The betting in this cynical town is that the Olympic deal is all fixed: Chicago’s got it for 2016 thanks to the clout that can be exerted by Dem machine pol Barack Obama aka the president of the United States. A president, aided by local pol hustlers David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, can do many things now to ensure this city gets it so that, Obama has boasted, he can toast the Olympics in his home town as he finishes his second term. Huh? Second term?
Dem Defeat Possibility Looms.
If I were a betting man…and I am… I’d say he doesn’t. With the exception of Lucifer tumbling through the clouds to the bottomless inferno of hell, has anyone toppled from topmost so soon. The main source to keep in mind is the Rasmussen Poll, which runs a daily tracking survey of Obama, collected via telephone surveys of 500 likely voters per night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. Their analyses of the numbers are overwhelmingly accurate.
Take a look at how Rasmussen predicted the 2008 presidential election and what really happened. Rasmussen called the election for Obama 52% to 46%. The final had Obama 53% to 46%. In 2004, Rasmussen called it for Bush 50.2% to 48.5%. The final had Bush 50.7% to Kerry 48.3%. That’s an incredible record of accuracy. So what does Rasmussen say today?
Rasmussen polling last week had 41% strongly disapproving of Obama and only 30% approving. And here’s the stunner: as of now, 57% would throw out all members of the Congress and start over again: Just 25% would keep the Democratic Congress. Moreover, Gallup last week showed 70% independent voter disapproval with the Democratic Congress. On top of that, the usually accurate Charlie Cook report, one of the nation’s barometers of political thinking projects at least 20 Democratic House seats falling in the next election. But as I know Charlie Cook hopes otherwise, I can say that when Charlie says the Dems will lose 20, he fears they will lose 40.
A loss of 40 Dem seats would put the Republicans close to taking over the House (now the House stands 178 Republicans, 257 Democrats)…and the fallout isn’t over yet. In short, I think that with oncoming economic and foreign crises there will be a 50-50 chance of Republicans winning the House.
Over in the Senate there are a good number of Democrats slated for extinction…including the majority leader, Harry Reid (Nevada). My prognostication is that the following Democratic seats will turn Republican: Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Michael Bennet (Colo.), Chris Dodd (Conn.) and Specter (Pa.)…plus seats where Dem incumbents will not run i.e. Burris (Ill.). Seats vacated by Republican incumbents will all stay with the GOP—Missouri (Kit Bond), Kansas (Sam Brownback), Florida (Mel Martinez) and Ohio (George Voinovich). This means there will be a slightly under 50-50 chance that, at this stage anyhow, the Republicans will pick up the Senate. Now if Obama miraculously comes up with a cure for cancer, don’t expect these numbers to hold—but I think they will.
Likely Finale for Health Care.
The only person I listen to for a prognosis on the national health care outcome is Charles Krauthammer, a conservative physician, psychiatrist and Pulitzer winner. He thinks if the Obama people are smart they will take this exit strategy. They will (a) drop the public option aka widespread government intrusion into medicine; (b) scrub any reference to end-of-life counseling; (c) drop the argument that Obamacare is “cost-cutting” because it isn’t; (d) re-write the bill to make health care universal and permanently protected with draconian regulations that ban denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, denying the dropping of coverage if a person gets sick; and capping insurance company reimbursement.
Krauthammer: “Isn’t there a catch? Of course there is. This scheme is the ultimate bait-and-switch. The pleasure comes now, the pain later. Government-subsidized universal and virtually unlimited coverage will vastly compound already out-of-control government spending on health care.” But the pain will not come immediately, he says: but when it does, “the only solution will be rationing.” Bad news but he says legislators on both sides of the aisle will support the legislation. I sure hope his prediction doesn’t come to pass.
Fatal Dem CIA Blunder.
What is almost inconceivable to me is this: why the administration is courting disaster on the national security front by probing operatives of the CIA, the very people who should be thanked profusely for keeping us from other terrorist attacks?
