Ranger from the North

From A closing argument for John McCain by John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson:

If he wins, Obama will take the oath of office, in which he'll swear to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Yet the record shows that Obama isn't particularly fond of the Constitution. In a 2001 interview on Chicago public radio, Obama noted that the Warren Court had "never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society," and "to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical." Obama asserted that the Constitution "reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day."

He also noted that the Court "didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted." Obama seemed to think the Constitution deficient, because it provided only a guarantee of negative liberties – what the government can't do to citizens – rather than a positive right to welfare. The Founding Fathers would be shocked by Obama's attitude toward this cornerstone of American principles.

From Edward Whelan:

With its five living-constitutionalists, the Supreme Court is well to the left of the American public and threatens to engage in yet more wild acts of liberal judicial activism. The Court urgently needs to be transformed into an institution that practices judicial restraint. If Barack Obama is elected president, he will drive the Court further in the wrong direction, and the liberal judicial activists that he appoints will likely serve for two or three decades. Our system of representative government, already under siege, would be lucky to survive an Obama presidency.

(Via Power Line)

Charles Krauthammer makes the case for John McCain.

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the last year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of "a world that stands as one"), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as "the tragedy of 9/11," a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts, but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?

Read the whole thing. He concludes:

Today's economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I'm for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

Check out Obama Shrugged for the latest news on the Obama campaign's online donation "issues".

Maybe the mainstream media will get around to covering this story sometime after November 4th. Well, probably not. If The One wins, he will need to be re-elected in 2012.

John Hinderaker:

Our last vacation from history ended when the enemies who had steadily been gathering strength struck in New York and Washington, D.C. The vacation which is about to begin may come to an end in much more dramatic fashion.