‘Message to the National Republican Establishment: Stay Out of Our Primary’

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Ever since John Cornyn and the NRSC backed Charlie Crist in Florida last May, that’s been the basic message of Not One Red Cent. But if you thought Florida Republicans were outraged at national GOP meddling in their primary, just wait until you see the ‘Bama buzzsaw that hits John Boehner when he gets to Huntsville on Monday:

Not long after invitations were sent out for a Rep. Parker Griffith fundraising event, headlined by House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), several local organizations from both sides of the political spectrum announced plans to protest the event. Planned for March 8, 2010 at the Space & Rocket Center, starting at 5:00 pm, the the protest will include members of the Huntsville Tea Party, Left In Alabama, Athens-Limestone Tea Party Patriots, AAMU Democrats Student Club, The Dale Jackson Show, North Alabama Healthcare for All, Madison County Republican Executive Committee, and the Limestone County Republican Executive Committee. AFL-CIO will be holding a press conference at the Marriott Hotel near the Space & Rocket Center in protestation, before the protest event and the fundraiser.  Organizers invite the public to attend.
“We are sending a message to the national Republican establishment: stay out of our primary.  . . . We’re pushing back against the political machine,” said Christie Carden, founder of the Huntsville Tea Party. . . .

Read all of that. Just as with Cornyn’s support for Crist against Marco Rubio, Boehner’s backing of Griffith puts the national GOP establishment in the position of campaigning against the exact kind of dynamic young leaders they need to be supporting. Republican candidate Les Phillip:

“Congressman Boehner coming to Huntsville to raise money for Parker Griffith goes to show exactly how out of touch Washington D.C. is with the rest of America and their refusal to listen to “We the People”,” remarked Phillip.  
“Two of our local Republican executive committees specifically asked the National Republican Congressional Committee to stay out of this race and let the people of North Alabama decide who our best candidate is, but they refuse to listen because they think they know better than we do what is best for the fifth district.” . . .
“John Boehner and the NRCC are supporting Griffith with the notion that he will lure more Democrats to switch parties. This approach does not take into consideration the conservative nature of Republicans in Alabama’s 5th district, or Griffith’s record of voting with Nancy Pelosi nearly 85% of the time, more than many of his former Democrat colleagues.”

The liberal blog Left in Alabama has announced support for Monday’s protest:

Griffith is everybody’s problem.  Sure, I won’t agree with everyone at this protest on every single thing — maybe not on most things.  But we all agree that Griffith has got to go, and for now that one common purpose will let us stand on the same sidewalk in near perfect harmony.

Wingnuts and Moonbats unite! You have nothing to lose but those clueless morons at the national GOP!

UPDATE: Just got off the phone with a conservative operative who disagrees with my criticism of Boehner. “It’s his job. It’s what he’s got to do.”

Yes, I know, and it’s time for a change in the job description.

National party interference in contested primaries is poisonous, and if Griffith was promised help in the primary in exchange for switching parties, he was promised something that he had no right to expect. And let me explain something else that should be obvious: Good candidates don’t need the national party to bail them out in the primaries. 

Just go down the list of worthless assholes that the national GOP has wasted money on in recent years: Arlen Specter, Lincoln Chafee, Charlie Crist — see a pattern here?

Speaking of worthless assholes: Bob Corker. But I digress . . .

As I told my friend in our phone conversation, the major problem at GOP-HQ — encompassing RNC, NRCC, NRSC and the rest of the D.C.-based party apparatus — appears to involve staffers who combine arrogance and incompetence in a particularly dangerous way. I refer you to last October, when House conservatives confronted NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions for the Scozzafava screw-up:

Sessions was called out by conservative members of the caucus, and challenged when asked why NRCC resources — cash and personnel — were being used for Scozzafava. “We have a conservative running in this race, and the Republican Party is not with him,” says a conservative House member who attended the meeting. “There are a number of us who are profoundly embarrassed by this race, and while we don’t blame Pete, we do blame the NRCC staff for apparently not doing its job.” . . .
According to NRCC staff, Scozzafava was viewed as the “most cooperative” candidate of a group put forward by local Republican Party bosses in the 23rd District. “She wasn’t going to be a loose cannon and the money was happy with her,” says one NRCC source . . . “Ideally, we wanted someone who could self-finance, but we didn’t have anyone like that,” says the NRCC source. “Then we went with someone who would have a natural pool of donors; [Scozzafava] met that criteria.”

Where do they find idiots like this? Does the NRCC personnel department have a special program for hiring feeble-minded dimwits? Is there a stupid quota at GOP headquarters, or are these staff jobs reserved for particularly inept relatives of major Republican donors? “Don’t worry about flunking out, son. If all else fails, I’ll get you a job with the Republican Party.”

