The Other McCain

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

Begala On CNN Debating Fleischer

Posted on | July 15, 2011 | 14 Comments

by Smitty

Apparently, Michelle Bachmann or her husband has deviated from Correct Thought in some way. I think it may have to do with whether it’s OK to put the pee-pee in the poo-poo, but I’m not sure. Begala has characterized the Bachmann’s ideas as a “crackpot, bigoted theory” more times than someone manning an airport gate says “at this time”. Begala must get about 10K every time he says “crackpot, bigoted theory”. At least, that’s my crackpot, bigoted theory. But is my crackpot, bigoted theory shiny enough? What is your crackpot, bigoted theory? Can we get bailout money to assuage our crackpot, bigoted theories? Could a sufficient stealthy crackpot, bigoted theory, say, “capitalism is wrong” execute a slow march through our societal institutions?

Category: Uncategorized

VIDEO: Teen Bride Courtney Stodden Says, ‘God Blessed Me With My Soulmate’

Posted on | July 15, 2011 | 42 Comments

You are free to criticize the 16-year-old singer for her marriage to 51-year-old Doug Hutchison, but she says you need to take your argument to The Man Upstairs:

‘I was a virgin,’ said Courtney. ‘I knew that if I kept that, I would really be blessed with a beautiful gift. And God did. He blessed me with my soulmate. So I’m really thankful for that.’

Please note that the newlyweds are well aware what people have been saying about their marriage:

‘I’m a pervert, Courtney is a whore, Courtney’s parents are the worst parents in the world – pimps selling their daughter,’ [Hutchison] said.

And once more I remind my Christian conservative readers that, on her Facebook page, Courtney describes herself as a Christian and a Republican. She’s on our side, whether we like it or not.

UPDATE: I suppose I should have previously thanked Amanda Read, who re-Tweeted this to my attention after it was Tweeted by Dana Loesch. Sorry for the belated hat-tips. I did a quick Google search and found this bizarre reaction from Jessica Wakeman:

The segment danced around some of the very real potential psychological issues that it could have raised about a union such as this. Sure it’s legal, but is a 35-year age difference (even if she’s an “old soul”) sexually predatory? Has Courtney Stodden been “groomed” for sexual relationships with older men, despite being a virgin on her wedding night? I’m assuming the show had to skirt around any suggestion of that in order to lock down the interview.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? What kind of perverse bordering-on-libelous insinuation is that? By whom are you saying she was “groomed”?

Look: If you want to do some kind of psychoanalytic trip on this girl, go watch Courtney’s video message about cyber-bullying. Teenage peers in her hometown had, evidently, been talking trash about her online for years, and it really bothered her.

One might suppose that Courtney was a very lonely kid: Dreaming of a life far beyond her small-town roots, with aspirations for a show-business career that set her apart from her peers, and beauty that made them envious. Kids are cruel to oddballs and misfits, and that’s what she was. And if we try to understand and empathize — rather than judge and condemn — it seems rather obvious that from Courtney’s perspective, Doug Hutchison’s support and encouragement for her ambitions was like a lifeline thrown to someone on the verge of drowning.

Whether Hutchison was right to permit this vulnerable teenager to fall in love with him, and whether her parents were right to consent to their marriage, are subjects which will necessarily evoke controversy. But as for why Courtney was so strongly attracted to Hutchison, while it may seem inexplicable to many, to me the answer is right there in that video about cyber-bullying, which I again urge you to watch — and try to put yourself in her shoes.

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Celebrities, Marriage, Religion, Sex, Video

Wrecking-Ball Right Reaches Robert Reich, Frank Schaeffer

Posted on | July 15, 2011 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

Who is the audience for some of the vacuous noise one sees on the Puffington Host? Robert Reich whines almost cutely in The Rise of the Wrecking-Ball Right, but his title demands at least a rubber chicken to the head, if not something more violent.

Recently I debated a conservative Republican who insisted the best way to revive the American economy was to shrink the size of government. When I asked him to explain his logic he said, simply, “government is the source of all our problems.” When I noted government spending had brought the economy out of the previous eight economic downturns, including the Great Depression, he disagreed. “The Depression ended because of World War Two,” he pronounced, as if government had played no part in it.

