A Glimpse of The First Amendment Under an Imperial Obama?

On Democratic Prompting, the FCC investigates TV Military Analysts who were pro-War on Terrorism and pro-Bush.

Obama Bans Reporters of Newspapers that Endorsed McCain from his Plane.

Obama Campaign Asks DOJ to Prosecute a 527 Group for Producing An Ad Asking Questions about Obama and Bill Ayers.

Obama Campaign Asks DOJ to Investigate Those Questing ACORN Over Voter Fraud (including John McCain).

Obama Lawyer Threatens TV Stations that Run NRA Ad.

Obama Campaign Asks Supporters to Flood WGN Radio Station with Calls While National Review Author is on Call-in Show.

How does that liberal saying go? If you aren't outraged, you aren't paying attention.

Peggy Noonan Gives a Sort-of Pseudo-Endorsement of Obama

Peggy Noonan has a weird column praising Obama (and McCain a little too) without seeming to actually want him to win or endorsing him. However, I, as jerks are want to do, posted a not nice comment at the WSJ.com. Here it is:

Ms. Noonan is certainly right, if he is elected, Barack Obama will have the ability (just like any other President) to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy. But I think we must ask ourselves just exactly what that new tune will be. You don't have to be a fan of George W. Bush in any sense of the word to recognize that a foreign policy that brooks every provocation, that turns a blind eye to the dangers the world faces, that assumes that America is the cause of and solution to all the world's problems is disastrously naive, at best. Time and time again, Mr. Obama has shown that his foreign policy is nothing but an unfortunate empty shell of rhetoric and hopeful-but-ultimately-unrealistic expectations. Time and again Mr. Obama has insisted that he will meet foreign leaders without precondition, that he will lend the world's worst tyrants America's credibility. Even as Senator, Obama's meeting and touring with Prime Minister Raila Odinga boosted that man's support throughout all of Kenya. But Obama was nowhere to be found when Mr. Odinga's supporters torched a church with 50-some people inside. Is this really the new tone for which Ms. Noonan hopes? A foreign policy too blinded with self-righteousness to recognize good from bad, friend from foe?

Ms. Noonan, [i]is[/i] wrong about at least one thing, however. Mr. Obama's election would not be "a fresh start." Mr. Obama's election would be a return to the domestic and economic policies of 70 years ago. The New Deal isn't so new anymore. And while there are many people in America who openly support those policies, Ms. Noonan, to date, has not been one of their number. Now, however, now that Obama is a "runaway train," Ms. Noonan sees all these policies as "a fresh start." How illuminating.

To Ms. Noonan, Mr. Obama "shows good judgment." Of course that's true, now. It wasn't true when Mr. Obama was younger and a major drug abuser. It wasn't true when he was a community and organizer operating among one of the most corrupt political machines in the country. I'm guessing it probably wasn't true--at least to Ms. Noonan--when Mr. Obama was an Illinois state senator and consistently voted the direct opposite of Ms. Noonan's stated views. But Ms. Noonan is right, for the last 4% of his life, Mr. Obama has shown excellent judgment and therefore is somehow qualified to be President.

Finally, one has to wonder which Barack Obama Ms. Noonan is talking about when she writes "[Obama] took down a political machine without raising his voice." Mr. Obama didn't take down a political machine, he enmeshed himself in it. Over the years, Mr. Obama has shown that there is no member of the Illinois political machine too loathsome to support, that there is no ethical breach bad enough to separate him from the powerful and the greedy. Mr. Obama's own advisers regularly cycle themselves between his camp and the Illinois political machine; perhaps he speaks softly to them about taking down the machine in between political cycles. Some may say that's simply how you get things done in Illinois. Some may say that's simply how politics work in America. Both may be reality, but the Obama who takes down political machines is a mythical creature with no relation to reality.

When Obama won Alabama, it was a great moment. When he refused to criticize Palin, that was a great moment too. His campaign is certainly historic and would definitely serve as a practical rebuke of George W. Bush.

