Ghost Writer

Jack Cashill at The American Thinker does a literary analysis of Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father and draws two interesting conclusions: Obama didn't write it and Bill Ayers probably did. If Cashill's correct, and he seems to have done some homework, the finding is significant. First, Senator Obama's reputation for intellectual brilliance is predicated largely on the grace and style of Dreams, and, secondly, it gives the lie to the senator's claim that he didn't have a very close relationship with Ayers.

The circumstantial evidence that Cashill amasses is, by his own admission, not dispositive, but it's much more than merely suggestive. Read his case for yourself and make your own judgment.

RLC

Only Eight

How many times will we have to hear that Obama was only eight years old when Bill Ayers committed his crimes before someone asks what that has to do with anything? No one thinks that Obama participated in Ayers bombings so why does his age at the time they happened matter? Would it be exculpatory if someone friendly with German nazi war criminals during the 1960s was only eight when the crimes were committed? Would we be saying that it doesn't matter that the man associated with nazis decades later since he was only eight when the nazis were perpetrating their evil?

It's an indication of the weakness of the case that is made in Obama's defense that he and his supporters have to grasp at such an inane and irrelevant excuse.

Meanwhile, the candidate pretty much admits he's a Marxist socialist:

From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.

RLC

Prelude to <i>Without God</i>

Recently, I wrote a trio of posts titled Hurtling Toward the Cliff in response to an article by physicist Stephen Weinberg titled Without God. Over the course of the next two weeks or so I'd like to elaborate on this theme in a series of posts which will examine a number of facts about the world and human existence and consider these facts in the light of both atheism and theism. The series will borrow for its title Weinberg's Without God.

It'll be my contention in the series that theism offers a far superior account of these facts, that it makes better sense of them, than does atheism and that the theistic view of the world is therefore more intellectually satisfying and more rational than is it's opposite. Seventeen facts or phenomena about the world and human life will be considered:

1. The fact that the universe had a beginning
   
2. The fact of cosmic design
   
3. The fact of biological information
   
4. The fact of human consciousness
   
5. The joy we experience in an encounter of beauty
   
6. The fact that we believe our reason to be reliable
   
7. Our sense that we have free will
   
8. Our desire for answers to life's deepest questions
   
9. Our sense of moral obligation
   
10. Our sense of guilt
    
11. Our belief in human dignity
    
12. Our belief in human worth
    
13. Our belief that there are basic human rights
    
14. Our desire for justice
    
15. Our need for meaning and purpose
    
16. Our belief that we have an enduring self
    
17. Our desire to survive our own death
    

In what follows it will be argued that theism provides an easier, more comfortable explanation for each of the above than does atheism. When taken together they add up to a powerful case for the proposition that it's eminently reasonable to believe that a personal mind, a mind similar to that imputed to the God of Christian theism, undergirds the world.

The first installment of the argument will be posted tomorrow.

RLC

More on the Right to Health Care

A few days ago I made the comment that Senator Obama's view that people have a fundamental right to health care/insurance strikes me as ill-considered. A couple of readers thought this sounded a bit callous and uncompassionate, but I think it's Obama's view, though no doubt well intentioned, that is the less compassionate. Here are a few reasons why:

1) A right held by one person entails an obligation owed by another. By conferring a right to health care on one person we obligate everyone else, including others who may be struggling to make ends meet, to fork over even more of their income to the person with the right. In other words, we give people who may or may not be in genuine need a claim on your wallet. That may seem compassionate to the recipient, but it's decidedly uncompassionate to the person who must hand over his purse rather than be allowed to use his resources to help his own family.

2) When someone feels they have a right to receive a benefit from the state it stifles gratitude. They expect the taxpayer to pay up, indeed they come to believe they're owed the benefit and are aggrieved if the taxpayer resists. Rather than fostering gratitude for the sacrifice others make on their behalf the right cultivates instead a sense of entitlement in the recipient.

3) Since a right to health care puts the taxpayer in relation to the recipient like a debtor stands in relation to the person he owes, the taxpayer tends quite naturally to feel resentful at the transfer of his resources to people who demand that he do so. This not only serves to foster bitterness between classes but, to the extent that the classes break along racial lines, it nurtures a seething racial animosity.

4) When people feel the government owes them a benefit it stifles their initiative. People who know that others will provide for their needs are much less motivated to work to provide them for themselves. If we didn't learn anything else from Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs we should have at least learned that dependency destroys the work ethic.

