random thoughts

Random Thoughts

Crossposted at Right Minds

Just a few random thoughts…
 
Most people think that Jesse Jackson’s now infamous rant about Barack Obama (“I’d like to cut his nuts off!”) is actually a good thing for Obama—after all, many moderate voters who may be unsure of Obama don’t like Jackson, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. There may be some truth to that, but I think that an equally strong argument could be made that Jackson’s criticisms hurt Obama. Obama is running as a unifying, transformational figure, and criticism by anyone, especially an (ahem) “civil rights leader” like Jesse Jackson undercuts that image. It isn’t possible to know what kind of impact Jackson’s statements will have in November, but I doubt the Obama campaign is very happy about them.
 
Actually, I do know what impact Jackson’s statements will have in November—none. In four months, everyone will have completely forgotten about them.
 
Speaking of November, it seems (incredibly) that McCain could still actually win. Gallup’s daily tracking poll has the two candidates tied, Rasmussen has Obama up by two, which is within the margin of error, and the RealClearPolitics national poll average has Obama up by 4.8 points, down from almost seven points up only a few weeks ago. Right now, is seems that neither candidate really wants to seize control of the race.
 
Considering how entertaining the race was just a few months ago, the whole political landscape has suddenly grown very dull. Bush is a lame duck and won’t do anything, Congress will probably wait until the next president is sworn in before doing anything, and neither presidential candidate is making much news. Boring.
 
And just to put things in perspective, the Daily Kos is one of the most popular liberal blogs. It has a lot of influence among Democrats, presidential candidates attend its YearlyKos conventions, it gets tons of liberal traffic. Cracked.com is a website that makes funny lists about pop culture—it’s amusing (I read it), but sort of…lightweight. Cracked gets twice as much traffic as the DailyKos. (Compare them at www.alexa.com. It’s fun seeing how different websites compare). If you’re reading this, you probably think about about politics a great deal, and it’s easy to forget that most Americans really couldn’t care less.
 
One series of books I really enjoy is the Inspector Rebus series by Ian Rankin. They are dark, rather depressing books, but they hold your attention and feature interesting plots and well-done dialogue. They are set in Scotland, and if Rankin’s books are at all accurate, there is a wholly different culture regarding crime over there. The police are almost powerless, there are whole neighborhoods that they can’t enter without extreme caution, and it is considered almost impossibly difficult to get a conviction. There are crime-ridden places in the U.S., of course, but I’m pretty sure that police officers can at least patrol most areas in our cities. Anyway, you might want to check them out.
 
On the bright side, there aren’t many guns in Scotland. (The bad guys seem to use mostly fists and knives). So they’ve got that going for them.
 
John McCain has come out with an ad that basically tells Hispanics what great people they are. (I’m not exaggerating). It’s a pretty blatant pander, and it might annoy some conservatives, but I think it’s pretty effective. It shows McCain talking about Hispanic military service during a debate, and McCain can be surprisingly eloquent when talking about that sort of thing. See it here

Random Thoughts

Just a few random thoughts…

It seems that conservative bloggers are almost unanimous in their abhorrence of John McCain. In the first days after he won the nomination, I thought that anyone who was seriously considering voting for a third party candidate was crazy; now, it seems that there are basically two kinds of conservative bloggers—those who absolutely refuse to support McCain and will vote for a third party candidate, and those who will do so, but only extremely reluctantly. Sometimes it seems that I am the only conservative blogger who actually likes McCain as a candidate. And really, with the exception of Fred Thompson, who among the GOP candidates was any better?

If you said Mitt Romney, remember that he supported amnesty for illegal aliens before he was against it, supported some forms of gun control, and believed in climate change.

It’s been a while since Mike Huckabee said something stupid, but he hadn’t stopped working at it, he was just resting. His latest:
 

“The greatest threat to classic Republicanism is not liberalism; it's this new brand of libertarianism, which is social liberalism and economic conservatism, but it's a heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism because it says "look, we want to cut taxes and eliminate government.”

We sure dodged a bullet with that guy, didn’t we? Imagine if he was the Republican nominee.

Barring any attack tomorrow, May will have had fewer causalities than any month since the Iraq War began. Harry Reid might want to rethink his “the war is lost” statement. Conditions in Iraq could change quickly, but right now, it is indisputable that we are winning that war.

And Obama might want to rethink the notion that Iraq is actually a recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda. They don’t seem to be very effective right now, do they?

Many people claim to be “spiritual,” but dislike “organized religion.” What is the other kind of religion?

Trinity United Baptist (Barack Obama’s church) had a guest preacher in on Sunday, and he is perhaps the only person alive crazier than Jeremiah Wright. He’s Father Michael Pfleger, a Catholic priest who apparently moonlights as an occasional preacher at Wright’s old church. (I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure that Catholic priests aren’t, as a rule, allowed to take part in the religious ceremonies of other faiths). To appreciate the full extent of the Pfleger experience, you really have to watch the video, but if you don’t, imagine a pasty white guy in a Roman collar trying to imitate Jeremiah Wright. Watching Pfleger is almost surreal. (Transcript and video of Pfleger’s remarks is at Michelle Malkin).

Obama responded by denouncing Pfleger’s comments. It’s starting to become habitual for Obama to be forced to disown yet another crazy acquaintance.

Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan published a book that supposedly tells “What Happened” during his time in the Bush White House. He claims to regret his role in pushing the Iraq War, and feels that the Bush administration deceived him during the Place affair (which it actually did). Many conservatives are angry about the book, but really, there haven’t been any lurid allegations made. McClellan’s book doesn’t seem to have any new facts—just his personal thoughts about old ones.

A lost tribe has been discovered in the Amazon. There are apparently over 100 such tribes, and there is a great deal of debate over whether we should contact them. In my view, not contacting these groups is racism of the worst kind—we would rather that they live their lives as “noble savages” then enjoy the benefits of our technology. True, their culture would irrevocably altered, but most cultures are constantly changing. Why should we doom these people to a Stone Age existence?

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