Bayou Bobby for Vice President

“My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” quipped John Adams of the vice presidency over 200 years ago.

Not much has changed since the late 1700s (Dick Cheney is quite an anomaly historically), but the VP slot is surely more important the older the presidential nominee is. Thus, more so than Barack Obama, John McCain had better choose well his VP and that choice should be Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a real up-and-comer in the party.

Why? First of all, the guy can talk. Just look him up on YouTube and listen for yourself. Jindal speaks quickly and powerfully on his feet. His is not the fluffy eloquence of a pre-packaged Obama speech, but he can do that too. He is just the kind of talent the McCain camp is going to need if it is to exploit the hypnotic change-mania that has gripped much of the country.

If there was ever a state that needed change, it is Louisiana, and he has capitalized on the change rhetoric in his own campaigns. “I suspect that some of those who oppose making big changes in Louisiana government will try to mount a counter-offensive…. But before we can change the direction of our state, we all have to change our current mindset. We have to defeat cynicism…. We can change. We must change. We will change…. [C]hange is not just on the way: Change begins tonight!” declared Jindal upon claiming victory for the governorship.

Next, McCain can’t win the election without a better outreach to the conservative base, and he has done a poor job thus far. If anybody can excite the base and get them out to the polls for McCain, Jindal is the one to do it. He has a 100% pro-life voting record and an “A” from Gun Owners of America. He campaigned for governor on cutting taxes among other issues. Rush Limbaugh has gone so far as to call him “the next Ronald Reagan.” The battle against Obama for independents will be formidable, so finding a way to win over staunch conservatives is a must.

At 37, Jindal is even younger than Obama by about a decade (helping McCain diffuse the age issue) yet has a much longer and more impressive resume than the Democratic nominee. Brace yourself for a deluge of experience: He graduated with honors from Brown University in biology and public policy and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford who turned down admission to medical and law schools at both Harvard and Yale. At McKinsey and Company, Jindal consulted Fortune 500 companies. Two years later he was appointed the Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals and another two years later appointed Executive Director of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare. Jindal’s particular background in health care, which is sure to be an important issue this election, couldn’t be more timely.

From there he went on to serve as the president of the University of Louisiana System and then the Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in 2001. Only then did he begin a career as an elected representative to Congress serving two terms and winning his reelection with an incredible 88% of the vote! As governor of Louisiana, his approval ratings have reached as high as a whopping 77%.

And to top it off, no matter how hard we try to ignore it, race will likely be an issue in the presidential campaign. It can only help to have a person of color on the Republican ticket when campaigning against an historic opponent, an African American. Don’t expect much of a shift in the black vote, but it will be much easier to deflect the perennial accusations of Republican racism with an Indian-American at McCain’s side.

In short, Jindal is the youthful, articulate, reforming, conservative, and accomplished rock star that the Republican Party desperately needs in the fight against the predicted blue political tide this November and in the effort to bring the party itself back to its winning principles.

Help us Bobby Jindal, you’re our only hope.

Secret to Obama’s Success: White Guilt

This is the best, the keenest, most insightful analysis of the Obama phenomenon I’ve read thus far!

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB120579535818243439-lMyQjAxMDI4MDE1ODcxOTg1Wj.html

The Obama Bargain
By SHELBY STEELE
March 18, 2008; Page A23

Geraldine Ferraro may have had sinister motives when she said that Barack Obama would not be “in his position” as a frontrunner but for his race. Possibly she was acting as Hillary Clinton’s surrogate. Or maybe she was simply befuddled by this new reality — in which blackness could constitute a political advantage.

But whatever her motives, she was right: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.” Barack Obama is, of course, a very talented politician with a first-rate political organization at his back. But it does not detract from his merit to say that his race is also a large part of his prominence. And it is undeniable that something extremely powerful in the body politic, a force quite apart from the man himself, has pulled Obama forward. This force is about race and nothing else.

The novelty of Barack Obama is more his cross-racial appeal than his talent. Jesse Jackson displayed considerable political talent in his presidential runs back in the 1980s. But there was a distinct limit to his white support. Mr. Obama’s broad appeal to whites makes him the first plausible black presidential candidate in American history. And it was Mr. Obama’s genius to understand this. Though he likes to claim that his race was a liability to be overcome, he also surely knew that his race could give him just the edge he needed — an edge that would never be available to a white, not even a white woman.

How to turn one’s blackness to advantage?

