Quote of the Day

John Podhoretz, on Joe Klein on Charles Krauthammer:

He won’t like me saying it, but Charles Krauthammer, who is more than a friendly acquaintance, is far from a tragic figure. He is a miraculous figure. He has, through a combination of raw will and a sagacious mind and a rigorous temperament that, were it possible, he should leave to science so that it can be studied and bottled and sold, lived a life both triumphantly important and triumphantly ordinary. (Although his wife, Robbie, is far from ordinary. For one thing, she is from Tasmania. For another, she is an artist of great skill. For a third, she has the dirtiest and liveliest mouth in either her forsaken hemisphere or her present one.) If you are his friend, in a fashion that I can’t quite explain, you come to have no sense whatever that he is in that chair. He may be right about what he argues (obviously, I think so, most of the time). He may be wrong. But whatever he is or is not, to argue that Charles’s views are restricted by the restrictions on his physical form is do violence to the most basic notions of civil discussion.

I'd read the Politico article earlier, but skimmed past Klein's dissing of Krauthammer [w/t link added]. I was too nonplussed at Politico's implication that Krauthammer was some kind of conservative Pied Piper, apparently based on NRO's regular posting of his transcripts. Those transcripts take up no more of NRO's Corner bandwidth than any of the hundred or so other conservative pundits with Corner posting privileges.

In fact, not realizing that Krauthammer has physical challenges, I always wondered why they posted the stuff for him. But I appreciate the fact that they do so, since he's generally on target and I don't catch him on the tube.

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No, Rick.

Rick Moran, writing at The Next Right:

I will say frankly that this is the nuttiest part of Limbaugh's speech. There is probably no one answer to what ails conservatism but there is widespread agreement among profressionals (sic) that people like Rush, who wish to repeal not only the Great Society but also the New Deal, are anachronisms. It is not going to happen - ever. The question then becomes do conservatives chase a will o' the wisp goal that guarantees them permanent minority status or do they apply conservative principles to government as it is and not as we would wish it to be?

We stand on principle, Rick. The government is doing things it should not be doing. The fact that it has been doing these things since before we were born does not make them right. The fact that the majority currently supports them does not make them right.

You go ahead and stand for the status quo. I will stand for liberty.

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E Pluribus Unum

From many, one. From many of us in flyover country to whomever inside the beltway would continue to disparage the Voice Crying In The Wilderness:

Rush Limbaugh is a formidable force. Do you know why? Because he says what conservatives believe, and he is extraordinarily articulate, witty, insightful, and yes, courageous. There is a very large portion of Americans that still strongly believe what the Founding Fathers believed, and don’t care much for what Alinsky and Marx believed. You might think Rush (and his 20 million listeners) gauche, obtuse, obvious, unsophisticated, and ignorant. That’s OK, because we think you are self-important gas-bag idiots without a lick of common sense, with DC-centric tunnel vision and no idea what real America and real Americans are. When pressed, we can do disdain better than you can too.

Read the whole thing, and understand that it's not about Rush Limbaugh: it's about us.

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The Trouble with the Base

Reading this Corner piece from the great Ramesh Ponnuru, two things struck me.

First, I noticed a trend: people are picking apart the Republican party and the conservative movement into constituent groups -- Married Anglo-Saxon Protestants, conservative Catholics, et al. Seeing a lack of physical diversity, they then prescribe as remedy the abandonment of foundational ideology.

The troubles with that line of thinking are legion, but the main thing about it is the continual confusion of the Republican Party with the conservative movement.

The Republican Party is a liberal organization. It was founded in the liberal furnace of Abolition, tempered by war with the truly conservative forces of Southern aristocracy, and had its new car smell become malodorous with the stench of Reconstruction. It was the party of the intellectual, of noblesse oblige, and of the black voters they freed from bondage.

Nowadays, the Republican Party exists as a vehicle to win elections, based primarily around the popularity of laissez faire economics. That social conservatives largely identify with it is because A) social conservatives are largely free-market types, as well, and B) they have nowhere else to go.

Modern Conservatism, forged by Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan, is an alloy of the conservative notion of not fixing what is not broken with the ideas of Enlightenment and classical liberalism. It attempts to keep America fixed in its foundational form. It's a bit of a coincidence that conservative in America means classical liberal.

This unification of the Republican Party and conservatism is a holdover from Ronald Reagan, so forged by the power of his ideas and his steadfast support of them. People are naturally wont to label themselves, and to adopt the ideas of those peers and leaders with whom they largely agree. This, too, welds the Republican Party and conservatism.

