Dennis Prager Explains Why the Left Hates Conservatives

Perhaps the most telling of the recent revelations of the liberal/left Journolist, a list consisting of about 400 major liberal/left journalists, is the depth of their hatred of conservatives. That they would consult with one another in order to protect candidate and then President Obama and in order to hurt Republicans is unfortunate and ugly. But what is jolting is the hatred of conservatives, as exemplified by the e-mail from an NPR reporter expressing her wish to personally see Rush Limbaugh die a painful death — and the apparent absence of any objection from the other liberal journalists.

Every one of us on the right has seen this hatred. I am not referring to leftist bloggers or to anonymous extreme comments by angry leftists on conservative blogs — such things exist on the right as well — but to mainstream elite liberal journalists. There is simply nothing analogous among elite conservative journalists. Yes, nearly all conservatives believe that the left is leading America to ruin. But while there is plenty of conservative anger over this fact, there is little or nothing on the right to match the left’s hatred of conservative individuals. Would mainstream conservative journalists e-mail one another wishes to be present while Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi or Michael Moore dies slowly and painfully of a heart attack?

From Karl Marx to today, the Left has always hated people on the Right, not merely differed or been angry with them.

The question is: why?

Here are three possible answers.

First, the left thinks the right is evil.

Granting for exceptions that all generalizations allow for, conservatives believe that those on the left are wrong, while those on the left believe that those on the right are bad, not merely wrong. Examples are innumerable. For example, Howard Dean, the former head of the Democratic Party said, “In contradistinction to the Republicans … (Democrats) don’t believe kids ought to go to bed hungry at night.”

Or take Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., who, among many similar comments, said, “I want to say a few words about what it means to be a Democrat. It’s very simple: We have a conscience.”

Has any spokesman of the Republican Party ever said anything analogous about Democrats not caring about the suffering of children or not having a conscience?

Second, when you don’t confront real evil, you hate those who do.

You can see this on almost any school playground. The kid who confronts the school bully is often resented more than the bully. Whether out of guilt over their own cowardice or fear that the one who confronted the bully would provoke the bully to lash out more, those who refuse to confront the bully often resent the one who does. During the 1980s, the left expressed far more hatred of Ronald Reagan than of Soviet Communist dictator Leonid Brezhnev. And, when Reagan labeled the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” the liberal world was enraged … at Reagan.

Those (usually on the left) who refused to confront communism hated those (usually on the right) who did. They called the latter “war mongers,” “cold warriors,” charged them with having “missile envy” and with loving war.

Today, the left has similar contempt for those who take a hard line on Islamic terror. The liberal and leftist media routinely place quote marks around the words War on Terror. To the left, such a war is manufactured by rightists for nefarious reasons (oil, self-enrichment, imperialism, etc.). Indeed, the Obama administration has actually forbidden use of the term “Islamic terror.” America is at war with a nameless enemy. The real enemies the Democratic administration is prepared to name are the Republican Party, tea parties, Fox News and talk radio.

Third, the left’s utopian vision is prevented only by the right.

From its inception, leftism has been a secular utopian religion. As Ted Kennedy, famously quoting his brother Robert F. Kennedy, said, “Some (people) see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?” That exemplifies leftwing idealism — imagining a utopian future. There will be no poor, no war, no conflict, no inequality. That future is only a few more government programs away from reality. And who stands in the way of such perfection? Conservatives. How could a utopian not hate a conservative?

To put in another way, the famous ’60s left-wing motto “Make love, not war” embodies the problem as the left sees it: The left makes love in the world and the right makes war in the world. How could you not hate the right? The right, with its beliefs in a strong military; in individuals, not the state; taking care of themselves, their families and their neighbors; and in punishing criminals, is the anti-Love, a figure as reviled on the left as the antichrist is to Christians.

This hatred will only increase if the left feels its programs to greatly increase the size of the government are in any way threatened in the forthcoming elections. The problem is that this hatred does not decrease even when the left is in power.

Comment:  It is unusual for Dennis Prager to use such strong language in his analyses of important matters.  “Hate” is indeed the correct word to identify the feelings of the leftwing idologues.  I find them possessed.  

