Real Election Fraud

Carol Campbell is a Democrat running for state representative in Michigan's 83rd House District. She is doing so because she thinks the current representative, Paul Muxlow, a Republican, is against the middle class. That's no surprise. Yet there is a part of her campaign which, quite frankly, doesn't help her cause. She has a billboard up which reads, "Keep your mitts off our Social Security and Medicare." If that's her opinion, fine. The trouble is that Social Security and Medicare are not state but rather Federal issues.

The St. Clair County Democratic Committee defends the billboard as an example of her moral compass. That may apply to her personal opinion on those questions, but as she is running for a Michigan political office it cannot help her cause. Indeed, it actually brings her moral compass into question: shouldn't she be concerned with Michigan issues? As such, it leaves the voter to wonder whether she has a real grasp on any issues at all.

Candidates need to concentrate on the issues which they will potentially face in the job they seek. If they do not or will not, then they ought to expect defeat at the ballot box. We're not saying that that will happen to her; the voting public isn't necessarily up on the differences between state and national issues either, and some will surely vote for her based on her stands on Social Security and Medicare. Yet that only demonstrates that some voters are knee jerk voters.

A political candidate, though, should know better. Running for the Michigan House on federal issues is tantamount to shyster politics. It is at the least stupid and at the worst, downright immoral. You're trying to get your potential constituents riled up over issues which you cannot affect. It's a fraudulent way to seek election.

When pressed for a better answer to the question than 'it reflects Ms. Campbell's moral compass', the St Clair County Democratic Committee said that it was harassment to harp on the question and refused to consider it further. So much for free speech; so much for addressing issues rather than sentiment. So much, indeed, for trying to tell the voting public what it needs to know in order to make a decent decision at the polls.

Or do we have enough information? In this case, we certainly do. That one question speaks volumes about the mentality of liberal Democrats. Getting elected is what matters, and the questions we must face in the office we seek be damned. It is shallow politicking such as this which gives politicians the bad name so many of them deserve. We deserve better from our candidates and elected representatives.

The President Fiddles

Can Barack Hussein Obama be James Earl Carter? He's certainly attempting his best imitation. The trouble is that, in this case, it's hardly the sincerest form of flattery. We have chronic unemployment, Muslim terrorists attacking our embassies and consulates, and a lack of domestic and international leadership which the world is freely exploiting. We have an America on the wane with a President blaming everyone except himself; perhaps he does want to create a nation in decline. His vaunted intelligence community, credited so much for the killing Osama Bin Laden, did not see the obviously planned attack on Benghazi coming and appears unwilling to accept that everything happening in Cairo and Yemen and Libya, as well as in at least seven other nations, has anything to do with embarrassing the US on the Anniversary of 9/11 but is only in response to a film which no one seems sure has actually been made. He will not admit that the Muslim world may well be testing America's resolve, a resolve they see weakened after almost four years of pandering. Some people do not understand nice, Mr. President. Yet with all these attacks on the US and US citizens Mitt Romney is the one who has supposedly gone of the deep end. Why is the President so afraid of the free speech of a fellow candidate for the White House when he is so unwilling to support the free speech of Americans who may criticize Islam? Why not try to understand the passions of Mitt Romney as much as you try to understand the passions of those who hate us, Mr. President? Mr. Obama can say what he wants, but he would surely be criticizing Mr. Romney if the shoe were on the other foot. You campaigned in 2008 for your job, Mr. President, and are doing so again for the next term of office. Take the heat. It's essentially what you yourself wanted. We need to remember more than the last four years if we are to make a sound choice for President in November 2012. We need to remember what the America of 1979 looked like. It is strikingly similar to the America of 2012.

The Devil's in the Details

We have, in the last 24 or so hours hours, witnessed attacks on the American Embassy in Cairo, and the death of an American diplomat in Benghazi, Libya, along with the destruction of the American consulate in that city. The Libyan President has condemned the act; we do not know this minute about any official Egyptian response. In the meantime, President Barack Obama has announced that he will not visit Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he is in the country later this month.

What does it all mean? Well, once you factor in the facts that both Egypt and Libya have, relatively recently, underwent regime changes, and that Israel has warned the West for years about Muslim intentions in the Middle East, the obvious conclusion is that the Obama Administration is turning a deaf ear towards the situation. It is doing so to the peril of the United States and her citizens.

What's more, many Americans themselves, indeed many people of many nations, are not learning certain lessons which they need to understand if we are to understand world events at all. There's no doubt that Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi were tyrants. In a perfect world, they would have had to be brought down.

Yet our world is not perfect. As such, and as a direct reflection of the lack of perfection on the part of Americans and others who want tyrants out of power without regard for what happens next, when known tyrants are removed without known superior personages in a position to take their place, the people in those places are playing with fire. Yet the world, in its relative ignorance of many local political situations, applauds the changes. What does that get us?

Murdered Americans in increasingly unstable areas of the globe, that's what.

We are seeing in Libya and Egypt exactly what we ought to have expected to see given the circumstances of their revolutions. We are witnessing what must almost naturally happen in a power vacuum: the rabble begins to win in the short run, which means an increasing likelihood of worse tyrants in the long run. That is bad for the locals. It is bad for the world.

Libya and Egypt today are precisely what we should the fear the most, and in a part of the globe where stability is necessary to world security. We are watching the devil we don't see at work. We fear he will be worse than the devil we once knew. Not only for us, but for the very people he purports to lead.

