The Other McCain

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

Quin Hillyer Denounces Jeffrey Lord as a ‘Purveyor of Smear Jobs … Despicable’

Posted on | February 2, 2012 | 32 Comments

The escalating craziness among Republicans — which I have already mentioned twice today — has now spilled over into a feud between two esteemed contributors to The American Spectator, and now the hot-blooded Southerner Quin Hillyer has called out his antagonist:

Jeffrey Lord, who has intellectual integrity about equivalent to Bill Clinton’s, has become a purveyor of smear jobs utterly divorced from facts, logic, and decency. After an exchange of about a dozen emails back and forth in which he refused to acknowledge simple facts — not opinions, facts — the time has come to show him up for his growing and despicable hackery.

As usual in such matters, the gentlemen are disputing over the honor of a lady, in this case Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post. My friend Quin and I have sometimes disagreed quite strongly, and I have myself taken note occasionally of Ms. Rubin’s evident pro-Romney bias, but have not followed the argument and am thus unaware of what my friend Jeffrey Lord could have written that would inspire Quin to such invective. I am reminded of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s famous parting words to Braxton Bragg:

“I have stood your meanness as long as I intend to.  You have played the part of a damned scoundrel, and are a coward, and if you were any part of a man I would slap your jaws and force you to resent it. You may as well not issue any more orders to me, for I will not obey them, and I will hold you personally responsible for any further indignities you endeavor to inflict upon me.  You have threatened to arrest me for not obeying your orders promptly.  I dare you to do it, and I say to you that if you ever again try to interfere with me or cross my path it will be at the peril of your life.”

If Lord and Hillyer cross paths at CPAC next week, the fight is likely to be far more interesting than any speech or seminar at the conference.

Category: American Spectator

Florida Conservative to Limbaugh: ‘I Don’t Think That I’ve Ever Been Accused of Being an Establishment Republican!’

Posted on | February 2, 2012 | 33 Comments

As I said this morning, everybody’s gone crazy, and it seems that even Rush Limbaugh drank the kooky Kool-Aid, inspiring a paranoid outburst that Florida state Rep. Scott Plakon felt obliged to correct:

As a longtime fan and admirer of Rush Limbaugh, I was disappointed to hear his comments regarding the work of the Congressional Redistricting Subcommittee on which I am honored to serve. His suggestions that we “rigged” the maps to force Allen West out of Congress are simply ludicrous. I was there…it didn’t happen…I know. It is especially surprising to see Mr. Limbaugh join with the chorus of left wing groups that are attacking our work.
I can only presume that Mr. Limbaugh’s lack of knowledge of our process, laws and constitution would lead him to make such statements and would lead him to take these kind of cheap shots at Representative Will Weatherford and the work of our committee. . . .
I was the only Florida legislator to endorse Herman Cain (when he was at 5% in the polls) before September 24th, the day he won Presidency 5 and started his climb in the polls. Last week I endorsed Rick Santorum. I’ve filed and/or passed the Health Care Freedom Amendment, the red-light camera repeal, the cap and trade repeal, etc., etc. I don’t think that I’ve ever been accused of being an “establishment Republican”!

Read the whole thing. People need to chill out.

Category: Election 2012, Florida, Rush Limbaugh, Sunshine State Sarah

Troglopundit Is Not Only an Acromegalic Sideshow Freak, But Is Also Wrong

Posted on | February 2, 2012 | 15 Comments

My friend Lance Burri was once famous as the second ugliest conservative blogger in Wisconsin. That was before Sean Hackbarth and his ludicrous hipster soul-patch moved to Washington, D.C., however, and the Towering Man-Mountain of Cheeseland has since ascended to the pinnacle. But I digress . . .

Troglopundit has wasted several thousand pixels in defending the folly known as The Rick Perry “Only Conservative Who Can Beat Mitt” Bandwagon and, because his wrongness is so transcendently self-evident, I thought I’d link it, denouncing the Trog as a worthless varmint.

Just because he is my friend.

If Lance were my enemy, I’d praise him, and then he would be added to the Official Tabitha Hale List of Unimportant Bloggers™ on which list my own name is permanently foremost.

Category: Rick Perry, Rule 2, Rule 4, Tabitha Hale, Troglopundit

Woo Hoo! The CPAC 2012 Schedule!

