Libercontrarian

Crushed between the wheels of capitalism and big government.

Clinton Wins Pennsylvania

It looks like Hillary has secured a win in Pennsylvania... and it smells an awful lot like New Hampshire, when the teary-eyed baring of her soul on national TV propelled her to a win when she was looking like she'd come in third.

Pundits and pollsters have predicted Obama's expenditure of around $11 million clams on attack ads would shrink her lead and perhaps would deliver the "coup de grâce" to her failing campaign. This belief was largely upheld by, once again, polling that revealed a tendency for the Democratic electorate to seek "Change." Hillary, as it was described to us, would represent More Of The Same - a continuation of America's Feuding Families: Bush v. Clinton, Clinton v. Bush, and so on. Obama would be our last good shot at fixing things before the country went totally down the tubes to Big Oil/Pharma, Corporate Outsourcers and the mortgage pirates.

That was when things started going wrong with Big O.

Two weeks back, Barry O said a dumb, dumb thing in front of what he thought was a sympathetic crowd. He was inadvertently recorded, and his debasement of Middle America in front of a bunch of billionaires began a downhill slide for him that continued with his lackluster performance at last Sunday's debate (see below) and has ended with him losing, and from all reports, losing BIG to Senator Clinton in Pennsylvania. I think the folks that want "Change" but are nervous about what it's going to take to get there may have moved in a Clintonian direction.

So how come the poll results are so confusing?

I call it as "White Liberal Guilt." This little monster tends to rear its head whenever Middle-Class White folks discuss people of color - they trip over the words attempting to announce that they are not a bunch of seething cross-burners or nonhipsters. African Americans have long been subjected to racism, their minds shout, so I GOTTA SHOW how NON-RACIST I AM!!

Note that White Liberal Guilt doesn't come out of hatred or adoration of anyone's culture or anything, but rather more understated fears of ostracization from other White folks because of a naughty failure to observe political correctness. They are afraid that if they say anything, anything at all that could be misperceived as "racist" about a person who happens to be non-White will cause other folks to view them as insipid, close-minded, and old-fashioned. Unfashionable. Unforgivable. Such misapprehensions can damage relationships in a long-lasting manner, as the modern paradigm of character-judgment offers no redemption for White bigotry.

So how does White Liberal Guilt feature into Hillary's win?

Comfort zone, perhaps - the woman DID spend time in the White House, after all. Racism a factor? Certainly to some extent. Obama's youth and apparent inexperience? Dopey statements and problematic relationships surrounding Big O? These last two are probably the largest factor, and the teflon-coating on the candidate is starting to wear thin. The net result is that, like New Hampshire, folks told the pollsters what they thought they'd want to hear based on their White Liberal Guilt, and did what they wanted to do when they hit the voting booth.

 

posted by: underwhelmed at April 22, 2008 19:37 | link | comments |

My take on the debate

Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibbons asked some damaging questions tonight of both candidates, and by all accounts, the hard issues they brought up were largely unwelcomed by either candidate. The event, in my opinion, broke down into a base examination of why either candidate will lose to John McCain in the fall. There were no saving grace moments, gaffes abounded on both sides, and only the hardcore Left will mindlessly see this unpolished (at best) debate as anything but a gut-wrenching failure for Socialism.
 
It was all a pretty typical assault upon the opposing candidates' characters, except this time the taunts were accurate criticisms. That these criticisms were brought to the fore by the other member of their party lays the groundwork for the survivor's destruction at the hands of a prepared, cranky, well-spoken and intolerant contrarian like McCain who has better credentials and a markedly higher "likeability index" than either of the two Democrats. Yes, if this continues to devolve into the catastrophic tailspin, Rush Limbaugh's dream of "Operation Chaos" will be realized and conservatives will have their own easy win in the fall.