The answer is that one “bargains.” Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America’s history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer’s race against him. And whites love this bargain — and feel affection for the bargainer — because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma. Bargainers are conduits of white innocence, and they are as popular as the need for white innocence is strong. Mr. Obama’s extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence.

His actual policy positions are little more than Democratic Party boilerplate and hardly a tick different from Hillary’s positions. He espouses no galvanizing political idea. He is unable to say what he means by “change” or “hope” or “the future.” And he has failed to say how he would actually be a “unifier.” By the evidence of his slight political record (130 “present” votes in the Illinois state legislature, little achievement in the U.S. Senate) Barack Obama stacks up as something of a mediocrity. None of this matters much.

Race helps Mr. Obama in another way — it lifts his political campaign to the level of allegory, making it the stuff of a far higher drama than budget deficits and education reform. His dark skin, with its powerful evocations of America’s tortured racial past, frames the political contest as a morality play. Will his victory mean America’s redemption from its racist past? Will his defeat show an America morally unevolved? Is his campaign a story of black overcoming, an echo of the civil rights movement? Or is it a passing-of-the-torch story, of one generation displacing another?

Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny. And, as the Clintons have discovered, it is hard in the real world to run against a candidate of destiny. For many Americans — black and white — Barack Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority. So the Clintons have found themselves running more against America’s very highest possibilities than against a man. And the press, normally happy to dispel every political pretension, has all but quivered before Mr. Obama. They, too, have feared being on the wrong side of destiny.

And yet, in the end, Barack Obama’s candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton’s or Jesse Jackson’s. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama’s run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were “challengers,” not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don’t know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . .” And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama’s Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a “blank screen.”

Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama’s political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday — for 20 years — in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage (“God damn America”).

How does one “transcend” race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn’t thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to “be black” despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn’t this hatred more rhetorical than real?

But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one’s blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America’s television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.

No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.

Mr. Steele, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the author of “A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win” (Free Press, 2007).

Obama: Most Liberal Senator In 2007

http://nj.nationaljournal.com/voteratings/

By Brian Friel, Richard E. Cohen and Kirk Victor, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, Jan. 31, 2008 Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the most liberal senator in 2007, according to National Journal‘s 27th annual vote ratings. The insurgent presidential candidate shifted further to the left last year in the run-up to the primaries, after ranking as the 16th- and 10th-most-liberal during his first two years in the Senate.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., the other front-runner in the Democratic presidential race, also shifted to the left last year. She ranked as the 16th-most-liberal senator in the 2007 ratings, a computer-assisted analysis that used 99 key Senate votes, selected by NJ reporters and editors, to place every senator on a liberal-to-conservative scale in each of three issue categories. In 2006, Clinton was the 32nd-most-liberal senator.

In their yearlong race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama and Clinton have had strikingly similar voting records. Of the 267 measures on which both senators cast votes in 2007, the two differed on only 10. “The policy differences between Clinton and Obama are so slight they are almost nonexistent to the average voter,” said Richard Lau, a Rutgers University political scientist.

But differences define campaigns. The yeas and nays matter. And in a Senate in which party-line votes are the rule, the rare exceptions help to show how two senators who seemed like ideological twins in 2007 were not actually identical. Obama and Clinton were more like fraternal policy twins, NJ‘s vote ratings show.

As the battles for the 2008 Democratic and Republican presidential nominations have raged, the candidates have blasted each other for taking positions that are out of line with party dogma. Obama has repeatedly challenged Clinton’s 2002 vote authorizing the Iraq war, labeling her foreign policy “Bush/Cheney-lite”; Clinton has pointed to Obama’s “present” votes on the abortion issue in the Illinois Legislature to raise questions about his support for abortion rights. Meanwhile, Republicans have battled over the strength of their conservative credentials on taxes, immigration, and national security.

When the campaign shifts into the general election, however, the two nominees may each seek to cast their opponent as a party extremist. During the 2004 presidential campaign, for instance, Republicans attacked Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., as an extreme liberal, including by pointing to his ranking as the most liberal senator in NJ‘s 2003 vote ratings.

Such lines of attack are already apparent in this year’s race. At a January 16 Republican National Committee meeting, Karl Rove, President Bush‘s former campaign architect, called Obama “a straight-down-the-line United States Senate national Democrat.” Rove pointedly added: “Nonpartisan ratings say that he has a more liberal and a more straight-party voting record than Senator Clinton does. Pretty hard to do.” How the eventual nominee handles criticisms of his or her voting record could help determine the next president of the United States.

