Tag: politics

Run away, Rush, run away

I find Rush Limbaugh’s retreat on Slutgate to be more than a little amusing:

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh apologized Saturday to a Georgetown University law student he had branded a “slut” and “prostitute” after fellow Republicans as well as Democrats criticized him and several advertisers left his program.

The student, Sandra Fluke, had testified to congressional Democrats in support of their national health care policy that would compel her college to offer health plans that cover her birth control.

“My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir,” Limbaugh said on his website. “I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choice.

Now, I don’t know if Ms. Fluke is a slut or not. I do know her position on government funded birth control is idiotic and that she’s not intelligent enough to understand basic supply and demand or she wouldn’t be pursuing a law degree at the age of 30. So, she may well be a slut, but she is not necessarily one. I tend to think it’s a little strange to apologize to someone for something that is possibly, though not necessarily, true without first attempting to determine if one is actually incorrect or not.

But Limbaugh’s apology demonstrates the fundamental cowardice of the conservative media. They are spooked as easily as neurotic thoroughbred horses. He’s the one with the massive audience, so why should he pay any attention to what his advertisers want? By allowing them to dictate his limits, he’s making himself their bitch. That’s fine, if that’s his desire, but then he would do well to abandon all of the heroic posturing of which he is so fond.

As with the Republicans, Limbaugh operates by one core principle: Always Retreat. And that is why conservatism has failed and one reason why American democracy is a thing of the past.

WND column

The Limits of Democracy

Two of the most informative political tracts one can ever expect to read share very similar names. I mention this simply because in these degreed, but uneducated days, if one happens to refer to Cicero’s “Republic,” one can reliably count on being “corrected” by someone insisting that it was not Cicero, but Plato who wrote it. But for all their similar appellations, there are distinct differences between “De re publica” and “Res publica” that are less the result of the distinction between practical Roman thought and philosophical Greek philosophy and more the difference between the experience of an accomplished politician and the utopianism of an academic without responsibility.

The military supports Ron Paul

It’s strange, how the candidate who is supposed to be crazy because of his “insane” foreign policy is so strongly supported by the military, who actually have to carry out the dangerous tasks that are so cheerfully set for them by Republican and Democratic chickenhawks alike:

Current and former service members staged a rally outside the White House today in support of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul.

Several hundred troops and their supporters attended the event. The veterans were men and women, young and old, some in uniform and some in plain clothes.

The demonstration was a mostly silent affair, with the veterans standing calmly at attention in rows. An organizer bellowed that each second of quiet was for every military suicide since President Obama took office. A second moment of silence was for each soldier to die abroad under the current commander in chief.

The ironic thing is that many members of the military openly despise their slobbering Republican “supporters” who are so eager to show their enthusiasm for the military by waving flags as they send its members off to die for Afghan democracy, Iraqi oil, the national security of Israel… and whatever the purported rationale for being in Somalia was.

Proving the opposite

A professor of mathematics complains that unlike the fortunate Chinese, America does not enjoy the benefit of being ruled by scientists:

For complex historical reasons, Americans have long privately dismissed scientists and mathematicians as impractical and elitist, even while publicly paying lip service to them. One reason is that an abstract, scientific approach to problems and issues often leads to conclusions that are at odds with religious and cultural beliefs and scientists are sometimes tone-deaf to the social environment in which they state their conclusions. A more politically sensitive approach to problems and issues, on the other hand, often leads to positions that simply don’t jibe with the facts, no matter how delicately phrased….

Dinosaurs cavorting with humans, climate scientists cooking up the global warming “hoax,” the health establishment using vaccines to bring about socialism – it’s hard to imagine mainstream leaders in other advanced economies not laughing at such claims.

I always enjoy the left-liberal arguments which revolve around the idea that because someone, somewhere, might be laughing at an idea, it must not be true. And, of course, given that there is no global warming and climate scientists did cook up one of the most colossal scams in human history, the professor manages to explain more cogently than he imagined why Americans, for all their flaws, still aren’t dumb enough to vote for scientists.

The problem isn’t so much that “an abstract, scientific approach to problems and issues often leads to conclusions that are at odds with religious and cultural beliefs”, it is that ideology hidden under a veneer of an abstract, scientific approach to problems and issues often leads to conclusions that are at odds with readily observable reality.

Americans don’t refuse to vote for scientists because they think scientists threaten their beliefs, Americans refuse to vote for them because they conclude, on the basis of considerable evidence, scientists are foolish and stupid.

