This year’s shamelessly swiped image is shamelessly swiped from over here. I thought it was the best-looking of the bunch. Even though it’s from last year…

[Update: I decided I just can’t stand having the wrong year in there like that, so I copped a modified version from over here.]

It bears repeating. On the list of things to be done When I Start Running This Place and become Dictator of the World Forever…Item #3 on the list says that within any given municipality, every single damn veteran therein gets Veteran’s Day off or else nobody does.

This is one of those things that, if Mork From Ork was living in your laundry room and he came asking you about it one day, you’d never be able to explain it. People who are not vets — get Veteran’s Day off. This guy I met down at the post office who is a vet — he has to work. How come that is?

There are no good answers. That’s because it’s one of those things we do that don’t make any sense.

Anyway. The day ahead beckons. Rant done.

Happy Veteran’s Day, veterans. We are the folks living in the fortress, you are the wall. You can exist without us, but we cannot exist without you. Thank you.

David Boaz writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Let the government run the schools, and it may end up teaching your children values that offend you. Let the government have new powers to fight terrorism, and it may use those extraordinary powers in the pursuit of ordinary crimes. Let the federal government give the states money for highways, and it may eventually use its money to impose its own rules on the states.

In the Obama era, the slippery slope has gone vertical. Instead of “eventually,” the feared extensions of government power come immediately.

An indigent has made an unexpected and startling claim that his deplored economic status is the natural consequence of his own poor decision-making:

The incident occurred near the dumpster behind the Shop Rite store in Brooklyn, when Willard Kookish, formerly of 435 Subprime Lane in Nutly, NJ, casually told a reporter that “my problems are my own fault.” The veteran New York Times reporter Ken McLiar, who has been searching area dumpsters for a 3,785-part series on people who are homeless due to the evils of American capitalism, admits he was astonished by Mr. Kookish’s bizarre confession. When asked to elaborate, Mr. Kookish went on to say, “I went through college drinking and smoking dope and never learned anything. I’ve had many job opportunities but didn’t bother to show up. My family left me a nice house to live in but I took out home equity loans on it and spent the money on hookers and gambling. When the housing boom collapsed I lost everything. I made bad decisions and here I am bearing the consequences.”

Nobody really quite knows what to make of this. Taking responsibility for your mistakes? Your life sucks because of your own errors of judgment and you don’t want to blame someone else? What the hell is this? What planet are we on?

Experts, on whom the incompetent depend to explain the complicated world they fail to understand, are unanimous. “It’s Reagan’s fault,” says Professor Wilton Chumpley, a consulting sociologist from the University of Twerp in Belgium. “Remember how in the 1980s that actor-president mislead people into thinking they could spend their own money and run their own lives without expert help? And then you had that crackpot economist Milton Friedman falsely claiming that the government shouldn’t be responsible for directing people’s existence. It made less sense than the UFO stories, at least for smart people like myself. But, tragically, some fools took it seriously; it ruined their lives.”

President Obama has not commented publicly on the controversy but has privately told aides that “former President Bush is not getting off the hook for the economy, the War in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina or Willard Kookish’s failures on my watch.” Sources speculate that Kookish’s mortgage default will be added to the list of indictable offenses against former Bush Administration officials.

Good. Very good.

John Allen Muhammad, the mastermind behind the sniper attacks that left 10 dead, was executed Tuesday night as relatives of the victims watched, reliving the killing spree that terrorized the Washington metro area for three weeks in October 2002.

He looked calm and stoic, but was twitching and blinking as the injections began, defiant to the end, refusing to utter any final words. Victims’ families sat behind glass while watching the execution, separated from the rest of the 27 witnesses.

That’s so much more civilized, and so much more respectful to human life, than to hunt around for excuses for the next twenty years to keep this guy breathing and eating and writing books and granting teevee interviews. No contest.

For a second there I got my one-man-jihad guys mixed up. Thought it was the Fort Hood murderer they just put down. Got all excited there; thought the world had suddenly come to its senses.

Well, seven years is alright — an improvement, anyway. Someday, perhaps, justice will be swift enough that murderer and victim will be embalmed on the same day. Yeah, we’ll never quite get there, but it’s a nice thought. Murder as nothing more than a form of suicide. It would still happen now & then…but imagine the lives that would be saved. That’s change I can believe in.

The other one-man jihad is another story. More on that later. For now, it’s one down. Yay.

John Cole lets the Republicans have it.

The funny thing about all of this is that no matter how bad all their ideas are, no matter how disastrous their governance has been, no matter how many horrible things they have done to the economy and this country, what really is killing the Republican party is that deep down, they are just complete assholes. You see it in the way they treat women, you see it in the way they treat minorities, you see it in the way they treat homosexuals, you see it in the way they treat anyone who is not a white Christian, and you see it in the way they treat anyone who disagrees with them slightly about anything. They just have no respect for anyone, and it shows. People don’t like to be treated like crap, and grown-ups don’t want to be associated with people who yell “You lie” or scream “socialism” or “Hitler” or accuse you of being a terrorist whenever they don’t get their way.

If you read the Corner or the Weekly Standard, or listen to any talk radio or any of the mouth breathers on Fox, or read any right-wing blogs, you will instantly know what I am talking about. You can’t help but notice that they are just loudmouthed jerks, stubborn bully boys, and insensitive and insecure cads. James Wolcott once wrote that Eric Cantor looked like the “pricky proprietor of the Jerk Store,” and that could be applied to the majority of the prominent Republicans out there. I guess that should be suspected from a movement in which the only thoughts are “Fuck you, I got mine.”

I was not aware there was such a simple and clear correlation between one’s position on the ideological spectrum and one’s asshole-ness. Wow, I must be a real moderate. If you were to task me to find a right-wing asshole, I’m pretty sure I can find one without too much trouble…if you asked me to bring you a left-wing asshole I could bring you a few of those too. Anywhere in between. Assholes, assholes, assholes.

Cole has a much simpler and prettier view of the world — all the assholes are clustered down by one end.

Hey, does that mean if I really am an asshole, I can stop being one just by agreeing with John Cole about everything? Or at least fool people into thinking I’m not one?

Update: You know what this…along with my observation this morning…harkens back to. The plaque. That plaque I made.

The liberals look at the rest of us and say — I think you’re stupid, now prove you aren’t by backing my shitty program. I think you’re an asshole, now prove you aren’t by backing my shitty program. Always, always, always, the character of the person being recruited figures into it…and always, there’s something for the recruited to prove…because the shitty program cannot be sold on its own merits. It always boils down to “You have to support it, because otherwise I’ll think the worst about you.”

And the program seems to have consistent characteristics as well. It makes the living of life easier, but less worthwhile. Takes the resistance out…at taxpayer expense…but once you’ve overcome that declining resistance, you’ve accomplished less and less because you’ve enjoyed the opportunity to accomplish less and less.

It is simpler to survive, but tougher to prosper.

