“Drain the Jacuzzi!”

“This government isn’t too big to fail, it’s too big to succeed.”

“We don’t want an economy built to last, we want an economy built to grow.”

“This is Obama’s Washington.”

I wonder, however, if one of the points she hammered throughout the speech really registered with her audience.  Her signature line in this speech was “The door is open.”  She meant that political conditions are becoming conducive to a renewed commitment to small government and liberty.  People’s mindsets are changing.  We are not governed by the “rules” of political seasons past; the door is open to choosing our candidates and charting our nation’s future on a different basis.  The door is open to not accepting a continuation of the false compromises of previous decades.

(As I go to press, I see that Tina Korbe picked up on this theme.)

I have referred to those false compromises – “compromises” in which the conservative, small-government side gave up virtually everything – as the “old consensus.”  I see it losing, bit by bit, in this primary season.  People are no longer obediently making their political choices within the parameters defined for them by the professional political class.

This doesn’t mean that the voters have ideal candidates with whom to make their statement against the old consensus.  Santorum and Gingrich both have their drawbacks, as Paul always has.  But a critical mass of voters has recognized that Romney is the old consensus, and they are rejecting it.  The CPAC vote was remarkable for Romney’s 38% — because it wasn’t bigger, because Santorum got 31%, and even Gingrich, in a conclave of the politically connected, got 15%.

Everyone outpolled Ron Paul at CPAC, even though he has regularly won the CPAC vote in the past.  This signals a change in the mindset of politically active conservatives – not merely a new perspective that it’s overwhelmingly important to defeat Obama, but a perspective that the core of the conservative movement is shifting, and we need a serious mainstream candidate because it is a life-or-death matter to be effective in the political process.

That obviously doesn’t mean the CPAC voters think we need a “moderate,” leadership- and media-approved candidate.  If it did, they would have gone for Romney, rather than voting 46% for the mainstream candidates who are not Romney – and who are perceived, in many if not all cases correctly, as less satisfied with and enthusiastically “managerial” about the matter of big government.

But the point to take away is that voter sentiment, as it relates to the meaning of different candidates and the basis of government, is changing.

And that, I think, is about half the reason why Sarah Palin didn’t throw her hat in the ring for this campaign cycle.  Her evaluation of political conditions is remarkably accurate and prescient:  she saw, long before most of the voters did, that the game of expectations itself needed to change, and that only we could do it.

What strategic value was there for Palin in participating in the Cynical Media Slime-fest and All-Out Kick-em-in-the-Nads, mud-slinging, business-as-usual, expectations-on-autopilot primary season?

Six or eight months ago, the sea change in the voters’ sentiments and propensities might have been foreseeable, but it hadn’t happened yet.  Those who think Palin could have won lots of primaries on the basis of pre-primary voter sentiments are wrong, I think.  After all, the business-as-usual approach – Karl Rove tells everyone how bad a candidate is, the media magnify his or her every quirk or mistake, the media and some (not all) of the other candidates pile on with allegations that range from hostile spin to outright falsehood – has so far felled our most conservative candidates.

But in the process, the voters have been changing.  That’s what Palin saw before others did.  Do I think she is counting the days to a brokered convention?  No.  There is no one who could reasonably adopt that as a “plan.”  She won’t run this year; that’s my rational assessment as well as my gut feeling.  (I could of course be wrong, although I think some big conditions will have to change more for that to be the case.)

But if she does run, it will not be because she has changed, but because we have.  There are political conditions in which she could run successfully, and conditions in which she couldn’t.  The latter have constituted our political environment up until the last couple of months.

If the conditions are changing now, I believe that is largely because voters are having to wise up to the flaws in our own thinking by going through this ugly spectacle.  We already knew that the media have no intention of giving our candidates a fair shake, and that many in the GOP leadership want to submarine the small-government conservatives.   What many voters didn’t understand is that if we want to select leaders of character, we have to graduate from high school, and overlook the vicissitudes of “presentation” that sometimes make good people look like buffoons to those who see without humility, mercy, or discrimination.  We have to see with better eyes.  We have to think independently of the jeers embedded in the media narrative.  We have to be wiser citizens, placing in political leadership only the hope that is appropriate to free men and women.

We can’t have a candidate who sounds like Mitt Romney, but will lead the way a small-government conservative would.  That’s not an option.  What we’re doing in this primary season is coming to grips with that reality.  I think Palin knew instinctively that we would have to, before it would make sense for her to jump back into the electoral fray.

But, as I said, I think that’s only about half the explanation.  The other half is that Palin is an evangelical Christian.  She believes God has a plan for her life, and that He gives her a certainty in her spirit about the big choices she has to make.  I suspect she has had a peaceful certainty that joining the campaign as a candidate for 2012 was not something she should do.  If she were to analyze it, she might say that God knows better than any of us how the voters’ concerns and expectations are going to change.

Meanwhile, the door is open.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Who is to be congratulated for the elimination of Cain, Perry, Bachmann, and Huntsman?  The voters.  That’s right.  Sure, the candidates made some mistakes.  The media did everything possible to prejudice voters against them, and that was a crying shame.  But voters didn’t have to let the media or the contrived, somewhat artificial debate process make their decisions for them.

There is good news in all this.  First, the voters really are making the decision.  Second, the voters are starting to think for themselves.  It would have been nice for that to happen earlier, but there’s no time like the present.

Third, with the voters thinking for themselves, candidates who are focused on liberty issues are still on the ballot, and the party dialogue on those issues continues.  I know a lot of people don’t see it this way, but they’re wrong:  the most important thing the GOP can possibly do in 2012 is decide what it is and what it wants.  Self-identified “conservative” voters may be in a national majority according to the surveys, but it has been more than 20 years since we were all pulling together.

The bottom line is that the GOP is not agreed on what the problem is. We’re fighting that out right now – and it’s healthy, if annoying.  One faction says the problem is Obama; the other faction says it’s the way we now govern ourselves, which – no matter who is in charge – cannot avoid oppressing the people with regulation, debt, and crony-enrichment schemes at the people’s expense.  The latter faction is divided between those who see enough prospect for change with one of the candidates still in the race, and those who don’t.  Those who see even Gingrich and Santorum as too reflexively “big government” in their thinking are a growing voice.

The good news is that we are having the debate in a way that matters.  That is very good news.  Never underestimate the power of ideas.  They stick with people, even when it seems they haven’t, and they are the only thing that can motivate people to unite and make positive changes.

The mainstream media don’t depict it that way, of course.  They labor to depict the GOP primary season as a turkey shoot run by Keystone Kops.  But Americans have a choice as to whether they let the mainstream media distribute their opinions to them, like thematic gift baskets, and more and more Americans are choosing to just say no.

I wrote last year about Rick Perry as a candidate of the “old consensus” – my term for the modus vivendi adopted over the last 60 years by Democrats, who were increasingly taken over by progressive statists, and Republicans, who fought a rear-guard action to keep statism from getting too big and expensive.  Under the old consensus, Republicans were largely focused on the monetary and economic expense of statism, and the tacit agreement was that the right would accept as much statism as we could “afford.”  As long as we were growing economically – so this consensus went – we could afford a fairly heavy burden of statism.  Perry, I thought (and still do think), was on the Reagan end of the consensus rather than the Rockefeller end.

But what I see happening in the Republican primaries is an awakening of conservative voters to the disasters invited by the old consensus.  The loss of fiscal integrity and loss of liberty for America are products of the old consensus, and they have proceeded in lockstep: we are losing as much of the latter as we are of the former.  I believe 2012 is the year in which a critical mass of GOP voters has awoken to the reality that the old consensus is a destructive path and is in any case unsustainable.  Voting to continue down it on any basis is voting to remain on course for destruction.

I urge GOP voters not to be discouraged about this.  Ideas outlast everything else.  The idea of individual liberty and limited government cannot be killed.  America has not had a fundamental dispute over basic ideas for a very long time; we have become conditioned to the foggy stasis of bumper-sticker slogans and complacent, rarely-visited idea-sets.  It feels unsettled and strange to truly be debating the relationship of man and the state: to be breaking up those idea-sets and repudiating things supposedly bought into decades ago.  But a movement of ideas is a force of remarkable power, and one that no state power arrangement has ever ultimately withstood.  America’s burgeoning movement of ideas will not expire ignominiously.

The future of liberty on earth depends on what happens in America in the next decade.  If there is any nation on earth that can navigate peacefully back from the brink of statist implosion and loss of liberty, it is the United States. In 2012, GOP voters can rejoice in having alternatives, imperfect as they are, to a big-government statist candidate.  Voters can choose to affect the political process – and possibly the outcome in November – by casting their votes on principle.

Some words to live by as we go forward.  The president doesn’t make us, we make him.  The integrity and character of the people are paramount.  The only sure way to lose a battle is to stop fighting.  America has beaten the odds every time.  We will beat them again.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

This primary season is a fight for the character of the GOP.  The fight is not the perennial standoff between “social cons” and “fiscal cons”; it is a long-postponed dispute over the size and charter of government, and how the GOP will approach it.  It is the most basic possible dispute over ideas about man and the state and their consequences.  It’s also a dispute only the Republican Party could have.  The Democratic Party does not have such a diversity of viewpoint, at least not in any politically consequential way.  The decision about whether America will continue on a fiscally unsustainable path of ever-growing statism comes down to the GOP’s fight with itself.

The Romney wing represents the attitude that America is really OK with the size of government we have now: it just needs better management and some tweaking on the margins.  The Romney wing does not by any means have a class-hostile, socialist vision for the future.  It has no intention of interfering with the citizens’ intellectual liberties, and its view of managerial government is not predicated on the idea that the people need to be coerced (or “nudged”) into collectivist life choices.  It simply sees the existing size of government as compatible with a free-enough life, in the sense that we don’t need to push for significant changes.

The other wing – the one that has been getting behind a different candidate every few weeks – believes precisely that America is not OK with the size of government we have now.  Its main point is that our fiscal and economic problems, and many of our social ones, result directly from the size and interventionist activities of government.  The size of government is the problem – already, today – and if it isn’t fixed, America literally cannot survive as a republic with the intellectual and lifestyle liberties we have enjoyed up to now.

Many in the GOP’s “Not OK” wing have perceived government to be out of control for some time.  But the shock administered by the Obama administration gave the most direct impetus to the Tea Party movement, because it brought home to many Americans how vulnerable we had already become to executive overreach.

For this wing of the GOP, it isn’t enough to put a Republican in charge of the sprawling, momentum-driven executive.  The mere existence of such a gigantic apparat is an already-proven threat to liberty.  A Democrat could be reelected to head it at any time, and even with a Republican in charge, the civil-service army would continue in obscurity to pursue regulatory and money-spending charters issued years or decades ago.  The failure of Congress to pass a budget for over 1,000 days has suspended the legislature’s principal hammer over the executive’s freedom to do what it wants.  As long as government limps along from month to month, on continuing resolutions that are mainly about constituency-tending fights in the House and Senate, Congress cannot gather its will to bargain seriously with the executive over spending priorities.

For the “Not OK” wing of the GOP, what is essential in 2012 is repudiating government on this model.  Nothing is more important to America’s future than that.  The different wings of the GOP have differing views of what constitutes “realism”:  the “America is OK” wing views it as unrealistic to focus on something other than putting up the candidate whom they feel will appeal to the most voters.  The “Not OK” wing sees that as an unrealistic perspective on the current situation.  If government is not reined in – put through an effective bankruptcy proceeding, with its assets sold off and its charter reorganized – then nothing else will matter.

Who is right?  While I am with the “Not OK” wing philosophically, I don’t think it would be the end of America as we know it if Mitt Romney were elected.  But I do believe it would be a grave strategic error for the Republican Party to endorse him early, and silence intra-party dissent as if he represents what America really needs.  A Romney presidency would be no more than a hiatus in deliberately using the state as a steamroller for ideological purposes.  That would be better than 4 more years of Obama, but from the perspective of getting America on a different path, it’s not good enough.

The GOP needs this fight over philosophy of government.  What has to be established in the 2012 primary season is that the small-government vote matters.  If that is not established, the GOP itself will matter little.  Its difference from the Democratic Party will not be sufficient to attract (or keep) membership.

I believe Palin has a strategic view of America’s future that looks beyond the 2012 election itself.  The most important thing now is that the small-government perspective continue to have a chance to express itself on its terms.  If it is silenced in electoral politics, there will be no hope of changing America’s path.  And the only way for it to have a voice is for this primary season to continue on a competitive basis.  That is the mechanism through which the voice of either wing of the party matters to the industry of politics.  That’s where the noise has to be made.

Palin is right.  This is an incredibly “political” year, more so than any year I can remember other than maybe 1979.  Americans are more engaged in political ideas than I have ever seen them.  Obama’s poll numbers aren’t good, but perhaps more importantly, those numbers and others on GOP candidates keep shifting.  People’s choices haven’t been set in stone.  They’re not sure what’s going on, they’re still trying to find a candidate who says what they’re waiting to hear, and they haven’t made up their minds.  The media will do what they’re going to do, but the people are having a separate dialogue with themselves, and it isn’t over.

I believe the GOP would be out of step with the remarkable nature of this year to crown a big-government-as-usual candidate early, on the theory that we need to damp down philosophical debate and concentrate on “campaigning” as early as possible before November.  The campaigning is what is annoying the living bejeebers out of the voters; it’s the philosophical debate that matters this year.  Shutting it down would be a tactical as well as a strategic error.  The only way to force Romney to the right is to keep the primary season competitive.  It’s also the way to keep quality attention on the most important debate America has had on the nature of government since 1860.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The reason Romney hasn’t had that much real political success is that he doesn’t have much in the way of a political philosophy.  When political conditions are set for him by outside agency, he’s an effective manager.  His admirable record at Bain, and his achievement in organizing a faltering Olympics for success, attest to that.  But his record as governor of Massachusetts indicates that in a political role, he accepts existing conditions as given, and seeks merely to optimize certain narrow priorities within them.

He is not committed to political principles, but to management.  The two things are different, and one of the worst mistakes Republicans make is to imagine that management trumps political principle.  In fact, the management focus knuckles under repeatedly to political pressure (see Romney in Massachusetts, Schwarzenegger in California, and generations of big businesses facing political activists).  Only philosophical commitment, based on irreducible and non-negotiable ideas, can stand – or prevail – against the assault of demagogic-statist political themes.

It is clear from his passage on “the very poor, the very rich,” etc, that Romney is operating on the vague, complacent mindset conventionalized by left-trending American politics over the last 80 years: that government must “help” certain demographics, while rebuking others; and that no amount of evidence will induce us to change our definition of “help,” or our assessment of the need for it.

What that means in practice is a “cycle of poverty” welfare regime for the very poor; a symbiotic relationship for government with the very rich; a selective dismissal of the impact of government regulation and taxes on our economic conditions; and an incessant, increasingly expensive use of the middle class as a political football.

Those are the factors that have created our current, untenable situation.  Its greatest impact is – as always – on the poorest among us.  The poor have less opportunity today than they did as little as 40 years ago to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” through enterprise and investment as opposed to narrowly-defined “education” and “jobs.”  And the principal reason is that regulation has them surrounded.  It has suppressed job opportunities, made it harder to set up in small business or as an independent contractor, and jeopardized saving by increasing the prices of the goods and services needed for survival.

Impoverishing the middle class with taxation and job-killing regulation hits the poor even harder than it does the middle class.  The middle class is what ultimately employs the poor, by exercising market demand; if it has less purchasing power, the poor lose jobs and business opportunities.  Forcing the price of goods and services up with regulation also hits the poor harder than it hits anyone else.  Policies that seek to suppress the industries and commercial activities disliked by activists hit the poor harder than anyone else.

Government favoritism, toward unions and big business alike, hits the poor harder than anyone else, because it is based on favoring the already connected, and preventing independent “upstarts” – frequently the poor – from competing with them.  Besides distorting markets and costing everyone more in price terms, favoritism also creates a public debt burden, which hits the poor again by adding to the economic discouragement of the middle class.

A separate but intertwined aspect of this issue is the one Newt Gingrich has spoken passionately about:  the debilitating and demoralizing effect on the poor of the very programs that, in Romney’s formulation, keep them “taken care of.”

I truly don’t think Romney means to be cavalier about the poor.  But his wording indicates that his first political instinct is managerial rather than liberty-promoting.  The two postures pull in different directions.  Governments are perennially inclined to try to manage their people.  They don’t naturally respect their people’s liberties and dignity; they have to be ordered to, and kept under constant surveillance and rebuke.  Romney is not the man to do that.  He appears to see the poor, like a lot of other things, as a managerial problem for government.

In the present case, respect for the people would entail acknowledging and revising policies that are socially destructive, and seeing whoever is poor at a given time principally as a “middle-class in waiting,” in need of liberty and opportunity.  It is still possible to offer public assistance without maximizing the disincentives thrown up by government to enterprise and independence for the poor.  The key is to avoid the deadly idea that assistance programs render the poor “taken care of,” as if the poor are a bill coming due.  The poor are people – the source of all creativity and wealth – who will largely respond to and make the most of the same incentives as the middle class and the rich.  America is, if nothing else, a demonstration of the truth of that maxim.

Romney consistently comes off as having an old-school interventionist approach to government.  He also seems to have missed the right’s whole welfare-vs.-enterprise discussion of the 1980s and ‘90s.  He is clearly not someone who would say that for the good of the people and in the interest of our most precious, most empowering commodity – liberty – government needs to stop doing whole categories of things.  Romney doesn’t reflexively or naturally formulate any comment on policy in small-government terms.

It is not, in fact, conservative to think of the poor as “taken care of” by the destructive, self-perpetuating welfare regime in the United States.  Far better for the poor to have the kind of opportunity, and the buying power of their earnings and savings, that they do not have now, but would have if the load of regulatory overreach, predatory taxation, and constituency-tending-by-overspending were lifted on Americans as a whole.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

So, is Adelson’s money buying Newt’s support of Israel?

Not hardly. One of my readers did a little research and sent me a few helpful links. (Thanks!)