From my own personal conversations with , readings of , and listenings to this fringe of Americana, I strongly believe the Left’s hate is primarily against whatever is  Christian   in the country.   It is understandable that the European Jewish community would carry  its hates, prejudices, and  perhaps fears about  Christianity when arriving in America.   It is my experience that the most virile anti-Christian Jewish populations are  leftwingers and unite with the general anti religious, more vocal atheistic noises of the Left in general.  

Almost all of my long time vocal and aggressive evangelists of the Left, announce their atheism as the measure of their superiority as being Marxist begins there and moves right on into the “law” that everything in human life is determined by economics.  Because God is dead to the Left, Government lives as God.

American conservatives generally divide their devotions, first to God and then to country, but not government as country, but living as country, democratically.   (I still have the prejudice that this is the Protestant in all of us Americans who have been Americanized by “the American way”.   We shall be known, by God and Man, by our works, our good deeds, our wealth of knowledge and its rewards,  our Christian behavior from our Judeic past which has led to America as it has been, a struggle to achieve individual and group success…..to measure well in the eyes of God and Man. 

It was through the Protestant line that the power to reach God did not go from God to Bible to Priest to Man, but from God to Man through the Bible.   This direct relationship would elevate mankind beyond any levels previously imagined.  (And therein lies some rub as well.)

The Left is a religious movement determined to replace Christianity through its long history of methods…..fair or foul……what ever is necessary to reach god….government…..

Government is God to the Left.

The Enemy of Our Democratic Freedoms Is Shariah Law…..

is the gist of an excellent article written by Roger Kimball at Pajamas Media.   He gives it the title, “Islam versus the West;  What you need to know!”

“My college Greek tutor used to tell the story of his college Greek tutor, who would end every class by stepping to the blackboard, writing down two or three points, and saying, “Gentlemen, this is the irreducible minimum you should take away from this class.”

Let me emulate that example and offer the irreducible minimum you should take away from the news today. It’s from the indispensable Andy McCarthy over at National Review Online. His column is called “It’s about Sharia,” and the irreducible minimum I’d like to highlight is this striking proposition:

“Islamism is not a movement to be engaged, it is an enemy to be defeated.”

 

Please, commit that to memory. Think of it every time someone tells you that Islam means “peace” or starts making excuses for the latest chapter in the annals of Islam’s war against the West.

For that’s what we’re talking about here: Islam’s war against the West. It’s not Islam’s misuse of commercial airliners, its penchant for sawing off the heads of people they disapprove of, or even its profound lack of sympathy for bacon. No, it’s Islam’s fundamental, essential  incompatibility with foundational Western values like free speech, the separation of church and state, and equality under the law. Such things are not simply missing from Islam: they are positively repudiated by Islam, a fact that is ingredient in the very word “Islam,” which, pace the multiculturalists, means not “peace” but “submission,” i.e., submission to the will of Allah.

Many well-meaning  people, I know,  will shudder when they hear this. Islam is “a great religion.” How could it be fundamentally incompatible with all those good things we like to celebrate in the West? Women’s rights, religious toleration, not to mention Chateauneuf-du-Pape and kindred potations. Aren’t we beyond all that hawkish, “divisive” talk about the “conflict of civilizations”? Very possibly — if wishes were horses, which they are not; ergo, etc.  Cf. Matthew 13:43: “He who has ears, let him hear.”

Andy’s column is a gloss on an important speech that Newt Gingrich delivered at the American Enterprise Institute a few days ago. Newt’s key insight is that we are engaged not in a war against terror but a war against Sharia, i.e., Islamic law. Would that our current masters in Washington had as clear-eyed an appreciation of the nature of the conflict in which we are immersed. “Gingrich,” Andy writes, “is going about the long-overdue business of resetting our understanding of the civilizational jihad that has been waged against the United States for some 31 years.” He continues:

“The single purpose of this jihad is the imposition of sharia. On that score, Gingrich made two points of surpassing importance. First, some Islamists employ mass-murder attacks while others prefer a gradual march through our institutions — our legal, political, academic, and financial systems, as well as our broader culture; the goal of both, though, is the same. The stealth Islamists occasionally feign outrage at the terrorists, but their quarrel is over methodology and pace. Both camps covet the same outcome.

