The Other McCain

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

Ain’t I Done Told Ya So?

Posted on | April 2, 2012 | 9 Comments

Perhaps you remember this Sept. 23 headline:

Does Pain Explain Perry’s
Poor Debate Performances?

Once more, I give credit to Brian Ledbetter of Snapped Shots for the e-mail tip alerting me that Rick Perry had undergone back surgery in July, thus permitting me to become the first national journalist to suggest that there might be a connection between the Texas governor’s back pain and his problems in the TV debates.

The day after I posted that at The American Spectator, Perry’s campaign denied (to Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post) that the governor’s back pain was a problem. It was nearly three months later — in an interview with the Des Moines Register published Dec. 11 — that Perry admitted he was “pretty fatigued” because of his back problems.

Ah, but it was worse than mere “fatigue,” as I was told during my trip to Iowa and reported on Dec. 31:

Earlier this week, I talked to a well-informed conservative who claimed to know — from sources close to the Perry campaign — that the governor had been prescribed Oxycontin for pain, and was subsequently taken off that medication when it became apparent it was affecting him negatively.

The Iowa source who told me that was speaking off-the-record in such a way that, when he described (but would not name) his source, I suspected I knew the quite famous political operative. However, I don’t burn my sources, especially not in such a way that it would burn my source’s sources, so therefore:

  1. I only mentioned it once, burying it in a blog post on New Year’s Eve; and
  2. I made sure the sourcing was vague.

Also, given that this was a second-hand sort of item, I didn’t want to seem to be spreading malicious gossip without substantiation. However, in my defense — another fact that was necessarily omitted from that Dec. 31 item — I knew it wasn’t malicious because the Iowa source actually had a favorable disposition toward Perry, despite being disappointed by the mismanagement of Perry’s campaign in the Hawkeye State. (Note to self: Call source and see if we’ve reached “now it can be told” status.)

OK, so that’s what happened from September through December, from my first speculation until the subsequent confirmation that back pain was a major factor in Rick Perry’s undoing. Now, via Alex Pappas at The Daily Caller, the denouement:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry was under the influence of painkillers during televised presidential debates over the last year to help relieve severe back pain, according to a soon-to-be released eBook on the 2012 Republican race for president obtained by The Daily Caller.
“It became an open secret that he was using painkillers in sufficient dosages to keep him standing through the two-hour debates,” write the authors of “Inside the Circus.”
A source provided TheDC with an advance copy of the eBook, authored by Mike Allen and Evan Thomas. The book comes out Tuesday.

Read the whole thing. And keep this little episode in mind next time I tell you something that seems too strange to be true.

UPDATE: My smartass friend Doug Winship — one of the world’s greatest bartenders — knows just how to stick the knife in:

Too bad you quit blogging. You could brag about this….

Yeah, thanks, smartass. I would have actually quit, too, if tip-jar hitters hadn’t talked me out of it. So hit the freaking tip jar.





Category: Debates, Election 2012, Iowa, Rick Perry, Texas

Ron Paul Supporter Challenges Romney Over Mormon Doctrine in Wisconsin

Posted on | April 2, 2012 | 69 Comments

Did no one else see this coming?

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was confronted at a town hall meeting here Monday by a young man who read from a book of scripture published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and asked Romney whether he agreed with his church’s one-time belief that interracial marriage was a sin. . . .
The questioner, Bret Hatch, 28, a local supporter of Rep. Ron Paul’s, read from typed notes as he asked Romney whether he agreed with a verse from Moses 7:8 from the “Pearl of Great Price.”

You can read the relevant chapter of the Mormon “Book of Moses” and see for yourself what it says. And you may remember that I previously predicted what is now beginning to happen: As long as the media and the Democrats (but I repeat myself) saw the GOP nomination being in doubt, Romney’s status as a bishop in the LDS church was treated as off-limits, except when it was used as a club to clobber evangelical Christian voters for their supposed anti-Mormon prejudice.

By contast, recall how often Rick Santorum’s support for Catholic doctrine — especially his church’s opposition to artificial contraception — was a frequent subject of mainstream media “controversy.”

Now that Democrats are near-certain that Romney is the nominee, however, the media is going to start covering Mitt’s Mormonism in a very serious way — “Oh, look, he’s a fringe kook!” — as if this were an entirely legitimate topic of political discussion.

Again, by contrast, remember that the preachings of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in whose pews Barack Obama sat for 20 years, were quickly dismissed by the media as irrelevant, and anyone who called attention to Obama’s having briefly attended a Muslim school in Indonesia was condemned as a crackpot conspiracy theorist.

Those Republicans who have joined the “Roll Over for Romney” movement, asserting that Mitt is not only “inevitable” as the nominee but also the most “electable” of the GOP candidates, will likely get a brutal lesson in absolute ruthlessness, as the Left will not hesitate to exploit religious bigotry when it suits their purposes.

Perhaps the voters of Wisconsin can save us from this fate:

Even as you read this, Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign is going all-out to win the Wisconsin Republican primary. It’s important to make that point up front, because if you permit yourself to be hypnotized by media coverage of the campaign, you will helplessly succumb to the belief that the fight for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination is all over but the shouting. There are many people who want to convince Republican voters in Wisconsin and elsewhere that Mitt Romney is the “inevitable” nominee, and not all of them are in the paid employment of the Romney campaign or his super-PAC.
Between the official campaign and its allied “Restore Our Future” super-PAC, pro-Romney forces have unloaded more than $3 million in advertising in Wisconsin, but what they’ve spent attacking Santorum is dwarfed in value by the network airtime devoted to promoting the message of Romney’s inevitability. It is remarkable to observe how this appeal to bandwagon psychology has actually intensified since Santorum won the March 24 Louisiana primary by a whopping 22 points. . . .

Read the rest at The American Spectator.

UPDATE: CNN, ABC News, Politico — see what I mean? Now that they think Romney’s clinched, this “issue” magically become legitimate.

Let’s just pray Rick Santorum’s phone-from-home get-out-the-vote volunteers can work some magic in Wisconsin.

Category: Election 2012, Mitt Romney, Religion, Wisconsin

E.J. Dionne, Political Psychic

Posted on | April 2, 2012 | 14 Comments

Everybody knows that E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post is a liberal Democrat — both a partisan and an ideologue — a “social justice” Catholic from Massachusetts whose political beau ideal is Ted Kennedy. (Ah, “compassionate liberalism“! Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.)

Only a person of such impeccably ironclad progressive credentials — author of the 1996 book, They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era — could ever have been employed as political reporter (!) for the New York Times and the Washington Post before being promoted to the op-ed pages, the faculty of Georgetown University, et cetera.

So we know who Dionne is, what his qualifications are, and we recognize him as a special pleader for the Democratic Party and in particular its most left-wing elements. Yet it is apparently Dionne’s belief that his mental superiority is so vast as to endow him with omniscience, and it is this belief in his own clairvoyance — E.J., the All-Knowing! — which is on display in Dionne’s latest op-ed expedition:

Right before our eyes, American conservatism is becoming something very different from what it once was. Yet this transformation is happening by stealth because moderates are too afraid to acknowledge what all their senses tell them. …

Thus he begins, and thus he ends:

If our nation’s voters want to move government policy far to the right, they are entirely free to do so. But those who regard themselves as centrist have a moral obligation to make clear what the stakes are in the current debate. If supposed moderates refuse to call out the new conservatism for the radical creed it has become, their timidity will make them complicit in an intellectual coup they could have prevented.

You see how Dionne, unquestionably himself a man of the Left, here presumes to discern the intentions of the Right — a stealthy “transformation” of this “new conservatism” into a “radical creed” — even as his mind-reading powers enable him to see that it is the “timidity” of moderates which stops them from preventing “an intellectual coup.”

We presume that Dionne can only have known these things by mystical processes, because no one has ever accused E.J. of speaking two words to any genuine right-winger, and his idea of a “moderate” almost certainly includes half the Democrats in the Senate.

But wait: What is it that has inspired E.J. the All Knowing to this extraordinary exertion of his psychic powers? It was last week’s oral arguments in the Supreme Court about the constitutionality of ObamaCare. You will recall the Left’s panicked reaction at the skeptical SCOTUS questioning and the obvious inability of Obama’s solicitor general to refute the doubts raised by the justices:

Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. should be grateful to the Supreme Court for refusing to allow cameras in the courtroom, because his defense of Obamacare on Tuesday may go down as one of the most spectacular flameouts in the history of the court.

That’s from Adam Serwer in Mother Jones, for crying out loud! If even such a deep-dyed Bolshevik sees it like this — Serwer’s March 27 item was headlined, “Obamacare’s Supreme Court Disaster” — we can expect, at a minimum, that a 5-4 majority of the court will find ObamaCare at least partly unconstitutional.

