[GCFL-discuss] FW: McCain for President, Part 1 and 2 - By Charles Krauthammer

[Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List]

Siarlys, try this one.
 

greenBubble 

Subject: McCain for President, Part 1 and 2 - By Charles Krauthammer 


 
October 24, 2008 

McCain for President

By Charles Krauthammer
<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/author/charles_krauthammer/> 


WASHINGTON -- Contrarian that I am, I'm voting for John McCain. I'm not
talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it's over
before it's over. I'm talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered
conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they're left out in the
cold without a single state dinner for the next four years. 

I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe --
neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher
Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) -- yelling "Stop!"
I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain
ship. I'd rather lose an election than lose my bearings.

First, I'll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize
voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in
living memory. The "erratic" temperament issue, for example. As if
McCain's risky and unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to
tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came
crashing down a month ago renders unfit for office a man who
demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in the face of
unimaginable pressures as a prisoner of war, and who later steadily
navigated innumerable challenges and setbacks, not the least of which
was the collapse of his campaign just a year ago. 

McCain the "erratic" is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record
testifies to McCain the stalwart. 

Nor will I countenance the "dirty campaign" pretense. The double
standard here is stunning. Obama ran a scurrilous Spanish-language ad
falsely associating McCain with anti-Hispanic slurs. Another ad falsely
claimed McCain supports "cutting Social Security benefits in half." And
for months Democrats insisted that McCain sought 100 years of war in
Iraq. 

McCain's critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers.
What's astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William
Ayers.

Moreover, the most remarkable of all tactical choices of this election
season is the attack that never was. Out of extreme (and unnecessary)
conscientiousness, McCain refused to raise the legitimate issue of
Obama's most egregious association -- with the race-baiting Rev.
Jeremiah Wright. Dirty campaigning, indeed. 

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us
forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We
have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic
soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of
fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus
the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been
cramming on these issues for the last year, who's never had to make an
executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A
foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most
vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of "a
world that stands as one"), and who refers to the most deliberate act of
war since Pearl Harbor as "the tragedy of 9/11," a term more appropriate
for a bus accident?

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most
serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who
not only has the best instincts, but has the honor and the courage to,
yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the
surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable
strategic victory? 

There's just no comparison. Obama's own running mate warned this week
that Obama's youth and inexperience will invite a crisis -- indeed a
crisis "generated" precisely to test him. Can you be serious about
national security and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test? 

And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two
significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he's been in the
Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only
opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its
success. 

The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with
evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did
not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.

Today's economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time
pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on
the parapet? I'm for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb. 

________________________________

October 31, 2008 

McCain for President, Part II

By Charles Krauthammer
<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/author/charles_krauthammer/> 


WASHINGTON -- Last week I made the open-and-shut case for John McCain
<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/10/security_first_why_im
_voting_f.html> : In a dangerous world entering an era of uncontrolled
nuclear proliferation, the choice between the most prepared foreign
policy candidate in memory vs. a novice with zero experience and the
wobbliest one-world instincts is not a close call.

But it's all about economics and kitchen-table issues, we are told. OK.
Start with economics. 

Neither candidate has particularly deep economic knowledge or finely
honed economic instincts. Neither has any clear idea exactly what to do
in the current financial meltdown. Hell, neither does anyone else,
including the best economic minds in the world, from Henry Paulson to
the head of the European Central Bank. Yet they have muddled through
with some success

Both McCain and Barack Obama have assembled fine economic teams that may
differ on the details of their plans but have reasonable approaches to
managing the crisis. So forget the hype. Neither candidate has an
advantage on this issue.

On other domestic issues, McCain is just the kind of moderate
conservative that the Washington/media establishment once loved -- the
champion of myriad conservative heresies that made him a burr in the
side of congressional Republicans and George W. Bush. But now that he is
standing in the way of an audacity-of-hope Democratic restoration,
erstwhile friends recoil from McCain on the pretense that he has
suddenly become right wing.

Self-serving rubbish. McCain is who he always was. Generally speaking,
he sees government as a Rooseveltian counterweight (Teddy with a touch
of Franklin) to the various malefactors of wealth and power. He wants
government to tackle large looming liabilities such as Social Security
and Medicare. He wants to free up health insurance by beginning to sever
its debilitating connection to employment -- a ruinous accident of
history (arising from World War II wage and price controls) that
increases the terror of job loss, inhibits labor mobility and saddles
American industry with costs that are driving it (see: Detroit) into
insolvency. And he supports lower corporate and marginal tax rates to
encourage entrepreneurship and job creation. 

An eclectic, moderate, generally centrist agenda in a guy almost
congenitally given to bipartisanship. 

Obama, on the other hand, talks less and less about bipartisanship, his
calling card during his earlier messianic stage. He does not need to. If
he wins, he will have large Democratic majorities in both houses. And
unlike 1992, Obama is no Clinton centrist. 

What will you get? 

(1) Card check, meaning the abolition of the secret ballot in the
certification of unions in the workplace. Large men will come to your
house at night and ask you to sign a card supporting a union. You will
sign.

(2) The so-called Fairness Doctrine -- a project of Nancy Pelosi and
leading Democratic senators -- a Hugo Chavez-style travesty designed to
abolish conservative talk radio. 

(3) Judges who go beyond even the constitutional creativity we expect
from Democratic appointees. Judges chosen according to Obama's publicly
declared criterion: "empathy" for the "poor or African-American or gay
or disabled or old" -- in a legal system historically predicated on the
idea of justice entirely blind to one's station in life. 

(4) An unprecedented expansion of government power. Yes, I know. It has
already happened. A conservative government has already partially
nationalized the mortgage industry, the insurance industry and nine of
the largest U.S. banks. 

This is all generally swallowed because everyone understands that the
current crisis demands extraordinary measures. The difference is that
conservatives are instinctively inclined to make such measures
temporary. Whereas an Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Barney Frank administration will
find irresistible the temptation to use the tools inherited -- $700
billion of largely uncontrolled spending -- as a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity to radically remake the American economy and social compact.

This is not socialism. This is not the end of the world. It would,
however, be a decidedly leftward move on the order of Lyndon Johnson's
Great Society. The alternative is a McCain administration with a
moderate conservative presiding over a divided government and generally
inclined to resist a European social-democratic model of economic and
social regulation featuring, for example, wealth-distributing
growth-killing marginal tax rates. 

The national security choice in this election is no contest. The
domestic policy choice is more equivocal because it is ideological.
McCain is the quintessential center-right candidate. Yet the
quintessential center-right country is poised to reject him. The hunger
for anti-Republican catharsis and the blinding promise of Obamian hope
are simply too strong. The reckoning comes in the morning.

letters at charleskrauthammer.com <mailto: letters at charleskrauthammer.com>


Copyright 2008, Washington Post Writers Group 



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