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Posts Tagged ‘McCain’

The Palin “Troopergate” scandal

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

UPDATE #2: Here is a list of all the left’s attacks on Sarah along with appropriate rebuttals. They have gone nuts.

UPDATE: This is my favorite comment about Sarah Palin so far:

Gov. Sarah Palin (soon to be VPOTUS) is known to hunt, kill, gut and eat her prey -GO Sarah!!!

Look out, Joe !

The left is frantic to find a handle on Sarah Palin, especially since her nomination has proved to be wildly popular. Expect to hear a lot about this story. Excerpts:

1. The brother-in-law trooper was out of control and threatening family members BEFORE Sarah Palin was governor. The investigation also began before she was governor. He was suspended but the union got the suspension reduced to five days.

2. Palin appointed Monegan, the Public Safety Commissioner, AFTER the Wooten story began.

First, the video accusation is that the Governor’s office has questionable reasons (meaning removing Wooten from the AST) for firing Public Safety Commissioner, Walt Monegan in July 2008. As we know, documented complaints from Palin about Wooten started prior to Monegan’s appointment… which Monegan may, or may not have been aware.
Yet Monegan was appointed by Palin. She is certainly within her rights to fire him. And if complaints were already lodged about Wooten to the immediate superior, Col. Julia Grimes, why did she need to pressure him to fire Wooten? Afterall, if Palin was going to “abuse” her power to get Wooten fired, why not direct that power over Grimes as the superior of the Troopers?

And if getting Wooten fired was her quest, why did she not take steps to do that in 2005 during the complaint period, instead of specifically stating under deposition she was staying silent in order not to put his job at risk? Not to mention the gap in time… why would it take her two and a half years to fire Monegan because of Wooten?

3. The reasons Palin fired Monegan were unrelated to the Wooten story.

Andrew Halcro, who was defeated by Palin in the gubernatorial primary, lists the reasons why Monegan was fired.

When Walt Monegan was appointed, he realized the deep problems at DPS including low morale, understaffed detachments and the lack of a funding commitment to a long term vision.

He also recognized, that along with the strategic plan his department developed and introduced just months ago, there needed to be a commitment of resources to follow through on the public safety needs for Alaskans.

“We want out employees to know that help is on the way; that we are planning to grow our staff to provide both the needed services for this vast state, and the appropriate training necessary to do it”, Monegan wrote in his 2008-17 Strategic Plan.

But the Palin administration wanted Monegan to go in another direction. They wanted him to cut corners on a budget that had already fallen behind over the last decade. Under Former Governor Murkwoski there was significant investment made to try and catch up with growing costs but Palin’s budgets have again started to starve the agency.

To make matters worse, the change to the state’s retirement benefit program adopted by the legislature in 2004 has had a negative effect on the departments ability to recruit new Troopers.

OK. You have to read between the lines here. This guy is the one who filed the complaint against Palin yet he lists the reasons for the firing and Wooten wasn’t one of them. Murkowski, the former governor and mired in scandal, is his hero. That gives a clue.

Monegan was fired because he refused to take another job in the administration once Palin realized he was not solving the problems of the Public Safety office. She offered to make him head of the Alcoholic Beverage Commission, in a job she felt he was better suited for. He refused.

The problem for Palin was that Monegan was vocal about his concerns about the growing problems in rural Alaska due to alcohol and drug abuse and recognized that the state needed to invest more in protecting the public.

She recognized that he was better suited for that problem but he turned it down. I have never seen a police agency that thought it had enough money.

This story will run for a while but the summary provided by Flopping Aces is the best source. Once again the blogosphere beats the MSM.

Of course, the left thinks it has a scoop. They should keep crooning these lullabies to themselves. Right up to the debate.

Tags:Alaska, McCain, Obama, Sarah Palin
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McCain/Palin

Friday, August 29th, 2008

UPDATE # 4: I can’t improve upon this explanation of how she was chosen.