That was what prompted Dionne’s March 28 denunciation of “judicial activism” by the court’s conservatives, merely for the tone of their questions, without waiting to learn what their actual ruling might be:

Three days of Supreme Court arguments over the health-care law demonstrated for all to see that conservative justices are prepared to act as an alternative legislature, diving deeply into policy details as if they were members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Right: And the Supreme Court never touched “policy details” in Brown v. Board, Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v. Texas or any other landmark ruling of which E.J. the All-Knowing approves. I remain convinced that the final verdict on the ObamaCare debacle was not written by a Georgetown professor, but by a blogger named Jimmie Bise Jr.:

“They could have been honest with us. They could have come to us as men and women and talked with us, sought our counsel. They could have tried to convince us that the good of their ideas was worth all we would have to give up to get it. They did not. They lied and lied and lied some more. They called us ignorant and vicious and heartless and stupid. They pushed a bill none of them had read in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve. They fudged numbers so badly they ended up counting whole piles of money twice. They accused anyone who disagreed with them of wanting to kill old people and innocent children. They built a law their own lawyers can not ably defend.”

Any rational, well-informed and intelligent observer could see that Nancy Pelosi’s frantic ram-it-through-in-the-middle-of-the-night trainwreck of a bill would turn out badly, and when even the Solicitor General — for whom no task is more important than protecting his boss’s signature legislation — can’t defend its constitutionality, we can only conclude that it is constitutionally indefensible.

So we return to today’s column by E.J. the All-Knowing. Donald Douglas says Dionne is pining for the days of Eisenhower, and William Jacobson is impressed with the awesome success Dionne ascribes to the Right: “Are We Really Doing That Well?”

What’s E.J. really up to? And who the hell does he think he’s fooling? What Dionne is clearly trying to do is to drive a wedge between the four conservatives — Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia — and the court’s only true “swing” vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy.

If Dionne were honest, he would admit that he wet his pants when Kennedy declared during oral argument that ObamaCare’s individual mandate “changes the relationship of the federal government to the individual in a very fundamental way.”

Instead of doing that, however, Dionne pretends to discern a “stealth” radicalism among conservatives (i.e., Chief Justice Roberts & Co.) and accuses moderates (i.e., Justice Kennedy) of “timidity” in refusing to prevent an “intellectual coup.”

The wonder of it all is that E.J. the All-Knowing thinks that we — including Justice Kennedy — are too stupid to see what he’s doing.

 

 


Category: Health Care, Intellectuals, Supreme Court

The Trayvon Martin Song

Posted on | April 2, 2012 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

Here’s a shout out to the Raaaaacism Industrial Complex, busy exploiting a tragedy, to pile evil upon evil:

Hoodies on high! Minds tightly closed!
#Occupy slouches with quite unsteady step.
Comrades shot by the white racist reactionaries
March in spirit within our ranks.

Clear the streets for the brown battalions,
Clear the streets for the liberators!
Millions are looking upon the Barack ‘O’ full of hope,
The day of freedom and justice dawns!

For the last time, the call to arms is sounded!
For the fight, we all stand prepared!
Soon Obama’s banners will fly over all streets.
The time of bondage will last but a little while now!

Hoodies on high! Minds tightly closed!
#Occupy slouches with quite unsteady step.
Comrades shot by the white racist reactionaries
March in spirit within our ranks.

Reference

Further reading at Power Line and Breitbart.

Category: Racism

Brutal: New Rick Santorum TV Ad Compares Mitt Romney to Barack Obama

Posted on | April 2, 2012 | 27 Comments

According to Politico, this new TV ad is now running in Wisconsin and will soon be running in Pennsylvania:

UPDATE: This ad appears to be part of a general effort by the Santorum campaign to put the focus squarely on health care, as the candidate also publishes an op-ed column in USA Today:

As the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of the individual mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, we Americans need to remember that we have the freedom to make choices for ourselves. We, not our government, choose the food to eat, the clothes to wear, the ideas to believe. “ObamaCare” is the opposite of freedom. Under ObamaCare, the government, not the individual, has freedom. We can do better.
Just ask the Congressional Budget Office. It forecast that as many as 20 million Americans could lose their employer-provided health insurance under ObamaCare, and that premium costs will rise over the next decade.
ObamaCare – based on RomneyCare, the plan Massachusetts adopted when Mitt Romney was governor – tells insurance companies which benefits their policies must offer and what range of prices they could charge. It requires that individuals buy conforming policies, and cuts $500 billion from Medicare. The Independent Payment Advisory Board will limit what treatments doctors can prescribe. . . .

