The good old days...

Since I'm stuck at home sick with a respiratory infection, I thought I'd spend a little time writing. I was going to write a note about the media coverage of last week's election but after reading my notes I realized that it's not any different from the other dozen notes I've written about media bias. The only real difference was the overtly confrontational nature from the panel at MSNBC towards Michele Bachmann and their obvious lack of objectivity as the night wore on. As the returns came in, the panel seemed less like journalists and more like the character Glum from the "Gulliver's Travels" cartoon. Remember him? Always the sad sack who would pronounce, "We're doomed. We'll never make it." One wonders if the impending sale of NBC to Comcast will shake up the blatant partisanship of MSNBC.

One interesting point during MSNBC's coverage of the election was something that didn't happen all night. Not once during the entire coverage did anyone on the panel utter the word "Teabaggers" to describe the movement that played such a pivotal role in the Republican rout. I asked myself why that would be since both Olbermann and Maddow, and to a lesser degree Chris Mathews, made it a habit of using that word freely during their regular broadcasts. Was it a directive from on high? Was it a pact between the three? Was it the knowledge that their future bosses at Comcast might be watching? Who knows. Either way, it was a grim joy to see the defeat of the Democrats played out on the faces of the unholy trinity. Revenge may be a dish best served cold but it's even better when it's being filmed.

That is old news now and not nearly as surprising nor newsworthy as I first thought it would be. The media is biased. That's been clear for years and I find it hard to add anything more to it. What I really wanted to write about was related to our present situation but on more of a historical tangent. Oh hell, why not just say it.

I miss Bill Clinton.

There, I said it. Moreover, I'm not ashamed of it either. I did vote for him twice after all. Some of you already know that I was once a Democrat although I held some moderately conservative beliefs. I was raised a Kennedy Democrat. John F., not Teddy. Most of my immediate family are still Democrats to this day. I try not to get into too many political discussions during family get-togethers but it's a well known fact I lean to the right. I grew up believing that Democrats were the party of the little guy and I thought that was an admirable thing. I never questioned those beliefs and apart from voting for Reagan in his second term, I voted Democrat regularly. Hell, I even voted for Michael Dukakis. That was more of a protest vote than anything else. The senior Bush was head of the CIA at one time and that just had a creepy feeling in my mind. I voted for Reagan for two reasons; first, I was in the army at the time and he was wagging his finger at the Russians nearly every day on TV and second, I liked having someone who was the Commander of the military who wasn't afraid to flex his military muscle when it was needed. I still like to say that at one time, many years ago, Ronald Reagan was my boss.

On to the real meat of this note though. I miss Bill Clinton. A lot. Despite his failings as a man he was one hell of a good leader for this country. He represented a new style that matched the attitude of the nation. We were quickly approaching the new millennium and he was well suited to the task of leading us into it. He was given an economy that was just beginning to roar back into life, job growth was good, people were making money and his ability to connect with the common man was uncanny. Who can forget, "I feel your pain."?

While his moral compass may have been stuck pointing south, to his crotch, his leadership was spot on. When he lost the house in '94 he realized quickly that things would have to change in order to govern effectively. He rose to the challenge and made quick work of forming new partnerships in the Congress. While he is still credited for signing welfare reform into law, it's hardly mentioned that it passed his desk 3 times before he actually signed it. It was a sweeping reform and wildly successful and it showed his willingness to reach across the proverbial aisle. He was a keen political animal, the likes of which we weren't quite used to. He was smart, likable and always on the lookout for his next moment of glory. He also represented a new era in politics. He was the first politician that we stopped putting on a pedestal. We recognized him as a man. Flawed and imperfect but with a good heart. He loved his country and it showed.

He took what appeared to be a crushing defeat and turned it into a chance to showcase his astounding adaptability and his expert political gamesmanship. His ability to triangulate became the stuff of legend. He was able to bring all sides to the table and forge an outcome that left most feeling like they won the day.

So why the wistful remembrance about a man I find so reprehensible today? Quite honestly I wish I saw the same traits in our current President. What I've seen so far from Obama is more of the same rhetoric that led him to the defeat he just suffered. His post election statements and his subsequent interview on 60 minutes were both filled with laments about how he didn't get his message out clearly enough. How he should have done a better job at convincing his opposition that his way was the best way. His arrogance will simply not let him believe that the American people might not agree with him. Bill Clinton wanted approval more than anything else. Maybe his childhood played a role in his need to be liked but whatever the case, it served him well in the aftermath of the 94 midterm. He played it beautifully, masterfully and with such ease you hardly noticed that he had just had his political head handed to him.

If Obama has any political instincts at all, he will learn an important lesson that Bill Clinton already knows. You either listen and learn or you become a weak footnote in history.

Can you say Jimmy Carter?

The Week In Review

My, oh my where do we begin? Let's start by saying that this is not like any other weekly review I've written up to this point. While I will try to hide my obvious jubilation over the election results, I will also attempt to relay some astounding facts that both surround and hide inside the aforementioned results. Those of you with a conservative lean are at a minimum pleased with the election I suspect but for me this was more than an election. This was a realignment of both the Republican and Democrat parties. This was the loudest shout the American people have uttered in more than a hundred years. It was a reaffirmation of the power of both the people and their most sacred duty...their vote. This election represents, in a much broader sense, the true might and majesty of what our country stands for. The peaceful exercise of the modern transfer of power.

Forgive me if I wax rhapsodic about the greatness of this country. No other country allows it's people such freedom, such an absolute role in it's future, it's persona and it's character. In a scant 160 years, we went from a country at war with itself for the determination of slavery, to electing a black man President. That alone, speaks volumes about the role this country plays in the world as a model for the real gift of Democracy. It is the individual, or a collection of them, that shape the face this nation shows the world.

Having said that, it is obvious that while the country may have the sense of enlightenment needed to elect a black man President, it is not above telling that same man that his choice of a course for the nation is wrong and must be altered. Despite the mainstream media belief that any criticism of a black man is veiled racism, it is impossible to believe that the results of our last election are only about race. They must be about the ideology of the party in power and the direction we must go moving forward. If the independents or moderates that essentially flung Obama into the White House to begin with abandoned him two years later, one can only surmise that they were, in actual point of fact, unhappy with who they thought he was. He ran as a centrist to attract that sacred middle that all politicians seek to woo during an election season but wound up taking a radical left turn after his inauguration. Two years of health care reform, bailouts, stimulus, rising unemployment and the incessant meddling in the business of America which is business after all, finally boiled over, leaving the Democrat party burned and disfigured beyond it's ability to comprehend.

With the help of the Tea Party, that sacred middle sent what amounted to a cacophony of disdain and displeasure throughout the entire Liberal establishment. Now, that's not what you'll hear from almost everyone on the left. There are so many records tucked inside this election and I suspect that if you don't watch Fox news, you'd never have heard about them. I will try to list just a few firsts or at least the record moments in this election:

Tim Scott won his race in South Carolina on the GOP ticket. What is the amazing fact here? Tim Scott is black and the fist black GOP member from South Carolina since reconstruction. Yes, you read that correctly.

Col. Allen West, whose YouTube videos of his inspirational speeches went viral, won his race in Florida. West is also black and the first black GOP member in Florida since the 1870's.

The state House in Alabama flipped to Republican control for the first time since 1865.

There were a total of 688 State level congressional seats won by Republicans out of a possible 1,000 up for election. That's fully 2/3 of ALL available seats.

The US House changed hands in a stunning upset to the tune of 66 seats. For perspective, the Republican Revolution of 1994 was a gain of only 54 seats, enough to wrest control of the House at the time. If that was a "revolution" what was this? A bloodless coup? A tsunami?

No Democrat running for a state level congressional seat, either House or Senate had been elected who wasn't an incumbent. Let that little tidbit sink in for a moment. Only those who were already entrenched could retain their seats. No New Democrats got elected. Just breathe slowly and savor the delicious aroma of the meaning of the word "mandate".

Now, did you hear those facts from any of the mainstream media outlets? Did Chris Mathews weep with joy at the election of a black man in Florida? Do you think he felt a thrill go up his leg? Do you think Keith Olbermann will pick one of the two previous Republicans I just mentioned as a role model for black Americans or will he name them his Worst Person?

Another truly astounding fact of this election is the newly developed ability of conservatives to mobilize and organize. Those two actions were relegated solely to the left for so many years that conservatives looked silly and weak in comparison. This election showed how strong the right can be when it is properly motivated. The assault on freedom represented by the gargantuan Health Care law and it's impending death knell for individual choice in decisions based on our lives seemed to be the proper motivation. The rise and subsequent denigration of the Tea Party by every sector of leftist ideology proved to be the final nail in the coffin for the left. Despite being called stupid, violent, extreme, racist and the ever popular "Tea Baggers", a thinly veiled insult and a graphic sexual term, the Tea Party managed what no other movement in the past had been able to do. It woke up a sleeping giant by metaphorically holding up the Constitution in one hand and the Health Care Law in the other. It asked the American people which document was more important? Which was really indicative of what the country stood for? Do we stand for freedom from oppressive Government or do we sit quietly while that same Government attempts to behead the dreams of our founding fathers? The answer seems clear to most people, unless you have a journalism degree from Columbia. Those people seem to think that stupidity and anger ruled the day.

Let's compare two recent elections and then ask a very important question. In 2008, the American people spoke loudly and Barack Obama was propelled to immortality. The left declared this a moment worthy of remembrance and praise for a country that still smacked sorely of racial divisions hundreds of years old. They declared it a mandate for a more moderate America that would heal itself and the world all at once. Obama won that election by a 52% - 47% margin over John McCain. While that does mean that he won a technical majority of the American People, it was hardly earth shattering in that he only won by 7 percentage points. Hardly what one could reasonably call a mandate by any any definition of the word. The only true historic part of that election was that a black man won. While that is an admirable goal, especially from a country with such an ugly past in matters of race, that remains the sole moment of regard worth noting.

In 2010, the number of Republican gains is staggering by comparison. The margin of victory in the US House is the largest since 1938. A 66 seat pickup is the stuff of political dreams in the modern era. It is, quite frankly, a political analyst's wet dream. When you couple that with gains in the US Senate, gubernatorial gains and the enormous gains in the State Houses across the country,what one word comes close to describing it?

Mandate. A conservative mandate of such Herculean proportions that surely even the President would be humbled by it's size.

If you were talking about any other President, I would agree but not our current President. He still seems convinced that he either didn't get his message out clearly enough or he was just so smart that none of us mere mortals could comprehend his brilliance. His "conciliatory" speech the day after the election smacked of self delusion and a verbal doubling down of more of the same policies that had just been rejected. He didn't see it as a rejection at all. He still seems to think he just needs to better explain why his Statist policies are such a good thing for the country. He doesn't understand that wasting nearly two tears trying to "reform" the best health care system in the world while the economy sank deeper and deeper into recession might give most of the country the impression that all he cared about was his agenda, not the millions of unemployed and the millions more being systematically hurt by the downward spiral. Had he expended half the energy in rescuing the economy that he spent destroying one-sixth of it, this election would have had much different consequences.

In a nutshell, his Keynesian economic beliefs and his burgeoning "ideologue" persona, his entrenched, unshakable belief that he knows best, eventually dragged him and the entire Democrat party into an abyss of mediocrity. It exposed the modern Democrat party as a big government party that holds faith in the State above faith in the people. It places it's ideals for humanity above the desires of it's people.

That, of course, is my opinion but I suspect that it's shared by at least 66 Republicans. Regardless of what you may have heard, there are jobs being created...for Republicans all across the country.

This post will end on that note but I still want to dissect the election from the media's reaction. There is so much information to be disseminated in this election that I find it a necessity to tackle the issues separately. This is both for you the reader, I don't wish to bore you but also for myself. I do have a tendency to ramble. You must believe me when I say that for all the information contained in this post about the election from the standpoint of results and reasons for it's outcome, what lies ahead in the media's perception of it is equally as astounding.

The Guardians Of Hypocrisy

Rush Limbaugh says often that you can tell what liberals are up to by what they accuse you of. If they accuse you of being in the pocket of special interests, they're trying to deflect criticism of the use of Union donations. If they accuse you of taking advantage of campaign finance laws, they're really hoping all those baskets of cash from the Chinese aren't noticed. If they accuse you of low moral character in a public official, they're really trying to prop up a President who got a "Lewinsky" in the Oval Office.

More recently, they've been howling about the negative campaign ads that they see from the Republican party and the influence of money from Political Action Committees (PACS) who don't have to report where that money comes from. These claims are the kind that will make you shoot soda from your nose when you hear them if you know the real truth. The truth is this: totaling up the money spent by Democrats, left leaning PACS and the Unions, we come to 1.1 billion dollars. The amount from Republicans and right leaning PACS comes to 600 million dollars. That's just over half what's been spent from the left. The hypocrisy is so thick you could cut it with a knife. A dull knife. A dull, rusty, 200 year old knife.

As far as negative campaign ads go, both sides have their fair share but from what I've seen, the left has far and away the most negative and incendiary ads to date. Alan Grayson (D) Florida, used an excerpted portion of a speech, given by his opponent Dan Webster (R) at a church, to give the impression that Webster thinks women should, "...submit to me", calling him Taliban Dan. You've no doubt heard the backlash of the "Aqua Buddha" ad from the Kentucky Senate race that wound up bringing Rand Paul up in the polls by nearly 7 points. And while not technically an ad, Joy Behar's comments on The View about Sharon Angle being a "bitch who was going to hell", it's still well within the framework of hypocrisy for the purposes of our discussion on the subject. Angle sent Behar flowers and a thank you card the next day. It seems donations flooded into Angle's campaign coffers after Behar's nasty remarks and the polls tilted in Angle's favor too. Kind of a reverse double whammy. Not a peep from the left about those ugly comments.

Another trend in the media and in the upper echelon of Democrat leadership is that the impending losses by the left are due to fear and scare tactics by right wing radio and Fox News. It can't be because the American people are tired of promises and committees and action plans by the current administration, it's because Americans are ill informed and not thinking clearly. Nearly everyone on the left, from the President on down, has tried to make the case that Americans simply don't know a good thing when they see it. When Obama was elected, the media applauded Americans for their intelligence and enlightened sensibilities. A scant 2 years later, Americans are stupid and running on racism and hatred.

To use one of Obama's favorite metaphors, American's are removing him from the driver's seat and telling him to let THEM drive. In Obama's world, he's in the driver's seat and everyone else is in the back. He has the country in a rear facing child seat so they can't see what's going on up ahead and only the Democrat leadership is allowed in the front.

To take this analogy to it's proper place would be to say that Obama should have stopped miles ago and asked for directions because he's gotten us hopelessly lost and we're dangerously low on gas.