57 States and Africa

Could it be that the unattributed claim that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country was simply made up by Democrats in an attempt to counterbalance Barack Obama's thought that there were 57 or more states? Of course, even if Sarah had thought any such thing and I doubt she did, I cannot understand how this would actually counterbalance Obama's mistake. After all, she was trying to be Vice President of the United States and he was aiming to be President. While knowing that Africa is a continent is pretty important, it is even more important that the President should know how many states are in the United States. If the Vice President were not to know this, the Vice President would at least have time to learn it on the job as Vice President. Apparently, the Governor of the 50th state of Alaska already knew this! And she has executive experience too!

Detecting an Elitist

I have often commented on how elitists often presume to know how to manage your life better than you can. Without your upbringing and childhood experiences, without your body and mind, without knowledge of your dreams and goals, without knowledge of how you specifically make a living or invest for your future, and without your loves and friendships, they are sure they can provide you a better plan for life than you can provide yourself. And best of all, you do not get an option to review their plan for your life and choose to either sign on or walk away from it in disgust. No, their plan is mandated by government and you are forced to submit to it in the name of the Law of the Land!

Some time ago in a comment I made on the Bidinotto Blog, I noted that I would rather spend an evening in discussion with Sarah Palin than with Barack Obama. Well, perhaps that comment planted a seed of thought in Robert Bidinotto, who has made some interesting and useful observations on how elitists gravitate to Obama, while those who respect the fact that others want to and should be allowed to manage their own lives are drawn to Palin. He notes that the very irritating (for me) tendency of elitists to elevate style above substance and principle plays a strong role in their disdain for Sarah. Indeed, in part because of Palin, many so-called libertarians and some conservatives are actually going to vote for Obama! Elitists are not always found amid the socialist spectrum.

This quote is very long, but it is nonetheless less than half of Robert's post of 30 October and I do want people to focus on this astute observation.

Sarah Palin (and Joe the Plumber) have indeed become Rorschach symbols for conservatives and libertarians, but also for the wider culture. Whether one views them favorably and sympathetically -- or whether one despises and repudiates them -- speaks volumes about one's personal self-image and one's sense of place within American society and culture.

What Sarah and Joe symbolically represent and personify are the millions of inhabitants of what intellectual and cultural elites arrogantly dismiss as "Flyover America": the "non-intellectual," pop-cultural American heartland that lies between its two culturally "sophisticated" coasts. They represent plain, simple, unpretentious, hard-working, self-supporting individuals whose concerns focus mostly on the concrete matters of daily living.

By contrast, the elites base their personal self-images on how smart, well-educated, well-connected, and culturally sophisticated they are. Their social "comfort zones" center around associations with others who occupy the same educational levels, cultural classes, and social strata.

This division is not primarily economic: There are plenty of wealthy people in Middle America. But most of those are self-made successes -- people who built small businesses or struggled to support themselves through school. But they still retain an emotional connection to their social and cultural roots: to their old neighborhoods and families, and especially to the values that shaped them as they grew up. By contrast, many of the financially successful among the elites had the privilege of attending the finest schools, and/or came from upper-middle-class families, and/or found some other portal of access to "sophisticated" circles.

Now, observe the pedigrees, educational backgrounds, social circles, cultural preferences, and zip codes of those conservatives and libertarians who are expressing their loathing of Sarah Palin and/or their admiration for Barack Obama. Using the same criteria, contrast them with those who like Sarah and despise Obama.

It is certainly true that "progressive" John McCain has sunk too often to a populist assault against the financially successful. But populism shouldn't be confused with a legitimate sympathy for, or identification with, the millions of working Americans who are being targeted for regulations and financial exploitation by politically connected elites. Just consider, for example, who are the beneficiaries of the massive governmental financial bailouts, and who are being forced to pick up the tab. What right-wing elitists are repudiating as "populism" becomes much more transparent when they attack not McCain, but Sarah Palin or Joe the Plumber -- and especially in the kind of insults they use to demean the latters' intelligence and mock their cultural values and preferences.

I'm generalizing, of course; there are notable exceptions among all these groups; but I think the exceptions prove the rule. And the rule can be summarized by means of a simple question:

Would you rather spend an evening with Sarah Palin or Barack Obama?

That question appears to be a huge, if tacit, factor in the polarization taking place in this election -- a factor competing with any philosophical principle or other calculation among the electorate in deciding whom to support. I certainly believe it explains the dispute on the right between supporting McCain or Obama.

Thank you Robert!

Sarah of Wasilla

Sarah of Wasilla leaped into the contiguous United States, a heroine in shining armor, and energized the Republican Party, the conservatives of that party, John McCain, many white women, many blue-collar Americans, and my friend Robert Bidinotto. Clearly many are either smitten or admirers, or both.

Robert Bidinotto has been doing a thorough job of documenting the socialists' attempts to smear and discredit our American heroine, Sarah of Wasilla, at the Bidinotto Blog. Most recently, he has uncovered how Charles Gibson of ABC in his interview with Sarah of Wasilla very selectively edited her responses to his questions to make her look as unprepared and generally uncertain as possible. Often, the most substantive part of her response was edited out! This interview is a travesty of objective journalism and as clearly as is possible shows that the Mainstream Media (MSM) is in Barack Hussein Obama's harem.

I highly recommend that you visit his blog and get a more accurate view of our American heroine.

Obama on Earmarks

Barack Obama is now criticizing Sarah Palin for hiring a lobbyist to obtain earmarks for the town of Wasilla when she was its mayor.

She responded that she was surprised that he chose to open this line of criticism, because in his three years in the Senate, Senator Obama authored more than $1 billion worth of earmarks. He managed to produce about $1 million of earmarks a day. This is a very connected man, who no doubt greased many a campaign contribution with an earmark or more. He must have been unusually committed to the earmark game to have produced so many.

According to Obama's Senate website, he has requested 330 earmark projects since joining the Senate in January 2005 through the end of 2007, which total $931.3 million. He has said he is not making any earmark requests this year, but he had apparently already made requests for $91 million worth this year before he stopped making earmark requests. He joined Sens. DeMint and McCain in co-sponsoring an earmark moratorium for the year. The $931.3 million is about $1.2 million per working day, assuming that the Senate actually works 5 days out of every 7 during the year, which it does not. In fact, Sen. Obama has not cast a Senate vote since 9 July.

Senator Joe Biden is still seeking earmarks and has been successful in getting more than $90 million so far this year.

In two years as governor, Palin sought 83 federal earmarks at a cost of $453 million according to the Anchorage Daily News. But, she also vetoed more local projects than any other governor in the state's history. She cut Alaska's federal earmark requests from 52 projects for $256 million in her first year as governor to 31 projects totalling $197 million this year. Alaska has long been addicted to them and Sen. Stevens and Congressman Young have been masterful in delivering them to the state. In March, the Anchorage Daily News reported that "Sen. Ted Stevens is aggravated about what he sees as Gov. Sarah Palin's antagonism toward the earmarks he uses to steer federal money to the state." She also opposed Rep. Don Young by encouraging her Lt. Gov. to run against him in his re-election.

One of the left's favorite criticisms of Palin is that she is so good at bringing in earmarks that per resident of Alaska the amount of earmark money is much higher than that received in Illinois per resident. This is the revenge that the low population states with two Senators get on the commonly unlimited-government-favoring large population states. The Democrat and more socialist states impose a socialist federal government upon the low-population, more free-market states without thinking through the consequences that come from the equal state representation in the Senate. If government were small, this "unfair" advantage of the low-population states would not matter, but because of the greater pressure for big government from the higher-population states, a disproportionate part of all federal monies goes to the residents of the low-population states. Sarah Palin, whom the Democrats would like to picture as naive and simple, if she is responsible for the Alaska income from the federal budget, is more wily than they are. In reality, Sen. Stevens and Rep. Young, are the primary cause of much federal money going to Alaska.

