Turn Crisis Into Opportunity

Nancy Pelosi wants to call the House back for an emergency lame-duck session of Congress next week primarily to address the dire situation facing General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

OK. Let’s look at the Big Picture:

The U.S. auto industry is on the verge of bankruptcy for one basic reason: for the second time in 30 years they have missed the market and built gas guzzling SUVs that cannot compete with Toyotas and Hondas and hybrid technology in an era of exploding fuel costs. Sure, labor costs and health care costs are also a big problem, but if we sold cars like the Japanese do, we could handle all the rest

So here is what we, The People, ought to say and do through our Congress: Detroit, if you want our money here is the deal. We will keep you afloat but in return you are going to enter an agreement with the US Government , including the Pentagon and the Department of Energy, and as a joint, war-time temporary partnership you are going to immediately re-tool and start building plug-in hybrids, electric and hydrogen fuel-cell cars. We are going to bring the smartest brains the USG has to work with Detroit’s smartest brains and we are going to leap frog the present internal combustion technology - and once again America is going to be at the forefront of the car industry. Hell, we invented cars - and how to mass produce them. Let us seize this crisis to turn it into a once-in-a-century opportunity to regain our pre-eminence.

Other benefits to this plan are:

• We begin to get off the addiction of imported oil;

• These new technologies are Green and will help the environment;

• National Security mandates that we no longer be dependent on our enemies and adversaries for a vital product (oil);

• We can sell these new technologies world-wide - and thus help rejuvenate our economy and our manufacturing base;

This is indeed going to cost a lot of money. But we seem to be spending hundreds of billions like we used to spend hundreds of thousands.

Let us spend this money wisely - not on manicures and pedicures and ridiculous executive pay packages - but on going forward by going backward to the days of American ingenuity and leadership.

Video of Former Congressmen John LeBoutillier and Bill Hendon on "Imus in the Morning" Discussing the Abandonment of U.S. POWs in Indochina

via YouTube:

Why the GOP Lost

Let us just quickly sum up what happened on Tuesday - and then we will move on to the future - of the nation, of the Republican Party and of the conservative movement:

Barack Obama won on Tuesday precisely because - as Buffalo Bills quarterback Trent Edwards said last weekend - he is “the most opposite of the guy we have in there now.”

Indeed, the exit polling confirmed what I have been writing in this space for a long time: G.W. Bush had become a millstone around GOP candidates’ necks. He - more than anything else - is why the GOP got wiped out on Tuesday.

What President Bush represented to a majority of people is a sneering, arrogant, chip-on-his-shoulder, my-way-or-the-highway face of this era’s conservatism; in fact, that also became the face of the United States around the world. And it was that face that voters rejected on Tuesday.

President Reagan was just the opposite: a cheery disposition, a funny laugh and chuckle - and a pleasant demeanor all while trying to convince - not browbeat or threaten - others to change their minds.

If we, as conservatives, are to come back to power we will have to project a totally different face and persona.

The Republican Party will have to become a party of “smart” people who can reach out to the suburbs (where we were completely wiped out) and to educated people. And at the same time we need to keep our base of committed conservatives, too.

In fact, we have to get rid of this exuberant disdain for well-educated people and for education itself. G.W. Bush and Sarah Palin have reveled in their dislike for education, for well-educated people and for reading and for acquiring knowledge.

It used to be in this country that everyone worshiped education and wished to have a great education but somewhere along the way many on the Right have transposed their hatred (well-deserved, by the way) for the Leftism taught in our colleges and universities into hatred of the actual education itself. And that is a tragic mistake. Because only reading the Bible and nothing else isn’t enough to solve this nation’s multitude of problems. In fact, we need to ask God to help us all learn more and know how to learn more in order to keep up with the ongoing and exponentially expanding base of knowledge on all topics.

So we are going to need to change the face of the conservatism; less anger, more brains.

And we need to move on from the Bush Era. Please, no talk of Jebbie in 2012!

Let us first settle on the direction we need to move - and then find new candidates who can sell that message.

For those of you who think the country is doomed, you are wrong. Any time you believe that a majority of your fellow citizens are idiots, you don’t get the majesty of our nation. Obama’s election means something to these people. It is good that they have their chance to run our country. If they do well, we all do well. And if they can’t get a handle on our problems - and if we re-make ourselves into a smart party - then we can and will come back to power.