Simpler to survive, but tougher to prosper…simpler to survive, but tougher to prosper…simpler to survive but tougher to prosper. Kind of like those witches in that movie — “light as a feather but stiff as a board.”

Anyway. You better help them or you’re an asshole. Got that message? Good. Now help them spread it.

So last year I read all about this and got excited, but my better half put a veto on it.

This year I’m going to try the overtures a little bit earlier, and see if I can’t get her to see things my way.

Five pounds of lovely bacon going with that bad boy. They say it keeps the turkey all moistened-up, with pig fat yet, and as an added bonus it is seasoned to perfection.

Maybe this is year we get to find out for sure.

Taranto:

“We don’t know all the answers yet,” the Associated Press quotes President Obama as saying Friday about the Fort Hood massacre. “And I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts.”

Not only is the president right, his advice is tautological. Premature judgment is ill-advised by definition. But one senses in much of the commentary about suspect Nidal Malik Hasan a desire to avoid considered judgment as well — not just a reluctance to jump to conclusions, but a drive to go far out of one’s way to avoid ever reaching one particular conclusion.

There follows an impressive procession of quotes of people tryin’ like the dickens to avoid the one particular conclusion. It’s invaluable to have this entered into the record, but it seems to us James Taranto might have saved himself the trouble and just jumped ahead to this one:

[C]onsider the following insight from Susan Campbell of the Hartford Courant:

Much has and will be made of [Hasan’s] religion from people too ignorant to read a Qur’an, or too isolated to talk to a Muslim, or too stubborn to educate themselves. Even the Washington Post calls him a “devout Muslim.” But can a “devout Muslim” commit such acts? No more than a “devout Christian” can, no.

In fairness to Campbell, she posted this on Friday, before much of the above information had been published. Still, it seems fair to ask: Just who is jumping to conclusions?

I think we’ve reached a turning point, and the turning point is this:

Intellectualism has become the readiness, willingness and ability to call dangerous things safe, and safe things dangerous.

If you’re ready, willing and able to call dangerous things dangerous and safe things safe, you are a moron. None of this stuff needs to be debated. We only need to indulge in the name-calling, then relapse back into what we were doing just before disaster struck. When we change things, the more we change them, the less we need to discuss what we’re doing.

If you see nothing wrong with that, then you’re just a real smarty-pants. If you do see something wrong with it then it goes to show how stupid you are.

It’s one year ago and we’ve just elected “basically God” as our next President. I tell you “the next one after Him is going to be a Republican…and a year from now, most people will think so.”

Sure, you’d take the bet. Who wouldn’t?

Probably call for a paddy-wagon and lock me up in the looney bin. Who in the world could blame you?

And yet…one year and just a handful of days…here…we…are.

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of likely voters say it is at least somewhat likely the next president of the United States will be a Republican, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

The number has been trending in this direction since Democrat Barack Obama took office in January and is up 14 points since then.

Stunning. History-making. Whiplash.

Mister Wonderful is a bowling ball dropped over the Mariana Trench.

Update: Polarizing.

Daphne forwards on (via off-line) the brilliant prose of some overly-emotionally-invested pro-ObamaCare blogger who’s getting incensed about all the protests…and has decided to start calling people names. Real mature.

AIN’T NO PARTY LIKE A CONSERVATIVE TEA PARTY BECAUSE A CONSERVATIVE TEA PARTY DON’T STOP!

Seriously. You might have thought that the tea partiers had packed up their homemade often misspelled signs and their bejeweled flag t-shirts so they could get back home to their miserable lives but think again. They’re like a band of traveling gypsies who dress poorly and keep showing up uninvited. On Thursday thousands of activists who aren’t really sure what they’re protesting camped out at the Capitol for what was referred to as the “Super Bowl of Freedom,” sponsored by Republican members of Congress.
:
Naturally our own Rep. Jeb Hensarling was out there rallying the troops and, according to WP, standing in front of the tastefully done Dachau banner. Rep. John Carter pointed to the House office buildings and, apparently forgetting for a minute that he’s a House member, encouraged the protesters, “Go get ‘em!” No. Really. I have no idea why Texas gets a bad name.

The ubiquitous Jon Voight brought the D-list star power to the event, standing with the lawmakers and saying of Obama, “Could it be he has had 20 years of subconscious programming by Reverend Wright to damn America?” I’m pretty sure the only people who’ve been programmed are the feeble-minded and easily brainwashed protesters. Go get ‘em.

Well, perhaps it stings just a little bit being compared to Nazis because there are quite a few things that make the analogy work. Like the human-experimenting…the ultra-charismatic personality up at the tippy-top of the org chart…wonderful speechifying…the population-at-large claiming, perhaps truthfully in many cases, that they had no idea what horrors were being practiced by their own government…

Wasn’t so long ago the shoe was on the other foot, because our House Speaker was claiming she saw the protesters with swastikas and tried to spin it like the protesters were neo-Nazis. That didn’t work so well. Know why? Because if you can find a Nazi, and you figure out the Nazi is opposed to ObamaCare…the Nazi would be right about that one thing.

Anyway. Like I said in the comments. What is it about desiring control over your own life? Or what is it about not desiring control over your own life? Everything’s wonderful and you’re all happy, until someone else comes along and demands the freedom and responsibility you know you should be demanding, and that one event just sets people off. It’s like, if we were all just handed secret ballots on whether we want ObamaCare or not, the simpletons could vote yes, people who love liberty could vote no, and the simpletons would stay happy and content because they could labor on under the delusion that “everyone” agrees with them.

Maybe that’s the way we should be doing it. Just bypass Congress altogether. See if this is something The People want.

“Embedding disabled by request.” Gawd I hate that.

Awhile ago I pointed out that with the economy in its weakened state, one of the most hazardous things about being alive right now is that we are under continuous assault by stupid ideas that begin with the words “in times like these.” At work, at play, on the teevee, when you hear the words “in times like these”…or “with the economy the way it is right now”…or “with things the way they are” —

— you know the next thing to come afterward is blisteringly stupid.

Now, I don’t see the reason for this. Yes, we are flawed humans. And yes, when we hear those magic words we are left open and vulnerable to…whatever. But that doesn’t mean the next thing has to be damaging or stupid does it? Why can’t we say “with the economy the way it is right now”…and then follow it up with something that makes sense?

So I thought I’d come up with some ideas. Let’s spread the word around that with the economy in the crapper right now…………..

