Right Wing Nut House

Here’s my latest from PJ Media - typical Moran bombast against the crazies in the GOP whose latest brainstorm is to blow up the economy by refusing to support raising the debt ceiling.

Do ya think I was too hard on them?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the new Republican Party: Just like the old one but now with 25% more nuts and 50% more empty heads. At least Pontius Pilate had the decency to wash his hands before committing a despicable act of blatant irresponsibility. DeMint wants to crucify us without even using a handi-wipe before plunging the world into chaos.

This guy [DeMint] isn’t posturing as Obama and other Democrats did in 2006 when they voted against the debt ceiling. Their nauseating hypocrisy on the issue today notwithstanding, at the time, their opposition to raising the debt ceiling was a political gambit, a way to tweak the majority in the press. No one seriously believed that they were hoping for a default. But DeMint, Beck, and other Tea Party congressmen have made it plain that they seek nothing less than forcing a default in order to “save” us. Only when we are prostrate and the world is set afire will we come to our senses and get our fiscal house in order.

How “conservative” it is to deliberately default on your debts is a mystery. Nor is there any definition of conservatism I’ve seen yet that commits insanity in order to destroy another insanity. It would, as Allahpundit notes wryly, be the “end of the Republican Party” and “an economic collapse triggered by a Republican-driven federal default is slightly more likely to cause trouble for conservatives than voting to raise the ceiling in return for, say, a balanced-budget amendment or other heavy debt-reducing concessions.”

Thankfully, there are probably still enough adults in the GOP to deal with Mr. DeMint’s impulse control problem. But we have been put on notice: there is faction of the Republican Party that cares nothing about governing responsibly and would actually prefer to see the United States on its knees than give Congress a chance to begin to address our fiscal crisis responsibly. Why worry about the crazies in North Korea and Iran when we have our very own loony toons brigade of anarcho-politicos right here in the good old U.S.A.?

They are playing Russian Roulette with a slight variation in the rules; load five chambers with bullets while leaving only one empty and pull the trigger.

Good luck with that. The rest of us will pass, thanks.

I submitted this piece to FrontPage.com on Monday and never saw it when it was published so I am highlighting it today. It’s about the Constitution and how ordinary people have forced it to become an issue in politics and the culture.

A sample:

This reawakening of interest in our founding document by ordinary Americans has forced a re-examination of the relevance of the Constitution as it pertains to the duties and responsibilities of government in modern, 21st century America. It has reached the point where the avalanche of questions has invited a backlash from proponents of government expansion who seek to belittle and smear those who are earnestly and with great seriousness trying to place into context the actions of government.

“What do they know?” goes the criticism. How dare they question 221 years of constitutional law that has been carefully constructed to reflect the thinking of the greatest legal minds in American history? Besides, these rubes have it all wrong. They worship the Constitution like it’s the Bible, and approach questions about that document with a religious fervor that smacks of saintly veneration.

As Newsweek’s Andrew Romano sneered recently, these “constitutional fundamentalists” are “seek[ing] refuge from the complexity and confusion of modern life in the comforting embrace of an authoritarian scripture and the imagined past it supposedly represents.” Lexington of the Economist blog echoes these sentiments, writing about the Tea Party’s promotion of the Constitution: “When history is turned into scripture and men into deities, truth is the victim.”

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular political talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome Rich Baehr and Larrey Anderson of the American Thinker and Fausta Wertz of Fausta’s Blog to discuss next year’s debt ceiling showdown and other hot topics making news.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

Rep. Danny Davis has dropped out of the Chicago mayor’s contest and thrown his support behind the only other major African American candidate in the race, former US senator Carol Mosely-Braun.

“I’m proud that I will be here when Carol Moseley Braun becomes the next mayor,” Davis said. “I come here tonight…to help prove unity is more than just a concept.”

Braun said she is emboldened by the endorsements from both Davis and state Sen. James Meeks, the other major African-American candidate who dropped out of the contest last week. Braun called it a “great way to start the new year.”

“I’m so please to have their support,” she said. “Their endorsements…bring us closer to winning this election.”

Davis at first said he wasn’t so much dropping out of the contest as “dropping into victory” by endorsing Braun. He later clarified that he is ending his campaign.

“I am totally dropping out of the race. I am supporting Carol Moseley Braun with every ounce of fervor that I have,” Davis said. “I am even going to give her some money. I am going to try to get every person who thought that they might support Danny Davis to switch their support to Carol Moseley Braun. In fact, I will start tonight.”

The announcement at Davis’ West Loop headquarters came after African-American leaders met privately for days with the candidates in an attempt to unify behind a single contender who could improve the odds of an African-American winning the Feb. 22 election.

Davis and Braun both had insisted Thursday that they would keep running for Chicago mayor. Then they met again today, leading to Davis’ departure from the contest.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson brokered a roughly four-hour meeting Wednesday night with Davis and Braun at his Rainbow PUSH headquarters that was also attended by several ministers, business leaders and politicians. Among them was U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, who is backing Braun, and state Sen. Rickey Hendon, who is backing Davis.

Where does this leave Rahm Emanuel?

With a unified black political community behind Mosely Braun, her chances of winning just shot up substantially. It is significant that the Rev. Jackson brokered this agreement given the factionalization of the black vote in the past between west side and south side African Americans. For the first time since 1983 when the city’s only black mayor - Harold Washington - was elected, the African American community will head into primary day backing a single major candidate.

For Emanuel, this negates any opportunity he had to use Mayor Daley’s very successful game plan in winning the primary. With the black vote usually split, Daley successfully courted the growing Hispanic vote while siphoning off just enough black machine votes to add to his astounding margins of victory in working class white neighborhoods. For Rahmbo, the Hispanic vote is expected to split between two major candidates and it is doubtful that he will be able to run up the 85-90% margins in Bridgeport and other white communities in the city that Daley was famous for.

Might Rahm’s former boss take a hand? Bill Clinton offered to come to Chicago to campaign for Emanuel and had his face slapped by black leaders for even thinking about it. And the African American community, while supporting Obama to the hilt as president, no doubt recalls some of the betrayals the former state senator effected when Obama was part of the regular Democrats prior to his run for the presidency. His tacky deal with Daley to support his mayoral re-election (over a qualified African American candidate) in return for Daley’s support in his bid for the White House did not sit well with many in the “reform” community, or among rank and file blacks. Obama’s “help” may be no more welcome than Clinton’s.

Meanwhile, Daley is quietly doing what he can for Emanuel without showing his hand too much. A lot of Daley’s support, however, was personal, based on patronage and loyalty to his family. It is difficult to see how he can transfer many important Democrat’s loyalty from their chieftan to someone who many Democrat’s see as an interloper.

Now Mosely Braun has the opportunity to employ Harold Washington’s successful strategy of uniting the black community while exciting the liberals in Hyde Park and along the lakeshore to back her candidacy. Her name recognition will also help immensely. She will have decent funding, an army of dedicated volunteers, and the opportunity to portray Rahm as a carpetbagger.

Emanuel is down, but not out. Obama no doubt still has some pull although how much personal capital he will be willing to expend probably keeps Emanuel up at night. Rahmbo wins or loses now based on how big a hand his friend and former boss Barack Obama takes in seeing his former chief of staff succeed Daley.