Democrats are going for broke

By Klaus Rohrich

 One thing you can say about the Democratic Party, they are an interesting bunch. Scrutinizing the events and pronouncements during their convention is both educational as well as entertaining. Today’s Democrats as a party make George Lukas’s Star Wars bar look like a convention of southern Methodists, given the freak show they’ve put on.

It’s clear that the Democratic Party has devolved into a collection of specific interest groups, some of which are in competition with each other, as in the pro-life vs. the pro-choice faction of the party. But by and large, today’s Democrats have become the repository of the aggrieved and disaffected, of the professional victim, of dissatisfaction and envy, of race baiters and poverty mongers with each faction passionately pursuing its own narrow interests and supporting others’ narrow interests in return for having theirs upheld.

Despite Bill Clinton’s admonition that the Democrats are striving to achieve shared prosperity and shared responsibility, there’s clear evidence that the opposite is the case. Certainly the Party is happy to share prosperity, so long as that prosperity can be winnowed out of the pockets of successful individuals who have chosen to work hard. But responsibility is another matter altogether, as under the Democrats fully 50% of Americans pay no taxes.

But that’s really just the tip of a very ugly iceberg. The demands and complaints that we’ve heard during the Democratic Convention highlight the fact that the Party is at the outer reaches of the fringe of mainstream society.

Government must pay for my abortion faction

Today’s Democrats are all about having the government pay for everything. There’s the “government must pay for my abortion faction,” which consists largely of shrews who don’t know well enough to keep their knees together and firmly believe that in order for a woman to be complete she must have experienced at least one abortion. Then there is the “government must pay for my contraception” faction of the party, which consists largely of shrews who do not want to keep their knees together, but don’t want to take responsibility for the outcome.

“Save the planet” faction

Other factions in the party include the “save the planet” faction whose belief stipulates that the only way the planet can be saved from the ravages of SUV driving white people is to give all our money to the UN. (This faction differs from the “save the earth” faction, whose beliefs include forcibly sterilizing individuals to reduce human population. Pres. Obama’s science advisor, John Holdren, heads that faction).

“America is racist” faction

Another prominent faction of the Democratic Party is the “America is racist” faction, which is comprised entirely of individuals whose life’s mission it is to find new words that can be vilified as racist rhetoric. This is how words like “angry,” “professor,” “Chicago” and “welfare” all became racist slurs needing to be eradicated from the English language.

“Comprehensive immigration reform” faction

Almost as militant as the “America is Racist” faction is the “Comprehensive immigration reform” faction. This faction’s core belief is that while all countries on the planet are legally entitled to protect their borders from invaders, the United States is uniquely disendowed of this legality. As such, it is the belief of this faction that anyone who happens to make it into the US, no matter by what means, should be granted immediate citizenship, provided with free healthcare, and made paid-for-life members of the Democrat Party.

“I’m poor because he’s rich” faction

Equally evident is the “I’m poor because he’s rich” faction, which believes that prosperity is a zero sum proposition. Thus, it’s no longer possibly to prosper without the government redistributing wealth, because all the wealth has already been spoken for by the wealthy. It’s one of the reasons that so much is made of Mitt Romney’s personal wealth because if only he didn’t have all that money, there’d be more money for food stamps and other government programs.

Union “living wage” Faction

Unions also occupy a prominent place in the Democrats’ Big Tent, albeit that tent is starting to look more and more like a crack house on the bad part of town. This faction believes that if the government nationalizes all business then all the workers will get a “living wage.” They hold General motors as a prime example of a successful nationalization. You’ll recall when President Obama nationalized GM and Chrysler in 2009, the secured creditors lost their security and the Autoworkers’ Union took an equity position. The price? Voting Democrat!

“More than two genders” faction

The “more than two genders” faction of the Party is working diligently to advance gay marriage. This is the faction that seeks to bring lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender entities into the mainstream and ensures that their issues are given priority. This faction wants to convince all Americans that it’s all good.

How weird and out of the mainstream is the Democratic Party? It’s so weird that they even kicked God out of the Party, forcing Him to join the Republicans.

It seems to me that the Tampa Convention and the Charlotte Convention have served to highlight the basic philosophical differences between the Republicans and the Democrats. One is a party striving to create a climate in which we can prosper, while the other is pandering to a rag tag collection of special interests.