A few days later I was confronted by another conservative Republican who blamed the nation’s high unemployment rate on the availability of unemployment benefits. “If you pay someone not to work, they won’t,” he said. When I pointed out unemployment benefits couldn’t possibly be the cause of joblessness because there are now about five job seekers for every job opening, he scoffed. “Government always makes things worse.”

Government-haters seem to be everywhere.

Dude, the cart ain’t the horse. The over-reaching federal cart can’t drag the economic horse anywhere. Benighted fools such as yourself that pretend otherwise and write this sort of dreck are part of the problem.

It’s no coincidence that the emergence of the tea party coincided with the Wall Street bailout.

Have I already noted that you’re a fool, Mr. Reich? The bailout was just another brick in the wall of economic doom built by you and your Progressive ilk, crushing liberty.

Add in the relentlessly snide government-hating and baiting of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and his imitators on rage radio; include more than thirty years of Ronald Reagan’s repeated refrain that government is the problem; pile on hundreds of millions of dollars from the likes of oil tycoons Charles and David Koch intent on convincing the public that government is evil, and you have all the ingredients for the emergence of a wrecking-ball right that’s intent on destroying government as we know it.

See, Reich: Fox, Rush, Reagan, Koch, Stacy, the rest of the blogosphere and I are, to merge you and Buckley, standing athwart history swinging an internet-driven wrecking ball. We’re saying to you and the rest of the Ruling Class Overlords: get stuffed! Your sad little socialist pandering can maybe bring temporary respite to Americans. Back to the horse/cart metaphor, your liberty substitutes are useful so long as the cart has a little momentum in it. Let history demonstrat even a slight positive grade, and your ideas are toast.
We hate your ideas, and hope they fall off the planet, without dragging those who love liberty along for the ride.
Is that enough wrecking, Mr. Reich?
Meanwhile, Frank Schaeffer serves up enough Old Testament-grade drivel to qualify as one of those priests of Baal whom Elijah wrecked: “Debt Ceiling Chaos Is a Born-Again Religion Problem”. Really? Do you actually conflate faith and politics to that degree, Frank, or are you imitating a knob for effect?

To understand why an irrational self-defeating action like destroying the credit of the USA might seem like the right thing to do you have to understand two things: that the Republican Party is now the party of religious fanatics and that these fanatics — people like Michele Bachmann — don’t want to work within our system, they want to bring it down.

In the scorched-earth era of the “health care reform debates” of 2009 and beyond, Evangelicals seemed to believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations weren’t the evil government. The right even decided that it was “normal” for the state to hand over its age-old public and patriotic duties to private companies — even for military operations (“contractors”), prisons, health care, public transport, and all the rest.

See, Frank, our government has become a pack of thieves. Are you, yourself among their number, or wearing blinders? Or do you tell yourself some rational lies to rationalize ‘quantitative easing’?

Even the word “infrastructure” lost its respectability when government had a hand in maintaining roads, bridges, and trains. In denial of the West’s civic-minded, government-supporting heritage, Evangelicals (and the rest of the Right) wound up defending private oil companies but not God’s creation, private cars instead of public transport, private insurance conglomerates rather than government care of individuals.

Schaeffer, you paint with a broad brush. I cheerfully vote for parks and other civic improvements, At The Local Level. Yet you seem to be the one setting government up as God with ‘government care of individuals’. Do we need to be frank about your idolatry problem, Frank, or is that cow sacred?
In conclusion:

Theology is — by nature — not about reason but about faith. If God’s will is to be served then so be it if America is plunged into chaos! This debt ceiling fiasco is just another chapter in the “culture” wars.

The extreme language of Evangelical/”pro-life” rebellion has now been repackaged in the debt ceiling showdown. It is the language of religion pitted against facts.

One can nearly agree with your foolishness, if government is become God, in violation of the Establishment Clause, and you are the “culture” warrior foisting a God, call It “Progress”, down the public throat.
How about we go for something rational, secular, and economic like spending less than our tax receipts? How about if We The Caesars don’t overdrive what We The People render?
I’m warming up, but I have to go see about a plane.

Category: Uncategorized

Chinese Animators Lampoon Debt Crisis

Posted on | July 15, 2011 | 3 Comments

by Smitty (via Legal Insurrection)


The absurdity of it all is underscored by a bear with a Mao cap, an elephant standing on a money hose, and a ‘backdoor plan’. The fact that these guys are Taiwanese means that they don’t reveal Jim Morrison when they open the back door, but I think we can forgive them that. Our government certainly behaves as though it were as stoned as Mr. Mojo Risin’; perhaps that is enough.

Category: Uncategorized

Gingrich Advises GOP on ‘Bully’ Obama: Stop Negotiating and Start Legislating

Posted on | July 15, 2011 | 13 Comments

Say what you will about Newt, he’s a brilliant legislative tactician:

President Obama is a “bully” who is “clearly failing” on economic policy, according to Newt Gingrich , and House Republicans should stop negotiating with the White House and move forward with passing their own solutions to the debt-ceiling and budget deficit.
“Obama has put the ‘bully’ back in the bully pulpit,” Gingrich told reporters Friday afternoon. The former Speaker of the House and current GOP presidential hopeful accused Obama of “intellectual dishonesty,” and said congressional Republicans should “take Social Security off the table” in the current debate over the federal debt ceiling.
John Boehner and House Republicans should “quit talking to Obama and start passing legislation,” Gingrich said in a conference call with a number of writers for conservative publications and blogs. . . .

Read the rest at The American Spectator. In a situation like that — where everybody and his dog is on the same conference call — the trick is to take good notes, figure out your lede before the call ends, and be the first to whip out a quick 200 words. Let somebody else transcribe the whole thing and write an 800-word analysis, if they want. Just get the scoop while the getting’s good.

Take notes, kids. This will be on your final exam.

UPDATE: The conference call was billed as a follow-up on Gingrich’s recent appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show:

In that interview, Newt panned Mitch McConnell’s compromise plan:

The way it is written I think is basically a surrender by the Republicans. Now is the time to be calm, courageous, creative and clear. To be calm, first I want you to understand. Obama is under as much pressure as the Republicans are. Does he want to be the first president in American history to default? Is he really going to go out to the world and say I can’t do my job and I can’t get Washington to work? I don’t think so. I think in the end he’s going to have to reach an agreement.
Second, I think that they have got to be courageous because this is a hard business. This is history. This isn’t politics. This isn’t 30-second attack commercials. This is a power struggle between the 80 percent of the American people who believe in a citizen-centered government and the 20 percent who believe in a Washington-centered government. That power struggle is as deep and as real as anything since the civil war. You have to have the courage to stand there and take the heat.
They’ve also got to be creative that’s why I suggested just now, pass a one-month debt ceiling increase and pay for it with the same number of dollars in savings and be prepared to come back a month later and do the same thing. And do it once a month until we win the presidency.
And finally, I think you have to be clear so the American people understand it.

UPDATE II: John “Doctor Zero” Hayward has more at Human Events:

Gingrich called on “everyone in the conservative movement” to “do what I’ve done, and call it the Obama Depression.”
“You can go everywhere in this country and find ways Obama kills jobs,” he asserted. “Obama is the best food stamp president in American history, but we need a paycheck president.”
Gingrich believes today’s congressional Republican leadership holds much higher ground than he did, during his legendary battles with President Bill Clinton. “Clinton was a natural centrist, but Obama is a radical.” He says Clinton won re-election [in 1996] by adopting Republican policies, such as welfare reform, while Obama is incapable of such ideological flexibility.
“Do we have the nerve to take on the most radical President in American history?” is the question Newt Gingrich wants every conservative to ask. . . .

Read the whole thing. Friendly advice to John: Never begin your story with “In a conference call with bloggers today . . .” Why? Because the real news-value is what he said, not where he said it or to whom he said it. Also, by leading with “conference call,” you’re telling the reader up front that what you’re reporting isn’t exclusive. But if your story contains important material that the other reporters on the call forgot to include, your story is exclusive to that extent, and therefore you don’t want to start off by signaling the reader, in effect: “Hey, a dozen other publications have the same story, so this isn’t really anything special.”
Therefore, when reporting a conference call, do what I did:

  1. Lead with the news.
  2. Slip into the second paragraph the fact that the subject “told reporters” such-and-so; and then
  3. At some point later in the story, mention that all this stuff was said in a conference call, or during a speech to a Kiwanis Club, or overheard in a bar while the politician was sloppy drunk and trying to pick up a 17-year-old.

On second thought, sometimes where a politician says something is more important than what he says, but that’s just the exception that proves the rule.

UPDATE III: Linked by The Lonely Conservative — thanks!

UPDATE IV: Katrina Trinko of National Review gets down into the tall grass of policy:

Newt Gingrich thinks that Republicans should only hike the debt ceiling by as much as Democrats are willing to cut spending by.
“The principle for a long-term debt ceiling hike ought to be very simple: the president does not get any more money in the debt ceiling than he signs into savings. So if he wants a trillion dollars increase in the debt ceiling, there has to be a trillion dollars in savings in how the government is run,” Gingrich said in a conference call with reporters this afternoon.
Gingrich focused on waste, fraud and abuse when talking about how spending could be cut, arguing that applying Six Sigma business practices to the government could save as much as $500 billion. He also cited a study done by his Center for Health Transformations that estimated Medicare and Medicaid theft amounted to $70 billion to $120 billion. He pointed to Rep. Paul Ryan’s $700 billion savings estimate for block granting Medicaid, and recommended that cabinet officers should eliminate the 10 percent of workers least effective under them. . . .

Read the rest. Katrina got her story online about 30 minutes after I did, and adds serious news value with the detail about the specifics of Gingrich’s policy ideas, but I still think his “bully” remark was the obvious headline from the story. To have a candidate for president call the incumbent a “bully” is news, any way you slice it.

Also news: Gingrich’s campaign is $1 million in debt, which would rather tend to undermine his lecture on “applying Six Sigma business practices,” I suppose . . .


Category: American Spectator, Barack Obama, Budget, Election 2012, Journalism, Newt Gingrich

Renowned ‘Heh-ologian’ Nancy Pelosi Explains What BHO Means By ‘Job’

Posted on | July 15, 2011 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Thanks to The Blog Prof for the clip tip. The context was the debt limit negotiations. I disagree with Blog Prof’s assessment that “this comparison [of BHO to Job] is nothing short of INSANE”. In fact, this is one of the more accurate statements Princess Pelosi has drooled since she became a load on the taxpayer wallet.

Job is no place compared to this President in terms of patience.

You’ll have to forgive Nancy’s mishandling of the vowel. She used a long ‘o’, when she really meant a short one, to judge by the latest employment figures.
BHO’s desired end state for the country is equality of condition, at least for all knuckle draggers who didn’t vote for Obama. Aren’t we headed that direction under BHO’s economic variations on the Tower of Babel? Haven’t we been plagued in Egypt?
Sackcloth and ashes are about the lowest common denominator for the American people. Nancy is totally correct: Obama will not rest until your job is no place compared to his.

Category: Uncategorized

McCain Clan Didn’t Notice Stacy’s Absence

Posted on | July 15, 2011 | 14 Comments

by Smitty

As Stacy was noting recently:

This was the second year in a row that the Fourth has found me dead broke, without fireworks or the means to get to Alabama, so that I have been continuously (and quite publicly) humiliated in the eyes of my friends and family for the past 24 months.

This blog can now report that the absence of Stacy McCain in no way impeded the Annual McCain Clan Bath.

cheap_shots_r_us

Cousins Jedediah and Polly-Esther git them some of that hygene, whether they's needin' it or not.


All right, all right: this post is nothing more than a cheap shot. I will hit the tip jar as penance.





If you laughed, maybe you should, too.

Photo: Anorak News.

Category: Uncategorized

System Shock: Straightforward, Positive Campaign Ad for Virginia’s Dianne Blais

Posted on | July 15, 2011 | Comments Off on System Shock: Straightforward, Positive Campaign Ad for Virginia’s Dianne Blais

by Smitty (via Allahpundit on Twitter)

Allahpundit teases with the question of whether this is the greatest campaign ad ever. I suspect that such an award would go to one with maximal impact, which would probably be a Ladd Ehlinger outing.

That said, the notion of a simple collection of jaunty couplets delivered by the candidate herself is a breath of fresh air.

Thanks for caring enough to run for office, Dianne Blais!

Category: Election, Video, Virginia
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