The Other McCain

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

GOP May Gain Control Of VA Senate. Also, InstaVision Offers A Sarah Palin Tease UPDATE: A Sarah Palin ‘Vacuum’?

Posted on | November 10, 2011 | 44 Comments

by Smitty

Jason Kenney at Bearing Drift reports that canvassing is done in Spotsylvania for the 17th Senatorial District, with a 226 vote margin for the GOP hopeful. This is good news, and will hopefully lead to results substantial enough to reach the misguided voters in Ohio.

Speaking of misguided, voters in my VA Senatorial District love the Democrat incumbent, and also hate bow ties as much as Paco. Somebody needs to tell Paco that bow ties are as traditional, masculine, conservative, squared-away and action-ready as the fedora.

For me, the neck tie is all about conformity. One calls a meeting at the office. Even when tarted up with a knot from Matrix Reloaded, one is still encumbered with the fact that the bulk of the chaps in the room are wearing, *yawn* neck ties.

And so you step out. You acquire a fetching bit of silk from Carrot & Gibbs or Beau Ties, master the art of doing at the neck what you’ve been doing on the shoe your whole life (for truly, anyone wearing a cheater is worthy of as much disdain as Paco has poured upon the humble bow tie) and wear it to the meeting.

Now, you have made a statement! Yes, you say, I understand this is business, and we have to comport ourselves to a certain standard. If you’re not as rich as Richard Branson, you cannot flit about wearing a cravat and walking into the meeting like you’re walking onto a yacht. Yet you have not been so quotidian as to wear Yet Another Necktie.

People notice.  “How do you tie one of those?” they ask. To which you gently reply, “The word ‘bow’ is an indicator.” Quite a few lads are bow-tie curious. It is not an occasion to condescend if they indicate the desire to man-up and have a go at the bow. Rather, encourage.

The bow tie, like sound conservative principles, may yet help save these United States.

For some good follow-on wonkery, do watch Michael Barone on Instavision. Toward the end, Insty throws out the Palin bait. Barone gives the notion of Sarah pulling a Reagan a solid ‘Meh’. Too late for the early state primaries. Intellectually, I’m in full agreement. In some emotional dimension, it would be momentarily cool, but remember this: Barack was elected with a lot of irrational exuberant rah-rah, as well. Repeat after me: There Is No Political Savior. If you want the U.S. to turn around, it starts with you, not candidate X, Y, or Z.

Although, pot-stirrer that I am, note this: I can’t help but think that if X, Y, or Z persuaded Sarah to join the ticket as VP, it would be an astounding win-win. That candidate would gather her phenomenal grass-roots support, and she would garner the executive résumé bullets. Furthermore, after eight years of X, Y, or Z, Sarah steps up to President (the way St. Albert of Gore did not). If you actually want to make course alterations for the ship of state away from the current European-style Welfare State Debacle heading, having Sarah on board would be an awesome way to go.

But who listens to me?

Update: Quigley at The Hill, emphasis mine:

Newt Gingrich rises, in opposition to MSM. He appears the best option now to face Romney. But is his appeal broad enough, and can the professor appeal to plain folk? That is the question and that is the question that Sarah Palin should be asking this morning. Possibly she created “the vacuum on the right” when she got off the bus and took it back to Alaska. As per last night it is safe to say there is still time to get in simply because nothing else is working. And the failure of the other contenders works positively in her favor.

I don’t know that it’s a bad thing for conservatives to get past the ‘quest for a rock star’. Nor do I blame Sarah Palin for looking at the banal nature of politics and opting for a role with a lower ‘ick’ factor.

Sarah will, I trust, prayerfully carry out the Divine will for her life as best she can, which is about all that can be asked of anyone.

Category: Blogging, Virginia

The ‘Go-Away’ Money Game

Posted on | November 10, 2011 | 38 Comments

Washington, D.C., has a very rigorous “employment rights” regime, as opposed to, say, Floyd County, Georgia, where I had been working before I joined the staff of The Washington Times in 1997. And the sense of entitled grievance-mongering fostered by “employment rights” was profoundly harmful to the workplace environment.

