McCain Becomes Border Hawk as Hayworth Closes In

In writing any article on John McCain it is almost obligatory to mention his war record as one of the most prominent members of the “Hanoi Hilton” club. He deserves every American’s respect if not reverence his for heroism.

But that does not make him a conservative.

John McCain has found himself in a fix in his contest with Arizona conservative J.D Hayworth. How does a four-term Republican U.S. Senator with an abysmally liberal domestic record redefine himself to voters as a Reagan conservative? He came to Congress in 1982 as just that, but by the end of the Reagan years he was already moving left on his domestic record.

These days McCain is out busily rewriting his political history on the “I am not a maverick, I’ve never been a maverick, I don’t even know a maverick” Campaign Express.

But how does he un-write McCain-Feingold, the very bill that enabled Barack Obama to out fundraise him according to some estimates by 8 to 1 in the 2008 presidential contest? Mark Levin calls McCain’s eponymous campaign finance bill “the most brazen frontal assault on political speech since Buckley v. Valeo.”

Let’s look at a couple of things you may not know about John McCain:

Indian Gaming: McCain, a lifelong gambler, is largely responsible for the creation and expansion of the $26 billion-a-year Indian gaming industry. He has had questionable ties to the lobbyists and the tribes they represent. The argument here is that gaming brings revenue to poor Indian tribes. Take a look around a few reservations sometime and see if it’s worked.

He has joined with the ACLU to grant due process to terrorist combatants.
He has used his Vietnamese nightmare to put the kibosh on waterboarding, a method far removed from the daily torture he received from the North Vietnamese.

Along with a lot of other Republicans, John McCain became Washingtonized years ago.  Next Exhibit: Cap-and-Trade: Let’s get this straight: cap-and-trade – any cap-and-trade policy – is a whacko “greenie” idea meant to regulate every drop of oil you buy or consume, and how you use it. Sound conservative to you?

Recently McCain has taken to attacking Hayworth for his “connections” to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Let me say this: If J.D. Hayworth has ever been criminally connected to Abramoff, then John McCain should be in federal prison for his ties to Charles Keating. The truth is that neither Hayworth nor McCain were criminally involved with either man.

And now suddenly John McCain is a border hawk. He is calling for the troops on the border that he decried for so many years, and he is even turning his head to the occasional racial profiling that may result, because illegal traffic is “becoming” increasingly dangerous.

Is this the same John McCain who co-drafted McCain-Kennedy, the broadest pro illegal immigration amnesty bill in history? Suddenly – presto-chango – dangerous criminals are crossing our borders? Where has he been for the last twenty years? Well, in Washington, that’s where.

Naw, this couldn’t be because McCain is in the fight for his political life and Hayworth is closing in on him.

Yes, Senator, we should have troops on the U.S. border with Mexico and this time they should actually carry loaded weapons like real soldiers.

John McCain is a wealthy man and there are many ways in which he can serve his nation, but, frankly, he would be more help to conservatives if he only signed on as a tour guide at the Vietnam Memorial.

Obama’s Crises Oriented Agenda and 2012

In the final year of the Bush 43 presidency the President worst nightmare came true when the “perfect storm” of the financial kind blew into Washington. It began with the housing market correction in December 2007 followed by the subprime mortgage crisis and soaring oil prices.

You policy wonks out there will find me sorely lacking if your expecting a blow-by-blow on just where W made his mistakes and to what degree the Senate and Housing Banking committees’ actions played in this disastrous turn of events. I know what I like and that’s about it. Suffice to say there was plenty of fault to go around.

What I do know is that the mega crisis set the stage for the subsequent epic that followed and is playing out before our eyes today.

You have no doubt heard Glenn Beck speaking – sometimes ranting – about the “paradigm shift” that the nation is currently undergoing, and all of that is certainly true. But what we are seeing with the Obama administration is the result of that shift, which actually began in the 1950s and resulted in the New Left revolution of the sixties.

Obama is probably more anonymous heir-apparent (the child who steps out of the woodwork at the last moment to claim the will) than anything else to a government that has been pathologically dysfunctional for decades. The same scenario played out in a Hillary Clinton presidency would have likely ended with similar results, although it can be argued that Hillary has a certain Machiavellian flare lacking in the Alinskyite from Chicago.

Be that as it may, accurate or not, the age of crises-oriented government is upon us, and it began with a Republican president, much as what I believe was the less significant crisis that we now know as the Great Depression began 80-plus years ago. Bush handed them the sword and they have used it with relish, to paraphrase Richard Nixon.

Now 2.6 million jobs later and not yet even in the eye of this Perfect Storm we are seeing the end result of a nation driven by the impulse shoppers in Washington for nearly a century.

And now they have their Messiah, Barack Obama. The housing-subprime crisis couldn’t have been timelier if he himself had created it for the first year of his presidency. Now “crisis” is the keynote of virtually every speech he makes, and will be until, hopefully, he is defeated in November 2012.

The one crisis, however, that he cannot “fix” is the unemployment crisis, not that he would if he could. It suits his short-term purposes like a glove. Number 1 chink in Obamanomics. If he can ease it by two points by the end of 2011 he indeed stands a good chance of being reelected but he must do it.

Still at the forefront of The President’s crisis agenda is Energy – read climate crisis – which of course necessitates the creation of hundred of thousands of “green jobs” for which the technology much less the need do not exist. Then sandwich in a broad-sweeping Amnesty plan. There will be assaults on gun rights and myriad other basic freedoms, all cloaked in the crises scenario Obama has embraced.

The Tea Party movement is Obama’s current cause extraordinaire, which at its base is Freedom of Speech repackaged and filtered out by the likes of Bill Clinton, CBS anchor Harry Smith and other prominent lefties. The result of course is a mess that cannot be cleaned up in the most perfect of all Obama’s outcomes.

There is, however, cause for hope. Barack Obama, with all of his flare and type-A aggressiveness, has an Achilles heel.

He is unbelievably arrogant, and that, accompanied with a big mouth can defeat him in 2010 and beyond.

More Americans would buy the guy hook, line, and sinker were in not for these two character defects. This country – even left-leaning so-called moderate Democrats – hate a know-it-all. And Barack is the mother of all know-it-alls.

The GOP in my estimation is not ready to lead the country out of this mess but they are none-the-less our only hope if we are to bring the government back to sanity in the next three years. The problem right now as I see it is twofold and one much more serious than the other. First we must destroy the Democrat New Left, beginning in November and continuing into the 2012 cycle.

Secondly, we must fix what ails the Republican Party. If we do not craft and execute a cogent plan over the next few months we may well see a truly disastrous second Obama term in 2012.

And that will be a crisis of our own making.

SHARPTON – STEELE SHAKE A TAIL FEATHER

Just when we thought Michael Steele had stooped as low as a Republican can go by cleverly but shamefully pulling the race card after the Voyeur Bar scandal, he stoops even lower, by joining Al Sharpton to take his show on the road. Now we learn that he may have made an RNC contribution to Sharpton’s National Action Network.

Al Sharpton, whom sociologist Orlando Patterson has called a racist and arsonist, preached his first sermon at age 4 and has been scamming the public ever since. His shameless, inflammatory promotion of Tawana Brawley’s rape allegations against Dutchess County New York D.A. Steven Pagones, demolished the prosecutor’s career before it was established that Brawley had perpetrated a hoax.

Sharpton has been extorting business owners and corporations A for years by threatening protests and boycotts while simultaneously soliciting donations and sponsorships from them. The idea that any Republican leader would legitimize this demagogue is beyond understanding.

What happened to the Michael Steele who so proudly wore his ethnicity as a badge of honor against the lies of the Left that the Republican Party is an exclusive white boy’s club?

Where is the commonality between Al Sharpton, a man who makes his living by inflaming racial unrest and has enriched himself by cheap, underhanded chicanery, and Steele, a man of integrity and principal?

Their color? Surely that is the only thing in the world this decent but misguided man has in common with the likes of Al Sharpton. It has to be that or Michael Steele is simply not the man we thought we knew.

Recent charges are disturbing enough. But with the country’s future at stake, Steele has stepped too far over the line to come back.

In the words of Armstrong Williams:

With unemployment at Depression-era highs and public angst brewing over President Obama’s disastrous health reform, indeed the time is ripe for the Republican Party to step up its fundraising efforts and move to crush its opponents this November. Yet instead of capitalizing on this rising tide of discontent, the GOP finds itself mired in controversy about lavish spending on everything from limos to private aircraft. Why would a donor—any donor—entrust his/her funds to a political cause that burns through money like an AIG futures trader?

I’ll go Mr. Williams one better. While tens of thousands of Tea Party members are gathering across the nation wondering where the GOP has been, why is Steele speaking to a bunch of race baiters who think of him as nothing more than an Oreo sellout? Why is he not out there winning back Tea Party conservatives?

The GOP had an opportunity to redeem itself with millions of Americans who have felt betrayed for nearly a decade of overspending and crooked deals. It was a precious opportunity but it is lost. Republicans may win in November, but the brand is still tarnished.

What have we learned from the actions of Michael Steele? We have learned that at the end of the day the Republican Party hasn’t changed a bit.