Bad Moon Rising

Who knows if this cri de coeur is genuine, but whether it really comes from inside the Obama campaign or not, the analysis is interesting. If it was, in fact, written by an Obama staffer, as it purports to be, then it's fascinating and highly significant. Here are the opening paragraphs:

After a long and careful consideration of all the implications and possible consequences of my actions today, I have decided to go through with this in the hope that our country can indeed be guided into the right direction. First, a little personal background... I am a female grad student in my 20's, and a registered Democrat. During the primaries, I was a campaign worker for the Clinton candidacy. I believed in her and still do, staying all the way to the bitter end. And believe me, it was bitter. The snippets you've heard from various media outlets only grazed the surface. There was no love between the Clinton and Obama campaigns, and these feelings extended all the way to the top. Hillary was no dope though, and knew that any endorsement of Obama must appear to be a full-fledged one. She did this out of political survival. As a part of his overall effort to extend an olive branch to the Clinton camp and her supporters, Obama took on a few Hillary staff members into his campaign. I was one such worker. Though I was still bitterly loyal to Hillary, I still held out hope that he would choose her as VP. In fact, there was a consensus among us transplants that in the end, he HAD to choose her. It was the only logical choice. I also was committed to the Democratic cause and without much of a second thought, transferred my allegiance to Senator Obama.

I'm going to let you in on a few secrets here, and this is not because I enjoy the gossip or the attention directed my way. I'm doing this because I doubt [many] of you know the true weaknesses of Obama. Another reason for my doing this is that I [have] lost faith in this campaign, and feel that this choice has been forced on many people in this country. Put simply, you are being manipulated. That was and is our job - to manipulate you (the electorate) and the media (we already had them months ago). Our goal is to create chaos with the other side, not hope. I've come to the realization (as the campaign already has) that if this comes to the issues, Barack Obama doesn't have a chance. His only chance is to foster disorganization, chaos, despair, and a sense of inevitability among the Republicans. It has worked up until now. Joe the Plumber has put the focus on the issues again, and this scares us more than anything. Being in a position to know these things, I will rate what the Obama campaign already knows are their weak links from the most important on down.

The post gets more interesting as it goes on so read it all at the link. There's a similar report making the rounds from another anonymous Democrat who looks at the situation in Pennsylvania and draws a gloomy conclusion. That report can be found at American Thinker. Unfortunately, there's an accompanying video that shows McCain supporters responding in very unflattering fashion to the provocations of some Obama demonstrators. One wishes that voters on both sides would comport themselves with a little more dignity and class.

RLC

Invasion of Privacy

As soon as private citizen Joe Wurzelbacher posed a question to Barack Obama that caused Obama to say something impolitic, Wurzelbacher became the object of a state intrusion into his private records by Ohio government employees who also happen to be Obama backers. The invasion of his privacy was okayed by the director of Ohio's Job and Family Services Division, Helen Jones-Kelley, a donor to the Obama campaign, and whose underlings rummaged through files trying to discover whether Joe the Plumber could be found to have been cheating on taxes, child support or welfare payments.

The fruits of their searches were then turned over to the media so that Joe could be properly humiliated before the entire nation, all because he had the audacity to ask a question that Obama handled poorly.

It's frightening that public employees have no reservation about using their access to personal records for partisan purposes and will reveal confidential information about private citizens if it's politically useful to do so. This is an abuse of power, and it makes us wonder what such people will do when they have the IRS, the attorney general and the secret service at their disposal.

Michelle Malkin has details on this travesty and the media indifference to it in her syndicated column which can be read here.

RLC

It's Possible

John Podhoretz at Commentary elaborates on ten reason why McCain might win on Tuesday. He's not saying he will win, only that an Obama victory is by no means a certainty. Here are reasons 8 through 10:

8) What happened with the Joe the Plumber story is that Obama has now been effectively outed as a liberal, not a moderate; and because liberalism is still less popular than conservatism, that's not the best place for Obama to be.

9) The fire lit under Obama's young supporters in the winter was largely due to Iraq and his opposition to the war. The stunning decline in violence and the departure of Iraq from the front page has put out the fire, to the extent that, like the young woman who made a sexy video calling herself Obama Girl and then didn't vote in the New York primary because she went to get a manicure, they might not want to stand on line on Tuesday.

10) Hispanic voters, who are always underpolled, know and appreciate McCain from his stance on immigration and will vote for him in larger numbers than anyone anticipates.

Podhoretz's first six reasons can be read at the link. It may be grasping at straws, but Obama does appear worried, the polls are tightening, and Pennsylvania seems to be in play. If strongly blue Pennsylvania is close then red states that earlier appeared to be tilting toward Obama will probably remain Republican. If so, McCain could pull it out on Tuesday.

Poor Erica Jong.

RLC

Erica <i>Agonistes</i>

The self important never seem to realize that they're a walking parody of themselves. Here, for example, are excerpts from an interview given by Erica Jong to an Italian newspaper describing her angst over the possibility that "The Messiah" (Louis Farrakhan's description) might lose next Tuesday:

"The record shows that voting machines in America are rigged."

"My friends Ken Follett and Susan Cheever are extremely worried. Naomi Wolf calls me every day. Yesterday, Jane Fonda sent me an email to tell me that she cried all night and can't cure her ailing back for all the stress that has reduces her to a bundle of nerves."

"My back is also suffering from spasms, so much so that I had to see an acupuncturist and get prescriptions for Valium."

"After having stolen the last two elections, the Republican Mafia..."

"If Obama loses it will spark the second American Civil War. Blood will run in the streets, believe me. And it's not a coincidence that President Bush recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American citizens in the streets."

"Bush has transformed America into a police state, from torture to the imprisonment of reporters, to the Patriot Act."

Like someone hallucinating from a terrible fever, Ms Jong's agonies appear to have placed such stress on her cognitive faculties that she's seeing bogeymen everywhere.

The Bush/Cheney paranoia is par for the left, but I'm always amazed that "liberals" have so little compunction about insulting and demeaning an entire racial group and that the media lets them get away with it. What does it say, after all, about Ms Jong's assumptions about blacks that she speaks with such apodictic certainty of a resort to violence if Obama loses? Apparently Ms Jong believes, as does a sizable portion of the American left, that not only should we expect such behavior from African Americans but that we cannot expect better from them.

Such thoughts as these, if spoken by, say, Rush Limbaugh, would be trumpeted all across the country as proof of the insidious racism of the right, but when a member of the liberal literati delivers herself of such sentiments, her ideological confreres simply nod in solemn agreement. Even more amazing is the fact that black spokespersons, many of whom are hyper-quick to discern even the most minute racial slight or slander, don't seem to be insulted by such remarks. Very curious.

RLC