Right Wing Nut House

Pat Ruffini was kind enough to reply to my post from yesterday where I asked how his plans to counter the left’s online advantage fit in to reform of the Republican party.

My point - either not well made or Pat chose not to respond specifically - is one of timing. What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Does creating this online juggernaut occur in a vacuum? Is it dependent on what the Republican party does to reform itself? Are the two goals mutually exclusive or is their some kind of symbiosis involved where the rightroots’ efforts lead to reform of the party or vice versa?

Pat referred to my “strawman” argument as one of tactics. Au contraire, mon ami. First, if by “strawman” Pat means I was deliberately misrepresenting his position, that was not my intent. If he took it that way, I’m sorry. I am 100% behind Pat’s efforts and, as an aside, believe him to be the best individual to get this idea off the ground and in motion.

Having said that, I believe there to be a disconnect in Pat’s reasoning that would be fatal to his efforts. Quoting from his response:

I would break down the three things the GOP needs to do as follows:

• Rebuild our infrastructure. There is no question that the left has us beat online and in the new forms of alternative media. We need a strategy for addressing that. This is a main focus of Rebuild the Party but not the only one.
• Find our message. In the absence of a new Reagan or better infrastructure, we need to find a compelling message that resonates. We need to be more centrist / more conservative. We need to focus more on social issues / fiscal issues. Etc. etc. We hear a lot of this lately. Henke has a framing for this that I like: the unifying narrative.
• Find new leaders. Only when people have a leader they can rally behind will the movement be activated. This was certainly true of Obama.

The right answer is that we need all of the above. None of these can happen without the other. Perhaps the largest failings of the Bush years can be attributed to the fact that we had a new leader without an ideological revival at the same time.

Rick is right that new technology will be for naught if we keep spending like drunken sailors. Tactics cannot overcome structural deficits or crappy, uninspiring messaging. Good marketing cannot dress up a bad product.

“Rebuilding infrastructure” was not my impression of what The Next Right and Rebuild the party.com was all about. I thought Pat was in the business of creating a whole new ball of wax - online activism, fundraising, candidate recruitment - everything the left is now doing online as well as transplanting some of the Obama model to the right. Certainly we can piggyback some of that on an existing organizational template through the RNC or some other party department but the bulk of what must be done has to be accomplished if not in opposition to the party (do they really want 5 million people trying to tell them what to do?) then certainly independent of it.

As for the “message” or Henke’s “narrative,” that indeed, refers to tactical matters that I agree is vitally important but not relevant to my critique. And whether or not finding a “Reagan” is even possible given the nature of politics and the fact that The Gipper was a World-Historical figure who by definition comes along once in a generation or two would be an iffy proposition at best.

So is wondering about whether the chicken or the egg comes first in this reform process a question of “tactics” or is it a fundamental question regarding the viability of Pat’s ideas? By reforming the party, I think we are both talking about not only issues but structural changes as well (Pat addresses this at RTP.com by calling for RNC reform). I am not sure that the way the national party’s thinking is organized at the moment, Pat’s online ideas fit entirely in the party’s plans for the future. I’m sure they’re grateful for the efforts and would give their right arms for the kind of organization Pat is talking about but are they going to be a help or a hinderance?

So my question from yesterday about why conservatives should exert the energy to become more active before the party takes the necessary steps to reform itself both issueswise and organizationally stands. Indeed, if that question can’t be answered, it puts Pat’s entire enterprise at risk in my opinion.

Patrick Ruffini and Mindy Finn have a nice write up in today’s Washington Post regarding their new web effort Rebuild the Party.com. The website features a list of endorsers that constitutes a who’s who of the rightysphere as well as a plan they would like to see the GOP adopt that, includes the recruitment of 5 million new Republican online activists, reorganizing the RNC, developing a new fundraising model, and rebuilding the grass roots infrastructure of the party.

All ambitious goals to be sure. But are they achievable?

Everybody agrees the GOP must become more web savvy and that a better connection has to be made to conservatives online. Few would also argue with the notion that efforts must be made to catch up to the Democrats in online fundraising and organization. But then we have the problem with the Republican party itself and its refusal to get serious about the kinds of reforms that would make a conservative like me proud to belong once again.

If Ruffini wants me to promote candidates, raise money, and urge volunteers to work for campaigns he better put a burr under the ass of the party leadership and get them busy on changing just about everything about the organization that contributed to its defeat these last two elections. These are not just technical adjustments or changes around the edges. We are talking about fundamental alterations in people, policy, and ideology that would make the Republican party worth getting excited about again.

Republicans are about ready to fall into a couple of traps that losing parties apparently can’t avoid when the dust settles following a debacle such as they have experienced the last two election cycles. The first is the belief that the reason for being rejected by the voters is that their candidates weren’t “pure” enough ideologically and that only by pushing forward “true conservatives” can the GOP find its way back.

I don’t dispute the necessity for putting up more conservatives for office. But the idea that you can have some kind of lock step litmus tests to determine who a “true” conservative might be is nuts - and counterproductive. There are plenty of competitive congressional districts where one of those “true” conservatives would get slaughtered by most Democrats. When 70% of the country does not identify itself as “conservative,” you are deliberately setting up the GOP for defeat if you advocate only “real” conservatives receive support.

There are candidates that would be completely acceptable to the vast majority of conservatives who would fail some of the litmus tests given by the base. A party that seeks to diminish its ranks by making membership dependent on a rigid set of positions on issues is a party doomed to maintaining its minority status. The Democrats made the exact same mistake in 2000 and it cost them in 2002 and 2004.

Only when they stopped listening to people like Kos and recruited dozens of candidates that reflected the realities of their specific district did they break through in 2006 and 2008. These candidates were not hard left ideologues but much more pragmatic in their politics. That didn’t mean they were “conservative” or even “moderate.” It means they were attractive candidates with decent name recognition, well funded, well organized, and in tune with local concerns. And they wiped the floor with our guys.

The other trap the GOP appears to be springing on itself is the idea of “me-tooism.” “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” may have worked for Bugs Bunny, but to see Republicans seeking to alter the disastrous Bush/Obama policies on bailouts only by proposing less money or nibbling around the edges rather than uniting to oppose these fundamental alterations in American society only proves that the vast majority of them are not worthy of conservative support. On this, the most important issue that has come before the Congress in a generation, the GOP is failing the test.

Pat believes that changes in the party can be effected by uniting the conservative community online and forcing the GOP to make necessary alterations. I believe he is being overly optimistic. What should come first, party reform or rightroots activism? What good would all of Pat’s great ideas be if they came to fruition and the GOP was still a party of pork-loving, deficit embracing, open border hugging, lobbyist kissing corrupt hacks? Is Ruffini saying that by initiating the kind of activism he is looking for online that the party will, either naturally or by osmosis, magically reform itself into an organization that conservatives would feel justified in backing?

This, is not an insignificant point. As is stands now, the rightroots are more conservative than they are Republican. And the noises being made by many GOP officeholders are not encouraging. The transformation of our economy into some kind of quasi-socialist managed disaster is going on with barely a peep from Republicans. Yes there are some like Senator Inhofe who are trying to hold the line. But if the GOP is interested in employing the conservative online community in a bid to help the party back to power, it would be helpful if a few more congressmen and senators joined the fight, proving that they were worthy of conservative support by acting like, well, you know, conservatives.

In the end, despite the undoubted genius of Ruffini and his friends, I can’t see him making much headway until the Republican party rediscovers its fundamental philosophy and its primary purpose for existing; to elect honest and ethical candidates who espouse conservative values . Not litmus tests but rather shared principles of governance with room for disagreement and debate.

Can Ruffini’s template for conservative activism and organization goad the GOP into that kind of a reformation? I think Pat is counting on that happening. But from where I’m sitting, it would appear to be an uphill battle to motivate online conservatives to join a cause where their activism would be exploited by those who don’t share their principles or care for their opinions.

The maneuvering began before Barack Obama was even elected president. A genuine political scramble was on as Illinois politicians great and not so great let it be known subtly and not so subtly that they wouldn’t say no if Governor Rod Blagojevich tapped them to fill out the unexpired portion of Obama’s term in the United States Senate.

There are so many issues and personalities involved in the decision-making process that the selection promises to be controversial no matter who is chosen. It would take the wisdom of Solomon to sort out the confusing, conflicting currents of race, faction, and family in order to arrive at a consensus so that the Democratic Party in Illinois doesn’t fly apart at the seams.

And smack dab in the middle of the maelstrom is the current governor, Milorad “Rod” R. Blagojevich, proud Serbian-American. He is also a man on the cusp of becoming the fourth Illinois governor out of the last seven to be indicted for corruption. He was mentioned prominently and not in the best light, during the trial of Obama friend, financier, and patron Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who was convicted of fraud in connection with a statehouse “pay to play” scheme. Federal prosecutors have leaked the information that they think they have enough on the governor for an indictment, largely — it is believed — because Rezko is singing to the feds in exchange for a lighter sentence. There is also a move among members of his own party in the Illinois House to impeach him. The governor is not only unpopular in the state, he is spectacularly and universally hated. A recent poll conducted by the Chicago Tribune found that just 13% of residents approved of the job he was doing.

