The Other McCain

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

If By ‘Wake Up’ VDH Means ‘Think Rationally’, Then He’ll Be Waiting Forever

Posted on | March 17, 2012 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

When those in the liberal community wake up to how they are being used (and thereby embarrassed) to facilitate a pathological sort who really does seem to dislike women, then Maher will go the way of Keith Olbermann and be left ranting to the wind.

I’m confident that Maher’s kept afloat by the money. He is apparently doing more for the Commie business model than Olbermann. That is what keeps an otherwise useless creep of Maher’s ilk afloat.

But the liberal community to which Victor Davis Hanson alludes is a pathologically misogynist, raaaaacist group of haters. So their wakeup isn’t likely to occur on this mortal plane.

More on Maher at Granite Grok.

Category: Intellectuals

MISSOURI GONE WILD: Caucuses Disrupted by Ron Paul Supporters

Posted on | March 17, 2012 | 53 Comments

Libertarians or anarchists? The NY Times reports, you decide:

ST. PETERS, Mo. — Voters here in St. Charles County may not get a say in who will be the next Republican presidential nominee after a disorderly caucus on Saturday caused organizers to adjourn before delegates were selected.
The unrest began as the caucus at Francis Howell North High School was called to order more than a hour late, then delayed again when a member of the crowd refused to put away a video camera, as required by the rules outlined by the local Republican Party.
“People attended the meeting with an agenda,” said Eugene Dokes, chairman of the St. Charles County Republican Central Committee. “When that happens, it’s really hard to accept the authority of the room.”
Members of crowd began shouting, “We make the rules!” among other chants as organizers tried to regain control, which they did briefly. But the shouting quickly escalated when it came time to appoint a chair of the caucus.
The police were called in, and two people were arrested on trespassing charges after being asked to leave when the meeting was then called to an early close.

This is what the Paulbot Blog-Troll Caucus is like in real life.

UPDATE: The Kansas City Star:

Confusion and contention also marred several other crowded Republican gatherings, the Associated Press reported.
In Clay County, arguments between Paul supporters and others became so intense that the caucus chairman threatened to have voters removed by force.
Backers of the Texas congressman said they were upset their views weren’t being heard. “We’re just a little frustrated because caucuses are supposed to be run by a very strict set of rules,” said Paul supporter John Findlay, who lost his bid to become caucus chairman. “We raised a number of points of order, points of information, points of parliamentary inquiry, many of which have been ignored.”

These bogus “parliamentary” tactics are straight out of the radical playbook: Purposeful disruptions, intended to delay the normal procedure of events and provoke confrontations, with the hope of making such a farce of the meeting that regular citizens are discouraged from participating.

Go to a mental ward, give a psychotic a copy of Roberts Rules of Order, and after he’s released, he can begin a promising new career as a Ron Paul activist — as soon as he goes off his meds, that is.

UPDATE II: Shane Vander Hart:

I’m tired of the drama that Paul is causing when he has zero chance of winning anything.

Look, I love it that Paul gets college kids excited about the the concept of liberty. I’ve got a profound libertarian streak myself and, in fact, voted for Bob Barr for president in 2008. But obnoxiousness is practically an ideology to some of these kooks. Disrupting meetings with “point of order” gibberish is akin to those wacko tax protesters who claim they have some sovereign right that recognizes no higher authority than the county sheriff.

They don’t have a political philosophy, they have a personality disorder.

UPDATE III: ABC News on the Charles County debacle:

[Police] arrested two Paul supporters and ended the caucuses early. A joint-jurisdictional police helicopter arrived on the scene. Kipers said about 10 officers arrived in total.
“Two people were arrested for trespassing after receiving numerous warnings to leave the school property,” the St. Peters police said in a press release. “Both subjects were transported to St. Peters Justice Center where they were booked for Trespassing and released on a summons.”
The St. Peters police identified the Paul supporters as Brent Safford, 45, of O’Fallon, Mo., and Kenneth Suitter, 55, of St. Charles.

OK, somebody Google these characters and see what you can find out about them. I’ll guess that if you inquire among local Republicans, you’d find these two are widely regarded as obnoxious fanatics.

UPDATE IV: By the way, hat-tip to Dan Collins. I called him while we were out on our family excursion today and he shared the news.

Bob McCarty blogs about “The St. Patrick’s Day Massacre” in Charles County, complete with video of Stafford’s arrest.

