The Other McCain

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

Let The GOP Airbrushing Begin

Posted on | August 25, 2012 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

The Franklin Center points to Florida Watchdog:

The many months of attempting to find the “anti-Romney,” the candidate without a large state government health care plan or a more liberal governing record in his past, seem to have been unsuccessful.
As foretold by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in November 2011, the political press at that time was ready to commit to nearly a year of avoiding Romney’s ‘inevitability,’ engaging in an “extended masquerade, designed to persuade credulous readers and excitable viewers that the Republican presidential nomination is actually up for grabs.”

Masquerade, my right big toe. Every single day had to be played out, and it’s pure hooey to pretend otherwise:

  • Romney could well have imploded, a la Akin. Still could.
  • The base had to be identified, and persuaded to get off the couch.
  • The issues had to be identified, publicly mensurated, and sorted.

Anybody who says that, without the nomination process as a whole, Romney would not have arrived at Paul Ryan as VP pick is really doing a disservice. The primary votes were cast (I didn’t vote for Romney in the VA primary) and those results were important information for decision making upstream.

In summary, I reject all this: “your voice doesn’t matter, it’s all decided by the power brokers” noise. Pure disinformatzya. Keep an eye on anybody circulating it.

Category: GOP

Nugent Sticking To His Guns

Posted on | August 25, 2012 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

Newsmax:

Second-Amendment champion and rocker Ted Nugent expressed outrage at the shootings outside New York’s iconic Empire State Building on Friday, but pointed to the tragedy as a failure of gun control.

Money quote:

“Everybody dead in Aurora was unarmed and helpless. Everybody dead in Milwaukee was unarmed and helpless. Everyone dead at Virginia Tech was unarmed and helpless,” Nugent told Newsmax in an earlier interview this month. “How dare the president or Nancy Pelosi, or Bloomberg want more of that?”

ICYMI, here is the Nuge telling Piers Morgan a thing or two about gun control’s inefficacy:

via Mike Gaukin

Update: linked at Hogewash and WWTFT.

Category: New York

Racism Industrial Complex Training Film: “Bob Is A Racist”

Posted on | August 25, 2012 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

This country in general, and this blog in particular, cannot stop in its relentless quest for ‘fairness’, and a raaaaacism-free country.
Sadly, it appears that Bob Belvedere has been outed as a raaaaacist by the Solipsist Piffle Legal CanYouNameTerrorists (SPLC):

Next up on the list to be outed, apparently, are Troglopundit and American Glob. It’s all about the children, you see.

On a related note, Althouse explains the mental gymnastics required to view mention of a birth certificate as a raaaaacist statement:

To see it as racist, you have to have a background belief that to think of someone as a natural-born citizen is to think of him as white.

Ah, so! Connecting the dots in that fashion, the picture would start to resemble a bodily orifice.

Video via Ace and Ed Driscoll.

Category: Ace of Spades, Camp of the Saints, Ed Driscoll, Troglopundit

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Fear, Loathing and Deficient Hygiene

Posted on | August 25, 2012 | 15 Comments

TAMPA, Florida
We were cruising down U.S. 301 somewhere south of Hawthorne in the pre-dawn gloom, congratulating ourselves on having made good time on our long drive to the Republican National Convention when we saw a sight that inspired panic in our hearts.

There, lurking in the fog beside the highway, were three large deer.

Terror on four hooves.

Braking instantly, I slowed to 40 mph and Ali Akbar said, “Damn. I tried to yell ‘stop,’ but I couldn’t say anything.”

Indeed, we had both been momentarily paralyzed by fear. We were in that weird state of hypomanic delirium caused by sleep deprivation and excessive caffeine intake — too excited to sleep, too tired to think — and our mental acuity had begun rapidly degrading.

Had the deer actually tried to run in front of the KIA, we would have been doomed by my slow reflexes, dulled by exhaustion.

But the deer just stood and watched us roll past.

An omen? Maybe.

We arrived early in Tampa. The condo Ali has rented for the week won’t be ready until 11 a.m., so we had three hours to kill — and we reeked.

