Well, we’ve got six hundred something days until the election and it feels like it’s already the primary season for the 2008 election. Senator Barack Obama announced his entry into the fray yesterday. Barack wouldn’t dare quote President Reagan, but that’s the image he’s trying to construct. He’s currently in the process of delivering this image in carefully orchestrated events – Oprah, “Sixty Minutes”, etc. The image we’re supposed to be getting is the image of an idealist gazing upon that shining city on a hill and trying to make us believe that he’s the guy who can lead us back there.

Before I get started I want to thank all the great thinkers who engineered our present campaign finance laws which set the conditions for an infinite number of Political Action Committees, advocacy groups, and hundreds of fund raisers. Endless phone calls, mail, and internet spam are employed in an attempt to drain the average individual contributors of their maximum contributions each of which will buy approximately 1.2 seconds of local market television time. What’s really great about this is that campaign fund raising is now continuous. Why do I keep thinking of the Laws of Unintended Consequences when I think about campaign finance reform? We’ll talk about that some other day.

Senator Obama, or “The Barackster” as my friends and I refer to him, said some interesting things yesterday. He mentioned the “smallness of our politics.” He said, “The time for that politics is over.” He said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

What’s interesting about this? What’s interesting is what is not there. What is interesting is the lack of content. What is interesting is the overuse of the term “Rock Star” when referring to the guy. (I wonder if Hillary thinks of him as a rock star).

What is also interesting is that he quoted Abraham Lincoln. You may have thought, as I did, that The Barackster would have quoted our first black president, Bill Clinton. Then again, one would have to look long and hard for anything quotable from Bill Clinton that trumps his “I Did Not Have Sex With That Woman” speech.

Okay, so this is a big PR rollout. After all Senator Obama, like any other presidential hopeful, has to start spending his campaign dollars to try and raise more campaign dollars at the rate of one small contribution at a time. He should do pretty well considering Senator Joe Biden’s endorsement of his cleanliness.

By the way, if there were any justice Senator Biden’s exploratory committee would be shut down by now. But, as we all know there’s a double standard at work here. Any Republican would have not only lost his or her chance at the presidency, but would be having trouble with a lot of people calling for their resignation. Senator Biden, however, is the beneficiary of the ThreeStupidityStrikesforDemocratsOnly rule. He’s guilty of plagiarism. He’s guilty of an obviously stupid remark that has a racial taint to it – much more directly than Senator Trent Lott’s praise of Senator Strom Thurmond which resulted in Senator Lott losing his leadership post. I can’t wait to see what’s next. Maybe it will thin the field if he just gets around to his third strike soon.

Okay all you tough young reporters out there here’s the question you need to ask Senator Obama on the campaign trail -- “What will you do?” What I’m referring to is just what will Senator Obama do (if he gets elected president) and we’re still in Iraq and he sets an arbitrary deadline to “get out of Iraq.” Then we see the rapid progression of a Middle East dominated by Iran as a virulent anti-U.S. influence which by then will have not only nuclear weapons but some capability to deliver them.

I think I know what Barack will do. He’ll be dealing with the Al Sharpton’s and Jesse Jackson’s of the world who will probably be appointees in his administration somewhere advising him that the racial imbalances of the country are the number one priority and a new Civil Rights bill has to be passed to solve our problems in much the same way Campaign Finance Reform has solved all of our campaign finance irregularities and problems. He’ll be listening to others telling him that health care for everybody, particularly for every illegal immigrant in the country, is our number one priority and it has to be either mandated or nationalized. He’ll be reminded by powerful interest groups who helped him get elected that gay rights and women’s rights are our number one priority and that we need a whole new affirmative action revitalization effort. Another group will try to convince him that energy independence is the answer to everything and a huge government bureaucracy will have to be established to improve the national security and global warming problems we now have because of our dependence on Big Oil which delivers Foreign Oil to our refineries. By the way, this new Energy Agency will spend several billion dollars a year and won’t produce one gallon of gasoline or ethanol.

Somewhere down about twentieth on his list will be national security. Barack will be trying to play catch up on global security commitments with about two thirds of the military we have now which will have been reduced due to military budget cuts intended to help us reduce the accumulation of national debt. (Never mind that seventy five percent of our unfunded liabilities are related to Social Security and Medicare and have nothing to do with our military expenditures which have not exceeded 5% of GDP at anytime recently including the costs of the ongoing battle in Iraq).

That’s what Barack will be doing in my opinion. When it comes to the “Audacity of Hope” let’s just hope that when Barack gazes on that shining city on the hill that he isn't looking at some kind of radioactive glow.

Hillary’s continuing to work at having it not just two ways, but several ways. Campaigning in front of crowds in New Hampshire that are apparently more liberal than she is, they apparently want their next mommy or daddy president to make it stop. Make it go away, Mommy. Make it stop, Daddy. Take that noisy bad old war away.

So Hillary says things like: “It's very easy to go around and say, 'Let's end the war.’ If we had a Democratic president we would end the war."

And here’s a doozy: "knowing what we know now, I would never have voted for it.”

And finally, "The mistakes were made by this president, who misled this country and this Congress." All of this was said to the kind of applause a coach gets at a pep rally right before leading the team to a first class glute whupping.