In short, Governor Blagojevich might want to hurry the process of selecting Obama’s replacement along since he may not be sleeping in the governor’s mansion much longer. He claims he wants to settle the matter before Christmas. If so, he will probably be able to make that deadline — barely — before either resigning in disgrace or being kicked out by members of his own party.

If it were only Blagojevich who had input into the decision it would still be difficult, but at least the governor would avoid incoming fire from several factions with a huge interest in who will replace the new president in the Senate. And there is no interest group making more noise and demanding consideration than African Americans.

They’ve got a good case. Once Obama formally resigns from the Senate, that body will be left with no African Americans serving. There are two prominent African Americans in Illinois who may have the inside track as well as a few other blacks not as well known but who might be on Blagojevich’s short list .

One candidate, Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett, who served as Mayor Daley’s staff chief and headed up the powerful Transit Board in Chicago, is a long time friend of both Michelle Obama (who she hired for the Mayor Daley’s staff years ago) and Barack. But she has  removed her name from consideration because she is destined for the national stage, being named Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President. She is also currently busy as co-chair of the Obama transition effort.

The other major African American contender is Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr., son of former presidential candidate Reverend Jesse Jackson and a power in Chicago politics. If Blagojevich wanted to open a can of worms, he could do no better than select the younger Jackson to replace Obama. It would tick off Mayor Daley, anger a rival faction of African Americans in the city, and worry many downstate Democrats who feel Jackson would be a millstone around their necks in 2010.

Jackson carries a lot of political baggage. He once disrespected Mayor Daley’s father, the former Mayor Richard M. Daley, very publicly. He has opposed Daley in his efforts to expand O’Hare airport, desiring that the government build a new airport in his district. He has also clashed with Governor Blagojevich on several issues and railed against the corruption of his administration. A congressman since 1995, Jackson ran an abortive campaign for mayor in 2006, smartly dropping out when the Democrats achieved a majority in the House of Representatives. It would have been an uphill fight to pull enough liberal white, African American, and Hispanic votes to beat Daley who is very popular with many minority groups, especially Hispanics.

Jackson wants to replace Obama badly. He was first out of the box, making it known in October that he would be “honored and humbled” to take Obama’s seat. He actually commissioned a Zogby poll showing him in the lead among all candidates who had been mentioned.

He is also very liberal — a fact not lost on downstate Democrats who have figured out how to run in previously Republican territory and believe that having Jackson at the top of the ticket in 2010 might very well set them back and allow the Republicans to retake control of one or both houses in the legislature.

Given all this, it appears that Jackson would only have an outside shot at being chosen. That leaves two potential candidates — one not very well known and another known all too well as one of the more colorful characters in Illinois politics.

At age 73, state Senate leader Emil Jones has had a long career as a Chicago Machine politician. Starting as a sewer inspector, Jones worked his way up the ranks and is now one of the most powerful politicians in the state. His own campaign kitty funds dozens of Democratic senators in their runs for office, making him a force not only on the Senate floor where he rules with an iron fist, but also in the corridors and cloakrooms where his legendary powers of persuasion are put to use in service to what some see as his own agenda.

Jones, who is retiring from the state Senate in 2010, has said he wouldn’t turn the job down. In fact, some observers believe he would make a perfect replacement for Obama. He almost certainly wouldn’t run for re-election, thus clearing the way for a battle royal among all the current crop of Senate hopefuls in a free for all primary in two years. African Americans would be happy. Daley would be happy. Obama might even like to see his former mentor get a nice reward at the end of his career. And Governor Blagojevich could breathe a sigh of relief — temporarily — as he would have avoided a bruising fight.

But Jones, as Roger Simon of Politico points out, has some major drawbacks:

He was one of Obama’s political patrons, is close to the governor and is an African-American, yet I got snorts of derision when I ran his name past some other Illinois sources of mine. That’s because Jones is from the old school — he started out as a sewer inspector, which is not bad training for a life in politics — and is not a modern, ready-for-TV candidate, possessing an orator’s tongue. He is a Chicago pol — the ring tone on his cell phone is the theme from The Godfather — but he would be a “place holder” only and would not run in 2010.

So Jones would appear to be out of contention. The other dark horse candidate from the African American community is Congressman Danny Davis. But Davis has many of the same problems that Jones has. He is 67, a former Chicago alderman, and while he is well spoken and knowledgeable, he may have too much baggage to be a good choice to run in 2010. He once accepted a trip to Sri Lanka paid for by the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist group. He is also a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America. If downstaters thought they might have problems with Rep. Jackson in 2010, Davis might be their worst nightmare.

Other candidates include the lieutenant governor, longtime Democratic office holder Pat Quinn. However, Quinn may be busy moving into the governor’s mansion if Blagojevich is booted out or if he resigns. Then there’s Congressman Jan Schakowsky, a popular Democrat from Chicago’s near north side. If Blagojevich wants to choose a woman, she would be one option.

The other female option open to Blagojevich is one of the more compelling figures in Illinois politics. Tammy Duckworth is an Iraq War veteran who lost both her legs in combat and ran a spirited campaign in 2006 against Peter Roskam, who was vying to replace 16-term Congressman Henry Hyde. Although losing that race, the Asian-American won national attention both for her heroism and her anti-war advocacy.

Now serving as Blagojevich’s veterans affairs chief, Duckworth has made known her desire to be selected to be Obama’s replacement. And Obama himself may have sent a signal of who he might be favoring. When the president-elect laid a wreath at a soldier’s memorial in Chicago this past Veterans Day, at his side was Tammy Duckworth. Now it is true that Duckworth is head of veterans’ affairs for the state. But Obama didn’t have to have anyone by his side. The fact that he chose Duckworth may give us some sense of who he might wish to see in his Senate chair next January.

Duckworth also has a stellar list of supporters including Illinois’ other senator, Dick Durbin, who recruited her to run for Congress in 2006. Her campaign that year was managed by Rahm Emanuel, and she had David Axelrod as a media advisor.

A female war veteran, an up and coming star of the Democratic party in Illinois, a young (40), intense campaigner with a compelling personal story, a choice that would please the new president, and someone who could run very well downstate — Tammy Duckworth would seem to solve a lot of Governor Blagojevich’s headaches.

But this is Illinois. And if there is anything about politics in this state that is consistently true it is to expect the unexpected and take nothing for granted.

This article originally appeared at Pajamas Media

Here, in the winter of conservative blogger’s discontent, a small ray of sunshine has peeked through the black clouds and brightened what has otherwise been an unrelenting skien of gloom and doom.

I am talking about how president-elect Barack Obama has tacked to the center by reaching out for establishment Democrats and Clintonites to fill in the first blanks of his administration’s personnel sheet and the reaction to that by our blogging friends on the left. And then there’s the sore spot that is Joe Lieberman and the monumental sense of betrayal felt by the Kos Kids that the “traitor” wasn’t boiled in oil and his bones made into a xylophone.

Now, truth be told, the leftosphere has it all over conservative bloggers when it comes to organizing for fundraising, grass roots activism, and internet political action. To give you an idea of the discrepancy between right and left on the internet, I recently sent a congratulatory telegram to the RNC for finally hooking up all 50 state parties via Western Union telegraph. All that is left to do is build a time machine so that the Republican party can make that Great Leap Forward into the 20th century and perhaps start using that new fangled invention by Alexander Graham Bell he calls “the telephone.”

Do you think I’m being facetious? Well, maybe a little. But listen to Pat Ruffini, perhaps one of the most tech savvy guys on the right, as he explains the technological advantages Obama and the Democrats have at the present time:

Obama is not President-elect without the internet. He would not have been the nominee without the internet. And had we had a much closer race in the general election, two, three, four points, maybe, had we not maybe had this economic crisis crop up, the internet and the youth vote would have been the deciding factor in the general election as well. He’s got a network of ten million people on e-mail that are now going to be called upon to pass his agenda. So every member of Congress can expect at a minimum a couple thousand phone calls when one of his bills comes up, because he’s built this huge network that he’s now going to unleash on passing his policy agenda. Beyond that, he went into cell phones numbers, you know, announced his vice presidential pick by cell phone. He’s got a database of six to eight million cell phone numbers. Some think, I would be surprised if Republicans have a database of six to eight thousand cell phone numbers. So that is a huge, those are huge numbers, huge advantages, and it’s going to have to be, I think our number one priority tactically, like David said, we’re going to have a rich, vibrant debate about what our message should be. But I think everybody…and there is going to be plenty of disagreement on that. But I think everybody can agree, in this particular area, in technology, is something we need to get serious about fast.

So when I see the sharp end of the stick for the Democrats - the netroots - wailing and gnashing their teeth that Obama has “betrayed” them with his personnel picks and by not kicking Lieberman out of the party, I can’t help but smile and be heartened that it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.

