The Other McCain

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

Stephen Green’s Hair Of The Dog

Posted on | April 9, 2012 | Comments Off on Stephen Green’s Hair Of The Dog

by Smitty

George Will owns it at the outset, but the closing Lincoln bit was a nice touch:

Category: Uncategorized, VodkaPundit

Blaming Citizens United For Gingrich Is Like Blaming Kel-Tec For Trayvon Martin

Posted on | April 9, 2012 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

Possibly too soon for the analogy, but this bit from Adam Clancy at The American Interest is really that off-putting (emphasis mine):

But as Gingrich found out all it now takes is the support of one billionaire to keep your campaign alive indefinitely. For Gingrich, that billionaire is the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam. Adelson donated $5 million to the floundering Gingrich campaign after Iowa. When that failed to resuscitate the campaign Miriam kicked in another $5 million in the lead-up to South Carolina. And as if to prove that casino owners can be just as profligate as their customers, Adelson donated another $5 million in mid-February after it became apparent that Gingrich’s win in South Carolina was not the game changer they had hoped it would be. All told, the Gingrich super PAC “Winning Our Future” raised $18.8 million through the end of February, of which the Adelsons contributed $16.5 million. It is fair to say that without the Adelsons’ largesse, enabled by the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, Gingrich would have gone quietly into the good night.
As well as prolonging the primary, Citizens United also made it a nastier process. Mitt Romney ran a traditional, pre-Citizens United campaign. He performed well in Iowa despite the state not being a naturally fertile ground for his brand of Republicanism. In friendlier territory in New Hampshire, Romney won a convincing victory. He emerged from the Granite State as the overwhelming favorite and proceeded to South Carolina with at least one eye on the general election. What Romney’s campaign had not counted on was Sheldon Adelson’s checkbook.

What is with all this emoting about nastiness? This whinging about on the topic of money in politics is a Progressive’s erotic legislation dream:

  1. Stir up the angst about the money.
  2. Write another atrocious piece of legislation.
  3. ???
  4. Progress!

Let it be. There is no way under the sun that you’re going to achieve human redemption through the rule of law, much less stink-free electoral campaigns. The solution to bad speech is more speech, but it does not follow that the answer to odious legislation/court decisions is more legislation/litigation:

But fortunately, voters are not mindless automatons. They evaluate the messages being presented to them and compare them with elected officials’ records in office. An incumbent with a good record will find his ads reach a receptive audience. Conversely, an interest group whose agenda is broadly unpopular with voters is going to have a harder time using ads to reduce the candidate’s poll numbers.
Relatedly, as Meg Whitman recently learned, advertising dollars are subject to diminishing returns. If the average voter sees candidate A’s ad 10 times and candidate B’ ad only once, that’s likely to give candidate A a sizable advantage. But if the average voter sees candidate A’s ad 1000 times and candidate B’s ad only 100 times, the gap is unlikely to matter. Indeed, some voters might get so tired of seeing candidate A’s ads that they vote for candidate B out of spite.

So, while I’m no more enthusiastic about batteries of negative advertising artillery than the next bloke, I submit that the electorate itself is doing as good a job or better as Congress in dealing with the situation.

Category: Election 2012, Newt Gingrich

In Case You Haven’t Noticed Yet, Everybody Recently Went Crazy

Posted on | April 9, 2012 | 29 Comments

Everybody but me and you, that is, and one of us is probably on the verge of cracking up under the enormous stress that seems to be driving people off the deep end lately.

Either we’re in the midst of an epidemic of mass hysteria, or else all these people jabbering like magpies on the Internet are describing a reality with which I’ve lost touch, because it makes no sense to me:

Mitt Romney: He’s Inevitable! Electable! Invincible!

Crazy, right? But kooks who believe such things seem to be everywhere nowadays, especially on the Internet:

U.S. Senator Calls President ‘Stupid’ on Twitter

 You don’t even have to look for this stuff. It’s everywhere:

Toddler on Easter egg hunt stumbles on live GRENADE…
which has to be blown up by bomb squad

It’s impossible to parody such madness. For instance, some crazy people still believe stereotypes about black people being good at basketball, but you’d better keep your distance from such wackjobs, or else you’ll never get a job at National Review. (Did somebody say “rim shot”?)

Jeff Goldstein won’t be sending his application to National Review any time soon, because if he was ever in the same room with Rich Lowry, he’d never be able to resist the urge to punch him out.

Some kook — and the Internet’s full of ’em lately, I tell ya — will almost certainly interpret that link as an “endorsement” or “defense” of what John Derbyshire wrote, which is a popular game crazy people play: Demanding that you denounce something somebody else wrote or said or did as if you’re in charge of what other people write, say and do.

