by Ann Coulter
Well, it looks like it's the end of the road for Hillary. Time for her to pack up her pantsuits and go back to ... wherever it is she's pretending to be living these days. Now we just have to get rid of the other two. Perhaps if I endorse Obama ... This week, Bill Clinton lost his second presidential election for a protege.
Ronald Reagan was so popular, he not only won a 49-state landslide re-election for himself, but he also won a symbolic third term for his boob of a vice president, George Herbert Walker Bush (who immediately blew it by breaking his own "no new taxes" pledge).
By contrast, in addition to not being able to get half the country to vote for him in two tries, Clinton's connection to any other presidential candidate spells utter doom. Both his vice president and his wife have been defeated in elections they should have won, but lost because of their unfortunate association with him. The country has spoken. It wants to be rid of the Clintons.
The reason two elections in recent history -- the 2000 presidential election and the 2008 Democratic primary -- were razor-close is that in both cases there was some strange, foreboding, otherworldly force dragging down the presumptive winner.
Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, lost an election that should have been his in a walk. In fact, he was the first incumbent president or vice president in 100 years to lose an election in peacetime with a good economy. Mind you, that was before we even knew that Gore was a deranged conspiracy theorist who believes the Earth is in serious peril from cow flatulence.
What was the mystery factor to explain such a historic loss? The media's pollsters may have lied to the public about Clinton's vaunted popularity, but Gore's pollsters got paid not to lie to him. And they told Gore the truth: Clinton was killing him. After the election, Gore pollster -- and erstwhile Clinton pollster -- Stanley Greenberg told Vanity Fair magazine that if Clinton had helped, he said he would have "had Bill Clinton carry Al Gore around on his back." (This was when one man could still actually carry Al Gore on his back.) But research showed that whenever Clinton was mentioned, Gore's numbers went down faster than -- oh, never mind.
Steve Rosenthal, political director of the AFL-CIO, also blamed Clinton for Gore's loss, saying polls showed that voters who cared about character voted for Bush. (I know, I know. Are there actually people who care about character and vote Democrat? Yes, apparently they exist.) Poor Gore did everything he could to distance himself from Clinton, publicly criticizing Clinton's sexual exploits with an intern, refusing to allow Clinton to campaign with him and taking as his vice president Joe Lieberman -- the first Democratic senator to scathingly denounce Clinton's antics with Lewinsky from the Senate floor. But voters couldn't forget Gore's boss, the purple-faced lecher.
As election predictors go, the Dow Jones has been remarkably accurate. If the Dow goes up from the end of July to the end of October, the incumbent president or vice president wins; if it goes down, the incumbent loses. It has been wrong only four times since the Dow was created in 1896. Thus, on Nov. 1, 2000, an article in The New York Times began: "The verdict of the Dow Jones industrial average is in, and it says Al Gore is headed for the White House."
And yet Gore lost. It was only the third time in more than a century that the Dow went up in the three months before the election and the incumbent lost. The two other times were: (1) Herbert Hoover in the middle of the Great Depression, and (2) Hubert Humphrey in the middle of the Vietnam War. (The only time the Dow went down and the incumbent won anyway was for popular Dwight Eisenhower.)
So we have documented proof: Americans rank Bill Clinton with national misfortunes on the order of the Great Depression and the Vietnam War. (This, of course, is an overreaction: The Great Depression wasn't that bad.) And now Bill Clinton has wrecked Hillary's campaign, too. He's like the creepy guy who graduated last year but still hangs around the high school cafeteria chatting up sophomores.
In a Time magazine poll taken earlier this year, more than twice as many voters said Bill Clinton's involvement in Hillary's campaign made them less likely to vote for her as said they were more likely to vote for her. (Some even said that "having Bill Clinton around makes me less likely to vote for What's-Her-Name." One-third of the respondents were upset Bill didn't call the next day, like he promised.)
So before remembering that we are now left with two dangerous choices for president -- a young liberal who is friendly with terrorists or an old liberal who is friendly with Teddy Kennedy -- take a moment to revel in the fact that our long national nightmare is over. It turns out getting rid of the Clintons was the change we've been waiting for.
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Obama responds to Ayers and the Old Glory Boogie
The Barack Obama campaign responded to the pictures of Obama political and community associate William Ayers stomping on the American flag, first published in 2001 in Chicago Magazine. In a statement reported on Fox & Friends this morning, Team Obama deplores Ayers' actions but rejects any connection between Ayers and Obama:
That distance might be hard to maintain. First, the profile in the magazine wasn't exactly a low-profile article in an obscure publication. Ayers had just published a memoir of his days as a fugitive for domestic terrorism in the Weather Underground, and both the book and the publicity gained national attention, especially after 9/11. Obama continued to work with Ayers after this, appearing on public panels with Ayers into 2002.
