The Voter (Suppression) Project.

I am in the middle of something, so this post will be short and to the point.


Anyway, a gentleman named Jay N. DeLancy claims that he started some outfit called the "Voter Integrity Project" , and he posted an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal about voter fraud. In it, he declared that "only lawful" voters should vote. In the same article he also made some very serious and specific charges and allegations about voter fraud down in North Carolina. (Keep those folks in your thoughts. They are under siege.)

There was one little problem, though: he didn't provide any links or names.
He claims that he met "countless eyewitnesses to voter fraud", but failed to give us even one name for his article.

If there was such an eyewitness, why didn't they report it to election officials? That was a rhetorical question. We know why. There wasn't any.

Personally, I smell a rat with this guy and his "Voter Integrity Project". I think that this is all in his head. This is just another desperate and lame attempt by those on the political right to keep people from voting.

Sadly for them, Colin Powell was right; it will all backfire in the long run.

Here is the link.

"Any state seeking reform gets brutally attacked by activist judges, the media, and even Hillary Clinton. Despite race-baiting vitriol from fraud deniers, North Carolina had made great strides to mitigate our corrupt election laws..."

Translation: We are trying our best to keep those minorities and immigrants from voting, but we are being overwhelmed. They have learned to use the courts and the media to get the word out, and now we are getting desperate.

Jay, I will wait for those links and some names......

Checking Shelby.

Every now and then I have to call out one of my favorite conservative writers. Shelby Steele is a pretty smart guy, and he usually does a good job of observing some of the racial dynamics here in America. The problem with Shelby, however, is his ideology, and where he chooses to align himself in our political debate.

Shelby is a classic black conservative. He likes to call out black folks and liberals for being too lazy and disingenuous, and he praises the conservative ethos and their (so called) honesty.

Anyway, Mr. Steele has struck again. [h/t to David for e-mailing this article to me) This time he has penned an article for the Wall Street Journal about Obama. (Shelby is fascinated with Obama. He is still pissed that the first black president came from the left and not the right.) In it, he lets America have it for not calling out Obama for his incompetence and giving him a pass because of his exotic skin and charisma.

"The president's success in having Osama bin Laden killed is an exception to a pattern of excruciatingly humble and hesitant leadership abroad. Mr. Obama has been deeply ambivalent about the application of American power, as if a shameful "neocolonialism" attends every U.S. action in the world. In Libya he seems actually to want American power to diminish altogether.

This formula of shrinking American power abroad while expanding government power at home confuses and disappoints many Americans. Before bin Laden, 69% of Americans believed the country was on the wrong track, according to an Ipsos survey. A recent Zogby poll found that only 38% of respondents believed Mr. Obama deserved a second term, while 55% said they wanted someone new.

And yet Republicans everywhere ask, "Who do we have to beat him?" In head-to-head matchups, Mr. Obama beats all of the Republican hopefuls in most polls.

The problem Mr. Obama poses for Republicans is that there has always been a disconnect between his actual performance and his appeal. If Hurricane Katrina irretrievably stained George W. Bush, the BP oil spill left no lasting mark on this president. Mr. Obama's utter confusion in the face of the "Arab spring" has nudged his job-approval numbers down, but not his likability numbers, which Gallup has at a respectable 47.6%. In the mainstream media there has been a willingness to forgive this president his mistakes, to see him as an innocent in an impossible world. Why?

There have really always been two Barack Obamas: the mortal man and the cultural icon. If the actual man is distinctly ordinary, even a little flat and humorless, the cultural icon is quite extraordinary. The problem for Republicans is that they must run against both the man and the myth. In 2008, few knew the man and Republicans were walloped by the myth. Today the man is much clearer, and yet the myth remains compelling.

What gives Mr. Obama a cultural charisma that most Republicans cannot have? First, he represents a truly inspiring American exceptionalism: He is the first black in the entire history of Western civilization to lead a Western nation—and the most powerful nation in the world at that. And so not only is he the most powerful black man in recorded history, but he reached this apex only through the good offices of the great American democracy.

Thus his presidency flatters America to a degree that no white Republican can hope to compete with. He literally validates the American democratic experiment, if not the broader Enlightenment that gave birth to it. "

Let me jump in here: Barack Obama is no worse than any of the previous presidents before him. So Shelby, you lost me at hello. Your article, from its outset, is poisoned by ideological prejudice. And you give Americans credit for enlightenment where they deserve none. I would argue that electing Barack Obama only highlighted the fact that America is still stained by its sad racial legacy. And it has created more bigotry, ignorance, and uncontrolled hostility by not only the usual suspects, but by those who we never expected to become so afraid and fearful of losing their country to those other people.

