The Reverend Pat Robertson’s endorsement of Rudy Giuliani only underscores why the former has become so irrelevant and his once vaunted Christian Coalition a shadow of its former self. An avid pursuer of political power and limelight, the Rev. Robertson diverted the energies and resources of a once powerful Christian Coalition towards his media empire while his foot soldiers languished in the last few election cycles. The result is a Christian Coalition that exists on stationery and small office spaces in a few scattered state capitals with no central coordination and none of the education outreach and voter guides that made CC the premier voice of Americans of faith.

This is the value of the endorsement that Rudy gets. And in return I suspect the good reverend is hoping that a future President Giuliani will give him some loudmouthed cushy job to make him, er, a little more relevant, this time on the federal dime.

Ah…and Rudy was claiming that a Giuliani-led GOP ticket could be strong in the secular Northeast. Yeah…wait for the New Yorkers and Connecticut yankees finding out that Rudy is Pat Robertson’s man.

As for Pat Robertson, the scriptures come to mind, “but for a few pieces of silver”.

Robertson is likely to argue, as other semi-conservative pro-Rudy politicos have, that the New York mayor has the best chance of beating a Hillary Clinton in the general election. Most recent polls contradict that hypothesis, pointing out that the strongest anti-Hillary candidate is John McCain. These pols on the Rudy gravy train also mention the former mayor’s pledge to appoint strict constructionist judges. Unfortunately, his record in New York suggests a penchant for appointing ultra-liberal radicals to lower benches. Finally, the pro-Rudy folks, in an almost apologetic tone, claim that a president really cannot do much about social policy issues that we conservatives hold dear. Wrong again because the President can and does set the tone of debate and has the use of executive orders and vetoes at his command. This president has wisely set the tone of a Justice Department that pursues religious discrimination , an area of civil rights understandably ignored by liberals who have nothing but contempt for Americans of faith. Executive orders have been used by President Bush to prevent the Democrats from by-passing the Hyde Amendment in foreign aid disbursement and at military bases overseas. Will a President Giuliani do that? I don’t think so.

All the endorsements in the world will not change the fundamental policy beliefs of Rudy Giuliani, beliefs that the candidate himself has never repudiated. The former mayor of New York, unlike Governor Romney, remains steadfastly opposed to applying the rights guaranteed under the Constitution’s 14^th and 2^nd  amendments to the American people.

Pat Robertson is a man who blamed homosexuals for the tragedy of September 11, 2007. Now he has endorsed a pathologically lying, cheating megalomaniac who exploited that very tragedy for nefariously personal political gain. This is the perfect homophobic-megalomaniac marriage made on K-Street.

And Republicans deserve better. America deserves better.

Well, at least KsReaganite’s.

Of the four top tier candidates for the Republican nomination, the one I admire the most is Senator John McCain. A genuine war hero with decades of experience in foreign policy crafting and a largely consistent voting record, McCain is a respected commonsense conservative who is very competitive in every state against any Democrat.

I am afraid, however, that he will never reach that point. My research and instinct convinces me that the only candidate who has a viable shot of denying the Rudy Giuliani the nomination is Governor Mitt Romney, a man whose changing convictions have prompted more than one post on this blog in the past. As a veteran of the Dole’96 and Bush’00 campaigns, I can see only one path to stop Mayor Giuliani: the same candidate scoring wins in IA, NH, SC in a row and then using the momentum to make a stand in FL where Giuliani is leading big right now. Mitt Romney is the only candidate who has the numbers, money, and organization to pull that feat off. As an added bonus his family roots and business connections make Romney well poised to do well in the early contests in Nevada and Michigan

While I am very uncomfortable with Romney’s rather recent change of heart on key issues, the authenticity of his ‘conversion’ is seemingly attested to by true blue heavyweights like Paul Weyrich and Jay Sekulow. This is where I have to do my due diligence but leave it as  “for God knows what is in the hearts of men”, as the Scriptures say. I will thus accept that Governor Romney means it when he says he now believes in protecting all children, preserving the Second Amendment, and vigorously opposing special privileges for any special interest group.

So, with a profound apology to Senator John McCain and those who rightly admire that American hero, KsReaganite does endorse Governor Mitt Romney for the GOP presidential nomination. Unique among today’s politicians in having been married once and staying faithfully  married to that one spouse, Romney’s personal life is above reproach, setting an example of leadership for all and sundry. His outreach to all three segments of the Republican coalition-economic, social, and defense-bodes well for recreating an inclusive party and his financial resources give him the tools to do so.  The man is telegenic, wealthy, and energetic, three key qualities in a competitive candidate of the 21^st century. He can beat the Giuliani-Hillary duo.

Give him that chance.

Some weeks ago I had written about predator teachers in public schools and their allies in the teachers unions and Democratic controlled state legislatures. Now, partly spurred on extensive reporting by NBC, states from Maine to Missouri to California are initiating proposals to make it easier to identify, publicize, and discipline teachers who prey on children. Understandably, the opposition to these proposals is coming from the National Education Association (NEA) teachers union, the bureaucrats at the teacher licensing commissions, and the Democratic majorities in the legislatures of ME, MO, and CA. Bureaucrats are naturally protective of their turf while Democratic legislators are elected largely through money given by the NEA. Thus this alliance to protect predators is a natural one.

The Democratic Party claims to be the party that cares for children and, I am sure, most ordinary Democrats do. But looking at the robust Democratic alliance with the NEA and Planned Parenthood, both organizations dedicated to protecting child molesters, one has to wonder whether the party of Franklin Roosevelt does indeed have the interests of American children at heart. A party that actively collaborates with the allies of child predators does not actually look like pro-children to me.

And I sure hope Hillary’s ‘village’ to raise children does not include the NEA and Planned Parenthood.

‘Karma’ is one of those quintessentially Eastern mystic concepts bandied about, mostly as a matter of uneducated rhetorical flourish, by hippie type liberals. It can affect powerful self-proclaimed conservatives as well, as French president Nicholas ‘Sarky’ Sarkozy has recently found out. When he rudely (well, he is a Frenchman after all!) walked out of the Leslie Stahl interview earlier week, most American viewers wondered what he was hiding about his personal life.

 

There is not really much hiding going on. As almost everyone knows in Europe, Sarkozy’s wife Cecilia has abandoned him for another man and a divorce is in the works. She had pulled the same stunt two years ago with the same ‘other’ man but apparently a reconciliation was worked out in time for the French general election. Not anymore. Sarky is left all by his poor self for good, it appears.

 

And I don’t feel an iota of sympathy for Monsieur Le Presidente. Let me tell you why.

 

More than a dozen years ago, as a municipal judge, Sarkozy was honored with the officiating role at the wedding of a good friend and his bride. Before the signatures on the marriage certificate were dry, by his own admission, Judge Sarkozy had lust in his heart for the new bride, his friend’s wife. For two years he hounded this couple ceaselessly ,and finally managed to break up his friend’s home (which by then had an innocent one year old child) by whisking away the wife. A few months after that, he married that woman himself. With friends like this…….That woman is now known as Cecilia Sarkozy.

 

Nicholas Sarkozy richly deserves the humiliation, the pain, and the abandonment that he once was instrumental in visiting upon a close friend. As for the soon to be former first lady of France, well she will be much more at home in certain districts of the neighboring Dutch capital Amsterdam.

The college campuses of the great state of New York have, of late, become platforms for the international Bush haters. Last month it was Mahmoud Ahmedinijad at Columbia. Last week it was Irene Zubaida Khan, the hyper-active president of Amnesty International (AI), at SUNY-Buffalo. That’s all good for free speech.

 

But Amnesty International is not exactly non-discriminatory about free speech. Or for that about matter anything else. It considers internet surveillance under the Patriot Act unconscionable but has no comments about the wholesale banning of websites by Syria’s Dr. Bashar Asad.

 

Don’t get me wrong; I have tremendous respect for the lofty principles of AI and was actually a member of the same during my freshman and sophomore years in college. But the fact is that like many other well-intentioned humanitarian organizations, AI has become progressively anti-American and anti-Israeli and largely selective about advocating decent treatment of human beings irrespective of their domicile. And during the presidency of Ms. Khan, a London lawyer of Bengali origin, this selectivity of conscience has become only more pronounced. Not that any of this is surprising; like most other first- or second generation immigrants with a modest education, Irene Khan has tried to out-liberal the liberals and out-left the Left in order to feel that she has ‘arrived’. Hence the constant conference, seminars, letter writing campaigns about Gitmo, the Patriot Act, rendition, and Palestinian criminals in Israeli jails. And nothing but a mere paragraph or footnote about the brutal dictatorships of Castro, Asad, and Khameini,  or about those who have disappeared in the maze of mini-jails run by Hamas and Hizbollah in Gaza and Lebanon.

 

Amnesty International, following the footsteps of so many other once-respectable organizations like the NEA, NOW, Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood, has abandoned its principles to become just another handmaiden in the service of the Liberal-Left.

So Tom Tancredo has seen the light, but one has to give the fellow marks for sheer chutzpah. The Colorado Congressman, who is running for President, has decided he simply does not stand much of a chance to get re-elected to Congress from his own district. Given the fact that he polls no more than one percent in national polls and about twice as much in IA and NH, chances are pretty good that come January 20, 2009, he will not be inaugurated as our President either. Good riddance for Colorado, good riddance for America, and good riddance for the Republican Party.

 Few House Republicans are so entirely unversed in international trade and so thoroughly clueless about  political demographics than Tancredo, a former bureaucrat turned opportunistic xenophobe. Nor are too many of his colleagues so apt to regularly suffer from foot-in-mouth disease.  And even in an inherently hypocritical profession as elective politics, Tancredo has a place of his own when it comes to speaking from both sides of his mouth. None of his appearances go without his boldly mentioning that he is a “Christian” and that Jesus is his “personal Savior and Lord” while displaying marked hostility to the Bible’s clear commandment  “The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.” (Leviticus 19:34). In that respect, Italian-American Tom is no different than Italian American Rudy who, while claiming to be a pious Roman Catholic, advocates that the Constitution’s equal protection clause does not apply to vulnerable children.

 

Little do they learn, even from an event as close to memory as the 2006 general elections when Republicans lost their majorities in both chambers of Congress. In an analysis of competitive races (those won or lost by within 5 % points) it was seen that not a single Republican who held to compassionate conservatism on life and immigration lost to a Democrat who did not. But the harshest Republican advocates of abortion on demand and immigrant bashing fell like nine pins across Arizona, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Ohio.

 

And so next year Tom Tancredo will join their ranks. So long the Honorable Gentleman from Colorado. Except that there is little honorable and nothing gentlemanly about this guy.

I am not particularly fond of Senator John McCain's politics all the time. His occasionally mercurial temper, the shoddy circumstances of his second marriage, his gratutious insults towards religious conservatives some years ago, and his sponsorship of the infamous McCain-Feingold.....the list of negatives is not short. Heck, I worked against the man in the 2000 presidential primary season.

But when little people like the xenophobes question McCain's love of country, it offends me. When uneducated buffoons who have never seen combat from a ten mile distance claim to know more about valor and torture than the war hero of POW John McCain, that simply goes to show the empty ego of such buffoons. Whether it is Tom Tancredo, Pat Buchanan, or one the several self-proclaimed 'grass roots' conservatives, what unites the loudest detractors of McCain is their littleness in comparison to McCain's greatness.

