Obama would take away our liberties

By Jay Ambrose

Here, today, is a potpourri of election thoughts, brought to you because there are endless topics to talk about and liberals are tossing out so many inanities that sticking to one subject lets them off the hook on others.

No. 1: An Obama win means liberty’s diminishment. Already, leftist economists are telling us that individual choice in economic affairs is not rational, which is to say, our superiors in government should dictate what we do. Obama wants stifling regulation and a transfer of dollars from doers to whiners. And there’s more.

He also wants to get rid of secret ballots in elections to determine whether workers form unions, an abridgement of a principle dear to our traditions. Though he himself is opposed, many of his fellow Democrats in Congress are intent on restoring the Fairness Doctrine, which in effect could rid radio of conservative commentators, meaning there would no longer be any major medium that wasn’t primarily left leaning.

No. 2: The left is still selling the case that it was Republican deregulation that brought us to the current financial mess and in no part social engineering as seen in a law, in bureaucratic bullying, in activities at quasi-governmental Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and in programs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, all aimed at extending home loans to bad risks.

What the deniers have going against them is information so convincing that even the usually liberal but also honest Washington Post editorial page said interventionists did in fact contribute mightily to the current catastrophe.

No. 3: Left-wing bigotry is on the rise, as is seen in the assertion that white racists are a significant factor in a process that has given us a black Democratic nominee deemed likely by pollsters to win the presidency in a landslide. No one sees a contradiction here?

Trashing evangelicals

Along with this, we have liberals still trashing evangelicals as nut cases and insisting conservatives lack compassion even though we know they give more to charities than liberals do. And we have a Democratic representative from Georgia, John Lewis, accusing Republicans of racial hatred and comparing them to George Wallace simply because of questions about some of Obama’s puzzling associations.

No. 4: The New York Times has led the big-media pack in campaign coverage that with too few exceptions has been outrageously biased, recently including an absolutely gratuitous, irrelevant attack on Cindy McCain, John McCain’s wife. Intellectual journals have disreputably had at McCain as a warmonger, and thoroughgoing probes of the relatively unknown Obama have been missing in most of our prestige publications.

Even in papers I mostly applaud, I have found so-called fact checkers ridiculously uninformed, often mistaking argument for certainty and missing obvious blunders on the Democratic side. Where do we find the fact checkers to check the fact checkers?

No. 5: Barack Obama, very inexperienced but very bright, chose a running mate who complements him perfectly, Joe Biden, who is very experienced but very dim, as illustrated most recently by his statement on how our enemies would test an Obama administration.

I once thought Biden’s non-stop goofiness was explicable on other grounds, but after watching parts of a cliche-ridden, misshapen speech on TV the other day, and learning of his electorally self-hurtful anticipation of a manufactured crisis if Obama is elected, I now believe the man is just not particularly with it.

But even if the remark was politically stupid, arousing Obama to quickly say in his own defense that Biden did not mean what he meant, it just may have been true. Elect a naif who believes in a timetable-retreat in Iraq, and terrorists just may come at us, Israel or other friends with the happy assurance that paper tigers don’t bite back.

X Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers, is a columnist living in Colorado.