1. …We need to go ahead and let kids pray in school if they feel like they need to.
2. …We cannot take away any profit incentive from people who might come up with a good solution to our problems.
3. …We need to entertain every argument on its merits, rather than haul out the racism card against anyone who takes issue with Obama.
4. …We all must learn to compromise, and get along with less…even the labor unions.
5. …We need to be especially vigilant in making sure our representatives openly debate their legislation…or at least read it themselves.
6. …We need to look to wise people — or to ourselves! — for solutions to our problems. NOT Hollywood!
7. …We need to avoid the temptation of making deities out of false prophets who happen to have charismatic personalities.
8. …We need to leave talk radio unregulated, along with the Internet.
9. …We simply cannot afford to let people live who we know want to do harm to others. If they’ve been convicted and sentenced, off ’em.
10. …We need to avoid passing bad legislation just to assuage the guilty consciences of senators who drowned girls in their cars.
11. …We absolutely, positively have to abandon Keynesidan economics once and for all.
12. …We have to make it easier for people to buy things.
13. …We have to make it easier for people to sell things.
14. …We have to make it easier for people to start and grow their businesses.
15. …In general, we just have to do what we can to make things easier. Let’s leave cap-n-trade for later.
16. …We have to Drill Here Now, Drill Baby Drill!
17. …We have to encourage people to buy their own personal firearms, so they can protect themselves when they can’t rely on anything else.
18. …We simply cannot afford a seventeenth amendment anymore, and we need to go back to election of senators by state legislatures.
19. …We have to have tax holidays, the more the better. Nothing less will do.
20. …We can no longer afford to endlessly haggle with the dictators around the world who are obviously up to mischief. We need to take ’em down.
21. …We have to take extra precautions to make sure officers in our military aren’t wagering one-man jihads against their own country.
22. …We must waterboard, and do whatever else it takes.
23. …We have to depend on the family unit, and we have to stop making “Doofus Dad” movies.
24. …We need our children working, the younger, the better. It’s what they’ll have to spend their lives doing to pay all this debt.
25. …We need to leave Wal Mart ALONE.
26. …We all need to get behind Rush Limbaugh. The quotes attributed to him were FAKE. It’s a free speech issue. He could be any one of us.
27. …Children should be encouraged toward independence. They should learn to hunt, fish, tie knots, use a knife, sail, go camping.
28. …We simply cannot afford to raise taxes.
29. …No argument should be supported with “The Experts Say.” People need to learn to think for themselves.
30. …Presidents need to be making decisions, not speeches.

Pajamas Media:

In turn, I had also been inspired to write my piece by the supreme idiocy of Michael Moore on a recent Hannity, when the filmmaker made the staggeringly naive observation that there are a mere “few hundred guys on monkey bars” roaming the world. Hannity shot back that we are talking about millions of terrorists.

A couple of hundred? I think there are a thousand just living around the corner from me in London’s Edgware Road! Moore laughed at Hannity and said it was absurd to treat terrorists like “they are some kind of nation.” My God, Michael, they are many nations.

Moore’s verbal tick of “only a wuss would be afraid of that” betrays a struggle the hardcore MoveOn liberals have been having with their feelings about masculinity. They cannot embrace it; they’ve figured out it’s politically expensive to repudiate it; all they can do is re-define it. And so they live in a world in which manly is good again, but now manly has something to do with sitting on the sidelines, on your ass, pretending out loud that safe things are dangerous and dangerous things are safe.

As last month wound down to a close, it was clear to anyone who ever knew the meaning of the term that Keynesian economic theory was being given a good ol’ try, and was failing the test on such a massive scale that it might never recover. At least, in a medium of honest practice and evaluation, it would never recover.

So I proceeded to pretend we’re all honest, and I wrote up the obit:

Keynesian Economics Dead Forever

Keynesian economic theory, which says the most wonderful thing you can do to the economy in a capitalistic society is pool everybody’s money into a big pot by force and then spend it in some unified effort rather than let folks hang onto their wealth to spend as they please — was disconnected from life support yesterday, time-of-death recorded soon after. It was then wheeled down to the morgue and a tag was placed on its toe. We’re all going to stop arguing about it now. Forever. All the economists who’ve been promoting it for the last three quarters of a century…the ones that are still around, anyway…will be issuing an apology for wasting so much of our time, attention and resources.

Now, I don’t know if the Wall Street Journal editors read this blog. I’ve always presumed that hardly anyone ever does. But how else then do you explain this gem which popped up on their “Review & Outlook” section over the weekend…

A familiar definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. So in the wake of yesterday’s report that the national jobless rate climbed to 10.2% in October, we suppose we can expect the political class to demand another “stimulus.” Maybe if Congress spends another $787 billion in the name of job creation, it can get the jobless rate up to 12% or 13%.

It’s hard to imagine a more complete repudiation of Keynesian stimulus than the evidence of the last year’s job market. We’ve now had two examples of such stimulus—President Bush’s $160 billion effort in February 2008 and President Obama’s mega-version a year later—and neither has made even the smallest dent in employment. [emphasis mine]

Seriously, how in the world would you keep the vitals going on this cadaver? How? Here’s a situation where you can’t even fall back on the tried-and-true alternate-universe method of “Oh sure, things are bad WITH our magical program, but Trust Us WITHOUT the magical program they’d be even worse!” Even that turkey won’t hunt here. The egkspurts were given their chance, pre-stimulus, to tell us how bad things would get without the magical program. Fast forward to today, and things are much worse with it than they were ever supposed to be without it.

The program failed.

The theory failed.

Case closed.

All you can do to keep the bones dancing, is to say…the right people weren’t in charge. Or something spoiled the experiment. Maybe George Bush’s global warming upset the economic plane somehow.

So much suffering across the generations. Just stop it already.

Illustration made available from Gerard, who last week was also responsible for calling our attention to this wonderful morsel of cinematic art: The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon (naughty, non-work-safe language).

It’s one of the stupidest things we’ve ever seen on YouTube. It’s probably the funniest as well, especially in the second half.

It seems an oddly well-fit metaphor here. Who is the guy running, Keynesian economic theory? Spoonkiller is reality?

Or could it be the victim is our job market and the relentless, pursuing wraith is Obama’s policies that continue to muck with it?

Bagdad Bob Gibbs let his mouth run away with him — no, really, it occasionally happens — as he addressed some of the shocking, disturbing images protesting the health care bills:

I will continue to say what I’ve said before. You hear in this debate, you hear analogies, you hear references to, you see pictures about and depictions of individuals that are truly stunning, and you hear it all the time. People — imagine five years ago somebody comparing health care reform to 9/11. Imagine just a few years ago had somebody walked around with images of Hitler.

Hopefully we can get back to a discussion about the issues that are important in this country that we can do so without being personally disagreeable and set up comparisons to things that were so insidious in our history that anybody in any profession or walk of life would be well advised to compare nothing to those atrocities. [emphasis in linked article]

Go ahead and chase that link…to see how Mr. Gibbs was properly chastened.

Well, the Obamafans will never know about it, so I guess no harm done. Not the top of his game, though.

I just subscribed to this one a couple weeks ago because I like her delivery and she’s occasionally funny.

Her reaction to Levi’s “spread” is more entertaining than usual. Which isn’t much. More of a chuckle than a har-har. “Stupidhead.” I’m not showing this one off, just sort of bookmarking it.

…is profiled in the New York Times:

The police officer who brought down a gunman after he went on a shooting rampage at the Fort Hood Army base here was on the way to have her car repaired when she responded to a police radio report of gunfire at a center where soldiers are processed before being sent overseas, the authorities said Friday.

As she pulled up to the center, the officer, Sgt. Kimberly Denise Munley, spotted the gunman, later identified as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, brandishing a pistol and chasing a wounded soldier outside the building, said Chuck Medley, the director of emergency services at the base.

Sergeant Munley — a woman with a fierce love of hunting, surfing and other outdoor sports — bolted from her car, yanked her pistol out and shot at Major Hasan. He turned on her and began to fire. She ran toward him, continuing to fire, and both she and Major Hasan went down with several bullet wounds, Mr. Medley said.

Whether Sergeant Munley was solely responsible for taking down Major Hasan or whether he was also hit by gunfire from her partner is unclear, but she was the first to fire at him, the authorities said.

Sergeant Munley, 34, is an expert in firearms and a member of the SWAT team for the civilian police department on the base, officials said.

Mr. Medley said she had received specific training in a tactic called active shooter protocol, which was intended for this kind of situation.

“She’s absolutely a hero,” he said. “She had the training; she knew what to do. And she had the courage to do it — by doing it she saved countless people’s lives.”

The original 911 call came in at 1:23 p.m., and five minutes later Sergeant Munley had already shot the gunman.

Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone, the post commander, praised Sergeant Munley on Friday for reacting so swiftly and without hesitation. “It was an amazing and an aggressive performance by this police officer,” General Cone told The Associated Press.

Sergeant Munley began her career as a police officer in the beachside town of Wrightsville, N.C., after graduating from high school in nearby Wilmington. She quickly earned a reputation for fearlessness, despite her stature. (She stands 5-foot-4.)

Her partner in Wrightsville, Investigator Shaun Appler, recalled how Sergeant Munley saved him one night when she wrestled a large man off him after the man had pinned him down and was trying to take his gun. She earned the nickname Mighty Mouse for that, he said.

“She’s a ball of fire,” Mr. Appler said. “She’s a real good cop.”

In Britain, there is angst over the prospect of cops carrying guns.

Can you just imagine. What if a nutjob of this sort takes the time and trouble to really tool up, is not suicidal like Seung-Hui Cho…and there aren’t any armed cops?

Indeed, Munley acted under lessons learned from Virginia Tech:

Reviews in the aftermath of the shootings at Virginia Tech, where 32 died, found that first responders’ decision to be careful and wait for backup probably cost lives as that gunman moved unchecked from classroom to classroom as law enforcement massed outside.

Those findings had found their way to Fort Hood’s Special Reaction Team, which had practiced an entirely new protocol for at least a year before Thursday afternoon’s rampage here, in which 13 were killed and at least 28 wounded.

“The lesson from Virginia Tech was, don’t wait for backup but move to the target and eliminate the shooter,” says Chuck Medley, chief of Fort Hood’s emergency services. “It requires courage and it requires skill.”

It also requires arms.

I have another “imagine” moment — the opposite end of the spectrum. Imagine the liberal horror scenario in which it’s “like the wild west,” as they say. A gun on every single hip, and the familiarity with that device, and associated skill, brandished as brazenly as the hardware itself.

Gunman does his gunman malice. Charges in. Rifles blazing. Yells “Aaaaiiirrggghh!” just like Rambo. Now, how long would that last?

I’ll rant about the news coverage later. Munley is well deserving of a spotlight.

Others blogging: Cassy, Atlas, Mudville, Rick, Gerard.

Regardless of who is right or who is wrong, it seems to me when victories by one faction over the other are scored in a society’s significant political events, the assault that lead to the victory more often than not has been spearheaded by the battering ram known as the question-mark.

We may debate why that is, but for the purposes of this immediate thought that isn’t too important. What is important is that when one sincerely thinks one is right, and one sincerely seeks to make “points” against one’s enemy using the question-mark, one can do this honestly or dishonestly. An example of doing it dishonestly would be the attempt to legitimize same-sex marriage. “What’s normal?” “What’s a normal marriage?” Or, to make the devastating battering-ram extra heavy and extra pointy…”who is to say what a normal marriage is?”

The honest way to do it would be to find genuine contradictions in the argument of your intellectual opponent, and use the question mark to highlight them rather than to portend a spooky other-wordly future in which an there’s an elite aristocratic layer of corrupted clergy who go around deciding people’s marriages. (Just by way of example, in our plane of reality, if you don’t trust or like a clergyman — don’t have him perform your wedding ceremony. Problem solved.)

There is a great deal of fussing…and it probably rises well above the consternation, conflict and uncertainty that actually exist where it counts…about what the conservative base is to learn from the NY23 contest this week. How is the conservative message supposed to be advanced in a way that it takes hold? Here’s an idea. Use the question mark. And use it honestly. If it is to be used honestly, the immediate task that arises is to find a crack in the wall of the hardcore liberal fortress, against which the battering ram can be used. A crack that is a logical contradiction. Need we labor long or hard to find such a crack?

Their core mission as they see it: To create a wonderfully advanced society, free of any problems or as free of problems as possible…functioning for the benefit of, and in the interest of, everyone. It sounds so nice I want to sign up right now. I’m reminded of the vision’s toxicity when I simply look upon the machinery that is put in place to deliver the utopia. Health care, for example. Sarah Palin’s death panels, far from being an urban legend, are part of a natural force like gravity. They are quite unavoidable. All programs must be managed by someone. Management is ultimately about making decisions about resources in order to fulfill the most vital tasks within the great body of work that is to be attempted day-to-day.

In this way, the dream of utopia turns into a nightmare rather quickly.

Not only that, but most of the time the American electorate realizes it. Three election cycles out of every four…or at least two out of every three. We spend more time retreating from the utopian nightmare than we spend advancing onto it.

What we realize is the contradiction. The attempt is supposed to be to make a kinder, gentler nation for everybody. But somebody has to steer our great society as it makes its “progress” toward this vision, as a single moving object on a single course. Devil’s in the details. When you get down to the real-world decisions, like does this taxpayer qualify for head-of-household status, or is that company too big and should it be forced to break up…someone has to get screwed so that someone else can come out on top.

This is the direct antithesis of building a society “that works for everybody.” As a crack in the wall, it’s a gaping huge one. And a lot of folks who are tinkering with the idea of keeping our nation’s Congress friendly to The One, and perhaps re-electing Him, would be interested in knowing that. Or being reminded of it.

So I propose going forward into ’10 and ’12, the movement be built up around this simple…honest…question:

Who defines progress?

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

The piece of genetic perfection and loveliness (although she could use a sammrich) known as Marisa Miller…winner of last week’s alphabetical face-off against Leeann Tweeden…

…what young lady whose name begins with N can hope to even compete?

We finally picked Nadine Velasquez, who’s been on “My Name is Earl”:

More than adequate for this morning’s entry. In fact, going by just what you see above it’s a genuine toss-up.

I had to rely on the GoogleGodz to go get me some more samples of each contender. Then, and only then, is the contest decided.

Genetic perfection carries it again. Marisa comes out of it two-fer-two.

Maybe. I’m sure when your ass is constantly being kissed 24×7 for a couple of years, whenever it stops and it’s time to pull the trousers back up, it probably feels like a thumpin’.

I have no way of knowing that for sure.

Related: Bagdad Bob Gibbs plays it down.

Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel and more — here.

With a grateful hat tip to the guy who lifted our Palin-in-hot-pants poster, Diminished Expectations. To the blogroll he goes, and we’re gonna check back often.

D’JEver notice that lately when we talk about what’s required of a person who aspires to be our nation’s next President —

When we’re talking about a democrat, it seems we’ve all or mostly settled into a belief that it’s a sales job…a cheerleader job…it demands a talent that has something to do with “instilling beliefs” in people…”calling on” people…making people step up to do what those people already know they should be doing anyway.

When we’re talking about a Republican, suddenly it seems we change our minds and in the blink of an eye, the job transforms into something that has to do with playing Trivial Pursuit, or something like it. I dunno. Maybe we’re being somewhat consistent on the “making people feel” stuff. Suddenly we’re feeling un-confident because the person cannot list the ten avatars of Lord Vishnu in the correct order.

I’m a little less concerned about what newspapers Sarah Palin reads, than about whether Barack Obama can locate Afghanistan on a map. Seriously. Thomas Jefferson famously said “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” Makes you wonder if Punch Sulzberger has access to a time machine.

Rush Limbaugh giving his thoughts, responding to Chris Wallace…who falls into the tired old meme…wow, do you think Sarah Palin’s ready? Can she speak the seventy languages we demand out of people who want to be President — when they’re Republicans? Balance three basketballs on her head while juggling enraged wombats in heat and riding a unicycle? Use her mind tricks to convince an Imperial Stormtrooper these aren’t the droids he’s looking for?

I disagree with Rush on something near the end, though. Politicians do get dragged through things. And while what Sarah Palin endured is certainly…ah…unique — there are some other things that might be worse, that are not going to be happening to her. I think if you’re married and you cheat and get caught at it, then try to hang onto your career with bloody fingernails while the powers-that-be have decided it isn’t in the cards…that can get ugly. Or you can be a white male who is caught mistreating women. A Republican white male, that is. A Bob Packwood. Not saying Packwood didn’t deserve what he got, but I think that was worse than what Sarah Palin went through.

Be that as it may — smiling through it is not a rarity at all. We have it in abundance. That phony, painted-on parade-beauty-queen smile. It’s almost a form of pollution. And yeah, they can keep it up through thick & thin.

Palin’s smile, I think, is genuine and that is what makes it unique. Limbaugh should have elaborated on this for that is what he truly meant…

Anyway, the dichotomy is interesting. People are ready to swear on a stack of bibles their thoughts haven’t been manipulated. And yet they all march in lock-step on this: “Do you think Sarah Palin’s ready to be President?” Unvoiced subtext: With all the responsibilities and demands that the job entails? Like performing brain transplants everyday using just your thumbs?

Whether or not Obama’s ready, and suddenly we’re talking about a whole different job. Of COURSE He’s ready! Sure He’s got a few nutty ideas, like when you have more debt than you can ever repay you should take out more debt. But nevermind all that, He makes you feel so good!

So on the GOP side of things, who gets the blame? The seat was considered to be a safe Republican one…if Owens had some special, perhaps local agenda he was publicly embracing, I’ve yet to hear of it. Obviously the voters were recoiling from something.

Is there something inherently nasty and off-putting, as I have been repeatedly told, to be a “tea party” guy? Just standing up for more freedom and lower taxes somehow takes on an acrid, visceral tone? People still get the feeling they can’t look at themselves in the mirror unless they do their bit to send Barack Obama out and apologize to the world and throw around money we don’t have?

Or could it be they were recoiling from the instability. The heat that was radiating from that big crack in the middle. The wobbling. The self-contradiction. The “We’ll get your vote by being exactly like those other guys…except not quite so much.”

Looks to me like the second of those two. John McCain was certainly wobbly, certainly trying to get in (to whatever extent he was really trying) leveraging the “Not as much of a democrat as that other guy” approach. He wasn’t visceral. He wasn’t nasty. Yes there was a lot of campaign propaganda coming from the Obama camp that McCain/Palin represented meanness, ill will, toxicity, poison, acid, snips snails & puppy dogs’ tails. And yeah I think a lot of hardcore democrats bought into it, but those were folks who would never have voted Republican anyway.

I think when people choose leaders they want to choose someone who’s going to stick to something. They’ll choose someone who’ll stick to something ugly, over someone who doesn’t stick to anything. When people vote, it seems they vote with the expectation that as soon as the guy’s sworn in, he’ll go meet behind closed doors with Satan himself. Someone whose interests are directly contrary to the electorate’s. And so a wobbly-guy who’s voted in, will produce decisions worse than a fairly-sturdy guy who can remain consistent about what he’s pushing, even though he might be pushing the wrong stuff. No reflection on Doug Hoffman. But the GOP party machinery was obviously completely taken-fer-a-ride on this thing. They spent too much time in smoke-filled back rooms just like it was the Tamany Hall days, and I think that flipped this thing over.

It makes sense, and people do seem to be voting that way consistently. Consistently. How many people have we seen run on this “I’m not all-right or all-left, I’m just in the middle somewhere”? When has it ever worked? It hasn’t, because “in the middle somewhere” means every single decision is up-for-grabs. No…people aren’t wild about fringe-kook stuff. They just want to know what they’re getting. They always choose a transparent packaging. Always. Well, except for where the really charismatic hopey-changey people are concerned.

Twenty-four hours ago it looked like Hoffman had this thing locked up. Some of the news reports I read were droning on about how much he had to worry about in 2010, as voters…blah, blah, blah. Well, it’ll be interesting to see if I read the same stuff about Owens and his chances in 2010.

Update: Interesting take on things: “Conservatives Win.”

At the beginning of last year, I saw something wrong with the little-i…something so wrong that I included it in my essay of What’s Wrong With the World.

Notice how every hot luxury item now, the thing you get your significant-other to show how much you love them, has a name that begins with a lowercase “i”. There is deep psychological symbolism involved in this. “i” is a pronoun we use to reference ourselves…as individuals…usually capitalized, but here, curiously, not. It’s as if we have been conditioned to think less of ourselves. Lowercase “i”…as in…”i’m so glad i have this personal music player because i wouldn’t be worth much without it.” Or, “i hope people will think better of me now that i have a phone that everybody else would like to have.”

These items represent the culmination of energetic research and development, and tend to be quite capable. But people don’t want these items for what they can do…people want the items for what they are.
:
[W]hat arouses this wonder about things that begin with “i”, is a curious brand of self-contradictory confusion. Everybody wants to be like everybody else…but not really. They want to be different, to have what nobody else has…but not really. All this passion is aroused from the fact that so many others want the item in question. Or to be more precise about it, so many others recognize the item in question. But not so many others have it just yet.

