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I take an unusual step today, I realize. A number of my friends, family, and closest associates will no doubt disown me. Rush Limbaugh will probably never mention RedState again. But I have to endorse Barack Obama for President.

I owe Barack Obama an endorsement. The campaign Barack Obama has run this far has earned him my admiration. While I’ve criticized people like Doug Kmiec for supporting Obama, I have seen the light.

I, Erick-Woods Erickson, do this day endorse Barack Obama for President. He has done all I have asked and now I should do at least one thing he asks and give him my support.

Please do read on . . .

Raising taxes is an unpopular enterprise, so in order to pull it off, one has to engage in more than a bit of class warfare. One has to talk about “raising taxes just for the rich” or some other such nonsense in order to sell the tax hike–this despite the fact that the rich actually pay a huge share of the taxes in this country and that the more such class envy we see in efforts to sell tax hikes, the more Atlas may shrug.

All of this is a prelude to a discussion of Barack Obama’s tax policy, which as Stephen Moore points out, should induce more than a little consternation on the part of readers and voters:

Barack Obama has been on a class-warfare tirade since he locked up the nomination, accusing John McCain of defending Bush tax cuts for “the rich.” “For eight long years,” he said Monday in a speech laying out his economic agenda, “our president sacrificed investments in health care, and education, and energy, and infrastructure on the altar of tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs.”

Hmmm. Anybody even dimly acquainted with the record, especially President Bush’s vast expansion of Medicare, might doubt the factual basis of such a statement. Never mind. Mr. Obama and the Congressional Democrats promise to sock it to “rich” taxpayers next year to pay for “middle class tax cuts” as well as some $300 billion in new spending. But there’s a problem: They won’t tell us exactly who the rich are.

In various tax proposals Mr. Obama has set the definition of rich at levels of $100,000, $200,000 and $250,000 in annual income. He has vowed, for example, to erase the Bush tax cuts not only for those who make more than $250,000, but to end the cap on Social Security taxes, which amounts to a tax hike on anyone who makes more than $100,000 in income. More recently, Austan Goolsbee, an Obama economic adviser, told me the new cap might be set at $200,000.

All of this has caused some heartburn among certain Democrats in high cost-of-living states. New York Rep. Joseph Crowley says a couple with earnings of $100,000 could be “a police officer and nurse.” “In New York City,” he adds, “they’d be struggling.”

You know, at some point, someone should really call the Obama campaign on all of this. They have no idea what “rich” means. The standards keep shifting and the Obama tax plan will hit “rich” people who don’t qualify as being wealthy under any meaningful definition of the term. The economic damage this scattershot policy will do will be massive, of course.

But fear not! There are certain “rich” people who actually are rich in every sense of the term and who will do quite well in an Obama Administration. Read the rest of the Moore article to find out who they are. And here’s a hint: There shall be no “windfall profits tax” on them.

Evidently, there is a campaign focused on taking tiny little snippets of statements John McCain has made and making McCain look utterly cruel and heartless as a result of those snippets. This game must be amusing for about five minutes–seven, tops–but after a while, one wonders what is to be gained by it. Other than misleading the electorate, of course.

The latest would-be kerfuffle involves Democrats howling over McCain supposedly saying that “it’s not too important” when American troops come home from Iraq. Problem is that these charges utterly and completely misses the context of the McCain statement:

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said: “The Obama campaign is embarking on a false attack on John McCain to hide their own candidate’s willingness to disregard facts on the ground in pursuit of withdrawal no matter what the costs. John McCain was asked if he had a `better estimate’ for a timeline for withdrawal.

The exchange that has Democrats licking their chops began when co-host Matt Lauer asked about the surge strategy in Iraq: “If it’s working Senator, do you now have a better estimate of when American forces can come home from Iraq?”

McCain replied: “No, but that’s not too important. What’s important is the casualties in Iraq, Americans are in South Korea, Americans are in Japan, American troops are in Germany. That’s all fine. American casualties and the ability to withdraw; we will be able to withdraw. General [David] Petraeus is going to tell us in July when he thinks we are.

“But the key to it is that we don’t want any more Americans in harm’s way. That way, they will be safe, and serve our country and come home with honor and victory, not in defeat, which is what Senator Obama’s proposal would have done. I’m proud of them. And they’re doing a great job. And we are succeeding and it’s fascinating that Senator Obama still doesn’t realize that.”