At one point, Hillary suggested the Repubs atone for the Bush Administration's inadequacies by "just bowing out of the election as an apology" out of shame of their manifold failures by not running anyone in the election. Wouldn't that give that Leftist Fascist the ballot that tin-hats like Stalin have organized on election day, where they're the only entrant, while perhaps secret police could collect the results? It's a tyrant's dream! Running unencumbered! That's how Hitler attainted power; he had no practical competitor in 1934 and certainly none thereafter. I am sure he had every desire to appear to be the best choice, even if he was the only one. Such a nakedly voiced wish for that ideal should scare the pants off of every right-thinking American who ever picked up a history book and read about this kind of politicial usurpation.
 
Can you imagine that terrible woman in power? The kind of tyrant who "believes in the Second Amendment" but thinks it should be subject to reasonable restriction, presumably to eclipse the practical exercise of those rights by free men as a potential roadblock to that tyrant's dream of absolute power.
 
I guess I too am guilty of clinging to my guns and my religion. This close-mindedness has apparently made me unable to understand their Progressive beliefs. Hooray for me! My benighted state continues unabated!

Note: This post was originally put on the board on Sunday night after the debate. I was crafting it on my PDA, and was not paying much attention to sentence structure, spelling, or any of the other things that are conducive to coherence in writing. I have gone back through it, aghast and ashamed, and cleaned it up.

posted by: underwhelmed at April 16, 2008 22:50 | link | comments |

Senator Obama Reveals His Elitist Roots Again

What will he say next? In a speech delivered last Sunday (yes, it took the Main Stream Media that long to get it out) to a closed group of wealthy donors in San Francisco, he said:

"But — so the questions you’re most likely to get about me, ‘Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What’s the concrete thing?’ What they wanna hear is — so, we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing — close tax loopholes, roll back, you know, the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama’s gonna give tax breaks to middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide health care for every American. So we’ll go down a series of talking points.

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Wow. Just WOW. People in small towns are suffering because the government hasn't been there to minister to their every need. It's not their fault - it's the fault of the Bush Administration, of big business, of [insert Socialist-identified bugaboo villain here] which leads those people to seek respite from their troubles in a mindless worship of Jesus, or to lash out with hate of those even less-fortunate Hispanic newcomers to the American workplace, or to "delve into a culture of gun-worship" to defray their economic suffering. I guess Senator Obama has not priced out an AR15 lately - you've got to be doing well to afford many of these toys, aside from the OBVIOUS CONCERNS ABOUT PROTECTING YOURSELF FROM CRIMINALS.

Such arrogance is truly amazing. Would Senator Obama's own religious proclivities, which have been well-documented, be a salve for his own sense of dissatisfaction with America? Could this be a bit of Freudian projection? Does the citizenry being angry at a government for doing nothing about an utterly lawless community within our nation reflect some sort of nation-wide sociopathy? Are people who take their personal and community defense seriously "escaping the reality of their economic downturn?"

This candidate for President of the United States of America will be eventually recognized as being an elitist and being percieved as "out-of-touch" by American voters. Whether or not this happens prior to or after his election is in question, but it WILL happen nonetheless. If it is the latter, I suspect great upheaval will follow.

Once again, I have told you that I won't be voting for him. Neither should you.

posted by: underwhelmed at April 13, 2008 08:14 | link | comments |

Observation on the Election - Obama's Shine Wears Thin

I have eschewed politics for a couple of years, owing to the fact that there are already a couple of people who comment on the topic and one more dopes opinion is as useful in the world as 370 gallons of cold bacon grease.

Caution be damned, however, as the antics of the two least sensible participants in the current election give witness to their mutual unsuitability for the position of President of the United States. Our Leftmost candidate, Senator Obama, has revealed himself as an apologist for some intolerably racist and America-hating sensitivities, and his opponent, Senator Clinton, has engaged in at least five "Classic Clintonian" behaviors just this week that serve to remind the voting public why her and her miscreant husband should remain as far from the seat of power as is physically possible. Today I will examine what I consider to be a severe tarnishing of Senator Obama's reputation, and tomorrow I will take up with Senator Clinton's missteps.

