The Conservative Soldier

For the intelligent among us, the whining and hand wringing by auto executives from Motor City is, at the very least, quite annoying. Based on their alarmingly shallow performances with each passing Congressional hearing, it seems entirely possible that our children one day will know Detroit as Moron City, or Notown.

The Shrinking Three’s chief execs seem small, don’t they? They don’t act like leaders. They’ve presided over their once iconic companies like a bunch of morons. Never mind that Detroit is not much of a city because of their missteps. Michigan is fast becoming, economically, a marginal state. Thank God it has a western coastline on Lake Michigan to attract tourism. And Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.

Can you imagine how painful it must be for these little auto men to go before equally small people on Capitol Hill in Washington to ask for other people’s money, to be rescued? Were they any good at confrontation, at tough sledding, at crisis management, they’d never find themselves in the position of talking about cash burn rates and imminent collapse. And begging, hat in hand, for billions, with a “B”.

Had they started confronting and taming corrosive labor unions decades ago, Americans today might find Toyotas and BMWs little more than a passing curiosity, just as we did say, in the 1970s, when the odd Alfa Romeo or Renault was spotted amid a sea of Cadillac Sedan de Villes or Lincoln Continentals or Oldsmobile 88s. (C’mon, was there anything sexier on the road around 1970 than a Buick Riviera coupe?)

But it did not happen. Here are the words of a journalist who spent the past three decades chronicling, perhaps unknowingly, the demise of an American industrial giant.

“In many ways,” writes Fortune’s Alex Taylor III, “the story of General Motors since the 1960s is a tale of accelerating irrelevance. Customer preferences changed, competition tightened, technology made big leaps, and GM was always driving a lap behind.”

I do not begrudge the chief executives of Chrysler, Ford and GM the comfort of traveling aboard a Gulfstream corporate jet. I just wish they’d learned, long ago, how to fly by the seat of their pants and keep U.S. automaking viable.

It is therapeutic, indeed, amid the countdown to Obamanation to know there are credible voices beyond the predictable dinosaur media. Because I care about the future, and about all of you, I dig deep into print and electronic media to shed light on these authoritative voices, even while striving to join their ranks.

If you are not subscribing to free internet columns by Dick Morris, visit DickMorris.com today. Add him to your opt-in list.

Dick Morris, 11/14/08: “Is Barack Obama seriously considering appointing Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State?

Obama would do well to remember the history of Harry Truman and Jimmy Byrnes in 1944.  Byrnes, known as the “assistant president” in FDR’s third term, was widely thought to be Roosevelt’s choice to replace Henry Wallace as his running mate on the 1944 ticket.  At the last minute, FDR re-considered and decided Byrnes, a South Carolinian, was too conservative and went with Truman instead.  But the Democratic Party establishment clearly was disappointed.  While they wanted to get rid of the almost-Communist Wallace, they wanted Byrnes not Truman.  (Just like the party establishment really wanted Hillary, not Obama, to be the presidential nominee).

So Truman named Byrnes to be his Secretary of State after he took office on Roosevelt’s death in 1945.  Byrnes, who thought he should have been president, proceeded to make his own foreign policy.  He flew to a meeting in Europe with the allied foreign ministers and barely kept President Truman posted on the deliberations.  He became a loose cannon who thought he was the president.  After a year of this nonsense, Truman fired him and brought in George Marshall to take the job.”

Christopher Hitchens, 11/15/08: “I might possibly have voted for (McCain-Palin) all the same, clothes pin clamped over my nose in the voting booth, if only because of the crucial struggle for a free Iraq and an autonomous Kurdistan. And, in such a case, I would have been very annoyed at the suggestion that my vote was a racist one. ‘Historic,’ yelled the very headline across the top of my morning newspaper. (Just the news, please, if you would be so kind.) Would the letters have been so big for the first female vice president? And isn’t it already historic that millions of white Christians voted, win or lose, for a man with one Kenyan parent, that parent having been raised as a Muslim?”

More Hitchens, from the same 11/15/08 rendering: “More worrying still, there are vicious enemies and rogue states in increasing positions of influence throughout the world, yet many Obama voters appear to believe that the mere charm and aspect of their new president will act as an emollient influence on these unwelcome facts and these hostile forces. I can’t make myself perform this act of faith, and I won’t put up with any innuendo about my inability to do so.”

Rush Limbaugh, writing in the subscribers-only Limbaugh Letter, Nov. 2008: “Using government power to allocate ‘wealth’ — by first confiscating it from the producers — has failed every time it’s been tried. The socialist doctrine has an unalloyed record of catastrophe : impoverishing every society it has shackled, spreading nothing around but misery, scarcity and want.”

And, finally, I direct you to the latest assault on our intelligence by a Beltway pundit, the finger wagging Clarence Page of the formerly great Chicago Tribune. Click here to read his Sunday column. The Kool-Aid is really talking in this one. Below, my retort:

There is a reason why talk radio, cable television and the blogosphere thrive today. These are sources of intelligent insight and commentary. We no longer find these in dying newspapers like the Tribune. Clarence still believes that an old Beltway pundit can get away with publishing complete misstatements of fact, if not blatantly erroneous arguments. His dramatic crescendo in today’s column references the Iraq war going “sour”; Afghanistan re-erupting; Hurricane Katrina (yes, that’s still Bush’s fault); and, my favorite, Congressional Republicans “plagued with individual scandals.”

Let us examine these in the context of reality, not Beltway soapboxing.

The United States has WON the war in Iraq. We are no longer winning. We have won. That’s a “W” for “W”.

The war on terror is ongoing. Yes, it will re-erupt in a lot of places, including Afghanistan. We must fight terrorist groups wherever they emerge. (How we will do this when Obama slashes military spending is a question for another day).

Katrina? That unpreventable natural disaster is blamed on the Bush Administration when, in fact, the state and local governments responsible for a swift first response completely and tragically failed thousands of people. These victims had bought into the “change” that a Mayor such as Ray Nagin pledged to bring the downtrodden of New Orleans. He did not care about them, as it turned out. New Orleans’ decades old denial that it would ever be hit by a massive hurricane did not change until it was too late.

If you want to shed light on Congressional scandal, look not to individuals’ human frailties, look to the the biggest scandal in recent American history — the blind eye turned by mainly Democrat lawmakers to uncontrolled lending fueled by the bloated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These Democrat Congressmen (Barney Frank, et al) cheered from the sidelines as millions of Americans took on huge debt (easy home loans) they would never be able to repay, or even pay incrementally.

When I decide not to renew my subscription to the “re-designed” (unreadable) Tribune, it will not be because I detest the silly new multi-font tabloid look, it will be because Clarence Page and other fellow dinosaurs have lost touch with American core values in their lust to discredit President Bush and elevate a pretender named Obama, their hometown hero.

If elected President of the United States, Sen. Barack Obama will, in reality, become a Chief Executive Officer with one all-encompassing mandate.

He will not have time to consider the will of the American people or the security of the homeland. Obama will be serving the whims of a wealthy, powerful and often corrupt Board of Directors. In these seats of ultimate but invisible power will be mentors William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Rashid Khalidi, Father Michael Pfleger, Antoin Rezko, George Soros, Oprah Winfrey and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, among others.

This might prove to be less an election than a bloodless coup. By rejecting federal campaign funds that he’d pledged to accept before his advisers got involved, Sen. Obama will outspend Sen. John McCain by at least $250 million. The origin of millions of these dollars are undocumented.

This is less about democracy than subversion. Obama has not provided something as basic as proof of citizenship — his. And the citizenship status of countless, mystery internet donors also remains unknown and uninvestigated.

Our smitten media stands by, watching, as the United States and its Constitution takes on the ultimate supreme council of Obama fund raisers, operatives, religious zealots and community organizers. The community, in this case, has a population of about 305 million.

The author David Freddoso in his landmark book, The Case Against Barack Obama, gives Obama far greater benefit of the doubt than some will about the Senator’s radical ties, but raises the central, numbing question that must be asked.

“Barack Obama has many ties to radicals — some violent, some intriguing, and some just odd,” he writes in the 2008 book. “… Obama is not a Marxist or a radical. He is certainly not a terrorist-sympathizer. Yet it is clear that radicals have influenced his judgement. … Should he become president, will he entrust such men and women with executive power?”

When Sen. McCain says he is an American and, as such, chooses to stand up and fight, he is not spewing campaign slogans to inspire crowds.

He is enunciating what the stakes are and what patriotic Americans must do.

When our country is threatened, we fight. I stand with Sen. McCain.