Gov. Palin was in favor of the bridge from Ketchikan to its airport on Gravina Island which was expected to cost $223 million while campaigning for the governorship, but its cost escalated to $398 million and she reviewed the situation with the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities and decided that there were better ways to spend the money. Meanwhile the Senate was given the chance to stop the Bridge to Nowhere and transfer it to Katrina rebuilding, but Sens. Obama and Biden voted for the $223 million earmark to go toward building the bridge anyway. We are still waiting for them to apologize for approving that earmark in which they sided with the good ol'boys Senate network.

Obama exposes himself as a simple-minded cookie, while Palin is a sharp cookie cutter.

Of course, we should have principled, limited government which legislates in a considered, open, and rational manner. Our Congress believes in none of this. This is why we have unprincipled, unlimited, ill-considered, hidden, and highly irrational government. In such a hideous environment, the people of a small town will want to get some of their federal tax money sent back their way, however inefficiently and wastefully, by joining the fight for earmarks. This is the cost of unprincipled, unlimited government.

We must all try very hard to demand that every level of government operate to allow the inalienable right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is done by limiting the scope of government by applying strictly maintained principles among all voters and government officials. Palin, to her credit, is clearly a much greater champion of this kind of principled government than is Obama. She appears to be moving in the right direction, while he appears to do the right thing only after McCain has put him under pressure to do so and the polls make it clear that the voters are responding to McCain. Note the way Obama keeps backing off slowly on additional taxes, following McCain on foreign policy issues, backing off on his use of earmarks, and lately favoring off-shore oil drilling.

Obama Compares his Executive Experience with Palin's

Obama says, "Well, my understanding is that Governor Palin's town of Wasilla has, I think, 50 employees. We've got 2,500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe $12 million a year. You know, we have a budget of about three times that just for the month. So I think that our ability to manage large systems and to execute I think has been made clear over the last couple of years."

Can we count the many ways in which this is a very silly thing for the Obama messiah to say?

• Is Obama running for President against Gov. Sarah Palin or against Senator John McCain?
• If he is running against Gov. Sarah Palin, why is he comparing his executive experience against hers when she was the mayor of a small town, instead of when she was governor of a state?
• If he runs his election campaign poorly by spending huge sums of money and is still losing the election, then his management ability is clearly incompetent. This appears to be exactly what he is doing.
• He has managed a Senate Office staff for about 3 years, but his actual opponent has managed one about 10 times longer. No one thinks this is the equivalent of managing a private enterprise business, but there is some management expertise needed.
• Sarah Palin and her husband have managed a private fishing business for many years. This may not be the dream of a Harvard Law School graduate, but it sure beats the management experience of someone who gave contracts to political supporters to build and repair affordable housing no one could live in!

Obama has pointedly neglected the fact that Gov. Sarah Palin managed 17274 Alaska state employees in 2006. The state budget grew greatly in 2007 to $5.5 billion, so there was probably a large increase in the number of state employees in 2007. Is this because Obama is so stupid that he overlooked this? I doubt it. I think he thinks we are too stupid not to think of this. This points to his deeply entrenched elitism. We are all dumb peons who can be led by our noses so long as we are entranced by his sonorous tones and his own sense of absolute self-confidence. It also points to his total lack of a moral compass. If we were so stupid, he should not be so willing to take advantage of that stupidity to become our President. We should be asking for the leadership of a man of strong moral principle and we would need that all the more the more stupid we the people are.

Obama has also claimed that McCain has no more experience than he does. Does this mean that he is so unaware of his opponent's history that he does not know that Commander John McCain was the commanding officer of a jet squadron during the Vietnam war? Or does it mean that he is so unaware of the nature of the military services that he does not understand that the commanding officer of a unit is both a leader and a manager? Is he so ignorant that he is unaware that the expensive and complicated equipment of an aircraft squadron, with its many logistical needs, makes its management tasks greater than those of many other military units? Or once again, is Obama simply trying to take advantage of the ignorance of the voter in a most unsavory manner? Would this ignorance or this conniving immorality be that of a messiah?

Stupid people get and deserve leaders notable for their stupidity and immorality. If we do not want such leaders, it behooves us not to be stupid and ignorant!