Second, that outcome is the death of freedom. In Islamist ideology, sharia is deemed to be the necessary precondition for Islamicizing a society — for Islam is not merely a religious doctrine, but a comprehensive socio-economic and political system. . . .

Sharia, moreover, is anti-equality. It subjugates women and brutally punishes transgressors, particularly homosexuals and apostates. While our law forbids cruel and unusual punishments, Gingrich observed that the brutality in sharia sanctions is not gratuitous, but intentional: It is meant to enforce Allah’s will by striking example.”

One further point. The main front in the battle between the party of freedom and the party of Jihad is not unfolding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, or even in the colonized bits of Europe. It is here in the United States.  The Ayatollah Khomeini used to refer to America as “the Great Satan” not because he thought America was the embodiment of evil (though he may well have thought that, too) but rather because America epitomized everything about the West that tempted good Muslims to abandon that which made them Muslims: their belief in, and adherence to, Sharia, i.e., a view of the world that embraced the will of Allah as the last word about, well, about everything. There is no “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” in Islam because Caesar, i.e., the secular realm, has no independent claims at all.  Allah is it and Sharia describes the implementation of his law.

Andy McCarthy and Newt are right:

“The war is about the survival of Western civilization, and we should make no apologies for the fact that the West’s freedom culture is a Judeo-Christian culture — a fact that was unabashedly acknowledged, Gingrich reminded his audience, by FDR and Churchill. To ensure victory in the United States we must, once again, save Europe, where the enemy has advanced markedly.  . . .

Our allies are the Muslims who embrace our freedom culture — those for whom sharia is a matter of private belief, not public mission. Our enemies are those who want sharia to supplant American law and Western culture. When we call out the latter, and marginalize them, we may finally energize the former.”

 To which I will only add, Amen.”

Comment:   Thank you, Roger Kimball.   This is the clarity that needs to be widely,  loudly, and frequently stated to remind the more dormant muscles of the human project of the western world and others  who value freedom to wake up occasionally from their pleasures, become adult if only for a moment, and attempt to think what their lives would be  without the freedoms that go with democratic institutions, democratic tolerance  and the kindness and peacefulness that usually accompanies freedom’s  fresh air.  

If only Mr. Obama and his political Left would appreciate these freedoms instead of carving them up and replacing them with government dictate.

Dayton Family Buying the Minnesota Governorship?

 

 

Who is “Win Minnesota”, And Who Funds Them? – Here’s the list of major contributors to “Win Minnesota” during the 2006 campaign. 

• Anne Bartley (San Fran) $25,000 [Linked via the Rockefeller foundation to Alida Messinger - whose maiden name was "Rockefeller" and who...well, we'll get back to that.  She's also linked to Hillary Clinton's "Women's Leadership Council" and former Clinton administration figure]
• Shayna Berkowitz (Mpls) $100,000; ]
• John Cowles (Mpls) $20,000; [Why yes, the former Strib publisher!  But don't you dare say the Strib is biased!]
• Andrew Dayton (Mpls) $1,000;
• David Dayton (Mpls) $5,000;
• Eric Dayton (Mpls) $1,000;
• Mark Dayton (Mpls) $25,000;
• Mary Lee Dayon (Mpls) $100,000;
• Vanessa Dayton $1,000;
• Sandra Ferry (NY) $50,000; [Yet another Rockefeller - sister of Alida Messinger]
• Barbara Forster (Mpls) $25,000; [generic liberal with deep pockets]
• Roger Hale (Mpls) $100,000; [Former Daytons' executive]
• John Harris (PA)$20,000;
• Myron Kunin $5,000; [Hair care tycoon]
• Kim Lund (Mpls) $25,000
• Darlene Luther 47A Committee $10,000 ;
• alida Messinger (NY) $165,000;
• Midwest Values PAC (Franken) $20,000;
• Linda Pritzker (TX) $30,000; [Scionette of the Hyatt fortune, big-time liberal with deep pockets; major donor to MoveOn.org]
• Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux $10,000;
• Tina Smith (Mpls) $10,000;
• Linde Uihlein (WI)$100,000; [Schlitz heiress, long-time political plutocrat]
• Julie Zelle (MN) $5,000

That was a lot of Daytons, and people linked with the Daytons!

