The Thomas Chronicles

“If they [Republicans] bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”

When Obama started to descend his rhetoric back in June into mobster-speak, the press panned it and shrugged their shoulders. Some at the time praised his tough talk against the Republicans and felt the statement entirely justified. Others thought Obama went a bit too far.

But still others recognized that it was a quasi-quote from the movie The Untouchables. It’s a poignant scene in the pews of a cathedral where Malone, played wonderful by Sean Connery, coaxes Eliot Ness into seeing what it will take to take down Al Capone.

Malone: You said you wanted to get Capone. Do you really wanna get him? You see what I’m saying is, what are you prepared to do?

Ness: Anything within the law.

Malone: And *then* what are you prepared to do? If you open the can on these worms you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they’re not gonna give up the fight, until one of you is dead.

Ness: I want to get Capone! I don’t know how to do it.

Malone: You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That’s* the *Chicago* way!

One can only speculate if Obama really meant this in his heart. Does he really believe that McCain and the Republicans are evil? If so, does he think that extreme, underhanded actions against them are justified? A presidential candidate viewing and treating his partisan opponent as though he were Al Capone is something very much worth noting.

Whether or not he believes this in his heart is beside the point. Look to a man’s actions; not his heart and motives.

(Note: Obama has made repeated accusations that McCain and the Republican Party will use racism to intimidate and scare voters.

Of course, by doing so, Obama is attempting to manipulate the racism and bigotry of his liberal leaning audience against conservatives, which is, in fact, doing exactly what he’s accusing McCain of doing— that is, scaring people into believing that McCain and the Republican Party are intrinsically racist and evil.

This, in itself, is bigotry.)

Now, ramping up his hostile rhetoric, he’s going that mobster quote one further.

He’s not going to be the only one acting tough and swaggering in a ten-gallon hat. He’s asking you, yes YOU, the average Joe, to get into other people’s faces and tell them off.

“I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face,” he said.

“And if they tell you that, ‘Well, we’re not sure where he stands on guns.’ I want you to say, ‘He believes in the Second Amendment.’ If they tell you, ‘Well, he’s going to raise your taxes,’ you say, ‘No, he’s not, he’s going lower them.’ You are my ambassadors. You guys are the ones who can make the case.”

Obama believes in the Second Amendment?

Perhaps it was some time after voting for a law that made you a criminal for using your gun against a home invader. If someone breaks into your home, threatens you and your family and is possibly armed, if you shoot him, you’d be going to jail.

Or perhaps it was some time after he voted to ban the manufacture, sale and possession of all handguns.

Maybe he has had a change of heart on the Second Amendment of our Constitution. Who knows?

Maybe he doesn’t know that by increasing taxes on businesses and corporations, he’s going to drive them overseas. Maybe he doesn’t know that taking money away from people who sign our paychecks will affect the amount of our paychecks.

It’s possible he doesn’t realize this.

But my primary gripe about his is that he wants his supporters to get into people’s faces and somehow force them to believe in the Obama way of life.

Doesn’t anyone think that is disturbing, not to mention wrong?

It sounded like Michelle Obama knew what she was talking about when she said:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

This almost smacks of Nazism to me, where members of the Nazi party went out and forced non-party members to sieg heil like everyone else.

It is one thing to ask your supporters to propagate your message, it is quite another thing to ask them to argue with others and get in their face. One is the democratic way of doing things. The other is something entirely new in American politics.

In the time honored tradition of dumping rough thoughts on a makeshift page, I thought I’d do that today for this post.

Obama’s Descent

For the past few days I was thinking about quite a large variety of things, not least of which is this topsy-turvey election cycle. Nothing is pat or predictable about it. Not public opinion, not commentator reactions, not even the action/reactions of most of the candidates.

I didn’t expect presidential candidate senator Obama to select senator Biden for his running mate. It seemed incongruous, indeed even contradictory, to the entire theme of Obama’s campaign, which is to infuse Washington with new blood, new politics and the severing of the good-’ole-boy back-scratching modus operandi entrenched in Washington, D.C.

