Tag: politics

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.

Tucker Max on Obama

I tend to agree with those who believe that you can learn a lot about a man’s character from how he plays sports. In that vein, Tucker Max’s recollection of playing basketball with a mid-30s Barack Obama at the University of Chicago is informative indeed:

“I do remember that he had a good understanding of the game. He knew when to backdoor cut, how to pick and roll, when to take his man away so you could drive, how to block out for rebounds, etc. And he would hit open jumpshots if left alone. He was not some doofus out there trying to get exercise. He understood the basics of basketball very well, which is better than most people who play pick-up. Just this knowledge of the game made him fun to play with.”

“But the thing is, even though he knew the basics and could execute them, his performance wasn’t anything beyond that. He didn’t have what basketball players call ‘old man game.’ Old guys who have that know every trick, use every advantage, and kill your youth and quickness with their guile and strength. That wasn’t Barack. He would beat you if given space, but if you played even half decent defense on him, you could take him out of the game.”

“He played point guard a lot, but I don’t remember him as a dominant court leader, controlling the flow of the game…. Weirdest thing about him — I always thought he would be better than he was. I mean, here was this guy, in good shape, relatively young (mid 30s at the time, I think) clearly likes and knows the game, and is black (so there’s the quasi-racist assumption that he’s good at basketball)… but he was never that great. Even after I knew the limits of his game, I always half-expected one day he would just decide to turn it on and light everyone up, but it never happened. He had everything that you’d think would make him great, and he definitely looked the part, but he never really turned that look into serious production in an actual game. I saw so many people pick him first, and then get burned because he didn’t play up to that pick.

This very much jibes with my perspective on Obama, which is that he is not a competitor and is naturally disengaged. That’s why I expected him to step down after his first term and why I don’t expect him to put in much of an effort in competing against Romney this fall. It’s also why I never put any credence in those who worried, needlessly, in my opinion, about Obama the Would-be Socialist Dictator cancelling the elections and ruling with an iron fist.

He simply doesn’t have it in him to try that hard. He doesn’t see the point of working that hard. This is a pattern that goes back to his high school days in Hawaii and can be seen in his graduate career at Harvard Law, his faux-literary career, and his political career. If someone is going to open the door for him, he’ll certainly bother to stroll through it, but he’s not interested in pushing on the door himself.

I’ve played against a lot of half-hearted competitors like this in a wide variety of sports. The one thing they all do is hang their heads and give up once the tide begins to turn against them. I suspect one reason the Democrats running his campaign already appear to be in panic mode prior to the Republican convention is because they know that if Romney gets a serious convention bounce and starts running ahead of Obama in the polls, Obama is going to quit on the campaign, quite possibly in literal fashion.

Already, he seems to be doing little more than going through the minimal motions necessary. When was his last major speech, his last big press conference? As for the potential for rumored October surprises, particularly from the Fed, ask yourself this question: why would Ben Bernanke prefer a lukewarm banker’s ally like Barack Obama to an enthusiastic quasi-banker like Mitt Romney?

UPDATE: Steve Sailer puts in a lot more work to reach a similar conclusion: My last word: it’s easy to overthink Obama. Don’t overlook the largest element in his make-up—the “apathetic quasi-intellectual sports fan.”

WND column

Does Romney want to kill Americans?

Former U.S. presidents seldom publicly criticize the current occupants of the White House. It is even more unusual for them to criticize a sitting president who belongs to their own party. But this did not prevent Jimmy Carter from criticizing Barack Obama’s policy asserting the president’s right to murder Americans at will without due process in an article he wrote for the New York Times.

Fake Republicans for Obama

Powerline exposes the latest iteration of a stupid old Democratic trick:

It happens all the time in talk radio: a caller will say that he is a lifelong Republican, and will recall fondly how he voted for Ronald Reagan. Then he says that today’s Republicans have gone too far, and for the first time ever he is voting for a Democrat! These callers are nearly always lying. If you look them up, you likely will find that they are Democratic Party precinct chairmen.

