Personal Asides: It Looks Like No Debate but a Deal on the Rescue by Monday…Carol Marin is Outraged at Proft’s Salary—What About Hers (Including the One Partially Paid by the Feds?)…Axis Sally.

No Debate but a Deal.

John McCain’s hope to justify his Hail Mary pass…stopping his campaign, ditching the Friday debate and returning to work full time in Washington…is to get recalcitrant Republicans to vote for the rescue. He made an effort to get credit with voters for the White House summit (getting Obama in the door) but so far things ended in a tie. If he can get Republicans to go along and can get sufficient media credit for it (problematic) the pass attempt will have been worth it. But in any event it looks like Obama will have the stage all to himself tonight (Friday) unless things fall together like a magician’s trick bag. Democrats have every incentive to stall so that their candidate for president will have the total limelight tonight. Right now the odds look like McCain can’t crack it. Not all Hail Mary’s…not even SOME…work and McCain may have used up his favors.
Marin Outraged.

Carol Marin, the Old Mother Hubbard of Chicago journalism (who had so many children she doesn’t know what to do) has three political analysts jobs which would indicate that this city is in dire poverty for talent if it has to rely on this lady (who after three decades has absorbed a decent TV presence). She has Steve Neal’s old job at the “Sun-Times” where she writes sophomoric and unenlightened predictables. She has Dick Kay’s old job at Channel 5 where she blocks a more expert reporter from matriculating upward. And she has Bruce DuMont’s old political analyst job at WTTW-TV which is easy pickins’ because all you have to do there is smile beatifically and produce the old pre-digested pablum. WTTW lives off federal and state grants as well as donations from “viewers like you” so it is sure that a part of Carol’s salary…about $70,000 or so from 11…is paid by involuntary taxpayers.
Since Carol has an approach to politics from the 1960s and she likes to find some corruption, in her Channel 5 gig she cast an arched eyebrow at Dan Proft’s earnings in Cicero—despite the fact that the earnings are with the approval of elected officials there, have been listed and accounted for and aboveboard. But of course Dan Proft is a REPUBLICAN. Horrid thought. In scrounging to get material, isn’t it strange that Obama-fancier Marin hasn’t done a story about her key source David Axelrod who runs a fancy consulting organization as result of the fabulous connections Axelrod has. Of course Axelrod is not listed as a lobbyist any more than Bill Daley was—but why won’t Mother Superior of All Righteousness Carol take a look Axelrod’s way? Because she is a consummate liberal Democrat, that’s why. How much taxpayer money goes into Carol’s pocket from her Channel 11 gig? No one will know because the funds are all co-mingled which leaves a lovely curtain of darkness beclouding accountability for Viewers Like You.

Legatee of Axis Sally.

Axis Sally was the beguiling high-piped siren who broadcast to our troops the futility of opposing her employers, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and imperial Japan.

Axis Sally’s style has been avoided by most of the Left. The Daily Kos doesn’t say our country and the West is decadent, that we are led by a ring in our nose by Israel and that the heroes of the West in the past such as Winston Churchill were in reality wrongheaded vipers. Only one of any prominence has done that…and his represents himself as being from the right although on major issues like foreign policy and defense he is at one with the Obama people although he doesn’t say it. His name is Patrick Buchanan. Good old Pat. Who traveled the world as an aide to Richard Nixon. Who did the same as an aide to Ronald Reagan. Nothing they did rubbed off on him. He was mum while they lived but isn’t now. Some say he prattles to the shade of his long dead father, an Irishman who hated England. Hated Churchill. A conspiratorialist. Whether true or not, consider:

Earlier this week the president of Iran came to the United Nations and in his speech said (a) the United States is a fast-fading power, its glory is behind it; (b) it is led as if hypnotized by Israel, (c) Israel is an evil nation and will be expunged. Drain off the venomous rhetoric and parse it closely and what do you find? It squares on all major points with what Buchanan has been telling his countrymen…in a syndicated newspaper column and on widespread TV outlets, his own magazine, his own website—only he cloaks it in less inflammatory language with many a soft chuckle interspersed along the way.
Even so, he has said things that the Iranian president has not said.
Like the Iranian president, Buchanan has long trumpeted that the future of the United States is fast fleeting. Like that evil Iranian president, Buchanan with his high whinnying voice slams Israel every chance he gets although he is discreet enough to deny his anti-Semitism: an anti-Semitism that is ever-more apparent as Buchanan grows longer in the tooth. And Buchanan has done the Iranian president one better: he has written a revisionist history, concocted by his fevered brain and with the help of some blindsided eccentrics with academic degrees: a history which turns facts on their heads. Hitler, he calls an evil man (cosmetics else the book trade wouldn’t touch it) but one who had no designs on world conquest or America. Only Europe. And Britain could have benefited from it were it not for the real evil one was Winston Churchill (while very bright, another dab of cosmetics to assuage the book trade) who led Britain to lose its empire and his country to lose dramatically in the world poker game. Buchanan is so twisted he cannot even allow we…the West…won the Cold War. He would say: win, hell! The Cold War is still on. Who does he back in the tilt between Putin and Georgia? You guessed it: Putin.

Buchanan’s presence is not everywhere but it is significant enough to warrant some concern. For he is not a ranting nut on a soapbox in Bughouse Square. He’s soft-spoken, widely published, widely heard. But, we are at war. Our soldiers are overseas and only one so-called responsible commentator tells them their game is lost. His voice bears the melody of Axis Sally; in fact it’s as pipingly high as was hers. . Sure, there are lesser Axis Sallys in varying degrees on the left who secretly do not wish our country well and hope we lose—but the major one in this country occupies prominent position on the McLaughlin Group, in “revisionist” history books and on MSNBC…slurring Churchill, trying to re-write history. He has abandoned the Republican party, has become so radicalized, so discordant to the interests of America that his former president bosses…would certainly disown him were they alive.

His presence has become as vile as the most strident commentators on the Daily Kos except that he masquerades under false colors left over from his once honorable conservative reputation.
No, I don’t say silence him anymore than the northern copperheads who opposed the Civil War were shut up. But consider. If it walks like a duck, squawks like a duck, it may be a duck. Here is a man who has opposed efforts to bring ex-Nazis to justice…who once wrote Hitler was “courageous”…who stands with the Confederacy, hates Lincoln, despises Churchill and is unalterably opposed to the stand our nation has taken in time of war. Eugene McCarthy once said he felt it would be good for this nation to lose in Vietnam. I don’t think Buchanan has said that yet. But he’s not that far behind.
I just say: identify him for what he is. A copperhead.