Wall Street Abandons Obama; the GOP Will Shift Accordingly

If this is true:

JP Morgan honcho Jamie Dimon, once a “fat cat” ally of President Obama, seems to have strayed to Republican contender Mitt Romney.
Dimon, a lifelong Democrat who was rumored to be on Obama’s short list for treasury secretary before he settled on Tim Geithner, met privately with Romney on Tuesday morning before a fund-raiser at Brasserie 8¹/2 hosted by Highbridge Capital, a JPMorgan-owned hedge fund.

 ...then the tide of independents and centrists are going to benefit Romney. People tend to view him as the most moderate of the real contenders for the Republican nomination. Which is a problem, as most of us deep-red radical-right-wing teabagging bitterclinging RAAAAACISTS view Romney as an economic heretic at best or a RINO at worst.

So who does that benefit? Herman Cain, fresh of his upset in the Florida straw poll. If centrists and bankers flood to Romney, then the GOP establishment has its Candidate of Gravitas and Experience. Which means the winguts and libertarians are going to need someone of minted outsider status who's demonstrated the capacity to win something. We thought Rick Perry was going to be that guy; so far he's shot himself in the foot and then shoved that foot in his mouth. Bachmann blew herself up going after Perry. Gingrich seems to be running for a Cabinet job (which he'd be good at).

That leaves Hermann Cain. For a guy whose candidacy has been declared dead to jump ahead in the polls as he has means a significant shift. It also means that the Tea Party vote is not bound up and sold to Sarah Palin. It also means that this race has just begun.

BTW, Chris Christie isn't going to run for President unless Obama wins. He's nowhere near dumb enough to think that he's conservative enough to satisfy the nationwide GOP base. He might be amenable to be someone's running mate, but that's it.

Sarah Palin's not running either. How do I know? Because she's not running. Her hesitancy speaks volumes about her own assessment of her own chances. Deep down, I don't think she really wants to run.  The dust storm kicked up by 2008 has cast her family into chaos and her out of a job. And that was as a Vice-Presidential candidate. She knows the real thing would be worse.

Flat-Out Moronic: The Intellectual Pretensions of the Sub-Literati

Galileo was not brought before the Inquisition for saying that the earth goes around the sun. I'm going to repeat that in large font:

Galileo was not brought before the Inquisition for saying that the Earth goes around the Sun.


The Church punished Galileo for an error of theology: for stating that the observations of the eye were superior to the Revelations of Scripture. Also, for claiming that heliocentrism had been proven true when it had not, and mocking others who argued the contrary (including the Pope of the time) in print. His offense was relatively minor and possibly unintentional, so his punishment was light. But you cannot claim to be historically literate on the subject if you insist on repeating the old farcical lie.

And if you do so while mocking others for essentially, knowing more than you do, then you're claim of literacy is driven down to Kindergarten levels reserved for people who thought that the Boston Tea Party was in 1776.

Thieves, Liars, Whores, Swine and Gilded Fools: A Four-Letter Dissertation on Politics

August is traditionally the time of vacation, down time, relaxing. I need such most greatly, for a variety of personal reasons. So this post may be considered my declaration of farewells, for the nonce. I've learned that for me, blogging is a cyclical activity.

But first, it is time to take stock of the inanity which has prevailed before us, of the Debt-to-GDP ratio hitting 1-to1, of the thousand manifold bottles of snake-oil that the New Class has sold us. Walter Russel Meade has a fine dissertation on "The Progressive Crisis" (h/t: Ace), which the usual suspects of the droit-osphere have linked approvingly to. He correctly points out what Ayn Rand pointed out 60 years ago: that there is an unspoken will-to-power in the Progressive Movement. Our Saviors are as corrupt and wicked as the rest of us, and the people know it.

Barack Obama is full of shit. Harry Reid is full of shit. Nancy Pelosi is so full of shit she could fertilize Death Valley. Now, as it happens, being full of shit goes with the territory of politics, because politics is shit. Hunter Thompson, who had a Ph.D in Being Full of Shit, nevertheless once wrote something in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas about the profession of journalism that I quote approvingly:

Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits -- a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo cage.

But a few shifts in nomenclature and metaphor would suffice to make this an utterly apt description of politics. Politics is a bunch of glad-handling buffoons, flannel-mouthed ward bosses, and dipshit crusaders. There's but a few of any rank anywhere in the City of Washington that the country would miss if they all spontaneously combusted tomorrow.

This is not a matter of replacing one group of swine with another. I still haven't decided whether John Boehner is full of shit yet (odds are, yes). The nature of the activity is inherently corruptive. To rule others, one can adopt one of two strategies: letting the traditions of your people guide your every action, or attacking every vested interest not on board with your self-aggrandizing agenda. The first is mere office-holding, the second is tyranny. Progressives of every stripe keep declaiming that they have found the Third Way, and more bodies have been littered in that fruitless Grail-Quest than frozen ships seeking the Northwest Passage. It is a fantasy: nothing more than tyranny in a velvet glove. Politics is shit. Inhale deeply.

And that is why I could never muster the anger at someone like Charlie Rangel or Robert Byrd. Rangel is a thief, and a racist thief at that. But I suspect that, in some deep-down, cameras-off world that neither you nor I will ever see, the son of a bitch knows he's a thief, and justifies his thievery on the same grounds that I have offered: he must swim in the same seas as everyone else. That he's a fat little fishy in a sea of shit does not change the odeur of the water one jot.

So sure, catch the fat little fishy if you wish, mount him to the wall. Send his ample ass to jail: why not? That oily bastard lives by our sufferance, which we the people, in our limited wisdom but unlimited sovereignty, can withdraw at any time we see fit. Just you remember: there are plenty of fish in the shitty sea.

No, I have no animus for the Rangles and Byrds of the world of politics. Thieves are thieves, and eventually they end up robbing themselves. I reserve my true hate for the ones who claim not to hunger for graft or power but for a Square Deal for all Americans, the ones who claim that it is time to put politics aside and do the People's Will. Proggies have been shilling that line for a century, and it's the biggest pile of dinosaur shit there is.

The People don't have One Will; that Rousseauist fantasy builds nothing but guillotines. The People are a multiverse of conflicting dreams, desires, and ideology. They have no Main Line from which silken-voiced princes with first-rate temperaments can eternally suckle. 40% of them hate Democrats, 40% hate Republicans, and the rest would rather everyone just play nice. You cannot claim a Mandate to do whatever the hell you please on the basis of winning 51% of such an electorate. It is a house built on quicksand.

The People's Will is a fantasy, and I hope that Obama knows it. Bill Clinton did. That man was as gifted a liar as politics has seen in a while, but he was a better whore. And whores know that it doesn't matter what the john wants if you get extra for the service. So if the john wanted to hear that The Era of Big Government was Over, then Billi would make that sound pretty coming out of his mouth. He knew the tricks; he knew the game; the People (or 60% of them) loved him.

Right now, 50% of the People are fucking sick of Obama, of his fecklessness, his emptiness, his inability to handle one thing with anything approaching success. What the Sam Hell are we doing in Libya? Who the hell knows? Who's in charge? What the hominy fuck happened with ObamaCare? Did Obama even read an executive summary of it? And precisely what about trillion-dollar deficits does this simple bastard love so much?

The worst of all politicians, worse than Thieves, Liars, Whores, or other Associated Swine, are the Gilded Fools: the Bobble-heads, the ra-ra true-believing priests of the Progressive Leviathan. Fools there are aplenty in Washington, and every state house and city hall for that matter. Dennis Kucinich is one such, as is John Edwards (Sarah Palin might be, as well). But these are more or less harmless, as they quickly up-jump their place and show their true motely colors. But sometimes, press or party takes a Fool and Gilds him, makes him shine brighter than the Sunne in Splendour, and the 20% that just wants everyone to play nice will swoon like a 12-year-old at a Justin Bieber concert (In Edwards' case, the gilding did not work, perhaps because a gelding was more in need). By such precise means did a junior senator with no executive experience and a middling legislative experience parlay a MLK-timbered voice into the highest office in the land. The story was too good. We just had to believe that he knew what the hell he was doing.



And now we sit, with a government broke and broken, about to fundamentally disprove Hamilton's postulate that a national debt could be a national treasure (or for those who know the context of that remark, fundamentally prove it). And we are shocked, shocked I say, that the warring tribes cannot negotiate with one another. We can't believe that there's actually a dimes worth of difference between the two.

Well, there is. The GOP has no shortage of Thieves, Liars, Whores, and Swine. Duke Cunningham was a Thief; Gingrich was a Liar, and the Maine Sisters (Snowe and Dukakis) consistently sell their virtue to whatever trawler comes by. But the GOP doesn't get to Gild many Fools, because the gang of fuckoffs and misfits don't usually let them. The rest may or may not actually mean what they say about shrinking the size of government.

Yet even Swine can find a truffle, and the gang of elephants has stumbled upon the reality that eludes the current Gilded Fool: We cannot afford the size of the government we currently have. Not even if we expropriate the wealth of the nation can we afford it. You can only loot Microsoft once. It won't be there to feed the current services baseline next year.

