[StBernard] Straight Talk: McCain, Obama, and the "Change We Need"

[Westley Annis]

Straight Talk: McCain, Obama, and the "Change We Need"
by Ross Mackenzie

John McCain will get my vote -- no question. He easily 
surpasses Barack Obama in wisdom, values, character, 
experience, judgment, truth-telling, and his positions 
on most of the issues. The decision is not even close.

The case for McCain is matched by the case against Obama. 
Go ahead and pull the lever for Obama if you want a 
president -- let's see . . .

-- Who has kept the company of radicals and the corrupt, 
is a product of the ruthless Chicago political machine, 
and in the mid-1990s was a member of the New Party -- an 
offshoot of the quasi-Communist Democratic Socialists of 
America.

-- Who regarding many of those early associations, and 
on most issues, is insistently vague, sketchy, and opaque. 
(For instance, as a regularly attending parishioner over 
20 years, could he truly not have heard -- or sensed -- 
the unconscionable extremism of the spiritual adviser 
who married him and baptized his daughters?)

-- Who lengthily cites the need for bipartisanship yet 
can offer no substantive record of it, has on no major 
issue bucked his party, and speaks of his ideological 
adversaries with a smug, debonair, patronizing condes-
cension.

-- Who on foreign policy is an isolationist, protection-
ist naif with essentially no experience, driven by the 
leftist conviction that he can schmooze even the meanest 
islamofascist or Iranian thug around to right reason. 
How successful is a dreamy-eyed untested high-schooler 
likely to be at mixing it up in the National Football 
League?

-- Who was willing to lose in Iraq, and even now remains 
unwilling to acknowledge that the U.S. surge of forces 
there achieved what might be construed as a win.

-- Who according to Army Times, Navy Times and Air Force 
Times surveys, trails John McCain among active duty 
military personnel by better than 2-1.

-- Who campaigns on "change" and "hope" and "yes we can" 
-- vapid inky nebulosities reminiscent of nothing quite 
so much as Richard Nixon's "Now More Than Ever" and 
"Nixon's the One."

-- Who hardly is a conservative reformer like McCain, 
but a tax-and-spend leftist more radical in (a) his 
approach to government and (b) his views on America in 
the world than any nominee for the presidency ever.

-- Who speaks nonsense on taxes generally, and in the 
midst of a financial maelstrom and slow-motion crash not 
only would end the Bush tax cuts (terming some of them 
"corporate welfare"), but also would impose a new re-
distributionist, spread-the-wealth system levying higher 
taxes on the most productive and allowing nearly half 
the voters to ride practically for free.

-- Who speaks equal nonsense on Social Security reform 
and health care.

-- Who in 2005 refused to join the effort -- in which
McCain was a principal -- to rein in Fannie Mae and 
Freddie Mac, so enabled by sitting members of Congress 
(especially Democrats Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd) 
to do their subprime lending damage to the nation's 
financial system. (Two heavily compensated and bonused 
former executives of those agencies have been advisers 
to the Obama campaign, one of them, with Caroline 
Kennedy, responsible for fingering the undistinguished 
Joe Biden -- the Senate's No. 3 liberal, to No. 1 
liberal Obama -- as the most distinguished prospect to 
become Obama's running-mate.)

-- Who nourishes a regulationist mentality that would 
intrude the federal government ever more into the pri-
vate sector and private lives.

-- Who in mid-October -- according to polls -- was deem-
ed unqualified for the presidency by 45 percent of the 
electorate (about the same percentage as in mid-March).

-- Who falls woefully short on energy independence, es-
pecially in his odd resistance to the nuclear power with-
out which the U.S. cannot free itself from the tightening 
noose of hateful petro-dictatorships such as those in 
Moscow, Caracas and Tehran.

-- Who dismisses as somehow flawed the achieving feminism 
of a Sarah Palin possessing more executive experience than 
Messrs. Obama and Biden combined (yet still mocked by the 
left as unqualified to be vice-president), in favor of 
the "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" 
feminism of Gloria Steinem.

-- Who, in league with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid mani-
pulating a Democratic supermajority in Congress, would 
preside over an aggressive leftist orthodoxy re-establish-
ed in Washington utterly unstoppable -- as at no time 
since the New Deal and the Great Society. Says McCain: 
"Were my opponent elected with a Democratic Congress in 
power, not only would there be no check on my opponent's 
reckless economic policies, there would be considerable 
pressure on him to tax and spend even more."

So if you believe this is the hour for Barack Obama in 
concert with a fevered leftist Congress to radicalize and 
revolutionize, go ahead and make his day -- and liberal-
ism's.

My vote will go to John McCain -- an experienced conser-
vative reformer who understands two things Obama evidently 
does not: (1) the folly of raising taxes in a financial 
storm, and (2) the implacable islamofascist threat.

Notes McCain: "In Obama, perhaps never before in our hist-
ory have the American people been asked to risk so much 
based on so little." And: "The hour is late. Our troubles 
are getting worse. Our enemies watch. We have to act imm-
ediately. We have to change direction" -- but to a new 
direction based not on whacked out leftist theory but on 
prudence and right reason.

To borrow a familiar campaign theme, the McCain-Palin 
ticket represents precisely the "change we need."