Scott Spiegel

Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

Unless Mitch Daniels has an unprecedented change of heart or Rudy Giuliani lives up to rumors he’s planning another run, I’m throwing my support for the 2012 Republican presidential nominee to a candidate who isn’t yet competing.  Here’s why:

1. Republican gubernatorial candidates in 2010 did spectacularly well, mostly by emulating New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s style and substance on the campaign trail.  Christie is on the cutting edge of the Republican Party: Other GOP governors are taking his lead by standing up to public sector unions, refusing to raise taxes, declining to fund unaffordable public works boondoggles, and slashing spending.  Even Democratic governors such as Andrew Cuomo are following Christie’s playbook.

2. Christie has a talent that Donald Trump supporters wrongly insisted would make the latter a uniquely formidable candidate: the ability to take the fight to the enemy.  In Trump’s case, they meant his confronting President Obama over the trivial birth certificate issue, whereas Christie has been battling teachers’ unions in New Jersey.  But Christie’s fearless propensity to confront his current opponents bodes well for his future capacity to face off with a certain big-eared neophyte who stumbles off track without his teleprompter, and always looks nasty and petty when he fights back.

3. Christie is wildly popular as a potential candidate among Republican voters, a fact that gets masked by the fact that his non-candidacy means he’s excluded from many straw polls.  But John Zogby regularly includes Christie as a choice, and Christie took first place in all four of the primary polls Zogby’s run since November 2010.

4. Waiting until the last minute to announce his candidacy, after the current crop of candidates has had its sorry say, is neither a foolish nor an unprecedented strategy.  Confidantes say Christie is still considering running, but might wait to announce until after November 2011, when he may be able to help Republicans take over one or both chambers of the New Jersey Legislature.  Christie may also be waiting until passage of pension reform and other state legislation—i.e., until he has more fully secured his record of accomplishment as governor.  Anyway, in this country it’s always better not to appear to be lusting for power, more charming to be dragged kicking and screaming into office rather than appear to be drooling over the prospect like Gingrich, Pawlenty, or Paul.  I’m perfectly content to be despondent for the next six months by the presence of a weak field if it means Christie will enter the race this fall.

5. Christie has no patience for fools, of which there are plenty in New Jersey, but even more in Washington, where the stakes are higher.

6. Christie is electable.  He won the governor’s race in a heavily Democratic state that went for Obama over McCain by 16 points, despite facing a conservative third-party candidate and being outspent five-to-one by the incumbent opponent.  Though he claims not to be interested in the presidency, Christie has plausibly admitted, “I already know I could win.”  Fundraisers around the country are imploring him to meet with them.  Diverse conservatives from Henry Kissinger to John Boehner to Ann Coulter who know something about electoral politics have been begging him to run.

7. He’s articulate, passionate, and colorful, and makes fewer mistakes when speaking off the cuff than Obama makes when using his teleprompter.  In this amazing video—one of dozens of similar videos floating around YouTube—watch him slowly eviscerate a pro-union audience member’s loaded questions, rhetorical tricks, and sneering tone, to such a degree that by the end of his brilliant answer even she seems to be nodding in agreement.

8. All the other candidates have fatal flaws.  Most are too inexperienced or naïve (e.g., Cain, Paul) or slick and ingratiating (e.g., Pawlenty, Romney).  Cain, for example, is making the rounds of the talk shows bragging about how he has no foreign policy, while Pawlenty is already boring the nation with trite pronouncements such as, “We are going to win it, and it’s going to start right here in Iowa.”  In contrast to others in the field, Christie can use to his advantage the fact that he has a distinguished career as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey and two hugely successful years in executive government, yet is not a typical politician who says things just to make people feel good.

9. The Obama campaign is already investigating Christie’s background and trying to find dirt on him to intimidate him.  Surely we can’t let liberals get away with their lowbrow tactics yet again.

10. Christie has done a fantastic job as governor of New Jersey in his first term, and shows more promise than any of the other GOP presidential candidates.  His failure to run could cost Republicans the White House and hand Obama a second term.

