Via Ace of Spades, and pretty much over once Kelly noted that Burton had gotten the narrative wrong from the start about what Fox had been reporting.  Mind you, a distressingly increasingly-common subset of Obama supporters would disagree, but that’s mostly because they apparently have difficulty grasping the notion that a mere woman could possibly be effective against one of their candidate’s spokesman (Allahpundit says “spokestool,” which is of course mean of him).

Anyway, enjoy.

***This is satire, in case that wasn’t obvious***

Precocious Youngster Sells Cookies To Buy Attack Ad

Repeat after me: Obama is not a moderate, Obama is not a moderate…

We can now add Dan McLaughlin to Stanley Kurtz as someone who took the time to diligently document Obama’s troubling past.  Dan has a lengthy series on Barack Obama and The Integrity Gap
that really is must read material.

Start with the link above and just keep reading.  Well worth your time.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Thomas Sowell is on to the Obama con.  He notes how tempting people find Obama’s words:

Barack Obama is much smoother. Instead of issuing explicit denials, he gives speeches that sound so moderate, so nuanced, and so lofty that even some conservative Republicans go for them. How could anyone believe that such a man is the very opposite of what he claims to be — unless they check out the record of what he has actually done?

But when it comes to deeds things are very different:

In words, Obama is a uniter instead of a divider. In deeds, he has spent years promoting polarization. That is what a “community organizer” does — creating a sense of grievance, envy, and resentment — in order to mobilize political action to get more of the taxpayers’ money or to force banks to lend to people they don’t consider good risks, as the community organizing group ACORN did.

After Barack Obama moved beyond the role of a community organizer, he promoted the same polarization in his other roles.

That is what he did when he spent the money of the Woods Fund bankrolling programs to spread the politics of grievance and resentment into the schools. That is what he did when he spent the taxpayers’ money bankrolling the grievance and resentment ideology of Michael Pfleger.

When Barack Obama donated $20,000 to Jeremiah Wright, does anyone imagine that he was unaware that Wright was the epitome of grievance, envy, and resentment hype? Or were Wright’s sermons too subtle for Obama to pick up that message?

How subtle is “Goddamn America!”?

As Sowell points out, however, raising any of these issues is seen as divisive and distracting from the issues.  And he notes how this leads to the Obama con:

Does anyone in real life put more faith in what people say than in what they do? A few gullible people do — and they often get deceived and defrauded big time.

That is what is at the heart of this election.  Are we going to take what Obama says over what he has actually done?  Are we going to take his word when he has consistently proven himself untrustworthy?

The media doesn’t want to have these questions asked, but they are necessary and valid.  It is up to the voters to ask them and think about what the answers mean.

Out of the first 2,100 (of about 5,000 submitted, all in the last few days before the deadline) handed in by notorious Democratic ally ACORN, all of them were fraudulent.  Not my word choice: CNN’s.

CNN is now mocking ACORN for this.

Mocking:

Extra fun is watching the ACORN attorney try to weasel out of this.

Today’s must read is the The Wall Street Journal’s editorial exposing Obama’s deceptive tax rhetoric.

The Journal says of Obama’s promise to cut taxes on 95% of families:

It’s a clever pitch, because it lets him pose as a middle-class tax cutter while disguising that he’s also proposing one of the largest tax increases ever on the other 5%.

And he has been pushing this angle very hard in key battleground states.  The Journal, however, takes a closer look at his proposals and finds that Obama is up to his old tricks:

There are several sleights of hand, but the most creative is to redefine the meaning of “tax cut.”

For the Obama Democrats, a tax cut is no longer letting you keep more of what you earn. In their lexicon, a tax cut includes tens of billions of dollars in government handouts that are disguised by the phrase “tax credit.” Mr. Obama is proposing to create or expand no fewer than seven such credits for individuals…

Here’s the political catch. All but the clean car credit would be “refundable,” which is Washington-speak for the fact that you can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer — a federal check — from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this “welfare,” or in George McGovern’s 1972 campaign a “Demogrant.” Mr. Obama’s genius is to call it a tax cut.

So we have massive wealfare disguised as tax cuts.  But it gets worse:

There’s another catch: Because Mr. Obama’s tax credits are phased out as incomes rise, they impose a huge “marginal” tax rate increase on low-income workers. The marginal tax rate refers to the rate on the next dollar of income earned. As the nearby chart illustrates, the marginal rate for millions of low- and middle-income workers would spike as they earn more income.

Some families with an income of $40,000 could lose up to 40 cents in vanishing credits for every additional dollar earned from working overtime or taking a new job. As public policy, this is contradictory. The tax credits are sold in the name of “making work pay,” but in practice they can be a disincentive to working harder, especially if you’re a lower-income couple getting raises of $1,000 or $2,000 a year.

There is not an issue where Obama isn’t using sleight of hand if not outright deception to sell his policies.  But these type of debates are hard to get across to the average voter.

As the Journal notes, McCain needs to find a way to explain the reality of Obama’s policies and their effect on voters.  Obama is a talented con man, McCain has to find a way to break the spell of America is in for a harsh awakening.

A picture is worth a thousand words and all that . . .

Jennifer Rubin jumps of the Rick Lowry column I noted below to make the argument that a politician’s record should trump their rhetoric:

The surest clue to a politician’s intentions is his record, not his campaign rhetoric. Obama’s is fairly clear. Up through 2002 he sat on the Woods Fund and gave out money to a hodgepodge of left-leaning groups including ACORN and the Arab American Action Network. As a state senator he opposed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act and favored strict gun control. As a U.S. Senator he was rated the most liberal (with some pretty liberal competition) — voting to cut off funding for troops and against both Justices Roberts and Alito and supporting the Democratic party line on everything from taxes to offshore drilling. He has been exquisitely sensitive to Big Labor’s agenda (e.g. opposing the Colombia Free Trade agreement, helping to sink immigration reform, and favoring the Orwellian-sounding Employee Free Choice Act).

In short, this is a very, very liberal fellow. Maybe with a Democratic Congress he’ll practice superhuman restraint. Maybe the economic crisis leaves him little chance to enact taxes and a raft of new programs. Maybe a savvy Secretary of State will sit him down and explain that he’s just not going to woo rogue state dictators. (Who will that be — Madeline Albright? Tony Lake? The mind reels.) But perhaps he’ll do what he has done his entire political career: pursue an immoderate and ultra-liberal agenda. It seems obvious that’s what he’d prefer to do.

The question is how you cut through the noice and chaos of an election and the headlines of the financial crisis to make the broader point that Obama is too liberal for the country?

Voters don’t seem as open to this line of argument as they were in the past.  I think you have to tie the liberalism into the inexperience to make a argument that Obama is not prepared to lead.  It can’t just be “liberal, libeal, liberal.”  It has to be his policies will hurt not help; that he has not learned the lessons of the past.

A number of pundits have argued that McCain should run against an unpopular Congress; argue for divded government in essence.  I think this is a good idea given the unpopularity of both Bush and Congress and the general centrist inclinations of the country, but it is easier said then done.  Can voters be made to understand the danger of a united leftist government?  We shall see.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Rich Lowry gets to the heart of Obama’s success.  First he notes how Obama has benefited from the financial crisis:

After the Democratic primaries, Obama’s challenge was connecting with working-class voters on their economic concerns. Could the dispassionate Obama rouse himself to do it? Could he overcome his exotic background and elitist vibe? Then, a stock market that lost almost 21 percent in value in seven days rendered the questions moot. The vertiginous drop sent every Republican candidate in the country reeling, and relieved Obama of the burden of connecting. Now, he only has to seem reassuring and nonthreatening. That he knows how to do.

The he notes how Obama is the master of saying nothing; of seeming moderate and prudent no matter what the issue or his previous positions:

Obama could have been prepped for the presidential debates by Shakespeare’s Polonius, whose perfectly balanced advice to his son — “be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar,” etc. — is weak-mindedness masquerading as wisdom. Obama repeatedly promised “fundamental change” in the second debate, but otherwise portrayed himself as the embodiment of moderation, nay, even a kind of conservatism. In his own telling, he wants to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, reduce spending, preserve but improve the current health-care system and win the war in Afghanistan while prudently drawing down troops in Iraq.

In the first debate, he said John McCain was “absolutely right” about the need for more government accountability, for fewer earmarks and for spending cuts, and about the success of the surge in reducing violence in Iraq and the danger of a nuclear Iran. At times, he seemed determined to be the first presidential candidate to win a debate on the basis of sheer agreeability.

But, as Lowry notes, the amazing thing is that no one really knows what Obama really believes or what he will really do:

But no one can know whether Obama is the leftist his associations suggest, or the irenic uniter of his iconic 2004 convention speech; whether he’s the down-the-line liberal who kowtowed to the base of his own party in the Democratic primaries, or the pragmatist who readjusted to the center as soon as enthralled liberals handed him the nomination. The consistent line running through his career is opportunism, a willingness to accommodate whoever — Bill Ayers or the swing voter in Ohio — can help him up the next rung in his ladder of ambition at any juncture.

The GOP finds this exasperating.  How can the country allow Obama to avoid defining himself?  How can a candidate be this slippery?  Why isn’t Obama required to explain his past?

I don’t have any easy answers, but I think it has to do with the emotional undercurrent of this election.  Voters have decided to blame President Bush for all the ugly things in world (Iraq, the economy, etc.) and even when they don’t blame him directly are tired of the status quo.  They want to believe that change is possible; they want a chance to wipe the slate clean.

Obama’s image, history, persona, style, and temperament all fit this need better than McCain.  The only chance McCain has is if voters decided that going with this emotional choice is too big a risk.  So far he has failed at making this case.

Maybe he never had much of chance given the environment and the media’s unwillingness to tolerate criticisms of Obama and to cry racism at every turn.  But this is reality.  Obama is a talented snake oil salesman.

Given the above, I don’t think specific policy proposals are going to determine this election.  What is going to determine this election is what voters feel.  McCain has to put together a coherent theme that changes the emotional calculation and hammer it home for the next 20 some days.

If he doesn’t I guess we will find out who the real Obama is . . .