The Discerning Texan
-- Edmund Burke
Monday, November 03, 2008
A few more Closing Arguments
Read the whole thing.Speaking in Seattle to campaign contributors behind closed doors earlier this month, Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden all but endorsed John McCain for president.
"Mark my words," Senator Biden warned the assembled supporters. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."
"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," Biden continued, citing the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."
Recalling that Senator Obama selected Biden as his running mate because of his purported foreign-policy expertise, one might think that more attention would be paid to the obvious import of Biden's words.
Not surprisingly, Biden made no mention of the world testing the mettle of Senator McCain if he were to take office (although he did later, lamely seeking to dismiss the meaning of his words). And for good reason. McCain's mettle has already been tested - proved under conditions beyond the imagining of most Americans. If it is possible to give something beyond the last full measure of devotion to our country, McCain has.
We think that the country would be best served by calling on McCain for one last mission - as president.
*****
If he wins, Obama will take the oath of office, in which he'll swear to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Yet the record shows that Obama isn't particularly fond of the Constitution. In a 2001 interview on Chicago public radio, Obama noted that the Warren Court had "never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society," and "to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical." Obama asserted that the Constitution "reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day."
He also noted that the Court "didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted." Obama seemed to think the Constitution deficient, because it provided only a guarantee of negative liberties - what the government can't do to citizens - rather than a positive right to welfare. The Founding Fathers would be shocked by Obama's attitude toward this cornerstone of American principles.
Meanwhile the third leg of the Power Line troika, Paul Mirengoff, evokes the great and eloquent Thomas Sowell:
And finally, for my fellow defenders of the Second Amendment (hell the entire Constitution for that matter...), what say it better than the words of Barack himself? :After the big gamble on subprime mortgages that led to the current financial crisis, is there going to be an even bigger gamble, by putting the fate of a nation in the hands of a man whose only qualifications are ego and mouth?
Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else.
Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise-- whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team-- is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.
The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama's trademark is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges-- very bright and articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in real world.
The signs of Barack Obama's self-centered immaturity are painfully obvious, though ignored by true believers who have poured their hopes into him, and by the media who just want the symbolism and the ideology that Obama represents.
The triumphal tour of world capitals and photo-op meetings with world leaders by someone who, after all, was still merely a candidate, is just one sign of this self-centered immaturity.
"This is our time!" he proclaimed. And "I will change the world." But ultimately this election is not about him, but about the fate of this nation, at a time of both domestic and international peril, with a major financial crisis still unresolved and a nuclear Iran looming on the horizon.
For someone who has actually accomplished nothing to blithely talk about taking away what has been earned by those who have accomplished something, and give it to whomever he chooses in the name of "spreading the wealth," is the kind of casual arrogance that has led to many economic catastrophes in many countries.
The equally casual ease with which Barack Obama has talked about appointing judges on the basis of their empathies with various segments of the population makes a mockery of the very concept of law.
After this man has wrecked the economy and destroyed constitutional law with his judicial appointments, what can he do for an encore? He can cripple the military and gamble America's future on his ability to sit down with enemy nations and talk them out of causing trouble.
Senator Obama's running mate, Senator Joe Biden, has for years shown the same easy-way-out mindset. Senator Biden has for decades opposed strengthening our military forces. In 1991, Biden urged relying on sanctions to get Saddam Hussein's troops out of Kuwait, instead of military force, despite the demonstrated futility of sanctions as a means of undoing an invasion.
People who think Governor Sarah Palin didn't handle some "gotcha" questions well in a couple of interviews show no interest in how she compares to the Democrats' Vice Presidential candidate, Senator Biden.
Joe Biden is much more of the kind of politician the mainstream media like. Not only is he a liberal's liberal, he answers questions far more glibly than Governor Palin-- grossly inaccurately in many cases, but glibly.
Moreover, this is a long-standing pattern with Biden. When he was running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination back in 1987, someone in the audience asked him what law school he attended and how well he did.
Flashing his special phony smile, Biden said, "I think I have a much higher IQ than you do." He added, "I went to law school on a full academic scholarship" and "ended up in the top half" of the class.
But Biden did not have a full academic scholarship. Newsweek reported: "He went on a half scholarship based on need. He didn't finish in the 'top half' of his class. He was 76th out of 85."
Add to Obama and Biden House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and you have all the ingredients for a historic meltdown.
Don't listen to the talking heads. Get out there and do your civic duty. If you have to stand in a 4 hour line so be it: better people than you endured far worse in places like Bastogne, Valley Forge, Gettysburg, and Anbar province: it is time for you to pay them back by defending our country from within. Each soldier in uniform takes an oath to "Preserve, Protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States". The President has to take that oath too.
In my mind, there is no question which candidate would take that oath seriously...and which one did not. Tomorrow is a day that We, the People need to stand up and pull our country back from the precipice. We owe it to those who laid their lives on the line to protect our present form of government--if not to ourselves--to not let the Left throw the baby out with the bathwater.