Contacted on January 30 to respond to Obama’s scores in NJ‘s vote ratings, his campaign said that the liberal ranking belies the public support he has been receiving. “As Senator Obama travels across the country, and as we’ve seen in the early contests, he’s the one candidate who’s shown the ability to appeal to Republicans and the ability to appeal to independents,” said campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

But she also said that it’s important to note the differences between Obama and Clinton on key issues. “The Democratic Party needs to nominate someone who shows a clear contrast with where Republicans are, on issues like the war in Iraq and the economy and the influence of lobbyists on Washington,” Psaki said. “One of the reasons he’s received such strong support is because he’s drawn the starkest contrast on those issues.”

Asked whether the liberal ranking could be used against Obama in the campaign, Psaki said that voters appreciate that he is up front about his positions on issues, even if those positions don’t line up with their own. “Part of the reason he’s appealing to some Republicans and independents is, he has that authenticity,” she said. “He’s very clear from the beginning that we can’t do this alone and we need to work across party lines and focus more on uniting than on dividing.”

Asked about Clinton’s relatively moderate placement in NJ‘s rankings, one of her campaign advisers responded, “Her voting record as a whole shows she takes a comprehensive, balanced approach toward policy. Senator Clinton looks at the broader picture. She tries to see the challenges from not only the blue-collar worker’s face, but also the white-collar worker’s, not only Wall Street but also Main Street, and from that tries to put together a policy that’s best for America as a whole.”

The Clinton adviser said that the Democratic candidates’ shift to the left reflects the two parties’ stark splits over Bush’s policies. Asked how the differences between Obama’s and Clinton’s voting records have played on the campaign trail, the adviser emphasized that the two have not differed over the past year on the critical issue of the Iraq war. “The most interesting thing of this exercise is… it simply looks at the votes,” the adviser said. “Did they vote yes? Did they vote no? What did they vote? For the most part, Senator Clinton and Senator Obama have identical voting records on Iraq.”

The Yeas And Nays
Indeed, the similarities in Obama’s and Clinton’s voting records last year were extensive. Both supported most measures aimed at withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. Both supported comprehensive immigration legislation including a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Both voted to support most Democratic positions on health care, education, energy, and the budget, and both voted against most Republican positions on those topics.

But NJ‘s vote ratings are designed to draw distinctions that illuminate the differences among lawmakers. The calculations ranked senators relative to each other based on the 99 key votes and assigned scores in three areas: economic issues, social issues, and foreign policy. (House members were scored in a separate set of rankings. The full results for both chambers will be published in our March 8 issue.)

On foreign policy, for example, Obama’s liberal score of 92 and conservative score of 7 indicate that he was more liberal in that issue area than 92 percent of the senators and more conservative than 7 percent. Clinton was more liberal than 83 percent of the senators on foreign policy and more conservative than 16 percent. The ratings do not mean that she voted with liberals 83 percent of the time, or that she was 83 percent “correct” from a liberal perspective.

The ratings system — devised in 1981 under the direction of William Schneider, a political analyst and commentator, and a contributing editor to National Journal — also assigns “composite” scores, an average of the members’ issue-based scores. In 2007, Obama’s composite liberal score of 95.5 was the highest in the Senate. Rounding out the top five most liberal senators last year were Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., with a composite liberal score of 94.3; Joseph Biden, D-Del., with a 94.2; Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., with a 93.7; and Robert Menendez, D-N.J., with a 92.8.

Clinton, meanwhile, tied as the 16th-most-liberal senator in 2007 with Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich.; both had a composite liberal score of 82.8. Clinton’s home-state colleague, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., was the 15th-most-liberal, with a composite score of 83.

Members who missed more than half of the votes in any of the three issue categories did not receive a composite score in NJ‘s ratings. (This rule was imposed after Kerry was ranked the most liberal senator in our 2003 ratings despite having missed more than half of the votes in two categories.) Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the only other senator whose presidential candidacy survived the initial round of primaries and caucuses this year, did not vote frequently enough in 2007 to draw a composite score. He missed more than half of the votes in both the economic and foreign-policy categories. On social issues, which include immigration, McCain received a conservative score of 59. (McCain’s composite scores from his prior years in the Senate, published in our March 2007 vote ratings issue, are available as a PDF.)

