The feeling that an Obama victory is inevitable is producing candor from the Left about what that means.

Here's Rep. Barney Frank on CNBC today:



"Deficit fear has to take a second seat"!

I wish a had a dollar for every time a liberal has taunted me during the last several years over the "Bush/GOP deficits!"  My hunch is that left-wing talking point will be popped down the memory hole, and suddenly deficits won't matter!

Frank also let's us know "there are plenty of rich people out there we can tax." Did you hear that, Sen. Obama!

Now, liberals like to point out that Obama has promised -- promised, mind you! -- not to tax households making less than $250,000 a year.

Would that be the same Obama who promised to use the public financing system? The same Obama who promised to lead a filibuster against the renewing the Foriegn Intelligence Surveillance Act?

Cold comfort. An Obama promise is worth about as much as...an Obama promise.

In conversations with others about the dangers of an Obama victory, I've been pointing out it will most likely lead to an explosion in the scope of government control of the economy on a scale not seen since the New Deal. Anyone with minimal brain activity discern that by reading the tea leaves of Obama's campaign rhetoric.

Paul H. Rubin lays it out in scary detail in a bracing op-ed from today's Wall Street Journal, "Get Ready For The New New Deal":

Unlike FDR, Mr. Obama will not have to create the mechanisms government uses to interfere with the economy before imposing his policies. FDR had to get the Supreme Court to overturn a century's worth of precedents limiting the power of government before he could use the Constitution's commerce clause, among other things, to increase government control of the economy. Mr. Obama will have no such problem.

FDR also had to create agencies to implement regulations. Today, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Board (both created in the 1930s) as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and others created later are in place. Increasing their power will be easier than creating them from scratch.

Even before the current crisis, there was a great demand for increased government regulation to limit global warming. That gives the next president a ready-made box in which to place more regulation, and a legion of supports eager for it.

It's my belief the thinking members of the Left welcome the financial crisis for the very reasons described in Rubin's op-ed. They understand it is a rare opportunity to radically expand government control over economic activity by exploit fear of economic collapse. Americans are indoctrinated with the myth of the New Deal -- that government saved capitalism -- and will hearken to that myth to justify massively expanding government regulation.

Does it matter that the New Deal myth is wrong? That FDR's policies artificially prolonged the Great Depression?

Not really, since most Americans believe it. And left-wingers don't really care one way or another: their goal is growing government whether it or not it hurts the economy.

OK, it's not the whole political Right, and it's only a very small pity party, mainly centered in New York City.

But I've noticed a distinct tone of self-pity and victimization from salon conservatives.

For example David Brooks, pet conservative of the New York Times opinion page, worried that Republicans would become hostile to smart guys like him:

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Brooks tars Gov. Sarah Palin as a class warrior and laments the GOP isn't nice to urbane cosmopolitans like him in an interview with Huffington Post (Brooks is one of those conservatives HuffPost types like):

But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

I guess David Brooks doesn't read anything other than his own columns, or else he has conducted the most massive canvass in rank-and-file GOP in history and can say with authority that the GOP base is anti-idea.

How urbane.

Last week, Christopher Buckley decided endorse Barack Obama because John McCain in a Daily Beast post. I agree with one thing Buckley said: the only reason anyone cares about it is because his last name is Buckley.

But underneath all the bon vivantness, Buckley musters extremely thin affirmative reasons for endorsing the most left-wing major presidential candidate in American history:

- Buckley thinks Oabama has a "first rate temperament."

- Buckley thinks Obama's books are "first rate."

- Buckley thinks Barack is really smart and approves of his Ivy League education.

That's it.

Buckley then closes his eyes, tosses a coin down the wishing well and wishes very, very hard that President Obama won't do any of the things he's promised to do.

Buckley also spends a great deal of time blaming for being angry at his flippant endorsement of Senator Government. No respect for urbane sophistication from the rubes of the Right!

Rounding out the pity party is the Peggy Noonan with another weekly excursion into vaporous prose. This week, Peggy thinks Sarah Palin is "failing." 

Notice a pattern here? The urban sophisticates of the Right have lately turned Sarah Palin into their whipping girl. Noonan is a later arrival at that party, probably still stung by the awkward dichotomy between her published praise of Palin and off-air panning of her during the RNC.