So how about this year?

So far in 2010, “Win Minnesota” lists the following donors to “Win Minnesota”’s current warchest (currently worth $1,173,500),

• Andrew Dayton $1,000
• David Dayton $50,000
• John Cowles $25,000 [Remember him from 2006?]
• MaryLee Dayton $250,000
• Emily Tuttle (MN) $5,000
• Ronald Sternal (MN) $5,000
• Alida Messinger (NY) $500,000
• James Deal (MN) $50,000
• Roger Hale (MN) $10,000 [Remember him from above?]
• Barbara forster (MN) $25,000
• Democratic Governors Association $250,000;

So of the $1.1 and change million warchest, $851,000 came from Daytons, and Alida Messinger.

But wait!  There is another fund registered with the state, with a different account number but with the same email and street addresses, that has $850,000 socked away but has spent no money.

And where did that $850,000 come from?

• Alida Messinger (Mpls) $50,000
• Win Minnesota $50,000
• Education MN $250,000
• Laborers District Council $100,000
• MAPE $50,000
• IBEW MN State Council $50,000
• MN Nurses Assc $50,000
• Local 49 Engineers $25,000
• Vance Opperman $50,000
• Afscme Council 5 $50,000
• MN AFL-CIO $25,000
• SEIU MN State Council $50,000
• AFSCME (Wash DC) $50,000;

And who is this Alida Messinger who has contributed  over $1.46 million over the past four years! – to the cause of disinforming Minnesotans about Republicans?  ….. The youngest daughter of John D. Rockefeller III!

The ex-wife of candidate Mark Dayton.

So “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” is essentially a front for a group of unions and, to the tune of millions over the past four years, Mark Dayton’s family, friends and ex-wife.

They are paying millions of dollars to advertise – and hiding it from casual view.

Mark Dayton is trying to buy the election, but he’s taking great pains to make sure you don’t know about it.

2010 Campaign So Far – To date in the gubernatorial campaign, A4aBM has raised $93,386 (as of this past Tuesday). 

They’d spent $72,383 of it as of Tuesday.   Of that $93,386, 79.636 of it came from the “Win Minnesota PAC”.

So that’s two election cycles in a row (so far) where “Win Minnesota” has been the leading funder of s hit pieces against Republican candidates.

The above information and commentary was sent to me by good friend, Lisa Rich.

Blagojevich “Not the sharpest knife in the drawer”, But Was Elected Illinois Democrat Governor

“Corrupt, Or Just Clueless” is the headline to the Clarence Page article wrapping up the Rod Blagojevich trial for the Chicago Tribune.   Mr. Page wrote:

“I am inspired, as you might guess, by the robust closing arguments that attorney Sam Adam Jr. gave for his celebrity client, former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was accused, among other high crimes, with trying to sell President Barack Obama’s U. S. Senate seat to the highest bidder.

Surely Adam’s closing argument will be remembered in the annals of American legal history as the dull-knife defense.

“No one’s going to say he’s the sharpest knife in the drawer,” Adam assured the jury, “but he’s not corrupt.”

In other words, don’t hate him because he’s a nutball.

The Democratic ex-governor meant no harm, Adam insisted, despite the bad impression left by federal prosecutors’ 24 counts against him.

He was alleged to have misused his powers as governor to extort campaign contributions from those seeking legislation, appointments or other favors. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, his defense countered.

Rather, his attorneys argued, the prosecutors were trying to criminalize ways, means and horse-trading through which political business has been done since the birth of the wink, the nod, the back pat and the elbow massage.

After all, said Adam, “this is a man who considered appointing Oprah Winfrey (to the U.S. Senate).” Indeed, that was one of Blago’s better ideas.

Yet Adam got me to thinking: This is hardly the first time that a newsmaker has thrown himself on the mercy of the American public and pleaded that he may be dumb, silly, ignorant or clueless but, at least he’s not a crook.