Read the rest.

 
 


Category: Barack Obama, Election 2012, Health Care, Mitt Romney, Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, Video, Wisconsin

‘A Portrait of a Dysfunctional Alliance That Was Doomed From the Start’

Posted on | April 2, 2012 | 8 Comments

Thus does Howard Kurtz describe the e-mails between Current TV and its recently fired superstar, Keith Olbermann:

The arguments escalated for months, with Olbermann directly appealing to the former vice president on three or four occasions, until relations had become so poisoned that, on Friday, Current fired Olbermann for breach of contract. He has vowed to take the matter to court and questioned the ethics of [Al] Gore and [Joel] Hyatt.
Some of the disputes are fundamental—such as missing days of work—and some sound petty, but they add up to a portrait of a dysfunctional alliance that was doomed from the start. Where Current management viewed Olbermann as a chronic complainer who had clashed with the bosses before leaving his previous jobs at MSNBC and ESPN, the liberal commentator came to believe that he had joined a rinky-dink operation, even if the channel was committed to paying him $50 million over five years.

Of course, both points of view are arguably true: Olbermann is a chronic complainer and Current TV is a rinky-dink operation.

It is also true, however, that communicating by e-mail is a poor substitute for sitting down face-to-face to discuss a problem. Even a phone call is a more humane means of communication. So the very fact that the “relationship” turned into a series of back-and-forth e-mails between network executives and Olbermann’s manager was probably a big part of the problem.

Also, as several people have pointed out, Olbermann’s status at Current seemed to go downhill once the network hired former CNN executive David Bohrman as their new president. That may be coincidental, or maybe not. If Olbermann was used to dealing directly with Gore and Hyatt, and suddenly he had to deal with Bohrman as the go-between, you could see how that might lead to trouble.

Category: Keith Olbermann

Stephanopoulos: ‘Van Hollen, How Will The Dems Reply To Ryan?’
Van Hollen: ‘George, We’ll Take Class Warfare For 45% On The Rich’

Posted on | April 2, 2012 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

UPDATE: regret autoplay faux pas. I blame Hugo Chavez. Click URLs to view clips.

You’ve really got to enjoy the panache with which Chris van Hollen tries to serve a polished Democ**t budget turd:
http://widget.newsinc.com/single.html

AEI explains the atrociousness of the Democ**t budget in detail. My question is, could this be a tell that Van Hollen is a Motörhead fan?

Note to Chris van Hollen: your party is a complete, utter, categorical joke on budgeting. Pretty much everything else, too. However, your reliance upon the stupidity of the American people to believe that the very wealthy (e.g. Congress members and their friends) would actually pay these murderous tax rates is an astounding kidney-load down the back. Thanks for the ‘rain’, man.

Bonus: Van Jones gets his nose tweaked by Ann Coulter. How funny it is to see a Commie try to make the freeloader argument. Just WTF was a ‘Green Jobs Czar’, anyway? And, past the nonsense, Socialism is the freeloader problem writ large.
http://widget.newsinc.com/single.html

Category: Budget, Democrats

A Comment On Comments, Served Up As A Post

Posted on | April 1, 2012 | 26 Comments

by Smitty

Breitbart has a post concerning their comment system. That’s not terribly notable, except that it’s the same one this blog has used for a year-ish. So maybe Stacy will give me a little credit for technology choices, and even ponder some of my other suggestions, for example, TweetDeck.

Third party comment systems like Disqus facilitate more comments by making it trivial to log in using Twitter or Facebook accounts. I commend the use of such systems to all bloggers who would like more comments on their posts. In fact, I’ll venture to the bulk of the WordPress blogs that you’re taking it on the chin. Blogger is a bit less tedious, for me, as it lets you log in with a Google account. I would share more of my vibrant wit with any number of WordPress blogs, but YetAnotherBleedingLogin has all the attractiveness of Arianna Huffington sporting a three alarm hangover.

Then again, you might consider fewer one-liners from me a feature.

Update: Daily Pundit wants inline (non-nested?) comments. I think you can set that, in fact.

Category: Blogging
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