[Vision2020] Latest Recruiting Tool (was RE: The 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht!)

[Saundra Lund]

Andreas wrote:

"Isn't it interesting that someone totally unaffiliated with Christ Church
would return to smear the Church's least-favorite ex-member?"

 

Maybe the point was to distract us - have you seen Christ Church's latest
recruiting tool?  Between this and the shameful incident at Farmer's Market,
they seem to have a lot they hope we won't notice . . . 

 

Not surprisingly, the author of the moronic article in the sad rag clearly
missed the sentiments of those in Latah County since Obama not only captured
the majority vote here, but he also performed respectably out in the county.
And, it's telling that Hichens seems to have had his head in the sand to
know only about the Palin effigy hanging but to be completely ignorant the
Obama effigy incidents, and to be completely clueless that he was in the
heart of an area where anti-democracy and anti-free speech cowards were
stealing Obama campaign signs by the truckload from the yard of supporters.

 

Ah, well, no one ever accused Peter Hithcens, who was here to speak at NSA,
of being the sharpest knife in the drawer  J 

 

Nonetheless, the article is definitely worth the read to see what locals had
to say - I certainly learned some things!

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1082308/PETER-HITCHENS-The
-Zombie-Third-World-Marxist---How-American-West-views-presidential-race.html

OR

http://tinyurl.com/6yuxea

 

PETER HITCHENS: The Zombie and the Third-World Marxist ... How the American
West views the presidential race

>From PETER HITCHENS in Moscow, Idaho
Last updated at 10:11 PM on 01st November 2008

They tell me that about one person in 50 on the streets of Moscow, Idaho, is
legally carrying a concealed pistol. A lot more have them in their cars. I
rather approve of this, though I don't think I'll join in. 

Many of those packing heat are women combining a hard, practical feminism
with a conservative view of the right to bear arms. 

The important thing is that you don't know who is armed and who isn't, and
nor do potential rapists and muggers. I am sure this arrangement improves
everyone's manners no end. 

It is certainly a very polite place and shoot-outs here are a good deal
rarer than they are in gun-controlled London or Manchester.

Peter Hitchens in a gun shop in Moscow, Idaho

Armed with words: Peter Hitchens on a visit to a Moscow gun store

As America approaches her most momentous presidential election for decades,
I am in the True (but not specially Wild) West, the top left-hand corner of
the United States, a hard-core Republican state that most visitors only fly
over. 

They think it's dull. How wrong they are. 

This extraordinary, divided little city, enfolded in low, fertile hills, is
America in miniature - split down the middle, Left versus Right, Christian
versus secular, gun-owner versus gun-hater, abortion advocate versus
big-family home-schooling Bible-walloper, cyclist versus gas-guzzler, Obama
versus McCain - and some interesting stations both in between and beyond. 

Some local liberals fear that a powerful Calvinist Church plans to turn
Moscow into America's version of Iran's Holy City of Qom. 

All around, in the farm and logging countryside, self-sufficient, taciturn
men in pick-up trucks would rather have a head-on collision with a freight
train than vote for Barack Obama. 

Out in the forests and the fields of wheat, peas and lentils, Democrats are
so rare they ought to be a protected species. 

In Moscow - which is actually named after Moscow, Pennsylvania, not the one
in Russia - there is at least a more or less evenly matched argument. But it
is mostly a dialogue of the deaf. 

The great Obama cult that has engulfed the Left is a sinister mystery to the
other side. The Left regard their devout neighbours as glowering, fanatical
ayatollahs. Yet they pass each other daily in the street, share the city
council and, when the liberals aren't boycotting the conservatives, buy from
each other's stores. 

Well, up to a point. 

>From the well-stocked firearm shop on the Pullman Road, which sells
everything you might need for hunting elk, felling burglars or discouraging
rapists, it is a surprisingly short distance to the excellent French
restaurant on Main Street, which confusingly just happens to be run by an
Evangelical Christian pastor and superb cook. 

The two businesses share few clients. Rigs with gun racks tend not to be
clustered here but near the burger and Mexican joints further out. 

On a rise overlooking the city stands this Moscow's Kremlin, the almost
wholly Left-liberal University of Idaho, a tree-girt fortress of
Obama-worship and political correctness. You can be pretty sure that nobody
up there is carrying anything deadlier than a Marxist theory. 

This institution's advertising slogan used to be: 'You can go anywhere from
here.' Which is quite funny because the student who went furthest from here
was Sarah Palin, the Lipsticked Pitbull herself. 

And the university, which you might think would rejoice in this success, is
rather quiet and shifty about her. I asked to interview the university
president about his distinguished journalism-school graduate and he was
politely unavailable.

Barack ObamaJohn McCain

Battle lines: Obama and McCain polarise opinion to a degree that is
extraordinary even for America

But one student paraded through town last week with a placard declaring
'Sarah Palin, embarrassing Idaho University since 1987', which I suspect is
a more candid expression of what the liberal professors think. 

Roy Atwood, once a senior lecturer at the university, recently defected to
take charge of the rival, highly conservative New St Andrew's College. He
says: 'My guess is that the university is deeply embarrassed, even though
she is the most important person ever to have emerged from there.' 