UPDATE V: Duane Lester at All American Blogger describes his experiences at the Nodaway County caucus:

At this point, the establishment GOP types in the room were aghast. Who were these people? Who do they support? One woman said, “I’ve never seen them before and I’ve lived here for 50 years!” . . .
One of the members of the county GOP committee said to me that some of these people had been working and organizing and planning with the GOP for years and had never seen the people who were dictating the terms of the caucus. They were upset because they saw the fruits of their labor being taken away from them and used for an agenda they didn’t agree with.

Read the whole thing.

Category: Election 2012, Missouri, Ron Paul

That Quality Of Hayes

Posted on | March 17, 2012 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

I guess I missed the Twitter hash game, but I’ll follow the Conservatory and make my contribution:

I’ll double down with an older meme:

#OccupyResoluteDesk is a petty little worm. Why he thinks he can get away with (a) cheap shots and (b) a lack of fact checking remains a mystery. The Rutherford B. Hayes meme should be used to step on BHO whenever possible, for as long as BHO pollutes our civic discourse.
The World’s Youngest Blogger’s reaction to #OccupyResoluteDesk’s latest beclownment:

Update: PowerLine wonders if RFH will prove to be BHO’s ‘killer rabbit’ moment. I think it’s especially hard to narrow it down to much less than a Top 100 KRMs for the Killer Rabbit administration, but I’m willing to accept this.

Category: Barack Obama

Angelica Houston Revelation/Prophecy?

Posted on | March 17, 2012 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

Emphasis mine, via Breitbart:

“What has happened, that we are fighting again for reproductive rights?” wonders Rosie O’Donnell, filling-in for Piers Morgan. “And how did guys get to be the ones to solely discuss it?” responds Angelica Huston.

So, wait:

  1. Reproductive rights are solely discussed by guys.
  2. Houston and O’Donnell are discussing reproductive rights.
  3. Does this add another dimension to their non-feminine appearance?

This blog is merely asking questions.
Houston goes on to mention the Dark Ages. This is certainly true, as the Progressive Faith continues to abort as many unbelievers as possible. But was Angelica talking about the annual bloody carnage offered to Moloch via abortion? In reality, “Dark Ages” may have been a wee prophecy (via Althouse) about Rosie’s show. The big questions there are

  1. whether Rosie will don the steel bikini for her final show,
  2. whether such a spectacle would destroy any TV set upon which it was viewed, and
  3. whether BHO can mandate viewing of Rosie’s last installment via executive order as a bailout for the electronics industry.

One is nearly tempted to lament the exit of Rosie, as she is such great snark fodder. Nearly.

Category: Celebrities

Spring Break

Posted on | March 17, 2012 | 17 Comments

Smitty and his family have gone sight-seeing in D.C.

I am being kidnapped by my family for an outing to Antietam National Battlefield Park.

Rick Santorum is somewhere in Missouri, campaigning for votes in todays’s Republican caucuses, but we must rely on commenters to link the latest news of that and other Important Breaking News Developments. Follow me on Twitter and I’ll try to send a few messages from the so-called “real world.”

Category: Family

Sarah Palin’s Secret Plot To Capture The White House In 2012?

Posted on | March 17, 2012 | 18 Comments

by Smitty

One is tempted to wonder if the Left wasn’t more disappointed than the Right by Sarah Palin’s demurring from diving into the nomination meat grinder. Geoffrey Dunn, at the Puffington Host:

Anyone who has watched Sarah Palin closely in recent months can only marvel at the “magical thinking” she embraces with respect to the potential outcome of the Republican Party primary for president. It’s clear that Palin still has her sights set on the White House for 2012.

“. . .watched Sarah Palin closely. . .”
I enjoyed her CPAC speech, and her Breitbart Is Here piece, and concur with her Obama Dozen as a going-in position on the highlights of the balls #OccupyResoluteDesk has fumbled in his three years of thievish buffoonery while denigrating the office of President of the United States. Oh, the occasional Fox moment, I suppose, when recorded and put on YouTube. Who diverts time from blogging and reading blogs to watch Fox directly anymore?
Sarah is a charismatic political force. Conceptually similar to Breitbart’s media force, in fact. I say conceptually similar because direct comparisons fall apart immediately. I guess those on the Left who obsess about politics might “[watch] Sarah Palin closely”.

