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The stalwart Charles Krauthammer picks McCain.
… There’s just no comparison. Obama’s own running mate warned this week that Obama’s youth and inexperience will invite a crisis — indeed a crisis “generated” precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test?
And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he’s been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success.
The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.
Today’s economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I’m for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.
Debra Saunders too.
… When Obamacons explain why they are deserting the GOP nominee, you don’t hear them arguing that Obama will do better by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. They don’t say that Obama has the best ideas for the economy. They instead lean on the belief that Obama can bring people together.
They gloss over the fact that McCain will settle for nothing short of a successful military policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or that Obama sees Iraq as a place where the U.S. government spends $10 billion a month that could go to social programs at home. They count on Obama to do what is expedient, not what he has pledged to do.
They tend to agree more with McCain’s emphasis on limiting taxation to encourage job creation than Obama’s zeal to spread around affluent people’s wealth. So they don’t dwell on the policy questions.
They don’t care that McCain has a history of working with Democrats, while Obama has a history of talking about working with Republicans. Because they have lined up behind the Democrat, they have determined that Obama will bring people together.
This isn’t about ideology – moderate or conservative. It’s a personality contest.
David Warren has a thoughtful column on education.
… Moreover, the late J.M. Cameron, among the greatest teachers ever to grace a college in Canada (St. Michael’s at Toronto), once gave me reason to hope. I asked him what, after half a century of teaching, he could find in common among his best students over all that time — the handful who stood out permanently in his memory. I expected him to struggle with this question, but he answered straightaway:
“They were all self-taught.”
Later: “They all arrived in university ready to make the best use of its resources, they were all burning with zeal to learn. They looked for professors who could help and guide them, they ignored professors who could not. Most came from humble backgrounds, and also stood out for their gratitude.”
He assured me that students like that were untypical in the dustbowl 1930s, just as they were in the salad bowl 1960s and ’70s, but confirmed that university standards had been in free fall. Still, he said, “There are students who can’t be stopped, and there are students who can’t be started. The latter have always been more numerous.”
In the 1960s and ’70s, as we should all know, universities were vastly expanded, on the new “drive-through” model, so that the majority of students who did not entirely belong in a demanding intellectual environment became an overwhelming majority, and the universities themselves were reduced to immense, tax-sucking bureaucracies, focused almost exclusively on turning out graduates, the way Burger King turns out Whoppers. …
A columnist with the Oregonian wonders what gives with the Left’s days of rage.
… I love politics and public policy, but the ugliness, the anger, the coarseness and even the threats of violence I’ve experienced as a conservative opinion-writer in achingly “tolerant” Portland have contributed to my decision to leave the business after this election. My heart was starting to harden — do we conservatives not have hearts, do we not bleed? — and I didn’t want that to happen.
I joked at first about some of it. When a reader sent me my column covered with dried feces, I looked on the bright side. He could have said he wouldn’t …. on my column. I took comfort in the fact law officers visited the Iraq War foe (a peace advocate!) and the liberal critic (a Portland public school teacher!) who threatened my family. But the constant expletive-laced rants, the nifty Nazi-Hitler-German references, the holier-than-thou hate for any opposing view from the half-informed — well, it’s not what our public discourse should be about. It wasn’t in a better age. If I sometimes responded in kind (and I did), forgive me.
What accounts for this rage? Maybe it’s that so many feel the White House was stolen from them eight years ago. Maybe they just feel entitled to rule. (Dude, where’s my country?) Maybe it’s the Iraq War. Or George Bush, though many lefties have worked themselves into the same derangement syndrome over Palin. Maybe the cause is deeper. I don’t know. I only know it’s not a good thing for civil society.
Obama’s not my candidate — McCain is — but, if he’s elected on Nov. 4, Obama will be my president and I’ll be happy to cheer two things. One, the fact that the United States has, at long last, elected an African-American president. Two, the possibility that Obama’s election might deliver us from this nastiness. I think it’s called the audacity of hope.
More on that subject from Power Line.
I don’t think there is any precedent in our history for the shameful manner in which the Left has treated Sarah Palin. Left-winger Andrew Sullivan gleefully posted a particularly disgusting example of the phenomenon today; it’s a YouTube video titled “Red, White and MILF.” Watch it only if you have a strong stomach. If you don’t know what “MILF” means–I’m sure most of our readers don’t–Google it.
I can remember when Sullivan was a respected journalist, not a gutter smear merchant and borderline pornographer. His descent exemplifies the Left’s decline in recent years to a baboon-like level of discourse. …
Thomas Sowell looks at Obama and the courts.
… The kind of criteria that Barack Obama promotes could have gotten three young men at Duke University sent to prison for a crime that neither they nor anybody else committed.
Didn’t we spend decades in America, and centuries in Western civilization, trying to get away from the idea that who you are determines what your legal rights are?
What kind of judges are we talking about?
A classic example is federal Judge H. Lee Sarokin, who could have bankrupted a small New Jersey town because they decided to stop putting up with belligerent homeless men who kept disrupting their local public library. Judge Sarokin’s rulings threatened the town with heavy damage awards, and the town settled the case by paying $150,000 to the leading disrupter of its public library.
After Bill Clinton became president, he elevated Judge Sarokin from the district court to the Circuit Court of Appeals. Would President Barack Obama elevate him— or others like him— to the Supreme Court? Judge Sarokin certainly fits Obama’s job description for a Supreme Court justice. …
Ilya Somin in Volokh makes important point about property rights