Obama - a beached flip flopping whale?

A beached whale could not flip and flop more than Obama writes Krauthammer. Nevertheless, as even I have written, it matters not because the press and media want their anointed messiah to win in order to atone for past sins committed against the ever pure by the other side of the aisle interlopers and Right Wing Conspirators. Yes indeed, it's pay back time for the Far Left.

Think how wonderful that politicians of the same stripe are capable of turning the other cheek when their survival is challenged. Their charitableness towards fellow ideologues is saintly.

However, partisanship and desire for power makes it almost impossible to display the same generous spirit towards opponents so they lie and lie and lie. Do whatever it takes to win is their mantra.

Meanwhile, we taxpayers are hammered on the political anvil of populist pap, deceit and Congress' uncontrollable urge to spend and it matters not what Party is in control. (See 1 below.)

Peggy Noonan wrote an op ed piece in Saturday's Wall Street Journal entitled: " Let McCain be McCain" and Stephen Moore wrote one about Phil Gramm entitled: "The Return of Dr. No." Both op eds relate.

Phil Gramm is much younger than I. He attended my prep school long after I graduated. I supported his ill-fated run for the Presidency and now he has resurfaced as one of McCain's economic advisors. In that regard McCain is being McCain. Both are mavericks when it comes to fiscal matters.

Noonan is correct about letting McCain be himself. Most politicians would be better regarded if they allowed themselves to be themselves. The problem is they arrive in Disney East imbued with a feeling of self importance, begin drinking the potent water from the Potomac and something mysterious happens - they morph into caricatures believing they can drink their own bath water causing many to self-destruct. Newt Gingrich being an example of one but the list is endless and transcends both aisles.

I hope McCain and his "handlers" read what Noonan has to say. She is right about Obama being the new kid on the block - the Music Man as I like to say. She predicts voters will eventually return to their sanity and reject the Chicago Whiz Kid after a they get a belly full of his artfulness.

As for Phil Gramm he has not changed a whit - he still believes in the free market and remains blunt and outspoken. Gramm acknowledges McCain may not make the best president but he is the right person for these times. Gramm sees McCain capable of helping us win against terrorism because he is tough, will get runaway spending under better control and will steer us away from trade protectionism unlike Obama.

What Gramm understands about McCain and why he is willing to get involved is what Noonan predicts the majority will ultimately come to understand as well. McCain is right for theses difficult times and Obama is not.

I pray their words reach God's ears.

We have had a belly full of political style and charisma and where has it gotten us - a nation on its knees with Carter, a war on poverty, though well intended, which spawned a period of policy blunders under Johnson, a dark and disturbed Nixon, a soiled Oval Office and blue dress with Clinton and a inarticulate GW.

It is time for some Truman plain talking and maybe McCain is the one. Certainly Phil Gramm is.

As for the econmy it seems to be suggesting we are in for a protracted period of small w's and no v type recovery like many have predicted. Ours is a leveraged economy and borrowing and debt play such a large part. With the collapse in the financial markets the ripple effect is beginning and will widen. The FED is on the horns of a dilemma - damned either way. Eventually they will succumb to fighting inflation which is their historical charge but more inflation seems inevitable.

If one reads Marshall Goldman's "Petrostate" the contrast between a resource rich Russia and an overspent America becomes quite evident. That is not to say our nation with its technical know how, strength that comes with a free society and an educated work force does not have the capability of bouncing back - we do. However, these positive attributes must be harnessed and not allowed to run in all directions fed by misguided populist garbage, stylized rhetoric and shallow retrogressive thinking AKA the likes of Obama.

Dick


1) The Ever-Malleable Mr. Obama
By Charles Krauthammer

"To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies."


That was then: Democratic primaries to be won, netroot lefties to be seduced. With all that (and Hillary Clinton) out of the way, Obama now says he'll vote in favor of the new FISA bill that gives the telecom companies blanket immunity for post-Sept. 11 eavesdropping.

Back then, in the yesteryear of primary season, he thoroughly trashed the North American Free Trade Agreement, pledging to force a renegotiation, take "the hammer" to Canada and Mexico and threaten unilateral abrogation.

Today the hammer is holstered. Obama calls his previous NAFTA rhetoric "overheated" and essentially endorses what one of his senior economic advisers privately told the Canadians: The anti-trade stuff was nothing more than populist posturing.

Nor is there much left of his primary season pledge to meet "without preconditions" with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There will be "preparations," you see, which are being spun by his aides into the functional equivalent of preconditions.

Obama's long march to the center has begun.

And why not? What's the downside? He won't lose the left, or even mainstream Democrats. They won't stay home on Nov. 4. The anti-Bush, anti-Republican sentiment is simply too strong. Election Day is their day of revenge -- for the Florida recount, for Swift-boating, for all the injuries, real and imagined, dealt out by Republicans over the past eight years.

Normally, flip-flopping presidential candidates have to worry about the press. Not Obama. After all, this is a press corps that heard his grandiloquent Philadelphia speech -- designed to rationalize why "I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother" -- then wiped away a tear and hailed him as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. Three months later, with Wright disowned, grandma embraced and the great "race speech" now inoperative, not a word of reconsideration is heard from his media acolytes.

Worry about the press? His FISA flip-flop elicited a few grumbles from lefty bloggers, but hardly a murmur from the mainstream press. Remember his pledge to stick to public financing? Now flush with cash, he is the first general-election candidate since Watergate to opt out. Some goo-goo clean-government types chided him, but the mainstream editorialists who for years had been railing against private financing as hopelessly corrupt and corrupting evinced only the mildest of disappointment.

Indeed, the New York Times expressed a sympathetic understanding of Obama's about-face by buying his preposterous claim that it was a preemptive attack on McCain's 527 independent expenditure groups -- notwithstanding the fact that (a) as Politico's Jonathan Martin notes, "there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any immediate plans to create such a group" and (b) the only independent ad of any consequence now running in the entire country is an AFSCME-MoveOn.org co-production savaging McCain.

True, Obama's U-turn on public financing was not done for ideological reasons, it was done for Willie Sutton reasons: That's where the money is. It nonetheless betrayed a principle that so many in the press claimed to hold dear.

As public financing is not a principle dear to me, I am hardly dismayed by Obama's abandonment of it. Nor am I disappointed in the least by his other calculated and cynical repositionings. I have never had any illusions about Obama. I merely note with amazement that his media swooners seem to accept his every policy reversal with an equanimity unseen since the Daily Worker would change the party line overnight -- switching sides in World War II, for example -- whenever the wind from Moscow changed direction.

The truth about Obama is uncomplicated. He is just a politician (though of unusual skill and ambition). The man who dared say it plainly is the man who knows Obama all too well. "He does what politicians do," explained Jeremiah Wright.

When it's time to throw campaign finance reform, telecom accountability, NAFTA renegotiation or Jeremiah Wright overboard, Obama is not sentimental. He does not hesitate. He tosses lustily.

Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in Philadelphia -- only to haul her back on deck now that her services are needed. Yesterday, granny was the moral equivalent of the raving Reverend Wright. Today, she is a featured prop in Obama's fuzzy-wuzzy get-to-know-me national TV ad.

Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he's finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.