Canada Free Press

'Washington Post' Catches Democrats Rewriting Civil Rights History

by John Nolte

 
 One of the ways in which President Obama was able to win states such as North Carolina and Indiana in 2008, was through an unprecedented turnout among blacks, who were obviously and understandably inspired to vote for America's first black president. But today, with his approval ratings stubbornly stuck at 47 to 48%, Obama knows he's going to need a similar explosion of black support if he's going to have any chance at all for a second term.

But when you’re a failed president whose only impact on black Americans has been to increase their unemployment rate and side against them on the issue of same-sex marriage, this is not a group Obama's going to be able to inspire as easily. So, as we've seen for months now and during the last two nights of the Charlotte convention, Obama is running a base campaign, a "devil you know" campaign that says, "If I can't get you to come out and vote for me, I can damn well get you to vote against the other guy."

In any number of cynical moves, Team Obama has appealed to the worst in the Democratic base through the waging of a campaign of bitter divisiveness. We've seen the phony War on Women, the demagoguery of class warfare, the unilateral decision to stop enforcing certain immigration laws for a special demographic (Hispanics), and now we've learned that Democrats have gone so far as to manufacture an Orwellian rewriting of history on the DNC Website. 20 paragraphs of nonsense are in support of this opening sentence:

For more than 200 years, our party has led the fight for civil rights, health care, Social Security, workers’ rights, and women’s rights.

The idea that Democrat Party has led the fight for American civil rights for over 200 years is nothing more than a bald-faced lie. Even the Washington Post's fact-checker found the claim too preposterous to ignore:

The Web history mentions the leadership of President Woodrow Wilson in helping pass the 19th Amendment, without noting that he was a racist or that he repressed civil liberties — even to the point of jailing one of his rivals for the presidency in 1914 (socialist Eugene Debs).

The history also highlights the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Certainly President Lyndon Johnson, a Texas Democrat, played an essential role, but it is worth remembering that 80 percent of the “no” votes in the Senate came from Democrats, including the late Robert Byrd (W.Va.) and Albert Gore (Tenn.), father of the future vice president. Republican votes, in fact, were essential in winning final passage of the bill.

And let's not forget that The Great Emancipator, the president who spent his legal and political career making some of the most persuasive, moral, common sense, and elegant cases against slavery in our nation's history -- was a Republican. Oh, and he freed the slaves.

And since that time, we have always been the Party of Lincoln:

In the 26 major civil rights votes after 1933, a majority of Democrats opposed civil rights legislation in over 80 percent of the votes. By contrast, the Republican majority favored civil rights in over 96 percent of the votes.

For a contrast of how low Obama is stooping to divide and conquer, the Washington Post reminds us  how the history of the Democratic Party and civil rights was presented during Bill Clinton's 1992 convention:

[I]n the 1992 book, “Of the People,” which Democrats distributed at the convention that nominated Bill Clinton. That book, written by real historians, obviously has a slant, but it found the space to mention such historical blemishes. For instance, it acknowledged that before the Civil War the party “played both sides of the slavery issue” and after the Civil War, the party “reached out a welcoming hand to returning Confederates, not to blacks.”

And have you noticed lately how we keep hearing about these so-called gaffes -- these racially charged gaffes?

We've had three instances in almost as many convention days of Democrat officials hurling Nazi references at Republicans; we had a sitting vice president tell a crowd filled with many black Americans that Mitt Romney would put them in chains; we had a sitting president light a stick of racial dynamite under the body of a dead teenager; and we've had the media scream racism at every serious criticism of Obama, ranging from the record number of people currently on food stamps to his gutting of welfare reform.

But on a less shrill and more subtle and disturbing scale, what we see almost every day in the media and from Democrats is unceasing chatter about how Romney can't win enough of the minority vote to win the election -- how he can't appeal to these groups and how that somehow proves there's something wrong with him.  

On the flip-side, however, even though Romney is winning a smaller percentage of the white vote than Obama is the minority vote, the fact that a majority of whites are polling with Romney is also presented by the media as a Romney/Republican flaw. The subtext and sometimes outright text is that if Obama loses it will be because of racist whites who vote against him.

Naturally, though, the media won't even speculate on the idea that there might be a sinister racial motivation behind a black and Hispanic community that will only give a small percentage of its votes to a white candidate.

The double standard here is shameless.

But what we're seeing in ways that are subtle (the rewriting of history) and not-so-subtle ("chains"), is a reprehensible campaign of racial division that the media is complicit in -- unless you want to argue that NBC News choosing not to broadcast a single speech made by a minority speaker at the Republican convention that first night was just an accident.

Moreover, do you think it was an accident that Chuck Todd, NBC's Chief White House Correspondent, walked the floor of the RNC convention hall and dismissed the presence of non-white faces before the cameras as nothing more than token window dressing?

Because he's failed so miserably, Obama can't win on his record, so he and his media minions have launched a campaign of resentment and part of that campaign is to -- if you'll pardon the expression -- whitewash Romney, the Republican Party, and the convention in Tampa into something it's not: lily-white and without a proud history on the front lines of the civil rights movement.

Worse still, this campaign of resentment is determined to make Romney and those of us who support him look racist and maybe even feel racist for making what we believe is the best decision for our country.

Sometimes you have to pull your head out of the news cycle and take a 30,000 foot look over the landscape to see the big picture of what's really going on. And what I  see are not isolated events or "gaffes," but rather pieces of a vicious gameplan methodically being rolled out by a desperate and divisive president and the race-baiting media that worships him.  

Big Journalism

You Will Not Hear About the Real General Motors Tonight at the Democrat Convention

6 Sep 2012
By Seton Motley  

 We’ve heard a great deal this week from members of President Obama’s protected Crony Socialist auto bailout class.  Many were showcased last night in the maudlin propaganda flick "An Economy Built to Last: Auto-Industry."  The film was followed by speaker Bob King, President of the Democrat appartchik-union United Auto Workers (UAW).  A “saved” General Motors (GM) employee will be speaking (in Mandarin?) this evening.  And the uber-failed “success” of the $82 billion auto bailout has been repeatedly flogged throughout the festivities.

We will hear about the “more than one million jobs saved.” 

But this is the Administration that claimed the $1 trillion so-called “Stimulus” bill “created or saved” jobs - in non-existent Congressional districts.

So there is, yet again, an Obama Math problem.  Some more Numerical Issues about which you will not hear in Charlotte:

We’re going to lose over $42 billion on the $82 billion auto bailout.  Obama in late 2009 said we would make money on it.

$26.5 billion of the loss was a straight payoff to the...UAW....

President Obama illegally carried forward through the bankruptcy the ridiculously exorbitant UAW contracts.  Which were a hay-yuge contributing factor to GM going under in the first place - and are again, predictably, helping to wreck the bottom line.....

During the bankruptcy process, President Obama illegally paid off the UAW first and in full - before secured bondholders who should have been made whole before anyone else got a dime.  Which was incredibly disruptive and destructive of the entire bond market.  Economic uncertainty, anyone?

We heard from illegally over-rewarded UAW President King.  Will we be hearing from any of these Obama-victim bondholders?  Or any bond market experts to explain just how cataclysmically damaging this was to the economy?  Ummm, no.

We will not be hearing from any of the 100,000 or so GM and Chrysler dealership employees who Obama summarily fired...

(B)ecause (these) Joe and Jane SixPacks were guilty of working at auto dealerships that were owned by Republicans....  (N)othing like crushing innocent middle class Americans to mete out a little political payback.

We will not be hearing from any of the 20,000 or so non-union GM-subsidiary Delphi employees - whose pensions President Obama slashed by up to 70%.
With all of these President Obama American Job Kills, we will not hear that...

(China is) where GM is doing most of its hiring - along with funding celebratory movies of the Communist Revolution.

Or...

GM (is) to Invest $1 billion in Russia Within 5 years

Or...

General Motors (is) to Invest $150m in Indonesia Plant

The bailout may not have saved one million jobs - but the jobs it did save are in...Moscow and West Java.

We will not be hearing anything about the myriad inanities in which GM is engaging.

90+% of GM auto loans are now of the Freddie Mac-Fannie Mae-esque subprime variety - made to people whom GM and everyone else know can’t pay them back.

GM in 2010 launched a venture capital division which is investing in fabulously successful things like...solar panel companies.

In fact, no company registered more (non-)green (non-)energy patents than GM in 2010.

We will not be hearing these inconvenient facts about the Eco-Fantasy Chevy Volt.

Chevy Volts cost $41,000 to make, and sell for $41,000.  It is a non-profit vehicle, yet GM has spent millions advertising it.... 

Even more inane, GM just spent $10.4 million to build a Chevy Volt-ville - an Obama Candy Land Potemkin village. 

And lest we forget - there was the Chevy Volt song...and dance.

And yet Volt sales remain, as always, pathetic.  Perhaps because it only gets 35 miles to a 12-hour charge, and costs twice as much as a similar-sized regular gasoline mobile.

As of November of last year, the total Chevy Volt subsidy Taxpayer cost was $250,000 per Volt sold.

Another contributing factor to the Volt’s non-sales: Obama and GM admit to only one Volt fire - dangerously rabbit-holing at least five fires and a whole host of attending Volt charging problems that have not yet been adequately explained.

All of which explains how GM is actually doing - about which we won’t be hearing.

The Taxpayers are still stuck with 500+ million shares of GM stock.  For us to break even, they must be sold at $54 per. They debuted post-bankruptcy at $33 per share and are now around $22 per share.  This sets us up for a more than $16 billion loss – just on the stock.

This week’s downsized Fantasy Land Dystopia will be marked far more by what is not said than what is said.

Please, enjoy tonight’s last dollop of Leftist ephemera.

Big Government

Gutting Welfare: GAO Says Obama Must Submit Work Requirement Waiver Plan to Congress

By Kevin Glass 

Republicans and the Romney campaign have been relentlessly hitting the Obama Administration on the proposed rule that would allow states to waive work requirements from the successful 1996 welfare reform law. Today, the Government Accountability Office issued a report that the Obama Administration's executive order must be submitted to Congress before it goes into effect:

In a legal opinion requested by Senator Orrin Hatch, Ranking Minority Member of the Senate Committee on Finance and Representative Dave Camp, Chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, the GAO General Counsel's Office determined that the Department of Health and Human Services' recent memo making changes to operation of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program... must be submitted to both Houses of Congress before it can take effect.

While Democrats have been crying foul over Republicans' attacks, the GAO has found that an attempt to institute this waiver process without Congressional review would be an illegal power grab. This will at least put a small bump in the road for the Obama Administration's attempt to relax one of the key components of welfare reform.

This doesn't mean that it would be easy for Congress to block Obama's welfare waiver plan, though. Under the rule that the GAO cited, all that's required is that the Administration submit the proposed plan in writing to Congress, not that it requires a vote to be implemented. As FDL reported, Congress would have to submit a joint resolution to "review" the regulation, and that might require 60 votes in the Senate. However, House Republicans can still make a lot of noise to try to raise awareness about these new welfare work requirement waivers and possibly force an uncomfortable vote in the Senate.

The Obama Administraton's method of governance by executive order has been troubling recently, and in this case they've clearly attempted an overreach. While mainstream media "fact-checkers" have taken issue with the phrase "gutting welfare," the facts are that the Obama Administration is planning on allowing state governments to relax their work requirements. As Romney policy advisor Lanhee Chen said, "if you open the door, people are going to walk through it. He's expecting that."

Townhall

Bill and Hillary and Huma and Anthony

September 5, 2012
By Stella Paul

As Bill Clinton once again takes center stage at the Democratic National Convention, let's amuse ourselves by screening the vilest soap opera in American history: Bill and Hillary and Huma and Anthony.

This one's got it all: two sham marriages, sexual perversions, and national treachery at the highest level.  

Naturally, the "mainstream media" refuses to inform you of it, but that's why I'm here.

If you've scratched your head trying to puzzle out the complex inter-relationships between these glamorous grifters, stop scratching.  I'm about to unveil a Grand Unified Theory that explains why Huma Abedin, the alleged Muslim Brotherhood asset who's the top aide of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, chose to marry disgraced ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner in an interfaith ceremony performed by matrimonial expert Bill Clinton.

 America first learned of Huma Abedin in 2007, in a worshipful Vogue article titled "Hillary's Secret Weapon: Huma Abedin Oversees Every Minute of Senator Clinton's Day."  Featuring glossy photos of designer-clad Huma, the article rhapsodized about her "wrinkle-free" Prada suit, "flawless" skin, and "long, luxurious hair" with "bouncy waves you see mostly in shampoo commercials."

The photo of Huma statuesquely displayed on a chair drew attention, as did the eyebrow-raising descriptions of Huma's and Hillary's mutual adoration.  That attention intensified as Hillary became secretary of state and installed Huma as her top aide.  Mumblings could be heard about the nature of their relationship and the unusual background of Huma, who grew up in Saudi Arabia.

Someday we may look back upon the intern scandals of the Clinton White House with amazement at our preoccupation with Bill, Monica Lewinsky, and cigars.  The bigger scandal may have been in First Lady Hillary's office, where Huma Abedin waltzed into her internship as a new college graduate, despite her screamingly obvious Muslim Brotherhood family ties.

Five Congress members, including Rep. Michele Bachmann, have raised concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the federal government, with special emphasis on Huma's role at State.  For their trouble, they have been hysterically accused of McCarthy-style witch-hunts, by everyone from Jon Stewart to John McCain to GOP honcho Ed Rollins.

Naturally, Barack Obama defended Huma at his annual Ramadan dinner, praising her as an "American patriot" to whom the American people owe a "debt of gratitude."  Surely, that settles it.  After all, no one understands American patriotism quite like Barack Hussein Obama.

Nevertheless, despite all the elite venom hurled at Michele Bachman for unmasking Huma, the evidence against Abedin is overwhelming.  Andrew McCarthy, Walid Shoebat, and Diana West have factually established that the Muslim Brotherhood is the Abedin family business, and that Huma herself worked in it for years, editing the family's Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs.

Now, let's pave the way for Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin's national joke of a husband, to make an appearance.  Somewhere in 2010, the Clintons may have decided that their public embrace of Huma as their "second daughter" wasn't quite cutting it anymore, and they needed to set up a more conventional-looking arrangement.

Enter Anthony Weiner, the bachelor congressman with a panting lust to be mayor of New York.  I suggest that, in classic Clintonian fashion, a deal was struck.  The Clintons would endorse Weiner for mayor if he would marry Huma Abedin.

The situation was win-win for everyone. The rumors about Hillary immediately subsided, which pleased Bill, who plans to make her president.  Weiner gained the backing of the formidable Clinton machine, thereby sprinting to frontrunner status in the highly competitive mayoralty race.  And Huma got to keep her top-secret security clearance at State, and look forward to the day when she could pray in the Ground Zero mosque, gazing down at the World Trade Center site as first lady of New York City.

 If you don't think the Weiner-Abedin union is a political deal, ask yourself: on what basis could it possibly be anything else?  Shortly after their marriage, Weiner committed a Twitterectomy of his career, tweeting lewd photos of himself to young women around the country.  But in addition to being a cheating pervert, Weiner is widely known as a nutcase, exposed in the New York Times for temper tantrums that left him unable to keep staff.  And he has no money, thereby rendering him unable to provide Huma with the glamorous lifestyle she requires.

Most importantly of all, Weiner is not a Muslim.  Huma's religion allows Muslim men to marry non-Muslim women, but forbids Muslim women from marrying outside the faith.  Yet Huma remained unsullied by honor killing threats from the usual Islamic enforcers; instead, the party line seemed to be that Huma's marriage was adorable.

Even now, the outrageous Clintonian shenanigans continue.  We've just learned that Huma, her unemployed husband Anthony, and their baby Jordan are moving into a $3.3-million Park Avenue apartment owned by a longtime Clinton crony and top Obama bundler.  You and I may have to live within our means, but in Clinton World, such rules never seem to apply.

Now as Bill formally nominates Obama for a second term, both men are complicit in Hillary's scandal that should be the shame of the nation.  But what's an historic disgrace to us is less than a shrug to them.  Bill has been taking Saudi money by the barrel for years, and Obama admires the Muslim Brotherhood.
In fact, working with Hillary's State Department, Obama has helped to install the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, using the "Arab Spring" turmoil to empower these sworn America-haters.

And now here comes the icing on the treachery cake: Obama and Hillary reportedly have informed Iran that they've abandoned Israel, leaving the only Jewish State to face a nuclear Iran alone.  How proud the Abedin family must be of their little girl!

 Conventional wisdom has it that Hillary is a formidable contender for president, but I suspect that that may not be true.  For one thing, her appearance and behavior are both falling apart, as she drunkenly carouses in public with exclusively female friends.  And for another, the American public may not be so forgiving as the Bill and Hillary and Huma and Anthony saga unfolds.

Stella Paul can be reached at Stellapundit@aol.com.

