A letter in today's Colorado Springs Gazette prompted this reply from ClearCommentary.com:

Perpetuating the left’s pet myth that President Bush’s economic policies have been disastrous, letter writer Charles Merritt darkly warns that Sen. McCain has pledged to continue the Bush legacy (“Public, McCain mimic Bush in profligate spending habits,” July 17). 

First, as President Reagan correctly observed, the president can’t spend a dime.  Indeed, all appropriations bills originate with members of Congress and only they have the power of the purse.  Therefore, if Congress is legislating a diet rich in pork it must be because their constituents support it, which is their craven way of ensuring re-election. 

A second fabrication, compliments of liberals and their foot soldiers in the mainstream media, is that the Bush tax cuts favored the so-called ‘rich.’  During the much-vaunted Clinton years a single income earner at $30,000 paid $3,157 in federal taxes, while under Bush that figure is $2,756; a married couple with $50,000 in income paid $5,085 and $4,012, respectively.  You can view the rest of the rates at www.taxfoundation.org, but the conclusion is unavoidable:  Low to moderate income earners have faired much better under Bush than Clinton, and Bush even removed millions of low wager-earners from the tax rolls entirely. 

Unlike Sen. Obama, who has pledged to increase income and capital gains taxes, and who plans to hobble the research and development efforts of petroleum producers with a so-called windfall tax, Sen. McCain understands that lower taxes and regulation lead to economic growth for all income earners. 

Another specious argument is that low income earners are permanently mired in poverty.  A Treasury Department study last year demonstrated that nearly 58% of filers who were in the poorest income group in 1996 had moved into a higher income category by 2005, and that nearly 25% jumped into the middle or upper-middle income groups, with 5.3% having made it all the way to the highest quintile. 

So if you want higher taxes and lower growth, by all means support Obama; but if you want lower taxes and greater opportunity for economic success, McCain is the clear choice.

In January of 2007, Barack Obama introduced legislation in the senate that would mandate the removal of all U.S. troops by March 2008.  Since then he has revised his views on Iraq to neatly comport with changes on the ground, all the while denying progress has been made.  Now that fifteen of the eighteen benchmarks have been met and Iraq is gearing up for its fall elections, Obama has again re-scripted his policy recommendations.

When circumstances change it's a sign that we understand the inner mechanisms of the issue at hand when we adjust our thinking.  However, it's important to gauge to degree to which politics plays a role in these exercises, which means reverse engineering Obama's thinking and divining his contemporaneous motivations.

With respect to Iraq, the unavoidable conclusion is that his policy modifications were the equivalent of a gallows conversion and were therefore motivated by political realities and expedience, not merely a revision at the edges of an otherwise unchanged policy.  Indeed, Obama's early positions reveal a deep and abiding ignorance of warfare and the dovetailed way in which a loss in Iraq would tarnish America's honor and vilify the sacrifice our military personnel made who perished there.

More broadly, Obama's insistence early in his campaign that we must leave Iraq belies the reality that Iran and al-Qaeda would decimate innocents while transforming it into a terrorist stronghold.  It's that kind of unadultlike thinking that has led to the unnecessary loss of millions throughout history.  Obama and his leftist acolytes seem determined to remain in their intellectual bell jar which is impervious to the lessons of war, of tyrants, and how best to defeat them.

Now Obama appears poised to bring the same misguided thinking on Iraq to Iran, where he would employ "aggressive diplomacy."  It's quintessential State Department reasoning that lacks any hint of intellectual humility to suggest that his Harvard education will outwit the likes of Ahmadinejad, someone who has demonstrated his willingness to lay waste to Israel.  Although diplomacy is an important component of our approach to Iran, it's only a stop on the way to serious threats, because that is the only language they understand.

In his most recent remarks about leaving Iraq, Obama continued to criticize our efforts there while continuing to insist that or resources should have been focused on Afghanistan.  First, his thinking might be more credible if he had spent any time in either country, but instead his 'fact-finding' has consisted of discussions with aids and advisors.  And, despite his serial revisions, the word "win" remains absent from his lexicon.

It taxes the imagination to think that millions of Americans will vote for this man, someone whose resume wouldn't even qualify him for a cabinet position, much less the presidency.  It's a sign of collective desperation among Democrats, of the pathological way in which their hatred of President Bush has marred their judgment, and of their dim understanding of history.

If Obama represents the best the left has to offer, his candidacy may be an early warning that the decrepit and decayed policies of modern liberalism might finally be headed for extinction.  In which case, we ight see a new generation of Democrats, one in the vein of Truman, Jackson, and Kennedy.  That would be healthy for both parties.