Good ad:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Massachusetts has drowned itself in the Kool-Aid since 1972, but maybe a strong Republican candidate, a strong message, and an insane Democratic party can make the difference.

UPDATE:  If you’d like to contribute to Brown’s campaign, here’s his website.  As Kate said in the comments when she provided the link, the Dems are pouring money into his opponent, while the GOP has abandoned Brown.  Once again, it’s up to “we, the people” to rescue the government.

Thanks to Sadie for putting me on to the latest Obama/media stunt, this time the conscious decision to mimic a famous series of en famille JFK pictures in the oval office.  I guess when your numbers are tanking, imitating a dead president is one way to try to shore yourself up.

I was not a rebellious youngster.  I accepted my parents’ values and their rules, and pretty much toed the line.  My one area of rebellion was, looking back, a rather bizarre one:  I refused to buy into the Kennedy mythology.  Perhaps because I was a child of the Watergate era, I simply refused to accept that Kennedy was the epic hero the intelligentsia of my youth claimed.  By the late 70s, I already knew about the Bay of Pigs debacle, the pathetic face-offs with Kruschev, the mafia involvement and mistresses.  There wasn’t anything I knew about him that sounded good other than those East Coast accented speeches, and I, despite being a word person, was unimpressed.

I was therefore pleased to read Jason Maoz’s neat summary of the myriad failures of the Kennedy administration, some so bad that even its staunchest admirers, when forced to be honest, had to conceded that their idol had feet of clay:

John F. Kennedy was a president of questionable character and relatively meager accomplishments, but his untimely and violent death, followed by decades of unceasing image control by the Kennedys and their media groupies, has helped sustain the popular standing of a president who almost certainly would have been impeached or forced to resign the presidency had even a fraction of what we now know been made public while he was still alive and in office.

The left-wing journalist Seymour Hersh, after spending years wading through the muck of pumped-up war stories, doctored medical records (contrary to the image of “vigor” he liked to project, Kennedy suffered from a variety of ailments and consumed a prodigious daily cocktail of pharmaceuticals), compulsive extramarital activity, Mafia ties and electoral shenanigans, was forced to reevaluate the man he once admired.

“Kennedy,” he said in an Atlantic Monthly web interview shortly after the publication of his 1997 expose The Dark Side of Camelot, “was much more corrupt than other postwar presidents, by a major factor. Much more manipulative, though Nixon was a close second. There’s nothing wonderful about Nixon — Watergate proved that — but I think that Nixon was an amateur compared to Kennedy….”

You can read the rest here.

The Kennedy myth is especially instructive in the Obama era.  His admirers are claiming him as the second coming of Kennedy, right down to the pretty young wife and cute (and they are cute) children.  What they’ll refuse to admit is that Obama is probably Kennedy’s equal too in corruption, manipulation and dishonesty.  And those of us who are conservatives will have to face the fact that, just as Kennedy’s image has been hagiographied to the point that even his followers’ disillusionment cannot destroy the myth, so too will the Obama myth almost certainly become impregnable to time and truth.

I carpooled to a soccer game today.  The driver, who is someone I don’t know very well, is a very charming man who is quite obviously a potential Obama voter.  He wasn’t quite sure about me and, since he was a very civil individual, he never came out and either insulted McCain or lauded Obama.  He did say, though, that he thought it was the government’s responsibility to provide medical care.  He also characterized Vietnam as a complete disaster.  That gave me an interesting opportunity to explain to him a few historic facts he didn’t know — because very few people know them.

I started out by reminding him of something that most people forget:  the Vietnam War was a Democratic War.  Kennedy started it and Johnson expanded it.  (Nixon, the Republican, ended it.)  I didn’t say this in the spirit of accusation, because I wasn’t being partisan.  I said it to give historical context to a larger discussion about freedom versus statism.

I noted that, in the 1930s — and, again, most people have forgotten this — the major battle in Europe was between two Leftist ideologies:  Communism and Fascism.  When he looked a little blank, I pointed out that the Nazis were a socialist party, a fact he readily conceded.   I also reminded him that, in the 1930s, given that Stalin was killing millions of his countrymen, and that Hitler hadn’t yet started his killing spree, Fascism actually looked like the better deal.  World War II demonstrated that both ideologies — both of which vested all power in the State — were equally murderous.

Men of the Kennedy/Johnson generation, I said, saw their role in WWII as freeing Europe from the Nazi version of socialism.  When that job ended, they saw themselves in a continuing war to bring an end to the Communist version of socialism.  Again, they were reacting to overwhelming statism.

Thus, to them, it was all a single battle with America upholding the banner, not of freedom, but of individualism. They knew that America couldn’t necessarily make people free or bring them a democratic form of government, but that it could try to protect people from an all-powerful state.  That’s always been an integral part of American identity.  He agreed with everything I said.

I then moved to the issue of socialized medicine, which I pointed out, again, gives the state all the power.  The state, I said, has no conscience, and it will start doling out medical care based on its determining of which classes of individual are valuable, and which are less valuable, to the state. My friend didn’t know, for example, that Baroness Warnock of Britain, who is considered one of Britain’s leading moralists, announced that demented old people have a “duty to die” because they are a burden on the state.

A few more examples like that, and we agreed that the problem wasn’t too little government when it comes to medicine, but too much. Health insurer companies operating in California are constrained by something like 1,600 state and federal regulations.  I suggested that, rather than give the government more control over the medical bureaucracy, we take most of it away.  He conceded that this was probably a good idea.