What’s wrong with Hillary’s position? I’ve said it in my last two posts and believe that it is important enough to say again. This is an encouraging signal to an enemy who is not running for office in 2008. Our enemy is looking to see what kind of government we will elect in 2008.  They would prefer not to have a conservative Republican government.

Yessiree, you heard it right.   They (radical Islamists worldwide) have a preference about which U.S. administration we elect. They want Hillary’s administration (reason enough not to vote for her right there). They know that she’ll pack up and go home. Then they can regroup and plan more of their operations in our hemisphere rather than defending themselves in their part of the planet. By the way, they’ll accept Obama also if he promises the same things.

Let me add again (until it sinks in) IRAQ IS NOT THE WAR. Iraq is a battle in a much larger war. It’s an ideological war that just happens to be centered in Iraq at the moment.

Hillary doesn’t think the struggle against the monsters of terror is our number one priority. She’s not leading. She’s poll reading and consulting with her showpiece husband. She’s telling New Hampsherites and Iowans what she thinks they want to hear – universal health care, more affordable college, and reviving small town economies (none of which she can actually accomplish). She believes the American public is exhausted with Iraq and just wants it all to go away.

Maybe, but the American people can take it. They need to hear the truth and they need to be lead not appeased. They don’t need more bunk.

Maybe it’s just me, but when I watch poker players I don’t see them telling the people they’re playing against that the game will be over at midnight no matter what.

I haven’t played racquetball players who say, “Let me throw these last five points because I’ve got to get out of here by six.”

I haven’t seen too many football games where people say, “We’re not playing the fourth quarter. It’s late and we’ve got to get home to watch Desperate Housewives.”

But when it comes to warfare, many of the highly paid politicians whom we elected to represent us seem to think it is their mandate to quit no matter what the cost and to make sure that our enemy knows this.

Let’s be clear on this. As I said in my previous post HILLARY CLINTON CAN NOT STOP THE WAR ON TERROR. She can’t stop the war now as a Senator and won’t be able to stop it as President (shudder). By the way, Hillary doesn’t seem to even know where the war is. She thinks the war is in Iraq, apparently. She got this from the media.

We do have a lot of soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen in Iraq, and they are fighting. They are fighting in the War on Terror in Iraq, but Iraq is not the war. It is a battleground in the war. We have soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, FBI guys, and CIA operatives in a lot of places fighting the war.

So here’s the way it could work. Hillary gets elected President (shudderbarfgoodgod). She has enough Democratic buddies in Congress (barfshuddergodbarfgeezelouise) to defund (or zero the funding for) the war effort. Troops are called home (assuming we have the money to transport them home). We have a parade, declare major combat operations over, and watch as Iraq and the rest of the Middle East come under Iranian control (except for the Kurds who have had it with subjugation, oppression, and terror and are ready to tear any perceived enemy’s head off at the slightest provocation).

Hillary will begin “negotiations” with Iran, Syria, Libya, the Palestinians (not to be confused with Palestine) and East Timor in an effort to improve our approval ratings with radical Islamic countries. Doubling our approval rating in those countries would raise it to about two percent. These “negotiations” will continue while Hezbollah and Hamas attack Israel, radical Islamic groups attack France (who cares), England, Germany, Italy, and Denmark. Hillary will convince the voting public that these attacks are our fault because we did not successfully curb global warming or provide universal health care.

That brings up The Answer. The Answer from the Hillary Administration for responding to Radical Islam will be universal, government mandated health care. It won’t be paid for or provided by the government. Even Hillary isn’t dumb enough to try and take over the nurse’s unions. So it will be mandated rather than provided.

But, that’s not the point. The point is that the distraction of trying to provide universal one-size-fits-all health care will kill all interest in the war. At least it will kill our interest. The big question is “Will the enemy respect that we have lost our will to fight and are too busy to continue the War on Terror?”

The Other Answer is “No, you idiot. They’re still going to try to kill you.”

 Hillary’s been saying some interesting things lately. Let’s face it. The mainstream media guys are calling it for her already with only six hundred something days to go before the 2008 election.

You have to keep track of her bunk because, if she’s elected, some of t may actually happen.

First, she’s going to confiscate money from Big Oil to fund Big Government Energy Independence, whatever that is. Will Hillary’s Big Government actually produce energy? It will be interesting to see what a gallon of gasoline costs once it’s produced by Big Government. My guess I it will be about eight to nine bucks a gallon.

Then she still wants to hijack healthcare. She still loves the European healthcare model. Socialized medicine, we used to call it. I think they call it that because you spend a lot of time in waiting rooms socializing.

More recently she says she’d end the war. You’ve got to understand that she can’t do that. Even as President of the United States, Hillary would only have influence over our end of the war. What she really means, of course, is that she’d quit. Also, she’s not really talking about the war on terror. She’s talking about quitting an important battleground – Iraq. Maybe she’s thinking that after a couple of terms of her healthcare we’ll finally be healthy enough to fight the war and we can reengage.

You know, if you’re sorry enough to vote Democratic then go with Obama. At least then you’d have a “clean” guy leading you into disaster.