Out with the old; in with the new.

And to provide icing on this rather delectable cake, senator Obama was black. A post-racial candidate in an uncertain post-modern era.

This tact, in addition to his “narrative” of the generational divide between the Gen-X’ers and the Baby Boomers, was one of the major thrusts of his primary campaign and it probably had much to do with his primary victory over the fabled Clinton Machine.

Soaring rhetoric, soaring crowds… Rockstar Obama goes on a world tour and was greeted with the soaring adulation of thousands…

And then, he picks senator Biden as his Vice Presidential running mate, and the great tale of Obama, the surmounter of mountaintops, wavers, stumbles and began his downward skid.

There have been many indications prior to his pick of Vice President that Obama’s principles were, well, somewhat less durable than previously thought. After all, for a campaign that has “Change” and “Hope” as its mantra, the Biden pick seemed contradictory. You cannot have a more entrenched, good-’ole-boy-back-scratching Washington fixture than Biden. (And, yes, this is the same senator Biden that was for the nuclear freeze during the Cold War.)

Obama’s continuing descent into sound and fury, like his recent tantrum, “Enough is enough!” is more like the self-inflicted wounds of a thousand paper-cuts than anything else.

After Obama’s great first impression on the national scene with his message of “Change”— (a message that still has great resonance, I might add, because we all have the suspicion that our government have divorced themselves from the people they serve and have become parasitical)— the American people began to catch glimpses of the Obama behind the closed curtains.

As if a breeze revealing piecemeal more and more parts of a stage-show, what we found appalled us. It’s not just the racist, anti-American thunders of Obama’s former pastor, Reverend Wright; it’s not just Obama’s association of terrorist, Bill Ayers, and their working together to disperse millions of dollars in Chicago; it’s not just that we can’t confirm or disprove whether Obama attended a Muslim madrassa in Indonesia when growing up.

Indeed, none of these things were decisive in swaying the American public one way or the other toward or away from Obama’s candidacy. But what was, and still is, fueling Obama’s descent in the polls probably has a great deal to do with the impression that Obama is a) not who he presents himself to be and b) that he looks down on America and the run-’o-the-mill American.

He’s made comments to the effect that Americans are arrogant; that we should learn Spanish in order to be more cultured and worldly; that we just cling to our guns a wee bit much (perhaps like a paranoid schizophrenic, trigger happy Will Bill griping his six-shooter).

Further comments, such as him declaring himself “citizen of the world” and that he won’t use nukes against our enemies in any and all circumstances even if one of our own cities were transformed into boiling tar pits, didn’t help much either.

While, yes, Obama’s story is a story that can only happen in America, it is also a story of privilege. Perhaps Obama’s view on middle-class and poor Americans is influenced by the fact that he attended an elite prep school in Hawaii before entering Harvard Law School, a prep school that has as its attendees the Hawaiian Royal Family and the aristocracy of Japan among others.

Oh, and the grandma that worked herself to the bone supporting Obama through law school also happened to be the Vice President of the Bank of Hawaii.

Of course, being privileged doesn’t disqualify a man from becoming President. We’ve had a long list of Presidents emerging from the upper echelons.

But talking to the American people from the penthouse floor down to the street level as opposed to taking the elevator down to the lobby to address them isn’t very smart, especially for a campaign noted for its political acumen.

Who’s This Palin Character Anyway?

Early this month, the American people was introduced to yet another new face in American politics. And that face was Mrs. Sarah Palin, Governor of the state of Alaska.

In an unpredictable move in an already unpredictable election, presidential candidate John McCain tapped a virtually unknown woman, a governor, to be his Vice Presidential nominee, and it seemed the election boat capsized and righted itself and when it did, it looked very different. Which is to say, everything about this election had changed on a dime.

Oh, the best laid plans of mice and men…

For the past few days, I’ve been trying to decipher what exactly makes Governor Palin so dynamic and compelling to the American people.

Is it because she’s a woman?

But we’ve seen powerful women in politics before. There is the senior senator from Texas Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and, of course, senator Hillary Clinton, who was just a snail’s crawl from the Democratic nomination.