It’s an attack upon the individual, but not a complete one. The individual’s desire to be somewhat unique, is what drives the marketing here. But only somewhat. The individual desire to show his individuality not by being a real individual, but by being part of an elite crew…with some members in it…but not too many. Recognition is widespread, almost universal. Actual peerage is narrower and more coveted. That’s the key. The capability of the technological hardware, or lack thereof, is a decidedly second-hand consideration.

Now, I don’t know whether Weisshaupt reads this blog. I’ve long maintained that hardly anybody does. But how then would you explain this gem which appeared at Townhall this weekend:

[M]ost iPhone users are liberals. They are people who WANT a Mommy and Daddy watching over them. iPhone developers must navigate a Byzantine approval process that is so bad, that some even stoop to using Microsoft’s .NET to get things done. Apple tests and approves every application offered on the iPhone to make sure they all play nice together. This of course ensures the phone will deliver the beautiful and slick user experience Apple has decided its users will have. The iPhone is a good example of the “one-size-fits all” top-down mentality of liberals. If you want a different experience from what your masters thinks you SHOULD have and SHOULD want, you are just SOL. The lowercase “i” in iPhone doesn’t occur by accident. The individual just isn’t as important, and the “Phone” takes precedence.

Weisshaupt also included this YouTube clip which helps to make the point. Perfect. Wish I’d known about this.

Hat tip to Dr. Melissa Clouthier, who is not in favor of the analogy even a little bit. She protests. Almost viscerally. As if she has an iPhone herself, it seems.

Sorry Melissa…I see your point, and if you muted your message a little bit, perhaps said something more fluid like “the analogy has problems,” I might have gone along. But fails from the very beginning?

It’s not a failure from stem-to-stern, no. Can’t agree; there’s something to it. Of course, I don’t have a Druid and I don’t have an iPhone so I can’t completely disagree either.

But a culture has been built up around the iProducts; a culture appealing to some, abhorrent to others. The decisions about how the products are to be supported, are made according to an understanding of this culture. How the product is supported, in turn, affects the decisions people make about whether to buy one or not…depending on whether they find that culture appealing. And the culture is decidedly antagonistic toward the concept of the individual making autonomous decisions about how to live his own life.

You know what’s a fantastic illustration of what I’m talking about? Microsoft. They stand alone in being consistently…inconsistent. They put out a product, and the product makes all these assumptions about not only what I want to do, but how I want to do it. The assumptions are wrong and I end up hating it. Next time, they put out a product that is more easily customized to the work-area I’ve put in place, and I end up liking it so much I’ll pay full price for it years and years out of its support window. (Just licensed Excel 97 two weeks ago.) Then they come out with some other pig-in-a-poke that goes back to telling me how to work, and to add insult to injury, makes some decisions about what menu items I don’t want to see anymore and what big friendly in-your-face buttons I’d rather see instead. I end up wanting to throw the goddamn thing against the wall.

The difference is that I — capital-I — and others like me, have this “work-area” at all. If your mission in life is more along the lines of simply fitting in, you might not have one; or if you do, it might play second-fiddle in importance to the next veiled leviathan’s attempts to manage every facet of your life for you. It is a virtual work area, not a fixed location. I’ve put it together piece by piece; there are projects in it, initiated for purposes known only to me. The projects have versions, they have task lists, they have resources, they have prerequisite tasks…I’m above every single one of those…and beneath all of them, are the tools. When I buy a doodad or a gizmo, it’s a tool. Just like the newest guy on the boat mops the deck, and I’m the Captain. You fit into my boat, or I’ll throw you the hell overboard. You just joined the crew and you want to run the whole thing? Not here, bub.

But that’s me.

Other folks are perfectly content to have the newest product step on board and “take charge.” I recall a certain election a year ago that’s turned out rather dismally…and out of the teeming masses that voted for Mister Wonderful, still over half of them still can’t manage to admit the experiment’s been a failure. I rest my case. It’s like Joker said in Dark Knight: (some) folks couldn’t possibly care less what the plan is, just so long as there is one. They want to be managed.

There’s a real cultural divide here, and Apple is firmly on one side of it. I’m not entirely sure how safe it is to say all iPhone users are liberals…but I think it’s pretty safe to call it that nearly all liberals are iPhone owners, or would like to be.

…or to put the hate on folks living in sin, like me…or to join me in shaking your head at the unabashed narcissism…or for just a rollickin’ good laugh.

You have to read the whole thing. Yeah, the guy can’t do math. But hey. It’s a great point to be made: If you’re still paying credit card bills from the wedding, and the marriage is already over, something’s all gunnybags and it’s probably because your priorities were hosed.

Is it time to lose faith in the institution of marriage? The better question is, how are we treating the institution? Like we deserve to have it? Is there any institution left in which one can lose one’s faith anymore? Suppose the institution were to be offered to the animal species of…I dunno…hyenas. Or wombats. Would we as humans be able to honestly say we’ve treated it any more respectfully while we had our God-given monopoly on it?

You best read this, from a clergy, before answering that one…

The special day comes, the best man is still drunk, the groom is hung over, no one knew about that interesting tattoo that the maid of honor had way low on her back, now revealed by the plunging back of her dress that is held up only by wishful thinking. Grandma, upon reading the logo of the maid of honor’s tattoo, has fainted.

Somewhere in all this the vows are exchanged, and quite a few of the wedding party receive their first Holy Communion that day, however one of the ushers puts the host in his suit pocket not having a clue what it is. (This actually has happened to me twice.) The pictures have been taken. The noise level in the church reaches that of an English soccer match after the riot has broken out. The children are jumping off the altar and the priest is scowling at everyone. Now on to the pictures in the forest preserve, a “must” at every wedding. There the wedding party is attacked by mosquitoes, one of the children falls into the lagoon and the bride is having a hard time smiling for the photos. The best man passes out. On to the reception.

The bride loses it because the shade of fuchsia in the floral center pieces clashes with the shade of fuchsia in the wedding party’s outfit. The groom adjourns to the bar where the game is on the television. The wedding dinner is served as music is played at a mind numbing volume. Grandma is better now. She has turned off her hearing aid. The priest is seated with the pious relatives in plaid suit coats and leaves shortly after the grace before meals. The best man makes the toast which drones on about how he loves the groom and one begins to wonder…

Moral of the story: Plan for the marriage, at least as much as you plan for the wedding. Good message. From what I’ve been able to observe, it seems there is no shortage of people who need to have it explained to them, and that’s a pity.

Hat tip to Rick.

Bret Stephens, writing in the Wall Street Journal. I wonder if the fellas will relate to this better than the gals…or if the gals will understand it much better than the fellas…

I once overhead a guy try to make a date over the phone. His end of the conversation went roughly as follows:

“How about Friday?” (Pause.) “Not Friday? Because I’m free most of the weekend.” (Pause.) “Not this weekend? What about next Saturday?” (Pause.) “Are you free at all next week?” (Long pause.) “Well, are you ever free?”

Apparently she was not, at least as far as he was concerned.

Now it’s the turn of the Obama administration to play the guy who won’t take a hint. And it falls to the Islamic Republic of Iran to be the girl who’s hard — actually, impossible — to get.

Tehran’s most recent abrupt rejection came last week, when it reportedly decided that it was not enough for the U.S. to trash four binding Security Council resolutions demanding that Iran cease enriching uranium. Nor was it enough that France and Russia were prepared, with America’s blessing, to convert Iran’s existing stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) to a grade of 19.75%, a hair’s breadth shy of the 20% needed for a crude nuclear device.

There’s an easy explanation for why we keep getting suckered into this; it’s because the alternative is so “unthinkable.”

I’m afraid the twilight is now upon that era of diplomacy. The dawn came with the Armistice and the League of Nations; the dew had all burned off the grass by the time Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, and the alternative to diplomacy was really thought to be unthinkable. Everything since then has been one phony peace after another. Tenuous…temporary…fleeting…illusory…delusional. No, worse than all those: blackmailed.

The litmus test of whether a decision is later recalled as a wise one, is not the horror with which future generations might view the alternatives. It is whether they can appreciate the quality of thinking that went into it. How good of a job was done, by those making the decision, fitting it into an overall, self-validating plan, which included quality contingencies for all of the possible ensuing events.

By the time you’re asking that question of “What the hell were ya thinkin’???” it’s a safe bet yesterday’s decision is all-but-disqualified from the running of decisions you can look back on fondly.

Tomorrow’s generation will not look back fondly on our six-to-nine decades of “oh please oh please stop your invading/assembling/enriching pretty-please.” They will have to deal with all the weaponized terrorists that would have burdened them had we chosen the alternative…except the terrorists in this “real” timeline will be far, far wealthier. To say nothing of a great deal better practiced in how to manipulate the leadership of western civilization to do their bidding.

Hope the fellow on the phone eventually shed his cluelessness, and got himself a wife who was more appreciative of his slavishness and time-management acumen. Be that the case or not, I’ve a feeling he doesn’t look back too fondly either on his yesteryears of…oh, what do we call this…I want to be charitable, since I think the point’s been made. Let’s call it flexibility.

Whatever. Unwise decisions. From the right vantage point, they’re pretty easy to spot.

Update: If you’re looking for something to cheer you up after reading the above, don’t go looking to Byron York — who takes note of a new belief, fast becoming more popular, that perhaps Obama is approaching international diplomacy the same way he once approached community organizing:

During last year’s campaign, I spent some time in Chicago looking into Obama’s career as an organizer. A number of the people he worked with back then — he was on the job for all of three years, from 1985 to 1988 — are still in the field today, and they have vivid memories of their time with future president. Talking to them, and looking back over Obama’s record, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that as an organizer, Obama started a lot of projects, gave a lot of inspirational talks, but accomplished very little.

Among other things, Obama tried to find new jobs for displaced steelworkers, to create after-school programs, and to bring new political power to public housing residents. But he truly succeeded at just two things. One, he pushed the city of Chicago to open up a summer-jobs office on the far South Side, where there had not previously been an office, and two, he helped force the city to clean up asbestos in a 1940s-era housing project in the same neighborhood.

That was it.
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That’s not to say that Obama left no legacy as an organizer. The colleagues I talked with all remembered him fondly. Several said he inspired them to improve their lives. But these were all people who shared his goals. They wanted to believe in him and in their shared enterprise.

Does Mahmoud Ahmedinejad fit into that category? The Taliban? Kim Jong-il?

Now that Obama is the president of the United States, he is the power figure, not the supplicant or the protester. Certainly a president still needs to convince foreign leaders to give him what he wants, but when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world, Obama isn’t the underdog. His years on the South Side are little help.

You can see Obama’s community organizing approach at the White House every day, in the attempts to marginalize Republican opponents, or in the attacks on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. But handling the life-or-death issues of America’s relations with the world — that’s a new job entirely. And Obama has no experience that prepares him for it.

Ninety-seven percent think so.

I didn’t think 97 percent of Americans were in agreement about anything, but apparently they are about texting while driving: They think it should be illegal. A mere 3 percent don’t care, or didn’t answer cause they were busy texting.

And half think it should have the same penalty as drunk driving. Steeeep.

One of those rare situations in which I’m in the majority.

However, I do not agree with what comes next…

What’s fascinating is that while 80 percent think phones should be a no-no, they deem it kosher if you’re going hands-free. Newsflash, morons, a bunch of studies show it’s just as distracting if you’re using a Bluetooth headset.

How droll. You said “newsflash morons.” What a clever little dipshit you are.

It should come as no surprise whatsoever to anyone capable of passing the eighth grade, that anytime you hear a “bunch of studies” have found something it usually turns out to be a bunch of horse shit, and this is no exception. Over three years ago I exposed the plain fact that this “bunch of studies” was nothing of the kind. It is, to the contrary, a steady trickle of studies that are put out by not an overwhelming number of researchers, but three. Frank Drews, David Strayer, and William Johnson.

I don’t know how these three plan to make money off of this. But anyone who’s ever driven a humble-sized car like mine, and passed someone on the left who was driving something more halftrack-sized…that someone holding a flip phone up to her left ear, thereby making it an impossibility to even think of checking the blind spot…will immediately understand this to be some of the purest nonsense.

Anyway, if you click open the link you’ll find the pattern continues. David Strayer, the second of the three, is putting his name at the top of this codswallop. But to be fair to Dr. Strayer, it seems his point isn’t quite so much to let the hold-phone-up-to-ear motorists off the hook, it’s that the conversation is inherently distracting…which is a slightly different message. And he’s comparing it to chatty passengers, favoring the latter since they might possibly alert the driver to upcoming conditions and situations. I’m skeptical of that too, but that’s a whole different subject.

But it’s pretty clear these three researchers have an agenda of some kind. So I have a big problem with it when I hear about this “bunch of studies” — especially when the people authoring them probably don’t see the drivers I see every day.

Hands-free devices are not just as unsafe. They cannot be. Well I suppose they could be…could be…if, and only if, you’re already in the habit of using the “braille” method of moving into the lane to your left. Just hope for the best, and if you don’t hear a crunching sound you’re probably alright. Yes, in that scenario, you’re probably just as dangerous if you’re using a hands-free device.

But most of us check. We’re supposed to. And people who hold bricks up to their ears are physically incapable of checking. So there. Go research that, then get back to me.

Driving while texting though? Eh…I’m wondering what in the world the three percent are thinking. It’s not a freedom guaranteed in the Constitution, it’s not why Paul Revere made his midnight ride. Put the goddamn thing down and do yer drivin’.

You’d think it would be beneath Joe Biden’s dignity to even acknowledge the humble existence of Alaska’s former Governor. But I guess he’s smarting from Dede Scozzafava pulling out of the race…so he goes off in a sustained Biden moment, before reaching a climax:

“Sarah Palin thinks the answer to energy is ‘Drill, baby, drill,’ ” Biden said at a rally this afternoon. Then he leaned in to the microphone: “It’s a lot more complicated, Sarah.”

Biden called on Democrats to “join us in teaching a lesson” to a Republican Party he said is promoting “absolutism” and “cannot tolerate any dissent.”

Say it ain’t so, Joe…doesn’t the very concept of “teach someone a lesson” fly in the face of tolerance?

Flashback to just last week, when it was the Obama White House that needed a lesson on tolerating dissent…

No bona fide conservative I have ever met would countenance for a millisecond the government suppression, in any way, of a certain political point of view just because it differs from his own. But I have talked with and received e-mails from many liberals who favor Obama’s plan to emasculate conservative talk radio, who believe it’s acceptable, nay, desirable for universities to present primarily the liberal worldview and for liberal politicians — with the MSM’s help — to unilaterally declare a false consensus on such hotly disputed issues as man-made global warming.

A handful of liberals, to be fair, have criticized Obama for his war on Fox News and conservative talkers. But most aren’t the least bit troubled by it and are probably secretly relishing it. Have you ever heard prominent liberal voices go after Keith Olbermann or other extremely liberal and biased MSNBC or CNN hosts as they have Fox and Sean Hannity?

Palin’s response to the Delaware Dimwit? Pretty priceless…

Apparently the Obama-Biden administration only approves of offshore drilling in Brazil, where it will provide security and jobs for Brazilians. This election is about American security and American jobs.

There’s one way to tell Vice President Biden that we’re tired of folks in Washington distorting our message and hampering our nation’s progress: Hoffman, Baby, Hoffman!

Dede Scozzafava, whom voters in New York’s 23rd district were repeatedly reassured is a Republican right down to the marrow of her bones, showed her true colors when, after dropping out of the race for the House seat, she threw her support to the democrat.

You know, we can debate about what the bedrock principles of the Republican party ought to be, and what they should not be. But I think — and feel free to call me a right-wing nutjob for entertaining such a thought — those principles ought not have a whole lot to do with helping democrats win.

Toby Harnden raises some legitimate issues about Scozzafava’s character, the lack thereof, and how stupid must the local GOP machinery be for investing so heavily in her:

If Dede Scozzafava had a shred of political integrity about her she would have backed Doug Hoffman or declined to endorse anyone. The fact that she took the Republican party’s cash, failed miserably as a candidate and then vented her spleen by trying to torpedo the new de facto Republican candidate (the one who would have beaten her in a primary had there been one) underlines what a losing bet she was right from the start.

There’s been a lot of claptrap written about this race, the most hysterical and hilarious example being Frank Rich’s wishful oped. Liberal Democrats desperately want the Republicans to be a party of lunatics, a gibbering fringe of Christianist militia members bowing down before idols of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. But saying it’s happened so doesn’t make it so.

The first thing that has to be remembered is that, leaving ideology aside, Scozzafava was a shockingly bad candidate. Any candidate whose campaign calls the cops on a reporter asking persistent questions should resign from the race immediately – and be charged with wasting the time of police who could be solving real crime.

That is not the tone & tenor of a typical Scozzafava/Hoffman piece. A typica Scozzafava/Hoffman piece is something like the Frank Rich column that was linked…and maybe like this one from The Nation:

Moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava, the party’s nominee in Tuesday’s special election for an open New York congressional seat, has suspended her campaign. And with that move, the new “new right”…can claim a clear victory in its struggle to define the GOP as a far more extreme party than anything envisioned by Bush, Cheney or Gingrich.

Scozzafava, a state legislator, had the Republican ballot line and support from the party apparatus in Washington. But Tea Party and Town Hall activists — and their mentors and funders such as former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, and the powerful Club for Growth — threw their support behind Doug Hoffman, a more right-wing contender running on the New York Conservative Party line.

Scozzafava took a beating for her support for gay rights and abortion rights, her alliances with organized labor and her sympathy for the plight of the unemployed.

The attacks were brutal and they dried up financial support for the GOP nominee’s campaign — even though she began as a presumed frontrunner in New York’s historically Republican 23rd district, where the seat went vacant after President Obama nominated moderate Republican Congressman John McHugh to serve as Secretary of the Army.

Those tea party people! Extreme…anti-gay-rights…anti-sympathy-for-unemployed. Beatings. Attacks. Brutal.

Well, the Scozzafava problem is an interesting one. And it’s an important one. It’s persistent…and asymmetrical. This summer we witnessed the spectacle of “blue dog democrats” doing damage to the President’s health care scheme. They were called “moderate blue dog democrats” — but those who opposed them within the democrat party, were not called “extreme.” Nobody entertained any questions about whether the “blue dogs” were charting a new course for the democrat party…or should’ve. I don’t recall anybody wringing their hands about what was to happen with each & every little resistance to the blue dogs, or even thinking about taking them seriously. Only questions I recall being raised had to do with how many blue bones had to be tossed to the blue dogs, to make ’em heel.

They weren’t acting as a Trojan horse to get a Republican-in-democrat-clothing elected as a democrat…as was the case with New York’s 23rd seat just now.

So what is up with this Trojan horse move — this Scazzafava maneuver? Why is it that Republicans are constantly being introduced to the latest democrat to pretend to be a Republican, and constantly lectured and finger-waggled and tut-tut-tutted into thinking the democrat is really a Republican, when she isn’t?

The answer, I submit, has to do with the differential between two things that only appear to be the same thing. But aren’t the same thing. Those two things are: Popular preference of one official party over the other…and popular preference of one ideology over the other.

As far as party preference, just look around. White House — democrats. House of Representatives — democrats. Senate — democrats. Governors and state legislatures — democrats.

The ideological preference, on the other hand, looks like this…

I see a differential. Do you?

The differential is both a cause, and an effect. As an effect, it raises an interesting question: Effect of what? Some kind of self-loathing perhaps? Maybe conservatives are “for” things that we all want…but a lot of us just don’t envision as possible?

As a cause, it explains why the Republicans, and conservatives in general, will continue to be blitzed from all sides by this Scazzafava problem. All these David Brocks, all these Ariana Huffingtons, all these Andrew Sullivans. They’re just moral cowards. People with a desire to say stuff, to pretend they have something important to say, but really just want to go after whatever is the most popular.

Such cowards aren’t going to try to emulate liberal values. And they damn sure won’t try to pretend to be Republicans. They’ll do whatever is popular…sit on the fence…in matters of ideology, try to act like conservatives, just in tiny, nugget-sized pieces, only with decidedly insignificant issues. And weakly and temporarily. But in matters of political apparatus, vote for whichever party has the biggest label.

So it’s going to keep happening. Again and again and again.

Update: Regarding the matter immediately under discussion, Hoffman is surging but the undecideds are one-in-five.

Nevertheless…here’s hoping the whole thing turns out like this: