The Other McCain : Page 2046 : "One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up."

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

Posted on November 9, 2011November 9, 2011Comments

“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. Continue reading Herman Cain Under the Bus? ‘No Wonder We’re So Well and Truly F–ked’ →

Bubba Got Crushed

Posted on November 9, 2011November 9, 2011Comments

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.

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

Posted on November 9, 2011November 9, 2011Comments

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.

Public Sector Unions: Conflict Of Interest?

Posted on November 9, 2011November 9, 2011Comments

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.

Karen Kraushaar, Serial Victim

Posted on November 9, 2011Comments

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.

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

Posted on November 9, 2011November 9, 2011Comments

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?

Did Herman Cain Harass Ace of Spades?

Posted on November 9, 2011November 9, 2011Comments

Ace hasn’t made that accusation, but why else is he hating Herman Cain with the heat of a thousand suns?

I’ve made no bones — I think Cain is a godawful candidate, woefully uninformed, and, when confused, showing a tendency to offer up liberal, not conservative, guestimates as to the right answer. . . .
For some reason, some people are determined that this is the godawful candidate we have to go the mattresses for.
Why? We have ten other godawful candidates. What’s so special about this godawful candidate?

You can see the depths of the hate Ace has for Cain in that he’s doing the “second look at Gingrich” thing that all the Cain-haters have been doing ever since Cain zoomed to the top of the polls five weeks ago.

Ace deserves credit for being absolutely up-front about his Herman-hating, and having explained it in exhaustive detail, which is more than some other anti-Cain pundits have bothered to do. Charles Krauthammer and Karl Rove, among others, are being gutless weasels about their anti-Cain attitudes.

So . . . second look at Gingrich? Not just no, but hell, no.

Newt won’t do, and everybody knows it deep in their hearts. The recent Newt boomlet won’t last, because there is a definite ceiling on Newt’s support, and that ceiling will prove lower than the 25% that Romney’s been stuck with for months.

There is something distinctly pathetic in the attempt to inflate the Newt boomlet into an actual boom, to pretend that we’ll see Gingrich on the stage in Tampa next August accepting the GOP presidential nomination. “Ain’t gonna happen,” to borrow a phrase from He Whom Ace Hateth.

What the Newt boomlet represents is the frantic desperation of those Anybody But Romney conservatives who jumped aboard the Rick Perry bandwagon in August, when it looked like the Smilin’ Texan Express was a one-way ticket to glory. After the Perry bandwagon ran into the ditch, and Cain zoomed skyward as the unexpected beneficiary of the Smilin’ Texan’s collapse, the Perrybots spent five weeks making elaborate arguments about Why Cain Can’t Win.

And they can’t back down from that contention, because backing down would compel them to admit they misjudged the political landscape, which would undermine their prestige as pundits, an irretrievable disaster for the Know-It-All Brigade.

Here we are now, Nov. 9. It has been 46 days since Cain won the Sept. 24 Florida Straw Poll, and it is 55 days until the Iowa caucuses. It has been 10 days since the first sexual harassment story ran in Politico on Oct. 30 and . . .

Cain is still winning — 25.2% in the RCP average to Romney’s 23.3%, with Gingrich at 12.2% and Perry at 10.2%. The most recent poll (Gallup/USA Today) shows a dead heat, Cain and Romney with 21% each. And as I said a couple of weeks ago, sooner or later victory becomes its own argument.

“Cain can’t win.” He’s winning.

“Cain can’t survive this scandal.” He’s still standing.

Bloodied but unbowed, this “godawful candidate, woefully uninformed” has one great advantage: He never read the Official Political Campaign Rule Book that explains why he’s supposed to lose, and why this scandal is supposed to destroy him.

Meanwhile, here’s your Karen Kraushaar headline round-up:

A Second Accuser Goes Public Against Cain
— New York Times

Karen Kraushaar calls
Herman Cain ‘a serial denier’
— CNN

Karen Kraushaar, second Cain accuser
wants ‘joint press conference’
— Reuters

Karen Kraushaar ‘had to leave
her job because of Herman Cain’
as new sex harass accuser comes forward
— NY Daily News

Karen Kraushaar now wants to go
public with other women with
allegations against Herman Cain
— Washington Post

Assuming that the parade of accusers is finite, assuming that we will not be disccusing Accuser #11 and Accuser #12 this time next week, Tuesday’s press conference may prove to be the turning point, the high-tide of the “scandal” tsunami which gradually begins to recede. If so, it will fade away in the rearview mirror after Thanksgiving and by Dec. 3 — with one month to go until the Iowa caucuses — the campaign narrative shifts. If Cain reaches early December still at or near the top of the polls, his survival will be the story: Here is the guy who stood up to the Politics of Personal Destruction and lived to tell the tale.

“If” is a very tricky word, of course. But I haven’t yet abandoned plans to become the Ambassador to Vanuatu. And if Ace of Spades says he was sexually harassed by Herman Cain — well, Ace was askin’ for it.

You know what they say: Once you go ewok, you never go back.

BTW, Herman Cain’s “Iowa Fund” money-bomb — with the goal of raising $999,000 in online contributions by Nov. 9 — hit its goal 26 hours ahead of schedule and has already exceeded $1 million.