Posted on | February 2, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

I hope to see vast amounts of our readership there. The schedule is up, so we can start planning how to be in seven places simultaneously.

Category: CPAC

Will Donald Trump’s Hair Style Challenge That Of Willard Mitt?

Posted on | February 2, 2012 | 18 Comments

by Smitty

Oh, bring it, Donald; I, for one, contend there is insufficient buffoonery in American politics today. If any can mitigate the excess of ‘sobriety’, it’s you:

I will be making a major announcement tomorrow (Thursday, February 2) at 12:30 pm at Trump International Hotel & Tower, Las Vegas, Nevada

Actually, given that I’m relatively unhappy with all of the candidates, Donald making some waves sounds fine.

Call it a reverse Cloward-Piven: I’m contending that the only way to break the current Ruling Class grip on things is to drive it all to 11, in the full Spinal Tap fashion. There isn’t a thing wrong with us that the metaphorical equivalent of a few more shots of Jose C. cannot fix. Let us puke out the decades of Progressive idiocy in full technicolor glory, and re-emerge fully purged and ready to take an adult view of matters.

I salute you, Donald, and whatever species of varmint crouches upon your cranium.

A later post, also at Alan Colmes, claims Trump will endorse Gingrich. But wait: why isn’t the uber-capitalist Trump endorsing Mitt? Could the Donald have Bain damage? Hahaha–THUMP [Ow, Stacy, I thought we were cutting down on the physical abuse around here!]

Category: Celebrities

I’m 9.5 On Julie Borowski’s 10 Reasons To End The Fed

Posted on | February 2, 2012 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

I don’t fully agree with #8, “The Federal Reserve is Unconstitutional”. The Federal Reserve Act followed the usual course of legislation, and was signed into law by Woodrow “Effing” Wilson. In my opinion, the Federal Reserve urinates all over the spirit of the Constitution, for reasons Julie well and truly elaborates.

However, just as it’s not explicitly illegal to sit down with a case of whiskey and drink yourself to death, I wouldn’t argue that the Federal Reserve is strictly un-Constitutional. Plenty of other nonsense afoot today is, but Bicycle Pump Ben is not.

Category: End The Fed

While I Was on My Way Home, Apparently, Everybody Went Crazy

Posted on | February 2, 2012 | 50 Comments

Wednesday was one of those Hell Days that remind me why people told me I was crazy for even trying to cover the presidential campaign in such an improvisational low-budget manner.

The cheapest modes of transportation are seldom the most convenient. But I’ll spare you the nerve-wracking details of why I was in transit (and thus offline) for more than 12 hours, except for the few minutes it took to dash off a single blog post.

However, during a frantic day of desperate haste, there were certain moments of serenity. I was racing from Tampa toward Jacksonville in the rented Impala and talking on the phone to my editor at The American Spectator when I heard the rented GPS unit (an extra $10.99 a day) say: “Re-calculating.”

“Uh-oh,” I told my editor. “I think I just missed my exit.”

And I was unfortunately right. The GPS “re-calculated” that I should drive to another exit 17 miles north, but before I got that far, there was an exit with a billboard promising the joys of “Jim’s BBQ,” and I was hungry, so I got off at that exit instead. My nerves were so jangled at that point, I needed some time to get my head together anyway. Service at Jim’s BBQ was kind of slow, but while I waited for my order, I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette and enjoy the Florida sun.

Within a few minutes, the order was ready and I got back in the car with my sandwich, chips and large sweet tea, happy to discover that the GPS had once more re-calculated to determine that this exit would do just fine — just drive eight miles east on Marion County Road 318.

What a lovely drive it was. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that some clever landscape architect had designed the scenery along County Road 318. Live oaks draped with Spanish moss shaded the route, overarching the road in a picturesque canopy. If a busload of Japanese tourists had taken this scenic byway, they’d have shot 437 gigabytes of photos and videos in the 10 minutes it took to drive from Jim’s BBQ to the crossroads town of Hawthorne.

By the time I turned left and headed north on U.S. 301, I’d finished my sandwich and was in a much mellower mood, sipping my sweet tea, and searched the radio dial until I found an Ocala talk radio station. Rush Limbaugh was talking about the ginned-up media furor over something semi-stupid Mitt Romney said on CNN:

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair , I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich…. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

OK, semi-stupid, but politicians say much stupider things every day. And Rush explained that people were trying to turn this into The Greatest Gaffe Ever. It wasn’t until many hours later that I got home and saw the ginormous Memeorandum aggregation showing how many people were hyperventilating themselves into a coma over this, among them Erick Erickson:

The National Review’s Candidate
Won’t Stop Digging

Yeah, wow. Candidates who say stupid stuff on TV? I could name three reasons why nobody should ever support such a candidate, but . . . oops. And there was also this news:

BREAKING NEWS: Trump to Endorse
Newt Gingrich Tomorrow

How many influential conservatives now supporting Newt have previously denounced Donald Trump as a scurrilous, untrustworthy, publicity-seeking fraud? The number is certainly larger than zero, but we will now be expected to forget about those earlier denunciations and instead pretend that Trump’s endorsement is the Good Housekeeping Seal of Conservative Approval.

As I continued checking the headlines, the news just kept getting crazier and crazier:

The Newt Gingrich campaign is gearing up to challenge the results of the Florida Republican presidential primary based on the Republican National Committee’s own rules which state that no contest can be winner-take-all prior to April 1, 2012.

Does anybody else remember how, in 2000, we all hated Florida Democrats for trying to change the rules of the election after the election was over?

Then there was Ann Coulter praising RomneyCare’s individual mandate — the same kind of individual mandate that conservatives are demanding that the Supreme Court declare unconstitutional.

But it isn’t just politicians and pundits who have succumbed to this mass psychosis. Everybody’s gone crazy all of a sudden, so that there was this headline:

Accused teacher’s behavior was
reported decades ago, students say

Crazy, right? And also this:

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — Detectives in Cumberland County have charged a Greensboro doctor with seeking sex from someone he thought was a 14-year-old girl.
Vijaya-Prakash Boggala is charged with felony solicitation of a child by computer to commit unlawful sex acts.
A spokeswoman for the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office says the 31-year-old doctor was wearing hospital scrubs when he was arrested Tuesday in Fayetteville parking lot where he had arranged to meet an underage girl. Authorities say that person was an undercover sheriff’s deputy whom he met on Internet.

This guy is smart enough to get a medical degree, but apparently too stupid to know that every “teenage girl” on the Internet is either (a) an undercover cop, or (b) Chris Hansen of Dateline NBC.

That’s crazy, but not nearly as crazy as the rumor that Smitty told me. I’d arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina, with about a half-hour to change planes for Washington, and was waiting for my next flight when Smitty called to say that he got an e-mail saying that CPAC — the annual conservative conference in D.C. that I’ve been covering every year since the late 1990s — had decided to set up a “credentialing” process where you have to apply in advance merely to be allowed to cover it.

“What? Are you kidding me?” I said. “The folks at CPAC are my friends. I’ve been doing this gig for years. They love my coverage. All I do is show up and they give me credentials — carte blanche, wherever I want to go, whatever I want to do. Somebody must be pulling your leg.”

“No, I think this is official,” Smitty said, and recounted a bizarre tale about how CPAC had decided to outsource the credentialing process to some non-profit outfit, which had been granted authority to decide who was permitted inside the so-called “Bloggers Lounge.” And so, according to the rumor Smitty heard, unless you filled out an application and submitted it by a certain deadline, you wouldn’t be allowed to cover the conference.

“But Smitty,” I said, “that’s completely insane. Do you have any idea what a public-relations nightmare they’d be dealing with if, for example, they tried to ban Andrew Breitbart from CPAC because he didn’t submit his application on time? It’s silly. Who told you this crazy stuff?”

Then he told me. But it’s so crazy you wouldn’t believe it if I told you.

Anyway, I’m going to CPAC, and all my friends at CPAC will be happy to see me, and if anybody tries to “ban” me from anything, don’t worry: You can always find me in the lobby bar, or wherever the cool private parties are happening.

