Right Wing Nut House

I have taken a lot of grief over the years because on several occasions, I have used this website not to attack the left (something I do with great regularity and enjoyment) but because I also highlight some of the lunacy on the right we regularly get from talk show hosts, activists, and other prominent conservatives.

It is not an urge to purge that drives me to expose these clowns, charlatans, mountebanks, and just plain goofs. It is rather an effort, in my own very small and insignificant way, to stand up for what I know is right; that employing reason and rationality to fight Obama and the liberals is far superior to the utter stupidity found in the baseless, exaggerated, hyperbolic and ignorant critiques of the left and Obama that is passed off as “conservative” thought by those who haven’t a clue what conservatism means.

Yes, I usually find myself being almost as unhinged in my criticism of these kooks as they are in criticizing Obama. So be it. Trying to argue rationally with someone who believes Obama is a Nazi, or a Communist is akin to arguing with a stone wall. And at least the wall is smart enough not to keep opening its mouth and further proving how irrational it is.

I reject arguments that one shouldn’t criticize one’s own side and “do the left’s dirty work for them” (the silly and simple minded argument that I am somehow “jealous” of a talk show host’s or a pundit’s success are so laughable that I never bother to respond). I believe that one of conservatism’s major problems these last few years has been a failure of self-examination - and I include myself in committing that sin. Unless one constantly challenges one’s beliefs by examining the underlying assumptions of what we truly believe, testing them against what is happening in the real world, and using the logic and reason granted us by our humanity to determine if they still pass muster and are consistent with our principles, we fall into the trap of being inconsistent in the application of our philosophy.

You don’t have to be an “intellectual” to accomplish this. All it takes is to read and listen to opposing viewpoints once and a while. To close one’s mind to alternative points of view is, by definition, unconservative. And to take the position automatically that liberals have nothing of interest you want to hear is beyond illogical - it is ignorant.

And yet, this is the de facto position of most of my many detractors - that somehow, my mind has been polluted because I quote some liberal every once and a while or I agree with something a liberal says about conservatives. This is nuts. And if anyone would take 10 seconds to think about it, most rational people would agree.

Where does this close mindedness get us?

In the past weeks you’ve heard me talk about the How to Take Back America Conference being held in St. Louis this Friday, Sept. 25, and Saturday, Sept. 26, with speakers like: Gov. Mike Huckabee, “Joe the Plumber,” U.S. Reps. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., Trent Franks, R-Ariz., Steve King, R-Iowa, Tom McClintock, R-Calif., Dr. Tom Price, R-Ga., and Three-Star Gen. Jerry Boykin. But someone who’ll be there that you didn’t hear about is Kitty Werthmann. Kitty was 12 years old when Adolf Hitler took over Austria.

She is 83 with a “vivid memory” of what happened in her homeland next. She witnessed the government take over the banks and the auto industry. Sound familiar? In the last nine months, Obama and the Democrats in Congress have successfully orchestrated the government takeover of Chrysler and General Motors along with countless banks.

She witnessed the “compulsory youth” service and indoctrination. That sounds a little like Obama’s call for “mandatory volunteerism” for America’s youth.

The government takeover of the schools immediately replaced crucifixes with pictures of Hitler and Nazi flags. “All religious instruction was replaced with physical education,” said Werthmann. No prayer was allowed. That all happened here decades ago. It is interesting, however, that Obama’s speech to the captive audience in the government schools – complete with the essay assignment about how students could help him achieve his political goals – was replaced once the American people got wind of it. And speaking of government control of education, if the Senate agrees, all student loans will be government issued, according to a bill that passed the House last week.

Before commenting on the substance of what the author actually believes is solid evidence that Obama wants to set up a Fourth Reich, I want you to look at that list of Republicans who will be giving their imprimatur to a conference that features such idiocy. Those are not “fringe” players. They are all considered “mainstream” conservatives. Should they be taken to task for attending a conference that features such off the wall lunacy?

If it was the only such session that featured, they might be given a pass. But here are a few other sessions that many would see as extreme and many more would see as batsh*t crazy:

HOW TO DEFEAT ATTACKS ON SOVEREIGNTY BY U.N. TREATIES AND NORTH AMERICAN UNION (Just tell me where those black helicopters are)

HOW TO ADDRESS THE PROBLEM OF SUPREMACIST JUDGES (um…elect more Republicans?)

HOW TO DEFEND AMERICA VS. MISSILE ATTACK

I would urge you to click on some of the links to other, more sedate sounding seminars like “How to Counter the Homosexual Extremist Movement” or “How to Understand Islam” to understand why I condemn any so-called “mainstream conservatives” who participated in this nuthouse of a conference.

A description of Mrs. Werthmann’s “seminar:”

At the How To Take Back America Conference last weekend, conservative speaker Kitty Werthmann led a workshop called “How to recognize living under Nazis & Communists.” Announcing the panel in a column preceding the conference, talk show host Janet Porter gushed how Werthmann’s description of Austria in the 1930s is a “mirror to America” today — noting “They had Joseph Goebbels; we have Mark Lloyd, the diversity czar.” The room was packed over capacity to hear Werthmann, who grew up as a Christian in Austria and serves as Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum South Dakota President.

During her session, Werthmann went through a litany of examples of how President Obama is like Adolf Hitler. She noted that Hitler, who acted “like an American politician,” was “elected in a 100% Christian nation.” Although she failed to once mention Antisemitism or militarism, Werthmann explained how universal healthcare, an Equal Rights Amendment, and increased taxes were telltale signs of Nazism. Werthmann also warned the audience:

If we had our guns, we would have fought a bloody battle. So, keep your guns, and buy more guns, and buy ammunition. [...] Take back America. Don’t let them take the country into Socialism. And I refer again, Hitler’s party was National Socialism.

[...]

And that’s what we are having here right now, which is bordering on Marxism.

Is there any way to logically address Mrs. Werthmann’s points? The answer is no. And the reason is because she is living in a different reality than the rest of us. To 95% of the world, what Obama and the Democrats are doing you can agree or disagree with, but it is being done by the all-American way of Congress proposing, and the president disposing. Even Obama’s executive grabs like taking over private business finds precedent in American history among presidents. Obama is dead wrong. But he is not a Marxist, or Nazi, or even a socialist. He is a far left American liberal which, by the way, puts him considerably to the right of the Euro-left.

To casually toss about the terms “Marxist” and “Nazi” shows that those who do so are wildly exaggerating what the liberals are doing. Mrs. Werthmann may be a witness to history but her analogies are childlike in their logic. Exaggeration is not argument. It is emotionalism run rampant. And at its base is simple, unreasoning fear. Fear of change, fear that the powerlessness conservatives feel right now is a permanent feature of American politics, and, I am sorry to say, fear of Obama because he is a black man.

The emotional state of conservatism now coupled with the hyper partisan atmosphere in the country (and the already excessive ideological nature of the opposition to Obama) is a combination that afflicts the reason centers of the mind and is proving to be a block to thinking logically. What is there to “fear” about Obama and the Democrats? They are proposing the same liberal crap that the left has been promoting for more than 30 years. We have fought them before using reason and logic. What is so different now?

I agree with the left to a certain extent that the right - especially on the internet - has become something of an echo chamber (it’s true on the left too but their crazies have already been marginalized). This has resulted in what might be termed a “negative feedback loop” where the more exaggerated claims about dastardly Democrats go around and around, becoming ever more outrageous and illogical, until we get overflowing crowds at a seminar where the most fantastically stretched and mangled analogies to Nazis and Communists are taken seriously.

I don’t know how to say it any other way; those conservatives who don’t see a problem with this, or don’t think it “representative” of a significant portion of the conservative movement, or who don’t believe this sort of thing should be taken out, examined, and criticized as forcefully as possible are fooling themselves into believing this kind of thinking doesn’t matter. It is poison coursing through the body of conservatism and we either use reason and logic as an antidote or it will end up killing us.

