harmonicminer

In 1992, we all knew, those of us who were paying attention, that Bill Clinton was essentially, uh, a disposable Caucasian inhabitant of a towable vehicular dwelling, that his wife was an incredibly ambitious person who would stop at nothing to use her husband to climb into power, that Clinton was a smooth talking liar, and that the main stream media had protected Clinton from the public learning about him until it was too late. The first thing he did was go back on his promise of a middle class tax cut.  Remember?

I have this terrible, terrible feeling that in 16 years or so, Michelle Obama will be running for president of the United States, just following the presidency of Sarah Palin, who will have spent her 8 years trying to undo all the damage done by the first Obama presidency, just as Bush had to rebuild the military and intelligence systems gutted by Clinton, cut taxes to stimulate a moribund economy suffering from the the recession that began near the end of Clinton’s term, and did his best to appoint judges to reverse the creeping totalitarianism of the US judiciary.

The only real remaining question, purely academic, unless Vegas starts offering odds:

Which of Barry’s promises will he go back on first?  I don’t meant the ones that will be disastrous if he keeps them, like deliberately losing Iraq,  raising taxes on the investor class, nationalized health care, stopping secret voting for unionization of non-union shops, the “fairness doctrine”, etc.  I mean the ones that he makes “conditionally”, so that the conditions in which he’ll honor them will never be met, like aggressively expanding the number of nuclear power plants, drilling SIGNIFICANTLY for oil (as opposed to doing just enough to say he did it, and then saying it proves that drilling won’t solve anything), etc.

The millenial generation is about to get a real education, in the hardest way possible.  I hope they’re smart enough to learn from it, and not be taken in again.  They are going to pay, and pay, and pay, for their entire lives, for programs Obama will begin.

Last night’s debate has convinced me that McCain has about a 1% chance of winning.  He just didn’t say what needed to be said, and his time is growing short.

Power Line, quoting the New York Post

Some [of the Biden Blunders], of course, were just Biden being Biden. He smeared Dick Cheney as “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history.”

To which we must take specific offense: After all, the founder of this newspaper, Alexander Hamilton, was killed in a duel by then-Vice President Aaron Burr. (Certainly Burr was a better shot than Cheney.)

Investor’s Business Daily on some of the Biden Blunders in the debate. See if you find anything about this in the NYTimes, and if you do, what page it’s on.

as InstaPundit’s Michael Totten instantly noted after the debate, Biden, the great, seasoned foreign policy expert who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, falsely claimed France and the U.S. “kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon.”

Of course, the debate’s moderator, Gwen Ifill of PBS’ “Washington Week,” didn’t call Biden on the gaffe; that might not be good for sales of her upcoming book, “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama” (especially if there turns out not to be an Age of Obama).

There was also Biden’s accusation that John McCain is soft on regulation, when in fact he tried to beef up regulations on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, an explanation for why he got so little campaign money from Fannie and Freddie over the years, under $22,000, as opposed to the more than $126,000 Obama received in his short time in the Senate.

Sen. Biden falsely claimed that Obama didn’t pledge to meet with Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; he falsely claimed Gov. Sarah Palin supported a windfall profits tax on oil companies; he said he’s always been for clean coal in spite of his record of voting against it in the Senate.

Biden said we have to drill for more of our own oil, easily leading viewers to conclude he and Obama are in favor of more domestic drilling, but as the American Thinker blog’s Rick Moran noted in a list of “Biden’s Big Lies,” “Biden has opposed offshore drilling and even compared offshore drilling to ‘raping’ the Outer Continental Shelf.”

Gov. Palin called Biden on his claim that Gen. David McKiernan in Afghanistan said that the surge could not be applied in Afghanistan; in fact, McKiernan has said that some aspects of Gen. David Petraeus’ Iraq strategy could be part of our war efforts in Afghanistan.

And Biden was wrong when he claimed that both McCain and Obama opposed troop funding; McCain simply opposed legislation with a withdrawal deadline.

The Delaware Democrat falsely claimed that McCain’s health care plan raises taxes, failing to mention his proposal’s offsetting tax credit. And he was untruthful in claiming that under an Obama Administration the middle class will “pay no more than they did under Ronald Reagan.” Obama, in fact, says he will return income tax rates to the Clinton levels, which were significantly higher than those in effect after tax reform during the Reagan Administration.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty noted Biden’s claim that “we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spent on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan building that country” and concluded Biden was “off by 2,000%.”

Geraghty also found that “Katie’s Restaurant” in Wilmington, Del., where good old Joe invited anyone to have a beer with him, apparently hasn’t been around for decades. Maybe the senator was too busy conferring with imaginary French liberators of Lebanon to visit his constituency.

But when tall tales are told with a straight face and mock conviction they are, unfortunately, believed by all too many, especially when the media helps peddle the disinformation.

McCain criticizes Ifill – Yahoo! News

Hours ahead of the vice presidential debate, Sen John McCain (R-Ariz.) criticized the selection of PBS’ Gwen Ifill as moderator because she is writing a book called “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.”

“Frankly, I wish they had picked a moderator that isn’t writing a book favorable to Barack Obama, let’s face it,” McCain said on “Fox & Friends.” “But I have to have to have confidence that Gwen Ifill will handle this as the professional journalist that she is. …

“Life isn’t fair, as I mentioned earlier in the program.””

Ifill is host of “Washington Week” and star of “The NewsHour” and is viewed as one of Washington’s fairest journalists.

The last line is simply laughable. “Is viewed” as fair by WHOM? The AP doesn’t bother to mention this.

During the Democratic National Convention, Ifill offered her neutral analysis on NBC News before Michelle Obama’s speech: “A lot of people have never seen anything that looks like a Michelle Obama before. She’s educated, she’s beautiful, she’s tall, she tells you what she thinks and they hope that she can tell a story about Barack Obama and about herself.”

During the Republican National Convention, the PBS ombudsman fielded numerous complaints about Ifill’s coverage of Sarah Palin’s speech. Wrote Brian Meyers of Granby, Ct.:

“I was appalled by Gwen Ifill’s commentary directly following Gov. Sarah Palin’s speech. Her attitude was dismissive and the look on her face was one of disgust. Clearly, she was agitated by what most critics view as a well-delivered speech. It is quite obvious that Ms. Ifill supports Obama as she struggled to say anything redemptive about Gov. Palin’s performance. I am disappointed in Ms. Ifill’s complete disregard for journalistic objectivity.”

Having watched both of the broadcasts just referenced, I concur with the description of Ifill’s behavior.

Fairness is in the eye of the beholder. What I behold is someone with a serious conflict of interest, demonstrated partisanship, i.e., the usual main stream journa-hack.

It takes Thomas Sowell to point out the obvious reason failing CEOs are often released early from their contracts with bonuses.

What really sets some people off is the fact that a CEO who has mismanaged some corporation into losing billions of dollars is rewarded with a severance package worth millions.

Think about it. If the CEO’s decisions are costing the company billions, it is a bargain to get him out the door immediately for millions, rather than having his departure delayed by either internal struggles or battles in the courts.

UPDATE: Now that I think about it, the USA would save enormous amounts of money, and be obviously better governed, if every single member of congress was offered 10 million dollars simply to leave. Cost: a mere 5.35 billion. Practically nothing. Only small change in comparison just to the pork in every year, yet alone the money wasted to the efforts of lobbyists and special interests, and the money spent in straightforward vote buying with entitlements.

One thing you’d know about the congress critters who stayed…  either they’d be the very honest ones, or the ones already making more than 10 million per term in less scrupulous ways.  So we’d have only the honest, or the very competent (scarily so), but at least we’d get rid of the weak minded dopes.  Think of it as funded term limits.

Obama’s lack of effort to pass the supposedly critical bailout detailed at The Campaign Spot on National Review Online

voting present

Contrast time: McCain put his prestige on the line, and went and worked, out front, for the bill, even at some risk to his campaign. Obama just hung back to see how the wind would blow, while talking the talk in campaign stops.

Political Pulse | The Associated Press-Yahoo! News Poll on Yahoo! News

Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks, many calling them “lazy,” “violent,” responsible for their own troubles.

This story has been up for two days now…. the AP/Yahoo news line NEVER leaves a single story up this long.  Maybe they want to give their readers time to memorize it?

I’ve already deconstructed this one here.  One other thought:  maybe this is an innoculation against Obama losing the election.  If he loses, the ground is being prepped to cry “racism!” instead of dealing directly with his weakness as a candidate.

UPDATE:  Now Geraldo is going to cover this.  I would think that alone would be enough to embarrass anyone who takes this seriously.