Like most Americans, I’m more than content to read about the 2008 Presidential Election at this point, prior to the nominating conventions. I’m not glued to my television screen following it. Besides, I have plenty of Equestrian Olympic events, and Women’s Beach Volleyball, recorded on our satellite box to catch up on.

Consequently, I’ve seen nothing of the Saddleback Civil Forum on Presidency. But I can tell that John McCain surprisingly mopped the floor with the glib Mr. Obama, since the Obama Campaign’s media allies, NBC and NYT are now whining about McCain cheating.

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Byron York confirms the McCain victory.

Warren — Pastor Rick, around here — asked big questions, about big subjects; he wasn’t concerned about what appeared on the front page of that morning’s Washington Post. And his simple, direct, big questions brought out something we don’t usually see in a presidential face-off; in this forum, as opposed to a read-the-prompter speech, or even a debate focused on the issues of the moment, the candidates were forced to call on everything they had — the things they have done and learned throughout their lives. And the fact is, John McCain has lived a much bigger life than Barack Obama. That’s not a slam at Obama; McCain has lived a much bigger life than most people. But it still made Obama look small in comparison. McCain was the clear winner of the night.

Hst tip to the News Junkie.

From Ms. Underestimated via Gateway Pundit:

NBC’s Chris Collinsworth prods Basketball player Kobe Bryant (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) with an audible sneer to remember that public expressions of patriotism are no longer appropriate.

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Collinsworth: Is that a ‘cool’ thing to say, in this day and age? That you love your country, and that you’re fighting for the red, white and blue? It seems sort of like a day gone by(?)

Bryant: No, it’s a cool thing for me to say. I feel great about it, and I’m not ashamed to say it. I mean, this is a tremendous honor.

Roger Kimball enjoys the New York Times’ dilemma on how best to suppress Jerome Corsi new book.

Oh dear, Oh dear, Oh dear. Jerome Corsi, author of the bestselling Unfit for Command in 2004, a book that turned the phrase “swift boat” into a verb and helped defeat John “Reporting for Duty” Kerry, has written a new book about Barack Hussein Obama (yes, I know I am not supposed to mention his middle name, but I am going to anyway) called The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. It’s officially published only today (you can order it from Amazon here), but already it is # 1 on The New York Times bestseller list with 475,000 copies in print so far. The Times, naturally, is in a swivet lest Corsi’s book undermine The Messiah’s planned advent in November and they have wheeled into print with a longish dismissal masquerading as a review today. “Significant parts of the book,” the authors write (the Times requires two reviewers when a serious demolition job is commissioned), “have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since its debut on Aug. 1.”

“Challenged”? Who would doubt it? Anything can be challenged: “Who goes there?” But have those “significant parts” been shown to be false? …

That’s one of many questions the public should be asking about Barack Hussein Obama. Today’s piece in the Times veritably weeps with anxiety. Corsi’s book has dwarfed a similar effort to discredit John McCain (35,000 in print): is there no justice in the world? The Times was in a tough spot with this book. The paper’s usual procedure with books it dislikes is to ignore them. Someone must have made the calculation that it was better to try to head off Corsi’s book at the pass, to strangle it in the crib as it were. I think they will rue the decision. Most people who read the Times would probably have been only dimly aware of The Obama Nation had the Times not brought it to their attention. Now they have had it rubbed in their faces. The paper did its best to dismiss the book, but questions and doubts will linger–not so much about Jerome Corsi but about Barack Hussein Obama. Who is he? Who are his friends? What does he believe? Is he the sort of person the American public wants leading the country? Is he a “stealth radical liberal”?

Actually, I think a Tuesday slash-and-burn article under Politics combined with studied non-recognition in the Book Review itself is pretty much Times’ standard operating procedure.

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Earlier Obama Nation post.

The authors of the Left Behind books say Obama is not, repeat: not, the AntiChrist.

link

Stephen Moore, in the Wall Street Journal, describes how the environmental movement has come to claim the right to regulate, tax, and control every aspect of every American’s life.

Earlier this month, while visiting a friend in San Francisco, I almost spilled my latte in my lap when I read this on the front page of the Chronicle: “S.F. Mayor Proposes Fines for Unsorted Trash.”

The story began: “Garbage collectors would inspect San Francisco residents’ trash to make sure pizza crusts aren’t mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom.” Isn’t that what homeless people do — rooting around in other people’s garbage? If Bay Area residents are caught failing to separate the plastic bottles from the newspapers, according to the newspaper story, they could face fines of up to $1,000.

“We don’t want to fine people,” the mayor is quoted saying reassuringly. “We want to change behavior.” Translation: Do exactly as we say and no one gets hurt. And San Francisco considers itself one of the most progressive cities in America!

When I was a kid, the environmentalists promoted their clean skies and antilittering agenda mostly through moral suasion — with pictures of an Indian under a smoggy sky with a tear rolling down his cheek or the owl who chanted on TV: “Give a hoot, don’t pollute.” Such messages made you feel guilty about callously throwing a candy bar wrapper on the ground or feeling indifferent toward car fumes. Back then I was a devoted recycler, but not for sentimental reasons. It was the financial incentive: You got up to a nickel for every bottle you brought back to the grocery store. So I would scavenge the landscape to find unredeemed bottles to buy baseball cards and candy.

But now the the environmental movement has morphed into the most authoritarian philosophy in America.

Read the whole thing.

Let’s all go out and pollute something.

Bruce Walker, at American Thinker, argues that, just as it was no accident that Ronald Reagan armed with conviction and consciously asserting the ideals of Liberty the United States was founded upon was able to bring down Communism and win the Cold Water, it is also no accident that the post-Reagan return to political “realism” has enabled the enemies of Liberty worldwide to regroup.

After Reagan, the candle glowed brightly, then it flickered, then it died. Why? The Old World has always been torn between the remnants of its ancient empires and the bold promise of human liberty. Its elites, its sophisticates, its nationalists have always whispered that America and its promises are lies. German culture, Japanese uniqueness, Chinese civilization, Islamic greatness, French grandeur and Russian tsars of myriad denominations — these were truth, and liberty was a lie.

For a few brief years, the East no longer believed the tale of its political and ideological bosses. Hong Kong, not Beijing, was the future of China. Bricks of the Berlin Wall were solid souvenirs of Marx’s folly. Russians dreamed of a joyful future. Reagan had been Washington again, and when Madison and Jefferson did their work, the world would be well, so it seemed.

Then nothing happened. When Reagan left office, it was like when Lincoln was shot. The keen mind and the wondrous soul which endured everything to emancipate men was gone. Small minds and smaller hearts scurried in. George H. Bush, famously, sacked the men of Reagan and replaced them with more sensible functionaries. …

Anyone could see that the pressure which worked on the Soviets would work on the Chinese Communists as well. Students in Beijing begged the world for freedom in 1989, something unprecedented under the Soviets. The theme of liberty should have permeated every transaction between America and China. Not just government, but business should have resonated with the importance of human rights over commercial profits. If Clinton believed that, he might have been able to rally the nation, but Clinton emphatically rejected the value of liberty over comfort.

The Presidency in eight short years went from being occupied by a moral colossus to a moral dwarf. Clinton sold national security secrets for something as banal as campaign contributions. Although Yeltsin was President of Russia during all of Clinton’s administration, our clever Clinton was unable to prevent on August 19, 1998 – one decade ago – the collapse of Russian financial markets and the destruction of the hope of a Russian middle class. This was the midpoint between the presidential campaign to elect the successor to Reagan and our grim world today — ten years ago.

What was Clinton doing ten years ago? He was on national television, the very same day that the Russian economy collapsed and the rise of Putin was assured, explaining that he had an “inappropriate relationship” with Monica Lewinsky and, by the way, he was ordering cruise missiles to hit aspirin factories in Sudan to combat a terrorist threat.

Urbanista Amanda Platell takes to the moors for one of those journalistic visiting the rustic primitives who shoot think pieces, and finds the shooting sports and the pursuit of the red grouse nothing like what she expected.

Like many townies, my prejudices about the Glorious Twelfth were well and truly fully formed. The official start of the shooting season was nothing more than an ancient ritual to massacre thousands of defenceless birds.

The killers were a bunch of men with Prince Charles cut-crystal accents looking down their long aristocratic noses at ordinary folk like me, city folk, you know, the kind who have to buy their own furniture. Their dogs would have better pedigrees than me.

So it was with some cynicism and not a little trepidation that I agreed to take part in the Glorious Twelfth last Tuesday, the traditional start of the shooting season, on a moor on the Durham/ Northumberland border. …

Odd, isn’t it, that we city dwellers feel squeamish at the thought of an animal being bred and ultimately shot in the wild, yet feel no pangs over the battery chickens or pigs raised in appalling conditions for our table.

But I wanted to put my prejudices to the test and, more importantly, to try better to understand the problems facing our beleaguered countryside, bled dry by a government that neither knows nor cares about voters outside of their urban heartlands.

The Daily Mail does a fine job of demonstrating just how clueless it is, illustrating a red grouse (Lagopus lagopus) shooting article with a nice picture of a capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus), and identifying a picture of a shooter aiming a great big over-and-under shotgun as the “traditional image” simply because the man in the picture is wearing tweeds. Amanda’s side-by-side double is, of course, far more traditional. Nobody cares about waxed cotton versus tweed.

