If ever a short-but-on-point video that was both really funny and a total “must watch” arrived in my in-box, it has got to be this one!

A major hat tip to Brenda.

…life of late has been a bit crowded where time is concerned. I’ve been dividing my time between a work project and a commitment I made to help someone out in the maintenance of his own business (no compensation to speak of, more in the nature of a favor), and it hasn’t left me much time to post. I manage to make my rounds in the blogosphere, but only have limited time to comment. This will shortly change — I’m beginning to think I was born with a shoestring schedule or the like, considering that I’m trying really hard to be semi-retired.

I commented recently to a friend, while we were listening to Katrina & The Waves’ Going Down To Liverpool (to do nothing) that I had come to Chicago to do precisely that, only it hasn’t yet worked out as such.

That said, I took some time out earlier to watch a DVD of Live Free Or Die Hard, and must say that I found it profoundly entertaining. The Die Hard series is among the few whose sequels are worth watching, and a third one that qualifies thus is worth remarking upon.

Non-stop action (though the stunt scenes are a bit unbelievable when applied to “real life” probabilities), a plot based on something that I’m not entirely unsure couldn’t happen given the criminal minds that seem to migrate into the field of computer hacking and, as a welcome change, an F.B.I. deputy director who is portrayed by Hollywood as a competent, dedicated law enforcement official rather than the usual corrupt, criminal mastermind the left coast film liberals enjoy portraying.

Okay, having gotten that bit out of the way…

Anyone who visits this blog with any regularity knows how I feel about John McCain being the next President of the United States (Tancredo or Thompson, one of you guys get your ass back here, right now, or send Mitt!).

While I know where Ann and Rush are coming from — let Hillary preside over the coming four year disaster, so a Democrat will have been on watch — I’ve finally come to terms with the distasteful fact that I’ll have to pull the lever for the RINO — he’ll be the lesser of two evils in the general election, albeit not by much, though I won’t donate a dime to his campaign. Let Russ Feingold or La Raza make a donation in my name if it strikes their fancies.

As I said before, I despise the thought of having to choose between the measles or the mumps, but there it is…

But I didn’t come here to rehash things I’ve already posted. I came here to talk about one aspect of a McCain Presidency that actually gives the Arizona guy a checkbox in the positive column, at least for me, as a Jew: His stance on Israel.

Yesterday, I got into a debate with a new friend, one who is a kindred spirit from a political point of view rather than a shiftless liberal, over the concept of negotiating with Arabs. He firmly believes that as far back as the Golda Meir administration, Israel could have struck an equitable deal with Egypt and, as a result, the Arabs in general, in the way of establishing peace in the Middle East.

While his points were good from the usual optimistic humanist viewpoint, they were delivered from the perspective of western thinking — that everyone shares our outlook on life, reasonableness and can, as a result, be negotiated with. My own point that Muslims are 180 degrees different in that respect from us didn’t seem to register. What I couldn’t get across was that when you’ve “negotiated” agreements with an entity more than half a dozen times and while you honor your side of the deal every time while the other party ignores theirs, you have to realize, finally, that it’s pointless to enter into further negotiations.

Especially when each time, you make major life and death concessions that give the other side major strategic advantages that afford them ever increasing, indelible opportunities to destroy you, all your issue and all you stand for.

Elements of his side of the debate cited the massive proportion of Arabs to Israelis with the factors of Iran (he believes that Iran could beat Israel in a war, I believe that given a free hand to conduct such a war utilizing all their capabilities without politically motivated restriction, Israel could kick Ahmadmanjihad’s butt) and Hezbollah mandate negotiation in the interests of Israel’s survival.

How many times does Israel have to “negotiate” away land and release terrorists from prison before it sinks home that dealing with the Arabs is a one way street? When Israel is down to one square mile of sovereign territory, all incarcerated terrorists have been freed and “Palestinians” are hailing down rockets on that tiny, crowded acreage, will our leaders continue to press for “negotiations”?

But as usual, I digress.

Back on topic (have I actually been there yet, to begin with?), McCain’s statements regarding the Israeli-”Palestinian” situation are right on point. My debating “opponent” was right when he said that McCain is a true friend of Israel.

The success of Hamas and Hizbollah in the Middle East is not only a danger for Israel, but also a threat to US national interests, said John McCain, the US Republican presidential candidate.

“If Hamas/Hizbollah succeeds here, they are going to succeed everywhere, not only in the Middle East, but everywhere. Israel isn’t the only enemy,” Mr McCain said in an exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post.

“They are dedicated to the extinction of everything that the US, Israel and the West believe and stand for. So America does have an interest in what happens here, far above and beyond our alliance with the State of Israel.”

The American who will almost certainly be the next POTUS actually grasps the reality of the situation.

“I really think that we should understand that the US and Israel are partners. Israel is not a client of the United States,” he said. “If you are partners, then you don’t dictate what you think the terms of the survival of a nation should be.”

If only our last several administrations had been bestowed with such clear insights into the Israeli-Arab situation…

…seems to be underway.

An international humanist organization has warned that Islamic governments are trying to use the United Nations to shut down free speech. The warning comes as a bloc of Islamic states is holding a summit with “Islamophobia” high on the agenda.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) on Thursday began a meeting in Senegal, with the shadow of Danish cartoons satirizing Mohammed and a Dutch lawmaker’s film criticizing the Koran hanging heavily over the gathering.

The 57-member bloc is considering a report by a new body set up to monitor instances of what many Muslims view as growing prejudice against them and their religion, particularly in the years since 9/11.

Warning that Islamophobia poses a threat to global peace and security, the 58-page report by the “Islamophobia Observatory” examines the reasons for the perceived trend — exemplified by stereotyping, hostility, discriminatory treatment and the denigration of “the most sacred symbols of Islam” — and suggests ways to combat it.

The recommended steps include a range of responses, including monitoring of and responding to incidents, and a campaign to show Islam to be a “moderate, peaceful and tolerant” religion.

But the report also says that legal measures are required.

Legal measures, huh?

“There is a need for a binding legal instrument to fight the menace of Islamophobia in the context of freedom of religion and elimination of religious intolerance,” it says.

“The Islamophobes remain free to carry on their assaults due to absence of legal measures necessary for misusing or abusing the right to freedom of expression.”

Islamic states must therefore keep “the pressure on the international community at the multilateral forums and bilateral agendas,” the OIC report recommends.

Since the uproar over the Mohammed cartoons in 2006, the OIC has stepped up its attempts in international forums to protect Islam against criticism. Late last year it succeeded in getting the U.N. General Assembly to pass a first-ever resolution on the “defamation of religions.” Islam was the only religion mentioned by name in the text.

The OIC has 56 votes at the 192-member General Assembly, but it managed to win sufficient support from non-Muslim nations, mostly in the developing world, to see the resolution pass by 108 votes to 51, with 25 abstentions.

Repeat after me: The U.N. is our friend. The U.N. is our friend. The U.N…. ah, forget it, even after I repeated it 1000 times, I still wouldn’t be able to convince myself of its veracity.

As the U.N. prepares later this year to mark the 60th anniversary of the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights, some observers worry about the growing clout of the Islamic bloc, and its agenda.

In a statement delivered to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva on Wednesday, the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), a non-governmental organization with consultative status at the U.N., voiced concerns about the OIC push.

“The implications of this [defamation of religions] resolution for freedom to criticize religious laws and practices are obvious,” the IHEU said.

“Armed with U.N. approval for their actions, states may now legislate against any show of disrespect for religion however they may choose to define ‘disrespect.’”

As I understand it, the U.N. is supposed to deal between governments, not supplant them.

“The Islamic states see human rights exclusively in Islamic terms, and by sheer weight of numbers this view is becoming dominant within the U.N. system,” the organization added. “The implications for the universality of human rights are ominous.”

And this,

The charter would be in accordance with the provisions of the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam - the last major OIC human rights document - which says that all human rights and freedom must be subject to Islamic law (shari’a).

“Everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the shari’a,” it says.

Emphasis mine.

Of course, the U.N. will do the usual — perform the kiss of shame on the Islamofacists of the OIC and in so doing, attempt to hammer yet another nail in the coffin of the free world.

These people are truly amazing in the scope of their stupidity: Anyone with an IQ of 6 who has their access to information should be able to see what the leaders of the Islamic nations are trying to do, yet they simply suck it up and go with the program, not seeming to grasp the very real fact that their own personal freedoms are as much on the line as everybody else’s, that once Sharia has been successfully foisted on the western world, they’ll be the first to go.

I’d like to see our government and those of other free countries fight the OIC charter tooth and nail at the U.N., but with their collective recent track record of sucking up to Islam as any kind of indicator, I won’t hold my breath.

