Reminds one of another slick Democrat politician who said he wouldnt’ run for President in the middle of his term as governor of Arkansas.

Add this to Obama’s broken pledge to abide by campaign fund raising and spending limit Check it out on the ; Collins Racing Services;Fast Relief From Hot Flashes, Mood Swings & More. View complete and up to date EstraceOral versions: Estrace, Activella (also contains a progestin), Estradiol acetate, Vaginal ointment: EstraceFast Relief From Hot Flashes, Mood Swings & More. Buy Estrace Estradiol-17b (micronized) Estrogen EstraceGet The Facts About EstraceIncredible prices. Alternative Treatment For Menopause treatment – Stem CelGet The Facts About Estrace Side Effects. s.  How do you know when to trust a liar?

If George Bush didn’t really do anything to protect life, why does what he did have to be undone?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090307/ap_on_go_pr_wh/obama_stem_cells

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090123/pl_nm/us_obama_abortion

Yet it is dangerously Pollyannaish for conservatives to think that the majority of voters did not know they were voting for a big-government nanny state when they cast their ballot for Obama.

Rush is right that McCain’s attempt to wear the mantle of conservatism never really worked, because his lifelong reputation as a “moderate” more intent on reaching compromise than on leading a movement aimed at advancing key principles could not ultimately be overcome. Along the same lines, Sean Hannity’s prescription is that the Republican Party has to identify strong candidates who will articulate strong conservative principles, and they will carry the day. Sean is right, but only half right.

Running articulate, conservative candidates is essential, but not adequate in and of itself. Conservatives have to face the fact that we are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of a critical mass of the American people. And we have to rebuild the movement by re-emphasizing persuasion and education, concerning the fundamental principles that serve as the foundation of conservatism and the founding of the United States.

It is not enough to say, “we believe in limited government, personal liberty, private property, and the principles of the Founding Fathers, so vote for us.” I am convinced that most people don’t even understand these principles or know why they are important. For conservatives to succeed significantly in national elections, we are going to have to continually teach these principles, explain them thoroughly, and make it clear why straying from them can ultimately be so dangerous. This was the genius of Reagan, and no Republican president since him has had it. Reagan never stopped selling conservative principles. He understood them because he internalized them by reading widely, thinking deeply, and communicating (in speech and in writing) about these principles, and he never let up. In politics, just when you think you have won, that’s the time to push even harder.

Democrats have always seemed to understand this basic tenet of the effective acquisition of political power: Never stop campaigning. Bill Clinton’s entire presidency was a campaign; Barack Obama’s re-election campaign will begin on January 21, 2009 (maybe it has already started). Pick a major issue important to the waning Republican administration, however, and look at the horrible failures to teach, explain, and sell their position in a relentless way. Partial privatization of social security should have been a winning issue, but the administration caved at the first sign of a fight. And the Democrats successfully convinced a majority of Americans that Bush was trying to “take away” their social security.

The war in Iraq began with popular support, yet Bush failed to keep selling it, allowing the Democrats to make it into a liability for the GOP that brought the Dems back to power in 2006. If you step back and try to look at them with a little historical perspective, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been resounding successes overall, though not without serious but expected setbacks along the way. The American military, led by President Bush, overthrew two violent, bloody, terribly repressive regimes, liberated more than 50 million people, and killed tens of thousands of terrorists, all with breathtakingly low casualty rates. I am convinced that this administration’s historic unpopularity–before the economic crisis–had more to do with its inexplicable negligence in failing to keep selling the war (yes, a little propaganda–as long as it was true–would have been a good idea) and the Democrats relentless attacks than it had to do with Bush’s alleged incompetence.

My thesis here is not intended to give comfort to liberals or to depress conservatives. Nor am I lining up with so-called moderate conservatives–like David Brooks of the New York Times–who believe that conservatism needs to be reformed or modernized to become competitive again. That’s another way of saying Republicans need to create a new kind of conservatism, essentially liberalism lite, in order to be competitive. My argument could not be further from that. I am saying that the conservative movement needs to realize that we have to re-fight the old battles. No longer is it safe to assume that the principles of limited government, free markets, and individual liberty are widely embraced.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, many of us thought that would be the death knell of the planned economy. Sadly, we were premature. While Russia is looking more and more like the Soviet Union of old, and dictator Hugo Chavez, the darling of the “world community” and of the American left, is nationalizing significant aspects of the Venezuelan economy, the United States has just elected a leftist President and Congress, on the promise of government guaranteed health care, education, prosperity, etc. Then there’s the bail-out, supported by a Republican president and both his would-be successors, not to mention both parties in Congress. Thus we find ourselves in the United States with an “economy czar” who has near-dictatorial authority to spend upwards of a trillion dollars, in the person of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and his eventual successor.

In future posts, I hope to examine some of the specific reasons for my conclusion in more detail. But if we do not admit that the conservative movement has a challenge before it more serious than the mere packaging of slicker and more attractive candidates, we will be doomed to more failure. And we could be witnessing the dawning of a new era of big-government liberalism that will change America as drastically, or more so, than the New Deal.

The questions are central to the role of government in the United States of America and to the function of the Presidency.  With all the promises both candidates have made, with all the things that Obama says he will do (most of which are unrealistic and outside the realm of the presidency), nobody has ever challenged him with the simple question, “Is that the role of the President as defined in the Constitution?”

The US Constitution is the job description for the President, yet there has been no, and I mean no, discussion of the Constitution by either campaign.  Whoever wins this thing will swear an oath, in fact, to “defend and protect the Constitution of the United States of America.”

Isn’t it only fitting that the candidates be required to know and understand the Constitution as a pre-requisite to being elected, so that they know what it is that they will be swearing to defend and protect?

