Scott Spiegel

Much has been written about 2012 GOP presidential primary frontrunners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich’s weaknesses as candidates.

Less has been written about how they stand up next to each other, and whom the comparison favors.  A close look at their records makes it clear that Romney can only benefit from Gingrich staying in the race as long as possible.

Gingrich will likely help Romney in two ways: first, by making Romney seem more conservative to hesitant members of the Tea Party wing of the GOP.  This will happen via Gingrich’s patchwork quilt of liberal positions on such issues as Romney’s role at Bain Capital (“Exploitive!”), Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity (“Right-wing social engineering!”), and Nancy Pelosi’s cap-and-trade bill (“Bipartisan!”).

Second, Gingrich may push Romney to the right on some issues, nudging his competitor to come out more forcefully for the conservative aspects of his platform and commit to them more unwaveringly as campaign promises.

(This is in contrast to the advantage Romney gains by Ron Paul staying in the race, which is for Paul to make Romney seem like a spring chicken with a manly laugh instead of an old goat with a girlish giggle.)

Newt’s attacks on Romney from the left will help Romney develop defenses against the charges the Obama campaign will inevitably fling at him in the general election.

And positions on which Gingrich is good—for example, his promise to repeal Obamacare on his first day in office—may spur Romney to take ever bolder stances.  If you have any doubts about Romney fulfilling his oath to issue a 50-state executive waiver, Newt’s upping the ante on Obamacare will make it harder for Romney to back down.  Newt’s grandiosity, however annoying and impracticable, will prod Romney to promise and act bigger.

(Give Newt credit, I guess, for proposing too many ideas rather than too few.  It’s just that voters get suspicious when the ideas include things like giving the moon statehood.)

Newt’s arrogance and intemperance will make Romney seem even-handed and statesmanlike.  Take Newt’s petulant refusal to debate Obama in the general election if the events are moderated by “the media.”  And they say Newt won’t help build party unity!

What of Newt’s endless, reckless assaults on Romney?  Won’t they hurt Romney in voters’ eyes?  I doubt it.  Being called fickle by Newt is like being called a blowhard by Al Sharpton.

But it’s not only Newt’s venomous attacks on Romney that will drive voters to side with the former Massachusetts governor.  Newt’s pathetic justifications for his dips in the polls and poor recent debate performances belie his claim that Romney is the forked-tongue prevaricator in the race.  My favorite Newt excuse, on his Tampa debate with Romney last week, is: “I stood there thinking, ‘How can you say these things you know are falsehoods?’  That’s why I was quiet, because there was no civil way to call him out on what was in fact a series of falsehoods that were astonishing.”  Because if there’s one thing we know about Newt, it’s that he’d rather be quiet than uncivil!

Or consider this half-baked zinger, which Gingrich offered as a rationalization for why Romney would win the Florida primary: “He can bury me for a very short amount of time with four or five or six times as much money, most of it raised in Wall Street from the guys who got bailouts from the government.”

Let’s unpack this obfuscating, run-on defense, which sounds like something a Democrat would say.  Under normal circumstances, we tend to accept that candidates who raise lots of cash have many passionate supporters.  Gingrich himself has been bragging about how much cash he raised after his unexpected South Carolina victory.  Now suddenly campaign cash is bad?

“A very short amount of time” implies that Romney will best Gingrich in the polls for just a few days, maybe a few weeks—a mere blip in the unstoppable wave of his opponent’s gathering momentum.  Um, wait—doesn’t that precisely describe Gingrich’s standing?

As for Wall Street: Which former GOP Speaker of the House supported the September 2008 bank bailout?  Why, that’s right—Newt Gingrich!

Gingrich has threatened to stay in the race until the 2012 Republican National Convention in August.  I say bring it on.

Romney doesn’t give the GOP exactly what it wants as a candidate, but what he gives us is better than what any of the remaining candidates gives us—and Newt’s presence in the race makes Romney an especially appealing contrast.  Rick Santorum obsesses over social issues and is an unreliable fiscal conservative.  Ron Paul is terrible on foreign policy.  But Newt is in a category of his own: erratic and reckless, bombastic and bloviating, he alienates independents, many conservatives, and probably his own dog.



 Print This Post

Related articles

• Newt Gingrich Calls Mitt Romney Pathetic, Vows to Fight on After Florida Primary (thehollywoodgossip.com)
• “Newt Gingrich Robocall: Mitt Romney Forced Holocaust Survivors To Eat Non-Kosher Food.” (althouse.blogspot.com)
• Mitt Romney ahead of Newt Gingrich in polls as Florida votes (abclocal.go.com)
• Mitt Romney aims for strong Florida performance to fend off Newt Gingrich challenge (100gf.wordpress.com)
• Romney confident as voters end heated Fla. primary (newsok.com)

Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

10. Andrew Cuomo – Yes, really.  As I wrote earlier this year, “When Democrats cut spending and refuse to raise taxes, as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has—i.e. when they abandon their party’s core philosophy and govern like conservatives—they enjoy skyrocketing popularity ratings and set their constituents on a path to financial solvency.”  Cuomo’s late-career, probably temporary, but remarkable conversion followed the example set by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who also stood up to public sector unions, slashed spending, and held down taxes.

9. Darrell Issa – California Representative Darrell Issa held hearings this summer on the Justice Department’s botched, scandalous Operation Fast and Furious gun-trafficking sting operation, including gripping testimony from ATF officials from Phoenix and Mexico.  Recently Attorney General Eric Holder was forced to admit that Fast and Furious was “flawed in its concept and flawed in its execution”—kind of like his boss’s presidency.  Along with the Treasury Department’s pursuit of the administration’s tainted $535 million loan to solar energy company Solyndra, Issa’s persistent work erased the laughable notion that the corrupt Obama tenure has remained blissfully transgression-free.

8. Peter King – New York Representative Peter King bucked controversy by holding hearings on whether Muslim Americans were becoming radicalized and linking with terrorist groups to plot attacks on home soil.  From my column “Liberals’ Game of Cat-and-Muslim”: “[King] held a hearing on whether al-Qaeda is trying to recruit young Muslims in the U.S. and whether Muslim Americans are sufficiently cooperating with federal officials…  [H]undreds of willfully naïve, politically correct New Yorkers gathered in Times Square, steps from where [Faisal] Shahzad tried to kill hundreds of New Yorkers, to protest King’s hearing as racist and Islamophobic.”

7. Mitch Daniels – Second-term Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels navigated such juvenile obstructions as Democratic legislators walking out to protest Republicans’ agenda, and ultimately got the bulk of long-stalled GOP legislation passed in the state.  Daniels wowed CPAC with a speech on fiscal austerity that included such zingers as “Our morbidly obese federal government needs, not just behavior modification, but bariatric surgery” and his reference to federal debt as “the new red menace.”  One of the only feasible GOP presidential candidates both conservative and articulate, Daniels declined to run this year despite widespread pressure to do so.

6. Pat Toomey – The deficit reduction supercommittee boasted only one reliable fiscal conservative: Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey.  All five other GOP members voted for the boneheaded budget bill in August that unnecessarily raised the debt ceiling.  Without Toomey, Republican supercommittee members might have caved to Democratic pressure to raise tax rates on high-income earners.  The committee failed—which, given Democratic intransigence, is the best outcome we could have hoped for.  Toomey’s first year in office after dispensing with Joe Sestak in hostile blue-state territory in the 2010 midterms was a resounding success.

5. Rick Perry – Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry held the distinction of leading the state that oversaw 40% of all new U.S. jobs created since the recovery began, triple the number of the next-closest competitor New York, with over 1 million added since he took office.  Texas’s jobs boom resulted not just from rising oil prices—private sector industries such as construction, hospitality, and professional services also saw growth—but also Perry’s understanding of the hindrance excessive regulation places on incentives to invest and hire.  Perry offered a more conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, thus helping push the GOP front-runner to the right.

4. Herman Cain – Businessman, radio host, rocket scientist, and presidential candidate Herman Cain spent the year touting his 9-9-9 flat tax plan, which would gut the federal tax code and replace it with a 9% federal income tax, 9% corporate tax, and 9% national sales tax.  Rick Perry produced a copycat plan, and Newt Gingrich revived his old plan, and suddenly the nation began seriously debating the merits of flat tax plans for the first time since Steve Forbes’ last run.  And did you know that, back in the day, as president-elect of the National Restaurant Association, Cain was one of the most vocal critics of Hillarycare?

3. Ann Coulter – The left-wing, Obama-endorsed Occupy Wall Street movement that seeped into the national consciousness like a whiff of raw sewage had no concrete antagonists, just the sorry spectacle of a bunch of hippy retreads and trust fund brats battling hypothermia and body lice in tent cities around the country.  Ann Coulter was the conservative who foretold it best, in her bestseller Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.  From the book jacket: “The Democratic Party activates mobs, depends on mobs, coddles mobs, publicizes and celebrates mobs—it is the mob.”

2. Scott Walker – From “Wisconsin’s Government Cheese Revolution”: “Governor Scott Walker… proposed a bill that would… prevent [public sector] unions from forcing members to pay dues, require annual secret ballots on whether to remain unionized, and ask members to contribute a pittance toward their lavish pensions and health care plans.”  Walker’s courage in standing his ground in the face of protestors calling him Hitler and Hosni Mubarak, and Democratic legislators fleeing the state to avoid voting on the bill, presaged the guts that mayors around the country didn’t have in dealing with Occupy Wall Street.

1. Michele Bachmann – Minnesota Representative and Tea Party leader Bachmann embodied the best combination of conservative/articulate out of all the 2012 GOP presidential nominees; it’s inexplicable that she isn’t doing better in the polls.  From my column “CDC Prepares for Outbreak of Bachmann Derangement Syndrome”: “Bachmann has labeled herself a ‘constitutional conservative’—precisely the correct label to use in this bizarre era of pay czars, light bulb bans, and trillion-dollar deficits…  Bachmann [took] leadership roles on… repealing [Dodd-Frank] and replacing ObamaCare with free market reforms.”  Here’s hoping she can at least snag the VP slot.

 Print This Post

Related articles

• Is Michele Bachmann Angling to Be Mitt Romney’s Vice President? (swampland.time.com)
• Toomey: Dems had reason to fail (politico.com)
• Ann Coulter Book “Demonic” Predicted Tactics Of OWS… And What’s Next (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on 2012: I’m biased (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)
• Conservatives use Cuomo to counter Obama (timesunion.com)

Last week a concerned reader took issue with my negative comparison of the Occupy Wall Street protests to the Tea Party rallies—in particular my statement that “Tea Party rallies have been amazingly peaceful, with not a single arrest… across hundreds of cities and thousands of events…”  The reader was correct—there were in fact Tea Party arrests I had overlooked.

In March of 2011, Jim Canelos was arrested in Mohave County, Arizona for wearing a flag hat at a county supervisors’ meeting that prohibited wearing hats.

In February of 2010, Mervin Fried was arrested in Kingman, Arizona for bringing a symbolic pitchfork to a protest in a county administration building.  Fried argued that the county already allowed citizens to carry guns—a more dangerous weapon—into government buildings, and was later acquitted.

Most notably, in November of 2009, ten protestors angry over ObamaCare were arrested for engaging in disorderly conduct outside Nancy Pelosi’s office in Washington, D.C.  The ralliers were discovered to have been organized by rabid anti-abortion activist and Democrat Randall Terry of Operation Rescue.

That’s it!  A dozen Tea Party arrests in two-and-a-half years, most tied to anti-abortion protestors.  Given the media’s left-wing slant, you can be sure that every arrest ever made at a Tea Party rally in the tiniest hamlet in the country has been thoroughly documented.

Now that we’ve gotten that straight, let’s examine the arrest record of Occupy Wall Street, which just hit its one-month anniversary:

•    Several weeks ago in New York, over 700 protesters were arrested for marching into the vehicular lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge against police orders and cutting off traffic;

•    Last Tuesday 129 protestors were arrested in Boston and 6 in D.C. for trespassing and disorderly conduct;

•    On Saturday 92 protestors were arrested in New York for occupying a branch of Citibank, knocking down police barriers, and other offenses;

•    Also on Saturday, 53 protestors in Tucson, 24 in Denver, and 19 in Raleigh were arrested for occupying public parks after closing time;

•    On Sunday 175 protestors in Chicago were arrested for setting up a tent city and occupying Congress Plaza near Grant Park;

•    Also on Sunday, 46 protestors were arrested in Phoenix for refusing to evacuate a public park at closing time

This is just a partial list and includes only roundups at the most high-profile rallies in the biggest cities.

Let’s not forget the recent riots abroad, mostly in Western Europe, inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protests.  In Rome on Saturday, police arrested protestors for breaking windows, destroying statues, spraying graffiti on churches, vandalizing bank lobbies and ATM machines, smashing police cruisers, and setting dumpsters, cars, and military depots on fire; attacking police with batons, rocks, bottles, fire extinguishers, and bombs; injuring hundreds of innocents, mostly police officers; and causing millions in damage to public property and untold damage to private property.

