The American Conservative

On the basis of this interview, I believe Nhlanhla Nene deserves to be the next Chairman of the ANC:

Shopping spree at Nieman-Marcus:  $75,062.63

Another shopping spree at Saks Fifth Avenue:  $49,425.74

Baby clothes for out-of-wedlock child:  $92

Hair and make-up work to make one self look like Tina Fey:  $4,716.49

Spending other people’s money like drunken sailors:  Typical

For everything else, use the Republican National Committee’s credit card. The Palins sure did and oh boy how they must have thought they had just won the lottery.

But I don’t blame them. What do most Americans do when they’re given access free money, whether from their home equity or their credit cards? They spend it! And since of course our economy revolves around buying things (Remember, your President wants you to go out and shop til’ you drop and defeat the terrorists!), providing one with an account to go buck wild in Nieman-Marcus is simply doing one’s patriotic duty.

Speaking of the RNC and prolifigacy with other’s people’s money, apparently there’s a big brouhaha in Florida over state Republican Party chairman Jim Greer’s luxury lifestyle.  According to Politics1 website  Greer apparently uses party funds to fly a lear jet across the state, has run up $500,000 in charges on an American Express account, has spent $3.5 million on absentee ballot mailouts and has used state party funds to print the party newsletter on glossy paper in color with 11 photos of Greer himself to mail to RNC members across the country because Greer plans on running for RNC Chair next year. As you would expect state party coffers are exhausted, the McCain campaign is furious the state party has nothing left to help their cash-strapped efforts which led to, according to the website, the ”frustration reaching such a level of fighting that Greer was denied a seat on McCain’s campaign plane when McCain hopscotched around Florida a few days ago.”

By golly I’d say the way Republicans spend money, Greer would be the ideal choice to lead the RNC. Maybe he can come up with a new campaign slogan:

“And you thought the Democrats were the party of big spenders? Vote Republican!

Amazing seeing Bill Kristol quoting Horace in the NYT this past week, pretending that he’s not really one of those nasty neocons who hate everyone who doesn’t agree with them.  Somehow I can’t quite see Bill parsing a Latin text, so I guess one of the clever staff at Weekly Standard must have given him an assist.  Probably that little weasel Matthew Continetti who has the look of someone who spent some down time in a seminary.  Bill and his gang are definitely working hard to put the lipstick on the pig. 

Meanwhile, here in Purcellville Virginia no one I know has seemed to care a fig about my views on the upcoming election.  Truth is, like many old school conservatives, I am conflicted and will likely wind up voting a split ticket featuring Obama at the top with Frank Wolf for Congress and Mark Warner for Governor.  I have been following Pat Buchanan’s arguments against an Obama who would be the standard bearer of the most left wing administration ever to be seen in America as well as Justin Raimondo’s warning that the Democrats have already been coopted by foreign policy interests that are hawkish to say the least.  Like others, I am disturbed by Obama’s apparently high level of comfort with extreme leftists like Bill Ayers juxtaposed against his apparent willingness to invade or bomb sovereign countries in a fashion not so dissimilar to George W. Bush. 

But against that, Obama is smart and thoughtful and was raised poor, something I consider a virtue. He may actually have some compassion in him - he once spoke sympathetically about the Palestinians before AIPAC gained control of his campaign.  He is also likely to be a president who will move to the center politically, something that his campaign has already demonstrated, for fear of triggering a backlash a la Clinton with Gingrich.  John McCain is, on the contrary, a silver spoon baby driven by blind ambition, reckless, married to pointless soundbites, lacking an independent thought on anything, and clearly prone to fits of extreme and uncontrollable anger.  Whoever is elected president will have to raise taxes and I, quite frankly, wouldn’t mind seeing America’s crop of new billionaires get really squeezed.  Screw ‘em.  They’ve been screwing the rest of us for the past eight years.  In foreign policy, Obama has demonstrated some desire to negotiate rather than launch cruise missiles.  I think it is clear that the McCain-Palin instinct runs the other way, so that has to be a plus.  In immigration policy I don’t see any difference between Republicans and Democrats - they both want a flood of immigrants even if the people are saying no.  In social programs they are also pretty much the same.  No one will ban abortion or gay marriage.  No one will make the American economy more competitive or slow globalization.  So it all comes down to my conviction that McCain-Palin don’t stand for anything that I want to see while Obama just might do something that is a tad better.  It’s a pathetic choice, quite frankly, and I do wish that Ron Paul had somehow made it this far. 

It’s been suggested that we need to take into consideration the Bradley Effect. But I would also add the Forrest Gump Effect and the Beavis and Butthead Effect aka Butterfly Effect.

Not the right word for the Weathermen killed in that Greenwich Village townhouse explosion   How about “better off dead” ?  They had just built a nail bomb,  from about 40 sticks of dynamite, covered with hundreds of one-and-a-half-inch roofing nails. The New York police department’s informed guess is that it was aimed at Columbia’s Low Library.  Certainly it was an antipersonnel bomb.

Ayers was a bad guy: you’re supposed to keep your political arguments within the law.  People in left-liberal circles – at least a fair fraction of them – are comfortable associating with people like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.  No one should be.  If they had repented, maybe – but they haven’t.

As far as I can tell, Senator Obama was not particularly close to Ayers – but he was certainly comfortable with him. Is this a negative?  Sure. But then, the typical member of his faction of the Democratic party believes all manner of nonsense.  McCain may be a damned fool, but that hardly makes Obama any less foolish.

All this talk about Barack Obama “palling around with terrorists” gets one thinking — if it’s about spending time on a board full of local high-hats and do-gooders and attending a Hyde Park “coffee” in 1995 hosted by a guy who directed property bombings in protest of the Vietnam War 37 years ago, killing no one (unless you include the three luckless Weathermen who killed themselves making the bombs), then what is it called when your senior campaign advisor not only took money to promote some of the bloodiest dictators, thugs and kleptocrats in the world, but courted for cash the man in many respects responsible for the misbegotten occupation of Iraq and the deaths of 4,186 American servicemen and women?

Do we call it “palling around with prostitutes”? “Mugging it up with mercenaries?”

These days no one calls the relationship between Charlie Black — John McCain’s chief strategy guru, a role he’s been playing on-and-off since the Reagan years — and his various former clients, including Ahmed Chalabi, otherwise known as “The Man Who Pushed America to War” much of anything, because they’re too busy handwringing over former Weathermen Undergrounder Bill Ayers, who is now some fancy-pants professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

About the time when Obama was giggling over Rocky and Bullwinkle, Ayers and company were planting home-made explosives on public property such as memorials, the Pentagon and the U.S Capitol. No one got hurt because the group would issue warnings and places would be evacuated ahead of time (The attempted killing via car bombing of Judge Murtagh in New York has been tied by his son to the Weathermen, but none of them were ever charged, and I cannot find any independent verification that Ayers’ wife Bernadine Dohrn ever “took responsibility” for it as right-wing blogs have lately contended).

Meanwhile, less then a decade later, Black’s own public relations and lobbying operation (BKSH & Associates), was driving around Jonas Savimbi in a limo through Washington, getting him invited to the best parties, state dinners and congressional meet and greets. Savimbi was an Angolan rebel leader who many called “terrorist,” and was accused of “burning and raping,” shelling civilians and laying land mines over the scarred landscape of his country when he wasn’t in Washington, paying Black millions to get him aid for guns and to burnish his image among the Republican establishment, including President Reagan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bob Dole and others, who reportedly called him a “a true patriot” as a result of Black’s stellar spinning.

Black has also taken tens of thousands of dollars to represent dictators like Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire, Siad Barre in Somalia and Nigeria’s Ibrahim Babangida. He was hired for $950,000 at one point to improve the image of former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos before he was cast out of his country in disgrace for embezzling billions from the treasury.

But this is often dismissed as “ancient history.” What is happening in Iraq today, is not history. The 140,000 U.S troops still there are a testament not only to the razzle-dazzle of PR whizbangers like Black, but to the chumminess he and other operatives created between Chalabi and well-placed Washington politicians like John McCain. President Bush and a fleet of red-faced lawmakers like to say they promoted the 2003 preemptive strike because of “the available evidence,” but as it’s been made all too clear since, they chose to give special access to agenda-driven operators like Chalabi, who had been working Capitol Hill for over a decade and not only provided false evidence of imminent danger to the U.S, but convinced Republican leaders and the White House that the U.S could stage an invasion with a small force and minimal casualties. Besides the flowers and sweets, an insurgency and shadow government were waiting to take down Saddam Hussein once American forces broke in the doors, they said. That never happened, and countless American lives have been shattered — a military strained to a breaking point not seen since Vietnam — because of it.

