BY TOM TOMORROW
Obama will move us to One World Government in the blink of an eye, and environmentalists are Nazis.
Glenn Beck also spends a lot of time mocking people who — in his phrasing — say “help me, government, help me, I’m scared!” — (i.e., people who believe that government programs to help the needy are actually a good thing.)
That’s when he’s not saying, in all seriousness, “Please build a fence along the Mexican border, government, I’m scared!”
I had forgotten about this:
HARTFORD, Conn. –U.S. Sen. Barack Obama rallied Connecticut Democrats at their annual dinner Thursday night, throwing his support behind mentor and Senate colleague Joe Lieberman.
Obama, an Illinois Democrat who is considered a rising star in the party, was the keynote speaker at the annual Jefferson Jackson Bailey Dinner.
Lieberman, Connecticut’s junior senator, is under fire from some liberal Democrats for his support of the Iraq War. He was key in booking Obama, who routinely receives more than 200 speaking invitations each week.
Some at Thursday’s dinner said that while they were pleased with Lieberman’s success in bringing Obama to Connecticut, they still consider Lieberman uncomfortably tolerant of the Bush administration.
Obama wasted little time getting to that point, calling it the “elephant in the room” but praising Lieberman’s intellect, character and qualifications.
“The fact of the matter is, I know some in the party have differences with Joe. I’m going to go ahead and say it,” Obama told the 1,700-plus party members who gathered in a ballroom at the Connecticut Convention Center for the $175-per-head fundraiser.
“I am absolutely certain Connecticut is going to have the good sense to send Joe Lieberman back to the U.S. Senate so he can continue to serve on our behalf,” he said.
Bill Clinton also came to Connecticut and campaigned for Joe, though if I recall correctly, Hillary was carefully neutral. And once Ned Lamont won the Democratic primary, both Hillary and Obama threw their support behind him.
Still: two years ago, Changey McHopealot’s first impulse was to endorse Joe Lieberman.
Please tell me I’m not the only one who saw this :
This is from James Loewen‘s book Lies My Teacher Told Me, a survey of what the most widely-used high school textbooks on American history leave out. It was published in 1995:
The sole piece of criminal government activity that most textbooks treat is the series of related scandals called Watergate…In telling of Watergate, textbooks blame Richard Nixon, as they should. But they go no deeper. Faced with this undeniable instance of government wrongdoing, they manage to retain their uniformly rosy view of the government. In the representative words of The United States—A History of the Republic, “Although the Watergate crisis was a shock to the nation, it demonstrated the strength of the federal system of checks and balances. Congress and the Supreme Court had successfully check the power of the President when he appeared to be abusing that power.”
As Richard Rubenstein pointed out, “the problem will not go away with the departure of Richard Nixon,” because it is structural, stemming from the vastly increased powers of the federal executive bureaucracy. Indeed, in some ways the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan-Bush administration, a web of secret legal and illegal acts involving the president, vice-president, cabinet members, special operatives such as Oliver North, and government officials in Israel, Iran, Brunei and elsewhere, shows an executive branch more out of control than Nixon’s. Textbooks’ failure to put Watergate into this perspective is part of their authors’ apparent program to whitewash the federal government so that schoolchildren will respect it. Since the structural problem in the government has not gone away, it is likely that students will again, in their adult lives, face an out-of-control federal executive pursuing criminal foreign and domestic policies. To the extent that their understanding of the government comes from their American history courses, students will be shocked by these events and unprepared to think about them.
Wow, did he get that one wrong.
… but Fox is not to be outdone:
Who does Usama bin Laden want to be the next president? More people think the terrorist leader wants Obama to win (30 percent) than think he wants Clinton (22 percent) or McCain (10 percent). Another 18 percent says it doesn’t matter to bin Laden and 20 percent are unsure.