Right Wing Nut House

I penned a special column for PJ Media on the 9/12 protests yesterday, pointing out the historical significance of the event; that it represents the first truly mass movement of conservatives in American history.

A sample that will no doubt bring the wrath of the right down on my head:

It is definitely an opposition movement, however. Certainly there is mass unhappiness with President Obama and his policies. And there is opposition to the Democrats in Congress. But does this really translate into electoral strength for Republicans? I am going to go out on a limb and say no. The anger here is a reaction (reactionary?) against a growing government, higher taxes, and the sense that the country that they grew up in is slipping away right before their eyes.

This is all fed, of course, by the pop conservatives on talk radio who have ginned up outrage against Obama and the Democrats. I say “ginned up” because what the president and his party have already done doesn’t need the added fear mongering being promoted by Beck, Hannity, Rush, and Savage in order for conservatives to rally. Raised taxes, cap and trade, health care reform, bailouts and takeovers, and other liberal agenda items should be sufficient to outrage anyone on the right and motivate them to protest these horrific policies. It is unnecessary to brand Obama a “communist” or even a “socialist” to realize that his policies spell disaster for individual liberty and the free market economy.

Getting caught up trying to guess the number of attendees at Saturday’s protests (as I and many others are doing today and will continue to do) is irrelevant. This is history in the making, something the United States has never seen: a genuine grass-roots conservative mass movement, activated by the new technologies, communicating effectively using the new software and hardware — and it is growing.

I received an email from a long time reader yesterday who was concerned I couldn’t see that the protests were, at bottom, “anti-American, racist, and dangerous…” There’s nothing “anti-American” about protesting anything. We are, after all, a nation born out of protest, nurtured in the bosom of contrarianism, and defining progress by going against the grain in order to right significant wrongs in our society. This is not “dangerous” by any stretch of the imagination - except to the comfort of the elites who always believe it dangerous when the hoi polloi become restless and disagree that only they in their superior wisdom are fit to tell the rest of us what to do.

As for the charge of the protest being “racist,” well, that’s nonsense. If you’re going to tar an entire movement with that epitaph based on the beliefs of a tiny fraction, then you should have no trouble referring to the civil rights movement of the 1960’s as a “Communist” movement since the CPUSA played a prominent role in the SCLC and other civil rights organizations. The same holds true for the anti-war movement where you couldn’t attend a protest without tripping over a Communist or two.

This protest movement encompasses the right in all its contradictions, it’s factions, and its various conceits. From far right nullification supporters to Rand Objectivists, conservatism in all its glory was on display. The dominant theme as it appeared to me was “Don’t Tread on Me” - the words emblazoned on the iconic Gaddsen Flag. This is both a warning and a statement of fact. The truth is, whether due to agitation by talk radio hosts or the very real belief held by millions that President Obama is going too far, too fast, in his quest to “remake” America, there is a sizable segment of the population who has stood up and said “enough.”

In their struggle to define what it is they don’t like about the direction Obama and the Democrats are taking the country, I believe they mis-identify their concerns as fighting “socialism” or “Communism.” But at bottom, I believe above all else, that they wish to “conserve” their own vision of what America is and what it should aspire to be. This vision is no more invalid than that of the presidents’ despite attempts on the left to delegitimize it. It is Burkean in its roots, and has to do with classic conservative values that have been at the root of conservative thought for as long as the republic has endured.

Change is coming to America. Change always comes to America because we are a dynamic society that stands still for no one. But the value of conservatism has always been that, in Bill Buckley’s words, conservatives “stand athwart history yelling Stop!” It is always better to manage change, to channel the revolutionary nature of our society into acceptable, and accepted paths that lead to consensual change. Any other path leads to blood and revolution. Just ask the French.

President Obama and the Democrats are moving too far, too fast. They have exceeded the comfort level for change that many Americans - perhaps most - believe is right and proper. You can argue the merits of the president’s agenda. That’s politics. But the pace of change is structural in our society. We aren’t set up for the kind of rapid, dizzying alterations that Obama and the Democrats are proposing. This is especially true because some of what the president advocates would change the fundamental relationship citizens have with the government.

“Small moves, Ellie. Small moves…” was the advice that Elenore Arroway’s dad gave to the youngster as she fiddled with the dial of her ham radio in the film Contact. By moving the dial in small increments, she was much more likely to be rewarded by making contact with another ham radio enthusiast.

Hundreds of thousands of people at the Capitol yesterday gave President Obama the same message.

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

Tonight, my friends Rich Baehr and Ed Lasky of The American Thinker join me to preview Obama’s address before a joint session of Congress as well as talk a little about Van Jones and Obama’s views on 9/11.

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

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

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

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

In case you missed it, here is my latest PJ Media column that was published yesterday. It’s on Pat Buchanan’s wretched column from September 1 in which he seeks to absolve Adolf Hitler of most of the blame for starting World War II.

A sample of Buchanan’s ignorance:

What follows are just a few of the more jaw-dropping errors of fact that Buchanan has included in his article, as well as the answers to some of the many questions that he should have known before even asking them.

After Munich in 1938, Czechoslovakia did indeed crumble and come apart. Yet consider what became of its parts. The Sudeten Germans were returned to German rule, as they wished. …

How could they wish to return to a place that in the entire thousand-year history of that enclave had never belonged to Germany in the first place?

From the 13th century on, the Sudeten Germans (making up about 25 percent of the population of the Sudetenland) had been ruled by the Habsburg Empire. The old Austria-Hungarian province of Bohemia claimed most of the land, and when the empire disintegrated following World War I, the Sudetenland was annexed by the new nation of Czechoslovakia.

Churchill tried without success to get Chamberlain to stop referring to the “return” of the Sudetenland to Germany in order to refute Nazi propaganda which was claiming otherwise. In effect, Buchanan is parroting the Nazi party line on the Sudetenland by claiming that Germany was only threatening war because they wanted their territory back.

It’s not that Buchanan is playing at revisionism that I object to. There has been much scholarship in recent decades that has shed light on pre-World War I British moves against Germany that were to have profound consequences for Europe for much of the rest of the 20th century. That kind of revisionism enriches our understanding of history and can be argued on the basis of fact.

Buchanan’s thesis is without merit because he fails to contextualize his arguments, placing them in a vacuum where the actions of Hitler can be examined without reference to any other events that were occurring simultaneously or in the past. It’s a clever manipulation of chronology - not serious analysis: A writer’s trick and not reasoned argument.

It’s a rather long piece and by no means a complete takedown. Buchanan asks too many rhetorical questions for that. But I think I captured the most egregious errors of fact and logic in Mr. Buchanan’s sad attempt to excuse one of the greatest mass murderers in history his foul deeds.

The left is discovering that unhinged speech directed at Obama is a very bad, very destructive thing.

Wow. I mean, like, Wow.

This is surreal. If Joe Klein really believes that this is some kind of recent phenomenon, then we must assume that he agreed with the vast majority of the Democratic base when they accused Bush of going to war for Haliburton and oil, for being like Hitler, for wanting to kill black people in New Orleans by deliberately withholding aid, for plotting to take over the government and set up a dictatorship…

Since Klein (and the rest of the hand wringers on the left who are currently upset at the idiocy being demonstrated by right wing talk radio listeners who think Obama is a commie) didn’t write similar warning screeds when the kind of talk above was not only commonplace, but accepted as part of the lefty narrative against Bush (and supported by many, many Democrats on the Hill who fed these nutters by hinting that they were right), it makes bullsh*t like this ring hollow indeed:

The amazing thing remains not only the unwillingness of responsible Republicans–a term that is in danger of becoming an oxymoron–to call bull– on this, but also the willingness of many prominent Republicans to join in the slinging of garbage. Michelle Cottle reports that there are Republican-sanctioned efforts afoot to have parents not send their children to school on September 8 because the President is scheduled to address the nation’s school-children that day and they are afraid that he will fill their little heads with socialist propaganda. That is somewhere well beyond disgraceful.

Could I just say that the intensity of this getting pretty scary…and dangerous? We are heading toward a cliff and the usual brakes of civil discourse are not working. Indeed, the Republicans have the pedal to the metal–rushing us toward a tragedy far greater than the California health care forum finger-biting Karen describes below. I’m usually not one to panic or be overly worried about the state of our country–even when we do awful things like invade Iraq and torture people, we usually right our course before long–but I have a sinking feeling about where we’re headed now. I hope I’m wrong.

