Charles Krauthammer Certainly Ain't No Cultist

Contrarian that I am, I'm voting for John McCain. I'm not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it's over before it's over. I'm talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they're left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years.

I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe -- neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) -- yelling "Stop!" I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I'd rather lose an election than lose my bearings.

First, I'll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory. The "erratic" temperament issue, for example. As if McCain's risky and unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month ago renders unfit for office a man who demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in the face of unimaginable pressures as a prisoner of war, and who later steadily navigated innumerable challenges and setbacks, not the least of which was the collapse of his campaign just a year ago.

McCain the "erratic" is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart.

Nor will I countenance the "dirty campaign" pretense. The double standard here is stunning. Obama ran a scurrilous Spanish-language ad falsely associating McCain with anti-Hispanic slurs. Another ad falsely claimed that McCain supports "cutting Social Security benefits in half." And for months Democrats insisted that McCain sought 100 years of war in Iraq.

McCain's critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What's astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.

Moreover, the most remarkable of all tactical choices of this election season is the attack that never was. Out of extreme (and unnecessary) conscientiousness, McCain refused to raise the legitimate issue of Obama's most egregious association -- with the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dirty campaigning, indeed.

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the past year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of "a world that stands as one"), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as "the tragedy of 9/11," a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?

There's just no comparison. Obama's own running mate warned this week that Obama's youth and inexperience will invite a crisis -- indeed a crisis "generated" precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test?

And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he's been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success.

The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.

Today's economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I'm for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

— Charles Krauthammer - endorsing the McCaintosh - even on the Washington Post

Charles Krauthammer understands everything - even:

Better Take A Powder

"Powell spent far more time saying what he didn’t like about McCain than he did identifying what he liked about Obama.

...While everyone is asking why Powell is backing Obama, perhaps the more interesting question is: why does Obama welcome his endorsement? Obama responded to the news by saying he was ‘honoured and deeply humbled’, and indicated that Powell would be an adviser of some kind in his administration. It may seem obvious, given the potential electoral benefits already mentioned, why Obama embraced Powell’s support. But one of the central arguments Obama deploys during his campaigning is that he had the foresight to oppose the Iraq war, and yet Powell was intimately involved in that war and the entire Bush foreign policy. Powell is the one who put forward the case for war to the United Nations with his speech on bogus weapons of mass destruction.

Obama’s welcoming of Powell’s endorsement – and suggestion that he would use him as an adviser – indicates that he really will not represent a decisive break from Bush, as he claims. Obama’s main criticism of McCain is that he follows Bush, and yet here we have Obama aligning himself with one of Bush’s main lieutenants. In fact, with regard to Afghanistan, if anything Obama outdoes both Bush and McCain in bellicosity.

...During the interview in which he announced his support for Obama, Powell said a key objective for the next president is ‘restoring a sense of purpose, a sense of confidence in the American people, and in the international community in America’. But it was notable that, in his brief list of Obama’s attributes, Powell did not elaborate upon the new ‘sense of purpose’ Obama would introduce, or how Obama would go about restoring a ‘sense of confidence’. He could not, because Obama has not."

— Sean Collins, giving a "there there" to liberal illusions, in Spiked!

JUDAS!!!

UPDATE: I didn't have a chance to get my thoughts down about this when I posted it (I was getting ready for work) but you can be sure, I am writing. For now, I'll just say I don't buy a word of Powell's lame excuses for this latest betrayal. For Colin Powell, this is about race and nothing more.

Considering the contradictions littered amongst his reasons in the press (I can't watch the actual broadcast at work) and being familiar with his history, both as a towering military figure and an extremely whiney politician, race is the only reason this can make any sense. If you can call it that.

And, like all racially motivated thinking, that's a mighty big "if".

Stay tuned,...

"Secretary Powell says his endorsement is not about race. OK, fine. I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed. I'll let you know what I come up with.

I was also unaware of his dislike for John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia. I guess he also regrets Reagan and Bush making him a four-star [general] and secretary of state and appointing his son to head the FCC. Yes, let's hear it for transformational figures."

— Rush Limbaugh, who can also see through this race-based sham, and mentioned it to Politico.com

The Republicans were going to make Colin Powell president once - whew! - dodged that bullet! (Ha-ha!) Actually the only people on the conservative side who were afraid of the assassination of our potential black candidate were Colin and Alma Powell. That says a lot. It says, like Barack "guns and religion" Obama, there's a certain mindset that certain blacks hold, where they can't get over themselves, or the past, and they're going to hold the country hostage to their vision of that past, no matter what obvious changes have occurred. They've simply refuse to change with it. I mean, neither Colin Powell, or Barack Obama, will ever be confused with Martin Luther King, so what are they afraid of?

Let's be clear: Colin Powell, and Barack Obama, aren't "Americans", or even "black Americans", but "African-Americans". They're both a silly hyphenated formulation Jesse Jackson came up with, oh, so many years ago in an effort to make as much of a claim to this soil as he could muster. You either bought it or you didn't - I didn't - but most blacks did, and whites have gone along out of politeness. But it's a half-assed Americaness, at best; one of those sorry hugs you give to someone when you're forced to by circumstance, without the necessary bigness of heart one needs to make it real. (Or like trying to offend someone by calling them "the 'n' word" instead of "nigger".) And just as Colin Powell couldn't endorse Obama without taking a swipe at the Republican Party for imagined racial animosity, Barack can't get us to be "One America" with Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pleger, and Louis Farrakhan standing behind him. It just don't work like that, folks.

And that's one of the funniest things about Powell's endorsement of Obama: didn't he notice all those race-baiters Obama's hooked-up with? Of course not - this isn't about race - that's probably why he didn't mention any of the boogie men as he spoke of Obama's wonderful "judgement". Considering Wright and Pleger's over-the-top performances during the primaries, Barack Obama - or even the late Sam Kinison - could appear to have a better "temperament", too.

CP never mentioned Bill Ayers either, except to dismiss him, because Powell was "troubled" by his ever being mentioned in the first place. Imagine that. The potential President of the United States works hand-in-hand with a communist murderer and his friends, for decades, and it's those who bring it up that are put on trial. The fact the Barack lied about Ayers, repeatedly - especially in the last debate where he denied the easily provable fact of starting his political career in Ayers's home - is never mentioned as "troubling" by Powell or anyone else. And that's the most troubling thing about this whole charade: the cultism.

I know, I know: I'm supposed to be writing about Colin Powell and race. But multiculturalism is as NewAge as crystal gazing, so fuck the bullshit, I'm going there: "there" being the fact there are so many topics surrounding Barack Obama that have been deemed off-limits to polite (or hostile) conversation it's crazy. Everytime somebody white tries to discuss some unpleasantness or another, Obama screams "racism" (there - you happy?). Mention Obama has done things that hurt blacks, and even black people scowl at you. He's the Rev. Sun Myung Moon of black culture.

So let's see: On one side we've got John McCain and the Keating Five Scandal, in which he was exonerated - with even the Democratic lead investigator saying "John McCain is an honest man." On the other side, we've got Barack Obama with a cavalcade of sins that are now so long, and so weird, I hesitate to start listing them for fear my fingers will be stubbed out by the time I finish - if I ever do finish. That's how long it is, and, considering I discover a new lie daily, that list is probably getting longer by the minute. And still, two weeks from election day, people insist he's a viable candidate. People, if this isn't a political cult, then I don't know what is. Either that or I'm trapped on Zombie Island.

Please don't eat my brain.