Thinking of those women in our government, you’d have to think that it just doesn’t get much higher than that. And yet, out of all three, you cannot say that they inspire the kind of enthusiasm people are gushing over Governor Palin.

Palin, I’ve read, have inspired fashion trends among women: rimless glasses, hair raised up. I think it would be fair to say that none of these women were the progenitors of fashion trends (with perhaps the exception of Hillary Clinton’s pants suits… though I’m not sure she started that one).

Is it because she’s from Alaska?

Perhaps.

From everything I’ve seen about Alaska up to this point, Alaska seems a much more rugged place than most of American. Indeed, it has the feel almost of being America’s last frontier where nature is as crude and unforgiving as it had been for this country’s pioneers in their trek westward to the Pacific.

Small town Alaska hearkens us back to who we were, where we’ve gone and where we want to be somewhere in between.

I imagine, however, that it is both of these and more. Unlike many of our politicians for whom circumlocution seems to be the norm, Governor Palin speaks forthrightly and doesn’t mince words.

As she spoke before the thousands of people at the Republican National Convention, she spoke directly to them, not as from a marbled pedestal but from eye level, which was to say, “I know and understand where you are coming from because that’s where I come from.” She could be your next door neighbor or the school teacher at your local high school. In a very real sense, she connects with people where they live, that she’s one of them.

My brother Instant Messaged me the day after her speech at the RNC and I asked him what he thought. He said, “It was very moving.”

For myself, I didn’t find her speech to be all that moving, but she exuded a genuineness that couldn’t be contrived even if someone tried. I also noted how she saw individual people.

She’s not panning across the unwashed masses, viewing a faceless multitude; she saw single people out of the many. She saw them.

What does this mean translated into a national election for the Presidency? I have no clue.

Another Nixon?

The Palin pick Day 1:

“She’s just a mayor of a small town!”

“She’s an ambitious shrew!”

The Palin pick Day 2:

“Her daughter is the real mother; not Palin!”

“She’s a bad mother!”

I haven’t seen this level of vitriol leveled against anyone before. I thought the accusations and venom directed toward President Bush was bad, but the media’s unprovoked attacks against Palin immediately after her being named as the VP nominee has gone beyond the pale from the get-go.

If liberals and the media foam at the mouth at the mere mention of President Bush, given time, I wonder how they’re going to react to Palin. They haven’t heard of her name for more than an hour when they began to bare their teeth and growl like a mad, rabbies-ridden dog.

… and the insanity of it is: She hasn’t done a darn thing yet.

This was before she wowed the nation with her speech before the RNC (and it was done extemporaneously because of deliberate sabotage from the fascists, I might add), and well before people had time to do any meaningful research on her.

Peggy Noonan had this to say:

But endless front page stories connected to Mrs. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter? Cable news shows that had people insinuating Palin, whom America had not yet even met, was a bad mother, and that used her daughter’s circumstances to examine Republican views on abstinence education? That was ugly.

In the end it made Palin the underdog, and gave her the perfect platform for the perfect dive she made Wednesday night.

…

But this latest fight commences on a new and wilder battlefield. The old combatants were old school gentlemen, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite; the new combatants are half-crazy cable anchors, the lower lurkers of the Internet, and the anonymous posters on the comment thread on the radical website.

This new war on new turf is not good, and carries the potential of great harm. Everyone really ought to stop, breathe deep, and think.

I am worried they won’t. A friend IM’d the day after Palin’s speech, and I told him of an inexplicable sense of foreboding. He surprised me by saying he shared it. “Calling all underworlds reporting for duty!,” he wrote. “The bed is about to fly around the room, the puke is about to come out.” He meant: this campaign is going to engage unseen powers and forces. He meant: this campaign, this beautiful golden thing with two admirable men at the top and two admirable vice presidential candidates, is going to turn dark.

If the liberal media was successful in their propaganda against Bush with them chanting “Bush-Hitler” from the rooftops for 7 unending years, and if they’re this vicious right out of the gate against Palin, imagine what they’ll do to over time.