Look at this article from 1998 in the San Francisco Jewish Weekly, titled Resignation of Newt Gingrich means Israel is losing a friend. For those of you readers who can’t do difficult math, that article was written more than 13 years ago, which means Sheldon Adelson’s money played no part in Newt’s opinion on Israel. So far, the best the Forward can come up with is Adelson’s money contributed to Gingrich’s group in 2006. Whoops. That’s eight whole years after we read this:

A Jewish Democratic politico said of Gingrich’s pro-Israel credentials, “I don’t think Newt is acting. I’d like to say he’s full of it, but he isn’t. Yes, he was trying to out right-wing the right-wing Jews, but he’s a true believer. Livingston may say what AIPAC wants to hear, but it’s not in his kishkes. He’s not a true believer.”

Really? A Democrat called Gingrich a right-wing Israel supporter in 1998?

But wait. There’s more! In 1998, Gingrich also called Jerusalem “the united and eternal capital of Israel”

Oh, pshaw. There must be some way Adelson’s money influenced Gingrich’s opinion. Maybe he’s so rich, he has a secret time machine and he went back in time to convince Newt to support Israel?

Or maybe Newt’s been a supporter of Israel for decades. (Also, Newt is pretty damned close to getting the Yourish.com cherished Master of Juvenile Scorn™ designation.)

Speaker Newt Gingrich said today that the White House was trying to blackmail Israel by pushing it toward the negotiating table, but President Clinton said he was only trying to bring about fruitful talks on Mideast peace.

”It’s become the Clinton Administration and Arafat against Israel,” Mr. Gingrich said at a news conference. ”The Clinton Administration says: ‘Happy birthday. Let us blackmail you on behalf of Arafat.’ ”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The Forward itself discussed Gingrich’s ties to Israel in the 1990s (buried, of course, in page two of an article using the Gloom-and-Doom Machine profiling his ties to Adelson). On the first page, they date the Adelson-Gingrich relationship back to 2007. This, kiddies, is how you get away with saying that your article is objective because it mentioned the recent and more distant relationships. It is also what is known as “slanting.” But the most important takeaway here is just what I wrote the other day: The only reason the liberal media is jumping all over the Gingrich-Adelson relationship is because Adelson is a Jew who is supporting a conservative Republican, rather than the liberal media-slash-Jewish establishment’s approved causes–which would be liberal Democrats.

Haim Saban influencing Bill Clinton? Not a problem. Sheldon Adelson is contributing to Newt Gingrich’s campaign? OMG, he’s a conservative, somebody stop him!1!!

Your objective media, exposed.

Cross-posted.

Will Weatherford, Florida state representative and spokesman for the Romney campaign in Florida, confirmed this weekend that the Republican-controlled Florida legislature is about to approve a redistricting proposal that will make it much harder for Allen West to be reelected.  Legal Insurrection points out the obvious:

Weatherford tried to hide behind a need to comply with [state and] federal law, but that’s obviously a dodge since there could have been many ways to comply yet not sacrifice West.

To point out some more “obvious,” this is a Republican-controlled legislature.  Did the Republicans allow other GOP-held Congressional seats to be severely jeopardized by the new district lines?  Apparently, only one.  An analysis done for the Washington Post last week indicates that Allen West’s and Tom Rooney’s seats are the ones in the most danger.  Getting positive help from the redistricting are Republicans Dan Webster, Sandy Adams, Mario Diaz-Balart, and John Mica.

Redistricting isn’t as easy as it looks, of course.  But it is not believable that it is either a fully non-partisan process – when anyone is doing it – or that the Florida GOP leadership was neutral as to which seats were jeopardized by their plan.

One possibility is that Republican leaders thought West and Rooney were the most likely to achieve reelection in newly hostile districts.  They haven’t said that, so that’s pure speculation based on trying to put this in a positive light.

Meanwhile, who are Florida’s arguably most outspoken, conservative Republican Congressmen?  West and Rooney.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

…the premise [that “we want everything to be fair”] relies heavily on how we choose to define the word “fair” and what sort of taxes we’re talking about here. (And to be clear, I’m still sorting through some of this because it’s hardly a simple, cut and dried issue.)

I agree that it’s not a cut and dried issue, largely because it cuts across multiple unarticulated premises about human life in general, and the relation between man and the state.  I also got interesting responses from readers at both the Green Room and my home blog.  Reader KGB provided a quote from P.J. O’Rourke’s book Eat the Rich:

So if wealth is not a worldwide round-robin of purse-snatching, and if the thing that makes you rich doesn’t make me poor, why should we care about fairness at all? We shouldn’t.

Fairness is a good thing in marriage and at the day-care center.  It’s a nice little domestic virtue. But a liking for fairness is not that noble a sentiment.  Fairness doesn’t rank with charity, love, duty, or self-sacrifice.  And there’s always a tinge of self-seeking in making sure that things are fair.  Don’t you go trying to get one up on me.

At The Optimistic Conservative, reader Cousin Vinnie asks the following:

At the risk of sounding like a liberal, if you are going to have taxes of any kind, you cannot completely avoid the fairness debate. Is it fairer to tax citizens’ current income (which most folks use to get by day-to-day), their current purchases or other economic activity (which increases the cost of barely getting by as well as living high on the hog), or to tax inheritance (which people probably are not relying on for subsistence)?

The variety of responses and thoughts out there is enlightening.  It is worth thinking long and hard about, that although the Obama administration proposes to “make things fair,” we don’t have a consensus on what fairness is – in the generic – or what anyone should be doing about it.

One of the most interesting aspects of this debate is that relatively few commentators tie the Obama “fairness” argument to the political tactics of collectivist ideologues.  Those tactics were once very well known: take a word or expression that people think we all know the meaning of – justice, democracy, peace, fairness – and appropriate it for militant statist schemes that actually portend something very different.  With this kind of political bait-and-switch fraud, you can gain control over the people that they had no idea they were ceding.  This has been the method of socialists for decades.

In the current case, for example, the Obama administration wants us to focus on “taxes” as we discuss disparities between rich and poor, and to predicate the whole debate on “fairness.”  We think we know what is meant by these terms.

But given the background and the trend of sentiments expressed by Obama and those in his administration, it is entirely reasonable to assess that what is important to them is not “taxes,” specifically, but “disparities between rich and poor,” and the association of “fairness” with giving the central government a charter to intervene in those disparities.  Taxes are a specific case on which to establish a general principle: that cultivating “fairness” requires government intervention.

We are justified in opposing this approach on principle.  But we should also take care to think comprehensively about “fairness” and what that means to communal life.  The public debate today is predicated – and I mean this in a clinical, analytical way – on a kindergarten-level understanding of the concept.  We speak about fairness as if the context is that we all showed up in a kindergarten classroom, and during play time, the bigger or more aggressive kids got hold of all the good play items, and the teacher had to enforce a “redistribution” because that wasn’t “fair.”

Even when conservatives viscerally reject this idea of “fairness” as a model for adult relations, we can’t always articulate alternative ideas about fairness.  The kindergarten model comes to us naturally, early in life, and in my experience, it takes years of upbringing – moral teaching, the cultivation of attitudes and beliefs – to supplant it.  Without that upbringing, we don’t formulate a compelling alternative idea about fairness.  We just keep seeing the world as a kindergarten classroom, in which an authority figure either is or is not enforcing “fairness.”

It isn’t possible to cover the topic comprehensively in a single post, but I propose we start with considering the following questions relating to fairness, as a means of evaluating its place in life and politics.

1.  Is fairness properly cultivated as a condition or an attitude?  The adult world once had a ready answer to that question.  Children were taught that we should take care to be fair with others (the attitude), but that life – in terms of events, outcomes, and other people – wouldn’t necessarily be fair (the condition).

Is it really possible to impose a condition of fairness on the world around us?  It is unquestionably possible for each of us as an individual to behave fairly, to the extent we can manage to – fairly, that is, according to our individual consciences and what we have been taught about how to treat our fellow men.  But no matter how fair we seek to be, there will continue to be unfair outcomes, and many of them will be out of our control.

The P.J. O’Rourke quote gets at a principle of both Christianity and Judaism, which is that God’s primary interest is in the attitude with which each one of us does things.  God can cause any external condition He wants to; His highest concern is our spiritual and moral development as individuals.  The Proverbs are full of instructions to individuals to be fair-minded in various situations, but there is no attainable condition of corporate “fairness.”

The West has had a dichotomous approach, however, to the condition-versus-attitude question.  A very accessible discussion of the twin trends in Western thinking is in Balint Vazsonyi’s 1998 book America’s 30 Years War, which distinguishes outcomes-based ideas of law and human relations from those based on eternal principles for decision-making.

Vazsonyi traces the outcomes-based ideas through early law systems from Hammurabi’s to the Egyptian pharoahs’ and those of Imperial Rome, up to the Napoleonic Code and the modern variants of socialism.  Then, from the Law of Moses through the democratic ideas of ancient Greece, the republican concepts of pre-imperial Rome, the moots of the medieval Germanic tribes, and the pragmatic common-law provisions of the Anglo-Saxon heritage, Vazsonyi outlines persistent threads in the type of law that does not pretend to control outcomes, but rather chooses decision-making methods that will, as far as possible, suppress bias in favor of fair-mindedness.  Hence, for example, legislatures that face reelection often; separation of government powers; 12-person juries and courts of appeal.

(For another synoptic view of Western thinking on this and related topics, see David Gress’s substantially longer From Plato to NATO, also published in 1998.)

The “attitude” focus recognizes human relations and government as interactions in which the moral worth and choices of individuals are paramount; the “condition” focus sees society and government as systems that produce outcomes, and the systems’ mechanisms and outcomes as paramount.

 2.  Are “fairness” and “equality” synonymous?  This question has been widely discussed in America in recent years.  I think most readers have a good idea of the points of argument on this topic; e.g., is it really “fair” for one person to be paid the same as another person who isn’t doing as good a job?  If numerical equality defines fairness, then what about the fact that some people have IQs of 86 and others have IQs of 172?  Do we redress this unfairness by some means unrelated to IQ?  Etc, etc.  This may be a less intellectually challenging question than some others – we all understand that people are different by nature – but it is remarkable how often we allow it to go unasked.

We also prize equality before the law.  But is that mainly because equality is “fair,” or is it because we understand the dangers inherent in the power of the state, and that evil can be amplified through it if the law is allowed to treat individual citizens differently for biased and invidious reasons?  We do think of equality before the law as fair, but the historically demonstrated danger of not having it – the danger to life, property, and social harmony – is the decisive consideration.

3.  In human life or government, does failing to make “fairness” the goal of a proposal inherently mean that the proposal is unfair, or will produce unfair outcomes?  An analogous question would be:  If you’re not on a weight-reduction diet, does that inherently mean that you’re fat?

Consider that men in the United States have to register with the Selective Service Board.  The purpose of this program is to ensure that the US can draft soldiers in a time of need.  It is no part of the purpose of the registration program to ensure “fairness” of any particular kind, but neither is its intention to operate “unfairly.”  Its purpose is narrow and pragmatic: register potential soldiers with the federal government.

Does that make it unfair?  Can it only be fair if those designing the program thought specifically about “fairness” and made specific provisions for it?  If they did so, what kinds of “fairness” must they have taken into consideration, in order for their program or its outcomes to be deemed “fair”?

How about traffic fines?  They are intended to discourage reckless driving.  But they may fall unfairly on the drivers of red sports cars or old clunkers, who attract more attention from the police than drivers of mid-size, late-model sedans.  Should our traffic laws take into account the unfairness of being targeted for driving a Z-Roadster?  Should lawmakers have capped the percentage of traffic fines that can be assessed on speeders driving enormous, belching 1971 Buicks?

4.  Is “unfair” being used to mean “doesn’t favor or disfavor the things I would”?  Very often, we call things “unfair” that are the result of policies we don’t agree with.  Taxation perennially falls under this heading.  It isn’t possible to tax the people without levying a burden.  That’s what government is:  overhead that you have to pay for.  We just have different ideas about the right way to do it.

As an example, I regard a percentage-based income tax that requires the government to know every last cent of a taxpayer’s income as a bad policy – because it encourages government to grow and the people to be complacent about that.  I don’t call it “unfair,” however, nor do I imagine government can function without revenue.  I dislike the policy for reasons other than conventional ideas of “fairness.”

Likewise, others may disagree with a policy of taxing retail sales, seeing that as a discouraging burden on commerce.  Others prefer not to tax real property, viewing that as government holding a hammer over our property rights.  There are many reasons to object to types of taxes, but none of them is nearly as likely to hinge on “fairness” as on policy preferences.

There is no rate or type of taxation that’s absolutely “fair” as opposed to “unfair.”  Different types and rates of taxation, and different kinds of deductions, produce different results.  Some may be good and some bad, but not necessarily fair or unfair.  The percentage-based income tax, for example, has produced an unequal tax code, along with societal acceptance of an interventionist role for government between us and what we earn.  In the private sector, taxing income is a way of taxing production, which translates into suppressing production on the margin.  Are these things “unfair” – or are they dangerous and dysfunctional, from a particular policy standpoint?

5.  Is it possible to “reason” our way into putting “fairness” in the proper perspective, without adopting an attitude about it on principle?  I would submit that it is not.  In neither our personal lives nor in politics can we behave as if our reasoning and bargaining powers will lead us to perfect situational perspectives on fairness.

If we let fairness in the door as a controlling quantity, human history suggests that we will never meet its rigorous standard.  Nothing can ever be “fair” enough, because there will always be someone who isn’t happy with the current conditions, and can point out an undeniable situational disparity of one kind or another.

The sensation of unfairness comes from deep within the human consciousness.  But it cannot be assuaged by any perfect reordering of material conditions.  Indeed, when material conditions are promptly reordered in response to our childhood complaints about unfairness, that only encourages us to base our happiness on specific material conditions – and complain more and more readily at the drop of a hat.  On the other hand, when we learn to deal with unfairness under the tutelage of good-hearted, fair-minded adults, what we come away appreciating is the trust and sense of safety their fair-mindedness engenders in us, even though things aren’t always fair.

Fairness cannot be enforced, nor unfairness requited, by the actions of the state.  Politics doesn’t lead us, through its inherent clash of competing biases, to a universal standard of fairness.  It merely enforces one set of policy ideas over another.  The tendency of all of us to treat each other unequally in one way or another (many of them utterly benign) is not itself a reason for government to intervene between us, but rather for government – which is just other people to whom we have given authority – to be limited in what it can do to us, period.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

If the voters weren’t silly, they would understand that it has to be Mitt Romney, because, well, primary voters were silly and picked Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell over Mike Castle in Delaware, not to mention running with that goofy Sharron Angle in Nevada, and look how that turned out.  You can’t get California and you probably can’t get New York, if you’re the GOP nominee.  But you have a good shot at Pennsylvania and Ohio, Michigan and maybe even Illinois, if you’re Mitt Romney.  Newt Gingrich?  Forget it.  Gingrich can’t even win Georgia.

And the truth is, this analysis isn’t necessarily wrong.  If I had to make a bet, I’d bet that a Newt Gingrich nominated to run for the GOP in November would implode on the campaign trail.  He’d still make a better president than Obama, but his “sticking it to the media” shtick in the debates would lose its luster when he faced Obama.  He comes across as easily annoyed; the feistiness that resonates with voter sentiment in the primaries would weather time and tides poorly.  As between an irritable Gingrich and a cool, scripted Obama, I would predict without hesitation that the latter’s jokes during a debate would come off better.  All things being equal, that is.

As with the O’Donnell-Castle primary outcome in 2010, however, it’s not the voters who are silly.  They know that all things aren’t equal in 2012.  The voters who put Gingrich over the top yesterday believe that we can’t keep going down the same political path in the United States – and that that holds for Republicans at least as much as for Democrats, if not more.  Their perception is that the GOP leadership is invested in the current path of government: that it doesn’t want change; it is not committed to restoring liberty and limited government, but instead is comfortable with the growth of regulatory intrusiveness, and seeks merely to broker pragmatic accommodations to leftist activism as a sort of rear-guard action.

Considering that the GOP has been doing this for most of the last 80 years, the voters aren’t wrong.  They aren’t wrong about Mitt Romney: his record of enthusiastic accommodations to the left is a set of rusty, clanking weights tethered to the back of the Mitt-mobile.  Gingrich and Santorum both have some ‘splainin’ to do as well, but Gingrich has specifically repudiated some of his earlier faux pas (such as the snuggle-up with Nancy Pelosi on combating “global warming”).  He also speaks trenchantly on the issues that exercise the most voters:  federal debt, health care regulation, regulation in general, government intervention in the economy, illegal immigration.

It does matter to primary voters, moreover, that Gingrich “takes it to” the media by rhetorically denouncing the questions posed in the GOP debates.  Voters on the right perceive the one-sided political attitude of the media to be a significant problem for American politics.  And while I don’t get as excited as others do about Gingrich’s little rhetorical broadsides in the debates –responding with broadsides isn’t, per se, a component of leadership – this is another thing the voters aren’t wrong about.  Media bias is a problem, not only in politics but for our public life in general.  People believe a lot of things that aren’t so today because of the particular narratives favored by the major media.  The perception of public assent generated by the media’s formulations produces an environment for government taking actions that jeopardize our liberties.

Many voters are determined not to be ruled by federal executive agencies whose agendas are approved by MSNBC and the New York Times.  These voters are voting for the candidate they deem most likely to reverse America’s slide into precisely that method of government.  That they see such a candidate in Newt Gingrich speaks more loudly about the general state of the GOP than about anything else.  Voters are seeking to break the inertia and conventionalism of the Republican Party; this is, in fact, a power struggle, and one in which I would not bet against the voters.

The famous salvo from South Carolina in April 1861 precipitated a shooting war under old conditions that no longer prevail.  The Union had all the material advantage in that war, as it had the moral advantage in being determined to preserve the national union while ending slavery.

But today’s South is no longer under such a disadvantage.  A political salvo from the South is a different portent now.  Likewise, the Republican Party doesn’t hold a Union-like advantage over its members, nor is there any valid reason for our federal government to hold such an advantage over a law-abiding people.  Today’s “rebel” GOP voters in South Carolina aren’t the slave-regime old guard, they’re the abolitionists.  We need not be deceived that wanting to reverse the encroachments of the federal government, and defeat the plantation mentality in Washington, is evidence of irresponsibility or lawlessness.  The truth is closer to the opposite.

The people have one tool – the vote – by which to express the sentiment that things have to change.  In 2008, Mitt Romney didn’t look all that different from George W. Bush.  The Obama tenure has been a wake-up call that has put Romney in a new perspective: in 2012, he doesn’t look as different from Barack Obama as conservative voters would prefer.  Obama is less an outlier than the end-gamer of the same big-government principles embraced by both major parties over the past 80 years.  We have now seen with our own eyes where those principles lead, and the voters don’t want to go there.  It’s not the voters who need to wise up; it’s the Republican Party.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Romney is not a small-government, limited-government conservative.  He will not go on offense against the dangerous principles on which government is being conducted today in the United States.  This is thought by many to be behind his “electability,” but it makes him the most defensive of potential Republican candidates.

RomneyCare is only one example of Romney’s comfort with big government, but it’s an important one.  Romney has continued to defend the principle of an absolute purchase mandate, levied on anyone with an income and a pulse.  The health “insurance” purchase mandate is not like the mandate for driver’s insurance, because citizens can opt out of being drivers.  But avoiding the health-insurance purchase mandate of RomneyCare requires opting out of life (or leaving Massachusetts).

Purchase mandates are not so much a states’ prerogatives issue as an issue of the principles controlling the purpose and scope of government.  RomneyCare is wrong for Massachusetts because it’s bad government.  Of course people in Massachusetts can choose to levy such a mandate if they want, but that doesn’t make it a good idea.  It puts government in an intrusive role that not only invites but demands a spiraling level of intrusion, one that pits citizen against citizen, rent-seekers against taxpayers, and government against liberty.

The US federal government is engaged today in far too many things that promote all three of these conflicts.  Advocacy groups leverage the EPA to prevent business activities that would generate thousands of jobs.  Both unions and big businesses lobby incessantly for regulations and special laws that will ensure they don’t have to face the consequences of unprofitability.  Yet very often, the conditions that make them unprofitable are themselves produced by regulation, rather than market factors.  These sources of cost to the public purse go increasingly uncriticized; the fiscal disaster, we are told, can only be averted by taking more from the taxpayers and further modifying the taxpayers’ behavior.

Health care is, as always, a prime example of this kind of interplay.  Once the premise of public funding for health care is established, everything anyone does becomes a cost issue for the public treasury.  There are some protected categories of behavior, like those that lead to STDs and AIDS, but constituencies arise for controlling people’s eating habits and fertility, and for proclaiming everything under the sun – including the sun itself – to be a public health hazard.  The urgent necessity of controlling what people do is amplified by the centralized, spiraling cost of health-care disbursements.  Few forms of government-brokered activism are as inimical to individual liberty.

Government – not social or economic dynamics – is now the primary means of pitting citizen against citizen.  This needs to change: the scope and independence of federal agencies and the regulatory impulse need to be dramatically reined in.  We can’t afford for the federal government to continue on the premise of the last 80 years.  The basic premise must change.

This doesn’t mean that the changes need to be abrupt, but they do need to be scheduled and prosecuted with determination.  Only someone who believes that, however, will be willing to make the case, and face down the multifarious opposition to reducing the footprint of government on principle.  Reduction on principle means that government can’t come back in 10 years and start regulating again things that it was ordered not to regulate in 2013 (or tighten regulations that were loosened).  It means that the apparatus for reclaiming an over-regulatory posture won’t even be there in 10 years.

Romney is not the man who will do this.  He has coexisted comfortably with the regulatory premise throughout his public life – even during his years at Bain Capital.  He sees a need to change some regulations on the margin, but he is not an advocate of fundamentally changing the premise on which we now regulate ourselves.

Although it’s not the point of this post, I will suggest, for comparison, what a truly deregulatory posture might look like.  Besides eliminating, or at least drastically reducing, the size and charter of the EPA and other federal agencies, a key shift in principle would be requiring that Congress positively approve every new regulation.  We already have the condition in which Congress sets parameters for the regulatory charters of the various agencies – and that is what has gotten us to the current environment of wild, often incoherent overregulation.  It is a good principle to start with, that whatever forms of regulation Congress doesn’t have time to attend to directly, we don’t need anyway.

Much reduction in the footprint of regulation would flow from that.  I also like Rick Perry’s proposal to reduce the amount of time Congress spends in session.  It is shifts in principle like this that will change the basis of government.  Changing that basis is our only hope for arresting the fiscal freight train headed for the mother of all wrecks.  But Romney is not the candidate who will push for the changes we need.

That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be better than Obama.  He would.  But electing Romney will mean at least four more years of playing on defense:  trying to mitigate the score being racked up by the other side, rather than playing on offense to score touchdowns for liberty and smaller government.  That’s why so many of the voters can’t get excited about Romney.  They know we need someone to lead us in a direction of fundamental change – a shift in the principle of government, back toward the limited-government idea of the Founders, plus a very big reduction in its footprint – and they know Romney won’t do that.

I would put the other candidates (with Ron Paul as an outlier) in this order, as to how much they would push for fundamental change: Perry, Gingrich, Santorum.  All three would go further than Romney would in this regard.  If any of these candidates got a Republican-controlled Congress, we could expect some amount of actual reduction in the persistent basis for regulation.

Romney’s approach would be to tinker with it on the margins.  I will vote for Romney if he’s the choice, just as I will vote for any of the other three.  But what we need is a small-government president who will go on offense.  Defense will only stave off the eventual loss.  And as we see with the Republican apathy over Romney, in politics – unlike football – defense isn’t exciting or motivational.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Vivian: So you don’t actually have a billion dollars, huh?

Edward:  No, I get some of it from banks, investors…

Vivian: And you don’t make anything and you don’t build anything.

Edward: No. No.

Vivian: So what do you do with the companies once you buy them?

Edward: I sell them.

Vivian: … You sell them.

Edward: Well, l… don’t sell the whole company; I break it up into pieces… and then I sell that off; it’s worth more than the whole.

Vivian: So it’s sort of like, um, stealing cars and selling ‘em for the parts, right?

Edward: [ Exhales ] Yeah, sort of. But legal.

Edward Lewis could have added:  “… and I love being able to FIRE PEOPLE!!”  Or so the soundbite-driven understanding of all this would have it.

You’d think Romney’s opponents would know that much of the base they’re trying to appeal to hates demagoguery against business.  When a business isn’t profitable, there are good reasons why it’s better to repackage and repurpose its assets for more profitable use.  Unprofitable businesses aren’t made profitable by political bailouts; they are made dependent and unsustainable.  Businesses like Bain Capital ensure that resources are being put to the most profitable, job-creating uses, given the environment of regulation and taxes that businesses have to operate in.  There’s nothing wrong with the existence of such companies; indeed, they are a positive factor in a dynamic business climate.

But then, Romney is tin-eared himself on some significant things.  He did, in fact, say that he likes to be able to fire people if they’re not performing.  That is a stupid, politically insensitive way to word a valid requirement of a healthy economy.  People sometimes have to be fired, but it’s suspicious for someone to “like” being able to do it.  There is nothing more gratifying than an employee who does well, and in particular one who improves over time, while there is nothing that makes the average boss feel as terrible as having to fire one who simply can’t seem to measure up.

Why couldn’t Romney have said instead that businesses need to be able to fire non-performing employees, even though it’s never any fun to do that?  Apparently because that’s not the way he sees it.  His phrase about liking to be able to fire people is the one that came naturally to him.  It doesn’t mean he’s a cold-hearted jerk who loves to give people bad news, but it is a personality problem for him in political leadership.  ‘80s-era pop psychologists would have said that he is very “objective-oriented”: he resonates to the idea of the goal and the achievement, and gives short shrift to the people.

Republicans do want a better climate for business, but the more abstract, data-focused perspective of a Bain Capital graduate is not necessarily what they are looking for.  I don’t actually want a president who imagines he can boost the bottom line of US companies.  I want one who understands that government policies affect people, largely through the constraints they put on business.  And I want him to respect the rights and dignity of individual people, neither trying to bribe them with goodies nor trying to herd them into programs that he sees as financially smart.  I’m not looking for a president with an opinion on whether a whole bunch of things he isn’t in charge of can be profitable.

Bringing up Bain as an issue has also turned up the fact that Bain profited from a deal in the early 1990s involving a steel company that received a $44 million federal bailout for its pension plan.  While it is demagoguery to equate this with Bain itself receiving a federal bailout, it is still a problem for Romney.  Companies like Bain have been operating in the environment of government incentives, regulations, and bailouts for quite a while now, and Romney’s record is one of being comfortable with that.  (He endorsed the TARP bailout in 2008.)

More and more of the people are not comfortable with it.  It is well and good that Romney wants the government to get off business’s back, but it’s not OK to remove only some constraints while leaving others, and continuing to bail the whole mess out.

Sadly, Romney’s opponents have wasted a superb opportunity to talk about what they think is the proper relationship between business and government.  They have simply jumped on the demagoguery bandwagon, which frankly is cheap and annoying.  If I were crafting talking points, I would address the “liking to fire people” comment graciously – something along the lines of “I’m sure this is what Governor Romney meant to say” – and focus more on Romney’s comfort with the extent to which government regulates business, profits from regulating business, and bails business out so it can keep regulating and profiting.

One last thought.  In contrast to the bloviation-fest precipitated by the Bain Eruption, consider the cool dispatch and intelligence with which the candidates knocked down the idiotic social-issue questions posed by Stephanopoulos and Sawyer in the debate on Saturday night.  The candidates were ready to talk about those issues – irrelevant as they were – with principled specifics.

On the matter of business and government, however, it’s been all big-government complacency on one side, and all mindless demagoguery on the other.  Not a hint of a principled argument about the free market and the appropriate role of government, from the perspective of either a man-and-the-state theory, or a regulation-vs.-the-market theory.

Nothing has made clear like the last 40 months that there is no longer an American consensus on these matters.  The Obama camp knows exactly where it stands.  But the GOP candidates aren’t internally motivated and prepared to make specific cases about it, as they are about social issues.  Yet that’s what the voters are waiting to hear.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Romney, the son of a politician, has been running for office, holding office or thinking about running for office for more than two decades. “Just level with the American people,” Gingrich growled. “You’ve been running … at least since the 1990s.”

For some reason, Romney can’t do that. Or at least it seems like he can’t. His authentic inauthenticity problem isn’t going away. And it’s sapping enthusiasm from the rank and file.

Goldberg is right, but the underlying theme that voters need to be reminded of is that during so many important debates fromhealthcare, jobs, Wall Street Reform, confirmations, recess appointments, to taxes the culprits to invoke cloture or side with the Democrats typically are the same:  Senators Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe,  and Scott Brown–the trifecta of RINOs. All from the northeast, too.  See where I’m going with this?

Frankly, Romney, who the mainstream liberal media would like to see win the nomination, has yet to unite the GOP base.  His used car salesman pitch simply rubs people the wrong way.  We’ve seen this over and over again–even John McCain pointed this out and won in 2007′s primary–and now supports him–that should speak volumes to my point.  Romney has always been dogged by this and this is why we have such a large ‘Not Romney’ camp on the right side of the aisle.

The GOP is also paying the bitter price for not having anyone in line to succeed GW Bush.  The party’s internal tug of war will be an historical teachable moment and prepare the party for future elections.  The one saving grace is that, while the Democrats have Hillary, they have no one to succeed her at this point in time.  I say Hillary because she seems to be the only power broker left untarnished by Obama–even though she is an Alinsky kinda girl.

Additionally, the GOP presidential candidate will have a two-pronged mission as the nominee:  to beat the MSM and Obama.  However, enlightened voters now know for sure the media is mostly state-controlled, Obama was never vetted, and that his radical leftist ideology drives his policies, appointments, and regulations out of the mainstream.

Furthermore, the MSM needs Romney to offset Obama.  The formula is quite simple:  RomneyCare is to ObamaCare as Obama’s rhetoric is to Romney’s rhetoric all of which cancel each other out according to how the media sees it.

I’m not buying the media hype over who can beat Obama.  The primary is the primary and the game changes in the general.  Voters are more inclined to vote with their wallets.  We have gas prices averaging at almost $4 per gallon across the country, skyrocketing food prices, record foreclosures, record number of people on food stamps, high unemployment, ObamaCare, crippling regulations, and much more.  So if the MSM thinks that the historic 2010 midterm GOP wave was a whim, think again.  The Right accomplished its key mission of splitting the Congress so that Obama’s agenda could not be rammed through anymore.  Would we have liked the Senate, sure, but in 2012, the job will be finished.  My point is that who do we really want in the Oval Office?  A northeastern Republican who disavows the GOP or not.  We already have someone who does not have the consent of the governed.  Are we really going to take that risk again?

Finally, Romney has always touted RomneyCare as a great model for all the states to implement, but the reality is, the only person who implemented RomneyCare was Obama and now we have ObamaCare.  No thanks.

McCaskill still blasted the GOP for including the provision in the bill, but said she’d be “gosh darn if I think it’s a good idea to raise taxes on people working as hard as they know how right now.” In other words, Republicans put Senate moderates like McCaskill and Ben Nelson over a barrel, and they’re going to have to give the GOP something in order to produce an extension of a payroll tax holiday that was a bad idea when it was first implemented and hasn’t done anything to boost the economy anyway, but now it will look like a tax hike if it goes away. The Senate, which hasn’t produced a budget on its own in almost 1000 days now, couldn’t have botched policy any worse than this. McCaskill’s basically looking for a way out.

This brings up a problem I’ve been trying to highlight here for the last month. When Republicans begin talking about tax hikes, extending tax cuts and the related effect of each on the economy, there is a big trap waiting which the Democrats would love to see us spring. Let’s examine the emphasized portion above. So there is currently a “tax holiday” in effect which has effectively lowered the tax rate being paid by workers across the country. What that means, by definition, is that it is the current tax rate. But it was only intended to be temporary and it produces a negative effect on the Social Security trust fund, right? So we should oppose extending it on that basis… right?

(We’ll pause here for a moment so everyone can nod their heads solemnly in agreement.)

Now let’s take a look at the famous “Bush tax cuts.” We all know the story there. Something has to be done to keep the Democrats in check or they’re going to let them expire, which will result in – and I’m using the same language you can find on any conservative site around the web here – a massive tax hike, particularly on the rich job creators.

See anything fishy yet?

Those tax cuts were also written into legislation as being “temporary” in nature because they were designed with an end date specified, unless they were extended. (Or “made permanent” which is a complete joke because nothing of that nature is permanent and the next Congress is never bound by the decisions of the last one.) And allowing such a “tax hike” to take place would be disastrous for the economy, right? Right? Because you can’t have the government sucking more money out of the economy. It hurts job creation and etc. etc. etc.

The tax code is constantly in flux. (Mostly because the tax code itself is a destructive disaster to begin with, but that’s a story for another day.) Any time the tax code today changes tomorrow, it’s either a tax hike or a tax cut. You can’t make it one or the other based on your whims without being subject to charges of hypocrisy. If you fight against keeping the current payroll tax holiday in place saying it “will look like a tax hike,” you’d best not have a history of saying that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire would be a tax hike. Otherwise you’ve load up the opposition with ammo.

And if lower tax rates enacted by a Republican “helped the economy,” then you’d best be ready with an awful lot of data to show the massive majority of middle class workers that lower taxes which put more money in their pockets “hasn’t done anything to boost the economy anyway.” Otherwise you’re only making the fondest dreams of Democratic strategists come true.

Now some of you will be quick like a bunny to jump to the barricades and say, “No, no! There’s a difference between the marginal tax rates and payroll tax deductions!” To a certain extent you may be correct in theory, but we’re not talking about reality here. We’re talking about politics and talking points and thirty second sound bites which are easily digested by the masses in headlines. Who do you think the target audience here is… the OMB? Any outcome which results in more money being withheld from workers’ paychecks tomorrow will carry the only lasting image which counts.

You really can’t have it both ways.

But we will know — and very soon, too. I have in mind an infallible test, one that the Godfather might not even realize he’s taking.

There is little that a candidate for public office can do to punish a political operation that is savaging the principal. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to (a) push a positive public-policy agenda for the voters, (b) respond to political attacks by competitors and launch his own counterattacks, and (c) chastise third-party liars and libelers clandestinely dispatched by ideological enemies.

He just has to shrug off (c) and hope that nobody believes the slanders anyway; he simply doesn’t have the option of nuking the craven dastards properly — that is, while he’s still in the game scrambling for nomination or election.

But it’s all topsy-turvey once a candidate drops out of the running. At that point, he has given up all hope of election this cycle… so he has nothing left to lose by crushing his tawdry traducers. In fact, if he is to run again in the future with any hope of success, he is obliged to clear his good name; else his next opponent will cheerfully resurrect the old and unanswered charges, jump-starting the scandal serenade once again. The once and never again candidate would be forever barred from running for president, governor, congressman, or Chairman of the Elves, Leprechauns, Gnomes, and Little Men’s Chowder & Marching Society.

Thus we come to Mr. Cain, who abruptly announced yesterday that he is no longer in play to be President of the United States… who thus is also finally free to fully answer his accusers — most specifically Miss Ginger White, a longtime “friend” who now claims to have engaged in a 13-year sex romp with the erstwhile CEO of Godfather Pizza.

And so at last we come to the test: Now that Cain has dropped out of the race, if he is an innocent victim of calumny, he must go after Miss White in court.

If Cain sues White for libel and slander, her only defense would be truth. She certainly cannot claim never to have said that they had a long-term affair; she said it on national TV. Nor can she claim that she caused him no damages; arguably, it cost him his shot at the presidency! Neither can she rely upon his status as a public figure (which of course he is), because she certainly knows for a fact whether they had an affair; therefore, if they did not, yet she said they did, then that would certainly satisfy the requirement of “actual malice.”

No, no, and no; her only defense is to claim truth. But in such a case, my non-lawyer understanding is that truth is an “affirmative defense”… meaning the burden of proof shifts to the defendant, Miss White, to prove that they did indeed have an affair. Cain would not have to prove they didn’t; White would have to prove that they did. If she could not, she would lose her case; White would be slapped with potentially ruinous damages, and more to the point, Herman Cain would be utterly vindicated.

In fact, although there is no logical connection, if a court were to find Miss White liable for libel, or if she ‘fessed up and apologized, that verdict would cast grave doubt in most people’s minds about all the other accusations against Cain as well; that’s just how people think. If the worst charge against him is demolished as a mean-spirited, vicious falsehood, who’s going to believe the lesser charges? Only those who never would have voted for him anyway.

