Jan
27

Unelectable

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And if Mittens IS electable, the country is in a lot sorrier shape than we thought.

“The system that we put in place in our state was something we worked out with the labor community, the health care community, business, and the citizens of the nation. We came together, it was voted [on] by a 200-person legislature. Only two voted no.

“Our system has a lot of flaws, a lot of things I’d do differently. It has a lot of benefits. The people of the state like it by about three to one.”

Romney didn’t mention that the people of that state also voted for Barack Obama by nearly two to one.

The exchange offered a stark reminder of one inescapable set of facts:  President Obama spent the bulk of his first 15 months in office ramming his signature legislation down the throats of the American people. Yet, as his State of the Union Address made clear, he’d rather not bring it up. So if Republicans are going to have a mandate to repeal this unprecedented threat to liberty and fiscal solvency, they will have to bring it up — or, rather, their nominee will have to bring it up. And he will have to know why he opposes it — not merely that he does.

Oh, he knows why alright; he just can’t say it out loud. He “opposes” it because he thinks that position will help him get elected. No other reason than just that. And that’s his reason for everything.

These are his principles. But if you don’t like them, he has others.

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Jan
27

There’s waste, and there’s waste

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I’m with James.

Look, I want to go back to the Moon, too. I’d be happy with a base in ten years. I wish we had a big manned probe heading for Jupiter by now. But it’s not like we’ve stopped: Cassini flies by Titan on Monday, again, and we have a craft en route to Mars to deliver a big rover. Just those phrases give me pause: we have a probe flying past Titan, and a craft on the way to Mars. These are extraordinary things. There are positions people hold with which I disagree and understand, but I do not understand anyone who regards a machine on Mars driving around and taking pictures from ground level as a waste of money. Unless you went with the undercoating. That’s just a dealership scam.

Heh.

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Jan
26

Bob Dole is very, very disappointed with you people

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Who cares?

I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late. If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state, and federal offices. Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway.

Gingrich served as Speaker from 1995 to 1999 and had trouble within his own party. By 1997 a number of House Republican members wanted to throw him out as Speaker.

Sorry to have to say it, Bob, but from all I can see he’s pissing off all the right people, now just as then. You establishment, “moderate,” go-along-get-along liberal enablers didn’t like him then, and the fact that you don’t like him now is not something I consider problematic. At all. And advice on “electability” from someone who got trounced as badly as you did is probably something that ought to be kept to ones’ self.

NRO’s nonstop Gingrich bashing and Romney rah-rahing is really starting to try my patience, to tell you the truth. This bit from Dole really takes the cake:

In my run for the presidency in 1996 the Democrats greeted me with a number of negative TV ads and in every one of them Newt was in the ad. He was very unpopular and I am not only certain that this did not help me, but that it also cost House seats that year. Newt would show up at the campaign headquarters with an empty bucket in his hand — that was a symbol of some sort for him — and I never did know what he was doing or why he was doing it, and I’m not certain he knew either.

So there you have it, folks: not only did Dole lose because of Newt, but Newt is insane to boot, showing up at campaign HQ to stagger around with his ice bucket, reeking of last night’s cheap muscatel and muttering to himself like a dingy old wino.

And NRO is gleefully providing a forum for this drivel. Vote for Romney, because FEAR TEH CRAAAZY MAN!

I don’t know how much lower they can sink, but I’m sadly confident we’re gonna find out. And with each successful plumbing of newer depths, my resolve not to vote for Romney under any circumstances whatsoever is redoubled.

Update! Via TB in the comments, the story on the ice bucket. No wonder Dole didn’t get it. And still doesn’t.

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Jan
26

Unpossible!

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Nobody does it quite like Treacher, folks.

Nancy Pelosi claims to know something
That alone is reason to suspect she’s lying. I mean, what are the odds?

Very damned steep. But this is comforting:

I just don’t foresee any more cuddling on the couch for these two.

God, let’s hope not. That incredible blunder remains the closest thing to a deal-breaker for me where Newt’s concerned.

Desperate loser update! Oh good lord. So this sort of thing is how Romney might try to “take it to” the Democrat Socialists if we’re stupid enough to nominate him? He hopes to unman Gingrich supporters by trying to frighten all and sundry over the scaaarrrry prospect of Pelosi’s releasing her phantom super double-secret insider information on Gingrich? VOTE FOR ME, else you must tremble in fear over what Pelosi might do?

This is his idea of being a no-holds-barred fighter for conservatism: by helping the Left pimp a wholly discredited smear?

God, what a revoltingly power-mad punk. He plumbs new depths of pathetic with each grubby snivel. If this is what the GOP truly considers “electable,” they fucking well deserve to lose. Again.

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Jan
26

Another dishonest Romney attack, blunted

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This time the “Reagan hated Newt/Newt hated Reagan” bullshit.

Why would one in the position Mitt Romney now finds himself — thoroughly defeated in South Carolina by a surge of support for Gingrich’s conservatism — ever even entertain the idea of going after Newt Gingrich on Reagan?

This utterly dumb line of attack for Romney is as bad if not worse than Gingrich’s flirtation with attacking Bain Capital. It raises exactly all the questions of Romney’s vulnerabilities. Why, for example, did Romney deliberately play the wimp when it comes to defending Ronald Reagan in Massachusetts? At precisely the time in the fall of 1994, it should be noted, when Newt Gingrich was leading Chapter 2 in the Reagan Revolution? Is Romney really trying to draw attention to the fact that while Gingrich and hundreds of Republicans were on the verge of a historic landslide retaking the House by attaching themselves to the Reagan legacy… Romney ran from Reagan… and got clobbered?

If even those simple political basics can’t be learned, which in Romney’s case now include not just the broader inability to defend either Reagan or free markets but the quite specific inability to use the general principle of free markets and capitalism to defend himself over the inevitable “Mr. 1%” accusations — this should be a red flag for conservatives.

It is for this one. But the establishment RINO GOP has already demonstrated A) that they will stick at absolutely nothing to pimp their chosen standard-bearer, and B) they care far more about holding onto their power, such as it currently is, than they ever will about principle.

Newt Gingrich certainly was not Speaker or the House member pictured who already (and correctly) was thought to be the one who would follow O’Neill — Jim Wright. He wasn’t the Republican Leader or the Whip like the also-photographed Trent Lott or even a ranking member of a committee. By 1985 Newt Gingrich had been in the House of Representatives a sum total of six years, next to nothing against much older men like Speaker O’Neill (33 years in 1985) or Claude Pepper (23 years).

So why the young Congressman Newt in this book?

Answer: Newt Gingrich was part of the Reagan Revolution’s Murderers’ Row. And anybody who was in Washington in the day, much less in the Reagan White House or the 1984 Reagan re-election campaign (and I would make that particular cut of three), knew it.
WHAT, EXACTLY, DOES this mean? To use Mitt Romney’s words, what was Newt Gingrich’s “work product” for conservatism — for America — as part of Reagan’s Murderers’ Row?

Glad you asked. Here is an example of the kind of “work product” that made a young congressman from Georgia such a key player on Reagan’s Murderers Row.

This one, too, ought to be read in full. If anybody out there wonders why I’m all in for Gingrich despite having some major issues with him over the years, I’ll repeat: because he is the only one out there with a verifiable record of achievement advancing the cause of Constitutional conservatism, limited government, and liberty, that’s why. We don’t have to wonder, as we certainly must with Romney, if Newt would govern as a conservative once elected; he’s already demonstrated it, in spades. In sum:

Why did Newt Gingrich win South Carolina?

Because he was one of Reagan’s Lieutenants. A member of Reagan’s Murderers Row of conservative stars.

It’s too soon to know whether the conservative Gingrich or the moderate Romney will win this nomination. Or, yes, Santorum. Or even, if all those panicked rumblings from the Washington Establishment are true, someone not yet in the race — a Daniels, Jindal, or Ryan.

But whatever happens, quite unlike the picture Romney is trying to paint of his prime opponent in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich was very much present and accounted for on the Reagan team. To borrow from Reagan’s farewell address to the nation and the men and women who served him, Newt Gingrich wasn’t just marking time. He made a difference. He helped make that Shining City on a Hill stronger. He helped make the City freer.

Quite to the contrary of the Romney message, Newt Gingrich was in fact one of Reagan’s Young Lieutenants.

One of the best.

And that’s from someone who oughta know, folks, and not just some grubby, deceitful hack of a Massachusetts moderate.

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Jan
26

Anatomy of a smear

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Y’know, I really do hate these slimy sonsabitches.

Given all the attention to the ethics matter, it’s worth asking what actually happened back in 1995, 1996, and 1997. The Gingrich case was extraordinarily complex, intensely partisan, and driven in no small way by a personal vendetta on the part of one of Gingrich’s former political opponents. It received saturation coverage in the press; a database search of major media outlets revealed more than 10,000 references to Gingrich’s ethics problems during the six months leading to his reprimand. It ended with a special counsel hired by the House Ethics Committee holding Gingrich to an astonishingly strict standard of behavior, after which Gingrich in essence pled guilty to two minor offenses. Afterwards, the case was referred to the Internal Revenue Service, which conducted an exhaustive investigation into the matter. And then, after it was all over and Gingrich was out of office, the IRS concluded that Gingrich did nothing wrong. After all the struggle, Gingrich was exonerated.

Which is what makes the marriage between the mainstream press and the Democrat Socialist Party so insidious: they know it doesn’t matter if the charges are spurious or not, because the eventual exoneration won’t ever be covered. But here’s where it all gets kind of Kafka-esque:

The Gingrich case was driven in significant part by a man named Ben Jones.  An actor and recovered alcoholic who became famous for playing the dim-witted Cooter in the popular 1980s TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, Jones ran for Congress as a Democrat from Georgia in 1988.  He won and served two terms.  He lost his bid for re-election after re-districting in 1992, and tried again with a run against Gingrich in 1994.  Jones lost decisively, and after that, it is fair to say he became obsessed with bringing Gingrich down.

Two days before Election Day 1994, with defeat in sight, Jones hand-delivered a complaint to the House ethics committee (the complaint was printed on “Ben Jones for Congress” stationery). Jones asked the committee to investigate the college course, alleging that Gingrich “fabricated a ‘college course’ intended, in fact, to meet certain political, not educational, objectives.” Three weeks later, Jones sent the committee 450 pages of supporting documents obtained through the Georgia Open Records Act.
That was the beginning of the investigation.  Stunned by their loss of control of the House — a loss engineered by Gingrich — House Democrats began pushing a variety of ethics complaints against the new Speaker.  Jones’ complaint was just what they were looking for.

There’s no doubt the complaint was rooted in the intense personal animus Jones felt toward Gingrich.  In 1995, I sat down with Jones for a talk about Gingrich, and without provocation, Jones simply went off on the Speaker.  “He’s just full of s–t,” Jones told me. “He is. I mean, the guy’s never done a damn thing, he’s never worked a day in his life, he’s never hit a lick at a snake. He’s just a bulls–t artist. I mean, think about it. What has this guy ever done in his life?”

Well, he shoved your stupid ass out of Congress, for one thing–you, and a lot of other Democrat Socialists, which most of us consider a great service indeed, and a far more meaningful contribution than your greased-ham portrayal of a stereotypical insult to all things Southern on the boob tube will ever be. Onwards:

“Gingrich has never worked. He’s never had any life experience. He’s very gifted in his way at a sort of rhetorical terrorism, and he’s gifted in his way at being a career politician, someone who understands how that system works and how to get ahead in it, which is everything that he has derided for all these years. So I think he’s a hypocrite, and I think he’s a wuss, and I don’t mind saying that to him or whoever. To his mother — I don’t care.”

At that point, Jones leaned over to speak directly into my recorder.  Raising his voice, he declared: “HE’S THE BIGGEST A–HOLE IN AMERICA!”

Umm. Maybe second-biggest. Or third, if you throw in Ogabe. Onwards again:

Jones and his partner in the Gingrich crusade, Democratic Rep. David Bonior — they had been basketball buddies in the House gym — pushed the case ceaselessly. Under public pressure, the Ethics Committee — made up of equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats — took up the case and hired an outside counsel, Washington lawyer James Cole, to conduct the investigation.

Cole developed a theory of the case in which Gingrich, looking for a way to spread his political views, came up with the idea of creating a college course and then devised a way to use a tax-exempt foundation to pay the bills. “The idea to develop the message and disseminate it for partisan political use came first,” Cole told the Ethics Committee. “The use of the [the Progress and Freedom Foundation] came second as a source of funding.” Thus, Cole concluded, the course was “motivated, at least in part, by political goals.” Cole argued that even a hint of a political motive, was enough to taint the tax-exempt project, “regardless of the number or importance of truly exempt purposes that are present.”

Cole did not argue that the case was not educational. It plainly was. But Cole suggested that the standard for determining wrongdoing was whether any unclean intent lurked in the heart of the creator of the course, even if it was unquestionably educational.

Meanwhile, Democrats kept pushing to raise the stakes against Gingrich. “Anyone who has engaged in seven years of tax fraud to further his own personal and political benefits is not deserving of the speakership,” Bonior said just before Christmas 1996. “Mr. Gingrich has engaged in a pattern of tax fraud, lies, and cover-ups in paving his road to the second highest office in the land…I would expect the Justice Department, the FBI, a grand jury, and other appropriate entities to investigate.”

With the charges against Gingrich megaphoned in the press, Gingrich and Republicans were under intense pressure to end the ordeal. In January, 1997, Gingrich agreed to make a limited confession of wrongdoing in which he pleaded guilty to the previously unknown offense of failing to seek sufficiently detailed advice from a tax lawyer before proceeding with the course. (Gingrich had in fact sought advice from two such lawyers in relation to the course.)  Gingrich also admitted that he had provided “inaccurate, incomplete, and unreliable” information to Ethics Committee investigators. That “inaccurate” information was Gingrich’s contention that the course was not political — a claim Cole and the committee did not accept, but the IRS later would.

Why did Gingrich admit wrongdoing? “The atmosphere at the time was so rancorous, partisan, and personal that everyone, including Newt, was desperately seeking a way to end the whole thing,” Gingrich attorney Jan Baran told me in 1999. “He was admitting to whatever he could to get the case over with.”

It was a huge victory for Democrats.  They had deeply wounded the Speaker.  But they hadn’t brought him down.  So, as Bonior suggested, they sought to push law enforcement to begin a criminal investigation of Gingrich.

There’s a lot more, but I’ve already exceeded the bounds of fair use, so I’ll stop there. But you should definitely read it all. Love Newt or hate him, Romney’s use of this garbage against Gingrich as Mittens continues trying to desperately claw his way into the Oval Office is simply unconscionable, despicable, and far, far worse than Gingrich’s Bain attack, which I admit I didn’t really agree with either.

