The Skepticrats » Election 2008

How McCain blew the economic meltdown issue.

Deuce Geary — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:54:00 +0000

There were lots of things that made me tear my hair out over the McCain campaign. His refusal to make an issue of Jeremiah Wright, and even criticizing others for doing so, was the biggest. Second was not looking closely enough at the Ayers issue to put the lie to Obama’s claim that their relationship was distant.

Until the economic meltdown, which vaulted to #1 in invoking hair-pulling frustration. Initially, I was agnostic on McCain’s decision to suspend his campaign to return to Washington for this crisis. (These actions proved to be key in making independent voters see him as knee-jerk and panicky.)

My agnosticism turned to disgust when, in the ensuing days, I learned that McCain had a very simple case to make that would have been far more effective: It wasn’t deregulation that caused the problem, it was regulation that distorted market incentives, thus encouraging risky loans. Those loans extended well beyond the lower economic classes they were intended for when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac provided a market for such loans, allowing the lenders to make them risk-free (and sticking some other sap down the line with the paper). Of course lenders made bad loans under those circumstances.

To make McCain’s failure worse, he had all the evidence he needed to make the case that Democrats foiled the reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that McCain wanted. Not just a bunch of esoteric documents, but videos of congressman after congressman— including Barney Frank, who ridiculously positioned himself as a savior during the recent meltdown — ridiculously insisting that Fannie and Freddie were fine. They insisted that tightening credit would hurt the poor and minorities the most, so they balked at reform. All Republicans got for proposing reform was to be called racists for doing so.

Dave in Texas sums it up nicely at Ace’s:

A key opportunity was squandered in the financial crisis, Armey calls J-Mac’s reaction “visceral and insecure”, choosing to ’suspend’ his campaign and promising to bring an end to Wall Street greed.
Dude. Dude. You were handed this mess on a silver platter, with the sound bites, video clips and personal history of having taken two full shots at intervening in the shit within the past 4 years, and this was your play?
Visceral indeed. John and his gut reactions.

Yeah, it was a gut reaction, but McCain could have realized his mistake and made his case, but he didn’t, and I’m afraid it was once again for fear of being labeled a racist.

This crap with being afraid of being labeled a racist has got to stop now. No one’s ever going to see the logical fallacy of that charge if we keep caving in to it.

What will the Obama maniacs do now?

Deuce Geary — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:56:00 +0000

This is especially funny satire to me because I love zombie flicks. The Onion on the fate of the Obama-obsessed voters now that he’s won it:

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

Thank God there are people with a sense of humor today. With Obamageddon just weeks from now, I really need a dose of fun.

H/T: Cassy Fiano.

Is Obamageddon here, or is Steven den Beste’s election post mortem correct?

Deuce Geary — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:20:00 +0000

Over at Ace’s and at his own site, Slublog recommended Steven den Beste’s commentary on the coming Obama presidency, which den Beste titles, “It’s not the end of the world.” Sure hope not. But there’s plenty of bad news in it, and I didn’t think anybody could be more pessimistic than me.

Here’s one overview, which I really agree with, especially the last sentence:

I think Obama is going to turn out to be the worst president since Carter, and for the same reason: good intentions do not guarantee good results. Idealists often stub their toes on the wayward rocks of reality, and fall on their faces. And the world doesn’t respond to benign behavior benignly.

But I couldn’t disagree more with this:

Obama and Congressional Democrats will do things that cause harm, but very little of it will be irreversible.

That might be true for simple statutory changes, like union card check, but I think it is a crazy thought when it comes to the creation of new bureaucracies. Can you think of any significant ones we’ve gotten rid of?

Here’s one of the “good” things den Beste sees from the election and the course of the campaign, and another thing I disagree with:

It is no longer possible for anyone to deny that the MSM is heavily biased. The MSM have been biased for decades but managed an illusion of fairness. That is no longer possible; the MSM have squandered their credibility during this campaign. They’ll never get that credibility back again.

Oh, how I wish he were right, but I doubt it. Everyone saying this already knew the media was biased, and I don’t think the media’s pathetic performance in vetting Obama changed the minds of many people about the media except at the margins. The media will continue to deny, deny, deny, and doesn’t appear to be the least bit embarrassed by its performance. The ranks of those who think the media is left wing might have grown slightly, but not enough. A large portion of the electorate will remain sheep.

And here are three of den Beste’s most frightening predictions for an Obama presidency:

2. The US hasn’t suffered a terrorist attack by al Qaeda since 9/11, but we’ll get at least one during Obama’s term.

3. We’re going to lose in Afghanistan.

4. Iran will get nuclear weapons. There will be nuclear war between Iran and Israel. (This is the only irreversibly terrible thing I see upcoming, and it’s very bad indeed.)