Contrariwise, if the dame really can produce the complete cell-phone records she claims to have — including the content of text messages and e-mails that show it really was an affair, not merely friendship — then Cain himself would surely know it. In that case, he might make loud noises and wave his hands in the air, but he would never run the risk of actually filing a lawsuit he was destined to lose. Fighting such a high-profile case and losing it would crush his reputation far flatter than raging to the skies but avoiding a court of law like an atheist shies away from a cross.

So that is the acid test of Herman Cain’s veracity and fidelity: Simpy put, if he files a charge of libel and slander in court and dares White to claim “truth” as a defense, then he is very likely innocent of the charges.

But if he fumfahs around, rattling the bars of his cage but never actually making a federal case out of it, then I will fairly conclude that he’s guilty on all counts.

As I said, I reckon we’ll know pretty soon; Cain’s lawyer, Lin Wood, has already demanded those records from White; but he hasn’t pulled the trigger yet. Now that Cain is a civilian once more, he’s going to have to either fish or get off the pot.

And then we’ll all know whether he was a man with a mission — or a man with a secret.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

‘Pick your metaphor,’ Carney said at his daily briefing Thursday while dismissing the GOP proposal … as a showy, but ultimately shallow alternative to Obama’s plan. ‘Window dressing or gorilla dust.’

Nakamura spends the next 400 words puzzling over the obscure phrase gorilla dust, which he ultimately traces back to one-time spoiler candidate Ross Perot. Excellent idea for a press secretary: Use figures of speech that no one will recognize.

Actually, it’s a perfect idea for a press secretary to Barack Obama, who himself tends to speak in tongues when communicating. Here is Obama’s own reaction to the GOP alternative:

Tonight, Senate Republicans chose to raise taxes on nearly 160 million hardworking Americans because they refused to ask a few hundred thousand millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share. They voted against a bill that would have not only extended the $1,000 tax cut for a typical family….

The comment is vintage Obama, which is to say pure straw man argument peppered with a favorite meme, this month’s flavor being fair share. The GOP has espoused support (if for political reasons) for extending the payroll tax cut. They are thus notseeking to “raise taxes on nearly 160 million hardworking Americans.” The bone of contention between the parties is not whether to extend the cut but how to pay for it.

So what did each of the parties propose? The GOP plan called for freezing the pay for federal workers for an additional three years, trimming the federal workforce by 10%, and forcing high-income earners to pay more for programs such as Medicare. The Democratic plan was “the usual”—i.e., raise taxes on the wealthy.

It is understandable that the Democrats would balk at the Republican proposal, which fails to conform to their worldview, where more government means better government. But why feign righteous indignation over what is just the latest example ofan inability of divergent minds to meet?

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As with the original document dump in 2009, there is much in the newest 5,000-plus emails—nicknamed Climategate 2.0—to cause their senders justifiable mortification. And as with Climategate 1.0, the newest incriminating releases have commentators on the left exasperated.

Kate Sheppard, who covers energy and environmental politics for Mother Jones, laments that “in certain circles,” the latest batch of emails is “playing out much like the first batch of emails did,” meaning that anti-science ignoramuses on the right (and even some on the left!) are “cherry-picking” “quotes from the emails taken out of their context” so as “to paint scientists as scheming or lying.”

Among the media suspects she names are “conservative commentators” at the UK’s Telegraph, Hot Air (the latter a reference to an article by Ed that ran on November 22), and FOX News. But she also lambastes ABC News (which “just rehashed a bunch of he-said, she-said about it, rather than actually reporting”), the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and the New York Times.

So which are the most damning quotes that these various media have taken out of context? One especially popular choice is a portion of an email by Peter Thorne, who currently works with NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. In the passage, which appears near the beginning of the dump, Thorne writes:

Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary either in Chicago or when I visit in March (has a date been decided yet?).

As Sheppard acknowledges, the emails since their release have been posted in a format with links that enables the reader to view the complete email exchange and in so doing judge whether in fact a quote has been taken out of context.

But the fragments from the dump that most commanded my attention were those that can’t be explained away by a need for a broader context. Consider this one sent by Kathryn Humphrey, a scientific adviser with the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA):

I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.

Or this one by Jonathan Overpeck, co-director of Institute of the Environment at Arizona State University:

I agree w/ Susan [Solomon] that we should try to put more in the bullet about ‘Subsequent evidence’ [...] Need to convince readers that there really has been an increase in knowledge – more evidence. What is it?

Concerns for whether a narrative looks “strong” or the funding source (Government) “foolish” are anathema to scientific inquiry. So is a concern for “convincing” readers. It is the job of the unvarnished data to do that.

People like Kate Sheppard should be just as outraged by this political—and anti-scientific—silliness as the sources she condemns. Science is a quest first and foremost for the truth. If a hypothesis fails to predict or describe observable data, then the hypothesis gets replaced—not the data.

When science takes a back seat to politics and politicians’ agenda, we all lose.

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2.  That Rick Perry had anything to do with the “leak” of “information” about sexual harassment complaints against Cain to Politico.

3.  That Mitt Romney was behind the “leaks” either.

4.  That the mythical ability to silence baseless innuendo, or spin it and come out smelling like a rose, or avoid it altogether, is a qualification for being president of the United States.

5.  That the left-wing mainstream media act in good faith when they retail these allegations.

6.  That media coverage of such allegations and innuendo is some form of vetted professional activity, rather than just a glorified form of slam book smears and middle-school cafeteria gossip.

7.  That it is incumbent on any of us to take the endless effluvia of the media smear machine seriously.

8.  That it is a sign of intelligence to thoughtfully consider these charges-without-evidence, rather than simply dismissing them.

9.  That the whole circus matters to our choice of president, in terms of illuminating for us the character or abilities of any of the candidates.

10.  That any of these cheap-allegation dramas is even about the candidates, rather than about us, and whether we have any judgment or discrimination when it comes to what we let the media fill our heads with.

If a competent prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich, today’s media can smear one – and then make it look like some innocent ham sandwich over there behind the counter did it.  But the media can only do this because we cooperate with them, by simply accepting every negative, damning, evil thought they suggest to us.

Keeping the barrage up is virtually cost-free for them.  They are not going to stop, no matter how conclusively it is proven that they are full of shinola.  Accepting their cues, and spending day after day discussing things on their terms, is the actual problem.  And that problem starts with us.

There is no corrective for this problem in the mechanics of politics or the media’s M.O.  Politics and the media aren’t going to change.  Period.  We have to decide what our characters and priorities will consist of.  Do we have the strength of mind to say this? – “Don’t bother me with your innuendo about Herman Cain.  I want to talk issues.  We need to cut spending, reduce regulation, and undo all of Obama’s dangerous executive orders.  We need to restore a constitutional balance of power in the federal government.  And that’s just for starters. Iran is closing in on a nuclear weapon.  China is menacing all of Asia.  European security is in jeopardy, and so is ours.  That’s what I want to talk about.  The future of the republic is at stake.”

Who cares if “they” think we’re stupid?  Are we seriously going to let this election degenerate into a suicidal snark free-for-all because someone might think we’re stupid, if we don’t bite on every worm the media dangle on the hook?

Any one of us could be in Cain’s or Perry’s position – or Bachmann’s, or Palin’s, or that of any conservative front-runner past or present.  Ronald Reagan himself wouldn’t have triumphed over this kind of media attack.  He would have looked every bit as caught off guard and flat-footed.  One thing the blogosphere does is amplify cheap, off-the-cuff opinions and send them echoing back to us in chorus, as if “everybody” now thinks Candidate X is toast and his character is in shreds.  Is that really true?  What obliges us to think so, other than the kind of fearful, triangulating approach to our personal opinions that we should have overcome by the time we got our high school diplomas?

Herman Cain hasn’t been convicted of sexual harassment, nor have charges been filed against him.  It would be public record if these things had happened.  It is not a sign of intelligence or moral discrimination for conservative voters to feast on vague allegations against our candidates, which we are told by third parties were made by persons whose names we don’t know, and which never resulted in prosecution or sanction.  As a rule for life, that’s no way to think about morality, law, society, or other people’s characters.

And Cain’s not even my preferred candidate.  But this applies to all of them.  If we wait for cheap “bad news” about other people to cease flowing, we’ll be stuck obsessing over it for all eternity.  It doesn’t have to be true or significant; it will just keep coming.  How much we are preoccupied with evil allegations is up to us.  We only think it’s the media doing this to us.  In reality, we’re doing it to ourselves.  We have the power to say no: we’re not playing any more.  Until we do that, the MSM will have us by the short hairs.

Oh, and one more thing I don’t believe:

11.  That Americans are too foolish and weak-minded to figure this out.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The survey, conducted by the Fordham University Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy, finds that 73% of Occupy Wall Streeters disapprove of the way the president is handling his job and that only 36% plan to vote to releect him in November of 2012. In contrast, 60% said that they voted for Obama in November 2008. These paired data dovetail with those of a USA Today/Gallup conducted in August, which found that 51% of voters do not believe that Obama deserves a second term.

Demographically, the breakdown of Wall Street protesters is what you would expect. An overwhelming majority (68%) describe their race as white, while only 10% identify themselves as Black/African American. Hispanics make up another tenth of the total population.

When it comes to ideology, 39% think of themselves as extremely liberal, while another 33% consider themselves as plain liberal—again no surprise there. In terms of party affiliation, nearly as many protesters, 22%, identified themselves as Socialists or Green Party members as Democrats (25%). Thirty-nine percent claimed identification with no political party, and 2% claimed to be Republicans.

To put these polling data in a larger context, consider first the findings of a newly released Pew poll that reveal that support for the Occupy Wall Street movement among Americans have fallen to about 2 in 5 (39%). Then add in the self-acknowledged by team Obama that casting their lot with this rag-tag movement could further alienate independents and other mainstream voters, and you have the makings of a perfect electoral storm.

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(Note:  I didn’t realize until after writing this that Daniel Henninger had an opinion piece on a similar topic in today’s Wall Street Journal.  Great minds and all that.)

The other night, I watched a debate I’ve had on video for years: the PBS-hosted debate between early GOP candidates for the 1988 nomination.  (Many have forgotten now that H.W. Bush had quite a bit of competition.)  I wanted to see if my perception is correct that these debates have gotten much more stupid than they used to be.

And it is.  Boy, is it ever.  Bush was, of course, a “target” in that debate, as the sitting VP.  But the rest of the candidates weren’t out for blood.  There was no blood-in-the-water, feeding-like-sharks dynamic — nor did the moderator or questioners try to set the candidates up to go for each other’s throats, with cheap broadsides and one-liners that may draw laughs or applause, but fall apart on inspection.

The candidates talked – interestingly and intelligently – about a number of meaty topics.  They shoehorned way, way more substance into an hour and a half than the candidates for 2012 are able to get into 2 hours.  (There were 7 candidates in this 1988 debate; it wasn’t a narrow field.  It included blunt talkers like Al Haig, Jack Kemp, and Pat Robertson too.)

The differences between now and then?  Obviously, the behavior of the media is one.  The PBS organizers in 1988 weren’t trying to get a food fight going.

But the candidates’ behavior was equally important.  I’m not sure everyone has figured out that Romney could have refrained from being pugnacious and going into attack-dog mode in the first debate in which he and Perry faced each other.  The fact that he’s good at it doesn’t excuse doing it.  Perry, for his part, didn’t have to respond in kind.  He’s not good at it, and he shouldn’t have tried to match Romney cheap dart for cheap dart.  His strength is in talking policy and exuding a quietly tenacious benevolence.

These two were the field leaders, and they both whiffed at bat.  They didn’t have to take the bait and turn the debates into a mud-slinging contest.  I fault both of them – they’re both big boys – although the motive looks different for each one.  Romney comes off as cynical, willing to sling mud because it works for him, but then wipe himself off and pretend he didn’t start it.  Perry comes off as having had a bout of bad judgment:  thinking he was obliged to compete on the mud-slinging level, and getting mired up to his neck because that’s definitely not his area of strength.

But the most important difference between 1988 and today may be us.  If we didn’t let this contrived nonsense make our decisions for us, the first one who tried it – in the media or on the candidates’ stage – would get his comeuppance and have to scurry back into his hole.

We should know better than to think that debating abilities, in a content-deficient “gotcha” venue, are evidence of moral courage, constitutional vision, or strong leadership.   We should know better than to think that a president needs the ability to score points as Romney does (or as others did in the latest debate), in the artificial, closed-loop debating system designed to reward such point-scoring.

Leading the nation and dealing with global security threats don’t require that ability at all.

The president will never have to debate Hu Jintao or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on a stage under the “gotcha” questioning of MSM anchor persons.  He will never have to debate the leaders of Congress in such a venue.  He won’t even have to debate the Democratic candidate in this manner: an attack-dog stance doesn’t work in that forum, as H.W. Bush demonstrated beautifully when he tried it in 1992, and Dukakis when he tried it in ‘88.  No matter what the “gotcha” question, in the post-convention match-ups, both candidates know whose side everyone is on – they’re not taking friendly fire anymore, and they focus most usefully on getting their own, positive message out.

Of course, the media and Democratic politicians will dog a GOP president’s every step seeking to trip him up and manufacture narratives that put him in a bad light.  But they’re going to do that to any Republican who wins in 2012, and none of the candidates has a magic pill that will immunize him or her against that process.

The president, however, doesn’t spend his time trying to score points against the news media or Democratic politicians.  He’s the president:  he states his case to the people.  Our media today are too numerous and varied for the old MSM to actually prevent the president’s message from getting out. He doesn’t have to shout them down, silence them, or make them look foolish or guilty or incoherent in order to reach the people.  He just has to speak.

His connection with foreign leaders is even simpler, because it’s one-on-one and doesn’t involve the media at all, except as incidental noise.  The media may be able to confuse at least some average Americans about the president’s character and intentions, but they can’t confuse Nicolas Sarkozy, Felipe Calderon, or Benjamin Netanyahu.  (Nor can Democratic politicians who make royal progresses to Damascus or Moscow, for that matter.)

President Obama is Exhibit A in the case that smooth rhetoric is not evidence of character or ability to lead.  Conversely, anyone – anyone – can be made to look stupid under the klieg lights.  You, me, Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill, John Wayne, George Washington, Pope John Paul II, Mother Theresa, Margaret Thatcher.  (Well, maybe not Thatcher.)  It’s the easiest thing in the world to frame a moment so that someone looks like a guilty, inarticulate fool, unable to explain himself or get that awful knife-throwing machine turned off.  It’s also cheap and meaningless.

Our character as Americans ought to cause a revulsion in us against this kind of cheap theater in our political process.  As recently as 1988, it was better understood – by the media and the candidates – that it did.

I have my concerns about Rick Perry.  I think it was a serious misstep for him to go into attack mode in the debates; I’d prefer him to have seen the dilemma coming and chosen differently.  It was just the wrong thing to do, not so much because it’s not a good tactic for him – that’s an ephemeral concern – but as a matter of tone and leadership.  The debates have provided no reason, however, for concluding that anyone else who’s running would be a better president.  (I say this as someone who would be reasonably satisfied with anyone in the race except Ron Paul.)

My own view is that Perry has learned from his mistake and decided that his best option is to cut his losses and focus elsewhere.  That’s something I respect.  There will always be naysayers baying at such an enterprise, but we all have to recover from mistakes and losses at one time or another.  We can let the naysayers rule our attitude, or not.

Perry’s move is a gamble, certainly, but one thing it demonstrates is a willingness to strategize independently, rather than having his boundaries set by the organizational dictates of others.  He’s a politician; he understands the gravity of this move, and isn’t making it lightly.  But I, for one, am not invested in these debates.  I’d rather hear the candidates give their stump speeches, and peruse the information about their records that is available from numerous sources, friendly and otherwise.

Others may disagree.  But no reference to the “appearance” of the candidates, based on their debate performance, is a convincing argument about their character or suitability for the Oval Office.  The debates have been too silly for that.  They are little more than a high school popularity forum, showcasing facile performance abilities and leaving the viewer feeling cynical and unsatisfied.  I am convinced that 2012 will be decided by whether we show that we have the chops, as an electorate, to look beyond these debates.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Ditto for the Obama re-election campaign. Its latest hire is Broderick Johnson, who has come aboard in the role of senior campaign adviser.

Johnson, should the name be unfamiliar, is a longtime Wall Street lobbyist. His clients include have included Bank of America, Fannie Mae, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Shell Oil, AT&T, Comcast, and other OWS-defined enemies of the state.

Johnson currently is a partner at Collins Johnson Group, a D.C.-based communications firm that claims to provide

superior strategic planning and political consulting services to multinational corporations, government entities, political campaigns and parties, elected leaders, nonprofit organizations, issue groups, investors and entrepreneurs.

If you’re a member of the anti-Wall Street protest movement, you can find plenty of people in those sectors whose homes you might want to visit.

Matthew Boyle of The Daily Caller notes that Johnson, while still a registered lobbyist, visited the White House 17 times. The visits must have been of a personal nature because 2008 candidate Barack Obama was unequivocal about banning lobbyists from his administration. He even signed an executive order his first day in office excluding former lobbyists from working “on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years.”

And Barack Obama keeps his promises. Or at least he does 60% of the time. He said so himself on a campaign swing through Nevada and California yesterday:

I carry around a little checklist, and I think we’ve got about 60 percent of it done so far. And that’s not bad for three years, because I need another five.

Actually, the president’s math is suspect. If he made good on 60% of his promises in three years, then he needs only two more years to complete the remainder.

But I digress. Writes Matthew Boyle:

The Obama re-election campaign appears to have tried to hide or downplay Johnson’s lobbying history, as the original campaign press release announcing his hire completely ignored it. Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse hasn’t returned The DC’s request for comment on the issue, either.

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ON THE KEVIN McCULLOUGH SHOW:

1. THE HEADLINE ITEMS:
I believe Herman Cain has lost his bid for the nomination. His inexplicable inability to articulate what a pro-life position is, will devastate his ability to carry the base for the nomination. I listen and demonstrate how on today’s show. kmcradio@gmail.com

2. THE PRACTICAL DILEMMA:
A new movement in public schools is forcing parents to allow their kids to be exposed to naked indoctrination with no opt-out to the most objectionable parts. So should parental rights be equivalent to first amendment religious protections? Your replies: kmcradio@gmail.com.