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, the lone House member still in the presidential race, had a composite conservative score of 60.2, making him the 178th-most-conservative lawmaker in that chamber in 2007. His libertarian views placed him close to the center of the House in both the social issues and foreign-policy categories. He registered more conservative on economic issues.

Overall in NJ‘s 2007 ratings, Obama voted the liberal position on 65 of the 66 key votes on which he voted; Clinton voted the liberal position 77 of 82 times. Obama garnered perfect liberal scores in both the economic and social categories. His score in the foreign-policy category was nearly perfect, pulled down a notch by the only conservative vote that he cast in the ratings, on a Republican-sponsored resolution expressing the sense of Congress that funding should not be cut off for U.S. troops in harm’s way. The Senate passed the resolution 82-16 with the support of both Obama and Clinton. The 16 opponents included mostly liberals, such as Sens. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., and Sanders.

Clinton took the conservative position four other times in NJ‘s 2007 ratings. (See how Obama and Clinton voted in the three issue categories in this PDF.) The one that registered the loudest on the campaign trail was a vote that she cast in favor of an amendment sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., that called on the Bush administration to reduce Iranian influence on Iraq and to designate the Iranian revolutionary guard as a terrorist organization. The “sense of the Senate” amendment was approved 76-22.

Obama missed that vote, but said he would have voted no. In fact, on the campaign trail, he criticized Clinton for her position, arguing that the Bush administration could use the Senate vote to justify waging war on Iran. “I strongly differ with Senator Hillary Clinton, who was the only Democratic presidential candidate to support this reckless amendment,” Obama wrote in an opinion article in The Union Leader, published in Manchester, N.H. To combat that criticism, Clinton signed a letter to Bush urging him not to attack Iran and co-sponsored legislation requiring the president to seek congressional approval before an attack.

The Liberal Label
As Obama and Clinton have wooed Democratic primary voters, both have emphasized their liberal policy positions. But neither has embraced the liberal label the way that the Republican presidential candidates have proudly stamped themselves as conservatives.

In Obama’s first splash on the national stage, as keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he disparaged ideological labels as weapons used by partisans who have little else to offer. “Even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spinmasters and negative-ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything-goes,” he said. “Well, I say to them tonight: There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America.”

Talk like that is what makes Obama popular across the ideological spectrum, said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. “It’s not the ’90s all over again,” she said. “Instead of focusing in on what divides us, it’s focusing in on what can unite us. People are sick of the divisions. Republicans I know — and I know quite a few — are very enthused by this guy.”

For her part, Clinton at times has emphasized her nuts-and-bolts pragmatism. She cites her work with GOP colleagues such as Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, with whom she collaborated for three years to secure medical benefits for National Guard troops. Clinton hit that theme in a December ad aimed at independent voters in New Hampshire. “I’ve learned if you want to get things done, you have to know when to stand your ground and when to find common ground,” she said as she looked into the camera.

In recent interviews, both candidates’ supporters contended that they can handle any charges that they are too liberal for the country. Whitehouse, a Clinton supporter, said that she weathered that storm throughout her years as first lady. “What people remember as polarizing was the rabid Republican smear attack that lasted for years against the Clintons,” he said. “When you actually look at her on the record and working, she’s solidly bipartisan and very productive.”

Rep. Robert Andrews, D-N.J., who has endorsed Clinton, said that she has been wise to defend her 2002 vote for the Iraq war. “I admire that,” he added. “I think I give her credit for being resolute in her conviction that the vote was right at the time. Senator Clinton has this in her character. I’m hopeful that when she’s elected, that will manifest itself from the White House.”

Obama’s supporters likewise said that his record points to bipartisanship. “He has strong positions, but he doesn’t demonize the opposition,” Virginia Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine said in an interview. “He talks about the strength of his particular views, but he wants to hear from the other side and try to find common ground. He has a track record of always reaching out and trying to find someone on the other side of the aisle that he can partner with.”

Kerry, who has endorsed Obama, told NJ on January 29 that attacks on his own liberalism had no impact on the outcome of the 2004 presidential election. That line of attack wouldn’t work against Obama either, he said. “The whole point, folks, is — and the Republicans love to be simplistic and they also love to be wrong — is that he represents somebody who’s bringing together a broad coalition of people,” Kerry said. “It’s not going to stick. People are tired of the stupidity of these labels. They’re tired of that game.”

Asked about the question of ideology in this year’s campaign, Democrats generally said that most voters do not focus on labels such as “liberal” and “conservative.” “By and large, your average person out there, particularly young voters, are less interested in labels and more interested in seeing that somebody is going to put up or shut up,” said Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark.

