H/T Redstate

"In the bizarro world of liberals, discriminating against a job applicant because of the color of his skin isn't racist. Issuing a political advertisement objecting to this vile practice is."

Bret Stephens made an excellent point in today’s Wall Street Journal, comparing Senator Obama’s deliberate equivocations on Iraq with Richard Nixon’s notorious “secret plan to end the war” when he won the presidency in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam era. In both cases, the candidates for the party out of power wanted to exploit the unpopular nature of an ongoing conflict without committing themselves to any specific policy for terminating or continuing the war. Stephens points out that the chair of Obama’s “Working Group” on Iraq has even written a paper anticipating a semi-permanent contingent of  60,000 to 80,000 American soldiers as an “overwatch force” after Obama has “withdrawn” all combat troops, as he’s repeatedly promised. The big question, of course, is how you define combat troops.

But beyond the similarity to Nixon in his slippery handling of the issue of the war, there’s another haunting resemblance with the late leader that Democrats loved to deride as “Tricky Dick.”

Nixon became famous – notorious, really --- for beginning his most earnest, sweaty-jowled statements with the laughable phrase, “Let me make one thing perfectly clear.” This silly verbal tic alerted listeners that what followed wasn’t clear – or honest – at all. It served as a warning to expect obfuscation, not clarity.

So, too, Obama – in adopting, almost verbatim, one of the late President’s oddest quirks of communication.

On July 3^rd, after telling reporters he’d be open to “refining” his Iraq position based on conversation with generals, he called his second press conference of the day (in Fargo, North Dakota) to try to correct the impression of waffling. “We're going to try this again,” he said. “Apparently I wasn't clear enough this morning on my position with respect to the war in Iraq."

Then came the wonderful Nixonism, delivered in the same solemn, rumbling baritone favored on such occasions by the late President:

"Let me be as clear as I can be,” growled the candidate, and then proceeded to provide further confusion and dodging. Not even his most ardent admirers could take much encouragement from this dismal performance – complete with at least two more declarations about making his position “clear” and “completely clear.”

Well, Barack has made one thing perfectly clear: he’s not yet ready to disclose his “secret plan to end the war.”.  

One of John McCain’s Hispanic surrogates forcefully said Barack Obama is deceitfully inflating his role in the Senate on immigration reform for political benefit.

Prompting this criticism is a claim Obama made before the League of United Latin American Citizens. “I reached across the aisle in the Senate to fight for comprehensive immigration reform,” Obama told the immigration advocates in a speech Tuesday.

 “He was AWOL!” Diaz-Balart said. “I remember when Senator McCain came over here and met with House leadership and he met with the Chairman at that time of the Judiciary, Sensenbrenner here in the House to move this issue. To move the issue forward in meeting after meeting where a number of us in the House where there in the Senate, with multiple senators from both parties, by the way. Senator Obama was nowhere to be seen! He was absolutely AWOL.”

“The reality of the matter is that he has never worked on the issue except he did team up with an anti-immigrant senator, Mr. Dorgan to kill a very important leg of that legislation, the temporary worker program,” Diaz-Balart said.

 The bill Obama is attempting to take credit for was sponsored by McCain and Democratic Sen. Teddy Kennedy (D.-Mass.)

Jack Tapper of ABC News explained Obama’s minor role in the debate on his blog. The relevant part of his explanation is below.

There was a cohesive bipartisan group led by Sens. McCain and Ted Kennedy, D-Mass, that worked to defeat amendments that would hurt the overall bill's chance of final passage -- amendments that were too liberal for the Republicans and too conservative for the Democrats. And on at least five occasions, Obama voted for amendments against the wishes of the bipartisan group, including Kennedy.

These included an amendment Obama offered that would have sunsetted the merit-based evaluation system for immigrants after five years; two amendments from Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-ND, to sunset both the temporary guest worker visa program and the Y-1 non-immigrant temporary worker visa program after five years; and two amendments from Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-NM, that would have removed the requirement that 'Y' non-immigrant visa holders leave the United States before they are able to renew their visa, and would have lowered the annual visa quota for guest workers from 400,000 to 200,000 per year.

Obama voted for all five; Kennedy voted against all five.

“WHAT HE DID TO GET THAT MONEY”

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) earned universal praise with his prodigious philanthropy – building more than 3,000 public libraries in 47 states (and nations around the world), founding Carnegie-Mellon University and the Carnegie Institute of Technology (C.I.T.), establishing Carnegie Hall in New York, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and much more. Anti-business bias, however, leads many observers to speculate that he turned to charity in order to assuage his guilt over his success as a Captain of Industry. For a 1999 PBS “American Experience” program about the impoverished Scottish immigrant who became “The Richest Man in the World,” his biographer, Joseph Frazier Wall suggested: “Maybe with the giving away of his money, he would justify what he had done to get that money.”

And what had he done, exactly?

When Carnegie retired at age 66 (and sold his business to J.P. Morgan and associates to create the vast new company “U.S. Steel”) he employed 31,162 full-time workers at three major mills. His organizational genius helped create the steel business that played a crucial role in American industrialization and prosperity. However laudable his charitable endeavors (he managed to give away nearly all his money before he died at 83), the creation of jobs and wealth in his business career benefited his countrymen even more.