UPDATE # 3: The Times of London has a good piece with a great line. Camille Pagla, who convinced Al Gore to wear “earth tone suits” in 2000, says:

“We may be seeing the first woman president. As a Democrat, I am reeling,” said Camille Paglia, the cultural critic. “That was the best political speech I have ever seen delivered by an American woman politician. Palin is as tough as nails.”

UPDATE #2 Here is a profile from last December on her first year as Governor. Note the prescient prediction.

Palin has dismissed speculation she might leave Juneau for higher office before her term expires in 2010, saying, “My role as governor is where I can be most helpful right now unless something drastic happens, and I don’t anticipate that right now.”

Nevertheless, John J. Pitney Jr., a political scientist with Claremont McKenna College in California and former analyst for congressional Republicans, said Palin could be an ideal presidential running mate next year.

“What separates her from others is that at a time when Republicans have suffered from the taint of corruption, she represents clean politics,” Pitney said.

“The public stereotype of Republican is a wrinkled old guy taking cash under the table,” he said. “One way for Republicans to break the stereotype is with a female reformer.”

WOW !

UPDATE: Here is a biography from The Anchorage Daily News. I’ve been to Wasilla and it would be the capitol of Alaska but for jealousy by Fairbanks.

I have been a fan of Alaska governor Sarah Palin for some time now. This morning, John McCain announced (or soon will-his campaign has confirmed it) that Sarah Palin will be his VP. For more info on her go here, or here.

A bit of her history:

She resigned in January 2004 as head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission after complaining to the office of Governor Frank Murkowski and to state Attorney General Gregg Renkes about ethical violations by another commissioner, Randy Ruedrich, who was also Republican state chairman.

State law barred Palin from speaking out publicly about ethical violations and corruption. But she was vindicated later in 2004 when Ruedrich, who’d been reconfirmed as state chairman, agreed to pay a $12,000 fine for breaking state ethics laws. She became a hero in the eyes of the public and the press, and the bane of Republican leaders.

Then, after more examples of Alaska government nepotism and corruption,

In 2006, she didn’t hesitate. She ran against Gov. Murkowski, who was seeking a second term despite sagging poll ratings, in the Republican primary. In a three-way race, Palin captured 51 percent and won in a landslide. She defeated former Democratic governor Tony Knowles in the general election, 49 percent to 41 percent. She was one of the few Republicans anywhere in the country to perform above expectations in 2006, an overwhelmingly Democratic year. Palin is unabashedly pro life.

She is called “Sarah Barracuda” in Alaska;

In the roughly three years since she quit as the state’s chief regulator of the oil industry, Palin has crushed the Republican hierarchy (virtually all male) and nearly every other foe or critic. Political analysts in Alaska refer to the “body count” of Palin’s rivals. “The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah,” says pollster Dave Dittman, who worked for her gubernatorial campaign. It includes Ruedrich, Renkes, Murkowski, gubernatorial contenders John Binkley and Andrew Halcro, the three big oil companies in Alaska, and a section of the Daily News called “Voice of the Times,” which was highly critical of Palin and is now defunct.

Look out out Joe Biden ! She is just the sort of person to appeal to McCain and to give fits to ethically challenged folks like Biden.

Even the LA Times has a positive profile on her.

Here is a more realistic view of her from the left by someone who knows about her story.

In short, Palin can legitimately claim the maverick reformist credentials that McCain himself has long since lost. Her pro-life record helps McCain with the Republican base, her gender might lure away a few Hillary bitter-enders, and her youth goes a little way towards compensating one of McCain’s major weaknesses. Palin also manages the Obama-esque feat of commanding a great deal of popularity among people who don’t really know what she stands for–Dave Dittman, an Anchorage-based pollster, who has done a lot of polling and thinking about this, pointed out to me several months ago that Palin was maintaining a 85 percent approval rating among Alaskan voters even when her policies (particularly a natural gas line deal that has been a signature ambition of her administration) polled far short of that, and even when voters had trouble accurately describing her political leanings. She also pretty much guarantees a McCain victory in her home state, where Obama has been polling astoundingly well (Alaska hasn’t gone for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson).

Then, of course, there are the moonbat comments:

Interesting choice, but the commentary seems to be mixed on this. So, let’s see what the imagination brings to this:

1. Does she have any Rovian connections? It would seem odd to me that McSame would toe the Rove line on every issue to this point and then side step on the first “big” decision. Her narrative making the rounds is that she is a more reliable maverick than the trademarked one, having served up some party officials to investigations. The question I see arising from that is: in a party that values loyalty above all else as the Rovian GOP does, can the party establishment and the party $$$ get behind Palin without holding something back? I don’t think so.

2. My feeling for some time now is that the VP pick will determine what the GOP does. Palin’s “not ready to lead” target on her back means she will have to show clear skills in judgment, which seem to be problematic when she gets someone fired [yes, it is under investigation] because that man was divorcing her sister in the frequently ugly fashion. So, my prediction is that the GOP is NOT going to run either McSame or Palin in November, but a Manchurian candidate who will be sprung on the electorate in October complete with the full blessing of Rove and Cheney.

3. Remember, Palin has no detectable Rovian ties and has bucked the party. Cheney, W, Rove and the rest of the cabal can tolerate NO REAL INVESTIGATION of their activities for the last eight years, which means no Obama presidency, which will be forced by the blogosphere to dig even if the DLC lets it go. It also means no one on the GOP side can be selected who is off the reservation [Palin, McSame has been co-opted] because the political point scoring is too easy when Rove meets the bus.

4. It is not out of the realm of possibilities that the election is delayed ( = cancelled) for “national security” concerns, which will be stage managed by Rovian operatives. The event will probably not be instigated by Rove’s crew, but given the world volatility, I’m sure someone will do something stupid to give Rove a reason. The delay will last as long as it takes to keep everyone out of jail, which may be a very long time.

Posted by: rugger0

Well, to know them is to love them.

Tags:McCain, Sarah Palin
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Obama and his VP choice

Monday, August 25th, 2008

The Biden choice for VP nominee is two days old and already there is a question about Obama’s feelings toward his guy. What is the sign thing ?

At least Biden gets better treatment than Obama’s brother. Maybe McCain should adopt him.

Tags:Biden, McCain, Obama
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An interesting comparison

Saturday, July 26th, 2008

Today, Philip Terzian has a column on the similarity between Obama and Thomas Dewey in 1948. I hadn’t thought of this before but it makes some sense. Republicans hated Roosevelt and were desperate to get the White House back after 16 years. They had just taken control of Congress after 14 years in the wilderness. The Bill Clinton interregnum makes the comparison inexact but the political left is salivating at the chance to finally have both houses of Congress and the White House in their control. They are confident that they are about to triumph. Look at the triumphalism in leftist blogs.

Personally, I still think the chances are better than even that we will have to endure a President Obama for a term but I’m not ready to count McCain out yet. Obama has to close the deal with the American public and he is a ready source of gaffes. There is a widely held theory that Dewey lost the election because of an outburst where he cursed a railroad engineer for moving the train unexpectedly while Dewey was making a speech from the back platform, a common campaign method of the day.

Truman campaigned by telling the voters that Dewey did not understand the needs of the average American. He called Dewey a candidate of rich people.

One day, Dewey got angry at a railroad engineer because his campaign train was late for a speech. Truman charged that this proved that Dewey did not understand the problems of railroad engineers and other working Americans. He tried to make the election a choice between hard-working Democrats and rich Republicans.

The story isn’t quite correct because what really happened was the train moved unexpectedly, risking injury to the spectators listening to Dewey’s speech. He made a remark about the engineer that he thought would be taken as sympathetic to the crowd. However, it fit another scenario; one of a man who had little sympathy for the common man.

Then on Oct. 12, 1948, Dewey’s train pulled into Beaucoup, Ill. As a crowd of 1,000 people surged toward the rear of the train to greet the governor, the train lurched backward. “That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer,” Dewey said. “He probably should be shot at sunrise,” the candidate muttered into a microphone, “but we’ll let him off this time since nobody was hurt.” Lee Tindle, the 54-year-old engineer whom Dewey had insulted, was a 30-year veteran of the rails. “I think just as much of Dewey as I did before, and that’s not very much,” Tindle told an Associated Press reporter.

Even without the aid of YouTube or television, word of Dewey’s outburst spread, and Truman took full advantage. He praised his “all Democratic” train crew. Supporters wrote “Lunatics for Truman” on dusty boxcars. While Republicans touted Dewey’s New York administration and his campaign for its efficiency, Truman’s running mate, Alben W. Barkley, chimed in with a timely response: “The governor of New York showed his hand recently by advocating ‘shooting at sunrise’ as a cure for his conception of inefficiency,” Barkley quipped. “We at the Democratic Party do not consider ‘ruthlessness’ a proper synonym for ‘efficiency.’ “

Obama has already set the stage by making comments about small town voters.

He said: “You go into 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 it’s not surprising, then, 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.”

A few more like that and maybe we can start saying President McCain

Tags:Dewey, gaffes, McCain, Obama, Truman
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A You-Tube campaign

Friday, July 25th, 2008

Obama says different things to different groups and often gets away with it. He gets into trouble, however, when he says things on camera. Here are two clips of Obama saying opposite things about the same topic. I hope someone is collecting these things and will use them to run political ads during the fall campaign. There are already a few examples. One is here.

Obama is a gaffe machine saying, for example, that he has campaigned in 57 states and will be dealing with world leaders as president for 8 to 10 years.

Obama supporters, like Alan Colmes on Fox News, tries to counter with alleged McCain gaffes. One was his statement that Iran was supporting Sunni terrorist groups. He was accused of not knowing that Iran is Shiite and will not cooperate with Sunnis. That is untrue. Secondly, this week, Colmes tried to make an issue of McCain saying that the Surge was responsible for the Anbar Awakening. This story is all over the left wing blogs. What they don’t understand is that “The Surge” was not the addition of more troops to Iraq but a change in strategy that required more troops to carry out. That change coincided with the Anbar Awakening. The video linked to by the piece above is absolutely accurate. It is the political left’s ignorance of military strategy that is on exhibition, not McCain’s error.

Here is more on McCain’s statement.

“Yesterday,” a reporter asked McCain, “you suggested that the surge in Iraq predated the Anbar rebellion, and actually the Anbar rebellion came a couple of months previously. Did you misspeak, or did you have something else in mind?”
McCain said that he was referring to the successful counterinsurgency strategy in the Anbar — the co-option of the Sunni sheiks — which provided a model for troops who later surged into the country.
“First of all, a surge is really a counter-insurgency strategy,” McCain said.
I’ll separate that, because McCain says it often. Most of us equate the surge with troop levels, but for McCain, it has always been about a strategy; to executive the strategy, more troops were needed.
Colonel McFarland, in Anbar province, McCain said, “had already initiated that strategy in Ramadi by going in and clearing and holding in certain places. That is a counter-insurgency. And he told me at that time that he believed that that strategy, which is quote the surge, part of the surge, would be, would be, successful. So then, of course, it was very clear that we needed additional troops in order to carry out this insurgency.

Don’t expect to see anything about that from Obama supporters. You-Tube will define this campaign, both supporting and refuting what the candidates say. McCain is consistent and it should help him.

Tags:McCain, Obama, politics, you tube
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Truth and politics

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

Those two terms are not mutually exclusive but it sometimes seems that way. This week, Phil Gramm got his tit in a wringer for saying that the economy is not in recession. It doesn’t matter that his statement is true. George Will commented on that feature of politics today on This Week. Amity Schlaes, whose book on the Great Depression should be required reading for all politicians, weighs in on the subject today. The Democrats are following a successful playbook, however. George Mitchell, Senate majority leader at the time, managed to produce and prolong the 1991 recession by filibustering capital gains tax cuts, long enough to win the 1992 election for Bill Clinton.

Tags:economics, Gramm, McCain, recession
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Wesley Clark; his friends speak out

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

Wesley Clark has been on the news lately. First he was a Hillary supporter. Now he is an Obama supporter. He is trashing John McCain. What did Clark’s own friends say about him back when his autobiography came out ? Hint: It wasn’t nice.

Like his fellow airwave-hog Richard Holbrooke, the State Department’s special negotiator in the run-up to the Kosovo bombing, Clark sought to wage the war by chatting up Tom Brokaw and Christiane Amanpour. He made end-runs around the U.S. Army chain of command and leaked information to other branches of government (State, in particular) and other governments (Britain’s, in particular).

But at the same time, his methods led him into a propagandistic press strategy that was transparent to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to the war. And they hurt him in U.S. military circles, where he was considered a showboating egotist and a devious political operator. Defense Secretary William Cohen told Clark, through Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton, “Get your fucking face off the TV.” Shelton didn’t trust him. Nor did Gen. Eric Shinseki, subsequently Army chief. And once the Kosovo operation was finished, Cohen–with no objection from President Clinton–ended Clark’s tour of duty early. In essence, sacked him.

Hmmm…

Inartful, at best.

Tags:McCain, military, Obama, politics, POW, Wesley Clark
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Bush haters move on to history

Monday, June 30th, 2008

The author of a novel advocating the assassination of George Bush, has moved on to Churchill and Roosevelt. The book is Human Smoke and is an indictment of the Allies in World War II because they stood up to Hitler at last and refused to accept that final aggression. The author, apparently a pacifist, sets out to attack Churchill and Roosevelt but does it in a dishonest way. His novel, Checkpoint seems to have outraged even the New York Times, rather tolerant of most Bush-haters. The Booklist review gives a bit of the plot:

Jay and Ben are old friends who haven’t seen each other in a few years. A former teacher who has fallen on hard times, Jay is very, very upset about the war in Iraq. He has expressed his objections by marching in an antiwar demonstration in the nation’s capital, but the protest has had no effect. Now Jay has asked Ben, a writer currently working on a book about the cold war, to bring a tape recorder to a Washington, D.C., hotel room because Jay wants to talk about his decision to assassinate the president.

A columnist in The Independent has picked up on this pacifist nihilism and brought more light on this mindset.

Winston Churchill? Today we only remember his heroic opposition to Nazism. But while he was against gassing and tyranny in Europe, he was passionately in favour of it for “uncivilised” human beings whose riches he wanted to seize. In the 1920s, Iraqis rose up against British imperial rule, and Churchill as Colonial Secretary thought of a good solution: gas them. He wrote: “I do not understand this squeamishness… I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.” It would “spread a lively terror”.

He does not mention, and may not even be aware of the fact that Churchill goes on to confirm that by “poisoned” he meant tear gas. He may not know it because he took the lines from Baker’s book above.

The correction (unacknowledged by the writers) is here.

“I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes,” Baker quotes, but if one returns to the original memorandum, found in the Churchill Papers in Cambridge, it goes on to make it clear that the idea was not to use “deadly gasses” against the enemy, but rather ones aimed at “making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory [i.e., tear] gas.” Churchill goes on to write: “The moral effect should be so good as to keep loss of life reduced to a minimum” and “Gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror yet would leave no serious permanent effect on most of those affected.”

I am belaboring this point because we have begun to see a similar pacifist nihilism in the presidential campaign. The attacks on John McCain’s military record, the refusal to see progress in Iraq, attempts to undercut the war on radical Islam (perhaps because some would rather lose than see Bush win anything), all seem to suggest that some have gone beyond politics to some sort of lunatic antipathy to American civil discourse. I think we have seen only the beginning of this.

Tags:Bush, Churchill, McCain, Obama, presidential campaign, Roosevelt, second world war
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Munich all over again

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

American young people are famously ignorant about history. They are also enthusiastic about Barack Obama who promises to talk to every enemy of America without preconditions. That combination probably stimulated a somber column by Thomas Sowell today. I supported John McCain with enthusiasm in 2000 and was disappointed when George Bush defeated him in the primary elections. I thought Bush was minimally qualified, as exemplified by the abysmal interview he gave as a candidate when he could not name the president of Pakistan. Compared to Barack Obama, however, Bush was a master at governance.

I have read extensively in the history of the 1930s. When we read those accounts of well-meaning men and their efforts to keep the peace, we know the outcome. Today, we see the possible election of a well-meaning man with no credentials for office and I wonder if enough people will think about the future.

Tags:Bush, McCain, Munich 1938, Obama
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A preview of the presidential campaign

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Senator Obama’s speech last night, after he gained the majority of delegates for the Democratic nomination even while losing both primaries, is analyzed here and shows a preview of what to expect this fall. His radical associations with Weathermen terrorist BIll Ayers and race-baiting Reverend Wright and Father Pfleger are off-limits. That’s religion which is unfair to consider.

The suggestion that he visit Iraq to see what has happened since his two-day visit in 2006 ? No, McCain needs to tour the US.

Maybe if he went to Pennsylvania and met the man who lost his job but can’t even afford the gas to drive around and look for a new one, he’d understand that we can’t afford four more years of our addiction to oil from dictators. That man needs us to pass an energy policy that works with automakers to raise fuel standards, and makes corporations pay for their pollution, and oil companies invest their record profits in a clean energy future—an energy policy that will create millions of new jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced. That’s the change we need.

OK. Here are two items before us for consideration. Our addiction to oil from foreign dictators might be reduced if we drilled for oil in our own country, like ANWAR and the coastal shelf. Brazil has leased most of the world’s deep ocean drilling rigs to look for oil off its own shores. Why can’t we drill in our known reserves ?

Nuclear power provides over 75% of France’s electricity. Why are we not building lots of nuclear power plants ?

Canada has vast oil reserves, much of it in oil shale and tar sands. Why aren’t we developing refineries and exploration techniques to use this source from a close and friendly country that is not a “dictatorship” ? The Democrats in Congress have passed legislation that prohibits the government from using alternative fuels that have a larger carbon footprint than conventional oil. Greenhouse gases trump economics.

I wonder how willing the oil companies, which have world-wide operations, will be to turn over their profits to Obama ? I suspect they will simply move away, leaving us to get our energy from president Obama’s speeches.

How much success has Obama had in those states with economic troubles ? Not that much.

Clinton’s popular-vote victories thus far include the three biggest Electoral College prizes: California (a solid Democratic state), New York (another sure bet for the Democrats), and Texas (a solid Republican state). (Although Obama won more delegates in Texas, Clinton’s vote total exceeded Obama’s by nearly 100,000 votes.) However, her victories also include several of the largest swing states that both parties will be battling to win in November: Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as wins in the disputed Florida and Michigan primaries. As a result, Clinton’s 20 states represent more than 300 Electoral College votes while Obama’s 28 states and the District of Columbia represent only 224 Electoral College votes.

Obama won the nomination in caucuses, usually dominated by the more left wing sector of the Democratic Party, and early primaries before his awkward associations came to light. He hasn’t won a primary, except for Oregon, in the last month of the campaign. Oregon is a reliably Democrat state. The question is, can he win Ohio ?

Tags:Clinton, economics, energy policy, McCain, Obama
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A Brief History…