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“National defense is one of the cardinal duties of a statesman.”  - John Adams

FOR THE RECORD

“Charlie Gibson got it wrong. There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration - and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different. He asked Palin, ‘Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?’ She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, ‘In what respect, Charlie?’ Sensing his ‘gotcha’ moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine ‘is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.’ Wrong. I know something about the subject because... I was the first to use the term. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of the Weekly Standard entitled, ‘The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism,’ I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush doctrine. Then came 9/11, and that notion was immediately superseded by the advent of the war on terror. In his address to the joint session of Congress nine days after 9/11, President Bush declared: ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.’ This ‘with us or against us’ policy regarding terror... became the essence of the Bush doctrine. Until Iraq. A year later, when the Iraq war was looming, Bush offered his major justification by enunciating a doctrine of preemptive war. This is the one Charlie Gibson thinks is the Bush doctrine. It’s not. It’s the third in a series and was superseded by the fourth and current definition of the Bush doctrine, the most sweeping formulation of the Bush approach to foreign policy and the one that most clearly and distinctively defines the Bush years: the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world... Yes, Sarah Palin didn’t know what it is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn’t pretend to know - while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and ‘sounding like an impatient teacher,’ as the [New York] Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes’ reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage.”  - Charles Krauthammer

CAMPAIGN WATCH

“Only once in modern times has a vice presidential candidate swung an election. Lyndon Johnson brought Texas and Alabama to John F. Kennedy in 1960, states that otherwise would have been suspicious of a Catholic liberal from New England. I think Sarah Palin will be the second. She has changed the nature of this race in ways ominous for Mr. Obama. First, this race is no longer between a candidate who advocates change and the status quo, as Democrats would like to frame it. It’s between two different visions of change, and between a ticket that’s actually delivered reform, and a ticket that just talks about it.”  - Jack Kelly

THE GIPPER

“Ultimately, the choice before the American people is the choice between two visions: on the one hand, the policies of limited government, economic growth, a strong defense, and a firm foreign policy; and on the other hand, policies of tax and spend, economic stagnation, international weakness and accommodation, and always, always, from them, ‘Blame America first.’ It’s the choice between the policies of liberalism or the policies of America’s political mainstream.”  - Ronald Reagan

OPINION IN BRIEF

“One of the greater ironies of our time is that the post-convention bounce - and it may be more than a mere bounce - is a gift from the correspondents, pundits and other howling bloviators who set upon Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, snarling, snapping and scrapping like a pack of ravenous wolves. You can read and hear them now consoling each other with speculations that the National Enquirer, once the scourge of ‘respectable’ journalism, will turn up something from the garbage cans of Wasilla and the trash bins of Juneau and Anchorage. Barack Obama accuses John McCain of not ‘getting it.’ Sarah Palin says it’s Sen. Obama who doesn’t ‘get it.’ They’re all wrong. It’s the bloggers, the reporters, the pundits and the rest of the far-flung media that doesn’t ‘get it.’ It’s not the media’s fault. There is no media conspiracy, vast or otherwise. The average reporter, correspondent, columnist, pundit or editor couldn’t conspire with the entire Harvard Law School faculty to change the oil in his wife’s car. It’s worse than a conspiracy. It’s a consensus. The newsrooms of the agenda-setting newspapers, the television networks and the newsmagazines have become strongholds of the elites that Barack Obama, he of Harvard Law, insists he is not one of. The young men and women in the newsrooms of flyover country emulate the elites and sometimes dream of one day being one of them.”  - Wesley Pruden
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LIBERTY

“Seven years after its occurrence, 9/11 has become the uber dividing line between those who believe terror is a ‘nuisance’ which can be capably addressed by law enforcement, and those who believe it remains a mortal threat to our nation requiring military action wherever necessary. It remains the ultimate delineator of liberalism and conservatism. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the more ‘real’ it becomes, the more Americans are forced to confront this catastrophe head on - absent the editing, the ‘expert’ commentary, the psycho-babble and the historical revisionism - it becomes an albatross around the necks of those who think all men are ‘reasonable’ given sufficient amounts of ‘multicultural understanding.’ History can be a cruel mistress. For one day every year, always less than two months prior to any national election, Americans will be reminded that freedom is truly fragile, that its sustenance requires sober vigilance - and that in the world as it is, as opposed to one we would like, talk is mostly cheap.”  - Arnold Ahlert

RE: THE LEFT

“The patriotism feared by liberals isn’t the standard American-flag-pinned-on-your-lapel-patriotism (hardly anyone other than Barack Obama is against that). The kind they are afraid of is that which was stirred in us by the attacks on Pearl Harbor and again on 9/11 - the kind that motivated Americans of all races and political persuasions to pull together in the duty of our common citizenship and the common cause of enduring American ideals. Liberals are threatened by such patriotism because they worry that their position - their belief that they, rather than we as free people, are the better rulers of our lives - will be usurped by a rebirth of Thomas Jefferson’s understanding of self-reliance and independence. They also worry that an increase in such patriotism will continually motivate men from all walks of life... to join our military and fight for the preservation of this great nation. It’s hard to convince men who are risking their lives in service to this nation that this nation isn’t as good as it once was or that we need to turn the reins of our government over to Democrats so they can rescue us from ourselves by ‘the audacity of hope’.”  - A.W.R. Hawkins

SELECT READER COMMENTS

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“The entire 08-37 Digest is excellent. This site is wonderful for regular folks to keep abreast of everything political and to read the facts presented with sound judgment and critique. I forward them on when I can! Always to my family and politically engaged friends. Keep making it clean, honest and accountable and you will remain a credible source for all patriotic Americans! Thank you!”  - Shreveport, Louisiana

“You no doubt are aware of the commercial Obama has put on that mocks McCain for not using email. You have no idea how angry this makes me at Obama. As has been reported elsewhere since 2000, McCain is severely limited in the use of his arms and cannot type because of wounds received while in the military. Obama nonetheless sees fit to mock Sen. McCain for not using a technology that he is not able to use effectively. Will Obama try to pass this buck along to an overly zealous staffer like everything else? Is this the sort of veterans’ protection and benefits I can expect when I get home from the war?”  - Balad, Iraq

GOVERNMENT

“Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has a great twofer pitch: ‘green jobs.’... Governments create no wealth. They only move it around while taking a cut for their trouble. So any jobs created over here come at the expense of jobs that would have been created over there... One reason decentralized markets are preferable to government central planning is that human beings are fallible. Mistakes are inevitable. Some investments will be errors. Mistakes in the market tend to be on a comparatively small scale. If one company invests in plug-in hybrids and it goes bust, only a relatively few people suffer. The assets of the bankrupt firm pass into more capable hands. But decisions by government, especially the federal government, affect all of us. When government makes a mistake, the bureaucracy can’t go bankrupt. Instead, it will use its failure to justify increased appropriations in the next budget. If ‘green jobs’ make so much sense, the market will create them. They will be created by private entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who are eager to profit from winning investments. The best ideas will rise to the top, and green energy will gradually replace coal and oil. If politicians were serious about creating jobs and cleaner technologies, they would step aside and let the free market go to work.”  - John Stossel
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INSIGHT

“I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical form.”  - Calvin Coolidge

THE LAST WORD

“On Sept. 8, Fox News broadcast an interview between Obama and Bill O’Reilly that focused on taxation and the economy. Obama repeated his pledge to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, while raising taxes on the tiny fraction who earn more than $250,000... His tax proposal, he explained, was a matter of civility: ‘If I am sitting pretty and you’ve got a waitress who is making minimum wage plus tips, and I can afford it and she can’t, what’s the big deal for me to say, I’m going to pay a little bit more? That’s neighborliness.’ If that is Obama’s rationale for making the tax code even more steeply progressive than it already is, it’s no wonder voters are having second thoughts about his economic aptitude. ‘Neighborliness.’ Perhaps that word has a nonstandard meaning to someone whose home adjoined the property of convicted swindler Tony Rezko, but extracting money by force from someone who earned it in order to give it to someone who didn’t is not usually spoken of as neighborly. If Citizen Obama, ‘sitting pretty,’ reaches into his own pocket and helps out the waitress with a large tip, he has shown a neighborly spirit. But there is nothing neighborly about using the tax code to compel someone else to pay the waitress that tip. Taxation is not generosity, it is confiscation at gunpoint. Does Obama not understand the difference? Perhaps he doesn’t. Eager though he may be to compel ‘neighborliness’ in others, he has not been nearly so avid about demonstrating it himself. Barack and Michelle Obama’s tax returns show that from 2000 through 2004, when their adjusted gross income averaged nearly a quarter of a million dollars a year, their annual charitable donations amounted to just $2,154 - less than nine-tenths of 1 percent. Not until he entered the US Senate in 2005 and began to be spoken of as a presidential possibility did the Obamas’ ‘neighborliness’ become more evident. (In 2005-2007, they gave 5.5 percent of their income to charity.)”  - Jeff Jacoby

Veritas vos Liberabit - Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus, et Fidelis! Mark Alexander, Publisher, for The Patriot’s editors and staff. (Please pray for our Patriot Armed Forces standing in harm’s way around the world, and for their families - especially families of those fallen Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, who granted their lives in defense of American liberty.)