From today’s Omega Letter by Jack Kinsella:

A Perfect Storm

If someone had told me a year ago that the Republican Party would retain control of the White House after the ‘08 elections, I’d have wondered what they had been smoking.
The conventional wisdom since the mid-terms in ‘06 was that the Dems would sweep both Houses of Congress and recapture the White House.

The same conventional wisdom dictated that it would be Hillary Clinton leading the charge.
Hillary’s ambitions have been an open secret since she first began to run for the Senate — so much so that she was forced to pledge to serve out her first term before throwing her hat in the ring. Then, along came that great Democratic messiah, Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama is a liberal’s dream; a black man of mixed race, with a checkered history to forgive, an Islamic heritage that threatens Western civilization; articulate, urbane and erudite . . . the perfect candidate to stick his thumb in the eye of the Republican Establishment.

And the best the GOP could come up with to challenge two history-making candidates is a broken down warhorse, a relic of a war we’d like to forget, whose conservative credentials are so thin that Ann Coulter vowed to campaign for Hillary Clinton if McCain became the GOP nominee.

Fortunately for America, not everybody is as willing to drive over a cliff rather than countenance a bumpy patch in the road as Ann is.

Assessment:

If Jeremiah Wright had been the pastor of an all-white separatist church with Nazi sympathies, nobody would be debating whether or not his church’s most loyal members might have racist tendencies.

But Jeremiah Wright was the pastor of an all-black separatist church with expressed sympathies for both al-Qaeda, and The Nation of Islam, and therefore, Barack Obama’s twenty-year membership in the Trinity United Church hasn’t proved fatal to his campaign.

His brilliantly crafted speech diverted attention away from the anti-American, pro-African and pro-Islamic nature of Wright’s rantings, convincing America it was all about race, instead. (And if anybody is to blame, it is ‘typical’ whites — like his racist grandmother.)

What makes it about ‘race’ is that racism is introduced as the motive for any criticism of Barack Obama, as is sexism if one criticizes Hillary.

If you criticize Obama, you’re a racist, if you criticize Hillary Clinton, you’re a misogynist, and if you DON’T criticize John McCain, you’re all that and more.

After all, John McCain was endorsed by anti-Catholic pastor John Hagee, say Obama’s supporters. (And George Bush spoke at Bob Jones University — but he’s not running.)

If I am understanding the argument correctly, its ok to be a racist or a liar — just look at the Republicans!

(In case you missed it, the central campaign theme for ‘08 is ‘change’).)
The fact is, Obama’s 20 year membership in Wright’s church is NOT an equivalent to John McCain being endorsed by John Hagee, despite Obama’s apologists’ earnest contentions to the contrary.

Hagee endorsed McCain. That is not the same as McCain endorsing Hagee.
Obama attended Wright’s church for twenty years. That is a fairly strong endorsement of Wright’s preaching.

(Last year, Obama put $23,000.00 in Rev. Wright’s collection plate. I doubt McCain is even sure where Hagee’s church is.)

But Obama’s defenders are out there, making that case with a straight face, and hoping that if they talk fast enough, nobody will catch on.

And if they can’t pull it off, then they can always change the subject back to Hillary. . .
Early and often on the campaign trail, Hillary has described her harrowing trip into the heart of war-torn Bosnia as First Lady.

She described the plane corkscrewing in for a landing to avoid sniper fire, and running hunched over from the plane to the safety of their waiting cars. Hillary was accompanied on her Bosnian firefight by their daughter Chelsea.

At one point, she joked, “there was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn’t go, so send the First Lady.”
I’ll bet Bill had a laugh a minute as Hillary told the world that it was her husband’s policy to send his wife and sixteen year-old daughter on diplomatic missions that were too dangerous for him to risk.

But the Clintons stopped laughing when Sinbad started telling it, however. (The comedian was also on Hillary’s plane, together with singer Cheryl Crow.)

“It was too dangerous for the president. So he sent his wife and kid into combat along with a black comedian and a guitar player . . .”

The Clinton campaign slammed Sinbad, (noting he was an Obama supporter,) and staunchly defended Hillary’s version of events. Hillary included the sniper story in a speech as recently as last week.

“I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

But then CBS dredged up a videotape of the visit. It shows them smiling and waving as they walked at a leisurely pace across the tarmac from a cargo plane, stopping to shake hands with Bosnia’s acting president and listen while an 8-year-old girl read them a poem. (Oooops)
It’s been said that the Clinton model is to tell a big lie when a little lie will do, and to tell little lies when the truth would work better. Leaving aside that her husband is a convicted perjurer, Hillary’s list is pretty impressive all by itself.

* During her campaign for Senate she claimed to be a life-long Yankees fan (she’s from Chicago)

* She claimed Palestinian ancestry when addressing Arabs, Jewish ancestry when addressing Jews, and gave Sufi Arafat a big hug following a speech in which Arafat accused Israel of deliberately infecting Palestinians with AIDS.

* She once claimed to have been named for famed mountain climber Sir Edmund Hillary. (She was born five years BEFORE Sir Edmund became a household name by climbing Mount Everest)

* She claimed daughter Chelsea was at the Twin Towers on 9/11. (Chelsea was asleep on the other side of town)

* She once claimed to be a soccer star at school. (Her school didn’t have a soccer team)

* And of course, the Big One: “I had no idea that the vote to authorize the war with Saddam Hussein would lead to war.”

Hillary’s much-touted White House experience finally came shining through. Caught red-handed in a bald-faced lie, she coolly told a radio interviewer yesterday that she had merely ‘misspoken’.

“You know, I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things – millions of words a day – so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement,” she said.
Later, she repeated her ‘explanation’ saying, “So, made a mistake. I’m human.”

Misspoke? Her recollection of being sent to war zones too dangerous for the president was part of a prepared speech!

Her re-telling of the tale just last Friday came directly from the text of her prepared speech. How does one ‘misspeak’ from a prepared speech? (On three separate occasions?)
It is as ridiculous as Obama’s claim that he didn’t know his pastor of twenty years was a ranting racist. And evidently to their respective supporters, just as acceptable an explanation.
In a democracy, it can be rightly observed that the people get the government that they deserve.

What are the choices, again? Oh yeah. A liar, a racist and a war hero.

Decisions, decisions.

Now comes a new Gallup Poll showing a good portion of Democrats will cross party lines in November if their preferred candidate is not nominated.

The Democrats are destroying their party by this bitter primary campaign and it seems they don’t care enough to come to some sort of compromise about personal attacks.

If they don’t come up with some sort of plan the voters of Florida and Michigan will have been disenfranchised because the party will not allow their delegations to be seated in the convention.

Make no mistake, this is the workings of the party elites in Florida and Michigan to go forward with primaries on the dates they did, even after being told they would not be seated.

And it is the same party elites who govern our nation from state house to capitol of the U.S. Great judgment. They think they can break the rules and get away with it. It looks as though it isn’t going to work and the very leaders of the party, the Superdelegates, are going to be the deciding votes in who gets the nomination.

A perfect storm, indeed.