From Jane Mayer’s “The Manipulator,” in the New Yorker, 2004:

After the attacks of September 11th, many in the Administration began to consider a preëmptive strike against Saddam’s regime, and they eagerly received Chalabi’s intelligence briefings. In 2002, an Information Collection Program for I.N.C. intelligence, which had been funded by the State Department, was transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency, a division of the Pentagon. “Chalabi was the crutch the neocons leaned on to justify their intervention,” (Former CENTCOM Commander Gen. Anthony) Zinni said. “He twisted the intelligence that they based it on, and provided a picture so rosy and unrealistic they thought it would be easy.”

The C.I.A. remained skeptical of the defectors that the I.N.C. (Iraqi National Congress) was promoting, and insisted on examining them independently. President Bush was informed of the C.I.A.’s view of Chalabi soon after taking office, but he ultimately sided with Vice-President Cheney and the neocons.

Thanks to operatives like Black and BKSH, who represented Chalabi through a tidy $200K-$300K annual State Department contract, Chalabi had enough sway that when 9/11 hit, everyone turned to him for guidance. Read More…

The Politico and The New Republic both carry stories about Chris Shays, the Rockefeller Republican who has represented “the richest district in the richest state” since 1987. Shays is facing perhaps his toughest re-election battle against Goldman Sachs vet, Jim Himes. He is the last Republican House member from New England.

I figured this would be a close race earlier this summer and covered it for TAC. I discovered that, at least in temperament, Chris Shays was more conservative than his critics from the conservative movement. He favors consensus over conflict, gradual change over crusading enthusiasm.

Oddly, the conservative movement, in substance if not style, more and more resembles its old Rockfeller enemies.

And ironically, the conservative movement, under Bush, has become much more like its old Rockefeller foes. Since 2001, the conservative majority has supported massive spending programs like the faith-based initiatives and huge entitlement expansion like the prescription drug benefit—both at odds with their stated principles. Under the guise of improving standards, they backed No Child Left Behind, a landmark expansion of the federal government’s power in education. And in lockstep with their commander in chief, they supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq—the latest and most ruinous project of liberal internationalism since Vietnam. Who are the Rockefeller Republicans now?

Even as the GOP adopted the moderates’ policies, it was taking on the radical spirit of a movement—the Rockefeller agenda without the appealing compensation of the conciliatory temperament. Democrats were thus left with an open field of voters who wanted competent government that relates to their everyday concerns

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Another good reason to revise trade embargoes with Cuba.

Just in time for Halloween — thanks to ThinkProgress.org, which has linked to video (emphasis theirs):

Yesterday, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) sat for an interview with KUSA, an NBC affiliate in Colorado. In response to a question sent to the network by a third grader at a local elementary school about what the Vice President does, Palin erroneously argued that the Vice President is “in charge of the United States Senate“:

Q: Brandon Garcia wants to know, “What does the Vice President do?”

PALIN: That’s something that Piper would ask me! … [T]hey’re in charge of the U.S. Senate so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom.

Indeed, while Palin suggests that questions about what the Vice President does is something only her daughter Piper would ask, Palin herself asked this very question on national television in July. Apparently, she still hasn’t learned the correct answer.

In his endorsement of Barack Obama today, Boris Johnson offers a good summary of the Ayers hoo-ha:

I revere Melanie Phillips, and I have carefully studied her blog entries about Obama and the vote-stealers, or Obama and his association with a quondam terrorist called Ayers.

In the end I gave up, goggle-eyed and exhausted, having trolled the wilds of the Neocon internet without finding anything remotely approaching a smoking gun.

Obama’s terrorist chum is now a professor, and his last act of terrorism took place when the candidate was eight, and it is not really clear that he and Obama are chums at all.

Lady Phillips of Neoconomia answers,

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