But shouldn't the Presidency be above all that? Shouldn't the Presidency be above the historicity of one man? If Ms. Noonan is so eager to raise the level of political discourse in this country, shouldn't she begin by recognizing that our country is too important to let personal feelings count in the voting booth.

The more people talk about the historical nature of an Obama presidency, the more it appears that they're voting for all the wrong reasons--that they're voting in some sort of vainglorious attempt to somehow squeeze their name into the history books beside Obama's. Or perhaps they're simply voting for Obama because they dislike George W. Bush. But neither a sense of vanity nor a sense of personal animosity should be important enough to count in the ballot box, and while they do, this country will suffer.

Rather Pathetic, Honestly

So a writer at The Atlantic has started ragging on the LA Times for suppressing a video of Obama and Ayers at a party praising Rashid Khalidi and Charlie Gibson has decided he's going to start asking Obama some tough questions about his rather questionable fund raising operations.

Trouble is, the election is less than a week away. These questions have been swirling around the campaign for weeks and yet we've heard nothing. Now it is clear the press is desperately trying to write a record that they think will make them look bipartisan in the future. Four years from now, when someone implies that Charlie Gibson was in the tank for Obama, he'll say "no, no, look, I asked him some pretty tough questions." Nevermind, of course, that the election is less than a week away and Gibson obviously knows there's nothing anyone can do about corrupt fund-raising practices now.

Frankly, I think it's shallow and it reveals the press for what they really are: snakes who think the rest of this country is too stupid to figure out what they're really doing.

Sidebar

By the way, the new commercial by ACORN/Obama, accusing John McCain of actively suppressing the black vote is utterly disgraceful, although I'm sure no one in the Obama campaign is embarrassed about it (except maybe Joe Biden).

The Vacuous Intellectual

At age 30, she didn't have the audacity to write her memoirs because she had won a popularity contest among the editors of the Harvard law review. Instead she saw a problem with her small town and became mayor. She didn't hope to become part of one of the most corrupt political machines in the country, instead she ran against her own party on a "clean government" platform. Instead of sabbaticals to Bali, she worked on fishing boats with her husband. For all this, she has been charged one of the teeming masses, part of that faceless (and obviously brainless) part of America that doesn't live on the East Coast or in LA. She is the very opposite of her Democratic opponents, she is an anti-intellectual.

But let us look briefly at those "intellectuals" she's running against. You see, these are serious people, you can tell they've "thought" about things. But where, for instance, did Joe Biden earn his intellectual stripes? Hopefully it wasn't in law school, where he had to repeat a class for plagiarism and graduated near the bottom of his class (despite his assertions many years later). Surely it wasn't when he first ran for the Democratic nomination and was forced to pull out after he lied about his early life and law school and his undergraduate transcript. It must be at Katie's Restaurant where, according to Mr. Biden himself, he gauges the problems of everyday Americans. Of course, the fact that Katie's hasn't been open for years doesn't deter him.

But what about Mr. Obama? Surely his ability to act serious means he is serious. But Obama does nothing but blindly follow the most liberal political views in American politics. When pressed to explain his more liberal votes in the Illinois State Senate, instead of explaining his reasoning for making them, he simply blames his former staff! The NY Times' description of his time in law school is no better. The picture painted was of a man unwilling (or unable) to enter into the serious debates his peers held all around him. Instead of taking a side or proffering his own ideas, Mr. Obama sat mute, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with anything. Surely this man is a great a thinker!

I think the truth is, the idea of the modern intellectual is largely smoke and mirrors. Joe Biden is more "intellectual" than Sarah Palin because he's "thought about the issues." Nevermind that he's been proven wrong on virtually every position he's ever taken. As for Obama, mutely watching his Harvard classmates debate topics earns him the right to be intellectual while Sarah Palin living an actual life earns her nothing but contempt from the "working man's party."

Who was the last Democrat President who was not "intellectual" (if not "an intellectual")? Jackson? And yet compare public opinion of Barack Obama and the utter vacuousness of his so-called "intellectualism" with Ronald Reagan, a man who had been making serious policy speeches for 20 years, who ran California, and who successfully debated William F. Buckley on television by the time he was President.