Once again, what has she done to garner this hatred? (yes, hatred. It can’t be called anything else.)

Ralph Peters believe one cause of all their twitching and foaming at the mouth is because of her genuine belief in Jesus Christ.

NOTHING in recent memory has driven home the divide between our self-appointed aristocracy and “commoners” as sharply as the intelligentsia’s rush to mock Gov. Sarah Palin’s religious faith.

While the attacks and insults are backfiring on the mortified elites, the double standard applied to “Sarah America” is a disgrace that can’t be excused as “just politics.” …

Such a woman wouldn’t fit in Washington (nor would a man of equal faith). In the DC area (where I live), plenty of government-affiliated men and women regularly attend a church or synagogue. But their appearances are perfunctory and well-mannered. Passionate faith is regarded as an embarrassment.

Washington fears faith - even nominal believers inside the Beltway have been shaped by secular educations and secular caste values…

I have relatives whose faith is embedded in exuberant communal worship and public celebrations of redemption and joy. Washington, the professorate and the media not only don’t understand such believers, they despise them.

So, will they be successful again?

Will they pull another marathon of vile like they did for Bush? Or perhaps even pull a Watergate like they did with Nixon?

One hopes they’ll regain their sanity of some point.

I never thought I’d hear a Presidential candidate speak this way. Whereas President Bush sounded like a lawman out in the wild wild West with his “dead or alive” phraseology when addressing terrorists, Mr. Obama sounds like a Chicago mobster when addressing the Republicans.

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said at a fundraiser in Philadelphia Friday, according to pool reports.

“We don’t have a choice but to win,” Obama said, joking that he has heard “folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles games.”

It makes me wonder who he identifies with: the Untouchable, Elliot Ness, who fought the Chicago mobster, Al Capone? Or Al Capone fighting against the federal government establishment? Perhaps he should finish the quote with, “If they send one of ours to the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue!“

Upping the ante in the lethality of your opponent is, as they say, the Chicago way. If Obama wins the Presidency, I hope would employ such tactics not so much as on his own fellow Americans as on our enemies beyond our borders. Indeed, if “unity” and “change” and “peace” is what he is truly after, he is not doing a very good job in addressing the conservatives, and thus half the country, in this manner.

Maybe in the future we’d hear him tell Tehran, “If you bring a Scud, we’ll bring a nuke.”

Or is such tough thug verbiage only restricted to his domestic opposition? And if so, can this be called bravery?

Well, it had to happen.

The Presidential candidates are split right down partisan lines on the ruling.

Mr. Obama said that the Supreme Court ruling…

“…ensures that we can protect our nation and bring terrorists to justice while also protecting our core values.”

“The Court’s decision is a rejection of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo - yet another failed policy supported by John McCain,” he said. “This is an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus.”

And Mr. McCain said the Supreme Court ruling on Gitmo is “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

“We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called … habeas corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases.”

…

“These are people who are not citizens. They do not and never have been given the rights that citizens in this country have,” he said. “Now, my friends, there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people.”

McCain insisted that though he has fought to make sure that the US military won’t resort to torture, the detainees are still, in fact, “Enemy combatants.”

Needless to say, I agree with McCain. I don’t think foreign terrorists shooting at our troops outside regulated uniforms overseas can be considered U.S. citizens in any way, shape or form, and they certainly should get our civilian legal protections of habeas corpus.

Nationalism and sovereignty mean nothing if our laws became the law of the globe and that everyone therein is made to become little Americans. But, of course, our liberals are very selective about which American laws they want applied to terrorists. Treason and sedition is still on the books, you know.

It is unquestioningly presumptuous and condescending to make our laws applicable to citizens of other countries. This is what the Supreme Court has just done. This is just what Obama just supported.

More reactions:

Neo-neocon

“He stole the election!”

Probably one of the most vehement accusations against the Bush Presidency these past seven years is that the wasn’t a legitimate President. In the 200 election, they accused President Bush of stealing the election with legal chicanery. They said, and still say, that he “won” or “stole” the election with judicial decision and not by the popular will of the people, which made him a sham of a president. As evidence to this, they point out that Al Gore received more of the popular vote than President Bush (a point that was untrue then as it is untrue now, but that’s beside the point).