A long overnight road trip inevitably results in, well, hygiene issues. Ali had taken a shower before we left his apartment, so he wasn’t too bad, but I hadn’t shaved or showered since Thursday night.  By 8 a.m. Saturday, I didn’t look much like an award-winning journalist and smelled a lot like a hobo or, even worse, an Occupy protester. Speaking of which, here’s the front-page story from today’s Tampa Bay Times:

First encounter of protesters,
police will set tone for RNC
TAMPA — The first contact between police and Republican National Convention protesters is two days away. What happens Monday in downtown Tampa may well determine the success or failure of the entire week.
So say law enforcement experts who have studied large-scale political events that have spun out of control. Four years ago in St. Paul, Minn., police skirmished with protesters on the first day and never relaxed their riot-prevention mode. By week’s end, they had arrested more than 800 people.
“It’s too easy if a police department isn’t appropriately trained . . . to deal with protests in an offensive manner,” said Sam Rosenfeld, a security expert with the Densus Group in Plano, Texas. “To see every threat as a violent threat and to police it as such. If they have discipline and the self-control, it won’t escalate unless justified.”
The situation here is complicated by the low expectations that police and protesters have of each other. Recent reports of stockpiled bricks, ominous Internet videos, possible attempts by anarchists to shut down bridges and what protesters perceive as low-grade harassment have put both sides on edge. . . .

Read the whole thing. Clearly, Tampa police will need to employ maximum violence to suppress these dangerous anarchists. Crack a few heads with the riot batons, launch a few tear-gas grenades and if that doesn’t work . . . Well, one hesitates to suggest what further methods might be needed to maintain public order.

After all, Tampa is also bracing for Hurricane Isaac, and who knows what lawless chaos these protesters might unleash upon the innocent citizenry amid a hurricane-induced emergency? Best to take no chances: Shoot first, and ask questions later.

Did I mention that I’ve been awake for the past 27 hours? That I’ve probably consumed two gallons of coffee during that time? A man in my condition is apt to be a bit irritable, and a man who drives more than 900 miles to cover a political convention deserves something truly newsworthy: A couple dozen protesters beaten bloody by Tampa police — yeah, that’s what I’d call “news.”

While I’ve been sitting here indulging my weary imagination, Ali has been working on the details for Blog Bash, scheduled for Sunday evening at a mansion here in Tampa. The original plan was for about 60 people, but 165 people have RSVP’d. It’s the hottest ticket in town, with political VIPs and media celebrities on the guest list. If you’re gonna be in Tampa for the convention and haven’t RSVP’d yet, please be advised that you’d better get in touch with Ali Akbar immediately, and be prepared to beg.

Speaking of begging: Please don’t forget to hit the tip jar.

Ali Akbar works at the National Affairs Desk in Tampa, 9:30 a.m.

Well, it’s now about time to leave McDonald’s, head to the condo to take a long-overdue shower — and a nap.

 





Category: Election 2012, Fear and Loathing at the Republican National Convention

Review: “2016: Obama’s America”

Posted on | August 24, 2012 | 37 Comments

by Smitty

Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF): 2016 is a fantastic first therapeutic step for that Lefty friend of yours.

This blog doesn’t do movie reviews, being generally too caffeinated for extended screen staring. However, 2016: Obama’s America seemed a bloggable event. Here it goes.

For a movie with a futuristic title, 2016 spends the bulk of its time looking back, trying to get into the head of Barack Obama. If you find inner workings and hidden mechanisms of the subject head of no interest, then this is not the movie for you. Dinesh D’Souza, our guide to that head, uses Dreams From My Father as a roadmap. This is genius, as it obviates accusations that D’Souza was faking it as he went. As for the author of DFMF, [insert riff here].

The other key piece besides DFMF for scope is the auteur himself: D’Souza introduces 2016 by discussing his own, substantial biographical similarity to his subject. This is important because having an interviewer of Indian extraction grants the sort of outside-in perspective given by Borat, while remaining watchable. (I cashed out of Borat, playing on the hotel movie channel where I happened to be, at the rodeo scene where the Star Spangled Banner was butchered.)

So we have a quasi-foreigner peering through the lens of DFMF and offering the thesis that BHO is an echo of Barack Obama Sr.’s anti-colonialist views. I don’t disagree that this may be a significant component of his thinking. In confining himself to DFMF, D’Souza avoids material that would be incendiary. The target audience, again, seems to be people on the Left who need to come to grips with having been duped in 2008, and need to begin somewhere with just a little less bombast than the Mike Church show.

D’Souza’s task seems to be to portray Obama as coherent, if not likable. While D’Souza’s conservative views are in plain sight, D’Souza is anxious to show, through the faces and words of people who knew Barack Obama Senior as well as BHO, that BHO’s ideas have a starting point, and a historical context. There is a sense to it, whether or not you find it agreeable.

And I don’t. D’Souza wants to simplify the last four years to Barack working out his issues with his dad, as seen in DFMF. Well, I don’t think that more than a superficial analysis. I simply don’t believe much of anything about Barack. Every state from or about the fellow has to be assigned a probability of truth.

D’Souza’s scope, for example neatly avoids that pesky literary biography. While likely an example of pure marketing gimmickry, that and so many other details (Pakistan?) call into question whether much of Obama’s public record has a factual basis.

And so, having spent the bulk of the run time getting the audience to the 2008 election, D’Souza looks at some highlights from the administration. That bust of Churchill looms large for its colonial significance. The Obama Administration’s bizarre, spastic inability to relate the facts concerning the bust were at once silly and worrisome. Middle Eastern and domestic policy, seen through an anti-U.S. lens which sets America up as a neo-colonial power, and then then determines to topple the U.S., does make a depressing sense.

Ultimately, though, the results are what matters, not the motives or the analysis. Some time is spent on the race question, which D’Souza handles deftly. Obama, an interview passage with Shelby Steele suggests, is the uber-huckster, translating latent societal guilt into political power. People “wanted” to help Barack. This is how he wound up on the Harvard Law Review. The 2008 election was a triumph of mental judo, scaling Obama’s skill to eclipse Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But, while “Vote for Obama to prove you’re not raaaaacist” worked in 2008, the oratory didn’t scale. The cold light of day and the hard realities of economics meant that there was no recovery. The results aren’t there.

Now, according to D’Souza, for anti-colonialist Obama, this is all ‘fair’. Some karmic debt is paid if the entire world is a shanty town. I guess. Past all the crypto-Marxist theories, I can’t accept that BHO really wants an economically wasted country for himself and his daughters. It’s just too nihilistic, too ‘Borat’ of a worldview to accept, even in the possibly flaky head of another. Thus, I am not prepared to accept D’Souza’s thesis fully.

Where this movie is extremely valuable is as therapy for independent and blue-dog Democrat voters who need some kind of dispassionate means getting some perspective about 2008. In offering a non-shrieking place for Obama supporters to begin an introspective review of where we were told we’re going, where we are, and where we’d like to be, D’Souza has mad a valuable contribution.

Years later, when the memoirs are written, I expect that Obama will stand more revealed as combining the worst features of a Commie radical and a Mafia thug. 2016’s portrait of Obama as a man struggling to figure out what to do with that mental image of dad is a beginning. And it’s good for now. Plenty of time for a more sordid truth to emerge later, once the economic situation is less dire.

Update: linked by Rhetorican.

Update II: Another review at Stacy on the Right.

Update III: linked by Fishersville Mike.

Update IV: Another review at Perfection Under A Red Umbrella

Category: Barack Obama

Scott Ott On Fire; But It’s A Dry Heat

Posted on | August 24, 2012 | Comments Off on Scott Ott On Fire; But It’s A Dry Heat

by Smitty

This clip contains weapons-grade dry humor. View with caution and no beverages within the vicinity of the mouth:

Category: humor, PJTV

The World’s Youngest Blogger: Keep A Handle On That Ice Cream

Posted on | August 24, 2012 | 5 Comments

Category: World's Youngest Blogger

Todd Akin Rapes Missouri GOP

Posted on | August 24, 2012 | 41 Comments

The only question is whether it was a “legitimate” rape:

Whereas Rasmussen polling showed Romney leading pro-abortion President Barack Obama at the end of July and having Romney leading the race in the Show Me State all year, now Obama has the lead.
The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Missouri Voters finds President Obama with 47% support to Romney’s 46%. Three percent (3%) favor some other candidate in the race, and three percent (3%) more are undecided. At the end of July, Romney led by six percent and he has not trailed Obama in any Rasmussen poll all year.
“As the controversy over Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment continues, Mitt Romney’s lead in Missouri has vanished,” Ramussen says. “Missouri now moves from Leans Romney to a Toss-Up in the Rasmussen Reports Electoral College Projections.”

Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit was an unwilling victim and, unlike the “Magic Uterus,” the Missouri GOP had no natural defenses.

That’s not a hurricane headed toward Tampa: It’s a tropical depression.

 





 


Category: Election 2012, Fear and Loathing at the Republican National Convention, Missouri, Polls
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