(In one delicious footnote, Roman protestors expressed indignation that police hadn’t made more arrests of their most violent compatriots early on, so that the whole group wouldn’t be discredited.  Damned if you enforce the law, damned if you don’t.)

So let’s examine the totals: 12 arrests for the Tea Party rallies, which have been going on for 30 months; and 1200 arrests for the Occupy Wall Street mobs, which have been going on for 30 days.

It’s awfully close, but I’m going to have to suggest that Occupy Wall Street is less law-abiding than the Tea Party.  Yet to hear the mainstream media present it, Occupy Wall Street is every bit as peaceful and legitimate as the Tea Party.

The disparate treatment given to these wildly uneven tallies reflects the double standard set by the left-leaning media: One Tea Partier raising his fist in anger over intrusive government is as alarming as one thousand Occupy Wall Street protestors clashing with police.

Some commentators have noted that Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party both began out of anger over the nation’s largest banks being bailed out.  Though the sources of their grievances overlap, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have used vastly different tactics to get across their messages.  Ironically, the Tea Party, which is more suspicious of government, has been following the letter of the law.  Occupy Wall Street, which favors more government regulation, has been trampling all over the law.

This irony is easily explainable: The Tea Party believes the government has legitimate, limited functions, such as the power of the police and courts to protect people from the initiation of force and violation of property rights.  In contrast, Occupy Wall Street believes legitimate functions of government include providing universal healthcare, free college education, and a living wage; naturally, they see its policing functions as rather superfluous and heavy-handed, if not downright militaristic.

Thus, we have the spectacle of defense lawyers representing over 800 defendants in Manhattan’s criminal court system demanding that all charges be dropped for the protestors, and threatening individual trials for the miscreants, thus further clogging the system’s already overstuffed caseload.  (Prepare for agitators to crow that their struggle was victorious and their motives vindicated after overburdened prosecutors inevitably throw in the towel.)

Just before the fall 2008 bank bailout, which most Democrats supported and most Republicans opposed, President Bush infamously observed that he had “abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.”

The members of a protest movement that claims to be concerned with justice have been wildly indiscriminate in their violation of the law.  Occupy Wall Street protestors apparently believe they must abandon our civilized system of government in order to save it.



 Print This Post

Related articles

• Is Occupy Wall Street a Constituent Moment, And Not A Movement? (underpaidgenius.com)
• Occupy Wall Street: How long can it last? (cnn.com)
• Occupy Wall Street To NYC: Drop The Charges Against 800 Protesters Or We Will March To Court For Every Trial (businessinsider.com)
• Two In Three New Yorkers Back Occupy Wall Street Protests (businessinsider.com)
• Occupy Wall Street live: one month on (guardian.co.uk)

The only similarity Tea Party rallies and the Occupy Wall Street protests share is that both involve humans gathered in public spaces.  Other than that they have about as much in common as a Rolling Stones concert does with a public stoning.

The UK Daily Mail featured a story on the unsavory conditions at the OWS protestors’ home base in Manhattan, Zuccotti Park, including photos of one flannel-clad agitator squatting and defecating against a police car.  Hmm, I think the last time that happened at a Tea Party rally was… never.

Having destroyed the park over the past three weeks by filling it with patchouli ashes and feces, the protestors traipsed north on Saturday to turn another great New York gathering space, Washington Square Park, into a public urinal.

The glaring differences between OWS and the Tea Party rallies are obvious to anyone with a functioning pair of eyes (and nostrils).

The Tea Party movement, which began around the start of Barack Obama’s presidency and built momentum during the year-long national healthcare debate, was a grassroots uprising.  Across the country, people who had never been active in politics networked and gathered with concerned, like-minded citizens to demand a curb on the intrusion of federal government into our lives.

In contrast, OWS, which is a fraction of the size of the Tea Party, was instigated by an anti-consumerist Canadian magazine called Adbusters, and has seen its numbers swell via conspicuous throngs of bused-in union members, bored trust fund brats cruising for easy sex, disheveled homeless people looking for free food, and savvy criminals on the lam who understand that a crowd of ragtag bums is the perfect hiding spot for them.

Despite their heated rhetoric, Tea Party rallies have been amazingly peaceful, with hardly any arrests and not a single incidence of violence—except for those committed by union members against the ralliers—across hundreds of cities and thousands of events attended by millions of people over the past two-and-a-half years.

In contrast, OWS has rudely disrupted its host cities, with over 700 arrests in just one day in one city (New York) and tens of millions of dollars in policing costs only a few weeks into the movement.  Commuters and municipal officials have complained about the invaders’ lack of respect for residents just trying to go about their business.

Tea Party rallies have been antiseptically clean, to such a degree that public works employees have gushed about how attendees leave the protest areas cleaner than when they arrived.

In contrast, the OWS occupation has been sickeningly unsanitary, with widespread public urination and defecation, hordes of unwashed louts mating in filthy sleeping bags, mounting piles of rotting trash, and an omnipresent odor of raw sewage.

The Tea Party has been well-organized and influential, having achieved earth-shattering electoral results in special and off-year gubernatorial and senatorial elections, and a historic landslide in the Congressional midterms.

In contrast, OWS has been ineffectual and impotent, with no one—including the protestors—having any idea what they want, let alone how they hope to achieve it by playing hacky sack and painting their bodies like tribesmen.

Most Tea Partiers took time out of their busy days to attend the rallies, which were almost always held in the evenings, after work, or on weekends.

In contrast, most OWS protestors appear to have no jobs, homes, or responsibilities to attend to, and seem to be looking to the rallies to provide them with shelter, food, and a purpose in life.

And those are just the superficial differences!

On a deeper level, the Tea Partiers want government to leave them alone and allow them to be productive citizens and decide how to spend their money.  In contrast, OWS protestors wish to tear down the capitalist system while forcing society to give them free college, universal healthcare, and guaranteed home ownership.

The Tea Party’s heroes have included our nation’s Founding Fathers, and 20^th-century political and philosophical leaders such as Ronald Reagan, Friedrich Hayek, and Ayn Rand.  In contrast, OWS has thrown its support to the likes of cop-killer Troy Davis and al-Qaeda conspirator Tarek Mehanna.

Tea Partiers have been reading and debating the Constitution and the Federalist Papers.  OWS leaders have been teaching protestors how to pick open handcuffs with hairpins.

