The news of "Senator" Arlen Specter's defection to the Democrats has left the liberal media a flutter and I'm sure Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann are feeling tingles in their legs as well.  Despite his admirable job interrogating and devastating Anita Hill during the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Justice Thomas, Specter's departure from the GOP is highly desirable.  I don't know what Specter's party support voting percentage has been in recent years but it's clear he had moved into the RINO (Republican in name only) category and it was just a matter of time before he defected to the donkeys.  My modest proposal for party loyalty is that if a legislator doesn't support their party's positions at least 60% of the time (which is a D- in most academic grading), that their overall commitment and loyalty to party principles and policies is dubious and that they are prime candidates for defection to the opposition.

Particularly reflective of Specter's arrogance is his desire to avoid subjecting his political fate to Pennsylvania GOP primary voters in 2010.  Here's a news flash for the "Senator."  You are accountable to the people of your state and especially accountable to those of us who are members of the party you purport to represent!  Specter's defection will provide, in most cases, the Democrats with a sycophantic supporter of Obama Administration policies and his lack of overall moral principles, other than his absolute desire to retain his Senate seat, should give pause to any Democrats inclined to support him.  By moving to caucus with banditos Reid and Pelosi, Specter gives the Democrats a near hammerlock on Senate legislative activities and does not provide the counterbalance to Obama Administration fiscal recklessness, obsequious pandering to union militancy, foreign and national security policy weakness, and social policy degeneracy which this country urgently needs.

Hopefully, Specter's defection will allow Pennsylvania voters of moderate to conservative ideological convictions to see that former Rep Pat Toomey is the best representative of their ideological views and should be sent to the Senate during the 2010 elections.  Specter clings to a delusional ideological belief that the Democratic appeasement oriented Modern Republicanism of Nelson Rockefeller and Dwight Eisenhower is relevant, instead of being totally discredited by party members, ideologically dead, and not appropriate to the challenges facing our country today.  Specter's departure from the GOP gives the party a chance to expunge ideological and personally opportunistic offal from its intestines and to rebuild itself with principled conservatives willing to promote and pursue fiscally prudent, morally beneficial, and realistic national security policies to promote our country's economic, social, and foreign policies.

In the over 7 1/2 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks there have been no additional terrorist attacks in the U.S.  The reasons for this have been providential protection, security enhancements made by governmental agencies since 9/11, initiating military operations against Islamist terrorist strongholds in Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq, and conducting vigorous interrogation (including waterboarding) against terrorist suspects.  Unfortunately, Obama's recent decision to end enhanced interrogation against terrorist suspects is a dangerous move that drastically increases the likelihood of a successful terrorist attack in the U.S.

When seeking to gather actionable intelligence against terrorist targets time is of the essence.  It is often necessary to use harsh techniques to elicit the information necessary to prevent such attacks from occurring.  Islamist terrorists have no interest in appealing to our better our natures nor are they responsive to the alleged cures of secularist western psychotherapy.  They do not desire to dialogue with us.  They desire to destroy us and believe that by doing so they will go to heaven.  Attempting to rationally converse with them in the naive hope that they will voluntarily confess operational attacks against American targets is sheer stupidity!

Whether you are playing a game or sport or engaging in a war you never tell your opponent or enemy what you will not do because that gives them an overwhelming competitive advantage against you.  For instance, a prudent basketball coach will never publicly announce that they will not use a 2-3 zone defense against an opponent or abstain from taking three point shots.  Obama's decision to ban enhanced interrogation techniques means terrorists now know the limits to which use military and civilian intelligence personnel can legally go in their attempts to extract information from terrorists we capture.  Al Qaida and other anti-American terrorists can now train their operatives on how to effectively resist these drastically limited interrogations of them.  There is no telling how many American and civilian lives will be lost because of this imbecilic decision.

The Obama Administration's decision that it may actually consider prosecuting Bush Administration officials who wrote the legal justifications for these enhanced interrogations is also chilling.  Policy differences between presidential administrations are now being criminalized.  Can you imagine the outcry that would ensue if the Republican Administration coming after the Obama Administration decided it would criminally prosecute Obama Administration Justice Dept. officials such as Attorney General Holder for issuing this document.  The leftist legal "intelligentsia" would go beserk with cries of fascist intimidation and other nonsense.

Sadly, we have a President who is absolutely clueless on how to fight Islamist terrorism.  He naively believes he can sit down and have a civil conservation with terrorist despots like Ahmadinejad and demagogic twits like Hugo Chavez who desire to kill Americans and thwart our national interests at every turn.  This naive belief in his persuasive powers is something Obama shares with Franklin D. Roosevelt who stupidly believed he could turn Joseph Stalin into a respector of democratic freedoms.  If, God forbid, there are further terrorist attacks in the U.S. against American civilian and/or military targets, you can trace the lineage of such attacks to the April decision to end enhanced interrogation techniques.   Is this the kind of change you can believe in?  I don't think so.

Yesterday's rescue of the captain of the pirate seized U.S. tanker off the Somali coast is a welcome event.  The Obama Administration was slow to recognize the gravity of this matter but , fortunately, Obama decided to listen to the military and the Navy seals resolved this matter in the only way it could be.  Unfortunately, the pirates and terrorists as criminals mentality contending that such individuals can be prosecuted in normal civilian legal proceedings still holds dangerous sway in Obama Administration thinking as demonstrated by pronouncements and policy decisions made by Attorney General Holder and Sec. State Clinton.  The fact that the surviving pirate kidnapper is to be tried under civilian procedures is not a good sign that the Obama Administration understands that the resurgence of international maritime piracy can only be dealt with through military means.

Positive steps the Obama Administration could take to cope with this menace are reversing the two decades long decline in U.S. naval surface ships and seeking funding for fast, highly mobile, and heavily armed vessels capable of finding, tracking, and destroying pirates in oceanic and littoral waters in areas of the world as diverse as the Somali coast, Straits of Malacca, and elsewhere.   Giving our naval forces liberal rules of engagement to destroy these bandits is also essential!   The administration and congress should also draft legislation giving U.S. flagged merchant ships the legal authority to train and arm their crews to fight and defeat, or at least deter, pirate attacks until naval reinforcements can arrive.  Such legislation would be consistent with U.S. constitutional provisions giving privateers the authority to conduct de facto military operations and seize pirate property.  We should immediately withdraw from any international maritime agreements prohibiting civilian merchant ships and their crews from defending themselves against pirate attacks.  We should also work closely with our allies and potential allies to develop coordinated procedures for ruthlessly destroying pirate forces desirous of attacking commercial shipping which is so critical to global economic health.  A basic prerequisite of such procedures is an ABSOLUTE PROHIBITION against ship owners paying ransom to pirate terrorists.

These pirate attacks are result of the consequences of a failed Somali state which has no control over its terroritory and failed nation states are a national security threat to the U.S. and other countries which is constantly referenced in national security literature.  The U.S. and other western countries should seriously reconsider establishing a colonial presence in Somalia regardless of what the United Nations or African nations think.  Somali's location so close to critical trade routes and Middle East oil supplies is so important to the international economy that it must be governed by a stable and competent entity even if this entity consists of Western countries.  The world cannot allow that region of the world to be controlled by anarchy or Islamist terrorist organizations.

British Conservative Party leader David Cameron and his family should have the sympathies and prayers of all American conservatives today.  He and his wife Samantha have lost their six year old son Ivan who died after a long battle with cerebal palsy and epilepsy.  The Camerons have two other children and the British Conservatives are, under his leadership, experiencing a revival of their fortunes after nearly 12 years of Labour Government.  The House of Commons suspended Prime Minister's Question Time today as a gesture of sympathy for the Camerons.  The British Conservative Party website www.conservatives.com/ has a blog with expressions of sympathy.  As an American Conservative and admirer of British Conservatism, I wish to extend my personal sympathy to the Camerons and my prayers that they will experience God's healing comfort at this time.  Even though I don't have children, I appreciate that all children are God's precious and unique blessings.

The audacity of the Obama Administration's hyprocrisy reached new heights and sunk to new depths today.  It announced it was holding a "fiscal responsibility summit" to focus on the upcoming release of its first budget.  At a time when our budget deficit is skyrocketing due to Keynesian stimulus packages and never ending aid to incompetently run financial institutions and recklessly profligate mortgagees, Obama has decided the great unwashed among us need to learn the lessons of fiscal responsibility.

Watching Liberal Democrats like Barack Obama and Joe Biden pose as paragons of fiscal probity is nauseating!  It's like hearing the Kennedy family pose as paragons of ethical virtue, Bill Clinton posing as a defender of marital monogamy, and a brothel of prostitutes posturing as paragons of sexual chastity!  At no time in their political career, have Barack Obama or Joe Biden demonstrate the slightest concern for governmental budgetary restraint.  Neither have congressional allies of theirs as varied as Barney Frank, John Dingell, Robert Byrd, Harry Reid and a host of other congressional appropriators.  During a time when our government should be seriously looking at ways of trimming government spending, these dimwits have just passed a "stimulus" bill which will exacerbate our federal budget deficit and national debt, create limited long-term economic development and job creation, and further addict our credit obsessed society with the illusion of free money without consequence.

Whenever previous Republican adminstrations made tenouous efforts to achieve reductions in government spending or make substantive reforms to entitlement programs such as Social Security or Medicare, they were greated with vituperation from Obama, Biden, and other congressional Democratic defenders of unlimited pork barrel spending.  Charges of racism, meanness to the poor, insensitivity, and  other forms of denunciation greeted those of us with the gall to suggest the government should live within its means and not burden future generations with debt.  We should expose Obama and his economic pretensions for the hypocritical frauds that they are and tell him that real economic reform in this country requires making tough decisions that will offend the parasitic welfare state galoots representing many of the core constitutencies of the Democratic Party.  If Obama wants to truly be a fiscally transformative leader, instead of an empty rhetorical blowhard, he needs to have the political guts to repeatedly kick the labor unions, social welfare lobbies, civil libertarians, imprudent state and local governments, and other cohorts of liberal polity in the groin when they come squawking for economic stimulus money.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for this to happen but hope does spring eternal.

As part of the "change we can believe in" rhetoric of the Obama Administration, we will get to hear ourselves subjected to at least four years of black victimology rhetoric such as that propounded by Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday.  Claiming that the U.S. was "cowardly" on racial matters near and dear to the heart of leftist twits like himself, Holder vowed to revitalize the purportedly moribund Justice Dept. Civil Rights Division to go after manifestations of "racism" and other examples of "incorrect ideological thinking" not in accordance with the omniscient wisdom of Rassenfuhrer Holder and other affirmative action apparatchiks.

When our Attorney General should be focused on fighting international terrorism and real world blue and white collar crime, he has apparently decided to use the powers of his office to even the score with those of us not desiring to genuflect before his persecution complex.  If he were intelligent, Holder would address the real problems facing the black community by telling young black men and women to apply themselves in school, avoid drugs and alcohol, obey the law, be loyal to their opposite sex mates, and abstain from sex outside of marriage if they desire to achieve the fullest measure of the American dream.  Unfortunately, Holder seems imprisoned in a Jim Crow time warp where Bull Conner is lurking around  every street corner to smash any sign of black self-awareness.

Another example of this willingness from the newly empowered liberal black majority to flex its muscles occurred in New York yesterday.  The New York Post, in an example of genuinely American political satire, published a cartoon showing police shooting a chimpanzee for authoring the recently passed economic stimulus legislation.  An assorted cabal of local and state New York black politicians got in a dander over this thinking the cartoon was insulting Messiah Obama himself.  This mob has been filmed chanting "shut the Post down" in rhetoric which was used by the white racist lynch mobs of earlier in the 20th century.  My how the worm has turned.  Liberal twits like this need to understand that if they can denounce former President Bush and other conservatives with vitriolic imagery and rhetoric, that they should be able to take it when they and their causes are denounced by their critics.    We are going to be in for an interesting few years which will become even more challenging as the lofty expectations of Obamaland disintegrate over the next several months.

Barely two weeks into Messiah Obama's new order, the tarnish is eroding from his halo fasting than you can say "change we can believe in."  First Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, a reputed economic wunderkind, was found to have been deficient in his taxpaying, and his confirmation was opposed by 34 Senators with the wisdom to see that the leader of the department the IRS is part of should, as a minimum job requirement, be able to pay his taxes.  Today, the Obama Tax Evaders (the next big hip-hop act) became a trio when his nominee for Chief Productivity Officer couldn't demonstrate sufficient productivity to pay her taxes and was forced to give up her aspirations and when Health and Human Services Secretary designee Thomas Daschle was forced to resign when he forgot to pay various taxes and was found to have received significant financial benefits from the health industry he's supposed to regulate.  Daschle, a former Senate Majority leader who was thankfully ousted by South Dakota voters in 2004, has been an especially unctuous liberal populist whose purported prairie "man of the people" rhetoric is as enduring and substantive as the tumbleweeds floating across the Great Plains.  His departure from public life alone is glorious news for the future of our Republic and warrants conservative dancing in our ice cold streets and countryside!

You would think that the problems his appointees have had with tax matters would cause Obama's economic "brain trust" to consider drastically simplifying our hopeless convoluted tax system as a means to lessen the occurrence of such embarrassments and increasing economic productivity and revenue collection enhancement.  I'm  not holding my breath waiting for that to happen but hope does spring eternal.