Which brings me to the Powerpoint mess from earlier this week:

The presentation was delivered by RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart to top donors and fundraisers at a party retreat in Boca Grande, Florida on February 18, a source at the gathering said.  . . .
The 72-page document was provided to POLITICO by a Democrat, who said a hard copy had been left in the hotel hosting the $2,500-a-head retreat, the Gasparilla Inn & Club. Sources at the event said the presentation was delivered by Bickhart and by the RNC Finance Chairman, Peter Terpeluk, a former ambassador to Luxembourg under President George W. Bush.

One GOP donor got his knickers in a twist over the “uncivil” tone of that presentation — Dan Riehl addressed that complaint today — but complaints about incivility miss the larger point: What moron was responsible for this stupid mess and who hired him?

When I saw the Powerpoint presentation, I was stunned by its crude, amateurish quality. On Page 10, the presentation says RNC raised $81 million in 2009, so why couldn’t they have spent a few bucks to hire someone with minimal competency in graphic design? Pages 29-31 of this thing look like they were scripted and designed by an eighth-grader.

Maybe Jed Clampett is a major Republican donor and Jethro is in charge of graphic design at the RNC. But the point is that the stupidity of the person who designed this Powerpoint presentation is exceeded only by the stupidity of the person who hired the person who designed it, both of whom are less stupid than the idiot responsible for it ending up in the hands of the Politico.

At some point, this kind of stupidity and incompetence at Republican Party headquarters ceases to be a series of random incidents and begins to be discernible as a pattern. Maybe the grassroots activists in Alabama are wrong to blame John Boehner for the deal that requires him to support Parker Griffith, but they are certainly right in their belief that the national GOP has exceeded its stupid quota.

Have Blog (And Fedora) Will Travel

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Pete Da Tech Guy has been inspired by the success of his CPAC trip:

Do you have an event anywhere in the country that you want covered? I’m willing to do it. My fee is very straightforward. 1 week: $1000 plus expenses. . . .
My total hits for Jan & Feb were over 80% of my total for the entire previous year. . . .
The continued success of the blog coupled with my continued failure to find work in my field puts me in a dilemma. Potentially the blog’s success could turn into something that might support me but I’m not sure that people are dying to pay me to write from Fitchburg, (fascinating though I find my home town). I’ve now managed some national and state attention. I’ve been a credentialed blogger both at the state (Brown Election) level and at the national level (CPAC). . . .
If I’m going to support my family the blog and I are going to have to do our part, to wit the offer; $1,000 a week plus expenses.

Read the rest. It’s a very ambitious goal, and some bloggers may say, “A thousand a week? That’s an awful lot to expect from the tip jar.” But as they say, aim for the stars and you might just make it to the moon.

Or Hollywood. In case you missed it yesterday, I’m planning to leave in late March on a transcontinental road-trip  — among other things, I want to check out the Senate campaigns in Arizona and Nevada — and figure since I’m going that far west, I might as well go all the way to L.A. So expect me to be furiously rattling the tip jar for the Shoe Leather Fund this month.

And why not send Da Tech Guy on that trip? Maybe not the whole trip (I’ve got some other stops to make along the way West and back), but if Da Tech Guy could book a flight into Phoenix with a return trip out of LAX, we could cover that together.

Today is March 6 and if we’re going to spend two days in Nevada and be in L.A. by April 1, I’d say we need to get to Phoenix by March 27.

So that’s three weeks for Pete to raise $1,000 plus expenses for the trip.

Fumbling Majority Jerks Recklessly, Arhythmically

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by Smitty

Two months into the second quarter of the Worst Administration Ever, coupled with The Congress That Shall Live in Infamy, and atrocious ideas continue to shamble forward, zombielike. I’m moving toward the suspicion that the left knows that ObamaCare is pure fail, and that their goal is to make the death of ObamaCare the most excruciating possible spectacle, so that their backers can maximize the angst. Continue reading Fumbling Majority Jerks Recklessly, Arhythmically →

One Fails To Understand How David Brooks Breathes

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by Smitty

David Brooks excreted another verbal puddle of nonsense into the NYeT yesterday.
He sets out to compare/contrast people who are alerted to the Constitutional threat with…hippies.

About 40 years ago, a social movement arose to destroy the establishment. The people we loosely call the New Left wanted to take on The Man, return power to the people, upend the elites and lead a revolution.

OK, David.

Today, another social movement has arisen. The people we loosely call the Tea Partiers also want to destroy the establishment. They also want to take on The Man, return power to the people, upend the elites and lead a revolution.