(Emphasis mine.) As the quote makes clear, McCain’s concern is to ensure the safety of the troops–an objective that is far more important than any specific timetable for withdrawal.

Bizarrely and offensively, however, the Obama campaign and its surrogates have decided to try to portray McCain as not caring about the welfare of the troops. This is both entirely inaccurate when one considers the context of the McCain statements and entirely offensive when one considers McCain’s wartime heroism and the fact that his life experience alone has caused him to care more about the state of the military and the welfare of the troops than most of his peers in public service. War heroes deserve–if nothing else–the benefit of the doubt on these kinds of issues and McCain’s public life has made clear that he takes a backseat to no one in his concern for the troops.

So much for this “New Tone” I keep hearing about. And in a just world, when people think that the only way they can win a Presidential election is by deliberately misconstruing John McCain’s statements, it should say more about McCain’s would-be critics than it does about him. The actual facts surrounding McCain’s comment are crystal clear even if their portrayal by the Obama campaign and its surrogates is not.

Update: Via Hot Air, a video made of awesome.

Or are you? You are, after all, one of Hillary’s… let’s just say “one of Hillary’s” and leave it at that; probably not best to rock that particular boat right now**. Anyway, via Ben Smith:

Former Clinton aide James Carville suggested on CNN just now that Obama offer Al Gore the vice presidential nomination.

“I think if I was Senator Obama I would say the biggest economic problem we face is the biggest national security problem and the biggest environmental problem. And if I were him, I would ask Al Gore to serve as his vice president, his energy czar, in his administration to reduce our consumption and reliance on foreign energy sources,” he told Wolf Blitzer.

Ben - who seems to have been just the slightest bit soured on the entire Obama thing (good job, Ben Smith comments section! Damn good job!), goes on to note:

I’m not sure James Carville — with whom Obama had a public spat — is the first person whose advice he’s going to take, though come to think of it there is an open slot on the vetting committee today.

Considering the advice that Carville’s giving: why, yes, please put him in that slot, Senator Obama.

Please***.

Moe Lane

Over at Politico, Jonathan Martin has a blog up about another Obama radical. This time, it’s big time campaign bundler and Code Pink co-Founder Jodie Evans.

Evans is a notorious figure, notorious most recently for an inflammatory interview where she suggested that Osama bin Laden was basically being a reasonable chap defending his home:

Jodie Evans:… “We were attacked because we were in Saudi Arabia, that was the message of Osama, was that because we had our bases in the Middle East, he attacked the United States.”

Paul A. Ibbetson: “Do you think that’s a valid argument?”

Evans: “Sure. Why do we have bases in the Middle East? We totally violated the rights of that country. Why do we get to have bases in the Middle East?”

You can catch the audio here.

Code Pink is, of course, famous for their disruption of Congressional hearings, and for casting spells against Marine Recruiting Stations. Yes, that’s right, spells.

There’s more, read on …

Barack Obama *says* “no lobbyists allowed.” Barack Obama *says* this applies to the DNC.

Of course, he has a problem.

While Senator Obama ordered the Democratic National Committee last week to stop taking donations from lobbyists, the co-chairman and lead fund-raiser for the host committee for the Denver convention, Steven Farber, is a lawyer and federally registered lobbyist with Brownstein Hyatt Farber & Schreck LLP, a firm with offices in Denver, Washington, and elsewhere.

“Not only that, they’re a donor,” an advocate of tighter regulation of political funding, Stephen Weissman of the Campaign Finance Institute, said, pointing to the firm’s logo among several dozen “partners” on the host committee Web site.

This comes on the heels of me pointing out that two of the DNC’s vice-chairs are registered lobbyists.

So what is the Obama campaign going to do? They say John McCain is not allowed to talk about this. They say John McCain is hypocritical to harass Obama on this because he has so many connections to lobbyists.

Best I can figure, Obama must staff his campaign with high school dropouts because they very clearly don’t understand the meaning of the word hypocrisy. Hypocrisy means you, Barry, set standards that you, Barry, are failing to live up to.

Pointing out your hypocrisy is not itself hypocrisy — it’s actually shoot fish in barrel.