So what?

I was never a fan of Ms. Palin to begin with, as I’ve said more than once. For instance, in this post:

Do I think she would have made a good Veep? Without a doubt. I mean, it’s not a hard job and doesn’t require a lot of effort or experience. Look at it this way: if Gore, Mondale, Quayle, etc. — and now Biden, of all people — were up to the task, then you know that anyone can do the job. However, being Vice President means other things than just casting tie-breaking votes and presiding over the Senate. It means waiting for the President to die or resign.

Do I think she was ready for that to happen, given the fact that McCain is in his seventies and could drop dead at any given moment? No, I don’t think she was. She may be ready someday (I think 2012 is pushing it), but not right now.

And then there was this post:

Although I like her, I don’t think she’s experienced enough in national politics to be Commander-in-Chief. This may change as we get closer to 2012, though, so keep an eye on her.

About the only thing I liked about Ms. Palin was her willingness to say what needs to be said. When the left attacked her, she didn’t just sit back and take it, ala Bush, she fought back. When John “I Served In Vietnam” Kerry started in on her, she responded (and brilliantly, I might add). But it takes more than wit to be a leader of a national party, and it certainly takes more than not being afraid to stand up to liberal kooks and the media to be a good president.

Ms. Palin is a good conservative and a good Republican. Other than that, she’s not ready for the big chair. She may be someday, but that day is far off. Now that she’s resigned as Governor of Alaska, that day is probably even further off. If she runs for Senate or something like that, or takes a high-level Cabinet post in a future Republican administration, she might edge herself back in the running, but I really don’t see it happening.

I know I’ll catch some flak for this, but I’m pretty sure this is the end of Palin’s political career and, to be honest, I’m not at all bothered by it. I’m sure the people who are most upset about this are the kooks on the left. I mean, what will Sullivan write about now?

Gibbs: “… But, again, let’s–How about we do this? I promise we will interrupt the AP’s tradition of asking the first question. I will let you [Chip Reid] ask me a question tomorrow as to whether you thought the questions at the town hall meeting that the President conducted in Annandale—“

Chip Reid: “I’m perfectly happy to—”

Helen Thomas: “That’s not his point. The point is the control–”

Reid: “Exactly.”

Thomas: “We have never had that in the White House. And we have had some, but not– This White House.”

Gibbs: “Yes, I was going to say, I’ll let you amend her question.”

Thomas: “I’m amazed. I’m amazed at you people who call for openness and transparency and—”

Gibbs: “Helen, you haven’t even heard the questions.”

Reid: “It doesn’t matter. It’s the process.”

Thomas: “You have left open—”

Reid: “Even if there’s a tough question, it’s a question coming from somebody who was invited or was screened, or the question was screened.”

Thomas: “It’s shocking. It’s really shocking.”

Gibbs: “Chip, let’s have this discussion at the conclusion of the town hall meeting. How about that?”

Reid: “Okay.”

Gibbs: “I think—“

Thomas: “No, no, no, we’re having it now–”

Gibbs: “Well, I’d be happy to have it now.”

Thomas: “It’s a pattern.”

Gibbs: “Which question did you object to at the town hall meeting, Helen?”

Thomas: “It’s a pattern. It isn’t the question—”

Gibbs: “What’s a pattern?”

Thomas: “It’s a pattern of controlling the press.”

Gibbs: “How so? Is there any evidence currently going on that I’m controlling the press–poorly, I might add.”

Thomas: “Your formal engagements are pre-packaged.”

Gibbs: “How so?”

Reid: “Well, and controlling the public—”

Thomas: “How so? By calling reporters the night before to tell them they’re going to be called on. That is shocking.”

The left screamed bloody murder when Bush dared to have some people pre-screened before any big engagements, and yet they don’t seem to have a big problem with Obama doing it. They bashed us for years because we pointed to precedent by saying “Clinton did it, too”, ignoring the fact that when we said that, we were pointing out that they didn’t have a problem when Bubba J did it at the time, so they shouldn’t have had a problem when Bush did it. Now the shoe is, once again, on the other foot and, once again, they’re ok with it.

See, it’s not the process they have a problem with, it’s the party the person doing it belongs to. That simple, really. It’s called hypocrisy, and if our friends on the left majored in anything in college — besides Advanced Socialism, assuming they went at all — it’s Hypocrisy 101.

Update: Just a coincidence:

In the stage-managed event, questions for Obama came from a live audience selected by the White House and the college, and from Internet questions chosen by the administration’s new-media team. Of the seven questions the president answered, four were selected by his staff from videos submitted to the White House Web site or from those responding to a request for “tweets.”

The president called randomly on three audience members. All turned out to be members of groups with close ties to his administration: the Service Employees International Union, Health Care for America Now, and Organizing for America, which is a part of the Democratic National Committee. White House officials said that was a coincidence.

Lucky for Obama, huh?

What happened is liberalism, Mr. Ebert. Every problem we face in America today — illegitimacy, illiteracy, divorce rates, crime rates, poverty rates, social and moral decay, etc. — can be traced right back to 1960s, far-left radical liberalism, the notion that the world owes you a living and that government should take care of you from cradle to grave. The notion that the rich in this country aren’t real people who’ve busted their behinds all their lives to get where they are today, and therefore should have their money and property taken from them and given to the less fortunate. The notion that we can tax our way to prosperity. The notion that there is no such thing as a bad law or a bad regulation. You get the idea. It all started in the 1960s, and until far-left liberalism is finally dead and buried, America’s problems will not go away.

You want to know what the solution is, Mr. Ebert, it’s not more liberalism, it’s less liberalism. But I don’t expect for someone who backed Obama the way he did to actually get that.

Notice anything? I did. Both articles, at best, are claiming things that are simply untrue or, at worst, omitting facts that don’t jive with their agenda.

This wasn’t a coup in the technical or traditional sense. It was a court-ordered, Congress-backed removal of a law-breaking president. It’s not an overthrow of democracy, but a preservation of it. Naturally, the left wants to see it crushed.

Isn’t it funny how the left refuses to stand up for democracy in Iran, but they’ll stand up for commie dictatorships in our own backyard? The left loves to beat the drums of war in support of their favorite dictatorships, but won’t support — even for a second — a war when it is actually in this nation’s national interests.

These people are steering the Great Ship America into dangerous waters. And I mean that in every way possible. Economic policy, tax and spending policy, domestic policy, foreign policy, you name it. These are children who don’t know what they want, only that they want it now, and they’re willing to do great damage in order to get it. They simply cannot be trusted to pass this country to the next generation in better shape than when they found it. In fact, it’s debateable at this point as to whether this country will be worth saving once these people have left the stage.

That is all.

Remember, this is the kind of kook stuff the left is trying to teach here in this country!

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

Isn’t it funny that one can commit treason against the planet, but not the United States? I mean, the same paper that carries this insanity-laced column is the same paper that violated national security by publishing secret information in the war against terror. That’s all fine and dandy, I guess, but we dare not oppose global warming, because that’s serious business! Pfft.

Look, Krugman points out the usual “facts” that watermelon* environmentalists like Gore keep repeating, and have been repeating, since they first realized that the environment was their ticket to power and wealth. There’s no truth to any of it. They’ve been wrong on everything they’ve ever said about the environment! They’ve never been correct on a single thing! And yet they want us to just blindly hand over our liberties and our money to them simply because they think they are good people.

They bully people who dare to disagree with them, yet claim that they are the true victims. It’s unbelievably. It’d be funny if it weren’t so serious. Global warming (or climate change, whatever the nuts wanna call it) is just a giant hoax so that people like Gore can get rich and have power. That’s all it is, that’s all it ever was, and that’s all it ever will be. Mankind simply does not have it within his power, short of a global nuclear war, to change the climate of this planet.

(*Watermelon = “green on the outside, red [commie] in the middle”)

For the past five months, White House aides and friends of the Obamas have been quietly visiting local churches and vetting the sermons of prospective first ministers in a search for a new — and uncontroversial — church home. Obama has even sampled a few himself, attending services at 19th Street Baptist on the weekend before his inauguration and celebrating Easter at St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Now, in an unexpected move, Obama has told White House aides that instead of joining a congregation in Washington, D.C., he will follow in George W. Bush’s footsteps and make his primary place of worship Evergreen Chapel, the nondenominational church at Camp David.

I wouldn’t call it an unexpected move, because there is a precedent here. Most modern-day presidents have done almost the exact same thing. In Reagan’s memoirs, for example, he said they stopped going to public churches because he felt the danger he brought along with him (assassination attempts, terrorist attacks, etc) and the media spectacle his attending always created was unfair to others in the congregation, who wanted nothing more than to worship in private and in peace. So he had church services in the White House. The article mentions some other examples of this:

The challenge of being part of a church community but also praying in peace has long been a problem for Presidents, according to historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony. “McKinley hated having people staring at him while he read Psalms, sang hymns, put money in the collection plate or took communion,” he writes in America’s First Families. “By the 1920s, getting a presidential family in and out of church was a production. Secret Service agents had to cordon off a clear path from the curb to the church entrance before the Coolidges arrived … [and] they were swiftly escorted to their third-row pew.”

So I don’t see the problem here, if in fact there is one. Unless Reverend Wright is officiating, this is nobody’s business.