American Thinker

Just how wrong did the media get Clint Eastwood?

September 3, 2012
 by Karl

Admittedly, I am late to evaluating Clint Eastwood’s RNC performance. However, the fact that the pundit class is still critiquing it days later is one indicator of how shrewd it was as political theater. Accordingly, it is worth noting just how wrong some of the Eastwood analysis has been, even from those defending the speech.

The harsh, conventional wisdom about Eastwood’s decidedly unconventional approach to the convention is that it was the ramblings of a senile old man. Even may of Eastwood’s defenders have described it as rambling. This likely makes Eastwood’s day.

After all, who is Clint Eastwood? He is one of the top actors, directors and producers of motion pictures in the world. Most of the world — and almost certainly everyone tuning in to the RNC Thursday night — knows this. Yet most of the analyses of his RNC appearance are based on the notion that we were not witnessing acting. That mass suspension of disbelief may be the highest tribute Eastwood will ever be paid as an actor. If you think the Eastwood on stage was the only Eastwood there is, watch him promoting J. Edgar on The Daily Show last November. I have little doubt he will be equally sharp promoting Trouble With the Curve in the next few weeks.

Moreover, as a director, Eastwood has a reputation of knowing exactly what he wants. Also, he does not prefer to do many takes: “The big question, for me, is how to do it *** so the actors can perform at their very best and with the spontaneity that you’d like to find so that the audience will feel like those lines have been said for the very first time, ever. Then you’ve got a believable scene.” That approach is entirely consistent with Eastwood’s talent as a jazz pianist, someone who enjoys improvising within a framework.

The fact that Eastwood’s performance was not loaded into a teleprompter does not mean it was unplanned.

If you doubt that Eastwood was not simply winging it, don’t watch his performance — read the transcript. There may be no better indicator of just how intentional Eastwood’s performance is than to compare the visual impression he gave with the text delivered.

Eastwood begins with a touch of Admiral James Stockdale, but Clint answers the question of why he is there. The fact is that everyone really knows why Clint is there — to make a political statement. But Eastwood, in mentioning that Hollywood is perhaps not as monolithic as the stereotype suggests, is making a subtle suggestion to the audience he wants to reach: you may be part of some left-identifying group, but it’s okay to disagree and there may be other quiet dissenters in your group.

Eastwood then introduces the dramatic device of the empty chair, which in this context also echoes the political metaphor of the empty suit. This has been remarked upon, particularly as an echo of comedic dialogs from people like Bob Newhart, so I won’t dwell on it here, although it reappears below.

Eastwood then proceeds to use this comedic device to deliver — as Mark Steyn noted in passing — some of the toughest political attacks on President Obama heard during the entire RNC. A number of the traditional speakers strove to play on swing voters’ disenchantment with the failed promises of Hope and Change. But notice how tired and traditional that just sounded in your head. Mitt Romney (likely with help from a professional political speechwriter) did it pretty well: “You know there’s something wrong with the kind of job he’s done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him.” But did anyone do it as powerfully and emotionally as Eastwood’s segue from everyone — himself included — crying with joy at Obama’s historic victory to the tears we now shed over 23 million still unemployed, which Clint bluntly called a national disgrace?

This was the first part of Eastwood’s simple and effective argument. Eastwood points out — in a prodding, joking manner — that Obama was elected to bring peace and prosperity, but failed to bring either. That Eastwood may disagree with the GOP on some war issues is perfectly alright in this context, because, as suggested earlier and explored further below, Eastwood is not really targeting Republicans.

Eastwood then arrives at his Joe Biden joke: “Of course we all know Biden is the intellect of the Democratic party. Just kind of a grin with a body behind it.” That last part is not accidental in a performance featuring an empty chair. But the first part is even more dangerous. For the last 3+ years, we have been accustomed to having Biden as safe material for humor, while Obama has been kept off-limits. Eastwood leverages the latter into the former, suggesting that Sheriff Joe is the real brains of the operation. Ouch! No wonder Team Obama got annoyed enough to respond.

Having delivered these punches regarding our dire situation with velvet gloves, Eastwood then does the softest of sells for the Romney/Ryan ticket. As Jesse Walker noted, it was almost more of a pitch for Not Obama. Again, there was nothing accidental about the nature or placement of this speech within Clint’s imagined dialogue.