Assistant Editor at The New Republic Jim Kirchick:

“With its congressional majority, the Democratic Party has refused to seriously try to end the war, to stop the bailout and to stop the trampling of civil liberties, just to name a few off the top of my head,” wrote David Sirota on the popular liberal blog OpenLeft, decrying the serial betrayals of Obama and the congressional Democratic majority. The Democratic Party, he wrote, has “faced no real retribution” for its manifold heresies, something that Sirota believes he and his band of angry bloggers must change. “We better understand why this happened,” he fumed.

Allow me to provide an answer. You don’t matter.

That the Netroots - the fabled bloggers who, in 2004, carried Howard Dean from being an unknown governor of a small state to a Democratic presidential front-runner - are not the potent political force that the media portrays was confirmed this past week when Senate Democrats resisted their “demand” that Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman be punished for endorsing John McCain for President (Lieberman was reelected as an independent in 2006 and caucuses with the Democrats). Ever since Nov. 4, when Democrats increased their majority beyond the point that Lieberman’s allegiance was necessary for them to maintain control over the Senate, punishing Lieberman has been the primary goal of liberal bloggers. For weeks, they pounded their keyboards, huffed and puffed on their Internet radio shows and called on their readers to flood the offices of Democratic senators with phone calls and e-mails demanding that Lieberman be stripped of his chairmanship over the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Yet on Tuesday, Democrats voted an overwhelming 42-to-13 to let Lieberman keep that chairmanship.

“He wasn’t sanctioned,” seethed Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos. “And Senate Democrats trying to make that claim are dishonestly trying to cover up the extent of their betrayal of the American people’s vote for change.”

Given the intensity of blogger rage over Lieberman, one can understand how their defeat at the ends of their own party would lend itself to hyperbole, but when did the “American people” appoint Markos Moulitsas their spokesman? And while there are many ways to interpret the outcome of this year’s presidential and congressional elections, that voters across the country wanted Joe Lieberman to be stripped of his committee chairmanship is not one of them.

I can understand the rage of the netnuts over Lieberman and disgruntlement over Obama’s national security choices.They helped out in destroying Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and here’s Obama on the verge of naming her Secretary of State. How bellicose of Obama! Couldn’t he find someone who voted against the war who was qualified?

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize-winner in economics and a critic of corporate globalization. He should be Treasury Secretary.

Senator Russ Feingold is a champion of civil liberties. He should be Attorney General.

Robert Greenstein is head of Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He would make a much better OMB director.

Arlene Holt Baker, executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, would be a tremendous Secretary of Labor.

And if Obama really wanted change, if he really wanted to honor progressives who backed him early on and then did the grunt work against McCain, he’d nominate Dennis Kucinich as Secretary of State.

That sure would indicate a welcome departure from empire as usual.

Well, it would be a departure from sanity at least.

Taking pleasure in another’s discomfort is not very grown up of me, I know. I should be solicitous of the left’s disappointment. I should give them words of tenderness and understanding. I should forswear criticism while encouraging them to keep the faith. I should allude to all the good things they’ve got and not despair.

Nahhhhh…

Every once and a while, even smart people say or write stuff that makes them look stupid.

Why, even I myself have fallen victim to these little intellectual hiccups. You don’t write on a blog everyday for 4 years and not, on occasion, come up with some really, really lights out, eye poppingly, drop dead clueless, monumentally ignorant stuff. Any blogger or writer who tells you differently is either a liar or so full of himself that the power of their egos would probably light up Chicago. It is an occupational hazard and is impossible to avoid. (I can’t think of anything offhand but I’m sure there are some intrepid commenters out there who would help me out.)

Of course, there are some bloggers and writers out there who make a career of writing brainless, fatuous, jaw droppingly doltish stuff. Village idiots like TBogg or the folks at Sadly No have taken bathroom humor, playground taunts, and pre-teen sex jokes to a level unseen by most adults. I would add the pathologically bigoted writings of Debbie Schlussel and just about everything written by Robert Kagan as examples on the right of writers who make a living penning witless missives, dopey treatises, and uninformed balderdash.

But even very smart, very witty people can fall victim to the Stupid Virus. Take the delightful CNBC host and commentator James Pethokoukis, who also writes a money blog for US News and World Report. He really caught a virulent form of the disease with his post entitled “How Tom Daschle might kill conservatism.”

The GOP strategist had been joking about the upcoming presidential election and giving his humorous assessments of the candidates. Then he suddenly cut out the schtick and got scary serious. “Let me tell you something, if Democrats take the White House and pass a big-government healthcare plan, that’s it. Game over. Government will dominate the economy like it does in Europe. Conservatives will spend the rest of their lives trying to turn things around and they will fail.”

And it turns out that the fearsome harbinger of free-market doom is the mild-mannered ex-U.S. senator with the little, red glasses, Tom Daschle. He’ll be the guy shepherding President Barack Obama’s healthcare plan through Congress via his probable role as secretary of health and human services. At the core of Daschle’s thinking on the subject is the creation of a “Federal Health Board that would resemble our current Federal Reserve Board” and ensure “harmonization across public programs of health-care protocols, benefits, and transparency.” (Forget secretary of state, Hillary Clinton should shoot for chairman of Fed Health and run one seventh of the U.S. economy.) And the subject of that “harmonization” would be a $100 billion to $150 billion a year plan that would let individuals (and small businesses) buy insurance from private companies or from a government plan.

Daschle and the Obamacrats certainly have the momentum: a near-landslide presidential election victory, at least 58 Democratic votes in the Senate, and a nasty recession that will make many Americans yearn for economic security. Already the health insurance companies seem set back on their heels. The industry’s trade organization now says it would accept new rules requiring them to cover pre-existing conditions as long as there was a universal mandate for all Americans to have health insurance. On top of all that, Obama clearly wants to make healthcare reform a priority in his first term, as evidenced by the selection of a heavy hitter like Daschle. And even if he wasn’t interested, Congress sure is, with Max Baucus and Ted Kennedy readying a plan in the Senate. A few observations:

1) Passage would be a political gamechanger. Recently, I stumbled across this analysis of how nationalized healthcare in Great Britain affected the political environment there. As Norman Markowitz in Political Affairs, a journal of “Marxist thought,” puts it: “After the Labor Party established the National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party when health care, social welfare, education and pro-working class policies were enacted by labor-supported governments.”

Passing Obamacare would be like performing exactly the opposite function of turning people into investors. Whereas the Investor Class is more conservative than the rest of America, creating the Obamacare Class would pull America to the left. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, who first found that wonderful Markowitz quote, puts it succinctly in a recent blog post: “Blocking Obama’s health plan is key to the GOP’s survival.”

I’ll go even further and say that passing Obamacare would turn the US from from being the world’s only superpower into a second class backwater with little more influence than France on the world stage. This may happen anyway thanks to the financial meltdown and the subsequent $2 trillion and rising in bailouts. Let’s face it; trillion dollar deficits and half a trillion dollar defense budgets are an impossibility. They cannot exist in the same universe. You can’t cut entitlements in a deep recession and since there is only around $35 billion in real discretionary spending to be cut, something has got to give somewhere. With Democrats in charge, it will be the defense budget.

But would Obamacare “kill” conservatism? That’s something of a nutty idea considering that it comes from an analysis given in a journal devoted to that wildly successful political philosophy known as Marxism. In a deterministic world where we are all happy little Commie robots, we would “vote our interests” and cast our ballot for the politician who promised us the most goodies. Democrats and liberals have been whining for years that Americans in flyover country have been hypnotized or fooled by Republicans into actually voting against politicians who will give them everything necessary to make their lives easier.

But determinism is dead, killed by the reality that people simply don’t act the way the Marxists say we should act. If they did, I guarantee you the old Soviet Union would still be with us while the United States would have gone the way of the Dodo bird. In the aggregate, people do not make decisions for themselves or their families based on what is best for their “class” or even care much about how their lives might be improved at the margins by voting for big government liberals. It has never been that way in America when voting for president and is only partly true when voting for Congressmen and Senators.

A study done earlier this year and published in the Journal of Leadership Studies revealed some of the real reasons people choose one presidential candidate over the other - and it ain’t because one of them will shower them with gifts from the government:

An article to be published in the new Journal of Leadership Studies (Wiley Periodicals, Inc.) on February 28th discusses results of researching and analyzing data from the seven most recent U.S. presidential elections comparing Democratic and Republican Party candidates who were successful in securing votes. The analysis reveals what tipped the scales with voters and how perceptions of leader intelligence, feelings of pride and hope, as well as feelings of fear and anger, were found to impact the decision process, rather than the issues that candidates present.

Researchers M. David Albritton, Sharon L. Oswald and Joseph S. Anderson used data from the National Election Studies (NES) division of the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan to expand upon previous work on voter attitudes, perceptions of leaders, and voter support. They found perceived intelligence, inspirational qualities, and charisma to be key factors in the formation of voter opinion. Instead of the varying positions on issues, voter’s perceptions of these key traits are found to be predictors of whether or not that voter will consider a leader to be of high quality.

