Category Archives: Democrats

Update II: History Or More Obama Hysteria?

Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections 2008, Media, Racism

I don’t know how much more of the elections coverage I can take.

With Obama on the verge of clinching the Democratic Party nomination, the accursed Cable Anchors are poised to cement their role in history by declaring this event an historical one. Chris Matthews and Wolf Blitzer, a disgrace to their profession, have dissolved in soggy sentimentality. (The MSNBC network has posted this quotidian demonstration of what I mean.)

Every American, vaporized Matthews, will remember where he was on this historical day, when a black man became the nominee of a major American political party.

All this because Barack Obama is African American (or sort of).

However, the American people have given Obama such support not because of his ancestry, but because they like him better than the other White House hopefuls. Moreover, the reason Americans haven’t elected a man or woman of color beforehand is that no decent candidate presented himself.

Are the media suggesting that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton’s bids for the office failed because of their color? I venture that their color was the least of their problems. Their characters: now that’s another matter entirely.

In Obama the American people see a viable candidate. The idea that Obama’s impending nomination is historical is an insult to Americans—it suggests that the barrier to the nomination of a Barack in years past was purely racial, rather than the absence of a strong black (or blackish) candidate.

Update I: Here is the text of Obama’s victory speech.

Update II (June 4): Sen. Clinton is the democratic choice; Obama the delegate’s choice. Democrats the country over elected Hillary; party delegates ratified Obama. Is Hillary angry that petty party rules trumped her popular appeal and stymied her bid for president? She should be. Clinton stopped short of conceding last night.

Crappy Kennedy Reminder

Democrats, Family, Justice, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Morality

Yesterday, on the phone to my father in South Africa, he reminded me of who Ted Kennedy REALLY was:

“A man who left a young girl to drown”:

“On the evening of July 19, 1969, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts drove his Oldsmobile off a wooden bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, drowning his passenger, a young campaign worker named Mary Jo Kopechne. The senator left the scene of the accident, did not report it to the police for many hours, and according to some accounts considered concocting an alibi for himself in the interim. … At the time, Kennedy managed to escape severe legal and political consequences for his actions thanks to his family’s connections…”

Amidst the latest genuflection to TK, Americans and the mindless media would do well to reflect on this man’s defining act. Dad thinks the Kennedy clan is rotten to the core.

My father has been a big influence; he’d always remind that justice was the most frequently occurring word in the Hebrew Bible. When Waco happened, dad was outraged. “They—the government—murdered those people in cold blood,” he fumed. It’s an immutably true insight that has eludes too many Americans. Needless to say that we did not debate, but only touched on, the kidnapping by Texas authorities of 450 FLDS kids—it was implicit and obvious dad would be appalled by that act of tyranny. And he was.

What’s more remarkable is that dad has always been left-leaning. Although I would not call him a left-liberal, he’s certainly not quite the classical liberal, as he seems to believe state interventions outside the remits of classical liberalism can be a good thing.

Still, my father’s sense of justice is really quite extraordinary, always has been. It doesn’t matter who commits injustice, he will speak truth to power, a trait that has been as helpful to his career as it has to mine.

Always an original thinker, Dad had this to say about the banal Obama: “He reminds me of a community organizer.”

Another of his funny lines that stuck with me from last night’s call: In the wake of these assaults, “a few thousand people had fled South Africa to the safe haven of Zimbabwe.”

Blasting Big Oil

Democrats, Economy, Energy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights

Another front on which “conservatives” have joined forces with the Democratic berserkers is in placing the blame for gas prices on the oil companies. Not on government, God forbid—it has spent us into oblivion, causing the dollar’s devaluation, and, consequently, the prices of all commodities to rise. No sirree. Like Obama and Clinton, dittoheads lay in to “Big Oil.”

Do me a favor; leave off that bogus bugbear.

Exxon Mobil and the rest have done a smashing job of bringing a product to market despite the fact that they’ve not been allowed to build a refinery for 25 years. Who has outlawed drilling in the arctic tundra or off the coast of California and Florida?

Not one nuclear power plant has been constructed since Three Mile Island. That’s due to the energetic efforts of your government and the environmental antediluvian interests it heeds. But chiefly government. Why? Because it has a duty to say “no” to the anti-civilization lobby. (McCain is a pinko to rival all pinkos when it comes to understanding energy.)

To the list of our government’s energy infractions, Pat Buchanan, in Day of Reckoning, adds the tearing down of “great dams like Hoover and Grand Coulee.”

Reduced supply and increased demand means higher prices. Cheer a Democrat-led attack on oil companies and you’ll be penalizing their ability to bring gas to market. Lines around the block will ensue.

Writing in the New York Times, Ben Stein deconstructed the “Us vs. Them” myth of oil ownership, also a component in the demonization of “Big Oil”:

“First, Exxon Mobil, like all the other gigantic integrated energy companies in this country, is owned not by a cabal of reactionary businessmen holding clandestine meetings in a lodge in the Texas scrublands (as Oliver Stone so brilliantly illustrated in “Nixon”).

Exxon Mobil, in fact, is owned mostly by ordinary Americans. Mutual funds, index funds and pension funds (including union pension funds) own about 52 percent of Exxon Mobil’s shares. Individual shareholders, about two million or so, own almost all the rest. The pooh-bahs who run Exxon own less than 1 percent of the company.

When Exxon Mobil earns almost $12 billion in a quarter, or $41 billion in a year, as it did in 2007, that money does not go into the coffers of a few billionaire executives quaffing Champagne in Texas. It goes into the pension and retirement accounts of ordinary citizens. When Exxon pays a dividend, that money goes to pay for the mortgages and oxygen tanks and in-home care of lots of elderly Americans.

So, Mr. Obama, which union pension plans — and which blue-collar workers who benefit from them — will be among the first you would like to deprive of the income that flows from Exxon’s rich dividends?

When Mr. Obama or his Democratic rival, my fellow Yale Law School graduate Hillary Rodham Clinton, go after the oil companies and want to take away their profits, they are basically seeking to lower the income of the ordinary American. Why do that? It’s just cutting off one end of a blanket and sewing it to the other.”

Red/Blue Split In The Democratic Party

Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections 2008, Hillary Clinton

An analysis of the divided democrats by the always-edifying William Schneider, CNN senior political analyst:

Well, we are seeing a red/blue split in the Democratic Party, and that could create a serious problem as we head towards the general election.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SCHNEIDER (voice over): You’ve heard about the red/blue divide in American politics. Barack Obama condemns Republicans for exploiting it.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: … to slice and dice this country into red states and blue states, blue collar and white collar, white, black, brown, young, old, rich, poor.

SCHNEIDER: Well, it’s happening already inside the Democratic Party. Barack Obama is winning the blue Democrats, young voters, upscale urban professionals, well-educated liberals and African-Americans.

Hillary Clinton is getting the red Democrats — seniors, whites, blue collar and rural voters, and more conservative Democrats. The split has gotten bigger since Clinton became a gun-toting, whiskey- drinking, street-fighting, tax-cutting populist.

SEN. HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON (D-NY), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: And I know how hard you’re working, working for yourselves and working for your families. And I will never stop fighting for you.

SCHNEIDER: In Indiana, nearly half the Democratic primary voters said they have a gun in their household. They voted for Clinton. And the half of Democrats who did not own a gun? They voted for Obama.

Red versus blue means left versus right. In Indiana, lost liberal Democrats to Obama. They are the blue voters. Clinton and Obama split the moderates. Conservatives, or red Democrats, voted heavily for Clinton.

This is the first time this year we have seen such a sharp ideological division among Democratic voters. The deeper that split becomes, the greater the risk to Democrats in the fall if Obama wins the nomination. Among Clinton voters in North Carolina on Tuesday, fewer than half said they would support Obama over McCain, whereas 70 percent of Obama voters said they would vote for Clinton over McCain.

SCHNEIDER: Red Democrats, older, more blue collar, more conservative, are the most likely to vote for a Republican in the fall.