Right Wing Nut House

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

Tonight, I welcome Fausta Wertz of Fausta’s Blog, Jeff Dunetz of Yid with a Lid, and Monica Showalter of Investors Business Daily. We’ll discuss Mark Steyn’s piece in The New Criteria about the inevitable decline of the two great English speaking nations.

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

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

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

My latest is up at PJ Media where I give an account of the passage of the massive tax increase that was rammed through the Illinois legislature last week.

A sample:

The fact is, we treat these politicians and the whole process as if it were a religion. This breeds humorlessness among the citizenry, which leads to a decidedly unfunny political climate where we are forced to take goofballs like Joe Biden and Sarah Palin seriously. What passes for humor from both sides is the kind of ill-tempered, mean-spirited, pulling-the-wings-off-flies jocosity you grow out of when you hit puberty.

That’s why before I go to bed at night, I hit my knees and thank God I live in Illinois.

You people who live in good government states like Minnesota and Vermont really don’t know what you’re missing. You might have the occasional stray dog who wanders off the straight and narrow, dipping their greedy paws into the public purse, or perhaps being a little too generous to their friends and political supporters. Politics, like any human endeavor, has more than its share of charlatans, grave robbers, and amoral amoebas who were born with a prison number tattooed across their forehead. No matter how squeaky clean you try and make your local governments, these types always seem to make an appearance now and again just to remind us all of the moral frailty of our species.

But really, how entertaining is that kind of government? Once you start taking politicians too seriously, they start taking themselves too seriously and then you’re in trouble. A politician who takes himself too seriously actually believes they can solve the problems of the world by spending just a little bit more money that isn’t theirs. They start to believe their own campaign rhetoric about how wonderful they are and before you know it, your state is up to its eyeballs in debt.

Illinois has the most fascinating, the most colorful, the most entertaining politicians in the land, which makes following the goings on in Springfield akin to watching a combination Demolition Derby and cockroach race. Of course, we still get politicians who spend the state into penury, but at least we’re disabused of the notion that any high ideals or uplifting principles are at work. It is a rotten-to-the-core, cynical, sybaritic exercise in politics for fun and profit and it was on full display last week. A lame duck session of the Illinois legislature passed a gargantuan tax increase on individuals and businesses, while borrowing another $4 billion to seed the gold-plated retirements of unionized state workers.

I am going to start calling Illinois Governor Pat Quinn “Four-County Quinn.” In the November election, Quinn managed to win just 4 out of 102 Illinois counties. Of course, he won Cook County, the most populous county in the state, by more than 500,000 votes. This proved too much a handicap for his Republican opponent Bill Brady to overcome.

It should be obvious by now that Illinois politics will never be reformed, which is why it is so much better to see the goings on in Springfield as comedy rather than bemoan the lack of good government. Life’s too short to grant these crooks and charlatans the benefit of taking them seriously. If you do, you’ll only end up miserable like all Illinois political reformers who continue to be disappointed that their efforts don’t yield more positive results. Trying to stop a tidal wave of corruption with a spoon is not logical - but it makes the reformers fair game for humor too. King Canute had better luck stopping the tide from coming in than reformers have in trying to stem the corruption in Illinois politics.

What happens next with Illinois’ fiscal crisis? Sit back, pop some popcorn and prepare to be amazed and entertained.

I have a piece up this morning at FrontPage.com on the fall of the Lebanese government.

A sample:

What appeared to be the last straw was the failure of a joint Syria-Saudi Arabian initiative to broker a compromise between the two parties. Indeed, the issue is so intractable and the positions of the adversaries so set in stone, that a compromise always appeared to be out of reach. When this became obvious on Tuesday night, Hezbollah jacked up the pressure by demanding that the cabinet, which hadn’t met since December 15th of last year, meet to vote on the issue while threatening to walk if this demand was not swiftly met. The majority March 14th party refused to convene a cabinet meeting with a gun to its head, at which point it became just a matter of time before Hezbollah made good on its threat.

The opposition chose the present moment to make their move as Prime Minister Hariri was in Washington meeting with President Obama. The timing could not be coincidental as the opposition ministers announced their resignations at the same time that Hariri and Obama were holding talks. Mustapha Allouch, a senior member of Hariri’s Future Movement, told AFP that the opposition wanted “Hariri to enter the meeting with the US president as an ex-premier or as head of a caretaker government.”

Hariri cut short his visit to Washington and will return to Lebanon to consult with his coalition about what to do next, after stopping off in France for talks with French President Nicholas Sarkozy.

[...]

And so Lebanon’s descent into the Iran-Syrian orbit continues unabated as Hezbollah’s grip on the throat of the tiny country gets stronger and Syria circles around the carcass like a jackal waiting to pounce once the prey stops struggling. It’s a far cry from the heady days of the “Beirut Spring” just 5 short years ago when such high hopes were ignited by massive protests that kicked the Syrian army out of Lebanon and elections brought independent-loving democrats to power.

