"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same."Ronald Reagan
During the 2000 election, Republican smear artists trying to stop the presidential campaign of John McCain spread rumors that the former POW was "nuts" because he had been "in the cage too long"—in the Hanoi Hilton for five and a half years. The campaign decided to make public Captain (now Senator) McCain's medical records, which showed that he had an enlarged prostate and trouble lifting his arms (repeatedly broken in captivity), but had been judged perfectly sane by a series of Navy psychiatrists who had tested him for years after his release from prison.
The details of those medical evaluations make you wonder why McCain is not stark raving mad today. Tortured repeatedly to extract a confession, McCain "tried to hang himself X2 to avoid giving in........
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The McCains are not like most Americans. They belong to a warrior caste that has been fighting America's conflicts for more than two centuries. (McCain's grandfather Adm. John S. McCain was depressed at the surrender of Japan. He complained to his chief of staff, "I feel lost. I don't know what to do," and died of a heart attack four days later.) .....
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on Oct. 26, 1967, he was flying through heavy flak over Hanoi, dodging SAM missiles that looked "like flying telephone poles," when he heard a "beep" signaling that a SAM had locked on to his plane. McCain was just about to drop his bomb on target. He writes that he should have jinked to evade the missile, but out of stubbornness, or a mad kind of bravery, he flew straight on and toggled the bomb switch—just as the missile blew off the right wing of his plane. The force of the ejection from the spinning plane broke his right leg and both arms.....
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Near death, McCain survived in prison camp by sheer cussedness. The same belligerence that got him into trouble in school worked to maintain his spirits as he cursed and taunted his guards in solitary confinement.....
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The Romney campaign is banking on winning Utah, with its heavy concentration of Mormons.
Beyond that, the campaign is also focused on picking off the handful of states holding caucuses or state conventions on Tuesday. The campaign says some minimal organization — it has had at least one paid worker in almost every Feb. 5 state since the fall — and spending can produce results. The states include Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia.Adding Alaska, where Mr. Romney’s son Josh has been dispatched, more than 250 delegates are at stake in this first group of states out of the more than 1,000 delegates up for grabs on Tuesday.
The campaign has then drawn up a broader list of battlegrounds where it believes it can be competitive, including Georgia, Illinois, Missouri and Tennessee. Advertising will most likely be focused on those primary states.
The most serious obstacle in many places is Mr. Huckabee, who continues to pull social conservative voters from Mr. Romney.
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"Just a few months ago, the 2008 presidential contest seemed predetermined. The New York lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton were far ahead in their respective party polls. And in the one-on-one match-up, Sen. Clinton was all but declared the foreordained winner a year in advance.
But not now.
After Barack Obama's unexpected surge in Iowa, Bill and Hillary Clinton resorted to chewing him up through their trademark politics of personal destruction......
Long gone was Bill's carefully crafted veneer of ex-president as global humanitarian and bipartisan senior statesmen. Instead, the Bill of old lost his legendary temper at reporters. He shook his finger. He bent the truth. Always he distorted Obama's record......
The result of all this has been that while Hillary still polls ahead of the surging Obama in most states, in hypothetical general election polls she runs behind Republican front-runner Sen. John McCain.
End of story?
Hardly. In reaction to McCain's own surge and the Republican windfall, the conservative base went ballistic. Soon a Republican civil war broke out over how best to lose the election.
Despite McCain's 82 percent ranking by the American Conservative Union, and his support for balanced budgets, an end to pork-barrel spending and earmarks, strong support for the war, and expressed regret over once supporting the Bush illegal immigration reform package, McCain was branded by the conservative media as a sellout and a near liberal. Not to mention, he was supposedly too old and hot-tempered to be the Republican nominee. The more McCain was discovered not to be a perfect conservative, the more he was accused of not even being a good one....
The Democratic cat-fighters are doing their best to give away a once-sure general election, but the Republicans seem to be doing even more to ensure that they forfeit the unexpected gift they've been given.
If Hillary Clinton does end up winning her party's nomination, November's vote may hinge on whether moderates and liberals are nauseated enough by the Clintons' brawling and character assassination to cross over and vote for a decorated Republican war hero - that is, if his own flag-waving party doesn't destroy him first."
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.
"Hey-hey, ho-ho, the Marines in Berkeley have got to go.
That's the message from the Berkeley City Council, which voted 8-1 Tuesday night to tell the U.S. Marines that its Shattuck Avenue recruiting station "is not welcome in the city, and if recruiters choose to stay, they do so as uninvited and unwelcome intruders."
In addition, the council voted to explore enforcing its law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation against the Marines because of the military's don't ask, don't tell policy. And it officially encouraged the women's peace group Code Pink to impede the work of the Marines in the city by protesting in front of the station.
In a separate item, the council voted 8-1 to give Code Pink a designated parking space in front of the recruiting station once a week for six months and a free sound permit for protesting once a week from noon to 4 p.m."
Tonight John McCain won the Republican Presidential Primary in Florida. He beat Mitt Romney by about 5%. It is also reported by several news media outlets that tomorrow at the Reagan Library in California that Rudy Giuliani will endorse John McCain before the Republican Debate on CNN. That debate will have John McCain, Mitt Romney,Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul. It looks now like John McCain is unstoppable on his way to the Republican Convention in Minneapolis this summer. I like John McCain and as readers of this blog will remember he was my first choice before his campaign fell apart last summer. Since then I have gotten to know Mitt Romney better and he is still my candidate. If I was voting on Super Tuesday(next Tuesday) it would be for Romney but at this point Romney is a long shot to get the Republican nomination. Congratulations to John McCain for bringing his campaign back from the dead. You are a heroic leader and a true warrior!
From an Editorial in today's San Diego Union -Tribune:There is something awfully distasteful about a former president morphing into a political attack dog. Even more so when the individual in question embraces his new role in ways that are cynical, hypocritical and underhanded....
Much of the media saw through this and, in recent days, there has been a lot of criticism of the Clintons for their “anything goes” approach to this race. This isn't news to those of us who have long been skeptical of this couple and their tactics. But it may have come as a shock to African-Americans and other elements of the Clinton coalition who now support Obama.....
One has to wonder if it isn't already too late and if the Clintons haven't already crossed some line and lost the support of the same people they will need in November, should Hillary Clinton become the Democratic nominee. In fact, Obama has begun telling audiences that, while he is confident he can bring the Democratic Party together if he is the nominee, he is not sure Hillary Clinton can do the same if she wins the nomination. We'll leave that to the Democrats to sort out. But one thing that the Clintons already have had working in their favor is the notoriously short memory of the American people. Folks age. Time passes. People forget. Even the juiciest soap operas fade from memory.
But thanks to recent events, and the way the Clintons have behaved, it's all coming back.
It started snowing in Medford this afternoon and it's sticking. It's a winter wonderland.