Rep. Charles Rangel, for example, tried to sound upbeat last week as he faced an ethics subcommittee hearing on 13 alleged violations of House rules, charges that forced him to give up his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee.

“While this is not a good day for me,” the New York Democrat told reporters outside the hearing, “the only good thing I can find is that there’s no inference of corruption at all.”

None? That’s in the eye of the beholder. He is alleged to have violated House gift rules and failed to disclose taxable income on a rental property in the Dominican Republic, among other allegations. It strains one’s belief to hear that the nation’s top tax writer as Ways and Means chairman could be even more confused than we are about the tax laws he helped to create.

Still, the popular and personable (“Call me Charlie”) Rangel would much rather be seen as clueless than corrupt.

Too late for that in the case of former Rep. James Traficant of Ohio, the last House member to face an open ethics committee trial. Known for announcing “Beam me up, Scotty,” at the end of his floor speeches, the then-Democrat was expelled in 2002 after he was convicted of 10 felony counts, including bribery and racketeering.

More recently he’s been speaking at tea party rallies, broadcasting a weekend radio talk show in Cleveland and trying to get on the ballot to win his old congressional seat back as an independent. Corrupt or clueless? Who cares? If anyone is rooting for him it is reporters because he is so much fun to cover.

One more possible contestant: Sen. John Kerry was ironing out an embarrassing tax oversight of his own. The Boston Herald reported that the Massachusetts Democrat has been keeping his new $7 million yacht parked in Rhode Island for repairs, which also spared him an estimated $500,000 in his home state taxes.

Not corrupt, said Kerry in his own defense, just tardy. “I don’t think I dealt with (the controversy) fast enough, effectively enough,” he told The Boston Globe. He will pay his home states’ taxes anyway, he said, to avoid even the appearance of avoiding taxes on his new toy. Maybe he does have a clue after all.”

Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune’s editorial board

Comment:  Representative  Maxine Waters  of  California, another proud  socialist member of  the Democrat Party is expected to be on the docket soon to explain her Extortion 101 peculiarities.

Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd are still dancing free as long as no one looks too closely at their role with Fannie and Fredie. 

The Promising Candidacy of Marco Rubio

I like Fred Barnes.  I see him stutter and stammer when he gets all excited expressing himself on the Fox evening panel with my favorite news analyst, Charles Krauthammer.  

He likes Marco Rubio as a campaigner and as a conservative.   That is a good combination.   And it is essential that Mr. Rubio be elected Florida’s Senator in November if conservatives (especially the devoted and thinking variety with the right American message and wisdom with a bit of political savvy kind)  are going to win enough seats to take over the United States Senate.

Mr. Barnes wrote  a strong article of support for Marco Rubio in the Weekly Standard.  I have selected the core of it here:

“By the end of the campaign in November, nearly every voter in Florida with a television or a computer or who has attended a Rubio event should have heard Rubio’s speech or at least pieces of it in TV ads or online videos. In every appearance, including my interview with him in late July, he delivers the speech in whole or in part. There’s a reason for this: It’s an awfully good speech. It’s intensely patriotic and focused on how he’d like voters to see the choice they face in the election. It’s better than any speech I’ve heard from a Republican candidate or elected official in a long time. And Rubio delivers it passionately.

Rubio gave the essence of the speech in his farewell address to the Florida legislature in March 2009. He delivered it again at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington last February. He repeated parts of it during his debate with Crist on Fox News Sunday in March. I heard him give the speech to the Florida Family Policy Council in May and to business groups in Orlando in July. 

The core of the speech is a paean to American exceptionalism. He mentions the word “exceptional” repeatedly, perhaps to highlight the contrast with President Obama, who suggested to a French audience last year that America is no more exceptional than any other country. The election, Rubio told the Southeast Building Conference, will decide whether America will “continue to be exceptional or be like everybody else.”

At CPAC, Rubio dwelt on the theme of exceptionalism. “I am privileged to be a citizen of the single greatest society in all of human history,” he said. 

There’s never been a nation like the United States, ever. .  .  . It’s sometimes easy to forget how special America really is. .  .  . What makes America great is that there are dreams that are impossible everywhere else but are possible here. .  .  . This is the only place in the world where you can open up a business in the spare bedroom of your home.

Rubio often cites one of Ronald Reagan’s stories. A Cuban exile told Reagan, “Don’t feel sorry for us. We had somewhere to go. Where are Americans going to go if they lose this great country?” The idea is “you could lose what made us exceptional,” Rubio explains. “Reagan kind of represented this re-embrace of the notion that America could remain exceptional.” Now Rubio does, or will if he’s elected. “It’s certainly not inevitable” that America will become “just another important country. It’s a choice.”
 

America’s greatness “didn’t happen automatically, didn’t happen accidentally, and won’t continue automatically,” he says. Voters must choose the future they want. Here’s how Rubio described the choice to me:

There are those who believe the country is headed in the right direction, who believe that jobs are created by the president and the U.S. Senate and the Congress and government, and who believe the world is a safer place if America retreats from it and weakens itself. People who believe those things should not vote for me. There are two other candidates running they can support.

If, on the other hand, you believe it’s the private sector and only private sector growth that will create the kind of revenue that we need in our country and the positive economic influence that we need, if you believe the government should not spend more money than it takes in, and if you believe the world is a safer place when America is the strongest country in the world, I’m the only candidate with ideas to help accomplish that. And that’s what the choice is going to be in November.

That’s a pretty stark choice. But “people are looking for voices that offer them serious choices, policy choices,” Rubio insists.

I think what they’re tired of is a political process that’s full of people who will say or do anything to get elected, people who treat elections like a high-stakes beauty pageant where all you have to do is shake a few hands and memorize a few lines that test well.

The key point in Rubio’s speech, apart from his defense of American exceptionalism, is economic growth. “You can’t build your national defenses if your economy is not generating revenue that will pay for it, and you can’t pay down your debt,” he says. 

I think the way you do it is you grow your economy, you find more people jobs, you create more entrepreneurs. You create new industries that multiply the number of jobs-created. .  .  . What we are getting out of Washington today and all levels of government is anti-job creation.

His speech emphasizes the big picture, but Rubio also has a wonkish underside. Last week, he put out a dozen “simple ways to cut spending,” starting with cuts of 10 percent in the budgets of the White House and Congress. Earlier, he announced 12 ways to “grow our economy” and 11 to “help the Gulf Coast economy to recover.” His economic ideas include permanently extending the Bush tax cuts and ending “job-destroying double taxation of capital gains, dividends, or death.”

In 2005, Rubio circulated books with blank pages, asking people to write down their “innovative ideas for Florida’s future.” It was a stunt that worked. The next year, he published a book with the 100 best ideas. “We passed all 100 of them in the House [and] 57 of them became law or policy in the state of Florida,” he says. The ideas “are all over the place.” 

As a candidate, Rubio is rigidly disciplined. He refuses to discuss campaign tactics and strategy. When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interviewed him last month about extremism in the Tea Party movement, Rubio stressed his free market message. Tea Party people “want to see policies implemented at the highest levels of government that will keep us exceptional,” he said.

Another example:

Blitzer: If you were elected, would you be part of the Tea Party caucus in the United States Senate, let’s say with Rand Paul, he’s a Republican candidate in Kentucky, or Sharron Angle, a Republican candidate in Nevada? Would you be part of a caucus like that?

Rubio: Well, I don’t know what the need for that would be obviously. .  .  . I’m more interested in being a part of a caucus that would lower taxes in America and create an environment where jobs are going to be created in the private sector, creating an environment where the private sector can grow and create prosperity.

When I interviewed Rubio, he answered nearly every question with snatches from his speech, no matter what I asked. Will a significant bloc of Democrats vote for Crist, as polls currently indicate? “I don’t really break the electorate down that way,” Rubio said. Then he invoked his idea of an electorate that chooses between candidates who like the country’s direction and those who don’t.