Lastly, I reminded him what happens when government steps in as the <span style=”font-style: italic;”>pater familias</span>.  He didn’t know that, up until Johnson’s Great Society, African-Americans were ever so slowly “making it.”  As a result of the Civil Rights movement, opportunities were opening for Northern Blacks, and they — meaning the men — were beginning to make more money.  The African-American family was nuclear and starting to thrive.

This upward economic trend collapsed in the mid-1960s, and its collapse coincided absolutely to the minute with government social workers fanning out to black communities and telling them that the government would henceforth provide.  Since it seemed stupid to work when you could get paid not to work, black men stopped working.  They also stopped caring about their families, or even getting married, since unmarried mothers did even better under welfare than intact families.  In a few short years, not only did African-Americans as a group collapse economically, their family structure collapsed too.  Men were redundant.  The state would provide.  Again, my friend nodded his head in agreement.

The ride ended at that point but, as he was dropping me off, my friend told me (and I think he was speaking from his heart), that it was an incredibly interesting ride.  And I bet it was, because I gave him real food for thought in the form of facts and ideas that fall outside of the orthodoxy that characterizes our ultra-liberal community.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and McCain-Palin 2008.

Obama has been doing his darndest to tie himself to the Kennedy’s, right down to hiring Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg for his Vice President investigation committee.  Hillary, inartfully, also made the Kennedy-Obama link with her references to June assassinations.  (What was the woman thinking?  She was historically accurate, but she must have known how it would play in the media?)

Now, CDR Salamander discovers that Obama has taken the matter even further, to subliminal levels.

I was speaking with a liberal this weekend who opined that McCain will win, something he found inconceivable in a match between Obama and McCain.

“Why,” I asked?

“Because McCain’s never done anything,” he replied. Rather than defend McCain’s record, I asked a different question:

“What’s Obama done?”

A millisecond went by, and then I got this answer:

“Obama is so much smarter than McCain.”

Yup, that’s what Obama’s done: He’s been smarter. If that’s your criterion, of course, I’ve got a very bright 9 year old who would love to have the run of the White House, not to mention control over the nation’s nuclear weapons.

By the way, this same liberal is a huge fan of JFK, so I began looking at JFK, McCain and Obama. Working off the top of my head, I came up with the following:

Feel free to add to this. I’ve never been much of a Kennedy fan, since I came of age when all the unsavory allegations about him (the womanizing, the mafia connections, etc.) hit the news, and that permanently colored my emotional reaction to the man. I know all of you will have more useful comparison facts than I do.

William Katz has his own, very interesting, blog at Urgent Agenda.  However, he saves his long posts for Power Line and this time he has a doozy about the many ways in which Obama is not JFK.  Since Katz lived a life that was front and center at many historical events in the second half of the 20th Century, what he says has the resonance, not just of scholarship, but of personal knowledge.  I particularly liked these thoughts about the great chasm between JFK and BHO:

Kennedy had a wry, ironic sense of humor. I’ve never heard Obama say anything even vaguely humorous, and that worries me. Lincoln was known for cracking jokes. So was FDR. Reagan was famous for it. I wonder about a man like Obama who seems to take himself so very, very seriously, and to regard every word as golden.

Kennedy, when he ran in 1960, was widely seen as too inexperienced for the presidency, especially by Eleanor Roosevelt, who questioned his record publicly. Yet, Kennedy’s experience towers over Obama’s. Kennedy had served in Congress for 13 years. He’d been elected twice to the Senate. True, his record had not been outstanding, and he hadn’t been considered a Senate leader. True, he’d had a dalliance with McCarthyism. But he’d also seemed to grow in stature, had a decent war record, and had watched history firsthand as the son of the American ambassador to Britain in the years leading up to World War II.

Obama was elected to the Senate in 2004, and has been running for president ever since. His record is thin. In the one national office he has held, he has been decidedly undistinguished. He clearly lacks Kennedy’s sophistication on foreign policy and knowledge of history. I don’t recall Kennedy having to fire one adviser after another, or having to explain statement after statement. I do recall that Kennedy had a catastrophic first year in office, despite his background. He blundered at the Bay of Pigs. He was rolled by Khrushchev at the Vienna Conference only months later. I shudder to think of a President Obama sitting down with the dictators he seems so eager to engage. What will he tell them? “I’m the change you’ve been waiting for”?

Finally, there is an issue of personal quality. Kennedy, with all his failings, with his scandalous private habits, with the arrogance of privilege that sometimes touched him, had an ability to look at himself. He knew he’d failed in that first year. He said so. And he had the dignity and understanding of power to acknowledge publicly what had happened. He was asked at a press conference to assess blame for the Bay of Pigs. Whose fault was it? He replied, “I am the responsible officer of the government.”

When something goes wrong in the Obama Crusade, Obama normally attributes it to staff problems. History, if he becomes president, will read his blunders differently.

That bit about the sense of humor struck me particularly strongly.  Two of the greatest presidents ever — Lincoln and Reagan — were also two of the funniest, in large part because they could be self-deprecating.  While they had the necessary ego to believe they could lead a great nation, neither took himself too seriously.

Obama, however, believes his own hype and is utterly humorless in defense of his own wonderfulness.  As you recall, he threw Wright off the train, not because Wright is a wacko, anti-American nutjob, but because Wright “disrespected” Obama — a sentiment that made the Harvard educated, elitist Obama sound no different from the average Compton gangbanger who blows away the kid next door for “disrespecting” him.  It strikes me that the only people who have a problem with this type of “disrespect” are those who (a) don’t respect themselves, (b) are pretty sure that they are not worthy of actual respect and (c) have no sense of humor!