"When You Put Your Head in the Sand, Your Ass Becomes a Target"

Ladd Ehlinger reminds the California GOP that politics is a full-contact sport, and should be played accordingly:

Does your opponent live outside of the district and can't even vote for him or herself? Does your opponent have problems with a previous divorce? Does your opponent have a problem with coddling gangmembers?
Pound them with it! Pound them!
SCREW this meme that says "we should have positive campaigning only." You know who wants to have a positive campaign at all costs? Losers -- and YOUR OPPONENT!
There is no such thing as a positive winning campaign - because, unfortunately, it's "negative" to point out your opponent's many flaws. It's especially upsetting to your opponent. But highlight these flaws you must! Otherwise, no one will know that your opponent got rapists and murderers out of jail to rape and kill again!

Read the Whole Thing. I should mail a copy to the Maryland GOP.

Religion is Bad. When Republicans Do It.

Via Other McCain, Ian Stanley of the Telegraph lays down the persistent media double-standard:

Harry Reid, leader of the Senate Democrats, is a Mormon. Many readers probably won’t know that because the mainstream media oddly doesn’t talk about it. It’s okay to call Mitt Romney a polytheist with twelve wives, but Reid is untouchable because he’s a Democrat. And yet it’s reasonable to theorise that the leader of the Senate wears the magic underwear associated with Mormonism. Is his belief that Jesus walked on American soil, anti-science? Geographers and historians would probably object.
Democratic presidential candidates regularly visit black churches, Nancy Pelosi has invoked her Catholicism so many times you might think she was a nun, and Barack Obama was married by a pastor who actively hates America. Yet Krugman suggests that only the GOP uses and abuses religion every election. More sickening is the innuendo that there is a uniquely violent subtext to conservative faith, as if every Right-winger wants to shoot an abortionist. There is no comparison between fundamentalist Islam and Dominionism: one kills and the other doesn’t. The conflation of the two is ugly and deceitful.

It gets awfully damn tiresome to have to point these things out. And I don't mind Stacy McCain's "Welcome to the Party, Pal" response. But so long as there are people who refuse to admit that this is going on, it needs to be underscored. We need to say, as McCain does, that:

It would be great if we could have a reasoned, well-tempered discussion with the Left, but the typical Lefty cannot or will not engage in a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. Conservatives have inadvertently arrived at Abuse, instead of the Argument Clinic.

Although, in all honesty, the Argument Clinic kind of sucks, too.

"Jon Huntsman is a Moby. That is All."

The title comes from the comments of another Protein Wisdom rant at the feckless GOP establishment:

Tax reform. That’s the extent of Huntsman’s plan.
And that’s about all that establishment Republicans care about. Entitlement reform? Huntsman doesn’t deal with that.
Big government, ruling-class “compromises,” and lower taxes.
That’s what the GOP ruling class is. That’s all it is

Can't really argue with that.

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.

Hey, Rubes!: Republicans for Obama Edition

A bunch of "Republicans" who chose Obama over McCain, because of that dirty Palin woman, are upset that he didn't turn out as he promised.

Pundette invites them all to get stuffed: (h/t Insty)

Cry me a river. They looked at Obama's Harvard law degree and that sharp pant crease and thought he was one of them, or at least more so than that uncredentialed piece of Wasilla trash, with all her vulgar "you betchas" and excessive children, including that embarrassing baby she doted on. And these snobs, instead of apologizing for contributing to the downfall of America, have the nerve to complain about "class warfare."

One has to wonder why these people bother to register as Republicans. Isn't being able to decipher MSM smears and fixes a prerequisite?

I am the Wrecking-Ball Right

There's a good line in the movie L.A. Confidential, after the second-plot-point fight between Sgt. Bud White, played by Russell Crowe, and Guy Pearce's Lt. Edmund Exley. Exley has discovered that the three black men he arrested for a shooting at the Nite Owl restaurant, in which an ex-cop was killed, were innocent. He recieved a promotion for his work on that case, but now he wants it re-opened.

"The Nite Owl made you," says White. "You want to tear that down?"

"With a wrecking ball," replies Exley. "You want to help me swing it?"

And the enemies become allies.

I've thought of nothing else since I looked at Robert Reich's "The Rise of the Wrecking-Ball Right". Most of the article is but strawmen assembled by anecdote, but the closing paragraphs sums up the basic meme that many on the left have been and will be adopting this coming election season:

Secession of Southern California

The usual write-up in the LA Times (h/t: Memeorandum):

Accusing Sacramento of pillaging local governments to feed its runaway spending and left-wing policies, a Riverside County politician is proposing a solution: He wants 13 mostly inland, conservative counties to break away to form a separate state of "South California.''

This occasionally happens on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and for much the same reasons.

"Secession proposals are just ways of thinking about California, and are also ways for people who feel neglected get the attention that they deserve," said USC historian Kevin Starr, who has written extensively on California. "It's never passed, and it will never pass. It's been up to bat 220 times and struck out every time.''

Ah, but it only needs to work once.

GOP Applies the O'Rourke Circumcision Precept

"You can take 10% off the Top of Anything."

It would be nice if they were going to slice everything quickly. It would also be nice if they were ready to slice whole departments from the executive branch. But I'll take half a loaf.

If you don't get the reference, you need to read Parliament of Whores. Or any O'Rourke for that matter.

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.

P.J. O'Rourke on Atlas Shrugged.

I had begun to consider ol' P.J. a bit of a relic, semi-retired like Lord Kitchner before WWI. But of late he's been doing yeoman's service, first deftly cutting Amy Chua off at the knees:

You might think that Amy Chua is a fascist pig. She wrote a previous book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, so she is.

And now, he updates Ayn Rand more successfully in a few sentences than, one suspects, the filmmakers will two movies:

An update is needed, and not just because train buffs, New Deal economics and the miracle of the Bessemer converter are inexplicable to people under 50, not to mention boring. The anti-individualist enemies that Ayn Rand battled are still the enemy, but they’ve shifted their line of attack. Political collectivists are no longer much interested in taking things away from the wealthy and creative. Even the most left-wing politicians worship wealth creation—as the political-action-committee collection plate is passed. Partners at Goldman Sachs go forth with their billions. Steve Jobs walks on water. Jay-Z and Beyoncé are rich enough to buy God. Progressive Robin Hoods have turned their attention to robbing ordinary individuals. It’s the plain folks, not a Taggart/Rearden elite, whose prospects and opportunities are stolen by corrupt school systems, health-care rationing, public employee union extortions, carbon-emissions payola and deficit-debt burden graft. Today’s collectivists are going after malefactors of moderate means.

The Inner Party always has privileges. This is a point that we wingnuts need to make louder over the coming year: that progressivism primarily benefits those who can afford to pay for it.

There's life in the old boy yet.

It's the Hypocrisy, Stupid.

Listen up, proggies.

Death threats are bad. Everyone knows this, and everyone is supposed to say so.

Civility is good. Everyone knows this, and everyone is supposed to speak up for the civil against the uncivil.

You aren't supposed to excuse the uncivil when they happen to sit on your side of the aisle. You're supposed to keep them under control, or at the very least, not encourage or defend them.

So when unsubtle threats and extortion demands get sent to those who dissent from the Proggie sense of entitlement vision, everyone is supposed to call those people what they are: vain, ridiculous petty tyrants with the manners of Vandals and the morals of pimps.

You're supposed to call it out, in the interests of a better, more civil society for all of us, not just the people who agree with you.

And if you can't or won't do that, then don't be surprised when your caterwauling about how awful and scary the people who disagree with you are falls on deaf ears and rolled eyes.

Ball's in your court.

I Love the Smell of Disco in the Evening. It Smells Like Victory.

One of the standing lines from the Right since Obama's rise has been that he is Carter in blackface. Instapundit, and myself, have long been of the opinion that Carter II is about the best we could expect from Obama. But he might mean something different from what I mean.

Carter's great virtue from a conservative point of view was his complete impotence, an almost adorable inability to come to terms with the challenges of his time. This had nothing whatever to do with his intellect. James Earl Carter, Jr. graduated from Annapolis and studied nuclear physics; such men are not without grey matter. Rather, he persistently misconcieved what the country the times needed and wanted.

And why was this good? Because by 1978 it was arguable, and by 1980, obvious. A sea change could and did occur in the American political landscape because the country had percieved that the New Class had failed to provide what it had promised. Conservative success in 2012 depends in no small part on a similar perception.

As P.J. O'Rourke once put it, after we get Carter, we get Reagan.

Bias Amongst the Bias-Hunters

In Other News, Duh.

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”

Many on the Right have commented on this. I am of two minds about it. On the one hand, it's good to see epistemic cloture being breached, and anything that would let moonbats and wingnuts see each other as differently-thinking rather than non-thinking would be welcome.

On the other, I dislike the idea of being made part of a Designated Victim Group. One of the reasons conservatives don't study psychology and anthropology has to be that conservatives tend to be drawn to study other things. How many progressive military historians are there?

Still, if this is what it takes, well, such is the Age of Revolution.

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.

On the New Civility

Jim Treacher calls out Richard Cohen for being the hypocrital swine he is:

Go ahead and insult anybody you want. But please excuse me if I don’t take you seriously when you turn right around and call on the rest of us to be nicer to each other.

And then, of course, there's Don Surber's Rant Heard Round the Right-osphere:

The left suddenly wants civil discourse.

Bite me.

The left wants to play games of semantics.

Bite me.

The left wants us to be civil — after being so uncivil for a decade.

Bite me.

The problem with all this is we don't even have an agreement about what civility consists of. What is it about the Tea Parties that the Left finds uncivil? The entirely peaceful protests, which usually leave the site cleaner than it was found? The dissent from the Keynsian Consensus of 2008? The accusations of socialism/fascism/communism levelled at Barack Obama? What?

If we could agree upon what was out of bounds, and we could trust the other side not to violate those bounds, perhaps we could establish this new civility.

As it stands though, I'm off to buy a bigger soapbox.

Obama's Tucson Speech

Hopefully this will be the last I write on this subject.

My initial reaction to Obama's speech, which I read last night, was that he was sounding the right notes, and appearing presidential for the first time in his presidency. By explicitly calling attention to the Loughner's victims, he made the subject what it should have been all along. It was the right re-focusing of the national attention and mood.

Now, many on the Right are not going to be satisfied with this. For them, nothing short of defending Sarah Palin and telling the unhinged of his own camp specifically to silence themselves, will be acceptable. As with his Iraq Speech, I'm not so picky. I don't expect a Democratic President to specificaly call out members of his own party for rebuke. There's simply no benefit for him to do that. No Republican President would do it either.

No, last night, however briefly, Obama was the President of the whole country, not just the people who agree with him. That is more than I usually expect from him, so I will grant it respect.

The Essayist #22: Politics and the Oedipus Effect

The Greeks believed in destiny. Unlike Old Testament prophets, Greek oracles weren't interested in changing behavior. If the gods let you know that something was going to happen, then that thing was going to happen. That thing was not going to change, no matter what you did. The message was not "Check yourself," but "Brace yourself."

Oedipus proves this perfectly. His parents, and then he, were told that Oedipus would murder his father and marry his mother. Everything that Laius, Jocasta, and Oedipus did to prevent this guarunteed that it would happen. By abandoning baby Oedipus on a hillside, Laius and Jocasta guaruntee that Oedipus grows up not knowing who his real parents are. By getting away from the people he thinks are his parents, Oedipus puts himself into his true parents' path. As Camille Paglia put it in Sexual Personae: "Oedipus, fleeing from his mother, runs right into her arms."

Perpetual Party Obituaries

Among the more tedious aspects of politics is the rush to pen gleeful post-mortems of the losing party. But two years ago, the GOP was supposed to be doomed, a regional party on its way out like the Federalists of old. Now the Democrats are, in the eyes of the wingnut-sphere, swirling the drain. Here's Roger Simon, prognosticating a nervous breakdown for the donkeys:

the reasons for the Democratic breakdown are infinitely more serious, starting with this little tidbit — Keynesian economics is dead. Giving away money as the route to political success or attempted social justice just isn’t going to work anymore, because there isn’t any money to give away. And it’s only going to get worse as the population ages. The whole justification for the Democratic Party — the welfare state — is one giant Ponzi scheme that makes Madoff seem like a piker.
And everybody knows it. All across the world, from Portugal to Japan, the system is in free fall.

Now, I don't think he's wrong on the subject of Keynesian economics. I think it is "dead", inasmuch as the idea that it's reached its practical limits is becoming widely acceptable. But that doesn't mean dismantling the progressive Leviathan will be a task simple or assured. The beast still has many adherents, who will fight for their place at the public teat.

So no, the idea isn't dead, and it isn't pining for the fjords, either. It's just old, and sick, and in need of hip replacements to survive.

GOP Should Seek Clarity

The DC Examiner:

Often when Washington insiders talk "compromise," they really mean engineering a situation where nobody really has to take a position, or responsibility. In those circumstances, clarity is better served by forcing positions into the open, even if doing so involves confrontation.

Ultimately, it is the people who are going to have to decide what course we take in these troubled waters. Politicians do well when they give people a choice between competing options rather than obfuscate the differences. The question is, do politicians believe they will be rewarded for this?

One of the main reasons for the Democrats' defeat this year was voters' sense that they wouldn't listen -- that they rammed through a predetermined agenda without paying any attention to voters' misgivings, and that they, in fact, seemed to glory in their lack of accountability. (Remember Speaker Nancy Pelosi's parade-with-gavel through the throngs of anti-Obamacare protesters?)
By listening to voters at town hall meetings, Republicans can not only show that they care, they can accomplish something else. They can actually learn something.

They represent us. They ought to give a damn what we think.

Read the whole thing.

Obama's Iraq Speech: I'll Take Half a Loaf

President Obama:

This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It’s well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security. As I have said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hope for Iraq’s future.

A good few wingnuts are annoyed that Obama went no further, to admit that Bush was right in 2007 and the Surge worked. Jennifer Rubin, and Jonah Goldberg both make this point, and Stephen Green wrestles it down and holds its nose into the mess it made. Myself, I don't care too too much. Yeah, it would be nice, but politicians don't get paid to admit error.

This is a President who has blamed his predecessor at every turn, who stood in sharp opposition to his predecessor on Iraq from its beginning. Here, without condescension or agression, he speaks of Mr. Bush and Iraq in at least the semblance of a spirit of charity.

That sounds like healing, friends.