Who might the Obama White House throw its weight behind in the general election, Crist or the Democratic nominee? When his four kids are grown, “they’re not going to be talking about who the White House supported,” he said. They’re going to be talking about whether the country chose the right direction in 2010.

Rather than challenge Crist in the Republican primary, Rubio was urged to run for state attorney general. What was his wife’s advice? 

She reminded me that this election was about the kind of country my kids would inherit .  .  . if we allowed them to be the first generation of Americans to inherit a diminished country. .  .  . Had I run for these other offices, I think she would have felt that I was just running for the title and not the issues.

Were the CPAC address and others I’d heard his basic speech? “It’s the basic message,” Rubio said. “Our message hasn’t changed one bit.” Indeed it hasn’t. Then he summarized it succinctly. What are Florida’s problems? Chiefly unemployment (11.5 percent), he said. Again, he delivered a capsule version of his speech.

The ability to stick to a fundamental message and ignore the small stuff is the mark of a good candidate. Recall the politicians who were skilled at this. Reagan was. So was George W. Bush. Rubio is in good company.

But all of this—the message, Rubio’s strength as a speaker, his energy and passion—doesn’t guarantee him a safe path to the Senate. “No one’s ever seen a race like this in Florida,” says LeMieux. It’s unusually complicated. A Quinnipiac poll last week gave Crist a 5 or 6 point lead over Rubio, depending on who wins the Democratic primary on August 24, congressman Kendrick Meek or billionaire Jeff Greene. Rubio was ahead by 2 points in a Rasmussen poll of likely voters.

When Crist switched to independent, he was regarded as a goner. But he’s recovered. His handling of the Gulf oil spill has been skillful, and his flip-flops on issues haven’t hurt him appreciably. “Republicans see it as treason,” says Quinnipiac’s Peter Brown. “Independents see it in a different light. Democrats like it.” 

At the moment, Crist is getting a quarter of the Republican vote. This probably won’t last. “This is a great year to be a Republican,” says LeMieux, a perceptive analyst of Florida politics. “A lot of those Republicans who like Governor Crist personally are going to come home.” And vote for Rubio.

This means Crist’s ability to attract Democratic votes is critical. He’s hired Josh Isay, a former aide to Democratic senator Chuck Schumer, and his Democratic consulting firm SKDKnickerbocker, along with several other Democratic strategists.

The White House surely could have blocked Democratic operatives from signing on with Crist. But neither President Obama nor Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, intervened. Obama endorsed Meek months ago but has done little to help him. Meek got 13 percent in the Quinnipiac survey.

A competitive Democratic nominee would actually help Rubio by keeping Democrats from defecting to Crist. “I can’t imagine the Obama administration’s political machine abandoning the Democratic nominee, especially if it’s Meek,” Jeb Bush says.”

Even New Yorkers Want Obamacare Repealed

John Hinderaker at PowerLine offers this bit of interesting news regarding Obamacare,  out the blue…..the Blue being New York state:

“The Democrats hoped that once they passed their government medicine plan, opposition to the measure would die down amid voter resignation. But that hasn’t happened: most Americans remain opposed to government medicine.

What is striking is how broad and deep this opposition runs. Even in New York, one of the bluest of states, 56 percent of voters want Obamacare repealed. Such poll results suggest that Republicans may be able to pick off Congressional seats not generally thought to be in play by stressing their opposition to government-controlled health care and by advocating alternatives that would actually reduce costs, like authorizing interstate competition among insurance carriers and repealing state mandates.”

Comment:  I would be much happier if there were evidence to show the  public’s  displeasure with Obamacare would carry over  to Obama’s  selection  of Ellen Kagan to the Supreme Court, and  Obama’s  war against Arizona,  and Obama’s  refusal to enforce existing federal law regarding illegal immigrants, and Obama’s determination to ruin the nation’s economy and the citizen role within it by bloating the power of government to micromanage citizen life.

The one person central to this ruination of America  is the man who for 22 years was a member of Jeremiah Wright’s “Goddamn America”  church in Chicago….the man who is buddy with Weather Underground terrorist, Bill Ayers, and convicted felon tony Rezko, the man who knows so little history he keeps changing it whenever he speaks,  president Barack Obama.