Unlike many right-wing commentators, I did not endorse the tea-party movement when it erupted. Nor, like a few unusually shameless media whores, did I rush to leap in front of the parade and claim that I was leading it. I did not even think of doing either because I concluded from the start that the tea party is a useless and incoherent political mirage that is unlikely to accomplish anything of substance. It is not elections but the subsequent actions of the officials elected that matter.
Tag: politics
Unelectable!
Ron Paul beats the smack out of the RINOs at CPAC:
Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas) won the annual straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, an early, though unscientific, indicator of conservative favor as the 2012 presidential campaign cycle kicks into gear. Paul, with a 30 percent plurality, topped numerous high-profile White House contenders. He finished seven points ahead of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who placed second. All other candidates finished with less than ten percent of the vote: former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson snagged six percent, as did Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich won five percent.
Needless to say, if Mitt “Obamacare” Romney had beaten every other potential Republican candidate this easily, all we would be hearing about was the inevitability of Captain Underoos’s nomination.
Ideological plague
This comment from an Althouse reader illustrates the problem of voter mobility:
My sister and brother-in-law — a couple of liberal Obama-votin’ Democrats — are currently trying to get out of Illinois as fast as they can. They literally cannot afford to live in Illinois anymore — they were having trouble making ends meet *before* the gargantuan tax hike.
Needless to say, no matter where they go, this couple will cling to their liberal Obama-voting ideology and continue to demand the very big government that they fled in Illinois. They are ideological disease carriers. The only viable solution I can imagine is permitting such refugees to move into a limited government state if they are willing to sign a consent form giving up their right to vote for as long as they were resident in their former state. Although perhaps even that is taking too big a risk since they’ll probably settle in an enclave of like-minded carriers. This should be a legally defensible approach since if one doesn’t wish to give up one’s right to vote, one doesn’t have to reside there.
The useless Tea Party
Most of you will recall that unlike those bloggers that leaped on the bandwagon with alacrity, I have been extremely skeptical of the Tea Party from the very beginning. And, as Karl Denninger points out, the skeptics were correct:
That’s thirty-one out of forty voting for the bill (77.5%), eight voting against, and one no-vote. Despite the eight nay votes, Tea Party-backed candidates overwhelmingly supported an extension of the PATRIOT Act.
As I expected, the Tea Party is an ineffectual and ideologically incoherent joke. They don’t see the intrinsic dichotomy of claiming to support small government while simultaneously playing totalitarian world police. Yes, the movement managed to get a few people elected to office, but that’s totally irrelevant because, as we have seen every time that Republicans get elected to office, they support extending and expanding central government power. This behavior is as predictable as the phases of the Moon; it is the nature of the sort of beast who runs for office.
And despite the brave “well, we’ll just throw them out again” rhetoric that we’ll likely hear from the more principled Tea Partiers, I am confident that most of the 31 Tea Party-backed sellouts will easily win re-election with the enthusiastic support of the very people they betrayed. Notice, by the way, that it is Republicans who are pushing the Patriot Act extensions.
“Republican leaders will bring the bill back to the floor under a rule, where it will almost certainly secure the 218-vote threshold.”
As for Michelle Bachmann, I was unsurprised to see that she was one of the frauds. I remember when she was first getting started in Minnesota politics. If I recall correctly, my father was one of her contributors, but I didn’t think much of her at the time and I have seen no reason to revise my opinion since.
Be careful what you wish for
You just might get it:
Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak is to step down Thursday night, two sources told NBC News, as widespread protests against his 30-year rule continue to grip the country. Following an all-day meeting of the country’s supreme military council, the army said all of the protesters’ demands would be met and that a further statement was due to be made later Thursday that would clarify the situation.
NBC News reported that a high-ranking source inside the president’s office said Mubarak would step down and the newly appointed vice president, Omar Suleiman, would take over. This was then confirmed by a second source. The news came following repeated warnings by members of the regime of a military crackdown or coup.
I’m a little surprised by these reports, as it was my impression that things were dying down and Mubarak had weathered the storm. But then, he’s old, and no doubt the army realized that they were going to have to deal with the succession sooner or later. They might as well face the issue now while they can get some credit with the populace for it. It will be interesting to see if the democracy fetishists are consistent in their demands for Egyptian democracy of the sort that is denied to Americans and Europeans or if their fear of an aggressive new Islamic democracy wins out.
116 may be too generous
From Obama’s recent speech to the Chamber of Commerce:
“Auto executives predicted that having to install seatbelts would bring the downfall of their industry. It didn’t happen. The President of the American Bar Association denounced child labor laws as “a communistic effort to nationalize children.” That’s a quote. None of these things came to pass.”
Apparently the moron failed to recall that General Motors filed for bankruptcy on June 1, 2009. Chrysler filed for bankruptcy on April 30, 2009. American birth rates are well below replacement rates when immigrant births aren’t counted, and the federal government explicitly claims a right to children that supercedes the parental claim in many areas, including health and education. One can reasonably argue about whether or not these events can truly be said to have been caused by the specific government policy, but to base an argument on the events not having happened takes a special combination of ignorance and unfounded arrogance.
UPDATE – It takes a real rocket scientist to attempt lying about something one did in public more than 24 times in the last two years.
“President Obama’s assertion on Sunday that he “didn’t raise taxes once” is “blatantly false,” a taxpayer watchdog group says. Obama made the claim in his pre-Super Bowl interview with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. According to Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), President Obama has signed into law at least two dozen tax increases.”
Neocons aren’t conservatives
Glenn Beck belatedly notices:
Fox News’s Glenn Beck lashed out at Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol on his radio show this morning, accusing Kristol of betraying conservatism and missing the significance of what Beck sees as an alliance between Islamism and socialism.
“I don’t even know if you understand what conservatives are anymore, Billy,” Beck said in his extended, sarcastic attack on Kristol. “People like Bill Kristol, I don’t think they stand for anything any more. All they stand for is power. They’ll do anything to keep their little fiefdom together, and they’ll do anything to keep the Republican power entrenched.”
The pragmatic set will always sell out their professed principles. This should never come as a surprise, after all, their lack of attachment to principle is precisely why they describe themselves as pragmatists in the first place. It’s not as if Bill Kristol has changed because people like him never stand for anything but power. And they’ll be screeching like banshees about the need for American military intervention once the Caliphate that they claim doesn’t exist begins to turn its attention towards Jerusalem again.
Where Beck is wrong is to think that beginning by confronting the ur-caliphate in the Middle East is the right strategy. The strategically correct place to begin is removing its footholds in the West.
A challenge to the separation of powers?
Karl Denninger suspects the Obama administration is on the verge of committing sedition:
The White House officials said that the ruling would not have an impact on implementation of the law, which is being phased in gradually. (The individual mandate, for example, does not begin until 2014.) They said that states cannot use the ruling as a basis to delay implementation in part because the ruling does not rest on “anything like a conventional Constitutional analysis.” Twenty-six states were involved in the lawsuit.
So now we have a White House that has declared its intent to ignore a declaratory judgment. The Administration has no right to do this. Obama’s White House has exactly two options:
Comply with the ruling. This means that any and all activity authorized or mandated by the Statute cease now.
File an appeal and ask for a stay pending its hearing. If said stay is granted, then the ruling is held pending consideration.
That’s it…. This is now a full-blown Constitutional Crisis. The Executive’s willful, intentional and publicly-stated refusal to honor a declaratory judgment is an open act of willful and intentional violation of The Separation of Powers in The Constitution and, if combined with the use of or threat of use of force as is always present when government coercion is employed, treads awfully close to the line, and may cross it, of 18 USC Ch 115 Sec 238.
I tend to doubt that Obama and his crew are actually intending to challenge the separation of powers over health care reform. I suspect they are so accustomed to being able to impose their version of reality on everyone else that it doesn’t occur to them that it’s not always possible; after all they succeeded in convincing most of the nation that Obama is a highly intelligent author instead of the teleprompt-reading dolt with a ghostwriter that he observably is. I also suspect they simply didn’t stop to think about what the consequences of declaring that the executive branch need not pay any attention to declaratory judgments by the courts might be.
You must admit that it would be a rather peculiar objective for which to openly attack the separation of powers doctrine. And, given what is happening in Egypt and Tunisia right now, unusual timing as well.
Consider the name
In which Israeli commentators appear to be genuinely surprised that a man named Hussein who attended madrassahs as a child might take a slightly different tack in the Middle East than his white Episcopalian predecessors:
If Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak is toppled, Israel will lose one of its very few friends in a hostile neighborhood and President Barack Obama will bear a large share of the blame, Israeli pundits said on Monday. Political commentators expressed shock at how the United States as well as its major European allies appeared to be ready to dump a staunch strategic ally of three decades, simply to conform to the current ideology of political correctness….
Who is advising them, he asked, “to fuel the mob raging in the streets of Egypt and to demand the head of the person who five minutes ago was the bold ally of the president … an almost lone voice of sanity in a Middle East?”
Regardless of whether Obama is a Muslim himself or not, he is obviously going to be sympathetic to the various causes of the non-European third worlders because he considers himself one of them. Look at how he behaves towards longtime European allies like the English versus his kowtowing before the Saudi king and the head of the Chinese regime. Obama’s degrees from Columbia and Harvard no more give him a normal American perspective than did the King of Jordan’s attendance at Deerfield Academy and Georgetown.
It’s rather like the Romans being surprised when they support a Teutonic general’s claim to the imperial throne and then see him taking sides in barbarian affairs. If against all expectations he somehow managed to survive and win a second term, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Obama start openly supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al-Ikhwān against Israel.
UPDATE: I wrote that before I read this article: The Obama administration said for the first time that it supports a role for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned Islamist organization, in a reformed Egyptian government. The organization must reject violence and recognize democratic goals if the U.S. is to be comfortable with it taking part in the government, the White House said.
It would be interesting to learn what “democratic goals” are supposed to be, especially in light of how the Muslim Brotherhood is a bigger fan of genuine democracy right now than the Obama administration is.
The political malleability of women
Marriage not infrequently causes even the most elite women to come to their political senses:
Only two years ago Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy had claimed that she was “instinctively left-wing” after at one stage supporting her husband’s Socialist rival in the 2007 presidential elections. She had also publicly opposed Mr Sarkozy’s plan to conduct DNA tests on immigrants…. But in Monday’s interview with Le Parisien newspaper, she said her previous political persuasion was only due to her belonging to a “community of artists.” “We were bobo (bourgeois bohemians), we were left-wing but at that time I voted in Italy (her native country).” I have never voted for the Left in France and I can tell you, I’m not about to start now. I don’t really feel left-wing anymore,” she said.
Not that I’m a fan of Sarkozy, of course, but he is certainly less objectionable than the French Socialists. But the observation points to an obvious problem in the West. As marriage rates continue to decline, we should expect to see women moving even further to the political Left. Since men are moving steadily to the right in the USA, this will likely create a situation where most women, blacks and immigrants are the core of the party opposed to the other one consisting of native men and the minority of women married to them. This is unlikely to make for a stable political system or a stable society.
Of course, the economic Fimbulwinter should render all of that irrelevant long before it becomes an actual problem.