But even with the difference between the Republican Party and the conservative movement, it must be recognized that the people who make up these groups are motivated by a set of beliefs. Almost all Republicans have as a core belief that people are better off when they can fend for themselves economically. Government, in this mindset, exists to defend us from each other and from outsiders. As Reagan said, government is not the solution, but the problem.

Another core Republican belief is that all men are created equal. We do not want discrimination, even if it is intended to remedy earlier discrimination in some other direction.

And it is these ideas which fundamentally bind us together, and these ideas we seek to further.

We cannot therefore reach out to other "groups" without recoiling in horror at the thought of dividing mankind up into groups. It stinks of the corpse of that war we fought in our youth, and it is not our way.

We believe our ideas are of universal appeal, and do not need to be packaged to pander to people based on their personal place in the nation's demography.

The second thing that struck me is that Ramesh Ponnuru is for some reason still reading Kathleen Parker.

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Proposed Constitutional Amendments

• For each new law enacted by Congress, a law must be repealed.
  
  
• For each new item of spending or increase to an existing item, an identical amount must be cut elsewhere in the budget.
  
  
• The Cabinet must contain at least one but at most ten members.
  
  
• All government documents, except Treaties and Agreements with foreign powers, must be printed only in English.
  
  
• Congress shall make no law to favor one business over another, nor to acquire any ownership in a business.
  
  
• In questions arising over the classification of people, Congress shall make no law to applying to one group but not others, except to distinguish citizens from non-citizens.
  
  
• In this Constitution, the terms "ex post facto" and "Bill of Attainder" apply to laws that either favor or punish.
  
  
• "Interstate commerce" shall mean an exchange of value between separate Persons in two or more States.
  
  
• Senators and Congressmen shall serve no more than two consecutive terms.

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Congressman: Bailout Dwarfs Income Tax

From Beyond Bailouts:

...Over the Thanksgiving break, [Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-TX)] noted Congress had given the Treasury Secretary the authority to spend $1.7 trillion of your tax dollars (although the bailout has cost far more than that). That number is greater than the $1.21 trillion the federal government will receive in income tax this year. So what's Gohmert's plan? He wants to revoke the Treasury Secretary's authority to buy assets and instead suspend the income tax for a year.

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The Tyranny of Small, Featureless Men.

I'm not ready to annoint Michael Steele as head of the RNC, any more than I am ready to endorse Sarah Palin for President in 2012.

This, however, is a portrait of the Republican Party, and to say that it falls short of greatness is something of an understatement:

As to the new chair, don’t pay any attention to people who aren’t on the RNC,” he told me. “This is not a good thing, but the current RNC believes only one of their own should be chair. Maybe a dozen have a clue politically — and that’s being very kind. None (as chairman) could be an ideas leader or command the substantive respect of Republican senators or representatives.”

If Michael Steele isn't a member of the RNC by Tuesday, you're all a bunch of idiots.

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Coming Out of Short-Lived Depression

Me, that is, not the economy.

I still feel a twinge of denial that the elections really went as badly for the cause of freedom as they did, and that the Nanny State did so well. But there it is, and I must recognize it.

I take comfort only in the suspicions that my countrymen were deceived by a charlatan and a willing media, caught up in the symbolism of it all.

And now there is a great work ahead of me, ahead of us. There are many huge battles to fight.

We must convince the American public that the ideals of liberty, national sovereignty, and freedom of thought are worth more than life itself.

We must convince the American public that it's as wrong to vote oneself money from the Treasury as it is to steal from a neighbor.

We must convince the public that prosperity comes from capitalism, not from the Nanny.

We must convince the American public that we must be one people, with one language and primary loyalty only to each other, not to foreign lands.

We must dismantle the government-run education system. It is far too dangerous to liberty to have the government tempted to indoctrinate, which we have seen it do with increasing abandon.

All of these are hard, because of our own self-doubt and the easy smear to which each one of those points subjects us.

Is not life paramount, and isn't it convenient to risk the life of another?

Have you never accepted money from the Government -- even a tax credit? Don't you care about the poor children?

Do we really expect immigrants to know our language, when that has never been our way? In the past, immigrants abandoned their old land. Now they are a short journey away. It makes things difficult.

And the entrenchment of the public education system is so thorough, its stamp placed so firmly on the fabric of American society, that I don't hold much hope for its dissolution.

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Someone Please Tell David Brooks He Is An Idiot

Writing to accelerate his newspaper's fall into negative net worth, David Brooks says:

The other camp, the Reformers, argue that the old G.O.P. priorities were fine for the 1970s but need to be modernized for new conditions. The reformers tend to believe that American voters will not support a party whose main idea is slashing government. The Reformers propose new policies to address inequality and middle-class economic anxiety. They tend to take global warming seriously. They tend to be intrigued by the way David Cameron has modernized the British Conservative Party.

