The Other McCain

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

All Right, Everybody Quit Making Fun Of Matthew Yglesias

Posted on | August 13, 2012 | 10 Comments

by Smitty via (JWF)

Yglesias cannot be held to account for mistaking the Paul Ryan for the Congressman who engaged in insider trading after the 2008 housing meltdown:

Public Servant Drool Bucket
Man who cares about his country Useless sack

To the best of my knowledge, ‘Gentleman’ Jim Moran has offered no explanation, much less an apology, for the allegations of day trading made in Schweizer’s book. I’m sure it was all ‘ethical’, by the standards of Nancy Pelosi’s Congress, if whiffy.

Prof. William Jacobson plays the Sheldon Whitehouse card. Just leave a little room under the bus for ‘Gentleman’ Jim, eh?

You might think that only an abject moron could mistake the two, given the facts, but ease up: everybody looks the same, if you spend your day in a Lefty Media Gimp Suit. So, a little forbearance is in order.

Update: thanks, Instapundit!

Category: Jim Moran, Legal Insurrection, Paul Ryan, Uncategorized

The Onion: “Don’t Even Try To Pretend You Haven’t Imagined Me Being Elected President One Day.’

Posted on | August 13, 2012 | 17 Comments

by Smitty

Your NSFW potty mouth of the day, via AllahPundit on Twitter, is a faux Paul Ryan in the Onion:

Admit It, I Scare The Ever-Loving S**t Out Of You [Lefties], Don’t I?

This is one of the key aspects of Ryan: he’s young enough that, after 8 years of executive tutelage under Romney, he could potentially do where ManBearPig could not. Fleet up to CINC.

This is a crucial selling point. The GOP failed, in a major way, after Reagan, serving up an equestrian who was just another brick in our wall of Progressive Debt. Not to say that Bush41 was the worst, just that he failed utterly to advance the Reagan agenda.

And so we find ourselves out on Poo Pond, paddle-less. The two things we need are:

  1. vision, and
  2. time.

This is what’s so great about Ryan. So long as Ryan’s ticker doesn’t go south on him, he could be at the helm for significant reform.

Let that inform your efforts to support Romney/Ryan.

Update: linked by Fishersville Mike.

Category: Election 2012, GOP

Is ‘Pansexual’ a Synonym for ‘Slut’?

Posted on | August 13, 2012 | 30 Comments

“Any port in a storm”? “Love the one you’re with”? There are some people whose only requirement is friction, and I suppose it would be accurate to describe them as “pansexual,” although another suitable synonym would be “Texas Democrat“:

Democrat Mary Gonzalez was the first lesbian to openly serve in the Texas House of Representatives, and now she’s becoming the first “pansexual,” too.
“During the campaign if I had identified as pansexual, I would have overwhelmed everyone . . . Now that I’m out of the campaign, I’m completely much more able to define it,” she explained.

So what does it mean? Basically, she’s into freaks:

Although she came out as bisexual at age 21, Gonzalez said she has also dated transgender and “gender-queer” people, in addition to women. . .
“As I started to recognize the gender spectrum and dated along the gender spectrum, I was searching for words that connected to that reality, for words that embraced the spectrum. At the time I didn’t feel as if the term bisexual was encompassing of a gender spectrum that I was dating and attracted to.“

Whoever or whatever’s available in the bar at closing time. eh?

Her campaign motto is written on the bathroom wall of every honky-tonk in Texas: “For a good time call Mary Gonzalez.”

UPDATE: In related news: FAA AC/DC A-OK! (The National Center for Transgender Equality? The question arises: Equal to what? I mean, you were a man and now you’re a woman, so if you’re the victim of “discrimination,” who’s oppressing you? Isn’t this all just a war against . . . y’know, normal people?)

Category: Democrats, Texas

Iowa Flashback: August 2011

Posted on | August 13, 2012 | 20 Comments

Intersection in a cornfield near Roland, Iowa

Paul Ryan is campaigning — and getting heckled — today in Iowa and I don’t know how many readers realize that today is the one-year anniversary of the Iowa GOP Straw Poll at Ames, which I covered under the headline, “Fear and Loathing at the Hilton Coliseum.”

In case you’ve forgotten, Michelle Bachmann won the straw poll, Ron Paul was second, Tim Pawlenty was a weak third, Rick Santorum was a surprising fourth and Herman Cain finished a disappointing fifth. Rick Perry was sixth at Ames; his write-in total actually exceeded Mitt Romney’s straw-poll vote. What reminded me of this anniversary was an e-mail I got today from an Iowa reader:

I’ve been following your articles since you interviewed me at Herman Cain’s stop at Denison, IA, in 2011. Keep up the good work.

