Obama, in his own words

If John McCain is smart, he'll take the last 30 or so seconds of this new web ad and turn it into a TV spot.

Breitbart.tv includes here a transcript of those last 30 seconds--Obama, before entering the Senate, discussing the possibility of running for president:

I am a believer in knowing what you’re doing when you apply for a job. And I think that if I were to seriously consider running on a national ticket, I would essentially have to start now, before having served a day in the Senate. Now there are some people who might be comfortable doing that, but I am not one of those people.

One possible tagline: "Don't take our word for it. Take his."

(...or should that be His?)

--Shack

"How can we lose to these racists?"

Around this time in 2004, Charles Krauthammer penned a brilliant column comparing the panicking Democratic Party to temperamental chess genius Aaron Nimzowitsch:

Upon losing a game at the 1925 Baden-Baden tournament, Aaron Nimzowitsch, the great chess theoretician and a superb player, knocked the pieces off the board, jumped on the table and screamed, "How can I lose to this idiot?"

Nimzowitsch may have lived decades ago in Denmark, but he had the soul of a modern American Democrat. After all, Democrats have been saying much the same — with similar body language — ever since the erudite Adlai Stevenson lost to the syntactically challenged Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. They said it again when they lost to that supposed simpleton Ronald Reagan. Twice, would you believe? With George W. Bush, they are at it again, and equally apoplectic.

Actually, this time around, even more apoplectic. The Democrats' current disdain for George Bush reminds me of another chess master, Efim Bogoljubov, who once said, "When I am White, I win because I am White" — White moves first and therefore has a distinct advantage — "when I am Black, I win because I am Bogoljubov." John Kerry is a man of similar vanity — intellectual and moral — and that spirit thoroughly permeates the Democratic Party.

Democrats feel a mixture of horror and contempt for the huddled masses — so bovine, so benighted, so besotted with talk radio — who made a king of an empty-headed movie star (Reagan, long before Arnold) and inexplicably want the Republicans' current nitwit leader to have a second term.

(Read the whole column, when you have the time--it's a classic.)

Don't look now, but it's happening again. Slate editor Jacob Weisberg writes:

What with the Bush legacy of reckless war and economic mismanagement, 2008 is a year that favors the generic Democratic candidate over the generic Republican one. Yet Barack Obama, with every natural and structural advantage in the presidential race, is running only neck-and-neck against John McCain, a sub-par Republican nominee with a list of liabilities longer than a Joe Biden monologue. Obama has built a crack political operation, raised record sums, and inspired millions with his eloquence and vision. McCain has struggled with a fractious campaign team, lacks clarity and discipline, and remains a stranger to charisma. Yet at the moment, the two of them appear to be tied. What gives?

What gives, indeed? If you need a hint, here's the title of Weisberg's piece: Racism is the only reason Obama might lose

Yep, they're panicking.

--Shack

The Next Wright?

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the credited source of the title of Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope, proved to be such an embarrassment that Obama was eventually forced to disavow him.

The likely source of Obama's most (in-?)famous campaign line is apparently such an embarrassment that he never even avowed her in the first place.

Over at Human Events, Fred Eckert has the lowdown on Alice Walker, author of the 2006 essay collection We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For. As you might expect, she's an Obama supporter:

Obama is, she proclaims, “not perfect but humanly stunning…We look at him…and are glad to be of our species.”

However, her enthusiasm for left-type leaders doesn't stop at Obama. She's nearly as enthused about a certain individual roughly 90 miles south of Florida:

Others of our species that she goes gaga over include Fidel Castro: "What's not to like about the man?” she asks. “If Fidel could dance, he'd be perfect!"

A little closer to home, we find another of Walker's favorite people:

A segment of our species Walker seems to be especially fond of is convicted cop killers. She has more than once visited in prison one of America’s best-known cop killers, Mumia Abu-Jamal, a cause celeb of the far Left. He’s “a beautiful person” and “compassionate,” she tells us, “he has a lot of light.” Besides, she has a feeling that what he was actually doing at the scene where the police officer was murdered was just “trying to help.”

The bullet extracted from the dead officer’s brain matched the five spent shells that were in the gun registered to her beautiful person/compassionate friend -- the gun he had with him at the scene, the gun he attempted to keep away from police arriving at the scene of the murder, the gun that fit into the holster he was wearing. And there was a return bullet from the police officer’s gun in his chest.

So what if a jury convicted him, so what if five eyewitnesses implicated him, so what if he subsequently screamed, “If you let me go, I’ll kill all of you cops.” So what if even the likes of Michael Moore has pronounced him guilty as charged? To the nuttiest of the Loony Left -- which includes this woman from whom Obama gets his rallying call -- this cop killer is their kind of guy.

