"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
That’s Quin Hillyer’s description of John McCain, a description he thoroughly justifies with a grocery list of Cousin Maverick’s selfish tantrums:
Does anybody doubt that this man of deep grudges, reportedly flagrant infidelities, an intense mean streak, and a disdain for the actual substance of most domestic political issues would easily lend himself to caricature precisely because his own manifold flaws make him a walking caricature all on his own? . . .
by Smitty
Via HotAir, Daniel Henninger offers a look at the disconnection of the Progressives from America. He notes
Constitutional professors quoted in the press and across the Web explain that much about the federal government’s modern authority is “settled” law. Even so, many of these legal commentators are quite close to arguing that the national government’s economic and political powers are now limitless and unfettered.
When you go to Tea Parties and see a large minority of attendees wearing some sort of military service-related paraphernalia, you need to know that Americans who’ve served understand the Constitution, and have sworn to defend it. This ‘settled law’ business, while certainly important, is also a foreign concept.
We don’t need is the glib one-liners from the members of this Judas Congress. We don’t need the POTUS jetting about, leaving carbon footprint and sales pitch in his wake, as if a deficit in trust can be overcome with a multitude of words. We don’t need the libe(ra)l media pissing down our backs and telling us it’s raining.
We need a concise, layman’s explanation of:
(a) how they think ‘settled law’ tantamount to a Constitutional Amendment, and
(b) how it is that common-sense interpretation of things like Article 1 and Amendment 10 are nullified by (a).
The Judas Congress is today what the British Parliament was in the 1770s: a distant, un-representative pack of louts. And the Tea Parties, which are a peaceful analog of Washington’s Colonial Army, are not backing down. If you read The Glorious Cause, you realize that Washington’s army won by merely sustaining its existence. By refusing to lose to Royal forces, time was on Washington’s side.
The modern Progressive louts, the Democrats and these GOP squishes that are already trying to cut their deals, promise to be highly entertaining as time drags on, the Tea Parties rise, and Progressive elites sink.
by Smitty
Via the Daley Gator, we have my Congresstool getting the Jason Mattera treatment. I would like to think that Jim Moran knows that there are only 11 Congressional districts in Virginia; he’s served my State’s delegation since the flipping Bush41 Administration.
I would also like to think that ‘clerical error’ means ‘honest mistake’. However, if you asked me to assign a probability to the likelihood that my Congressman is innocent of any shenanigans with respect to stimulus money, I fear I would be duty-bound to return a low number.
As is the case with Mattera’s confrontational style, one wants to give a bit of general human empathy to the person on the receiving end of this sort of ‘New York’ approach to dialog. Rep. Moran, however, can get bent. I’ll be supporting the winner of the Republican primary for VA-8 like the life of my country depends on it. Actually, I think it does.
Update: Pundit and Pundette have more on NOVA’s finest.
Update II: via Dan Riehl on Twitter, some old Moran dirt.
by Smitty
From a Freedom Works email:
We expect over ONE MILLION protesters across the country, and I hope you’ll be among them. But if you cannot, there are still plenty of ways for you to help out and make your voice heard for freedom.
It will take a lot of pictures to back up that prediction. Even so, we can expect the liberal media (you can’t spell ‘liberal’ without ‘libel’) to convert the attendance estimate to hexadecimal, and then take the logarithm, so that the final figure fits fingers. But they could well disprove my mockery by breaking with tradition and reporting honestly.
I do wonder if Conor Friedersdorf shall have recovered from the encounter with Valley of the Shadow on Twitter in time to meet some actual Americans. Come chill with the homies, Conor: we’re generally good folk, after all.
by Smitty
It’s sort of a shame that public dialog seized upon Rep. Hank Johnson’s remark to Admiral Robert Willard about the Navy’s plans to relocate to Guam. Saying that “My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated it will tip over and capsize,” whether in hyperbole or as a result of his noted illness, while remarkable, is something of a distraction from more pressing matters. For example, RNC staffers in an S&M dungeon.
There are better uses of sailors than deploying them to WESPAC to flip islands over to see what’s underneath them. We should deploy those squids to Capitol Hill, to flip through pending legislation to ensure that someone, anyone, gets us out of the “pass legislation to find out what’s in it” penalty box into which this Judas Congress has dumped us. Oh, and a nice coat of machinery grey paint for that tool, the Wicked Witch of the West. S&M dungeons, indeed.
On an April Fool’s related note, Rebellion blog linked us in a set of brief parodies of other blogs. We look good alongside GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD, but I thought American Power was the most fun.
And, of course, when was David Lee Roth never anything but self-parody?
Update: Phelps, not only are you hammered, but you’re falling below David Lee Roth on this post. Let that be a lesion to you.
Update II:
(via Villainous Company)
Neil Cavuto gives Ben Quayle a few minutes on Fox, and the kid manages only to lock up the clueless slacker vote: Continue reading VIDEO: Dan Quayle’s Son Inadvertantly Makes the Case for Vernon Parker →
Drew M. at Ace of Spades says John Cornyn is “starting to go wobbly,” which involves the wholly unwarranted assumption that Cornyn was ever steady to begin with.
It was Cornyn who, by giving the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s endorsement to Charlie Crist — 15 months before the Florida GOP primary — sparked the Not One Red Cent rebellion.
Over and over, we have seen recently that Republican “leadership” in Washington is a joke, their cowardice exceeded only by their incompetence. Pete Sessions and the National Republican Congressional Committee squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Dede Scozzafava campaign, and the NRCC’s candidate-recruitment efforts consist mainly of trying to find “self-funders” — e.g., Ben Quayle types with lots of Daddy’s money to throw around — rather than identifying real leaders with solid values, like Vernon Parker.
The recent foibles of the Republican National Committee are too numerous to mention, but the bondage-nightclub fund-raiser is the tip of a very large iceberg of RNC staff blunders. The RNC also backed Scozzafava and there was that moronic Powerpoint presentation. Now Michelle Malkin calls our attention to the latest outrage:
Mr. Steele agreed to meet with the immigration groups after they staged a brief but noisy sit-in at the R.N.C. offices on March 22.
Several advocates emerged from the closed-door session to say Mr. Steele had pledged to help find at least one more Republican sponsor for a bill being crafted by Senator Lindsey O. Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, and Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, a Democrat.
The advocates “walked away with a commitment from Steele to work with Sen. Lindsey Graham and the party’s leadership to enlist another Republican senator’s support for comprehensive and bipartisan immigration reform,” the leaders of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement said in a statement. The movement is a coalition of groups that support a path to legal status for illegal immigrants.
This kind of sellout — the GOP elite betraying the party’s conservative grassroots — occurs routinely. While I was in Arizona, I heard rumors that if John McCain’s big money isn’t enough to buy re-election, the NRSC will spend money to help McCain destroy J.D. Hayworth. It’s typical of the kind of clueless Republican “leadership” that spent $320,000 to help Arlen Specter defeat Pat Toomey in 2004 — and was prepared to do the same this year, until Specter decided he was a Democrat:
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, [wrote an April 2009 letter] to fellow Republicans asking them to support Specter.
And Cornyn certainly wasn’t alone:
In a sign of party support, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s Bluegrass PAC contributed $10,000 to Specter [in March 2009].
“Does the GOP have enough balls?” Neither balls, nor brains.
(Cross-posted at the Hot Air Greenroom.)
by Smitty
Day By Day makes a great historical allusion that merits mention. As a part of the Battle of the Bulge, the Siege of Bastogne had the fascists pinning down the 101st Airborne for a week. “When confronted with a written request from German General Luttwitz for surrender of Bastogne, [Brigadier General McAuliffe] replied ‘NUTS!'”
According to an article in the Daily Mail the reply was not “Nuts” but a four letter expletive that was changed for propaganda purposes for domestic consumption. But that was not the case, according to Vincent Vicari, McAuliffe’s personal aide who was there at the time. As quoted by Richard Pyle of the Associated Press December 12, 2004, Vicari said, “General Mac was the only general I ever knew who did not use profane language. ‘Nuts’ was part of his normal vocabulary.”
So, both the allusion to fascism and the