The Obama campaign is trying to perpetrate the same deception. It has just released a video called Republican Women For Obama, which features four or five women who claim to be Republicans, or to have been Republicans until recently. But, of course, they are appalled by Mitt Romney–it is hard to say why, apart from a couple of discreet references to abortion, but did they really just now figure out that the Republican Party is pro-life? The ad is surprisingly ineffective, but it is also dishonest. At least one of the women who pose as “Republican women for Obama” is a long-time Democrat.

Her name is Maria Ciano, and BuzzFeed finds that she has been a registered Democrat in Colorado at least since 2006.

Of course, there is an easier way of knowing that the woman isn’t a Republican than combing through her Facebook page and voter registration. First, she is an unmarried Hispanic woman. Second, one has to be a pretty extreme Democrat to be appalled by Mitt Romney’s “right-wing” ways.

UPDATE: Obama is clearly getting desperate. President Barack Obama said Mitt Romney has locked himself into “extreme positions” on economic and social issues and would surely impose them if elected, trying to discredit his Republican rival at the biggest political moment of his life.

Romney is a flip-flopper, not an extremist, and everyone knows it. Obama’s 2012 campaign is looking more hapless than Hillary Clinton’s catastrophic 2008 team.

Better Ayn Rand than Asimov

I find this criticism of Paul Ryan by Paul Krugman to be richly ironic, coming as it does from a man whose economic philosophy is based on an imaginary science called “psychohistory”:

So far, most of the discussion of Paul Ryan, the presumptive Republican nominee for vice president, has focused on his budget proposals. But Mr. Ryan is a man of many ideas, which would ordinarily be a good thing. In his case, however, most of those ideas appear to come from works of fiction, specifically Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.”

For those who somehow missed it when growing up, “Atlas Shrugged” is a fantasy in which the world’s productive people — the “job creators,” if you like — withdraw their services from an ungrateful society. The novel’s centerpiece is a 64-page speech by John Galt, the angry elite’s ringleader; even Friedrich Hayek admitted that he never made it through that part. Yet the book is a perennial favorite among adolescent boys. Most boys eventually outgrow it. Some, however, remain devotees for life.

If Ryan wants to silence Krugman’s attempts to attack him in this vein, he need merely point out that Atlas Shrugged is considerably more mature fiction than Foundation, the adolescent science fiction novel that Paul Krugman never outgrew.

Scratching back

The good professor always sends a lot of traffic to Amazon when he links my books, so it only seems fair to help him out in return, especially when it costs nothing to nobody. Download his PDF on the Obamacare decision – no registration or cost required – and apparently he’ll get to count some kind of academic coup or something. It actually makes for pretty interesting reading, and it’s only 21 pages, but more importantly, downloading it will make some leftist professor whose paper on 19th Century Transgender Law in the Third Ruritanian Republic gets bumped down a notch cry.

It’s moderately funny too. Consider the following quote: “This has led some commentators to suggest that Roberts’ holding in Sebelius was, like Marshall’s opinion in Marbury v. Madison, a sort of Trojan horse, smuggling in a victory over an important legal principle while shrouding that victory behind a win on the general issue for the other side. There are two problems with this conception: One is with the understanding of Marbury that it embodies, and the other is with the understanding of NFIB that it embodies.”

Translation: “No, you idiot Republicans, it’s exactly what it looked like. Roberts stabbed you in the back, so quit pretending you liked it.”

A strange trip to Tampa

So we’re told Joe Biden is heading to Tampa during the Republican National Convention… I wonder what sort of kabuki show starring the bumbling Vice-President is in store. How desperate are the Democratic elders to get someone else, anyone else, on the ticket? Is it just a feeble attempt to steal the media limelight or is there something darker in the works?

I was at RNC-New Orleans in 1988, as my parents were delegates. At one point, due to the black suit and shades I was wearing, I was drafted to help three bodyguards hold the doors at a Minnesota Senator’s cocktail party against some literally filthy Democratic protesters who were trying to get in. These things get a little messier on the ground than they usually appear on TV. The parties are surpassingly excellent, though.