Monday, December 31, 2012

The MEC's presser and what, hopefully, its impact on these ridiculous negotiations will be

Most important thing in this lengthy post at Hot Air, at least so far (it keeps getting updated): a Tweet from an insider who says "House leadership is livid at his speech and may blow the whole thing up."

The LITD position on this whole thing is the position Charles Krauthammer put forth at the beginning of December: Pubs need to walk away from the whole thing.  Grover Norquist also said as much: make sure their fingerprints aren't on whatever happens.

It may hurt McConnell's image, or Boehner's image or clout for a deal to fall through at this late hour, but any deal would gravely hurt the cause of freedom, and that is far more important.

If we're not the party of people getting to keep what is theirs, we have no raison d'ĂȘtre.

The MEC made it about as clear as he could that his overall objective is to break the Republican party's back.  His remarks that "Just two months ago they were adamant that no tax increases be part of any deal, and now..." and "If they think that further tax increases aren't going to continue to be part of our ongoing efforts to bring down the deficit . . ." damn well ought to be a deal-breaker.

It's going to be a long, grinding New Years Eve.

The latest evidence that the MEC holds the country he presides over in utter disdain

Have you heard about the State Department advisory group headed by former SecDef William Perry?  I hadn't either, but I'll pay more attention now.  It is recommending that the MEC regime and Russia work out a plan to reduce their respective nuclear arsenals without bothering to craft an actual treaty and present it to Congress for ratification.

I guess this kind of development is to be expected, given that we now live in a climate in which someone who has taught constitutional law at Georgetown for forty years can get New York Times op-ed space in which to say it's time to jettison that document, which, in his view, has outlived its usefulness and constrains us in an age of unforeseen complexity.

I don't continue to fight because I'm brimming with confidence about freedom's prospects.  I continue to fight because I couldn't live with myself if I didn't.

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Just some "sloppiness," doncha know

That's how the MEC characterizes the Sept. 11 debacle in Benghazi that left 4 Americans dead.

Why we call the MSM the propaganda arm of the Freedom-Hater regime

David Gregory - he of the 30-round-AR-15-magazine-used-as-a-prop recent fame - snags a Meet the Press interview with the Most Equal Comrade this morning and asks him - seriously - "Is this your Lincoln moment?"

I liked what a commenter at some site I was visiting a little while ago said:  "David, is this your Monica moment?"

Saturday, December 29, 2012

The limit to Mitch McConnell's ability to stand by his principles

Word has it that a critical mass of Senate Pubs are willing to cut a deal that agrees to a hiked tax rate for those with incomes over $500,000 and - you guessed it - has no spending cuts beyond the sequestration.
So it's the the old "Here are my testicles on a silver platter" point at which Washington Pubs inevitably find themselves when locked into one of these recurring taxing-and-spending crises with their FHer counterparts.

It is so very late in the day.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

The embodiment of the poison coarsing through Western civilization's veins

Wasn't sure I had anything to say about the controversy - make that controversies - Piers Morgan has been generating lately, but then I ran into Peter Wehner's piece on Morgan's interview with Rick Warren and this delightful video clip from his interview with the singularly magnificent Ted Nugent.

This guy makes Larry King look like he's in the same league with Edmund Burke.

Not even on the same planet

Just about any specific public-policy, cultural, or economic issue one discusses with a general array of one's acquaintances these days quickly turns into a microcosm of the general chasm between the two Americas that very tensely co-inhabit this physical continent.

Bookworm had this once again brought home to her in some Christmas-season conversations about gun policy.  She lives in Marin County, so most of those with whom she was conversing were FHers, and things quickly devolved into shouting matches.  Her post about it is lengthy, but most informative and enlightening.

One thing that makes the FHer takeover of America so chilling is that these people know in the cores of their beings that their worldview is built on intellectual and moral quicksand.  Their denial of that makes them all the more determined to extinguish any opposition to it.

Monday, December 24, 2012

A once-great civilization now untethered from reality

No one in the major capitals of the West - not Britain, not France, not Greece, not Italy, not the United States - is even trying to make the appearance of addressing the actual situation we each and all face.  Certainly, there's a lot of talk about taxes, spending, borrowing and such.  But we will not be returning to a path of advancement and growth and those stirring up the sound and fury signifying nothing know it.

