The Other McCain

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

Sullivan’s Gut Is Also Confused

Posted on | January 14, 2012 | 19 Comments

by Smitty

Sullivan’s Daily Ditch isn’t of much interest, but one must correct a mis-perception here:

The big surprise for me in this is Ron Paul’s remarkable strength in South Carolina. My gut tells me it’s driven by military types, who share the view of many active duty soldiers that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were idiotic. But the evangelical machers’ embrace of Santorum could now help Romney. If it halts Santorum’s slide, it may also halt Gingrich’s and Paul’s rise, allowing Romney to claim a bigger victory.

Ron Paul’s strength is rooted in economic interests. I don’t doubt that there are substantial peacenicks among his supporters, but to venture the notion that the SC military residents have gone all Jimmy Carter is to forget where the U.S. Civil War began.

As for the rest of the incoherent analysis about halting Santorum’s slide and the rise of Gingrich and Paul, the World’s Youngest Blogger replied in his diaper, and I must tend to the WYB’s analysis. I recommend you have a go at siring and raising a child, Andrew: it has a wonderful clarifying effect on on thought.

via The Moderate Voice

Category: Andrew Sullivan

This Vintage Pin-Up Girl Would Probably Look Better in a Santorum Sweater Vest

Posted on | January 14, 2012 | 21 Comments

This post is not merely a timely reminder that you can get your own Rick Santorum sweater vest for a $100 contribution to his campaign — although it can’t hurt to remind you — but also an opportunity to rattle the tip jar as I prepare to head back out on the road.

While I was out on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, conservative theologian Doug Wilson expressed his criticism of “Rule 5,” but I was so busy doing coverage that there was no time to respond. And I guess you can consider this post a response, once again borrowing William Teach of Pirate Cove’s idea of using vintage cheesecake to anchor a link-around aggregation or, as Jimmie Bise Jr. of Sundries Shack calls it, “clearing the browser tabs”:

  • Da Tech Guy is still rattling Da Tip Jar, and I’ve already contributed, so you should go help the Godfather of the Axis of Fedora.
  • When RINOs attack: Mitt Romney’s “super PAC” goes after Rick Santorum. Has anybody else noticed that the Romney campaign hasn’t run a single ad criticizing Ron Paul or Rick Perry? As if they’ve figured out that those guys are irrelevant and pose no threat to Romney, y’know what I mean?
  • Speaking of irrelevant and posing no threat to Romney: “Days after his third place finish in New Hampshire, some Huntsman for President staffers have already left the campaign, while others tell BuzzFeed they wish the former Utah governor would drop out so they could join Mitt Romney’s team.”
  • If you’re a voter who’s still undecided in South Carolina, ask yourself this: Which Republican candidate inspires blasphemy by liberals? “MSNBC’s Alex Wagner is caught muttering ‘Jesus’ under her breath as a clip of Rick Santorum talking about classes in America plays.”
  • Bill Quick is still convinced Newt can beat Romney. However, I find it hard to imagine Republicans rallying behind the candidate who dumped two ex-wives and collected more than $1 million from Freddie Mac. The way this primary campaign is being waged in the blogosphere is kind of like trash-talking the opponent in SEC football, and it’s best not to take these things personally. At least Bill links my blog, which counts for something.
  • Being compared to a teenage girl on Prom Night? Not exactly flattering, but at least Andrew links my blog, which counts for something.
  • What’s the most interesting thing in this story? “Rick Santorum delivered a stark warning to South Carolina voters Saturday, telling them Mitt Romney is a sure loser in November if he becomes the Republican presidential nominee. ‘Don’t buy all this baloney that we need a moderate to win,’ Santorum told about 200 people gathered at Tommy’s Country Ham House in Greenville. ‘We need someone with strong core convictions who is going to appeal to the voters in the states we need to win and that’s not him. That’s us.'” The most interesting thing: 200 people at a Greenville restaurant on a Saturday. The word to describe that is “surge.”
  • Santorum endorsed by vintage pin-up girl Christian conservative leaders: “Family Research Council president Tony Perkins announced Saturday a meeting of Christian conservative leaders had decided to coalesce around GOP hopeful Rick Santorum. The group heard pitches from surrogates for Republican candidates Friday, and voted to back Santorum after three rounds of voting.”
  • The Lonely Conservative: “I guess the moral of this story is that Republican primary candidates should not adopt the rhetoric of the left.” Another moral of the story: When in doubt, go with the sweater vest.
  • Tony Perkins said he “was surprised that the group was able to coalesce around one candidate,” and credited their surprising unity to the sweater vest “desire to defeat President Obama.”
  • Guess which candidate the Christian conservatives rejected? “Rick Perry didn’t even make it past the first ballot, Perkins said. . . . Gingrich had passionate supporters, even on the final ballot, but [Perkins] suggested the group had doubts about Perry’s electability. ‘There was some concern because of the stumbles he had in the race may be too hard to overcome,’ said Perkins of the Texan, noting that many of the same participants this weekend had attended a similar conclave on Perry’s behalf this past summer.”
  • Tina Korbe’s probably already got her official Santorum sweater vest.

So that’s the link-around, which will have to do for now, because I’ve got to get ready to drive — yes, I said, drive — to Myrtle Beach, S.C., where Rick Santorum will speak at 9:30 a.m. Sunday at the Faith & Freedom Coalition Prayer Breakfast.

It looks like about a nine-hour drive and I’ll be bringing along my 13-year-old son Jefferson as an assistant, because covering a presidential campaign is an excellent educational opportunity for an eighth-grader.

My wife’s a little worried about us driving all the way to South Carolina, but I’ve promised her I’ll keep our son away from pin-up girls.

Besides, Jefferson only likes nice girls, the kind who wear sweater vests. And hit the freaking tip jar.





RECENTLY:

Category: Rick Santorum, Rule 5, Shoe Leather Fund, South Carolina

Next, Newt Gingrich Will Probably Mail Order a Pair of Acme Rocket Skates

Posted on | January 14, 2012 | 20 Comments

Like Wile E. Coyote trying to catch the Roadrunner, Newt’s Bain attack on Mitt Romney has backfired, actually increasing Mitt’s popularity with conservatives.

Everybody will tune in for Monday night’s Fox News debate waiting to see if an anvil falls on Newt’s head. (Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Category: Election 2012, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich

The Duke

Posted on | January 14, 2012 | 12 Comments

by Smitty

Slightly rough language here. This sounds like excerpts from a larger interview. Does anyone know the context?

Category: Uncategorized

Guess I Might Be Joining Drach

Posted on | January 14, 2012 | Comments Off on Guess I Might Be Joining Drach

by Smitty

Who must also be a Virginian. I thought that Perry’s lawsuit was a trifle *cough*Progressive*cough* in its general character, for all more primary ballot choice would be welcome. What a crazy. . .train. I mean, crazy like some pre-pubescent Japanese kid rocking out with Ozzy crazy:

Category: Virginia

Santorum’s South Carolina Surge: Announces More Endorsements, Campaign Schedule for Weekend

Posted on | January 14, 2012 | 12 Comments

Lots of news today for the Rick Santorum campaign, including three endorsements by South Carolina GOP leaders, Stephen Brown, Bill Connor, and Patrick Haddon. Brown had previously endorsed Michele Bachmann, and Haddon switched his endorsement from Rick Perry to Santorum.

The Santorum campaign also announced endorsements by Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage and by pro-life activist Abby Johnson. The campaign released Senator Santorum’s schedule for the three-day weekend, which includes a noon candidate forum with Mike Huckabee today in Charleston, a Sunday “Faith & Freedom” prayer breakfast in Myrtle Beach, and Monday night’s Fox News debate, also in Myrtle Beach:

Saturday, January 14:

8:30am ET: Senator Santorum hosts a “Faith, Family and Freedom” Town Hall in Greenville, SC.
Location: Tommy’s Country Ham House
214 Rutherford Street
Greenville, SC

12:00pm ET: Senator Santorum will participate the “Huckabee Forum: South Carolina Undecided” in Charleston, SC.
Location: College of Charleston
Sottile Theatre
44 George Street
Charleston, SC

3:30pm ET: Senator Santorum will hold a volunteer rally at the Rick Santorum for President South Carolina Headquarters in Mt. Pleasant, SC.
Location: Rick Santorum for President South Carolina Headquarters
311 Johnnie Dodds Boulevard
Suite 141
Mt. Pleasant, SC

5:00pm ET: Senator Santorum will address the congregation at the Cathedral of Praise in Charleston, SC.
Location: Cathedral of Praise
3790 Ashley Phosphate Road
Charleston, SC

Sunday, January 15:

9:30am ET: Senator Santorum will address the Faith & Freedom/South Carolina Republican Party prayer breakfast in Myrtle Beach, SC.
Location: Sheraton Myrtle Beach Convention Center
Grand Ball Room
2101 North Oak Street
Myrtle Beach, SC

3:00pm ET: Senator Santorum will hold a “Faith, Family and Freedom” Town Hall in Florence, SC.
Location: Percy & Willies
2401 David H. McCloud Boulevard
Florence, SC

Monday, January 16:

9:30am ET: Senator Santorum will appear on the Laura Ingraham Nationally Syndicated Radio Show.

3:05pm ET: Senator Santorum will address the South Carolina Tea Party Convention in Myrtle Beach, SC.
Location: Springmaid Beach Resort
3200 South Ocean Boulevard
Myrtle Beach, SC

4:15pm ET: Senator Santorum will address the Faith & Freedom Coalition in Myrtle Beach, SC.
Location: Myrtle Beach Convention Center
2101 North Oak Street
Myrtle Beach, SC

9:00pm ET: Senator Santorum will participate in the FOX News Republican Presidential Debate in Myrtle Beach, SC.
Location: Myrtle Beach Convention Center
2101 North Oak Street
Myrtle Beach, SC

11:00pm ET: Senator Santorum will appear on “Hannity” on FOX News.

Category: Election 2012, Rick Santorum, South Carolina

Somehow, I Thought This Was About The Republican Primaries

Posted on | January 13, 2012 | 11 Comments

by Smitty

via Miss Cellania

Category: humor

Can Mitt Be Stopped? ‘A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Romney Inevitability’

Posted on | January 13, 2012 | 47 Comments

“The final tally in the New Hampshire primary showed Rick Santorum clinched fourth place and Newt Gingrich took fifth, according to the New Hampshire secretary of state.
“Throughout late Tuesday night and early [Wednesday] morning when the votes were tallied, Gingrich had been fourth, but Santorum overtook him, beating him by just 138 votes, with 23,174 votes for Gingrich and 23,312 for Santorum.”
— Boston Globe

On the phone with a friend this afternoon, we were talking about the Perry problem, which is beginning to depress me. Da Tech Guy is trying to be philosophical about it, but I’m getting discouraged, because it’s turning out as badly as I’d feared, and perhaps even worse. Frightening vibes of vindictive sadism are emanating from the Perry camp, and this is never a good sign.

Three days after Christmas, a CNN poll finally validated what I and others had been saying for weeks: Rick Santorum’s tireless campaigning in Iowa was producing a last-minute surge. And suddenly Santorum, who had spent months grousing about his relative lack of media coverage, was swarmed by reporters everywhere he went.

Almost as quickly, the Perrybots attacked. They had spent three weeks expecting that once Mitt Romney’s attack ads destroyed Gingrich in Iowa, the beneficiary would be The Only Candidate Who Could Beat Romney™ (as they had been marketing their guy since mid-summer). The fact that Iowa Republicans shifted instead to Santorum drove the Perrybots into unprecedented paroxysms of frothing rage.

What especially infuriated them was that the Perry campaign, which had been saturating Iowa with some $3 million of ads — including an ad that attacked both Gingrich and Romney — hadn’t anticipated Santorum’s December surge. So by the time it became apparent that Santorum was surging, it was too late for Perry to do anything more than hit Santorum with a last-minute radio ad, plus some cheap underhanded smear tactics like disseminating anonymous anti-Santorum flyers. (Which the Perry people then deviously tried to blame on Ron Paul’s campaign.)

Despite everything that the Perry campaign and its proxies could throw in at the last minute, however, Santorum came within eight votes of beating Romney in Iowa and, as I said to my friend on the phone today, “How much different would it have been if Erick Erickson hadn’t spent five days slamming Santorum at Red State? Couldn’t that have cost Santorum the votes he needed to beat Romney?”

Of course, the anti-Santorum messages didn’t stop after Iowa and this vengeful negativity from Perry’s people — as if Santorum unjustly deprived them of something that was rightly theirs — was not unnoticed, either by the Santorum campaign staff or by various journalists covering the campaign. A rather eminent pundit asked me last weekend in New Hampshire, “What the hell happened to Erickson?”

What is especially annoying about this is that, for all the harm inflicted on Santorum, they haven’t done Perry any good at all. He’s still down at the bottom of the GOP heap and, even if he gains ground in South Carolina now — as at least one anomalous poll suggests — all Perry can do is drain votes away from either Gingrich or Santorum, the two candidates with a plausible chance to beat Romney there.

So I was telling this to my friend, who has already joined the “Roll Over for Romney” camp, and explaining that I intend to fight as long as there is anything left to fight with, but was frustrated by the apparent determination of the Perry people that, if their guy can’t be the “Not Romney” alternative, then they’ll destroy whatever other “Not Romney” has a chance, just for the pure hateful spite of it.

It grieves me terribly to see such petulance from people I’ve long regarded as political allies, just as it embarrasses me to have to cite Bill Kristol (!) as an example of clear-thinking courage:

Thus Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal last Thursday: If Romney, having beaten Santorum by all of eight votes in Iowa, wins in New Hampshire, where he has a summer home and has been campaigning for six years—well, then we should all just accept the inevitability of Romney. After all, then “Romney is 2-0.” And if he’s 2-0, by whatever margins and in states with 11 electoral votes—“he becomes the prohibitive favorite” for the nomination.
Really? Well, no. But the point [of Rove’s argument] is to convince Santorum supporters, and those of you who might consider becoming Santorum supporters, that he has no chance, so as to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of Romney inevitability. After all, “Mr. Santorum shouldn’t kid himself; he faces huge obstacles. . . . He hasn’t had to endure withering scrutiny but will shortly. His chief opponent has tremendous organizational and financial advantages and has been through the rigors of a presidential primary race.” Rove does note with gracious condescension, “Mr. Santorum has a shot, and that’s all he could have hoped for.”
Actually, Santorum can hope to win. He has been running to win. And after what he pulled off in Iowa, it’s foolish to suggest he doesn’t have a chance to win. His Iowa performance, and his speech Tuesday night, were impressive enough to suggest to primary voters in subsequent states that they should make an effort to judge both his capacity to win and his capacity to govern.

Exactly so. For a long time, Santorum’s critics said he seemed “whiny” or “sanctimonious,” but in the past few weeks, Santorum seems to have gained confidence and found his voice, and people are responding to his positive message. Unlike either Gingrich or Perry, Santorum never resorted to using “Occupy Wall Street” arguments against Mitt Romney. And Santorum’s ad have been optimistic and inspirational:

The Santorum campaign has said they’ll spend $1 million to spread that message in South Carolina, and there is reason to hope that, with a week to go — and two debates — before next Saturday’s vote, he can finally score a breakthrough win.

Despite my own pro-Santorum bias, however, I’d be OK if somehow Gingrich pulls ahead to beat Romney. If the point is to stop Romney from clinching in South Carolina, it doesn’t really matter who stops him. But there are only so many anti-Romney votes to go around, and every vote wasted on Perry (currently 20.9 points behind Romney in the RCP average of South Carolina polls) is in effect a vote for Romney.

Think about it: When the votes in South Carolina are counted on the night of Jan. 21, if Romney wins by a margin smaller than the vote total for Rick Perry, the supporters of Perry will have inadvertantly handed the nomination to the RINO they spent six months denouncing as unacceptable to conservatives.

By all normal political logic, Perry’s humiliating fifth-place showing in Iowa should have been the end of his campaign, but his staff and consultants insisted that he had to keep going, if only to give them a chance to spend the rest of the millions in campaign cash he’d collected. Yet they have refined the avoidance of blame to a high art, so I’m sure when all is said and done, Dave Carney and his (well-compensated) friends will lay all the blame for their failures on some convenient scapegoat.

But this is depressing me, and I don’t want to be depressed. What I want is for people to wake the hell up and start thinking for themselves, and realize that trends in human affairs are never really inevitable. The actions of individuals make a difference, and if you have the courage to stand up and speak out, you can make trends happen, rather than always being the victim of somebody else’s trend.

That’s why I like Rick Santorum: He’s the guy who says you don’t have to vote for Romney just because somebody told you Romney’s “electable”

All the noise from all these pundits won’t amount to a hill of beans, if the people of South Carolina decide to take a stand and tell the pundits to go straight to hell. Join the fight — and fear the vest!

Category: Election 2012, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Polls, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, South Carolina
« 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