To my mind, there is no alternative. Ignore it and it only gets bigger and more outrageously out of touch with reality. This is why I write about it. This is why you should join me in condemning and marginalizing these crazies, inoculating conservatism against contracting this plague on rational thought.

President Obama has decided to personally attend the International Olympic Committee meeting in Copenhagen this week in order to make a presentation in support of Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 summer games.

Mark Silva:

President Barack Obama, who initially planned to let First Lady Michelle Obama represent the United States in Copenhagen this week, when the International Olympic Committee chooses a site for the 2016 summer games, plans to travel there too.

The White House, which earlier had announced that an advance team was headed to Copenhagen to prepare for a possible presidential trip to Copenhagen, confirmed this morning that Obama will travel Thursday night. The IOC meets Friday.

A senior administration official told the Tribune Washington Bureau this morning that Obama will travel to Copenhagen Thursday night, and return following the Friday meeting. The first lady plans to travel Tuesday, and meet with individual members of the IOC on Wednesday and Thursday to make Chicago’s case for the games. The president will join her at the full committee meeting on Friday.

What in the wide, wide world of sports is going on here?

It’s not like the president doesn’t have anything to do, nothing important on his plate at the moment, right?

* An economy that, despite administration claims, is not recovering in any meaningful way and is in severe danger of slipping back into crisis.

* An ongoing, vital review of our policy in Afghanistan with the commanding general threatening to resign unless he gets a massive infusion of troops. The president has asked General McChrystal to “wait” - now we know why.

* The very day he leaves for Copenhagen, a representative of the United States government will sit down for talks with Iran about the future peace of the world and Iran’s ambitions with regard to building a nuclear weapon - a supposed centerpiece to his policy of engagement.

* His continuing problems with his own party in trying to get health care reform passed.

Why was his wife’s importunings to the IOC not good enough? What could possibly have possessed the president to put some of these other, demonstrably more important activities on the back burner and go to Copenhagen and personally lobby the super-annuated, corrupt, and cynical IOC members to bring the Olympics to Chicago and create a bonanza of “pay to play” and other schemes to enrich Daley cronies and perpetrate the obscenity that is the Democratic political machine in Illinios?

In a word, payback.

All through December of 2007, Obama and Daley danced around each other’s political ambitions, each wanting the other’s endorsement - neither wanting to pay too high a price. They met several times at City Hall, feeling each other out about both the efficacy of such endorsements as well as the timing.

For Obama’s part, any endorsement of the corrupt Daley would tarnish his “reform” credentials - a crucial element of his eventual “hope and change” mantra. Obama trotted out these “outside the machine” bona fides whenever it suited him politically. The real Chicago reformers never trusted him - with good cause. He had been known to back machine candidates in the past, stiffing his “friends” in the reform movement.

But Obama was trying to preempt Daley from staying “neutral” which would have helped Hillary Clinton who at the time was a prohibitive favorite to win. The Daley family had very close ties to the Clintons with the Mayor’s brother Bill having served in the Clinton administration as Commerce Secretary and also run Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign. Bill Daley’s rolodex of heavy hitter contributors was the stuff of legend among Democratic politicians.

But Daley was playing coy. He had never endorsed a presidential candidate in a primary before and just because Obama had close ties to the city, didn’t mean he would abandon that tradition. But Daley was also in a spot of political trouble. Hizzoner’s biggest fear was that the reformers would find an attractive minority candidate to run against him in the Democratic primary.

Now Daley prided himself on his cultivation of the large and politically active Hispanic community in Chicago, as well as his stroking of the South Side black community. But a re-election endorsement from the most prominent African American politician in the state would pretty much seal the deal and assure him of another term in office.

Arguably, Daley would be doing the relative unknown Obama much the bigger favor. Hence, the dance for mutual endorsements ended when Daley gave the nod to what appeared to be the hopelessly outclassed Obama within hours of his announcement that he was seeking the presidency. This followed Obama’s own endorsement of Daley that occurred three weeks previously that dripped with a cynicism worthy of any hard bitten machine pol. Obama actually congratulated Daley for his efforts to clean up the city - less than 6 months after two of Hizzoner’s closest aides were convicted in a patronage scheme.

The rest is history. At the time, Daley was probably the best known national Democratic figure to support Obama’s candidacy. And the fact that Bill Daley, with his trusty Rolodex, was installed as one of Obama’s most important advisors was equally significant.

So now it’s payback time as the president travels to Copenhagen to try and get the biggest payoff for the Chicago machine in its long and sorry history. The several hundred million dollars that gravitated to the city and state in stimulus money will be seen in retrospect as a pittance compared to the opportunities for Cook County, Chicago, and Illinois politicians to garner a potential several billion dollar windfall. The opportunities for graft, featherbedding, pay to play, kickbacks, and other business as usual practices of the machine that reward friends, punish enemies, keep the mob happy, and keep the machine’s loyalists in power will be beyond counting.

The machine will benefit through spending to construct the Olympic village, run concessions, realize a fortune in extra taxes imposed on hotels and motels, restaurants, bars, and other travel industry businesses, and generally prosper from the hundreds of thousands of visitors expected in the city during the course of the games.

For starters, as Crain’s reports, let’s take the construction of the Olympic Village:

Chicago and the Obama administration are exploring ways the federal government can bolster the city’s bid for the 2016 Olympic Games with financial support for the $1-billion Olympic Village.

Crain’s has learned that senior presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett and Lori Healey, president of the Chicago 2016 committee, met this month with top officials of the Department of Housing and Urban Development to discuss financing options for the village, the single biggest project — and question mark — in the city’s bid.

The main hurdle facing Chicago is coming up with a long-range plan for an Olympic Village that is commercially viable while meeting objectives of existing HUD programs that could be tapped for funds, such as low-income housing tax credits and grants or loan guarantees for community development, affordable housing or housing for seniors.

“I think it’s premature to talk about what the funding might be,” says Ms. Jarrett, a former co-chair of Chicago 2016 and city planning commissioner who now heads White House efforts to help Chicago’s bid. “A proposal has not been made to the federal government, but the administration is not closing the door” on anything, she adds. The administation “obviously (is) willing to meet and listen.”

Hat Tip: John Ruberry

Lastly - and this is pure speculation with a little partisan twist thrown in - my observing Obama these many years has convinced me that there are few politicians who have such an inflated opinion of their own worth. Obama presiding over the Olympics in 2016 - his last few months in office if he wins reelection - would be his own crowning achievement (and Daley’s ticket to immortality as well as the signature achievement of his family’s 50 year domination of Chicago politics). I think there is a significant element of narcissism in all of this which makes his abandonment of Washington at this crucial time appear even more of a selfish act.

I don’t see much in the way of questioning whether this trip is necessary from too many people - press or pundits. Then again, what would you expect?

UPDATE

Byron York and I are on the same wavelength today.

Michelle Malkin has two additions to the Culture of Corrpution - Olympics Edition.

Malkin also had a piece last week that Ed Lasky pointed me to that has Valerie Jarrett standing to make millions on selling some rat infested apartments.

Hey - not a bad impersonation of a Think Progress headline, don’t you think? And as I always say…”If you ‘Think Progress,’ Think Idiocy!”

What set me off was this head shaking headline:

Uninsured 22-Year-Old Boehner Constituent Dies From Swine Flu

The copy is predictably bloodcurdling:

A 22-year-old woman from Oxford, Ohio, died from swine flu on Wednesday. Kimberly Young graduated from Miami University in December and continued to live in Oxford, Ohio, within Minority Leader John Boehner’s congressional distrct. Reports now indicate that after initially getting sick, Young put off treatment because she was uninsured…

Oh my GOD! Is this true? Did someone really DIE in a Republican Congressman’s DISTRICT!

Liberals were right when they warned us that Republicans opposed health insurance reforms because they want you to die. That poor young girl should have listened. If she had only had the courage to go against the wishes of her Congressman and buy health insurance, she would be alive today. But Boehner is a sneaky one. He used all of his wiles, all of his GOP MoJo Magic to make that poor girl decide that at age 22, she was indestructible and didn’t need health insurance - a waste of money, that.

After all, no other 22 year olds in the entire United States have made similar decisions, right? Only in GOP congressional districts are 22 year olds under the spell of evil GOPers and are mesmerized into believing they don’t need insurance and that getting it would be a waste. They’d rather spend their limited income on luxuries like housing and food.

Oh, wait…:

There are plenty of reasons people go without health insurance, but no group has more cause than 20-somethings. These young adults are less likely to be offered employer-based coverage, earn less money to buy insurance on their own, are generally healthy and spend little time worrying about the worst-case scenarios that could befall them.

No wonder, then, that this age group has the highest uninsured rate of any cohort in the U.S. population: some 13 million Americans ages 19 to 29 - or 1 in 3 - lack coverage. That’s a scary number, and not just because any of them could end up needing serious medical care for an unforeseen illness or accident. The willingness of young people to forgo insurance, it turns out, is a major problem for the entire health-care system, which needs them on the rolls to help spread out risk and keep older Americans’ premiums from going even higher. Young adults, after all, are less likely than older generations to need health care, meaning insurance companies can charge them low premiums and, in most cases, sit back and collect without much risk of paying out for health-care services.

What a dick, this Victor Zapanta, fellow is. Identified as a “researcher” for CAP, Zapanta is a blooded political activist having worked for both Clinton and Obama in 2008. Someone should teach this kid what it is a “researcher” does. What they don’t do is smear people based on the most outrageous number of degrees of separation - except in the hyper-partisan world of Think Progress where every raindrop that falls in New York is responsible for a flood in California. That’s actually a more realistic connection to reality than Zapanta’s wretched attempt at guilt by non-existent association.

Let’s take Mr. Zapanta’s technique and apply it in another direction shall we?

467 Chicagoans Murdered in 2006 While Obama Was Senator

While Barack Obama sat in the senate supporting gun control, 467 Chicagoans were murdered needlessly because they couldn’t defend themselves. These poor victims were denied their constitutional right of self defense because they were represented by a senator who hates the constitution and wants to keep guns out of their hands that almost certainly would have saved their lives.

Another 442 Chicagoans were murdered in 2007…

It needs a little work. I don’t quite have the accusatory tone down right, don’t you think?

The idea that Boehner’s opposition to health care reform - or that anything Boehner has ever said or done - is in any way responsible for this young girl’s death is unbelievably calumnious and so off base as to be beyond the pale of rationality, of reason, and logic. The notion that Think Progress is connected in any way to an organization - The Center for American Progress - that is supposed to be a serious place for the study and promotion of public policy is a disgrace to intellectual honesty, a blot on our public discourse, and an affront to the decency of our democracy.

If you were to peruse the archives of this uber-partisan rag, you would find literally hundreds of similar off the wall headlines that are not meant to inform, or even to attack based on facts, but rather to simply smear in the most vile and distorted manner. It is the worst of politics, and given their connection to a supposedly august think tank, beneath contempt.

I don’t want to hear that the right does it. I will turn around the argument I make to conservatives and say, “So you want to ape the worst tactics of your opponent? How idiotic is that?” Indeed, if there is one thing about both right and left extremist partisans that is becoming more and more clear, they are interchangeable in their ignorance and stupidity.

I know I’m pissing in the wind here but God help us if blogs like Think Progress and their righty counterparts ever achieve more influence than they currently enjoy. Rational discourse, so polluted now with bilious rants and wildly exaggerated and distorted attacks, would disappear entirely and all that would be left would be two sides hurling rocks at each other across a great chasm of hate and distrust.

There is little doubt that the nation’s newspapers are in deep trouble. And not just a few rags here and there. The entire industry is in the process of going extinct with the exception of a few papers funded by individuals with very, very deep pockets and can absorb the millions in losses incurred by running a modern, metropolitan daily newspaper.

Why this is so, is a trickier question and not conducive to simple, one sentence answers. You can say the internet is killing the daily newspaper and that would be true, but not the whole story.

You can say blogs are killing newspapers and you would be indulging in wishful thinking. They have certainly affected newspapers but most bloggers need newspapers more than newspapers need blogs.

You can say political bias is killing newspapers and you would be picking nits. Bias in reporting only makes the political class angry. No one else really notices or cares.

You can say that the standard business model for the daily paper does not reflect the reality of the marketplace and you would be correct - except most papers have already tried to adapt to the internet age and are finding it very tough going.

The number one reason newspapers are dying is because they cannot compete in a rapidly changing information marketplace. The print editions are not as immediate as television. The web editions are hard to navigate and difficult to find the information for which you are looking. Advertising revenue for both is dropping as marketing whizzes use social networking sites and techniques to drive conversation about products and services that were once full page ads. The huge falloff in revenue from classified ads moving to websites like Craig’s List has also contributed to the decline.

People’s reading habits are changing. Audio books and Kindle are revolutionizing the way we read and web sites like Memeorandum make it a simple matter to pick out information that the reader feels is necessary to know or in which he is interested. Newspapers are becoming superfluous - an unwanted appendage that doesn’t fill any need except that of tradition and continuity.

Blogs and message boards do a better job of informing about sports, style, even business. Ditto for what used to be called “opinion journalism” and is now simply ranting, for the most part. Such opinion columnists don’t marshal arguments, illuminate options, and recommend a course of action. They have - with very few exceptions - become creative writers, trying to outdo blogs in their use of colorful invective and snarky sarcasm.

If Rupert Murdoch gets his way and readers are forced to pay for the privilege of accessing on-line newspaper content, it will only hasten their demise. The New York Times “firewall” experiment proves that. Not enough people are willing to pay to read opinion - even if they are usually in agreement with the columnist. They can get pretty much the same thing for free on blogs. And sometimes, the writing and thinking is superior to that which is found at newspapers, online or otherwise.

That leaves paying for “news” stories. This presupposes that no one will step in and offer for free what these newspapers want to charge money for. The Army of Davids who would eagerly dive into the void and “report” on various news stories using what they discover on local blogs, YouTube, or even Twitter would doom to failure any attempt for newspapers to alter their revenue plans to include charging for online access - even if it’s only a “nominal” fee.

I love newspapers - both online and dead tree. But they belong to another age, much like the elegance of a horse drawn carriage or the friendliness of a Mom and Pop grocery store. What exactly is it that newspapers do that would justify their continued existence?

“Investigative” reporting? Most newspapers don’t do that anymore - too expensive. And even if a paper has an investigative reporting department, is that reason enough to pay for the privilege of access when these stories make up such a small percentage of news reported during the course of a year?

“In-depth” analysis of issues? Anyone who is interested in an issue or a story can find a dozen websites ranging from think tanks to university professors who would do an equally good job of giving context, history, and analysis to any issue.

There are niche areas where newspapers could thrive. I can see an ESPN or IDB, or Wall Street Journal remaining viable as long as their price for access was reasonable and commensurate with the value of the content. Ditto for websites that report on fashion, or movies, or any other department found in daily newspapers. I wouldn’t doubt it if there weren’t already websites that contain obituaries. Many would pay for access there too.

But why pay to read about New York sports teams in the New York Times? If you’re from New York, you could get equally good coverage and analysis on any of a dozen blogs. Sports talk radio would give the sports fan access to the same news with the bonus of it being free.