Now, many of those politicians are either dead, or cowed by events. And the people of Lebanon are on edge today wondering how long – or if – the peace will last.

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

Tonight, I welcome Jazz Shaw of Hot Air’s Green Room, Vodkapundit Stephen Green of PJTV, and Doug Mataconis of Outside (and Below) the Beltway. We’ll examine political rhetoric and whether its excesses can lead to the kind of tragedy that occurred in Arizona last Saturday.

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

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

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

Michael Daly writing in the New York Daily News:

Palin would no doubt say that she was only speaking in metaphor, that she only meant her followers should work to unseat Giffords and 19 other Democrats who had roused her ire by voting for health care.

But anyone with any sense at all knows that violent language can incite actual violence, that metaphor can incite murder. At the very least, Palin added to a climate of violence.

Palin should have taken it as a warning of what might happen when a Tea Party hothead dropped a gun while heckling Giffords at an earlier Congress On Your Corner event, more than a year ago.

No doubt Palin is not even bothering to defend her use of metaphors because “figures of speech” are just that; a way to colorfully enhance language to make it more interesting and memorable. If I were to say, “Hang Michael Daly from the highest yardarm!” no one with a rational brain cell in their head would actually believe that I was advocating violence against Mr. Daly - despite the fact that a swift whop to the nose with a rolled up newspaper is in order for his clueless rant about metaphors inciting violence.

Similarly, as Jack Shafer points out, the use of military metaphors in politics is so pervasive as to make any criticism of it both bizarre and hypocritical:

For as long as I’ve been alive, crosshairs and bull’s-eyes have been an accepted part of the graphical lexicon when it comes to political debates. Such “inflammatory” words as targeting, attacking, destroying, blasting, crushing, burying, knee-capping, and others have similarly guided political thought and action. Not once have the use of these images or words tempted me or anybody else I know to kill. I’ve listened to, read—and even written!—vicious attacks on government without reaching for my gun. I’ve even gotten angry, for goodness’ sake, without coming close to assassinating a politician or a judge.

From what I can tell, I’m not an outlier. Only the tiniest handful of people—most of whom are already behind bars, in psychiatric institutions, or on psycho-meds—can be driven to kill by political whispers or shouts. Asking us to forever hold our tongues lest we awake their deeper demons infantilizes and neuters us and makes politicians no safer.

Indeed, at the risk of sounding crass, the only reason this brouhaha erupted was because a nutcase coincidentally got a gun and shot a congresswoman. Otherwise, Sarah Palin’s “bullseye” map had long been forgotten and dropped off the radar of our political conversation.

This begs the question of when Mr. Loughner could have been exposed to the map and why it took him many months to become inspired enough by it to act out his fantasy. Is this a slow motion incitement by metaphor? Why the delayed reaction - even if you accept the preposterous notion that Loughner saw the bullseye map in the first place. Someone on the left might want to explain this to the rest of us before they continue with the “Palin has blood on her hands” meme. Where did Loughner see the bullseye map? When? How could a mind without logic or reason, logically process the bullseye map - as in the suggestion of cause and effect being posited by many liberals - and become inspired to kill?

If you’ve read Loughner’s YouTube blather and incoherent ranting, you wonder if any such logical assumption can be made:

If I teach a mentally capable 8 year old for 20 consecutive minutes to replace an alphabet letter with a new letterand pronunciation then the mentally capable 8 year old writes and pronounces the new letter and pronunciation that’s replacing an alphabet letter in 20 consecutive minutes.

I teach a mentally capable 8 year old for 20 consecutive minutes to replace an alphabet letter with a new letter and pronunciation.

Thus, the mentally capable 8 year old writes and pronounces the new letter and pronunciation that replaces an alphabet letter in 20 consecutive minutes.

Every human who’s mentally capable is always able to be treasurer of their new currency.

If you create one new currency then you’re able to create a second new currency.

If you’re able to create second new currency then you’re able to create third new currency.

You create one new currency.

Thus, you’re able to create a third currency.

You’re a treasurer for a new currency, listener?

You create and distribute your new currency, listener?

There’s more, but if you believe that this tragically broken mind can process information the same way that you or I do then you’re as illogical as Loughner.

Note also that much of the narrative about this incident being caused by conservatives using violent language, threats, and metaphors was formed within a couple of hours of the shooting. In other words, before anything was known about the killer - even his name - the meme had been set, the narrative formed, the smears unleashed despite the fact that motive, state of mind, or even the political affiliation of the killer was published.

This appears to be another case of liberals not letting a crisis go to waste. Already, there has been a move to introduce gun control legislation in Congress. If someone can show me how this tragedy could have been prevented unless guns were banned entirely, I would love to see that fantasy.

