Obama so far......

First off, I want to acknowledge the fact that Barack Obama will be the 44th president of the United States. I will oppose him when I must, but I will support him in all that I can. He'll be my President and Commander-in-Chief. May God grant him wisdom and strength, and success for our country in the War on Terror.

So, cabinet appointments. I have to say that apart from the social issues (which are hugely important), the names leaked so far are awesome. This is not a lefty cabinet. Geithner, Clinton, Jones, Gates...I hope all of it is true. None of these people are lefties when it comes to their respective job descriptions. You can't hope for better as a conservative than these names. After all, this is a Democratic administration. Obama could have taken this country off a cliff if he wanted to. He has the power and the mandate. This means Obama isn't an ideologue. The real danger with Obama, and I have thought this for quite a while, is the social issues. On the economy and foreign policy, he is in general wise and sensible. I believe he is a man of good intent, even on the social issues, but he must be opposed on those issues. His beliefs are wholly out of sync with what is right there.

So here's hoping the foreign policy appointments pan out and that Mr. Obama will make good decisions for this country and the world. Hey, a bright spot: there ain't gonna be any Monica's in this White House. The Obamas, despite their wrong social beliefs, have respect for the Oval Office and will not defame it. That is nice to know. I cannot do a Clinton redux. The Obamas also respect the military greatly. That is also nice to know.

So, we're off to a good start as Mitch McConnell said.

The difference in character between McCain and Palin

I hope you'll forgive my French, but I am pissed off today, majorly. I'm conservative, and so Senator Obama cannot be my candidate this election. He would do great damage to this country, no matter his intent.

I am also human. Senator Obama lost his grandmother today, on the eve of his possible election to the Presidency of the United States. As anyone who has followed this election closely knows, Senator Obama is a 20th Century man in the sense that he is very, very reticent and does not like to show emotion in public. He's an extremely private person. Tonight, there were tears streaming down his face after he spoke about his grandmother.

You would think that the opposing candidates would be able to summon the grace and maturity to recognize this loss and back off the personal attacks a bit. In the case of Senator John McCain, you would be right. He is a man of profound character, wisdom, and life experience, and he showed that.

It was apparently too much to ask of Gvernor Palin, who showed disgustingly poor class and an incredible lack of simple human grace. She couldn't bring herself to condemn comments from Hank Williams Jr. that Senator Obama does not like the national anthem. She couldn't stop herself from dredging up that old quote from Senator Obama's wife about being proud of America, as she said that she and Mr. Williams had always been proud to be Americans. Her behavior was morally repugnant, and it was a dishonorable thing that she did today.

When somebody's going through a tough time, you back off the personal attacks. You sure as hell don't question his patriotism.

Send her back to Alaska and perhaps in ten years she'll be fit for high office.

The future

What does the future hold? Senator Obama had a solid lead at this point, with just over 22 days to go. We are facing a crossroads in our history: will we take a left turn, or will we go to the center with McCain? Will we allow liberal Supreme Court Justices to be appointed and keep Roe vs. Wade for the next twenty years? Will we instead elect McCain and possibly overturn Roe within the next four years?

John McCain has a lot of faults. Campaigns tend to cheapen and lessen the honor and courage and dignity of men, and this one has been no different. But underneath all the invective and dishonesty and fudging of the truth is a man whose character was formed long ago. His life has always been devoted to his country, and he has tried, often at great cost, to do what is honorable and right. He has fallen short many times, but where he fell many others had never even reached for. He is old now, but I'm hoping that America will give him one more chance to serve, one more mission to complete, one more order to follow.

Barack Obama is one of the most profoundly interesting politicians of our lifetime. As a conservative, I disagree with him on several very important issues. But he has a wisdom far beyond his years, and a tempered view of what is possible in life that is rare among liberals. I believe this is because of the life he has lived. We conservatives like to say that he is arrogant, pollyannish, and pie-in-the-sky, a man who never struggled to get where he is.

I believe only the first to even remotely resemble the truth, and perhaps one day he will get his chance to lead this great country. Perhaps when that day comes, he will have realized the poverty of his pro-abortion position. One can only hope. I sincerely do.

Either way, America will live on. It is up to us to preserve her greatness and ideals, and as others have said, keep that beacon shining brightly. Whoever America chooses as her president, I wish ourselves luck in one of the most challenging times we have ever faced. May God Bless America.

Politics isn't worth someone's life

Angry Republicans, Democrats, and Americans for that matter: politics isn't worth a man's life. The election of Barack Obama as president would do great damage to this country in a few important ways, namely the social issues. I understand that, and I wish it were not so. But I cannot countenance the rage I have seen and the threats to his life and call myself a honorable, moral, and Christian person. This is not right, America. Everyone needs to calm down.

This is a man who has faced greater danger every single day of this campaign than we know, partly because he is black, partly because his name sounds Arabic, partly because of his upbringing. He received Secret Service protection earlier than any candidate in history. Racism and ethnic-ism, if you will, are declining in this country, but the kooks are out there. All they need is a little rage and scare tactics to bring them out. That is why it is not only irresponsible but dangerous for McCain, Palin, and conservatives to pretend that nothing is happening out there and that all they are doing is asking legitimate questions about Senator Obama's record.

