Does McCain love the US and want to preserve it?

November 01, 2008
Lawrence Auster to Andrew McCarthy:

Andy,

You write:

"McCain, moreover, is an authentic American hero who loves our country as it is and would essentially preserve it." [Italics added.]

Really? The man who said that what makes America great is its putative lack of any heritage or culture inherited from the past? Here's my Number One McCain quote, which I've posted many times, from a speech he gave to the Al Smith Dinner in October 2005:

[O]ur one shared faith is the belief that a nation conceived in an idea--in liberty--will prove stronger, more enduring and better than any nation ... made from a common race culture or to preserve traditions that have no greater attribute than longevity.

The man sees any tradition of a people, whether that people is conceived in ethnic or even just in cultural terms, as a bad, inferior thing. Andy, not that long ago mainstream conservatives and neoconservative were making the preservation and defense of America's common culture one of their main causes. McCain doesn't believe in that. To the extent that we have a common culture, he would want us to get rid of it. For him the highest, supreme value, perhaps the only value, is an "idea of liberty." But if liberty is the unqualified and highest value, then the liberty of other people to come to our country and change it into their image and their culture must be the inevitable result. So McCain's idea of liberty means the extinction of our culture.

And it's not just I who say this. He made the consequences of his attack on our culture explicit when he said to a Hispanic group in May '06, during one of the big immigration debates:

This [is] one of the defining moments in American history that really does define what kind of nation we are.

If there was ever such a thing as a noble cause, it is the one we are embarked on now. Anyone who is afraid that somehow our culture will be anything but enriched by fresh blood and culture, in my view, has a distorted view of history and has a pessimistic view of our future.

So, on one hand, he's against our having a long-lived national heritage based on culture, and on the other hand he looks forward to our country being "refreshed," i.e., transformed into a different culture, by the "blood" and culture of Hispanics. Their invading culture is good and to be welcomed. Our historical culture is trash, consisting of "traditions that have no greater attribute than longevity," and is to be cast aside.

Do you still say that McCain loves our country as it is and would essentially preserve it?

Larry

Civil liberties advocates turn blind eye for Obama

October 31, 2008
Michelle Malkin

If Joe the Plumber were Jawad the Suspected Terrorist, civil liberties activists would stampede the halls of Congress on his behalf. Liberal columnists would hyperventilate over the outrageous invasions of his privacy by Ohio state and local employees. The ACLU would demand the Big Brother snoopers' heads. And Democratic leaders would convene immediate hearings and parade him around the Beltway as the new poster boy/victim of unlawful domestic spying.

But because peaceful American citizen Joe Wurzelbacher is an outspoken enemy of socialism, rather than an enemy of America, the defenders of privacy have responded to his plight with an impenetrable cone of silence.

After the last presidential debate, during which John McCain invoked Joe the Plumber's anti-socialism shot heard 'round the world, several taxpayer-subsidized employees in Ohio immediately rifled through government databases in search of damning information. The Columbus Dispatch identified Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, as one of the dirt-diggers. She also happens to support Barack Obama and contributed the maximum amount to his presidential campaign.

... Democratic Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland quickly pooh-poohed the civil liberties infringements and denied any nefarious political motives.

If that doesn't send a chill up your spine, you don't have a spine.

In addition to Jones-Kelley, investigators have uncovered at least three additional suspicious uses of state computer systems to access Wurzelbacher's data...

I contacted the ACLU twice this week for comment about this rampant plundering of Joe the Plumber's records. Like the Genesis song goes: No reply at all. (That was the same reply the ACLU gave me two months ago when I asked if they had any reaction to the Chicago gangland tactics of a MoveOn spin-off group that announced it was trolling campaign finance databases and targeting conservative donors with warning letters in a thuggish attempt to depress Republican fundraising.)

For the last seven years, these left-wing privacy champs have lobbied on behalf of foreign enemy combatants. The ACLU fought unsuccessfully to kill the Bush administration's post-9/11 effort to monitor terrorist communications in the United States. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and USA Today went ballistic over the government's bank surveillance program to trace terrorist financing.

Those same papers fumed earlier this year when State Department contractors illegally sifted through the passport files of Obama ...

But when freelance members of the Obama Goon Squad take it upon themselves to do opposition research on The One's citizen critics and rummage through government databases, where are all the privocrats? And how safe will your state tax and IRS records be if Dear Leader is elected?

Lawrence Auster

...a frightening glimpse into the America that Barack Obama and the Democrats would create for us, an America where, if any person scores a good point off a Democrat, as Joe the Plumber did off Obama, Democrats will go searching in his records to find embarrassing things on him. An America in which people like Joe Wurzelbacher would be afraid to speak up.

Notice Malkin's point about how the ACLU refused to return her calls on the matter. Gosh, I guess those liberals don't care about "chilling" effects on free speech after all, do they?

Consistency is a virtue...

Obama will emasculate US defence forces

24th October 2008
Melanie Phillips

The impact of the financial crisis on the American presidential election has somewhat obscured the most important reason why the prospect of an Obama presidency is giving so many people nightmares. This is the fear that, if he wins, US defences will be emasculated at a time of unprecedented international peril and the enemies of America and the free world will seize their opportunity to destroy the west.

... As I have said before, I do not trust McCain; I think his judgment is erratic and impetuous, and sometimes wrong. But on the big picture, he gets it. He will defend America and the free world whereas Obama will undermine them and aid their enemies.

Here’s why. McCain believes in protecting and defending America as it is. Obama tells the world he is ashamed of America and wants to change it into something else. McCain stands for American exceptionalism, the belief that American values are superior to tyrannies. Obama stands for the expiation of America’s original sin in oppressing black people, the third world and the poor.

Obama thinks world conflicts are basically the west’s fault, and so it must right the injustices it has inflicted. That’s why he believes in ‘soft power’ — diplomacy, aid, rectifying ‘grievances’ (thus legitimising them, encouraging terror and promoting injustice) and resolving conflict by talking. As a result, he will take an axe to America’s defences at the very time when they need to be built up. He has said he will ‘cut investments in unproven missile defense systems’; he will ‘not weaponize space’; he will ‘slow our development of future combat systems’; and he will also ‘not develop nuclear weapons,’ pledging to seek ‘deep cuts’ in America’s arsenal, thus unilaterally disabling its nuclear deterrent as Russia and China engage in massive military buildups.

Obama would fail security clearance for Federal employees

October 23, 2008
Daniel Pipes

... let us review a related subject – Obama's connections and even indebtedness, throughout his career, to extremist Islam. Specifically, he has longstanding, if indirect ties to two institutions, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), listed by the U.S. government in 2007 as an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas-funding trial; and the Nation of Islam (NoI), condemned by the Anti-Defamation League for its "consistent record of racism and anti-Semitism." ...

That Obama's biography touches so frequently on such unsavory organizations as CAIR and the Nation of Islam should give pause. How many of politicians have a single tie to either group, much less seven of them? John McCain charitably calls Obama "a person you do not have to be scared [of] as president of the United States," but Obama's multiple links to anti-Americans and subversives mean he would fail the standard security clearance process for Federal employees.

Strange how the highest office in the land isn't subject to security clearance.

Auster: McCain 'has no ideas'

September 05, 2008

"Strikingly bad." Those were the words, or words like those, with which commentator Jeffrey Toobin summed up John McCain's speech last night. He said the speech had no theme, no vision, and presented no policies, and was only good in its closing, rousing section. I agree. But this is exactly what one would expect of McCain. McCain has no ideas. He has a couple of pet issues he cares about, such as reducing pork barrel spending, and he has his sense of "honor" and of "service to something larger than ourselves," and he has his delight in messing up conservatives and Republicans. And that's about it. His speech perfectly reflected the intellectual and political vacuity that has characterized his entire career.

Audio: Defence and discrimination

24 August 2008
Background Briefing, ABC radio (mp3)

American security laws based on where a person was born mean some Australians can't work in defence industries in Australia. It's against our laws - but it's like it or lump it...

The American regulations assume that no matter what kind of citizenship you have, or how long you have lived away from home, your loyalties are always going to be based on your country of birth...

Lorena Allam: It's a global phenomenon which is making countries nervous about the potential and the politics of these new communities of migrants, or diasporas.

Michael Fullilove: Host countries are becoming increasingly aware and often uncomfortable about the new communities in their midst.

So a government allows people into their country whom their defence department acknowledges will have loyalties first to their country of birth. Strange. And these people are also allowed to vote, outbreed the natives, form political parties, and take jobs in police, government and courts. Strange inconsistency. It seems that a slow takeover, balkanisation, and ethnic conflict, are all OK, so long as you just don't bomb us in the process.