September 11, 2001

Eleven years have now passed since what may become the defining point of a generation. Eleven years, almost to the minute as this is being written, terrorists attacked the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and were overcome by the passengers of an airplane over the hills of Pennsylvania. Eleven years, and we still cannot make any sense of it.

The trouble is that there is no sense to be made. To be sure, we can understand the reasons for even such terrible actions, in the same way that we can understand the reasons Hitler did what he did. Yet that is not the same as understanding.

How do we, how can we, come to actually understand rape or murder or thievery, mass murder or any any other evil which may be added to such a gruesome list, if we are to be decent human beings ourselves? It is only in warped mind where such heinous acts may be justified. As such, reasonable people simply cannot understand them. It is beyond their ability; it is pure nonsense.

So the goal today should be to remember. Remember the victims and their families, remember the countless acts of heroism that day, remember even the perpetrators of such despicable carnage if for no other reason than to remind ourselves that such twisted souls do exist, seeking the ruin of those those not in lockstep with them. But hopefully, remember even so that their redemption may be possible. If we are the good people we claim to be, even that shouldn't be so difficult of a task on so difficult of an anniversary.

GOP Supports Civil Rights

The minority vote is taken for granted by the Democratic Party. That's a shame, when you consider how badly that group has played minorities over the years.

Democrats want to take credit for all the advancements in civil rights in recent times, indeed for any and all forward movements on civil rights in our entire history. Yet at the least, the GOP deserves more consideration in what it has done in that area over time.

It was a Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, who sent federal troops to insure that minorities were allowed in public high schools. Going back much further, a Republican, Abraham Lincoln, did the most to free the slaves. Say what you want about what he said at the time, his actions were what ended slavery.

How quickly too we forget the Dixiecrats, Democrats who opposed civil rights legislation. You know, the guys such as the late Robert Byrd, whose past the Democratic party has gone to great pains recently to ignore if not outright, ahem, whitewash? Not that it isn't good that he may have recanted later on in life, there is nonetheless his history of at least initially working against minorities.

It is interesting also to note that Republican support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was actually stronger than Democratic support. As a Party, the GOP voted for the Act by about an 80% - 20% margin; Democrats, while overall in favor of it, voted at about a 62% - 38% figure. Indeed, not enough Democrats in the Senate voted for the measure to have passed it on their power: only 46 Democratic senators voted aye. That means that it would not have passed the Senate without Republican support at a time the Democrats were the majority party by a tremendous number in that chamber, 67-33.

Why don't we hear about this in schools and the media? Because it's not history that they like. It makes conservatives in general and Republicans in particular look too good. So much for the objectivity of the journalists and educators.

When you throw in the fact that many minorities are social conservatives, one cannot help but conclude they need to rethink their ties to the Democratic Party. But when the race card gets played, well, we'll see who's actually played.

Would they Boo Sick Kids too?

You have to wonder whether the Democrats are trying to shoot themselves in their collective foot. They leave God out of the platform, then contrive to put Him back in. The action is met by boos, and, of course, it's all on film. A film which will be repeated over and over throughout the next nine weeks. 

It's nothing short of rank stupidity. They even had the order to pass the addendum to their platform typed into the teleprompter. Even Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the chairman of the convention and the one at the podium during the voice vote which ended in booing, seemed confused and unsure of what to do. He finally announced that, in his teleprompted opinion, two-thirds were for the amendment, the Democratic platform would be altered. It was a completely scripted moment. Except for the boos, and the clear fact that there was not two-thirds support for the measure. Further attempts at damage control, and that is exactly what this was, went so far as to assert that the President did not know that there were no references to God in the original platform. 

Please. The President was not aware of something so obvious as that? Sitting presidents control their conventions, which mean they control the platform. If he didn't know, then it is simply another sign of how out of touch Barack Obama is with the American public. Last night's events overshadow the whole Democratic National Convention. The way in which they handled the issue is merely another symptom of the the illness which affects their party. 

They make a bad and wholly avoidable mistake and then compound it with something profoundly stupid. It is one more sign of the discomfort in their ranks as we head towards November. There is fear in the hearts of the Democrats. It shone brightly last evening.

God and the Democrats

The Democratic National Convention is underway this week in Charlotte, North Carolina. It has hardly been smooth sailing. But perhaps more than anything else, there have been a couple of things which so far define the meeting in ways which should profoundly affect the American people and their view of the Democrats.

For starters, it seems that the national debt has crossed the $15 trillion dollar mark as the convention began. This was labelled 'unfortunate' by the Huffington Post. Why? Because it reflects poorly on their candidate? It was hardly an instance of unbiased journalism, considering their choice of the word unfortunate. Who are they to judge? Why not simply, ahem, report the fact? It shows us two things: one, the Huffington Post is biased towards the left and favors the Obama Administration. But most telling is that it shows very clearly to the American voting public that this Administration and this party are spending our nation into oblivion. It is not a message they wish to be reminded about during their time in the spotlight precisely because it illuminates the main trouble President Barack Obama and his minions must answer for in this election cycle.

Beyond this, the Democrats have dropped dropped the word God from their platform. He is mentioned in terms such as 'God-fearing Democrats' yet they do not otherwise appeal to Him. This leaves the question, who can they possibly be pander to with such an omission? The relatively few Americans who don't believe in God? How many votes can they hope to secure with this move? How could it have really hurt them to appeal to a Deity? Were there people ready to vote Republican if the Democratic Party had called upon the Almighty? We doubt it.

The Democrats are in trouble and they know it. Why are they going out of their way to exacerbate it? Have their fears become panic? Time will tell; our best bet is to let the clock keep ticking. Their further reactions to the tick tocking will tell us all we need to know.