A wee bit late

I’m not saying National Review’s call for Gingrich to get out of the race is misguided. I’m merely saying it is much later than would have been justified:

At the moment Rick Santorum appears to be overtaking Newt Gingrich as the principal challenger to Mitt Romney. Santorum has won more contests than Gingrich (who has won only one), has more delegates, and leads him in the polls. In at least one poll, he also leads Romney. It isn’t yet a Romney–Santorum contest, but it could be headed that way.

We hope so. Gingrich’s verbal and intellectual talents should make him a resource for any future Republican president. But it would be a grave mistake for the party to make someone with such poor judgment and persistent unpopularity its presidential nominee. It is not clear whether Gingrich remains in the race because he still believes he could become president next year or because he wants to avenge his wounded pride: an ambiguity that suggests the problem with him as a leader. When he led Santorum in the polls, he urged the Pennsylvanian to leave the race. On his own arguments the proper course for him now is to endorse Santorum and exit.

The correct moment to tell Gingrich to leave the race, of course, was the moment he decided to enter it. No one was ever going to vote for the corrupt and thin-skinned little troll. The only purpose he served was to make Santorum and Romney look half-electable by comparison, and they both possess the electability of a Republican candidate in the classic Dole/McCain vein. They’ll lose, but they’ll lose respectably and make it look as if the Republican Establishment actually wanted to win the election.

Which, as is readily apparent, it doesn’t. Obama is obediently bombing who he’s told to bomb and defending the interests of the banks he’s told to defend. So long as his handlers can sufficiently head off his self-destructive political instincts – seriously, he’s picking a fight on healthcare now? – and keep him from quitting the race in a morose tantrum, the Republican Establishment will be perfectly satisfied with a loss to Obama it can blame on the Tea Party.

We have a very strange situation in 2012 where it is the Democratic Establishment that wants Obama out whereas the Republican Establishment is perfectly content with the idea of him serving a second term.

Everybody hates Captain Underoos

The more inevitable Mitt Romney looks, the less Republicans like him:

“In Missouri, Romney lost by 30 points and did not win a single county. In Minnesota, Romney finished third behind Ron Paul and did not win a single county. And in Colorado Romney kept his loss within five points, but finished 35-points behind his 60 percent 2008 total.”

I was, of course, amused that in at least one National Review post, the second-place finisher in Minnesota was unidentified. I do find it remarkable that so many Republicans would turn to Santorum as the anti-Romney candidate, however. Republicans apparently really, really, like their central banks and foreign wars.

Mr. One-term

Or so Gallup appears to indicate:

Gallup released their annual state-by-state presidential approval numbers yesterday, and the results should have 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue very worried. If President Obama carries only those states where he had a net positive approval rating in 2011 (e.g. Michigan where he is up 48 percent to 44 percent), Obama would lose the 2012 election to the Republican nominee 323 electoral votes to 215.

I haven’t been hearing as many rumblings about Democrats attempting to encourage Obama to step aside; most of them now appear to involve Biden stepping down as vice-president. But I wouldn’t be convinced that he won’t until he actually accepts the nomination at the Democratic convention this summer. In addition to the eligibility and intra-party pressure issues, Obama simply doesn’t strike me as the sort of personality who is willing to lose when he has the option of claiming instead that he didn’t even try to win.

Drowned in the swamps of Florida

The charade of the Newt Gingrich comes to its inevitable end:

Last week, New York magazine’s John Heilemann pointed out a deep truth about Newt Gingrich’s peculiar presidential campaign: The very media elite that Gingrich delights in hammering has actually been in his corner all along. The press likes a horse race; the press likes outsize personalities; the press favors an underdog; and the press even takes a strange sort of delight in being ruthlessly attacked.

Of course most political reporters don’t want Gingrich in the White House. But they’ve had every incentive to keep him in the headlines and overrate his odds of defeating Mitt Romney for the nomination.

Tuesday night’s Floridian drubbing won’t change those incentives, so we can expect a last burst of media chatter about how Gingrich could still recover, ride a wilderness campaign to a Super Tuesday comeback and fight Romney tooth and nail all the way to the convention. But chatter is all it will be. For Gingrich and his media enablers alike, the dream died in Florida….

The sooner Gingrich is out, the better. The only substantive choice is between Mitt Romney and Ron Paul. Even if Romney ultimately turns out to be the clear and unabashed choice of Republicans, as I expect him to be, at least people will have been presented a clear choice between debt-laden doom and the only way out of the banking abyss.

Selective and belated protest

Karl Denninger, himself a Catholic, points out the absurdity of the Roman Catholic Church finally finding something in Medicaid to which it can object:

The Church already supported this unjust law for decades. By supporting mandated cost-shifting of medical care and the tax system that funds it, most-particularly (but not limited to) Medicaid, the Catholic Church has long supported these procedures with their direct employment tax dollars as well as espousing the belief that the Church laity is morally (say much less legally) bound to pay said taxes despite the fact that some part of those taxes, no matter how small, is used to fund these procedures, drugs and devices.

You, Mr. Sample, along with the rest of the Bishops emitting this speech and all the prelates who gave this sermon (or any derivative of it) are hypocrites. Forced cost-shifting of “procedures that violate conscience” was just fine so long as it could be foisted off on the congregation and in fact was fine so long as it was “hidden” among the weeds!

The Church has been paying its employment taxes without complaint just like everyone else, even though Medicaid provides for birth control pills and other related services including, in some cases, abortion!

There has been no organized objection, no refusal to pay those taxes and no call for the laity to refuse to pay those taxes.

Now, Catholic Bishops and prelates, you see the price of your own hypocritical behavior and “forced charity.” Rather than stand on liberty, personal choice and conscience you have deigned to seize only on this specific instance in Obamacare while leaving the provision of Medicaid, which everyone has to pay for that has earned income or pays employees, including the Church, alone!

Where were you in the 1980s? In the 1990s? In the 2000s? When Obamacare was being debated — and Catholic Charities supported it? Oh, it was all ok then, because you felt Catholics had an obligation to cede our particular moral values for the “poor” and “less advantaged” irrespective of how that need for care happened and irrespective of personal liberty, freedom and morality.

Unfortunately, while most people are idiots, even non-idiots are completely incapable of drawing logical conclusions concerning the probable consequences of current trends. I remember how my father’s political activism was regarded with amused indulgence by a friend of his, who believed that his concerns about the creeping expansion of government were completely overblown. It didn’t matter how many new laws and bureaucratic outrages were cited by my father, they were always waved off as trivial and irrelevant. However, once the State of Minnesota announced its plans for revising health insurance, which had a direct and negative effect on this friend’s income, he suddenly became tremendously concerned about the terrible dangers of government involvement in the economy.

It was, of course, much too late by that time. And since he had never had any concerns about the effects of government expansion on others, he had neither right nor reason to expect anyone else would give a damn about their effects on him. Thus the State conquers, slowly, inexorably, laying one small brick at a time.

I think it is great that the Roman Catholic Church is finally being leashed and brought to heel. Perhaps now it will finally understand that a government that possesses the power to dictate to others in accordance with your wishes is a government with the power to dictate to you in accordance with the wishes of others. The Church has always been at its best when it is standing in opposition to the governments of the world, and at its worst when it is working in collaboration with them.

Romney = President Goldman Sachs 2.0

The usual suspects have their sticky little fingers all over the supposed alternative to Obama too:

When Bain Capital sought to raise money in 1989 for a fast-growing office-supply company named Staples, Mitt Romney, Bain’s founder, called upon a trusted business partner: Goldman Sachs, whose bankers led the company’s initial public offering. When Mr. Romney became governor of Massachusetts, his blind trust gave Goldman much of his wealth to manage, a fortune now estimated to be as much as $250 million.

And as Mr. Romney mounts his second bid for the presidency, Goldman is coming through again: Its employees have contributed at least $367,000 to his campaign, making the firm Mr. Romney’s largest single source of campaign money through the end of September. No other company is so closely intertwined with Mr. Romney’s public and private lives except Bain itself.

I know I am shocked, SHOCKED, to learn that there is gambling taking place in the Washington establishment. It will be interesting to hear how all of the Romney Republicans who rightly deride Barack Obama as President Goldman Sachs will respond to the news that their favored candidate is owned by precisely the same corporation.

And it’s not as if Newt Gingrich is any better, being a Freddie Mac tool. You can complain about Ron Paul’s shortcomings, real and perceived, all you like. But the fact of the matter is that if you don’t support him, you are supporting more of the exactly the same thing that Obama is presently providing.

One could, of course, argue with the numbering system. There is a reasonable case to be made that George W. Bush was actually President Goldman Sachs 1.0, courtesy of his Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson.