The Other McCain

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

Recursive Blood Donation Picture

Posted on | September 17, 2010 | 26 Comments

by Smitty

Is it excessively geeky to open up the blog on the netbook to last May’s blood donation post, and then have a picture taken of that, while donating again?
axis of fedora coughs up the blood
I mean, of course it’s geeky. The question here is whether it’s excessively so.
Again, I go for the apheresis machine, which limits me to approximately three visits a year.

Category: Uncategorized

If He Worked For Allahpundit, What About Barney Frank?

Posted on | September 17, 2010 | 13 Comments

by Smitty (via AmericanGlob)

Allahpundit says that this ad made an alpha male out of him:

Could Sean Duffy have that affect on Barney Frank? I think the experiment worth undertaking, and hope the cheese heads concur.

Related: the Swamp Thing reports that Feingold feels not like gold.

Category: Politics, Republicans

O’DONNELLPHOBIA! Media Discovers Dreaded Gay-Hating Extremist Theocrat Is Related to People Who . . . Uh, Aren’t

Posted on | September 16, 2010 | 65 Comments

In the famous words of the most successful politician in Delaware history: Big f***ing deal.

Christine has a lesbian sister named Jennie, whom I’m pretty sure I met Wednesday while I was filing from the lobby of the Fairfield Inn in Dover. I also met Christine’s father, her mother, her brother-in-law, etc.

True confession time: Two of my cousins are Democrats.

I’m not going to name them, because I’m not sure whether they’re out of the closet. It’s disgusting to think that my own flesh and blood would vote for the Party of Evil but, after all, I was myself a Democrat until I was 35 years old. There but for the grace of God . . .

Did I mention that a distant relative of mine is a vicious backstabbing RINO? (Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Bob Barr!)

Please notice that progressives automatically assume that Jennie O’Donnell’s sexuality somehow discredits Christine. The MSM would never dream of employing this tactic — what shall we call it? hypocrisy by association? — against a Democrat. Surely there must be at least one liberal Democratic member of Congress whose close relative is an NRA member, a Southern Baptist, or a Tea Party activist. But you will never see the liberal media do a feature story portraying a Democrat’s right-wing kin as being some sort of a rebuke of their relative’s liberal politics:

STUMPWATER, Mississippi — His beer-drinking buddies call him “Catfish” and think of him as a regular good-ole-boy, but none of them know that Arnold Frank has a famous brother, the gay liberal congressman from Massachusetts . . .

Never going to happen, you see? The media’s unquestioned assumption is that all intelligent people of goodwill are liberal Democrats. So people who aren’t liberal Democrats are therefore automatically objects of suspicion, whose views and associations must be investigated and exposed.

It is only Republicans who ever receive this kind of treatment. A Democrat’s family history and career associations can never be used to discredit them. Say, for example, that a Democrat’s father was a foreign socialist, that he went to Indonesia with his mother whom he subsequently described as a “secular humanist,” and he spent 20 years in a church with a radical preacher while palling around with terrorists in the most notoriously corrupt city in America . . .

Not a story. Nothing to see here. Move along.

O’Donnellphobia is like Palin Derangment Syndrome, where anyone who’s ever had a disagreement with Sarah Palin becomes a credible source for a hit piece.

Oh, look, there’s Christine’s ex-ex-gay disgruntled former employee dishing dirt!

And – O’MGasm! — Christine has known men in the biblical sense:

It was in college at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey that O’Donnell did things she regrets — drinking too much and having sex with guys with whom there wasn’t a strong emotional connection.

That’s right, folks: Christine O’Donnell is a sinful harlot, a fallen woman who probably wears push-up bras and lipstick like a cheap hussy.

And if she was a liberal Democrat or Meghan McCain, this would make no difference whatsoever.

Only because Christine O’Donnell is a conservative Republican do these thing get reported. Why? Because conservatives are evil and dangerous and lurking in your children’s closets!

It’s just like the “raaaaacism” thing: Left-wing fear-mongers keep beating that drum to remind everyone that America is always just one GOP victory away from The Dark Night of Fascism, when the stormtroopers come goose-stepping down Main Street, rounding up the masturbators and homosexuals and brown people and anyone else who doesn’t swear the Blood Oath of Eternal Allegiance to Newt Gingrich.

You know: Like 1959 all over again, when Eisenhower was president and Richard Nixon ate nine Jewish babies for breakfast every morning and liberal college professors were routinely burned at the stake.

(Hat-tip to Daffyd ab Hugh for coining “O’Donnellphobia.”)

Category: Christine O'Donnell, Delaware, Election, Gays

Note To The Mini At US-50 And Gallows

Posted on | September 16, 2010 | 39 Comments

by Smitty

I hope the experience of entering an intersection you had no hope of clearing before your light went red, and then having your escape cut off by those of us going West on US-50 was sufficiently traumatic.
Our roads are filled with creeps like you, who think that there is no need to apply common sense to traffic situations. The act of looking down the road and making a reasonable estimate of your chances of clearing the intersection prior to entering said traffic feature must offend your sense of fairness, progress, and, of course, privilege.

portrait of a knob on parade

Genius entered from the NE and stopped at arrow tip.


It’s likely that a glance at the stern of your Mini Cooper would reveal a sticker beginning with the letter “O”. Furthermore, I’m sure you rail at the stone cold ugliness of Northern Virginia traffic, cursing the day George W. Bush exited Barbara to begin his reign of terrestrial terror and impediment of Holy Progress.
No doubt you instantly grasped that all of the irritated, oncoming traffic that left you stranded dead center in that oversized intersection were members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, who wallowed in schadenfreude at the thought of hanging such an inconsiderate twerp out to dry on the clothesline of his own idiocy.
But will this public humiliation be enough? Will ruthlessly holding up a mirror to the face of your own selfish behavior convince you to think? Or, like the rest of the Progressive morons on either side of the aisle, will you simply hate reality all the more, blaming everything under the sun except your own idiocy, and pile on even more?
At some high level of abstraction, one should forgive you. And I do. But not the retardedness of your action. No, I want that moment to be a club with which you beat yourself into some repentance. Wait until you’re sure there is room for you prior to entering the intersection.
This revolutionary notion of considering the consequences of your actions can have a positive, catalytic effect on your life. Debt, bastards, and grievous injury can all be avoided by simple acts of forethought. Whatever else, learn from the experience you had there at Gallows Road today, that you avoid swinging from a similar metaphorical gibbet later on.
That is all.

Category: Uncategorized

BREAKING: Fire Melts Steel, Oswald Killed JFK, Vince Foster Shot Himself

Posted on | September 16, 2010 | 41 Comments

While I was toiling in defense of Christine O’Donnell’s criticism of coed dorms, the Progressive Orgy Room was going berserk again:

Back in 1996, when then-Speaker Newt Gingrich’s finances were being investigated, O’Donnell complained that people were on a witch hunt to find anything to get Gingrich, instead of paying attention to serious ethics scandals — like putting Bill Clinton on trial for the supposed murder of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster. . . .
O’Donnell was squarely in the conspiracy camp back then.

Which is a flat lie, according to O’Donnell’s actual remarks, provided in the transcript of the C-SPAN program which the same blog quotes at length:

I think it’s very interesting that President Clinton has come on a lot more charges and a lot more serious charges than what Newt Gingrich is being charged on, yet we’re not making as big of an issue, we’re not forcing that he go to trial . . . We’re not giving people like Paula Jones a fair trial, we’re not giving the case of Vincent Foster a fair trial — when there is a lot more empirical evidence that Clinton is involved in wrongdoing. . . .
Well, I think people are out on a witch hunt for Newt Gingrich . . . They’re just seeking anything to bring against him, because if you look at the charges, failing to seek legal advice on his tax exempt status. By no means am I dismissing the charge, but when you look in comparison, the beast of Whitewater that Bill Clinton is involved in and the little attention that that is getting, and the little serious investigation that that is getting.
Bill Clinton is charged of — for much more serious accounts of fraud than a mistake that Newt Gingrich got in. If you examine almost anybody’s tax records you can find something to charge them on. I hate to admit, but taxes are very complicated, so you can find something to bring almost anybody.
And then there’s also the issue of murder with Vincent Foster. That’s a much more serious charge than failing to seek legal advice, and yet we’re all just blowing that off, and everybody’s trying to focus on Newt Gingrich like a witch hunt, to bring him to the stake and burn him, because they don’t like the policy that he’s behind.

Is Eric Kleefeld incapable of reading his own transcript? Speaking extemporaneously on live TV, O’Donnell said that “the case of Vince Foster” had not been given “a fair trial,” that there had been “little serious investigation,” and subsequently said that “the issue of murder with Vince Foster” was “a much more serious charge” than any accusation made against Newt Gingrich.

All of which was arguably true, and the views expressed by O’Donnell were very widespread among Republicans in 1996. She said nothing about a conspiracy and, indeed, did not even use the phrase “cover-up,” which was in common circulation at the time.

For 10 years, I had the great honor and privilege of working with one of America’s finest investigative reporters, Jerry Seper of The Washington Times. Jerry did about as much reporting on Vince Foster’s July 1993 death as anyone on the planet. Jerry fully agreed (as do I) with the final conclusion that Foster indeed committed suicide. However, the circumstances surrounding Foster’s death were certainly suspicious and news accounts of the case left many people unconvinced of the official police explanation. It was not until Kenneth Starr issued a definitive report in 1997 that these suspicions were laid to rest.

Starr’s report had not been issued when O’Donnell spoke in 1996 of “the issue of murder” in connection with the Foster case. It would have much better if she had said “allegations of murder” or the “question of murder.” Given that she was speaking in a live-TV format, however, her somewhat awkward phrasing cannot fairly be construed to mean that O’Donnell was herself making such an allegation, much less that she was “in the conspiracy camp.”

So we see that, as in other instances, O’Donnell’s critics have seized upon her long-ago words, wrenched them out of context and interpreted them in the worst possible light. Note that O’Donnell’s defense of traditional Christian moral beliefs have been given this “gotcha” treatment by the same progressives who scream bloody murder if anyone makes reference to Barack Obama’s association with Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright or with Bill “Weatherman” Ayers. 

Eric Kleefeld of Talking Points Memo tries to paint Christine O’Donnell as being “in the conspiracy camp,” but he is utterly silent about his fellow progressives who, among much else, have claimed that Republicans “stole” the 2000 election in Florida, rigged Ohio voting machines for similar purposes in 2004, and invaded Iraq to pursue the interests of Halliburton, Big Oil and the “Zionist entity.”

Neither should we forget that longtime Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal earned the nickname “Grassy Knoll” for his conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination, nor the “Fire Can’t Melt Steel” proclamations of prominent liberal 9/11 Truthers like the woman we should henceforth call The Other O’Donnell:

“I do believe that it’s the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel. . . . Miraculously, the first time in history, steel was melted by fire. It is physically impossible.”
— Rosie O’Donnell, 2007

You can’t accuse liberals of not having standards. They’ve got exactly two: One for them, and one for everybody else.

UPDATE: Linked by Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection.

Category: Christine O'Donnell, Crime, Delaware

Once Again, Christine O’Donnell Is Right: Coed Dormitories Are a Very Bad Idea

Posted on | September 16, 2010 | 80 Comments

Yesterday, I took notice of Rachel Maddow’s snide attack on Christine O’Donnell for having had the temerity to say, in 1996, that masturbation violates biblical injunctions against lust. It goes without saying that Maddow is heedless of biblical injunctions (e.g., Romans 1:18-32), as is her right in a free society, yet what struck me was the MSNBC hostess’s easy assumption that every viewer shared her disdain.

Maddow offered no argument of her own about the propriety of masturbation; she merely played video of O’Donnell’s comments and smirked. Salon’s Justin Elliott takes a similar approach toward O’Donnell’s statements (quoted in a 2003 article by Cheryl Wetzstein of The Washington Times) about coed dormitories at colleges and universities:

Dorm life has evolved into a blending of the sexes, from coed buildings to coed floors, coed bathrooms and now even coed rooms.
“What’s next? Orgy rooms? Menage a trois rooms?” asked Christine O’Donnell, spokeswoman for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Del., which publishes a college guide.
All this coedness is outside normal life, said Miss O’Donnell. “Most average American adults don’t use coed bathrooms – if they had the option of a coed bathroom at a public restaurant, they wouldn’t choose it.” Coedness “is like a radical agenda forced on college students,” she said.

Like Maddow, Elliott presents O’Donnell’s opinions as self-evidently laughable. The reader is assumed to believe that only someone “nutty” could hold such views.

Is this so? Are coed facilities at universities — including coed bathrooms and coed dorm suites — so non-controversial that no intelligent person could plausibly criticize this policy?

Young people may be forgiven for not knowing that, until the 1960s, many of the nation’s most prestigious universities — including Harvard, Yale and Columbia — were all-male institutions. When Hillary Clinton graduated from Wellesley, it was a women’s college.

Historically speaking, then, coed campuses as a ubiquitous phenomenon in higher education are a fairly recent development. Coed dormitories are an even more recent innovation and, it must be noted, are by no means ubiquitous in 2010. The last time I checked, my alma mater (Jacksonville State University in Alabama) still had separate men’s and women’s dorms. Even on campuses that have coed dorms, these are merely one housing option, and many students choose to live in single-sex dorms. (If indeed they stay in campus housing at all, off-campus apartments being now preferred by many students.)

When I was entered Jax State in 1977, the visitation policy in dorms was still enforced rather rigorously. Women could visit in men’s rooms (and vice-versa) only during certain hours. Having a female guest in your room after-hours — “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” — could result in disciplinary action, up to and including expulsion.

At issue in all such discussions  is the question: What is the purpose of a university?

Do universities exist primarily to facilitate the sex lives of students, including teenaged freshmen and sophomores? Or is it possible that parents who pay up to $40,000 a year to send their children to college hope that administrators will provide an environment where students may focus their attention on getting an education? Insofar as parents generally wish to see their own values upheld by their children, do parents who disapprove of promiscuous sex have no interest in whether university housing policies facilitate such promiscuity?

Don’t students themselves also have an interest in avoiding unwanted intrusions on their privacy that might occur in a coed environment? Indeed, does student-housing policy involve questions of personal safety, or was the alleged gang-rape of Megan Wright merely an isolated incident?

Noting the decline in academic standards in public education, Newt Gingrich once described modern high schools as “subsidized dating.” Have we now reached the point where universities may be described as “subsidized fornication”?

These are serious questions, deserving of serious discussion, and addressing such questions was certainly within the purview of Christine O’Donnell’s position as a spokeswoman for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. (The controversy surrounding her employment at, and departure from, ISI being a subject we may explore later.)

Elliott’s sneering atttitude toward O’Donnell’s criticisms of coed dorms implies that — like her advocacy of premarital chastity — no reader could (or should) take such matters seriously. She’s just a kook.

Well, say hello to another kook: Wendy Shalit, whose 1995 Commentary article criticizing the coed policies at Williams College led to her 1998 book, A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, which I heartily recommend.

I’d wager that O’Donnell’s views on coed facilities were influenced by Shalit’s arguments, and if Justin Elliott has never acquainted himself with those argument, this is his fault and not O’Donnell’s. I would similarly bet that O’Donnell’s advocacy of chastity (including the avoidance of masturbation) was influenced by Josh Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye, another book I heartily recommend.

Of course, Wendy Shalit and Josh Harris are not candidates for the U.S. Senate, and O’Donnell’s opinions about coed dorms and masturbation are irrelevant to the campaign in Delaware. It is politically convenient for Justin Elliott and others to pretend that Christine O’Donnell is some sort of fanatical freak — a right-wing Christian theocrat! — but their dismissive attitudes ought not deceive intelligent and skeptical people.

Sneering contempt for old-fashioned virtue is a very dangerous thing. It is remarkable how far gone our popular culture is in this regard. All sophisticated people are now supposed to scoff at the notion that young people can refrain from premarital intercourse, much less be “masters of their domain,” as the Seinfeld show once phrased it. 

So casual is our cultural assumption that “everybody’s doing it” that we are shocked when anyone dares suggest we shouldn’t do it. The only acceptable morality is now amorality — an agnostic indifference to virtue — and our society has become strikingly intolerant toward those who publicly dissent from the New Sexual Orthodoxy.

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil . . .
— Isaiah 5:20 (KJV)

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.
— II Timothy 4:3-4 (KJV)

In warfare, it is generally an error to cede the high ground to one’s enemy, and soi-dissant “conservatives” who refuse to defend the Judeo-Christian moral tradition are committing a strategic error. It goes without saying that O’Donnell is scorned by God-hating wankers like Charles Johnson:

As I have elsewhere argued, “Thou shalt not steal” is the most persuasive argument against the Welfare State. Biblical injunctions against adultery and covetousness are part of the same moral fabric that condemns government-abetted expropriation of wealth. Advocates of economic liberty therefore should not lightly disregard this common ground of morality they share with social conservatives.

Conservatives should not unnecessarily intrude discussion of sexual morality into the political discourse. It ill behooves us to adopt the self-righteous posture of pharisaical crusaders seeking to use government as a scourge for the chastisement of sinners. Neverthless, in situations where traditional morality is under assault — as when liberals sneer at O’Donnell’s advocacy of virtue — conservatives ought to rally to its defense, however unfashionable such morality may be in our decadent era.

In fact, I would argue that an occasion like this is a teachable moment, permitting conservatives an opportunity to remark on the increasing decadence of our culture. O’Donnell is now being ridiculed, you see, because she once dared to question the modern liberal idolatry of Progress.

“We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity.”
— Edmund Burke, 1790

“My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”
— G.K. Chesterton, 1923

The Cult of Progress involves the assumption that everything new and modern is better than anything traditional and old-fashioned. It is the credulous acceptance of this unexamined premise that provides an ideological foundation upon which liberals have erected their syllogisms of Hope and Change.

Christine O’Donnell’s willingness to speak out in defense of moral virtue ought to be applauded by conservatives, and deserves respect from all decent citizens of humane goodwill.

CHRISTINE O’DONNELL for U.S. SENATE

Category: Christine O'Donnell, Culture, Sex

The New Democrat Party Logo Revealed

Posted on | September 16, 2010 | 21 Comments

by Smitty

We’ve long been fans of the graphical snark at No Sheeples Here. She even left us a little room to collaborate on her latest outing:

Thanks, NSH!
As for the Democrat Party, well, at least they’re in character. Nothing like Yet Another Attempt At Substituting Style For Substance (YAAASSFS) to give us an opportunity to yuck it up a bit.

Nice Deb also has an excellent entry.
Proof Positive takes a nip at everyone’s favorite chew toy.
Novatownhall goeth for the hot, thweet colorth.
My pet HEH.

Category: humor, No Sheeples

Stinging Rebuke Of Stephen Kruiser’s Twitter Philosophy

Posted on | September 16, 2010 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

Despite the oracular utterances of The Kruiser, Frank J. Fleming offered a pithy rebuttal today, on Twitter, of course:

Category: Blogging
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