08.27.10

Our big chance not to be stupid

Posted in Diciness of Western civilization's survival prospects, Human freedom, Politics, Public opinion at 1:05 pm by Administrator

So a Republican National Senate Campaign Committee lawyer is heading to Alaska to help out Lisa Murkowski.  Could there be a more unmistakable sign that the GOP establishment still insists on being the Stupid Party?

We’ve seen this so many times.  W’s support of Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey.  Newt’s support of Dede Scozafava over Hoffman in that special election in upstate New York last year.

A lot of lefty pundits lately are trumpeting a schism within the Pub party, and it’s mostly whistling past the graveyard since, schism or no, the Freedom-Haters are facing a bloodbath this fall. Still they have a point.  Modern Pubs are of two types: those with Tea Party fire in their bellies, and Reasonable Gentlemen.

To any new BN readers out there, let me define my term “Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.”  It’s that mindset that says, “Well, yes, we have deep philosophical disagreements with our colleagues across the aisle, completely opposite policy prescriptions.  But we know these guys.  We run into them at lunch in the Capitol Hill mess, at social functions around Washington.  Our kids go to the same schools.  We’re all just Reasonable Gentlemen and Ladies earnestly keeping the nation’s best interest at heart.  And politics is merely the art of the possible, so we presume some degree of compromise going into our work on any given issue.”

It basically amounts to rolling over, exposing your underbelly and inviting your mortal enemy to claw out your entrails.  It sells out Americans’ freedom every time it’s practiced.

And now comes along a new type – and, in lots of cases, generation – of candidate, people with real and substantial experience in areas such as business or military service, people who indeed are not well-versed in the ways of Washington, with its system of gotcha and calling in favors and offering people cover for theri betrayal of principle with sound bites about “common ground.”  The GOP establishment thinks – well, let’s be blunt here – that they’re a bunch of yay-hoos.

We’ll get our chance to demonstrate a massive show of force.  Probably in both houses of Congress.  But it’s our very last chance.

I’m going to take a little chance with my level of rhetoric here and say that I see Divine Providence sending us a clear message: Either go into this with a clear and comprehensive set of values and principles you’re willing to defend with the utmost fierceness, or you will be responsible, even more than the current regime, for the final undoing of the greatest esperiment in freedom in history.

UPDATE: It gets worse: The Alaska GOP phone-banked for Murkowski in the final days leading up to the primary.

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08.13.10

The age of disconnect – today’s edition

Posted in Barack Obama, Behavior and motivation, Michelle Obama, Outrages of the current regime, Politics at 1:29 pm by Administrator

Alex Wagner at Politics Daily lays out the laundry list of ways that the Most Equal Comrade and his regime are moving – careening – in the opposite direction from the reality that is as plain as day to most Americans – Michelle’s lavish Spain vacation, the economic numbers, Iraq’s obvious unpreparedness to take its place among nations as a stable state even as MEC sticks determinedly to his schedule for US withrawal, Robert Gibbs’s antagonizing of MEC’s leftist base. 

We’ve never seen anything like this.  Just what is the overarching strategy of this bunch?  What are they ultimately aiming to do?

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08.12.10

A sliver of sunlight

Posted in Politics at 9:27 pm by Administrator

Carly Fiorina is ahead of Boxer by five points, per a CBS poll.

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07.27.10

Shirley Sherrod’s husband

Posted in Ideology, Politics, Race card at 2:28 am by Administrator

Whooeee, does this guy ever get ripe with the Marxist liberation rhetoric.

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07.09.10

You have to hand one thing to him: he’s committed to his principles

Posted in Barack Obama, Ideology, Politics at 1:32 pm by Administrator

Dick Morris’s column today is full of the kinds of observations that can only be made by a seasoned political insider.  He notes that the Most Equal Comrade is at a very similar juncture to the one Bill Clinton found himself at in 1994, but due to a different set of motivations.  Clinton, who basically pursued a political career as a way to meet chicks, wasn’t driven by core principles.  He had nonetheless found himself, by the time of his first midterm elections, way off in lefty-land due to a perceived need to shore up the support of that base.  Authenticity was never his strong suit.  The Most Equal Comrade, on the other hand, is indeed a committed ideologue, a radical leftist through and through, and that’s why he is where he is.  Clinton sized up his situation and moved to the center.  The Most Equal Comrade will do no such thing, and it will eat, like a cancer, what’s left of his credibility, goodwill and ability to survive.

To the recent examples of this regime’s commitment to leftism that Morris offers (the DOJ whitewash of the New Black Panther voter-imtimidation case, the federal lawsuit against Arizona over its immigration law), I would add this chillingly totalitarian recess appointment of Donald Berwick.

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07.02.10

The face of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

Posted in Politics, Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome at 2:15 pm by Administrator

Lindsey Graham says the tea-party movement will “die out.”