WHERE HAS JOE KLEIN BEEN FOR THE LAST 8 YEARS? “Stolen elections” ring a bell, Joe? That one was advanced not only in 2000 (despite massive evidence to the contrary) but also in 2004 - to the point that Members of Congress actually challenged the electoral vote! Talk about intensity!

I am at a total loss in understanding such blindness. The left spends fricking 8 years in refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the Bush Administration, and then Steve Benen has the gall to write crap like this?

Birthers, Deathers, Tenthers. Beck, Palin, Limbaugh. Bachmann, Inhofe, DeMint, King, and Broun. A scorched-earth campaign intended to tear the country apart, questioning the legitimacy of the president, the government, and the rule of law. It’s all very scary.

Allow me to substitute: “”No blood for oil” conspiracists, Diebold rigging voting machines, Bush-Hitler, agents of Israel running government, re-instituting the draft, Bush a tool of the Saudi Royal family, HALIBURTON!, a staged terrorist attack so that the 2008 elections would be canceled, FEMA built sites to house anti-war protestors…and on and on.

Not to mention McKinney, Conyers, and half the Democratic caucus who worked tirelessly to undermine the Bush presidency, attacking him in the most vile personal manner, tearing the country apart with their unhinged opposition to anything and everything he did. And while legitimate criticism of our war effort in Iraq could have been tolerated, very few of the rhetorical bombs tossed at Bush from the left was of the “legitimate” variety and much of it was gross exaggeration, hyperbole, dishonest, and deliberately provocative.

Yes Steve, It’s scary now and it was equally scary back then.

There is no excuse for the unhinged nature of dissent on the right - something I have written about at great personal and professional cost for years. But when lefties like Klein, Benen, and their hand wringing ilk invade the public discussion with their weeping about how extreme the opposition is without even acknowledging the dangerous, delegitimzing, depressing, maddening, and yes, scary rhetoric coming from their cohorts during the Bush years, one can not only question their judgment but their sanity as well.

Who are they trying to kid? I will continue to assault irrational, and shallow conservatives like Beck, Limbaugh, and their rabid listeners. But I expect to see a little context from the opposition as well. Nothing in politics happens in a vacuum. For every action, there is an equal or greater reaction.

These vacuous, easily misled talk show adherents spent 8 years listening to the opposition say the most outrageous, the most putrid stuff about their president. And I have seen it more than once in comments on various blogs (and some have taken me to task for writing against the idea), that now it’s our turn for a little payback.

My response has always been “Why ape the absolute worst in your opponents? How dumb is that?” Of course, such logic doesn’t seem to get anywhere except that these same fruitcakes accuse me of being a liberal.

I see very little difference in how unhinged the opposition is acting towards Obama and those who pilloried Bush. Klein, Benen, and the rest are just being drama queens, solemnly informing us how frightened they are at such rank emotionalism in politics, while intoning warnings of these times being the “worst” this, or the “most dangerous” that. It’s pure poppycock. They either slept through last 8 years of the left’s assault on decency and rational discourse or they have the balls to ignore it in order to make a political point.

Get real guys. You’re still part of the problem. The overwhelming number of people who oppose Obama do so in a rational, respectful manner. They are not birthers, or deathers, or any other unhinged faction. They are ordinary Americans and for you to lump them together with the wild eyed fanatics brands you as being equally culpable for the state of political discourse in this country.

Try the truth. It would be a nice change after 8 years of bombastic lies.

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

Tonight, my special guests are Cassy Fiano of AIP and Fausta Wertz. We’ll talk about Afghanistan, health care reform, and some politics.

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

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

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

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

Liberals are licking their chops at the prospect of using the death of Ted Kennedy to unite the party and get a health care reform bill passed.

Is exploiting the death of Kennedy a rotten, shameless, despicable thing to do? In politics, nothing is rotten or shameless - unless you’re on the other side taking advantage of an obvious political gambit. The only consideration is if something works or not. And baby, the Dems are going to milk the death of Kennedy until they wring every last ounce of political capital they can manage from his rotund carcass.

They are going to bend every effort to tie the emotional attachment with the late senator sincerely felt by the vast majority of Democrats directly to the health care bill with the hope that it will give some of the Blue Dogs, and liberals the cover they need to come to an agreement. In short, using the memory of Kennedy and good feelings elicited when appealing to his ghost, the Democratic leadership hopes it makes party members more willing to compromise to achieve the goal of creating KennedyKare.

I would fully expect the Republicans to do the exact same thing in similar circumstances. Of course, that would be an impossibility at the moment since no Republican living, dead, or in between has that kind of pull with the party, nor is there an issue that Republicans could rally around even if such a mythical beast existed. The appeals to Reagan’s memory may engender fond feelings of nostalgia, but the wellspring of actual political power that the Ghost of the Gipper can wield is just about dry.

So the question isn’t should the Democrats exploit Kennedy’s death, but rather what is the best way to go about doing it to achieve success?

Renaming the bill in honor of Kennedy won’t do much. Nice symbolism but hardly enough to break, what most media reports have said, is a titanic log jam of proposals on reform where several committees and individuals are working at cross purposes. Getting a bill out of this mish mash is going to take a lot more than simply calling the monstrosity something else.

In order to rally the Congress, more substantive and public demonstrations of both real and manufactured emotionalism will have to be employed for the gambit to work. Kennedy is going to have to first be beautified, and then named as a civic saint - a party icon that can be invoked with such reverence that “What would Teddy want?” becomes a rallying cry for reform leaders.

It starts today with a “carefully orchestrated” procession from the Kennedy’s beloved Hyannis Port, through the streets of Boston where the political and emotional symbolism will fairly drip from old imitation gas streetlights in the city’s historic North End:

A procession will leave Hyannis Port at 1 p.m. today, accompanying Kennedy’s body to Boston for a final journey through a city indelibly marked by his family.

At about 2:15, the procession is expected to wind its way through downtown, first passing through the North End, where his mother was born, then crossing the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway on its way to the State House, and ultimately passing the Bowdoin Street residence of President Kennedy when he first ran for Congress and the federal building that bears his name.

Crowds are encouraged to gather on Hanover Street along the Greenway, on City Hall Plaza, and on the Boston Common in front of the State House.

The procession will end at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, where Kennedy will lie in repose and visitors will be invited to pay their respects today and tomorrow.

There will be a massive outpouring of people who will want to view the remains, reminding members of Kennedy’s enormous popularity not only in the party, but with the average working American as well. TV images of the procession passing these Democratic touchstones will also serve to connect Ted to his martyred brothers thus making a direct appeal to generations of Democrats.

This is powerful stuff, and the news nets will milk coverage was well, seeing that events such as these will bring millions of eyeballs to their broadcasts who might not normally be watching.

Same thing happened when Reagan died, and for the same reasons. National tragedy is the honey that attracts millions of extra viewers and there’s no reason to complain about it.

There will apparently be no less than 3 memorial services; an invitation only event tomorrow night at the library (no word on whether it will be televised, although I can’t imagine it not). Then, the actual funeral mass at a Basilica on Mission Hill. Here, there will be “limited press access” which is probably short hand for pool reporting.

From there, more symbolism will be used as another procession will form, taking the casket to Logan Airport for the trip to Washington and a late afternoon burial at Arlington Cemetery.

President Obama is scheduled to give the eulogy on Saturday and will no doubt give it his usual best effort. How hard will he hit the meme of passing health care reform in Kennedy’s name? Hopefully, the guy isn’t completely tone deaf and will refrain from hammering the world wide audience over the head with references to it. However, it would be perfectly legitimate for Obama to specifically tout reform since Kennedy himself is quoted as saying the issue was central to his public life. Republicans will complain no matter what but the president must still strike a solemn balance between honoring Kennedy and taking care of politics.

A couple of interesting side notes. First, why no lying in state in the rotunda of the Capitol? It could be because they would then have to move the funeral mass to Washington, D.C. as protocol would dictate that any lying in state be conducted before the funeral rites. Plus, the funeral would have to be moved to a Sunday which, while permissible, is atypical in the Catholic church.

Secondly, there has been no announced Wellstone-style Congressional memorial service. It may not have been planned yet. Or, Democrats might be a little hesitant considering the grief they got following the tribute to Wellstone after his death from a plane crash in 2002.

Surely Al Franken is being disingenuous at best when he writes in HuffPo about that Wellstone tribute:

A pained Limbaugh asked his audience the day after the memorial: “Where was the grief? Where were the tears? Where was the memorial service? There wasn’t any of this!”

This was a lie. I was there. Along with everyone else, I cried, I laughed, I cheered. It was, to my mind, a beautiful four-hour memorial.

I didn’t boo. Neither did 22,800 of the some 23,000 people there. This has been a much discussed, much lied about aspect of the memorial. A number of Republicans, like Peggy Noonan and Weekly Standard writer Chris Caldwell claimed that 20,000 people had booed Trent Lott. (Caldwell claimed that 20,000 people booed a whole litany of people who weren’t booed at all.) We’ll never get an actual count - but I’d say about two hundred people booed Trent Lott when his face came on the Jumbotron. This was about a minute after 23,000 people cheered for Bill Clinton when his face appeared on the Jumbotron.

How does that square with an account from someone a little less partisan, William Saletan of Slate?

But the solemnity of death and the grace of Midwestern humor are overshadowed tonight by the angry piety of populism. Most of the event feels like a rally. The touching recollections are followed by sharply political speeches urging Wellstone’s supporters to channel their grief into electoral victory. The crowd repeatedly stands, stomps, and whoops. The roars escalate each time Walter Mondale, the former vice president who will replace Wellstone on the ballot, appears on the giant screens suspended above the stage. “Fritz! Fritz!” the assembly chants.

“Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning,” Wellstone declares in a videotaped speech shown on the overhead screens. “Politics is about improving people’s lives.” But as the evening’s speakers proceed, it becomes clear that to them, honoring Wellstone’s legacy is all about winning the election. Repeating the words of Wellstone’s son, the assembly shouts, “We will win! We will win!” Rick Kahn, a friend of Wellstone’s, urges everyone to “set aside the partisan bickering,” but in the next breath he challenges several Republican senators in attendance to “honor your friend” by helping to “win this election for Paul Wellstone.” What can he be thinking?

Franken is right. I watched the entire memorial service (I admired and liked Paul Wellstone even though I vehemently disagreed with him on almost everything he stood for.) It is true that 20,000 people did not boo Trent Lott. But unless those 200 phantom booers mentioned by Franken were right next to a microphone and had their numbers seem inflated, my guess would be more like 5,000 booed Lott, with even louder boos for Jesse Ventura, then governor. I seem to recall Denny Hastert also receiving a healthy round of boos but am not sure he was even there.

At any rate, Saletan’s description of the “Memorial Service” is spot on. Numerous speakers trashed Republicans - not just the two he mentioned. It could very well be that Franken - as rabid a partisan who has ever served in the senate - has an entirely different idea what partisan speechmaking is all about than normal people like you and me.

Whether it was planned to be a pep rally is not the point. That’s what it became and Democrats would do well to recall the reaction to press reports - including those bastions of right wing lying, the New York Times, and Time Magazine that led to at least a mini-backlash that could have cost Mondale the election.

But such an event might be a topper to what Democrats obviously hope will be an emotional outpouring in memory of Senator Kennedy which might translate into the political muscle necessary to ram through KennedyKare. In fact, one might expect the Democrats to try and stampede the issue into passing once Congress is back from their recess after Labor Day.

Would it work? The stampede, probably not. But I don’t see how the death of Ted Kennedy and the Democrat’s exploiting the emotional context of remembrance and history that will be on display, can do anything except help President Obama and the Congressional leadership realize some kind of health care bill before Thanksgiving.

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

Tonight, my special guests are Dr. Melissa Clouthier and Andrew Ian Dodge. We’ll look at the war that has broken out between the CIA and the White House as well as the latest on health care reform.

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

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

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

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

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

Tonight, my special guests are my good friend Jazz Shaw and AIP writer Despina Karras. We’ll discuss the fate of the public option in health care reform as well as a brewing civil war in the Democratic party.

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

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

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

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

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

Tonight, my special guests are my good friends Ed Morrissey of Hot Air and Rich Baehr of The American Thinker. We’ll discuss several topics surrounding the debate over health care reform.

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

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

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

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

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

Tonight, my special guests are Jimmy Bise, Dan Rhiel, and Stacy McCain. We’ll look at the lefty blogger who slandered Sarah Palin by starting a divorce rumor as well as the town halls being held by Democrats that are being disrupted by conservatives.

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

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

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

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