Mandatory denunciations were part of the Moscow Show Trials and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The attempt to impose intellectual conformity, under threat of denunciation if you don’t conform, is totalitarian. It wasn’t necessarily suprising, then, to find myself today denounced as an Enemy of the People here and there for refusing to agree with Big Brother that We Have Always Been at War With Eastasia. And people seem to be so stressed-out about this that even the mildest disagreement causes them to erupt in fury. You’d never believe the indignant tone of the e-mail I received today from a liberal atheist, to which I tried to respond as calmly as possible:

I made no “assertion that atheists are more likely to be bigots.” I said there was a significant overlap between “the New Atheism” and evolution-based “Scientific Racism,” an overlap of which Derbyshire is an example.
There are certain people — I’ve met them — who have gotten off into the pessimism thing, reading a lot of Nietzsche and Spengler, etc., and thus are filled with a doomsday horror about the Decline of the West, the kind of theme that inspired Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz.
While I am not necessarily of the opposing school (which we might call Pollyanna Conservatism), the market for right-wing pessimism is overcrowded already and I never cared much for Nietzsche anyway. If I were offered a six-figure fellowship at the Declinist Foundation for Doom and Gloom, I’d take it, of course, and please let me know if there’s a publisher interested in my idea for a book called Where Are We Going? And Why Are We in This Handbasket?
Nevertheless, I see no reason to apologize for observing that fanatical atheists are usually also fanatical about other things. Some atheists are fanatical environmentalists, and some are fanatical racists. Some of them are even fanatics about bicycling.
Me? I’m just trying to make a living, buddy. And it’s a damn hard dollar.
— RSM

It’s important not to take these liberal kooks too seriously, but at the same time, you want to keep a close eye on them, because you never know when one of them will snap and start spouting profanities and racial slurs on national TV, like Susan Candiotti on CNN:

Category: CNN, Fear. Loathing.

This Would Only Matter If It Was, Say, A Ron Paul Campaign Office

Posted on | April 9, 2012 | 21 Comments

by Smitty

I, for one, rejoice at the vast strides Barack Obama has made in reducing the number of bogus attacks on campaign offices for insufficient diversity:

Original photo.

If a GOP contender published that, the media would be on it like libelous edits on NBC. It’s just one more way BHO is winning the hope to change the future! Yes, that’s correct: despite all claims to the contrary, our President has balls!

Category: VodkaPundit

The Science Is Settled!

Posted on | April 9, 2012 | 24 Comments

According to the latest scientific study, homophobes are secretly gay!

Therefore, Fred Phelps is Andrew Sullivan’s dream date, or something.

For many years, I’ve been working on a scientific study to confirm my hypothesis that some lesbians — the really hot ones — are in fact secretly bisexual and eager to have me join them for a threesome.

Category: Gays, Science, Sex

So, How Was Your Vacation?

Posted on | April 9, 2012 | 12 Comments

Advice to Tourists: When seeking a tropical resort destination, try to avoid locations where the beach is right next to the airport runway:

By the way, this never happens to tourists in sunny Vanuatu.

Category: Video

Nate Silver, the Experts and … Me

Posted on | April 9, 2012 | 9 Comments

From Matt Welch’s article about dinosaur media:

In 2008, a 30-year-old baseball stat nerd looked at the reams of public research product churned out by the nation’s 1,500-plus daily newspapers, and concluded that, though “there is nearly as much data as there is for first basemen,” the “understanding has lagged behind.” So Nate Silver launched 538.com (named after the number of votes in the Electoral College), and through sheer intellectual rigor and superior numeracy went on to outperform all comers in the political prediction business that year. As Silver later explained in The New York Post, too often “polls are cherry-picked based on their brand name or shock value rather than their track record of accuracy,” and “demographic variables are misrepresented or misunderstood.”
Silver, who was later hired by The New York Times (a blogger-to-riches story that would have made headlines a decade ago but is no big deal nowadays), is a living refutation of the Labor Theory of Value. All those thousands of big-media reporters and commentators and pollsters, paid full time to analyze and interpret political information, got their clocks cleaned by a sports geek blowing off steam after hours.

You should read the whole thing. By the way, Nate Silver is a data omnivore and, in recent months, I’ve had the sneaky feeling he’s been reading my blog, although he’s never cited me. Read more

Category: Election 2012, Fear. Loathing., Iowa, New York Times, Newt Gingrich, Polls, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul

What Would Derbyshire Say?

Posted on | April 9, 2012 | 29 Comments

Jim Geraghty at National Review cites a story by Politico:

“Despite the broad changes in President Obama’s overall job approval rating since he became president, certain subgroups of the population have consistently rated him better than others, and these patterns continued in March. Blacks, Hispanics, women, 18- to 29-year-olds, Easterners, postgraduates, Americans earning less than $24,000 per year, and those who don’t regularly attend a place of worship all show higher support for Obama than their counterparts …”

What the departed Derbyshire might have said about this story is not what Jim Geraghty says. But you know he secretly thought it.

A friend reminds me that, in 2006, Derbyshire panned Ramesh Ponnuru’s book, The Party of Death. On Friday, Ponnuru was one of the first National Review staffers to denounce Derbyshire, who had also made himself obnoxious by his rather outspoken atheism.

Category: Barack Obama
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin