The Other McCain

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

If You Think Mitt Romney Is ‘Electable’ …

Posted on | March 6, 2012 | 73 Comments

. . . just wait. Maybe you’re right. But if you’re right, why are liberals so eager to have Romney as the Republican nominee? Maybe you think George Stephanopoulos is stupid?

Rick Santorum will hold a party tonight in Steubenville, Ohio, which he and his supporters hope will be a “Super Tuesday” victory celebration. Yet the latest polls indicate that Mitt Romney could win the Ohio Republican primary and, coming on the heels of Romney’s narrow win last week in Michigan, a Buckeye State victory might be enough to effectively clinch the nomination as the GOP Establishment’s “It’s His Turn” candidate. Whoever wins the Ohio primary, however, the result of today’s vote will be actual news, in contrast to the ridiculous ginned-up controversy that has swirled around Rush Limbaugh for the past week. And the story of how “SlutGate” became such an all-consuming affair is worth re-examining chiefly because it demonstrates the operational methodology of what the late Andrew Breitbart called the “Democrat-Media Complex.”
Go back to Saturday, Jan. 7, when ABC broadcast from Saint Anselm’s College in Manchester, N.H., a debate among six Republican presidential candidates, with George Stephanopoulos and Diane Sawyer as moderators. After the first commercial break in the broadcast, seemingly out of the blue, Stephanopoulos posed this question to Romney: “Senator Santorum has been very clear in his belief that the Supreme Court was wrong when it decided that a right to privacy was embedded in the Constitution. And following from that, he believes that states have the right to ban contraception.… Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?” . . .

That’s from my American Spectator column today, which suggests the possibility that clueless Republicans have been manipulated like puppets on the media’s strings. And by “clueless Republicans,” I mean the 31%-38% of Ohio GOP primary voters who, according to the Real Clear Politics average, are willing to nominate the man Team Obama wants to face in November:

Mitt Romney could all but guarantee he’ll be the GOP presidential nominee by winning Ohio on Super Tuesday. …
“Ohio is a state that [Rick] Santorum cannot afford to lose,” said GOP strategist Alex Castellanos, who worked for Romney in 2008 but is neutral in this race. “If Santorum loses Ohio, it’ll be practically impossible to stop Romney.”

Exactly. For all intents and purposes, Ohio is the nomination, an unfortunate reality for which we could blame many factors, if we wanted to engage in hindsight recriminations. But there’s no point today in scapegoating the Republicans who have heretofore unwittingly aided the candidate they claimed to oppose by supporting Not Romneys who were clearly doomed from the outset.

Maybe Santorum can win tonight in Ohio, and we won’t have to contemplate the likelihood of a Romney-led debacle in November. And maybe, as I said, you think Mitt is “electable.” Maybe you think you’re smarter than George Stephanopoulos and his ABC News colleague Claire Shipman and their good buddy Jay Carney.

Why, however, are all these liberals convinced that Mitt is such a perfect choice as the Designated Republican Loser for November? I hesitate to endorse their cynical logic, but does anyone else remember how our Designated Republican Loser in 2008 grinned all the way to the nomination after winning “Super Tuesday” with a semi-secret tailwind of anti-Mormon prejudice?

Yeah, maybe I’m the only one who remembers that, or maybe not. Crack Emcee at The Macho Response doesn’t seem to care much for the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and I link his post not to endorse such anti-LDS views, but rather to remind you what kind of stuff is out there.

Maybe all you Republicans who think you’re smarter than George Stephanopoulos are now saying to yourself, “Wait a minute! Are you trying to tell us that the Democrats would be willing to exploit such religious bigotry merely to win an election?”

Damn right they would — and will. If they can’t beat Romney with the “greedy Wall Street 1-percenter” class-warfare argument, the Democrats will not hesitate to Do Whatever It Takes to Win. Read more

Category: Election 2012, Mitt Romney, Ohio, Rick Santorum, Rush Limbaugh, Shoe Leather Fund

How Feminism Actually Works

Posted on | March 6, 2012 | 47 Comments

“The quintessential example of this is of course Ted Kennedy, whose career stands for the proposition that you can allegedly assault women and even leave a woman to die and be reelected for eternity so long as you vote the right way.
“That is to say, for all of the left’s bleeding-heart smugness about ‘good intentions,’ they’re remarkably bottom-line on this: So long as you support abortion and the rest of their packet on social issues, your actual intent when calling a woman a ‘mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick’ is irrelevant. It’s an irrebuttable presumption of feminism, a de facto ‘get out of misogyny free’ card.”
— Allahpundit, Hot Air, “Kirsten Powers on Rush and Sandra Fluke: Where’s the outrage at misogynistic liberal men?”