Tea Party organizers have been handing out miniature flags; OWS leaders have been distributing condoms.

As anyone who’s been watching knows, the Tea Party increased its influence the larger it grew and the more it pervaded our culture.  Given the public revulsion over the Wall Street protests, the longer these embarrassing displays continue, the bigger the anti-Democratic tsunami will be in 2012.

Related articles

• Don’t Compare The Protesters To The Tea Party Movement Around Someone On Wall Street (businessinsider.com)
• Occupy Wall Street is nothing like the TEA Party (trommetter.com)
• Why I believe in the Tea party by Rob Rosasco (Allen West, Marco Rubio, Pam Bondi and more) (allenwestrepublic.wordpress.com)
• Reliable Sources Panel Analyzes The Difference Between Tea Party And Occupy Wall Street Media Coverage (mediaite.com)
• Trashing America: Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street (rogueoperator.wordpress.com)

What the hell are the Wall Street occupiers protesting?  Do they even know?

The “Occupy Wall Street” hoodlums have been occupying Zuccotti Park (formerly Liberty Plaza) near Manhattan’s financial district for almost three weeks, with no signs of leaving.  They have literally been occupying the park—demonstrating without a police permit and setting up living quarters, complete with their own sleeping area, kitchen, and “library.”  They have been clogging neighboring streets and bridges.  They have pledged to occupy the area through the coming winter.

Demonstrators are trying to boost the legitimacy of their operation by passing out hundreds of thousands of copies of their self-published, four-page diatribe, “The Occupied Wall Street Journal.”

The self-described occupiers are, of course, long-haired, hippie-ish, slovenly, litter-strewing, profanity-spewing, Marxism-spouting, law-and-order-despising, ill-informed, inarticulate, slack-jawed, and unfocused—in other words, your typical left-wing mob.

(You knew the mob just had to be leftist before you even heard what it was about.  From what other portion of the political spectrum could activists organize so many thousands of unemployed people to do nothing but sit around in the street and chant all day?  Contrast the Wall Street occupation with Tea Party rallies, which always take place in the evening or on weekends, outside of work hours.)

The highlight of the movement so far came when New York City police arrested 700 thugs who unlawfully marched into the traffic lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday evening, cutting off traffic for hours.

Not ashamed in the slightest at their disruptive, feral behavior, the picketers have been screaming “police brutality” over their supposedly shocking mistreatment.  Such brutality has included police telling marchers that they would be arrested if they blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, then arresting marchers when they blocked the Brooklyn Bridge.  Dissenters were lined up in neat, orderly rows in plastic handcuffs and then escorted away in vans—or, in protestors’ minds, tortured and abused by sadistic Gestapo officers.

Dreadlocked hooligans have set up tent cities in support of the Wall Street protestors in Boston, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, and Seattle.

On Monday the protestors held a “corporate zombie” march, with participants dressed like zombie bankers stuffing Monopoly money in their mouths.

Celebrity lefties such as Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, Russell Simmons, Cornel West, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and Roseanne “Robespierre” Barr have made guest appearances to support the protestors.

So what exactly are the protestors protesting?

The Associated Press characterizes the activists’ grievances as “corporate greed and other issues.”  That’s about as specific and succinct a description as you’re likely to find anywhere, including in the protestors’ own literature.

The “other issues” protestors have railed against include—and this is far from an exhaustive list: bank bailouts, home foreclosures, high unemployment, global warming, destruction of the ecosystem, poverty, food modification, excessive health care company profits, Islamophobia, Jewish control of the economy, social inequality, the execution of Troy Davis, and the inclusion of American Indian-abuser Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.

One movement leader narrated a video in which he states that the marchers are protesting the following evils: “corporatism, fascism, crony capitalism, a police state, an American empire, [too many] military bases, dead bodies in Iraq, a ‘welfare warfare’ state, and ‘Republi-crats.’”  The site hosting the video explains that protestors’ strategy “was inspired by recent uprisings in Spain, Greece, Egypt, and Tunisia”—as though the causes of the austerity protests in Western Europe were remotely related to the causes of the democracy protests in the Middle East.

Perhaps this is a clue: The demonstrators have held many of their rallies in front of Federal Reserve buildings around the country.  Does that mean they’re protesting the existence of the Federal Reserve?  Are they opposed to its manipulation of the U.S. currency, including the Obama administration’s quantitative easing programs?  Are they calling for a return to the gold standard?

Why no, actually, those are demands being made by attendees at Tea Party rallies.  In fact, those are thoughtful demands I could actually get behind.

In contrast, the Occupy Wall Street protestors are less focused in their goals.

Thus, in one video, we get such contradictory statements as the following musings, separated by mere minutes:

“It’s about, like, people making things happen, rather than expecting, like, someone else to take care [of you].”

“It’s a process of educating people… that we have to be first and foremost altruistic, and care for the collective before caring for ourselves.”

Whereas the Tea Party’s message is razor sharp and crystal clear—limit the size and scope of the federal government and restore individual liberty—the occupiers’ message is fuzzy and incoherent, a miasma of unfocused, seething rage.

Even the über-liberal The Nation, which recently featured a helpful FAQ section on the movement, groaned, “Ugh—the zillion-dollar question” in response to an honest query on what the demands of the protestors are.  They elaborated: “The General Assembly [Occupy Wall Street’s organizing body] is currently in the midst of determining how it will come to consensus about unifying demands.  It’s a really messy and interesting discussion.  But don’t hold your breath.”

Riot first; self-reflect later.  The motto of the radical left.

 Print This Post

Related articles

• Hey Occupy Wall Street: Dressing up Like Zombies Is Dumb [Occupy Wall Street] (gawker.com)
• Where Are the Grown-Ups? by Lila York [uh-oh] (jhaines6.wordpress.com)
• Days of Rage: Hours of Opportunism (onmiyogi.wordpress.com)
• Celebrities Help Occupy Wall Street (huffingtonpost.com)
• If You Thought Last Week’s Occupy Wall Street Protests Were Crazy, Get Ready… (businessinsider.com)

Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

Maybe Michele Bachmann is reluctant to elaborate on her views on homosexuality with reporters because—gasp!—she doesn’t care.

On Sunday’s Meet the Press, host Dick Gregory badgered Bachmann about comments she had made seven years ago on her interpretation of the Bible’s statements on homosexuality.

