The Cast of Characthers

ViRedd

New Member
The cast of characters
By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, October 31, 2006


Perhaps nothing so captures the superficial, frivolous and irresponsible spirit of our times like the sudden boomlet for Barack Obama as a candidate for President of the United States.
He is a bright, personable and articulate young man but what has he ever actually accomplished that would qualify him for the highest office in the nation and the leadership of the free world?
This is no criticism of Senator Obama. He has been in the Senate only a couple of years. Maybe a decade from now he will have crafted enough important legislation, or distinguished himself in some other way, as to be someone worth considering for President. But today, just because he is fluent, smooth and black?
Similarly for Congressman Harold Ford, who is running for the Senate in Tennessee. However moderate he may seem, his election could turn the Senate over to extremists like Ted Kennedy & Co.
Both Ford and Obama are probably better than most Congressional Democrats, but that is a very small claim in a high-tax party that has been irresponsible on national defense for decades and has fought against even modest attempts to control illegal immigration.
Contrary to what you might think from the way the media cover politics, elections are not about the careers of politicians but about the fate of the country. That fate is definitely on the line now with a nuclear Iran and a nuclear North Korea looming over our children's future.
The time is long overdue to get serious about the caliber of people to whom power and responsibility are to be entrusted. That is especially important if and when the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives after this election.
They can be vague about their agenda but they can't hide the facts about who will stand to wield power if they take over the House.
Everyone seems to be talking about House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as a new Speaker of the House after this year's elections. But is anyone interested in what she has actually done in the past, as a guide to what to expect from her in a powerful position that also puts her next in line to become President of the United States after the Vice President?
On immigration, Congresswoman Pelosi voted against tightening border security. Current House Speaker Dennis Hastert voted for it -- and also led the fight that stopped the Senate amnesty bill from gaining approval in the House of Representatives.
On taxes, Congresswoman Pelosi has paid no attention to their actual economic consequences and instead repeated the standard Democrat's line about "tax cuts for the wealthiest few, causing red ink as far as the eye can see."
Cuts in tax rates have been followed by increases -- repeat, increases -- in tax revenues. This has happened not only during this administration but also as far back as the Kennedy administration.
Red ink comes from runaway spending, which can always exceed any increases in revenues. When a bill was introduced in the House of Representatives to cut federal spending on welfare, Pelosi voted against it.
Upper income earners -- most of whom are not rich -- have in fact paid more total taxes after the rates were cut because these cuts have spurred economic growth and higher incomes. But to admit this would be to abandon the twin pillars of liberalism, higher tax rates and class warfare rhetoric.
As regards the war on terrorism and the terrorists' war against the west, Nancy Pelosi has opposed having international phone calls to and from terrorists monitored by American intelligence agencies.
The liberal spin is that this is "domestic spying" when someone on one end of the line is within the United States. Pelosi also doesn't think we are treating terrorists nice enough at Guantanamo. She wants to give them "rights" that neither the Constitution nor the Geneva convention gives them.
This is from someone who, as Speaker of the House, would be two heartbeats away from becoming President of the United States. We can only hope that the President and Vice President never travel in the same car or fly on the same plane.


Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of author of Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy. Be the first to read Thomas Sowell'scolumn. Sign up today and receive Townhall.com delivered each morning to your inbox. Sign up today!


Copyright © 2006 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.
 

ViRedd

New Member
Cast of characters: Part II
By Thomas Sowell
Thursday, November 2, 2006