Actually, it’s a political movement. There is no attempt to broach any new language, attire, or societal structure. Also, the interest is in preserving the Constitutional establishment. There has been a threatening buildup of debt, usurpation of power, and deployment of spineless tools (see your nearest mirror, David) to support a Progressive overthrow of all that is good in the country. There is explicitly No Revolution, David. Only the slow erosion of separation of powers and Constitutional levels of government which you have overtly and covertly supported.

There are many differences between the New Left and the Tea Partiers. One was on the left, the other is on the right. One was bohemian, the other is bourgeois. One was motivated by war, and the other is motivated by runaway federal spending. One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Wal-Mart.

Thanks for the trite oversimplifications, David. The sad thing is that your straw man cage match might be viewed as accurate by someone. Or some two. Beyond that are the people who actually attend the Tea Parties, and know that the attendance runs the gamut of the economic spectrum.

But the similarities are more striking than the differences. To start with, the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor. This mimicry is no accident. Dick Armey, one of the spokesmen for the Tea Party movement, recently praised the methods of Saul Alinsky, the leading tactician of the New Left.

Wow, David. You behave as if:

  • There was something new under the sun when the Left trotted out these radical tactics–Alinsky was substantially cribbing Sun Tzu.
  • Mass rallies are somehow new or off limits because the Left “did them first”–no they didn’t.
  • Extreme statements such as “The country is frickin’ broke!” are inaccurate. Facts are facts, and the simple truth that Progressive idiocy has bred an extreme situation cannot be avoided while calmly pursuing a remedy.

Thus, accusations of mimicry are stupid. Who gives a flying French fornication if there is any discernible overlap between methods? Attack the godforsaken problem! The “logic” of Brooksism would seem to be that Americans should just keep on pluckin’ that chicken until some completely new, historically unheralded method becomes available.
Will that be pixie dust, or a magic wand, Mr. Brooks?

These days the same people who are buying Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals” on Amazon.com are, according to the company’s software, also buying books like “Liberal Fascism,” “Rules for Conservative Radicals,” “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left,” and “The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party.” Those last two books were written by David Horowitz, who was a leading New Left polemicist in the 1960s and is now a leading polemicist on the right.

Yeah? So? And? Are you denying the value of “know thy enemy”?

But the core commonality is this: Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence. Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it.

You are so completely wrong here, Brooks, as to bring a halt to all commentary. There is simply no joy in flogging erroneous ideas the way I crush the occasional millipede that creeps into the house. The Tea Party understands that people are fundamentally corrupt, David, and that there Is No Virtue In Bureaucracy. Can I beat that drum louder? Progressive Utopianism cannot purge the fundamental entropy in the human soul. No. What the Founders did, and you and your ilk seem bent on undoing, David, is delegate a finite set of powers to a central government to accomplish a limited set of objectives.
A century ago, we lost our way. We have the debt, the cratered political system, and the cratered roads to show for it.
The Tea Party is a restoration, not a revolution, you nitwit. The erroneous ideas you gleefully espouse are going to be systematically brushed aside. The painful realities of entitlement sunshine blown up generations of American fundament are going to be faced. The clear, simple wisdom of the Constitution, and the lessons of history will again be studied, so that snake oil salesman and kool aid merchants like yourself can be gently laughed at and ignored.
Or my name is not Phineas J. Whoopie.

Update: Ed Driscoll-lanche!

One Bong Hit Away From Murder: Warning Signs of Psycho-Libertarianism

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“[E]veryone knows that marijuana is a gateway drug to libertarianism.”
— Tom Maguire, e-mail to Professor Glenn Reynolds

The Psycho-Libertarian Dopehead Menace continues to stalk the blogosphere and everybody’s starting to catch a contact high. Meanwhile, a report from the Los Angeles Times raises the question: Which came first, the heavy marijuana use or the murderous insanity?

Bedell, 36, of Hollister, Calif., had mental health problems and had used marijuana, according to authorities, friends and court records.
San Benito County Supervisor Reb Monaco said he had been a close friend of the Bedell family for 35 years. . . .
Patrick, he said, had suffered from mental illness for at least 15 years.
“He probably was mentally ill for that period of time,” said Monaco, a retired schoolteacher. “He seemed rather paranoid. He was a heavy marijuana user and tended to self-medicate with marijuana. I don’t know if he used other drugs.” . . .
His parents reported him missing in January and asked local authorities to hold him, concerned about his mental health, said San Benito County Sheriff Curtis Hill.
Hill said the report stemmed from a call the family received from a Texas state trooper Jan. 3. The trooper said he had stopped their son for speeding on a freeway heading west outside Amarillo, Hill said.
“There’s an inference in [the report] that he was concerned about his mental health,” Hill said. Apparently finding no cause to hold Bedell, the trooper let him go, the sheriff said. . . .
According to the report, the Texas state trooper told Bedell’s mother that he was concerned for her son’s mental health because his car appeared to be in disarray. He said that Bedell had told him he was on his way to the East Coast.
The father told San Benito County deputies that he was concerned for his son’s safety. He said Bedell had a medical marijuana card, had been detained for mental evaluation before and had no friends or relatives on the East Coast. . . .
Bedell recently had attended San Jose State as a graduate student, studying electrical engineering, said Pat Harris, a university spokeswoman. . . .

Ah, yes, grad school — that’s a telltale warning sign, folks. If your kid ever says he’s “thinking about going to grad school,” obviously he must be on drugs.

Next thing you know he’ll be registering as a Democrat and going on a shooting rampage at the Pentagon, just like all those other extremist right-wing libertarian dopehead killers.

UPDATE: The ever-excitable Dave Niewert is frustrated that the MSM aren’t doing enough to portray drug-addled Democrats as “far-right” terrorists, and cites this NBC News video as evidence of the Conspiracy Of Silence:

As we saw in Austin, far-right extremist rhetoric plays no small role in inspiring these acts. And inevitably, it is ordinary Americans who pay the price.
— Dave Neiwert

You see how the Left arrogates to itself the authority to define terms, so that dope-addled mentally ill Truther anti-military Bush-hating Democrats — gosh, who does that remind me of? — are obviously under the influence of “far-right extremist rhetoric.”

Quit Smoking Dope or You’ll Go on a Psycho Rampage, You Libertarian Freaks

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Young people who smoke cannabis or marijuana for six years or more are twice as likely to have psychotic episodes, hallucinations or delusions than people who have never used the drug, scientists said on Monday.
— Reuters, March 1

Pinto: I won’t go schizo, will I?
Jennings: It’s a distinct possibility.
— National Lampoon’s Animal House, 1978

Having previously dabbled in the political blame game with the Pentagon shooter, I think now it’s time to play the “Reefer Madness” card on the late J. Patrick Bedell:

I have a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and studied biochemistry at San Jose State University. . . .
My desire for justice led me to violate what I think is one of the most unjust laws, cannabis prohibition, by growing 16 cannabis plants on my balcony in Irvine, CA from March 2006 to June 2006. . . .
One desired result of my effort is (will be) billions and billions of carefully cultivated, highly valuable cannabis plants growing throughout the United States with complete security of property. . . . This is a way of associating the work of Ludwig von Mises with financial value, which may be a tool to implement his ideas in reality.

Speaking of “tools,” the unlinkable Charles Johnson seized on this murderous dopehead’s Mises reference to implicate libertarianism. Single-sentence refutation:

Ronald Reagan was likewise a “devotee” of Mises and F.A. Hayek, but was not a murderous dopehead.

Case closed. But two can play the Little Green Footballs game:

J. Patrick Bedell was from Southern California, just like Charles Johnson, Charles Manson and O.J. Simpson.

Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Send the Body to Keith Olbermann

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So says Professor Glenn Reynolds, in not quite so many words. The Christian Science Monitor cites certain predictable sources to gin up speculation that the Pentagon shooter was motivated by “right-wing extremism,” but . . . eh, not so much:

 Internet research shows that the guy was a 9/11 Truther and an anti-Bush nut case.

So much for the SPLC-hyped Libertarian Militia Menace, I suppose. But what about the Lower Glennbeckistan Tea Party Lynch Mob? Again, not so much:

“Teabaggers” aren’t typically associated with antipathy to the military, but don’t underestimate the conclusion-drawing power of Frank Rich when he’s crashing on deadline.

Frank Rich and Frank Schaeffer: Frankly Kooky! 

More at Michelle Malkin, Left Coast Rebel, Outside The Beltway, Moonbattery, Gateway Pundit, Jules Crittenden, The Jawa Report and Riehl World View.

UPDATE: Gabriel Malor at AOSHQ shares a disdain for “the practice of associating killers and crazy people with either the Left or the Right”  — a disdain being expressed by several others on the ‘sphere, too. (Even one of Sully’s henchpeople gets in on that action today. If Sully himself had been on blog duty, he no doubt would have blamed Sarah Palin’s uterus.)

The problem with giving the Left a free pass on this kind of stuff is that the Left is so relentless in blaming the the Right for all the world’s evils, both specific and general.

Less than eight hours after Gabriel refused to point fingers for the Pentagon shooting, he was shocked to discover that the British Guardian had used a photo of a Klan rally to illustrate an article about the Tea Party movement. (Three guesses as to who is the main source for that article smearing Glenn Beck — and your first two don’t count.)

If you don’t understand the strategic advantage that the Left gains by continually hyping  their scary stories about  the threat of “right-wing extremism,” you are a worse fool than Patrick Bedell’s ideological BFF — Rosie “Fire Can’t Melt Steel” O’Donnell:

FURTHER READING: