Quote of the day

Sorry to cherrypick, but I thought this was an incredibly idiotic comment. Name a candidate in the November elections who conducted himself or herself in this manner.

McCain and Palin are pro-life. So what? Yet, as an Ohioan, I was inundated with Obama mailers informing me that McCain and Palin were going to steal the right to choose and even put a woman in jail for getting an abortion.

Sorry, it’s the pro-choice lobby that’s strident about the abortion issue. And it’s the gay lobby that’s strident about the gay-marriage issue.

Keep drinking from the liberal-talking-points memos. They’ll have you thinking uncritically in no time. It’s already having an effect.

BuckeyeSam on April 4, 2009 at 11:48 PM

I used to think gay marriage would be the issue that prompted a massive pushback from Middle America, and proved to be a fatal overreach for the Left. Now it’s popping up amid the smoking wreckage of the constitutional democracy that was annihilated in 2009, and it seems almost like a quaint afterthought. At least gay married couples won’t have to bear children who are immediately slapped into chains, forged from 80% income tax rates, to pay Obama’s budget deficits.

If the Republicans are to pull the country out of its socialist nose dive before the system crashes completely, they will need a coherent message to run on in 2010, and even more so in 2012. I don’t believe that coherent message can be forged without substantial input from social conservatives of different stripes, not just because social conservative and religious voters are needed to build a political coalition, but because only they are able to provide the energy for the moral case against Obama-style fascism.

The New Fascism is an explicitly moralistic enterprise, presented to voters in the supercharged language of right and wrong. Obama does not make his case to the electorate in calm, rational terms – quite the opposite. He tells them no deliberation is possible, no debate can be allowed – we must adopt his policies instantly, without considering any alternatives. He tells them to accept these policies not because they’re efficient or logical – you can’t make that case while you’re screaming for Congress to sign your trillion dollar pork bill without deliberation. He sells his leadership to the voters by telling them it is morally wrong to oppose him.

Obama’s entire campaign was based on moral, emotional arguments: it’s racist to vote against him, it’s evil to look into his past, he promises to punish the greedy when he reaches the White House, it was morally wrong to sacrifice American military lives to overthrow Saddam Hussein, etc. He did not approach the voters with pie charts and spreadsheets to convince them his policies were the most efficient way to repair the damaged financial system. Indeed, he offered no policies at all, and swiftly violated virtually every half-hearted promise he made to his voters.

His tenure in office has continued as one long emotional appeal, even to the point where he has been happy to organize mob violence, and threaten business executives with more of the same. Notice that he didn’t lay out a business plan for AIG, then explain how unconstitutional seizure of AIG employees’ bonuses would enhance that plan. He just pointed at them and called them evil, and his minions nodded grimly and began lining up at the bus stops.

There is simply no way to combat this approach by deploying a legion of accountants and publishing 500 page position papers no voter will ever read. Look at the absurdity of that poor idiot who stalks Sarah Palin threads and posts her resume over and over again… not even the politically engaged voters of this blog are persuaded by it. The voters were not terribly interested in Obama’s resume in 2008, and they will not be calmly flipping through job applications and conducting interviews to hire his replacement in 2012.

To defeat the New Fascism and snap Americans out of the weird fugue state that allowed it to be born, Republicans must make the passionate, moral case against it. It’s not simply inefficient to place politicians in charge of “private” companies, or enslave the private sector to ideology – it’s morally offensive. Examples such as the AIG debacle can be used to prove this point to the electorate. Consider the overall mood of the voters, three months into the Obama presidency: they tell pollsters they wish him well and like him personally, but there’s a growing sense of unease. They know something is wrong, but they can’t put their fingers on it, exactly. The Republicans need to give them the philosophical, emotional tools to understand this feeling of unease, and show them why they shouldn’t just be ambivalent… they should be angry. The “socially liberal, fiscally moderate” centrists we so often obsess over are incapable of making this case with moral energy – they can only try to explain things like the relationship between deficit spending and inflation, while Obama’s allies in the media are assuring voters that the only way America can prove it has begun to evolve past its racist origins is to re-elect The First Black President.

Doctor Zero on April 5, 2009 at 12:29 AM