A long-standing joke at election time is that if someone were to run under the name "None of the above," that candidate would win. This year, the Democrats are running as "None of the above" and polls show that they may well win the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate.
Can we afford to have Congress controlled by people who refuse to discuss their own record or agenda, at a time when a nuclear Iran and a nuclear North Korea loom over our future and over the future of our children and grandchildren?
Some clever people say that Democrats will have two years in which to discredit themselves in Congress before the 2008 elections. But clever people have led many nations into catastrophes. Is this the time to experiment with "None of the above"?
Who are the Democrats who will take over key Congressional committees affecting the destiny of this nation if their party wins the House of Representatives?
Do we really want Congressman Alcee L. Hastings, who was impeached as a federal judge and removed from the bench due to charges of accepting bribes, put in charge of a committee handling top secret national intelligence?
Do we really want far-left Congressman Dennis Kucinich to be chairman of the subcommittee on national security?
This is the same Dennis Kucinich who once introduced a bill "to abolish all nuclear weapons," who has refused to condemn Hezbollah terrorists, calling instead for us to have a "recognition that connects us to a common humanity and from that draw a flicker of hope to enkindle the warm glow of peace." Poetic but dumb.
Do we really want John Conyers to become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, when he has already indicated that he wants to use that position to impeach the President -- which is to say, to absorb endless hours of White House staff time answering his charges instead of spending those hours dealing with one of the most dangerous international situations ever faced by this nation?
Then there is Congressman Charles Rangel, who has favored tax increases time and again and bitterly denounced tax reductions equally as often and as loudly. He would become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, in charge of tax legislation, if the Democrats win control of the House of Representatives.
On the Senate side, do we really want Senator Pat Leahy to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he and Ted Kennedy pioneered the techniques of character assassination of judicial nominees known as "Borking"?
The only judges who could get confirmed under Leahy's chairmanship would be the kind of judges who will create new "rights" out of thin air for terrorists, as they have created new "rights" out of thin air for criminals, and who would impose gay marriage on the country, regardless of what the people or their elected representatives want.
Legendary House Speaker Tip O'Neill once said that all politics is local politics. Yes and no.
In one sense, there are hundreds of local elections for Congress, rather than a national election. But the consequences of these local elections will be national and lasting, especially as regards the confirmation of federal judges who will have lifetime appointments.
Even voting for a moderate Democrat like Harold Ford in Tennessee for the Senate can mean putting extremists like Ted Kennedy and Pat Leahy in charge of the Senate and liberal activist judges on the bench for decades to come.
Voting for a moderate Democrat for the House of Representatives can mean putting extremists like Nancy Pelosi, Dennis Kucinich, and Charles Rangel in charge of the House, where all spending bills and all impeachment bills originate. Some people are justifiably angry at some of the Republicans in Washington. But voting to vent your emotions will have national and long-lasting consequences, both through lifetime judicial appointments and through the prospect of seeing the United States denied the resources needed to fight international terrorists at a time when our future and our children's future are on the line as never before.
 

ViRedd

New Member
Cast of characters: Part III
By Thomas Sowell
Friday, November 3, 2006


Candidates are not the only major factors in this year's elections. The media have taken a big role -- and a biased role.
The latest in a long list of examples is the way they have immediately circled the wagons around John Kerry to protect him and the Democrats from the reaction to an ill-advised remark that the Senator made at a college in California.
What was the remark? "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
That's what the man said. It's on tape so there is no basis for dispute about that. What there is a dispute about is what it meant.
One plain meaning is that, if you don't get a good education, you could end up getting sent to Iraq. This would be consistent with a disdain for the military apparent not only in Senator Kerry's voting record but also that of many other Democrats in Congress. So the Republicans grabbed that ball and ran with it.
Senator Kerry now claims that it was a "botched joke," meaning that President Bush didn't get a good education and that he has gotten the country stuck in Iraq. Even if we bend over backward to believe that Kerry didn't really mean what he said, but had simply messed up the punch line, his follow-up statement later on only made matters worse.
He said he would "apologize to no one" that if anyone would believe that "a veteran, someone like me," would "somehow criticize more than 140,000 troops serving in Iraq" then "they're crazy."
Maybe Senator Kerry has a bad memory -- or maybe he is counting on the rest of us having a bad memory. He criticized more than 140,000 troops serving in Vietnam, making sweeping and unsubstantiated accusations against them of widespread atrocities back in the 1970s.
He criticized them at home and abroad, giving aid and comfort to our enemies in wartime. That is what first got the Swift Boat veterans after him, years before he ran for President in 2004.
Regardless of whether we believe Kerry's account of his service in Vietnam or the very different accounts by many who served in the same unit with him there, military service does not confer lifetime immunity from criticism for what you do afterwards.
Benedict Arnold was a military hero during the Revolutionary War. But General Arnold changed his mind on that war, just as Senator Kerry has changed his mind on the war in Iraq -- and no one has claimed that Benedict Arnold's earlier military service made him exempt from criticism.
How is this story played in the media? The front-page headline on the San Francisco Chronicle read: "Bush, GOP seize on Kerry's Gibe to Turn Focus from War in Iraq." The Chronicle has learned well the New York Times' technique of imputing motives instead of reporting facts.
Has any Democrat ever been accused by the mainstream media of "seizing on" some statement by a Republican, much less have bad motives imputed?
This is not the first time the media have circled the wagons around Senator Kerry. Despite the fact that Kerry has shamelessly tried to exploit his military service in Vietnam decades later, Tim Russert is the only major media commentator who has ever asked him why he will not open his military records, as President Bush has done.
Kerry has said that he would, that he has, and yet to this day he has never signed the simple form that Bush signed to make the facts available to all.
What makes this all the more important in the case of Senator Kerry is that he has not only made his military service a claim to national leadership but has put his honorable discharge on his web site -- where its date, years after he left the military, raised serious question about his credibility.
The date of his honorable discharge was during the Carter Administration, when less than honorable discharges were allowed to be upgraded. But why would a military hero need that? Except for Tim Russert, the mainstream media show no such interest in that question as they did when they relied on a forged memo to trash George W. Bush's military service. Biased? You bet.



Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of author of Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy.
 

medicineman

New Member
Maybe in your own posts you might have seen the part about the Democrats winning the House and Maybe the senate! I'll go on record as saying I'm pretty sure they'll win the house unless Bush and the voting machine gurus steal it, and then you might be looking at insurection! The senate is too close to call, If the republicans win by large margins in the senate races, we can assume they rigged the Machines, as Diebold and Bush are pretty chummy! And if that is true, rigged machines by Republicans, what does that say about our system of govt. if The USA whom supervises elections all over the globe, can't even trust it's own elections? Are we that far from the freedoms promised by our glorious constitution. God help us if Diebold steals the elections, we're all doomed to be slaves and this country will slip into a Dictatorship guided by fear as fast as you can say Jack Robinson Jones!
 

ViRedd

New Member
Goddammm ... you are one negative person, Med.

You can bet, if the Republicans win, the Dems WILL claim that the machines were rigged. They'll claim that, no matter how many recounts are held.

Actually, I agree ... the Democrats have a great opportunity to take back the house and senate. If they don't, then they will definately be a party of past gone times. They might as well hang it up and go the way of the Whigs. They are not needed anymore anyway ... we have the Republicans who are no longer the party of limited government. The Democrats have been taken over by the Communists and the Republicans have been taken over by the Socialists. That sure doesn't leave much room for advancing liberty.

Vi
 

Doobie006

Well-Known Member
I think Obama would make an excellent candidate for president, precisely because he's only been in the senate for 2 years. After 10 years he will be so saturated by the stench of politics, that the qualities we find admirable in him today might no longer be there.
 

medicineman

New Member
I think Obama would make an excellent candidate for president, precisely because he's only been in the senate for 2 years. After 10 years he will be so saturated by the stench of politics, that the qualities we find admirable in him today might no longer be there.
Exactly, Fresh thinking. Vi says he has no plan, who in the fuck has a plan to make it right? The fresh approach might be just what those entrenched Bureaucrats need to put them in order. If they worked harder on fixing the broken government instead of on staying in office, they would probably be granted a long career in congress
 

ViRedd

New Member
I've asked before, but here it is again ...

Please list the ideas that Obama has put forth that would qualify him in YOUR eyes. This time ... list the "fresh" ideas. Thanks ...

Vi
 

medicineman

New Member
I've asked before, but here it is again ...

Please list the ideas that Obama has put forth that would qualify him in YOUR eyes. This time ... list the "fresh" ideas. Thanks ...

Vi
Investigate this on your own! I don't feel inclined to fuel you disdainful rhetoric!
 
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