Barack Obama apparently thinks the Constitution is inadequate. Here is what he said on a Chicago Public Radio station in 2001:

OBAMA: If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.
But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted. One of the I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change and in some ways we still suffer from that.
MODERATOR: Let’s talk with Karen. Good morning, Karen, you’re on Chicago Public Radio.
KAREN: Hi. The gentleman made the point that the Warren court wasn’t terribly radical with economic changes. My question is, is it too late for that kind of reparative work economically and is that that the appropriate place for reparative economic work to take place – the court – or would it be legislation at this point?
OBAMA: Maybe I’m showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way.
You just look at very rare examples during the desegregation era the court was willing to for example order changes that cost money to a local school district. The court was very uncomfortable with it. It was very hard to manage, it was hard to figure out. You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time.
The court’s just not very good at it and politically it’s very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally. Any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts. 

To Obama, the Courts could come up with a way to justify positve rights (”what the federal or state government must do on your behalf”), but he doesn’t think they will.  So it has to be done at the grass-roots level of community organizing. Hello ACORN!

Obama believes that the government must provide “redistributive” justice. If it can’t be forced through the courts, it should be enacted through legislation.  This is a fundamentally radical view of human rights and of the American experiment in ordered liberty.  It is at odds with the vision of America’s founders and even with a great many Americans to this day.  Obama’s view would be consistent with the notion of a “right” to health care, which he advocated in the last debate; a “right” to housing; a “right” to education, etc.  This view of rights not only guarantees that a person cannot be obstructed in trying to obtain those goods, but also that the government must actively provide them to every citizen.

The President’s most fundamental duty is to uphold and defend the US Constitution.  Will the citizens of the United States elect a man to the presidency who does not believe in the very document he will swear to uphold? 

Reminds one of another slick Democrat politician who said he wouldnt’ run for President in the middle of his term as governor of Arkansas.

Add this to Obama’s broken pledge to abide by campaign fund raising and spending limits.  How do you know when to trust a liar?

Yet another distasteful irony of this election, as “Ken” points out in a comment on another post, that if McCain loses, it will be in large part because of the very regulations he was responsible for passing into law.  McCain is abiding by the restrictions that he advocated on campaign finance and spending, while Obama is not. 

Even more ironic, too, that it was always the Republicans that were excoriated in the press for attempting to “buy” elections with their extravagant spending.

Where is the criticism of Obama for shattering all spending records for a presidential election, for literally buying this election in the most brazen manner?  This is after promising that he wouldn’t.

You have to feel kind of sorry for old McCain, who has been so skillfully and easily duped by Chicago-style politics.  There is something endearing and sincere in McCain’s appeal to honor.  There are things which his strong sense of integrity will not let him do; and some of these are very frustrating to his supporters. Going after Obama with regard to Jeremiah Wright is a case in point.  Yet you have to respect a man who would rather lose an election than lose his honor, even if he defines that honor differently than we would.

To Obama and his base of support, honor went out of fashion with knights in shining armor.  Their sense of duty is to one thing only:  power.  And power can be achieved only through victory.  And victory, therefore, must come at any cost.  What’s wrong with a little ballot-box-stuffing and illegally gotten campaign cash?  Not a damn thing if it will help us win.  Honor? Integrity? Belief in binding principles that are more important than any one person?  Those are the illusions of fools . . . fools who lose elections.

 http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14811.html

No big money donors are willing to fund the independent groups that can run a massive ad campaign linking Obama to Jeremiah Wright, for example.  This is because they expect McCain to condemn them for doing it; they don’t believe that his campaign will know how to capitalize on it; and they are not sure it is worth the investment because, if McCain should win, will he govern that much more conservatively than Obama?

This campaign is fraught with ironies, delicious to Dems, nauseating to the GOP.

One is the irony of ideology:  Obama is steeped in extreme leftist ideology and is successfully running as a moderate.  McCain is steeped in pragmatic moderation and is attempting to run, unsuccessfully, as a conservative.

Obama has successfully packaged a Trojan Horse approach, with the LEM’s (Liberal Establisment Media. I refuse to call them mainstream; don’t cede the middle ground to them) help to be sure.  The radical left is thrilled with Obama, because they know he is one of them.  But they know he has to run more moderately in order to win, and they are willing to look the other way while he tacks to the center.  The mainstream Democrats and that amorphous group of left-leaning, generally non-ideological voters don’t know or refuse to believe that Obama is a radical leftist. Thus he has cobbled together a winning coalition:  keeping the left wing base in the fold and bringing the middle along.

On the other hand, McCain cannot keep the Republican base happy, because he has never been and is not now a movement conservative.  He is a patriotic and slightly right-of-center pragmatist.  Yet McCain can’t even get credit for that.  He used to be the darling of the “moderates” and independents, yet they are flocking to Obama, a radical leftist in his ideology.  In short, Obama is winning because he is perceived as middle of the road (when he is not), and McCain–the real moderate–is losing because he is perceived as being right wing (when he is not).

Watch this:

http://americaschoicenow.com/

See the Wall Street Journal’s analysis:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122420205889842989.html

McCain’s best argument may be purely defensive.  Give me the White House as the last bulwark of defense against the coming storm of liberalism about to be unleashed on America through the Congress.  Remember good old gridlock?  We want you back, big time.

Not that McCain is the best defense we could have, with his penchant for caving to Democrat demands, but he is the only defense we have at this point. 

Vote McCain, shutter the windows, pray for the best, and head to the basement (don’t forget the duct tape).

Maybe when the storm is over, there will be enough of America left to be worth preserving . . .