Obama’s Civil War Idiocy

In his so-called speech on “patriotism” today (and we will be hearing much more about Mr. Obama’s “patriotism” in the near future, believe me) Senator Obama displays a surprising and dangerous ignorance about the nature and conduct of the Civil War. While I am sure that this is of no particular concern to most of Mr. Obama’s supporters, to whom history is what happened yesterday, it ought to concern citizens of common sense everywhere given that it’s quite possible that, in a little less than seven months, he might be the most powerful man in the world.

Let’s begin with one deeply alarming excerpt:

Adams’ Alien and Sedition Act, Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese Americans – all were defended as expressions of patriotism, and those who disagreed with their policies were sometimes labeled as unpatriotic.

There are a few things to consider here. The first and most obvious is that the overwhelming majority of Lincoln’s critics were, by definition, unpatriotic – in that they were defending people whose avowed objective was the destruction of the United States. But, of more direct relevance is the fact that Obama lumps in Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus with the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Japanese internment – both events which the liberal interpretation present as unqualified evils (assessments which I would wholly in the case of the form and partly in the case of the latter disagree with).

I’m going to take a step back and discuss what habeas corpus is. It’s a term we hear thrown around a lot – but I don’t think that many of the people who rant and rave at the President over it even understand the meaning. A petition for habeas corpus is a petition filed by an individual, or someone acting on behalf of an individual, demanding that the authorities prove that someone is being held according to law. It’s a safeguard against arbitrary detention.

But, sometimes, it’s absolutely necessary for the authorities to detain people arbitrarily and in a fashion which may be contrary to the law (or some Judge’s interpretation of the law). A perfect example of this is what President Lincoln did during the Civil War, particularly during the early stages of the conflict. Suspending habeas corpus may well have allowed Lincoln to prevent the secession of Maryland – an act which, had it come to pass, would have made the fall of Washington to the Confederacy a near-certainty. The President had no legal authority to arrest, as he did, members of the Maryland Legislature – but, in dire circumstances, necessesity outweighs legality. Anyone who believes otherwise (such as, for example, Ron Paul supporters) ought to be kept as far away from any sort of executive office as humanly possible.

This is a lesson applicable to the present war, as well. The sheer idiocy of the left’s approach to detained terrorists almost staggers all belief. How can individuals such as myself not believe that the left is on the other side when they struggle desperately to allow the Islamists to wage a decades-long legal Jihad which will fill the newspapers, cost billions of dollars, and clog up the courts. Not, I should hasten to add, that I have any real affection for the overly-legalistic approach taken by the Administration, either.

If the terrorism-as-a-law-enforcement-problem approach that the left tried in the 1990’s was a spectacular and continuous failure (and, indeed, has been one wherever it’s been tried anywhere in the world), it’s also fair to say that the President’s hybrid approach – mixing law and the military – has also been less than satisfactory. At its core, the problem is that the approach is lacking in ruthlessness – the core problem of many of this President’s policies. I admire him. I think that he’s a good man. I think that he’s been a good President. But, I think that the thing which keeps him from being a great man and a great President is that he’s been entirely too nice.

An effective War on Terrorism would restrict the conduct of the war to military means. That is to say that a true war would require that all Jihadists and their supporters, anywhere in the world (including within the United States) be treated as military targets. Arresting Jihadists, save for intelligence value, is idiocy. It costs money and gives them a chance to score propaganda points. A proper policy would classify all terrorists according to the traditional laws of war. That is to say that all Jihadists, Jihadist supporters, and their ilk would not be subjected to the domestic criminal laws of any nation, but instead would be treated as combatants in a war and, since they fail to follow the traditional rules followed by such individuals, they would be treated as illegal combatants and subject to the sanctions traditionally meted out to such individuals, which is to say that they would be summarily executed anywhere they were found in the world.

Indeed, part of me wonders how the world might have reacted if such a declaration was made after September 11th and, in the next weekend, a few thousand al-Qaeda supporters worldwide had simply been shot dead in the streets as they celebrated the attacks. Would any government have dared to speak against the United States or retaliate for such actions? I doubt it.

The next President needs to be tougher than this one – not weaker. The next President needs to understand more of what is sometimes required of us if we are to survive.

