When Bill Clinton was first elected president in 1992, it was a chilling experience. I become politically aware in the late 1970s, my conservatism weaned on the foreign policy platform of the Committee For The Present Danger, writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and the free market economics writings of Nixon/Ford Treasury Secretary William Simon. The 1980 presidential campaign was the first one I seriously paid attention to, and I backed the eventual winner, Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Ask older seasoned citizens who their formative president was, and they’ll tell you FDR. The second Roosevelt was the only national leader they had ever known in their youth and formative years. So it was for me with President Reagan. So much so that when 1988 rolled around, I confronted the rather emotionally, if not intellectually, jarring realization that Reagan was retiring, and oh by the way, Michael Dukakis is leading Reagan’s veep by seventeen points.

Didn’t last for long, of course. Neither did the Bush41 presidency. So when I went to bed on Election Night ‘92 to stare at the bedroom ceiling for eight hours, I was very fearful for the future of both my then-embryonic family and the country.

There were some close calls the first two years, which fortunately and blessedly brought the GOP to power in Congress as a counterbalance to Mr. Bill. The remaining six years were a tabloid’s wet dream come true, but the country itself (9/11 aside) was not measurably further endangered.

I try to tell myself the same thing about the eventual Barack Hussein Obama administration. “Oh, life will be a little tougher, economic life will be a bit leaner, we’ll have to absorb another wave of homeland terrorist attacks that hopefully won’t involve WMD, libs will be as insufferable as they were in Clinton’s first biennium, but we’ll get through it, and the voters, with the next few years as stark contrast to the HIGHLY underrated Bush43 years, will return to their senses in 2010 and 2012.

Whether that last sentence pans out is the subject of another post - suffice it for now to say I have my doubts - but the almost self-hypnosis that precedes it is distressingly undermined by items like the following.

***Just exactly what is the ultimate source (or sources) of the thirty-three million dollars in campaign cash that has tsunamied into Barry O’s campaign coffers from abroad?:

More than half of the whopping $426.9 million Barack Obama has raised has come from small donors whose names the Obama campaign won’t disclose.

And questions have arisen about millions more in foreign donations the Obama campaign has received that apparently have not been vetted as legitimate….

The FEC has compiled a separate database of potentially questionable overseas donations that contains more than 11,500 contributions totaling $33.8 million. More than 520 listed their “state” as “IR,” often an abbreviation for Iran. Another 63 listed it as “UK,” the United Kingdom.

More than 1,400 of the overseas entries clearly were U.S. diplomats or military personnel, who gave an APO address overseas. Their total contributions came to just $201,680.

But others came from places as far afield as Abu Dhabi, Addis Ababa, Beijing, Fallujah, Florence, Italy, and a wide selection of towns and cities in France.

Until recently, the Obama Web site allowed a contributor to select the country where he resided from the entire membership of the United Nations, including such friendly places as North Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Unlike McCain’s or Senator Hillary Clinton’s online donation pages, the Obama site did not ask for proof of citizenship until just recently. Clinton’s presidential campaign required U.S. citizens living abroad to actually fax a copy of their passport before a donation would be accepted.

With such lax vetting of foreign contributions, the Obama campaign may have indirectly contributed to questionable fundraising by foreigners.

Which, let us all remember, IS ILLEGAL. Who would ever have believed that there’d be a Democrat presidential candidate even more corrupt, and more “indiscriminate” about accepting campaign subsidies, from America’s enemies than La Clinton Nostra? Bill Clinton’s 1996 ChiComm funny money shenanigans didn’t end up hurting him much, but at least earned him a Senate investigation. With the Democrats knocking on the door of a filibuster-proof majority, who will investigate B.O.’s literal sell out to Iran, Hamas, and God knows who else?

***How many Obamunists are characterized by this waif?:

My interest was piqued, but the dark time lived on until my faith in others was renewed on January 4 in the Iowa state primary. Obama had beat out squeaky clean southern boy John Edwards and former first lady and next in the line of political succession Hillary Clinton. I was in shock. And then I came to Jesus/Obama.

I donated to the campaign. I followed every primary with bated breath, and muttered my prayers to the political gods while proselytizing the miracle of my new prophet. I got a car magnet, I bought a t-shirt; a pin and bumper sticker are on their way to my campus mailbox. Then the media and right wing questioning began: what is he? A rock star, or the next president? Bono or Britney? The naysayers used his popularity among young people against him. Who had ever heard of political posters in college dorm rooms? Bumper stickers on the back of your high school neighbor’s Jetta? Guess what those “Jesus is my homeboy” t-shirts were replaced with at Urban Outfitters? A smiling Obama under his own cutesy sayings like “Obama for yo Mama.” …

I’ve officially been saved, and soon, whether they like it or not, the rest of the country will be too. I will follow him, all the way to the White House, and I’ll be standing there in our nation’s capital in January 2009, when Barack Obama is inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States of America.