The Left was disgruntled and antagonistic, but they left well enough alone at least temporarily, not in thought and word but in deed because President Bush seemed such a dunce, a lightweight, a kicker cowboy well out of his depths. In the aftermath of 9/11, however, they were proven very wrong.

It was around this point, the point at which the Left discovered that President Bush wasn’t a bumbling nincompoop that they actively attempted to castrate and discredit his administration by unendless accusations and perpetual negative campaigning (compliments of George Soros and the Leftists.).

So, as to this Democratic Primary, where are the outcries of injustice? Where are all the denouncements of foul play, chicanery and lies, lies, lies?

What I am referring to, you might ask?

It is simply this. Hillary Clinton received more votes than Obama. She has won more states than Obama. The states that Obama won were oftentimes caucus states that lock out the general public voting. So, when all’s said and done, it’s Hillary that has more claim to the Democratic nomination than Obama.

But Hillary Clinton will concede the election this week because she doesn’t have the delegates, superdelegates and the love of the Leftists— and she certainly doesn’t have the support of Soros who’s ditched her for Obama. Anyone ever wonder where Obama’s endless millions comes from?

Well, someone should be posing the question, and I hope it’s just not me.

You know, watching the Democratic Primary was like watching two football teams duking it out up and down the field. Two yards here, five there. A yellow flag penalty here, a touchdown there. Now that it’s effectively over (I’m still hoping that Hillary would take the fight to the convention… ), I should feel somewhat cathartic, that I should be somehow relieved that the Democrat’s year-and-a-half long hissy-fit against each other has ended.

But I don’t feel cathartic. I feel worried. Anxious of what will happen next.

I watched the post-game highlights last night with snippets of Hillary’s sort-of-but-not-quite victory speech and Obama’s now familiar political rock concert and I’d to make an observation.

Like all rock concerts, there is a segment of people who attend rock concerts who don’t really go to see the band at all. They come to fantasize that it’s them on the stage playing music to the throng of thousands. These groupies would close their eyes and sing along with some internal fantasies playing inside their heads. Then they would open their eyes and see the enormous big screen tv projecting over the crowd, and they imagine they are seeing themselves up there being slobbered on my the masses.

Last night as I watched Obama worked the crowd in his speech, I noticed that none of the people standing behind him at the podium looked at him. The all inclined their heads upward to the undoubtedly massive tv screen somewhere up above. They were seeing images of themselves standing behind the great Barack Obama and they looked very enamored with what they saw. The people standing behind Obama kind of looked like the people closing their eyes at rock concerts pretending that they’re the band rather than part of the crowd.

Does this sum up Obama’s constituents or is this indicative in any way?

With Hillary Clinton and McCain, however, there is a difference in the crowd. They actually look at their candidate and try hard to listen to what they have to say.

I watched McCain’s speech before the results of the primaries came in. There too is another difference between Obama’s and McCain’s crowd. In McCain’s crowd, there weren’t many of the ready cheerleaders hustling the hoorays and the gimmick chants like in Obama’s mass rallies. Those there tried to really listen to what he had to say because what he had say required thought.

McCain didn’t offer quick crowd pleasers, eloquent platitudes. He asked his audience to ponder and turn over his ideas and see if those ideas were true and if they matched their own.

And between the two, there lies the difference.

The video I posted in my previous post shows a clearly disturbed and meloncholy Barack Obama. Even though he still exuded his usual easy confident mannerisms, he was much more abrupt, even sharp in his statements.

I was wrong in my original post on this subject. I think Obama did for once unequivocally denounce the Rev. Wright’s statements and denounce his views on America. One might say that Obama’s vehemence was even an overreaction. As one person described the event, “Obama threw Wright under the train, let him roll around for a little bit, and then jumped atop him like mash potatoes.” Well, uh… that sounds about right.

I actually feel sorry for Obama and this whole controversy. He seemed genuinely hurt emotionally by Rev. Wright’s vitriolic rants at the NPC. Not because of what Wright actually said, but because Obama reacted as though he’s been personally betrayed.

Let us be clear here. Obama didn’t denounce Wright out of a sense of moral outrage. He denounced him because Wright’s actions didn’t allow him to do anything else.

Charles Krauthammer gives this opinion about the whole hoopla:

At a news conference in North Carolina, Obama explained why he finally decided to do the deed. Apparently, Wright’s latest comments — Obama cited three in particular — were so shockingly “divisive and destructive” that he had to renounce the man, not just the words.

What were Obama’s three citations? Wright’s claim that AIDS was invented by the U.S. government to commit genocide. His praise of Louis Farrakhan as a great man. And his blaming Sept. 11 on American “terrorism.”

But these comments are not new. These were precisely the outrages that prompted the initial furor when the Wright tapes emerged seven weeks ago. Obama decided to cut off Wright not because Wright’s words or character or views had suddenly changed. The only thing that changed was the venue in which Wright chose to display them — live on national TV at the National Press Club. That unfortunate choice destroyed Obama’s Philadelphia pretense that this “endless loop” of sermon excerpts being shown on “television sets and YouTube” had been taken out of context.

Obama’s Philadelphia oration was an exercise in contextualization. In one particularly egregious play on white guilt, Obama had the audacity to suggest that whites should be ashamed that they were ever surprised by Wright’s remarks: “The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour of American life occurs on Sunday morning.”

That was then. On Tuesday, Obama declared that he himself was surprised at Wright’s outrages. But hadn’t Obama told us that surprise about Wright is a result of white ignorance of black churches brought on by America’s history of segregated services? How then to explain Obama’s own presumed ignorance? Surely he too was not sitting in those segregated white churches on those fateful Sundays when he conveniently missed all of Wright’s racist rants.

Regarding Rev. Wright, I’ll give Obama the benefit of the doubt and conclude that he must really believe at least some of that rubbish Wright says. Wright’s comments, which have circulated the world via the internet, and his outlandish statements at the National Press Club, is nothing new. It’s been what Wright has preach for about thirty years and it is in perfect accord with Black Liberation Theology and the Black Value System, which is the professed ideology of the Trinity United Church of Christ.

The alternative to this is much worse.

Faced with the alternative I’d prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt and think he actually believes at least some of Rev. Wright’s radical views. The alternative to this is that Obama sat in that congregation for 20 years, gave tens of thousands of dollars to that church, and knowingly corrupted his children simply because he wanted to get ahead in politics.

One makes him a misguided man who believes in an inherently racist ideology. To other makes him an amoral opportunist who would do anything to be President. He’s already exposed his daughters to Wright’s vitriol, which could possibly poison their views for a long time to come; he has thrown his white grandmother under the train and belittled her as “typical white person” who’s really racist at heart; and now he’s thrown Wright under the train.

Far better if he actually believes in Wright’s ideology rather than being a an amoral user tearing through the lives of others.

Even with all my doubts of Obama, I don’t think Obama’s supporters should be derided either. There is a genuine hunger for bipartisanship. For the past seven years, the Democrats and the Republicans have conducted a very visible sumo wrestling match that made both of sides appear like whining children throwing tantrums.

Into this void of severe dissatisfaction with our government steps Barack Obama, who promises to brush aside all this bickering. He proposes that we work together instead of working against each other.

In a word, he is proposing a peace. Or at least a truce.

It is not surprising thing, then, that people are responsive to this basic message and platitudes, even though, unfortunately, Obama’s done more belittling of his opponents and has done more to silence opposition than any candidate thus far. It seems that his definition of bipartisanship is to do things his way and no other. (Note: He has not draft one single bipartisan piece of legislation. His invariable liberal voting record speaks for itself.)

With this said, however, his supporters shouldn’t be faulted for their support. They too want peace and an end to two party sumo wrestling match.

In fact, I do too. I just don’t think Obama’s the ticket for achieving that end.