The reason seems to be that the far left which composes much of the Obama political base must be fed raw meat in order to keep it satisfied and happy. But last week of all newspapers, The Washington Post, came out with the best argument for not having Attorney General Eric Holder’s probe. In essence, the story described the course of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s interrogation. The report said that the very tactics that horrify liberals made the CIA aware of plots to attack the U. S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan; to fly high-jacked aircraft into Heathrow Airport; to derail a train in the U. S. ; to blow up gas stations in the U. S.; to fly an airplane into the tallest building in California; and to blow up bridges in New York.
The conclusion of the story is clear. Enhanced…even “harsh”… interrogations were able to secure this intelligence “find.” Key terrorists were holding back information before application of tough techniques and buckled to spit out the truth. According to a CIA report, KSM (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) under duress gave invaluable information that led to the arrest of a truck driver in the U. S., Iyan Faris, who was plotting to bomb New York landmarks; also of a sleeper operative named Saleh Almari; of another operative, Majid Khan and two Pakistani so-called “businessmen”with whom KSM was working to smuggle explosives into this country.” All told, the CIA maintains detainees in mid-2003 enabled us to apprehend 70 individuals that al-Qaeda had recruited.
Obama has played a very duplicitous game with this “probe.” First he said he opposed looking backward: he wanted to look forward. Then he added that he is giving the Attorney General sanction to do whatever he wants with the issue—meaning that Obama will be the “good cop” while Holder will be the “bad one.” But by allowing Holder to go on with his probe, Obama will not evade blame for an action which is bound to ruin the morale of the agency most directly concerned with our internal safety—and in do doing, Obama is sidelining himself to the farthest corners of the political Left. It reflects an amazing ineptitude. If, God forbid, terrorism strikes these shores after Holder’s “probe,” the Democratic party will be held responsible from the topmost office to the least significant one.
The Kennedy “Legacy.”
Right after Teddy Kennedy died last week his so-called reputation was soaring, not unlike a bloated Macy’s float tugging at the ropes in New York’s Thanksgiving Day parade…with media calling him “the Lion of the Senate” where “lyin’” would be more appropriate. Much of the commentary airbrushed out the tragic death of 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick. In retrospect the story is even worse than when first revealed in 1969.
Teddy and a female consort had no idea…so intoxicated and infatuated with themselves were they…that a sleeping Mary Jo was curled up in the back seat. So when Ted drove the Oldsmobile into the pond and it overturned, both of them in the front seat escaped. Then in a great display of cowardice did Kennedy hide and refuse to report the accident to the police. When he and his consort returned to the cottage where the party had been going on, they were told that Mary Jo had been in the back seat. Still there was no report made to the police.
Divers who recovered the body later said that if a report had been called in immediately, there would have been a good chance that Mary Jo could have been saved: her body was found in a pathetic state of gasping for air in the front seat. And so what did the liberals say about their hero? I’ll tell you what one idolater-biographer wrote (Adam Clymer of The New York Times). Get this: “[His later] achievements as a senator have towered over his time—changing the lives of far more Americans than remembered the name `Mary Jo Kopechne.’”
Another Kennedy groupie ruminated last week in The Huffington Post what Mary Jo “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history [sic].” How does that hit you? Her life was sacrificed for Kennedy’s proclivity to spend multi-billions to help socialize America.
The Vatican’s wise silence (despite much media pressure) signified that the era of Kennedy “dynasty” blather beginning with Brother John has thankfully ended. Speaking of John: it was about him that Douglas MacArthur mused: “what is there so heroic about one of our PT’s being rammed by a Japanese destroyer? Sounds like gross ineptitude to me. That skipper should have been court-martialed!”) Instead, old Joe, the great man’s billionaire father, hired a raft of publicists to make his son a legend, then commissioned ghost hack-flack Ted Sorensen to write a bogus book in JFK’s name about great Senators which Old Joe hustled to get a Pulitzer prize. (Sorensen chipped in last week with another comment to Time by marveling that it was God’s will that Teddy survived to accidents, a plane crash and the tipping of his car into the pond at Chappaquiddick: not a mention of the death of Mary Jo).
Earlier in JFK’s background, Old Joe hired none other than Arthur Krock, chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times to write young JFK’s senior thesis at Harvard…which earned Kennedy, a mediocre student, a cum laude at graduation. Then Old Joe had Krock do a finished book signed by JFK, Why England Slept which got the young man media attention.
Old Joe is long gone but a greater work of deification has occurred with the mainstream media on behalf of his son Ted. We are told by the media that with Teddy’s passing “an era of civility has ended” in the Senate. Do you recall Kennedy’s words about legal scholar Robert Bork, up for confirmation to the Supreme Court? They went this way: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police would break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids and schoolchildren would not be taught about evolution.” An era of civility indeed.
“The most successful Senate career in history” trilled the Huffington Post. Greater than Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Fighting Bob LaFollette, Robert Taft?
The USSR Memo Media Ignore.
Last week a revelatory story appeared in Forbes written by Peter Robinson, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution which outlined the following:
In 1991 a reporter for the London Times, Tim Sebastian, was picking his way through Soviet archives when he came upon a memo composed by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, addressed to Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, the boss of the Soviet Union. It dealt with John Tunney, a former Democratic senator from California who had been Teddy’s roommate at the University of Virginia school of law. Ronald Reagan was president and engaged in a delicate series of negotiations with the USSR. The memo read:
“On 9/10 of this year [1983] Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow. The senator [Kennedy] charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.” The transmitted message proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would help Andropov in providing expertise in dealing with Reagan if in return the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic party a hand in the 1984 presidential election: meaning that it would generate to the media and others the sense that things would go better between the two powers if a less confrontational person than Reagan were to be elected as president.
Quoting the memo: “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations. These issues, according to the senator [Kennedy] will, without a doubt, become the most important of the election campaign.” Then Kennedy via Tunney proffered a few specific hints. First, , a Kennedy visit to Moscow. “The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA” i.e. Kennedy would help the Russians polish up their propaganda.
Second, Tunney acting for Kennedy offered to make it possible for Andropov to sit down for a few interviews on American television to make “a direct appeal…to the American people.” This “will, without a doubt, attract a great deal of attention and interest in the country…If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y. V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews…the senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American people.”
Kennedy’s motives? “Like other rational people, [Kennedy] is very troubled by the current state of Soviet-American relations.” But there was a personal matter as well. “Tunney remarked that the senator wants to run for president in 1988,” the memo continued. “Kennedy does not discount that during the 1984 campaign the Democratic party may officially turn to him to lead the fight against the Republicans and to elect their candidate president”—but Kennedy’s preference would be four years later when Reagan would be out of the political picture.
In 1992 Tim Sebastian published the story about his finding the memorandum in the London Times. But here in the United States the story got no attention (unsurprising). Sebastian wrote a book in 2006, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism which published the memo in full. Again, no media coverage. Historian Paul Kangor who reviewed the document says, “The document has stood the test of time. I scrutinized it more carefully than anything I’ve ever dealt with as a scholar. I showed the document to numerous authorities who deal with Soviet archival material. No one has debunked the memorandum or shown it to be a forgery. Kennedy’s office did not deny it.”
No evidence exists that Andropov ever acted on the memorandum. He died within eight months of receiving it. Tunney, the son of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney, is still alive at age 75. Yet the record is clear: while the U.S. and U.S. S. R. were engaged in a climactic struggle (which the U. S. eventually won, due to Reagan’s hard-line persistence) Ted Kennedy was offering aid and comfort to our nation’s prime enemy.. which, if done by any other politician, would have guaranteed censure of impeachment or both. But once again, a Kennedy has escaped the worldly bar of justice.
But maybe not with the ultimate Just Judge.
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