboard.

His common traits are that he isn't looking for anything from anyone -- just the promise to be able to make his own way on a level playing field. In many cases, he is an independent businessman and employs several people. He pays more than his share of taxes and works hard.

The victimhood syndrome buzzwords -- "disenfranchised," "marginalized" and "voiceless" -- don't resonate with him. "Press 'one' for English" is a curse-word to him. He's used to picking up the tab, whether it's the company Christmas party, three sets of braces, three college educations or a beautiful wedding.

He believes the Constitution is to be interpreted literally, not as a "living document" open to the whims and vagaries of a panel of judges who have never worked an honest day in their lives.

The Angry White Man owns firearms, and he's willing to pick up a gun to defend his home and his country. He is willing to lay down his life to defend the freedom and safety of others, and the thought of killing someone who needs killing really doesn't bother him.

The Angry White Man is not a metrosexual, a homosexual or a victim. Nobody like him drowned in Hurricane Katrina -- he got his people together and got the hell out, then went back in to rescue those too helpless and stupid to help themselves, often as a police officer, a National Guard soldier or a volunteer firefighter.

His last name and religion don't matter. His background might be Italian, English, Polish, German, Slavic, Irish, or Russian, and he might have Cherokee, Mexican, or Puerto Rican mixed in, but he considers himself a white American.

He's a man's man, the kind of guy who likes to play poker, watch football, hunt white-tailed deer, call turkeys, play golf, spend a few bucks at a strip club once in a blue moon, change his own oil and build things. He coaches baseball, soccer and football teams and doesn't ask for a penny. He's the kind of guy who can put an addition on his house with a couple of friends, drill an oil well, weld a new bumper for his truck, design a factory and publish books. He can fill a train with 100,000 tons of coal and get it to the power plant on time so that you keep the lights on and never know what it took to flip that light switch.

Women either love him or hate him, but they know he's a man, not a dishrag. If they're looking for someone to walk all over, they've got the wrong guy. He stands up straight, opens doors for women and says "Yes, sir" and "No, ma'am."

He might be a Republican and he might be a Democrat; he might be a Libertarian or a Green. He knows that his wife is more emotional than rational, and he guides the family in a rational manner.

He's not a racist, but he is annoyed and disappointed when people of certain backgrounds exhibit behavior that typifies the worst stereotypes of their race. He's willing to give everybody a fair chance if they work hard, play by the rules and learn English.

Most important, the Angry White Man is pissed off. When his job site becomes flooded with illegal workers who don't pay taxes and his wages drop like a stone, he gets righteously angry. When his job gets shipped overseas, and he has to speak to some incomprehensible idiot in India for tech support, he simmers. When Al Sharpton comes on TV, leading some rally for reparations for slavery or some such nonsense, he bites his tongue and he remembers. When a child gets charged with carrying a concealed weapon for mistakenly bringing a penknife to school, he takes note of who the local idiots are in education and law enforcement.

He also votes, and the Angry White Man loathes Hillary Clinton. Her voice reminds him of a shovel scraping a rock. He recoils at the mere sight of her on television. Her very image disgusts him, and he cannot fathom why anyone would want her as their leader. It's not that she is a woman. It's that she is who she is. It's the liberal victim groups she panders to, the "poor me" attitude that she represents, her inability to give a straight answer to an honest question, his tax dollars that she wants to give to people who refuse to do anything for themselves.

There are many millions of Angry White Men. Four million Angry White Men are members of the National Rifle Association, and all of them will vote against Hillary Clinton, just as the great majority of them voted for George Bush.

He hopes that she will be the Democratic nominee for president in 2008, and he will make sure that she gets beaten like a drum.

Gary Hubbell is a regular columnist with the Aspen Times Weekly.