We all know about the sustained smear campaign on the internet. As others have said, every time someone introduces McCain at rallies by reffering to Senator Obama's middle name, it legitamizes these smears and fear of the 'other': People hear that, and many no doubt have gotten the bogus emails, and they think: perhaps he's a terrorist. Perhaps he hates America. Perhaps he hates the troops.

McCain's error is not so much that what he is saying is directly contributing to the rage and inciting these remarks; he doesn't intend for that to happen. His great failure has been that he is not strongly condemning these remarks, and the rage in general. He needs to. This is dangerous and it needs to stop.

I'm a conservative and I don't want Obama to get elected. But this isn't the way to do it, folks. It's wrong.

How can Obama leave his brother without money?

An odd story today in the Telegraph, a UK paper: apparently the Italian Edition of Vanity Fair (I am thankfully ignorant of the rest of its contents) has found George Hussein Onyango Obama, Senator Barack Obama's brother. He is Barack Hussein Obama's son, as Senator Obama is, but by a different mother than Senator Obama. And he lives on less than a dollar a day, in a hut in Kenya.

He's met Obama twice. We don't know the full story here, but I think, looking at the article, that it is at the very least odd that Senator Obama has apparently just forgotten about his brother. How can you allow your own brother to live in poverty while you run for president? I realize that Obama has somewhat tenous ties to the Kenyan side of his family, but ask yourself: could you allow your brother to live in poverty while you yourself are rich? Not just that, but could you all but ignore your brother and meet him only twice in almost thirty years? It sounds callous to me, again without knowing the full story.

I think it bears some investigation, if only to determine exactly what kind of person the Senator truly is, behind all the marketing and the media images.

The cowardice of the West enabled Russia's brutality

Abraham Lincoln said that the United States would be defeated, if defeat came, not from without but from within. I think this can be expanded to include the entire West. We will be defeated not from without, but from within. The conflict in Georgia, and the months and years that led up to it, has been a disgusting display of Western weakness, naivete, pusillanimity, cowardice, and appeasement.

Schroeder says that the conflict is Saakashvili's fault. A greater insanity has never come out of that traitor's mouth. He, along with Chirac, and now Merkel and Sarkozy, bear much of the responsibility for the ravaging of Georgia. In April, France and Germany (and others) denied Georgia the NATO Membership Action Plan. As Saakashvili correctly said, Russia perceived this as the new Munich. There isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Putin would have initiated this conflict had Georgia been given the plan.

They did this because they knew they could get away with it. After years of accommodation and appeasement, none of our words mattered to them. They ignored our calls for an end to the conflict. They have strutted around Georgia for a week, doing as they please. They threatened Poland with nuclear attack. They know that we are weak. The United States alone cannot isolate Russia; with the existing institutions, only a united West can do this. There was and is a chance for us to turn the tables on Russia and turn this military 'adventure' into a large strategic blunder, but only if we are united and take the necessary steps. I do not see this happening.

Merkel said on Friday that Russia's actions were "disproportionate in some aspects."

This is an appalling statement that reflects either a vast misunderstanding of the conflict, or the reality of a nation utterly beholden to Russian energy supplies. I think the latter.

The reality is that there wasn't much we could do after the invasion started, although we certainly could have been tougher. The tragedy of Georgia is that we didn't have the courage and strength to prevent the conflict months ago, when we had the chance. We were like the Republicans trying to regain their values six months before the election, after eight years of pigging out at the trough; we tried to get Russia to respect our wishes after eight years of appeasement and accommodation. It doesn't work that way, folks.

Will Russia lose, in the end? Yes. But if we keep on this same course, it will be many years from now indeed. France and Germany have blood on their hands, Georgian blood. Perhaps they will reconsider their opposition to Georgian NATO membership.

Russia returns to its history..

The Russians refuse to move past their sordid history; blind to its lessons, they cannot escape the vice-grip of their own brutal past. They were waiting for an opportunity, spoiling for a fight with Georgia, and they got one. This was not an innocent reaction to Georgian aggression; it was a pre-meditated attack that sought to use the excuse of Georgian involvement in South Ossetia as a way to send in their forces and message to the world.

The Russian attempt to blame this on Georgia and cry wolf is a laughably transparent attempt at obscuring Russian motives, which are singularly dark and brutal. Once again, Russia returns to its past, a time of autocratic brutality that has always failed in the end. The intermediate time may prosper Putin and his pet, Medvedev, but this return to a dark past will impoverish the Russian people, as autocracy always does.

In the end, Russia will fail. Humiliation, rather than the greatness they have always desired, will be their fate. Freedom and opportunity is the only end-state that will ever allow true greatness. State power is a cheap imposter.

Unfortunately, Russia has not learned the lessons of history. This is their great fault; brutality and aggression are all they offered to the world for the last 100 years. Rather than learn from the deaths of millions of their people, the collapse of communism, and the bankruptcy of state control, they have closed their eyes to the truth and blustered blindly down the path to autocracy.

This will all end in failure. It is sad that Russia refuses to avoid this future by changing its present course. How many will have to die before Russia learns that true strength does not lie in military domination, but in democratic freedom?