Tag: politics

The last Republican

Thanks to the suicidal pro-immigration policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations, Mitt Romney may be the last viable Republican candidate.

The demographic threat to the Republican Party grows out of the fact that every four years the electorate becomes roughly two percent less white and two percent more minority, primarily as a result of the increase in the Hispanic and Asian-American populations and the relatively low birth rate among whites. By my computation, this translates into a modest 0.85 percentage point gain for Democrats and 0.85 percentage point loss for Republicans every four years. In other words, the changing composition of the electorate gives Democrats an additional built-in advantage of 1.7 percentage points every four years.

Contra some optimistic left-liberal assertions after the 2008 election, I was confident that the demographic tipping point hadn’t been reached yet.  It could, however, happen as soon as 2016, and it will almost certainly happen by 2024.  Once Texas becomes a reliable Democratic stronghold, which it will thanks to its Hispanic immigrant population, it will be virtually impossible for a Republican to win the presidency again.

Unless, of course, the Republican party becomes the party of white nationalism and starts winning 75 to 80 percent of the white vote, which seems extremely unlikely given SWPL cultural influence, white female left-liberalism, and the party elite’s preference for irrelevance to “extremism”.  So, my prediction of a US collapse by 2033 would appear to be progressing rather nicely.

Romney 305, Obama 233

Romney 305, Obama 233

I am aware that many of the national polls are projecting an election
that goes down to the wire.  I am cognizant of the many hands being
wrung about the possibility that the Electoral College vote will diverge
from the popular vote. And it has been impossible to escape Nate
Silver’s thrice-weekly predictions in the New York Times that Barack
Obama has at least a 538 percent chance of winning the election
tomorrow.

Richard Dawkins on US politics

Keep in mind, this is the same keen political observer who fell for Sam Harris’s ridiculous Red State argument because he didn’t know that American states are divided into counties:

If anyone is in doubt that Dawkins is a staunch liberal, take a quick look at his Twitter feed. On it, he describes Mitt Romney as an “awful Republican,” and — this might sound familiar
— disdains every Republican candidate and president since Eisenhower.
He constantly, almost obsessively, retweets Barack Obama’s campaign
missives. He approvingly quotes
Obama’s infamous line about those who “cling to guns or religion or
antipathy to people who aren’t like them” and contrasts it favorably
with Romney’s NRA membership, which he characterizes thus:
“No dang libruls gonna take away mah constitootional raht to carry a
gun. Pow! Bang! Weehaaar! Good shoot’n pardner.” Indeed, so partisan is
the man that he even entertained the absurd dual conspiracy theories
that Bush cheated in his debates with a radio (it’s “undeniable,” apparently) and Romney with a handkerchief in his.

This is a shame, but it is not a surprise. I’ve very much enjoyed
Dawkins’s books on science, biology, and evolution, and I enjoyed The God Delusion,
too. The lattermost, however, made it clear that whatever genius
Richard Dawkins has for science does not extend into politics or current
affairs. (His passage on how to set up the “ideal society” is one of
the most excrutiatingly infantile things I’ve read.) If anybody could
profit from Thomas Sowell’s advice that experts should stay in their
fields, it is Richard Dawkins.

On the lecture circuit, Dawkins likes to explain to his audiences
that faith corrupts thinking people. Alas, his love affair with Barack
Obama appears to have proven him correct.

Charles Cooke fails to follow the logic to its obvious conclusion.  Richard Dawkins does not possess any genius at all.  I’ve read his books on science, biology, and evolution too, and while I find him to be a generally engaging writer, I find his reasoning to be ever bit as abysmally bad with regards to science, biology, and evolution as it is to US politics.  Keep in mind that of the two “scientific” concepts for which he is most famous, there is no material evidence for the one and the other is looking increasingly dubious.

Predictions

With the election rapidly approaching, let’s get all the public figures on record.  I’ll present my Electoral College prediction in my column tomorrow.  In the meantime, here are a few predictions that I’ve spotted floating around the Internet.  Feel free to add more in the comments and I’ll update this accordingly.