Apparently more confident of McCain-Palin's defeat, Peggy private contempt is becoming more public:

But we have seen Mrs. Palin on the national stage for seven weeks now, and there is little sign that she has the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office. She is a person of great ambition, but the question remains: What is the purpose of the ambition? She wants to rise, but what for? For seven weeks I've listened to her, trying to understand if she is Bushian or Reaganite--a spender, to speak briefly, whose political decisions seem untethered to a political philosophy, and whose foreign policy is shaped by a certain emotionalism, or a conservative whose principles are rooted in philosophy, and whose foreign policy leans more toward what might be called romantic realism, and that is speak truth, know America, be America, move diplomatically, respect public opinion, and move within an awareness and appreciation of reality.

But it's unclear whether she is Bushian or Reaganite. She doesn't think aloud. She just . . . says things.

Maybe one reason it is unclear is it has been only seven weeks, during which Gov. Palin has been campaigning for Sen. John McCain's policies and beliefs, not her own. She's the nominee's running mate, not the nominee -- a minor detail that seems to have escaped Noonan, who knows better: she once wrote speeches for George H.W. Bush, who famously decried Ronald Reagan's 30% tax cut as "voodoo" economics before enthusiastically embracing it as the VP nominee.

Noonan goes on:

In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It's no good, not for conservatism and not for the country.

Notice the emerging pattern?

Living out here in genuine Reagan Country -- Orange County, California -- maybe I a somehow able to see something that escapes these pundits of the East urbane sophisticate Right: Palin connects with a dispirited, hungry conservative base. They don't think such a connection should exist or is deserved, and yet there it is anyway.

Noonan then turns her attention to the unsophisticated conservative masses who insufficiently appreciate the urbanity of Christopher Buckley:

I gather this week from conservative publications that those whose thoughts lead them to criticism in this area are to be shunned, and accused of the lowest motives. In one now-famous case, Christopher Buckley was shooed from the great magazine his father invented. In all this, the conservative intelligentsia are doing what they have done for five years. They bitterly attacked those who came to stand against the Bush administration. This was destructive. If they had stood for conservative principle and the full expression of views, instead of attempting to silence those who opposed mere party, their movement, and the party, would be in a better, and healthier, position.

At any rate, come and get me, copper.

Oh Lord. Forgive me if I am not moved by this unbecoming concoction of false bravado, self-pity and narcissism. it's not as if Noonan, Buckley et al are pledging their lives, honor and sacred fortunes, here.

Here's my suggestion: take a long sabbatical from life in New York and dwell amongst the unwashed conservative masses for a while. It might help them to understand that the enthusiasm for Sarah Palin has nothing to do with their imagined anti-intellectualism and intolerance of the grass-roots they can't even see from the concrete caverns of NYC.

Finally, why do I get the feeling these folks are positioning themselves to be the pet conservative pundits during an Obama Administration?

Even as today's top shelf editorial by the WSJ exposes the lie of Obama's "tax cuts," The One inadvertently copped to the purpose and consequences of his tax plan: to punish success and redistribute wealth.

Check out this video from Fox news of a face-to-face exchange had with a plumber in Ohio yesterday. Not with one of the fat-cats who pretends will be the sole victims of his tax assault, but a regular Joe plumber.

Notice how Obama admits to the plumber that his plan will "punish your success." It's just that he doesn't want to punish it -- which in the world of Obama makes it OK, because intentions matter more than consequences.

Obama then makes matters worse by saying he wants to "spread the wealth." That's just the old fashioned Democratic practice of buying votes by taking money from one group of Americans and giving it to another group of Americans.
 
Maybe it's accidental bred by the growing sense of inevitability within the Obama campaign, but let's hope John McCain has enough nerve to take this exchange and clobber Obama with it over and over on Wednesday night. Obama's left-wing tax-and-spend reflexes are a huge liability that McCain has yet to effectively exploit in the debates. A lot of Americans aren't sold on Obama, and this is represents an opening for the McCain campaign to decouple leaners from Obama and put their votes in play again.

Gov. Sarah Palin seemed a little shaky as the Veep debate started, but as the night progressed, she hit her stride and did very well, even putting Sen. Joe Biden back on his heels on occasion.

In my view, Palin had to come in and dispel the bad impressions left from her Katie Couric interview -- something the Alaska Governor accomplished in spades. She displayed those qualities that have endeared her to such a wide swath of American voters in such a short time.

Both candidates obviously had their mission coming into the debate. Biden's was to attack the Bush Administration, as if he and Obama were running against George Bush, and not John McCain. Palin's was to attack Barack Obama and not nake it a Palin v. Biden contest.