But first we have to earn our way back.

More on all of this to come in subsequent columns.

Election Day Predictions

This is going to be an ugly election for the GOP and for the conservative movement, which lost its way when it allowed the Bush Family to co-opt it back in 1999.

Frankly stated, we are going to get creamed across the board - White House, Senate and House.

Obama will earn more than 350 Electoral votes - and win 54% of the popular vote.

Tuesday’s election will be a complete and total rebuke of our party and movement - and especially of the Bush Presidency.

John McCain has run a poor campaign and is a weak candidate. He looks old and does not inspire his audiences. His selection of Sarah Palin has backfired as she has become a major distraction and detriment for the GOP ticket.

We are also going to get wiped out - for the second consecutive election (2006 being the first) - in both the House and Senate.

Almost all the Big names like Liddy Dole and Gordon Smith and maybe even Norm Coleman are going down. So, too, will about 30 GOP Congressional seats.

Ted Stevens will lose.

Mitch McConnell and Saxby Chambliss will have to sweat it out on Tuesday night. Don’t be surprised if one of them loses.

This will be the second GOP train wreck in a row.

Thus the Bush Legacy will be one of total, abject failure on every level - not the least of which is to wipe out his party and the philosophical movement which he took over in 2000. Just like his father before him, G.W. Bush has handed the keys to the White House to the Democrats.

The Republican brand is severely damaged. Tuesday’s election will feature a huge anti-Bush and anti-GOP passion - coupled with a less-then enthusiastic effort from the GOP. There will be a disproportionate turnout - more Democrats will vote and fewer Republicans will bother as they can see the handwriting on the wall.

To sum it up: Tuesday is going to be a wipe-out of the Republican Party.

And on Wednesday we begin the process of re-making the party into a smart, effective political party devoted to doing good, not to advancing one family’s political fortunes.

JOHN LEBOUTILLIER TO BE ON FOX BUSINESS CHANNEL ON MONDAY MORNING

Tune into the Fox Business Channel - check your local cable line-ups for the number - it's #359 on Direct TV - at 8 AM Monday morning morning to watch the Roundtable hosted by Alexis Glick.

The Coming Obama Years

If Barack Obama wins this election, what will the next four years be like in this country?

Obama and the Democratic Super Majority in the Congress, led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, will certainly move to the extreme, hard Left:

There will be no one to check or block or restrain their worst, i.e. most liberal, instincts. Here is some of what they will do:

• Try to move the nation to Western European-style socialism. Hillary would have done this, too, had she won and Obama will, too, beginning in January. Each had dozens of new FDR-style spending programs they featured during their campaigns;

• This means heavier federal involvement in health care; perhaps the Federal Government will eventually take this over and nationalize it;

• Cradle-to-grave federal programs; all aspects of our lives will be affected - from schools to energy subsidies to doctors’ salaries to regulation of hospital costs to corporate governance to federal mandates on states and municipalities to a federal take-over of many pension funds;

• Yes, these un-restrained liberals, drunk with power, will re-impose the incorrectly named Fairness Doctrine to nail Rush and Hannity and Savage and their local acolytes. The Left sees Talk Radio as the one bastion of the media they can’t penetrate - so they’ll simply neutralize it and neuter it with this doctrine;

• They will cut defense spending - perhaps by up to 25% - they always do - as a quick way to move money into social programs;

• They will create massive new government spending programs - supposedly to re-build our “crumbling infrastructure” - but as a payoff to their labor pals;

• Whenever someone in the media dares to question what they are up to, these newly arrogant-with-power lefties will say, “Look what Bush and the Republicans did? Socialism? It was the Republicans who took over the banks and pored over one trillion dollars into bailouts!”