The Honorable Senator from the Great State of Illinois has, in the last 20 days or so, burned through the goodwill he achieved by beating Senator Clinton in many primary races. In doing so, we have had a greater chance to examine his record and, finding it rather thin; we have looked and found him implicitly cheering on some surprisingly racist and dysfunctional statements by his minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. These statements caused a number of Americans who were genuinely compelled by the Senator's egalitarian platitudes after each primary victory to become disdainful of his stated beliefs and intentions. White folks (I have largely considered myself "White" for many years while admittedly hovering on the edge of this group owing to my Greek ancestry) have been held to a fantastically high standard of "color blindness" for the last 30 years. We have drummed from existence the intolerant amongst us, the stirrers of the pot, the loudmouths with their ribald jokes about dumb Polaks and Jews and Blacks.

That color blindness, which has been rigidly self-enforced in both public institutions and private, in Hollywood, at church and at the family table, is our race's conscious effort to destroy this aspect of imperfection in our character - some twisted belief that we are "better" than other people because of some physical characteristic, instead of how we serve society and treat our neighbors.
It is not so unpredictable that White people would exhibit surprised dismay when they realized there was an entire church of people in the United States cheering a man screaming "God DAMN America!" or nodding their heads in agreement to the ridiculous assertion that the U.S. Government invented a disease meant to specifically attack people of color.

That kind of racial intolerance just does not reveal itself in White communities, at least not in any of the places I have been hanging out in for the last 30 years. It wouldn't stand the light of day - like a mold that's exposed to bleach and dry conditions, it just does not grow here. Indeed, I could sense, in talking to friends, reading blogs, and chatting with my wife a sense of shock that there could be such an undercurrent of racial hatred in a time where the racial insanities of Jim Crow can only be recalled in black and white. I'm 43, grew up in the South, and don't have a memory of "colored" water fountains or bathrooms.

So why did this mold grow in Trinity Church in Chicago? What dysfunction caused this sort of ignorant pap to become part of any Christian church's message? Moreover, can you find a church in any White community that has more than seventeen misfits with swastikas scribed on their foreheads that preaches the same kind of nonsense about people of color? Such a place would be the site of a daily protest by free-thinking Americans - so where are the Americans who are protesting Trinity Church's message of intolerance and disunity?

More importantly, and more directly to the point, why didn't the leading Democratic candidate for President of the United States lead himself and his family out of that place shaking his head in disbelief? Why only now is he casting off Reverend Albatross from around his neck? Is it merely a means of distancing himself from his belief structure now that the media's discovery of his implicit support of Wright's crazy rants threatens his run for President? Moreover, do we want a man who so effectively hides his beliefs in such a Clintonesque fashion to again be near the seat of power? How could we trust a man with such deeply-held hatreds to be responsible for the general welfare and defense of a country he seems to despise?

I had a brief romance with Obama - a "man-crush" in the vernacular of our times, because he seemed like an open-minded person who could, for the first time in eight years, communicate our great nation's intentions to the other leaders of the world with something greater than a fourth-grade set of communications skills. I didn't figure this wooly Leftist's behavior could be much of a threat to free people because there would be enough pressure around him not to go too far off the reservation. The revelation that he essentially endorsed Wright's teachings reveals his hidden potential for mischief. Leftists often slide their way into power on good wishes and fine talk, then use the power of the state to ruthlessly thrust their ideas on an unsuspecting public, usually to the unrelenting harm of the citizenry - you need only look at Venezuela's demented Leftist tinpot to see what happens when you elect such a person to the seat of power in your country.

I would not vote for Obama if I were you. I won't be, that's for sure. Tomorrow, I will take up with the other contender, Senator Clinton. Check back in at that time!

posted by: underwhelmed at April 03, 2008 22:16 | link | comments |

Template by motime.com