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Peggy Noonan, every once in a while, justifies her reputation for brilliant insight. In her weekly WSJ piece, this week, she puts her finger on exactly what seems so strange about this year’s Presidential Election: its candidates are a new kind of candidate, one with no real roots in American regions or communities.

OK, quick, close your eyes. Where is Barack Obama from?

He’s from Young. He’s from the town of Smooth in the state of Well Educated. He’s from TV.

John McCain? He’s from Military. He’s from Vietnam Township in the Sunbelt state.

Chicago? That’s where Mr. Obama wound up. Modern but Midwestern: a perfect place to begin what might become a national career. Arizona? That’s where Mr. McCain settled, a perfect place from which to launch a more or less conservative career in the 1980s.

Read the whole thing.

Bob Owens, who blogs as Confederate Yankee, informs us that Jack Stokes, Associated Press manager of media relations confirmed the authenticity of the photograph of Barack Obama’s school registration in Indonesia.

Owens then proceeds to discount totally the document’s significance, point by point:

Did Barack Obama have Indonesian citizenship? We don’t know anything from this picture other than that his stepfather Lolo Soetoro apparently claimed that he did. Would it impact Barack Obama’s current viability as a U.S. presidential candidate if Lolo Soetoro or Obama’s mother changed Obama’s citizenship to Indonesian? Not according to the U.S. State Department, which states plainly, “In order to lose U.S. citizenship, the law requires that the person must apply for the foreign citizenship voluntarily, by free choice, and with the intention to give up U.S. citizenship.” As Barack Obama was a child, not of legal age to surrender his citizenship, then all further discussion of this point is irrelevant.

The way this kind of thing works is that foreign governments commonly have one perspective on citizenship, and the US has another. Many countries recognize dual citizenship, the US does not. It is most likely that Barack Obama enjoys Kenyan citizenship and Indonesian citizenship from the perspectives of those countries.

Mr. Owens is correct enough is arguing that the circumstances of his birth and childhood adoption were not Obama’s choice, and there is no rational reason to hold his inadvertent possession of dual citizenship with other countries against him. But, these little details are factual parts of his life history which is a highly exotic one. Voters are entitled to the facts, and are entitled to make of them whatever they choose. It is not the privilege of Senator Obama or his media allies to decide exactly what facts of Barack Obama’s life, family background, and upbringing are and aren’t relevant and to edit out the details they prefer to conceal.

Was Barack Obama’s name actually changed to Barry Soetoro? Again, all we see is that this was what his stepfather allegedly wrote on his school registration, a document of far less formality than a birth certificate, passport, adoption form, or citizenship papers.

Give me a break. That Barack Obama was formerly known as Barry seems to be general knowledge. Second husbands often adopt their stepchildren, and in many cases stepchildren do take that second husband’s name. When the second marriage doesn’t work out, or a breach in relations with the stepfather occurs, they sometimes change back. It ought hardly to be thought remarkable that somebody living in everyday America in the 1960s and 1970s would prefer to be known as “Barry.” And it isn’t altogether surprising either that a young man of college age with fashionable attitudes in post late-1960s America might want to emphasize an African identity and resume the full “Barack.”

Name changes in America occur all the time without benefit of formal processes. It is particularly common for young people to change the way they like to be addresses at watershed moments like college. There’s really no point is disputing the obvious fact that he used to be called Barry Soetero, especially since the name change is unlikely to cause much political difficulty for him.

Perhaps Obama can be fairly accused of misrepresenting himself by failing to note his name was once Soetoro in the Illinois attorney’s registration record, but it would most likely be viewed as a technical faux pas, not a mortal sin. The purpose of the name change form in the Illinois bar is to accurately reflect name changes associated with marriages and divorces of attorneys already registered on the roll of attorneys admitted to the practice of law in Illinois. Far from being a major offense, this charge is a perversion of the intent of why the roll of attorneys is maintained.

Maybe so, but in a country in which allegations that somebody might have missed a National Guard meeting 30 years earlier can become a significant presidential campaign issue, Senator Obama will have to face the music for ancient errors and omissions just like anybody else.

Was Barack Obama a Muslim? Again, just because his stepfather allegedly wrote that in the blank does not necessarily mean that he was.

This picture of a school registration page is a photo of something that is not a legal document. At best, it indicates the possibility that Lolo Soetoro considered Barack Obama his adoptive son, that Obama had Indonesian citizenship, and that Soetoro considered Obama a Muslim.

At this point, Mr. Owens goes too far.

There’s this parochial school registration certificate out there somewhere as well saying I was Roman Catholic in 1954, and guess what? it’s perfectly correct.

Kids attending elementary school really do tend to belong to the religion favored by their parents, or in a case like Mr. & Mrs. Soetero’s, to the religion of the more religiously committed parent. Stanley Dunham Obama Soetero was a red-diaper baby and an atheist, so it’s perfectly natural that young Barry Soetero would be raised in the religion of his adopted father.

There is not an iota of a reason to believe that as a boy Obama had any personal loyalty to Christianity, or any connection to it whatsoever, beyond attending a Catholic school, doubtless on the basis of instructional quality.

Of course, this does not prove that Barack Obama is the Twelfth Imam, or even a Muslim, today. But, face it, Mitt Romney had trouble with his Mormon background in the GOP primaries this year, and the Mormons didn’t fly airplanes into the World Trade Center. Obama obviously really did have an officially Muslim childhood. He attended a mosque where he banged his forehead on the floor. He received instructions at the local Islamic religious school called a madrassa.

Those facts have whatever relevance the voters choose to place upon them. Obama’s skin color and mellifluous voice are inherited assets he didn’t choose which have been of great political benefit to him. His religious background wasn’t choosen either, and it may harm him politically, but what I think is even more likely to harm him to a much greater degree is his manifest willingness to lie, and his inevitably getting caught lying.

To the victor go the spoils. Stefan Korshak, at Monsters and Critics, reports on happy Russians collecting souvenirs and useful US-supplied gear in Georgia.

You’ll be seeing the stuff on Ebay very shortly.

The troopers of Russia’s 58th Army, fresh from chasing their US-trained Georgian opponents out of South Ossetia, are just in love with their NATO-issue loot.

‘Check out this war trophy,’ a T-62 tank commander named Viktor proudly pointed out to a Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa reporter. ‘A real NATO-standard bayonet!’

Russia’s soldiers currently occupying the Gori district of northern Georgia – abandoned by the Georgian army without a shot – are festooned with personal military kit previously owned by their enemy Georgia, whose government is intent on joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Some soldiers, like Viktor, chose to obtain just a souvenir. One of the most popular formerly Georgian military items now in Russian hands is a spiffy black-handled knife.

Viktor’s mates said the weapon, sometimes issued in a snappy leg holster, is suitable for locking onto a US M-16 automatic rifle sold to Georgia, and holds a great edge.

‘There were piles of them in the depot over there,’ said a sergeant name Oleg, pointing with his thumb to a plume of smoke rising from behind a hill. ‘The Georgians just ran, they didn’t even take their (expletive deleted) stuff with them.’ …

according to other troopers interviewed the Georgian army base at Gori became sort of a free military accoutrements shopping mart for discerning Russian soldiers interested in the latest in combat style.

Russian soldiers guarding access routes to Gori, on Thursday, were proudly wearing a remarkably wide selection of ‘personal items’ more commonly seen on soldiers wearing US or other NATO uniforms.

Highly popular among the Russians was US-issue ‘web gear,’ a torso harness used for hanging useful things like bandage packets, ropes, ammunition pouches stamped with ‘US,’ olive drab flashlights, and canteens.

One Russian soldier riding in a BMP armored personnel carrier had grabbed US-issue web gear with an mobile phone intact, left there by its former Georgian owner.

A BMP gunner describing himself as an ‘average Siberian guy’ had hung his newly-acquired web gear on his vehicle’s turret door, just like veteran US soldiers in US-made turrets in Afghanistan or Iraq. …

Some of the gear made its new Russian owner an undeniably more survivable soldier: Kevlar vests and helmets, flares, and medical kits – all lighter, easier to use, and harder to break than the Russian counterpart – were among the booty now being worn.

As a general rule, the 58th Army’s non-commissioned officers – veterans of Chechnya with at least a couple of years of service and sometimes more – got first pick. Privates mostly wore standard Russian army issue, as did officers.

‘It’s something to take home, to show your friends, to remember your service days when you get old,’ a corporal said. ‘It shows we were victorious.’

There’s already a trailer out for David Zucker’s anti-Michael Moore comedy satire, opening in theaters October 3rd.

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Hat tip to Dirty Harry’s Place.

A certain news agency has received a deliberate leak from a US military intelligence official, apparently intended to deter Iran from pursuing its nefarious plans by making a public announcement that the US knows all about them and is prepared to counter them.

The report states that Iran’s elite Quds Force, with the help of Hezbollah, has been training Iraqi Shiite assassination teams in four locations. Their targets are to be “specific Iraqi officials as well as U.S. and Iraqi troops.”