Associations Matter

A lot of Obama supporters were outraged that their man was asked in his last debate with Hillary Clintion about his associations with terrorist William Ayers and anti-American preacher Jeremiah Wright. Complaints in the MSM and blogosphere were loud and numerous that the debates should be about issues and that the matters dwelt upon by ABC's debate moderators are just distractions.

I don't think so. Debates, to the extent they're useful, which isn't often, should only be about issues if there's a clear difference between the candidates' positions. In the case of Senators Clinton and Obama there's not a sliver of ideological daylight between them, and, besides, whatever differences may exist won't matter anyway when the winner moves into the White House. Very few presidents do what they said they would do during those debates, George Bush being an exception.

The purpose of a debate in a campaign such as we have today between the two Democrats aspiring to the presidency should be to show the party faithful something of the character of the candidates and which of the two is most electable. In that case questions about Obama's friendship with Ayers and Wright are very relevant.

After all, if it transpired that John McCain was found to have been friendly with an abortion clinic bomber and that he had had as his pastor for twenty years a man who consorted with known anti-semites, despised his country and held bigoted views toward blacks, I doubt that Obama supporters would think those associations to be mere distractions.

RLC

Oil Change

Here's an article that will interest everyone who owns a car. Car owners often hear conflicting advice as to how often one should change the oil in their automobiles. This piece explains why the old standard of every 3000 miles is no longer applicable:

For years the accepted oil change interval (as per the carmakers) has been every 3 months or 3 thousand miles, whichever comes first. Why? Because the oils of yesterday degraded and broke down when left in the crankcase environment for longer than the prescribed interval. The combination of heat, friction, and the oil oxidizing over time resulted in an unholy clothing of the engine's internal parts called sludge.

As an automotive machinist for a good part of my career, I can tell you that sludge is an engine killer. Sludge takes a greasy, cake-like oily form and plugs oil return passages and acts like a sponge and soaks up good oil to grow its grotesque form starving the engine of vital lubricants.

Once established, engine heat crystallizes it to a hardened rock of ughhhhhh, I have spent many an hour scraping and yes, sometimes chiseling established sludge from the inside of an engine before performing a machining operation on it! As the machinist prepares to perform a machine operation on a cylinder head, crankshaft, engine block or the likes he/she must clean their work meticulously before performing the prescribed operation. If the sludge is not cleaned properly, the result will be a failed engine.

Why this lesson about sludge? Because without clean good quality oil in your car's engine, it will develop sludge and cause premature engine failure.

Go to the link for the author's recommendation and his rationale for it.

RLC

Liberal White Men

I need to visit the Huffington Post more often; there's some remarkable stuff there. Take Sunday's piece by novelist Nora Ephron, for example. What she reveals about the seamy truth of her party is just scandalous. She writes:

This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don't mean people, I mean white men. How ironic is this?

Here's how ironic it is. The men she's talking about, the "white men" who'll be voting against either the woman or the black man in today's primary in Pennsylvania, are all Democrats. Liberal Democrats, for the most part. Ephron is revealing what she believes to be an ugly truth about white male liberals: They're racist, misogynist bigots.

According to Ms Ephron Democrat males who vote for Hillary are not doing so because they like her but rather because they hate blacks and those who vote for Obama are not doing so because they like him but because they hate women. This is a quite astonishing admission. The assumed repository of tolerance and righteousness in our polity, the Democratic party, is thoroughly infected with the bacillus of race hatred and sexism. Who'd have thought it?

She goes on:

To put it bluntly, the next president will be elected by them: the outcome of Tuesday's primary will depend on whether they go for Hillary or Obama, and the outcome of the general election will depend on whether enough of them vote for McCain. A lot of them will: white men cannot be relied on, as all of us know who have spent a lifetime dating them.

White men cannot be relied upon? I think you can pretty much rely upon conservative white men to vote for the most conservative candidate. Ms Ephron evidently means that liberal white men, as every woman knows, cannot be relied upon. Fascinating.

And McCain is a compelling candidate, particularly because of the Torture Thing. As for the Democratic hope that McCain's temper will be a problem, don't bet on it. A lot of white men have terrible tempers, and what's more, they think it's normal.

I wonder if a post that said similar things about blacks or women would be allowed at HuffPo. Perhaps the sacred categories of racism and sexism don't pertain when the object of ridicule and insult is white men. It is quite acceptable to smear them as much as one cares to. In the liberal universe racism and sexism are crimes of which only white men can be guilty so Ms Ephron is immunized against the charge that her post is perhaps one of the most bigoted pieces of writing ever to appear in the mainstream blogosphere.

Hillary's case is not an attractive one, because what she'll essentially be saying (and has been saying, although very carefully) is that she can attract more racist white male voters than Obama can.

Yes, and this is in the Democratic party, too. Who would have guessed that a Democrat of Ms Ephron's stature would so blatantly acknowledge that her party is chock-full of bigoted cretins? Next time a male of your acquaintance identifies himself as a Democrat ask him why he's such a racist pig.

RLC