This goes toward confirming my repeated (and strangely controversial) analysis of feminism as a phenomenon deeply rooted in the radical-egalitarian worldview of the Left.

No matter how much historical fact I pile up in support of that analysis, Joy McCann will inevitably come back at me in a raging fury for having trod upon whatever sort of “mainstream feminism” she believes Christina Hoff Sommers has rescued from the leftist ash-heap. But the fact that the Left never stopped defending the contemptible Ted Kennedy — a man who was permitted to shamelessly abuse his inherited privilege simply because of his political posture as a defender of the downtrodden — and that Kennedy was especially a hero to feminists, would seem to demonstrate the validity of my analysis.

Feminism’s embrace of the vile Kennedy very much resembles the way the Left celebrates such monsters as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, et al., who have ruthlessly slaughtered innumerable innocents in pursuit of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. That the Left’s heroes butcher (actual) peasants and workers as an alleged means of advancing the (theoretical) rights of peasants and workers is one of those contradictions that the Left can never explain to the satisfaction of any honest observer.

The first successful Marxist revolution resulted, within 15 years, in the totalitarian dictatorship of Josef Stalin, whose bloody personal despotism exceeded every evil deed attributed to the tsarist regime during the entire history of the Romanov dynasty. The most loyal and heroic leaders of the Bolshevik revolution were marked down for especial humiliation by Stalin, forced to “confess” in show trials to crimes they had never committed, and then executed as “enemies of the people.” Meanwhile, many millions of peasants were liquidated in a terror-famine deliberately induced for the purpose of crushing rural resistance to the Stalinist agenda.

Western ap0logists for the Soviet experiment, even when they could bring themselves to admit the nightmare reality wrought by adherents of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, always insisted that these evils were not intrinsic to the philosophy. What was happening in Russia — or China, or North Korea, or Cambodia, etc. — was not “true socialism,” the apologists said, but was always explained away as the result of bad leadership or unfortunate historical circumstances.

However heinous might be the acts of flesh-and-blood socialists, their crimes could never be counted in the ledger against socialism as an egalitarian ideal.

You might have thought these idealists would have been disabused of their illusions in 1939 when Stalin made his deal with Hitler to divvy up Poland, and Communists in the West, who had spent years loudly clamoring for a “popular front” against fascism, suddenly began denouncing as “warmongers” anyone who proposed aiding Hitler’s adversaries. But the idealists learned nothing from that experience, and have learned nothing  in all the decades since.

Likewise with feminists. However cruel or selfish actual flesh-and-blood feminists might be, their misdeeds are never accepted as evidence of the wrongness of feminism as an ideal.

Ted Kennedy, Bob Packwood, Bill Maher, Alec Baldwin, Keith Olbermann — there is a long list of men who have been embraced as heroic defenders of “women’s rights,” but whose personal behavior toward women has ranged from exploitative to abusive to arguably criminal.

And is there no one in the feminist movement who will admit that the deaths of 40 million innocents — aborted babies whose historical misfortune it was to be conceived in The Age of Choice — is rather a steep price to pay for “equality”? Or are we not supposed to blink at this ghastly carnage, once it has been draped in the sacred mantle of “women’s rights”?

Never mind, I guess. Start talking like that and they’ll write you off as a religious extremist, even while they continue offering up their bloody sacrifices at the smoldering altar of Moloch where they gather to sing worshipful hymns of praise to their idol, Equality.

We are still two months away from National Offend a Feminist Week, but it is perhaps not too early to offer this definition:

Misogynist: A man who disagrees with a feminist.

Joy McCann to attack me in 3, 2, 1 . . .

Category: Feminism

Yid With Lid Raises A Provocative Question On Senator Ted Stevens

Posted on | March 6, 2012 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

There are enough layers of indirection here that the Lid’s causal question is more than a little coy: “Did Justice Dept. Malpractice Kill Senator Ted Stevens?” But the WSJ says:

. . .the blame for the 60th [ObamaCare] vote really belongs to the U.S. Justice Department.
That’s the day a federal court has ordered the release of an independent report on Justice’s “systematic concealment” of evidence. Specifically, the report ordered by Judge Emmet Sullivan found that federal attorneys prosecuting the late Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska hid “significant exculpatory evidence which would have independently corroborated [his] defense and his testimony, and seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government’s key witness.”

The case seems to be that Senator Stevens was the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice. While ‘gross miscarriage of justice’ is par for the Eric Holder course, and one would be naive to think Stevens was severely angelic, the notion of a fair trial is still an American ideal. Isn’t it? Holder has done a thoroughgoing job of sodomizing the notion.

And how is this going to look for #OccupyResoluteDesk? Admittedly, it’s really not possible for him and his sad pack of jackwagons to look much worse. But what this blog hopes people get out of this, and the Sandra Fluke story, is that Obama. Must. Go. He will write out a stack of pardons for his ghoulish little creepshow cast, and they can all find the Commie lecture circuit, golf course, whatever.

However, I don’t care if Zeeba the Syphilitic Camel limps its gangrenous, spavined carcass out of the GOP Convention. If you fail to support that camel, you are risking the continuation of the Obama Administration. Sure, I think all the candidates suck. It’s fun to say: ‘I cannot tell the difference between Obama and that doof you support, and will not vote for him.’ But when you look at Holder, Sebelius, Napolitano, &c, it’s hard to conclude that such primary season airs are rational. Maybe it is possible to conclude that, say, a Ron Paul administration would somehow achieve worse depths of fascism than we’ve seen from Chicago-on-the-Potomac. I just don’t see how.

Ted Stevens, love him or hate him, really got bent over. Tempting though it is to think about going all Hammurabi on the Obama Administration, I do hope we cleave to the moral high ground here, kick them all out of office, and work to keep them all separated from levers of power until they join Stevens wherever he went.

Category: Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Progressivism

Not-Mitt Protest Vote Registered In VA

Posted on | March 6, 2012 | 34 Comments

by Smitty

The Virginia GOP needs a personality transplant. 400 years on into the existence of the state, we have a GOP so sclerotic as to serve up one vote with a choice of two candidates. I was the only one in the room, and outnumbered 6:1 by poll workers. Way to excite people about representative democracy, people! The big sign by the check-in, where, in a feat of brutal, overt, raaaaacist voter suppression, I presented a driver’s license and stated my full name and address, stated in huge black letters words to the effect: “Write-in candidates are not permitted per Virginia Law [numbers]”.

Hopefully the not-Mitt candidate does well enough here, and the other not-Mitt candidates elsewhere, so that the GOP gets the message that this vaguely rigged seeming process is going to be the death of it. Or maybe the rebirth. I have joined the local Republican Committee, where we can hopefully, over time, circulate some blood in a purportedly red state that’s looking kinda old and purple these days.

Also, putting all of the primary votes on the same day would seem a tad bit more efficient, both in terms of set-up for the vote and participation. It’s almost as though Virginia’s GOP overlords don’t really care much for participation.

Category: GOP, Virginia

LIVE AT FIVE – 03.06.12

Posted on | March 6, 2012 | 7 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Super Tuesday Could Alter, Not Decide, GOP Race

Rick Santorum speaks at the American Legion in Westerville, Ohio

Romney closing the gap with Santorum but still can’t close the deal; 419 delegates in 10 states up for grabs in wild mix of races

Netanyahu Can Expect Enthusiastic Reception From Congress
Tough talk on Iran plays better on the Hill than in the White House




Seventy Protesters Arrested By State Troopers In Sacramento
Refused to leave California’s State Capitol after protest



POLITICS
Holder: U.S. Can Lawfully Target American Citizens

Attorney General Eric Holder

Discussing the targeted killing of American-born terrorists “only in the abstract,” AG insists

Sheriff Babeu’s Illegal Ex-Boyfriend Files Suit

UC Davis Pepper Spray Report Delayed By Union Action

Obama To Hold Press Conference During Super Tuesday

Protesters Still Going To Chicago For NATO Conference; G-8 Moved To Camp David

Supremes To Weigh Foreigners’ Human Rights Suits Under Alien Tort Statutes



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Crude Oil Drops In Fear Of Demand Destruction
Gold Extends Losses On Disappointing Market Data
PRC Lowers GDP Growth Target For First Time In Eight Years
Stock Futures Lower On PRC, Greece Concerns
Venizelos Tells Greece Bondholders Debt Swap Is Best And Only Offer
Service Sector Expands, Lifting Recovery Hopes
Farm Minister Asks PM Singh To Lift Cotton Export Ban
“Mass Effect 3” Conquers The Universe
Government Motors Volt Named 2012 European Car Of The Year
Gasoline Prices Continue To Rise



SPORTS
Manning, Favre Speak Out On Bounties

Saints DC Gregg Williams

Commissioner plans swift justice

Harden Leads Thunder Past Mavericks, 95-91

Saints To Bring In Randy Moss For Workout?