In the name of Obama, Amen.

Parody or epiphany? J-Ger has the same queasy feeling I do:

This [children singing about Obama] video illustrates a phenomenon that I’ve periodically underestimated in assessing politics this cycle.

A large number of Americans, like the poster on Mulder’s wall, Want To Believe.

They want to believe in a political leader who they can describe in Messianic terms. They want to touch hands that have touched him. They want the face of their leader staring down on them on posters in public places.

They want to indoctrinate their children about his greatness before they can think for themselves, as we saw in the “children singing” video.

They want to sing songs about him, and credit him for “healing people’s souls.” They want to get together in groups of tens of thousands and chant their leader’s name. They want to make that silly “O” salute.

Cam, you and I have talked offline about the Founding Fathers and their vision of what a citizen of the new nation would be: fiercely independent, largely self-reliant, skeptical of government power, fearful of the passions of the public at large, and modest in his national ambitions. A large swath of the public is the exact opposite of this.

“A Republic, if you can keep it.” It’s tough to keep it if enough of the citizenry wants to see the chief executive as a Xersian God-King.

What percentage of The Chosen One’s fifty-one percent (latest Rasmussen three-day tracking poll) is in his column at the moment because he, like Bill Clinton sixteen years ago, is just “the other guy” in visceral reaction to an outgoing prez surnamed for a slang term for a certain subcategory of body hair, and what percentage can’t wait to throw the Constitution aside (if they even remember that we HAVE one, much less what it says) and annoint Godbama “king of kings” for life? And in which direction is the latter proportion likely to go when the nation’s Fourth Estate “that screamed bloody murder over John Ashcroft holding prayer meetings with some staffers before work is now shrugging its shoulders (and shaking its tingly legs) at the fact that a portion of the national conversation includes, ‘In the Name of Obama, Amen.’”?

***Lastly, what do the above two questions matter when The Great Post-Partisan Unifier” is giving every indication of not waiting for his worshipful disciples to throw aside the Constitution but doing so quite proactively himself?:

I’ll be blunt: Senator Obama and his supporters despise free expression, the bedrock of American self-determinism and hence American democracy. What’s more, like garden-variety despots, they see law not as a means of ensuring liberty but as a tool to intimidate and quell dissent.

We London conferees were fretting over speech codes, “hate speech” restrictions, “Islamophobia” provisions, and “libel tourism” — the use of less journalist-friendly defamation laws in foreign jurisdictions to eviscerate our First Amendment freedom to report, for example, on the nexus between ostensible Islamic charity and the funding of terrorist operations.

All the while, in St. Louis, local law-enforcement authorities, dominated by Democrat-party activists, were threatening libel prosecutions against Obama’s political opposition. County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch and City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, abetted by a local sheriff and encouraged by the Obama campaign, warned that members of the public who dared speak out against Obama during the campaign’s crucial final weeks would face criminal libel charges — if, in the judgment of these conflicted officials, such criticism of their champion was “false.”

The chill wind was bracing. The Taliban could not better rig matters. The Prophet of Change is only to be admired, not questioned. In the stretch run of an American election, there is to be no examination of a candidate for the world’s most powerful office — whether about his radical record, the fringe Leftism that lies beneath his thin, centrist veneer, his enabling of infanticide, his history of race-conscious politics, his proposals for unprecedented confiscation and distribution of private property (including a massive transfer of American wealth to third-world dictators through international bureaucrats), his ruinous economic policies that have helped leave Illinois a financial wreck, his place at the vortex of the credit market implosion that has put the U.S. economy on the brink of meltdown, his aggressive push for American withdrawal and defeat in Iraq, his easy gravitation to America-hating activists, be they preachers like Jeremiah Wright, terrorists like Bill Ayers, or Communists like Frank Marshall Davis. Comment on any of this and risk indictment or, at the very least, government harassment and exorbitant legal fees. [emphases added]

I’m trying to keep myself grounded, centered, and calm so that I can at least sleep at night. I want to believe, too - that President Nixon was right when he said that no one president can destroy the country in just four years. I want to believe the Democrats that were so mean, so vicious, so treasonous, and so irresponsible in opposition for Dubya’s first six years, and so clumsy, incompetent, and ineffectual at the helm of Congress in the last two, won’t really go an a vengeful rampage against the opposition party, its supporters, and the nation’s institutions once given one of their own in the White House even more radically to the Left than they are. I want to believe that the 2008 victors won’t govern as Alinsky Marxists once given unfettered power over the country and stubbornly and heedlessly bulldoze America into economic depression and unprecented calamity overseas that comes boomeraging home, 9/11 style, to roost. I want to believe that Obamunists will not, after all, see ruling an impoverished, poisoned realm as preferable to governing in conventional and minimally responsible center-left fashion (if even that can be called either).

