Monthly Archives: October 2008

Updated: Canada Votes

Canada, Democracy, Drug War, Economy, The State

It was swift and efficient. It took a day. There was little fuss. Campaigning did not begin three years earlier. Voters and election officials managed to cast and count the ballots. There are no reports of systemic voter fraud. Conservatives have returned to form a minority government. (As the American duopoly merges into undifferentiated socialism.)

The Wall Street Journal once called Canada “an honorary Third World country.” The tables are turned.

Update: (October 18) It’s important to make finer distinctions. Canada is more socialistic than the US; the US is more fascistic. Take the Drug War. Canada doesn’t have one nearly as destructive to lives and liberties as the US’s. Ditto an SEC. The US put Canadian newspaper mogul Conrad Black in jail; not the other way round. When last did you hear of an SEC witch hunt in Canada? Canada has tried to follow the US’s lead in these areas, but has not lived up to the latter’s brutality. Not by any measure.

Campaign Pong

Barack Obama, Ethics, Media

This is quite eerie. CBS News’ Dean Reynolds compares the two campaigns on civility. It appears that the Obama camp is unpleasant and inconsiderate; the McCain camp the opposite.

When it comes to hygiene, I’m a regular Howard Hughes. So this tidbit is highly significant:

Obama’s campaign plane is “cramped, uncomfortable and smells terrible most of the time. Somehow the McCain folks manage to keep their charter clean, even where the press is seated.”

Read the report.

Updated: Who’s Stupid? Not Sarah

Conservatism, Elections 2008, Federalism, IMMIGRATION, Intelligence, Israel, John McCain, Just War, Media, Republicans, Sarah Palin, War

The following is an excerpt from my new WND column, “Who’s Stupid? Not Sarah.” It is the first in a series of three (unless the news cycle changes the plan):

“Governor Sarah Palin’s alleged lack of cerebral alacrity is probably less in doubt after the first Vice-Presidential Debate. Prior to that, a bipartisan consensus had been developing among the ideologically converging political class and their parrot pundits that she was indeed an idiot.

The biggest hitter was conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, who demanded that Governor Palin bow out of the race. “Only Palin can save McCain, the Party, and the country she loves. Do it for your country, please,” pleaded Parker histrionically.

How like a woman to implicate causes not in evidence for the country’s undoing.

Where was Sarah Palin when the Bush/Bernanke bulldozer was running up debts and deficits financed by promiscuous printing and borrowing? Whodunit? Who so debased the country’s coin? …

Sarah Palin … has an alibi. When these characters were gassing-up the economy with hot air, she was in Alaska getting her house in order. This does nothing to excuse Sarah’s subsequent sell-out, but it doesn’t put her at the original crime scene.

Elementary, my dear Ms. Parker: Palin quitting will not save your Party or the country.

…. At the very least, the developing consensus as to Palin’s aptitude, I venture, is premature. …”

Read the complete column, “Who’s Stupid? Not Sarah.”

Update: A reader sent this YouTube clip along with the comment, “Explain this about your precious Sara! [sic].”

He apparently had not understood my column, wherein I condemned Palin for turning her back on a laudable cause she and Tod once supported: peaceful secession, which is as American as apple pie. I’ll repeat what I wrote:

Palin slammed a cause she had, at one time, saluted: that of the Alaskan Independence Party. It advocates what was once a fundament of the American founding: peaceful secession. As leading economic historian Tom DiLorenzo has documented in rich detail, the Union was a voluntary one. If the states had believed it was a “one-way Venus flytrap,” they would never have ratified the Constitution.

“Sarah Palin: Palling Around With Secessionists” convinces me that by joining McCain, Palin has forfeited a previously held, laudable libertarian principle.

I urge the reader to read “Quebec May be the Guard of Our Ultimate Freedom” and “Raise a Toast to Western Separatism and Canada’s Good Health.” Since Sarah seemed to have once supported peaceful secession, I am all the more convinced that she was a patriot, and has sold her soul by adopting McMussolini’s creed.

'The Audacity of Hate'

Barack Obama, Race, Racism

Good column from Phyllis Schlafly dealing with Obama’s autobiography, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. In it:

Obama describes how he deliberately separated himself from his multiracial heritage in order to give himself a 100 percent black persona, different and alienated from the white world around him. Obama writes that the book is “a record of a personal, interior journey” to establish himself as “a black American.”

With his new all-black identity, Obama stews about injustices that he never personally experienced and feeds his warped worldview by withdrawing into a “smaller and smaller coil of rage.” He lives with a “nightmare vision” of black powerlessness.

Obama says that the hate doesn’t go away. “It formed a counter-narrative buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people – some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.”

Obama’s worldview sees U.S. history as a consistent tale of oppressors and oppressed. He objects to the public schools because black kids are learning “someone else’s history. Someone else’s culture.”

He even criticizes his white grandparents, who worked hard to give him a privileged life. Their motives are a mystery to Obama because they came from the “landlocked center” of the United States, which, he asserts, is full of “suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty.”

Obama grew up in Hawaii, the exemplar of a melting pot of races, yet he sees it as a place of “aborted treaties and crippling diseases brought by the missionaries.” Although his mixed race was not a handicap in Hawaii, he whined that “we were always playing on the white man’s court … by the white man’s rules.”

More about the man who would be president in our Obama Archives.