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Jan
26

Lese majeste

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Or perhaps His Majesty would prefer we think of it as something more along the lines of “taking the Lord your God’s Name in vain“?

I was expecting words of concern about the oil spill, worry about the pending ecological disaster, and words of confidence about how the federal government was here to help. Or perhaps he was going to vent about BP’s slow response. But no, the president was upset about something else. And he wanted to talk about, well, food stamps. Actually, he wanted to talk about a letter that my administration had sent to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack a day earlier.

The letter was rudimentary, bureaucratic, and ordinary…We were simply asking the federal government to authorize food stamps for those who were now unemployed because of the oil spill. Governors regularly make these sorts of requests to the federal government when facing disaster.

But somehow, for some reason, President Obama had personalized this. And he was upset.

There was not a word about the oil spill. He was concerned about looking bad because of the letter. “Careful,” he said to me, “this is going to get bad for everyone.”

Jonathan Last says: “If only he’d be so assertive with America’s enemies.” But as far as His Majesty is concerned, that’s just what he’s doing. “America’s enemies” have always been his friends, his entire life long. And “L’état, c’est moi,” you know.

Re: the Jan Brewer episode, Glenn Beck just said, “He has better relations with the Muslim Brotherhood than he does with the governor of Arizona.” To which his guest (not sure who it was) responded: “Well, he has more in common with them.” What can one say but: heh.

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Jan
25

Greatest President in history singlehandedly rescues hostages!

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All hail the King, who will no doubt be taking full credit for his exploits, his personal courage, and all-round derring-do:

U.S. special operations forces have rescued a kidnapped American aid worker and her Danish colleague in Somalia, U.S. officials said Wednesday. During the raid, all nine of their captors were killed.

Jessica Buchanan, 32, and Poul Hagen Thisted, 60, were abducted Oct. 25 by a group of armed men in the Somali town of Galkayo. Pentagon officials said there is no indication the men had any connection to international terrorism or al-Shabab, Somalia’s al-Qaeda affiliate. Instead, the men are believed to have been pirates, hoping to trade their captives for ransom.

The rescue was carried out by the same Navy SEAL unit that found and killed Osama bin Laden, two U.S. officials told the Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the operation. The unit is the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, also known as SEAL Team 6. The members of the unit who carried out the rescue operation were not the same personnel as those who killed bin Laden, the U.S. officials told AP. The Pentagon would not confirm those details, citing security procedures.

After killing the Somali captors, the commandos found Buchanan and Thisted unharmed in an outdoor encampment and freed them.

Somewhere, Warren Christopher is angrily wondering why the SEALs couldn’t have shot them in the shoulder or something, and other Leftards are wailing and wringing their hands over the “unnecessary” and “tragic” loss of life. But for the rest of us, this is how it’s friggin’ done. Hats off to the SEALs as always, and even a small tip of the ol’ chapeau to Ogabe for at least having enough sense to stay the hell out of their way.

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Jan
25

Perspective

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On Romney’s taxes:

There will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth about that 13.9 percent tax rate. As it happens, the lowest effective tax rate paid by a recent presidential contender was 13.1 percent. That fat-cat tax-evading money-grubbing greedy snob was none other than John Kerry, the Democrat candidate for President in 2004. As Romney pointed out in the Monday night GOP debate, he inherited nothing and earned his wealth. Kerry inherited everything, by marrying a rich man’s widow. Do you remember a lot of Democrats howling with rage over Kerry’s amazingly low effective tax rate? Was it ever mentioned at all?

Even at an effective rate of 13.9 percent, Romney forked over $3 million dollars, which is more than the combined payment of several hundred middle-class taxpayers. Barack Obama’s $3.6 trillion government spent Romney’s three million bucks in precisely 27 seconds. If every penny of Romney’s annual tax was used to pay down the national debt, Obama’s government would borrow it all back in 73 seconds. If the government had confiscated Romney’s full 2011 earnings of $20.9 million, it would have enough money to run for just over three minutes.

Since the average cost of Obama’s “green jobs” works out to about $4.8 million apiece, Mitt Romney’s annual taxes are not quite enough to fund one green job.

Which, of course, produces nothing of any value whatever. The bottom line:

Instead of fiddling around with huge volumes of tax law to produce ideologically acceptable outcomes, the government should be taking as little as possible from its citizens, using the most clear and simple methods possible, and spending no more than it collects. That will never happen, but the acolytes of leftist Big Government also don’t have the guts to do what they really want, and call for the seizure of all income above a politically determined limit. “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money,” as lifelong politician Barack Obama once observed.

Well, hey, it’s only fair, you know. If you’re a pig-ignorant, deceitful faux-pResident intent on dragging a nation over the socialist cliff into destruction so you can then remake it to your own dysfunctional standards, that is.

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Jan
24

Capitalism? Where, exactly?

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Not here, and certainly not there. But the socialist droolcases want to blame it anyway.

Economic and political elites meeting this week at the Swiss resort of Davos will be asked to urgently find ways to reform a capitalist system that has been described as “outdated and crumbling.”

“We have a general morality gap, we are over-leveraged, we have neglected to invest in the future, we have undermined social coherence, and we are in danger of completely losing the confidence of future generations,” said Klaus Schwab, host and founder of the annual World Economic Forum.

“Solving problems in the context of outdated and crumbling models will only dig us deeper into the hole.

“We are in an era of profound change that urgently requires new ways of thinking instead of more business-as-usual,” the 73-year-old said, adding that “capitalism in its current form, has no place in the world around us.”

And that’s the whole problem, you addle-pated old fool. It has no place in your centrally-run world, and hasn’t in a long, long time, with the inevitable result. Yet despite all the historical evidence–every bit of which refutes everything you believe in–you go right on clinging to your proven-failure model in preference to one that’s been far more successful at creating wealth and prosperity. Instead, you’ve chosen to pursue a dreary and chimerical “equality” that serves not to lift all boats, but to bring everyone down to a roughly equivalent level of misery and deprivation. As McQ says:

The dirty little secret these “elite” won’t admit was that their premise that capitalism could forever fund their social welfare states is absolutely wrong and failing. They’ve killed the goose that laid the golden capitalistic eggs. It isn’t “capitalism” that is failing. It is their social welfare system that is “outdated and crumbling”.

These are just the same people who got us into this mess trying to shift the blame from unsustainable policies founded in socialism to something which has kept their socialist utopias functioning for more years than they would have had it not been there.

And we should also be precise about what it is that has kept them stumbling along this long…a mixed economy, not capitalism. A mixed economy which has featured less and less capitalism as the years have gone by. Capitalism in its defined form exists in few, if any places in this world.

Margret Thatcher’s warning that the only thing wrong with socialism is you eventually run out of other people’s money has come true…again. The agony was only prolonged because some free market mechanisms were left to at least partially function over all these decades that the Europeans (and now Americans) were constructing their little social welfare houses of cards. The elite simply refuse to see that reality and now seek another target to which they can shift the blame. 

Yep. Far from being an indictment of capitalism, the dismal failure of Europe’s “third way” zombie economies is a testament to its resilience, seeing as how it’s managed to keep the kleptocracies of Europe–and America–staggering along for as long as they have.

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Jan
24

Sky: not falling

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Our way works, and their way doesn’t. Period.