If Team Obama wants to disassociate itself from Ayers in this manner, it should recheck its website. Obama still defends William Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn as part of Chicago's "mainstream". Does Obama think that stomping on a flag in an alley to celebrate a memoir of domestic terrorism represents the mainstream of political thought? That only makes sense when one supports demagoguery such as that issued by Jeremiah Wright on government conspiracies that created HIV as a genocidal tool and Dohrn's exhortation to "overthrow capitalism" in the United States.
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Why Obama will lose the General Election
While the MSM is crowning Barack Obama this morning and Hillary is cancelling appearances on morning talk shows, let's review the facts of whether or not Barack Obama could win the White House. The old adage, "numbers don't lie" will tell the story.
David Allen at The Politico tells us that Obama still isn't winning the white vote - critical if he would win in November. As I said in the previous post I doubt this changes even if Hillary drops out. If he can't win the white vote he can't win - period, and again just because Hillary drops out doesn't mean whites that supported her will simply turn to support Obama. A few might, but not in great measure. Allen's point that liberal Democrats are voting for Obama while more moderate/conservative dems are voting for Hillary is key. Morever Obama isn't even close in the 60 or over white vote category.
But there are many more problems that Obama will face after the Democratic Convention in the general campaign that simply will derail his quest. Namely a more concentrated media exposure. Divided with Hillary the media has really played more or less coach and mentor to the Wright/Ayers/Rezko connections, but with Hillary out of the picture this will change. The stories and potential further light on some of these connections will be too hard for interpret journalists to miss.
Further with greater media scrutiny Obama's superficialness will become even more apparent he will have to be even more "articulate" about "change" and "hope". True some in the media - such a Chris Matthews will continue their fetish with Obama, yet others like Tim Russert are beginning to circle anticipating increased opportunity for exposure.
This will include increased exposure on Michelle Obama who has proven to be almost the albatross to her husband that Wright has, which is why she has been limiting her appearances of late.
In the end - using a Wizard of Oz metaphor, the curtain will be pulled back, and America wills see that the dreamy idealist is more than anything "The Candy Man" and little else. Obama will get a lot of votes but simply not enough to carry the day. In the end people don't vote for paper tigers but for real flesh and blood reasons. McCain for all his faults has the name recognition, history with the American people that Obama doesn't have. This all adds up to the GOP keeping the White House in 2008.
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The unreality based left and religion
The left, with its healthy skepticism toward religion, has shown itself to be cynically flexible over the past few weeks in response to the utter insanities emitted from the big mouth of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama's pastor, mentor and friend of 20 years. Suddenly, some liberals have discovered a newfound love for extremists who hide behind the cloth to justify their radical views.
The lunatic remarks made by Wright in videotaped sermons released in March - which, lest there be any doubt that these pearls of wisdom were taken "out of context," Wright reaffirmed at the National Press Club last week - are indefensible, and it is beyond pedantry to quibble over whether a spirited defense of Louis Farrakhan is more or less offensive than blaming abortion doctors and gays for Sept. 11, 2001, as Jerry Falwell infamously did two days after the terrorist attacks.
But in the warped minds of some on the left, uttering such inanities is not only "understandable," it's laudable. That is, of course, if the person alleging that the government created AIDS to kill African-Americans is an aggrieved black man lashing out at the rapacious, capitalist and irredeemably racist United States. Wright, you see, is actually a "patriot" for speaking uncomfortable "truths" about his country.
John Nichols is the Washington correspondent for The Nation. Like most of his comrades, he tends to be a vociferous critic of the religious right, regularly denouncing them for all manner of bad deeds. But to Nichols, Wright is not a divisive figure spreading dangerous lies. He is, in fact, "in possession of the balm that has frequently proven to be the cure for what ails America," that is, "an eyes-wide-open faith in the prospect that this country can and will put aside the sins of the past and forge a future that is as just as it is righteous." Nichols ended his ode to Wright by comparing the preacher to none other than Thomas Jefferson, a comparison that Wright would likely find insulting, given that he's accused the author of the Declaration of Independence of pedophilia.
Indeed, many on the left are trying to outdo one another comparing great historical figures to Wright, whose most proximate antecedent would be a black, religious Lyndon LaRouche. Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell called Wright "Our Jeremiah," in that he is akin to the "biblical truth tellers who regularly warned the government that divine destruction was imminent if the nation continued to oppress the powerless." She then decided to insult the very notion of historical memory by comparing Wright to Frederick Douglass.
Don Wycliff, former public editor of the Chicago Tribune, was perplexed as to what all the fuss over Wright was about. "I'm trying to figure out what it was that got everybody's shorts into a twist," he wrote in Commonweal magazine. (Wycliff's bewilderment over the reaction to Wright's lies and hyperbole does not speak well to his skills as an ombudsman.) The double standard some liberals have employed in response to Wright makes one seriously consider their oft-stated preference for rationality, reason and secularism over superstition and prejudice.
The prophetic tradition in the white church is bad, but is "understandable" in the black church? Do liberals have any idea how racist and condescending that is?
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Yeah, Blame It On The White Folks
This whole racism as regards Obama deal is really starting to irritate. As Geraghty points out, Obama is carrying the black vote by over ninety percent. Whites aren't voting nearly as monolithically for the color of the candidate, as are blacks. Yet, because many white voters don't support Obama, obviously the bulk of them must be racists.
So, when will the media start asking the black community why it is so racist in their rejection of the wife of "the first black president?" Oh, I forgot, they'll get a pass. No tough questions allowed, what with the affirmative action-oriented curiosity of the mainstream media. They're an oppressed people, after all. What a crock!
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Obama's gospel is a negative one
By Thomas Sowell
Sometimes unrelated events nevertheless tell a coherent story. One newspaper story that caught my eye recently was about two high-powered schools in South Korea where Korean girls study 15 hours a day, preparing themselves for tests to get into elite colleges in the United States. Harvard, Yale and Princeton already have 34 students from those schools.
When a copy of the 50th anniversary report on members of the Harvard class of 1958 arrived in the mail recently, I thought back to one of my fellow students in that class who had worn a hole in the sole of his shoe but put a folded piece of newspaper in his shoe to cover the hole, rather than tell his parents. He realized that they would buy him a new pair of shoes if they knew-- and he also realized that they could not afford it. He went on to become a professor at several well-known medical schools and to have various achievements and honors over the years.
From even further back in time, I received a letter recently from a man who grew up in my old neighborhood back in Harlem. When he and I were in the same junior high school, one day a teacher who saw him eating his brown bag lunch suddenly arranged for him to get a lunch from the school cafeteria without having to pay for it. It happened so fast that my schoolmate had already taken a bite from the school lunch when he suddenly realized that he had been given charity-- and he wouldn't swallow the food. Instead he went to the toilet and spat it out. By now his brown bag lunch had been thrown out, so he just went hungry that day. He went on to become a very successful psychiatrist.
Like everyone else, I have also been hearing a lot lately about Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of the church that Barack Obama has belonged to for 20 years. Both men, in their different ways, have for decades been promoting the far left vision of victimization and grievances-- Wright from his pulpit and Obama in roles ranging from community organizer to the United States Senate, where he has had the farthest left voting record. Later, when the ultimate political prize-- the White House-- loomed on the horizon, Obama did a complete makeover, now portraying himself as a healer of divisions.
The difference between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright is that they are addressing different audiences, using different styles adapted to those audiences. It is a difference between upscale demagoguery and ghetto demagoguery, playing the audience for suckers in both cases.
People on the far left like to flatter themselves that they are for the poor and the downtrodden. But what is most likely to lift people out of poverty-- telling them that the world has done them wrong or promoting the work ethic of the Korean girls, the dogged determination of my Harvard classmate with the newspaper in his shoe, or the self-reliance of my fellow junior high school student in Harlem who had too much pride to take charity?
When young people go out into the world, what will they have to offer that can gain them the rewards they seek from others and the achievements they need for themselves? Will they have the skills of science, technology or medicine? Or will they have only the resentments that have been whipped up by the likes of Jeremiah Wright or the sense of entitlement from the government that has been Barack Obama's stock in trade?
In the real world, a sense of grievance or entitlement, as a result of the mistreatment of your ancestors, is not likely to get you very far with people who are too busy dealing with current economic realities to spend much time thinking about their own ancestors, much less other people's ancestors.
Another seemingly unrelated experience was being in a crowd at a graveside in a Jewish cemetery last week. That crowd included people who were black, white, Asian, Catholic, Jewish and no doubt others. This country has come a long way, just in my lifetime. We don't need people like either Jeremiah Wright or Barack Obama to take us backward.
The time is long overdue to stop gullibly accepting the left's vision of itself as idealistic, rather than self-aggrandizing.
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(For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)
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