The August Bloodletting Has Begun

By Alan Caruba

Politicians are always talking about the “October surprise” as an element of a campaign, but most of the hard work of destroying a candidate’s credibility begins in August. That was the case of the Swift Boat revelations about Sen. John Kerry’s real service in Vietnam before he came home to declare his fellow soldiers to be rapists and murderers.

August is going to be a month of political bloodletting and, though most of us will be either vacationing, watching the Olympics, or just kicking back a bit, the real fun of the campaign will begin.

The word is beginning to leak out of Washington, D.C. that President Bush will announce that troops will begin returning home.

“That would effectively remove a leading Democratic issue and raise further questions about Mr. Obama's ability to be commander in chief as a result of his rigid opposition to the military surge that he predicted would fail, advisers in both parties said Friday”, Donald Lambro reported in Sunday’s edition of The Washington Times.

Images of troops preparing to leave before the November elections will eviscerate the central theme of Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign, the ending of the war in Iraq and a withdrawal of troops. And you thought Bush was stupid?

Once the issue of troop withdrawal is settled, Obama will have nothing left to talk about except the many taxes he intends to raise on Americans, rich, middle class, and poor.

If you have any money left over after filling up the tank, buy Dr. Jerome R. Corsi’s bombshell new book, “Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality” ($28.00, Threshold Editions, a division of Simon and Schuster).

I am about halfway through. His research is so densely documented that his analysis will be hard for anyone to dispute. Initially, he finds in the person of Obama a man whose childhood was marked by one abandonment after another; by his father, by his step-father, and by his mother who left him with her parents to raise.

In his teens Obama embraced a black identity, although he is half white. In doing so, he absorbed the literature of black authors, many of whom were strongly identified with the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and 40s.

What more revelations are there to come between now and the Democrat convention and Election Day is anyone’s guess, but they will come, of that you may be sure. Obama makes Richard Nixon look like a model of spontaneity and virtue.

As the political pundits keep telling us, the election is Obama’s to lose. Aesop’s fable of the turtle and the hare, McCain versus Obama, is likely to hold true in 2008. Or maybe the Denver Democrat Party convention will rediscover Hillary Clinton?