new @ ExileStreet

by John Mark Reynolds [author, academic]

On the Need to Bluff

Good campaigners rely on “talking points.” That drives those of us with academic backgrounds crazy. We hear the same message day-after-day and want more. Sadly, if the candidate is foolish enough to give us more, he or she will display the fact that nobody knows much about everything. He or she will display some ignorance or shallow ideas and then the other side will pounce.

Bottom Line: Obama should be winning easily. Instead, he is running a campaign that is still messaging to the already converted. While McCain is not running a great campaign, he is running a steady one. Senator Obama is blowing it.

Argument:

Polls can fluctuate, but at present Senator Obama seems unable to close the deal with the American electorate. There is no respectable poll that shows Obama getting over half the vote. Almost all of them show him getting a good bit less.

Following my rule of thumb set at the start of the race, as a challenger Senator Obama is losing when he dips under a five point lead in the polls this early. Why? Obama is a challenger in a year for challengers and poll weakness early on is dangerous. Ask Jimmy Carter who won, but barely in a race that he should have put away. I think this was because Carter never expanded his base, because he believed (with everyone else) that he could not lose in a Democrat year. [more]

Timing, as they say, is everything, and not just for baseball players trying to hit a 95-mph fastball.  For example, if Hitler had come along 70 years later than he did, I have no doubt that he would have succeeded in conquering all of Europe.  One only has to look at how close he came, and that was in spite of all those nations and the U.S. aligned against him.  Today, much of Europe has no backbone, and I doubt that, in the wake of Iraq, Americans would have the collective will required to oppose Nazism.  It bears remembering that when we went to war against the Axis powers, FDR was never asked if he had an exit strategy.

While it’s true that our presidents must deal with a great number of issues other than war, war and national defense are at the top of the list.  Can anybody actually picture Barack Obama, a man born to be a left-wing social worker, as commander-in-chief?  Keeping America safe is simply not on Obama’s to-do list.  He has made that perfectly clear by several of his statements.  For instance, he insisted that John Kennedy got Nikita Khrushchev to pull Soviet missiles out of Cuba by sitting down and reasoning with him.  He obviously believes he will turn evil dictators into peaceful lambs by the sheer power of his personality. [more]

Sometimes, I swear, when I see what our tax dollars get us in Congress, I feel like asking for my money back.  But, other times, I find myself thinking that the laughs those clowns provide us nearly, but not quite, make up for their incompetence, hypocrisy and mendacity.  The Marx Brothers, at their goofiest, couldn’t hold a candle to these self-important bumblers, although I’m sure that Groucho would have been sorely tempted to try.

You see nincompoops like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and John Murtha, bloviating on TV and you realize that when poll after poll indicates that these political hacks have an approval rate only half as high as George Bush’s and only a point or two higher than measles, they somehow assume we don’t have them in mind. [more]

by Marc T. Newman [media reviewer/critic]

The Earth has become an enormous refuse heap. Toiling tirelessly amid the rubble is a little anthropomorphic trash compactor named WALL-E. With a cockroach as his only companion, WALL-E has been humming along for hundreds of years, cubing and stacking the endless sea of stuff that humans have used up and thrown away. The dust storms that arise from time to time seem bent on choking out whatever remains of life on this bleak, once-blue planet. Such a barren, post-apocalyptic world hardly seems to be a fertile setting for romance.

Living in an antiseptic culture of quick “hook-ups’ and failed relationships, you would think that people would have built up resistance to the allure of real romance. But we have not. Despite the long odds of success – or perhaps because of them – we value real love. And while we often despair of ever finding it ourselves, we still yearn for the possibility. So even in a bleak world like WALL-E’s, we hope that love can bloom.

Fortunately, love – the people at Pixar remind us – is more concerned with character than with circumstances. Properly established and nourished, love can grow anywhere. [more]

by Steve Finefrock - Hollywood Forum [scriptwriter]

Wesley’s Worms make for a test for the media, and the GOP. Wesley Clark’s yammering on “Face the Nation” that the presidential candidate without executive decision-making experience is retired Navy captain and fighter pilot John McCain is stepping in the kemshe right up to his eyebrows. He’s opening a can of worms that will metastasize in very pleasing ways – pleasing to us on the right.
 
Make that Wesley’s Wormhole, for it opens up a rift in political space that is Barack’s claim to New Politics, Virgin Political Purity and not doing things the same ole way. Despite Barack’s disownership of Clark’s bark, it raises issues worthy of examination:
 
Which Candidate Is Taller?
 
Which one belongs in the Oval? [more]

Sad News: There is an Election Coming

Normal people, those with actual lives, do not follow every poll on Real Clear Politics. If you have a good life, then it is likely that you are only vaguely aware that soon you will have to TIVO past even more political ads. You know there is an election this year, but like a trip to the dentist, you have put off the unpleasant task of deciding on a candidate. Fortunately for you, there are now only two candidates left with any chance of actually being the president.

Many (if not most) American voters only know three things about the two guys running for President:

1. Neither of them is named Clinton or Bush.

(A pause to thank God for His mercies.)

2. One is young and cool.

3. The other is old and a war hero.

Blessed is the man who does not check Rasmussen Report three times a day. If you are this person, congratulations on living a peaceful life. The genius of the republic is that it allows a man to be a patriot without being a politico. [more]

With the November election more or less around the corner, we are coming up on one of those traditions that should be stuck away in a kitchen drawer where we all keep pieces of string and out-of-date supermarket coupons.  I’m referring to those crusades staged every four years by talk show pundits and editorial writers to shame us all into voting.

They love to remind us of all the brave men who have bled and died so that we would be free to cast our ballots.  What they inevitably overlook is that millions and millions of people who never had the slightest bit of actual freedom have been free to vote.  Joseph Stalin regularly won elections with a plurality of 99.9%.  So did Saddam Hussein.  Dictators can always win elections, but sometimes they simply decide they’re not worth the bother.  The real distinction between people who are free and those who aren’t is that free men have the option of not voting. [more]

by John Mark Reynolds [author, academic]

Will we be able to sustain our population and our institutions?

We do know that the Nordic countries and other parts of Europe are engaged in a social experiment in whether marriage can fade away and culture survive. So far the experiment appears promising, but the returns are superficial. European countries have not needed to defend themselves against an aggressive adversary in decades.

The numeric tipping point (when traditional Jewish and Christian ideas were largely rejected about marriage) did not come until a few decades ago.

None of these regions have had to spend the money to defend themselves, because the United States has done it for them. Those days are coming to an end. What if Sweden faces an aggressive and nuclear Russia? What if Iceland no longer can rely on the United States to protect the sea lanes? [more]

There are, as I see it, two kinds of people.  There are those who love to travel, people who would sooner let their drivers licenses lapse than their passports, and then there’s me.

When I was younger, it was usually writing assignments that forced me to pack my suitcase.  Now, between those airport security lines that remind me of the endless serpentines at Disneyland and airplane seats that seem to have been designed for the transporting of sardines, long distance travel has lost whatever small allure it ever had.

In fact, of all the trips I have taken in my life, trips that included such destinations as Japan, Yugoslavia, Brazil and Spain, the most memorable one took place about 20 years ago.  The locale was Oxford, Nebraska.  The purpose was to meet my in-laws for the first time. [more]