That brings me to my second bit of Civil War-related idiocy in Obama’s speech:

Abraham Lincoln did not simply win a war or hold the Union together. In his unwillingness to demonize those against whom he fought; in his refusal to succumb to either the hatred or self-righteousness that war can unleash; in his ultimate insistence that in the aftermath of war the nation would no longer remain half slave and half free; and his trust in the better angels of our nature – he displayed the wisdom and courage that sets a standard for patriotism.

I understand what Obama is saying here. My strong suspicion is that Obama doesn’t. Let’s review what Lincoln did in order to save the Union.

He suspended basic liberties. He threw tens of thousands of people in a time where the population of the whole country was around thirty million. Roughly 40,000 civilians placed under military arrest in a population of 30 Million is the equivalent of about 400,000 today. Among those people were members of State Legislatures and a former member of the House of Representatives. Does that sound like something of which Mr. Obama would approve?

Lincoln waged four years of bloody war, through countless military reverses, in which roughly 360,000 Union soldiers lost their lives. There are many Civil War battles whose death counts easily exceed those of the entire War on Terrorism to date – in a much smaller population. The total Civil War dead, as a percentage of the modern population, would be in excess of six million. Do you think that, for any cause, Obama or the Democrats would have the guts to fight a war which killed more than six million people, more than four million of them on their own side?

Under Lincoln, Sherman’s Army hacked its way through the South, burning crops, towns, and cities. If any army tried that today, it would be accused of war crimes. Indeed, it was Sherman’s taking the war to the South which ultimately cut the heart from the Confederacy. Can you imagine Obama sanctioning such a thing?

Obama wants to take an idealized image of Lincoln and celebrate that without facing any of the underlying realities. Lincoln could show magnanimity towards the defeated South because the Union had won the war. He didn’t show them any mercy during it. He –and others, including myself – could respect the South because their soldiers had fought like men – with honour and courage – and they had not, as the Jihadists do, sought to wage war through the press through the commission of cowardly acts of mass murder.

Abraham Lincoln does set a standard for patriotism – because he was willing to pay any price, bear any burden, and do whatever it took to bring victory in that war. Obama wants to ignore that reality and instead embrace only a warm and fuzzy illusion – a pink Lincoln, if you will. In truth, Abraham Lincoln was everything that Barack Obama is not. He was a man of genuine courage who was willing to make difficult choices. He was a deep believer in the unique destiny of his country, an idea which Obama implicitly rejects and which most of his advisors and supporters are explicitly opposed to.

I’m not saying that Senator Obama is stupid. I am saying that he is ignorant, perhaps wilfully so – with a knowledge of the Civil War limited to what he learned in High School. I don’t imagine that his teenage years spent snorting cocaine and his post-college career shaking down people for racial grievance money has afforded him the time to ever read, for example, Shelby Foote’s masterful trilogy on the war. None of this will, of course, bother his supporters a jot or a tittle – unsurprising given that ignorance of history is a prerequisite for supporting the modern left – but is should frighten everyone else.

Perhaps, as in many other things, Obama is merely pandering to his deranged supporters’ fantasies. But perhaps – and the indications are that this many well be the case – he’s sincere and one of the nation’s great political parties has nominated for the greatest position in the world a man who combines Jimmy Carter’s malicious naiveté with the hard-edged historical realism of an eleven year-old girl.

Copyrights – Qui Bono?

The Government has it all wrong on their new copyright bill. They are blowing a historic opportunity to reach out to young voters over an issue they actually care about and to put the left in a horrible bind. There’s still time – some – to reverse course and make a historic, bold, and utterly ruthless move. Not that I expect it to happen – this government hasn’t shown itself to be much in any of those departments.

Let’s talk about copyright law for the moment – why it exists and why the government wants to strengthen it. Copyright laws were instituted to give authors and creators the exclusive rights to their work in order to make sure that they could make money off of it. These laws, historically, have been far weaker than they are at the present time – a result of intensive lobbying by the entertainment industry over the years. It’s worth remembering that, had they gotten their way in the 1970’s, the VCR would have been banned. The entertainment industry wants restrictive copyright laws which prevent people from stealing their work. That’s an impulse I can understand. They also want to prevent people from modifying the form of their work, so that people are forced to purchase multiple copies of the same – for example, forcing you to buy a song once on a CD and once in MP3 format. That, I would argue, is less defensible.