As it happens, Roy Atwood is also the only person in Moscow who can even
faintly recall the future Sarah Barracuda when she was plain Sarah Heath -
he was her academic adviser. 

He admits he cannot remember much. She showed few signs of what was to come.


'She was a cute little co-ed, a fresh-faced undergraduate student. She was a
typical conservative student at the university in those days,' says Roy. 

You might think that Mrs Palin is as beloved among Moscow conservatives as
she is loathed and despised among the Left-wingers. But it is not quite like
that. 

The town has its share of straight-down-the-line McCainites, believers in
lower taxes, military strength and even in George W. Bush, who would vote
Republican even if the skies fell. And the skies are creaking, if not
actually falling. 

Many people here are deeply worried about retirement. Americans live closer
to hard financial reality than we do in Britain. They know they must provide
for themselves. 

They save, invest and hope this will keep them in old age. But the Wall
Street collapse has devastated their funds, visibly, immediately and
painfully. 

For men such as Walter Steed, an Idaho delegate to the Republican
convention, the thing is to overcome their doubts and sorrows about the Bush
years, from Baghdad to the bank crisis. 

He admits to disappointment with John McCain: 'I wonder if he has the fire
in him.' 

But that doesn't matter when he is set against the alternative. 'I really
don't want Obama elected. I think he is scary,' Mr Steed says, citing the
many mysteries and vagueness about Obama's past. 

He also made the only reference to race I heard from any Obama opponent. But
it was aimed at Mrs Obama, who famously said she had not been proud of her
country until her husband was successful in politics. 

Mr Steed said, in words that made me sit bolt-upright: 'His wife is a very
angry black woman.' 

You have to wonder how many conservative whites fear in their hearts that an
Obama presidency might be a sort of racial reckoning, despite Obama's
carefully groomed image as a man at ease with himself and above that sort of
thing. 

America remains a country divided by an unofficial but potent apartheid,
even 40 years after the civil-rights marches. Racial division, fear,
mistrust, resentment and unresolved injustice are in the bones of this
country. 

Nels Reese in his garden in Moscow, Idaho with his Obama posters

Nels Reece's placards supporting Barack Obama

Mr Steed is really an old-fashioned businessman-Republican. He is suspicious
of the moral campaigns about such things as abortion (a scourge that has
touched his own extended family). That is why he is reasonably content with
McCain, who has never really got on with the Moral Majority. 

But then, the Moral Majority don't get on with him. The Christian
conservatives have begun to feel more than a little used by the Republican
Party, which woos them like mad at election time and then spits on them from
a great height once it is in power. 

I was shocked when a respectable, conservative, professional woman suddenly
snapped out the cruel, dismissive words 'John McCain is a zombie' in what
had until then been a light-hearted chat about politics. 

Some of the churchgoers here will vote for McCain only because he has picked
Palin, whom they regard as more or less one of them. But others won't. 

John Harrell, a computer expert who describes himself as a 'Biblical
Conservative', thinks the Republican Party has betrayed and ignored the
country's Christian constitution and is inviting divine wrath by doing so. 

I was reminded when talking to him that most of England's fierce
revolutionary Protestants emigrated to America centuries ago, which is why
this sort of language seems strange to us, though Oliver Cromwell would have
found it quite familiar. 

Mr Harrell was militantly scornful of the Evangelical worshippers who
continue to vote for McCain because of Sarah Palin, dismissing them as
'Evanjellyfish' and their churches as 'Girly Man Churches'. 

I had a similar message from Larry Cernik, a builder and small farmer with a
majestic set of whiskers, who is one of Moscow's concealed gun carriers. 

He said he was tired of Republican duplicity and excuse-making. Yet he
loathes Barack Obama, saying: 'He has the politics of a Third-World
Marxist.' 

While he personally sees McCain as a hopeless compromiser, he admits that
many others like him have been charmed back into voting Republican by Palin.


He says: 'Conservative Republicans will come home to the Republican Party
because of her. If McCain wins it will be because conservative Christians
think there's nowhere else to go, and Obama is so bad that they will take
McCain over Obama, and that will largely be thanks to Sarah Palin.' 

This is presumably what McCain intended when he chose the governor of Alaska
as his running mate. Such voters, themselves uninterested in policy detail
or foreign affairs, are unmoved by Palin's embarrassing performance in
searching interviews or the revelations about her costly wardrobe. 

She is one of them and the liberal East Coast media have it in for her,
which is a big point in her favour. They quite reasonably point out that
while Palin is subjected to fearsome microscopic scrutiny, Obama is almost
completely unknown. 

And, as I find out, he is specially unknown by his own supporters. These are
in general nice, civilised, organic, free-range people who speak in a
political language much more like Britain's.

Sarah Palin in her dorm room at the University of Idaho

Sarah Palin in her dorm room at the University of Idaho, where students and
staff now seem embarrassed to have any connection with her

One such is Nels Reece, whose tastefully restored Victorian house, built by
a banker in the days when banks were solid, stands on a busy corner in
Moscow's idyllic middle-class suburbs. 

Mr Reece, a courtly retired academic-with a Colonel Sanders moustache and
Danish ancestry, has Moscow's biggest concentration of posters backing Obama
sprouting on his front lawn. He usually displays a good crop of placards at
election times but admits that he has never put up so many before. 

He estimates that 5,000 people - a quarter of the city's population - drive
or ride bikes past his house every day and the Obama campaign is specially
grateful for his support. 

Long ago he voted for the foredoomed, far-out Republican Barry Goldwater
(who campaigned on the slogan 'In your heart, you know he's right' - to
which his opponents countered 'In your guts, you know he's nuts'). 

But not now. Changed by many travels abroad, he regards Idaho as 'an outback
place' and is dismissive about 'Joe Six-Pack', the mythical, beer-guzzling
voter Sarah Palin seeks to win over. 

Interestingly, the smallest and poorest house in this district (does Mr
Six-Pack live there?) is the only one to display a McCain poster, alongside
a placard urging 'God Bless Our Troops'. 

In Moscow, the Democrats are emphatically the party of the well-off and the
Republicans the party of the poor. 

Mr Reece's language about Obama is almost religious. He uses words such as
'visionary' and 'inspiration'. He also says, rather frankly, that Obama is
'not too black'. But he knows little about him. 

He has never heard of Tony Rezko, the Chicago businessman recently convicted
of fraud and corruption, who seems to have helped Obama buy his house, and
whom Obama lobbied for. 

He has also never heard of John Stroger, a dreary business-as-usual Chicago
machine politician whom Obama backed against a reform candidate, rather
undermining his claim to be the apostle of change, and to be much of a
visionary. 

But he has heard of David Axelrod, the ruthless propaganda wizard, fixer and
spin doctor who has been on hand during many of Obama's successes. 

This knowledge puts him ahead of another deeply civilised Obama fan, Tom
Lamar, a liberal member of the City Council and head of a not-for-profit
environmental institute. 

He hasn't heard of any of these unattractive and unvisionary figures in
Obama's past and present. But despite being so weakly informed about his
hero, he is an unshiftable supporter. 

When I put it to him that Obama has been handled softly by the American
media, Mr Lamar responded: 'I haven't really noticed any free pass. I don't
feel that he is untested and unexamined.' 

He even suggested that Obama had been treated worse than he would have been
if he had been white. 

But he was stuck for an answer when I pointed out that an effigy of Sarah
Palin, complete with glasses, red dress and beehive hair, had been suspended
by the neck from a noose in a Hollywood street as part of a Hallowe'en
display. 

Police have described this as a legitimate expression of opinion. Perhaps.
Yet it is quite clear that if anyone hanged Obama in effigy, especially in
the Lynching Belt of the Deep South, it would ignite a huge explosion of
rage, and not be treated as 'legitimate'. 

Mr Lamar retorted that McCain and Palin had wrongly whipped up mistrust of
Obama at their rallies. But these were not racist attacks. In fact, they
have centred largely on Obama's connection with former terrorist William
Ayers - a connection first publicised by me in The Mail on Sunday in
February, and mostly ignored by the pro-Obama American media for months
afterwards. 

Mr Lamar compared the atmosphere surrounding Obama with the fervent passion
that gathered around John Kennedy in 1960. Many do. 

A sign outside one of the gun shops in Moscow, Idaho

Call to arms: A sign outside one of the town's gun shops 

But that, too, ended in a hundred different types of disillusion. It would
have done even if Kennedy had not had a furtive and sexually greedy private
life, if he had not had so many disreputable associates, if he hadn't
bungled an invasion of Cuba or stumbled into the missile crisis that nearly
killed everyone. No human could have borne the load of hope laid on
Kennedy's shoulders. 

Nor can Obama bear the burden placed on him by the swooning multitudes who
chant 'Yes, we can' and prate meaninglessly about 'change'. 

It is odd that politicians who have so little real power to alter or control
events are so keen to promise change. Change of a bad kind is coming
unstoppably anyway, as the United States reluctantly accustoms itself to its
diminished status after Iraq, and its humiliating position as a debtor
nation in hock to China. 

As I write this, all polling suggests that Obama will win this election. It
could be wrong. I have seen many Democrats mistakenly declared winners by
America's Left-wing media (and their equivalents in Britain). 

But I suspect that this time the polls are right. If they are, I think it
will be mainly because so many Americans are aching to feel good about
themselves after years of being despised for the Iraq War and the Bush
follies. 

They have seen in Obama's sonorous but deeply phoney rhetoric a snake-oil
cure for their sickness of heart. Against all evidence and experience, they
want this cure to work. So they are passionately uninterested in - and often
hostile to - anyone who delves into Obama's real past. 

On Tuesday we shall see a festival of self-deception, which will last for as
long as it takes for this curious mass delusion to come into cold contact
with the real world. 

Then there will be disappointment as vast as the hope that bred it, and yet
another great bruising blow to the whole idea of government for, of and by
the people. 

 

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