Tag: politics

Disengaged

I told you last year that Obama doesn’t really want to win the election. I’ll bet he’s now wishing he’d gone with his original impulse, which was to find some excuse to gracefully evade the nomination and go on the international speech circuit.

Obama at the DNC: That’s it? It would have been better had he not spoken. Seriously. Like an aging rock star, President Obama, in a downsized venue, with downsized proposal and spewing downsized rhetoric only reminded us how far he has fallen from the heady days of 2008. The man, the agenda and the aura are faint imitations of their 2008 incarnations.
– Jennifer Rubin

I was stunned. This is a man who gave one of the great speeches of our time in 2004. And he gave one of the emptiest speeches I’ve ever heard on a national stage… There was nothing in it…
– Charles Krauthammer

The president’s aides understood they could never re-create the power of the past but hoped to convince voters that more has been done than commonly recognized. The “promises kept” theme was intended to address the same swing voters Mr. Romney sought last week to win over. Mr. Obama directly acknowledged the disappointments…. The president appeared to become emotional toward the end of his speech as he spoke of wounded veterans who somehow managed to walk and run and bike on prosthetic legs. He said he did not know if they would vote for him, but added that they nonetheless gave him hope that difficulties could be overcome.
– The New York Times

the president often felt flat, rote, and unconvincing — almost as though he wasn’t quite convinced by his own arguments and promises, and felt a little awkward selling them to us…. I think that while this convention helped the Democrats overall, the president himself delivered one of the weakest major performances of his career.
– Ross Douthat, The New York Times

Rubin, Krauthammer, and Douthat could be dismissed as Republicans simply looking to criticize the rival presidential candidate were it not for the New York Times article saying essentially the same things between the lines. The striking thing about the NYT’s summary of Obama’s speech is the complete lack of superlatives that characterizes their normal coverage of Obama. If they could have found something, anything, to inflate and praise in his speech, they would have done so. But they didn’t, because Obama gave them nothing.

Obama is disengaged and he is too much of a narcissist to throw himself into a campaign that he doesn’t even want to win. All he wants at this point is to avoid an embarrassing landslide in the presidential vote; one potentially informative metric might be to compare how many Democratic candidates for other offices appear on stage with him during the last three months compared to past presidential campaigns. I’ll bet Obama doesn’t appear with half as many candidates this fall as he did in 2008 or George W. Bush did in 2004.

Is evil all you can do?

Greatheart claims that voting is the full extent of his capabilities:

God doesn’t care about my pride, He does care how I conduct myself while on this earth. He will not judge me based on how others treat me; He will, however, judge me on my behavior. My vote is the only weapon I have against the evil at work in this country, so I will use it.

This raises three questions. First, why does Greatheart think his vote is the only weapon he has? Was the vote the only weapon possessed by George Washington or by the apostles? And does he truly believe God wants men to support what they know to be evil in the name of fighting evil?

Barack Obama is certainly evil. But there is no question that Mitt Romney is also evil, in fact, it is entirely possible that he is more evil than Obama. We know how Obama will govern, mostly in absentia. Whereas neither Mitt Romney’s governance of Massachusetts nor the way in which he violated party rules and used his power to silence dissent at the Republican National Convention indicates he will be a lesser evil than Obama.

Amateur hour

The Democratic Party belatedly realizes that attempting to appeal to less than two percent of the population is not a winning electoral strategy:

Embarrassed by Republicans, Democrats amended their convention platform Wednesday to add a mention of God and declare that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Many in the audience booed after the convention chairman, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, ruled that the amendments had been approved despite the fact that a large group of delegates had objected.

Democrats had approved a platform on Tuesday that made no mention of God or Jerusalem. Instead, it expressed “unshakable commitment to Israel’s security.”

As a general rule, aggravating Christians and then pissing off Jews is not a viable election strategy. The closer the Democrats come to becoming the Atheism+ party, the more they ensure Republican dominance of Karl Rove’s dreams.

The top 13 percent

The Pew Research Center takes only 11 questions to demonstrate why 74 percent of Americans shouldn’t be permitted to vote.

