Scott Spiegel

Saturday Night Live (SNL) is held up by “television historians” as a paragon of insightful, ruthless satire of the political scene.

Whatever merits SNL might have once had in that department, lately its level of political analysis has been about as deep as the shot glasses its writers undoubtedly empty before they pen each week’s program.

In its recent season opening skit—which was overlong and dolefully unfunny, like the rest of the show these days—SNL mocked Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell over—wait for it… her wacky background!  The tasteful, thoughtfully written sketch included an O’Donnell impersonator admitting that she masturbates constantly and an interlude in which the onanist pleasured herself off-set and returned to ask fellow performers for snacks.

Two years ago, during the 2008 presidential election, Tina Fey’s impression of Governor Sarah Palin was a hit, not because it was especially accurate, but because (1) it was amusing to watch the antics of this colorful, clueless, moose-hunting politician Fey had created out of whole cloth who bore no characterological resemblance to her real-life model, and (2) there was schadenfreude in seeing the snarky Fey gussy herself up and try but fail to imitate the classiness and charisma of the real Palin.

In a similar display of what passes for the evidentiary basis for Democratic public policy nowadays, comedian Stephen Colbert testified before the House last week on the plight of migrant workers.  Colbert cited as firsthand experience the publicity stunt whereby he recently spent a few hours in comfy upstate New York being photographed loading crates of vegetables for the United Farm Workers.  Colbert bored and abused committee members with his bottomless ego, then demonstrated his pro-gay credentials by telling a charming joke about Iowan “corn packers” that caused his audience to groan in revulsion.

Even Democrat John Conyers, Chair of the Judiciary Committee, had to ask Colbert to leave the hearing during the middle of his testimony, though his sponsor—nutty California Democrat Zoe Lofgren—urged him to stay.  House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer was later shamed into calling Colbert’s testimony “an embarrassment.”

And Jon Stewart, the number one hard news source for leftists under 40, is bringing his oh-so-clever Rally to Restore Sanity to the National Mall next month, where it will compete with Colbert’s isn’t-it-ironic March to Keep Fear Alive.  Both are supposed to be satires of Glenn Beck’s recent Restoring Honor rally and the massive Tea Party gatherings held in D.C. the past two Septembers.

So millions of sincere and patriotic Americans travel hundreds of miles to the nation’s capital on a heartfelt quest to show solidarity with fellow citizens who are disgusted with unprecedented government spending, regulations, and deficits—and the brightest and most influential minds on the left respond by pointing fingers and giggling at protestors’ clothes.  How about a Stewart rally defending the merits of the stimulus bill or ObamaCare instead of one poking fun at people for wearing tri-corner hats or dressing up like Benjamin Franklin?

Contemporary leftists have learned that one way to avoid sober analysis is to ridicule one’s opponents for personal quirks and fringe elements in their followings.  It’s true that laughter can be used to draw in an audience or emphasize a genuine point, but it can also be used to sidetrack discussion and win over sympathizers via a superficial, crowd-pleasing style rather than through probing facts and penetrating arguments.  As political communication expert and professor Lauren Feldman reports, “[P]olitical comedy suppresses argument scrutiny.  What this means is that when audiences are exposed to political humor or satire they are less likely to counter-argue the information contained in the message or question the fairness or accuracy of the message, relative to a non-humorous message.”

If comedy’s what the public wants, then a truly astute, non-PC SNL political satire would, say, chronicle the addle-headed trillion-dollar stimulus bill and its ludicrous, disproven Keynesian assumptions; the administration’s risible invention of the “jobs created or saved” metric; its snail-paced implementation of projects, tongue-tied lies about funded projects, and use of funds for ridiculous pork projects; and the bill’s predictably laughable failure to bring down the unemployment rate.

A series of hilarious sketches might skewer ObamaCare proponents’ side-splitting claim that the law will cover 30 million more Americans yet somehow bring down the cost of care; the preposterous Wile E. Coyote schemes Democrats plotted to pass the bill such as reconciliation, “deem and pass,” the Christmas Eve vote, and the Cornhusker Kickback; and Democrats’ kamikaze obduracy in passing the bill against the public’s wishes.

But no: having Kristen Wiig don a witch’s hat and fly away on a broomstick—now that’s getting to the heart of what’s wrong with the political system in America!

Since they’re so obsessed with the backgrounds of Tea Party candidates, let’s consider the history of various storied SNL actors’ fates: died from drug overdose (John Belushi), died from drug overdose and obesity (Chris Farley), murdered by drug-addicted wife (Phil Hartman), committed suicide (Weekend Update anchor and Reagan impersonator Charles Rocket), for starters.  These are part of the cadre of fine, upstanding thespians lecturing O’Donnell for having friends who dressed as goths in high school.

Republican politicians need SNL, Colbert, Stewart, Bill Maher, and other leftist chuckleheads like an elephant needs a flock of blue-footed boobies picking nits off its backside—less, actually, since the birds provide a useful function by keeping the elephant clean.  These “comedians” feed on the right-wing political class like parasites, then pass off their antics to rubes on the left as serious political discourse.



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Once upon a time, there was a fantastic Tea Party candidate for the U.S. Senate from Delaware who promised to reduce the size and scope of government and adhere to constitutional limits on its power—and, as a bonus, did not tell Bill Maher that when she was in high school some friends had experimented with “witchcraft,” did not express mixed feelings about masturbation 14 years ago on camera, did not default on her mortgage in the middle of the housing crisis, did not misstate the number of counties she won in her prior run for Senate, and did not take more than four years to graduate from college.

Unfortunately that candidate doesn’t exist.  A candidate who was the real Christine O’Donnell’s primary opponent, however, does exist: he voted for the Democrats’ cap-and-trade legislation, bank bailout, and stimulus bill, and has refused to support repeal of ObamaCare; his name is Mike Castle.  O’Donnell’s general election opponent Chris Coons supports all of the above and more, and is also Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s self-described “pet.”

Similarly there’s a candidate for governor of New York named Carl Paladino who has promised to cut state spending by 10% and taxes by 20%, reduce economically crippling state pension obligations, and cut 60,000 positions held by workers deemed incapable of executing their responsibilities.

You may consider Paladino unfit for office, because he had an extramarital affair and also forwarded some e-mails he had received with offensive jokes in them—until you consider his general election opponent Andrew Cuomo, who as President Bill Clinton’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary played a key role in the subprime mortgage crisis that led to the financial collapse of 2008.

Then there’s Sharron Angle, who’s running for the Senate in Nevada: she wants to abolish the bankrupt Social Security program, the meddlesome Federal Reserve, the intrusive Internal Revenue Service, the worthless National Department of Education, unconstitutional gun control restrictions, pointless offshore drilling bans, useless global warming regulations, and the U.S.’s embarrassing membership in the United Nations.  But—detractors have accused her of having ties to celebrity Scientologists Kelly Preston and Jenna Elfman!

Angle ran against primary opponent Bob Bennett, one of two cosponsors of the failed 2008 Healthy Americans Act—precursor to ObamaCare—which likewise would have required all Americans to purchase government-approved health care plans.  Angle’s general election opponent Harry Reid was instrumental in getting ObamaCare passed in the Senate.

Let’s not forget Rand Paul, Senate candidate from Kentucky and self-described constitutional conservative, who opposed the free-speech-limiting McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act, the wasteful bank and car company bailouts, and ObamaCare.  His great flaw is that he was politically incorrect enough to state that, had he been in Congress 50 years ago, he would have supported only 9 of the 10 Civil Rights Act titles, and would have contested the one prohibiting discrimination in private hiring and lending.  Oh—and he was involved in a college prank 27 years ago!

Paul is running against general election opponent Jack Conway, who supported ObamaCare, favors the union “card check” bill, and is open to cap-and-trade legislation.

How about Joe Miller, who’s running for Senate in Alaska?  He favors reclaiming unspent Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds to help cut the deficit, repealing ObamaCare, and enacting a balanced budget amendment.  His Achilles’ heel is that he’s never held elective office before.

On the other hand, Miller’s primary opponent Lisa Murkowski has been in office for nearly a decade, and she opposes repealing ObamaCare and bucked the majority of Republicans to vote for the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

And on and on it goes for the Tea Party candidates: South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley had unproven extramarital affairs, Florida House candidate Daniel Webster supports covenant marriage, Colorado Senate candidate Ken Buck was rude to birthers at a Tea Party rally.

Regardless of whether these Tea Party candidates are electable—and most of them are—fair-minded independents who seek outsiders to rein in government but are concerned about some of these mavericks’ personal quirks should focus on the big picture.

As The Intellectual Activist’s Robert Tracinski noted, “If you think a Christine O’Donnell has a lot of personal ‘baggage’ and that her personality makes her unelectable, fine—then send us someone better who stands for the same principles.  But our principles are the one thing we’re not going to bend on.”

Here’s a request for the mainstream media: as soon as we’re allowed to focus on Tea Party candidates’ substantive merits and faults relative to their opponents’, rather than whether they played Dungeons & Dragons 30 years ago, please let us know.



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President Barack Obama wants the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 extended at the end of this year for only those making under $250,000, and not for small business owners and two-income families—sorry, “the filthy, stinking rich.”

Republicans, including House Minority Leader John Boehner, want all of the tax cuts renewed.

Last June, Obama’s former economic advisor Christina Rohmer published an empirical paper demonstrating that tax cuts stimulate economic growth.

In July, Obama’s Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke observed that continuing all of the Bush tax cuts past 2010 would be a wise idea.

Recently, moderate Democrats and Independents in Congress including Senators Kent Conrad, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, Jim Webb, and Joe Lieberman, and a dozen Representatives, have stated that they are open to extending all of the Bush tax cuts.

Last week, Peter Orszag, Obama’s former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote an editorial in the New York Times supporting both sets of tax cuts as preferable to neither.

On Monday, Rasmussen reported that a majority of Americans favor letting the Bush tax cuts continue for upper income brackets.

Naturally, in this environment of receptiveness to renewing the Bush tax cuts and reinterpreting economic history, Boehner has capitalized on the wave of bipartisan goodwill and public support by announcing that he is fine with… discontinuing the tax cuts for high earners.

The setup for Boehner’s boner was foreseeable, since it has happened to spineless Republicans too many times before.  During his speech last Wednesday in Cleveland, Obama did a nice little hit job on Boehner and his policies, claiming that Boehner had no new ideas and simply wanted to return to the Bush era.

Last week, The New York Times did its own hit job on Boehner.

On Sunday, Boehner did something to actually deserve a hit job.

On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” host Bob Schieffer tried, successfully, to trap Boehner into saying that he would support only the middle class tax cuts, if Democrats opposed the tax cuts on high earners.

I may be reading too much into the tea leaves, but it seems that Schieffer may possibly have tipped his hand to Boehner when he rhetorically asked his audience, in the immediate lead-up to the interview, “Will he try to block middle-class tax cuts, if he can’t get the same cuts for the wealthy?  We’ll ask.”

When asked, Boehner sheepishly agreed that this would be a dandy idea.

Schieffer rubbed Boehner’s nose in his blunder by restating, no fewer than three times, what Boehner’s new position on taxes apparently was.  Boehner never once regained his footing.

As Mark Levin put it, Boehner responded to Schieffer by “embracing the template of the left, rather than deconstructing it.”

In the midst of a national anti-spending, anti-taxing, anti-class warfare tempest, in which Republicans have their largest lead by far in the history of the generic poll, and are poised to make overwhelming gains in Congress, Boehner decided, on the most important issue of the day, to punt.

Evidently Boehner fears that if he stands his ground against extending only some of the tax cuts, Democrats will try to portray the Republican leader as opposing all tax cuts.  This is like portraying a fish as opposing water.  Even liberal voters don’t believe Republicans are opposed to tax cuts.

Boehner should have responded, “I object to the premise of the question, which inappropriately puts our side on the defensive.  Why aren’t you asking House Democrats, who are actually the ones in power and can set the agenda for what we vote on, whether they would veto tax cuts for the middle class if the legislation didn’t exclude tax cuts for people in the upper brackets?  Is their irrational desire to punish the rich so strong that they would hurt lower income earners just to spite Republicans?  Are they not even going to allow an up-or-down vote on our proposal?”

When the Republicans sweep Congress in November, they will need a leader who can bravely implement conservative views and oppose Democratic monstrosities.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Senate Minority Whip John Kyl all disavowed Boehner’s comments on Monday, affirming that they would insist on a vote on renewing the entire set of tax cuts.  McConnell and Kyl reported that all 41 Republican Senators are opposed to extending the tax cuts to only the middle class.  But no—Boehner had to make nice to a liberal talk show host and demonstrate to Democrats that he was too weak-kneed to stand up to their disastrous agenda.

I don’t care if Boehner is “triangulating,” or trying to win points with the administration because he thinks Obama’s bill can’t pass the Senate anyway.  He needs to defend the principle that tax cuts for high earners increase incentives to invest and take risks, and yield greater government revenue, and he needs to say it using those terms.  Boehner may think he’s being clever, but what if his strategy backfires during the upcoming lame duck session of Congress—a distinct possibility, given the ruthless kamikaze machinations we saw from Democrats on the health care bill?  What if his words lead some moderate Republicans to feel pressured into giving in on tax cuts?

This is not an ideological purity test—it is a test of basic competence.  If Boehner isn’t clever enough to come up with an uncompromising response to a predictable query from a leftist septuagenarian in the dinosaur media, then he’s not adept or coherent enough to be an effective House Majority Leader for the reenergized, newly ascendant, Tea Party-infused conservative movement.



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The stimulus bill Congress passed in February 2009 was supposed to be spent predominantly on infrastructure rebuilding projects.

At an address to AFL-CIO members at Laborfest in Milwaukee on Monday, President Barack Obama pushed an additional $50 billion-plus stimulus bill designed to fulfill the novel task of… rebuilding the country’s infrastructure.

Obama warmed up his working class audience by wearing an open-collar shirt with rolled up sleeves, referring to his listeners as “folks,” and reminding them of the miserably unprosperous Reagan years, when unemployment plummeted from a Carter-induced 10% in 1982 to 5% by the end of Reagan’s second term.

The President’s proposed infrastructure spending aimed to rebuild roads, railways, and runways, not to mention public union coffers and Democratic Congressional reelection campaigns.

The bill would be paid for by eliminating tax breaks for oil and gas companies, also known as “raising taxes.”

In addition, the President proposed a new federal Infrastructure Bank of unspecified cost and scope that would use tax dollars to borrow private funds to fuel future projects.  You know—sort of a cross between Amtrak and Fannie Mae, with all the efficiency of the former and all the transparency of the latter.

Chastising Republicans for their platform of “No, We Can’t” and their propensity to oppose everything he suggests, Obama declared, “If I said the sky was blue, they’d say no.  If I said fish live in the sea, they’d say no.”  Actually, if he said never-ending Keynesian spending orgies stimulate long-term economic growth, we’d say no.  But close!

Obama announced that he would “keep fighting, every single day, every single hour, every single minute to turn this economy around.”  (He did not say “every single second”—a guy does need time to get in some golf swings and order shrimp baskets in between bouts of pondering the economy.)

Behold a president whose economic ideas are so muddled that he could pronounce, in his speech, “[A]nyone who thinks we can move this economy forward with a few doing well at the top, hoping it’ll trickle down to working folks… just [hasn’t] studied our history”; and then, a few paragraphs later, brag, “[W]e’ve given tax cuts to small business owners…  [W]e’re cutting taxes for companies that put our people to work here at home.”  Gee—I wonder how giving tax breaks to companies helps the middle class?  Perhaps, when taxes are lowered, wealthy company owners have more money to hire workers?  You might almost say that tax cuts cause jobs to “trickle down” to the working class.

When the stimulus bill failed to reduce unemployment last year, liberal commentators snickered at how dumb conservatives were for expecting the bill to have an effect right away.  In late spring 2009, when unemployment was at 8.5%, they said, Just wait a few more months.  At the end of the summer, when unemployment was at 9.5%, they said, Just wait till the end of the year.  At the end of the year, when unemployment was over 10%, they said, The stimulus could actually take years to lay bare its brilliant results.

Eighteen months after the stimulus bill was passed, the House Ways and Means Committee reported that more than 2.5 million jobs had been lost.

In order to minimize the egg on their faces a year from now, the Obama administration simply refuses to estimate how many jobs its new not-a-stimulus stimulus bill would create.

Obama’s announcement represents a perverse stubbornness to acknowledge that his party’s economic ideas simply aren’t working.  The one thing that might save his presidency would be for him to turn into President Bill Clinton and start governing from the center, but then he would have to admit that he was wrong, which he refuses to do.

The clincher that liberals know they should be following conservatives’ advice always comes when they trot out the old canard that “Republican leadership hasn’t brought any helpful ideas to the table.”  That’s what they said when conservatives rejected their nationalized health care scheme last year.  The claim was belied by dozens of innovative health care reform bills Republicans had introduced in the House that never even left the referral stage.

The Tea Party’s Contract from America, for starters, lists 10 fantastic ideas for strengthening the economy and creating an environment favorable to growth and development, such as simplifying the tax system, imposing caps on annual federal spending increases, and permanently extending the Bush tax cuts.  In other words, “no helpful ideas.”

Obama’s latest tin-eared proposal is final proof, in 12-foot tall, blood-red, block letters, for those who still need it, that he doesn’t get it: Americans are furious and terrified about the mountains of debt he has piled on top of us, and don’t believe any of his spending programs have done a thing to help the economy.



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In anticipation of President Barack Obama’s primetime address to the nation last night on the Iraq War, columnist Eugene Robinson wrote, “Now that the Iraq War is over… only one thing is clear about the outcome: We didn’t win.”

Actually, I can think of about 12 things that are clearer about the outcome of the Iraq War than the conclusion that we didn’t win: (1) Obama was wrong about the surge, (2) Vice President Joe Biden was wrong about the surge, (3) President George W. Bush was right to ignore Congressional Democrats and the Iraq Study Group and order the surge in 2007, (4) insurgent violence dropped precipitously after the surge was implemented, (5) if Democrats had had their way on the surge in Iraq, per Harry Reid’s declaration that “this war is lost,” it would have been lost, (6) Biden was wrong about dividing Iraq into ethnic partitions, (7) Biden is a loon for claiming that the Iraq War could be one of the great successes of the Obama administration, (8) Iraq is now the fourth-most politically free Middle Eastern country, after democracy Israel, republic Lebanon, and constitutional monarchy Morocco, (9) General David Petraeus’ Iraq surge set the model for beating back insurgents and winning in Afghanistan, (10) despite liberals’ bleating about its expense, eight years of the Iraq War—including training and preparation for the March 2003 invasion—now turn out to have cost less ($709 billion) than Obama’s useless trillion-dollar stimulus bill, (11) Bush’s popularity didn’t sink to the level that Obama’s is at now until late 2005, two-and-a-half years into the Iraq War and well into Bush’s second term, and (12) Obama’s address last night was full of bromides, revisionist history, and platitudinous prescriptions for the future that have little relation to what will actually need to be done in the War on Terror according to a fair evaluation of conditions on the ground.

But then I’m not Eugene Robinson, who recently called those who wanted an investigation into Park51 mosque supporter Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s radical ties “loudmouths,” “fraidy-cats,” and “professional victims,” dismissed Tea Partiers as racists, and called Dr. Alveeda King a “puppet” for appearing at Glen Beck’s Restoring Honor rally.

Oh, and: (13) if anyone deserves to give a triumphal speech marking the end of combat operations in Iraq, it is Bush, Petraeus, Vice President Dick Cheney, or Kermit the Frog—anyone but Obama, who opposed the war from the start and voted as U.S. senator to defund it.

And: (14) Obama has learned nothing about the danger of prematurely promising to remove our troops by a certain date and the fortifying effect this has on our enemy, as demonstrated by his declaration in his speech that we will begin removing troops from Afghanistan in July 2011 according to his preordained schedule, and by his standing commitment to remove all 50,000 troops still stationed in Iraq by the end of 2011.

Not to mention: (15) the most factual elements of Obama’s address could have been cribbed from a Bush speech on Iraq from five years ago, such as “We must never lose sight of what’s at stake.  As we speak, al Qaeda continues to plot against us,” and (16) Obama wasn’t honorable or honest enough to give Bush credit for the surge, saying only that “[N]o one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security,” which is about as controversial to his antiwar base as saying, “No one could doubt President Bush’s support for his family, or his love of his wife and children.”

Robinson’s liberal fantasy proclaims, “The war was on its way toward becoming a disastrous failure until the country’s Sunni minority turned against the al-Qaeda jihadists who had flooded into Iraq to fight against the hated Americans,” then adds, as an afterthought, “and Bush’s troop surge, ably led by Gen. David Petraeus, capitalized on this shift of allegiance.”  Yes, sectarian conflict facilitated conditions in which the surge could flourish, but: (17) Bush and Petraeus were savvy enough to recognize this shift in conditions on the ground, prepare a successful strategy to take advantage of it, execute this strategy despite the histrionics of Congressional Democrats, and persist until it yielded its intended results.

Give Obama credit for this: his Iraq speech was the best speech he has ever given from the Oval Office.  Of course, the only other Oval Office speech he’s given was on the BP oil spill, an address that even liberal supporters at MSNBC and The New York Times panned as amateurish and ineffective.

Bonus fact!: The Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index reports that 79% of Iraqis believe that conditions in their country will be the same as or better in 2010 than in 2009—more than you can say for residents of the United States.



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