As long as newspapers were the gatekeepers for information and commanded the attention of the masses, they could charge advertisers enough money to make a profit. But with such diluted information streams coming from all points, and advertisers finding alternatives that are cheaper and actually promise to promote their products better, newspapers have become entities in search of a mission. They are casting about desperately, trying to manufacture reasons to remain relevant. And no one - not readers or advertisers - is buying it.

Nothing I’ve written so far is news to anyone who follows the newspaper industry. Nor is the idea that somehow, the government must step in and “help” newspapers survive. Direct subsidies would be ridiculous. The government should not be in the business of subsidizing opinion. The slippery slope there is so obvious a 3 year old could see it.

But what about indirect subsidies in the form of tax breaks for newspapers that reorganize themselves into non profit organizations? The Hill reports:

The president said he is “happy to look at” bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.

“I haven’t seen detailed proposals yet, but I’ll be happy to look at them,” Obama told the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade in an interview.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called “Newspaper Revitalization Act,” that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations. That bill has so far attracted one cosponsor, Cardin’s Maryland colleague Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D).

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had played down the possibility of government assistance for news organizations, which have been hit by an economic downturn and dwindling ad revenue.

In early May, Gibbs said that while he hadn’t asked the president specifically about bailout options for newspapers, “I don’t know what, in all honesty, government can do about it.”

Obama said that good journalism is “critical to the health of our democracy,” but expressed concern toward growing tends in reporting — especially on political blogs, from which a groundswell of support for his campaign emerged during the presidential election.

“I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,” he said.

The president obviously doesn’t spend 10 hours a day on the internet like the rest of us. If he did, he would have known that there are many websites and blogs that already offer mostly unbiased analysis and fact based opinion. The idea that these qualities are solely the province of old school journalists found in the newsrooms of America is absurd.

Sadly, many on both the right and the left read only those blogs and websites that reflect their partisan tilt (this is less true on the left but there is still a very significant percentage of liberals who will read only liberal blogs.) It is not that the kind of information the president is talking about isn’t already available, it is that the number of people interested in non-partisan or less partisan reading is relatively small.

And perhaps the president would like to tell us how newspapers have promoted “mutual understanding?” Newspapers have historically promoted their own biased viewpoints, from Hearst to Ochs. Until relatively recently, newspapers were basically organs for one party or the other. Some still are.

If newspapers believe they can investigate corruption, fairly analyze politics and culture, and offer fact based opinion pieces that seek to inform rather than inflame, then by all means give them the tax breaks.

But you and I know that won’t happen. In fact, it is the profit motive that restrains newspapers from being too overtly biased in their reporting. Currently, newspapers must attract as many people as possible regardless of their political biases or party affiliation. If they were to go non-profit, what would be the incentive to be fair? There would be some, of course, who would respect the idea that they were in the business of informing their readers in as neutral a way possible of the issues and politics that are newsworthy. But such nobility would be even rarer than it is today. Without the incentive to make money, newspapers would de-evolve and revert to their past practice of being openly partisan or ideological. Remove the profit motive and you remove the one thing that governs content.

In the last 5 years, I may have read half a dozen dead tree newspapers. My reading habits have changed and the time spent perusing a newspaper could be better spent googling what I want to know. That’s the bottom line and I see no way that newspapers - online or traditional paper editions - will ever to be able to overcome the problem that the meteor has already struck Chicxulub and there is nothing they can do to save themselves from catastrophe.

An interesting back and forth recently between two of my favorite bloggers highlighted a couple of things that needed airing as well as revealing some on the right to have the intellectual capacity of a chipmunk.

Patterico and Goldstein got into it over something I’ve written about at length; the idea that we should not attempt to delegitimize Obama, that he is the clear winner of the election and that in a democracy, once the people have spoken, the minority accepts the will of the majority and takes on the role of “loyal opposition.”

Patterico took this concept one step farther and posited the notion that Obama was a “good man:”

Good men do bad things, and in the pursuit of ambition, they almost always do. Barack Obama is not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination.

What’s more, I think he will damage this country with bad policies. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Inevitably, he is going to take actions that I think are disastrous, and somebody will come back and say: “Hey, Patterico! I thought you said Barack Obama was a good man!” Yes, but I never said he wasn’t going to do horrible things. It’s quite clear he will.

What’s more, there is no way in hell he is going to do away with the poisonous atmosphere in Washington, and anyone who thinks that he can is a fool. It will be amusing to watch him try.

But I make no apologies for saying he is a good man. He is my President. He is our President. And while he hasn’t always done good, I do believe he is fundamentally a good man and a patriot who wants to make this country a better place.

Goldstein tried for a shot across the bow in response and ended up hitting the main mast instead:

Precisely the kind of self-righteous civility that fried McCain. Want to be clapped on the back for your decorum? Fine. Just say so.

But let’s not pretend you are being honest or principled. Graciousness is one thing; praise is another.

This “good man” was involved in ACORN blackmail schemes. With an attempt to fraudulently undermine the Second Amendment by gaming court rulings. He got rich off of schemes that led to the mortgage crisis — then stood by and let others fix it in order to keep his hands clean during the final stages of an election. He has thrown in with race hustlers,”reformers” who believe that domestic terrorism was a valid form of expression, odious foreign potentates –

There is nothing at all noble about praising a man and a party who reviles you simply because in doing so you appear noble. Jews have tried that. And it’s often ended with skeletons and ash, or the twisted wreckage of a bus in Tel Aviv.

In this case, it will end with more McCains — and so more Obamas and Reids and Pelosis and Olbermans.

If that’s nobility, I’m not interested. Yes, Obama is my President. But that doesn’t mean I’m forced to forget all he’s done to get there — and all that’s been done on his behalf, either by the savage supporters who went after Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, or by the “objective media” that sold its soul for a shot at establishing the government it desired.

I would agree with Goldstein - to a point. In questioning Pat’s intentions and motives in writing the post, Goldstein goes too far. Unless he has been vouchsafed the ability to peer into the souls of men and glean intent, I would suggest he stick with what he recommends and fights for so tirelessly - a literal interpretation of what is written. In literature, we can extrapolate intent from what we know about the author and his times. Can we not grant the same courtesy to Mr. Frey? Pat has not shown himself to be a link whore in the past nor has he necessarily proven to be the kind of blogger who sets himself up as the conscience of the right. (That job is taken and I will not, under any circumstances, give it up.)

In that, I see no attempt at self-aggrandizement on Pat’s part. If Goldstein wishes to make that argument, he must take me and dozens of other righty bloggers to task for writing basically the same thing. (Note: From what I’ve written about this subject, one could infer that I believe Obama to be a man fatally flawed by hubris and ideology but a man with good qualities.) How Jeff could separate those who genuinely feel that Obama is a “good man” from those who are looking for a “pat on the back” would be an interesting exercise that might even tax the abilities of the brilliant Mr. Goldstein.

But where Jeff nails it is in delineating the difference between “graciousness” in defeat and actual “praise” for what some might see as salutary qualities in the president elect. Patterico makes the age old argument, i.e. good men do bad things in the pursuit of power. Goldstein rightly calls Frey on this by listing a slew of bad things this supposedly “good man” initiated. Not to belabor the point but Hitler liked dogs, was good with kids, and generated enormous loyalty and devotion among his personal staff.

No jerks, I am not comparing Obama to Hitler. I am pointing out that even the worst of men apparently had some good qualities. Obama is not the worst of men but, as Goldstein points out, neither can he be termed a “good man” based on the fact that he exhibited many qualities in common with “bad men.” Good men may not be perfect. But they don’t lie for a living nor do they throw long time friends and associates under the bus because they have become a political millstone.

I have grown quite cynical about all politicians over the years. There are a handful I have met and known or covered closely who could be considered “good men.” Obama ain’t one of them and neither, for that matter, is John McCain. The only good man I thought who has run for president in my lifetime was Paul Simon. Much too guileless, gracious, and cerebral to have any chance whatsoever in 1988, Simon nearly won the Iowa caucuses on a shoe string but faded badly after that. Simon was legendary for his courtliness, believing good manners in politics was essential to a functioning democracy.

Obama ain’t no Paul Simon neither.

Stung to the quick by Goldstein’s broadside, Patterico responded, trying to explain:

I’m sick of people who want to write off entire groups of people as Bad People because of what they believe in. I’ve watched the left do that, and I’m seeing a lot of people on the right doing that now as well. (I’m not talking about Jeff here; I think he’s too smart to demonize all Democrats. But I believe some folks out there are demonizing people for their beliefs.)

When it comes to Obama, we’re obviously talking about a different situation. Many here are calling him a bad man because he has done some bad things and associated with some bad people. It’s true, he has, and I can respect the people who write him off for that reason. I’m simply not going to do it, yet. Like Beldar, I’m

deliberately giving Obama the benefit of the doubt on some of his associations, to call that merely “bad judgment” as opposed to evidence that he, himself, is also a “bad man.”

And like Beldar, I may well end up admitting that I was wrong about that.

But I’m not going to write Obama off as a Bad Man because of his beliefs, contrary to the wishes of my former commenter. And I’m not going to write him off as a Bad Man — or the majority of his supporters as bad People — based on what I’ve seen to date. So far, as I’ve said, I see him as a basically good and decent man who, like many politicians, has engaged in some highly questionable behavior in the pursuit of power.

I don’t think too many people are saying that Obama is a bad man because of what he believes - wrongheaded, dangerous, and even illogical as some of those beliefs are. If I were to believe that, I would have to condemn most of my family who believe many of the things that Obama does and that is something I cannot do. Liberalism may be a horrid ideology but it is not in and of itself evil or bad. A denial of the reality of how humans live and interact, yes. An ignorance of how wealth is created and the efficacious nature of private property rights, absolutely. But it is not fascism or Marxism.

And Frey is wrong in intimating that Goldstein was condemning groups of people for what they believed. In fact, it is something of a mystery where he got that idea from Jeff’s response to his original post.

Goldstein disagrees with me that Obama is no socialist but he does have a point about what is important about fighting the Obama Administration:

Patterico accused me of “demonizing” all Democrats, which is patently absurd. In fact, I dealt specifically with denying the appellation “good man” to someone who, through his actions, has proven to be anything but.

It matters who gets called a “good man.” It matters who we say has this country’s best interests at heart. And yes, it’s possible Obama does, to a certain extent — though what is important to recognize is that, at least so far as his governing principles to this point suggest, he doesn’t hold that view from the perspective of the country as it was founded, and as it was intended to be governed.

Which means that Obama’s best interests for the country are really the best interests for a country he’d like to see this one become — a new text that he’d like us to believe will be but an re-interpretation of the original text.

As someone who believes in the principles upon which this country was founded, I refuse to allow that someone whose ideological predispositions compel him to radically redefine that “imperfect document” that is the Constitution, has this country’s best interests at heart.

And I likewise refuse to allow that a man whose thuggish deeds and unsavory associations have defined him be granted the honor of “good man.” Because to do so is to make a mockery of good men, and to cede yet another bit of our ability to evaluate and describe and conclude in good faith into a bit of “hate speech” that won’t help the GOP regain power.

To which I say, outlaws ain’t team players. And it’s time to be outlaws.

And to which I say, sign me up for the “Hole in the Web” gang.

Goldstein’s point cannot be overstated or overvalued. At bottom, the real war between right and left is the destruction of conventions that facilitate real communication. We have all seen and commented on it. The constantly changing definitions of terms like “racism.” The deliberate textual misinterpretation of what conservatives say and write in order to extract a self-selected “meaning” that advances their argument at the expense of the author’s intent (Glenn Greenwald and Dave Neiwert are absolute masters at this).

Such machinations make it impossible to carry on a dialogue with the left about much of anything. And there are precious few on the right who consistently call the left out for their assassination of the language, taking the battle for intentionalism directly to the source. Goldstein is one of them.

We must refuse to allow Obama and his allies any room to breathe when it comes to opposing their stated intent to “remake” America into something it was never intended to be. But we can and should do it if not “graciously,” then certainly by recognizing that our disagreements should not devolve into the kind of mindless deconstructionism that the left has used against us for the last 8 years. Gleaning intent from Obama’s proposals should not concern us as much as fighting what he will attempt to do.

I believe at bottom, this is what Pat was trying to say. There is nothing “noble” in this construct any more than it is “noble” or “patriotic” to pay taxes. I believe it is self-evident to any conservative which is why I am confident that we would shame the left with our ideas of what constitutes a “loyal opposition”…

If the left could feel shame about anything.

UPDATE: 11/13

Patterico emailed me a few days ago asking me to correct what I had written - that he was condemning people who despised all Democrats - including Jeff Goldstein.

In fact, I misinterpreted what Goldstein had written believing that this was something Patterico had actually said rather than Jeff’s analysis of what Pat had written.

Apologies to Pat for the error.

One of the most hilarious Monty Python sketches is the “Upper Class Twit of the Year” where inbred, palsied, oblivious sons of English aristocracy are put through their paces jumping over matchboxes, “kicking the beggar,” taking the bras off of debutantes, and trying to walk a straight line.

But it is the final test for the twits - so funny it brings tears to my eyes - that is apropos of the current effort by anonymous McCain staffers to trash Sarah Palin. That “test” involves the twits being able to pick up a gun and shoot themselves in the head.

Being upper class twits, it takes them a while to figure it out. They fire the gun in the air or aim at their heads and miss until finally, one by one, it dawns on them what must be done and down they go.

What we see out of the McCain camp is not a circular firing squad but rather a bunch of twits pointing their guns at Sarah Palin and missing only to shoot themselves in head when all is said and done.

These misfires run the gamut from accusing the Alaskan governor of trying to promote her own future at the expense of the present effort in helping McCain win to whispering about her “shopping spree” and her lack of prep for the Couric interview.

Now all of you are probably aware that this kind of backbiting goes on in all losing campaigns so the idea that you can believe anything coming from anyone on the losing side is just preposterous. Exaggeration or outright lying is not uncommon. In the case of McCain twit loyalists, we have a little of both.

First, this breathless report from CNN:

Randy Scheunemann, a senior foreign policy adviser to John McCain, was fired from the Arizona senator’s campaign last week for what one aide called “trashing” the campaign staff, three senior McCain advisers tell CNN.

One of the aides tells CNN that campaign manager Rick Davis fired Scheunemann after determining that he had been in direct contact with journalists spreading “disinformation” about campaign aides, including Nicolle Wallace and other officials.

“He was positioning himself with Palin at the expense of John McCain’s campaign message,” said one of the aides.

Evidently, the campaign has fingered Scheunemann as the culprit who fed William Kristol some juicy tidbits about how the McCain camp completely mishandled Palin’s rollout. Apparently, they don’t like to read the truth in the newspapers.

Yes, the McCain campaign blew it with Palin. How could someone be ready to assume the presidency if they are deliberately kept from the press for 3 crucial weeks? Not that Palin was ready from day one - a point that I’ve made on several occasions. But it was a sick joke for the McCain camp to hide Palin from the press the way they did.

Overscripted, over managed, - just plain over. Palin will probably be seen as a net plus for McCain in that she certainly brought a lot of conservatives who otherwise would probably have stayed home to the polls. But her effect was negligible and might also eventually be seen as having a negative effect on independents and women. If Palin had been allowed the normal freedoms of any Vice Presidential candidate, would that have made a difference with those groups? We’ll never know because of the McCain campaign’s belief that she wouldn’t have helped the cause if she had been allowed to interact with the media.

What does all this have to do with Scheunemann? Someone was telling lies to CNN about his firing:

Advisers in the McCain campaign, in suggesting that Palin advisers had been leaking damaging information about the McCain campaign to the news media, said they were particularly suspicious of Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s top foreign policy aide who had a central role in preparing Ms. Palin for the vice-presidential debate.

As a result, two senior members of the McCain campaign said on Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had been fired from the campaign in its final days. But Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, and Mr. Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, said Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had in fact not been dismissed. Mr. Scheunemann, who picked up the phone in his office at McCain campaign headquarters on Wednesday afternoon, responded that “anybody who says I was fired is either lying or delusional or a whack job.”

Bad sourcing by CNN? Or perhaps some wishful thinking by a McCain partisan? Either way, it stinks.

The leaking by pro-McCain staffers about Palin has been incredible. They complain that Palin’s camp kept them in the dark about the French-Canadian comedy duo’s interview with Palin. But the prank call from the Canadians pretending to be French President Nicholas Sarkozy was on her schedule for three days. Are they trying to tell us that nobody - not someone extremely high up in the McCain campaign - checked Palin’s schedule on a daily basis? This would not surprise anyone given the general incompetence shown by these twits in everything from oppo research (where they had to rely on bloggers and friendly journalists to dig up the best stuff on Obama) to scheduling (McCain was in Florida on the last day of the campaign and spoke to about 1,000 people).

The stories about the Palin “shopping spree” have now grown so bad they have to be exaggerations. Some GOP donor evidently paid for much of her clothing no doubt due to the incredible stupidity of the McCain campaign who thought that “3 suits” for Palin would be enough for 9 weeks of campaigning. Michelle Obama was probably wearing three different outfits a day.

Could they have gotten by with less? Of course. But let’s be honest. The McCain campaign was selling Palin’s spectacular looks as much as they were pushing her conservative credentials. Quite simply, Palin wows male voters - even those who wouldn’t vote for her in a million years. And for those females not inclined to be jealous of her looks, her family, and her job, she is a hugely impressive example of a modern American woman who has it all.

Why shouldn’t she be dressed to the nines in order to promote this image? What is coming out of the McCain campaign now is pure poison, trying to shift blame for their incompetence and mismanagement on to Sarah Palin. And the Palin camp is fighting back, trying to answer these charges. What is striking is that they are giving reasonable explanations for issues being raised by McCain loyalists. It makes them much more believable than the wildly exaggerated image the twits are pushing of Palin as a “diva.”

It stinks of cowardice for McCain staffers not to own up to the fact that it was their ideas, their plan, and their piss poor execution that resulted in this landslide loss in the electoral college. There was nothing inspiring about this campaign at all. It didn’t energize the base. It failed to convince other conservatives that McCain would govern much differently than Obama. In the end, the candidate had no recognizable set of principles, no identifiable ideology, and no real issue that would have energized Republicans and conservatives and brought them to the polls. As it was, millions of GOP heartland voters either stayed home or, as I pointed out here, finally pulled the lever for Obama in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina.

To blame Palin for this is outrageous. And hopefully, if Erick at RedState gets his way, none of these twits will work in politics again:

RedState is pleased to announce it is engaging in a special project: Operation Leper.

We’re tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details.

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.

It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.

They’ll just have to be stuck at CBS with Katie’s failed ratings.

And to that I say, Bravo. The architects of this disaster who compounded their sin by trying to shift blame to probably the one person who prevented a spectacular electoral humiliation a la Walter Mondale should be kept far away from leadership positions in any future campaign.

If they want to help, let them knock on doors and stuff envelopes. At least if they fail there, they will have no one to blame but themselves.

The title of this post is taken from the second volume of Page Smith’s 8 volume social history of America. It refers to the creation of the American republic and how contemporaries of that event  all saw the start of something unheard of in human history - a federal Constitutional republic - as the beginning of a New Age of Man, a new beginning where citizens, unsullied by the infection of class distinction and royalty common in Europe, could create a new Zion - a paradise on earth.

Much has been made by me and others of how important it is to hew to the principles and precepts espoused by our ancestors who invented this country. But perhaps we sometimes lose sight of some uncomfortable facts when it comes to “original intent” of the founders and the stratified nature of American society at that time.

We don’t want to pull forward to this time the notion that African Americans are 3/5 of a person for purposes of the census. Nor would we want to have the view of most of the founders that the elites should run the country while the rest of us shut up and do as they say. Most of those well propertied men distrusted the people (in the aggregate) and were fearful that if the mob ever got too much control of the levers of government, their property would be taken from them.

There is also the shameful treatment of women as it related to the Constitution and the law as well as a decided bias against settlers on the frontier. A failure to live up to treaties with the Indians resulted in regular and bloody wars. Big states hated little states and vice versa.

The Constitution was very much a document of its time. It reflected the very best thinking of enlightenment and pre-enlightenment philosophers. But it is not a perfect document and to say today that Obama will toss it out the window I believe goes too far in describing what he will try to do. It is the difficulties of today that will dictate how he approaches our challenges. And in the context of Constitutional precepts written 220 years ago, he will stretch some of those no doubt to achieve what he wants.

Where he reaches too far, we will smack him down. But I believe he should get some leeway if only because our founders did the same thing when they first confronted the theory of the constitution with the reality of their times.

The problems of early America were enormous, having just come through a ruinously expensive war, a barely united populace behind the idea of a country at all, and squabbling about everything from land grants to borders among the several states. In fact, once the Constitution was ratified, the universal question on everyone’s mind was “Now what?”

How could they even begin to solve these massive difficulties? The Constitution was, after all, just a piece of paper.

It helped that George Washington was the first president. Not a brilliant man by any means, Washington’s strengths were his leadership ability and his sterling reputation - something he used as vintner might pour out wine from a carafe. The longer Washington was in power, the more his reputation suffered, the more empty the carafe became. Washington deliberately expended his most precious resource to keep the country from flying apart.

After 8 years, his reputation was still great enough that he was able to keep us out of what would have been a catastrophic war between England and France while putting the nation (with Hamilton’s scheming help) on a sound fiscal footing.

Obama is no Washington although I believe he has demonstrated some leadership qualities that some recent presidents have not. The guy has to have something inside of him to create the kind of mass movement I saw last night in Grant Park at the Obama Victory Rally. Easily 80% of that crowd of nearly a million were under the age of 25. Media and money help, no doubt about it. But our new president has something else about him as well; the ability to inspire. That is a quality not all politicians have and I have a feeling we will have need of that ability before all is said and done in the near future.

I will probably oppose 90% of what Obama and the Democrats try to do. Some commenters on this site question how I can do that and still claim to see Obama as “my president.” If that’s the kind of attitude Obama supporters are going to have I fear for this country. Such authoritarian impulses are common in mass movements and it remains to be seen whether Obama is strong enough to resist the temptations such support presents for him. It would be easy to turn to his true believers in times of political trouble and simply ride roughshod over the naysayers. Let’s hope he has the moral compass and clarity of vision to see beyond such pettiness and embrace diversity of opinion - even when things get rough.

One thing is certain; Obama, the Democrats, and liberalism are going to be given a chance. There’s not much we conservatives can do about that. Do we work to constructively engage the opposition or do we simply participate in mindless, partisan hackery? I’m not saying that we shouldn’t fight, and fight hard, for what we believe in. But we shall soon see if Obama is serious about engaging us in a dialogue. If he is, I would think that for the sake of the country, we try to meet him halfway.

We must pick and choose our spots over the next 4 years. Constant caterwauling about every little thing an Obama Administration does will get us nowhere. While we should oppose those things that we believe are detrimental, perhaps it wouldn’t kill us if we actually looked around to see if there was anything we could support him on?

Obama has spoken passionately on issues of individual responsibility for African American fathers and other single parents. This is conservative bread and butter and I would have absolutely no problem in helping our new president make those words a reality.

I know most of these words are falling on deaf ears. But I believe in democracy. And in case you haven’t noticed, the majority has just spoken as loudly and as specifically as they can in a democracy. If it is all or nothing for you - if you wish to oppose the color of the curtains Obama picks out for the Oval Office - then I wish you luck in your solitude.

I plan on being engaged the next 4 years - fighting against those things I believe need to be fought while offering what support I can wherever I see our interests merge. That is the role of a responsible opposition.

Who knows? Perhaps we can teach liberals a thing or two about what it means to be in the minority.

We are in a full fledged Indian Summer here in central Illinois - or, for those sensitive folk who believe it a sin to invoke any racial references even if they are positive, let’s call the 70 degree weather, gorgeous sunny sky, and the light wind sweetly scented with the smell of burning leaves “false” summer.

False, or Indian, it doesn’t matter. It is the last gasp of the seductress Summer, her last shimmy, her last provocative wiggle before her father, Old Man Winter comes barging into the room to check and see if we’re necking.

Nature is doing her yearly Technicolor thing - the autumn raiment covering the trees is really striking; spectacular deep reds on the maple across the street, elegant yellow-orange on the oaks lining the block, somber burnt umber covering the hickory. Is autumn a melancholy time for everyone? Perhaps it’s knowing what’s ahead that depresses me; the annual struggle with snow blowers, biting cold, dark skies, short days, and the lonely winds that whip across the prairie sod seeking a way through the weatherproofing to chill our bones.

Election day in America is held in November with a bow toward our yeoman farmers who would be too busy with the harvest to have time for politicking. Any later in the year and the roads would be impassable due to snowfall. So the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November seemed about right. Farmers could make the long, arduous journey to town and cast their ballot for the state’s electors. Back in the day, the presidential candidate’s name appeared nowhere on the ballot. Citizens elected people to represent them in the electoral college. Of course, everyone knew which candidate the elector was supporting so it felt almost like they were voting directly for Washington, or Adams, or Jefferson.

Eventually, states put the name of the candidate on the ballot, usually alongside that of the elector supporting him. It is an imperfect system and no doubt many Democrats wish to do away with it. But I sincerely hope they don’t if for no other reason than many of the arguments made at the Constitutional Convention in favor of the Electoral College still pass muster with me today. (I make many of those arguments here).

All of that is in the past and today, we find ourselves on the cusp of history. An African American may very well win an historic victory while the Reagan revolution - a cause for which I worked directly or indirectly for almost 30 years - is being swept away. As I have noted, change is part of the bargain if you want to be an American and accepting change is the key to thriving in this country. But I have an old man’s attachment to the causes of my youth and it will be difficult to see something that began with so much promise swept away due to the negligence, the cynicism, and the incompetence of the inheritors of it.

I read Ross Douthat’s melancholy post this morning and found myself nodding in agreement all the way through it. Now, Ross is one of them “elitist” conservatives in that he has more than two brain cells working at the same time and has actually written a book with big words in it - not like conservative hero Sean Hannity who makes it easy for us common folk to read by never using a word with more than 4 syllables in it. “Cotton candy conservatism” I call Hannity’s pablum. And that’s insulting cotton candy.

Here, he articulates my exact feelings about Bush and McCain:

I had a succession of meals last week with smart conservative friends, and I found them all relatively sanguine about the defeat that’s almost certainly about to be inflicted on the American Right. Each of them, in different ways, express a mix of enthusiasm for the “whither conservatism” battles ahead and relief at the prospect of finally closing the books on the Bush years. This has been an exhausting Presidency for conservatives as well as liberals, and for many people on the Right the prospect of being out of power has obvious upsides: No longer will every foul-up and blunder in Washington be treated as an indictment of Conservatism with a capital C; no longer will right-wingers feel obliged to carry water, whether in small or large amounts, for a government that’s widely perceived as a failure; and no longer will the Right have the dead weight of an unpopular president dragging it down and down and down. Defeat will be depressing, of course - none of my friends were Obamacons by any stretch - but it could be liberating as well.

This was how I expected to feel about a McCain defeat, too, and I’ve been trying to figure out why I don’t - why I feel instead so grouchy and embittered (clinging to my guns and my religion, and all that), and more dispirited than liberated. I didn’t have particularly high hopes for a McCain-led ticket in the first place: I never went in for the Mac-worship many journalists have practiced over the years, and part of me was dreading having to spend four years trying to explain that yes, I want a reformed conservatism, but no, I don’t like the kind of reform-ish quasi-conservatism that the McCain Administration is advancing. And then there were all the other reasons to think that a GOP defeat might not be so bad: You can’t win every election; it’s hard for a political party to change its ways without the clarifying effects of a devastating defeat; Obama’s a smart guy who’ll probably make at least some policy choices I support; the election of a black President will be a great day for America; etc.

I stopped “carrying water” for Bush a couple of years ago but I know exactly what Ross is talking about. He has exhausted himself having to defend some basic conservative tenets that, however imperfectly were advanced by the Bush Administration, nevertheless many of us felt obliged to point out the danger of the alternative. That and the constant drone of hyperbolic, rabidly partisan dissent left one feeling as if wrung through a wringer.

Tired, a little dispirited, Douthat takes the words out of my head and puts them on paper:

But I think the deeper reason for my political gloom has to do with something that Jonah Goldberg raised in our bloggingheads chat about conservatism - namely, the sense that the era now passing represented a great opportunity to put into practice the sort of center-right politics that I’d like to see from the Republican Party, and that by failing the way it did the Bush Administration may have cut the ground out from under my own ideas before I’d even figured out exactly what they were. As I said to Jonah. I have all sorts of disagreements with the specific ways President Bush attempted to renovate the GOP, on the level of policy and philosophy alike. But the fact remains that the renovation Bush attempted was an effort to respond to some of the political, social and economic trends that Reihan and I discuss in Grand New Party - and those of us who want a reformed conservatism have to recognize Bush’s attempt, and reckon with his failure.

This is by no means a new insight, but it’s one that’s been brought home to me by the looming end of the Bush Era and the struggles of the McCain campaign. Conservatism in the United States faces a series of extremely knotty problems at the moment. How do you restrain the welfare state at a time when the entitlements we have are broadly popular, and yet their design puts them on a glide path to insolvency? How do you respond to the socioeconomic trends - wage stagnation, social immobility, rising health care costs, family breakdown, and so forth - that are slowly undermining support for the Reaganite model of low-tax capitalism? How do you sell socially-conservative ideas to a moderate middle that often perceives social conservatism as intolerant? How do you transform an increasingly white party with a history of benefiting from racially-charged issues into a party that can win majorities in an increasingly multiracial America? etc.

Here are my own thoughts from a post I wrote after the 2006 mid term debacle:

The disconnect I speak of above arises from the cage that Republican candidates have been placed in by the various factions of conservatism that makes them slaves to an agenda that is out of date, out of touch, and after 2008, there’s a good chance that it will lead to Republicans being out of luck.

Breaking out of that cage will be difficult unless the party continues to lose at the polls. And part of that breaking free will be making the Reagan legacy a part of history and not a part of contemporary Republican orthodoxy. The world that Reagan helped remake is radically different than the one we inhabit today and yet, GOP candidates insist on invoking his name as if it is a talisman to be stroked and fondled, hoping that the magic will rub off on them. Reagan is gone and so is the world where his ideas resonated so strongly with the voters.

