Some iconography

The Obamaniacs in the media and elsewhere have gone to great lengths to portray Obama as some sort of saint. See first picture below for example. So I think it is fair to put up a picture of him that makes him look (to my eyes) as quite Mephistophelian. Mephistopheles is the Devil in human form, someone who delights in deceiving people. See the second picture below.







Fundraising deception

Now that Barack Obama is the presumptive Democrat Party nominee he has made his first move to try to put his imprint on his party by making a show of eschewing campaign donations from federal lobbyists. As the new head of the party, Obama might expect to have sway over the way the party does business. If Obama imagined that he would have such power, however, he seems to have been mistaken.

Obama announced his fundraising policy idea in Virginia on the 6th saying, "Today as the Democratic nominee for president, I am announcing that going forward, the Democratic National Committee will uphold the same standard - we will not take a dime from Washington lobbyists." That same day, the Politico put a call into the DCCC if they were going to live up to Obam's idealistic plan. Apparently they aren't. So much for "change" in Washington.

But, there is an underlying theme where it concerns his fundraising that the Obama campaign is flogging that is also untrue. The claim seems to be that Obama does not take money from big donors and that his entire campaign is floated by small donors. After Obama's new policy was announced, campaign manager David Plouffe sent off a quick email to reiterate this claim.

"We need to respond quickly and show that we are ready to take on Senator McCain in the general election," Plouffe wrote. "We are going to compete in the general election the same way we have all along_by depending on a movement of more than 1.5 million people giving only what they can afford."

It's a nice spin, but not really the whole truth. Obama has had plenty of big donors, PACS and lobbyists donating to his campaign. A quick check of donation reports on OpenSecrets.org that he has had some very large donations from bundlers who are directly associated with big businesses, universities, investment firms.

Goldman Sachs $571,330
University of California $437,236
UBS AG $364,806
JPMorgan Chase & Co $362,207
Citigroup Inc $358,054
National Amusements Inc $320,750
Lehman Brothers $318,647 sity $309,025
Sidley Austin LLP $294,245
Skadden, Arps et al $270,013
Time Warner $262,677
Morgan Stanley $259,876
Jones Day $250,725
Exelon Corp $236,211
University of Chicago $218,857
Wilmerhale LLP $218,680
Latham & Watkins $218,615
Microsoft Corp $209,242
Stanford University $195,262

Again, so much for "change." Obama may find that it is harder to actually make change than to merely say it. So far, when it comes to change, his two cents seems to be worth just that much.

Source






Obama and Trinity Church: Inseparable Peas in a Leftist Pod

Barack Obama might have grudgingly left his south side congregation of twenty years, but its radicalism will never leave him

Considerable time and discussion are spent on America's support for organizations such as the International Court of Justice and the United Nations, but what our country really needs is a free-floating magical tribunal devoted to reinstalling logic into our public square. Today, much of our discourse is thoroughly denatured by emotion-based reasoning, which generally amounts to advocates making use of no reason whatsoever. Thanks to the usurpation of authority and repudiation of our collective pride as a people, irrationality now poses as argumentation while invective masquerades as refutation.

This became evident again the other day when yet another outrage emanated from the upscale confines of Trinity United Church, a facility that until May 31, 2008, was the spiritual home of Senator Barack Obama. This latest imbroglio involved not Reverend Jeremiah Wright but another left-wing clergyman, Father Michael Pfleger.

Before this week the priest had not garnered the same amount of attention as Wright, yet his association with Obama is well documented. Pfleger is both a friend and spiritual endorser of the man upon whose head Newsweek has affixed a halo. As a member of the Illinois Senate, Obama steered $225,000 in pork payola to St. Sabina - Pfleger's south side Chicago church.

On the Sunday before Memorial Day the Chicago luminary appeared at Trinity and engaged in what undoubtedly was his standard racist shtick - only this time around his diatribe was recorded. The priest did a bizarre vocal impression of a black man while attacking Senator Hillary Clinton for her skin color, a hue of skin that he shares:

When Hillary was crying, and people said that was put on, I really don't believe it was put on. I really believe that she just always thought this is mine. I'm Bill's wife, I'm white, and this is mine. I just got to get up and step into the plate. And then out of nowhere came, hey, I'm Barack Obama. And she said oh, damn, where did you come from? I'm white. I'm entitled. There's a black man stealing my show.

Was this also an impersonation of the good news? Hardly. The priest's mission that Sunday, perhaps as it is every Sunday, was "to expose white entitlement and supremacy wherever it raises its head." Pfleger leaves the healing and contrition to the other members of his order. To him, vocation is political indoctrination.

The priest immediately - well, not immediately but shortly after the public found out about it - issued an apology: "I regret the words I chose on Sunday. These words are inconsistent with Senator Obama's life and message, and I am deeply sorry if they offended Senator Clinton or anyone else who saw them." By identifying Obama in his statement, Pfleger acknowledged the blatant connection that any reasonable person would make between the Democratic frontrunner and the folks in whose milieu he has been immersed for twenty years.

Unfortunately, Barack Obama may well be our next president, but he is surrounded by individuals who have nothing but disdain and contempt for our nation. He even shares a bed with one. Clearly, Reverend Wright was no aberration because his replacement, Otis Moss III, is an ideological clone. Moss is well known to Obama, who described him as a "wonderful young pastor."

The new Trinity headman was profiled by a reporter from the Plain Dealer who observed that he "rolls Scripture and hip-hop lyrics around in the same thoughts as he criticizes the mindset of young black males who'd rather play basketball than learn physics, Bush administration policies, the war in Iraq, and the United States' free market economy."

Moss compares passages in the Bible concerning prejudice against lepers to the racism blacks experienced in America. I guess truth can only be immortal when it happens to be all about you. Reverend Moss helps youths learn how to "stand outside the king's castle and throw rocks, but be prepared to go in and have hors d'oeuvres." His "Lord's work" consists of evangelizing for grievance and entitlement.

The new Reverend Wrong left no doubt that he approved of Pfleger's missive. Last Sunday, as the priest walked away from the pulpit, he announced: "We thank God for the message, and we thank God for the messenger." Whose God was he thanking? Apparently, not mine.

Trinity's configuration of God equates with a deity who preaches resentment instead of forgiveness and who defines "neighbor" as being one whose skin color matches your own - or someone like Pfleger when they possess an ardent self-flagellation hobby. Thus, his reign portends more of the same: political leftism first, advancing the views of Christ never . or perhaps secondarily and only then on those occasions when His African background is acknowledged. Yes, at Trinity, it remains all race all the time.

Only an abnormal or deviant Trinity parishioner would fail to accept the views of their leadership as his or her own. Why else would anyone spend a morning listening to such malarkey if they failed to believe it? Personally, I could not remain under their roof for five minutes, but Barack Obama managed to sustain a membership there for two decades. If the "Black Value System" was so anathema then why did he stay?

Presumption lies against Obama's claims of outrage. Indeed, Father Pfleger once said of him, "I don't think he could easily divorce his faith from who he is." I agree. The Democratic candidate has been steeped in anti-white and anti-American dogma since his twenties, so it is a major logical leap to pretend that he failed to internalize it along the way.

Upon deciding to depart from Trinity he proclaimed, "I'm not denouncing the church and I'm not interested in people who want me to denounce the church." The reason he left the church has everything to do with political expediency and nothing to do with its stance on patriotism and race. He ascertained that his longtime affiliation with Trinity now stood between his ambition and his goal - which, as we are slowly beginning to discover, is a space few non-masochists would ever want to occupy - so he cut the chord.

Given all that has happened in relation to the spiritual center to which he once donated $22,500, only a diehard leftist could continue to believe that where there is so much smoke there can be no fire. Judging from the reception Pfleger received at the pulpit last week, it would be impossible not to intuit, over a twenty-year period, that the congregation feels exactly the same way as Wright, Moss, and Pfleger do about America and its Caucasian citizens. Hopefully, the deluded nature of their perceptions will make the electorate realize that the only forces Obama can unite this fall are a coalition of the disaffected, the ignorant, and those pseudo-liberals permanently debilitated by white guilt.