I got 11 questions correct, along with 13% of voters. Two of them were a little tricky because one has to go with the candidate’s current public positions as opposed to what one tends to suspect their real positions on the subject are and what their probable actions will be. I went back and forth on two of them before finally concluding that it was a news-related quiz and correctly electing to take them at face value. However ludicrous that might be….

True libertarians won’t vote Libertarian

Karl Denninger explains one reason why:

From Ron Paul’s July 2012 Campaign finance disclosure:

Cash on hand: $2,497,183.28
Debt: $0.00

From Gary Johnson’s July 2012 Campaign finance disclosure:

Cash on hand: $14,264.95
Debt: $296,201.47

It really is this simple folks. Ron Paul does not believe in fractional reserve lending nor does he borrow against nothing (and since both campaigns are incorporated, there is no “there” there when it comes to campaign “assets” nor can either individual be personally attached to cover obligations) — that is, he walks the talk and has ZERO campaign debt.

Gary Johnson, on the other hand, specifically and personally rejected, to my face, “One Dollar of Capital” (the repudiation of lending against nothing) in February when I was in his guest suite in Orlando, in front of a bunch of other Libertarians and campaign workers. His statement was that getting rid of the ability to create credit out of thin air would “harm the economy.”

Irrespective of what he may now tell you in sound bites in an attempt to try to seduce you to vote for him he has borrowed against hot air to the tune of 20:1 when compared against his cash balance in his own campaign, which means that by his own actions he doesn’t believe in sound money and sound banking — his own campaign is a financial bubble!

Some have noted the irony that I, supposedly one of the Internet’s leading libertarians, does not support or belong to the Libertarian Party. Some have used this to claim I am not a libertarian. I, on the other hand, have always insisted that a number of the Libertarian Party’s policies are expressly anti-libertarian.

I think their choice of a standard bearer in the 2012 election tends to lend support to my perspective on the matter. So, who am I supporting this year? Ron Paul if he runs third party. Otherwise, no one. I don’t vote for evil, no matter what letter appears in front of its name. To quote Mr. Denninger: “I will not be complicit in the furtherance of destruction of our nation’s freedom.”

WND column

Romney’s Fair Warning

These days, political conventions are no longer where the two major parties select their presidential candidates. The selection process purports to be a democratic one, in which the grass roots have the opportunity to choose a candidate through the complicated series of state primaries and caucuses, although the reality is that the grass roots is usually choosing between one and three candidates preapproved by the party establishment.

While in 2008, Barack Obama did manage to upset Hillary Clinton, not even the complete lack of enthusiasm for Mitt Romney on the part of the Republican grass roots was enough to permit any of his nominal competitors for the nomination to effectively compete with him in 2012.

That didn’t take long

The advocates of homosexual “marriage” have been proven to be completely wrong, as the push for polygamous marriage has gotten rolling before homogamy has even been made legal in most states.

Three Brazilians in love have their nation up in arms over whether their relationship, now enshrined in a three-way marriage, is legal. The public notary who conducted their marriage says there’s no reason the threesome – or “thruple”, as the internet has charmingly labelled it – shouldn’t enjoy the same kinds of rights imparted upon two people who get hitched…. This is not about the advocacy of patriarchal polygamy that regards wives as unequal to, or property of, their husbands. But if three, or four, or 17 people want to marry each other simultaneously and equally, why should they not be granted the same status as two people who want to become a legal family?

As I pointed out, correctly, once you start messing around with the nouns in “one man + one woman”, you eliminate all the grounds for not messing around with the numbers too. Besides, the multiculti idiots have no choice but to support polygamy, since their precious third-worlders both practice and demand it.

Thus feminism dies, the victim of its own political success. And thus conservatives learn the bitter lesson of how turning to the state to defend your values is short-sighted and counterproductive.