Now, why does this government want to strengthen copyright laws? The short answer is two-sided. First, they’re under some degree of international pressure to do so, as Canada’s copyright laws are notably weaker than the global average. The second is that, in general, the average age of the Ministers and Bureaucrats in this government (in all governments, for that matter) is high enough that they simply don’t get this stuff and, thus, their natural law and order instincts drive them towards a tougher response to “piracy.”

What this debate misses altogether is the key question about this law – qui bono? Who benefits? Who is seeking these sorts of laws? The answer is: the big entertainment conglomerates, specifically the lazy and disoriented ones.

Internet piracy of media is time-intensive, bandwidth hogging, and places its practitioners at risk for any number of internet-related maladies. I buy my music from iTunes because it is reasonably priced, easy-to-do, and quick. I – and most other people – don’t have the time or inclination to venture either through the Torrents or the aging remnants of the old peer-to-peer networks in search of a song that could otherwise be had for $1.

The same is true for movies and television, though in Canada the alternatives are still in their infancy (iTunes movies having become available only last week with the television selection still limited and with Amazon Unbox and Hulu being inaccessible). I, for one, use a TiVo imported from the United States – a simple, no-fuss solution which delivers the media I want at a reasonable price.

Who will benefit the most from a crackdown on illegal downloading? The answer is obvious – the old-line entertainment bosses who don’t want the world to change. The morons who spend $200 Million making movies that no one wants to watch and millions more signing musicians who no one wants to listen to. A crackdown will slow the impetus on the content providers to sign deals which bring people media the way that they want when they want and instead encourage them to hold-fast to their old strategy of delivering it the way the bosses want when the bosses want.

After all, let’s get real here – the actual evidence that any of this stuff has a major effect on Hollywood’s bottom line is minimal, at best. I have a hard time believing that Evan Almighty tanked because ten million people watched a copy shot by some guy with a handicam in Montreal rather than spending $12 to see it in the theatres. A lot of this whining is a fig leaf to cover up the fact that the entertainment industry spends most of its time lavishing obscene amounts of money on projects without any obvious commercial viability.

More to the point – big entertainment doesn’t support conservatives (small or big C). They don’t give them their votes, their voices, or their money. Screw them.

On the other hand, the left does rely on the entertainment industry for money and support. Less so here in Canada – but that element is still there. Let the left carry water for the MPAA and the RIAA at the risk of alienating the young.

Instead of this nonsense, the government should scrap the copyright bill and replace it on the docket with one which tears down the barriers to Canada’s full ascension to the 21st Century in terms of technology and entertainment. Do away with the laws which prevent international telecommunications providers from entering the market. Let us have HBO, Showtime, and so forth direct from the source. Let Barnes and Noble open up a new mega-store in Vancouver. Let me finally buy the damned Kindle that I’ve been lusting after.

First, Kill All The Environmentalists…

When you take out your credit card to pay for that next tank of gas, know that you’re being robbed. But understand also that you’re not being robbed by the gas station owner or the oil company. You’re being robbed by lunatic environmentalists and their fellow travelers who, like all of the social and economic engineers in the history of the world, have irrationally convinced themselves that they may amend the laws of man and nature and not pay a price for it.

In the next few months you’re going to hear an awful lot of kooky plans for dealing with higher energy prices. Everything from the nonsense being peddled in the U.S. Senate yesterday in the form of a “windfall profits” tax on energy companies, to moronic calls for regulators to “control” speculators, to silly e-mail messages and Facebook groups which seek to “force” oil companies to sell gas at lower prices through selective boycotts (“everyone don’t shop at Shell on July 14th!”, etc). None of it will do any good. Some of it will do active harm. As for myself, I have a much better plan. It begins by borrowing from the Bard. First, we have to kill all the environmentalists.

Of course, I probably don’t mean that literally. Though some days, looking at the signs in front of gas stations, I pretty much do. After all, without them we could not only have all of the cheap energy that we or our children or our children’s children will ever need if we were to all live to be two hundred and fifty but we could all also make ourselves even richer at the rest of the world’s expense. Like I said – there’s nothing here not to like, unless you’re a nut.

I’ll get back to what I was discussing above. But, before I do that, I need all of you to understand something relatively simple. Why are oil prices so high? In the end, it relates back to the simplest economic problem in the world: the demand for oil exceeds the supply of oil. This is a problem that no tax can solve and no protest can ameliorate. That is because it relates to fundamental factors that are beyond the ability of the energy companies to control.

