HotAir has a wonderful, comprehensive analysis of why Barack Obama should not be the President of this great country. (Hat tip: Michelle Malkin.) Obviously, his policies are terrible, and his character (or total lack thereof) that would lead him to adopt some of those policies - such as vetoing funding for the BAIPA - is problematic.
Let’s move chronologically through The One’s meteoritic rise through American politics.
In 1996, when Obama ran for the Illinois State Senate, he cleared the field of all of his Democrat opponents by invalidating their candidacies. Despite being an ACORN-affiliated community organiser (i.e. with Project Vote) in his years after law school, he turned around and invalidated the signatures of every single one of his opponents, many of which were gathered by his old organisation. Thus, by inspecting the signatures of his opponents and getting them all disqualified, he ran unopposed. (Hat tip: Sweetness & Light.) The super-conservative (ha!) CNN.com has this to say about Mr. Hope-and-Change’s ascendancy:
“He [Obama] came from Chicago politics,” [Jay] Stewart said. “Politics ain’t beanbag, as they say in Chicago. You play with your elbows up, and you’re pretty tough and ruthless when you have to be. Sen. Obama felt that’s what was necessary at the time, that’s what he did. Does it fit in with the rhetoric now? Perhaps not.”
The Obama campaign called this report “a hit job.” It insisted that CNN talk to a state representative who supports Obama, because, according to an Obama spokesman, she would be objective. But when we called her, she said she can’t recall details of petition challenges, who engineered them for the Obama campaign or why all the candidates were challenged….
He [Gha-is Askia] said the Obama team challenged every single one of his petitions on “technicalities.”
If names were printed instead of signed in cursive writing, they were declared invalid. If signatures were good but the person gathering the signatures wasn’t properly registered, those petitions also were thrown out….
Kass, the Chicago Tribune columnist, said the national media are naive when it comes to Chicago politics, which is a serious business.
He said they have bought into a narrative that Obama is strictly a reformer. The truth, Kass says, is that he is a bare-knuckled politician.
Even the Boston Globe - not exactly a paper that is in the tank for Republicans - acknowledged this. In a September 2007 article, it investigated Obama’s sources of funds for his various campaigns. Despite his claims that he would not take money from lobbyists or political action committees, the vast majority of the funds that he took in during his Illinois years (2/3ds) were from such sources. Likewise, when he ran for U.S. Senate, he also raised significant amounts of money from PACs and lobbyists.
Once The Obamessiah decided to make a run for the U.S. Senate, he was faced with Democrat Blair Hull in the primaries, and, subsequently, Republican Jack Ryan. Blair Hull, despite his ability to raise more money, and higher name recognition, was defeated by Obama after Hull’s divorce records became public.
Ryan had divorced four years prior, and had his divorce records sealed by the court for the sake of his children. Upon request by the Chicago Tribune - more specifically, David Axelrod, one of Obama’s advisors - Ryan produced three years of tax returns and divorce records; he refused to turn over the sealed custody papers. His ex-wife, Jeri, backed him on this, not wanting the records to become public, either. The ChiTrib then sued to get access to them, above the protests of both Ryan and his ex-wife. A judge sided with the paper, unsealed the records, and turned them over to the press. Barack Obama, belatedly and hypocritically, lamented the politics of personal destruction as he made his way to the Senate.
(Citations: here, here, here.)
Obama, despite this, has maintained that he is an agent of change and new ethics. He championed public financing for Presidential campaigns and stated, unequivocally, that he would accept such financing if Sen. McCain would do the same. Nevertheless, he broke that promise and took private financing.
Aside from the inconsistency in using a pledge only for political points, and not for the principle of running a clean election, Obama’s campaign has engaged in repeated fraud to raise an unprecedented amount of money. As Michelle Malkin points out, The One’s campaign is rife with credit-card fraud. Long-time Republicans who are voting for McCain have found charges on their cards to the tune of $2,300. Obama has received donations from foreigners, although federal law prohibits that; he has also received donations from the likes of OJ Simpson, Daffy Duck, and Bart Simpson. Some of these donations come through throwaway gift cards that are not registered to any person; others came in when Obama’s website removed standard security features. Other donations are below the $200 thereshold which triggers a reporting requirement, but, in the aggregate, exceed that threshold; some of them even exceed - by thousands of dollars - the $4,600 maximum that any one individual may donate. All in all, Obama’s funds from unnamed and unreported sources exceed $300 million alone, which is roughly four times McCain’s public financing war chest.
Perhaps this is “change we can believe in,” but a lot of us prefer the American way.
Sphere: Related Content
The information contained here will not get any exposure in the major tv network news or cable news or major newspapers. WHY?
Could there be a bias?
It is very disturbing to accept that those responsible for keeping ciitizens sufficiently informed to make reasonable decisions are instead more interested in keeping from voters as much of the informatiion that might lead them away from the candidates or party the media supports.
Talk about the “FAIRNESS DOCTRINE” seeems about as hypercritcal as can be. I wonder whether Blogs such as this will be right behind conservative talk radio in efforts to prevent contra information from the public.
Thanks for stopping by and commenting.
“Disturbing” is right. To think that the press is usually a governmental watchdog, and not shilling for it….
In theory, the Fairness Doctrine is supposed to apply only to limited media, such as broadcast airwaves and radio airwaves. The idea - or the justification, depending on your viewpoint - is that when competing stations can’t just open up a new radio or TV station, the free market of ideas doesn’t work, and you need to force people to do so. Of course, this is ridiculous to start with, and, in the days of cable TV, satellite radio, and blogs, is inapplicable.
Still frightening, though. To think that Fox News (or is it the O’Reilly Factor) has more viewers than all the other stations combined? People are hungry for anything that resembles the truth.
Obama: It takes real work to turn fraud controls off
I operate a business where we are responsible for the online credit card processing and fraud security for thousands of online merchants accepting card payments over the internet.
I can tell you unequivocally, that every well-designed commercial online payment system is going to have the 3/4 digit code check AND the ZIP check turned ON by default.
Any merchant (Obama’s campaign in this case is a ‘merchant’) who is accepting payment without these checks had to actively go in and turn these checks OFF. This is easy to do and could probably be done with about 6 clicks in less than 2 minutes (un-checking the boxes that specify these safety checks and clicking ‘Save’). What’s much harder for most folks is making the decision to do this. Most merchants won’t make this decision because they want card holders to be protected.
Anybody who swipes at the pump knows that getting the billing zip right for an authorized purchaser is not hard at all. And it’s a great anti-fraud check.
What gets me about this is that Obama is telling all of us in advance how fantastically careless he intends to be with *your* money!
Ron Robinson
http://www.800Cart.com
Ron,
Thanks so much for weighing in and letting us know about that. I’m probably going to do another post about this issue (as the information keeps pouring in) and will include your comment in it.
Though I’m a liberal and a democrat, having someone to criticize the other side of the bread is like putting equal peanut butter on both sides. However, this post poses some questions about such accusations. You lack the necessary links or footnotes to support your words. Nowadays, it is easy to make a fabricated story in the internet.
I love McCain, I love that guy. But with the character that he shows during his campaigns, his real attitude is starting to show who he really is. And with his very judgmental selection of Ms. Alaska, God, John has the right judgment to be president and Sarah has enough knowledge to be vice or even be president.
Roxeanne, at the last part of your text you stated that you prefer the American way. Was Barack being un-American? If Barack is un-American and Sarah and John are American, I would rather be un-American than be a whining and hypocrital American.
Willie,
If fifteen links - many of them to the Boston Globe, CNN, and the like - are not sufficient for you, then I suggest you take your little comment and shove it. I have a little news flash for you about how blogs work: we can tell exactly what you’ve clicked on. So you got as far as seeing whether or not Barack would accept public financing if McCain promised to do so, too. Awww. Now work a little harder and read everything, then decide its veracity.
If you believe anything in that post is not true, then please, rather than whine and cry about how I didn’t do my research, go and find out what isn’t true and back it up appropriately.
How is the selection of Sarah Palin “judgmental”?? Pray tell, on what universe is she unqualified to be VP and Barack Obama, who has the executive experience of a fly, qualified to be President? Her mayorship of Wasilla, Alaska, makes her more qualified than he is.
Maybe you think that Barack Obama’s actions are American. Maybe you think that it’s the American way to lie, engage in financial fraud to buy an election, lie some more, unseal the divorce records of one’s political opponents (plural!!) to shame them off the candidacy, buy an election, work for a community organisation to get out the vote and then turn around and invalidate the signatures gathered by that group in order to chuck one’s candidates off the ballot, call Rev. Wright one’s “spiritual mentor,” and, of course, engage in voter fraud.
I don’t. I think America agrees with me. There are a lot of people out there who say “Barack Obama scares the hell out of me.”