For after all is said and done, John McCain is a war hero who has sacrificed more for this Republic than all the other presidential candidates and their smooth-talkers combined several times over. He is a public servant whose conservatism is a matter of record on most key issues: trade, taxes, sanctity of life, sanctity of marriage, defense, Second Amendment, public spending. On the two issues that he is not lock-step with the grassroots conservative movement-immigration and campaign finance-he owns up to his views and, unlike most other politicians, makes no effort to flip flop.

I have worked against this man once and may do so again. But nothing takes away from the fact that this is a decent, principled, honorable servant of this Republic who deserves our respect and gratitude.

Michael Medved seems to have been bamboozled by Rudy Giuliani as well. In his piece in the USA Today, he turned apologetic for Rudy’s anti-life stance by claiming that the former mayor stood where most of Americans did, that is, in Medved’s words ‘anti-abortion, pro-choice’. For a rather intelligent fellow, Medved certainly has forgotten that the ‘personally this, but..’ line is tired cliché that doesn’t sell anymore even in the Northeast. That is like saying that I am against slavery but pro-choice on slave-owning rights…an argument used by Southern liberals in the 1840s and 1850s, and thoroughly discredited by logic, rationale, not to mention ethics.  Beyond the apologia, Mr. Medved lied through his teeth about one particular aspect of abortion and Giuliani: contrary to fact and oft-stated position of the former New York mayor, the Medved article stated that Giuliani opposes taxpayer funding of abortions.

 

In case Mr. Medved wants to know where most Americans do stand on the issue, all he has to do is look at any credible source of polls. Once it is explained to them that Roe vs. Wade does not allow for ANY restriction on abortion on demand, a plurality of Americans claim themselves to be pro-life and anti-Roe…and that is not ‘personally’ pro-life but pro-life period. Furthermore, and perhaps more important, vast majorities of Americans strongly support parental consent and waiting periods while opposing taxpayer funding and interstate transportation of minors. Unfortunately, state efforts to reflect the will of the Americans people have been consistently thwarted  by activist, unelected, tyrannical judges.

 

I actually deeply respect individuals who openly and unapologetically claim to be pro-choice, without ifs, ands, buts. Their basis of argument is something I disagree (in that they believe the fetus to be a mere blob of tissue and I believe it to be a human being with a unique DNA) with,  but their rationale and logic are very sound. That is a far cry from intellectual pygmies who want to be personally this, publicly that, and ultimately, well, vacuous nothings. Having the same beliefs in private and in public..hmmm..there is a word to describe that phenomena in the English language. It is called INTEGRITY.

Now even a liberal outlet like MSNBC is running a big story on predator teachers. Thrice in the article there is mention of unnamed 'teacher unions' who protect such child molesters. Of course, it would be too much for the liberal elite, whose kids go to safer private schools anyway, to call the NEA and AFT to the mat and call them what they are: labor rackets whose sole aim is to use children to find comfortable careers without accountability and with four months of annual vacation (and please..enough of that 'teachers make so little money' bs that is simply not true: they make fairly decent living in most states and work only eight months a year without any performance benchmarks). The article also mentions two states where even convicted child molester teachers do not lose their teaching licenses-and hence the ability to move somewhere else to teach once they get out of jail. It will not surprise anyone that those states are Maine and Hawaii, two states with heavily Democratic legislatures in the pockets of teachers unions. Everytime I hear these Democrat candidates wail and whine about being 'for the children', I have to wonder about the adage of the first Republican president that 'you cannot fool all the people all the time'. From its very fundamentals, it is hard to imagine the Democratic party of today being anything of a friend to children. Its embrace of the biggest defenders of child molestation-ACLU, NEA, Planned Parenthood, and AFT simply underlines its contempt for children, specially the children of the working class.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21392345/
Next time, someone ought to ask Hillary how much money has she taken from unions that protect child predators. Let's see what Ms. 'I love the children' answers to that.

That Rudy Giuliani is a Liberal with a capital L is not just mere hyperbole and political wordsmithy. He was the mayoral candidate of the New York State Liberal Party-yes, the state of New York has an actual Liberal Party made up of left socialists and RINOs-on three occasions. Thus, during each of the time that Rudy was the GOP’s nominee for mayor of New York City, he also actively sought and received the nomination of the Liberal Party (New York law allows the same person to be nominated and listed on the ballot by multiple parties).  The Liberal Party of New York (LPNY), whose nominee Giuliani was on multiple occasions, is a far left party that considers the Democrats to be ‘conservative’. You see, LPNY advocates socialized medicine, drastic reduction in military spending, high marginal and capital gains tax rates, taxpayer funded abortion till the day of delivery (and probably afterwards too), and obeisance to the United Nations on foreign policy matters.

 

Now tell me again, how is Giuliani a ‘conservative’? Just because a non-entity Governor of Texas wants a cushy job in a future Giuliani administration?

The following story in today's MSNBC sums up so many horrors of  the liberal crafted modern American society: a litigation happy culture, preferring style over substance, cluelessness about the concept of marriage, and the utter foolishness of letting New Yorker city folks lead America.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12784368/?GT1=10450

That the Hillarites are woefully and increasing clueless with the America beyond the Starbucks laced strip malls is fairly obvious again with the cavalier ignorance (or is it arrogance?) that Congressional Democrats showed NASCAR fans this past weekend. In a memo to staff members who were to visit the North Carolina NASCAR races for some research, the Democratic leadership asked their aides to be vaccinated and immunized prior to going to these events. You would think they were being sent to some sub-Saharan African country with communicable diseases! But then, liberal Democrats do think that way about the values, mores, pastimes, and hobbies of those who work hard, go to church, and hold their culture dear. Let us face it, limousine liberal Democrats have nothing but contempt for the large swathes of people in America who shop at Walmart, worship on Sundays, and go to NASCAR events.

 

Little surprise then, as many latter day Schwarzenegger-Giuliani Republicans forget, that it is these culturally aware NASCAR fans who formed the core of the Reagan Democrat coalition in the 1980s. Without an appeal to their bedrock values-faith, family, God, guns, and NASCAR-Republicans may win puny Connecticut and Vermont again, but will surely lose the Carolinas and Cajun country.

 

Bottomline is this: Republicans will have a tough time winning elections without the RINOs of New Jersey and Connecticut but Republicans will find it impossible to win without the NASCAR going Reagan Democrats of the South and the industrial Midwest. Prudence should dictate our choices.

Frankly, I was expecting former Vice President and perennial presidential candidate Albert Gore, Jr. (Algore to us old Clinton era College Republicans) to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics- rather than Peace- for his ‘invention’ of the internet. Well, I guess it is hard to dupe even the Scandinavians about a claim like that.

 

But these Swedes and Norwegians are a largely dupable lot. Take the Nobel Peace Prize for example where Algore is not the only recipient to raise astonishment. The former Vice President and the later murderer Yasir Arafat, we are to surmise, belong on the same plane as Mother Teresa who won the prize over ten years ago.  Well, too much socialism and rampant secularism will blind you to a sense of absolute ethics, as is evidently the case with our Nordic friends. Their two subjective Nobel Prizes-those on Peace and Literature-routinely go, with rare exceptions like Mother Teresa, to the most rabid leftists, alarmists, anarchists, and anti-Western publicists.

 

Peace Prize for helping humanity? Mind you this is the same Algore who questions cutting down trees that provide medicines for cancer patients. If a conservative said something like that, he would be called ‘heartless’. When Algore says it, he is a ‘peacemaker’. No wonder, Hillary wants to make the United States more like the socialist, morally bankrupt paradises of Scandinavia.

 

By the way, will Algore be kayaking to Stockholm and staying there in an igloo to save the ‘ecosystem’ he harangues us all about saving? I seriously doubt it. He is, after all, a typical liberal Democrat hypocrite who sent his kids to good private schools but spent a career preventing poor people from having the same choice. There is ‘pro choice’ for you readers.

In a world full of America’s enemies, commonsense would tell us that we should not gratuitously offend our closest friends….and certainly not over a historical interpretation of an event almost a hundred years old. But then we are talking about radical liberal Democrats who run Congress these days. With a dose of abject sentimental stupidity matching the asinine foreign policy of the Carter years, the majority Democrats in the House Foreign Affairs committee, led by its ultra radical chairman Tom Lantos of California, voted yesterday to condemn the so-called Armenian genocide of 1918 and hold Turkey responsible for it. This is the same Turkey that has been our bulwark in Central Asia, an ally whose importance is ranked next only to Israel and England. This is the same Turkey from where our troops in Iraq are supplied a dozen times daily with ammunition, medicine, and intelligence. This is the same Turkey whose young men have bled with us in Korea, Kuwait, and Kosovo. This is the same Turkey whose armed forces, the second largest in NATO, are the mightiest sword of secularism and moderation in the Muslim world.

 

But then these are the same pathetic liberal Democrats who helped remove our ally, the Shah of Iran, in 1979, and welcomed Ayatollah Khomeni as a beacon of democracy in Iran.  The rest, as they say, is history. Except now history repeats itself at a juncture when tens of thousands of American lives are in harm’s way.

 

The only honorable course of action for the Senate is to resoundingly defeat the ignominy that is House Resolution 106 on the Armenian question. This is not the time, if there is ever any, to offend our closest military allies just to placate Los Angeles' ethnic political bosses.

As if it wasn’t enough for class warfare Democrats to go protectionist on us, now we have the GOP’s mighty turboprop twins Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo dancing to the same silly tune. Ah the glory days, they bemuse, when a lad of nineteen fresh out of high school would go to work in the local plant, makes tons of money, marry his school sweetheart who would stay home and raise kids, and retire comfortably with a home, a boat, and a truck. Depending on which turbo twin you ask, it is the Chinese (Hunter) or the Mexicans (Tancredo) who stole that American dream.

 

Pandering to our worst fears and appealing to their own non-existent cranial economic faculties, Messers Hunter and Tancredo demonstrate the other ugly armpit of the Republican Party (Rudy Giuliani, of whom I wrote in the previous entry, is the first armpit).

 

The facts are quite contrary to what the turbo twins portray. More Americans than ever before make their living directly as a result of foreign trade and investment and anyone who doubts it can quickly take a tour of cities and towns across the South where entire communities have entered the middle class thanks to Toyota and Nissan. Thanks to cheap Chinese and other Asian imports, luxury household goods once affordable only to the Bel Aire crowd are now purchased by regular Americans who shop every weekend at Target and Walmart.

 

Yes, there is pain in the rapidly dysfunctional industrial belt of the north. But the culprit is not Toyota or free trade. Rather, the responsibility for such frustration lies squarely on the doorsteps of those who have championed failing schools where football and cheerleading was emphasized over math and science. Such indulgent mediocrity could get us by with a comfortable middle class lifestyle back then when the Indians, the Japanese, and the Chinese weren’t going to schools or building factories. Those days are past.  They work harder, they complain less, they do with little, and their schools, as poor as they are, churn out nerds who can communicate, compute, and rig computers and industrial machines faster than their stateside counterparts can gossip over the latest pictures of Brittney Spears. Xenophobic imbeciles like Hunter and Tancredo would build a wall to protect entrenched mediocrity while sacrificing the livelihoods and purchasing power of millions of American families who depend on vibrant trade and investment to live the American dream.  

 

Fixing the economic malaise in the rust belt is a cultural issue more than an economic one. Failing schools, indulgent teenagers, and vanishing nuclear families create a dysfunctional society that cannot be artificially protected from competitors whose economic might is complemented by their social vibrancy.  The good fight has to be fought not at the customs posts on the borders but in the school boards, courthouses, and legislatures of America’s industrial heartland.