"..Conversely, the media hold the president's exceptionalism against Republicans. Here is Barack Obama, evidence of a new and progressive America. Here are the Republicans, a cast of largely white males, looking peculiarly unevolved. Add to this the Republicans' quite laudable focus on deficit reduction and spending cuts, and they can be made to look like a gaggle of scolding accountants.

How can the GOP combat the president's cultural charisma? It will have to make vivid the yawning gulf between Obama the flattering icon and Obama the confused and often overwhelmed president. Applaud the exceptionalism he represents, but deny him the right to ride on it as a kind of affirmative action.

A president who is both Democratic and black effectively gives the infamous race card to the entire left: Attack our president and you are a racist. To thwart this, Republicans will have to break through the barrier of political correctness.

Mr. McCain let himself be intimidated by Obama's cultural charisma, threatening to fire any staff member who even used the candidate's middle name. Donald Trump shot to the head of the Republican line by focusing on Mr. Obama as a president, calling him our "worst" president. I carry no brief for Mr. Trump, but his sudden success makes a point: Another kind of charisma redounds to those willing to challenge political correctness—those unwilling to be in thrall to the president's cultural charisma.

Lastly, there must be a Republican message of social exceptionalism. America has more social mobility than any heterogeneous society in history. Isn't there a great Republican opportunity to be had in urging minorities to at last move out of their long era of protest—in which militancy toward the very society they struggled to join was the way ahead? Aren't Republicans uniquely positioned to offer minorities a liberation from both dependency and militancy?

In other words, isn't there a fresh new social idealism implicit in conservative principles? Why not articulate it and fight with it in the political arena? Such a message would show our president as unevolved in his social thinking—oh so 1965. The theme: Barack Obama believes in government; we believe in you." [Article]

Let me jump in here: Republicans don't applaud social exceptionalism,they view it with scepticism. Your claim that Obama is an affirmative action president is proof of it. Telling the truth isn't political correctness, and honestly and openly questioning something isn't necessarily racism. But claiming that only republicans can move minorities out of their "long era of protest" because only republicans can show us how to work hard and achieve in America, is an insult to every hard working person of color who helped to make this country what it is. "Militancy" isn't always such a bad thing. Just ask the founding fathers to whom you and those of your ilk pray to every day. Without that "militancy" you wouldn't be able to speak of this great country that you seem to love so much. You wouldn't be able to collect a nice check from Stanford University. And you certainly wouldn't be able to collect what your publishers give you in advances for those wonderful books you like to churn out like pablum for the wingnut soul.

Shelby, I credit my success in life to my parents and the work ethic that they gave me, not the benevolence of white America. I have succeeded in America in spite of American -so called- exceptionalism, not because of it.

I wonder if you can say the same thing?

THE ALIEN IN OUR HOUSE!

Please read what Dorothy Rabinowitz, writing in the WSJ, had to say about his O ness:

"The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president's earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill.

There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama's pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn't lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice—and for good reason.
Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric; Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.

A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe. .."

That is a stunning pronouncement coming from a major columnist writing for a major A-merry-can newspaper.

"The alien in the White House" is what she is calling a man who was elected by a majority vote to be our country's leader. By writing that Obama doesn't identify with real A-merry-cans (as if George Bush did. I sure as hell didn't identify with the SOB. But then, I suppose, I am a globalist like Obama) what she is really saying is that nothing about him -from his name, to his skin tone, to his biological history- says A-merry-can. He is not one of us, so he can't relate. The reason that he has been facing criticism for his handling of the BP oil spill, is not because of his cool seemingly detached way of methodically dealing with problems, but rather his "un- affiliation" with the real A-merry-ca.

His "sense of identification lies elsewhere"? I wonder just where in the hell that would be? Africa? Indonesia?Cuba? Russia? Canada? Where? That, my friends, is a revealing and amazingly risible statement. But this is what masquerades for intellectualism in A-merry-ca these days. Rather than attack the man for his policies that might have led to this particular disaster (although I blame Bush, his former side kick, and BP) or even his style of handling things, we get this: that he is not really one of us. Imagine that: Our president is not one of us. Amazing!

"He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe."

Dorothy, I have news for you, you belong to that "fringe" as well. [Article]