May 08, 2008
New Column: In Fairness to Hillary
The question, my fellow election watchers, is not, "Why won't Hillary do the honorable thing and quit?" but "Why won't Democrats do the honorable thing and quit trying to force her to?"
Did Democrats make Ted Kennedy quit when he fought Jimmy Carter through the Democratic convention in 1980 in an effort to dislodge pledged delegates though Carter had already secured a majority? That was far worse than anything Hillary is doing.
Until one of the candidates secures the magic number of delegates (a majority) -- and that number is a moving target, given the limbo status of Florida and Michigan -- there is no nominee. A plurality won't cut it.
Nor is the candidate with the most pledged delegates automatically entitled to the nod of the superdelegates or even most of them. The superdelegates are free agents, who may choose either candidate for any reason.
The superdelegate system was designed to give the superdelegates maximum prerogative, which only makes sense because the party bosses established it to ensure their own control over the nomination process. The whole idea was to give them the power to substitute their judgment for the will of the people if, in their political omniscience, they determine the people's choice to be not prudent.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 05:51 PM | Printer Friendly
May 05, 2008
Is Barack a Team(ster) Player?
Almost every week, a new damaging story emerges about Barack Obama. Lucky for this wounded "messiah" that his disciples in the mainstream media neglect, until the last possible minute, their duty to investigate these reports. This week, there's a brand-new one, which has surfaced too late to affect the critically important Indiana and North Carolina primaries, but demands scrutiny nonetheless.
The Wall Street Journal -- admittedly a mainstream media outlet, save the editorial page -- has started the ball rolling on this one with a May 5 article examining the possible reasons behind the International Brotherhood of Teamsters' endorsement of Obama. We'll have to see whether Barack's disciples follow up.
The public line -- both of Obama and the Teamsters -- is that Obama secured the union's support by strongly condemning NAFTA, which the Teamsters believe results in the exportation of jobs. Hillary Clinton has been critical of NAFTA, as well, and even says she opposed it from the beginning. But her assertion is almost as incredible as the Bosnian sniper-fire tale because she and her two-for-one co-president were instrumental in bringing the trade agreement to fruition.
So NAFTA might be a factor, though Obama doesn't completely toe the line on protectionism, favoring certain smaller-scale agreements the Teamsters oppose. He also opposes expanded oil drilling in Alaska against the preferences of the union and favors comprehensive immigration reform over strenuous Teamsters objection. So what does Barack have over Hillary, besides her lateness to the party in opposing NAFTA?
The Journal tells us on page A1, "Sen. Barack Obama won the endorsement of the Teamsters earlier this year after privately telling the union he supported ending the strict federal oversight imposed to root out corruption, according to officials from the union and the Obama campaign."
Whoa! What's this all about?
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:08 PM | Printer Friendly
May 01, 2008
'Willful Blindness' to the Jihad
You might expect the lead prosecutor against the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to tout the criminal justice system as the premier strategy to fight terrorism. If so, you're wrong.
It is precisely because of Andy McCarthy's experience in that capacity that he understands -- in a way others can't -- the crippling limitations of law enforcement and criminal prosecutions in combating global terrorism.
Though he led the Justice Department prosecution team that convicted Omar Abdel Rahman, the "Blind Sheik," McCarthy is painfully aware that "as a class, baby-boom attorneys know nothing of war. Prosecutors included." Even this successful effort left way too many militants in place and encouraged the idea that they could attack us with impunity.
The entire orientation of the criminal justice system is to protect the rights of innocents, affording the accused due process and a litany of other constitutional protections. But we are at war with an enemy who doesn't fight wars according to conventional rules. If we continue to treat them as criminal suspects rather than enemy combatants, they'll always be many steps ahead of us in a war that only they are fighting. While our government frets over their constitutional rights -- rights to which enemy combatants have never been historically entitled -- it abdicates its duty to protect American lives.
Before the 9/11 attacks, we simply did not understand that Islamic terrorists had declared war against the United States and that to have any chance in this war, we'd have to engage them militarily.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:08 PM | Printer Friendly
April 28, 2008
The Rev. Wright Just Can't Help Himself
When it comes to the connection between Barack Obama and his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright -- or to John McCain's various positions on whether criticizing Obama for his relationship with Wright is fair game -- my head is spinning.
At first, the Obama defenders said Jeremiah Wright doesn't speak for Obama. Not only have Obama's ill-wishers taken Wright's statements out of context but they have unfairly imputed those statements to Obama.
Next, we witnessed the beginning of the Jeremiah Wright rehabilitation tour. He appeared on Bill Moyers' show, endeavoring to present himself as a calm, reasonable person whose statements had been twisted against him.
Then he spoke at the Detroit NAACP dinner. Forgive me if I have a different take than most Wright critics, but I read the transcript of the Detroit speech in its entirety and did not detect too much, if any, incendiary language.
Wright presented a rather innocuous talk about the differences in human beings and how our differences do not mean certain groups are deficient -- "just different." His theme seemed to be that we should strive to overlook people's differences and work toward reconciliation because we are all made in God's image. Bravo. Who could object to that?
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 07:31 PM | Printer Friendly
April 24, 2008
It's Barack, Like It or Not
Loyal Democrats should be grateful to Hillary Clinton, the Energizer Bunny of presidential politics, for her perseverance. Had she not stayed in the race against enormous pressure to bow out in favor of the media's anointed one, Democrats would have ended up nominating that "seriously flawed" candidate.
But wait. They're almost destined to anyway. They have little choice. How can they avoid nominating Barack Obama -- no matter how compromised he has become?