On those, I sure hope he’s wrong.

Bedtime thoughts on election night.

Deuce Geary — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:08:00 +0000

I know there are already thousands of posts up by conservatives expressing their frustration with the election results. So I knew I could find one that summed up my feelings pretty well, saving me the problem of struggling to come up with the words. My election night soul mate is John Derbyshire at The Corner:

I’m sour about the GOP too. What did it all get us, those 8 years of pandering and spending? If GWB had turned his face against new entitlements, closed the borders, deported the illegals, held the line on calls to loosen mortgage-lending standards, starved the Department of Education, and declined those invitations to mosque functions, would the GOP be in any worse shape now?
What won this election was the packaging skills of David Axelrod, the swooning complicity of the media, the ruthless opportunism of Barack Obama, and the unprincipled thuggishness of his supporters.
What lost this election was the cloth-eared cluelessness of George W. Bush, the timid squeamishness of John McCain, and the deep lack of interest in conservative principles among Republican primary voters.
Sour? You bet I’m sour. Where was conservatism in this election? Where was restraint in government? Where was national sovereignty? Where was liberty? Where was self-support? And where are those things now? Where are they headed this next four years? Down the toilet, that’s where. Pah!

Ditto.

Racists and rednecks re-elect Murtha! If we can’t kick him out of Congress, can we at least kick him out of the fraternity of Marines?

Deuce Geary — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:00:00 +0000

“There’s no such thing as a former Marine.” That’s something every Marine is taught, and it symbolizes the common bond of all United States Marines, past, present, and future.

Long after I left the Corps, I met a young Marine who, upon learning of my service, reminded me that there’s no such thing as a former Marine and then said that there was one widely recognized exception to this maxim: Dan Rather. (That exception probably isn’t valid because it seems Rather never became a Marine.)

So now, let me propose an exception for someone who was actually a Marine: Congressman John Murtha (D-PA), newly re-elected by his constituents even after labeling them racists, then rednecks.

Maybe I don’t have standing to issue this call. Hey, I’ll admit, I wasn’t that good of a Marine, and I never attained the rank that Murtha did. And Murtha’s seen combat, and I never did, so he certainly knows it better than I do.

But Murtha is beyond the pale. I’m not for disowning him because he opposes the war. I’m for disowning him because to further his anti-war cause, he irresponsibly accused Marines of cold-blooded murder so he could use their supposed combat stress as another reason to “redeploy” from Iraq (merrily helped along by MSNBC, of course). Not only has he never apologized, he says he doesn’t regret making the statements, notwithstanding that all but one of the Marines (so far) have been exonerated. (Too bad the Marines weren’t from his district – he apologized for insulting his constituents.)

You want o oppose the war, oppose the war. But don’t do it by defaming Marines.

Am I being unfair? Or does this deplorable conduct pale in comparison to his combined 37 years of active and reserve duty and his visits to wounded servicemen?

An awful lot of squeaky predictions . . .

Deuce Geary — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:31:00 +0000

Make that an awful lot of predictions of (or wishes for) a squeaker, over at NRO. Rob Long’s is the most concise: “To be succinct, I would say this about the election: Build an ark.”

One of the more pessimistic in the bunch says that the video below is a pretty good “cinematic depiction of how we conservatives will view election-night coverage” if Obama wins by a big margin:

Frankly, I think that’s a lot milder than we’re likely to react.

Pray for Ed Morrissey’s Optimistic Prediction

Deuce Geary — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 07:30:00 +0000

HotAir’s Ed Morrisey has an optimistic election prediction:

McCain/Palin 273 electoral votes
Obama/Biden 265 electoral votes

He predicts both Ohio and Pennsylvania going for McCain, and I think that may be likely after the release of Obama’s comments on coal from last January’s San Francisco Chronicle interview. He also gives McCain Florida and North Carolina.

As predictions go, I like it better than Allahpundit’s:

McCain/Palin 220 electoral votes
Obama/Biden 318 electoral votes

And he only gets there by giving McCain “partly because he and Palin have spent so much time there but mainly because [he doesn't] have the stomach to sketch out a truly gruesome landslide.”

Let’s pray Ed’s right.

Michelle Obama speaks the truth!

Deuce Geary — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 06:33:00 +0000

Really!

According to the person that posted this at YouTube, this vide is from December 6, 2004. You think Obama “did anything” between then and when he actually started campaigning for president? What was it, two years?

Jonah Goldberg at The Corner wants to know why this wasn’t in a McCain campaign ad. I can answer that, I think. A candidate stupid enough to put Jeremiah Wright off limits — indeed, too stupid to see that the relationship is relevant — is stupid enough to put Michelle Obama off limits, too.

I’m not saying go after her personally. I’m saying that insofar as her statements indicate her and The One’s joint mindset, they’re fair game.

Wow, I can’t believe I’m actually hoping that a Huffington Post piece is correct!

Deuce Geary — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 04:59:00 +0000

At Huffpo today, Earl Ofari Hutchinson says that the recent charges against Obama may not keep him from getting elected, but will dog his administration (emphasis mine):

The much vaunted October surprise turned out to be not one surprise but a succession of surprises. And they all seemed to go bust. Let’s tick them off. Obama allegedly broke bread with a Palestinian terrorist and in the process nodded and even spewed anti-Israel, pro Palestinian utterances. Obama’s campaign operated as a money laundering front. That is the campaign got stacks of cash from illegal, foreign, and even deceased donors all by gerrymandering the required internet verification screening mechanisms.

Obama praised his infamous, alleged race baiting former pastor Jeremiah Wright as the best the black church has to offer. Obama insisted that the courts didn’t go far enough during the civil rights era and should have redistributed the wealth to the black poor. Then there’s his Kenyan side aunt who’s been living for years in the U.S. illegally and in poverty supposedly with his full knowledge. So the multi count indictment against Obama reads like this. He is an anti-Israel (and closet anti-Semitic) PLO fellow traveler, who washes illegal money, is a stealth race baiter, who wants to mug the rich, and harbors illegal aliens. If one, or more of these charges were true it wouldn’t just dump Obama’s campaign. It would dump him in a jail cell. The temptation is to howl so hard with laughter at the pathetic absurdity of the charges that tears well up. The charges are, of course, overblown, twisted, and obviously an 11th hour last gasp at muckraking. They have predictably gained no legs in the MSM, and have come way to late in the game to change anything for McCain or against Obama . Yet there’s just enough bare fact, distorted and politically connived as they, are in the charges that they are steady grist for the internet Obama rumor, gossip and hit mill.

The real danger is that though the October surprises fizzled into non-surprises in October they could morph into real torments for an Obama White House in November and beyond.

***

As for Obama; he will be the most watched president in American history, a wrong sneeze, sniffle or cough will draw criticism. The October surprises that didn’t happen in October will be just one more thing to fuel that criticism. Don’t write the epitaph just yet for them.

First, if there’s any proposition that should make you laugh until your eyes tear up, it’s the notion that anything negative in Obama’s past would be even highlighted, yet alone aggressively investigated, by the MSM.

Second, I don’t want Obama or any president dogged throughout his (or her) term by bullshit allegations. But the ones Hutchinson mentions all have supporting evidence, at least enough to warrant a little further investigation. So I hope these do dog him.

Another "first" for Obama may eventually become permanent — how we will become Sweden.

Deuce Geary — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 14:02:00 +0000

From her interview on Dennis Prager’s radio show broadcast on October 27, 2008:

The bottom line that one can’t get away from . . . we are now about to elect a president, for the first time in our history, who believes, as he as indicated, that we are the moral inferior to most of the rest of the world.

That much I liked. But I disagree with the optimism she expressed for the country if Obama is elected:

The thought that we must all hold, and very deeply, is that we are a very great country and there is no, no election, and no president, no regime — as they now call democracies — that can possibly undo us, and that’s really quite important to know.

I just don’t think she’s right about that. The way I see it, a new administration can certainly turn around foreign policy, but domestic policy is another matter. And changes in the latter will lead to changes in the former.

Sure, we’ll go down a bad road in foreign policy if Obama is elected. He evaluates good and bad in terms of what the rest of the world thinks or the United Nations thinks instead of in terms of actual good and bad. (Ironically, people will call this “courageous.”) But that can be turned around rather quickly by a subsequent administration, even when the career Department of State boneheads are against it.

Domestically, I think we’re screwed. I’ve explained why before. Entitlements and other big government will never be reversed. Ever. Tinkered with, maybe, but that’s it. There will never be a real debate about ending programs. Instead, the conservative position will simply be how to run them “better.”

And as the American public learns to expect more and more of their personal needs to be taken care of by the government, pretty much anything beyond our borders will be considered someone else’s problem . . . let them solve it. Whatever we do, we won’t take sides. Why, that could mean we’ll eventually be drawn into something! Besides, who are we to say that the country committing genocide for the sake of racial purity is any better than the country trying to stop it? That question would be, to paraphrase Barack Obama on the question of when life begins, “above our pay grade.”

Well, you ask, why would that be bad? Hasn’t this worked for Sweden and Spain? France and Germany? Why, yes it has. For one reason: when these countries were creating their socialist utopias, there was still a United States in the world to do the heavy lifting. Who’s going to do it when our country — as we’ve known it since World War II, at least — is gone?