Posted on 08/09/2008 11:34:52 AM PDT by nwrep
I hope by 2012 a more conservative candidate emerges. If so, I will support him/her at that time, but for now McCain is the clear choice for this conservative voter.
Based on what I read of his wife's Princeton thesis, there wasn't any bar to clear at all in the Ivys in that era, except perhaps having a pulse.
I'm reminded of the Buckley quote that he'd rather be governed by the first 2000 names in thr Boston telephone directory than by the entire faculty of Harvard. This might explain the 57 states and creating oil with tire pressures, though.
This race is very close to being dead even right now.
The problem is the race is "dead even" on our home turf. There is not a single blue state, with the possible exception of Michigan, where we have a prayer of taking an electoral vote away from Obama. We are like homelandsecurity, we must be perfect everywhere all the time or the terrorists win. Playing defense is the way you lose wars and elections and we are back on our heels everywhere.
In addition to the electoral College other more subjective measures such as , party registration, crowd size, money, enthusiasm, tenure in office, unpopularity of George Bush, state of the economy, gas prices, media support, and momentum, Obama is light-years ahead.
If these factors have play in any one of the threatened red states which you mention, the presidential election is lost.
We here on FreeRepublic are as liable to become insular in our thinking as any other self-selected group. So we assume that the rest of America thinks and votes the way we do and it is only a question of time until the great mushy middle of America wakes up to the threat posed by a Marxist named Barak Hussein Obama. There is also a tendency among many Freepers to equate realism with defeatism and to try to counterweight it with cheerleading or, in extreme examples, with browbeating.
The danger in refusing to contemplate the worst case scenario was demonstrated to us on Friday by Lindsey Graham's gang of five which may have thrown away the only chance for Republican survival in this election. I listened to Saxby Chambliss being interviewed by Rush Limbaugh, and I came away convinced that Chambliss is living in a bubble and has not a clue about the disaster which is about to cripple the Republican Party and consign conservatism to the wilderness for a generation. If you did have a clue, or view was worried about anybody's election but his own, he would not have thrown away the only issue which might have saved the day.
If George Bush had agreed with my analysis instead of presumably agreeing with those who see no danger, he might've convened Congress to act on energy. If John McCain was half as pessimistic as I am, he might have curbed Lindsey Graham. He might indeed have more aggressively played the issue handed to him by a few stalwart Republicans standing in the well of the House in the dark.
This is not an election season in which anybody is going to catch Obama if he ever takes a real lead. The media simply will not permit it. He has too many other advantages going for him. There will be no catch up as we saw in 1988, 2000, and 2004. Come to think of it, we did not really catch up in 2000. I remember waiting in vain for George H. W. Bush to catch up in 1992. This is almost a metaphor for the dilemma we are in geographically. If Obama takes any red state, we lose. If Obama can capitalize on any of the factors which are running against us this cycle, we lose. If Obama can just take a lead, we lose. We must be perfect everywhere all the time in order to scrape out a win as narrow as Bush enjoyed in the last two cycles in the electoral College.
I don't like our chances.
Then they have earned Obama.
Michigan, Pennsylvania, Oregon and New Hampshire are all close and were all states won by Kerry last time around. I'd say we at least have a "prayer" in all of them even though we aren't favored to win any of them.
I'll agree with you that Obama should be the favorite right now. He has a lot of structural issues working in his favor. McCain is hanging in right there with him though and there is still a long, long way to go.
And how long ago did Gallup Have Obama up by 9, only to have it a statistical dead heat a few days later?
Oh, and these are “registered voters”, and not “likely voters”. If Obama is only up 5 in this poll he is, at best, tied in a poll that would matter, even if Gallup used decent methodology.
If true, he would have to be man who has done the leastest with the mostest. He is amazingly ignorant of western history and world events. Either that or he sees everything through red glasses.
“...CA is a state he will never, ever win. If he wants to push energy independence, he should come here to tell people in PA he intends to put Federal money into drilling for natural gas and mining for coal in the Keystone State.”
I think you’re right, on both counts. I’m not sure any GOP candidate short of Ronald Reagan could take California these days. I *do* think there’s some chance to take Pennsylvania and Michigan. It’s definitely worth the time and money.
Indiana has voted GOP for president for 40 years.
“We here on FreeRepublic are as liable to become insular in our thinking as any other self-selected group. So we assume that the rest of America thinks and votes the way we do and it is only a question of time until the great mushy middle of America wakes up to the threat posed by a Marxist named Barak Hussein Obama. There is also a tendency among many Freepers to equate realism with defeatism and to try to counterweight it with cheerleading or, in extreme examples, with browbeating.”