I don't care if the majority will not support shrinking government. It's the right thing to do.

I don't take Global Warming seriously. I don't believe:

• It is happening
• It is Man's fault

If it were happening, I would not believe:

• It would be bad
• There would be any way to fix it

Addressing inequality? That's not the purpose or function of government. Punish people who hurt others, but don't try to make sure they're all equally successful.

Middle-class income anxiety? Call out demagogues like Obama for their class-envy tripe. There, anxiety fixed.

w/t FrankJ

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What's In It For ME?

I'm scared.

For a long time we've known that when the people learned they could vote themselves money from the Treasury, the end was nigh.

They have learned it.

Whether it's Barack Obama's "tax cuts for 95%", jobs Americans won't do, corporate bailouts, or the third rail of Social Security, the appeal is always to the personal interest of the voter.

Joe the Plumber was attacked on the basis that he'd be better off under Obama's tax plan -- and unsubtly, that Joe must be stupid not to know that or dishonest in failing to admit it.

Illegal immigration is pushed on us with the offer of inexpensive farm produce. The principle of knowing that our neighbors and townsfolk have the same loyalty to America that we have is never mentioned.

The financial market bailout, or at least the direct mortgage buyout part, was sold to us on the basis that even if we did everything right, our neighbor in foreclosure would harm our home values.

And Social Security, of course, is renowned for destroying the careers of those who try to do anything but increase the benefits of those receiving it.

The list goes on. We have become a nation of beggars, lazy bums who are happy to see any expansion of government, endure any loss of liberty, as long as it benefits us personally.

There's nothing in that for me.

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Swoosh

Writing at PJM, John Avalon misses the reasons for John McCain's loss so thoroughly and well that were it not for his obvious sincerity one would suspect his failure to be intentional. It is clear that Mr. Avalon starts with a "centrist" position which he tries desperately to justify.

In order to truly revive itself, the GOP should be more like the real John McCain in the future, and less like the conservative cast of the past decade: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Tom Delay. And it certainly should not look to the likes of Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin to lead a restoration.

You do the math: America has a moderate majority — 50% of Americans are centrists, compared to 20% who are liberal and 30% who call themselves conservative. Independents are the largest and fastest growing segment of the electorate. Republicans need to appeal to the center and find common cause with independents in order to win. And that’s something they have increasingly failed to do over the past decade.

The unspoken premise here is that the Party should attempt to mold itself to the electorate, rather than standing for principles -- both in campaign and in office. Republicans lost the moderates because they only mouthed conservativism, and didn't act on it.

There is another option to giving up: teaching. McCain lost because an uninformed electorate judges the President specifically and the party they perceive to be in power generally on the basis of the economy. When McCain A) suspended his campaign to B) back the bailout bill and C) failed to deliver on even that, his fate was sealed.

But ironically due to that loathsome bailout, there is going to be an insidious increase in the level of government intervention in the economy, so that the President will begin to have an actual part to play in it. This is legion of disasters waiting to happen.

But back to the issue at hand. Avalon lists many reasons for McCain's loss, ignoring the elephant in the room: Barack Obama's "historic" campaign. There, how's that for a code word.

McCain’s come-from-behind win in the primaries was not only proof of the strength of the center but a repudiation of Karl Rove’s play-to-the-base approach because he won the Republican nomination without the support of right-wing talk radio and evangelicals.

The base was split between Huckabee, Romney, and a ghost: they were waiting for a conservative. With either Huckabee or Romney out of the race, the remaining conservative would have trounced McCain.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama appealed explicitly to centrists and independents early on in this campaign. They ran against the polarizing establishment of their respective parties. Their differences on this ground can be fairly characterized as substance versus style, rhetoric versus record. But Obama’s appeals to the center were relentless, beginning with his introduction to the American people at the Democratic convention in 2004, which expressed the underlying insight, “There are no red states. There are no blue states. There are the United States of America.”

John McCain lost in the general election because, the method of doing so aside, Barack Obama had his base locked up, and could afford to play to the center. McCain did not have his base locked up, and was forced to swerve this way and that.

The Republican Party is at a crossroads. Should it abandon its modern history as the home of conservatism, both social and fiscal? Should it return to its roots in classical liberalism? Or should it renounce the excesses of its recent past and become the home of Reaganism again?

I just hope it becomes something, and not the nothing that John Avalon desires for it.

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No more bailouts.

