The Other McCain

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

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

Bubba Got Crushed

Posted on | November 9, 2011 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

Over at Althouse, a poll choosing between a third round of Bubba or W. For 2K votes, W has 80%. I don’t know that Ann’s readership is all that right of center, either. While retaining some personal regard for Bush, I don’t think his policies did too much to help attack the generational Ponzi scheme.

That noise has got to be stopped. For the World’s Youngest Blogger’s sake, and the rest of WYB’s generation. After the Baby Boomers finish going ‘boom’, maybe we can get on with economically sustainable improvements.

Category: Ann Althouse, Instapundit

Tarkenton: Government Intervention Is A Blitzing 300lb Linebacker Coming To Sack An Economy Near You

Posted on | November 9, 2011 | 13 Comments

by Smitty:

No, Fran’s blog didn’t go for the sports analogy like I did in the title, but he does quote Sowell at length. Read the whole thin and share it with a sports fan you know who doesn’t read enough blogs. And then send said fan here.

The government keeps doing things, and all it does is prevent our economy from moving forward. The economy grows when small business grows. And small businesses grow when entrepreneurs can accurately estimate their costs, which our new regulations prevent. Businesses grow when entrepreneurs can accurately estimate their revenues and the possible rewards for taking a chance on a business, which is impossible with the uncertain tax situation. Small businesses grow when entrepreneurs know they’re on a level playing field, with a chance to succeed if their idea is good; this isn’t the case with government bailouts for big businesses and financial assistance to political cronies and favorites.
We’ve been trying the “do something” approach for a few years at this point, and I don’t think any of us like the direction it’s taken us. It’s time for a new plan.
Mr. President, Congress, Federal Reserve members, please stop trying to help. Don’t make any tax increases. Don’t give any more bailouts. Don’t pass any stimulus plans. Don’t play favorites. Don’t change the balance of power between labor and business. Don’t pass any new regulations, and put a moratorium on ones that haven’t come into effect yet. Don’t play with the interest rates. Don’t manipulate the housing market. Just let the market alone for a few minutes to breathe.

Category: Economics

Public Sector Unions: Conflict Of Interest?

Posted on | November 9, 2011 | 41 Comments

by Smitty

A couple of WSJ articles of note today on one of those no-brainer questions: Ohio Voters Reject Public-Union Limits

The law would have stripped the state’s 350,000 public employees of most of their collective-bargaining rights and forced workers to pay at least 15% of their health-care costs. With 97% of precincts reporting, 61% of voters in a referendum voted against the Republican-backed law, known as Senate Bill 5, while 39% supported it
The vote was closely watched beyond Ohio as other states have debated whether to rein in public unions to help governments cut spending on wages and benefits. Unions have faced bruising battles with newly elected Republican majorities in various states this year. In Wisconsin, lawmakers passed a law restricting union rights, but they failed to do so in Indiana.

What I’m understanding is that this means Rust-Belters really think that the Greek approach is the way to go. Zero Hedge has a NSFW peek at how well that will go.

Back at WSJ, The Public-Union Albatross, What it means when 90% of an agency’s workers retire with disability benefits:

The indictment of seven Long Island Rail Road workers for disability fraud last week cast a spotlight on a troubled government agency. Until recently, over 90% of LIRR workers retired with a disability—even those who worked desk jobs—adding about $36,000 to their annual pensions. The cost to New York taxpayers over the past decade was $300 million.
As one investigator put it, fraud of this kind “became a culture of sorts among the LIRR workers, who took to gathering in doctor’s waiting rooms bragging to each [other] about their disabilities while simultaneously talking about their golf game.” How could almost every employee think fraud was the right thing to do?
The LIRR disability epidemic is hardly unique—82% of senior California state troopers are “disabled” in their last year before retirement. Pension abuses are so common—for example, “spiking” pensions with excess overtime in the last year of employment—that they’re taken for granted.
Governors in Wisconsin and Ohio this year have led well-publicized showdowns with public unions.

In the Navy, we called a union a mutiny. In the private sector, a union seems a simple matter of freedom of speech and assembly. Yet a union is tantamount to a corporation, with the significant difference being that the union not only produces nothing, but its activities frequently impede production. Meanwhile, the same people who are strangely comfortable with unions manage to hate corporations.
The girl in the picture is either extremely cynical or no’ so bright. The hair may be the decider.
In summary, public sector unions are a conflict of interest so heinous that even a dim bulb like FDR knew they suck:

President Franklin Roosevelt, a friend of private-sector unionism, drew a line when it came to government workers: “Meticulous attention,” the president insisted in 1937, “should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government….The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” The reason? F.D.R. believed that “[a] strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable.”

I wonder which of our GOP hopeful will

  • say they are willing to wage war for liberty against unions during the campaign
  • deliver on the promise to protect private citizens from the public sector unions.
Category: Unions

Karen Kraushaar, Serial Victim

Posted on | November 9, 2011 | 90 Comments

One of Herman Cain’s accusers, who left the National Restaurant Association with $45,000 in “go away” money, then got a government job, where she filed a complaint demanding money and a promotion:

Karen Kraushaar, 55, filed the complaint while working as a spokeswoman at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Justice Department in late 2002 or early 2003, with the assistance of her lawyer, Joel Bennett, who also handled her earlier sexual harassment complaint against Cain in 1999. . . .
To settle the complaint at the immigration service, Kraushaar initially demanded thousands of dollars in payment, a reinstatement of leave she used after the accident earlier in 2002, promotion on the federal pay scale and a one-year fellowship to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, according to a former supervisor familiar with the complaint. The promotion itself would have increased her annual salary between $12,000 and $16,000, according to salary tables in 2002 from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. . . .
Kraushaar’s complaint was based on supervisors denying her request to work full time from home after a serious car accident in 2002, three former supervisors said. Two of them said Kraushaar also was denied previous requests to work from home before the car accident.
The complaint also cited as objectionable an email that a manager had circulated comparing computers to women and men, a former supervisor said. The complaint claimed that the email, based on humor widely circulated on the Internet, was sexually explicit, according to the supervisor, who did not have a copy of the email. The joke circulated online lists reasons men and women were like computers, including that men were like computers because “in order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.” Women were like computers because “even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.”

Kraushaar is very unlucky: Everywhere she goes, bad things happen to her, necessitating the services of attorney Joel Bennett.

Category: Uncategorized

Hard To Tell If The Tom Brokaw Diction Will Save Mitt Romney

Posted on | November 9, 2011 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

What struck me about Mitt at the Defending the American Dream Summit was how Romney will hang onto a consonant when giving a speech. The way Brokaw sounds, as if consonants get lodged in the sinuses. Mitt sounds like a congested Buckley serving bumper stickers without brilliance. The effect, like the rest of Romney’s campaign, seems directed at somebody who isn’t me. Possibly somebody above me in the food chain. He’s still got that Bruce Campbell thing going, though, so at least the presentation looks swell.

Enter Newt. William Jacobson deftly rebuts Jennifer Rubin’s efforts at recycling anti-Newt charges:

It will not work. Gingrich has done for his past indiscretions what Romney refuses to do for Romneycare: Apologize.
People will forgive those who make mistakes, own up to them, and move on to better things. Romney supporters will have to do better than tearing down other Republicans to unstick Romney from his 25%.

This is likely the case. If Newt has come so far that he can actually apologize to Doug Hoffman for the NY-23 debacle, perhaps he shall have truly repented. I’d expect some variation on the Buckley rule. Breath not held.

Looking forward to the foreign policy debate at Heritage on 22 November, Newt’s command of facts and history could seriously threaten Mitt’s bumper sticker collection and blue state diction. Herman Cain, of course, will be beset by allegations he sexually harassed a woman from Vanuatu, or maybe Xanadu. Would you sexually harass Olivia Newton John? I can admit to a crush on the bad Sandy from Grease, those decades past. Governor Huntsman could be interesting if his conversation with his supporter in New Hampshire is complete, and he attends. We still haven’t heard enough from Santorum. Paul can be relied upon for to do Ron Ron Ron, de do Ron Ron, and Bachmann will support the Israeli dude that #OccupyResoluteDesk has to deal with every day.

More Romney queasiness at Left Coast Rebel. Via Ann Althouse, remember to ‘Shop smart. Shop S-Mart‘:I guess if you’re the de facto GOP nominee, then you can just phone in the rest of the primary season?

Category: Debates, Politics, Republicans
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