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06.16.10

If they could be convinced to do it, there would be no stopping them

Posted in Politics at 4:38 pm by Administrator

How about Daniels-Ryan in 2012?

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Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome on full display

Posted in Congress, Politics, Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome at 4:29 pm by Administrator

Several Pub senators are publicly distancing themselves from Sharron Angle because they find her positions on Dept. of Education, Dept. of Energy, Social Security and the UN icky.

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06.11.10

Our culture’s struggle for the legitimate use of the term “mainstream”

Posted in Government bureaucracy, Government spending, Politics at 12:30 pm by Administrator

Mona Charen has a great column today on how Harry Reid is going to try to paint Sharron Angle as a nutcase because she’d like to see the Department of Education closed up.  (She’d also like to see Social Security phased out, the IRS abolished, and the US withdrawn from the UN.  It’s going to be delicious to see Harry Reid come to his embarrasingly public realization that millions and millions of Americans also would like to see these developments, and sooner, not later.)  Angle would do well to trumpet the litany of failures on the part of the DoE as her handy response to Harry as he gets his campaign underway.  The idea that there’s anything fringe about shutting down a massive government entity wasting billions of dollars is a phantom held only by those whistling past the graveyard.

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05.28.10

They really expect us to believe all Willie the Zipper discussed with Sestak was a non-paying advisory position?

Posted in Corruption, Politics at 8:17 pm by Administrator

It doesn’t add up.  That’s hardy sufficient incentive for dropping out of a Senate race.  Plus, why are we just now getting this crucial “information?”

And speaking of crucial information, the fact that W the Z, he of the global foundation and elder-statesman stature, was called in to basically act like, as Chris Wallace said a little while ago on Fox, a Chicago ward heeler, is the hottest tidbit so far in this unseemly little set of circumstances.

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05.09.10

The effete, chin-rubbing, pointy-head eunuch poster boy for journalistic Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

Posted in Ideology, Politics at 11:16 pm by Administrator

David Brooks sits next to E. J. Dionne on the panel on ABC’s This Week and, in the course of a conversation about Senator Bennett not even being on the ballot of a GOP straw vote in Utah, says to Dionne, “Have you had lunch yet?  Here you go.  Here are my balls.”

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04.05.10

What happens when you don’t “press for a full-scale response” to a “poison-tipped dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush presidency”

Posted in Karl Rove, Politics, iraq at 1:25 pm by Administrator

Joseph Shattan at The American Spectator on the fateful moment when Karl Rove opted to be sleepy rather than allow his entrails to blaze.  The result: the Freedom-Haters got away with the “Bush lied” meme, and that got TCM elected.

This gets back to something we address at BN fairly frequently.  Conservatives must be relentless in embracing both clarity and fierceness.  Our enemy knows how to exploit the most infinitesimal moment of confusion or inertia.

Being clear and fierce also helps us to articulate our counter-argument to the effete little NYT columnists and those of similar odor when they make our tea parties out to be riots incited by bigots and yay-hoos.

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03.30.10

Just when we can least afford a stupid party as the alternative to the FHer regime

Posted in Politics at 12:40 pm by Administrator

The RNC blows donor money on fancy resorts and kinky nightclubs.  Not the way to get people to put pen to check.

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03.27.10

Sounds like he just considered himself too cool to show up at the office like everybody else

Posted in Behavior and motivation, Ideology, Politics at 11:38 am by Administrator

Daily Beast looks into the differing explanations AEI and David Frum have for the latter’s departure.  He claims it happened over his Pubs-are-stupid-for-not-compromisisng-with-FHers blog post.  The Institute says he wasn’t doing enough to warrant pulling down $100K a year.

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03.04.10

Lest you think health care was the only realm in which they were working their evil . . . .

Posted in Corruption, Politics, Socialism at 7:43 pm by Administrator

 . . . Well, just read the whole thing.  It will make your head spin.

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To quit being the Stupid Party, one thing the GOP will need is some spine

Posted in Congress, Politics, health care at 2:18 pm by Administrator

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.

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02.26.10

He surely has other visions of his personal future, but history may tap him on the shoulder

Posted in Politics at 2:19 pm by Administrator

Mona Charen on Mitch Daniels and the Pub short list for 2012.  He’d be fabulous, but he’d have to be fully committed.

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02.23.10

It’s in situations like this that Reasonable Gentlemen can get us into real trouble

Posted in Energy policy, Politics at 8:12 pm by Administrator

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.

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Reclaiming the stupid party is really going to be a lot of work – this hour’s edition

Posted in Ideology, Politics at 7:34 pm by Administrator

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.

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Re-taking the stupid party and making it conservatism’s home once again won’t be a walk in the park

Posted in Ideology, Politics at 2:36 pm by Administrator

Red State on a “Republican strategist’s” dissing of Jim deMint, Marco Rubio (who leads Charlie Crist by double digits) – and Red State.

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