Just consider the magnitude of the Democrats' dilemma. They desperately want to regain the White House. They believed, as did political oddsmakers, the stars were lining up to make 2008 their banner year for both the presidential and congressional elections. Barack Obama had emerged as seemingly the most impressive candidate in years.
But when things seem too good to be true, they usually are. There was no way Obama could measure up to the supernatural image his supporters and the media painted of him. But little did we know that he would crash so far and so fast, that he was not only not messianic but also, like Hillary, "seriously flawed," in the words of Washington Post columnist David Broder.
Despite Obama's string of successes, he hasn't been able to win any major states, except for his home state of Illinois. He got blown out in Pennsylvania, even against the other "seriously flawed" candidate, who recently reminded voters, via sniper tall tales, of her propensity to prevaricate.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:47 PM | Printer Friendly
April 21, 2008
Beware: Obamutopia
Barack Obama, stubbornly clinging to his right to be charismatically shallow, at first complained that Hillary Clinton was unfairly criticizing him for being all flair and fluff with no substance. Now he's upset that Clinton and the media won't let him discuss substance. Based on some of his speeches lately, I'm thinking he ought to be grateful for the diversion because his policy proposals might not survive serious scrutiny.
Maybe it's unfair to interpret literally Obama's repeated stump speech assertion that we Americans aren't perfect but are "perfectible" and conclude he possesses a New Age or secular humanist worldview rather than a Christian one, which clearly rejects the notion of man's perfectibility.
Then again, his policy proposals do sound strikingly utopian -- almost as if he's saying we truly can achieve perfection, end poverty, eradicate health care problems, establish universal harmony, legislate away all corruption, and attain wholesale energy independence without, by the way, liberating ourselves from the shackles of enviro-policemen, who forbid us from exploiting our own resources.
Obama's pitch to fawning audiences is so hopelessly idealistic and his promises so painfully unrealistic that it's amazing he's taken as seriously as he is.
If George W. Bush were to deliver the pap Obama routinely includes in his speeches, he'd be laughed off the stage. "Saturday Night Live" skits would be hard-pressed to exaggerate the vacuousness of his utterances. In fact, I'd be surprised if sympathetic journalists weren't cleaning up Obama's quotes before publishing them. But YouTube isn't so forgiving. "We believe we can change, and that's the kind of hope I'm talking about."
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 05:14 PM | Printer Friendly
April 17, 2008
Mainstream Media Oblivious to Relevancy of Many Obama-gates
The dirty little secret about Barack Obama's indictment of flyover country is that he said what liberals, including Hillary Clinton, believe. Sufficient proof of this can be found in the liberal outrage at Wednesday night's Democratic presidential debate, where Obama was pressed both by the moderators and Clinton to explain Bitter-gate, Wright-gate, Ayers-gate and Flag pin-gate.
Consider the uncannily similar reactions of columnists Tom Shales and Stephen Silver.
Shales expressed indignation that ABC News moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos would dare ask Obama to justify his insulting remarks about small-town Americans and his relationships with certain anti-American people.
Shale's fumed, "For the first 52 minutes … Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with."
Shales was particularly perturbed that Stephanopoulos "came up with such tired tripe as a charge that Obama once associated with a nutty bomb-throwing anarchist."
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 05:37 PM | Printer Friendly
April 14, 2008
Obama's Projections of Bitterness
One of the silver linings of the mostly dismal presidential campaign has been that Democrats have finally come to see -- perhaps admit is a better word -- that the Clintons are pathological and ruthless power addicts. But that late-coming epiphany looks increasingly irrelevant, as the ascendancy of Barack Obama delivers a whole new set of deeply troubling concerns.
Democrats -- all but committed to this fresh, charismatic figure -- are forced to deny or downplay the almost daily revelations about Obama that would have derailed less promising candidates already. But they have to be concerned.
Given Obama's uncompromising liberalism, it was only a matter of time before his pretense toward unity and bipartisanship would be exposed for the mirage that it is. The contentiousness of the Democratic contest has just accelerated the process.
As these damaging items slowly dripped out about Obama, he was able to brush them aside dismissively. You'll recall his refusal to wear a flag pin, his categorical statement that "it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances," his assessment that the lives of our fallen soldiers in Iraq have been "wasted," his mindless promise to withdraw troops from Iraq according to an irresponsibly arbitrary timetable, and his naive remark that he would attach no preconditions to negotiating with the tyrants of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea.
The cumulative force of Obama's common-themed actions and statements would have compelled even a statistician to doubt they could be attributed to coincidence. Wasn't an objective pattern emerging to suggest that Obama would hardly be the fiercest guardian of America's national security interests?
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 07:19 PM | Printer Friendly
April 10, 2008
National Security Is THE Issue
While there is plenty of room for robust debate about Iraq, what concerns me is that the direction of this discussion has, ironically, taken our eyes off the real ball, which is our national security.
Don't get me wrong. I believe the Iraq war has everything to do with our national security. How we proceed -- whether we maintain sufficient forces there to ensure the nation's long-term stability or prematurely withdraw with reckless disregard for the consequences -- is critically relevant to our national security.
But instead of focusing on the national security implications, we are perennially bogged down in quibbling over the partisan flash points of whether we should have attacked Iraq in the first place or whether we're being perceived as liberators or imperialists.
Have any of the Democratic presidential candidates ever been asked, for example, whether they've considered the consequences of withdrawing our troops according to an arbitrary time schedule they have fashioned for political purposes?
They are forever excused for dodging this question on the illogical basis that the consequences of a precipitous withdrawal are not their responsibility. They didn't get us into this war in the first place (allowing here, of course, for a willing suspension of disbelief as to Hillary's assertion that she was deceived into voting for the Iraq war resolution).
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 05:08 PM | Printer Friendly