I do wish Palin had taken to the Obama-Biden ticket a harder on the subject of Iraq. Whenever Biden claimed, incredibly, that McCain was continuously wrong on the War in Iraq, Palin should have leveled a bazooka at him and said something to the effect of:

"With all due respect, Senator, if we had followed Barack Obama's advice on Iraq, the United States would be withrawing in defeat, rather than having victory within sight. if we had followed Obama's advice, the United States would have, for the first time in its history, deliberately chosen defeat in war as a matter of policy.

"Contrary to what you're claiming, Sen. John McCain was advocating the surge in late 2003, seeing before anyone else that our initial strategy wasn't working. If we had listened to John McCain back then, the War in Iraq would already be over."

"The surge worked. You and Barack Obama opposed it before it started, while it was being implemented, and Barack Obama still refuses to admit he was wrong and the surge was the right strategy. We can't afford that kind of inepxerience and bad judgement in our Commander-in-Chief."

But she didn't, and she did just fine.

I was happy Gov. Palin called a spade a spade and pointed out the Obama-Biden tax plan is pure income redistribution. Biden lamely tried to fend that off by calling it fairness, but the lipstick didn't stay on the pig.

During their next debate, McCain needs to pick up and expand that attack on Obama's left-wing economic policies.

Another missed opportunity for Palin was when Biden bragged about his tubing of Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination, and took responsibility for making a nominee's ideology the central confirmation criterion.

Gov. Palin should have questioned why Biden was responsible for the hyper-political enviorment in which we pick federal judges, a partisan sprial that denies eminently qualified lawyers and jurists the ooppirutniyt to serve on the bench.

"I don't know why Sen. Biden would be proud of hs role leading role in permanently poisoning our system of selecting judges."

Impact? Net plus for McCain's campaign. If Palin had a bad night, it would have demorailized Republican and given the Obama campaign possibly irreversible momentum. It also would probably killed Palin's promising future as a national candidate.

As it stands, Palin has assured her future as a Republcian star and strong presidential contender in 2012 or 2016.

Now, perharps the nervous nellies in Beltway conservative cirlces will calm down and abandon their fickel "dump Palin": talk.

For year, this Catholic winced at the wishy-washiness that characterized what seemed like the great majority of American bishops -- flinching from instruct their flocks in their Faith in the face of errors, and failing to crack down on immorality and abuse within the Church.

It's refreshing to see that changing, especially the willingness of more and more bishops to admonish Catholic politicians that their "personally opposed" pro-choice stances are nonsense, contrary to being a faithful Catholic, and help lead other Catholics astray.

One the best, Archbishop Raymond Burke -- now head of the Vatican's version of the Supreme Court -- recently spoke out again on this topic:

Burke, who was named prefect of the Vatican's Supreme Court of the Apostolic Signature in June, told the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire that the U.S. Democratic Party risked "transforming itself definitively into a party of death for its decisions on bioethical issues." He then attacked two of the party's most high profile Catholics -- vice presidential candidate Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- for misrepresenting Church teaching on abortion.

He said Biden and Pelosi, "while presenting themselves as good Catholics, have presented Church doctrine on abortion in a false and tendentious way.

You go, Your Grace.
I'm a partisan Republican, but i know a goodly number of anti-abortion Catholic Democrats, and it is a shame and a tragedy out how thoroughly the culture of death has taken hold of the Democratic Party. It is virtually impossible to advance to the top ranks if a Democrat is pro-life. Al Gore and Dick Gephardt were pro-life...until they decided they wanted to be President, at which point they accommodated their consciences to their ambition and became pro-choice.

The nomination of Barack Obama deepens that hold. Obama is the most extreme pro-choice nominee of a major party ever. Ever.

Obama is smart enough to recognize that he is far out of step with maiinstream America on this issue. The man who thinks he has the answer to everything professes sudden ignorance oon the question of when life begins. He has lied about his opposition to "born-alive" legislation while in the Illinois legislature.

The mainstream media has absolutely no interest in exploring Obama's exteeme pro-choice views. For one thing, those views don't striek them as extreme. Iin their world, that is the mainstream viewpoint.

But back to the point of this post. I'm heartened by what seems to be a rising tide among American bishops to confidently speak the truth of Catholic teaching to Catholic politicians who need to hear it.