Broadly speaking, there are three major man-made factors – three socialisms if you will – which are influencing oil prices.

First, we have speculation on a massive scale. Why do we have this? Well, one of the factors is the one that Spengler identified a few months ago as driving the crisis in the housing market: there are vast pools of European and Japanese capital which cannot be invested in those nations because they lack the young people to start businesses, buy homes, and have children to make use of that money. Thus, this great wave of cash is sloshing around the world – driven to seek the highest return. This is one of the first visible elements of the demographic crisis that Mark Steyn and others have been droning on about for years. A disturbance of the natural human order has economic effects. The result has been this recurrent global pattern of bubbles – technology, commodities, housing, energy – driven by speculation on a massive scale. Indeed, this is the one factor which promises relatively short-term relief. The present oil price is in the Pets.com-selling-for-$250 stage of the boom.

Second, in major chunks of the world – particularly in Asia – gas prices are regulated (and therefore subsidized) by the government. The result of this is that we have an artificially manufactured increase in the demand for energy because the price to the consumer is not reflective of the real cost of the commodity. Alas, there’s not really much that we can do about this at the present time and, given that these subsidies are reportedly costing the Chinese government a sum in the hundreds of billions of dollars, we will have to trust that this part of the problem will eventually sort itself out. That’s hardly satisfactory, but this is, I suppose, one of those “change the things we can and accept those that we cannot” sort of things.

Third – and winding back to my original point –we have artificial restrictions upon the supply of oil and gas here in North America. Yes, it’d take years to bring oil in Alaska and offshore online (though, if it were made a real priority, I expect that it could be done faster than the official estimates say – perhaps three or four years instead of six or seven), but even the signal that our governments were serious about ceasing to handicap our own energy production would send the oil price tumbling. Refusing to increase energy production during this sort of crisis – when we plainly have the means available to do so –is, to use a clinical term, totally fucking crazy. But, alas, with environmentalists that’s par for the course.

All of us are used to the idea that fanatical environmentalists care more for animals and plants that no one has ever heard of or has any particular use for than they do for people’s jobs or property. That strange idea has been around for so long that we no longer even bother arguing the point. This crisis, however, has made plain that the antipathy that the environmentalist feels towards man goes deeper than that – they would plainly like to see people (mostly, I need not add, the poor people they claim to hold affection for) freeze in the dark before they would surrender one jot of the fanatical position into which they are entrenched.

For decades, environmentalists have systematically erected barriers to the production and distribution of energy. Laws prevent oil drilling in countless places where oil might be easily and profitably be extracted. Regulatory requirements have frozen the construction of new refineries and power plants. Regulations, taxes, and the threat of more of both freeze the development of useful new technologies.

Step by step they have tightened the noose around our necks. They will continue to do so until they are stopped. They are against Western Civilization – in their hearts environmentalist fanatics would like to see the human race (or at least the rich and Western part of the human race) rendered extinct and replaced by some sort of global version of sub-Saharan Africa, where impoverished and suffering masses live under the benign rule of U.N. and local kleptocrats. I don’t claim that this is the ambition of all environmentalists – most people who would self-identify as such haven’t thought through their position to a degree sufficient to render them that morally depraved.

The truth is that, without troublemaking environmental radicals we could solve this problem pretty much overnight.

We begin with conventional oil. There’s a ton of it in Alaska and offshore – we go and get that. Environmentalists and their fellow travelers argue against this step on the grounds that, even if we legalized such production today the oil won’t begin to flow for years. This is disingenuous for two reasons. First, I expect that production could be brought online – in a crisis with so much money to be made – a lot faster than the official estimates say. But second, and perhaps more importantly, the promise of future supply would be immediately priced into present-day oil trading and would take a lot of the wind out of the speculator’s sails.

In the long-term, however, there are other solutions – the real alternative energy – that we never hear about.

An obvious one is nuclear power. Not only could nuclear power replace the oil which is presently wasted on electricity generation, but it would also have numerous other uses (which I shall get to shortly).

Even more important to our energy security are three true alternatives to conventional oil – tar sands, coal-to-gas conversion, and oil shale. Forget all of the “Peak Oil” nonsense that you might have heard or read. Those three sources can provide enough gasoline for America for a few hundred years if the need should arise.