The question of free speech and its effect on religious sentiment has been on the Human Rights Council’s agenda this week.

On Wednesday, the council considered a report by a U.N. “special rapporteur” on freedom of expression and opinion, Kenyan lawyer Ambeyi Ligabo.

Ligabo said he was concerned about attempts to expand the scope of defamation laws beyond the protection of individuals, to include the protection of “abstract values or institutions” such as religions.

Where international human rights documents placed limitations on freedom of expression, he told the council, they were designed to protect individuals — not religions — from criticism.

Ligabo also said he “strongly rejected” the view that the use of freedom of expression has undermined people’s ability to enjoy other rights, such as the freedom of religion.

His stance drew criticism from some Islamic states in the council.

Iranian representative Asadollah Eshragh Jahromi said Ligabo should address the issue of freedom of expression and religion “in a more balanced and comprehensive manner.”

“Insulting religions is incompatible with the right to freedom of expression and cannot be justified or interpreted under such a pretext,” he said.

“When someone defames a religion or religious personalities or symbols, he hurts the believers of that faith and impinges on his exercise of right to religion and belief,” said the representative of Bangladesh, Mustafizur Rahman.

The OIC and its allies effectively dominate the Human Rights Council, where 26 of the 47 seats are earmarked for African and Asian countries.

Emphasis again mine.

I fully understand that the oil lying underneath so much Islamic soil is a major factor behind Islam’s international “influence”, so perhaps we need to rethink certain policies in that regard.

…of New York Governor Eliot SPITzer’s liberal do as I say, not as I do moment. Or, I should say, many do as I say, not as I do moments.

ALBANY, N.Y. - Gov. Eliot Spitzer has decided to resign, completing a stunning fall from power after he was nationally disgraced by links to a high-priced prostitution ring, a top state official said Wednesday.

I posted about one or two of the witch hunts in which he engaged as the Empire State’s attorney general a couple or so years back, all in the name of furthering his political career at the expense of any company or individual he could find to prosecute, guilty or not. His most high profile targets were Wall Street based, though he also added to his resume by crusading against organized prostitution.

The recurring theme of his campaigns has been ethics “enforcement”, and, well…

The scandal erupted Monday when allegations surfaced that Spitzer, a 48-year-old married man with three teenage daughters, spent thousands of dollars on a call girl named Kristen at a swanky Washington hotel on the night before Valentine’s Day.

Client 9 apologizes:

“I have acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family and violates my — or any — sense of right and wrong,” the governor said at a news conference with his wife, Silda, at his side. “I apologize to the public, whom I promised better.”

Yes, you have, Eliot, you weasel. Now be a good chap and see if you can arrange pardons for all those you successfully prosecuted for the same thing and volunteer to do all their time for them.

Calls for his resignation came immediately. Republicans began talking impeachment if he didn’t step aside. Meanwhile, Spitzer stayed holed up in his Manhattan apartment, where he was reportedly weighing his options, including waiting to use resignation as a bargaining chip with federal prosecutors to avoid indictment.

Laying low, huh? Good luck with that! I hope the federal prosecutors indict you to hell and back, your inevitable resignation notwithstanding. Leaving office isn’t an option for you, resignation is simply a less messy way of arriving at that destination than having to be kicked out.

Since your wife’s not seeking a political career and yours is at its end, Eliot, what do the future prospects of your marriage look like? I only ask this because your wife’s name isn’t Hillary. What have your three daughters had to say about all this, knowing that their father not only cheats on their mother (paying tens of thousands of dollars to prostitutes, no less!), but is also a hypocrite of the first order?

Of course, Eliot has long been a hemhorroid on the political landscape, anyway. His anti-family policies and his aborted attempt to issue driver’s licenses to criminal aliens were in anything but the best interests of his constituency.

So, as they say, the riddance will be good.

Bye bye, you schmuck!

I have absolutely nothing against two or more consenting adults, sequestered in properly private surroundings, indulging in whatever non-lethal activities they please, so long as they keep it among themselves and refrain from involving anybody who does not wish to be included in the realm of their respective perversions.

In fact, while I strongly oppose same sex marriages, I have nothing against a same sex couple making legal arrangements in areas of family level hospital visit access (without veto power over such family decisions as life support issues and also without being permitted to adopt children) and dependent benefits, as long as all parties, including the employer in question, are agreed. The same applies to inheritances via will. This is done all the time between individuals who aren’t sleeping together, as it were.