Free society or political equality

The Republicans, like the Democrats, have chosen the latter. And, as Larry Auster points out, in doing so they have also chosen sexual socialism:

Mrs. Romney, along with the GOP which approved her speech, has inadvertently demonstrated once again why women should not have the vote and should not have prominent positions in politics. Because once women have the vote, they become a separate constituency with interests separate from those of men. This inevitably results (1) in female emotionalism and female resentment becoming central in politics; (2) in everyone bowing down at the altar of the mistreated, overworked “moms” of America, who are thus turned into a new type of oppressed ubermensch; and (3) in women as a group demanding substantive equality with men as a group. In short, sexual socialism….

Republicans say they believe in a free society. But the truth is that women’s political equality is incompatible with a free society, because women’s political equality moves society irresistibly in the direction of socialism.

Women will never, ever, be freedom-oriented voters. They will always be security-oriented. Even women who are intellectually freedom-oriented – and what percentage of the electorate is even remotely intellectual? – find it necessary to fight off the emotional appeal of security arguments that appeal to them more powerfully than any man can hope to understand. Mussolini is one of many socialists who knew this, which is why political equality, including a guaranteed percentage of representative seats in the parliament, is the very first plank in the Fascist manifesto.

The Democrats accuse Republicans of fighting a war on women. It’s not true. But they should be. Instead, they are putting the dreadful Ann Romney on display, who I suspect will make for a more baleful influence on American society than any first lady since Nancy Reagan. Hillary only engaged in a bit of financial corruption and fired her lawyer in an unusually untidy manner. Nancy gave us the War on Drugs.

And now we live in John Adams’s DictatorshipTyranny of the Petticoat. How terribly surprising to discover that the nation’s credit cards are maxed out. The choice is between Suffrage or Liberty and you can only choose one.

Sounds like snake oil

“The present administration has made its choices. And Mitt Romney and I have made ours: Before the math and the momentum overwhelm us all, we are going to solve this nation’s economic problems. And I’m going to level with you: We don’t have that much time. But if we are serious, and smart, and we lead, we can do this.”
– Paul Ryan

There isn’t much time, which is why he has proposed a budget that doesn’t balance for another 28 years. Color me dubious. The math is already grim.

Mitt Romney, Republican Totalitarian

Keep this shenanigan in mind if you still think that Mitt Romney is a fine, upstanding man who will turn the country around:

Listening to the announcement of delegates for the candidates, from the podium they are omitting any votes for other than Mitt Romney. But not all the votes are for Mitt Romney. Ron Paul and Rick Santorum have some votes. They’re being intentionally ignored. Not counted and then announced that he didn’t win, ignored as if they never happened.

For those who claim Obama is orders of magnitude worse than Romney, note that even the famously narcissistic Obama didn’t try to pretend that no one voted for Hillary Clinton at the 2008 DNC. The vote totals were 3,188.5 for Obama and 1,010.5 for Clinton. And while I no longer read National Review on a regular basis, I correctly anticipated that they would have some mention of this. John Fund explained what was going on behind Team Romney’s attempt to present a false front of party unity:

The proposed rules package surfaced last Friday as Team Romney moved to grant sweeping new powers to the Republican National Committee — and the Romney forces who now control it – to amend the governing documents of the Grand Old Party just about any time they want without a vote of delegates from the grassroots…. Team Romney was able to ram the proposed changes through the Rules Committee but a substantial minority, some 40 percent, vociferously objected.

Mitt Romney has revealed himself to be a centralist and a totalitarian with no respect for the rule of law. I don’t see how anyone who supported Ron Paul can, in good conscience, vote for the man this fall.

UPDATE: “The Republican National Committee is not transparent and does not have integrity. They stole votes. They stole delegates. They refused to send busses for our delegates. It’s a totalitarian process. This is not democracy. It’s a really sad day for us. I’ve worked for Republican candidates since I was 16. We believed the Republican Party had more integrity. Boy, did they prove us wrong.“

UPDATE II: Republicans demonstrate their respect for the rules: Delegates from Nevada tried to nominate Mr. Paul from the floor, submitting petitions from their own state as well as Minnesota, Maine, Iowa, Oregon, Alaska and the Virgin Islands. That should have done the trick: Rules require signatures from just five states. But the party changed the rules on the spot. Henceforth, delegates must gather petitions from eight states.