Should New Jersey’s Democratic Governor Jon Corzine win reelection next Tuesday, despite approval ratings that remain in the basement, he should be grateful his Republican opponent never considered the advice of former President Thomas E. Dewey after learning the results of the 1948 election.

Oh, whoops, I’m sorry, I forget, I was, uh, looking at the polls from that campaign and saw that Dewey had led the then-not very popular incumbent President Harry S Truman throughout the campaign, edging the Democrat by 5 points in the final pre-election poll.  On Election Day, he lost by nearly that amount.

You see, the aforementioned Mr. Dewey looked at his lead in the polls and said it was good.  He thought it was enough just to be the opposition to an unpopular incumbent.  Wanting a change, people would surely vote for the candidate most likely to beat the Democrat.  He wouldn’t need to wage an aggressive campaign.

Well, Harry Truman ran a spirited campaign.  And the rest is, as they say, history.  Perhaps because Mr. Dewey carried New Jersey by roughly the same margin he led in the last national poll, Corzine’s Republican opponent Chris Christie may have thought Dewey’s strategy of sitting on his lead would work in the Garden State.

The current polls, however, tell a different story, a very tight race, with some surveys giving the hapless Democrat an edge.  Hapless he may be as an executive, but he’s been ruthless on the campaign trail, zinging the Republican with tens of millions of dollars of negative campaign ads. (more…)

One thing you can count on when the AP reports on the story of the “outing” of the wife of Bush critic and Kerry campaign aide Joe Wilson (the dishonest one, not the apologetic one) is their failure to mention one significant fact about the Democrat’s ballyhooed New York Times article:  he lied.

Now that Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government (CREW) has won its lawsuit against the Department of Justice, it has “received documents related to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s interview with the FBI in the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA identity.”  The AP, as you can guess, ever eager to report a story that could be spun against that good Republican is all over it.  Writer Pete Yost “reports“:

In a New York Times opinion piece in July 2003, Wilson accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq’s efforts to buy a uranium “yellowcake,” in the African nation of Niger. Bush referred to the yellowcake during his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union speech to Congress as he was trying to rally support for going to war with Iraq. Yellowcake is a powdered form of uranium that could be used in a nuclear weapon if purified and enriched.

The year before, the CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports. Wilson brought back denials of any sale and argued such a sale was not likely to happen.

Um, Pete, since you seem to be quoting from Annenberg’s Political Fact Check report on the matter, why don’t you give us the rest of the paragraph:

But the Intelligence Committee report also reveals that Wilson brought back something else as well — evidence that Iraq may well have wanted to buy uranium.

And let’s not forget this:

But that’s not the way the CIA saw it at the time. In the CIA’s view, Wilson’s report  bolstered suspicions that Iraq was indeed seeking uranium in Africa.

In other words, if anyone was misrepresenting anything here, it was Joe Wilson.  If would be nice if those who cover the story would at least report the fact that this Democratic hack has long since been discredited.

But, then again, that might undermine the media effort to portray the former Vice President in a negative light. (more…)

This is just too delicious to ignore.  Recall the conventional wisdom of the better part of the last decade about then-President George W. Bush’s supposedly go-it-alone foreign policy and how that man antagonized our allies.  This silly notion was all based on the failure of two of our allies, France and Germany, to support that good man’s commitment to enforcing numerous United Nations resolutions which Iraq had violated.

Well, when Jacques Chirac, the man who served as President of France for the better part of W’s tenure in the White House stepped down in 2007, our relations with the Gallic nation quickly improved.  The problem was not the American President, but the French one.

Now, that perfidious Parisian has been ordered to stand trial for corruption.  Pardon my schadenfreude.

*NB, I flipped the order of the clauses in the title as, upon further reflection, I realized this version just plain sounded better.

FROM THE COMMENTS: Sean A offers an important reminder:

And just to be clear, during the Bush Presidency, when liberals were constantly bemoaning America’s “standing in the world community,” and shrieking about “the rest of the world laughing at us,” Chirac is one of the paragons of integrity whose approval they judged as indispensable.

To show you just how much a late bloomer I was as a film buff, when I first read about the first archetypal screen gangster, James Cagney, I confused him with Jackie Gleason‘s Honeymooners’ co-star Art Carney.

After reading about Peggy Noonan’s express in her wonderful What I Saw at the Revolution her “intuition” that the Gipper’s

. . . idea of the presidency and how to be president was influenced by a scene in Yankee Doodle Dandy, the big hit of 1942 [where an] actor playing FDR gives a presidential medal to George M. Cohan in a private little ceremony in a room in the president’s house

I knew I had to see the movie.  Cagney (of whom I then knew so little I mistook him for a small screen comedian

as Cohan, is properly awed.  The FDR character is down-to-earth and expansive–he has all the time in the world as he makes the visitor feel at home.  They reminisce.  Cagney/Cohan speaks of his birth–born red-faced and squalling on the Fourth of July as the cannon went off in the public square in celebration.

When I rented the flick, I saw not the Cagney familiar to most film lovers, the fast-talking, self-confident, rough-playing man of the streets, but a lovable fellow, devoted to his wife, committed to his country and dedicated to his music.

Only in recent days as I look for cinematic “heroes” similar to the mythological Achilles have I discovered the “real” James Cagney, the quintessential screen tough guy.  For a film lover, it has a been a real treat to experience his archetypal performances for the first time.  And it’s helped me shape the beginning of one chapter of my dissertation.

Just watching him, you can see how his performances influenced generations of screen gangsters and the directors who helped bring their characters to life.    Would Goodfellas have been so good had Scorsese not had Cagney to draw on as an influence?  Could Coppola have ever have conceived of bringing the Godfather to the silver screen without having scene the diminutive Irishman in action?

What contrast is his character to the role he played the first time I saw him on screen.  How interesting it is to experience a screen legend “backwards.”   And not for the first time.

Obama signed the stupid piece of legislation this week.  Figured I should mention it.  To underscore how inane and childish this legislation is — it is named the Matthew Shepard/James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Law.

Would Byrd’s name be attached if George W. Bush hadn’t been the Governor of Texas?  Would this new law have punished Byrd’s murderers any more than they were?  No — two were sentenced to death, the other will spend the rest of his life in jail.

Stupid, childish, petty Democrats run our nation.  Meanwhile, Congressional Democrats and Obama oppose things like free-market healthcare reform, free-market social security reforms,  and tax reforms that would actually do something for gay families.  And the Islamist Pogrom of Gays?   Democrats are silent.

Never forget that, folks.  But when you murder someone this weekend, just make sure you don’t yell nasty things at them first.

*sheesh*

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

It would be nice if there were more men like the Rudy Giuliani in the Republican Party, strong leaders who are conservative when it counts, fiscal hawks who are tough on crime and strong on national security, yet not beholden to social conservatives on issues of concern to gay people.  More often than not, when a Republican candidate is more “liberal” on gay issues than the rest of the caucus, he (or she) is more liberal on many other issues as well, not opposed to higher taxes, less committed to regulatory relief and reform, weaker on national security.

So it is with Dede Scozzafava, the Republican nominee for Congress in the special election to fill the seat of John McHugh, vacated when he was confirmed as Secretary of the Army.  Aware that she had a record on gay issues similar to that of the former Mayor of the Big Apple, we at GayPatriot had initially remained silent on the campaign, not joining other conservative bloggers in trumpeting renegade Republican Doug Hoffman who is running on the Conservative line in this election.

That all changed upon learning from the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund that Scozzafava was “the most liberal member of the GOP caucus in the state legislature, scoring a 15% rating on the Conservative Party’s scorecard.”  And she’s not just liberal on state issues, she is also liberal on national issues as well, supporting the Democrats’ spendthrift “stimulus” and their “card check” legislation.

At a time with record growth in federal spending, record deficits and an ever-expanding federal government, we cannot afford another spendthrift federal legislator, least of all one who calls herself a Republican.  We need to hold the line on federal spending and cut, not expand, government regulation.  We could find no convincing evidence that the Republican nominee in NY-23 is committed to that small government conservative agenda.

That is why we at GayPatriot join other “grassroots conservatives” in endorsing Doug Hoffman for Congress in the special election to be held next Tuesday, November 3 in New York State’s 23rd Congressional District.  We believe the Conservative candidate will do a better job in standing up to the big spending/big government policies put forward by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats and support a real reform agenda, cutting back on the size of the federal government, reducing the scope of its regulatory authority.

We recognize that Hoffman is not an ideal candidate, but we don’t live in the ideal world.  In this election, citizens of upstate New York have three real choices.   Considering the broad range  issues of concern to us, he is by the best of the three.  We encourage all GayPatriot readers living in NY-23 to pull the Conservative Party lever in next Tuesday’s balloting.