5) When charity becomes a government function it harms the church. Churches which have robust charitable ministries are often strong and vibrant, but churches which have had their outreach to their communities co-opted by the state often grow flaccid, weak, and cold. Charity should be the role of the church and people should turn first to churches when they're in need of help. Churches are then in a position to help these people not only with financial assistance but also to teach them how to manage money, how to parent, and instruct them in many other of the virtues necessary to rise out of poverty. When the government takes over this role, however, recipients have no expectations placed upon them and thus often fail to rise above the station in life to which they were born.

Marvin Olasky's Tragedy of American Compassion should be required reading for anyone who thinks that government "compassion" is the only way, or even the best way, to help people.

RLC

Losing Faith

Edward Heathcote Amory of The Mail Online summarizes David Freddoso's book, The Case Against Barack Obama, and declares that it has disabused him of his infatuation with the Illinois senator. Somewhat amazingly, in light of what Amory reveals about Obama, he still hopes Obama wins. Oh well.

Read the column at the link. You'll learn some things about Obama you probably didn't know and they're not pretty.

RLC

Insane Rage

I don't know if you've been watching any of the talking-head shows lately, but there's been a lot of handwringing about how McCain and Palin are inciting mobs and stirring up hate and whatnot at their rallies. Yet, despite the terrible climate of "insane rage" that the Republicans have allegedly been fostering, no one who has made such allegations on any of these shows has been able to give a single example of anything either candidate has said that was inflammatory. In fact, as far as I'm aware, there was only one incident involving one person at one campaign event who shouted a single ugly remark, but this single episode has been amplified by the media to the point that a casual observer might think that Republican rallies are typically Nazi-like hate-fests.

Meanwhile, the media turns a completely blind eye to the "discourse" on the left which is frequently as vile and hateful, and far more common, than anything you would find coming out of a GOP rally. No Republican sounds anything remotely like Barack Obama's pastor, the racist hate-monger Jeremiah Wright. Nothing any Republican has said or done is remotely similar to the movies made about assassinating Bush or the ugly things said about Todd and Sarah Palin. The media ignores the threats, for instance, by Sandra Bernhard who describes the grisly fate that awaits Governor Palin if she shows up in Bernhard's city.

Michelle Malkin lays out many of the disgusting details of what has become an almost typically despicable discourse emanating from the American secular left.

The Democrats and their supporters in the blogosphere, of course, are trying to intimidate the Republicans into so softening their criticism of Obama that it does no damage. They want McCain to lob marshmallows at their candidate. By failing to give any balance or perspective to the reports of howling mobs of frenzied, spittle-spitting Republicans, the media is doing their part to help the cause.

The irony in this is that, if anything, McCain has been far too timid in his willingness to cast a probing eye on Obama's associations with Ayers, Rezko, Wright, Pfleger, et al. He seems willing to allow his opponents to dictate what is acceptable criticism and what isn't.

It reminds me of the time I watched a hawk swoop down and seize a chipmunk. Once the chipmunk was caught it didn't even struggle, it just acquiesced in its fate. McCain has been acting like the chipmunk caught in Obama's talons. If he's not going to fight he ought never to have run for the nomination.

RLC

Oomph

Ramirez captures the plight of the American taxpayer:

If taxpayers feel squashed by free-falling corporate CEOs just wait until Obama gets into the White House. His promise that no one making under $250,000 will see a tax increase is very hard to believe.

If the Obama plan is implemented taxes will go up on almost every business in the country which means that employees will be laid off and prices will rise. Being unemployed and having to pay more for goods is just as much a tax increase as is having to pay the tax directly to the government.

RLC

Tackling a Taboo

ESPN's Jemele Hill dares to rush in where more timorous observers fear to tread. In a column at ESPN's Page 2 she wonders about something that everyone knows, but few are willing to talk about - the dearth of white running backs in major college and pro football.

Hill considers both the possibility that the disparity between white and black at some positions is due to a kind of discrimination as well as the possibility that it's due to genetic advantage, but, though she doesn't seem persuaded of the former possibility, she seems shy about drawing the full conclusions from her speculations about the latter explanation.

The idea that white football players are excluded from playing running back (or corner back) because of discrimination is silly. If whites had the talent to play these positions they'd be in them. It seems obvious to anyone who has ever been involved in sports that the ratio of whites to blacks at positions requiring speed is due to a difference in physical endowment that is racially linked. Blacks of West African ancestry are simply better suited, by virtue of their genetic gifts, for sports that require running and jumping.

Hill's article quotes a researcher who draws the right conclusion but then moonwalks away from it by asserting that genetic endowment is not a matter of race but a matter of one's ancestral environment. For example, people who come from high altitude regions, this researcher opines, are better suited for sports involving endurance. This, however, is flummery. It's like arguing that the lack of melanin in whites is not due to their race but due to having descended from people living in northern Europe. Regardless of how a race of people came to have the genetic characteristics they do it's simply nonsense to think those traits are not linked to their race.

Indeed, we've become so fearful of talking about race in this country that we are loath, like the people called out to gaze upon the emperor's new clothes, to note obvious truths even when no one doubts them. This seems absurd, perhaps, but there's a reason for it, maybe even a good reason.

Hill doesn't push her speculations this far, but it seems likely that we shrink from talking about the physical advantages that blacks have in sports like football and basketball because there's a very distasteful inference lying just down the road. If the success of blacks in certain sports is due to physical superiority then the inability of whites to compete with them is due to physical (i.e. genetic) inferiority. If we're intrepid enough to follow this inquiry further we find ourselves forced by consistency to acknowledge that the paucity of blacks in other areas of endeavor, like the technical fields and sciences, suggests a general inability to compete intellectually that must also be genetic. If the physical inferiority of whites is genetic then there's no reason to think that intellectual inferiority is not also genetic.

This is such an unwelcome conclusion, fraught as it is with so many unpleasant sociological implications and so vulnerable to abuse, that most people think it's safer to just not bring the matter up, which is why so few people ever remark out loud on the complete absence of white running backs in the NFL.

Hill's article makes a couple of bows to political correctitude but is overall an interesting read. It's certainly unusual that someone would be willing to take on this topic. I wonder what the reaction to her article would be had it not been written by an African-American woman.

RLC

Five Million Illegal Mortgages

Here's encouraging news:

Some five million fraudulent home mortgages are in the hands of illegal aliens, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

It's not known how many of those have contributed to the subprime housing mortgage meltdown, but it has affected every state, including Arizona.

The problem began years ago when banks were forced to give mortgages without confirming social security numbers or borrower identification. As a result, illegal immigrants were able to obtain home mortgages which they could not afford.

One illegal alien was arrested this year in Tucson after allegedly using a stolen social security number to buy two homes and rack up over $780,000 in bad debt.

So, let me see if I have this right. Millions of people are losing their life savings in part because many illegal aliens, whose presence in this country, we were told, will boost our economy, were not required to have any credit standing or social security number.

Unlike the financial debacle, which can largely be laid at the feet of Democrats, the illegal alien mess is truly non-partisan. Few in Washington, including the president and both of his would-be successors, have any inclination to do much about it. Like Nero, our political leadership is content to fiddle while Rome burns.

And it is burning. Illegals are placing an enormous burden on our police, hospitals, schools and other tax-payer funded facilities, especially in the southwest. Illegals kill thousands of Americans every year either by murder or by automobile accidents. Now it seems they're also partly responsible for the mortgage mess for which the tax-payers also have to pay.

No presidential candidate who shrugs his shoulders when confronted by this onslaught deserves to president. Unfortunately, one of them will be. At least McCain is willing to build the fence along the border. Obama isn't even interested in doing that.

RLC

Idiots?

A while ago we noted that Democrats were dependent upon the least educated members of our society for their electoral success and thus shouldn't asperse the intelligence of Republicans. We received a bit of criticism after this post for suggesting that idealistic young community organizers would be so cynical as to deliberately seek to exploit the poor and uneducated for political purposes. Well, read this:

In a confidential internal memorandum obtained by Face The State, the Colorado Democracy Alliance outlines a roster of "operatives" who worked for Democratic victory in the 2006 general election. The document outlines specific tasks for various members of the state's liberal infrastructure, including a campaign to "educate the idiots," assigned to the state's AFL-CIO union. Among the operation's intended targets: "minorities, GED's, drop-outs."

Individuals named in the document, marked "CONFIDENTIAL," "for internal use only," and "DO NOT DISTRIBUTE," are high-level elected Democrats including House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, former Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald, as well as Gov. Bill Ritter's press aide and former campaign chief Evan Dreyer. All are specially marked as "off-the-record or covert."

It's interesting that these "progressives" regard their electoral base as "idiots". That's the same language that Lenin used to describe the people who swallowed communist propaganda and wrote favorably of the communist revolution in newspapers and magazines. Lenin reportedly referred to them as "useful idiots".

Read the whole report and you find nuggets like this which indicate that the agenda of the Colorado Democracy Alliance is not dissimilar from Lenin's:

Laurie Hirschfeld Zeller, the newly installed executive director of CoDA, explains her organization's mission. "Our job is to build a long-term progressive infrastructure in Colorado while we're conceding nothing in the short term in terms of progressive goals at the ballot box."

The Bell Policy Center, a liberal think tank involved with CoDA, was praised for its work fighting to dismantle Colorado's Taxpayer's Bill of Rights. She characterized Colorado's constitutional requirement for voter approval of tax increases as "arcane."

In the opinion of this left-wing progressive woman it's "arcane" to allow taxpayers to decide through the ballot whether they will be taxed and by how much. In other words, for her and others who share her ideological outlook representative, democratic government and political freedom is outdated and obsolete.

Liberals and Progressives, like the old Soviets, use words like "democracy" as code. What they mean by it is what the rest of us mean by "tyranny".

RLC

How to Steal an Election

CNN's Drew Griffin is doing some of the best investigative journalism of this election cycle. He's looked into the allegations of voter registration fraud against ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and shares his findings with Campbell Brown:

The "good" news is that ACORN is active in all of the battleground states. Good luck Senator McCain.

RLC

Klunky Comparison

Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC were gleeful the other evening over a video (see below) which shows an Obama spokesperson named Robert Gibbs making an inept comparison between Obama's association with uncontrite terrorist Bill Ayers and Hannity's association with some unsavory guests on his show.

Apparently, Olbermann and Maddow think that somehow Gibbs' attempt to show that Hannity's asociation with his guests is no different than Obama's association with Ayers is successful, but it seems to me that a child could distinguish between the cases. Obama was allegedly friends, or at least friendly, with Ayers, they were exchanging e-mails and phone calls up to 2005. They are ideologically sympatico. Hannity is not connected to his more odious guests in any way except as an interviewer. How the two cases could justify the sort of snide contempt at which Olbermann is so adept is beyond me.

Take a look for yourself (first four minutes):

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Lieberman Dishes and Disses

Every conservative's favorite liberal senator, Joe Lieberman, has some thoughts on Barack Obama, the Democratic party, and his future in it:

Sen. Barack Obama's "na�ve" world view could embolden America's enemies during one of the most dangerous periods for America since the 1930s, U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman told Newsmax in an exclusive television sit-down interview Tuesday.

Lieberman, visiting Fort Lauderdale, Fla., also told Newsmax that he is so disappointed with the Democratic Party, he will consider whether to bolt the Democratic Senate caucus next session.

"I believe he's na�ve to think that people like [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad and Tehran will somehow become America's friends by talking to them - a warm embrace and a cup of tea. It's not going to work that way," said Lieberman.

In a wide-ranging interview, Lieberman also said:

� It's important for the political process to question Obama's ties to former Weather Underground bomber Bill Ayers: "I think these are very fair questions and it's now up to Senator Obama to answer them."

� Barack Obama is clearly 'not ready' yet to be commander in chief, and the country's adversaries, including Iran "will not fear him" if he were to become president.

� McCain should tout his economic plan that will emphasize tax cuts and job creation - exactly what a troubled economy needs. He said it would be foolhardy to raise taxes in a recession, as Obama has promised.

� The Republicans must emphasize that his plan for energy independence will create "hundreds of thousands, I think millions of new jobs."

"The Democratic Party of today is not the Democratic Party that I joined in the '60s under my hero President Kennedy, and it's not the Democratic Party of my dear friend Bill Clinton," Lieberman said.

You can read the whole thing at the link.

RLC

Day Labor

It might soon come to this:

RLC

The One

Alpha and Omega? Are these young men in their camouflage pants and military style drill arrogating to Obama the title by which God describes himself in Revelation 21:6?

Fascism often begins with paramilitary groups indoctrinating their members in a cult of personality. But fascism is not just paramilitaries investing a leader with a reverence usually reserved for the deity. It also involves propagandizing the young to regard the leader as a savior, the repository of all their hopes for a grand future. Watch this:

We are actually witnessing in the parents of these children an apotheosis, the promotion of a man with no record of achievement to Mt. Olympus. Maybe Obama himself is embarrassed by all this, maybe not, but it certainly says something important about many of the leftists who support him. Like the ancient Roman emperors, Obama has become more than a cult figure to them, even more than a savior. In the minds of the people who choreograph these performances he's sung and talked about in the same tones employed by religious people to sing and talk about God. It'd be funny if it weren't so serious. As it is it's truly scary.

Do rank and file Democrats not feel uneasy about this?

RLC

A Right to Health Care

In Tuesday night's debate Barack Obama surprised many viewers who had not yet fallen asleep by declaring that Americans have a right to health care. I wonder what he meant by that. Surely it's not a constitutional right, since nowhere in that document can we find such a right enumerated (of course, neither is it stated in the constitution that a woman has a right to kill her unborn child, but that omission doesn't mean much to liberals who reason that since it should be there we can safely act as if it is there).

Maybe Senator Obama meant that health care, or health insurance, is a human right, but, if so, where does he get that idea? It can only be a right of any kind if the rest of us are somehow obligated to provide it, but what could possibly obligate you to pay for my health insurance? Perhaps Obama derives the obligation from his Christian faith, but if so he's importing into the public square religious reasons for public policy, and that's illegitimate, as we've all come to learn from the good people at the ACLU.

Moreover, why would there be a human right to health insurance or care but not, say, to food or transportation or shelter? These are more basic needs than health insurance which many people can do without for years. Once we agree with Senator Obama that each of us has a right to be insured do we not also have to agree that the government, i.e. you and I, has a deeper obligation to provide everyone with a house, a car, and a full refrigerator?

Senator Obama has inadvertantly given us an object lesson in the injustice inherent in liberalism. Liberals, in order to win votes, persuade the masses that they will open up to them the public purse. This sort of demagoguery appeals to the great bulk of the population, but it's totally irresponsible and only encourages the masses to believe that they must also have a right to every other amenity in life. Of course, liberals encourage this thinking and believe it a grand act of compassion to take from those who work and give it to those who don't, or can't.

No one has a problem with helping those who are physically or mentally unable to help themselves, but the idea of helping those who choose not to help themselves, who make consistently bad choices in life and then expect the taxpayer to shield them from the consequences of those choices, rankles. The liberal solution, Obama's solution, is to tell us that the people who have worked hard and played by the rules have an obligation to support those who don't. A lot of folks see this as grossly unjust.

RLC

Civic Duty

Say Anything blog has an interesting statistic that reflects well on the civic virtue of the good people of Indianapolis. It turns out that 105% of eligible persons in that patriotic town and the surrounding county are actually registered to vote. The region has 644,197 people and 677,401 of them are registered to exercise the franchise in November. This is a very impressive feat.

We're sure it's a mere coincidence that the group ACORN, which is currently being investigated all across the country for voter fraud, has an office in Indianapolis, and that the Obama campaign's contribution of $800,000 to ACORN to help them get out the vote is an innocent misjudgment. Just saying.

RLC

No Life for Young Men

Back during the heyday of the debate over capital punishment opponents of the practice argued strenuously that offenders should be given life in prison without parole rather than be put to death. Advocates of the death penalty, on the other hand, argued just as fervently that once we end executions of murderers in favor of life in prison the "reformers" will next argue for imposing less draconian sentences so that ultimately no one will even get life in prison.

Jeff Hawkes, staff writer for the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal offers an excellent illustration of how the debate over how to punish killers will evolve. He argues that juvenile murderers should not be sentenced to life in prison, but all of his reasons apply just as much to killers as old as thirty five. Hawkes writes that:

Pennsylvania has 444 juvenile lifers, according to a May report by Human Rights Watch. That's not only more - far more - than any other state, it represents nearly one-fifth of all juvenile lifers in the United States.

Considering that no other country sentences children to life without the chance for parole, Pennsylvania's Senate Judiciary Committee is appropriately taking a second look at whether life without parole for juveniles is just.

Family members of murder victims implored the senators at a hearing last week to keep teenage killers locked up forever. But juvenile law advocates and researchers argued that the right thing to do is give an adult who committed a horrible crime as a teenager a chance to show he or she is no longer a danger.

Hawkes thinks that as long as a killer is no longer a danger to others he should be let loose, but if we accept this logic why impose a sentence at all? As soon the inmate convinces a panel of "experts" that he's rehabilitated why not release him forthwith? Indeed, those who have killed others in crimes of passion or revenge are probably not a threat to the general population in the first place so why incarcerate them at all?

He goes on to write that:

Beatriz Luna, associate professor of psychiatry at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said research suggests that teens should not be held as accountable as adults for their actions because the juvenile brain, particularly the region for impulse control, is not fully developed.

Research further suggests, Luna said, that the brains of people in their 20s and 30s continue to develop new pathways, indicating "great possibility for rehabilitation."

"...the fact is the adolescent brain is at the peak of risk-taking behavior, and it can be rehabilitated. My opinion as a scientist and as a member of society is that life without parole is quite uninformed (and) seems vindictive."

Well, if this is a rationale for not imposing a life sentence on juveniles then it's equally a rationale for not imposing a life sentence on anyone under thirty-five. Is that where Hawkes is headed with his argument?

Laurence Steinberg, professor of psychology at Temple University and co-author of "Rethinking Juvenile Justice," said brain processes responding to pleasure and reward are especially active in early adolescence, explaining why teens see the rewards of risky behavior and ignore the costs.

"The engines are running at full throttle," Steinberg said, "but there's not a skilled driver behind the wheel yet."

Hawkes concludes that "science and compassion are on the side of giving a lifer hope of showing a parole board he's not who he was at 13".

Of course the killer's not who he was when he was thirteen. No one is. No one at thirty is who they were when they were twenty. Everybody changes. Hawkes' argument is really a brief for doing away with life sentences altogether. First we stop executions, then we end life terms. What's next on this particular slippery slope? Doing away with prison?

RLC

ZZZZZZZZ

In what was otherwise a snoozer of a debate last night the most startling revelation to emerge was Senator Obama's statement that he would go to war with Iran to keep them from obtaining a nuclear weapon. He didn't say it exactly like that, but that was the clear implication of his assertion that we cannot let Iran have nuclear weapons and that, though we should try sanctions, etc., etc., he would not take the use of military force off the table.

Add this to his stated policy of surging troops in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban/al Qaeda who threaten to undo all that has been accomplished there, and his claim that we should invade Pakistan to get bin Laden, and those who saw Obama has the great anti-war hope must be seething with disappointment and frustration. Obama presented himself early on in the primaries as an anti-war progressive and garnered a lot of support from the constituency to which that position appeals. Now he turns out to be something quite other than what he originally appeared. In fact, with his threat to attack Iran, he seems to be a proponent of the "Bush doctrine" of striking an enemy who is preparing to strike us.

I have a word of encouragement, though, for those who may be feeling betrayed by Obama's willingness to bomb a nation that has not attacked us: Don't worry. I doubt very much if the senator really means what he's saying. He may think he does, but I believe the real Obama is the Obama of the early primaries, not the Obama of the campaign's homestretch.

As for the rest of the debate, the candidates were simply treading water. No one did badly, but not doing badly does not help McCain. McCain simply lacks the instincts necessary to wage a come from behind race. To be sure, he was hindered by the blandness of the questions selected by the moderator, Tom Brokaw who apparently turned aside any questions about illegal immigration, abortion, Obama's unsavory associations, or judicial appointments.

Even so, McCain needs to show the country what Barack Obama and the Democratic party will do to the nation should they get the power, and he doesn't seem to have the stomach for that. He didn't seem interested, for example, in explaining to viewers that the worst financial crisis this nation has experienced since the depression of the 1930s is due almost entirely to Democrat malfeasance. Maybe he should have Sarah Palin pinch hit for him at the last debate as a sort of designated debater. At least she won't go gently into that dark night of political defeat and oblivion.

RLC

SNL

Saturday Night Live did a funny skit on the financial crisis which pretty much puts the blame on everyone, but especially congressional Democrats, bad credit risks, greedy yuppies and liberal moneybags. The skit was pulled from the SNL website, evidently because of pressure from somewhere, but it was caught by patdollard and can be viewed there. It's pretty good.

RLC