03.04.10
Lest you think health care was the only realm in which they were working their evil . . . .
. . . Well, just read the whole thing. It will make your head spin.
To quit being the Stupid Party, one thing the GOP will need is some spine
Andy McCarthy on fear of being demagogued by FHers as the reason no fellow Pubs stood by Bunning. McCarthy also makes the point that, along with jobless benefits, another feature of this maeasure was preventing steep slashes in payments to Medicare doctors. Hell, those are the kinds of cuts they’ll be facing under TCM-care. Why not let them get a taste of the new order of things now?
Can you imagine how the fed-up populist groundswell would have cheered the Pubs if they’d come together on this?
The American people must have a choice between stupid and evil.
02.26.10
He surely has other visions of his personal future, but history may tap him on the shoulder
Mona Charen on Mitch Daniels and the Pub short list for 2012. He’d be fabulous, but he’d have to be fully committed.
02.23.10
It’s in situations like this that Reasonable Gentlemen can get us into real trouble
I’d been think this since I heard TCM talk about loan guarantees for nuke-plant construction: That is sounds like an interesting move in and of itself, but that it’s really a ploy to incrementally lure Pubs into signing on to “green” technology.
And with three characters like Graham, Lieberman and Kerry working together to craft an “acceptably biparitsan” energy bill, it becomes crucial for grown-ups to keep their wits about them.
Reclaiming the stupid party is really going to be a lot of work – this hour’s edition
Mitt Romney endorses McCain for re-election as Arizona senator. (And while BN endorses Hayworth, it comes with this qualifier: He needs to knock off the birther crap, and right now.)
And Scott Brown shows symptoms of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, voting for cloture on the jobs bill, andusing terms like “bipartisanship” and “put politics aside.” His election remains glorious, since it roars loudly the mood of the electorate, as well as making it likely that socialist health care is a dead issue. Still, we must expect him to mute our excitement with great frequency.
02.22.10
Critique of the critique (This isn’t merely wonkish wankery; it’s important to get clear about)
02.17.10
In environments such as, say, late-50s Cuba or Czarist Russia, it can have the desired effect, which is totalitarianism; in America, it just leads to a nasty train wreck
Observations on three aspects of the current D.C. meltdown. (HT: Real Clear Politics)
WSJ on the implications of Evan Bayh’s announcement.
Jeff Birnbaum on TCM’s inability or refusal to lead, and the vacuum that has created in Washington, at least until a critical mass of Pubs fully grasp the gravity of the situation and step up accordingly.
Dick Morris uses the term “ruin” to describe what TCM has done to the Freedom-Hater party.
We look out our front windows, up and down the streets where we live, and see daily American life ostensibly going on like it did five years ago, ten, fifty, one hundred years ago. Few of the people you see maneuvering through their day, however, are oblivious at this point to the sense that there is no hand on the tiller.
The more this unfolds, the more I understand the importance of Diana West’s 2007 book, Death of the Grownup. We have developed a pathological incapacity for seriousness. The leader of the free world is surrounded by the grimmest of challenges, many of his own making, and he still struts about like the winner of American Idol. There is an undeniable groundswell of Americans waking up to the gravity of our current juncture, but there is still a too-large infrastucture of “journalists,” “educators,” “artists” and “religious leaders” – to say nothing of “legislators” and “administrators” – who think our current course is just dandy.
A precarious state like this cannot last indefinitely.
02.15.10
Just wow
Evan Bayh is retiring as Indiana senator. Such a recent development I don’t have a link to a news story about it yet.
It will be interesting to say the least to get the full skinny on this one. I know Dan Coats was ahead of him in the polls, but Evan has never struck me as being afraid of a political challenge. As far as I know, he’s a happily married man. Healthy. Committed to his party.
As I say, as far as I know all the above is true.
UPDATE: Here is the AP story. I’m rather intrigued by his remark “I do not love Congress.” I’m sure he’ll be asked to elaborate on that in coming days.
It’s not even pejorative to these people
53 % of Dems view the term “socialism” favorably, per Gallup.
02.01.10
Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome is an increasingly fatal condition
Rubio over Crist by 12 points per Rasmussen.
01.28.10
Stats to confirm what your common sense had already told you
Andy Wickersham at Pajamas Media looks at what ADA and ACU ratings tell us about how far to the left the Dem party has veered in the last three and a half decades.
No wonder we call them Freedom-Haters.
01.26.10
More bad numbers for the Freedom-Haters
Kasich leads Strickland 51 to 45 in an Ohio governor’s-race poll.
Mike decides against it
Rep. Pence sees his immediate work as being done in the House.
I know that’s not the body we historically get our executive-branch candidates from, but does anybody else feel like a Pence-Bachmann ticket in 2012 would have some electricity to it?
01.25.10
The numbers would indicate that he ought to take the plunge
I was aware that Mike Pence was considering a challenge to Evan Bayh, but I didn’t know about the Rasmussem poll that shows the public favoring him in a match-up.
Doing more of what got them to this juncture
Conrad Black offers a first-anniversary/eve-of-the-State-of-the-Union take on The Aquarian Totalitarian at National Review Online that articulates everything I would put in such a piece, and no doubt more eloquently. To summarize, the current president is a ham-handed authoritarian leftist and an aloof naricissist who is ensuring himself of one dismal term in office. Black says that the Pubs really need to get out in front of this and start floating serious 2012 candidates soon, but that their problem is that none of the likely figures has what it’s really going to take.
That’s a problem not just for the GOP but for all Americans, given the fact that not just TCM but the entire FHer party and media infrastructure seems to have opted for doubling down on the policy orientation that the public clearly hates. Every day at sites such as Real Clear Politics, one gets columns like Todd Purdum’s in Vanity Fair, David Plouffe’s in The Washington Post, and Peter Beinart’s at The Daily Beast that drum home the theme that their message of socialism and planned decline just need to be conveyed more effectively.
In other words, while the Brown victory in Massachussetts was of the greatest significance, there is still a lor of fighting and thinking to do.
Our best bet is to couch all debates and discussions of specific policy in terms of first principles. We must be spotlessly clear about our use of terms such as “rights” and “help” and “justice.” We must permit no co-opting of them for purposes of doublespeak.
As I said in the post below, we’re dealing with a cornered, wounded beast. It still has the capacity to inflict its own grisly wounds if we don’t handle it carefully.
2010 will not be boring.
01.23.10
J.D. Hayworth for U.S. Senate
As I said in a recent post about political options, you should always look at where you can do better, and when you compare J.D.’s 98 percent rating from the American Conservative Union with that of 81 percent for the unltimate Reasonable Gentleman, Mr. Reach-Across-The-Aisle himself, John McCain, this one’s a no-brainer.