Robert Stacy McCain has a succinct phase for this reality: The State is not God. Get over it. The State can't do everything or satisfy everything. It has limits intrinsic to its nature, which are thievery, force, and lies. You can accomplish much with thievery, force, and lies. But you cannot uplift the human spirit with them. They do not nurture the true and good. They will not succor the middle class, or any other class. They will work only until there is nothing left to steal, no force left untried, and no lie still believed.

And on that note, I take my leave. I will leave Revolutionary Nonsense fallow for a few weeks, but will return by Labor Day at the latest. Enjoy the the Dog-Days.

Sarah Palin: Inching Closer to the White House, One Media Attack at a Time

It's getting so bad, even Ashton Kutcher has had enough.

Now some of this is due to the fact that Kutcher is a celebrity and has, at best, an ambiguous relationship with the media: he needs them and despises them at the same time. But we all have our tipping points. How long before the relentless determination to unmask this woman makes her candidacy an inevitability?

Krauthammer and Will Earn the Animus of Other McCain's Commenters

They are snobs, elitists, slide-rule minds in a Twitter world. And why?

They don't much care for Sarah Palin.

I'm not going to be impressed with Palin until her defenders can do something other than wave the bloody shirt like they were defending Acre from Saladin. If she is in fact, good enough, smart enough to be President, how's about forwarding some evidence to underscore that assertion?

Or you know, just keep doing this.
Worked like gangbusters for Christine O'Donnell.

Palin's Hokey-Pokey

I've never quite bought the premise that Sarah Palin is best suited to "that space between celebrity and conservative rabble-rouser." Her fame comes entirely from being a politician martyred by the Right's bete noire, the MSM. At some point, she's going to have to put her whole self into the Presidential Race, or her whole self out. If she chooses the latter, the spotlight's glare will finally turn away from her.

Wonkette, Snarking Sarah Palin Right into the Oval Office

Instapundit is wrong. Wonkette's Trig Palin-flameout has nothing whatever to do with the lack of Ana Marie Cox's steadying hand. It's always been exactly that lame:

Her blog is fun for a day or two until you realize that she doesn't have anything to say. It's all schoolgirl giggling and taking joy in the word "tits." Nothing wrong with that in small doses, but absent anything of greater substance it becomes as interesting as bathroom stall graffiti; if one didn't know otherwise, one would swear it was scripted. I can't be the only one who made the "how appropriate" eye-roll when I discovered that her last name was Cox.

Steven Crowder, on the other hand, is right on the money (h/t: Hot Air):



It's actually kind of annoying to have to constantly defend this woman, by which I mean constantly object to the tasteless, spittle-flecked rage with which progressives berate her. And if you imbeciles keep it up, you're going to unite the GOP behind her, and possibly enough independents (who most object to politics when it gets tasteless and dirty) to retire Emperor Golden Dancer to the lecture circuit early.

Don't say you weren't warned.

Palinoia is Bush Derangement Syndrome in a Skirt

Losing your mind over Sarah Palin has it's own cute name: Palinoia.  I won't take Taranto's argument and run with it, the way Robert McCain does, because I'm not that devoted to the vigorous thwacking of contraception. Rather, I found the key quote in Taranto's column early on:

They resent her because, in their view, she has risen above her station.

Sarah Palin is a state-college grad, and state-college grads aren't supposed to eke out Ivy-Leaguers for the top spot on the greasy pole of politics. She's the American equivalent of what Roman patricians called a homo novus, a New Man, one whos family had never had a consul before. Thus a good deal of the "she's a moron," is more or less the same as calling Gaius Marius an Italian hayseed with no Greek.

I do not mean to say that Sarah Palin is as accomplished as Gaius Marius. As I've said before, I have my doubts about her aptitude for the presidency. But snobbery is snobbery, and we've seen this before:

There are many among our political and media elite, and among those on the coasts who are in their zone of influence, who simply cannot believe that a born-again Christian from Texas can ever be right about anything, ever. Decades (centuries?) of internalized bigotry of urbanites against provincials, of secular humanists against unsophisticated believers, does not vanish overnight, not even in the face of an act of war, not when the same group has drank deep of the waters of Wilsonian collective security and refuses to believe that their enemy is their enemy because he wants to be so.

In short, George W. Bush has been despised since long before the Iraq War, because he is the living embodiment of Those People, and the habit of the American media and political establishment has for some time been to mock Those People as cruel, stupid, and dangerous.

The oldest kind of elitism in the world is the only kind that our ruling class celebrates.

UPDATE: In light of this post at Classical Values, I should point out where exactly my doubts on Palin spring from.

To start with, they aren't properly "doubts." That implies a bias toward thinking Palin is not competent to be President. Really, my problem with her is that there's been so much dust kicked up about her, that it's hard to discern the true person underneath. At the moment she was tapped to be Vice President, I liked everything I heard about her. Her speech at the convention was good (not great, but better than McCain's). After that, she entered the Media Circus and to date, hasn't come out. Almost everything about her is now part of the ongoing drama of her against her assailants. All of which I find a distraction to determining whether she really can handle the presidency.

If she steps up in the campaign, and takes the heat, and demonstrates her acumen, then I'll give her a vote. If not, there are others.

Old and Busted: Sarah Palin Made Loughner Shoot People

New Hotness: Zeitgeist, which is anti-semetic and right-wing, made Loughner Shoot People

You have to ignore a LOT to make Zeitgeist a Republican film. You also have to ignore a lot to make it a Democratic one. Mainstream American politics -- of which, like her or not, Sarah Palin is a member -- has as little to do with this sort of vision-dreaming. These people aren't on the political fringe. They aren't even cranks. They're nothing, detritus, the equivalent of the tinfoil they doubtless wrap around their heads to avoid the CIA mind control.

Kooks. Jared Loughner was a kook. And kooks do kooky things.

The Left likes to portray Tea Partiers as kooks, for the same reason that Federalists called Thomas Jefferson the Anti-Christ: for rhetorical purposes, an entirely cynical exercise in fear-mongering. And if I wanted to stretch it, I could make a comparison between that and the fear-mongering of Zeitgeist. But I'm not going to do that, because there's a world of difference between "You guys are lunatics!" and "the Federal Reserve is poisoning the wells, the Bilderbergers are unwittingly causing us to bow down to the Beast, Jesus is the Devil!!!eleventy!!!" Cynicism does many things, but it does not willfully deny reality.

Sarah Palin is Absolutely Right

I don't care about Sarah Palin. I saw very little of her in the 2008 campaign that really impressed me. By the same token, it doesn't take much subtelty to see that the response to her from the Left is preposterously out of proportion to her actual deeds. Like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, she seems to evoke a particular deranged fury from those who consider themselves our credentialed elite.

For both of these reasons, I hope she doesn't win the 2012 GOP nomination, and don't plan on voting for her to get it. To my mind, better candidates can be found, and if she does win, then the election will become a referendum on her media image, rather than anything about the issues or her ability to grapple with them.

That said, her response to the Gifford hysteria is absolutely dead on:

There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal. And they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently. But when was it less heated? Back in those “calm days” when political figures literally settled their differences with dueling pistols? In an ideal world all discourse would be civil and all disagreements cordial. But our Founding Fathers knew they weren’t designing a system for perfect men and women. If men and women were angels, there would be no need for government. Our Founders’ genius was to design a system that helped settle the inevitable conflicts caused by our imperfect passions in civil ways. So, we must condemn violence if our Republic is to endure.

One of the mushy middle's more tedious fallacies constantly refrains that our politics are so loud and obnoxious now, and getting worse. The demonstrable falseness of this belief doesn't stop them from holding it. So-called "moderates" and "centrists" believe it because they don't know anything about politics or history, and they don't know anything about politics or history because they find it distasteful.

Politics has never been nice. History has never been nice. Lament this if you will, take pains to curtail it if you must. But don't pretend that we're seeing anything new. Humanity makes innovations on this front but rarely.

Feminism for Me, But Not for Thee

Classical Values, noting the absence of the rather obvious sexism narrative:

When I said this:

If we suppose that Loughner's victim had been black or hispanic, I think there would be a pretty loud chorus on the left that the racist motivation for the shooting was obvious. Similarly, had Barney Frank been shot, there would have been immediate cries of homophobia. 

I should have noted that it would not be true if the black, hispanic or gay victim happened to be on the right side of the political spectrum. Thus, if, say, Clarence Thomas or Alberto Gonzales were assassinated (especially by leftist gunmen), they would not be seen as victims of racism. Similarly, when Pim Fortuyn was assassinated by an anarcho-primitivist nut, this was not condemned as homophobic by the PC classes.

It is a basic law of identity politics that such identities are conditioned upon being on the left. Which is another reason that no indignity heaped on Sarah Palin can ever be condemned as sexist.

Read the whole thing.

Right-Wing Rhetoric is So Violent, and Man Do I Wanna Slap Sarah Palin!

Via Carthago Delenda Est, another example of great lengths to which the left is willing to go to improve the tone of our national discourse, to calm the raging waters of our rhetorical madness.

The blogger (who is not the cartoonist) responds to objections thusly:

Now look at the first few comments there. It's people complaining that the cartoon is in bad taste! Good grief, have you people ever actually listened to Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage or looked at Sarah Palin's campaign strategy? I say again, madness.

See? All you have to do is look at them, and you know that they are scum who deserve nothing. And are way too angry all the time. It's so frightening!