Denison? Hmmm. That sounded familiar. So I quickly searched the archives and confirmed my memory — yes, that was the stop on Herman Cain’s bus tour with the overflow crowd at Crunk’s Cafe. And yes, I’d interviewed the lady afterwards:

COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa — Lois Vanderbur drove 30 miles from her home in Mapleton to attend Herman Cain’s event Monday in Denison. When the event was over, she went to eat at a nearby McDonald’s, where I overheard her tell her friend Rose Wolden: “Obama was an hour late for his speech and promised to raise taxes, and then the Dow fell 550 points.”
Mrs. Vanderbur, 68, is a very well-informed grandmother. When I asked her about the stock market tumble, she whipped out her iPhone, called up the latest numbers and told me that the Dow Jones Industrial Average had, in fact, closed at 10,809.85 for a one-day loss of 634.67 points. Forget all that stereotypical talk about Iowans being a bunch of ignorant hicks from flyover country. Their state’s most famous product is still corn — and the cornfields here are better measured by the square mile than by the acre — but the first-in-the-nation Iowa Caucuses have made politics at least the state’s second-most important export, and few Americans are more civic-minded than a politically active Iowan.
Mrs. Vanderbur and Mrs. Wolden were among more than 60 area residents who crowded into Cronk’s Café in downtown Denison for Cain’s mid-afternoon event, the second stop on his statewide “Common Sense Solutions” bus tour. . . .

You can read the whole thing, if you’d care to refresh your memory of where the campaign stood a year ago, although it seems like a million years ago now, doesn’t it? Read more

Category: Election 2012, Iowa, Shoe Leather Fund

Reasons Not to Have Sex

Posted on | August 13, 2012 | 20 Comments

You’re young. You’re sexy. You meet somebody else young and sexy. And next thing you know, you’ve got yourself a nearly incurable case of antibiotic-resistant Super-Clap:

Five years ago, the CDC said fluoroquinolones were no longer effective, but oral cephalosporins were still a common/easy treatment. Now injected ceftriaxone is the only recommended effective drug we have left. And it has to be given along with either azithromycin or doxycycline. . . .
Once gonorrhea becomes resistant to the last of our cephalosporin antibiotics — “its only a matter of time,” according to Dr. Gail Bolan, Director of STD Prevention at the CDC in todays announcement — we will have no treatment. Then when it gets into your bloodstream, it will be lethal.

Sex = death. Might as well start smoking cigarettes. It’s safer.

(Hat-tip: PJ Media.)

Category: Science, Sex

Memo for Oliver Willis

Posted on | August 13, 2012 | 19 Comments

Your make the intriguing assertion that it’s bad form for the press corps to tell the version of events favored by the campaign:

So it appears that the Romney campaign briefed multiple news outlets about the behind the scenes of how they hid Paul Ryan’s selection from the media. I’m not saying this isn’t a story, but the way this is being rolled out is pretty ridiculous.
All of these news outlets and several of their writers began tweeting out links to the story at midnight, which would indicate they were all under some kind of embargo. But they’re all basically telling the same story!
I feel like these guys all decided to embrace their inner Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum while writing this fanfic.
It’s also worth noting that with very few variations, this is the version of the story of how Romney selected Ryan that the campaign wants to be told.

Really? For the past four years (longer than that, actually, going back to fall 2007, during the Democratic primary campaign against  Hillary) the press corps has rather shamelessly covered Obama in exactly the way David Axelrod wants Obama covered. Bernie Goldberg wrote a book about it entitled A Slobbering Love Affair.

However, let a Republican campaign manage to control their own narrative — no matter how minor the subject — and you cry foul.

What you are clearly advocating is that the press must be relentlessly adversarial toward Republicans, even while your and your buddies at Media Matters denounce any news organization that takes an adversarial approach toward its reporting on Democrats. You are, in effect, expecting the media to operate according to Herbert Marcuse’s Marxist-Leninist redefinition of tolerance:

“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”

And the insulting thing about it is that you act as if the rest of us are too stupid to see what you’re doing. It is not my intention here to write an entire treatise on the causes and effects, the history and culture of liberal media bias. Frankly, I just don’t have time today. But your indignation at the coverage of the Ryan roll-out calls to mind something John Podhoretz observed:

So insulated are many, if not most, American liberals that they simply presume that which they despise is inherently despicable, and that what they fear is inherently fearful. As they gather in their echo chamber, all they hear are voices resounding with the monstrousness of redesigning Medicare and the parlousness of cutting the federal budget. They genuinely do not know that budget cutting is popular, even if only in theory, and that tens of millions of voters do understand the notion that the government is living far beyond its means.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll.) This “insulation” of which Podhoretz speaks is made possible by the dominance of liberalism not only in the news media, but also in the entertainment industry and in the educational establishment. It takes a real effort for anyone to see over the hedges of liberal belief that have been erected around us, and to understand that the world we behold on TV — in magazines, in movies, in history textbooks — is a warped funhouse-mirror reflection of the actual world.

The people who perpetuate these distortions of reality are enthralled by what Thomas Sowell called The Vision of the Anointed.

They believe themselves to be engaged in a worthy cause, the advancement of capital-p Progress, and they regard those who oppose them as unlightened or even malevolent.

Therefore, the anointed attempt to suppress knowledge of facts that don’t confirm their vision, and insist that we pay attention only to the narrative that they have carefully constructed. This is why Media Matters rails so persistently and obsessively about Fox News, and this is why liberals high-fived each other when Andrew Breitbart died, because the political success of liberalism is dependent on monopolistic control of the narrative.

You think we’re too stupid to see what you’re doing, and you demonize anyone who accurately describes what you’re doing, lest anyone pay attention to the little boy who points out that the Emperor has no clothes.

As to this specific occasion — major news organizations all telling the same story of the Ryan roll-out — is it not possible that the reason they’re all telling the same story is because the story is true? Must you rule out as self-evidently implausible the version of events told by the Romney campaign? Must members of the media presume that whatever Republicans say is false? Are Republicans so notoriously dishonest that even in so minor a matter as this, they must be lying, so that reporters must apply their investigative skills to learn the hidden (and presumably scandalous) Real Truth behind the lies?

What you seem to be asserting, Oliver Willis, is either:

A. Everything that Republicans say is false.

or

B. There is no such thing as objective truth, only whatever “truth” serves a particular political purpose.

We are not too stupid to see the implicit logic of your arguments, nor are we too stupid to understand why the Democrat-Media Complex is panicked by the Neutral Objective Fact that Paul Ryan is sexy.

 

Category: Media Bias

Maddow Left Sputtering By ‘L’ Word

Posted on | August 13, 2012 | 24 Comments

by Smitty

Say what you want about Rich Lowry, he did a splendid job against Keith Olbermann’s more masculine brother here. It turns out that Maddow just can’t handle the word ‘logic’:

I guess that in Maddow-land the selection of Ryan as VP means that Mitt Romney is open to attack for every vote Ryan has ever taken, in addition to every version of Ryan’s Roadmap, plus notes that Ryan passed back in homeroom, and so forth.

via Newsbusters

Update: shorter Daily Pundit: “Duh!” Yet I still cling to the notion of rational political dialog. Call me a romantic.

Category: Democrats, MSNBC

Paul Ryan in the American Spectator

Posted on | August 13, 2012 | 15 Comments

When you think about qualifications as vice president, the first thing you have to ask is, “Have they written for the American Spectator?”

Paul Ryan’s byline first appeared in the American Spectator in July 2009, and today he’s back with a column slamming Obama’s “you didn’t build that” rhetoric:

President Obama recently made a stunning remark about business owners in America’s free enterprise economy. After dismissing the hard work and ingenuity of successful individuals, the president said, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Who? Ultimately, the government.
Yet this was only the latest version of the president’s four-year disparagement of American entrepreneurialism. In 2008, then-candidate Obama said he intended to “spread the wealth around” — not his own wealth through voluntary transactions, of course, but the earnings belonging to American families through coercive redistribution. In April 2009, he claimed that the founding principles on which America was built are too weak to withstand 21st century pressures. He called our free economy a house built upon sand, destroyed when the financial storm of 2008 hit. America must be reconstructed, he asserted, upon a “new foundation” of “pillars” hewn from the solid rock of big government.
The agenda he promoted demonstrated in a practical way what his rhetoric meant. He pushed unprecedented stimulus spending, a government-driven health care overhaul, further distortions in the U.S. financial sector, an expensive cap-and-trade system to restrict American energy, and more. His transformative proposals were based on a vision of a government-centered society that conflicts with the foundational principles of freedom and equality rooted in our Declaration of Independence. To support his expansive new vision of government without limits, the administration sent Congress four massive annual budgets that called for crushing levels of debt. The Democrat-controlled Senate, cognizant of the political peril of voting for such reckless spending, taxes, and new debt, gave up on budgeting altogether. The U.S. Senate unanimously rejected Obama’s budgets, without passing any budget of its own for over three years.
The failed leadership and the dismal results from a president of such great promise have been disappointing. . . .

Read the whole thing.

And, by the way, while I am not a candidate for the vice-presidency — doggone that “vetting” process! — I am still a correspondent for the American Spectator, and have my own column there today.

Category: American Spectator, Election 2012, Paul Ryan
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