And what overview of an Obama supporter would be complete without taking a look at her ideas of how to fix what's wrong in the world's hot spots?

Walker’s advice on how we need to deal with Osama bin Laden: 1) We need to “remind him of all the good, nonviolent things he has done,” and 2) we need to convince him to understand “the preciousness of the lives” of the people he’s killed. Of course, in the matter of preciousness of life, she is pro-abortion and has had one.

She doesn’t like religions, especially the Catholic Church. And she says the real problem in the Middle East is the Jews.

Of course, if Obama could claim that he had no knowledge of Wright's more extreme rantings--in spite of sitting in the pews every Sunday for two decades--and get away with it, it shouldn't be too hard for him to disclaim any knowledge of Walker, as well.

After all--he's already appropriated her title, and to all appearances, he never even admitted he got it from her in the first place.

He doesn't need her anymore.

--Shack

The "Left Behind" Code

You can't make this stuff up.

Time's Amy Sullivan reports that Democrats are worried that John McCain's ad "The One" invokes the language and imagery of the Left Behind series of novels--and, taking the whole thing a step further, thus invites parallels between Barack Obama and Left Behind's Antichrist, Nicolae Carpathia.

To what end? Apparently, stoking Evangelical opposition to Obama's campaign:

Even if a fraction of the Internet-using public engages in outrageous Antichrist speculation, feeding those extreme beliefs wouldn't seem to be an obvious political strategy. But McCain advisers are aware that one of the goals of Democratic outreach to Evangelicals has been to simply neutralize their opposition. "You just have to take the edge off," says Michigan Democratic Party chair Mark Brewer, explaining why he spent much of a 2006 meeting with conservative pastors around his state. "Now that they've met me, they can see I don't have two horns and a tail."

A new TIME poll finds that the most conservative Evangelicals are the least enthusiastic about McCain's candidacy. Convincing them that Obama does have two horns and a tail might be the best way of getting them to vote. That's what worries Campolo, who also sits on the Democratic Party's platform committee. "Those books have created a subliminal language, and I think judgments will be made unconsciously about Barack Obama," he says. "It scares the daylights out of me."

Those diabolical Republicans! Those Manipulative Bastards!

Of course, pointing out Obama's pro-infanticide history with the Illinois equivalent of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act will do far more to put two horns and a tail on The One.

One (though not The One) hopes that McCain is merely waiting until after the Olympics to finally start going after Obama on that point.

--Shack

Zucker is coming

The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes reports that David Zucker, of Airplane! and Naked Gun fame (and, more recently, a certain skewering of the Iraq Study Group) has a new film coming out this fall.

The movie, a satirical look at the War on Terror titled An American Carol, thoroughly skewers the left wing:

The war on terror, of course, does not lend itself to hilarity. But Zucker knows comedy and has spent nearly four decades making people laugh. With his friend Lewis Friedman, a comedy writer, Zucker went looking for the absurd in the political left and found an abundance of material.

Zucker and Friedman poked fun of the know-nothing culture of antiwar protests. During a rally at Columbia University, students chant: "Peace Now, We Don't Care How!" Some of their protest signs are ones you'd find at any antiwar rally. Some are not. "9/11 Was an Inside Job," "Kick Army Recruiters Off Campus!" "End Violence--War Is Not the Answer!" "End Disease--Medicine Is Not the Answer!" "It's Too Dark Outside, The Sun Is Not the Answer!" "Overpopulation--Gay Marriage Is the Answer!"

Other claims were so absurd they didn't require exaggeration. "We really didn't have to do a lot of stretching," says Zucker.

When he heard Rosie O'Donnell claim that "radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have a separation of church and state," he knew he had several minutes of material.

In the film, a rotund comedian named Rosie O'Connell makes an appearance on The O'Reilly Factor to promote her documentary, The Truth About Radical Christians. O'Reilly shows a clip, which opens with a pair of priests walking through an airport--as seen from pre-hijacking surveillance video--before boarding the airplane. Once onboard, they storm the cockpit using crucifixes as their weapon of choice. Next the documentary looks at the growing phenomenon of nuns as suicide bombers, seeking 72 virgins in heaven. A dramatization shows two nuns, strapped with explosives, board a bus to the cries of the other passengers. "Oh, no! Not the Christians!" O'Connell's work ends with a warning about new threats and the particular menace of the "Episcopal suppository bomber."

The film is scheduled for release on October 3--right at the peak of the presidential campaign.

Here's hoping Zucker has better luck, politically speaking, than Michael Moore (whose pseudo-doppelganger, incidentally, is the protagonist of An American Carol) did with Farenheit 9/11 in 2004.

--Shack