Writing at Redstate, Francis Cianfrocca analyzes the proposed (or wheedled) bailout of GM, saying a bunch of smart things, including this:

If I were handling this for the US Treasury, I’d insist on a total wipeout of GM’s shareholders and management, force them to liquidate assets over perhaps a two-year period, and take a slug of preferred stock with a very large annual interest rate. Because you know there will be no possibility of making money on this bailout. The auto industry has too much of the wrong kind of production capacity, and it needs to disappear.

If I were in charge of handling this for the Treasury, I'd either say "We don't do this, or I walk."

The government has to stop meddling in the economy. People argue that something must be done to keep the economy moving, and I say: No! We've been spoiled by 20 years of good economies, except for hiccups, to the point where we think we've figured it out.

We can't outlaw pain. Attempts to try are leading us to a situation in which the government, soon to be led by a Marxist, controls the strategic direction of our biggest industries.

I have no doubt that GM failing would have a ripple effect on the rest of the economy. I also have no doubt that some of that effect would be seen as positive, especially by those at Ford and Chrysler.

Something has to be done all right. Something needs to be done to turn around this notion that our elections are about the economy. Something needs to be done to separate government and business. Something needs to be done to return us to the understanding of success as the result of repeated failure, that learning from mistakes doesn't happen unless we are forced to deal with the consequences of those mistakes.

GM has become too big to move quickly in response to changing market conditions. Their union membership, including retirees, is so large as to be its own voting bloc, exercising inertia of its own. Some say they have become too big to fail; I say they have become too big to succeed.

Pluck the cancer? That's the wrong metaphor. The proper one is to let the students succeed or fail based on their abilities, not slip them answers to the test so they don't fail.

Because in the end, none will study as hard or pay attention at lecture if they know that the teacher will bail them out in the end.

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Lepers

No one in the McCain campaign who does not publicly denounce each and every vile charge against Sarah Palin should ever work for a Republican again. See the thread at Redstate, and the petition:

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Sarah Palin Litmus Test

Support her, or you are going down.

That includes you, John McCain.

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Vita Blight, Speed bumps, and a Metaphor Stew.

There are some losers in the former McCain campaign who are seeking, by sniping through a willing media at Sarah Palin, to spin the 2008 McCain loss as due to her presence on the ticket.

If the goal of the McCain campaign was to win independent voters, then the selection of Sarah Palin ran counter to that. Talking to independent voters, it's clear that for most of them it wasn't Sarah Palin herself that turned them off to her. She is an attractive politician with a compelling story. It was cynicism over the choice of her by McCain, the identity politics of it all. They thought she was picked off the vine before ripe to have some nice fruit on the table, when the guests were hungry for real food.

I disagree with that view of Palin. I thought she was ready to be Vice President. In fact, I would rather have had her on the top of the ticket, and judging from the crowds at her events, there was a lot of enthusiasm for her among the Republican base. In August, the McCain campaign was struggling. Her selection caused intense interest in the Republican convention, and her performance there gave McCain a huge post-convention bump. She continued to draw huge crowds all during September and October. Far from being a "drag on the ticket", she is the reason there was even a contest.

But now the McCain staffers are leaking complaints about her wardrobe, need for coaching, and other similar issues that reveal their own lack of professional prudence and ethics. Every politician needs dressing up, and there are too many details for anyone in a national campaign not to have people turning research into talking points and turning talking points into polished answers. Like hiding the inner workings of a restaurant from the happy customers, these are matters that a professional political hack knows to keep private.

Being part of a high-profile losing campaign can be a bit of a career road bump. Them high road provides an easy detour around that bump this year, and that is to say to future employers that you were a loyal Party man or woman, and the campaign was simply beaten by the Obama phenomenon. There is no shame in that.

But by sniping from the gutter, the McCain staffers have turned a smudge into a blight, a warning bell into a blaring klaxon signaling the presence of toxic waste. It would not be so bad if it only affected the snivelers, but until all the petty little weasels are uncovered and made into infamous roadkill, anyone on the former McCain campaign will have to explain themselves -- and voice support for Sarah Palin.

I support Sarah Palin, and look forward to seeing her on the national stage for years to come.

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Shrug.

Commenter DelD at AoSHQ does a splendid job of capturing my attitude, minus the moving-to-Alaska fantasies. Quoted without permission:

So Obama won. It's not the end of the world. Everybody chill out.

1) It's hardly a popular vote blowout. McCain kept it close in a tough anti-republican climate, and there's a still a significant proportion of the population that's with us, nearly 50%, in fact.