However, I do have a problem with those same people imposing their chosen lifestyles on the rest of us via the courts and via our political system.

The conservative policy group Concerned Women for America is speaking out against a new project launched by a coalition of homosexual activist groups designed to recruit and vet openly homosexual professionals to serve in influential political positions in the next presidential administration.

Truncating…

Members of the homosexual lobby have done a masterful job of equating their chosen, changeable sexual behavior with immutable characteristics such as skin color, says Barber.

“They’re comparing apples to oranges, of course, because they are not the same,” he says of the homosexual lobby’s attempt at comparison. “They have hijacked the language of the genuine civil rights movement and, as such, in corporations around the country and in various governmental entities are considered minorities worthy of special consideration and special rights in terms of hiring practices.”

That is the issue in a nutshell.

A Burl Ives song I recall from my days as a wee lad, called The Monkey and the Elephant contained a verse,

The monkey asked the elephant
oh why are you so gray?
I’m gray because I’m gray, said he
and why are you so brown?
The monkey simply answered,
I’m brown because I’m brown.

Neither had any choice in the matter, one was born gray, the other was born brown. You can be born white, black, brown, tan, yellow or burnt umber, what you see is what you get. Depending upon where you are in the world, you can be a minority because of your skin color.

Here in the United States, if you’re not white, you’re considered a minority. If you hang with Republicans, you’re likely not suffering from any sort of racial oppression. If you choose to live in a Democrat managed environment, well, you made your bed… If they don’t keep you down so as to champion the quest for your “equality” and you get ahead, they might lose your vote. Is that convoluted, or what? Yet for some reason, it apparently works and is therefore a mainstay of Democrat policy.

But I digress.

Homosexuality is a matter of choice — I know, I know, I could be bombarded by arguments that it is more than a matter of personal option, it is a case of mix-up: A woman’s psyche was born in a man’s body or whatever, someone has a gene imbalance, etc, etc, etc — the attraction to folks issued the same gender as onesself is a far cry from the carved-in-stone reality of being born with skin of one color or another.

However, liberal lawyers, judges, activists, media and politicians have been aggressively, tirelessly misinterpreting the Constitution and twisting the truth long enough and successfully enough that they’ve mastered the art of sneaking in a veritable cornucopia of dogmas that run contrary to mainstream American beliefs and even logic itself.

They’ve successfully promoted homosexuals to the same status as genuine minorities and given them power in that regard, making them a favorite butt-munch for vote-hungry liberal politicians.

We’ve allowed our self seeking, ambitious politicians to lead us off the beaten track, as it were, into a kind of moral quicksand, and we are getting in ‘way too deep…

…to return to the United States, I wasn’t kidding.

You simply can’t trust any politicians in that G-d forsaken liberal hell hole — just before leaving San Francisco, for example, I voted for Gavin Newsome for mayor. Why? Because he was the most conservative and businesslike of all the candidates, despite being the usual liberal. And what was his first big move? To personally and massively conduct same sex marriages!

Previously, I had voted for Arnold Schwartzennegger to replace lying left winger Gray Davis as governor during the recall election. Under Arnold, the state’s government has now produced this.

The holidays are a busy time, so there’s a pretty good chance that you weren’t aware of a new California state bill which was passed a few months back and took effect last month. Better sit down for this one, it’s a doozy! On October 12th Govern-ator Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law California Senate Bill 777. That bill eliminates Education Code 212, which defines “sex” as “the biological condition or quality of being a male or female human being.”

In effect the bill redefines the term “gender” for all schoolchildren by adding Educational Code 210.7, which will read: “‘Gender’ means sex, and includes a person’s gender identity and gender related appearance and behavior whether of not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth.” In other words, it is a redefinition of gender that says you are whatever you choose to be regardless of your anatomical make-up. It tells kids that just because you are born a little girl or little boy, that doesn’t mean you are.

Unbelievable! Well, perhaps not for California. The word “tolerance” out there means forcing liberal agendas down peoples’ throats, and doing so by writing such efforts into law.

The ridiculous law has effectively banned use of the terms “mom” and “dad” from California schools. The reason? Using those terms promotes a discriminatory bias against alternative lifestyle parents. I never thought I’d live to see the day when “mommy” and “daddy” would be considered bad words. All kinds of vulgarity and foul language are just fine in these modern, progressive times - but you better not say “mom” and “dad!” That’s wrong! What country am I living in anyway?