Eastwood concludes by summing up the GOP case to undecideds and rebutting the main point Dems seem to advance for Obama. First, “[p]oliticians are employees of ours… And when somebody does not do the job, we got to let ‘em go.” Second, “we don’t have to be metal [sic] masochists and vote for somebody that we don’t really even want in office just because they seem to be nice guys or maybe not so nice guys if you look at some of the recent ads going out there.”
Eastwood was not “rambling.” He improvised within a structure, making a clear and concise case for dumping Obama.

Eastwood’s approach to this performance was not accidental. Eastwood is — by reason of his resume — the foremost expert in the world on Clint Eastwood fans. Harry Callahan may have understood that a man has to know his limitations. Eastwood knows his… and he also knows his strengths. A man does not produce and star in dozens of Clint Eastwood movies without having thought deeply about and received the benefit of copious market research into what appeals to people about Clint Eastwood.

From the standpoint of political science, it would be fair to hypothesize that appeals to both disaffected and libertarian voters (which is something of a feat) in a way that Mitt Romney could never hope to do. More colloquially, it would be fair to suggest that Eastwood appeals to the sort of people who gravitated to H. Ross Perot in the Nineties. He appeals to people who distrust institutions, who think that conventional politics fails the American people. The sort of people for whom Harry Callahan, Will Munny, Frank Horrigan, Luther Whitney and Walt Kowalski have an emotional resonance.

So why would Eastwood deliver a conventional political speech? Had he delivered his material as a series of slick-sounding zingers, it would have been the sort of speech the media expected from Chris Christie’s keynote address. But that would have been: (a) not in keeping with the Romney campaign’s softer approach; and (b) diminishing and disappointing to Eastwood’s target audience. Most of the chattering class failed to grasp this. Some on Team Romney failed to grasp this. But the evidence coming in, both anecdotally and from polling, suggests Eastwood still has his finger on the popular pulse in a way pols and pundits never will.

Hotair

Liberal Chickens Coming Home To Roost

By Victor Davis Hanson

 
 It could not last — the attendee of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church sermonizing on tolerance; the practitioner of Chicago politics lecturing on civility; the most partisan voting record in the Senate as proof of a new promised bipartisanship; earlier books and speeches calling for hard-core progressivism as evidence of a no-more-red-state-blue-state conciliation. And in fact the disconnect did not last, and Barack Obama finds himself dealing with assorted chickens coming home to roost.

In the summer of 2004, Michael Moore released a crude propaganda film, Fahrenheit 9/11, full of distortions and half-truths, and yet passed off as a documentary — all designed to help swing the election to Democratic challenger John Kerry. Hollywood, the media, and the Left in general did not worry about the film’s inaccuracies or the mythology that the infomercial was a disinterested documentary. Instead, liberals deified Moore. Indeed, he was an honored guest at the Democratic Convention, and liberal luminaries paid him obeisance at various showings of the film.

The goddess Nemesis took note, and this year Dinesh D’Souza and John Sullivan followed Moore’s model.

The result is a blockbuster “documentary,” 2016: Obama’s America, that does more to Barack Obama than Michael Moore once did to George W. Bush. The Left is perturbed, unappreciative that its own methods and objectives have been turned against itself, and in a more sophisticated and far more effective manner than Moore’s buffoonery.

The Left in the era of Barack Obama established other ends-justify-the-means precedents. In 2008, Obama surmised that no one else would ever raise the sorts of gigantic sums that he was then amassing (in toto nearly $800 million, more than twice the amount raised by John McCain), and so was the first candidate to renounce public financing of a presidential campaign in the general election since the law was passed. But, of course, Obama never imagined that four years later his approval ratings would be less than 50 percent, or that he would be running against a financier who could match his efforts dollar for dollar. Nor did Obama think that a mesmerized Wall Street, from which he raised more cash than any prior candidate, would object all that much to his populist boilerplate against “1 percenters,” “fat-cat bankers,” and owners of “corporate jets.” So now what exactly will he do? Appeal to Romney to abide by public-financing rules? Blast Romney for raising too much money? Damn Romney for courting Wall Street?

Beneath the folksy veneer and the serial calls for “civility,” Obama proved vicious in his denunciations of George Bush, at one point calling him “unpatriotic” for adding $4 trillion to the national debt over eight years. Obama offered two general arguments: that the chief executive is solely responsible for economic hard times, and that four years is easily long enough to right the ship. Obama scoffed at the Bush defense that politically driven interventions by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae — hand in glove with congressional overseers — had distorted the real-estate market and contributed to the subprime-mortgage collapse, which destroyed an otherwise strong economy.

Obama boasted further that he would cut the deficit by half during his first term, and asserted that he would rather be a successful president than a two-term one. And he added that he should not be reelected if the economy was not restored to health. Apparently Obama assumed that after every recession (this one ended in June 2009) there is a natural recovery, the latter all the more robust when the former is severe. For all the right-wing scare talk about Obamacare, federal takeovers, more taxes, and too many regulations, Obama also took for granted that the cry-wolf private sector would bounce back — no matter how much his policies threatened it — and would almost magically continue to make so much money that an ever-growing government could redistribute ever more of it.

Yet now Romney is echoing Obama’s exact arguments: Yes, the chief executive is responsible for things like 43 months of 8 percent–plus unemployment, $5 trillion in new debt, and anemic GDP growth; and, yes, if things do not improve after four years, then it is time to change the president.

Obama established a wink-and-nod type of negative attack. As he called in sonorous tones for hope and change and a new civility, he negatively stereotyped a stunning cross-section of Americans: The white working class became “clingers,” the police “stereotype” minorities and act “stupidly,” small-business owners “didn’t build” their own businesses, doctors lop off limbs and yank out tonsils, bankers are “fat cats” — apparently on the premise that such groups would never take all this invective seriously. At various times Mitt Romney has been reduced to a dastardly financial pirate, a killer of innocent cancer victims, a veritable racist, and now a misogynist. After the class-warfare card and the race card, we await only Obama’s use of the Mormon card. Yet the polls remain roughly even, and Obama is about to be the target of a no-holds-barred assault fueled by hundreds of millions of dollars. Ethically speaking, what possible Romney sin might Obama object to? That super-PAC ads are unfair? That Romney has gone negative? That Romney stereotypes entire groups? That Romney’s inner staff are ethically compromised? This, after Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, was paid $100,000 for two speeches in Nigeria in December 2010, to a company that was eager for influence and whose affiliates did business with an embargoed Iran; Plouffe made the trip to Nigeria about a month before he joined the administration as a senior adviser. Just this month, deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter on national television asserted something demonstrably false — that she did not know the facts about the woman Mitt Romney supposedly caused to die of cancer.

During the Bush administration, the Left established another caricature: the gaffe-prone, golf-playing elitist George Bush. Did they ever imagine that they were ensuring like caricature for the leftist academic Barack Obama, who quite unexpectedly would play golf four times more often in four years than Bush did in eight years? Or that for every Bushism there would be a “corpse-man”? Or that the small ranch house in Crawford, Texas, would be trumped by First Family jaunts to Martha’s Vineyard, Costa del Sol, and Aspen? I would like to think a slip like “57 states” is just a slip, or that golf is valuable presidential relaxation, but I was taught by the Left that such garbled speech is a window into a confused mind, and that presidential golf is elite recreation that betrays class privilege.

In 2008, there was a lot of sloganeering on energy policy. Obama assured us that we could “not drill” our way out of a spike in gas prices. “Millions of new green jobs” was heard at almost every rally, along with shouts about wind and solar this and that. In less guarded moments, Obama assured us that he would pass cap-and-trade legislation, “bankrupt” coal companies, and allow coal-based energy prices to “skyrocket.”

These were the heady days of “peak oil” and the liberal attack against “oil men in the White House” — on the eve of the Chevy Volt and breakthrough new companies with names like Solyndra.

At the very time when well-connected crony capitalists were squandering hundreds of millions of dollars in federal wind and solar subsidies, a quiet private-sector revolution in horizontal drilling and fracking vastly expanded America’s gas and oil reserves — despite, not because of, Obama’s energy policies. The paradox finally become so absurd that Obama was reduced to bragging that the United States was producing more gas and oil under his watch than ever before, apparently on the logic that oil men were so adept that they could find vast amounts of new sources of energy on private lands without worrying about the Obama administration’s efforts to virtually cut off all new leasing on federal lands. The result is that our first green president is facing $4-a-gallon gas while he brags that what he tried to stop proved unstoppable.

Nemesis, remember, is not just karma, but payback with an absurd twist.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.

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