The unions’ battle against Walker’s reforms has rested on the argument that the changes would damage public services beyond repair. The truth, however, is that the reforms not only are saving money already; they’re doing so with little disruption to services. In early August, noticing the trend, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that Milwaukee would save more in health-care and pension costs than it would lose in state aid, leaving the city $11 million ahead in 2012—despite Mayor Tom Barrett’s prediction in March that Walker’s budget “makes our structural deficit explode.”

The collective-bargaining component of Walker’s plan has yielded especially large financial dividends for school districts. Before the reform, many districts’ annual union contracts required them to buy health insurance from WEA Trust, a nonprofit affiliated with the state’s largest teachers’ union. Once the reform limited collective bargaining to wage negotiations, districts could eliminate that requirement from their contracts and start bidding for health care on the open market. When the Appleton School District put its health-insurance contract up for bid, for instance, WEA Trust suddenly lowered its rates and promised to match any competitor’s price. Appleton will save $3 million during the current school year.

Appleton isn’t alone. According to a report by the MacIver Institute, as of September 1, “at least 25 school districts in the Badger State had reported switching health care providers/plans or opening insurance bidding to outside companies.” The institute calculates that these steps will save the districts $211.45 per student. If the state’s other 250 districts currently served by WEA Trust follow suit, the savings statewide could reach hundreds of millions of dollars.

Remember, folks, this sort of success is precisely what the union goon squads are unalterably against. But the thing they really don’t like is this:

The manner in which the public unions ran the campaigns was telling. Because they realized that public-sector collective bargaining wasn’t the wedge issue that they’d expected, not a single union-backed ad mentioned it— even though it was the reason that the unions had mobilized for the recall elections in the first place. Instead, the union ads cried that Scott Walker had “cut $800 million from the state’s schools.” This was true, but the ads neglected to mention that the governor’s increased health-care and pension-contribution requirements made up for those funds, just as Walker had planned. That the unions poured nearly $20 million into the races, by the way, validated another argument of Walker’s: that mandatory dues are a conduit through which taxpayer money gets transferred to public-sector unions, which use it to elect Democrats, who then negotiate favorable contracts with the unions. In this case, the newly strapped Wisconsin unions had to rely heavily on contributions from unions in other states.

And that right there is the long and the short of it. Unions aren’t organizations established to defend workers’ rights or advance their interests. If they ever were in the first place, they sure aren’t now. They’re merely a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democrat Socialist criminal conspiracy, a branch which exists only to fleece their membership and give the proceeds to The Party–after skimming plenty off the top for their own corrupt leadership, of course. Any good they might do for workers along the way is purely incidental to their primary function: electing more Democrat Socialists.

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Jan
24

Another tool in the King’s arsenal

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To be used against the enemies of the State.

Bullshit. It is absolutely, positively, totally irrelevant whether the machine pinged, didn’t ping, or lit every situation board at NORAD with red lights and sirens. Bringing up the machine’s reaction is either abject stupidity or deliberate dishonesty — misplaced pseudo-egalitarianism or an attempt to divert people from the subject.

Paul is a Senator. Senators are members of Congress. Members of Congress SHALL NOT BE IMPEDED except in extreme cases. The Constitution doesn’t say “stopped” or “prevented”. It says “impeded”, that is, slowed down or temporarily inconvenienced. Paul lost two hours and missed his flight. That’s an impediment, and it’s unConstitutional.

Yeah, there’s the potential for abuse — LBJ doing 110 in his Lincoln on Texas back roads comes to mind. It fails to matter. The Constitution ALSO says that the only judge of the qualifications of members of Congress is Congress. If anybody’s going to slap a Senator down, it has to be the Senate, not some TSA baby-groper.

Senators are not “anybody else”, they’re Congresscritters. Congresscritters are important, and have that privilege in the Constitution, because they’re Congresscritters. The Framers put the requirement in because they knew history, particularly the events surrounding the English Revolution and Restoration. There’s a long history of rulers getting a free hand by preventing Parliament from meeting, and although there’s no way for Law to stand in the way of that in a practical sense, with that provision as Law of the Land Teh Protector at least can’t argue that the tactic is legal.

Like Ric says: a trial run. It might sound paranoid now, but you just wait and see what happens. Again. And speaking of rulers having a free hand, today we reach another grim milestone: “One Thousand Days Without a Budget.” Hey, they have to avoid passing it so we can’t find out what’s in it.

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Jan
24

Wherein I spare you the trouble of watching tonight’s utter waste of time

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A preview of the Pretend pResident’s SOTU speech.

COMRADES!

More government! Less freedom! More taxes! More class warfare! More Green scams! More money thrown down ratholes!

Everything is the Republicans’ fault. It all has nothing to do with me. So let’s put aside the partisanship and move forward. Oh, and I’d like to see a lot more civility from those fucking shitbags, too.

There are some who…even though really, there aren’t.

But let me be perfectly clear. (INSERT a whole pack of lies, obfuscation, misdirection, and wholly made-up statistics)

COMRADES! Working together, we can do away with the filthy, evil running dogs of capitalist imperialism and make this a Worker’s Paradise to be proud of at last. And if you don’t think so, it’s because I’m black. Well, half-black. Whatever.

Thank you.

There, that ought to about cover it. Anybody who bothers watching it expecting anything else deserves to lose the time spent doing so.

Update! Treacher adds some stuff I forgot:

Sure, Obama is killing jobs… just like he killed Bin Laden! Woooooo!!

Sure, Obama is bringing the economy to a halt…just like Osama’s pulse! Yeahhhhh!!!

And the usually dovish Democrat Socialist automatons will be on their feet cheering til their throats bleed.

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Jan
24

No cigar on this one either, Chris

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Another Christie blunder, and a pretty damned weak one too:

The problem that Mitt Romney has is not only that he’s taken liberal positions in the past, but that he doesn’t have an argument for what he’s done to advance conservatism. This problem really struck when I watched New Jersey Chris Christie on “Meet the Press” yesterday. The following exchange ensued between him and host David Gregory:

MR. GREGORY: So you come back, though, to connection with conservatives. What, in your judgment, is Mitt Romney’s greatest contribution to the conservative cause?

GOV. CHRISTIE: Well, listen, this is a guy who has shown that the American free enterprise system can work and can work to create jobs across America. You look at places like Staples and Sports Authority, everybody who goes to work at those places today has Mitt Romney to thank for it. And he’s going to know how to do that as president, to get government out of the way, to be able to let the private sector create those jobs that we so desperately need and haven’t had in the Obama administration. That’s his greatest contribution to the conservative movement, to show that the American free enterprise system, which is under attack by the Obama administration, does work for people–for real people, middle class people. Because let me tell you, the people going to work at Sports Authority and Staples today, David, those aren’t the elite. Those are middle class Americans who are using those jobs to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads and send their kids to college. Let the president attack that.

But that’s a total non sequitur. Warren Buffett no doubt has proved that the free enterprise system can work, and he’s invested in tons of companies that have gone on to create jobs. Yet nobody would confuse that with doing something for the “conservative cause.”

As with his never-ending run for the presidency, it ain’t really about what Mitt might do for conservatism. It’s about Mitt, and nothing else.

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Jan
24

Class war

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Joel Kotkin gets more than one thing wrong here, but the one that sorta grabbed me is this:

The decline of the patricians has been occurring slowly for decades as the interests of the wealthiest have diverged from those of ordinary Americans. In the country’s first two centuries, some common ground joined the traditional conservatives who made up the bulk of the moneyed class and who spearheaded the quest for national power and economic expansion with the muscular progressivism epitomized by the two President Roosevelts. The forgers of American preeminence in the business world—Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan, the Rockefellers, Thomas J. Watson of IBM, David Packard and Bill Hewlett—embraced the ideal of growth where enriching themselves meant creating unprecedented opportunities for hundreds of thousands of Americans. These men built and financed things—from oil wells and high-tech instruments to autos and suburban tract houses—essential to the prosperity of the working and middle classes they employed and depended on to purchase their products.

But the last successful product of this class, John Kennedy, was elected more than a half century ago, to lead a nation that was ascendant, confident and economically vibrant.

What product or opportunity did Joe Kennedy ever produce for the working and middle classes? Besides bootleg liquor, I mean?

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Jan
24

More barking from the Left

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From Romney’s fellow Northeastern liberal attack dog.

TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie went on full attack-dog mode Sunday, calling Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich an “embarrassment for the party” on national television hours after the former House speaker defeated Mitt Romney in the South Carolina primary.

“I’m not talking about character, I’m talking about how you conducted yourself in office,” Christie said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “Newt Gingrich has embarrassed the party over time — whether he’ll do it again in the future, I don’t know.”

He said the former speaker used his influence in Washington to earn $1.6 million consulting mortgage giant Freddie Mac, and now dresses it up on the campaign trail as the work of a “historian” or “strategic adviser.”

Christie also pointed out that Gingrich was ousted as speaker by his own majority, and accrued a mountain of ethics violations costing $300,000 in fines.

And somewhere, as Christie and other Romneybots parrot the Pelosi line without any reference whatsoever to the facts, Michael Moore is smiling. Not that you’ll hear anything about that from the RINO hypocrites who said the exact same thing about Newt over his Bain attack.

The dig at lobbying, which is not the same thing as consulting, is nice, too. Since lobbying is actually citizens banding together to petition the government for redress, are we now to assume that the RINOs are against this fundamental Constitutional principle too?

Look, I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I like Christie just fine. He’s as good as it will ever get in the Northeast, much as Scott Brown and Romney himself are in their respective states. But that doesn’t change the fact that a decently half-conservative politician who is pretty good in their own liberal cesspool is going to clean up nice for the national stage.

Much more dismaying to me is Coulter’s jumping on this wheezy bandwagon. I really never thought I’d see the day when even she would be attacking another conservative using the diseased thought process of the Left. But somehow, well, here we are. Call it Newt Derangement Syndrome, maybe?

Ann Coulter has been a Romney supporter for a long time, and she’s a brawler; it’s no surprise that she would come away from the SC primary swinging.

What’s unexpected is who she’s targeting. Instead of diligently investigating why Newt won, she has turned her acerbic tongue loose on the electorate instead. The very next morning after the primary, she suggested that republicans have become ‘the mob’ on Fox News, and has implied there and elsewhere that voters are stupid for backing Gingrich just because he can deliver an insult to the MBM. Along with a host of other sarcastic and bitchy slights.

Ann Coulter, November 17, 2004, crowing in victory:

As we wait for CBS to concede the election, Democrats are claiming Kerry lost because Americans are stupid and if there’s one thing voters respond to, it’s crude inasults.

Hm. You don’t say. Well, nobody’s perfect.

You can say that again. But it should be noted: Coulter didn’t say all Americans were stupid. Just them thar stupid hayseed redneck overemotional South Carolina retard hicks. So there’s that. Then she goes on to defend the impartiality and fairness of the liberal media.

No, really. She does.

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m having fun lobbing some of the rhetorical grenades used by the Romneybots back at ‘em. But there’s a more serious concern here, at least for some, and Hawkins expresses it as well as anybody:

With that in mind, this primary has been considerably dirtier and more vicious than it should have been. It’s one thing to go after Barack Obama, but trying to win brutal negative campaigns against your fellow Republicans in a presidential primary is a loser’s game. Maybe, just maybe, you could make a case for it if the race had ended early, but clearly, this fight isn’t going to be over in a week or two. If the sort of vicious attacks we’re seeing from ALL the campaigns and the Super PACs that are supporting them don’t stop, the eventual winner will be considerably weaker versus Barack Obama. We’re already seeing a lot of hard feelings, lingering resentments, and entrenched negative opinions and if these scorched earth campaigns continue on for another few months, it may simply create too much bad will for ANYONE to defeat Barack Obama.

So, with that in mind, I have a simple request: Tone it down.

Actually, I can’t agree with that one. In fact, I seem to recall that the exact same thing was lamented by Court Media propagandists in 2008, when they were all upset about Hillary and the “bruising” slog to the nomination that was inevitably going to leave a weakened Democrat Socialist nominee bloodied, exhausted, and staggering into the general, which of course the propagandists DID. NOT. WANT.

I think we all remember how that worked out in the end.

Let ‘em go right on hammering each other, I say. Whether the nominee is Gingrich or not, it’s just plain delusional to think that none of this will be brought up by the Obama regime and its jackals, and as such the candidates might as well get some practice dealing with it now. In truth, it’s yet another problem with Romney: he isn’t really a fighter himself (kinda hard to be when you have no principles other than “elect me!” to defend), and much prefers to have surrogates and underlings do his dirty work for him (see Christie reference above). Every time Newt or anyone else has hit him with something that might be considered a little rough–or even downright unfair– he’s ended up with that same deer-in-the-headlights look you get from the King when the Royal teleprompter goes down.

In fact, one of Newt’s selling points as far as I’m concerned is the fact that his dirty laundry has been out on the line for a long time now. Like Palin, he’s been about as vetted as it’s possible to be already. He’s faced the DSNC lapdogs of the press already, more so than most, and he’s survived it with at least some credibility intact. You can’t say the same for Romney, or for any other “maverick” Rethugnican–ahem–who has to a certain extent been handled with kid gloves by Antique Media because of their Progressivist tendencies, or their penchant for attacking their fellow Republicans, or whatever.

His lack of preparation and seasoning from having to stand up under the withering Democrat Socialist/Antique Media shitstorm, and the stuttering weakness with which he deals with assaults from his own side, completely undermines the whole Inevitable Electable line for me. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that his inability to cope with such makes him pretty much unelectable, really. Meanwhile, Newt goes right on chewing ‘em up, spitting ‘em out, and asking for seconds, as conservatives stand up and cheer.

Politics ain’t beanbag, as they say. In fact, it’s only just barely civilized at all; it never really has been very polite or genteel, and given what the stakes are in an age of an extra-Constitutional, all-powerful Leviathan state, it probably shouldn’t be. As I said yesterday, I consider Gingrich’s obstreperousness a feature, not a bug. I very much doubt I’m the only one.

Far from being a vote thrown away out of pique or spite without consideration for the chances of removing the King from his usurped throne, it’s my belief that someone as rough and tumble as Gingrich will be the only personality type capable of defeating the villainous swine. Weak as Ogabe looks right now–and we shouldn’t forget that that could very easily change by November–Romney is weaker still. Better to expose that weakness now.

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Jan
24

Two nations divided by a common language

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Can anybody out there make heads or tails of this?

A ‘dull witted person’ is chosen as the referee or ‘jobanowl’ and the two teams decide who flonks first by tossing a sugar beet. The game begins when the jobanowl shouts “Here y’go t’gither!”

The non-flonking team joins hands and dances in a circle around a member of the flonking team, a practice known as ‘girting’. The flonker dips his dwile-tipped ‘driveller’ (a pole 2–3 ft long and made from hazel or yew) into a bucket of beer, then spins around in the opposite direction to the girters and flonks his dwile at them.

If the dwile misses completely it is known as a ‘swadger’ or a ‘swage’. When this happens the flonker must drink the contents of an ale-filled ‘gazunder’ (chamber pot (‘goes-under’ the bed)) before the wet dwile has passed from hand to hand along the line of now non-girting girters chanting the ancient ceremonial mantra of “pot pot pot”.

A full game comprises four ‘snurds’, each snurd being one team taking a turn at girting.

Good lord. All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe.

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Jan
23

Another lesson they’ll never learn

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Seems pretty obvious, too.

There are two ways to win elections. The simplest is to find a way to win the support of the electorate as it exists. But when that’s not possible, a candidate must find a way to change the electorate.

That’s what Gingrich did on Saturday.

If turnout and vote distribution in South Carolina had been consistent with the 2000 and 2008 contests, Gingrich would certainly have fared worse and quite possibly would have lost. Mitt Romney performed well in the wealthier, more moderate counties on the southern seacoast and showed well in the populous counties of the Midlands around the state capital. That coalition was enough for John McCain.

But there were 30,000 more votes cast than in 2000 and 157,000 more than in 2008. And they mostly came in the northern part of the state, in the Appalachian foothills and along the North Carolina border.

To put that in perspective, the total increase in Republican turnout in South Carolina from 2008 was greater than the entire turnout in Iowa this year. While both Iowa and New Hampshire saw only modest increases in Republican participation, South Carolina shattered old records and added a whole extra Iowa’s worth of new voters and gave Gingrich the most votes of any candidate in the state’s history.

That’s more than just Not Romneyism of this cycle.

That’s what happens when you fire up the base, as opposed to demoralizing it by ramming another RINO fraud down their throats. Be sure to read the rest; Stirewalt seems to have it all pretty well figured out.

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Jan
23

The Great Inevitable (Un)Electable

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Walsh dresses Mittens in the funeral suit:

To whom does Romney really appeal? Who are his broken-glass voters? Yes, he seems like a pleasant enough fellow and no one doubts his business or organizational acumen. But he’s hurt himself badly in the debates — and not just, as the new conventional wisdom has it, in S.C., but right from the start. The stammering, the stuttering, the evasiveness, the boilerplate bromides, the rude and annoying way he turns to stare at his fellow debaters when they’re speaking — he’s an empathy-repelling Stepford Candidate; wind him up and he gives pretty much the same performance every time. Whereas Gingrich alone finally figured out that if it’s red meat that’s wanted, you might as well rip chunks of it from the flesh of the unctuous moderators and throw it right at the ravenous studio audience.

None of the usual political allegiances work for Romney. Unlike Santorum, he has no appeal to the working-class white ethnics, many of them Catholic, who used to be Democrats but since have found a home in the GOP. The absurd defense offered by his apologists that venture capitalism is the essence of the American Dream is not likely to sway voters for whom paychecks are earned with sweat, not favorable treatment in the tax code after you’ve made your pile.

Unlike Perry, Romney has no natural appeal in the South — where, no matter what the Constitution says about “no religious test” for office, his Mormonism is still the subject of much sotto voce muttering. His Michigan upbringing notwithstanding, he lacks Bachmann’s midwestern appeal (as well as her accent). Unlike Paul, he’s not a single-issue crazy, who can fire up his troops by waving the Federal Reserve’s bloody shirt. And while the Pennsylvania-born Gingrich is as regionally unanchored as Romney — Newt’s a northerner comfortable among southerners — somehow the former speaker has pulled it off, probably because he doesn’t try to fake it. 

I think maybe that last is the most crucial thing. With Romney, it’s all fakery. Newt might get some things wrong–and certainly has, plenty of them–but I can’t recollect ever doubting his sincerity, at least. As for the Mormon business, the only time I’ve ever heard that brought up was a lone ranting nut on Mark Levin’s show, I think it was. Nobody I know gives a damn either way about it. That aside, this bit, too, is good:

Gingrich is a Civil War buff and he may finally have realized that while he doesn’t yet command the men and materiel that Grant had, being General Meade, the man who defeated Lee at Gettysburg and thus changed the course of the war, will be good enough for now.  

So if Gingrich wins the nomination, can he beat Obama? The smart money says no, but you’d expect a poll-obsessed, racing-form consulting collection of media eunuchs to say that. (Heads have been rotating on MSNBC the past 48 hours as the metrosexual chatterers try to unearth the secret of Gingrich’s belligerent appeal, unable to wrap their minds around the fact that it’s the very belligerence that’s the appeal.) 

The dumb money, however, says…maybe. In a fight between a puncher and boxer, between Grant and Lee, the boxer may sing and dance for round after round, but if the puncher ever catches up to him, it’s lights out. Gingrich’s genius in going after the media is that he knows they are Obama’s Praetorian Guard and shock troops rolled into one. If he can take them out — by making them look as ridiculous as they really are and thus stripping them of their pompous, bogus “morality” — he can sweep up the midwest, roll up the South, and very likely force the surrender in the same place Grant cornered Lee: the swing state of Virginia.

Or he could just blow up again and go down for the third time. 

He could. But at least we know he’ll go down swinging, rather than sucking eggs.

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Jan
23

Response to a jackass

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Don’t know where Ace got this petulant whine, but he shoulda left it where it was.

I’d also like to thank Rick Perry, who was actually one of the most conservative candidates. Thank you, Rick, for having the nomination handed to you on a silver platter and then eating said platter because you’re a fucking moron. And, once again, thanks again to Romney’s BFF, Michelle Bachmann, and the True Conservative cohort. Why would we want a candidate who is weak on immigration when we could have a candidate who is weak on absolutely everything? I know, crazy right?

Now we’ve got a race between Romney and Gingrich, two sure winners. Obama is as weak as an incumbent can be, and I have full faith in the ability of the GOP to take him down.

Oh, and I can’t actually bring myself to thank all the twits who say that they’ll never vote for Romney, even in the general. I want to give you all a special go to hell from the depths of my soul. You’re worse than a Democrat. At least the Democrat voter naively believes that another Obama term is in the country’s best interest. You know damn well what 4 more years of Obama mean and you’ll let it happen our of petulance and pride. Yes, I’m sure we’ll get the second coming of Reagan in 2016 to make up for it. That worked so well in 2008, didn’t it? Idiots.

Go piss up a rope, pal. You may be fine with continuing to vote for any old closet liberal the GOP establishment crams up your ass in hopes that he might somehow miraculously turn up in DC and govern like a conservative–which, why would he? And why would the GOP establishment ever bother to get behind a real conservative and push hard the way they have for Mittens? They already know they own your vote no matter what, so why should they do anything but keep trotting out their tired stable of Dole McRomneys for an easy-lay sucker like you?–but I’m all done voting for liberals myself, and I don’t give a good goddamn whether they have an “R” after their name or not.

“Worse than a Democrat”? Anyone willing to whore their vote out to yet another liberal fraud in GOP’s clothing so easily might as well fucking BE a Democrat, because you’re enabling them just as surely as any Pelosi or Reid voter out there ever has. Without applying pressure to the RINOs and openly supporting people who espouse and promote Constitutional conservatism, refusing to swallow the empty suits they roll out each and every campaign season with the usual demand that we all shut up and unite behind them, the constant Leftward drift is going to continue. That being the case, it matters not a whit to me whether the guy at the top of the goatfuck has an “R” or a “D” after his name in the newspapers; I’d rather spend my time and effort on more effective ways of dealing with the deteriorating situation, not all of which are suitable for mention in public places…or on this blog.

But you go right on expecting something different as you continue with business as usual, smart guy. My loyalty isn’t to the GOP; as I’ve noted here many times, I’m not a registered Republican and never have been, nor is it likely I ever will be, even though that’s where most of my sympathies lie. Most; not all. People like you are always bleating about the horror of pissing off the “independent” vote by running a firebrand like Gingrich–well, here one sits, jackass, and I’m way more offended by a shrill, whining dope like you than I ever will be by someone like Gingrich. Now go ahead and lecture me some more on who this “idiot” better get in line and vote for or else, whydon’thca.

Failing that, kiss my ass, Peaches, from now til election day.

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Jan
23

Buck: passed

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Allah, if it be thy will, take this cup from poor old Barky.

The unemployment rate when Mr. Obama was elected was 6.8 percent; today it is 8.5 percent — at least that’s the official number. In reality, the Financial Times writes, “if the same number of people were seeking work today as in 2007, the jobless rate would be 11 percent.”

Regular gasoline per gallon cost $1.68 in January 2009. Today, it’s $3.39 — that’s a 102 percent increase in just three years. (By the way, if you’re keeping score at home, gas was $1.40 a gallon when George W. Bush took office in 2001, $1.68 when he left office — a 20 percent increase.)

Electricity bills have also skyrocketed, with households now paying a record $1,420 annually on average, up some $300.

Since December 2008, a month before Mr. Obama took office, food-stamp use has increased 46 percent. Total spending has more than doubled in just four years to a record high of $75 billion. In 2011, more than 46 million people — about one in seven Americans — got food stamps. That’s 14 million more than when Mr. Obama took office.

Median household income has dropped nearly 7 percent in the last six years, taking inflation into account. What’s more, nearly 20 percent of males age 25 to 34 now live with their parents.

On the macro side, America’s annual budget has jumped to $3.8 trillion — and yet the United States brings in only about $2.1 trillion in revenue. The U.S. trade deficit for 2011 was $558 billion. America’s total public debt stands at $15.23 trillion; in January 2009, the debt was $10.62 trillion. Mr. Obama is on pace to borrow $6.2 trillion in just one term — more debt than was amassed by all presidents from Washington through Bill Clinton combined. The debt is rising by $4.2 billion every day — $175 million per hour, nearly $3 million per minute.

So, America, that is the State of Your Union. But remember, Mr. Obama had not one thing to do with it.

No wonder the blockheads scream “RACIST!” any time this stuff is brought up. It’s all they got.

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Jan
23

We don’t give a DAMN how y’all do it up North

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A fun rip in defense of Paula Deen:

From food to faith, the mythic Dixie–soulful and abundant, passionate and insubmissive–has always clashed with the rigidly cosmopolitan north, which keeps an ever watchful eye on we, her unlearned, drawling wards.

Yet the northern perspective of the South amounts to little more than a crude distillation of the most specious of stereotypes, the uncouth yang to their cultured yin. Reserving unparalleled contempt for the region’s myths and manners, fundamental to northern exceptionalism is the notion of southern inadequacy.

The impulse for Bourdain to shepherd Deen and her flock, ignorant and fat the whole bunch, is driven by the presumption that inherent in the southern experience is something so harmful to the social accretion of our great union that it must be contained at all costs. God! Guns! Grease!

Southerners know that a steady diet of bacon-wrapped doughnuts and fried butter will induce various and sundry health complications just as sure as we know not to emulate Bourdain’s once-serious drug habit. But if forced to choose a lesser vice, we would probably settle on the legal one.

Actually, some of us will settle only for both–and anything and everything else we can get, too. Then again, some of us are out there scratching our heads and wondering how we managed to get so old after years of “live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse.”

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Jan
23

Words you’ll never hear

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From the RINO establishment: “It is time now for all of us to put aside our differences and unite behind the candidate the voters have chosen as the clear frontrunner.” Also: “This spurious and vicious attack by a desperate loser is unconscionable, strikes at the heart of American values, and plays into the hands of the Left by handing them an issue to bludgeon the GOP nominee with, one that is based not on fact but on smear, innuendo, and outright falsehood.”

But hey, it’s okay when Mittens does it, eh, RINOs?

In an exclusive with Larry O’Connor earlier today, Governor John H. Sununu called on Newt Gingrich to release the records pertaining to a 1990s congressional ethics investigation, in a move to defray attention to Romney’s decision not to release his taxes.

The ethics report on Newt Gingrich is publicly available, but has been construed as politically motivated. The alleged violations concerned a course that Gingrich taught at Kennesaw State College while serving in Congress. The course’s promoters received  financial support from “individuals, corporations and foundations,” promising that the project qualified for tax-exempt status. The ethics committee ultimately concluded that the course was “actually a coordinated effort” to “help in achieving a partisan, political goal” — something that would run afoul of its tax-exempt status.

And yet, when the IRS looked into those accusations in a three-year investigation, it found that the donations to Gingrich’s charity were “consistent with its stated exempt purposes,” and Gingrich’s course and course book “were educational in content,” according to The Washington Post in 1999.  By then, Gingrich had left office, preferring retirement to a fight over leadership.

Gingrich adamantly denied violating the law, but ultimately agreed to pay a $300,000 fine for making misleading statements to the ethics committee.

It appears that Gingrich was fined, mostly for political cover to the Republicans. The IRS declared that Gingrich’s course ”was educational and never favored or opposed a candidate for public office.”

Still it’s curious as to why Romney’s surrogates are making this an issue, and why Governor John Sununu, especially, is making a big deal of it.

Not really. Romney is an oily bastard who will do absolutely anything to get nominated for the office he’s spent so many years lusting after and unsuccessfully running for, that’s all. Watch for this perennial loser to get even dirtier, using any ammunition he can have his well-paid minions grub up, now that he’s back on track to fall short yet again.

(Via Ross)

Update! Jacobson says it: “Mitt Romney sides with Nancy Pelosi.” And then there’s this:

The judgment is in. After three and a half years of investigation, the IRS has cleared Newt Gingrich and his allied nonprofit groups of any violation of the tax laws in the controversy over his television history course “Renewing American Civilization.”

So after having run countless news reports highlighting the accusations that ultimately forced Gingrich to pay a $300,000 fine, did the media correct the record with a decent airing of the decision? Are you ready? ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted exactly zero seconds to Newt Gingrich’s vindication. Only CNN’s Brooks Jackson filed a decent TV report, on the early-evening show “Inside Politics.”

And now Romney’s trying to use it in the throes of his desperation. That article is from 1999, and Bozell is still waiting for a correction. He’ll never get it, any more than we’ll ever see any proper contrition from the Mittbots–who whined so piteously over Gingrich’s supposed “attack on capitalism”–over their boy’s adoption of Lefty smear tactics in his unswerving quest for the office he so greedily covets.

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Jan
23

Autos for assholes

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Ross has an excellent list of ‘em, including:

7. Buick LeSabre
You’re stuck behind a car that is signaling right, but won’t move. You’re following a car going 20 in a 35. You’re shouting at the car in front of you, which refuses to turn right on red, despite the fact that there isn’t another car in sight. You are behind a 2004 Buick LeSabre driven by a person old enough to have known Ulysses S. Grant.

A good list all around, but I woulda found room on it for the Corvette. In fact, I was behind one the other day with the vanity license plate “URLookin,” driven by a nondescript, middle-aged, fat slob with a scruffy half-a-beard and a wispy mullet sprouting from various places on his mostly bald head. I was lookin’, all right, but not for the reasons he thought. And I already knew well enough just what I was going to see. You almost always do with those damned things. They’re like jerk magnets, although naturally there are exceptions here and there (a very close friend of mine being one of ‘em), and I do like some of the older ones myself.

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Jan
23

NRO loses big

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Some clear-eyed analysis from, of all places, NRO, which has been in full weeping-wailing-gnashing of teeth mode over Gingrich’s trouncing of their own Golden Idol:

Conservatives not only resent the liberal media for trying to pick the Republican nominee (n.b. the media prefer Romney) but they also resent Republican politicians who, once elected, spend their careers appeasing the media while abandoning conservative principles (n.b. the supine leadership of the Republican party in the House of Representatives). Conservatives want a president whose attitude toward the media matches the attitude Gingrich has shown in recent debates. A president with that kind of attitude, they hope, might actually govern as a conservative.

There are now three viable candidates — Rick Santorum, who won Iowa; Romney, who won New Hampshire; and Gingrich, who won South Carolina — in what could be a protracted Republican primary battle. The eventual winner may be the candidate who best persuades voters he will stand for conservative principles while standing against the establishment media.

Bingo. NOW you’re getting it. I would only add that, number one, not only do we resent the liberal media for etc etc–we resent the supposedly conservative media for doing its level best to cram a non-conservative down our throats yet again, because the conservative message is just too scary or offensive or something to ever actually be presented without shame, without reservation, without equivocation, and without being throttled back to something more palatable to liberals. And number two, the eventual winner, in a party that putatively represents conservatives, not only “may be the candidate who best persuades voters he will stand for conservative principles while standing against the establishment media” — he damned well ought to be.

I do still love NRO. There are several really fine writers there, and they have done much over the years to keep a sometimes flickering flame burning. But too many of the folks over there jumped in with both feet for Romney-claiming him to be “inevitable” based on always-unreliable polls and not much else–and in so doing, they have completely missed a boat they should have been on all along here.

Mitt wasn’t the guy last time around; given the conservative/classical liberal groundswell inspired by fear and loathing of our first nakedly socialist “president,” he was never going to be the guy this time, and the good folks at NRO should have known it. As I said to Jeff G in an e-mail exchange the other day: now do we get to demand that they suck it up, act like grown ups, and hold their noses to vote for the inevitable, electable candidate they don’t really like much? I won’t hold my breath, but I will present another Corner post:

It’s a long way to Tipperary and it will be a long way to the GOP nomination. But whatever the outcome, Newt Gingrich has infused the Republican campaign with energy and an excitement not seen since Ronald Reagan ran for president. Talk about energizing the base! For several elections now, Republicans have had to accept what the establishment forced down their throat. There was John McCain the last time around, who told his staff not to criticize Barack Obama. There was Bob Dole, a war hero, but a horrible campaigner who was such a Washington insider one could wonder whether he could find his way out of town without a driver to take him. There is no question that a Gingrich–Obama debate would be the political equivalent of a Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier prize fight known as “The Thrilla in Manila.” Both Bushes are decent men, but neither could rally and inspire the way Gingrich can. His criticism of the media resonates with the base.

It’s more than just that, of course. His very cantankerousness, derided by establishment types as a liability, is actually an asset. Those busy struggling to “get along” with the Progressivist juggernaut don’t get it, but the truth is, real Americans have been waiting a long time now for a warrior, a fighter. We’re not shying away from the battle; we’re aware that it is sorely necessary, and almost too late for it to be successfully joined. We’re not put off by someone eager to lock horns with the people who hold the Founders and their ideas in all-too-obvious contempt; THAT IS WHAT WE WANT. Dan Riehl endorses Gingrich thusly:

Say what you want about Gingrich, one can look at his record and see someone who actually was once involved in some serious reform of the right kind in Washington. I watched the debate last night and all the others, sorry, but Santorum does not impress in this regard. I’m sure he’s a fine man and I have resisted criticizing him, but that dog won’t hunt, most especially in any general election. So, get over it.

Conservatives now have but one horse to ride; otherwise, you may as well saddle up with Mitt and head off into the sunset with whatever you think is a genuine form of conservatism. Romney is not going to expend one iota of political capital selling it, or fighting for it, because he doesn’t believe in it. He is as elitist and out of touch with the working class that empowers Reagan conservatism as is Obama. And he’s damn near as progressive in terms of government being the answer to everything, as long as he’s the one who gets to make the decisions. That’s not conservativism. It’s bullshit.

Sure enough. And one more from one of the smarter guys at NRO, Mike Walsh:

What counts is passion. The 2010 midterms proved that, but the GOP bonzes seemed embarrassed by the Tea Party’s success. They pushed the “electable” and “inevitable” memes as hard as they could in the service of a milquetoast candidate, and the mainstream media, openly rooting for the other side, was only too happy to help them out. As I’ve been saying, Romney’s been the candidate the Democrats have wanted to face all along, in part because of his glass ceiling. Which is turning out to be a glass jaw.

So Romney has simply got to come up with a more cogent rationale for his candidacy than he has up to now if he has any hope of becoming president. He can’t run for CEO any more.

That Bennett propaganda film may not have been entirely accurate but — and this is the point – it obviously worked. It also clearly disarmed Romney and left him with his guard down when the knockout punch — his taxes — came along. It was obvious all along that his reluctance to release his taxes was based on the fact that he pays capital gains on his income, not “income taxes.” That’s clearly defensible and entirely legal — but the electorate is in no mood for a lecture on the distinction, and it’s terrible in the current political environment.

In an ideal world, Romney would be a strong candidate. But it’s not an ideal world. In fact, it’s a downright mean, nasty, grubby world of imperfect men struggling to confront serious historical and philosophical forces while battling each other for power and prestige. Segments on the right have not entirely digested the notion that Obama and his party are running on a platform of contempt for America and “fundamental change” for the future; it’s like they think the Dems don’t really mean it. And that taking the high road by confining the campaign to “jobs” will appeal to the “real” America somewhere out there in the heartland. And that playing rough is beneath us.

Newt played rough in South Carolina and won big. That ought to tell the GOP something. Whether it will is another story.

Actually, in an ideal world, Mitt would be running as a Democrat Socialist, and that party would still represent a truly loyal opposition rather than becoming the criminal conspiracy that it now is: a veritable Star Wars galactic cantina of a polyglot rabble of Leftist ideologues: disgruntled malcontents and freeloaders; bitterly-clinging Marxists and other deluded, unhinged Utopians; neo-Luddite environmentalists who wish not only to destroy America and capitalism but every vestige of civilization; people whose obsession with fringe sexuality and/or abortion trumps every other issue in public life; and seditious, America-hating would-be tyrants of every warp and woof.

We’re a long, long way from anything that could even jokingly be called an ideal world. So you can be assured that the dead-ender power elite in the Republican Statist Party won’t learn a damned thing, any more than they did from the Tea Party Rebellion in 2010. As Bill says:

Oh, and hey – the Tea Parties are dead, right? And Florida is much less conservative than South Carolina.

Keep telling yourself that, guys. In the meantime, we’re going ahead without you. Which is, I know, what really bothers you the most. Because it’s not just that Mittens Romneycare has lost his air of inevitability. It’s also that you’ve lost your air of omniscience and omnipotence. Why, if the people can just elect whoever they feel like, then they don’t really need you at all, do they?

And Lord knows we can’t have that.

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