Category: CPAC

LIVE AT FIVE – 02.02.12

Posted on | February 2, 2012 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Soccer Riot In Egypt Kills 74, Army Blamed

Medical personnel carry a wounded soccer fan at Port Said Stadium

Thousands injured, protests over lack of security quickly turn political

Does Defiant Gingrich Help Or Hurt GOP’s Chances?
No congratulations for Romney, and no surrender from the former speaker




Facebook Sets Historic IPO
Potential $10 Billion offering would dwarf Google’s



POLITICS
Romney Surges In Swing State Polls

Mitt Romney

Former governor outraises Obama in Massachusetts

Washington State Senate Approves Gay Marriage Bill

Parents Of Slain Border Patrol Agent Sue Justice Department

Mississippi Supreme Court To Rule On Barbour Pardons

White House Proposes Aid For Underwater Homeowners

Filmmaker Without Media Credentials Arrested At Congressional Hearing



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Stocks Rise As Manufacturing Data Raise Optimism About Economy
AMR Confronts $1 Billion Question After Job Cuts
Tokyo Exchange Glitch Halts Some Trading
Chrysler, Koreans Push U.S. Sales; Honda Posts Surprise Gain
Asian Stocks Unsteady On Mixed PRC Data
Oil Hovers Below $98 Amid Mixed U.S. Demand Signs
Gold Prices Build On January’s 11% Rally
Apple Loses Bid To Ban Samsung Phone, Tablet
RIM Blackberry 10 Image Leaks
Microsoft Snipes At Google On Privacy
Antitrust Panel Probing Verizon Wireless/Comcast Deal



SPORTS
Ali’s Legendary Trainer Angelo Dundee Dies, 90

Muhammad Ali and Angelo Dundee, 1962

A figure of integrity in a sport that often lacked it

Big Lead, Chance For Big Win Ends In Frustration: Spurs 99, Rockets 91

Reimer Stops 25 Shots As Leafs Blank Pens 1-0

Callahan Lifts Rangers Over Sabres In Shootout, 1-0

Ducks Score First But Dallas Scores Most: Stars 6, Ducks 2

Panthers In First After 4-2 Defeat Of Caps

Blazers Hand Bobcats 10th Straight Loss, 112-68

Westbrook Helps Thunder Hold Off Mavs

“Spot-Fixer” Mohammed Aamer Released From Jail; Will Appeal Ban From Cricket

Nationals v. Lannan: Arbitration Decision Expected Today



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Inside Demi’s Dangerous Desperation To Stay Young And Skinny

This week's Pimple Magazine cover

Insecurity led to drug-fueled breakdown

“Soul Train” Creator Don Cornelius Dead In Apparent Suicide

Gwyneth Paltrow Shows Some Skin In Harper’s Bazaar


Nine Untold Secrets Of The High Stakes “Hunger Games”

Taran Noah Smith Of “Home Improvement” Busted For DUI, Drug Possession


Joan Rivers Gets Stoned, Can’t Drive Home – And Has It All Filmed For Her Reality Show

Snooki Says She’s Not Pregnant – OR Fat!

Katy Perry In Talks With Paramount For 3D Movie



FOREIGNERS
Russia Holds Firm Against Military Intervention In Syria
Over 200 Rescued As Ferry Sinks Off New Guinea
Allies Plan To Give Afghans Lead Role In 2013
Jihadis Plead Guilty In London Stock Exchange Bomb Plot
Wills Off To Falklands As Argentina Fumes
Boko Haram Spokesman Arrested By Nigerian Secret Service
Sudanese Rebels Put Pressure On PRC
Rival Militias Fight In Libyan Capital



BLOGS & STUFF
Jonah Goldberg: What Is Wrong With This Guy?
Michelle Malkin: BlunderMitt – Let Them Eat Food Stamps
Gateway Pundit: Donald Trump To Endorse Newt Gingrich
Allahpundit: Gingrich To Challenge Florida “Winner Take All” Rule, Demand Proportional Delegate Apportionment
Legal Insurrection: Apathy Will Be The Legacy Of Romney’s Carpet Bombing
Dean Esmay: Romney Wins Florida, But Did Gingrich Truly Lose?
Weasel Zippers: Rep Jackie Speier (D-Cal) Blasts Komen Foundation For Dropping Planned Parenthood
Riehl World View: Ann Coulter’s Laughably Weak Attempt To Defend RomneyCare
Shot In The Dark: Gurgling You Can Believe In
Power Line: Obama Cruising For A Historic Defeat…Or Maybe A Tie?
Rod Dreher: Actually, It Won’t Be 1972
Daily Pundit: Big Changes On The Horizon
American Power: Taliban Ready To Seize Power In Afghanistan After NATO Pulls Out
Ted Olson: Obama’s Enemies List
Hit & Run: The Interns Are Revolting!


SOTD: Only God Knows Why

Category: Live at Five
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