The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Norquist And His Pesky Pledge

Posted on | June 14, 2012 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

[Clip below the fold, to preclude auto-play disaster.]

A few notes:

  • The Left cannot make a positive point. The caller has to insinuate that there is evil afoot when influence and money are used to constrain Leviathan. I’ll bet the beverage of your choice that the caller is some civil servant, GS-14 or better, whose dreams of bureaucratic utopia are hampered by Grover the Hobbit and his crew. Make a positive case, lady! Start from first principles and explain why giving money and power to the likes of our federal government isn’t like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
  • Ah, the sound of the Left hand clapping. Is the audience supposed to overlook the fact that the Left lobbies just as hard, or harder? Understood, everything the Left does is predicated upon the assertion: “The people are stupid.” Conservatives will continue to beat the Left with the Wisconsin stick until the Left grasps that this assertion is like Lincoln’s quote about fooling people. The internet has limited “some of the time” considerably, Lefty jackwagons.
  • Editorial question to Breitbart: how do you decimate an individual?



via Breitbart

Comments

20 Responses to “Norquist And His Pesky Pledge”

  1. McGehee
    June 14th, 2012 @ 8:56 am

    Editorial question to Breitbart: how do you decimate an individual?

    I don’t know about doing it to someone else, but a few years back with changes in eating behavior I managed to decimate myself.

  2. Bob Belvedere
    June 14th, 2012 @ 9:12 am
  3. smitty
    June 14th, 2012 @ 9:24 am

    Doesn’t render the point here moot.

  4. Bob Belvedere
    June 14th, 2012 @ 10:09 am

    Wasn’t meant to.  The point was to inform people that Norquist the man is not to be trusted or considered legitimate.

  5. smitty
    June 14th, 2012 @ 10:13 am

    Aye, trust but verify.

  6. PaulLemmen
    June 14th, 2012 @ 12:06 pm

    I resemble that remark!

  7. pdxnag
    June 14th, 2012 @ 12:56 pm

    Will Mr. Norquist sign a pledge in opposition to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in America?

    Not just any Dhimmi. This man is a clear and present danger to freedom. Does his favorite pledge include lower taxes for foreign sovereign fund owned corporations? I think that he thinks that it does. He may be an all-around scoundrel.
    (Think also of Hank Paulson’s 1.5 trillion conversion of private bankrupt Fannie Mae obligations to US Government obligations to foreign owners, like Norguist’s Islamist pals. Let Norquist scream about that giveaway. He won’t. In my opinion.)

    Imagine Hitler (or Haj Amin al-Husseini) saying “look, I’m for lower taxes.”

  8. Quartermaster
    June 14th, 2012 @ 1:33 pm

    Smitty, Reagan never trusted Ivan because everything they said had to be verified. It was a nice throw away line.

  9. Thane_Eichenauer
    June 14th, 2012 @ 1:42 pm

    Norquist focuses on the tax issue.  Anybody is welcome to take up more specific issues and make their own pledge.  It is hard enough to nail candidates down on taxes for anybody to expect Norquist to make variations of the pledge.

  10. pdxnag
    June 14th, 2012 @ 2:21 pm

    But for Norquist’s plants Bush would never have said “Islam is peace.”

  11. Zilla of the Resistance
    June 14th, 2012 @ 2:21 pm

    Worse than a dhimmi actually, he actually facilitates the civilizational jihad, whereas a dhimmi simply submits to it.
    http://politizilla.blogspot.com/2011/10/grover-norquists-islamic-supremacist.html
    The tax pledge is just a diversion from his islamic supremacist fuckery.  It’s a way to strongarm the right from saying anything about his treasonous activities, at it has been very effective at that, obviously. People nee to realize that they don’t need Grover Norquist or his pledge to oppose raising taxes and stop giving him a tool to black mail people with.

  12. Pathfinder's wife
    June 14th, 2012 @ 3:06 pm

    Sadly, he isn’t the only one I think needs to be worried about.
    But he one of the bigger snakes, so there’s that.

  13. Thane_Eichenauer
    June 14th, 2012 @ 4:10 pm

    I don’t know about you but I find his tax pledge to be very useful.  The day I hear of another pledge then I can consider (if I so choose) to stop paying attention to Grover Norquist and his ATR pledge.  Until an alternative appears I have no reason to cry about Norquist or his Muslim advocacy.  As Norquist points out his ATR isn’t the source of the power of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge but the voters who have a plum line by which to separate the people who only talk the talk from those who walk the walk.   

  14. Zilla of the Resistance
    June 14th, 2012 @ 4:49 pm

     I’ve got the run down of some of the others as well in this post from February 2011:
    http://marezilla.com/2011/02/conservative-dhimmitude/
    the infiltration of the Republican party is pretty deep.

  15. Zilla of the Resistance
    June 14th, 2012 @ 4:53 pm

     But for Norquist, Anwar al Awaki, who was later proven to have been deeply involved with 9/11, would never have been an honored GUEST of the Bush White House AFTER September 11, 2001!
    http://politizilla.blogspot.com/2011/08/no-quarter.html

    Immediately after islamic terrorists came and murdered us by the
    thousands on our own soil, our “leaders”, including President George W.
    Bush, disgracefully went out of their way to proselytize for the people
    who KILLED US, repeating the mantra “islam is a religion of peace”
    as if saying it enough times would make it so. George W. Bush appears
    to have been doing it out of naivete or wishful thinking, but the
    results were disastrous. Bush’s
    “muslim outreach” was facilitated by the notorious stealth jihad
    enabler “Republican” Grover Norquist and helped islamic supremacist
    infiltrators to reach the highest levels of our government. One such infiltrator was Anwar Al Awaki who Congress is only now wanting investigated for his role in the very 9/11 jihad attacks that insanely resulted in our government’s kissing the raised asses of the mohamadeens.

  16. Orrin
    June 15th, 2012 @ 1:04 am

    Norquist’s tax pledge has been a fiscal disaster, both in my home state of Nevada, and federally.   Not because we “need more revenue,” but because the major loophole in the pledge is to keep spending on the credit card.  Starving the beast doesn’t work – if he wants to reduce spending, he should ask candidates to pledge to reduce spending.

  17. smitty
    June 15th, 2012 @ 6:57 am

    You cheerfully join in the caller’s error on the clip: asserting that the tax pledge, itself, drives the fiscal insanity.
    The tax pledge is a necessary, but insufficient (to the degree that I can agree with you) tool in the reform effort.

  18. pdxnag
    June 15th, 2012 @ 1:21 pm

     

    Taxes are just one slice of a two slice
    sandwich of taxes and spending. But both of those issues taken in
    myopic isolation wholly ignore the big bad bully of market distortion
    caused by meddlesome elected folks at all levels of government. Maybe
    the guys and gals at http://www.ij.org could be an alternative hero, or
    additional hero. Market distortions are harder to quantify and
    explain (note ObamaCare/RomneyCare for example).

  19. Orrin
    June 16th, 2012 @ 2:24 am

     Sorry, but no – I didn’t.  Calling the tax pledge “necessary but insufficient” misses the problem.  The pledge has become the de facto definition of “fiscally conservative” ALL ON ITS OWN, when pledge signers are often anything but.  It provides cover for bad behavior (debt, budget gimmicks), while preventing real, actual conservative reform. 

    Here in Nevada, for example, the Governor drove a budget (in the face of a Dem controlled legislature!) that was $500 million LESS than the previous biennium’s budget – the first time Nevada government had ever actually shrunk.  And yet Norquist called Gov. Sandoval a “rat” because part of the budget overhaul included extending some taxes set to sunset after the Supreme Court rightly ruled a whole mess of budget gimmickry (thievery from local governments) illegal. 

    I’ve been writing about this issue in more depth back at my place.  This isn’t about “needing to be more moderate,” it’s about understanding what conservatism actually is – and is not.  And based on prior performance, Norquist’s pledge is anything but conservative.

  20. First Principles Blog Series On Taxation : The Other McCain
    June 16th, 2012 @ 11:11 am

    […] June 16, 2012 | No Commentsby SmittyFirst Principles was taking me to task in the comments over on the Norquist post. This is the kind of back-and-forth that can be highly educational, if one can dodge the temptation […]