Tar sands are pretty simple – and already in progress (though, God help the world if the left takes power in Canada anytime soon and tries to shut them down).

Coal-to-gas conversion is possible, practical, and affordable. We know that it can be done – the Nazis used it during the Second World War. The technology is there. The primary obstacle to making gasoline from coal on a large scale is radical environmentalists who will obstruct both the new large-scale mining operations and the construction of necessary conversion plants.

The coal reserves of the United States are the equivalent of 4.7 Trillion barrels of oil. American demand for oil is roughly twenty-one million barrels per day. Obviously, there are other uses for that coal – but there’s enough just in that to fuel the United States for a few hundred years.

Then, there’s oil shale. Basically, oil shale is a kind of rock that can be processed to create oil. The estimated global reserves of oil shale are the equivalent of 1.6 Trillion barrels of oil of which 1.2 Trillion are located in the United States. In other words, the Oil Shale reserves of the United States represent a store of energy sufficient to fuel the entire country at current rates for about one hundred and fifty-six years.

There is one thing which can be said for the “Peak Oil” hypothesis – insofar as it relates to conventional oil, it works very much in our favor. If North America seems to have been slightly shortchanged in terms of conventional oil, we also have – between tar sands, coal, and oil shale – an overwhelming percentage of the world’s future energy supply. The kind of money we’re talking about here is in the trillions and trillions of dollars.

So, why isn’t this so? Ask our environmentalist friends. We absolutely could do it, if only we could find the will. Read this carefully. Do some research. Understand that the reason you’re paying so much at the pump has very little to do with the evil oil companies, or President Bush, or whomever else popular culture wants you to blame. The blame for our woes rests soundly upon the environmentalists who have deliberately restricted our economic growth and grabbed cash out of your wallets in the name of their own illusory greater good.

Obama: Israel is a "Constant Sore"

I guess that "BO" should stick to the script:

JG: Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?

BO: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy.

Hurrah, the Death Penalty is Back!

Georgia today had the honour of being the first state to execute a criminal following the Supreme Court's lifting of a temporary death penalty moratorium. I realize that some here have religious or ideological objections to capital punishment but, I suspect it goes without saying that I am not among those individuals.

Indeed, I am for the death penalty not only on practical grounds ("no dead criminal re-offends") but on philosophical grounds as well. The refusal to use the death penalty to punish criminals - a tool used by pretty much all known human societies since the beginning of time - is a sure sign of civilizational decadence and decline. The death penalty isn't merely about the offender and the victim - it is the recognition that there exist absolute and unforgivable offenses which are not merely against human law, but against natural law as well.

No one will miss this sub-human trash:

Lynd, 53, was sentenced to die for kidnapping and shooting his live-in girlfriend, Ginger Moore, three times in the face and head two decades ago. After he buried Moore's body in a shallow grave near a south Georgia farm, authorities said Lynd fled to Ohio, where he shot and killed another woman who had stopped along the side of the road to help him.

When we kill a criminal such as this, we reaffirm our own belief in humanity and civilization. Killing someone like this is a way of expressing our own self-confidence - it is a way of saying, "yes, we are certain enough of ourselves and our collective morality that we are going to write you out of the human race." It is the judgement of civilization that such people should die.

The real pity is that we can't use the death penalty for more offenses. Look, for example, to the case of Josef Fritzl in Austria. It is regrettable that Europe has abolished the death penalty - and that the death penalty has been more-or-less abolished for crimes other than murder in the United States because, quite frankly, I can think of few creatures who deserved to die more than this... thing... does. Killing him would be a collective reaffirmation of our own humanity.

Now, of course, there are many - and I'm sure many here - who aren't comfortable with such power being in the hands of the state. I thoroughly disagree here. Given that the death penalty would - even if I was allowed to extend it to rapists, child molesters, and some other criminals - be fairly narrowly applied. It is a power which will only touch upon the vilest things which walk the Earth. The use of the death penalty - as authorized by the will of a jury of one's peers - is one of the narrow powers that the state ought to have.

After all, the state - at least in a libertarian state - is a repository for those functions - contracts, law enforcement, national defense, international relations - which cannot (or should not) be exercised on an individual level. If you assume that, in the state of nature, mobs would simply kill rapists, child molesters, murderers, and the like then it is fair to say that the obligation of the state to carry out this function is implicit in the social contract.

Deport This Man, Today

Naeem Muhammad Khan has a Facebook account. He lives in Toronto. He is unemployed. He’s also an avid Jihadist who arrived in this country less than two years ago.

Why is he still here?

While this nation is at war, he posts a banner on his Facebook page encouraging support for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. He says that Osama Bin Laden is a “hero.” He says that the reason that he’s here is because he’s free here to preach the Jihadist creed in a way that he wouldn’t be in most of the Moslem world.

Why is he still here?

The man is of no value to this country. Given that he is unemployed, he is a drain on the Treasury. He is worthless. He is scum. If we were a culture with the self-confidence to do what is morally right we would… Well, I’ll stop there – lest I draw the scrutiny of the self-appointed defenders of the “rights” of our murderous enemies.

If you want to know why I have so little regard for this nation’s government, even under the present Administration, take a look at this man. A nation so degraded, so enervated, that it cannot properly dispose of as odious a “man” as this isn’t worthy of respect. A nation whose people so happily accept such a state of affairs is, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, “prepared for a master – and deserves one.”

So, I’m issuing a challenge to the Immigration Minister, Diane Finley. One that I am hoping that others will pick up and echo: deport this man, today.

I realize that government doesn’t normally move at that pace. But, of course, if can – if the appropriate fire is lit. I am calling on the Immigration Minister – and for that matter the Prime Minister – to make people jump. Go. Arrest this man. Put him on a plane. Send him back to Pakistan. There are other courses of action which would also be morally right and emotionally satisfying, but this one happens to be legal, so I’ll settle for that.

Prove me wrong. Show me that this is still a country. Tell the world that this is something more than an international flop-house for terrorists, criminals, the shiftless, and other assorted miscreants. Honour those who do come here to make better lives by removing from their presence – as well as ours – such a wretched creature.

Not that I believe that they will. As I have said before, this country is too far-gone for that. Even under this, supposedly right-wing government, we don’t have the guts to face down the left. Even if they did summon the courage to do something, he’d probably win in some damned court and be back here in a few years with $25 Million and an apology.

Speaking of odious individuals with a Facebook page, have you ever wondered what happened to Abdulkareem Khadr, the member of the famed Khadr al-Qaeda family who was badly wounded in a shoot-out with Pakistani forces where his father, a senior member of al-Qaeda, was killed?

Yes, for the record, the man I linked to is one and the same. I corresponded with him briefly in the past, before he, if I were to guess, probably Googled my name and guessed that my intentions towards him were other-than-benign. This member of the self-proclaimed al-Qaeda family, wounded while on the other side of the war that we are fighting, would seem to have spent the last few years enjoying the full benefits of my tax dollars – recovering his health through our health care system. He attends Birchmount Park Collegiate in Toronto, where he is scheduled to graduate in a few months. I’ll note that it’s a public school, as well. Given his family’s unique background and that his father is dead, one wonders how they support themselves. It wouldn’t be shocking to find that the boy is a leech on the taxpaying public in a third way as well.

He would seem to have friends. One supposes that they’re ignorant or – given his notoriety it seems difficult to believe that they would be – they, like to many people in this country, view being on the other side as simply another lifestyle choice. I thought about going up and down the list and asking the people if they know that they’re linked with Canada’s al-Qaeda family but, in the end, that would seem to be an empty exercise. In all probability those people are lost just as this country is lost.

If no one in this country could rouse themselves to act against him – and the rest of his family – than Khan is probably perfectly safe. One more step towards all of our graves.

As I have said before, leftism is AIDS for civilization. All of that touchy-feely nonsense, all of those false doctrines – none of them is fatal in and of themselves. Socialism is difficult to counter because, on the surface, the proposals are not directly harmful. But, like HIV/AIDS, leftism attacks the immune system and wrecked the ability of the body to defend itself from what, under normal circumstances, would be minor irritants.

Can this country be saved? Not, I think, without a drastic change. If our leaders – if our Conservative leaders – cannot rise to such a simple and obvious challenge, than how shall we ever save ourselves? We’ll just continue our long process of bleeding out under the Liberals being alternated with the tourniquet of the Conservatives.

