After April 13 Obama Democrats went into campaign mode. They staged a poll-driven Senate vote to increase taxes on oil companies.
They began a Mediscare campaign against Ryan’s budget resolution that all but four House Republicans had voted for. That seemed to pay off with a special election victory in New York’s 26th Congressional District.
The message to job creators was clear. Hire at your own risk. Higher taxes, more burdensome regulation and crony capitalism may be here for some time to come.
I’m hoping for not more than another year and a half, until January, 2013. We’ll probably survive that long, though there will be a lot of unnecessary suffering. I don’t want to think about another five years of it.
That victory was much more than a dignified escape from a sticky predicament. The coalition victory in Iraq was a historical turning point that may well turn out to be comparable to the cannonade of Valmy. It changed the course of world history. We have not done justice to those who gave their lives in Iraq until we recognize the full dimensions of their achievement.
The story of Iraq has yet to be told. It is too politically sensitive for the intelligentsia to handle just yet; passions need to cool before the professors and the pundits who worked themselves into paroxysms of hatred and disdain for the Bush administration can come to grips with how wrongheaded they’ve been. It took decades for the intelligentsia to face the possibility that the cretinous Reagan-monster might have, um, helped win the Cold War, and even now they haven’t asked themselves any tough questions about the Left’s blind hatred of the man who did more than any other human being to save the world from nuclear war.
It may take that long for the truth about the war in Iraq to dawn, but dawn it will. America’s victory in Iraq broke the back of Al-Qaeda and left Osama bin Laden’s dream in ruins. He died a defeated fanatic in his Abbotabad hideaway; his dream was crushed in the Mesopotamian flatlands where he swore it would win.
So a liberal Congressman basically stands accused of sending a highly inappropiate tweet, while a right-wing blogger basically stands accused of setting him up. They could both be innocent, of course. Or not. But this isn’t a case of he said/he said. There are electronic records of all these actions. If both of the accused open up their computers to a neutral, third party tech nerd–-who doesn’t have to be in law enforcement–-it should be possible to find out fairly quickly if either/both/none of them is culpable, no? The truth is in there!
I don’t recall Buckley as a stammerer, just a deliberate speaker. It’s been a long time since I heard him, though. And I do find Obama’s long “aaaaaannnddds” annoying. Of course, I think that Sarah Palin needs a speech coach, too, not to get rid of her accent, but to lower the register of her voice a little and not sound quite so screechy.
We may be about to finally find out, though I expect them to continue to stonewall: a judge has ordered the University of Virginia to release the climate research materials And Michael Mann is his usual smarmy, ad-hominem self:
“I think its very unfortunate that fossil fuel industry-funded climate change deniers … continue to harass U.Va., NASA, and other leading academic and scientific institutions with these frivolous attacks,” he said.
Hey, if I’m funded by the fossil-fuel industry, where the hell is my check?