2) If Barack does win, he do so only by pretending to be a centrist and a tax-cutter. And that lie is going to be exposed riki-tik. By 2010, the entire country will know just how liberal Obama is, and the pendulum will swing. It'll be up to us to see that it swings far enough.

3) It's important to remember that we're conservatives, not liberals, or "progressives" or whatever they're calling themselves this week.

Politics isn't our life, and if we lose an election cycle, we're still going to be happier as a group then they will ever be, even after they've won this one.

Like they always do, hardcore liberal voters have placed all their hopes and dreams into one, terribly flawed, terribly human basket. And without doubt they will be terribly disappointed, especially when they learn they've still got to pay their own mortgage and buy their own gas.

Their Messiah, ain't one, which will become painfully apparent to them soon enough.

Meanwhile, here on the right, we have low expectations of human nature and even lower expectations of government. It's hard to disappoint us.

And unlike the liberals, all of our hopes and dreams are in exactly the same place they were yesterday, in our family, our friends, our local community, in our work, in our religious faith, and in our country. Those are the great constants, always there for us even when we suffer the greatest of setbacks.

Yep, tough times are ahead, and we're going to have to fight like somsabitches to keep Obama and the Congress from screwing things up too much in the next two years. But, we've been there before, and we've prevailed before.


4) Don't give the f*tards on the left the satisfaction of seeing you all act like a bunch of hysterical schoolgirls. They're the ones who can't take defeat. We can take our lumps, get up, and keep fighting. We should be Happy Warriors. whose proper response to this is mockery, good humor, and hard work. We lost and elction, but we're still right, and they're still wrong.

Anyway, it's time to cowboy up, and get ready for the next go round.

The only thing I would add to that is that this election doesn't hurt. John McCain was a centrist, and was only our guy because he chose Sarah Palin for VP. This election isn't a repudiation of us or her, but of him.

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Assimilist

Michelle Malkin reports receiving the following email from an Obamunist:

My sympathies. I did some research, and you are exactly what I thought - an assimilist with no knowledge of themselves. What a hater! You attract minions of jealous non-thinkers. Thank you for making me proud to have voted for Obama.

A person's ancestry matters only to geneologists and racists, though I don't mean to tar one with the brush of the other. The idea that a person must cling to the culture of her parents is so illiberal as to be its antithesis.

By the way, Michelle, I think assimilist is code for 'Uncle Tom'.

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Voting for Dollars

Barack Obama and John McCain are arguing over which tax plan would benefit this or that group of taxpayers the most.

That misses the point completely. The question is which plan is best for the country, not which is best for a particular individual.

And we don't know which plan would be best, because neither plan will be implemented. Either plan would be worked over by Congress. In Barack Obama's case, the Democrats would throw in all kinds of special interest goodies. In John McCain's case, he'd have to accept changes to get it through what is likely to remain a Democrat-controlled Congress.

What we have to look at is the basic philosophy behind each plan.

Barack Obama says he wants to soak the rich, while John McCain says he wants to cut spending.

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I Crave the Words of Josh Treviño

I sometimes get a little thrill up my leg, even, as he breaks down some issue with his preternatural insight. And yet, when he writes this:

Rest assured that were I not in California, where the Republican ticket will struggle to break 40%, I would not be casting a protest vote of any sort. My vote for Bobby Jindal for President is intended as a protest to two entities: the McCain campaign, which has done a terrible job, and the national Republican party, which has done a terrible job of its own unrelated to the McCain campaign. That said, I don’t value my protest so much that I would knowingly contribute to Barack Obama’s margin of victory — so, make no mistake, were I in Nevada, Virginia, Indiana, or any other contested state, I would vote for the McCain-Palin ticket.

I wish he would read this:

When my girlfriend shows up for a date dressed in a particularly awful outfit, I don't say anything. I just hope for the best. At that point in the evening, I don't see any other viable options.

Or perhaps, if I could summon the temerity, this:

The election process is about more than just who wins. Sure, the winner is important, but there are other factors that have an impact on the behavior of government. For the sake of discussion, let's assume that one of the two major parties, or one of the two main contenders in a primary, will win the election. Why vote for someone else?

That piece was written in the context of third party candidates, but the logic applies here to urge the very course of action Josh has taken. Bobby Jindal, or some other True Conservative, fulfills the role of the third party for Treviño in this election. Apparently he finds persuasive the same reasoning needed to tilt against the two-party windmill.

I can understand it, on an intellectual level, but I suppose I'd have to live in California to really get it.

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Shorter Hitchens

Vote Obama - he's not as much of a Christian as Sarah Palin.
(w/t: Mark Levin)

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