Republicans, however, insist that they can make hay by showing how liberal the Democratic nominee is. “Senator Obama’s voting record, from what I have seen of it, tends to be very left-leaning,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “I saw Senator Kennedy’s endorsement of him as both an acknowledgement of that similar ideological view, but also — perhaps just as significant — that he represents the future and [Clinton] represented the past.”

In the general election, Cornyn said, the ideological differences between the Republican and Democratic nominee “would be certainly a stark contrast.” Drawing that distinction “would be important to present to people,” he said, adding that notwithstanding Obama’s appeal “really across party lines,” his ideology “would be certainly what the election would focus on.”

Graham, a McCain supporter, was equally adamant that ideology would be very important. Whether Clinton or Obama is the nominee, Graham said, the differences between the two parties’ candidates on taxes, judicial nominees, and war policy would be significant. “I mean, there would be big, huge thematic differences,” he said.

When asked about the Clinton ad featuring her work with him to show how she reaches across party lines, Graham noted he was proud that they extended military health care to the Guard and Reserves. “I don’t want her to be president not because I don’t like her,” he added. “I know the judges that she will appoint will be the opposite of what I would like. I know what she would do with the tax problems we have — she will not make the tax cuts permanent. And I know what she would do in Iraq. She would withdraw. She said she would begin withdrawing in 60 days of becoming president. That would be a disaster.”

Obama Weak on National Security

You don’t ensure the security of the US by disarming and cutting defense spending!! Is military spending “wasteful spending,” Barack?? The nuclear freeze movement was wrong during the Cold War; it is still wrong now. You think gutting the missile defense shield budget will make America any safer?

“Shame on you, Barack Obama.”

Obama ‘repudiates’ Farrakhan??

Can we believe Obama’s latest rejection of Farrakhan’s endorsement? 

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/01/obama_repudiates_farrakhan.html 

January 16, 2008

Ed Lasky
The New York Sun is reporting that Barack Obama repudiated the views of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan that were discussed in Richard Cohen’s Washington Post column. Cohen’s criticism regarding Obama’s ties to the Church and the Pastor that gave an award to Farrakhan were reaching a large audience that included potential Democrat voters who might be swayed to withdraw support from Obama.

This statement by Obama is a political maneuver that should be given little credence. Obama is very actively involved in his church; he knew of this award long before Richard Cohen publicized its grant to Farrakhan. Furthermore, Pastor Wright has had a long relationship and alliance with Louis Farrakhan.

Obama did not object to these ties between Pastor Wright and Farrakhan before; nor has Obama rejected the anti-Israel diatribes of Wright. Regardless, Obama adheres to a church and a minister that have long espoused positions inimical to the American-Israel relationship, let alone the trumpeting of black values and racial exclusiveness.

This follows a pattern for Obama: he shows extreme loyalty to a church and pastor whose controversial views eventually become publicized. Then Obama “disappears” the Minister and Obama’s campaign (not Obama himself) issues a statement that Obama does not agree with everything that Wright espouses.

He solicits and gains support from the controversial George Soros, a man whose anti-Israel passions and allegations regarding America’s Jewish community and Congress are well-known. When these ties become publicized, Obama’s campaign (not Obama himself) issues a statement that Obama does not agree with Soros on this topic.

When Obama articulates anti-Israel positions in off-the cuff remarks, his campaign (not Obama himself-stop me if you have heard this before) issues clarifications that attempt to explain away the plain English import of Obama’s (the supreme orator) expressed views.

In other words, Obama only disavows when it is politically opportune to do so. He seems to have never objected to these views before they become publicized and create a political firestorm because they belie his image of peace, compassion, unity.

Obama is not a profile in courage and his disavowals are political pabulum.

For a review of Obama’s troubling stance toward Israel, see my article today, “Barack Obama and Israel.”

Sorry Mike! – (for telling the truth about your record)

My fellow Christians and evangelicals, look at Huckabee’s record, not at what he says!

Fred Thompson zings Mike Huckabee on Sanctuary cities, taxes

Huckabee is Soft on Crime

I hear through the grapevine that he pardoned criminals based on whether they had converted to Christianity. If so, that is outrageous!

Chuck Norris Should Roundhouse Kick Huckabee

Chuck, you’re supporting the wrong guy.

Huckabee is a Pro-Life, Pro-Family LIBERAL