With the apparent addition of New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg as Commerce Secretary, Obama now has three Republicans in his Cabinet who will, hopefully, reign in possible penchants for protectionism.  Perhaps, they might even force him to scale down his economic stimulus fantasies and look at spending restraint and debt reduction as the best means for restoring national economic vitality instead of nostalgically trying to reprise FDR's New Deal.  I'm heartened by the growing opposition to the stimulus package which will further exacerbate the federal deficit and national debt, create limited long-term jobs, and resurrect inflation to levels not seen since the Carter Administration or even, at an extreme, Weimar Germany.   Astute students of economic history know the horrific consequences that Weimar Germany's hyperinflation ultimately  produced for German national leadership in the 1930s.   Hopefully, the Senator from New Hampshire to replace Gregg will have the wisdom and political courage to espouse fiscal thrift against the profligacy of the Obama Administration and represent a true alternative to Obamism despite the Granite State's recent drift to leftist stagnation.

As the Obamaite sans culotte hordes defenestrate Washington with a mania not seen since Jacksonian hordes invaded in 1829, it's a good time to make a preliminary assessment of George W. Bush's presidency.  I recognize that it is several decades before it's really possible to assess a president's impact on national and international politics but it is possible to make a few preliminary observations.

One of the most important is that George W. Bush is an honorable man who restored significant chunks of honor to a presidency desecrated by Bill Clinton's depravity.  Bush's presidency will be forever marked by the 9/11 attacks and his responses to them.  The imbecilic and hyperbolic responses of his deranged leftist critics to many of his policies also reflect well on the man and should endear him forever to all conservatives.

Bush was right to launch the initial assault of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and deprive some form of sanctuary to Al Qaida.  Contrary to leftist critics such as Plagiarizer Joe Biden, he did not take his eye off the ball by pursuing further operations in Iraq but not enough sustained attentioned and forces were deployed to Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal areas to further crush Al Qaida remnants.  Insufficient pressure was applied on Pakistan, in particular its intelligence services, to aggressively pursue Al Qaida and Taliban remnants in Pakistan's tribal areas such as Waziristan.  Cleaning up this region is a difficult and long-term task due to the reflexive Islamic primitivism of its inhabitants and will take decades of sustained effort.

Contrary to the petulant whining of leftist critics, Bush was right to launch military operations against Iraq.  We should have launched such operations if 9/11 never happened and Osama Bin  Laden didn't exist.  Saddam Hussein's regime aspired to acquire weapons of mass destruction, supported various terrorist groups, and conducted offensive military operations against countries as diverse as Bahrain, Iran, Israel, and Kuwait.  It was not a regime that was responsive to UN sanctions or to various UN blessed sanctions short of outright regime change.  The conventional operations against Iraq in 2003 were brilliantly executed and proper.  Unfortunately, we failed to plan for the power vacuum Saddam's ouster would create and we failed to account for the resurrection of centuries old Shia-Sunni hatreds within Iraq which occurred in the invasion's aftermath.  We should have sent a larger number of  troops for stabilization and reconstruction operations in the aftermath of Saddam's defeat.  Consequently, it has taken the pain and casualties of a civil war which only begun to be reversed in 2007 with the ingenious and visionary strategic leadership of General David Petraeus which is beginning to put Iraq on the road to having a chance of becoming a normal nation by the warped standards of Middle East Islamic culture.

President Bush's stalwart courage and resolve and his refusal to buckle in to defeatist cowards and critics is one of his greatest triumphs.  If the Mideast region achieves some greater semblance of political and religous freedom as a result of our actions and sacrifices in Iraq and Afghanistan in the decades to come it will be because of Churchillian resolve even if he lacks Churchill's rhetorical eloquence.

The fact that we have not been attacked by Islamist terrorists since 9/11 is another towering vindication of Bush's leadership.  Some of the steps his administration has enacted such as the USA Patriot Act, NSA's wireless surveillance program, and imprisoning Islamist terrorists at Gitmo, have been unpopular in the terrorist apologist communities of lawyers and leftist academics, but they have worked.  Civil liberties have not been impeded and you don't have to worry about these policies unless you are an Islamist terrorist plotting to kill or injure Americans or someone seeking to aid and abet such individuals.  Sadly, Bush and his administration have refused to rhetorically engage these imbecilic critics in the vigorous fashion necessary to gain widespread support for these policies.  This has, in turn, made Americans susceptible to the delusional sophistries of Barack Obama and his hordes of buffoons clamoring for "change we can believe in."

There were economic successes on Bush's watch.  The 2001 tax cuts, which are now in jeopardy, helped spur significant economic growth after the recession of Clinton's final presidential years.  Until 2007, significant stock market growth was occurring, the trade deficit was declining, and overall economic growth was positive.  Unfortunately, excess non-defense spending by the Bush Administration and Republican and Democratic congresses has drastically increased our budget deficit and national debt which are the core causes of our economic malaise.

Anyone with rudimentary knowledge of U.S. economic history should know that presidential policies can do more to harm economic growth than promote such growth.  Unfortunately, the abysmal economic education taught in our schools and in far to many families, reflects how easy it is for charlatans like Barack Obama to peddle their fraudulent visions of change masquerading as historically failed public policies.  Present and historic congresses and presidential adminstrations of both parties share responsibility for allowing imprudent legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act and American Dream Downpayment Act to become law without requiring prospective homeowners to demonstrate the earnings potential and workforce stability to demonstrate they can meet monthly mortgage payments.  Bush and conservatives should have done more to promote prudent long-term personal and governmental financial planning instead of succumbing to Democratic blandishments to spend more money to achieve desired social objectives or to believe that tax cuts alone, instead of prudent spending and long-term strategic financial planning, are all that's required to achieve sustained economic growth.

George W. Bush's presidential legacy is a mixed but honorable one on balance.  I believe honest and intelligent historians who are not seduced by leftist silliness and our contemporary enthrallment with Barack Obama will recognize that George W. Bush's presidency is a significant one who's stature will improve with time as Harry Truman's and Dwight Eisenhower's did.  Bush did a better job of responding to our problems than either of his defeated opponents Al Gore or John Kerry would have.  Buyer's remorse over Obama will occur within the next several months as it becomes manifestly clear that melliferous rhetoric, statist spending policy, and a dangerous alchemy of liberal Christian and secularist social polices are not the change America needs.
We will grow tired of Obama's empty rhetoric and polices which will worsen our national debt and endanger  national security.
The time will come when many Americans will realize how they let Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi play them for fools and they will long for the refreshing honesty of George W. Bush's presidency.

Most conservative men like myself, will also miss Dana Perino's press briefings.  She is a cheerful and assertive defender of the President (not to mention serious eye candy and worthy of being remembered as the hottest presidential press secretary) and it's regrettable she was not appointed to this position earlier instead of the duplicitous Scott McLellan who might as well have worked for the Democratic National Committee.   Fortunately, the archived White House website will feature video webcasts of these press briefings as we enter into the torpor of the Obama era. 

We should also be grateful for First Lady Laura Bush who restored civility and class to that position after it was degraded by Hillary Clinton who's degradation of national institutions as extended to the U.S. Senate, and will soon envelope the State Department and U.S. foreign policy credibility.

Conservatives must stand strong, humorous, and defiant in this orgy of Obamite imbecility.  The flaws of "change we can believe in" are about to become apparent and our opportunity to recover our bearings and our country will return sooner than many of us might expect.

Imagine living in a state or province anywhere in the world and visualize the southwest boundary of your home region being subject to artillery fire on a regular basis.  Consider what it would be like to live under such a situation where your homes, families, and businesses regularly experience explosive projectiles fired into your living and working spaces.  This nightmarish scenario has been a reality faced by Israelis living adjacent to Gaza since Israel made its ill-advised decision to return Gaza to the Palestinean Authority.  That "authority" has been dominated by the Islamist terrorist group Hamas which was popularly elected against the corrupt non-performing Palestinean "Liberation Organization" of Yassar Arafat.  Did Hamas try to materially improve the lives of Gaza's residents and pursue peaceful coexistence with Israel upon attaining power?  Not a chance!

Hamas is a terrorist organization like Al Qaida whose political and ideological raison d'etre is destroying Israel.  The Israelis have demonstrated remarkable if not foolish patience in tolerating Hamas' misbehavior in recent years.  Israel has every right to pursue the destruction of Hamas and should not stop until it has retaken Gaza and told the apologists of Islamist terror to shove their allegedly moralistic objections up their terrorist appeasing rear ends!  There will not be any hope for peace in that region until Palestinean and other Arab  children quit being indoctrinated with the dangerous mythology that Israel is an alien presence in the Middle East that needs to be expelled.  The curriculum of Arab school systems and mosques must be revised to tell the Arab world that Israel's existence is part of God's will and that they should quit clinging to 60+ years of Taliban mullah fantasies that Israel can be driven into the sea.  How much more of their human and financial capital will retarded Arabs invest in their suicidal stupidity? The Islamist amen corner in some leftist Western media outlets, the European Community, the United Nations, and European Union but that's the irrevocable fact of the matter.

I hope the Israeli Government will have the persistence and courage to only stop their operations against Hamas once they have decimated this terrorist organization and left the putrid corpses of its fighters rot on the streets of Gaza no matter how much international howling there is.