How a candidate’s charisma as well as how fear plays into a voter’s evaluation was also examined. Intuitively perhaps, fear played a negative role toward a candidate. Individuals who generated stronger feelings of voter fear were considered “lower quality leaders.” However, fear also helped shape positive behaviors toward a rival candidate. Surprisingly, charisma, traditionally considered an asset, was often viewed negatively when framed in the context of manipulating others toward personal gain.

The vote for president is the most personal political decision most Americans make. Political pros have known for decades, thanks to several landmark social psychology studies, what goes into the decision making process of citizens when they choose a president. First, as with any politician, it is likability that is most translatable into votes. Next comes shared values or comfortability. The third is fear of the alternative. Ideology plays into the comfortability index while positions on the issues and campaign promises are almost always way down the list.

Voting for other federal offices is not quite as personal but for House members especially, it is not national issues as much as it is local concerns that determine competitive races - a dwindling number thanks to finely honed redistricting techniques. More than anything, what will keep Democrats in power will be how the new Congressional district lines will be drawn following the 2010 census.

The Senate is a different story but is still an electoral body dominated by incumbents thanks to their massive advantage in fundraising, name recognition, and their ability to build a sophisticated political ground game over their 6 year term. Here again, likability and shared values mean more than any specific issues.

In the kind of deterministic construct offered by those who believe that Obamacare and other proposed social programs will kill conservatism because people will be so overjoyed that government will offer them “security” that they will vote for big government liberals for the foreseeable future fail to understand that first, we are a different people than the Europeans despite what many on the left who have abandoned the idea of American exceptionalism are telling us; and second, such twaddle reveals a lack of understanding of basic political psychology.

America has been gradually adapting itself to the idea that health care is a right, not a privilege. I would say to my conservative friends that politically - and realistically - we have probably lost this argument. The issue plays to the people’s basic sense of fairness and despite their misgivings about government run boondoggles, would support some kind of national health insurance that guaranteed everyone’s access to at least minimal care.

But I would say to my friends on the left that this doesn’t mean Americans will support the kind of massive intrusion being planned by Kennedy-Baucus or the Obama Administration - especially after conservatives get through informing the public of just what it means to have mandates, “Federal Health Boards” and other cockamamie ideas that limit freedom and choices. There are alternatives - some free market options as well as a mix of government-industry proposals - that would accomplish the goal without having government get on the slippery slope of eventually controlling the entire health care industry.

But even if Kennedy-Baucus were to pass - highly unlikely at this point - would that mean the “death of conservatism?” If Marxism couldn’t be killed off by it’s massive, world wide failures it is extremely difficult to see how conservatism could be executed by the passage of a government program - especially one that would be amenable to alteration once its deficiencies were exposed by its application to the real world. Conservatives may not be able to get rid of national health insurance. But there is no doubt that they will be able to run against its failures by proposing sensible alternatives and reforms.

Conservatism is a philosophy. I have had many arguments with my conservative friends over how to make this philosophy into a real world, governing ideal in a 21st century industrialized democracy. I am unsure if on some level, that “governing ideal” hasn’t run its course and lost its way. Making conservative principles and a conservative approach to issues relevant again will take a careful study of where we went wrong and some fresh ideas of how to translate the principles and values of conservatism into concrete, programmatic proposals that can compete in the great American marketplace of ideas once again.

Salagadoola mechicka boola
bibbidi-bobbidi-boo
Put ‘em together and what have you got
bibbidi-bobbidi-boo

Salagadoola mechicka boola
bibbidi-bobbidi-boo
It’ll do magic believe it or not
bibbidi-bobbidi-boo
(Music: Mack David and Al Hoffman; Lyrics: Jerry Livingston

It is either a serious discussion on the influence of the Christian right in the Republican party or a nonsensical debate about whether morals informed by religious beliefs have a place in the public square.According to Kathleen Parker and Kevin Drum, there is actually a question about the latter.

Parker:

As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.

Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.

I’m bathing in holy water as I type.

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.

Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth — as long as we’re setting ourselves free — is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.

What does she mean “oogedy boogedy?” And I note that most commentators on this article missed her allusion to “armband religion.” Now let’s think a moment and ask ourselves, what group in history is famous for wearing armbands? The Boy Scouts? Maybe, but do you seriously believe Parker was alluding to the Boy Scouts in her little self-aggrandizing missive?

Parker was comparing the religious right with those other famous armband wearers, the Brown Shirts of Nazi fame. But she did it in such a cutesy way, we will forgive her, right? Boy, I bet Parker’s little smear elicited a snicker or two from her new found friends on the left - a crowd she seems to be playing to more and more lately.

But it is the use of the pejorative “oogedy boogedy” that has everyone up in arms on the right. Jonah Goldberg wonders what all the fuss is about:

My email box runneth over with nice attaboys and more than a few interesting criticisms regarding my post about Kathleen Parker. Keying off some of the criticisms, here’s one thing I want to know, as I sit here at the Whither Conservatism conference. What aspects of the Christian Right amount to oogedy-boogedyism? I take oogedy-boogedy to be a pejorative reference to absurd superstition and irrational nonsense. So where has the GOP embraced to its detriment oogedy-boogedyism? With the possible exception of some variants of creationism (which is hardly a major issue at the national level in the GOP, as much as some on the left and a few on the right try to make it one), I’m at a loss as to what Kathleen is referring to. Opposition to abortion? Opposition to gay marriage? Euthanasia? Support for prayer in school?

Goldberg makes the excellent observation that there all sorts of legitimate points to be made both in favor and against those positions. Indeed, I have found some secular arguments against gay marriage to be if not compelling, certainly reasonable and based on both the law and common sense. Hence, “oogedy boogedism” actually expresses a nebulous kind of fear of the religious right more than it identifies any specific proposals that smack of “armband religion” as so cleverly construed by Parker.

Kevin Drum disagrees:

There will always be plenty of votes for a culturally conservative party. That’s not the problem. The problem is the venomous, spittle-flecked, hardcore cultural conservatism that’s become the public face of the evangelical wing of the GOP. It’s the wing that doesn’t just support more stringent immigration laws, but that turns the issue into a hate fest against La Raza, losing 3 million Latino votes in the process. It’s the wing that isn’t just a little skittish about gay marriage, but that turns homophobia into a virtual litmus test, losing 6 million young voters in the process. It’s the wing that isn’t just religious, but that treats belief as a precondition to righteousness, losing 2 million secular voters in the process. It’s the wing that isn’t just nostalgic for old traditions, but that fetishizes the heartland as the only real America, losing 7 million urban voters in the process. It’s the wing that goes into a legislative frenzy over Terry Schiavo but six months later can barely rouse itself into more than a yawn over the destruction of New Orleans.

What Drum doesn’t mention is the utter contempt liberals and Democrats had for the truth in defining the Republican positions on some of those issues. A “hatefest against Latinos?” Only if you’re a Democrat and want to smear your opponent by spreading that notion. Taking the Gilchrist or Tom Tancredo attitude and position on immigration as the mainstream conservative or GOP position is as ludicrous as the GOP trying to make Cindy Sheehan the poster girl for the Democrats on national security.

What Drum is either too much a partisan to say or just clueless about is that the Democrats successfully demonized Republicans on just about all of those issues he mentions above. He is alluding to a successful political strategy not the reality of where the movement or the party stands - with the exception of gay marriage. (Is he seriously saying that 7 million young voters abandoned the GOP because of that? Young voters have been trending left since 1992, long before gay marriage was even on the radar.)

Fetishizing the heartland as “the only real America” was a direct response to urban Democrats and liberals who have made trashing us out here in flyover country (a term invented by liberals) a cottage industry for authors, pundits, and idiot bloggers like Drum. Perhaps Drum forgets his liberal colleagues and their pointed smears of heartland voters after the 2004 election when calls for secession and sneering at voters in “Jesusland” was all the rage on the left. Fetishizing urban voters as smarter, more sophisticated, more worthy than those of us in the heartland might explain some of that pushback, wouldn’t you think - especially since a more liberal (not necessarily tolerant) attitude toward social issues is a litmus test in and of itself among urban elites.

Drum’s claims of “lost voters” as a result of the Christian right may be true in the aggregate but his specifics leave a lot to be desired. I too, have pointed out that the Republican party is now identified not as the party of fiscal conservatism (How could it be?) but as the party of anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage. Given the alternatives - an economy in ruins, unpopular wars, a despised president, corruption, and incompetence - it is perhaps understandable that the GOP saw its path to victory in turning out its evangelical base in huge numbers. As it turned out, that too, failed.

Now what? If Parker’s “oogedy boogedy” is an elitist’s exaggeration of what the religious right truly represents but if Goldberg is too dismissive of the public face of this movement - the Dobsons, the Ralph Reeds, even the Sarah Palins whose dogmatic approach to the political permutations of social issues turns off many urban, heartland, and in between voters - where can the GOP go to get its mojo back? (Apologies to Mother Jones and Jennifer Rubin.)

What the GOP needs is a little prestidigitation - some Bibbidi, Bobbidi, Boo to drive away the oogedy boogedies and allow the true nature of conservatism and Republican principles to dominate the national debate.

We aren’t going to do that with John Boehner as minority leader. Nor are we going to do it with the bulk of GOP Congressmen now who will no doubt be meekly acquiescing to Obama’s plans to nationalize health insurance, emasculate our defenses, seize control of our schools, and generally impose a liberal template on what still is a country that if it doesn’t lean center right can now be termed a “center-center” nation. More left leaning than they were 20 years ago, the electorate can hardly be termed “liberal” in any sense of the word. Obama won because people believed he would cut their taxes. When queried, the voters still want a strong defense and want a sane fiscal policy.

Those are conservative issues, my friends. The GOP’s mistake in trying to use social issues as a wedge rather than gathering under their tent the bulk of voters who would cast their ballot for a candidate who espoused Republican principles is what lost them the election.

The people may want some form of national health insurance - but they don’t want to break the bank doing it. They may want out of Iraq - but they don’t want our national defenses shredded. And the disconnect between the laundry list of social programs for the middle class offered by Obama and the taxes that would need to be raised to pay for them hasn’t sunk in yet with voters. When it does - when the trillion dollar deficits start to pile up - the Republicans don’t want to be standing too close to the Democrats lest they be hit with the rotten fruit that will be aimed at the left.

This entire argument among conservatives and Republicans comes down to tactics. We just went through an election that proved pretty conclusively that promoting social issues and making them the centerpiece of Republican orthodoxy is just too problematic - too open to dishonest liberal counterattacks that exaggerate and even lie about how pernicious and evil the Godbotherers truly are - oogedy boogedy in spades. The left successfully demonized the religious right and Republicans stupidly made them the poster children for the party. The millions of secular conservatives and religious moderates who had made up the backbone of the GOP fled in terror from the prospect of inquisitions and and pogroms - fostered by the left - and voted Democratic or stayed at home on election day.

Can the two wings of the party be integrated into a coherent whole? This is what will occupy conservatives and Republicans for the foreseeable future. The Kathleen Parkers of this world wants the religious right muzzled and beaten down. The evangelicals and the rest of the base want litmus tests in order to excommunicate those who disagree with them.

The schism is not as wide as it might appear. There is, after all, more that unites us than divides us. But it will take a towering personality or, God forbid, a shock like 9/11 to make the two sides realize it.

I don’t know whether Dick Cheney or Albert Gonzalez are really in trouble as a result of an indictment handed down by a Willacy County grand jury in Texas. But if I were a ham sandwich, I would definitely take it on the lam:

A South Texas grand jury has indicted Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on state charges related to the alleged abuse of prisoners in Willacy County’s federal detention centers.

The indictment, which had not yet been signed by the presiding judge, was one of seven released Tuesday in a county that has been a source of bizarre legal and political battles in recent years. Another of the indictments named a state senator on charges of profiting from his position.

Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra himself had been under indictment for more than a year and half before a judge dismissed the indictments last month. This flurry of charges came in the twilight of Guerra’s tenure, which ends this year after nearly two decades in office. He lost convincingly in a Democratic primary in March.

Cheney’s indictment on a charge of engaging in an organized criminal activity criticizes the vice president’s investment in the Vanguard Group, which holds interests in the private prison companies running the federal detention centers. It accuses Cheney of a conflict of interest and “at least misdemeanor assaults” on detainees because of his link to the prison companies.

Megan Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Cheney, declined to comment on Tuesday, saying that the vice president had not yet received a copy of the indictment.

The indictment accuses Gonzales of using his position while in office to stop an investigation in 2006 into abuses at one of the privately-run prisons.

Of course, lefties are short stroking their way to ecstasy. Our friends at Firedoglake:

Gonzales and Cheney have been indicted by a grand jury. The indictment is related to prisoner abuse at Wallace County Federal detention centers, which are run by Vanguard Group. Cheney has an investment in Vanguard and is charged with conflict of interest and “misdemeanor assault” on detainees through the company, while Gonzales is charged with using his office to quash an investigation. (h/t Perris)

Get out the popcorn, this could be interesting.

And maybe it will shine a light on the privatization of the prison system in the US, which has led to even greater abuses of prisoners than before.

The “Gun Toting Liberal” takes aim at…himself:

If you bothered to click on the aforementioned AP article, you’d have learned the South Texas jurorists indicted The Vampire the vice president on CRIMINAL charges stemming from making money through some sort of a hedgefund designed to abuse and torture federal prisoners and his pal “Gonzo” for — what else? — OBSTRUCTING federal investigations into The Veep’s [again... "alleged"] high crimes and misdemeanors. Gotta give ‘em both credit, because, again — COUNT of our Lame Duck President Bush to bail his fellow criminals out of any sort of a legal mess this whole fiasco might lead to — in other words, the only CHANCE we might have to see this trio behind bars is via International law and many, MANY of my fellow Americans share my point of view that justice just MIGHT be served the day they are sentenced for and held accountable by, The Hague for their [Pssst -- again -- "alleged"] war crimes. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen too many “pardons” going on over there lately; correct me if I’m wrong, which I, of course, frequently AM.

So just who is this brave, intrepid prosecutor who dares to do what the mealy-mouthed, weak-kneed, chicken-sh*t Democrats in Congress have failed to do all these years

Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra himself had been under indictment for more than a year and half before a judge dismissed the indictments last month. This flurry of charges came in the twilight of Guerra’s tenure, which ends this year after nearly two decades in office. He lost convincingly in a Democratic primary in March.

[snip]

After Guerra’s office was raided as part of the investigation early last year, he camped outside the courthouse in a borrowed camper with a horse, three goats and a rooster. He threatened to dismiss hundreds of cases because he believed local law enforcement had aided the investigation against him.

On Tuesday, Guerra said the indictments speak for themselves. He said the prison-related charges are a national issue and experts from across the country testified to the grand jury. Asked about the indictments against local players in the justice system who had pursued him, Guerra said, “the grand jury is the one that made those decisions, not me.”

It is not your average prosecutor who would camp out in front of the courthouse with a horse. And if he is an extremely horny fellow, I see the reason for the 3 goats. But it takes a certified, first class, loony tunes, nutcase to subject a rooster to this kind of abuse. Was he using the fowl as an alarm clock? Maybe it was part of some secret religious rite where eventually, he would have bitten the rooster’s head off a la Alice Cooper. More likey, he enjoyed stimulating conversations with the bird about the law and how he would get back at his “enemies.”

There has been no word on the fate of the ham sandwich but I’m betting it’s already disappeared. Evidently, Guerra was contemplating indicting a bologna sandwich as well — for impersonating food — but in the end, the grand jury balked and then broke for lunch. Guerra thought it suspicious that several of the jurors appeared to be eating bagged lunches with both ham and bologna sandwiches but before he could make his move, the evidence disappeared.

This isn’t the first “ham sandwich” indictment in the history of US jurisprudence and it won’t be the last. Perhaps the most famous Deli indictment was the Jim Garrison travesty that saw a perfectly innocent man - who happened to be a homosexual - indicted for the Kennedy assassination.

Clay Shaw got caught up in a Jim Garrison’s desire to be governor of Louisiana while also being the victim of the prosecutor’s pathological hatred of homosexuals. The Oliver Stone film JFK depicting this man as a hero may be the most cockeyed, dishonest, twisted, and disgusting view of history ever put on film. It’s as if Springtime for Hitler was actually made as a serious look a Nazi Germany.

Garrison has been thoroughly, completely, and deservedly discredited by so many reputable historical and journalistic sources that one must studiously and deliberately ignore the facts in order to give him even the benefit of the doubt for making an honest mistake. Garrison based his indictment on a “tip” from an alcoholic private investigator named Jack Martin who confessed to the FBI within a week of the assassination that he concocted the whole story while he was drunk.

In truth, the “story” Garrison tried to sell kept changing as his “investigation” unfolded. What was clear was his sick animus directed against gay men. He had actually made a name for himself “cleaning up” prostitution in the French Quarter a few years earlier. What is rarely mentioned when portraying Garrison as a courageous battler for justice is that almost all of the arrests in that effort were of gay men - many who were not prostitutes but simply cruising.

His first “theory” of the JFK plot was that it was a “homosexual thrill killing.” Only later, when that theory fell apart because one of the main “plotters,” a homosexual named David Ferrie, died of cancer (that Garrison said was actually given to him by the CIA) did he charge “the military industrial complex” with the crime.