It’s important to understand that this stuff will be taught to all children in the public school system beginning in kindergarten! Indoctrinating five and six year-olds to favor sodomy as a healthy and normal lifestyle choice has rankled some parents to say the least. Various Christian grassroots organizations have now joined together in calling for an “exodus” from the California public school system. The coalition includes Eagle Forum, the Campaign for Children and Families, and Exodus Mandate, as well as ten others.

Here is where we see why liberals oppose school vouchers; Such a program would enable children to escape the clutches of a public school system that seeks to indoctrinate them into beliefs that run contrary to those embraced by mainstream American society since our nation’s beginnings.

Because several million California families can’t afford to send their children to private schools (and is there enough room in said institutions to handle all the children of right thinking families?) or have them home-schooled (and just imagine how difficult it would be to find enough home-school teachers to accommodate the numbers involved!), the kids are literally trapped in this situation that will have a negative effect on their futures and those of California society, such as it is.

The California school system has been effectively turned into a wingnut farm.

I applaud the efforts of the various organizations that support an exodus from California schools and wish them luck, but also have to wonder what, exactly, they can accomplish as a bottom line. It seems to me that the only realistic alternative, since the population of the state is mostly liberal-voting, would be for concerned parents with average household incomes to move their families out of California altogether.

Alternative lifestyle groups claim that all they want is the end of discriminatory bias. Officials with the Gay-Straight Alliance Network and the Transgender Law Center already have outlined what they believe to be nondiscriminatory treatment in the school system. “If you want to use a restroom that matches your gender identity … you should be allowed to do so,” the groups advise. “Whenever students are divided up into boys and girls, you should be allowed to join the group or participate in the program that matches your gender identity as much as possible.”

Further, the groups advise, “If you change your name to one that better matches your gender identity, a school needs to use that name to refer to you.” Get it? Take your choice. Who do you feel like being today - Max or Maxine? The advocacy group also warns schools against bringing parents into any such discussion with students. Yeah, keep those parents out of this by all means. It takes a village, not parents.

California is a supremely beautiful state, but what festers among its population and political body far outweighs any reason I, as a right thinker, would have for living there again.

…and I’m sitting in front of my computer, feeling satisfied that I’ve actually had the time to read at numerous other blogs and comment at several of them.

I just finished reading a small-but-fun book by Julia Gorin titled Clintonisms: The Amusing, Confusing and Suspect Musing of Billary.

The book is great, I’d recommend it highly to anyone who treasures clarity in the realm of mainstream political figures, especially one whose every agenda is directed towards killing off the success as a nation that America has enjoyed since its inception as would appear to be a Clinton goal.

From my speakers comes the In My Life album by Judy Collins. Suzanne, Pirate Jenny, Hard Lovin’ Loser, Sunny Goodge Street. Memories from when I was a kid living with then hippy parents, mother and step-father, in 1967. Echo Park, Los Angeles, and later Montecito Heights.

Since I ordinarily visit blogs in the alphabetical order of my blogroll, I was disappointed early on when I went to post some comments at AB Freedom, and was notified that AB had banned my comments. I don’t understand why this happened, as I have never posted anything offensive there, but that’s the way it goes. If AB finds something offensive about me, it’s his thing to do. Since this isn’t a mutual thing and I agree with his political outlook, I will continue to visit his site and retain it in my blogroll.

The most striking post into which I’ve run this morning has come from Mike’s America. If any Democrat voter can reinterpret that, he or she is politically myopic.

Well I started out on burgundy but soon reached the harder stuff
Everybody said they’d stand beside me when the day got rough
But the joke was on me, there was nobody even there to bluff
I’m going back to New York City, I do believe I’ve had enough…

– Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (A Bob Dylan composition), Judy Collins cover

My schedule is kind of erratic, here I am in the wee hours, there I am in the afternoon or at midnight. When do I sleep?

Whenever it’s convenient!

Yesterday, I had a delivery from a local eatery called Sarpino’s Pizza. I ordered their average lasagna and ordered some meatballs on the side. I had the latter sent without sauce so I could heat them up later and have them on sandwiches with garlic mayo. Yum!!!!!!

Later is now. Yum yum, eatem up! So much for a conventional Sunday breakfast, LOL.

Tubewise, I recently bought the Stacy Keach Mike Hammer TV series and have been watching it at my leisure. What can I say? I’m a great fan of the late, great Mickey Spillane and Keach seems to have a grasp on things where the tough, two-fisted shamus is concerned.

Well, enough rambling for now… It’s time to chow down!

…let’s just concentrate on getting the Hispanic vote!

In a CNN debate in Austin, Texas, Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton agreed Thursday night that the Secure Border Fence Act of 2006, which directs the secretary of Homeland Security to construct 700 miles of double border fencing along specific sections of the U.S.-Mexico border, should not be enforced as written.

Stressing her desire to be deferential to the views of people who live along the border in Texas — which on March 4 will hold a primary that is widely viewed as a must-win event for the New York senator — Clinton said of a border fence, “there may be limited places where it would work. But let’s deploy more technology and personnel, instead of the physical barrier.”

“This is an area where Senator Clinton and I almost entirely agree,” said Obama. “I think that the key is to consult with local communities, whether it’s on the commercial interests or the environmental stakes of creating any kind of barrier.”

Both Clinton and Obama argued that the Bush administration was being too aggressive in pushing to build the border fence mandated by the 2006 law.

By “too aggressive”, they surely mean “verbally” aggressive. How much fence have they built in the last year and a half?

The agreement among the senators came in response to a question asked by CNN’s John King, one of the moderators of the debate.

On September 29, 2006, the Senate voted 80-19 for passage of H.R. 6061, the Secure Fence Act of 2006. (It passed the House on September 14, 2006, by a vote of 283-138). Clinton and Obama both voted for the act.

The law mandated that the secretary of Homeland Security build more than 700 miles of double fencing along specific segments of the U.S.-Mexico. Then House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King (R.-N.Y.), the principal sponsor of the law, explained its purpose in a floor speech on the day of the 2006 House vote. “It provides over 700 miles of two-layered reinforced fencing,” King said, according to the Congressional Record.

Above emphasis mine.

All 435 members of the House of Representatives and one third of U.S. senators faced reelection contests just one month after passage of the Secure Fence Act.

Yeah, sure… Voting for the bill was one thing, especially before an election, while actually allocating the funding to see it to fruition, after the election, is another thing entirely.

While Obama apparently has the black vote sewn up, he and Hillary are still vying for the Hispanic vote, yet neither wants to dumpsterize the vote of those favoring the enforcement of our immigration laws, so they offer straw-grasping alternatives neither would actually embrace, once elected, to the legislation they themselves voted for, in order to wear both hats.

That either specimen is actually a seriously considered candidate for leader of the free world is a telling example of how little today’s Democrats value even an iota of honesty in their political choices. But then, that became abundantly clear when they re-elected Bill Clinton.

I will admit to a certain amount of disappointment at the path the bulk of Republicans have chosen to take on the road to November, 2008. McCain.

Worse, he will be facing either Hillary Clinton or Hussein Obama, and it looks increasingly likely that the latter will triumph in that particular contest.

Gee, what great and diverse options we will have at the polls some 8 1/2 months from now!

“We’ll give youse a choice: Ya wanna coupla’ broken legs, or ya wanna coupla’ broken arms?”

On the right side of the political equation, we had some good candidates, but have tossed them in the dumpster in favor of arguably the worst of the lot (I exclude Ron Paul from this category, but then, I exclude Ron Paul from anything outside the realm of cartoons).

On the left side, they didn’t have any serious candidates to begin with, at least not for the leadership of this country, but have progressed from there to one who is both a career criminal and an unabashed socialist versus a… well, I think Wesley Pruden’s got a firm handle on it.

Barack Obama’s great gift is to persuade his audiences to fill in the spaces in his speeches he leaves deliberately blank. This particularly infuriates Hillary and her followers, stuck with a record consisting of the specifics of dozens of policies, proposals and promises, while Barack Obama offers a blank slate to anyone who inquires about specifics. He speaks in parables flavored with nuance and evasion. His rhetoric, sometimes brushing eloquence, dazzles the young and innocent, particularly those who have never sat in the pews of black churches to fall under the spell of powerful preaching of the Gospel.

The senator’s boast of his early opposition to the war in Iraq and his implied indifference to the demands of the larger war against terror further infuriate those who regard radicals in the Islamic world as real, the hour as late.

Obama’s found that he can take advantage of the more gullible, naive and downright stupid among us by promising them the moon while promising them nothing.

“Don’t ask me to explain, just trust me.”

What a gig! Any more openings?

“The great weapon the [Islamic radicals] have is persistence and patience,” Michael Chertoff, the director of homeland security, warned only yesterday, “and the one weakness that we have is the tendency to lose patience and become complacent. It strikes me as hard to accept that anybody would believe the threat is over. There is nothing these terrorists are doing or saying that could lead a reasonable person to believe that they have somehow lost interest. Our biggest challenge is making sure we do not drop our guard because time passes.”

Nobody listening to the man from Illinois wants to hear real-world stuff like this, not when you can groove to the mellow rhythms of the mesmerizing song of a messiah. Barack Obama is regarded even by his critics as sui generis, truly one of a kind, but his followers are like those of Chauncey Gardiner, the Peter Sellers character in the movie “Being There,” who is mistaken by the gullible masses for a wise man, whose casual remarks (”… first we plant the seed, then the sun and rains come, and the plant matures …”) are taken as political science for the ages. You can’t blame Barack Obama for seizing whatever is offered by glassy-eyed seekers of a bargain-basement nirvana…

Anybody remember The Who’s Rock opera Tommy?

Thankfully, the very last line of both that paragraph and the article is, based upon previous American experience, an accurate one:

We can be grateful that the magic of America is its ability to ride out storms.

I wouldn’t be at all amazed to see video of Obama performing, as a political speech, the track from Tommy titled Sensation.

Now, my own thoughts on the election: It’s a long way off, and in truth there’s not much to be said — the two finalists will be spending that time competing for the most powerful political office on earth, and they will say whatever it takes, shape and reshape their images and recreate themselves according to the strategic needs of a given moment, verbally degrade the opinions, policies, records, charactar and asset value (to our country) of one another. Politicians, the media and thousands of bloggers will both register opinions and report on the positives and proclivities of both nominees. Mud will be slung.

To me, it’s going to be little more than a dreary 8 1/2 months of people brawling over which of two undesireables is more desirable than the other, and in the end, as I wrote in an earlier post, we’ll be well qualified to decide whether we’d prefer the measles over the mumps.

That said, I see no point in blogging ala the merits of McCain over those of Obama or vice versa, so I’ll be posting little in the way of campaign related articles over the next several months (I said “little”, not “none”). Much hay will be made in picayune “he said, (she, or) he said” areas, pundits analyzing the most trivial uttered words, attitudes or postures during photo ops to emphasize some point or other that really won’t matter come November — we’ll get the fid no matter which of the two wins.

But once again, I’ll recall that last line of the Wesley Pruden column: We can be grateful that the magic of America is its ability to ride out storms.

Storm January 2009 - January 2013 will require one whole hell of a lot of riding out, and with any luck America, despite the incumbent, unprecedentedly profound and hyper-emotional split between our two major domestic ideologies will rise to the task, as Americans, of reclaiming a grasp on reality and fixing what will certainly be broken in the course of that four year period.

On a side note…

Russia came under mounting international pressure to allow independent inspection of detention camps in Chechnya yesterday as reports of torture and rape of its civilians sparked a further exodus of refugees.
Escapees from a Russian “filtration camp” north of Grozny, the destroyed Chechen capital, painted a picture of horrific abuses by masked Russian prison guards. International aid organisations and human rights monitors, which have been largely denied access to Chechnya, raised the alarm.

A Chechen man of 38 who spent weeks in the Chernokozovo camp north of Grozny before bribing his way out said women and men were being raped by masked Russians. The inmates, 16 to a cell, were beaten almost daily with iron bars, ordered to crawl before their Russian jailers, and forced to use their cramped cells as open toilets, he said.

…I’m kinda’ sorta’ wondering why champion of captured “freedom fighters” rights Dick Durbin isn’t right on top of this GITMOean outrage!

…Move America Forward has a YouTube video up that well reminds us of just where Code Pink is coming from.

So,

Marines are war criminals

Marines target civilians

Al-Qaeda is not a threat

WWII was an unjust war

Communism is okay

I don’t care what it says on these Code Pinkers’ birth certificates, driver’s licenses, state I.D. cards or passports, they definitely need to be deported, where is not important. The only way they should be acknowledged as Americans should be as the basis for prosecuting them as traitors.