“. . .clear that Palin still has her sights set on the White House for 2012.”Really? The Left inflates the Sarah Palin ’12 rumor mill like Zimbabwe Ben Bernanke inflates the dollar. Are we to believe that she’s mentally gearing up for this? That the candidates who’ve spent months and millions competing for the nomination are cheerfully going to scuttle that investment in favor of someone who sat out the primaries and lobbed the occasional FaceBook zinger at BHO?
Sure, I’ll support whoever the GOP nominee is, but the likelihood of a “secret plot” to put Sarah Palin on the ticket, much less, existing seems right around 0.
What’s the point of this silliness? Oh, look at the bottom of the post:

Award-winning writer and filmmaker Geoffrey Dunn’s best-selling “The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power” was published by Macmllan/St. Martin’s in May of 2011 and will be published in paperback this May.

I heard it was a bestseller in Elbonia, with a literacy rate similar to the likelihood of a President Palin next January.

Category: Sarah Palin

Wisconsin NORK Rube Self-Identifies

Posted on | March 17, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

I just ate, and Trog comes up in the reader. He’s on about

Look how cute that Kim Jong-un is

and I’m wondering what went wrong with water management in the vicinity of his swamp.

The Trog is shocked, SHOCKED! that the North Koreans are launching a rocket, in defiance of the United Nations ban on such. In defense of the United Nations, they were too distracted by considerations of U.S. voter laws to pay attention to North Korea.

Back to the Trog, though. (a) He apparently has a man-crush on Joug-un, and (b) this malady has clouded his judgement. I’m tempted to call for some sort of intervention, but this is Trog. We have to weigh whether an intervention would merely throw good time after bad.

Category: Troglopundit

His Newtness and His 176,000 Donors

Posted on | March 16, 2012 | 99 Comments

It’s Friday night and the Missouri caucuses are Saturday. Newt Gingrich isn’t even on the ballot in Missouri, which will award 52 delegates. There was a Missouri primary in February but, because of legislative hassles, that vote was officially “non-binding.” However, Rick Santorum won that primary with 55 percent of the vote — nearly a 30-point margin over Mitt Romney — and today’s caucuses will certainly ratify Santorum’s victory.

Maybe Missourians are still sore about 1838, who knows?

My point is that Santorum is about to put another one in the “W” column, the seventh state he will have won this month: Tennessee, Oklahoma and North Dakota on March 6, Kansas on March 10, Alabama and Mississippi on Tuesday, and now Missouri.

It’s important to say this, because none of the reporters, analysts or commentators on Fox News are going to tell you that Santorum’s on a winning streak, because they are indeed biased against him.

Now, let’s talk about Newt Gingrich. Ace headlined this:

Gingrich:  I Have Come Here To Chew Bubblegum and
Not Drop Out of the Race and I’m All Out of Bubblegum

Which is both cruel, and a fairly accurate summary of this:

Asked on CBS’s This Morning “under what circumstances” he would end his campaign before the convention, Gingrich responded: “Probably none.” He told host Charlie Rose, “I’ll be with you in Tampa, Charlie,” adding, “I have 176,000 donors at Newt.org. They want me to stay in the race.”

Hey, Newt, how many online donors did Herman Cain have before he dropped out? Lots. Rick Perry? Lots. Maybe not 176,000, but lots.

Gingrich is counting donors cumulatively, going back to late November and December, before any actual voting took place, when he was No. 1. On Dec. 13, Newt led Romney by more than 12 points, 35% to 22.3% in the Real Clear Politics average of national polls. It also includes the comeback period in January when Newt got a bump from his Jan. 21 win in South Carolina and, once again, bounced up to a lead (RCP average 31.3%-27% as of Jan. 27) in the national polls.

While he was on top, or at least a viable contender, Gingrich collected online donors by the tens of thousands, but that was “front-runner” money. Those donors were bandwagon-jumpers who thought they were giving money to The Man Who Could Beat Mitt.

And those people aren’t giving money any more because in the past six weeks it has become apparent that Newt can’t beat Mitt.

Gingrich lost Florida Jan. 31 and lost Nevada Feb. 7, and was 0-for-3 on Feb. 7, when he was third in Colorado, fourth in Minnesota and, as previously noted, failed to make the ballot in Missouri. Newt was fourth in Maine (7%) on Feb. 11; on Feb. 28 he was third in Arizona (16%) and fourth in Michigan (7%); and on March 3 he was fourth in Washington State (10%). On Super Tuesday, March 6, Gingrich recorded third-place finishes in Ohio, Tennessee and Oklahoma, and was fourth in Alaska (14%), North Dakota (9%), Vermont (8%), Massachusetts (5%) and Idaho (2%). On March 10, he was third in Kansas and fourth in Wyoming (1%).

In case you lost count, since Feb. 7, Gingrich has placed third in five states and placed fourth in 10 states, for a total of 15 third- or fourth-place finishes in the past six weeks. You can add in the balance against all those electoral embarrassments Newt’s lone victory in his home state of Georgia on March 6, but that was completely offset by his defeats Tuesday in Mississippi and Alabama, two states his campaign had previously called “must-wins.”

Newt is clearly no longer The Man Who Could Beat Mitt.

He is now The Guy Who Usually Finishes Fourth, and the vast majority of his previous donors aren’t going to pay a dime for that kind of action. They thought they were giving money to a winner, you see, and they’re not going to follow him down the rabbit hole of Wishful Thinking.

There is also the telltale silence of Team Newt about their February fundraising numbers. On Feb. 29, the Santorum campaign told the Associated Press they had raised $9 million in February from 100,000 donors. A week later, the Romney campaign said they’d raised $11.5 million in February.

Gingrich? Crickets chirping.

That silence tells us a lot, but not nearly as much as we’ll learn next week when the official FEC numbers for February are available. What we know, however, is that the Gingrich campaign ended January with cash on hand of $1,788,590, but with debts of $1,726,085, so that their net balance (minus debt) was just $62,505.

By comparison, Santorum’s cash on hand at the end of January was $1,474,064 against debts of $956,701, for a net balance of $517,363.

This is simply astonishing: In the month where Gingrich scored his biggest success (the Jan. 21 South Carolina primary win), somehow his “burn rate” was so high that it vastly exceeded his contributions. Gingrich spent $16.4 million in January, while raising only $5.5 million. Meanwhile the underdog Santorum finished the month with a balance (minus debts) more than eight times greater than Gingrich’s!

With that in mind, what do you think Gingrich’s financial report for February is going to tell us? And how do you think his March fundraising is going so far, given his inability to win Alabama or Mississippi, and his third- and fourth-places finishes nearly everywhere else this month?

Newt’s not going to be able to reverse this perception by scoring any wins any time soon. He’s not on the ballot Saturday in Missouri and won’t finish better than third Sunday in Puerto Rico. Polls indicate Gingrich will finish third in Illinois on Tuesday. That brings us to Lousiana next Saturday, March 24: One poll last week showed Gingrich third there, too. Gingrich was in Louisiana today, begging:

NEW ORLEANS — Newt Gingrich is asking supporters for donations as small as $2.50 to keep his GOP presidential campaign going.
The former House speaker told a New Orleans audience Friday that he can’t raise as much money as front-runner Mitt Romney can. But he said he is gaining 500 to 1,000 new donors a day. He said many of them give small but that he welcomes amounts that might lead to larger contributions later

He’s already desperate, and when the February financial reports are made public, showing a campaign that is essentially bankrupt, whatever little puddles of hope Gingrich has been able to sell to those “500 to 1,000 new donors a day” (a dubious claim) will evaporate almost instantly. If Newt then loses March 24 in Louisiana, it’s over.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! And thanks to the commenter who called my attention to a Feb. 17 article by Luke Rosiak of The Washington Times:

When Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign disclosed in October that it planned to pay the candidate $70,000, the transfer was unusual for a campaign committee. But weeks ago, the former House speaker revised his bill for the third quarter: He actually expected to personally receive $115,000 to reimburse himself for expenses during that period.
The campaign would not explain how the candidate forgot about and then found $45,000 in receipts. Far beyond that payment, the destinations of dollars donated to Mr. Gingrich’s campaign are being obscured by the unprecedented use of a clearly prohibited tactic, The Washington Times found — one that has accompanied the flow of the better part of $1 million in unexplained cash to Mr. Gingrich, family members and top staffers. . . .

Read the whole thing. How I missed that article last month, I don’t know, nor do I know what the explanation for such unusal accounting might be. But one can imagine that it raised eyebrows among the big-money donors. Newt would probably dismiss such financial questions as coming from “the elite media.”

UPDATE II: My attempted humor about Missouri’s less-than-exemplary history of religious tolerance has generated some less than mirthful comments from those who sympathize with the plight of 19th-century Mormons. But my mild jest about 1838 could never rival the studied cruelty of Allahpundit’s well-aimed shot at Gingrich:

Second look at Newt staying in the race to gratify his delusions of grandeur about being chosen as a consensus nominee at a brokered convention?

Ouch.


Category: Election 2012, Louisiana, Missouri, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum
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