. . . who refuses to quit. Haley Barbour quit. Donald Trump quit. Mike Huckabee quit. Guess who didn’t quit?
Four years ago at the studios of WSB Radio in Atlanta, I interviewed talk-radio host Herman Cain, who had only recently recovered from cancer. He smiled as he vowed, “Death’s going to have to catch me, and it’s going to have to run fast.”
Cain is smiling more than ever now, and running strong with a Republican presidential campaign that has surged to national prominence since the May 5 debate in Greenville, S.C. In a Fox News focus group of South Carolina GOP voters following that debate, pollster Frank Luntz asked for a show of hands: “How many of you think Herman Cain won the debate?” More than half the participants raised their hands. Luntz was flabbergasted, calling the result “unprecedented.” Luntz then went around the room, asking what it was that made the retired restaurant executive so appealing.
“He’s likeable,” one man said, summarizing a key factor in Cain’s campaign that seems to elude pundits. For the past two weeks, the political intelligentsia has struggled to understand how the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, who has never held elective office, could have suddenly emerged as a contender in a crowded Republican 2012 primary field. It’s never been a mystery to Cain’s communication director Ellen Carmichael.
“When people meet Herman, they like Herman,” she explained in a phone interview a few weeks before the Fox News debate in which 2 million viewers met Cain for the first time. . . .
Regular readers will perhaps best know Jim for the work he did last year to fix the engine on the famous 2004 KIA Optima:
Of course, that expensive repair job was just weeks before the car got wiped out by the “Whitetail Jihad.” We’ve now got all the parts to do that job, but the labor has been kind of busy. Jim will now have more time to devote to the task of fixing the KIA, because this morning he graduates from Ebenezer Christian School. You can visit Jim’s Facebook page, or just post your congratulations in the comments.
UPDATE 1 a.m. ET Friday: The phone lines were jammed throughout the three-hour broadcast, which raised $56,000. You can still contribute by visiting The Campaign to Defeat Obama Web Site.
The Campaign to Defeat Obama will have a radiothon tonight 9 p.m.-midnight Eastern (6 p.m.-9 p.m. Pacific) with guests including Michelle Bachmann, Andrew Breitbart, Phyllis Schlafly, Rick Santorum and . . . well, me, among many more.
On Wednesday evening – as part of a separate investigation into the nocturnal habits of S.C. First Gentleman Michael Haley – our founding editor received a call from an exotic dancer in Myrtle Beach, S.C. with some shocking information.
According to the woman – who declined to provide either her real name (or her “stage” name, for that matter) – she gave Michael Haley a lap dance during an August 2009 visit to the Masters Club in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
Obviously that isn’t the “shocking information” we’re referring to – plenty of guys (and some very cool girls) go to strip clubs and get lap dances all the time. In fact, multiple sources have told FITS that Michael Haley is a regular guest (and frequent “VIP room” customer) at one particular Columbia, S.C. strip club – a story we’ve been tracking for several weeks.
But this phone call – which was originally placed to verify another report of Michael Haley’s alleged affinity for nude nightlife – quickly took a bizarre turn.
According to this dancer, Michael Haley wasn’t alone on this visit to the Master’s Club.
“She was with him, you know,” the dancer told us.
Wait … she? As in Nikki Haley – who was then a sitting state lawmaker as well as an announced candidate for governor?
“Yes. I danced for her,” the woman said. . . .
It goes on and on. What’s with this annoying third-person reference to “our founding editor”? Are we supposed to be surprised that Will Folks gets late-night calls from strippers? Are we supposed to be shocked that Will Folks alleges Nikki Haley to be involved in every manner of evil?
Will Folks is going to keep this up until his skull has an “inappropriate relationship” with somebody’s tire iron.
As John [Podhoretz] and Jonathan [Tobin] have already noted, today’s speech at the State Department marks Barack Obama’s emergence as a full-fledged, born-again neocon firmly in the George W. Bush mold. . . .
Obama, like Bush, is a neocon because he has been mugged by events—in his case by the Arab Spring which has exposed the fragility of dictatorships that he once thought, in the fashion of his predecessor’s father, George H.W. Bush, he could make deals with.
Gone now is the apologetic tone of Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo, where he denied that America was “at war with Islam”; proclaimed, in light of Iraq, that “no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other”; and even tried to make amends for the U.S. role in the overthrow of the Mossadeq government in Iran in 1953.
Instead today at the State Department he spoke from a position of moral authority, telling Middle Eastern dictators that the U.S. will no longer tolerate a situation where “in too many countries, power has been concentrated in the hands of the few.” He even specifically repudiated the Realpolitik policy he had once favored, saying that “we have a stake not just in the stability of nations, but in the self-determination of individuals.” From now on, he announced, “it will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region, and to support transitions to democracy.”
Barack Obama showed up a half-hour late, and once again used the self-promoted White House occasion to say nothing specific, and nothing new. Even in the most specific part of the speech, regarding the American position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Obama offered nothing new. The entire speech could easily have been delivered by George W. Bush in its commendable but hardly inspirational cheering of democratization, which foundered on Obama’s decision to task Bashar Assad with leading democratic reform in Syria.
President Obama’s speech on the Middle East represents a watershed in his shift from a destructive and delusional approach to the Middle East, marked by indifference to democracy promotion and solicitude toward tyrants, toward embracing a policy that looks a lot like George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda.
So that’s three commenters who see Obama’s speech as a shift toward Bushism.
Who knew the National Enquirer had a foreign-policy desk?
UPDATE VII: David Limbaugh asks, where’s the outrage? But the problem is that, according to various commentators, what Obama said about Israel returning to the 1967 borders is just a reiteration of longstanding U.S. policy. If Max Boot isn’t complaining . . .
“Arnold Schwarzenegger has disappointed all of those who put their faith in males, Republicans, politicians or all any combination of the above.”
— Red State Gal, Death by 10,000 Papercuts
That’s rather over-generalizing, isn’t it? Surely, somewhere in America, there must be at least one male Republican politician who hasn’t spawned love-children (yes, it’s plural) by paramours. And yet the innocent are being blamed for the Sperminator‘s sins.