I want to believe that “life in these United States” will go on more or less like it has for my entire life. But the events of the past couple of weeks, and the accumulation of facts about Barack Hussein Obama that is fueling the growing center-right alarm of which I am but a small part, make that desire exceedingly difficult to attain.

Over twenty years ago, noted author and eschatologist Hal Lindsey wrote a book entitled Combat Faith. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf for many moons. Now looks like a particularly opportune occasion to give it a fresh perusal.  There will be a deep and widespread need for its contents in the bleak years to come.

[cross-posted at ]

This is very scary. Not allowing election observers at polling places is a very good way to protect voter fraud. While I was a poll observer, I saw many violations of election law, but whenever you call anyone, the people that were giving money (drugs or alcohol) to voters would disappear and then show up after election officers have left. Make no mistake, there is going to be fraud everywhere, especially in many big cities run by Democrat Machines. Just think all the dead people and dogs that always vote in Chicago. If it was not the dead and dogs in Chicago and Dallas, JFK would never have been elected. And now in Ohio, they are having early elections without poll observers. Just think of all the voters ACORN and their ilk can drum up and register the same day to vote. And even without an ID or anything verifying that they live on the precinct. I guess this is easier than having the polling places open hours after the polls have closed as they do in St Louis every year. A lot easier to get away with fraud. Thanks all to Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner. I am sure Obama will be happy.

H/T to The Next Right

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weyrE9jLGn0

Peggy Noonan joins us this evening on my radio program. We’ll be talking about the crossroad we find ourselves at in America. Peggy’s written a slim volume of a book titled “Patriotic Grace”. She’ll tell us what’s on its pages and why she wrote it. I think you’ll like it.

She’s one of my favorite writers and I’m delighted to be hosting her this evening. Please join us. Here’s your ticket to the performance:

GOLD PASS

*****

I’m actually not all that outraged that PBS talking head Gwen Ifill will be “moderating” tomorrow night’s Sarah Palin-Joe Biden smackdown. Certainly not surprised. Yeah, she’s written a gushingly adoring prequal book on the upcoming Hussein presidency, so she has not just the usual ideological conflict of interest that any Enemy Media jackal would bring to this role, but a financial one as well. If anything, the wonder is that she isn’t moderating one of the three McCain-Obama bouts so that she could throw her panties directly at the feet of the man she had a prominent hand in depicting as the Heathcliff Huxtable of the Beltway. But really, would Chris Matthews or Bob Schiefer or pretty much any journo outside of Fox News be any less likely to start off the debate by asking Governor Palin when she stopped masturbating herself with severed moose antlers under the table at gubernatorial policy meetings? The fact that Ifill is black, and therefore officially immune from any and all criticism for any shafting of Barracuda that ensues - any and all criticism PERIOD, actually - is putrid icing on a really rotten cake.

But I am somewhat taken aback by this:

I confirmed for us here on GretaWire: the McCain campaign did NOT know about Gwen Ifill’s book (I think I told them when I made my efforts - emails about midnight - to find out!) I am stunned….the campaign (actually both) should have been told before the campaign agreed to have her moderate. It simply is not fair - in law, this would create a mistrial.

They didn’t know? The negotiations for and vetting of debate moderators and other stipulations took place as much as two months ago; Ifill’s literary fellation of The One was announced back in July. How could Team Sith possibly not know about this? Does nobody ELSE in that campaign know how to email, or use Google? For a shop that was on its way to winning the unwinnable before Wall Street collapsed, I find that more than a little implausible.

A/P’s theory is more believable, though no less teeth-gnashingly aggravating:

[I]s this a case of Team Maverick deciding that the racial demagoguery they’d get from the left for trying to have her removed because of a pro-Obama book made it simply not worth the aggravation?

Y’know, given the ubiquity that Barack Hussein Obama’s race is going to have in his administration, and the PR weapon of mass destruction that it will be used as against any and all criticism of his decisions, actions, rhetoric, and policies over the next four years, if a Republican presidential candidate is too chicken to incur the Left’s racial demogoguery over the choice of a hopelessly ethically compromised moderator in a vice presidential debate before False Messiah ever takes office, should we start taking bets on whether the GOP will even have the courage to field a candidate against his re-election bid in 2012?

[cross-posted at ]