3. THE GOD THOUGHT:
“There is nothing more selfish than sorrow, and there is nothing more absorbing unless we guard against its tendency to monopolize. Work for the benefit of others, work for God’s purposes–work–is our best comforter next to the promise of God’s Holy Spirit.” CONTINUE: “God Thought” on facebook!

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An Ox came down to a reedy pool to drink. As he splashed heavily into the water, he crushed a young Frog into the mud. The old Frog soon missed the little one and asked his brothers and sisters what had become of him.
“A great big monster,” said one of them, “stepped on little brother with one of his huge feet!”

“Big, was he!” said the old Frog, puffing herself up. “Was he as big as this?”

“Oh, much bigger!” they cried.

The Frog puffed up still more.

“He could not have been bigger than this,” she said. But the little Frogs all declared that the monster was much, much bigger and the old Frog kept puffing herself out more and more until, all at once, she burst.

Back to the headline, Hugo Chávez Says His Cancer Is Gone, Simón Romero, writes,

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela declared on Thursday that he had beaten cancer, less than five months after he stunned Venezuelans by revealing that he had undergone emergency surgery to remove a tumor while in seclusion in Cuba.

This is not the first time he’s said that. Back in July he was saying exactly the same thing; now he continues to assert,

“No abnormal cellular activity exists,” said Mr. Chávez in comments broadcast on state media while on a visit to western Venezuela, where he was preparing to visit a Roman Catholic shrine. “I’ve begun to exit the cave,” said the president, dressed in a green military uniform.

Despite Mr. Chávez’s announcement, which he made after a brief trip to Cuba for a checkup, mystery still shrouds his condition.

Clearly, Hugo is sick – no doubt about it. Whatever condition he has is manifesting itself in many clear ways that he can not hide. Obviously it is a severe medical condition. Rumors have been flying on the nature of the illness(es), the most recent include kidney failure and medullary aplasia.

Is it cancer?

He‘s the one who’s saying it’s cancer, he‘s the one saying he’s cancer-free. However, as I pointed out in the past, “cancer” is a good smoke screen (there are some 200 types of cancers), elicits compassion – we all have family/friends who have been devastated by it – and explains a multitude of therapies and absences (and trips to Cuba).

Ask yourselves, with the decades-long propaganda on “Cuba’s excellent health care”, if Cuban doctors had actually cured Chávez’s cancer, wouldn’t both regimes (Cuba’s and Venezuela’s) be parading a team of oncologists on innumerable press conferences confirming this “cure”?

He has never publicly revealed what type of cancer afflicted him. Altogether, Mr. Chávez, 57, underwent four chemotherapy treatments, including three in Cuba and one in Venezuela, according to the government.

Physically, he still looked like a changed man on Thursday, appearing bloated and with a green military cap covering a bald head. Spiritually, Mr. Chávez also seems to have acquired a more religious air. “I’m more Christian every day,” he said Thursday. “Socialism is the road to Christ.”

Hugo must think that having close ties to Iran and moving Venezuela’s gold to Caracas may bring him closer to heaven, then. Hugo also spent some time beating up on the rich and mangling Biblical parables (video in Spanish)

Salvador Navarrete is the only physician who has dared to speak about Chávez’s medical condition (emphasis added),

a prominent Venezuelan doctor who describes himself as the president’s former personal surgeon, said this week that Mr. Chávez had less than two years to live, attributing his illness to a “very aggressive” tumor in the pelvic area.

Dr. Navarrete, a former militant in Mr. Chávez’s political movement, said he drew his conclusions from recent discussions with Mr. Chávez’s family.

It’s not clear if Navarrete has treated Chávez during this “cancer” occurrence – and, from a public-relations point of view, Navarrete’s statement that Chávez has been treated for bipolar disorder may be more damaging than a “cancer” (yet another reason for Chávez to bang the “cancer” drum loudly).

What is clear is that Navarrete has had to leave, along with his family, Venezuela suddenly (apparently going to Mexico) because of the fallout. Romero reports,

agents from the Sebin, Mr. Chávez’s secret intelligence police, had appeared at Dr. Navarrete’s office this week to question him.

Navarrete’s private practice and his teaching position are ended.

The moral from the fable at the start of this post? Take everything coming out from Chávez’s mouth as so much puffery, particularly when it comes to his health.

Cross-posted at Fausta’s blog

*Catch the next episode at 8pm EST on radio stations across America or by way of podcast:
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*Find The Kevin McCullough Show on our newest affiliate of the month:
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1. THE HEADLINE ITEMS:
The “Occupy” movement steps forward the next level. In demonstrations on Tuesday going so far as to claim that violence was necessary for genuine economic help to come about. ALSO: The latest excuse for a debate was held by Bloomberg last night, yikes. The swords were out for Cain, we’ll hear from Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. kmcradio@gmail.com

2. THE PRACTICAL DILEMMA:
A piece in the Atlanta predicts the “End of Men.” A female friend from Washington DC pointed this article out to me yesterday and today we begin a very important discussion of what the essence of this column would end up looking like. Sick of men? Think everybody else is? Your replies: kmcradio@gmail.com.

3. THE GOD THOUGHT:
“There is no second blessing or spiritual experience that can magically propel us to a state where we no longer struggle with sin. That won’t happen until we finally get to heaven. Between now and then we walk the hard road to glory.” CONTINUE: “God Thought” on facebook!

Also able to be heard via a snappy smart phone listening app for the AFR Radio Network at that same time each night 8pm EST. Download Apple’s iTunes AFR’s app here. Android and other smart phones may download here.

The human microphone idea is simple.  The crowd repeats each phrase uttered by a speaker, in order to amplify the sound and ensure the message gets across.  If you’re not alone in being reminded forcibly of kindergarten, wait, there’s more.  Check out the Chicago link above, and scroll down for the links to photos of “spirit fingers,” “peace guns,” and “point of process” triangle hands.  These methods of communication remind me of nothing so much as the cues used by grade school teachers with their young charges.

“OK, second grade.  We will walk single file to the lunch room.  If we need to stop for another class, I will raise my right hand.  The person behind me should raise their right hand and stop.  Everybody else raise their right hand and we all come to a stop.  Now, what do you see if we have to stop?”

“Your right hand!”

“That’s right.  And what do you do if you see my right hand?”

“Raise my right hand and stop!”

“That’s right.  Now, who has any questions?  Yes, Grayson?”

“Miz Smith, when do we put our right hand down?”

People used to get their buzz over responsive yelling by attending football games.  Communicating in code, with hand gestures, was something that was fun for a while if you were a Boy Scout or a Campfire Girl, earning badges and learning special, secret things.  Bird calls, writing in hieroglyphs, spelling out cuss words in American Sign Language – kids can have a lot of fun with codes.

But we have no tribal memory, as humans, of a time when it might have been a good idea to give a say over our lives or our government to people who adopt the communication modes of childhood.  That would just be stupid.  The kid-level communicating is cute when kids do it.  It’s creepy and weird when the people doing it have the bodies of adults – and aren’t in a comms-challenged combat situation like a SWAT Team, a SEAL team, or an infantry patrol.

The “creep” factor is the one that struck J. Christian Adams, who posted the video of the Atlanta human-microphone incident for Pajamas.  (Jazz Shaw today highlights the same mob’s ignorant dismissal of John Lewis.)  And there is definitely an element of mindless invigoration to it.  It’s one thing to listen to a demagogue (or even just someone giving administrative instructions), registering the message in your brain but not doing anything about it, at least for the moment.  It’s another kind of action altogether, to vigorously repeat everything a speaker is saying.  Doing so generates a powerful sense of noisy assent for everyone involved.  You’re not just there listening and thinking: you’ve sold out your critical thinking faculties, and agreed to convey automatically whatever the speaker wants to say.

It is, as Adams notes, the perfect incubator for a violent mob.  The reliance on coded cues – rather than on reasoned debate – is another proto-mob feature.  Ann Coulter’s latest book, Demonic, gives a number of examples of how mobs go into a frenzy over coded cues, interpreting them as pretexts for action in ways they would not if they were in a different, more measured – more explicit and articulate – communication environment.

When you’re five years old, there are a lot of circumstances in which the right thing to do is to ask you to suspend your reservations and critical thinking skills.  For one thing, you don’t have very much of the latter.  You don’t have much discrimination or judgment.

But in the adult world – the world of binding decisions, commitments, promises, ideology, political thought – the suspension of skepticism and rational, critical thought is fatal.  There is no realm of politics in which it is appropriate for crowds to act as a human microphone.  Politics is a tool, a method; it isn’t something that merits such a hold on us.  It’s not something we can trust and give ourselves over to.  A political movement, conducted with temperance and intelligent suasion, has its uses; a mob paroxysm is just an accident – and probably a violent and costly one – waiting to happen.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Characteristically, Hugo Chavez is propagandizing against the USA, siding with the Occupy Wall Street protestors while calling Mitt Romney “crazy man” and President Obama “a big fraud”;
Chavez slams “horrible repression” of U.S. protests

Socialist firebrand Hugo Chavez condemned on Saturday the “horrible repression” of anti-Wall Street protesters and termed a Republican presidential candidate “crazy” for his criticism of Cuba and Venezuela.

Although still convalescing from cancer surgery in June followed by four rounds of chemotherapy, the 57-year-old Venezuelan president is quickly returning to the tough rhetoric and strong views that have made him famous worldwide.

Not surprisingly, Chavez expressed solidarity with American activists who have been staging rallies and marches against what they view as corporate greed by Wall Street.
…
“This movement of popular outrage is expanding to 10 cities and the repression is horrible, I don’t know how many are in prison now,” Chavez said in comments at a political meeting in his Caracas presidential palace shown on state TV.

Hugo looooves the filthy hippies, unlike the workers whose businesses are in the line of feces, fire:

Over at the NYT, Jennifer Preston writes that Protest Spurs Online Dialogue on Inequity. Inequity, as in, lazy freeloading dirty hypocrites demanding $20-per-hour pay for doing nothing, while defecating on police cars, and tearing down sinks and vandalizing honest businesses struggling to stay viable in this economy?

Or perhaps the hundreds of companies suing Chavez for nationalizing their businesses in Venezuela?

No, I didn’t think so.

More like iniquity, from the Grey Lady.

Help! I’m being repressed!

Cross-posted at Fausta’s blog.

First, the collapse of the Eurozone, which does look likely to happen, is the death of a Big Idea.  It represents more than the collapse of a common currency.  It’s the death of an idea of human life, regulated and directed and comprehensively administered by the state.  The collapse represents a triumph of reality over hallucination.  You can’t, in fact, build a sustainable model for having the state organize most of the investing for the people, and use its resulting power to tell the people what they are allowed to think and say, how much electricity they can use, and what medical services they will be allowed to have recourse to.

It is impossible to maintain a sound currency – much less a sound fiscal policy – when that’s your going-in proposition.  And it’s good news that we are reaching the breaking point.  The collapse of the Eurozone means Europeans cannot keep doing what they have been doing.  They will have to do something else.

There are millions of people in Europe who will all still be there the day after the official collapse, however that ends up being marked.  The collapse represents a gigantic opportunity for them, if they will take it.  Each nation already has a mechanism for choosing new representatives, people with different ideas, to govern it.  I am not convinced that there is no one left in Europe who has the discipline and character to chart a new course, instead of collapsing in the gutter, whimpering.  There is a colossal infrastructure in Europe, and what it needs is not solicitude and life support but a release of the clamps in which it is immobilized by the 20th-century “European idea.”

America is not that far behind Europe.  We have deceived ourselves that we don’t intend to end up overregulated and overspent like Europe, but the Obama presidency has demonstrated with disastrous clarity just how vulnerable we already were – had already made ourselves, long before January 2009 – to Sudden Overregulation and Sudden Overspending.  If we are to recover, politically and economically – not to mention spiritually – this cannot stand.  We, too, like the Europeans, have to do something else.

At the heart of the European idea is ratcheting up the “civilization premium”:  the extra that it costs us to earn our bread and lodging in a complex society, as opposed to foraging for nuts and berries while we wait to be eaten by the local wildlife.

In many ways, civilization and complexity make things more efficient for us.  But paying for civilization pulls against that effect in a perpetual dynamic.  And the very purpose of the Euro-nanny-state is to add a growing premium to every unit of work effort or purchasing power, in order to pay for civilizational goals.

It has been a long time since anyone in Europe, or in the rest of the modern, post-industrial world, has worked almost entirely to pay for his own needs. The most productive are working at least 4 out of 12 months to pay the civilization premium levied directly by the state through taxes. We then work some months after that to pay the premium imposed indirectly by regulation.

Obviously, we have to pay for police and fire services.  We want to; those services create a stable environment for family life, property, and business.  But paying government regulators to withhold water from us, terminate oil-and-gas drilling, and maintain a system of litigation in which we can be made to pay rent to others for exhaling, doesn’t do that.  It doesn’t enhance our well-being or economic prospects; it merely makes the necessities of life cost more.  It makes us work harder to pay for the same things.  Very often, that’s not worth it to us, and one of the costs of civilization becomes a systematic discouragement of our efforts at the margin.

Today, America and Europe are drifting on a sea of resources idled artificially by government policy.  To begin with, we have a combined population that is less well-educated than its ancestors.  That is a huge idled resource.  The same population operates increasingly on a mental attitude of entitlement and resentment, and that idles it further.  Both of these conditions were created by the implementation of the European idea in the public schools.  Our people – the ones walking around right now – would be much more productive without these handicaps.

To me, this is the most important idled resource, but it cannot be unleashed without removing the clamps of regulation and taxation.  Regulation has taken the place of taxation as the worst imposition on our daily economic life.  It is a silent, mostly invisible killer.  I would like to see the American capital gains tax rolled back, but it’s not our capital gains tax that is destroying our economy, it’s regulation.

Don’t forget the words idled resources.  I’m not talking here solely about capital available for investment, although I’m talking about that too.  I’m talking about how much more you could accomplish, and how much more you could save and buy (with cash), if the government didn’t keep driving up your basic costs (and, indeed, the cost of everything else) with regulation, while diverting 30-60% of what you’re worth to your employer in the form of taxes, mandated benefits, and “social investment.”

I’m talking about the natural resources we could be making use of if the state weren’t literally putting them off-limits to us.  I’m talking about what each of us could do to escape the industrial-job straitjacket if the cost of starting a small business weren’t so prohibitive.  Above all, I’m talking about the new lease on life the younger generations could have if their heads weren’t being filled with hate-thoughts about normal human life 24/7.

Imagine how the economies of the Western industrial nations would surge to life if people were allowed to profit from deciding to work however long it took to do profitable things.  A simple proposition, but fewer and fewer of us can do that today.  The idea of profit in any form is demonized; major segments of profitable work are effectively prohibited, either outright or through regulation; “jobs” are defined in terms of what benefits must accrue to them, rather than in terms of what needs doing; and when there is a profit, it gets hunted down and confiscated in one way or another.  If the capital gains tax doesn’t get you, the regulation will.

Government, as Reagan said, is the problem.  There is nothing we can’t do if we will allow the people to put our idled resources back to work.  Those idled resources represent trillions of dollars in wealth and revenues.  And those trillions would pay down an awful lot of debt.  But they can’t be extracted from a controlled, limited, managed citizenry; they can only be produced by people who are free to labor and profit on the basis of their own motivations.

The impending collapse of the Eurozone is proof of the first truth.  It represents the biggest opportunity Europe has had in a century to acknowledge the second, and act accordingly.

Europe, get rid of your failing welfare state, your unsustainable national health systems, your religious belief in regulation, and your “multiculti” hate-management schemes.  Unleash your people.  Get the demons of self-hatred and institutionalized discouragement off your back.  This is the chance of a lifetime.  Go ahead.  Show us the way.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Today, 15 September, kicks off an 8-day period in which socialists, radical leftists, Islamists, and Palestinian activists will rail at a world that is disappearing.  The schedule includes the following:

15 September:  Rallies for Palestine in New York and other cities in the US and Europe

16 September:  Rally in Los Angeles to protest the US plan to veto the Palestinian statehood bid

17 September:  Day of Rage for the radical left, with protests in major cities and the 50 state capitals, plus an “occupation” of Wall Street

22 September:  Durban III conference to promote hysterical anti-Semitism at UN headquarters in New York (the US will not attend the conference, but it’s being held on our soil)

22 September:  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad address to the UN

23 September:  Palestinian delegation calls for a UN vote on Palestinian statehood

Most readers are aware of the issues surrounding the Palestinian statehood vote.  Besides there being, at present, no valid basis for the creation of a state – the leadership is divided, the elected leaders in Gaza and the West Bank have both stayed on after their terms ended with no new elections, the prospective state has no border and no agreements with its neighbors – there are the matters of persistent terrorism from Gaza, and the breach of the Oslo Accords represented by a unilateral statehood bid.  The US has excellent reasons for opposing the untimely call for a vote.

The Palestinian Authority vows it will request the vote anyway, in spite of intense US pressure to refrain.  If it happens, the call for a vote will, of course, be an embarrassment to US diplomacy.  But the statehood bid is untimely for a more important reason.  It is behind the times, out of step with the disintegration of the old 20th-century paradigm:  the narrative of political transformation that set “new statehood” in the context of the Western order.

According to that narrative, new statehood was two things at once:  it was a process of giving deserving peoples a place in the international order, but it was also seen by many on the left as a blow against the order – much like the community organizer’s practice of ensuring that plenty of irresponsible people are awarded the responsibility of the vote, and that they use it.

The quantity assumed to be constant in this narrative was the order itself.  The order was to be both railed at and battened on.  In some hazy future it might be “triumphed over,” but for the time being, there was no concrete plan – no Lenin-like competing idea for organization and governance – to supersede it.  Lenin’s idea collapsed from both the sword and its own cancerous inhumanity; it was discredited early on, and the world’s organized malcontents realized that, however emotionally satisfying Leninism was, their own aspirations needed the Western order to give them shape and meaning.  For careers of resentment and negativism to be sustainable, there has to be a large population of the productive and positive.

Under that paradigm, it made sense for malcontents to raid, harangue, and guilt-trip the productive, without ever producing an organized, sustainable result of their own.  In an analogy to the Western left’s posture, the hit-and-run guerrilla model of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas was the face of Islamism in the context of the 20th-century narrative.  Radicals were antagonists, not protagonists.  When radicals got in charge of a nation, as in North Korea or Cuba, Iran or Afghanistan, they were weird outliers; nobody wanted to be them. There was no viable, compelling model of either socialist utopia or Islamist statehood.

The new paradigm

The old paradigm is crumbling, however.  The principal factor in that is the squishy geopolitical profile of the United States.  It’s not just that the West is flailing and in debt over its head; it’s that there is today a rapidly declining expectation of order-keeping pushback from it.  That changes geopolitical and security assumptions for everyone.  It paves the way for a competing model of organization to arise.  And, inconveniently for the aspirants to Palestinian statehood, the competing model that is emerging is that of state Islamism.

Iran has given state Islamism a bad reputation, but Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey is – inch by inch – giving it a better one.  For the Arab Spring nations, it is increasingly likely that state Islamism in some form will be the organizing principle of their futures.  Islamism – political Islam – is making the shift right now between its old focus on a guerrilla and community-organizing profile against the West, and a new focus on gaining the tools and stature of state power.  Al Qaeda – the perpetual antagonist – is out; state Islamism – the seat of the protagonist – is in.

This changes the whole context of Palestinian statehood, and not just for Palestinians or Muslims but for everyone in the Eastern hemisphere.  According to the 20th-century narrative, Palestinian statehood was a blow against the Western order, a means of transforming it, and a way of giving “Palestine” a place in it.  Under the new narrative – still tentative, still emerging – there is a strong probability that Palestinian statehood will be an emblem of victory for state Islamism.  Regardless of whether it is intended so or not, circumstances have outrun the politics of the old paradigm.

Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood are competitors with Erdogan for leadership in the state-Islamism sweepstakes.  There is no semblance of unity among Muslims, or even among Middle Easterners, in this regard, and hence no one appointed to be the main patron of Palestinian statehood and carry it as a victory banner.  Unless someone is appointed to that role, a state of Palestine is likely to make the state of flux in the Middle East more intense and urgent.

Russians, Greeks, and the other peoples of Southeastern Europe see this much more clearly than Americans or West Europeans do.  Their security is directly affected by every new assumption of power, leadership, or influence in the Middle East.  They have national memories of life with the Ottoman Empire as a neighbor.  Whatever their sentiments were back in 1989, when many of them, secure within the US-dominated order, officially endorsed Palestinian statehood, they are not anxious today to see political victories for state Islamism (or, in a number of their cases, for nationalist insurgencies, of which these third-party nations have their share).

Reluctance for the transition?

What all this means is that quite a few of the nations in the UN – even Arab nations like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan; even nations that will vote for the unilateral Palestinian statehood initiative – are content to have the US to use our Security Council veto.  They’re not necessarily ready for everything to change.  With the Palestinian statehood question carrying new freight, and no clarity on who will benefit from it and whose ox it will most effectively gore, they may well prefer that the old paradigm linger just a bit longer.  The muted and distracted diplomatic posture of these nations on the Palestinian statehood initiative is a quiet testament to their ambivalence about it in a changing world.

Happily for them, it is the US that will take the heat.  Meanwhile, a small vignette in this over-stimulated drama is uniquely telling.  It hinges on the theme of activists that there is a one-sided slaughter of Palestinian children by the tanks and warplanes of a cruel, occupying state of Israel.

New meets old

In the US this month, activists are seeking to present the theme at the Museum of Children’s Art (MOCHA) in Oakland, as a rebuke to the complacent citizens of a monolithic West.  An anti-Israel group is sponsoring an exhibit of art supposedly executed by Palestinian children between the ages of 9 and 11 (see here as well).  MOCHA recently decided not to host the exhibit because of its political content, but the exhibit’s sponsors have expressed determination to get it on display “either inside or outside of MOCHA” (their emphasis) by their target date of 24 September.

Contrast this old-paradigm use of the tanks-and-planes theme with the new-paradigm use of it in Gaza earlier this week.  While Turkey’s Erdogan was making a high-profile visit to Egypt, Gazan children were arranged around a monument to the 2010 flotilla to invite Erdogan to visit Gaza.  Their young spokesman emitted this statement:

Speaking on behalf of the children, a Palestinian child Ahmed Fahri said that Israeli soldiers kept killing children of Gaza by their tanks and planes, adding that only one person [i.e., Erdogan] stood against it.

Fahri said that Erdogan was defending the children of Gaza, and they loved Erdogan very much, thus, schools, shops and children were named after Erdogan.

Erdogan has competitors; he will not find a path to regional or Islamist leadership without obstacles.  He may not be the one who achieves it.  His brand of state Islamism is focused less on sharia radicalism and more on traditional geopolitics and a neo-Ottoman idea.  But for now, he is riding the crest of the new paradigm – and we may be about to see that the old paradigm is not the one that “makes things happen” anymore.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

There was much riding on the debut of Gov. Rick Perry in the conversation of the GOP race. A race he came to dominate in less time than any other candidate on the floor.

On display would be not only the aggressive, misleading, and flat out dishonest gamesmanship of Brian Williams of NBC and John Harris of Politico, but the attempts by the other candidates to present Perry as somehow not the guy equipped to run the country.

Couple this with the heart-wrenching circumstances he faces in he and Ron Paul’s home state with wildfires that have devoured more than 1000 homes, and Rick Perry was a man tonight besieged from every angle. The heart, the mind, the friend, the foe… all gunning for him, testing him, and seeing how he would fare.

What the nation saw was a man who thought before he spoke, chose words wisely, and in whatever moment he found himself in, someone who wasn’t merely able to be conversant about the issue, but penetrate the tone, spirit, and focus of the discussion that caused everyone else on the stage to respond… to him!

This would’ve been a win for Rick Perry just on the mathematical equation of judging debates. But considering the increased odds he was up against, the smoothness with which he won, translates into massive points of confidence of those already supporting him, and for those yet decided, his plain speak common sense drew them in.

Odds were this debate could’ve set up a huge battle between Romney and Perry kicking off with Romney landing damaging blows. That picture never happened.

Romney was basically defeated for the night when the discussion turned to Romneycare. His refusal to address the issue, and to pretend to change the subject to giving all fifty states waivers to Obamacare was deflated the moment Bachmann (who touted another strong performance) hit back with “overturn” not “waivers” is the only true solution.

Huntsman–who was given an ungodly amount of time to yammer on about essentially nothing, should be relegated to the ash-heap of 2011, as more or less Cain should be as well.

Just not enough substance, just not enough focus. And with the lightest resumes on the stage both should be sitting down.

WHAT ASTOUNDS ME about this GOP field is the articulate nature that everyone besides Huntsman and to a lesser degree Paul are able to exhibit. I believe Obama, on merits would lose a debate to any of the following: Santorum, Gingrich, Bachmann, Romney, and Perry.

That’s a very deep bench with this level of communication skill. And my only hope is that Gingrich was telling the truth tonight when he proclaimed that the entire stage wants so bad to see Obama beaten, that they would all immediately go to work for the eventual winner.

Whoever the nominee is to be, He/She will NEED that kind of support from such an articulate supporting cast. At the end of the day, Perry won–he won big, and is likely to add to those huge polling leads he has gained in recent days.

But perhaps you disagree–I’d love to know your response and perhaps read it on my nationally syndicated show tomorrow. Drop me an email to weigh in.

Kevin McCullough is a nationally syndicated talk radio host, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR, and best selling author of three books. His most recent being: “No He Can’t: How Barack Obama is dismantling Hope and Change.”

You’ve got to accentuate the positive,

Eliminate the negative,

Latch on to the affirmative,

Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.

• WH: ‘No comment’ on union leader’s call for violence against Tea Party
• WH already playing down “major” jobs speech as just first leg of plan
• First glimpse of Obama’s big September jobs plan: Repeat the stimulus
• It takes a racist

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

An MSNBC news spot on The Weather Channel (TWC) this morning caught my attention.  Out of the blue, for no apparent reason, the news announcer informed his audience that thousands had taken to the streets in Israel this weekend to protest the high cost of living.  It was, he said, the eighth week of protests there.

TWC is usually about as interested in foreign social-protest news as Sports Illustrated.  In fact, street demonstrations abroad basically have to bleed if they’re going to lead in the American mainstream media.  People are out demonstrating around the globe all the time, and the average American hears about it only if he frequents the right specialty websites.  I couldn’t help noticing these few out-of-place sentences on Israel, because they were so unusual.

What possessed NBC-Universal properties MSNBC and TWC to feature protests in Israel in their news coverage this morning?  That’s an interesting question.  It is not, shall we say, made less interesting by the report of Maariv’s Kalman Libeskind, referenced by Arutz Sheva on 3 September, that American Democratic strategist Stanley Greenberg orchestrated the protests in Israel’s major cities this weekend.

According to the report:

Greenberg directed the strategists to create a protest that was not led by one specific group, in order to create social ferment. An unnamed left-wing leader would eventually step into this ferment and take the reins, Greenberg predicted.

The Israeli strategists reportedly include Boaz Gaon, Moshe Gaon and Eldad Yaniv, who worked in Ehud Barak’s successful race for Prime Minister in 1999, also in cooperation with Greenberg.

Greenberg, who advised Bill Clinton on campaign strategy in the 1990s (and Al Gore and John Kerry in their campaigns), runs the Democratic strategy firm Democracy Corps with James Carville and Bob Shrum.  He’s also a pollster with his own research firm, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner. Married to Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), he gained national fame for providing living quarters for Rahm Emanuel rent-free for five years.  He acquired additional notoriety for spearheading the effort to rebrand British Petroleum as the Greenest Big Oil Company in the Whole Entire Universe.

That’s the yada-yada most websites have on this today.  What I haven’t seen yet is an analogy to the fascinating project undertaken by the Greenberg-Carville firm in the Bolivian presidential election in 2002, when they were known as GCS.  The company was hired by incumbent president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (“Goni”) to run his reelection campaign, an essay in expeditionary politics that was captured in a documentary released in 2005 called Our Brand is Crisis.

The documentary was reviewed extensively by the leftosphere, with commentators tsk-tsking – suspended between irony and poignancy – over the excesses and the over-the-topness and the general run-amokedness of the GCS experts as they hacked a brazen swath through Bolivian politics.  The Boston Globe reviewer is typical:

Political documentaries don’t come any more shaming than Rachel Boynton’s terrific ‘‘Our Brand is Crisis,’’ a barely straight-faced account of what happened in Bolivia in 2002, when a group of US consultants helped a candidate win the presidency only to see the country slide into near-total chaos.

Globalism extends to the American way of campaigning, it seems, and the hubris of the gringo strategists — earnest ex-Clintonistas employed by James Carville’s Greenberg Carville Shrum group — would be hilarious if human lives and a country’s political will weren’t at stake.

It’s a galling and provocative experience to viewers of any political persuasion, and a reminder to the left of how easily idealism can run amok.

Well, sure.  If Republican strategists had done this, there would still be 33 people under investigation by a special prosecutor.  But if you’re satisfied about the poignant irony of the hubris, provocation, and gall juxtaposed with the idealism run amok, let’s move on to the strategy propounded by the GCS consultants in their strikingly candid interviews with the documentary crew. (Emphasis added.)

[Jeremy Rosner of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner] and his minions hold focus groups, print bar charts, and quickly decide on Goni’s campaign theme: crisis. The country’s falling apart, so who will you turn to?

It’s an uphill battle… ‘‘Over half the electorate really can’t stand you guys,’’ admits one of the consultants.

Against Goni are Evo Morales, a socialist firebrand who represents the country’s coca growers but who denies he’s a drug lord or a terrorist, and Cochabamba mayor Manfred Reyes Villa, a thoughtful pragmatist with a charismatic head of hair. Villa leads in the polls, so Rosner and company decide he must be taken down.

The consultants “happily discuss negative campaigning with the cameras rolling”:

Management consultant Tal Silverstein insists ‘‘we have to turn [Villa] from a clean candidate to a dirty one,’’ and articles go out fretting about his military experience and digging into his finances. ‘‘Tomorrow they’ll probably say I’m an associate of Osama bin Laden,’’ Villa shrugs in an interview.

Wrong. They tie him to the Moonies.

Go Google the reviews for more.  There are tons of them.  Given that Stanley Greenberg is one of this group’s leading lights, it should be no surprise that his approach, in enriching Israeli politics again in 2011, is to “create social ferment” so that an “unnamed left-wing leader” could step in and take the reins.  The country’s falling apart, so who will the Israelis turn to?  Libeskind seems to think Ehud Barak is being positioned as the turn-to guy – and given Greenberg’s connection with his 1999 campaign and the trio of Barak advisers, that doesn’t appear to be a bad guess.

Israel isn’t falling apart, of course.  Commentators there have had a healthy suspicion of the organizing force behind the series of protests, which started in mid-summer with demonstrations against the high cost of housing in the major cities.  In early August, Caroline Glick cited the work of Israeli bloggers in uncovering the following facts:

[A]s a handful of bloggers have shown, more than eighty percent of the protest leaders are professional far Left activists. For instance, Maariv bloggers Uri Redler and Rotem Sela researched the affiliation of all the speakers at the July 23rd rally in Tel Aviv. They found that out of 27 speakers, 21 are known leftist activists affiliated with Hadash, the communist party, with Meretz, with the New Israel Fund, with the Nationalist Left proto-party, and with the anarchists.

Redler and Sela also exposed that several “grassroots,” leaders are in fact professional political operatives affiliated with communist politicians and radical pressure groups. For instance, an activist named Tzika Bashour announced on Facebook that he would begin a general strike on August 1. Yediot Ahronot and Ynet covered his move as an authentic call of distress by an Average Joe.

The papers failed to mention that Bashour is a public relations executive who ran communist MK Dov Hanin’s campaign for the Tel Aviv mayoralty.

None of this means housing costs aren’t insane in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, or that Israelis don’t have legitimate beefs.  But with a little professional spadework, the blogging community has demonstrated that the “popular protests” look a lot like the ones orchestrated by the usual-suspect organizers in the United States; i.e., “Astroturf.”

Israeli-in-the-street bloggers aren’t buying the “social justice paroxysm” theme either.  Jerusalem Diaries is typical in reporting that the “protesters” out this weekend were mainly out for a nice time on a summer evening, with friends and food headlining the “protest.”  The Muqata called the demonstration in Tel Aviv the city’s “biggest block party ever.”  The socially-fermenting events featured well-publicized pop music and crowds snarfing down all the beer, cappuccinos, pizza, and puu-puus they could get their hands on.  There are highly organized professional malcontents manning these protests, certainly, but not an enraged citizenry ready to man the barricades and go to the mattresses with the Netanyahu government.

In light of this array of facts and associations, it’s no real surprise that Greenberg & Co participated in the 2006 Take Back America Conference sponsored by Campaign for America’s Future, an organization closely connected to the Apollo Alliance and funded by major unions, MoveOn.org, and the Tides Foundation.

It’s also interesting that Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, polling Wisconsin voters in February 2011, found that they “strongly agreed” with the state-worker-union agenda and opposed Governor Scott Walker, giving him a negative rating for his posture on public-worker bargaining rights.  But Wisconsin voters, when addressing not pollsters but the ballot box, have voted resoundingly this year – twice – to keep Walker’s Republican infrastructure in place, affirming originalist justice David Prosser in his state supreme court seat and returning a Republican majority to the state legislature in an August 2011 recall election.  The Greenberg poll in February, widely cited at the time, proved perfectly inaccurate as a predictor of voter decision-making.

Why does this matter?  Because it is of a piece with the manipulative, media-theme-building approach to politics Greenberg keeps being associated with.  He doesn’t have a history of being anti-Zionist; that’s not the point here.  Although he bills himself as a triangulating, “Third Way” centrist, his affiliations are very much with professional left-wing manipulators of public sentiment, and that is how he comes off in the latest instance with the protests in Israel.

To the question, “Why now?  Why in the summer of 2011?” the obvious answer would be, “Because the UN vote on Palestinian statehood is coming up in September.”  But I don’t assess Greenberg to be a mastermind here.  He’s a hired strategist.  His specialty is positioning politicians to be the turn-to guy.  Something else is going on.  As usual, the fact that GE-owned NBC networks are pointedly reporting faux “social ferment” as if it’s the real thing suggests a manufactured-news campaign.  Rockets from Gaza aren’t the only thing coming at Israel as the UN vote nears.

*UPDATE*:   A fellow blogger notified me of the statements made by novelist David Grossman, a leading figure of the Israeli left, while he is on a book tour in France this week.  Of the politics surrounding the protests this summer, Grossman had this to say at a meeting in Paris on 6 September:

The Israeli writer David Grossman believes that the social protest must . . . transform into a substantial political force and leverage its public success. . . “At the moment there is a consensus among all the participants in this protest not to speak of politics. . . But I believe that soon all these marchers will become a political force because this protest cannot remain a matter of good will alone. It must become a political means that will finally ask where did the money go, where did all those billions go over the years. The answer is that most of it went to the settlements, the settlers, and the army that defends the settlements that are a distorted situation and in any event will be evacuated in a future peace accord with the Palestinians.”

 
Grossman indicated that, “Now is not a good time to speak of politics and the occupation because the moment that they start to talk about it, the support for the protest will go down by 100s of percentage points.”

(Translation courtesy Emet m’Tsiyon.)

Grossman’s comments confirm two things.  One is this:  the sentiment on the Israeli left that the 2011 protests should be leveraged to create an impression of particular political demands (which, by the Greenberg strategy, will prompt the emergence of a politician ready to meet those demands).

But the other is this:  the demands that the left would like to see created are based on an unpopular idea.  Grossman – a leftist – judges that Israelis don’t support his narrative, which is that the high cost of housing and related social discontents were produced by the existence of the settlements and the “army that defends the settlements.”  He advocates holding off on introducing that narrative, because the people wouldn’t buy it.

Well, OK, his comments confirm a third thing.  He has a peculiar idea of the concept of “percentage points.”

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

how the worst terrorist attack in American history brought out the best in the American people. How Americans lined up to give blood. How volunteers drove across the country to lend a hand. How schoolchildren donated their savings. How communities, faith groups and businesses collected food and clothing.

Those of us who were in New York or Washington on that fateful morning need no reminder of how events went down or of the selflessness and camaraderie that joined all Americans on that day and in the weeks to follow. I was among those who resolved to donate blood on 9/11, but by the time I arrived at Bellevue Hospital, just before 9 a.m., I was too late. So many others who had the same idea beat me to it, and emergency personnel were turning away volunteers.

The president is quite correct when he says “we were united” that day, as one suspects we would be again were a tragedy of similarly imponderable proportion to occur on his watch. (That one did not, happening instead during the administration of the man he likes to hold accountable for the nation’s current woes, even though George W. Bush hasn’t been president for the better part of three years.)

Sadly, about halfway through his address, President Obama drifts off point, blowing an opportunity to say—or at least try to say—something meaningful. Instead, the speech devolves into a PSA for community service, one of his pet projects as a former community organizer.

It is hard to know whether the president still has the ability to say or do anything to bridge the yawning chasm of rancor that divides our country. Certainly, he lacks the trust of many on both sides. A recent Rasmussen survey finds that 68% of all Americans believe the partisan rift in Washington is likely to worsen in the near-future. Almost half (47%) view Barack Obama’s style of governance as partisan, but these are hardly recent trends. In April of 2009, a Pew poll found the gap in Obama’s approval rating, at 61%, to be the most partisan in the modern era.

It would take the widest-eyed of optimists to claim that the ill will that poisons our national dialog isn’t largely a quagmire of the president’s making. He has missed no opportunity to take shots at Republicans, at the conservative media, and even at members of the electorate (in the persons of the Tea Party). He likes nothing more than to deliver snide quips about “the enemy” before audiences of approving supporters as though a protective shield insulates the rest of us from his jabs.

For all his campaign talk of mending fences and bridging the partisan divide, for all the hype since about his oratorical skills, the president has been an abject failure at both. As for his speechifying, right now I’d be happy if he could reach the same level of rhetorical polish as Rodney King.

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It was reassuring to learn that the president loves his country more than he cares about his own political ambitions, though the implication didn’t quite square with an observation a week earlier from a White House strategist who said, “Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney.”

An article at Politico explained:

Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early-stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee. [Emphasis added]

Granted, it’s an odious strategy, informed by the most cynical brand of political gamesmanship. And it’s that much more obscene coming from a man who promised to transcend the old ways of Washington and deliver the nation into a new era of post-partisanship.

Give the Obama camp credit, though. Soon after the publication of the Politico piece, senior campaign strategist David Axelrod announced that anyone who went negative on Romney would be fired. Maybe the threat went a tad far in the direction of self-righteousness, but it demonstrated that the campaign had learned the errors of its ways.

Until yesterday. The identity of the Republican frontrunner may have changed, but Obama machine is back to plan A. Portions of an email from Hector Nieto, the campaign’s Texas director, appear in the Dallas Morning News, asking readers to hold Rick Perry “accountable on the campaign trail, inspire fellow Texans to get involved, and introduce his record—his actual record—to voters across the country.”

But the Obama camp doesn’t stop there. They have posted an online form where “Texans who have experienced Gov. Rick Perry’s failed policies firsthand” can rat him out.

If this approach sounds familiar, it is because the Obama administration has done it before. Recall that in August of 2009, at the height of the health care debate, the White House website called upon citizens to “tell on” opponents of the plan:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

This latest bit of chicanery is disgraceful for any seeker of high office but it is repulsive for a sitting president. It shows not only that he is willing to sling mud at his opponent but that he is too lazy to dig it up himself.

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But there is a big difference between the two situations, and it’s not that today there is no Soviet Union.  The difference is the character of the American people.  I’m not even talking about things like expectations for marriage and father-mother households: I’m talking about our expectations of government and society – or, as we used to put it, man and the state.  We no longer have the character and expectations of a free people, in the way Americans once did.

Before the ‘70s, Americans had not, by and large, bought into the idea of government as an agent of transformation for society or the planet.  In 2011, the evidence is that we have.  We think of government as children think of their parents:  as a source not just of food and shelter but of permissions, of ideas, of counseling and hope and the outlines of what is possible.  As parents transform their children from puling incompetents into people ready to assume a place in society, so government is now expected to both nurture and transform.

Although many warned at the time that government was getting too big and the American character was being undermined, there was still, in the 1970s, a much greater sense of self-reliance than there is now.  In comparison with 2011, there was almost nothing you did in life – for most Americans – that was a matter of “what the government would let you do.”  Constraints and restraints imposed by government were comparatively rare.  In most cases, they were crude and laughable, like Nixon’s wage and price controls in the early 1970s, or the regulation of air travel that prevented competition and kept ticket prices high (and discouraged the less well-off from availing themselves of the airlines, thus producing the wonderfully quiet, roomy, peaceful air-travel environment remembered so nostalgically by today’s senior citizens).

People in the 1970s could tell the difference between being regulated and not being regulated.  Regulation was overt.  It made the news.  Congress shouted and carried on about it – because back then, it had to be introduced and adjusted by Congress, rather than occurring as the result of bureaucratic processes in federal agencies that no more than 1000 average citizens in the entire country could locate on a map.

In 2011, Americans have no idea the extent to which they are regulated, and how much regulation costs them.  Regulation is the “new normal.”  People who can’t imagine dismantling the EPA, or OSHA, or the CPSC or the EEOC, because they vaguely fear that a bottomless pit with dragons lurks beyond the horizon of ever-increasing regulation, are not free citizens who have the mental liberty to make real choices.  Not understanding how much they are regulated, they also have no idea that a “normal” without today’s level of regulation might just be a great normal in which to live.

In the 1970s, Americans were still accustomed to greater freedom of action, and fought each new clamp on it strenuously.  In the 2010s, people don’t realize that the regulatory environment they regard as normal is what is narrowing their future by the day – and they have been trained to fear the very idea of life without incessant regulation.  They have been taught that the alternative to each and every form of regulation is destruction, despair, ruin, chaos, poverty, ignorance, injustice, disease, death, and the triumph of mean-hearted rich people.  As far as they know, there are two options, and only two: regulation, or an endless series of catastrophes.  There is no such condition as a satisfactory, unregulated outcome.  The unregulated life, to update Socrates, is not worth living.

A lot of Americans in 2011 would not elect Reagan, as their forebears did in 1980, because they don’t have the capacity to appreciate the level of genuine freedom voters wanted to return to when they put Reagan in office.  The truth is that when government has become – with our blessing – big enough to threaten Americans with federal prosecution if they resell a drop-side crib at a garage sale,* Americans have yielded up their important liberties, and are no longer eligible to exercise them.

I think Rick Perry looks like a pretty good guy.  If he’s the GOP candidate, I’ll vote for him.  But it’s important to understand that he’s more of a George W. Bush kind of good guy than a Ronald Reagan-type good guy.  He’s for business, for the middle class, for keeping taxes low and letting the people prosper.  But he doesn’t have a visceral antipathy to regulation and the enlargement of the discretionary scope of government.

It may be no accident that he and Bush have both been governor of Texas:  Texas, like much of “Red” America, has gotten to 2011 without having the reckoning with regulation that other states are having.  With its lighter regulatory load, Texas has continued to outgrow its regulatory environment, as California and New York have not.  Texas has been flying straight and level, rather than facing a painful stall-out – and what that means is that Texas’ leading politicians have not had to do the kind of serious rethinking of the trajectory of government that many among Tea Partiers and other right-wingers believe we need.

Don’t mistake me:  I’m a big fan of Texas.  The Blue states (and most of the Red ones, for that matter) should be so lucky.  But Texas is an example of the benefits of not letting things get too bad.  The important factor in Texas, moreover, is Texans.   What much of the country needs, however – not being populated by Texans – is a way back from things that have already gotten too bad.  It needs reversals more serious and fundamental than the gentle, marginal corrections to government that succeed with a more self-reliant citizenry.

The Reagan-era changes, important as they were, have been dwarfed by an unfettered explosion of government since he left office; what’s needed now is a reversal of the trajectory of government even more significant than that of Reagan’s legacy.  I’m not sure enough Americans are ready for that.  Rick Perry may, however, be just the man to hold the line against a worsening of our federal government’s incontinent profile, while the people get themselves sorted out.

He would unquestionably be better than Obama – and one thing I particularly like about him is that he seems to appreciate the scope of what he’s proposing to get into.  The next president’s term is going to be ugly; it’s unlikely to redound to the credit of anyone’s brilliant scheme of government-tweaking and economy-boosting.  Perry seems to have his head screwed on straight in the sense of not believing in more than government can actually do.  My main quibble would be that he hasn’t internalized the inherent danger to liberty posed by regulatory prophylaxis.

He may, with time, shift toward a more transformational political concept than he appears to have now.  Until a critical mass of the people does, the sentiments of individual politicians will have limited impact.  Perry as he is may not be the “Ronald Reagan” America needs today – but he may be as much of one as we are ready for.

* Actual advice from “Mom Houston,” a Houston Chronicle blog:

I want to throw out my old [drop-side] crib but am worried somebody may take it. What should I do?

Take your old crib apart and throw it out in pieces — one side one week, one side another week — so that nobody can rebuild it from the parts left on the curb or in the trash bin.

 

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The bruised egos of Washingtonians, and especially its political class, is another story, at least for those too thin-skinned to take some good-natured ribbing. Much of the comedic jabs were broadcast via Twitter. Here are several (h/t Washington Examiner):

@calebhowe: Breaking: Obama administration points out they ‘inherited’ fault lines from previous administrations.

@comradescott: Evidently the quake occurred on a little known fault line outside of DC called ‘Bush’s Fault.’

@charliespiering: I won’t stop shaking until Obama makes a speech telling me that everything is ok and that he has a plan.

@Ben_Howe: As all of DC leaves work at the same time, the United States experiences a brief economic recovery.

@TPCarney: Krugman says it wasn’t big enough.

@MaizeBlueNation: Fox News claims the Washington monument is leaning to the right, MSNBC claims it’s leaning to the left. More news at 11.

@politicoroger POLITICO had the earthquake story yesterday.

Charles Babbington of Associated Press offers a few more, minus attributions.

S&P has downgraded earthquake to a 2.0.

Rick Perry denies earthquake.

Michele Bachmann vows to bring all U.S. earthquakes down to a 2.9 magnitude.

There was just a 5.9 earthquake in Washington. Obama wanted it to be 3.4, but the Republicans wanted 5.9, so he compromised.

Not all of the barbs came from Twitter. The Wall Street Journal, noting that the quake reached Martha’s Vineyard, where President Obama was in the process of putting, wondered if “the temblor caused his ball to fall from the lip into the cup and help him win the hole, a la ‘Caddyshack.’”

Considering the kind of luck the president has been having lately, I’d be inclined to doubt it.

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Texas has challenges. The record speaks for itself. Lots of other states have challenges too. But there is a lot of hard work that needs to be done in Texas and a lot of children who need a chance to get a great education.

Far too few of their high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college. I feel very, very badly [sic] for the children there.

Putting aside the secretary’s grammatical infelicity (after all, he’s only Sceretary of Education), his criticism is baseless.

In an article in “TIME,” Andrew Rotherman, head of a nonprofit organization aimed at improving educational outcomes for low-income students, challenges Duncan’s claims. Writes Rotherman:

Overall, Texas students scored right around the national averages in reading and math on the NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress ]. And according to an Aug. 17 report by the group that administers the ACT college-admissions exam, Texas high school graduates only narrowly trail national averages for college readiness. True, the national averages aren’t great, but Texas is right there with the pack. So why is Duncan dissing the Lone Star State?

But Rotherman’s criticism of Duncan doesn’t stop with the Ed Secretary wrong-headed assertions about Texas schools. Rotherman further states:

[Texas’s] minority students outperform minority students in Chicago, albeit by smaller margins. And with a high school graduation rate of about 73%, Texas may be slightly below the national average, but it’s doing a lot better than Chicago, which only graduates about 56% of its students.

Any why is that relevant? Because in Duncan’s previous life, hewas head of the Chicago school system.

After presenting his facts, Rotherman asks why Duncan is “dissing the Lone Star State.” The question is coy. I’m confident that the author knows that the state’s chief executive is running for the job currently held by Duncan’s boss. The attack on Texas schools is nothing more than a thinly veiled attack on Rick Perry. And a bogus one at that.

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My colleague Karl writes today about the retirement from the GOP horse race of Tim Pawlenty, and the settling of the race into a “Romney vs. Not Romney” dynamic.  Pawlenty didn’t succeed in being crowned Not Romney in the Iowa straw poll yesterday, but how secure is the tiara on Michelle Bachmann’s head?  Is Rick Perry destined to step into a phone booth and turn into Not Romney?  What will the voters’ judgments be in the bellwether states of South Carolina and Florida?

The whole question is interesting, and begs in turn the question whether the 2012 campaign will be the clear-the-decks, all-bets-off political turning point that many are hoping for.  I think, to begin with, that a lot of people would find the “Not Romney” category an incomplete formulation.  It’s not so much “Not Romney” as “the category voters are looking for that Romney doesn’t fit into.”  Which, granted, has no future as a bumper sticker – but the point is that the thinking of non-Romney voters isn’t “anyone but Romney,” it’s “where’s the candidate who reflects what I want and believe in?”

Rick Perry may fill that bill for an electorally useful number of voters.  I don’t think he’ll have much trouble with Romney in South Carolina, and I’d call it even-Steven for the two candidates in Florida.  There are a lot of retired Northeasterners there to whom Romney appeals, but Perry can expect to do well with Florida’s Cuban-American Republicans, small business owners, and military.  Jeb Bush’s and Marco Rubio’s endorsements will carry weight.  I think I know which way Rubio will go, but I’m not sure what Bush will do.

I’m also not sure Florida will be a make-or-break state.  Assuming its primary is in January (as proposed), the early vote and the likelihood of a close split will mitigate the impact of a loss for either Romney or Perry.  Other states are likely to be more significant tests of the dynamic Karl outlines; the primary schedule has Missouri probably voting in early February, and the very interesting states of Illinois, Tennessee, and Virginia voting in March, along with the Colorado precinct caucuses.  Those states may well be a better test of the electorate’s mood.  Will Romney win where we would expect him to?

The campaign may well come down to the convention vote, as it did in 1976.  It’s very possible Romney and Perry will both have good reason to consider themselves “still alive” when Pennsylvania votes in April, and Indiana and Ohio in May.  (I’m using the proposed primary schedule; not all dates may come off as currently envisioned by the states.)  If Bachmann stays in the race, racking up strong third-place finishes, the likelihood of the decision being delayed to the convention goes up.

It’s tempting to say that the question in 2012 is whether there will be a single Republican brand the voters will line up behind.  I think a more basic question is whether we have reached a tipping point in the popular sentiment that things not only have got to change, but that they already have.  We saw some evidence of that in the primary nod to Christine O’Donnell in Delaware last year, as well as in Florida’s revolt against the national GOP establishment in picking Marco Rubio over Charlie Crist, Nevada’s choice of Sharron Angle to face off against Harry Reid, etc.  There are multiple factors at work in the ongoing saga of Wisconsin, but one of them is the major shift in voter sentiment:  voters are willing to endure civil unrest, and the unhappiness of taxpayer-dependent constituencies, and continue to endorse the political leaders who are standing against those eruptions and doing what the voters asked them to do.

Have we reached the tipping point?  Are voters ready to buck conventional expectations and do things differently?  If they aren’t, and they hand the nomination to Romney, even a GOP win in 2012 will be taken as evidence that politics as usual is what people really want.  Opinions will differ on whether endorsing Rick Perry instead is a signal that voters seek real change.  It’s possible that he will function as a sort of operational pause for GOP voters and the republic:  conservative enough that he’ll get a lot of Bachmann and Palin supporters, but with a standard political resume of reassuring length and girth.  A Perry candidacy could well serve to postpone the kind of transformative reckoning the GOP had between 1976 and 1980.

The coming primary season is likely to be the most significant, informative one the GOP has had in decades.  We will know some things at the end of it that we don’t know today.  The biggest thing, I think, will be whether voters are still hoping to identify a standard-bearer for the “Reagan consensus,” or whether they see a need to rewrite the consensus.  If it’s the latter, my money is on an updated “Coolidge consensus”:  something starker, simpler, and purer than the Reagan consensus.

Are we ready for that consensus to emerge yet?  That is the question.  We’re closer than we were four years ago.  Because words matter, I don’t even want to hazard a guess about 2012.  But I do think there will be a sign one way or the other: whether Sarah Palin gets into the race, and what happens if she does.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Few people in the public eye have said anything useful about the recent unpleasantness with the national debt and the national credit rating.  The president hasn’t.  The vice president hasn’t.  Surprisingly few of the declared Republican candidates have.  The MSM haven’t.  They’re busy trying to make the expression “Tea Party downgrade” go viral.

Indeed, at this hour of reckoning, with the Dow plunging and markets in turmoil around the world, the MSM have achieved another playground-taunt triumph with the silly Newsweek cover featuring an unflattering photo of Michelle Bachmann.  These people seem to have no sense of proportion, no judgment, no recognition that things have become serious and the time for sophomoric media jabs is past.

Who cares how they can make Bachmann look on a magazine cover?  The tabloids demonstrate several times a year that they can make the world’s most beautiful women look like something from the back of the refrigerator, if they photograph them in bad light with a telephoto lens.  The Bachmann cover is the equivalent of a slam-book entry, about as intelligent as holding your nose and chanting “You smell!” at a classmate.  Ridicule is the cheapest thing there is – and in politics, it’s usually deployed to shift the focus from a needed debate to specious topics and emotion.  I’d call it a reversion to high school, but it would be an insult even to middle-schoolers to pin it on their age group.

Meanwhile, Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan have had good, inspiring, on-target things to say about the US fiscal crisis.  Michelle Bachmann has had good things to say.  John Bolton had an important piece making the case that national security is inextricably linked with fiscal security, a much-needed point in the context of the recent debate.

But Sarah Palin came through today with a Facebook post that strikes the right tone and is at once simple, direct, and comprehensive.  It doesn’t rail at past mistakes, nor does it come across as a raised-voice, you’ve-got-to-get-this-people communication.  Palin takes it for granted – with refreshing common sense – that we are in a crisis, its features are obvious, and the task now is to deal with it, not continue to argue whether it’s really a crisis or how big it is or whose name we can pin on it.

She makes no bones about the significance of the problem we face.  I am particularly impressed with her point that if we don’t square ourselves away, the specter hangs over us of IMF staffers showing up on our doorstep with China and France and Germany arrayed behind them, ready to throw folders on a desk and start telling us how much we can spend on cable TV and incidentals each month.  Whether things would really play out for the US as they are playing out for Greece and Ireland is a valid question, but Palin is quite correct that the pitched confrontation is on the horizon now, as it was not six weeks ago – and she has the courage to face that possibility head-on.  It’s not pleasant to mention it, but it’s the right thing to do.

The last third of Palin’s post is devoted to laying out what we need to do.  Grow the economy by releasing the regulatory clamps on it, starting with the energy sector.  Cut spending and reform entitlements.  She doesn’t pretend the latter would be easy, but she faces head-on the fact that it is inescapably necessary.  I urge you to read her post for the discussion of particulars.  It is material and convincing without being in the weeds.

The piece is positive and encouraging for its forthrightness.  There is nothing “clever” to be done in this situation; it’s all straightforward.  The US federal government has to cut spending and let the economy grow, even if that means breaking the stranglehold of unions on the public trough and overruling advocacy groups and government bureaucrats who don’t want the economy to grow.  Pretending that the federal budget is too complex to be governed by the ordinary rules of accounting – or that the US is too special to be limited by the ordinary definition of fiscal solvency – is a dodge, not a sign of insight or expertise.

Palin focuses like any good executive on the big picture.  We have to cut spending and get government out of the economy’s way so it can start pumping out revenues again.  These things are increasingly obvious to everyone, and moreover, they constitute a plan.  Talking ourselves into corners about other, tangential things isn’t even interesting any more.  It feels so wrong that it’s hard to watch anyone’s news program at the moment: no one seems to be talking about what matters.

What is interesting is how few in our national political life have put the case together, as Palin has, without temporizing or bloviating.  I haven’t heard anyone else do what she does with this post.  She acknowledges the actual, enormous scope of the problem, envisions a solution, and outlines what to do to achieve it, with encouragement that it can be done.  It is sad and a little frightening that so many Americans have become unable to see this for what it is:  leadership.  Almost everyone else is focused more narrowly, on one aspect of the problem or another, and a good few commentators don’t seem to even have the vocabulary or the mental infrastructure to address the problem itself; they can only express opinions about the impossibility of the politics surrounding it.

It is the opposite of stupid to recognize the problem’s stark and simple outlines when all around you are swinging blindfolded at piñatas.  We spend too much, and we suppress economic growth and revenues with regulation.  Palin articulates that clearly.  Her ability to reach out directly through social media, and put her case in her terms, is a net positive for our current political climate.  She remains one of the best reasons to not let the MSM dictate our ideas and preferences to us.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

In strategic terms, here’s what just happened.  Obama tried to force battle on his terms, and Republicans refused the engagement.  No one has lost or won the big battle over “how the republic shall live,” because we haven’t had it yet.  Accepting battle on Obama’s terms was never a good idea.  Some thoughts:

1.  Rush Limbaugh has been right about something all along:  the 2 August date was an artificial construct.  It was never a date on which the US had to default on our debt service, nor was it a date on which government would have to grind to a halt.

2.  In outlining the case, it’s worth pointing this out one more time:  if federal spending had remained at the level of 2008, 8-2-2011 would have been just another day.  It was not necessary to add $3.7 trillion to the federal debt in the last 31 months.

Even taking reduced revenues into account – the product of a faltering economy – the cumulative annual shortfall in 2009, 2010, and 2011 need not have exceeded $2.5 trillion.

Of course, $2.5 trillion is a ridiculous number, but adding that amount to the total debt at the end of the Bush administration — $10.6 trillion – produces a sum of about $13.1 trillion, or about $1.2 trillion less than the debt ceiling of $14.294 trillion set by Congress in February 2010.  At the 2008-level spending rate, a debt ceiling of $14.294 trillion need not have been encountered until sometime in FY2013.  It’s because we spent faster than we were spending even during the Bush years that we encountered the debt ceiling in August of 2011.

3.  Obama’s policies, whatever their purposes were, are what precipitated the crisis deadline that just passed.  Much is made of the fact that the sheer size of our mandatory spending makes it a fiscal behemoth compared to discretionary spending, and that there have been natural increases on the mandatory side.  But there are reasons why that doesn’t parse as an excuse for the Obama deficits.  Here are a couple:

First, Obama has added to mandatory spending as well as to discretionary spending.  A spending gimmick in the Obamacare bill has already produced $105 billion in new mandatory spending in 2011 – about the same amount as the increase in Social Security benefits payments between 2010 and 2011, when Baby Boomers started turning 65.  That $105 billion is to be expended annually on a mandatory basis for the next 9 years.

(For his proposed 2012 budget, Obama has also reclassified certain types of spending from discretionary to mandatory: Pell grants and some transportation expenditures.  That accounting legerdemain moves about $68 billion onto the “untouchable” rolls of mandatory spending in FY2012.  Moreover, some of the stimulus funds have been funneled through Medicare and food stamp programs, beefing up expenditures by those programs beyond what demography and eligibility factors would dictate.  Not all of the increase in “mandatory spending” programs has been due to eligibility triggers in the American population.)

Second, however, the lion’s share of mandatory spending increases – the increases in Social Security and Medicare payouts due to demographic factors – was entirely predictable.  (Spending on welfare, unemployment, and food stamps was not quite as predictable, but certainly could have been foreseen with some accuracy given economic trends.)

With mandatory spending bound to increase by a largely predictable amount, and revenues declining, a president could have foregone the $787 billion stimulus package, and proposed net cuts in the spending he had control over.  That wouldn’t have prevented annual deficits, but it could have held them constant or reduced them instead of increasing them.  Obama and the Democratic Congress had that option from January 2009 to January 2011—but they didn’t use it.  If they had, it might have been possible to add even less than $2.5 trillion – the figure suggested by a continuation of the 2008 spending level – to the national debt.

4.  So much for the structural causes of the 8-2-2011 deadline.  Now for the handling of that deadline.  At no time prior to 8-2-2011 did the deadline have to become a threat hanging over our debt service, Social Security and Medicare payouts, or the operation of the military.  Sometime after the 8-2-2011 date such a crisis could have arisen, but nothing mandated it on 2 August.  How the funds on-hand were managed would have been up to the president.

In stage-managing the 2 August date, Obama (and the Senate Democrats) chose the option that invited a pitched battle at the deadline.  The point here is not whether Obama is a terrible person, it’s that if the battle had been fought over the 2 August deadline, it would have been fought on the terms he set up.

His handling of the debt-ceiling deadline is what defined the problem and set up the stakes and risks.  There never had to be a “crisis” on 2 August; objectively, the problem could have been defined differently.  It just wasn’t.

The president holds the high card if the crisis is defined on his terms.  Although there need not have been a threat to debt service, Social Security, and military pay, Obama had the discretion to make good on the implied threat.  He could also, by contrast, have issued assurances about what his priorities would be, in order to mitigate fear and uncertainty – but he didn’t.  In either case, he had the discretion to act on his own authority, at least within a timeframe of weeks.

The very fact that he cast the situation unnecessarily as a calendar-date crisis is an indicator of how he would have handled a post-2 August showdown.  But a perfect prognostication in that regard wasn’t necessary for Republicans to judge – probably correctly – that giving battle on his terms was a bad idea.

A number of people did want to see Obama’s “bluff” called:  they wanted to go past 2 August without a deal and see what he would do.  That would have been fighting the battle on his terms; we will never know if it was possible to win that battle, since it wasn’t fought.

But because it wasn’t fought, Obama was unable to steamroll the GOP on a tax-rate increase.  The point is also correct – and salient – that the big thing the Tea Party Republicans have done is change the debate.  Unlike every previous debt-ceiling negotiation, this one has not closed the books on the underlying issues regarding the size of government, for which the debt ceiling is a proxy.  The contingency built into the latest deal is real:  the Democrats will have to fight again to realize gains from this agreement.  That has never been the case before.  Yes, the Republicans have to fight again too.  But the outcome is not foreordained.

This is a tough time for the republic.  A whole lot of people who don’t care to think about government all the time are having to do just that.  Republicans, libertarians, conservatives, independents, low-information voters and former low-info-vos – millions of people who can never match the left in natural passion for “government” are having to spend time and effort on it, because the direction it’s going threatens to destroy our way of life.  If this summer doesn’t teach us the wisdom of keeping government small and not letting it acquire an ever-lengthening lease on us, nothing will.

But make no mistake, the campaign for smaller government continues.  It hasn’t been stopped.  In a sense it’s just getting started.  Of course the Democrats have unleashed the talking points about how this round went to their advantage, and Republicans will have no choice but to concede everything in the next scheduled confrontation.  That’s how they prosecute their campaign, and as long as their man is in the White House, they can’t be overridden on the definition of the crisis.  Don’t despair over that.  Obama defined the crisis this time, but he didn’t get the Republicans to accept battle on his terms.

It may not be “the end of the beginning” yet; but maybe it is.  People won’t agree in medias res on when the end of the beginning falls.  Churchill perceived the end of the beginning on 20 November 1942, when Hitler’s armies occupied most of Europe and roamed Western Russia, his navy was sinking allied shipping right and left, and his air force was successfully bombing targets in England and killing hundreds of civilians each month.  The bloody campaigns to recapture the territories of Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands had barely begun.

Few could imagine what victory would even look like, much less discern progress toward it.  Still, the US had just invaded North Africa, and Stalin had just launched a counteroffensive in Western Russia.  Conditions were grim, but was Churchill wrong to focus on the resources, plans, and hopes he did have, rather than what he didn’t, in characterizing the situation in that dark November?

If great fights could only be won by a series of uncontested victories, with no setbacks, no stalemates, and no periods when things look bleak, World War II would have been over by mid-1940.  We’re still in the fight, shipmates. It’s not over.  Don’t give up the ship.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

In a video message released today, Ohio Governor John Kasich explains how he fixed his state’s budget. It’s a must watch video for all those interested in fixing the current economic / debt mess in DC.

Believe it or not, Gov. Kasich actually – pay attention big spenders in DC! - balanced it.

“We took on the largest budget short fall in Ohio’s history,” Kasich says. And that’s not all: they did it while lowering taxes for… not just “the rich,” but everybody.

Kasich eliminated the much detested – and completely immoral – death tax. Furthermore, he made “long overdue reforms” that helped improve Ohio’s economy. Oh, and he gave seniors and students and their parents more choice. In other words, he actually tried to implement conservative solutions for his state’s problems. The result? Ohio is in better shape than in a long, long time.

It seems to me that America could use more governors like Governor Kasich. Heck, she could use such a guy (or gal) in the White House.

Watch the video:

Politicians wringing their hands over how to create more jobs might study the shale boom along the New York and Pennsylvania border. It’s a case study in one state embracing economic opportunity, while the other has let environmental politics trump development.

The Marcellus shale formation—65 million acres running through Ohio, West Virginia, western Pennsylvania and southern New York—offers one of the biggest natural gas opportunities. Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, a Democrat, recognized that potential and set up a regulatory framework to encourage and monitor natural gas drilling, a strategy continued by Republican Tom Corbett…

Then there’s New York. The state holds as much as 20% of the estimated Marcellus shale reserves, but green activists have raised fears about the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing and convinced politicians to enact what is effectively a moratorium.

The Manhattan Institute study shows that a quick end to the moratorium would generate more than $11.4 billion in economic output from 2011 to 2020, 15,000 to 18,000 new jobs, and $1.4 billion in new state and local tax revenue. These are conservative estimates based on a limited area of drilling. If drilling were allowed in the New York City watershed—which Governor Andrew Cuomo is so far rejecting—as well as in the state’s Utica shale formation, the economic gains would be five times larger.

This latest study demonstrates that, in Pennsylvania, they produced 81 billion cubic feet of natural gas in 2009, up from from five billion in 2007. This resulted in $2.8 million in direct economic benefits and $1.2 million in indirect benefits. Not to mention the insignificant matter of 72,000 jobs between the fourth quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2011. And these are good paying jobs, averaging $73,000 per year as compared to $46,000 on average for all other industries combined.

The sad part of this story is that, right across the border from some of the northernmost farmers reaping the benefits of these wells, they can see their neighbors in New York losing their farms and moving out of the state. New York’s new governor, Andrew Cuomo, has put in place a push to end the moratorium, much to his credit. Unfortunately the environmental groups and the courts still hold a lot of power and will likely be able to hold this effort up for many months, if not years, in the courts.

This is a good case study for the Obama administration to take a look at. We have similar situations playing out over other natural gas plays around the nation – particularly in the west – as well as the emerging potential of oil sands and other formations. But as long as government at every level allows activist groups to shut down productivity for one of the cleanest burning energy sources we have, the door remains shut to yet another immediate path to economic recovery and job creation.

Pretty much everyone remembers last January when the liberal mainstream media accused Sarah Palin of being an accomplice to mass murder because she had almost the exact same target map on her Facebook page that the Democrats had up a year earlier. This whole “do as I say, not as I do” fiasco prompted liberals to decree that we needed a widespread campaign for civility. (Yes, I realize how hypocritical it is to demand civility from others while falsely accusing your political opponents of being accomplices to mass murder.)

Well, I thought that everyone might be interested to take a look at the liberal idea of “civility” that’s been on display since last January. First, there was the lovely union rallies in Wisconsin where participants cursed out reporters, called people they disagreed with vile names and hit my friend Tabitha Hale over the head with a sign. (Video is NSFW.)

Then, we were all treated to Jack Stuef and the good folks over at Wonkette making fun of three-year-old Trig Palin on his birthday for having Down’s Syndrome and referring to him as “half-alive”, all the while implying that Todd Palin raped his own daughter.

[Below is an excellent take-down by Steven Crowder regarding the lovely column on Trig Palin published at Wonkette. Warning--video is NSFW.]

Next came NYT columnist David Carr referring to the people of Alabama, Kansas and Middle America as “the dance of the low-sloping foreheads”.

Oh, and who could forget the recent brouhaha regarding the Rutgers University professor who got drunk and accosted Paul Ryan in a DC restaurant for drinking an expensive glass of wine that he paid for with his own money. (Her behavior was particular egregious considering the fact that she was dining in the same expensive restaurant and drinking an expensive bottle of wine herself.)

So, if you were thinking that liberals couldn’t sink any lower with their “civility”, you would be sorely mistaken. Last Friday night, Bill Maher had comic Marc Maron and sex-advice columnist Dan Savage on the panel of his show. When the topic of Michelle Bachmann’s husband, Marcus, came up–along with his ministry to try to convert homosexuals to heterosexuals–Marc Maron said the following:

“I hope [he] takes all that rage that comes from repression and denial into the bedroom with her…and I hope he f**ks her angrily, because that’s how I would.”

Not to be outdone, Savage then replied to Maron’s quip with the following quote:

“I sometimes think about f**king the sh*t out of Rick Santorum…I’m up for whipping up some Santorum in Santorum.”

Really fellas?! This sounds an awful lot like saying that you would like to rape Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum simply because you disagree with them politically. So much for “civility”.

[By the way, this isn't the first liberal foray into rape fantasies. In 2009, Playboy wrote a column about the conservative women that they would like to "hate-f**k". Caleb Howe has the screen shots here.]

FYI, I’m not a huge fan of Marcus Bachmann’s whole “pray away the gay” crusade, just like I’m not a huge fan of Dan Savage’s claim that married people–gay or straight–shouldn’t be monogamous because it is “unnatural”.* However, what I like less is the growing idea in leftist circles that it’s OK to fantasize about raping people that you disagree with politically. Newsflash Lefties–people have the right to be misguided, give bad advice, disagree with you, or be flat-out wrong without being bombarded with threats of sexual assault.

Now, the nastiness of Bill Maher’s panel only became more pronounced from there. For example, later on in the show, Dan Savage said the following with regard to Congressional Republicans:

Behold the civility!!

However, by far, the most appalling moment of Maher’s show came when he did his “New Rules” segment at the end of the show. After about a minute of calling Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin a slew of sexist names (all the while claiming that he’s not a sexist), Maher launches into a tirade against Sarah Palin and her family when he says the following:

“…And when I point out that Sarah Palin is a vain-glorious braggart, a liar, a whiner, a professional victim, a scold, a know-it-all, a chiseler, a bully who sells patriotism like a pimp, and the leader of a strange family of inbred weirdoes straight out of The Hills Have Eyes, that’s not sexist. I’m saying it because it’s true – not because it’s true of a woman.”

Now, the Hills Have Eyes reference might go over your heads, but you really should be aware of what it means. The Hills Have Eyes is a horror movie by Wes Craven where the quintessential American family is attacked, raped and brutalized by a family of radiation exposed mutants–oh, and the youngest member of the mutant family is mentally disabled. (See the movie trailer blow.)

Ha Ha–that’s so funny! You know, comparing beautiful little girls and a special needs child to violent, hideous mutants…that’s a real knee-slapper right there. And hey, what would far-leftist humor be with making fun of a special needs child? Liberals really ought to come up with a bumper sticker that reads, “We hate little girls and special needs children–vote Democrat!”. I really think that would be a great way to win friends and influence people, don’t you? I mean, nothing says class and “civility” like hating on young girls and mentally handicapped children by comparing them to radiation exposed mutants.

[On a side note, I find it to be a bit peculiar that the people comparing the Palin children to violent, raping, murdering mutants are the ones actually fantasizing about the rape and murder/death of their enemies, but I digress.]

In all seriousness, though, if you think that any of the above humor from Bill Maher’s recent show is funny, then please, stop whatever it is that you are doing, let your fingers do the walking in the Yellow Pages and find yourself a good shrink. Really, if you think that fantasizing about people being raped, mocking a handicapped child and comparing young girls to disfigured, violent mutants is funny (simply because you don’t like their mother), then you are an awful person and you need help.

And yes, I am making a value judgement here and I realize that many liberals think that value judgements are icky and some would probably like to see me “hate-f**ked” because of it, but I don’t much care. Some behaviors are just frankly uncivil–nay vile–and should be loudly denounced as such. It is high time that conservatives start demanding real civility from liberals, instead cowering whenever they whine about our target maps and “Don’t Tread On Me” flags. Enough is enough. Here is where I take my stand.

*PS–See, I was able to disagree with people without fantasizing about their rape or murder, or comparing them to disfigured, violent mutants.

Cross-posted at Parcbench, The Minority Report and Right Wing News.