Category: Baseball Crank

Baseball Crank Explains It All

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— by Wombat-socho

Well, as much as anyone can explain what’s going on with the GOP and its primary voters this election season. I readily admit I’m a sucker for blog posts like these; everybody who writes books about our party seems to be either a) an insider with an axe to grind or b) a Democrat who would love nothing better than to use that axe on our necks, but the Crank is one of us slobs in the trenches, and seems fairly honest in his assessment of not only the candidates, but the other players in the primary game: the conservative commentariat, old pols like Bob “Viagra!” Dole, and radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh.


What The Republican “Establishment” Really Means
This post should be read first. It’s long, but well worth your time when it comes to understanding why nothing ever seems to change on Capitol Hill and who the players are in the GOP -not to be confused with the conservative movement, as you all should be aware by now, although that distinction is becoming increasingly meaningless as RINOs have become a threatened species within the GOP.


Establishments And Our Money: A Response To Avik Roy
This is a follow-on to the first post, answering the criticisms of sometime National Review writer Avik Roy, who appears to have taken the Crank’s comments excessively personally.

By and large, the two essays explain why the Tea Party and other populist chunks of the GOP base aren’t meekly falling into line behind Mitt Romney; as Billy Joel sang so long ago, it’s a matter of trust, and when it comes to Mitt, there ain’t none. This is something the people so eager to tear down Newt Gingrich don’t understand. His supporters know about his record. It’s been factored in, and at this point they just don’t care. They want a bomb-thrower, an iconoclast, a Samson in the Temple, and so far Rick Santorum just hasn’t been mad, bad, and dangerous to know enough. And every time Ann Coulter or the NR crowd tees off on Newt, it just hardens peoples’ resolve to stick their thumb in the eye of the Establishment. Because what goes around comes around, and it’s a lot more fun to dish it out than it is to sit back and take it.

Blogging and Incentives, Left and Right

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Baseball Crank writes that he has been blogging about politics since 2002 — “RedState wouldn’t be founded until the summer of 2004” — and relates some history of the ‘sphere:

If you have been reading or writing blogs for some time, you may recall the early, heady days of the blogosphere back around 2002-03 . . . The blog world was a small town in those days, where everybody knew everybody, nobody was too big to respond to emails, comments or trackbacks . . . I don’t want to overstate the degree of comity or idealize that era, but there was at least some degree of prevailing ethos that bloggers – amateurs using the internet to gather news and offer citizen punditry – had something in common even when their partisan and ideological interests diverged.
Those days are long, long gone. . . . The coordinated and utterly predictable left-wing assault on CNN’s hiring of RedState leader Erick Erickson over the past few days is merely the latest illustration of how the left side of the blogosphere sees it as its role not to debate conservative bloggers and pundits, but to destroy us and preclude us from being heard.

You should by all means read all of that, but when you’re done, come back here and read the rest of this, because the Crank touches on several points that are extremely important to understanding how different structural incentives separate Left and Right in the blog world and beyond. Continue reading Blogging and Incentives, Left and Right →