Yet, even though the mainstream media refuses to add the name of Obama to the thriving partnership of hate speech known as Wright, Pfleger, and Moss, there is no reason to think the Democratic nominee views his homeland through a different lens than the one they use. Logic dictates that nobody would ever spend that long in a den of zealotry if they were not at least sympathetic to the opinions of those who dwelled there.

When one removes the glitz from this scenario and contemplates it in the context of their own mundane life, its fallacious nature becomes readily evident. For example, were readers to discover that I subscribed to National Review, attended National Review events, termed William F. Buckley a "spiritual mentor," and donated thousands of dollars to the magazine's not-for-profit foundation, could they safely assume I was a conservative? To pose the question is to answer it.

We know that Obama hails from a radical church and that he possesses a radical voting record, so why would anyone regard this hero of progressives as being anything other than a left-wing radical? The mainstream media will continue to ignore every shred of evidence elucidating their champion's controversial past. Their blindness personifies George Orwell's phrase, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." Yet let us pray that discerning reality will not prove as daunting for the American people come November.

Source





The Audacity of the Democrats

There was a pre-Lewinsky time, before moral relativism blurred America's vision, when associating with people like Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers would have automatically excluded someone from attaining the highest office in the land. Back then, anyone with well known connections to such America-averse personalities would have been rejected by a super-majority of the electorate during primary season and almost certainly blocked by the Democratic Party before they could have gotten to within a mile of the White House. But those days -- when patriotic, true liberals like Joe Lieberman were considered typical Democratic Party politicians -- are gone. Now politicians like Lieberman are banished to the Party's periphery and leftists, not liberals, like Denis Kucinich, Bernie Sanders, Jim McDermott, John Kerry, (who served in Vietnam), Jim McGovern, Patrick Leahy, Richard Durbin, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have replaced them.

Until recently in our history, a President Barack Obama would have been an impossibility. But given the political and ideological climate that exists today in America, the ascension of a leftist like Barack Obama into presidential politics makes perfect sense. Beliefs like domestic terrorist William Ayers's and racist, anti-US preacher Jeremiah Wright's are no longer met with utter scorn or a trip to behind the woodshed, but are embraced, promoted and defended by many Americans. Think MoveOn, International ANSWER, think hordes of young neo-communists and their indoctrinating, puppet-master Marx-spouting professors. Think Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill and his acolytes. Think NYU, Columbia, The New School and Harvard. Most importantly, ponder the makeup and direction of the Democratic Party leadership. Like Barack Obama and his radical friends, it is appallingly far Left.

Ideological descendants of Marx and Rousseau now lead the Democratic Party and they have turned it into a disloyal opposition to an increasingly accommodating GOP. They have molded the Party into a force working stridently and unashamedly against a Commander in Chief during wartime. They have made it a den of treachery devoted to American defeat in Iraq. They preside over an institution advised and influenced by moneyed, non-governmental groups and individuals with unquestionably anti-US agendas who help make the Party a pseudo-intellectual sinkhole filled with perverse, tried-and-failed ideas repulsive to the majority of Americans. Those ideas are shaped into agendas which are then forced on the public by an activist leftwing judiciary and by a major media and arts consortium shot through with utter disrespect, indeed contempt, for traditional American values, religions and institutions.

The Democratic Party has devolved into a club for the illegitimately aggrieved, the self-absorbed, the self-hating and the perpetually pissed-off. It is a sanctuary where solipsistic malcontents and their disjointed causes find refuge and support. It has long ceased being an earnest gathering of broad minds where man's timeless problems are examined against the backdrop of the Constitution and solutions to them proposed based on the actual realities of the human condition. It is now the political province of the intellectually deceased, where frightened, lock-step ideologues and other small men and women concoct and promote divisive, destructive, weird and cowardly policies developed within a not-so-quaint, quasi-Marxist stricture of gender, class and race.

So what does all of that have to do with the propulsion of Barack Obama to within a whisker of the Presidency? Everything. It could not have happened without the existence of a substantial, organized, internal anti-US Left and the approval and guidance of the Democratic leadership I describe. Obama is in step with that radical element and with that leadership. His views reflect their views, and he is now a central figure in the deceptive, destructive strategy to restore the Democrats to power, a strategy that has been in play since the US Supreme Court declared Albert Gore the loser of the 2000 presidential contest. "Don't call me a liberal," says Obama. In a precise, lawyerly sort of way he is being honest - he truly isn't a liberal, but he is a leftist.

At a glance, Obama's quick rise in the world of presidential politics is puzzling. His background, including his personal and political associations, is antithetical to the historical stature of the American presidency. It could also be said that given his non-traditional upbringing, his schooling in radical politics and his seeming preference for friends and mentors who view America disdainfully, he is antithetical to the traditional American Experience itself. Obama is young and he has less than one Senate term under his belt. Neither quality is particularly presidential. Questions of patriotism dog him, as do questions about his religious and ethnic heritage. Many of the people who tutored and supported him through his personal and political journeys from the backwaters of Indonesia to the main stage of US presidential politics are contemptuous of the US. Some of them publicly express outright hatred of the country Obama now seeks to lead.

So why is so controversial a candidate even in the running to be president? Because he reflects his Party's leftist agenda, has unique, prodigious manipulative talents and equally impressive Hollywood attributes. These are indispensable in closing out the dangerous, deliberate game the Democrats have been playing with America's security and its perceived stature in the world. It is a game that has been going on beneath our noses since the election of 2000. Its object is simple: the acquisition of power regardless of cost to the Nation. It is something the American people must be reminded of, made aware of, before they enter the voting booth in November....

Now the 2008 election is upon us. Whether it is Iraq or Afghanistan, the economy or the overblown dangers of anthropogenic global warming, the Democratic Party and its media shills continue crafting and pounding home messages telling us that our national problems, real and imagined, are caused by Bush and the Republicans, They tell us that due to Bush and his policies, our nation is an evil one, our nation is hated by the world, our nation is fractured into pieces, our nation is murdering innocents, our nation is the world's biggest polluter, our nation is a den of racism, our nation is stingy, our citizens are impoverished, our economy has been destroyed. Collectively, this endless stream of buckshot propaganda adds up to a single, powerful and demoralizing statement: America has come apart at the seams - and George W. Bush and the Republicans are to blame for it.

Though the Democrats and their media shills are responsible for creating that illusion, Bush and the Republicans are to blame for generally ignoring or responding weakly to the Left's relentless assault on America's war-time morale. Instead of using the power of the White House pulpit to broadcast a steady, convincing message on the importance of presenting a unified national front in the face of totalitarian Islam, America is instead often treated to incongruous platitudes like, "Islam is a religion of peace." Instead of a forceful, direct calling-out of the Democratic Party, the State Department and CIA on their numerous subversions of Bush policies, those subversions are usually referred to by the White House as "disagreements."

Because of the Administration's seeming refusal to conduct investigations leading to the indictment of those leaking classified security information to the press, and thereby to the enemy, the Democrat-leftwing press consortium has been given implied consent to inundate America with torrents of articles and highly publicized tell-all books from former government officials, some revealing sensitive war-time information, most of them highly critical of America's Commander-in-Chief -- all published while American soldiers and civilians were, (and are), on the ground in combat areas, directly in harm's way.

With the exception of the Vietnam War, never before in America's history have such things happened while hostilities were ongoing. And what happened during Vietnam was tame in comparison. Worst of all, due to the subversive Democrat-media barrage, and crippled by its public relations ineptness, Bush and the Republicans could never quite convince the American people of a simple reality: that they are all in the fight of their lives against an implacable, dedicated, totalitarian death cult, one seeking nothing less than America's utter destruction, and that the fight demands focus and sacrifice from all Americans. Instead of rousing, convincing, patriotic speeches, the public was usually treated to lame utterances from Bush like, "Its hard work . . . we're working hard . . . we're making progress."

The end result of the inability of Bush and his PR team to own and promote the Big Ideas necessary to have focused America on the prize of victory in Iraq and on a greater victory over the worldwide forces of totalitarian Islam, is best summed up by three, short sentences written on a whiteboard in a US Marines barracks: America is not at war. The Marine Corp is at war. America is at the mall.

It is truly audacious of the Democrats to entice us with their slick-tongued messiah, one who appears out of nowhere and graciously offers to scrape clean and sanitize the same plate of defeat he, his party and their assistants in the media served to America for nearly eight years in the middle of a war. Soon we will see if a majority of the American electorate accepts that offer, or if it rejects it, sending the Democratic Party back to confront the same irrelevance it risked the safety and security of our nation to avoid.

Much more here





Who will win?

So who's going to win? In a parliamentary system, the answer would be easy: Obama. Voters prefer Democrats to Republicans generically. In Senate races, Democrats could conceivably gain 10 seats, and a theoretically veto-proof majority, if all the possibly close races go their way. In the House, Democrats' three special election victories in seats that, based on their performance in the 1996-2004 period, were safely Republican suggest that they could make similarly impressive gains. In no seat do the Republicans seem incapable of losing.

On the presidency, it's a different story. The most recent polls collected by realclearpolitics.com show Obama leading McCain by an average of 47 percent to 45 percent. That's just about the same as Obama's average lead of 47 percent to 44 percent in the 43 national polls taken since ABC and Fox News aired the Rev. Jeremiah Wright tapes on March 13 and a little less than his average lead of 48 percent to 43 percent in the 15 national polls taken after Super Tuesday and before March 13.

But the popular vote is one thing and the electoral vote, as we learned eight years ago, may be another. In all the statewide public polls taken in February, March, April and May, McCain leads Obama in 29 states with 281 electoral votes and Obama leads McCain in 21 states with 254 electoral votes (add 3 more for the District of Columbia, which nobody bothered to poll).

To be sure, both candidates lead by only a narrow margin in some states, and the numbers in some states may be skewed by polls that were just plain wrong. And enough states are close -- carried by a candidate by 7 percent of the vote or less -- to suggest that we are headed to an election as close as 2000 and 2004.

But it's not going to be on the same battlegrounds. McCain has narrow leads in some familiar target states -- Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire and Ohio. But he also leads narrowly in states that were not on the target lists last time -- Alaska, Montana, North Carolina, Virginia and (!) Texas. Obama has narrow leads in some familiar target states -- Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But also in some states not on 2000 or 2004 target lists -- Colorado, New Jersey and (!) Massachusetts.

Moreover, some states that were prime targets in 2000 and 2004 may not be this time. McCain leads by 8 percent in Florida and by 18 percent in West Virginia -- until 2000 considered safely Democratic. Obama leads by 8 percent to 10 percent in Minnesota, Oregon and Wisconsin. As I counseled some months ago, it's time to throw out that old map of the red states and blue states. There are more states -- and some different states -- in play this time.

It may be time, too, to throw out the old rule that says that economic distress moves voters toward Democrats. McCain is maintaining or improving on George W. Bush's performance in Michigan, which has the nation's highest unemployment rate, and in economically ailing Ohio. Obama is running significantly better than John Kerry or Al Gore in economically vibrant Virginia and North Carolina.

Contrary to what a lot of polls seem to indicate on their generic ballots, the issues don't really favor the Democrats as much as the hype would indicate. On energy the Democrats are rightly blamed for the high oil prices by a significant margin. McCain wastes this advantage by siding with the Democrats on things like AANWR, but other Republicans could take advantage of the high gas prices and what they are doing to the economy.

Democrats are also on the wrong side of the trade issue and taxes. On taxes particularly the the Republican point of view is still heavily favored.

While the war has been presented as a Democrat issue, less than 30 percent of the country favor Obama's position. The Democrats and Obama were just flat wrong about the surge and there recent attempts to explain the improvement are laughable such as Pelosi's suggestion that Iran was responsible for the reduced violence. That is just beyond laughable into the totally inane. At some point the Democrats should be paying a price for wanting to surrender to al Qaeda in Iraq and McCain is in a strong position to challenge them on that issue.

Democrats still have some undeserved carryover from the "culture of corruption" campaign from two years ago, but anyone focusing on that issue this year would see more Democrats than Republicans with ethical and corruption issues. The fact is that the Republican brad has been tarnished by a false image projected by Democrats and the GOP needs to turn that mirror image back on the Democrats.

In the one area where Republicans have missed opportunities, such as earmarks the Democrats are even worse. McCain is also positioned to score points on Obama on this issue too. With his earmark to help his wife get an exorbitant raise in her hospital position, as well as his earmark to help the distanced Pfather Pfleger, Obama looks pretty sleazy on the issue. It was one Clinton could not exploit, because she was an even bigger porker.

The Republicans have opportunities this year if they can break through the media embrace of Obama and get traction on these issues.

Source






Hillary's supporters to Obama: ''Continued scorn will not get my vote''

We've gotten an avalanche of emails from around the country this week in the wake of news that Sen. Hillary Clinton will be closing out her campaign Saturday. This one, from Billie Bromer of Augusta, Georgia, is representative of many, capturing the sentiments of Hillary supporters -- angry, aggrieved, mournful -- as they watch the end of a landmark campaign. What it shows: the considerable challenges ahead for the Obama campaign -- and the Democratic Party -- when it comes to winning these voters over in the next 150 days. Take a read:

I am one of those 'upset' Hillary supporters who is clinging to Hillary.com during my 'mourning and grieving' process. The media, the pundits, the politicians, and even the two remaining candidates are talking about me and my vote in November. But the story about Hillary supporters is incomplete. The most simple -- but woefully incorrect -- way to address the topic of the displaced, diehard Hillary women supporters is to lump us all together.

We came to Hillary for different reasons and we are clinging to Hillary for different reasons. Some of us are pretty strong feminists and we absolutely love the fact that Hillary represents all facets of the very best of women -- smart, tough, soft, protective, devious, tender, assertive compassionate (should I go on?) Some of us have been more moderate (sensible) Democrats and we absolutely love the fact that she doesn't represent the more liberal/progressive lean the party seems to be taking. Some of us just do not like Obama and we are NOT racists for not liking him. We see him as arrogant and smug and he just does not 'inspire' us.

We are homeless now and we are desperately seeking a home. We feel we have been ''abused'' by the Obama campaign and by the Democratic party. Why would we go back to our abusers, especially when they continue to minimize our thoughts and feelings? The feminist in some of us certainly trumps any party loyalty we may have had and actually trumps any views we may have on Roe v. Wade or Iraq. The more the party tells us how ''silly'' or ''stupid'' we are to ever consider supporting McCain, the more we become convinced of how we are not silly or stupid.

There is a message to be taken from this. Continued scorn for Senator Clinton or my support for her is clearly not the way to get my vote. Continued pressure on Senator Clinton to get us into the fold is not the way to get my vote. Obama himself needs to get my vote!

Continued denial by the party that half its voters just don't like their candidate is not the way to get my vote. Any suggestion that I am bitter, delusional, should get over it because I lost, in mourning, desperate, or otherwise inadequate is not the way to get my vote.

What is the way to get my vote? I don't know but, for me, it's not by making Hillary VP. For others, it seems to be. Will it take sensitivity and outreach from Obama for me? A double team effort? Nah! I have no interest in seeing or listening to Obama.

Outreach from Hillary? Sure! But would it be with freedom for her to address women's concerns about sexism? I don't think so because the party wants me to just ''unite'' and forget how divided it really is. Just like the superdelegate ''drip, drip, drip'' to Obama, there seems to be a ''drip, drip, drip'' of Hillary voters away from him. Understanding us may be the first way to stop the flow.

Source

(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.)