Vox Day: Romney 305, Obama 233 

Nate Silver: Obama 315, Romney 223 (November 6)
Nate Silver: Obama 307, Romney 231 (November 5)
Nate Silver: Obama 288, Romney 250 (October 22)
Nate Silver: Obama 320, Romney 218 (September 30)
Dick Morris: Romney 351, Obama  187
White House Insider: Romney 300+
Michael Barone: Romney 315, Obama 223
John Scalzi: Obama 294, Romney 244 
InTrade: Obama 303, Romney 235 
Jim Cramer: Obama 440, Romney 98 

As much as I have criticized the cult of Nate Silver, I could not agree with the man more when he writes the following in his column entitled “For Romney to Win, State Polls Must Be Statistically Biased”:

My argument, rather, is this: we’ve about reached the point where if
Mr. Romney wins, it can only be because the polls have been biased
against him. Almost all of the chance that Mr. Romney has in the
FiveThirtyEight forecast, about 16 percent to win the Electoral College,
reflects this possibility.

Yes, of course: most of the arguments
that the polls are necessarily biased against Mr. Romney reflect little
more than wishful thinking.  Nevertheless, these arguments are
potentially more intellectually coherent than the ones that propose that
the leader in the race is “too close to call.” It isn’t. If the state
polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you
can’t acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20
swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal
is to inform rather than entertain the public.

But the state polls
may not be right. They could be biased. Based on the historical
reliability of polls, we put the chance that they will be biased enough
to elect Mr. Romney at 16 percent.

That’s the primary difference between Silver’s opinion and mine.  He puts a chance of anti-Republican poll bias at 16 percent.  Even though I am not a Republican and I do not support Mitt Romney, I think it is closer to 90 percent.  That still may not be enough to account for the gap between what the polls are reporting and how I expect events to transpire on Tuesday, but it does explain the difference.  So let’s keep that in mind.  If Romney does win, the only possible conclusion is that the state polls must be biased.

For those who wish to bring up the 2008 election, I would remind everyone that I was incorrect about Hillary being the Democratic candidate, not about the Democratic candidate winning the general election.  It was always obvious that the Republican candidate – I thought it would be Pataki or a senator in the Dole mode – was intended to be a sacrificial lamb.  Nor should anyone forget that Silver’s poll-based predictions entirely failed in 2010.

Smells like game over

Despite not being at all a Muslim in any way, shape, or form, so help him, um, Moses, Obama actually managed to lose the Israelis:

Mitt Romney was running for president against Barack Obama in Israel, the former Mass. governor would win in a landslide.
A new poll released by The Times of Israel on Thursday showed that 45
percent of Israelis would vote for Romney, compared to 29 percent for
the president. 

As we saw from the commenter at McRapey’s, when you’ve lost the Israelis, you’ve lost the American Jewish vote.  I’m a little saddened by this tragi-comic ending, as I just don’t think a Romney administration is going to provide even one-fifth the comedic appeal of its predecessor.

Endorsements

All right, now that we’ve seen the very entertaining justifications presented by the cognitively challenged Obama voters, let’s see if the Dread Ilk can do any better.  For whom are you voting next week and why?  Alternatively, if you are not voting, what is your justification for your decision.

Stow the reactions to anyone else’s endorsement or reasoning, limit your comments to your own intended actions.  I’ll highlight what I consider to be some of the best and worst of them in a post tomorrow, and present my own endorsement for the presidential election.

On a tangential note, I found this to be easily the most interesting out of the 150+ endorsements there:

I have been undecided for a very, very long time. But I think this
thread is what finally made up my mind – after reading how many people
want Obama because they believe he won’t try to prevent Iran from going
nuclear. I’m endorsing Romney even though I’m angered by a lot of the
nonsense that comes out of the Republican Party, and even though I agree
with Obama on most things, especially health care and immigration
reform.

Why? Because my grandmother is a Holocaust survivor, and the
slaughter of her entire family was enabled, in part, by a policy of
wishful-thinking appeasement that thought any sacrifice was acceptable
to avoid war, and that the leader talking publicly about killing all the
Jews couldn’t possibly mean it seriously.

After World War II, as a 16-year-old without a single living person
in the world who knew her name, my grandmother moved to Israel, the only
country that would take her. Israel is where most of my relatives live
now. And much as I would love to, I can’t vote for the candidate who
seems likely to follow a policy of wishful-thinking appeasement while
Iran works on its nuclear arsenal and talks publicly about wiping
Israel’s six million Jews off the map.

Translation: Obama has lost the Jews.  Their concern for Israel is trumping their domestic left-liberal concerns.  If those who “agree with Obama on most things” are now voting for Romney due to his tough talk on Iran, Obama is one and done.

Conspiracy theorists, you disappoint me

For literally years, I’ve been hearing rumors concerning how Obama was going to cancel the presidential election and rule over the subdued nation as a CommunIslamic dictator with an iron fist.  And now, with this so-called “hurricane” meme being pushed on a credulous nation by Obama’s lapdogs in the mainstream, complete with photoshopped pictures of wind, rain, and eroded beaches and cheap Dan Rather-style videos of fake weather-buffeted reporters, giving Obama the perfect excuse to cancel the election next week, absolutely no one has managed to put two and two together?  No one thinks this is the perfectly-timed storm to put an end American democracy?  No one has even suggested that the man of mysterious birth who could make the oceans stop rising, and has now reportedly summoned the ocean’s wrath in a suspiciously timely manner, is not the bastard son of Poseidon?

Conspiracy theorists, you make me sad.  A very poor showing all around, I’m sorry to say.

And then they voted….

As most of you already know, I won’t be voting for either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama.  They are both corrupt men who are owned by the financial interests and primarily seek political power due to their character flaws.  Obama is is a weak little man whose only saving grace is his laziness, while Romney’s greatest strength, his executive competence, only makes him the more dangerous candidate for the country.

But given that few of us tend to pay much attention to the mindless blatherings of the sort of dimwits and mid-wits who still genuinely support Obama after nearly four years of witnessing the man’s boundless incompetence, I thought it might be interesting to see what their justifications are for endorsing the man for a second term.  Keep in mind these are actual, original sentiments expressed by people who are declaring their public support for Obama in the full knowledge that others will be reading them.  Depending upon your psychological outlook, you may find these presidential endorsements to be either highly amusing or incredibly depressing:

Obama.  Cause Repubs scare me. All the anti-women and anti-science talk bothers me greatly as a fairly smart woman with a daughter.  I don’t want to see my future turn into A Handmaiden’s Tale.

Women should get paid as much as men. Gay people should be allowed to make legal life-long commitments to the person they love. Women should be in control of their own bodies. People who have the misfortune to get a disease shouldn’t be shut out from medical care for the rest of their lives. Kids shouldn’t starve because their parents are poor. We ought to send fewer of our boys and girls abroad, and do better for them when they come home. We should be a leader in science, instead of rejecting it.  OBAMA 2012.

I support Barack Obama because he is not a Republican, and because I do not want to see any more people suffering.

I’m endorsing Obama. Basically because my GOP relatives just completely baffle me with their lack of sense – as do most of the GOP that I have seen lately on news outlets.

I endorse Obama as he has done the best he could with the mess he was left with, he has dealt with the GOP whose goal above all including the needs of the country was to make Mr. Obama a single term president and he allows women to choose.

I’m voting for Obama because stimulus is the only way to get an economy out of a depression, because we need to have the rich pay their fair share of taxes and right now they’re paying some of the lowest taxes in the last hundred years, because if it hadn’t been for unemployment benefits being extended I would have lost my house, because we need health care reform, we need to put an end to insurance companies being able to drop paying customers once they get sick.

I endorse Barack Obama for a second term. He turned around the economy, killed Bin Laden, and has changed his mind on gay marriage.

I am Voting for President Obama because he is the leader of the anti-rape party. Seriously.

Given what he’s accomplished in the context in which he’s had to work, I’m satisfied with Obama as president so far. That alone would enough in most election years to allow him to keep my vote in his tally. Is this the glowing, ringing endorsement that Obamaites can shout to the hills? I suppose it’s not, but this should not be confused with a lukewarm or half-hearted endorsement. This is not “you’ll do.” It’s “you’ve done well. Keep going.”

These are just a few of the many reasons I do not believe in the legitimacy or efficacy of pseudo-democracy. In addition to underlining the basic fallacy of “representative” democracy, it should suffice to explode the oft-heard claim that Democrats are more intelligent. In fact, if one takes the trouble to examine the electoral demographics, it is quite clear that the average Republican is both more intelligent and better-educated than the average Democrat.  Of course, that is a very low bar to clear, as one need only examine the disastrous Republican performance in office over the last thirty years to see that having ever-so-slightly more intelligent voters hasn’t prevented Republicans from governing in a disastrous manner.

If you’re the sort with a macabre sense of humor who finds this sort of thing amusing, you’ll find plenty more at McRapey’s.  If, on the other hand, this makes you despair for the country, I would urge you to be sure to have a suicide hotline on speed dial before wading into the mire.

WND column

Is Obama unfit for command?

There were no American helicopters shot down at the CIA annex in
Benghazi. But those who have seen the movie, “Blackhawk Down,” will
surely recall the scene where the two Delta snipers, Randy Shugart and
Gary Gordon, are desperately fighting off the Somali attackers, who are
attempting to capture the crew of the downed Black Hawk. Shugart and
Gordon, valiant men who were both posthumously awarded the congressional
Medal of Honor, killed 25 Somalis while defending the crew before being
killed by the enemy militia.

As the details of the large-scale attacks on the American diplomatic
compound and the CIA annex gradually leak out into the press, it appears
that two of the four fallen Americans, former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods
and Glen Doherty, died fighting in a manner no less valorous than Sgt.
1st Class Shugart and Master Sgt. Gordon.

We’ll see, won’t we

Obama supporters overseas are talking up Nate Silver as if he is a silver bullet to the werewolf of Mitt Romney’s campaign.  I just want to put this article on record so I can reference it after the election:

Nate Silver is Mitt Romney’s nemesis. Not intentionally; although he admits to being an Obama supporter, his whole career is predicated on getting his predictions right. Like he did in 2008, when “Poblano” accurately predicted the result of 49 of the 50 states, and all 35 senate races…. In fact, Silver is proving so damaging to their chances that Republican’s are drawing up a strategy for countering him. “Nate Silver continues to lead the Democrat Graveyard whistling choir”, Republican blogger Robert Stacy McCain wrote on Tuesday. National Review decried “Nate Silver’s Flawed Model”. “Everyone but Nate Silver thinks Obama’s lead is evaporating fast”, said Business Insider.  But the truth is we don’t. And the Romney camp knows it.

Here’s a prediction. As the election clock continues to tick down, and the momentum narrative continues to melt away, the attacks on Silver will intensify. We should expect a Fox News feature. More negative blogs. Maybe even a smear or two.  But the number’s don’t lie. At the start of this week, Barack Obama’s chances of winning Ohio were 70 per cent. Today they’re at 75. Wisconsin has moved up to 86 per cent, Nevada 78, Iowa 68, New Hampshire 69, Colorado 57, Virginia 54. Overall, his chance of wining is now put at 73 per cent, his highest for 18 days. That’s not momentum; that’s Omentum.

Barack Obama is holding a steady course to the presidency. But don’t take my word for it. Ask Poblano.

And yet, I seem to recall it wasn’t all that long ago that Obama’s chances were supposedly at 80 percent and Nate Silver was busily informing everyone that Romney’s post-convention bounce was minimal.  I note, furthermore, that the article doesn’t happen to mention 2010, when Silver was still providing five reasons that Democrats could hold the House as late as November 1st.  Nor should we forget that he claimed in August 2011 that the GOP majority was at risk and control of the House would be a tossup in 2012.

I don’t support Romney nor do I have anything personal against Nate Silver.  It’s just that after reading so much of Dawkins, Harris, and Hauser, I have developed a heightened sense for spotting a pseudo-scientific charlatan when I see one.  If things play out as I expect them to play out, with Romney winning an election that isn’t particularly close and the Republicans winning a comfortable majority in the House, Nate Silver will be publicly seen for the fraud I suspect him to be.