But Reagan’s principles remain with us. Free markets, free nations, and free men is just as powerful a tocsin today as it was a quarter century ago. The challenge is to remake a party and the conservative movement into a vessel by which new ideas about governing a 21st century industrialized democracy can be debated, adopted, and enacted. Without abandoning our core beliefs while redefining or perhaps re-imagining what those beliefs represent as a practical matter, conservatism could recharge itself and define a new relationship between the governed and the government.

But before reform comes the fall. And even if, as Yglesias believes is possible, the party and the movement are able to limp along for a few years with a cobbled together coalition, eventually the piper must be paid and the wages earned. It won’t be a quick or easy process. But it will happen nonetheless.

Ross and I are on the same wavelength although he has obviously given a lot more thought to the nuts and bolts of refashioning the conservative movement. But we both crave big answers to the big questions. How can small government conservatism be relevant in an era (probably permanent) where the people demand more and more from government? What role can conservatism play in a modern, 21st century industrialized democracy? What is the conservative answer to the nationalizing of health insurance or education policy? Is simple opposition all we are capable of?

The old truisms and bromides just don’t work anymore. The context has changed but we are still trying to squeeze the old verities into the framework of people’s expectations and desires with regard to government. There is, as I said, a “disconnect” that is so obvious, the American voter no longer sees conservatism as being relevant to their own lives.

I am not a believer in predestination. I do not think the future is set by any means. The future will be what we make of it - no more, no less. It is this hope that I cling to as I watch with sorrow the beliefs and work of my adult lifetime rejected en masse by the voters.

So be it.

If there has been one constant throughout American history, it has been that this is a nation that stands still for nothing or no one, that our gaze has always been locked on some distant horizon, leaving the present to take care of itself while caring little for our past.

This has led to some truly remarkable - dare I say “exceptional” - qualities in the American character. Some of these attributes have allowed us to perform almost magical feats of transformative metamorphosis, turning disadvantages into virtues while finding the good in the worst of situations. This kind of optimism is not unique to America. But we are the only nation that makes a civic virtue of it. As our ancestors hacked a civilization out the wilderness with nothing more than a few crude tools and a boundless hope for the future, something took hold in the spirit of those pioneers and settlers that allowed them to live in what can only be described as primitive conditions.

Always on the edge of starvation and with little coin or currency in their possession that would mitigate their hardscrabble existence, it was the realization that what they were doing was for their children and grandchildren that gave them the grim determination to tough it out and brave the dangers from man and beast in order to build something permanent out of what previously had been wild and untamed.

These people were hoping for change - they were counting on it. They were praying for it. And as the years passed and the land turned over, the future arrived with all the promise and hope for which our ancestors worked, bled, wept, fought, and died to effect. It was their vision, their expectations for the future that we build on today.

We are standing on the shoulders of giants as we look to the future in these uncertain times. We too, have a vision of America that we hope that someday will be realized. It is nothing like the America envisioned by our ancestors and this is how it should be. It is how it was with them as they helped create an America not as their grandfathers saw it but as they were able to imagine it.

The beauty of America is that each generation, each incarnation of Americans has the freedom, the ability, and the right to see an America they wish their children and grandchildren to live in and then try and shape their individual present and future to fit that notion. We practically invented the idea of the common man as an important player in history. And each succeeding epoch proves that the real catalyst for change is not politicians mouthing platitudes but ordinary people moving mountains - one rock at a time.

Many of us are fearful of the future if Barack Obama wins the presidency and the liberals dominate the Congress. All manner of evils are imagined. “America won’t be the same,” is the cry most often heard on the right. Some even go so far as to say the America we live in now will be no more and a new America will supplant the old one.

I have rejected that notion as totally unrealistic. But there is absolutely no doubt that change is coming. This would be true whether McCain or Obama were to be elected. This change has been happening right under our noses for decades and is only now being brought out in bas relief as a result of the election where conservatives have awakened with a start and realized that the American people are not responding the way they once did to our ideas, our beliefs, our issues.

Yes, a large part of that is the damage done to the conservative cause by Republicans claiming to be conservative but who betrayed everything that conservatism stands for. But, if you care to look beneath the surface of the voter’s anger, what you see are changed attitudes toward America, altered perceptions of the country as our citizens wrestle with change.

The changes wrought by war, by globalization, by a slowly evolving realization that our national identity itself is changing are merely catalysts that people can put their finger on to describe their unease. In truth, none of these things affect people where they live except in the grossest, macro sense that filters down through the media.

Consider:

* Our industrial sector has been shrinking for more than 35 years. We are no longer the “workshop of the world” and the high paying, comfortable middle class wages paid for those jobs are gone as well. The rapid pace of change has made the American worker expendable - unless he adapts to the new paradigm and adopts a skill that is in demand in this new world.

* While still the world’s leading economic and military superpower, we have discovered that nobody wants to fight us in the traditional ways of war and instead, our enemies prefer to engage in “asymmetrical warfare” where the odds are evened out and our will is tested more than our equipment or men.

* Demographically, the US is becoming less white, less suburban, more secular, and more educated.

These world-historic forces that are driving these change are bubbling up from the bottom - largely because of our influence on the world. It is the true Age of the Common Man and it will present enormous challenges for our economic livelihood and our security.

Yes, this is all rather frightening. Some take refuge in the past, demanding a return of the factories and the jobs that brought life to so many towns and cities across the nation. Others take refuge in religion, demanding a return to an America where belief in God animated the law and brought communities together. And still others - a few others - demand a wholesale destruction of the past and a different America built upon alien foundations.

To all those there is a common denominator - a palpable, unreasoning fear of the unknown - Shakespear’s “undiscovered country” of the future. Obama may tell the unions he will bring back jobs from overseas but it is an empty, worthless promise. You can’t get in a time machine, go back and bring forward conditions and realities that don’t exist today and haven’t existed for decades. Sarah Palin and the social conservatives will not be able to wipe out 34 years of privacy law by banning abortion, preventing gay people from joining in a legal contract denoting togetherness, or enforcing standards in our media against sex and violence.

Nor is it possible to dismember our past wholesale and substitute a new template over which America can be remade. It would take more than a few kooks and liberals to have that kind of influence on 380 years of history and more than 300 million citizens. It is a pipe dream and to those who fear such change, I would say that you are battling invisible demons.

Either Obama or McCain will usher in an era where the relationship between the citizen and the government will change. What kind of change is entirely up to us. That’s why I think it a good thing to embrace change and rather than trying to keep it from happening, work like the devil to make it yours and have it fit in to your concept, your belief in the future. Work to create a country where your children and grandchildren will be happy, free, and at peace.

This is what our grandfathers and their grandfathers imagined and fought for. Can we do any less?

Change we can freeze to death by:

Let me sort of describe my overall policy.

What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there.

I was the first to call for a 100% auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

These remarks were made by Obama on January 17 of this year. Not surprisingly this audio was hidden until now because the interview was with the far left San Francisco Chronicle.

Here’s the entire audio clip:

This illustrates better than anything the folly of “cap and trade” proposals. Obama plans to use his C&T plan as a gigantic club to beat up on power companies and coal companies (and the miners) if they don’t meet his arbitrary and capricious “targets” that drop every year regardless of any progress technologically in finding ways to mitigate the carbon output of power plants.

It will almost certainly cause a lot of smaller coal companies to either cut their work force as the demand for coal - our most abundant energy source - shrinks and probably drive a lot of these smaller concerns out of business.

And what about his gloating about driving businesses to bankruptcy? Has there ever been a presidential candidate who looked forward to the prospect of destroying someone’s life’s work and costing thousands of people their jobs?

But at least the Euro-twits pushing Global Warming won’t be mad at us anymore.

This blog post originally appears in the American Thinker.