Since 2004, the country has radically evolved in its understanding and acceptance of homosexuality, including its approval of same-sex couples getting married and adopting.  Gay marriage is legal in six states plus D.C. and available to 11% of the country’s population.  Gay marriage was used as a wedge issue in many states in the 2004 Congressional elections, but in 2008 it was used as such primarily in the context of California’s Proposition 8.  Prominent Republicans who now support same-sex marriage include Dick Cheney, Laura and Barbara Bush, Cindy and Meghan McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, S. E. Cupp, Margaret Hoover, Ted Olsen, and Vaughn Walker.  Countless other prominent Republicans favor gay civil unions; most didn’t back in 2004.  Even Ann Coulter was recently appointed Honorary Chair of the Advisory Council for gay conservative group GOProud.

Bachmann’s views on gay issues have also presumably evolved since 2004, or else she would have racked up a lot more anti-gay statements since then.  All of the Bachmann homosexuality quotes the media have been broadcasting appear to have emanated from just two sources: a two-part March 2004 interview she gave on the local Minnesota radio program “Prophetic Views Behind The News” and a November 2004 address she delivered at the EdWatch National Education Conference.  That’s it.  If Bachmann had truly been waging an anti-gay jihad for the past seven years, liberals wouldn’t have had to dig up archives of obscure evangelical talk shows and one-off education conferences from George W. Bush’s first term to find recordings of self-incriminating statements.

Bachmann’s position on gay marriage roughly mirrors President Obama’s.  Like Republicans Rick Perry and Herman Cain, she prefers allowing states to implement gay marriage if they choose—a position even Obama has barely uttered his support for.  She favors a constitutional amendment defining marriage as opposite-sex, which Obama opposes—though she well knows that such an amendment has little chance of becoming law.

If Bachmann weren’t too polite to share it, her response to repeated questions on her views on homosexuality would be, “Oh, God… not again.  Really?”

Bachmann clearly cares first and foremost about federal spending and national defense.  She became a conservative rock star two years ago as the most prominent elected official to spearhead the nascent Tea Party movement, with its primary goal of stopping ObamaCare and runaway government spending.  She has voiced vociferous, well-informed support of Israel and our military missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran to stop the threat of Islamic terrorism to the U.S.  These are the things that keep her awake at night—not whether Ellen DeGeneres gets a marriage license instead of a domestic partnership.

On Meet the Press, Bachmann addressed Gregory’s questions on homosexuality by insisting that she is not one to “judge” anyone.  She affirmed that she would not use sexual orientation as a criterion in hiring for positions in her administration or for judgeships.  Why wasn’t that a good enough answer for Gregory, who continued to hound her on her theory of human sexuality?  What was she supposed to do—declare herself a True Blood fan and invite Gregory out for cosmos?  Why don’t reporters grill Obama about his opposition to gay marriage, bludgeoning him with the same boring questions and refusing to accept his self-protective platitudes on his eternally “evolving” stance?

Liberals call Bachmann a hypocrite and claim they object to her “double-talk” and dodging questions.  They declare that they would have more respect for her if she simply endorsed her past statements point-blank.  What if she doesn’t quite believe them anymore?  What if the issue isn’t as important to her, or wouldn’t be a legislative priority for her if she became president?  Bachmann repeatedly responded to Gregory’s questions by reminding him that she is running for the presidency of the United States.  If she believes gay marriage should be dealt with by the states, then why would a President Bachmann staring down a $14 trillion deficit and a hostile Middle East worry about Neil Patrick Harris’s love life?

Liberals aren’t upset about a Bachmann presidency because they fear she would roll back gay rights or slow the national tide of increasing acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage.  As with Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharron Angle, the left are using a few nutty, outdated statements to stop a genuine reformer and charismatic populist, whose views on social issues are probably evolving like everyone else’s, from getting into office.  Liberals can’t stand the fact that Bachmann might effect real change on causes that are anathema to them, such as slashing unsustainable entitlement spending and stopping the worldwide spread of Sharia.



 Print This Post

Related articles

• Rep. Bachmann Clarifies Gay Marriage Opposition: I’m Not Running To Be Anyone’s Judge (mediaite.com)
• Could Anti-Gay Politics Sink A Presidential Campaign? (towleroad.com)
• Bachmann challenged on anti-gay comments (salon.com)
• Bachmann wins first poll of Republican contest for 2012 presidential candidate (guardian.co.uk)
• Gay conservative group requests meeting with Bachmann (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)

Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

The new meme on the left, helpfully demarcated on social media sites like Twitter via such catchphrases as #TeaPartyDowngrade, #HeckuvaJobTeaParty, and the trending #TeabaggersArePoopyheads, is that Standard & Poors’ downgrade of the U.S. long-term credit rating is due to the Tea Party’s push for spending cuts in the debt ceiling battle.

Never mind that S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch are the same agencies that thought Democrats’ Community Reinvestment Act and government-mandated subprime housing loans were a peachy idea; maintained top ratings for most securities backed by subprime mortgages; and thus contributed to the meltdown.

Never mind that S&P, headed by English lit major John Chambers, made a $2 trillion error calculating the U.S.’s debt-to-GDP ratio over time, then rewrote its justification for the downgrade to fit its already formulated decision.

Never mind that in the past five years, betting against S&P’s recommendations would have given you a better return on your investment than betting for them.

To the extent that one trusts S&P, its report gives a decidedly different impression of their reasons for the downgrade than those claimed by the left.

The report cites “difficulties in bridging the gulf between the political parties over fiscal policy, which makes us pessimistic about… a broader fiscal consolidation plan that stabilizes the government’s debt dynamics…”  S&P is obviously trying to be nonpartisan and spread the blame around.  It would help if they displayed less vagueness about where responsibility lies for the U.S.’s financial problems.  But I read that last bit as clearly highlighting Congress’s refusal to cut spending on items that make a real dent in our budget, which is largely the fault of Democrats, at least this time around.

S&P notes: “We could lower the long-term rating to ‘AA’ within the next two years if we see less reduction in spending than agreed to, higher interest rates, or new fiscal pressures…”  There is nothing in there about future debt ceiling inflexibility, extremist conservative posturing, or the intransigence of jihadist Tea Partiers.

The report continues: “[W]e believe that the prolonged controversy over raising the statutory debt ceiling and the related fiscal policy debate indicate that further near-term progress containing the growth in public spending, especially on entitlements, or on reaching an agreement on raising revenues is less likely than we previously assumed.”

Any liberals looking at this stopped reading that last paragraph after they got to “prolonged controversy over raising the statutory debt ceiling.”  The Tea Party held America hostage—S&P said so!

In fact, the agency stated that the prolonged debt ceiling debate was of concern, because the gap between the parties foretells difficulty in reining in entitlement spending.

Let’s see: which party favors reducing entitlement spending, and which is reflexively, dogmatically opposed to it?  If the two parties face gridlock on the entitlement cuts S&P is eager to see, which party is therefore more at fault for Congress’s failure to cut entitlement spending?  Why, I believe that would be the Democrats!

As for the claim that S&P was upset because Congress didn’t raise taxes, the agency explicitly took no position on what combination of spending cuts and/or tax increases, if any, should be adopted.

One very specific request S&P did indicate, however, is that an ideal deficit reduction deal should cut about $4 trillion over the next decade.  The plan Congress agreed to cuts $2.4 trillion.

So Tea Partiers were pushing for bigger cuts than Democrats and even House Republican leaders were willing to consider, and S&P wanted cuts twice as big as those Congress agreed on.  How is it again that pushing for cuts was the Tea Party’s mortal sin?

The only other crime for which the Tea Party might be to blame in S&P’s eyes is “brinkmanship” in using the debt ceiling as a negotiating tool to bring down spending.  But if a good chunk of the reason for S&P’s downgrade was the U.S.’s refusal to rein in entitlement spending, and Democrats are congenitally opposed to all entitlement cuts, then what other bargaining chip did Republicans have to work with besides the debt ceiling?

Anyway, it is logically impossible for S&P to have downgraded the U.S. out of fear that the debt ceiling standoff would result in our creditors not being paid.  The U.S. spends less than 10% of its revenue servicing our debt.  We failed to raise our debt ceiling in time on nine occasions in the past, and our debtors always got their interest payments.  How could there have been even a remote chance we would have defaulted?

If S&P really thought the U.S. was at risk of default, then they owe the American people an explanation of how exactly this might have happened.  An S&P downgrade, if any, should have taken place entirely because of our enormous debt, not our debt ceiling.  The fact that S&P refuses to make it clear which one is the cause for their downgrade shreds any credibility they have.

S&P’s downgrade is either entirely the fault of Democrats who refuse to cut entitlement spending or pass a budget, or S&P’s willful obfuscation of the difference between raising our debt ceiling and servicing our debt.  Either way, the Tea Party is utterly blameless.

 Print This Post

Related articles

• YA THINK? S&P bond rater: It’s the debt, stupid; Update: S&P official: Another downgrade will com… (pajamasmedia.com)
• S&P: Our new lord and master? (cbsnews.com)
• U.S. Treasuries are still safe! Sorta (money.cnn.com)
• Jonathan Miller: Credit Downgrade for Dummies (huffingtonpost.com)
• Taking on tea partiers – Axelrod on the ‘tea party downgrade’ (politico.com)

Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

If there’s an 80% chance President Michele Bachmann would repeal ObamaCare, enact entitlement reform, and prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, I’m sold.

Whatever trivial misstatements she’s made in her political career, this three-term Minnesota Representative is the strongest nominee the GOP has seen so far this campaign season.

Fox News host Chris Wallace recently demonstrated his journalistic integrity and respect for women in politics by asking Bachmann, “Are you a flake?”

There’s more evidence that Barack Obama isn’t a capitalist than that Bachmann isn’t a serious candidate, though I don’t recall any journalist asking candidate Obama, “Are you a socialist?”  If this is how Fox treats Bachmann, one can only imagine how the mainstream media will treat her.

Fortunately, Bachmann appears quite capable of defending her record.

Unlike candidate Obama, Bachmann has a real work history, with actual responsibilities, including five years’ tenure as a tax attorney, and experience running two mental health clinics, a charter school, and a family farm.

Unlike Senator Obama, Bachmann productively used her time in Congress, taking leadership roles on allowing drilling in ANWR, repealing the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, and replacing ObamaCare with free market reforms.

Bachmann has labeled herself a “constitutional conservative”—precisely the correct label to use in this bizarre era of pay czars, light bulb bans, and trillion-dollar deficits.

Bachmann is a more seasoned version of Sarah Palin and an excellent substitute for Palin fans who believe the former governor unelectable.  (And if depicting Bachmann staring off-camera is the best Saturday Night Live can do to mock her, the 2012 election is going to be no career-booster for Kristen Wiig.)

Bachmann may not have extensive foreign policy experience, but she’s clearly capable of fighting the United States’ gravest enemies, as evidenced by her having survived growing up in a Democratic household.

America’s favorite Tea Party hostess stands up to powerful RINOs in the House who refuse to get serious on spending.  She organized and chairs the vital Congressional Tea Party Caucus.

To top it all off, she’s electable, as evidenced by her recent dead heat showing with Mitt Romney in Iowa, her first-place finish in a national Zogby poll, and her winning performance in the New Hampshire GOP primary debate this month.

Naturally, liberals have temporarily recovered from their Sarah Palin hysteria and are developing a creeping case of Bachmann Derangement Syndrome.

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly, for example, branded Bachmann a conspiracy theorist for her claim that Obama wants Medicare to go broke so seniors will be forced to rely on ObamaCare.  Bachmann was in fact mistaken: She failed to note that Obama also wants all private insurers to go broke so the whole country will be forced to rely on ObamaCare.

Benen called Bachmann’s concern that federal voluntary “community service” might lead to mandatory service “obvious madness.”  Apparently Benen was unaware that the original version of the GIVE Act authorized a “Congressional Commission on Civic Service” to address “whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented…” (p. 267 in a 275-page bill).  No mandatory service here—move along!  The Commission was eliminated from the bill after conservative uproar, but this incident highlights Democrats’ modus operandi for sneaking unpopular provisions into legislation: First they tuck something objectionable deep into a bill where few will read it; then Republicans find it and raise objections; and finally Democrats remove it, deny it was ever there, and scoff at Republicans for “fear-mongering.”

As another example, Washington Post “Fact Checker” and partisan hack Glenn Kessler derided Bachmann’s claim of $105 billion in implementation funds being “hidden” in the ObamaCare bill as “ridiculous,” giving it a maximum rating of “four Pinocchios” on his truthfulness scale.  In fact, former Appropriations Committee member Ernest Istook confirmed that the authors’ act of authorizing so many new programs and funding them in the same bill was highly unusual.  The legislation isn’t clear on what the money will be spent on, and Obama-appointed bureaucrats are unlikely to be held accountable for it.  Neither the Washington Post nor any other major news outlet reported on the $105 billion implementation sum—probably because, as Bachmann noted, it was broken into small pieces and scattered throughout the 2,000-page bill.  But because the provisions weren’t written in invisible ink, Kessler claimed Bachmann was lying through her teeth.

The liberal site Think Progress blasted Bachmann as being crassly calculating for observing that Democrats hope to transform American society into one that’s more dependent on government, thereby securing a permanent “power base.”  In liberals’ projection of their own vile behavior, Republicans preventing Democrats from buying votes via taxpayer-funded entitlement programs is somehow the equivalent of Republicans buying votes.  This is like saying that Republicans’ efforts to prevent Democratic voter fraud is Republican voter fraud.

In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi claimed that on Hardball, Bachmann had demanded McCarthy-style investigations of Congress to determine which of our leaders are anti-American.  In fact, Bachmann was merely responding to an endless, tiresome line of questioning from host Chris Matthews, who had introduced the label ‘anti-American’ and was trying to get Bachmann to pin it on her colleagues.  Matthews whined, “How many Congresspeople… There’s 435… How many are anti-American?… How many people in the Congress… How many do you suspect?”  After fending off his badgering for several minutes, Bachmann finally replied, “You’d have to ask them, Chris,” and added, “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America?”  Not exactly the Salem witch trials.

These are just a few threads in the tangled web of “conspiracy theories,” “lies,” and “gaffes” that supposedly disqualify Bachmann from office.

Bachmann may not be the perfect candidate—who is?—but she’s the best conservatives have among those currently in the race.  I’d rather have a president with 80% of the facts at her command than one who governs according to 100% discredited crackpot redistributionist economic theories.



 Print This Post

Related articles

• Bachmann Bellyflops – The Atlantic (therealwithdarylanddevon.wordpress.com)
• Outspoken Bachmann launches White House bid (miamiherald.typepad.com)
• Bachmann Announces, Takes the Lead, Pushes Romney Out (atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com)
• Tea Party Star Michele Bachmann Formally Announces Republican 2012 Presidential Nomination Candidacy (themoderatevoice.com)
• Why Michele Bachmann will be the GOP nominee (dailykos.com)

What do the following quotes have in common?

“If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard.”

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”

“I don’t want to quell anger.  I think people are right to be angry.  I’m angry.”

“I want you to argue with them and get in their faces.”

“I’m itching for a fight.”

“Fight for it!”

“We’re gonna punish our enemies.”

“Our job is, keep our boot on [their] neck.”

“We talk to these folks… so I know whose ass to kick.”

“[Republican victory would mean] hand-to-hand combat.”

That’s right—they were all shouted at Tea Party rallies by Sarah Palin supporters resentful over a black President!

Actually, they were all uttered by our Commander-in-Chief or members of his administration in reaction to electoral, ideological, and other political opponents.

All are also apparently examples of the “civility” Democrats keep demanding conservatives display when engaging in political discourse.  This command was most recently circulated after Jared Loughner attempted to assassinate Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killed six people at an event in Tucson, Arizona.

Liberals are up in arms because last year Sarah Palin’s website featured a map pinpointing the locations of Democrats in conservative districts who voted for Obamacare, with a crosshair symbol over each one.  Giffords was one of the Democrats Palin targeted.

The map was accompanied by a pep talk from Palin that included such violent, blood-soaked rhetoric as “Let’s not get discouraged.  Don’t get demoralized.  Get organized!”  (Palin considered putting Hello Kitty images over her targets, but her handlers decided crosshairs would better fit her brand.)

To make the case that Palin/Tea Party rhetoric inspired Giffords’ shooter, a thinking person would ask whether Loughner was a Palin/Tea Party follower, and thus whether he could possibly have been inspired by them.

Anyway, moving on to what Democrats did, they instinctively shrieked that the right wing was creating a “climate” of vitriol and hate that was erupting in spontaneous acts of violence.  (We know how good Democrats are at making climate predictions!)

In fact, what we learned about Loughner is that he “favorited” a creepy YouTube video showing a terrorist lookalike burning the American flag.  (Remind me: Is flag-burning one of the major planks of the Tea Party platform or just a minor recommendation?)

Former classmate Caitie Parker wrote of Loughner, “As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal. & oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy.”

Loughner’s favorite works of literature include The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf.

Some commentators have argued that Loughner was not consistently right-wing or left-wing, since the Manifesto is left-wing but Kampf is right-wing.

In fact, Kampf’s author—Adolf Hitler—and his party were dyed-in-the-wool socialists, as in Nazism = Nationalsozialismus = National Socialism.

Closer to today’s liberals than today’s conservatives, the Nazis believed in an all-powerful government with centralized power held by smarter-than-everyone-else elites, not a limited government distributed among many sources and concentrated on the local level.

Chapter 12 of Volume One of Kampf is called “The First Period of Development of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”  Volume Two is titled “The National Socialist Movement.”  The Nazi platform included such gems as “That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished,” “We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions,” and “The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.”  I think it’s safe to classify Kampf as a left-wing publication.

Maybe Loughner’s mental illness led him to embrace such extremist works.  But I notice that paranoid schizophrenia somehow never induces people to become feverishly obsessed with The Road to Serfdom or the collected works of Milton Friedman.

Unlike what the more honest elements of the mainstream media have been telling us, Loughner isn’t a random crazy—and he’s not even a random crazy leftist.

Just during Obama’s time in office, we’ve been subjected to:

•    A leftist anti-Semite opening fire in D.C.’s Holocaust Museum

•    A posse of union thugs beating up a black Tea Party supporter at a town hall meeting

•    A liberal biting off a conservative’s finger at a health care protest

•    A left-wing Obama supporter and biology professor shooting three fellow professors in Alabama

•    An anti-corporate Obama voter crashing his plane into an IRS building

•    A liberal Ground Zero Mosque supporter stabbing a Muslim cabdriver in lower Manhattan

•    An environmentalist trying to blow up the Discovery building in Maryland

•    A 9/11 Truther opening fire on policemen in the Pentagon

At this moment, spoiled leftist thugs are torching Greece, France, Great Britain, and half of Western Europe, upset that the socialist way of life their governments promised them is unsustainable and must be scaled back ever-so-slightly.

But according to liberals, we’re suffering from a deluge of conservative hate speech that’s derailing public discourse and sparking acts of violence.

Our own President’s dearest friends, mentors, and idols have called for violent overthrow of the government, and in some cases actually committed such acts, including: William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Frank Marshall Davis, Mark Rudd, Van Jones, Andrew Cloward, Frances Fox Piven.

Meanwhile, the Tea Party’s most violent association is Sarah Palin clubbing fish with her children on “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.”

If Democrats wanted to claim that every act of political violence is committed by a disturbed, nonpartisan nut job, fine.  Republicans would be classy enough not to attribute the actions of an admittedly long string of psychotic lone wolves to the entire population of liberals.

But if Democrats keep trying to pin these acts on right-wingers, we will punch back twice as hard.

 Print This Post

Related articles

• Left, right struggle to define Loughner (politico.com)
• “VFR readers comment on the left’s Big Lie and the truth about Jared Lee Loughner” and related posts (amnation.com)
• Murder in Tucson (online.wsj.com)
• Did heated rhetoric play role in shooting of Giffords? (jta.org)
• Tea party’s new message: Don’t blame us (politico.com)

In a NewsRealBlog post last week, I wrote about the top 10 excuses Democrats will make for why they were destroyed in Tuesday’s historic midterm elections.  Apparently I gave Democrats too much credit.  I was assuming they would accept the fact that they had been defeated.

Any self-respecting coach who boasted a season average loss of 65 points would consider letting someone else take charge.  As Michael Tomasky observes of midterm elections, “[Y]ou lose 65 seats, you resign.  Period.  There should not be a question.”  But Congressional Democrats have expressed so little interest in replacing House Majority (soon to be Minority) Leader Nancy Pelosi that you might be forgiven for thinking she were a Republican plant.

(Perhaps liberal columnist Susan Estrich is also a Republican plant; see her hilarious but non-satirical column, “Nancy Pelosi, Superhero.”)

Pelosi plans to celebrate the wild success of the 111^th Congress with a swanky soiree in the Cannon House Office Building.

Let’s catalogue the damage from Tuesday’s elections.  Approximately 40% of incoming House GOP freshmen are affiliated with the Tea Party, and five (six if Joe Miller wins) of the seven Senate pickups are for Tea Party candidates.  This is to say nothing of reelected incumbents who are already Tea Party luminaries, such as Representative Michele Bachmann and Senator Jim DeMint.

Not only did Republicans net more than 60 House seats, 7 Senate seats, 7 governorships, and dozens of state legislatures—which should be a strong enough signal to Democrats that America is sick of their policies—but these candidates are on average more conservative and less likely to vote for Democratic legislation than Republicans in the current Congress.  Reelected incumbent Tea Party Congressmen are also more likely to pick up key chairmanships and leadership posts and exert greater influence over Congress.

But of the incoming GOP freshman class, the website ThinkProgress.com cries, “91% have sworn to never allow an income tax increase on any individual or business… 79% have pledged to permanently repeal the estate tax… 48% are pushing for a balanced budget amendment”—as though the American people weren’t wildly in favor of all of these proposals.

Paul Krugman hasn’t stopped his wailing for more federal stimulus spending and currency manipulation.  His latest diatribe, one week after the election, is indistinguishable from his diatribes from one week or even three months ago.  On Monday he proposed “weakening the dollar” and “leading people to believe that we will have somewhat above-normal inflation over the next few years,” citing as supporters of his crazy policies “many economists, some regional Fed presidents and the International Monetary Fund”—by which he means “discredited Keynesians, the people responsible for the mess we’re in, and the organization that has destroyed economies worldwide from Indonesia to Ireland.”

Apparently liberal commentators don’t just want surviving Congressional Democrats to commit suicide again.  Evidently they’d also like it if our Commander in Chief did so as well.  Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich advises President Obama to dig in like FDR in 1936, rather than move to the center like Clinton in 1994.  Frank Rich recommends that Obama dare Republicans to enact the tax and spending cuts they propose, and suggests that if the GOP does this, the Democratic Party will come roaring back in 2012 like Harry Truman in 1948.

Dan Froomkin of the Huffington Post muses, “[T]he big question will be what lesson Obama takes from Tuesday’s election results.  If he and his advisors are finally ready to acknowledge that the source of voter unhappiness was government ineffectiveness—rather than government overreach… then there’s plenty of room for him to maneuver on his own.”  Wrong lesson!  Try again.

Froomkin continues: “Indeed, progressives are urging him to seize the opportunity to take a more muscular approach with his executive powers…  They also hope Obama will use his regulatory authority, his enforcement powers, and his prerogatives as commander in chief to make decisive moves that can’t be sabotaged by Congressional Republicans.”  Wow—it’s as though Froomkin is directly channeling the collective will of American voters!

DeWayne Wickham of USA Today declares, “Don’t wave a white flag; hoist the battle flag.  That’s what Barack Obama should do…  The lesson to be learned… is not that Democrats should surrender to the right wing.  It is that they should put up a better fight to move their agenda.”  These cute sentiments are almost excusable in the waning weeks and days before an election—who doesn’t like an optimist, a persistent fighter, an underdog—but a week after the Democrats were destroyed?  Reality hasn’t sunk in for these people yet?

Sensible Toby Harnden of the UK Telegraph predicts, “Obama is not about to move to the centre…  Nothing in his career indicates he is ready to cut deals with political opponents.  He is sure what he believes is right; if you don’t agree with him, he pities you for being so slow to understand…  Last Tuesday was a setback like nothing else he had experienced in life and it appears to have left his enormous sense of self-assurance undiminished.”

And Wesley Pruden notes, “President Obama thinks nobody is really mad about what he’s done—they just want a little soothing syrup on it.  He promises better speeches to describe the same old soggy dish the dogs won’t touch.”

Please note that all of this Democratic blindness is occurring despite a marked absence of gloating on the part of the GOP, who recognize that the Tea Party threw them a lifeline and that they had better hold onto it tight if they want to survive the next election cycle.  Democrats are arguably no less triumphant about their performance last Tuesday than Republicans.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week, “[T]he White House has a choice: they can change course, or they can double down on a vision of government that the American people have roundly rejected.”  Alas, it appears that Democrats are choosing the latter.

To paraphrase an oft-cited definition of insanity: being a Democrat means doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different electoral results.



 Print This Post

Related articles

• 2012 Could Be Worse Than 2010 for Democrats (politics.usnews.com)
• Bad news Democrats _ 2012 could be worse than 2010 (sfgate.com)
• Cantor: If Pelosi stays, then Dems don’t get it (sfgate.com)
• Rachel Maddow Says Fight But Is Pelosi A Fighter? (middle-class-populist.com)
• Nancy Pelosi’s House with no center (sfgate.com)