Barry, if you are right about this it is very bad news for McCain.

By October, I don’t think Iraq will be the talk of the town (an unbelievable success will be virtually ignored so we can “move on”). The economy will be the issue. Neither candidate has a good foothold on that yet, but it will be the economy and not foreign policy.

I find it just plain weird that of all the places on the planet, Obama would choose that location to have his European coming-out party right after visiting Israel. Nothing is accidental in the world of pre-planning visual images for a presidential campaign. From the Wall in Jerusalem to Berlin with a quarter-million Germans cheering him on? Sorry, but that creeps me out. ~

I couldn’t agree more. Not only that, he’s up there talking about people of destiny and remaking the world.

And this is the man who wants to set up a civilian national security force as powerful as the military. That is what he said, isn’t it? Good grief – the only thing missing is Leni Riefenstahl

In any case, his handlers (and the adoringly attendant American press corps) either think about these things, or they don’t, and either way it gives me the creeps.

I watched Lehrer and he pulls out Brooks and Shields as the political commentators. First things first, NewsHour is a liberal crew. Lehrer puts on who he is comfortable with and he likes Shields, a mouthpiece for the Dems, who makes Jim laugh with all these stories about who he talked to “on the Hill” and he said “this and that.” One ex Marine loves another ex Marine. Shields does not move off his backside for a story. He calls himself a columnist but his writing (if you can find it – it sure does not appear in the DC newspapers) is silly, unreadable and porous. So he does the talk show business on Lehrer and Washington Week in Review, a local political commentary program watched by maybe fifty people. So this is where his bread is buttered. His wife is a former office holder with the Clintons. So need I go on. Suffice to say, he is a bought man. For liberal balance, Lehrer should go with Tom Oliphant of Globe; smart and poised and fair, not the Dems “made man” like Shields.

Brooks is a treacherous conservative who came out early (when the war went bad) against the president and has remained so. He is a token conservative at the Times along with Bill Kristol who has the guts and moxie and intellectual credentials to remain a voice of reasoned conservatism. But not so with Brooks, he is a “mamby pamby” conservative who has a good money gig on Lehrer and demonstrates his lack of toughness when he allows Shields to spout off incessantly with his silly DNC attacks. Brooks has no cojones.

I think David Brooks is getting pretty tired of Obama, he also said this about Obama:

The Berlin blockade was thwarted because people came together. Apartheid ended because people came together and walls tumbled. Winning the cold war was the same: “People of the world,” Obama declared, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together and history proved there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”

When I first heard this sort of radically optimistic speech in Iowa, I have to confess my American soul was stirred. It seemed like the overture for a new yet quintessentially American campaign.

But now it is more than half a year on, and the post-partisanship of Iowa has given way to the post-nationalism of Berlin, and it turns out that the vague overture is the entire symphony. The golden rhetoric impresses less, the evasion of hard choices strikes one more.

When John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan went to Berlin, their rhetoric soared, but their optimism was grounded in the reality of politics, conflict and hard choices. Kennedy didn’t dream of the universal brotherhood of man. He drew lines that reflected hard realities: “There are some who say, in Europe and elsewhere, we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin.” Reagan didn’t call for a kumbaya moment. He cited tough policies that sparked harsh political disagreements — the deployment of U.S. missiles in response to the Soviet SS-20s — but still worked.

In Berlin, Obama made exactly one point with which it was possible to disagree. In the best paragraph of the speech, Obama called on Germans to send more troops to Afghanistan.

The argument will probably fall on deaf ears. The vast majority of Germans oppose that policy. But at least Obama made an argument.

In the Summer of 2004, John Kerry was the odds on favorite to defeat Bush. The political savants wrote off the dumb guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. At the end of July, the Swift boats hit and Kerry started to slide.

Three months is a long time in a presidential election. I listened
to David Brooks on Lehrer tonight defend the press coverage as “well, because I am a member of the press,” and then go off to talk about
how the press are better educated people from Washington, New York and LA.

The American people are listening to this Times-ian self promotion and conceit and they tie it to the uncritical Obama coverage and they don’t just accept the press opinion anymore. That may be one reason McCain is still within a whisker of Obama in the polls.

The MSM wouldn’t report it if McCain suddenly sprouted wings and a halo. (It would be their job to photoshop them onto Barry).

The only hope I see is if Obama really hoses up any debates. My guess is his handlers will try to heavily script them (teleprompters anyone? scripted questions from the “audience”), or somehow manage to avoid them altogether. They know Barry can’t handle even simple questions regarding US history let alone anything else.

Yes, I did notice that dear Barry went to greet his fevered throngs in Germany after pandering…uh…visiting Israel.

Perhaps he is planning on being elected Chancellor?