St. Mary’s Knocks Off Gonzaga For WCC Championship, Automatic NCAA Bid

Bruising Battle With Clippers Goes To The Timbermutts

VCU Set To Dance Again After Downing Drexel 59-56

Nationals Beat Mets 3-1; Harper Hustles And Impresses



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Paula Deen & Brother Sued

Bubba Hiers, Paula Deen

Restaurant manager charges sexual harassment; ironically, predecessor was fired to avoid a similar problem




“Desperate Housewives'” Marc Cherry Takes The Stand

Kirk Cameron Catches More Heat For Remarks On Gays

“Grey’s Anatomy” Boss On Who’ll Be Back And Who Won’t

Lohan Gets Praise From SNL Cast



FOREIGNERS
Russian Police Release Anti-Putin Protesters
Netanyahu: Israel Cannot Afford To Wait Much Longer On Iran
Iran To Allow IAEA Inspectors Into Parchin Military Complex
Senator McCain Calls For Air Strikes On Syria
Congress Party Takes Hit In Uttar Pradesh Voting
Suu Kyi Woos Military Vote During Rangoon Visit
Prince Harry Arrives In Jamaica
Salafi PM Out By A Nose
Scandals In Hong Kong Raise Fears About PRC



BLOGS & STUFF
Maggie’s Notebook: Angela Morabito Answers Sandra Fluke
Jim Treacher: Want To Know Why The Left Hates Andrew Breitbart So Much?
George Weigel: The Battle Continues Beyond Rush
Michelle Malkin: The Autoworkers Obama Left Behind
Sandra Read: Was Rush Limbaugh Really Wrong?
Riehl World View: Compare Limbaugh’s Class To Imus’ Trash
iOwnTheWorld.com: Quislings All
Alexa Shrugged: Call Them Out By Name
JustOneMinute: A Strange Softening
Weasel Zippers: Bill Clinton Agrees To Appear With Obama On Fundraising Tour
Jim Pethokoukis: For 99% Of Americans, The Obama Recovery Has Been No Recovery At All
Don Surber: Rush, A Bust In Missouri
Powerline: Why Paul Krugman Doesn’t Like Us And Vice Versa
NRO corner: Koch V. Cato
Protein Wisdom: Welcome To Total Political War
Washington Free Beacon: The SEIU’s Organized Muscle
Hit & Run: The Most Open And Transparent Administration In History?
Lonely Conservative: Obama Bailing Out Real Estate Speculators
Megan McArdle: Hello, I Must Be Going
Donald Sensing: Tornadoes And Disaster Drivel

Category: Live at Five

Mike Malloy Progressively Throws Tornado Victims Under The Bus

Posted on | March 5, 2012 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

Hopefully the victims of the horrible, fluke, freak tornadoes will get a shout out from #OccupyResoluteDesk at his “squelch the Super Tuesday” news conference. May the Lord have mercy on Mike Malloy:

I thought that one of the tenets of liberalism was sympathy for victims. Oh wait, there is some fine print: “Except bitter cling-on conservatives”.

via Bluegrass Pundit

Or maybe he can talk about this, via Hot Air:

Update: linked by The Lonely Conservative.

Category: Progressivism

Sandra Fluke Argued for Mandatory Coverage for Sex-Change Surgery

Posted on | March 5, 2012 | 141 Comments

Rather belatedly, we are becoming aware that this supposedly typical Georgetown coed is not very typical at all:

[B]irth control is not all that Ms. Fluke believes private health insurance must cover. She also, apparently, believes that it is discrimination deserving of legal action if “gender reassignment” surgeries are not covered by employer provided health insurance. She makes these views clear in an article she co-edited with Karen Hu in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law.
The title of the article . . . is “Employment Discrimination Against LGBTQ Persons” and was published in the Journal’s 2011 Annual Review.

Remember, as Byron York previously reported, Fluke was rejected as a last-minute substitute witness at a Feb. 16 committee hearing because staffers for Chairman Issa were unable to discover Fluke’s claim to expertise relevant to the subject of the hearing. This law school journal article is the sort of thing that might have been discovered about Fluke’s background, had the Democrats who put Fluke forward as a witness done so with the usual 72-hour advance notice. Here’s one brief quote from the article:

Transgender persons wishing to undergo the gender reassignment process frequently face heterosexist employer health insurance policies that label the surgery as cosmetic or medically unnecessary and therefore uncovered.

Now, imagine Fluke trying to defend this language about “heterosexist” policies in a public hearing, with Republican members of the committee questioning her about whether religious institutions (or private businesses, or taxpayers) should also be required to foot the bill for “gender reassignment.”

Congratulations, America: You’ve been scammed!

UPDATE: Dan Collins at The Conservatory points out that the Obama administration is already providing illegal immigrants with “hormone treatments for transgendered people.”

Of course, this only makes sense. We wouldn’t want these foreign transpeople to go back to wherever they (illegally) came from and say that they’d been the victims of American “heterosexism,” would we? Then President Obama would have to issue another apology to the foreigners we had victimized.

UPDATE II: Welcome, Mark Levin radio listeners! A few words by The Great One certainly did kick the online traffic into high gear.

UPDATE III:  Linked by Evil Blogger Lady, and there is now a Memeorandum thread, aggregating further coverage by LifeNews.com, Nice Deb, Protein Wisdom, Hot Air, National Review, Riehl World View and The College Conservative.

Also linked by Bob Belvedere’s Camp of the Saints.

UPDATE IV: Ed Driscoll dubs this “Flukeaquiddick.”

UPDATE V (Smitty): click the Site Meter screen cap for Memeorandum thread.

Stacy wishes to clarify that the hours of 19-2100 on this chart are due to the awesomeness of Mark Levin. Any resemblance to a gesture telling James Wolcott that he is #1 is strictly coincidental.


Category: Democrats, Feminism, Gays, Health Care, Sex

Baseball Crank Reminds Us Why Guys Like Mitt Romney Treat Bloggers With The Affection Afforded A Wild Pitch

Posted on | March 5, 2012 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

You’re Mitt Romney. You’ve been running for POTUS for over half a decade now. And here is this anonymous blogger named Baseball Crank kicking north of 3,200 words worth of sand on your shoes while you’re up to bat. On top of that, he links ~15k of words from 2007 about why you were inferior to Senator John McCain even then.

Who is this anonymous guy? Where does he get off saying things like (emphasis mine):

A second problem I have with Romney, and which worries me greatly if he wins, is that he is precisely the kind of candidate that political consultants, campaign professionals and the campaign committees in the GOP love, and who lead us over and over again to defeat.
(Side note: if Romney’s the nominee, I will fight for him to win, because the stakes are too high to roll over and accept an Obama re-election. But that doesn’t mean I need to be blind to the costs of Romney winning).
Political consultants love candidates who enter races with a lot of money and not much in the way of a political record or political convictions. Such candidates can be tailored to a script and platform developed by the consultants, they spend money on the consultants and their businesses, and when the candidate inevitably fails because he or she lacks the natural political instincts and convictions to speak well off script, the consultant can just shrug, say there’s only so much you can do with a bad candidate, and move on to the next one. Over and over, Republicans have lost races with such people, and if Romney manages to back his way into a victory this fall, we shall never be rid of them.
We all know, whether or not we admit it, that Romney (who has heavily outspent his rivals in negative advertising in his key victories in Florida and Michigan) would not be the frontrunner in this race if he didn’t have the most money.

Oh, come on, BC! You know that guys in the Romney league buy the passion like they buy the votes. We’re talking about a league where it’s not about a paycheck or bills anymore. Money is just an abstraction; the game score on the X-Box of life. The money is just a distractor. What about the time spent building the team, the organization in all 57 states?

What a sad development, to have carefully sculpted such a fine traditional media image, from the Bruce Campbell good looks, to the poster-child children, to the gorgeous wife, to the speech tones so fine that they are measured with calipers in rehearsal, and then get trashed by some anonymous blogger.

You expect SNL to do something sophomoric, like a cold open with Sheppard “Norman Bates” Smith:

How do you respond to this sort of factual assault from a blogger? *sigh*

Bonus Bill Hader as James Carville having waaaaay too much fun (caution, this is PG-13 humor):

Category: GOP, Mitt Romney
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