Specific examples? Yeah, sure, I could cite specific examples, but why bother with any examples from my own experience, when we can talk about Karen Kraushaar?

Kraushaar’s former supervisor at the INS, who was named in Kraushaar’s complaint, characterized the 2003 complaint to ABC News as “frivolous,” and said Kraushaar may have been offered a few extra sick days as compensation.
The supervisor alleged that Kraushaar had a “poor work ethic.”

“Poor work ethic”? Why, you mean to tell me that the kind of people who habitually file workplace complaints aren’t the most industrious, cooperative, team-spirited employees? I’m shocked.

Ace slaps Kraushaar around for her complainin’ ways and says:

Apology time: This woman is not credible at all, plainly wants to be paid to not work, and yes, I should have been more skeptical of her.

So we have Kraushaar, who demands that her employer send her to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, because she didn’t think an e-mail was funny. And we have Sharon Bialek, who has a “history,” according to Bill Kurtis, and also seems to be a serious credit risk.

These two women are 50% of Herman Cain’s known accusers, and does anyone want to bet that the other two (still anonymous) accusers have something in their biographies that would suggest bad motives?

Category: Election 2012, Herman Cain, Scandal, Sex

Nicely Worded Lawyer-ese That Really Hacks Me Off

Posted on | November 10, 2011 | 24 Comments

by Smitty

Over at Volokh:

The modern Supreme Court is reluctant to directly overrule precedents, especially well-entrenched precedents, but is not at all reluctant to distinguish precedents, even when the distinctions in question are quite strained.

Why on earth are the 9th and 10th Amendments, the Bill of Rights, permitted to be overruled, then? This whole century of Progressivism has been an over-ruling of Article V in the Constitution, and conservatives should be thoroughly hacked off about it. Ken Cuccinelli, at least, gets this.

It occurred to me while driving to Philadelphia this afternoon that, for all #OccupyResoluteDesk is into spreading the wealth, Obama and the rest of the Ruling Class are not interested in sharing any power. Quite the opposite. All the power continues to drain into DC.

Sadly, precious few of even the GOP candidates are discussing the problem in any way that that will amount to a fart in a thunderstorm. Last night’s GOP economics debate substantially featured candidates talking about stylistic changes to the tired old Progressive Fail Train.

Our Constitution is the answer. That Constitution outlines a Federalist machete which, wielded judiciously, would hack the jungle back to something non-stifling. The Enumerated Powers are the guide. But doing that means the lawyers have to get on board with liberty, and quit buying into decades of Postmodern crap disguised as legal opinion. Attempting to turn Progressive sophistries into Constitutional truth by careful degrees would have made an interesting intellectual exercise, if it wasn’t so flipping expensive and difficult to turn around. Overrule precedents? Why, yes: yes, we should. Every opinion that doesn’t maximize liberty is an enemy of liberty.

One recent example of the kind of cloudy thinking that pervades our day comes from the GOP Economics Debate. One moderator (and props to CNBC for keeping things moving a relatively substantive) asked Ron Paul where the ‘government jobs’ would go if we started whacking whole agencies. Let us draw a distinction. Let us call a ‘job’ a private sector billet for a worker, which has a positive economic input. Let us call a government billet a ‘position’, and quit conflating jobs that add to the economy with positions that, necessarily, detract from the economy. The public has tolerated too much handwaving along these lines, too much anti-liberty thinking from lawyers, just because they came from Hale or Yarvard. I am not impressed.

Update: linke at The Camp of the Saints.

Category: Progressivism

LIVE AT FIVE – 11.10.11

Posted on | November 10, 2011 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

TOP NEWS
GOP Candidates Target Housing Market, Tax Reform, And Bailouts In Latest Debate

Participants in the 11/9 Michigan GOP Presidential Candidate Debate

Candidates focus fire on Obama Administration, avoid attacking each other


Has Rick Perry The Brain Worms?!?!?




Paterno, Spanier Out At Penn State
Trustees fire legendary football coach, school president in wake of pedophilia scandal

Italy Struggles To Placate Markets As Crisis Mounts
Parliament works feverishly on reform measures; Berlusconi expected to resign over the weekend once measures are in place.



POLITICS
Cain Blasts “Character Assassination”

Herman Cain at the Michigan debate

Crowd reacts angrily to moderator’s question about harassment; Romney declines to comment: “Look, Herman Cain is the person to respond to these questions. He just did. The people in this room and across the country can make their own assessment.”

Alaskan Storm Batters Bering Sea Coast From Barrow To Bethel

Mississippi’s Defeated Initiative 26 May Be Just The Beginning

Alabama’s Jefferson County Files For Largest Municipal Bankruptcy

Republicans Take Control, “Responsibility” In Virginia

GOP Senators Backing Internet Sales Tax Bill



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Asian Stocks Dive As Bond Yields Push Italy To The Brink
PRC October Exports Growth Weakest In Eight Months
Ag Department Shelves Christmas Tree Tax After Uproar
Cisco Beats The Street Despite Q1 Profit Drop
Home Prices Keep Dropping
Apple Drops Flash For Phones
Net Bandits Charged in $14 Million Ad Fraud Case
Amazon Ups Orders From Kindle Fire Suppliers To 5 Million Units
BlackBerry Loses App For GMail



SPORTS
Penn State Scandal Shatters An American Institution

Joe Paterno walks away from his Nittany Lions

“Once again, the uneasy relationship between powerful college football programs and universities’ role as educators, community hubs and stewards of young people is being harshly scrutinized.”

NBA Owners, Players Meeting As Deadline Expires

Connolly’s OT Goal Lifts Lightning Over Flyers

Bucs Claim Haynesworth On Waivers

With Haynesworth Gone, Will The Pats’ Other Big-Name Underachiever Stay?

Nationals Catcher Wilson Ramos Kidnapped In Venezuela



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Mariah Carey Sings Praises Of Jenny Craig After Postpartum Weight Loss

Mariah Carey, post-baby weight drop

Pop star drops thirty pounds, signs as new celebrity spokesman for weight loss chain

Dakota Fanning’s Advert For Marc Jacobs Banned

Eddie Murphy Drops Out Of Oscars Telecast


Howard Stern Defends Brett Ratner, Slams Hollywood As “Loony” (Video)

Michael Jackson’s Deathbed Up For Auction

Robin Williams Won’t Host Oscars, Says Billy Crystal “May” Be Interested

Madonna: The Director’s Cut



FOREIGNERS
Deal On Greek National Unity Government Collapses
Turkey Quake Kills Five, Scores Trapped In Rubble
Syria Crackdown Prompts PRC, Russia To Call For End To Violence
India, Pakistan Hold Summit In Maldives
UN Admissions Committee Unable To Find Consensus On Palestinian Bid



BLOGS & STUFF
Clayton Cramer: How Much More Evil Dos Our Culture Have To Get?
Don Surber: Feds Investigate Paterno
American Power: Republicans Believe Romney Most Likely To Win Nomination
Rasmussen Polls: Florida – Cain 30%, Romney 24%, Gingrich 19%
Megan McArdle: The Financial Folly Of Fairness
Jammie Wearing Fools: More Antisemitic Lunacy From Zuccotti Park

Category: Live at Five

Who Lost The GOP Economics Debate

Posted on | November 9, 2011 | 31 Comments

 

by Smitty

Candidates who:

  • Accept that working through the IMF to help out Europe is a good idea.
  • Accept the continued evil of the Federal Reserve.
  • Accept the existence of the IRS, and want to change the shade of lipstick on the pig.
  • Accept that the existence of Fannie and Freddie is justified. Unwind them. With a shotgun.
  • Think that bi-partisanship is possible. You make the case for liberty. Reaching across the aisle to mix with fascism is ++ungood.
  • Think that Social Security is some kind of moral imperative. ‘Moral’ is a subjective, religious call. However, Social Security is not even an ethical consideration. It’s a 10th Amendment violation. Screw Social Security. To the wall. With a bridge abutment. Liberty, Mike Foxtrot: liberty!
  • Accept that federal involvement with individual student funding is acceptable.
  • Would dare to panda to China. Everyone knows that China eats, shoots and leaves.

From the Department of Just Sayin’:

Overall, it was a good debate, modulo one moment of sheer agony brought on by Rick Perry. Come on, man!

Category: Debates

REPUBLICAN DEBATE IN MICHIGAN

Posted on | November 9, 2011 | 66 Comments

The Lonely Conservative has all the essentials about tonight’s debate — 8 p.m. ET — to be broadcast on CNBC. Rather than live-blogging, I’ll be updating periodically with links and comments.

BTW, Ann Coulter’s latest column is a must-read, if only for the quote about “idiot Republicans (who should be tracked down and shot).”

UPDATE: At the first commercial break, I Tweeted, “This will be remembered as The Debate Ron Paul Won.” Being an Austrian (i.e., Mises, Hayek) in economics, I swear I get a thrill up my leg when Ron Paul talks purty like that.

Meanwhile, when they tried to bring up the accusations against Cain, the crowd booed the moderators and cheered Cain’s strong response.

Jeff Goldstein observes that some guy named “Seth” has decided all the not-Romneys are “unelectable.”

UPDATE II: At the second commercial break now. Jon Huntsman is getting waaaayy too much time. We’ve heard from Rick Perry maybe 3 minutes, and it seems like we’ve had 15 minutes of Huntsman so far.

Man, the media loves ’em some Huntsman, don’t they?

UPDATE III: Perry can’t even remember all the three government agencies he wants to eliminate. Ouch, that was ugly.

Herman Cain never forgets 9-9-9, by contast.

UPDATE IV: Allahpundit was impressed by Herman Cain’s response to the attempt to raise the accusations: “He knew he’d be asked about it and he came prepared. If, if, there are no more accusers, I think this’ll be seen as the moment that the bleeding stopped.”

Herman just now got a laugh with a repetition of his 999 mantra.

UPDATE V: Debate over, Larry Kudlow said Cain had an “unbelievably good debate tonight,” and called Rick Perry’s brain-freeze “devastating.” Video:

When I was mocking Perry on Twitter some guy said, in effect, would you pick Romney over Perry in a head-to-head? To which I replied, “You posit a hypothetical” — and it’s a farfetched hypothetical, at that. Perry is now 4th (10.2%) in the RCP Average, and is unlikely to improve any time soon. So exactly how and when will this Perry-Romney choice be presented to Republican voters as the only choice they get to make, except in the minds of Perry’s supporters?

I believe Ace has used the term “wishcasting” to describe such ideas.

UPDATE VI: Allahpundit has a round-up of the devastating reaction to Perry’s brain-freeze, including a top GOP fundraiser’s verdict that the Perry campaign is effectively over — which is perhaps too harsh, but does indicate the severity of the damage.

Category: Debates, Election 2012

First, They Came for Mel Bradford

Posted on | November 9, 2011 | 27 Comments

Karen Kraushaar made this horse ‘very uncomfortable,’ according to
friends of the horse, who requested anonymity

“I love Cain’s story. He’s a guy who came from nowhere and did well, obviously against heavy odds. He’s a doer and a straight-talker, which I don’t see enough of from either party.”
— Clint Eastwood

“On his radio program Tuesday, Mark Levin aired a clip of veteran journalist and CBS anchor Bill Kurtis on WLS saying that Herman Cain’s accuser, Sharon Bialek, is a former CBS employee with a ‘track record.’ Given her checkered past, a chuckling Kurtis posited that Bialek‘s and Cain’s roles in the alleged car-incident could even have been reversed.”
— Tiffany Gabbay, The Blaze

“Yes, we should have standards and those standards should be higher than Democrats set for themselves. But those standards do not mean we have to join in every petty overwrought hyper-ventilated reaction from the left-blogosphere against one of our candidates.
“And for all the not-liberal bloggers out there who joined in, don’t worry, your candidate will get his in turn.”
— Professor William Jacobson (emphasis added)

Years ago, I began joking that I ought to write a book about the paleocon/neocon feud called, First, They Came for Mel Bradford, which title references the now often-forgotten 1981 battle over who would be chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in the Reagan administration. Bradford was a brilliant intellectual who had made the career-damaging mistake of questioning the rightness of Abraham Lincoln’s policies, and lost the battle, so that the NEH chairmanship (and subsequent honors) went to Bill Bennett.

The point of such a history — one of those Books No One Will Ever Pay Me to Write — would not be to vindicate one side or the other, but rather to explain how such intra-coalition conflicts come about, examine the tactics by which the neocons succeeded in their various purges (e.g., against Pat Buchanan and Sam Fraicis, among others), and to point out how these “inside baseball” squabbles among intellectuals shaped the conservative movement and affected the Republican Party.

As Richard Weaver once observed, Ideas Have Consequences, and the ascendancy of the neocons among conservative intellectuals from the 1980s onward has had profound consequences. For the past five years, since the humiliation of the Bush administration in the Republicans’ 2006 mid-term wipeout, there has been a sort of reappraisal and realignment, with free marketeers and constitutionalists asserting their influence at the expense of the neocons. Advocates of limited government have been vindicated by the failure of “Compassionate Conservatism,” and those who support a serious effort to enforce our national borders now clearly hold the whip hand against the open-borders apologists. Read more

Category: Conservatism 101, Election 2012, Herman Cain

Herman Cain Under the Bus? ‘No Wonder We’re So Well and Truly F–ked’

Posted on | November 9, 2011 | 62 Comments

“I write for money. And so far, nobody’s offered to pay me to save the world.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, May 5, 2008

Mike Hendrix at Cold Fury has an excellent round-up about the argument among conservatives about how we should react to the accusations against Herman Cain. And in that round-up, Mike cites Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom:

We’re living through an attempted coup. And our major worry seems to be how well Herman Cain’s staff is handling suggestions that he once made a pass at a woman. Who waited 16 years to hold a press conference about it.
No wonder we’re so well and truly f–ked.

Indeed, and we can boil the argument down to its essence: What is the object of the game? To win. Period, end of sentence.

Our Guy is in a fight, getting pounded like hell by our common enemy and, instead of sitting around wringing our hands about the niceties of tactics, we ought to be jumping into the fight and pounding the hell out of Our Guy’s attackers. Whatever the ultimate fate of Our Guy, we cannot rally people to our cause by appearing to be weak.

Weakness is not an attractive quality, in politics or anything else, and it is an error in political combat to worry about making the “smart” argument when what is needed is a winning argument, or at least a gesture of solidarity and a show of force that lets our opponents understand that we’re not a bunch of gutless weaklings.

Nothing is more dangerous in political punditry than the temptation to be “smart” rather than being strong. Granting the intellectual’s natural desire to be seen as insightful and consistent, there are times in politics when pragmatism and strategic necessity require the pundit to suppress such concerns long enough to make the crude and cynical calculation: “How can we win?” or even, “Never mind winning, how can we inflict maximum damage on our opponent in this fight?”

Understand that I do not mean to accuse anyone of insincerity in their arguments, or of trying to curry favor with the proverbial “Georgetown cocktail party circuit.”  Quite the opposite, I suspect some conservative intellectuals have succumbed to the same error that I attributed to Conor Friedersdorf in May 2008: Insufficient cynicism:

If you want to save the world, join the Peace Corps or become a missionary. If you want to be a professional journalist, stick to the facts, mind your grammar, hit your deadlines, and try to write something that somebody might actually want to read.

Nobody’s paying me for the correctness of my opinions, OK? Everybody’s got opinions and any random reader’s opinion about the Herman Cain controversy is as valid as my own, except for the fact that I’ve spent a hell of a lot of time covering politics and have known Herman Cain since 2007. Read more

Category: Ace of Spades, Cold Fury, Dr. Helen, Protein Wisdom
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