And as a sign of the times, Democrats are already using the tragedy to raise money. On the linked page, right next to the letter asking Democrats to send well wishes to Rep. Giffords, is a great, big blue button encouraging people to donate. That link appears in an mass emailing sent by “21st Century Democrats” with this partisan appeal:

We also know that Sarah Palin and Rep. Giffords’ opponent used violent imagery last year urging her opponents to “target” her. Last spring, after she voted to expand health insurance coverage to working families and cut drug costs for senior citizens her office was violently attacked.

Members of 21st Century Democrats helped elect Rep. Giffords in 2006 and re-elect her 2010 because she wasn’t afraid to fight for working people — or listen to them at the neighborhood supermarket. She voted for health care; Wall Street reform, job creation, and much more.

She stood with us — and we need to stand with her in her toughest hours.

Makes you want to pull out your hanky, doesn’t it? Oh, and while you have your hand in your pocket, could you also take out your checkbook and give generously?

You really can’t blame them. They are only following the dictum about not letting a crisis go to waste - perfected by Rahm Emanuel and his boss, the President of the United States, who himself, once used a very colorful metaphor in giving advice to his supporters about how to “debate” the opposition:

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said in Philadelphia last night. “Because from what I understand, folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.

Politics is not tiddlywinks. It is a full contact sport that oftentimes makes the MMA look like a tea party (metaphor deliberate). Efforts to curb “violent metaphors” - a matter of opinion with which reasonable, rational people recognize as accepted speech - is really about curbing speech by the opposition. Liberals don’t expect anyone to take their violent metaphors seriously when they use them. Only the tragic coincidence of a shooting spree by an individual whose reason has abandoned him has given the left a blatantly political opening of which they have shamelessly and to their great discredit, cynically taken advantage.

The tragedy in Arizona, where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot and seriously wounded by an incoherent maniac has caused many leftist heads to explode in absolute, unadulterated idiocy.

First of all, congrats on once again trying to politicize a tragedy. It warms my heart to know that suffering and dying by humans brings out the worst in many on the left and that common decency doesn’t matter half as much as trying to score partisan political points using the most incredibly stupid line of attack available.

While we’re at it, I would say to my friends on the right that it is equally nauseating to try and turn the tables and place responsibility for this crime on the left. The reasons both sides are so monumentally wrong is simple; the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, wasn’t just nuttier than a fruitcake; he was so sick that he was oblivious to the world around him. He was caught up in an alternate universe to the point that trying to say that something from our reality set him off is laughable.

For instance, one of the usual suspects of leftist who make hay out of suffering and tragedy, Jane Hamsher, tries to pin the blame on the congresswoman’s opponent:

Per Puppethead in the comments, Giffords’ 2010 Congressional opponent Jesse Kelly held a June 12 gun event that was billed as follows on the Pima County Republican website:

Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shot a fully automatic M15 with Jesse Kelly

The old Sarah Palin bullseye map of targeted Democrats is pulled out also. Curious the the exact same concept - a bullseye map of GOP targets highlighted by the DNC - seems to have been misplaced by Hamsher. No matter. The silliness - one might say the loony tunes attempt to connect a campaign event that involved taking some shots at a plain old target with the GOP candidate many months ago with today’s tragedy bespeaks a mind devoid of reason and logic. Sorry, not this time.

Mr. Lougner’s incoherent rambling in a YouTube posting entitled “My Final Thoughts” should close the case as to whether anything anyone has ever said anywhere at any time had anything to do with motivating him to go postal. Doug Ross has screen shots of the video if you’re interested in reading the missive of a stone cold maniac with absolute zero connection to reality.

Here’s the bottom line. It is the height of idiocy to posit that the motivations of humans who commit such heinous acts are as simple as many on the left make them out to be. The mind is a terribly complex organ and to try and make the gobsmackingly stupid direct connection between something anyone says or does, and the act of violence itself is giggle-worthy. This is especially true in broken and smashed minds like Mr. Loughner.

Trying to draw a line from something Hannity or Palin, or any other conservative says and a light going off in Loughner’s head demonstrates a cluelessness that proves partisan intent rather than any profound psychological truth. It also shows a laughable ignorance of how the mind works - even among those with a healthy psyche. The armchair psychologists on the left who continue to ascribe logical connections to an illogical mind can’t really be serious, can they? They have to know that it is more than likely that a voice in Loughner’s head told him to kill the congresswoman for reasons having nothing to do with politics.

We go through this exercise every time there’s violence like this. One side or the other tries to make political hay out of tragedy with no more knowledge of what drove the perpetrator to violence than my pet cat Aramas.

And at least Ari has the good sense to keep his mouth shut even if he does have a half assed theory about what caused a murderer to snap and let slip his inner demons to wreak havoc on our reality.

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

Do ya think I was too hard on them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A sample:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where does this leave Rahm Emanuel?

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

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

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

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

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

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