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Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

Now that Donald Trump and Mike Huckabee have been neutralized as 2012 Republican presidential primary candidates, it’s time to get to work discrediting the thoroughly inadequate and inappropriate front-runner wannabe, Newt Gingrich.

The former Speaker of the House, who initiated the groundbreaking Contract With America in 1994, then pissed away the Republican Congress’s momentum out of timidity after President Bill Clinton was reelected, had his chance to influence the course of national events.  With the notable exception of the successful Welfare Reform Act of 1996, he failed in his mission.

On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” candidate Gingrich revealed that he had fallen for the trap of thinking that not raising the federal debt ceiling means that the U.S. will default on its debt, or that default is necessarily a bad thing.  He told host David Gregory that if Obama and the Democratic Senate don’t compromise with House Republicans, he would favor an endless, niggling series of tiny budget cuts and “a debt ceiling [increase] every three weeks” until a long-term solution was reached.

Gingrich thinks the individual mandate component of ObamaCare—the most contentious, despised, and constitutionally dubious element of the bill—is a dandy idea.  He’s quick to clarify that he thinks such an undue violation of our individual freedoms should be carried out on the state level, not the federal level—though that’s not what he said a few years ago.

Gingrich cut a cutesy commercial with Nancy Pelosi in which the odd couple argued for Congress to act more precipitously to adopt anti-global warming legislation, though now he claims to oppose a cap-and-trade system.  He continues to support wasteful ethanol subsidies.

Gingrich famously partnered with race huckster Al Sharpton to promote greater federal involvement in the country’s educational system, based on the fantastic job Washington has done so far.

He opposed the Wall Street bank bailout proposed in the fall of 2008, until moderates in his party pressured him to change his mind, such that by the end of September he suddenly supported it.

Tea Party activists were aghast at Gingrich’s inexplicable endorsement of RINO Dede Scozzafava—who subsequently endorsed the Democrat in the general election after she lost the primary—over true conservative Doug Hoffman in the 2009 special election in NY-23.

On foreign policy, Gingrich opposes waterboarding as an interrogation technique, even though it was demonstrably successful in helping gain intelligence that led to the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.

But Gingrich’s biggest blunder so far was his mindless, shallow condemnation of House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity, which would cut $5 trillion from the budget over the next 10 years and take the painful and necessary step of instituting Medicare entitlement reform.  According to Gingrich on “Meet the Press,” such a plan is “right-wing social engineering.”  Reminder to Newt: Implementing a shortsighted, wealth-redistributing, unsustainable “social insurance” program in 1965 was “left-wing social engineering.”

According to Gingrich, undoing Medicare is too radical, even though instituting Medicare was too radical.  As Orwell might say: Redemption = sin.  Theft = generosity.

At this rate, Gingrich is on track to become the left-wing’s GOP darling, the John McCain of 2012.  He’ll be praised to high heaven by the New York Times editorial board for his forthrightness, bipartisanship, and flexibility—and then he’ll lose in a landslide to Obama, whom The Times and every other liberal media outlet will endorse in the general election before you can say “My friends…”

Proving that his only consistency is inconsistency, Gingrich disavowed his comments on Ryan and the individual mandate the next day.  His opposition to Ryan’s plan lingered in his stated reversal, however: “I think we should be very careful about imposing things on the American people.”  The implication being that privatizing Medicare is just as much an imposition on people as instituting Medicare.  Relief = imposition.  Slavery = freedom.

Gingrich added, “I don’t think you want to come in and to say to every single American, we’re going to come in and change uniformly for all of you in the most fundamental way what happens to you when you are 65.”  Rather than clarifying his position, Gingrich’s comments demonstrated only that he doesn’t understand the first detail of Ryan’s plan, or that he’s shamelessly misrepresenting and oversimplifying it to cover up for his blunder.

Gingrich thinks the will of the people should be respected in implementing major social legislation, but evidently the constitutionality of the legislation is of no great concern, nor does he harbor any presumption that more intrusive legislation should inherently be held to a higher standard of scrutiny than less intrusive legislation.

In a charitable characterization, Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey said, “It’s typical of Newt to be whimsical.  We always say: Newt always has so many great ideas.  Well yeah, but then he shifts between them at such a rate it’s pretty hard to track it let alone keep up with it.”

Gingrich used to be considered a man of principle, but desperation for political relevance has made it clear that he, like McCain—and Huckabee, Trump, and too many other contenders in the GOP field—has no principles.



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Liberals have been howling over the media’s claim that Osama bin Laden’s killing has “renewed” the debate over enhanced interrogation techniques, when any sensible patriotic American surely recognizes these as unconscionable acts of barbarism (though shooting an unarmed man in the face is apparently still acceptable).

In fact, any sensible patriotic American understands that such techniques are justified, indispensable tools for intelligence gathering in a war against Islamist savages who don’t respect the Geneva Conventions or any other international law.

But liberals love trying to confuse us with the two controversies surrounding EITs: their humaneness and their efficacy.  So if they can’t convince normal Americans that splashing water on a terrorist’s face—a technique carried out on our own special forces as part of their training—is an unspeakable atrocity, then they simply switch subjects and claim that EITs aren’t effective.

Just how ineffective are EITs?  Well, Pakistani-born, al Qaeda devotee Hassan Ghul experienced them several years ago at a CIA “black site” prison in Poland, and pretty soon he was singing like a canary about the alias of a trusted courier to bin Laden at his Abbottabad compound.

Ghul wasn’t waterboarded, but al Qaeda operations chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was.

Liberals, who are naturally only concerned about our well-being, soberly inform us that waterboarding and other forms of “torture” do not lead to reliable information—that detainees simply lie in order to make the interrogation stop.

That’s OK!  It turns out that our intelligence agencies are sharp enough to deal with just such a contingency.

Mohammad and his successor Abu Faraj Libbi separately lied about the name of the courier Ghul had provided.  The fact that two top al Qaeda members had fabricated a key piece of evidence clued U.S. intelligence officials in to the fact that it was important, which eventually led to the discovery of the courier’s name—and the location of bin Laden’s compound.

Liberals’ lethal push to use only “humane” interrogation techniques recalls the joke about the drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost, even though he didn’t lose them there, because the light is better.  (“Why are we politely querying the al Qaeda operations chief in a comfy lounge after his dinner of free-range chicken with mango chutney at Camp Gitmo?”  “Because it’s more humane that way.”)

Here’s an analogy liberals may comprehend: What do enhanced interrogation techniques and embryonic stem cell research have in common?

Answer: We don’t engage in enhanced interrogation techniques because we know for sure that they will immediately work, or exactly what information we will obtain from them.  We do it because we know there may be valuable intelligence to be gained by interrogating key members of prominent terrorist networks.

Similarly, scientists don’t propose carrying out embryonic stem cell research because they know for sure that it will immediately lead to life-changing breakthroughs and cures for fatal diseases.  They do it because they know there may be valuable information to be gained by carrying out this type of research, in addition to the less controversial adult stem cell research.

Some conservatives argued that the newly elected President George W. Bush was right to single out embryonic stem cell research as a particularly insidious technique that should not, unlike thousands of other research techniques, receive renewed federal funding.  These commentators boasted about the wisdom of his decision after adult stem cell research seemed to yield more promising treatment potential than embryonic stem cell research.

As any real scientist knows, the reason you do research is because you don’t know what you’re going to find.  If you downplay one area of research because it conflicts with your religious views, and that area proves less fruitful than a better-funded, less religiously problematic area, then it’s not because you had an open mind beforehand.

What if embryonic stem cell research someday takes off like wildfire and leads to numerous promising cures?  Will the same conservatives still insist it was wise to limit federal funding to adult stem cells decades ago?

We know that EITs indirectly led to information that helped identify bin Laden’s location.  What if we knew that waterboarding directly, demonstrably, inarguably produced the critical intelligence in this operation?  Would liberals still condemn the technique as “torture” and call Bush a war criminal?

EITs are used to fight terrorism; stem cell research is used to fight disease.  Like stem cell research, EITs must be attempted without prejudgment about their effectiveness if the goal is to save human lives.

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Obama doesn’t want to increase taxes on oil companies because it will bring down the price of gas.  He wants to increase them because it will raise the price of gas.

This week the House will vote on whether to expand offshore drilling and eliminate red tape needed to get drilling permits approved.  Democrats also hope to vote on whether to end billions of dollars in tax breaks to oil companies.

The media have been happy to do Obama’s bidding by referring to the tax breaks as “subsidies”—as though U.S. Treasury officials were riding around the country in an armored van handing out satchels of gold to Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhilips executives.

In fact, we’re talking about reducing the gargantuan taxes these companies pay for the sin of drilling for oil and making it widely available to a country that uses it in every daily setting and is dangerously dependent on Middle Eastern imports.

Since oil companies are likely to pass the cost of increased taxation on to consumers in the form of higher gas prices, the Democrats’ plan will, as usual, do nothing to solve the underlying problem, make things worse, and give greater influence to the federal government.  Mission accomplished!

Ending tax breaks for oil companies is the closest Democrats can get to imposing an outright gasoline tax, which they know is politically impossible during a recession.

To be fair, oil companies might not pass the entire added cost on to consumers—they might cut back on hiring, reduce wages, or otherwise trim their workforces.  Such actions will no doubt be wondrously helpful for the high unemployment rate.

Obama also recently announced the formation of a Justice Department task force to scrutinize whether oil companies are “manipulating” prices in collusion with oil speculators.

As high as gas prices are, there are many factors that have conspired to increase them, none having anything to do with the sudden greed of oil companies or the rampant fraud of speculators.

There’s the little matter of a dozen or so uprisings in oil-rich Middle Eastern nations over the past four months, which have elevated uncertainty regarding oil production and regime change in the region.

There’s the declining value of the U.S. dollar, due to Democrats’ hyperactive spending orgies, which has increased the price of imported oil.

There are seasonal differences in gas prices, many induced by onerous federal regulations.  For example, many states force gas companies to sell purer, more expensive blends during the summer, when a disproportionate amount of driving is done.  Not only does this directly raise gas prices all summer, it indirectly raises them in the spring by temporarily making gasoline scarce, since refineries must halt production while they shift their operations to the summer plan.

Then there’s the administration’s relentless, premature, taxpayer-subsidized push for unprofitable “green” energy, which makes prices higher for everyone, with no concomitant increase in fuel quality or reliability.

Both political parties insanely continue to support the production of biofuels such as ethanol, a program that does nothing but increase food prices, raise the cost of automobiles and fuel, and (if you care about such things) boost carbon dioxide emissions.

In addition to arbitrarily increasing automobile fuel efficiency standards to levels that are not cost-effective given current technological developments—which forces car companies to cut corners on performance to comply with the law—the Obama administration has twice defied a federal judge’s orders to lift the moratorium on drilling in the Gulf after the BP oil spill.  He continues to oppose drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, off the coast of Virginia, and just about every place else where there’s oil.

Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is doing its best to initiate creative new methods of preventing oil and natural gas drilling.  For example, the EPA recently proposed adding the sand dune lizard to its list of endangered species, thus greatly hindering oil exploration in the Texan/New Mexican Permian Basin, the second-most bountiful gas and oil field in the country.

But all of this should be good news to Obama, he of the “Electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” and “If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them” statements on the consequences of cap-and-trade restrictions.  Though he would never publicly admit it, $10-a-gallon, European-level gas prices are the apotheosis of Obama’s environmental plan for this country.

Don’t believe it?  Check out the statement his energy secretary, Steven Chu, made to the Wall Street Journal shortly before Obama’s election: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”  His Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, once famously said that he would refuse to allow expanded offshore drilling even if the price of gas rose to $10 a gallon.

But Democrats need not fear that high gas prices will reduce Obama’s reelection prospects.  If Obama takes action that a gullible public perceives as tough on oil companies, yet gas prices rise anyway, he’ll just claim that he tried his level best to rein in Big Oil, but the behemoth was simply too big to wrestle to the ground.



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