Writing in the Saturday Evening Post, James Phelan relates a wacky, surreal conversation he had with Garrison about the plot:

In an effort to get Garrison’s story into focus, I asked him the motive of the Kennedy conspirators. He told me that the murder at Dallas had been a homosexual plot.
“They had the same motive as Loeb and Leopold, when they murdered Bobbie Franks in Chicago back in the twenties,” Garrison said. “It was a homosexual thrill-killing, plus the excitement of getting away with a perfect crime. John Kennedy was everything that Dave Ferrie was not — a successful, handsome, popular, wealthy, virile man. You can just picture the charge Ferrie got out of plotting his death.”

I asked how he had learned that the murder was a homosexual plot.

“Look at the people involved,” Garrison said. “Dave Ferrie, homosexual. Clay Shaw, homosexual. Jack Ruby, homosexual.”

“Ruby was a homosexual?”

“Sure, we dug that out,” Garrison said. “His homosexual nickname was Pinkie. That’s three. Then there was Lee Harvey Oswald.”

But Oswald was married and had two children, I pointed out.

“A switch-hitter who couldn’t satisfy his wife,” Garrison said. “That’s all in the Warren Report.” He named two more “key figures” whom he labeled homosexual.

“That’s six homosexuals in the plot,” Garrison said. “One or maybe two, okay. But all six homosexual? How far can you stretch the arm of coincidence?”

And then there was Garrison’s Section 8 discharge from the army:

In 1952, Jim Garrison was relieved of duty in the National Guard. Doctors at the Brooke Army Hospital in Texas diagnosed him as suffering from a “severe and disabling psychoneurosis” which “interfered with his social and professional adjustment to a marked degree.” The evaluation further said that Garrison “is considered totally incapacitated from the standpoint of military duty and moderately incapacitated in civilian adaptability,” and recommended long-term psychotherapy.

Garrison has been quoted as saying that the information was placed in his file by the government in order to discredit him.

And this is the man that Oliver Stone made a hero of in JFK? Clay Shaw’s life was ruined - being outed as a homosexual at that time was the kiss of death. He died a broken man a few years after his quick (45 minute) acquittal by the jury. Perhaps Garrison’s abuse of power was best summed up by former New Orleans District Attorney during the 1990’s Harry Connick (father of musician/actor Harry Connick, Jr.) who tells investigator Gerald Posner (Case Closed) what he told Oliver Stone when the film maker asked his opinion of the Shaw Trial:

“I said I thought it was one of the grossest, most extreme miscarriages of justice in the annals of American judicial history. And Stone said, ‘Well, we are going to do the movie anyway,’ as if I was suggesting he shouldn’t do it. I said: ‘Well, do whatever you want to do. I have nothing to say about that. You were asking and I was telling you that it was just a miscarriage of justice. An innocent man was plucked out of somebody’s mind and made a defendant in a criminal case.’ “

Both Garrison and Guerra have proven the adage that, if he tries hard enough, a prosecutor can get a ham sandwich indicted. But a ham sandwich doesn’t have a reputation nor does the deli specialty have a family, friends, and loved ones who are affected by the crazies who sometimes end up dispensing justice in our system. Such men — including the Duke rape case prosecutor Mike Nifong — deserve as much disapprobation as can be heaped upon their heads as they are ushered off the stage into an infamous retirement.

With all this free money floating around and every CEO worth his salt lining up at the government trough ready to bury their faces and feed heartily on the taxpayer’s generosity, I think it’s time we began to look around and see what other companies - past and present - we should also claim to be “Too Big To Fail!”

For instance, a prime candidate for a government bailout would have to be John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. Sure it’s been bankrupt for 160 years but I didn’t see any limitation attached to that bailout bill, did you? Hell, if the Medici’s had an American subsidiary we could probably bail out that Renaissance era company too.

The fact is, the American Fur Company failed and it’s your fault. Tell the truth now, when was the last time you bought a beaver hat? Don’t you realize that thousands of fur trappers have been thrown out of work because you selfishly decided to be a slave to fashion rather than thinking of those trappers, trading post managers, export facilitators, dock workers, and ship captains who lost their jobs as a result of the switch from beaver pelts to silk in hat making?

And, of course, you know where that silk is coming from, right? This may have been the first instance of a Chinese attack on our economy. Haberdashers, seduced by cheap imports of silk, ought to be ashamed of themselves. The American Fur Company must be saved else we will lose our competitive edge in the world’s fur trade. Then there are the national security implications which are just too horrible to contemplate.

So we should give some of that $700 billion in bailout money to the descendants of John Jacob Astor and power up the fur trading business again so we can all buy a stinky, misshapen, butt-ugly hat made from the skin of cute little beavers who are trapped in steel jaws that, when sprung, clamp down on their leg, forcing the helpless creatures to either gnaw off their own limb or die a slow death by starvation. But if it will save American jobs, it will be worth it, right?

Similarly, we could save the “Big Three” American automobile manufacturers who have run into a skein of bad luck recently. Of course, that streak of bad luck has lasted 35 years and for all practical (and aesthetic) purposes, the US auto industry has been dead since then. But if we’re going to save The American Fur Company, we might as well try and pump some life into the moribund car manufacturing sector, right?

Actually, this might prove to be a bigger trick than trying to make beaver hats all the rage again. This is because there is a reason that Detroit has lost its positions as the Mecca of car manufacturing; they make sucky cars that no one wants to buy.

The Big Three can complain all they want to about the high cost of union benefits, unfair competition (Translation: It is unfair the Japanese are smarter, more innovative, and more quality conscious than we are.), and “green” regulations that add cost to their products. They are basically calling the American consumer stupid for actually wanting nice looking, trouble free, fully functional, safe, and adequately serviced autos. The gargantuan salaries paid to auto execs have not produced one single model that can outsell the Toyota Corolla.

For all their redesign, retooling, rethinking, and re-inventing the “corporate cultures” in Detroit, they have accomplished nothing in their efforts to compete with Japanese manufacturers. The excuse used to be that their plants were so much newer than ours. That is no longer the case as the average American auto assembly plant is almost just as recently built as the average Japanese plant. It’s not the age of the plant that matters anyway. It’s how the cars are built. And the Japanese have embraced new techniques, new technologies that give them a leg up in the competition.

Then it was the excuse that Japanese workers make much less than American unionized workers. That may have been true at one time but today, it is very close and getting closer all the time. The difference today is almost entirely due to health and pension benefits. But instead of losing market share because of this, the Japanese have been steadily increasing their sales numbers.

Face it. Detroit is in a fix of its own making. Shortsighted managers, unions who still believe that benefit packages should reflect 1970’s realities, a stubborn resistance to higher CAFE standards that would allow them to compete with the fuel efficient Japanese cars, and an inability to figure out how to make a decent profit on smaller cars. The fact that the enormous falloff in sales of SUV’s and other big car, high profit models was entirely predictable, the Big Three got caught with their pants down when gas prices got so high, people were paying a third of their weekly paycheck to fill up.

Despite all - failure at every level including executive, manufacturing, marketing, and labor - we are now supposed to rally around the cry “Too Big to Fail!” and hand these incompetents $25 billion (for now - more later, I promise you).

I say no way.

President-elect Obama wants to nationalize the auto industry:

Top advisers to President-elect Barack Obama are helping to draft an auto industry rescue plan that would bring new government oversight, including the possibility of an auto czar who could ensure the money was being used wisely.

Aides said Obama is also open to an oversight board that would perform the same function as one individual. The proposals come as the estimates of the cost to fix Detroit’s three largest automakers continue to mount.

“Certainly he wouldn’t believe in it being a blank check,” said an Obama adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to not being authorized to speak publicly on the topic. “He wants oversight to be making sure the auto companies have figured out how to become viable, ongoing concerns.”

Let’s be clear here. This would not be a “temporary” solution. Government “ensuring the money is spent wisely” sounds an awful lot like being able to approve or veto business decisions. If that’s the case, why shouldn’t the government be able to fire the boobs who are currently in charge and replace them with people they think could do a better job?

The point isn’t how much money they need or how much government control would be involved. The fact is that these companies are as dead as John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company and for similar reasons; an inability to adapt to changing market conditions and create a product that enough people want to buy in order to make the companies profitable. There’s a reason no one buys beaver hats anymore. And its the same reason that no one wants an underpowered, ugly, cramped Chevrolet Aveo.

I feel sorry for the thousands of workers who would lose their jobs if these companies went belly up. But the fault does not lie with the American taxpayer who those representing the workers and executives of failed companies want to saddle with their inadequacies.

We aren’t going to start the fur trading industry again by asking taxpayers to fund a rebirth. Neither should we try and restart the American automotive industry by asking taxpayers to save something that’s already dead.

First, they tried it in Russia. Bread lines, sausage lines, blue jean lines, lines for toilet paper, lines to ask what line to get in so that you could get on a waiting list to stand in another line to get a place of your own and be able to leave the 1 room apartment you were sharing at age 30 with your wife, two kids, mommy and daddy, your no good brother in law, your gramma, and crazy uncle Ivan who liked to re-enact the Battle of Stalingrad at the most inopportune times.

The only things you didn’t have to stand in line for were lard and vodka. This is why they couldn’t make socialism work in Russia; fat, drunk people who were told “If you think you’ve got it bad, you should see how awful it is in the west.”

There were no more surprised people in the history of civilization than the Russian proletariat once satellites began beaming shows like Dallas and Falconcrest through the Iron Curtain. At the time, TASS was still showing film of race riots from the 1960’s and calling it “breaking news.” The big drawback, of course, is that the image that replaced greedy capitalists oppressing workers was that of greedy capitalists playing around on their wives with gorgeous women half their age while trying to cheat their family. A good question could be asked whether it was better to be thought of as Babbitt or J.R. Ewing?

They couldn’t make socialism work in Russia - something in the water probably. Neither could socialism find its legs in Poland, Hungary, and a half dozen other European countries that don’t even exist any more. Shared scarcity does not, it turns out, bring people together in a spirit of socialist brotherhood and comity. In fact, it sets people at each other’s throats, as the battle cry “I will get mine before you get yours and failing that, I will prevent you from enjoying what you get” was heard throughout Mittel Europa.

Making its way eastward, they then tried to impose socialism on a civilization that nearly invented, well, civilization. There are no more practical people on the planet than the Chinese, having gotten that way by outlasting every attempt to govern them effectively over a 3,000 year period. True libertarians, them. Unfortunately, the busybodies of the Chinese nanny state wouldn’t leave the peasants alone who after all, were perfectly happy using an ox to plow their fields and plant their rice by hand rather than do the modernization thing. Some village commissars were surprised to return to farms where they had delivered a shiny new tractor only to discover the peasants having turned the mechanical beast into a distillery.

(What is it about socialism that turns people into raging alcoholics?)

A few years ago, the Chicom thugs gave into the inevitable and decided to go with the flow, acknowledging that the underground capitalist economy was far outperforming the official socialist one which, as usual, was causing the government to rethink their “Five Year Plans” every 6 months or so. The only stipulation the government imposed on would be entrepreneurs was that they pay protection money to the government (both over and under the table).

Even the Chinese People’s Army dove in to the capitalist craze that hit China. They found it efficacious to contribute to certain Democratic presidential candidates in order to get access to technology that could, in a pinch, be used to destroy the very people who were selling the secrets. No doubt the generals who were growing fabulously rich selling stuff to their own government thought that this was a pretty good tradeoff. It’s not everyday you get to make money off your enemy’s foolhardiness.

Western capitalists swarmed the ancient cities with Euro-signs in their eyes. If we thought that a few thousand American and European businessmen bringing ideas like “Free Labor, Free Markets, Free Men” would change a civilization that was inventing block printing when Europeans were still living in dirt hovels, we had another thing coming. The magic of western capitalism and the obscenity of Mao’s socialism did not impress nor did it disturb the rhythms of life that had kept time for several milenia.

The people, having seen it all for 3,000 years shrugged and went back to using ox dung to fertilize their fields and wooden hoes to tend the crops. They’ve learned to use the tractor but last I heard, it still doubles as a still.

One would think that having failed in two of the most populous nations on earth that socialism would have died of natural causes - or been executed for crimes against common sense and humanity. Ah, but you underestimate its adherents. You see, it wasn’t socialism that failed. It was the people who tried to implement it! They are at fault, not the crazy quilt logic, the jaw dropping contradictions, the counterintuitive view of human nature, or the contrived diktats of bureaucrats who think a “market” is some place you go to stand in line for moldy beets.

That is why our friends across the pond in what we used to call western industrialized civilization - now not very western, less industrial, and an open question whether it is still “civilized” in any meaningful sense - decided to dip their toe into the socialist pool and see if they couldn’t make a go of it.

Listening to our own homegrown socialists here talking about how it is over there, you would think that the Europeans had discovered the secret to immortality or at least found the Fountain of Youth so gushy they are about how good the Euros have it. Cradle to grave care, a 36 hour workweek, nearly impossible to get fired, real nice trains, and a list of social services that would make an American’s head swim.

Of course, they also have high suicide, drug addiction, alcoholism, and divorce rates. They don’t have children either because they hate them or think them an impediment to their lifestyle. The vast majority of them live drab, colorless lives with little opportunity to better themselves. And who would want to considering that governments frown on anyone getting too far ahead of their neighbors. They import the colored peoples of the world to do their scut work and then do everything they can to prevent their assimilation by sticking them in immigrant ghettos where hate and resentment against their lovable hosts will almost certainly explode into uncontrollable violence one day.

Other than that - paradise.

The question being asked openly for the first time in my lifetime is can socialism work in America?

Answer: Yes we can!

I say we should ignore what socialism (or the faux variety of the disease that afflicts Europe) has done elsewhere and approach the Bush/Obama socialist takeover of our industries as Americans should - with hope, optimism, a “can-do” attitude, and the desire to make a buck off of it.

I mean, if we can hack a civilization out of a wilderness, defeat the largest army and most powerful military in the world at the time to win our independence, fight a gigantic, continent sized civil war, tame the Spanish, spank the Kaiser, roll over Hitler and Tojo, and make the Soviet Union a memory, we can make socialism work! Yes we can perfect it!

First of all, we have to do something about the inevitable lines that we will be forced to queue up for in order to get any goods or services. Socialism is all about lines, about the orderly distribution of scarcity. Now I don’t know about you but if there is one thing liable to get my dander up it is standing in line - at the grocery store, at the bank, at Madame Crystal’s Pool Hall and Massage Parlor - anywhere.

Why not get the geniuses at Microsoft to work on this problem right away? Put the guys who came up with Vista on it, that would do the trick. Better yet, this sounds more like a marketing challenge to me. We should get in touch with the Coca-Cola Company immediately and find the guys who signed off on the campaign for Coke Zero. Their judgment is exactly what we need to solve this little problem.

You see, it is my contention that by getting utter failures to work on solving our line problem, we can’t go wrong. They are bound to come up with the worst solution imaginable. Hence, by making matters 10 times worse, we realize the full potential of socialism to really screw up our lives.

Next up, planning the economy. For this problem, we must look long and hard for the perfect combination of corruption and ignorance. Congress is too busy so we’ll have to go to the private sector.

We could commute the sentences of those Enron guys. And maybe a few others like the fellows who did such a great job driving Worldcom into the ground. These are the sorts we need to do a really 1st class job of taking the most vibrant, creative, productive economy in the history of the human race and flushing it down the toilet.

The one other area we could perfect that is not necessarily native to socialism but no good socialistic country should be without is the stifling of dissent and the imposition of group-think that would kill independent thought.

Face it, we wouldn’t be very good at this. Americans are just too cranky, too much in love with contrariness, too admiring of the guy who marches to a different drummer that anyone we put in charge of of making this an unquestioning, obedient, robotic thinking society would have their hands full.

As in other nations that have tried this - Soviet Union and China come instantly to mind - it just wouldn’t do to put those who believe in antiquated and outmoded ideas like free markets in jail. They must be shown the error of their ways. They must be given a new vision of the brotherhood of man. They must be led to the idea that forced altruism, insipid do-gooderism, and hectoring moralistic clap trap is the best way to approach life.

They must be beaten over the head early and often in order to show them the error of their ways.

This cannot be done, obviously, in the middle of the street or even in what used to be the privacy of their homes (as you know, it wouldn’t be “their” home anymore, but everybody’s). All that screaming would be bad for socialist morale not to mention dirtying our streets with blood and stuff. Street cleaners are our brothers too and we should only ask them to do what each according to their abilities etc.

I think either Michael Moore or blogger John Avarosis would be good candidates for the top job in our Department of Ideological Reform. Glenn Greenwald would make a good deputy for either man. They all hate conservatives sufficiently that either would be able to adequately carry out the purge of such thought from our national consciousness.

One thing is for sure, we Americans are going to give it our best shot. Once we are resolved to completing a task be it defeating Hitler or perfecting the idiocy that is socialism, I am convinced that we cannot be stopped.

George Bush has made an excellent start and I’m sure Barack Obama is eager to see what he can do to bring about this change that will remake America. What have we got to lose? Let’s get behind our new president and make socialism as synonymous with America as baseball, apple pie, and corrupt Congressmen.

Remember the children…

The Age of Obama has already begun in many respects as George Bush toddles off toward the sunset and Obama’s people swarm Washington, cognizant of the fact that they have less than 70 days to create an administration out of thin air. It really is one of the more remarkable facets of our democracy, this peaceful handover of power.

After nearly 4 years of hearing that George Bush would never “allow” an election and that it was likely that martial law would be declared and Bush would assume the presidency for life, it might be nice to get an apology from those on the left who advanced this preposterous idea. But asking the left to apologize for anything is a waste of bandwidth and breath. But there is no doubt that their “dissent” crossed the line many times and the “reality based community” went totally, completely, off its rocker cuckoo.

All the cockamamie conspiracy theories about Bush they have advanced over the last 8 years - about how Bush would set himself up as a dictator and a tyrant, how he would put his political enemies in concentration camps (built by Haliburton don’t you know), how there would be a “Reichstag Fire” - meaning another terrorist attack perpetrated by Bush who as we all know knew about 9/11 in advance and almost certainly planned it - in order that the president could institute all manner of draconian measures in order to silence his critics - all of it has been proved wrong by the passage of time. They are still holding out hope that Bush will attack Iran thus making something that has been predicted at least 5 times in the last 7 years come true. But time is running out and Bush is simply not cooperating.

This was the kind of “dissent” we had from the left over the past 8 years. All of this “speaking truth to power” was a mirage, a product of fevered imaginations and paranoid delusions sparked by unreasoning hatred and contempt for the President of the United States. And I have no doubt we will see similar nonsense from many on the right who are already getting the vapors just thinking about an Obama presidency.

Admittedly, this unhinged variety of dissent against Bush was practiced by a very vocal minority of liberals during the Bush presidency. The problem was that some very prominent lefties occasionally found themselves taking part in the madness. Glenn Greenwald and Dave Neiwert were particularly adept at walking to the edge of total derangement in their critiques while forgoing some of the more wacky notions that Bush was a cross between Satan and Stalin. Nevertheless, they and other prominent progressives indulged in some of the most vile, hateful, unreasoning, illogical falsehoods about Bush and Republicans in order to advance their political agenda or to win the approval of lefty knuckledraggers.

But things are going to be much different now that Barack Obama - our first African American president - is in charge. Or will they be?

Certainly on the left, the idea of “speaking truth to power” will fall by the wayside as will the notion that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” In fact, if initial indications hold true, some dissent will soon be equated with racism. And if you thought that political correctness was widespread before Obama was elected, the straitjacket the left is about to put language and symbolism in will make what they have done previously seem tame by comparison.

Consider:

The day after Barack Obama became president-elect of the United States, Larry DeBaker flew Old Glory outside his Pulaski Township home — upside down.

Neighbor Marilynn Curry said Friday she is offended by DeBaker’s action, particularly on the weekend before Veterans Day and just after the election of Obama.

According to the United States Code, as it pertains to flag etiquette, “The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.”

“I do feel people are in danger,” DeBaker, 52, of 3703 50th St., said Friday night. “This country is in distress as far as I’m concerned.”

DeBaker, a McCain supporter, said the country “elected to the highest office in the land someone we don’t know anything about.”

DeBaker said had planned to fly the flag upside down for a week or so, but is also considering taking it down until someone other than Obama is president.

Curry said she, her husband, William, and their daughter, Kacey, 12, a sixth-grader at New Brighton Middle School, had returned Friday afternoon from a Veterans Day program at the school when they noticed the flag.

Curry said her daughter said of the flag’s positioning, “That’s just rude and ignorant.”

Even the family doesn’t argue the man’s right to hang the flag upside down. But apparently, those champions of First Amendment Freedoms at Vanity Fair are wondering why the “National Press is Ignoring Small Town Racism” - and the first item is a story about the guy above exercising his right to protest Obama’s election by reversing the field of stars.

Racism? There is not one single solitary clue in that piece that would even hint at racism on his part. And there’s a problem with a few other examples of “racism” Vanity Fair has detected in Jesusland:

But there are plenty of people out there who don’t like it one bit that a black man is about to become leader of the free world.

For whatever reason, the national papers and wire services are ignoring the steady stream of local reports concerning post-election acts of racism. The only place to find them is in small-town papers. VF Daily scoured small-town America for news of these incidents. What we found may shock you.

• In Pulaski Township, Pennsylvania, a flag was hung upside down. [Times Online]

• In Midland, Michigan a man paraded through an intersection in a KKK robe. [MLive]

• A noose was hung from a tree at Baylor University. [Baylor Lariat]

• In Loxahatchee, Florida, a family home was covered in racist graffiti. [WPTV.com]

• A gunstore employee in Traverse City, Michigan hung a flag upside down. [Traverse City Record-Eagle]

• In Stokes County, N.C., a man crossed his flag with a black X and hung it upside down. [Winston-Salem Journal]

• At the University of Arizona, a cartoon with an individual using a racial slur against black people caused an uproar. [DailyWildcat.com]

• In Apolacon Township, Pennsylvania an interracial couple who supported Obama found a burned cross in their yard. [Star-Gazette]

• In Mount Desert Island, Maine black effigies were hung from nooses. [Bangor Daily News]

Now clearly some of these incidents are disturbing and should be dealt with by the law.

But aren’t we overreacting just a touch here? We are a nation of 300 million people and this is the best Vanity Fair can do in finding racism that “isn’t being reported” by the media? What do you suppose the ratio of racist demonstrations to legitimate protest might be? A thousand to one? Ten Thousand to one? More? Is there such a thing as “legitimate” protest? Vanity Fair has certainly narrowed the definition haven’t they.

And let’s look at a couple more of these incidents that Vanity Fair claims are “racist.” They already smeared Mr. Debaker by lumping him in with the cross burners. Do you suppose they are trying to drum up outrage over other non-racist incidents?

How about the “noose hung in a tree” at Baylor?

At 9 a.m. Tuesday, a rope was discovered tied like a noose hanging from a tree outside of Morrison Hall, prompting the Baylor NAACP and Baylor’s Association of Black Students to hold a joint meeting to discuss racially charged events on Election Day. The groups feel the acts were indicative of a racist culture at Baylor.

Devin Culberson, Spring freshman, found a thin, white rope tied to a loop at the end, hanging from a tree. Culberson borrowed a knife from a janitor and cut it down, he said.

The rope evokes historical images of when black people were hanged from trees in the American South in the early 1900s.

The rope is now in possession of the Baylor Police. Dub Oliver, Vice President of Student Life, says that he believes it was intended to look like a noose and send a hateful message. He hopes students will continue to come forward and help with the investigation.

Would someone want to explain this cryptography to me? Mr. Oliver “believes” it was “intended to look like a noose.” The rope was “tied like a noose” according to the single eyewitness to this “hate crime.”

Forgive me but either this story is poorly written (it is) or nobody knows what the hell is going on. There appear to be a lot of assumptions being made - not the least of which is that 1) the rope was, in fact, a “noose” and 2) that it was not placed their by Mr. Culberson in order to garner attention - a ploy we see often on college campuses. What we do know is that the Baylor African American community jumped on this questionable incident and concluded with little evidence and no logic whatsoever that there is a “racist culture” at Baylor.

There very well might be. But this story is so thin it cries out for a little more proof before a publication like Vanity Fair includes it with the Kluxers who are showing their displeasure with Obama.

Then there’s the racist cartoon at the University of Arizona. Did Vanity Fair actually read the piece they linked to? If they did, they would have discovered that the artist -Keith “Keef” Knight - who drew that cartoon regularly satirizes race relations in his cartoons. And even if they did read the piece, they almost certainly missed this:

Knight is a prominent black artist who often uses art in comic form to bring social, political and racial issues to the forefront of people’s minds. For example, one Knight comic showed police brutality against black Americans in order to stir discussion.

Accusing a black artist of racism against African Americans might be a first - even for Vanity Fair.

I am obviously not saying that cross burnings, racist graffitti, or racial epithets is legitimate dissent. What I am saying is that Vanity Fair is exaggerating. I see no huge breakout of racist incidents in the aftermath of an Obama victory. I see some unhinged criticism coming from the usual suspects on the right.

But then there’s this from Lucianne Goldberg:

We lost some long time posters yesterday. Password canceled, comments deleted, outa here. All because some of us haven’t gotten a grip. We lost an important election. Stuff happens.Don’t lose your ability to fight the good fight because you can’t control your temper.

We are conservatives but we refuse to be in a bad mood about it.

Ed Morrissey wrote a good post about Obama Derangement Syndrome when that idiot Georgia Congressman Braun compared Obama to Hitler and Stalin:

If we plan to offer a rational alternative to the coming debacle of the next two years, then we’d better stick to facts and eschew hyperbole. We need to oppose the reality of the radical agenda proposed by Obama and the Democratic majorities in Congress, not fantasies spun out of context-free snippets of speeches. The more critics invoke Hitler and Stalin instead of Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson, the better the reality of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi will seem in 2010.

There is going to be a huge temptation on the part of the left and Obama to use the race card over and over again to stifle dissent. I doubt whether they will be able to resist the pull of such a powerful weapon. They certainly didn’t resist it during the campaign. There is no reason to expect that if they can shoehorn race into any critique of Obama’s policies, they will do so regularly and shamelessly.

So before we go off half cocked and determine that there is a massive increase in racist incidents from people who are unhappy that Obama won, perhaps we should consider the source. Vanity Fair appears to be deliberately trying to gin up fears of a racist backlash in order to stifle legitimate dissent.

Thankfully, this tactic won’t work unless we allow it to.