Amen, Brother Nathan. Great post. I would add that in a race this close GOTV is going to be critical and McCain doesn’t even have his ground game in place in a lot of states yet. Obama has the money advantage to bus the youth and black vote to the polls in swing states and the plans to do just that have already been made. Local media here in Florida are talking about a huge registration push in black neighborhoods in the final days before registration closes, and if BO’s campaign is doing it here they’re doing it in other swing states.
The ground game is why Bush won, narrowly, in ‘04 and its importance should not be underestimated. Turnout, turnout, turnout is everything.
The youth and black vote is also notoriously difficult to poll. The black vote will crawl across cut glass to vote for Obama. The youth vote is less dependable, but even if youth turnout increases by a percent or two it could swing a purple state.
Freepers are way overconfident, IMO.
The very fact that Michigan is in play makes me think 0 is toast.
Incidentally and inspired by your nom de plume, I wish Newt had come back, at least in an organizational role, if not on McCain's behalf, then at least on behalf of the Republicans in the House and Senate. We need someone somewhere to nationalize this election. In another thread, Gallup says that the Congress is down to 31% approval, and any yet another thread it says 9% approval. The House and Senate races are just begging to be nationalized and if we don't do it the Democrats certainly will and they will sail to a wholesale victory where the slaughter will be painful to contemplate.
It seems to me, that nearly everyone sees the disaster coming for senators and congressmen, so it requires a stretch to believe that McCain can reverse the numbers at the top of the ticket in this climate.
Wow, those internals are amazing!!!! Obama is actually getting killed if this is the case.
Hey piytar, I'm not sure where you got your info, but Gallup mentioned nothing about your stats in their Survey Methods for this poll:
Survey MethodsFor the Gallup Poll Daily tracking survey, Gallup is interviewing no fewer than 1,000 U.S. adults nationwide each day during 2008.
The general-election results are based on combined data from August 6-8, 2008. For results based on this sample of 2,686 registered voters, the maximum margin of sampling error is ±2 percentage points.
Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only).
In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.
But even if they can somehow gets the money and the horses to mount a ground campaign, does he have the issue to energize the ground troops? It takes real commitment to go out night after night in the rain and the sleet and in the cold of the border states and to have doors slammed in your face. What will motivate people to do this? We already know they are motivated to do it for Obama. There is no evidence whatsoever that there is any readiness to do it for McCain.
I believe gining up fear of Obama, however appropriate to the facts, simply will not do it. There must be an overriding issue. It could have been energy and perhaps it is not too late but something must be done to integrate the campaign and raise it to the level of a crusade.
I have no grudge against you, and don't accuse you of anything. But because of my close and long-year knowledge of Iranian History (I lived in Iran before the Revolution), which I studied intensely, I want to educate others about the little-known history of Iran particularily the Pahlavi period.
I have in my personal possesion every single book on the Pahlavi dynasty and Reza Shah.
The Black article you posted is pure misguided propaganda and will take the time and dissect it entirely. Please take the time for my comment, as I will use my entire ressources at disposal.
If you are interested I can give you lengthy quotes from my library on the Pahlavis. The best source I recommend you is Yair Hirschfeld, an Israeli historian whose book is a standard on the Pahlavi dynasty. He sourced excellently that the propaganda against Reza Shah is baseless.
Okay, now I'll take apart the Edwin Black propaganda piece:
Iran and Iranians were strongly connected to the Holocaust and the Hitler regime, as was the entire Islamic world under the leadership of the mufti of Jerusalem.
A blatant lie. The Mufti of Jerusalem and his friend the Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Galiani were pro-Nazi antisemites who tried to stage a coup in Iraq in Spring 1941. At that time Hitler was friends with Stalin. Iran was dead afraid of the Nazi-Soviets partitioning the Middle East. When the pro-Nazi Iraqis staged their coup in 1941, Reza Shah of Iran proposed to send Iranian troops to arrest Al-Galiani and destroy the pro-Nazi Iraqi rebels. He tried to win with this the favor of Britain, hoping to win their support against the Nazi-Soviet alliance, which he felt was dangerous for Iran. The Arab world and Balkan muslims were indeed largely pro-Nazi, as were many Iranians. However not the leadership which tried to keep neutral and to thwart foreign invasion of Iran.
Read Donald Wilber, Hirschfeld and Stewarts book “Sunrise at Abadan” on this issue.
Iran's axis with the Third Reich began during the prewar years, when it welcomed Nazi Gestapo agents and other operatives to Tehran, allowing them to use the city as a base for Middle East agitation against the British and the region's Jews.
Half-true. Iran was long in focus of Russian and British imperialism. Therefore they sought for new trade partners. USA, Germany and smaller nation were courted therefore. Germany was at this time the leading producer of machines. Exactly what Iran wanted for modernisation. Therefore during the 1930's many German (and also other European and US) merchants and advisers entered Iran. There were proven to be only a dozen German agents, the most important being namely Schulze, Mayer, Gamotha and Ettel. The Anglo-Soviet claim of “thousands” of German agents was widely exaggerated and it was acknowledged later by British involved.
Key among these German agents was Fritz Grobba, Berlin's envoy to the Middle East, who was often called "the German Lawrence," because he promised a Pan-Islamic state stretching from Casablanca to Tehran
Grobba was special emissary to Iraq and liason to the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem. That's correct. However an “pan-Islamic” empire was solely the dream of the Nazi Mufti. The rulers of Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan were secuar Nationalists who fought Islamism. They would have never been part of an arabic Islamic superstate.
Relations between Berlin and Tehran were strong from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933. At that time, Reza Shah Pahlavi's nation was known as Persia. The shah became a stalwart admirer of Hitler, Nazism and the concept of the Aryan master race. He also sought the Reich's help in reducing British petro-political domination. This is true except that Reza Shah was NOT an Hitler admirer. The ties with Germany were primarily economic Iranian as well as British sources that knew him personally report that he disliked Hitler as a lunatic and voiced this to Turkish ruler Ataturk in 1934. In 1933 Iranian students in Germany were beaten by Nazis, and the Iranian ambassador protested vehemently.
The Nazis sent their Youth Leader Schirach to Tehran who tried to convince the Shah of modelling Iran's youth like the Hitler Youth. But the Shah thought of Schirach to be a rude, aggressive runt and chastised his minister for arranging this meeting. Iran then insisted that their youth will be modelled after the British Boy Scouts, NOT the Nazi youth.
So intense was the shah's identification with the Third Reich that in 1935 he renamed his ancient country "Iran," which in Farsi means Aryan and refers to the Proto-Indo-European lineage that Nazi racial theorists and Persian ethnologists cherished.
One source for this dubious claim was German Ambassador Wipert von Bluecher, whose memories I have in my library. Bluecher was a personal enemy of Reza Shah and wrote a lot of nasty things about him. This was perpetualised by pro-Nazi Iranians after Reza Shah abdicated in 1941, and also by his enemies, the communists and British.
As I wrote already, Iran is since ever the Iranian's own name for their people and country. 1935 was the year Iran abolished Islamic laws for woman and wanted to renew itself. Thus they insisted on their own name being used for them. The theory that there is a Nazi link is a theory only, whithout conclusive proof.
Shortly after World War II broke out in 1939, the Mufti of Jerusalem crafted a strategic alliance with Hitler to exchange Iraqi oil for active Arab and Islamic participation in the murder of Jews in the Mideast and Eastern Europe. This was predicated on support for a pan-Arab state and Arab control over Palestine.
This is true, but not attributable to Iran.
During the war years, Iran became a haven for Gestapo agents. It was from Iran that the seeds of the abortive 1941 pro-Nazi coup in Baghdad were planted. After Churchill's forces booted the Nazis out of Iraq in June 1941, German aircrews supporting Nazi bombers escaped across Iraq's northern border back into Iran.
False on several levels. The few agents in Iran were “Abwehr” and “SD”, Gestapo was a German secret police. Not a spy agency. The seeds for the pro-Nazi coup in Iraq was planned in Berlin, Rome, Baghdad and Muslim Jerusalem.
I have in all my books never read of German pilots escaping through Iran. Infact it was Vichy-French controlled Syria that was the base for operations in Iraq. Iran as I wrote already was pondering to invade Iraq and arrest the pro-Nazi rebels. Iranian generals even proposed Britain that Iran would bomb Axis and Soviet refinieries in the Middle East. They called the operation of after Iranian Generals cited diplomatic and logistic problems. Reza Shah later said that he regretted not invading Iraq in cooperation with Britain.
Read Stewart “Sunrise at Abadan”, Wilber and Lenczowsky.
Likewise, the mufti of Jerusalem was spirited across the border to Tehran, where he continued to call for the destruction of the Jews and the defeat of the British.
Half true. The Mufti and Al-Galiani after the failed coup did escape to Iran icognito and later left Iran through Turkey on the way to Berlin, dressed as Italians. However there is no indication that the Iranian King was behind this.
His venomous rhetoric filled the newspapers and radio broadcasts in Tehran. The mufti was a vocal opponent of allowing Jewish refugees to be transported or ransomed into Jewish Palestine. Instead, he wanted them shipped to the gas chambers of Poland.
Tehran radio was state-censored. However the Nazis, Soviets and British used their own radios to send propaganda through Iran. Infact a pro-Nazi Iranian radio propagandist was arrested by Iran.
In the summer of 1941, the mufti, with the support of key Iranian military and government leaders, advocated implementing in Iran what had failed months earlier in Iraq. The plan once again was for a total diversion of oil from the Allies to the Nazis, in exchange for the accelerated destruction of the Jews in Eastern Europe and the Nazis' support for an Arab state. Through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., Iran had already been supplying Hitler's forces in occupied Czechoslovakia and Austria.
Totally false and absurd. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was fully operated by Britain. It would imply that Britain was delivering the Nazis. Also a 40-head pro-German circle of Iranian officers planned a coup in 1943 not 1941.
Now, the mufti agitated to cut off the British and the Allies completely and supply Germany in its push against Russia.
True, but unrelated to the Shah's action. The Iranians were indeed overjoyed when the Germans attacked their nemesis Soviet Russia and hoped for the Soviets to lose however voiced their hope to Brtain that Hitler and Stalin would bleed each other white.
In October 1941, British, USSR other allied forces invaded Iran to break up the Iran-Nazi alliance. Pro-Nazi generals and ministers were arrested, and the shah's son was installed in power. The mufti scampered into the Italian embassy, where he shaved his beard and dyed his hair. In this disguise, he was allowed to leave the country along with the rest of the Italian delegation.
Half true. The latter sentence is correct while the idiot author can't get the basic facts right. The Invasion of Iran was in late August 1941. Not October. The arrest of pro-German Iranian officers was 1942/43.
Once the mufti relocated permanently to Berlin, where he established his own Reich-supported "bureau," he was given airtime on Radio Berlin. From Berlin and other fascist capitals in Europe, the mufti continued to agitate for international Jewish destruction, as well as a pan-Islamic alliance with the Nazi regime.
True, but unrelated to the Iranians, who by then were already occupied by the Allies.
He called upon all Muslims to "kill the Jews wherever you see them." In Tehran's marketplace, it was common to see placards that declared, "In heaven, Allah is your master. On Earth, it is Adolf Hitler."
Dubious, since Tehran was occupied by British and Soviets. However after the Shah abdicated political groups of all kind popped up. Communists, Nazis and Islamists of all colors. Possible that a splinter group like the SUMKA nazi party used such slogans. However the Iranian government under the new Shah (the old Shah's son) was joining the Allies in 1943 already.
When the mufti raised three divisions of Islamic Waffen SS to undertake cruel operations in Bosnia, among the 30,000 killers were some volunteer contingents from Iran. Iranian Nazis, along with the other Muslim Waffen SS, operated under the direct supervision of Heinrich Himmler and were responsible for barbarous actions against Jews and others in Bosnia. Recruitment for the murderous "Handschar Divisions" was done openly in Iran.
Total nonsense and absurd. When the Handschar Islamic Waffen SS Division was prepared and created by the Mufti in 1942/43, Iran was occupied by the Allies. There would be no Waffen-SS recruitment posters in Iran without approval of the Allies. Also while some Iranian students in Germany at that time joined the German Army, there is no source to my knowledge (Mr Black doesn't provide it and I haven't read anything like that on the Handschar Division) that tells of “Irania contingents” in this Division. The Handschar was made up from Balkan Muslims. Arab volunteers served in the “Arabische Lehrbattalion” and “Free Arab Legion”. No Iranian units.
Iran and its leaders were not only aware of the Holocaust, they played both sides. The country offered overland escape routes for refugee Jews fleeing Nazi persecution to Israel -- and later fleeing postwar Iraqi fascist persecution -- but only in exchange for extortionate passage fees.
Again Iran was occupied by the Allies. All this action would have required the Allies approval. Again nonsense. Indeed hundred thousand of Polish refugees from Soviet Union arrived in Iran and praised the hospitality. Iranian officers were on good terms with Polish officers, since the Poles saluted Iranian senior officers, unlike the British and Soviets.
Thousands of Jews journeyed to Israel via Iran both during the Holocaust and during the years after the fall of Hitler, when Arab leaders, especially in Iraq, tried to continue Germany's anti-Jewish program. Iran profited handsomely.
As above nonsense. Also Black is an idiot as there was only British ruled Palestine then. No Israel before 1948. Also the “Arab leaders in Iraq” by then were British installed. The pro-Nazis were ousted in Spring 1941 already.
Indeed the Iranian ambassador to France rescued hundreds of Jews persecuted by the Nazis. This is acknowledged by Yad Vashem.
Reza Shah when becoming King gave Jews civil rights and bowed before the Torah in the Tehran Syangogue. His son Mohammed Reza Shah was a close ally of Israel and the US. The Iranian secret service SAVAK was trained by the CIA and Mossad since 1953.
The rest of Black's article is correct, as he writes about the current Islamic regime after the Revolution 1979, which overthrew the Shah. When we look for Iranian antisemitism we have to look at Islam, Khomeinism and their Revolutionary Ideology. This had nothing to do with the Pahlavi Shahs who were anti-Islamic, pro-Western and modern minded.
I hope I have clarified the matter.
dont be concerned Oct suprise coming out Big for McCain Favor!!!!!
change is coming
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