Indeed, we lack even the hope of other endangered lands – such as France – that we might, in an hour of supreme emergency, turn back to other, darker traditions. We are already too weak and divided for that. Instead, our hopes must rest upon events – that some event or individual will bring about an awakening in this country which may once again give us the hope of brighter days.

McCain: 313, Obama: 230

I’ve updated my chart with a raft of new polls. We end up with the lead changing in just two states – New York and New Mexico. New York, of course, was probably to be expected.

The new batch of polls – including the Massachusetts one I already discussed – provide further proof of the emerging trend that I was talking about earlier. Namely – Obama appears to be doing better-than-expected in affluent and mostly-white states. I don’t think (barring a national landslide) that McCain will take from him many of the states that a “moderate” Republican might have expected to put into play – states in the Pacific Northwest and Upper Midwest. He might lose a state or two in the Southwest as well.

However, Obama continues to show a fascinating degree of weakness in the Rust Belt, the Mid-Atlantic States, and even in parts of New England. Interestingly, he’s also weak in the areas where the Democrats have gone looking for gains in recent years – in the Border States and the Upper South. There’s absolutely no chance, looking at the polls, that he’ll take Virginia, West Virginia, or Tennessee – all states that the Democrats have considered to be targets or possible targets in recent races.

As I’ve said in the past, I think that Obama is going to lose by a fairly big margin – and I think that the media is going to miss it for a long, long time. His problem, one amplified by the debate last night, is that he’s culturally alien to the great silent majority of Americans.

In places with a lot of “educated” (scare quotes used advisedly) voters, a man named Barack Hussein Obama who seems more a citizen of the world than of America might well be seen as transgressive and innovative. But, in the rest of the country, he – and his increasingly cult-like followers – look like Visigoths.

And, yes, there’s probably a racial factor here. That’s regrettable, but it’s also reality. The truth – pointed out during the early primaries but carried over to today, is that Obama seems to do well in two kinds of areas:

a) Places with a large black population (a factor which doesn’t matter nearly so much in a General Election since the black vote is already a bloc vote there).

b) Places which have very few black people.

Mixed places – like the big coastal and industrial states – seem to be troublesome for Obama.

Looking at the numbers – and seeing no fundamental shift from 2004 – we’re faced with a fixed reality. The Democrats have to win Ohio and every single other state that they won in 2004 in order to win in 2008. If they lose Michigan, which seems quite possible, then they have to win Ohio, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada – and hold every single other state they won in 2004. The math is much more problematic for the Democrats than for the Republicans at this point.

Right now Obama is underperforming in Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, California, and Pennsylvania. He’s actually losing the latter. A Democrat who loses even one of those states cannot possibly win a Presidential election at this point in history.

The shape of the battlefield for the Democrats is very grim. The “50 State Strategy” that the nutroots and Howard Dean forced on the DNC is plainly a bust. There’s no chance of the Democrats winning even a single state that Bush carried by more than a few points in 2004. All of those resources that were thrown into Deep Red states have been wasted. Florida is off the table. Many of the other target states from 2004 and 2000 – Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina – are off the table. They have been reduced to a single path to victory – win Ohio and hold everything else. Anything else is going to end in their defeat.

McCain, on the other hand, has many paths of victory. At a minimum, he can win by winning every Bush state except for Ohio – but winning New Hampshire. Or Michigan. Or Pennsylvania. Or New Jersey. Or New York. Or Massachusetts. Or California. The last three are less realistic, but possible at this point in time.

When you consider what lies ahead for the Democrats, it’s perhaps even worse for them than it sounds.

If Hillary wins Pennsylvania big – and every sign points to yet on that score now – there’s no way she’s getting out before the convention. The Barone scenario, where she wins the popular vote, now appears quite possible. They’re going to spend all of their money and time up until then shredding eachother.

I don’t think that Hillary will win the nomination. But, I do think that she’s going to destroy Obama. One disclosure after another thrown at him for months. Racial and gender animosities pitched to new levels of fury.

If I were a Democrat, I’d be thinking about a third candidate. Not, I should add, that I think that a third candidate – foisted on a reluctant party at the last minute – would have more than a 25% chance of winning. But, I think that the Democrats have to begin considering what a broad national GOP victory – with a strong performance in a number of deep blue states – means for their Congressional delegations.