• The liberals will go after corporate pay and try to legislate limits on CEO salaries;

• NEWSWEEK or TIME will have a cover story on The War Against The Rich;

• For the first year or two, the so-called mainstream media will remain totally in the tank for Obama and for this leftist agenda;

• Some writer will coin a phrase, i.e. the Square Deal, the New Deal and the Great Society, which will describe what Obama is trying to do;

• There will be talk of massive amounts of USG money being sent to Africa;

• The idea of sending US troops to African hot spots, i.e. Darfur and Kenya, will come up soon after the Inaugural;

• Some Civil Rights leaders will raise the idea of ‘reparations’ for the descendants of slaves;

• Michele Obama will be un-leashed and will quickly become the most unpopular First Lady - ever. Some people will almost miss the days of Hillary Clinton. Stories will abound about how she is hurting her husband’s political standing. His staff will try to muzzle her - and stories will then surface that there is a war between the Obamas inside the White House;

• Pakistan will deteriorate and almost fracture - and Obama will be more aggressive toward Al Qaeda and the Taliban than Bush was;

• Obama will tilt pro-Palestinian - and his relations with Israel will deteriorate; no American President will have had such bad relations with our staunchest ally;

• By the Fall of 2009, Obama’s approval rating will be down to 42%; his disapproval rating will be 45%; the nation will - again - be divided and polarized;

• Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson will not be frequent visitors to the Obama White House; the savvy Obama staff will try not to allow the Obama Administration to be painted with the Sharpton/Jackson poisonous paint;

• Teddy Kennedy will die - and the funeral will be a Who’s Who of the Left and of the DC Establishment. His funeral will be on national TV - and his “accomplishments” will be touted for weeks, while the death of Mary Jo Kopechne will be a small footnote; the media will fawn all over the Kennedys - all over again;

• Iran will smell weakness in Obama and make a move of some sort - perhaps in Lebanon; or, possibly, Tehran and Obama will make peace first and have a Summit - and then Iran will take advantage of a weak Obama;

• Leftists of all stripes will emerge as new ‘stars’ in the Obama Era. They will be products of today’s ‘progressive’, race and gender-based education system - and they will flaunt their arrogance and haughtiness;

• All sorts of crazy ideas will surface - from nationalizing certain companies and industries to God knows what; remember Lani Guinier? She is nothing compared to what is coming from this crowd;

• The anti-gun crowd on the Left will change federal law and try to end gun shows;

• Using Bush's "faith-based" programs as cover, the Left may allow some sort of disguised federal aid to church groups- especially leftist churches ala Jeremiah Wright's church and others preaching African Liberation Theology;

• Capitalism will be seen as an evil; all the anti-capitalistic nonsense taught in our colleges and universities will rear its ugly head in statements, confirmation hearings and interviews with new administration figures;

• The Congress will try to free hundreds of thousands of prison inmates who are serving time for drug and non-violent offenses; and then they’ll try to register them to vote for the Democrats in the 2010 mid-term elections;

• Most of G.W. Bush’s Executive Orders regarding family planning, stem cell research, and foreign aid coupled with family planning will be reversed;

• Obama and the Democrats will grant amnesty to the 12-30 million illegals already here - and the Border Fence will never be built; millions of new illegals will continue to stream into our nation; the Democrats will try to register these new voters as Democrats, of course, and that will alter all our politics for years to come;

• The Obama-Democratic Congressional Axis will nominate and confirm the most left-leaning federal judges in our history as payback for what G.W. Bush and the GOP did in the 2001-2007 period. Watch out - some real whackos are coming onto the bench;

In sum, the Obama Years will be the culmination of the last forty years of horrendously biased education coupled with a climate of liberal guilt and Political Correctness. Let’s close with this quote from the British Spectator - which sums up what is about to happen here in the USA. (The Brits Have a Way With Words):

"You have to pinch yourself—a Marxist radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshiped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States.
"And apparently it's considered impolite to say so."

— Melanie Philips, The Spectator (UK) 10/14/08

Coming Soon: The Palin vs. McCain Blame Game

As the McCain-Palin ticket heads for what looks like a blow-out defeat of historic proportions - the polling now shows even Republicans defecting from the GOP ticket and thus a double-digit lead for Barack Obama and huge, unprecedented early voting numbers - here is a prediction: the biggest fireworks of this campaign are going to come after the election.

And the two sides going after each other will be John McCain and his (few remaining) supporters, especially his alter ego/surrogate son/ Chief of Staff Mark Salter - versus Sarah Palin and her husband and any GOP leaders who remain allied with her in hopes of a 2012 candidacy.

At the heart of this conflict will be The Blame Game - who will get tarred with running one of the worst campaigns in modern political history.

Will the blame attach to McCain himself - for his herky-jerky, back-and-forth, inconsistent campaign strategies?

Or will McCain and Salter be able to sell the notion that Palin was a total disaster - and that they had no clue how bad she was until long after they picked her?

JFK once said, “Success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan.”

In the case of this impending GOP Debacle on November 4th, several factors come into play:

• McCain will still be a Senator. He will want to resuscitate his reputation inside the Beltway. He will have to grovel to the very media types he has recently snubbed - like Time’s Joe Klein and MSNBC’s Chris Mathews - and he will throw Sarah Palin to the wolves and cast all the blame on her - and some on Bush, too.

• His private internal campaign polls now show the same thing that the NBC/WSJ poll showed two days ago: Palin has hurt the GOP ticket even more than Bush has - a remarkable achievement.

• Yes, she solidified and electrified a slice of the GOP Right, but she cost him invaluable independents, moderates and conservative Democrats. In other words, she lost McCain more votes than she brought to his ticket.

• McCain already knows he made a monumental mistake in picking her. And he must be embarrassed over this decision. But he has to soldier on through November 4th - and seem as if he is proud of her and his decision to pick her.

• NBC’s Chuck Todd was at the NBC interview yesterday in Dayton conducted by Brian Williams where McCain and Palin sat side by side - and then NBC was allowed a few minutes alone with just the Alaskan Governor. Todd felt “tension” between the two candidates - as if the Blame Game had already begun in private.

• Here is what will come out after Election Day:

• McCain/Salter will savage Palin for excessive ego, ignorance, stupidity.

• The $150,000 Nieman Marcus/Saks Fifth Avenue shopping spree will be just the tip of the Alaskan ice berg in their criticisms of Palin.

• By the way, this shopping spree story coming just 13 days before Election Day is yet another sign of total political malpractice by the McCain-Palin-GOP heirarchy.

• Can you imagine - in this devastated economy - what the average struggling housewife or working mother thinks when they read about $150,000 of clothes being lavished on Sarah Palin? How many real “hockey moms” or Walmart shoppers will spend that amount on clothes in their entire life? Talk about politically tone deaf!

• This will all figure into the inevitable savaging of Sarah Palin. Plus other still-to-be-revealed items about her behind-the-scene behavior, demands, emotions, habits, children, disloyalty and God knows what else.

• They will use the still-unresolved Troopergate and National Enquirer adultery stories against her by leaking out other things they have learned about her since they chose her for the Veep slot at the end of August.

• You can bet that McCain and Salter, the vicious destroyers that they really are, are right now compiling a long list of grievances against her - all as part of affixing the blame on her for McCain’s crushing defeat.

• They will leak tales of how ‘stupid’ they learned she was - and how ignorant of national and world affairs - which is why they could not risk allowing her to hold a full-scale press conference. ‘Inside’ stories of their disastrous prep sessions with her - for speeches and debates - will suddenly ‘find’ their way into big newspapers.

• They are still steaming over her criticism of the McCain staff’s decision to pull out of Michigan and her critique of the ‘robo calls’ - even though she recorded the calls herself!

• In McCain World, criticizing McCain and his decisions is not tolerated. Period. And those who dare to criticize are O-U-T!

• Palin has a different agenda:

• She has her eyes on the GOP Presidential nomination in 2012 - and she will have some hard right support behind her - at least until and unless she is seen as too damaged to make it.

• Sarah Barracuda will go into full attack mode on November 5th.

• She will leak out her criticisms of the way she way she was not allowed to campaign.

• She will blame the by-then-discredited McCain Senior Staff for all the mistakes of the losing campaign.

• She will appeal to the Hard Right by blasting McCain for not attacking Obama hard enough.

• She will be trying to woo Rush and Hannity for her 2012 campaign.



This post-election battle will be entertaining. But it is not the real battle to come within the GOP. That fight comes after this little entertaining diversion between Mccain and Palin is finished.

McCain will be shunned forever within the GOP. They never liked him - and after he is routed, they won’t even pay attention to him. Payback can be tough, Johnny! All those years dumping on conservatives is about to catch up to you.

And Palin will be judged by next year to have so much baggage that she will not be able to run for national office again - and instead she will be trying to score a show on Fox like Mike Huckabee did.

By 2012 we conservatives will have new candidates to choose from - and maybe a new hero.