Why the Pubs deserve the "stupid party" label

Making someone who, according to Tagg Romney "wanted to be president less than anyone I've ever met in my life," the presidential nominee in a year in which America's survival as the beacon of human freedom was at stake was not a real swift move.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

The Most Equal Comrade's arrogance knows no bounds

New information about the contempt with which he has treated Boehner all week.  Told him he'd offer nothing in exchange for Boehner's offer of $800 billion in new revenue.  "I get that for free."  Said if the cliff plunge becomes a reality, he'd use his inaugural and State-of-the-Union addresses to blame Pubs.

The SOB is as narcissistic as ever, too.

FHers can no longer blame the Pubs for the 2008 economic meltdown

A new study confirms that the Community Reinvestment Act caused the banking-industry crisis.

Friday, December 21, 2012

It comes to this

Robert Costa at NRO provides a visceral - indeed, cinematic - account of the post-vote scene in the House basement last night, where the Pub caucus gathered to hear Speaker Boehner's post-mortem.  The Speaker's short, sad, moment in front of the group.  Various members standing up to exhort or shame their fellows.  Small clusters within the caucus heading out for nearby watering holes to get a handle on what had just happened.

Is it a defeat for Republicans?  In a certain sense, yes - the sense that will be the main point of MSM coverage of it.  The Beltway and the MSM, you see, set great store by image.  The Pubs now look like they can't muster cohesion.

Me, I think it's great.  Flat-out fabulous.  You see, my interest is in principle, and principle won a great victory here.  No stinking deal that has been cobbled together in the last few weeks has a damn thing to do with the actual problem that brings us to this juncture in the first place, namely, a federal government so broke and in debt it endangers our national security and culture.

And Plan B was an abandonment of principle too far.  First, Boehner was willing to "close loopholes." Then it was putting off debt-ceiling discussions.  With this latest non-starter it was stepping into the realm of actual rate hikes.

I'm proud of those who resisted persuasion.  Let's get an entire Congress full of such types.

You never compromise with Democrats.  Certainly not where tax policy is concerned.

Never.

Did I say never?

And now that John Boehner has been shown to have squish where a solid core should be, perhaps we can realistically look forward to his being replaced.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Proceed with extreme caution; no coherence for the next 50 miles

Great Daniel Henninger column in the WSJ today on the theme of societal guard rails, and how we probably don't have them anymore.

In it, he excerpts his own column from nineteen years ago on the same subject.  In that piece, he had pinpointed August 1968 as a moment when the likelihood that guard rails would disappear made a quantum increase.  He was, of course, referring to the yippie riots in Chicago's Grant Park, outside the Democratic National Convention.

My own frame of reference can lend a constructive perspective to the significance of that historical moment.  I was thirteen years old at the time, the son of a small-manufacturing-business entrepreneur and a homemaker.  It was a middle-class household, with lifestyle parameters ranging from the Presbyterian Church to pre-dinner martinis, to expectations of Boy Scout membership to season tickets to the touring-Broadway-show series at the Indiana University auditorium.  And in the midst of this was this highly impressionable adolescent holed up in his bedroom with the most subversive rock and roll records of the day, who was getting a taste via his peers of radical literature and exotic social theory.

We're coming up on Christmas, and it has me recalling the presents under the trees of the late 1960s and early 70s, LPs by figures whose entire orientation was, to use a 21st-century phrase, the fundamental transformation of America.  And that was the musical foundation I brought with me as I learned to play guitar,  joined musical ensembles, and got a taste of professional musical activity.

A long-playing vinyl phonograph record, for any readers who may not be old enough to be familiar with that delivery system, came shrink-wrapped, and, in the upper left-hand corner of the 12"x12" carboard cover, the logo of the corporation that had signed the artist in question to a contract and had manufactured and distributed the product in the consumer's hands.

These corporations, at this point, generally still had pre-countercultural-revolution-type American capitalists as CEOs, board members, and upper-management personnel.  Their marketing departments, though, were wising up to the shifting cultural winds and hiring hipsters to craft their appeal to the demographic that was clearly buying most of the nation's records.   The 1968 advertising slogan for the Columbia label, for instance, was "The man can't bust our music."

So there were adolescent consumers like me, as well as somewhat (but not all that much) older employees of these record companies, who could use the infrastructure of the recording industry to subvert the very culture that had spawned it.  We could do so because there was an even more solid and pervasive infrastructure behind it, namely, the whole edifice of what was at that time "normal" American life: clear gender roles, church attendance, dress codes in schools, television variety shows, acceptance of the fact that US foreign policy necessitated a projection of power, family vacations, robust civic organizations, settled neighborhoods.  That whole web of factors made for an America so great and prosperous that it could absorb the jabs of a counterculture that still depended for its viability on "establishment" institutions.

Up to a point.  As we boomers grew older ("matured," perhaps, or perhaps not) and moved into such realms as law, journalism, education, and, more to the immediate point, the recording industry and the arts and entertainment generally, we cut the bonds which had tethered all that to that "establishment" foundation.

Which gets us back to Mr. Henninger's guard rails.  I recall a point Diana West makes in her indispensible 2007 book The Death of the Grown-Up about U2 lead singer Bono accepting a Grammy at some point in the 1990s and telling the audience to "keep f---ing up the system," and how both he and his fans missed the irony that they were now the system.

There truly are no guard rails now - no behavioral guard rails that would have stigmatized a clearly troubled Connecticut boy sufficiently to prevent his playing violent video games and spewing rhetoric about being the devil on social media, and no fiscal-sense guard rails that would have the current debate  in Washington be about the actual problem facing the country instead of anything having to with increasing taxes.

You don't have to even attempt to make sense in post-America.  You can spout utter babble about your sexual identity, about personal or governmental solvency, about "inclusion" for jihadists, about windmill farms versus oil drilling, and, if you do it to a sufficiently rocking beat, you can become a celebrity, perhaps even a dictator.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

The official gummint take on Benghazi: It just kind of happened

The report of the Accountability Review Board finds that the lead-up to the Sept 11 attack and the attack itself were a major cluster-you-know-what.  But it concludes that nobody's accountable.

Nothing to see here.  Move on.

Robert Bork, RIP

A great jurist and the kind of mind that is an American treasure, that sees the nexus of legal theory, culture and the national soul.

The fact that he never served on the Supreme Court is one of the burdens Ted Kennedy is bearing wherever he is spending eternity.

Monday, December 17, 2012

The Speaker's cave of the day

Now it's the damn debt ceiling.

And, again, the MEC gave it a big thumbs down because it still mentions entitlement reform.

I know I've been posting a lot about this, the most tedious of our current front-burner issues in America, but it has the widest set of implications of any of them.  One can't help but parse Boehner's possible motives for this destructive course of action.  Is it more desperation, or more cluelessness?

Then there's the frustration we who love freedom and American greatness feel.  Our hands are tied.  He may or may not keep his Speakership, but that's a ways down the road.  Right now, there's no stopping him if he chooses to continue to be complicit in the obliteration of the Republican party.

What would be required for him to do what is right?


Sunday, December 16, 2012

Just how late in the day is it? Well, we've lost the will to recognize enemies

New training manual for US troops headed to Afghanistan says to refrain from criticizing the Taliban, criticizing pedophilia or mentioning "anything about Islam."

"Speakership in jeopardy": let's hope so

I've really tried to see the point of pundits who assure us that Boehner is one of the good gys who is just in an unbelievably tough spot, who has to balance pressures from all sides, who is conducting himself in a "valiant" manner, as Larry Kudlow put it.

But apparently last night he went there: Offering actual tax rate hikes on the most successful Americans.  While the MEC called it "progress," he turned it down because it also involved entitlement reform.

I don't know how one can conclude otherwise than that this guy is in the terminal stages of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.

The better to rule over you with, my pretty

Austin Hill at Townhall asks a pertinent question:  If the ostensible goal is debt and deficit reduction, why is the MEC pushing for more stimulus spending as part of a package to avoid the fiscal cliff?

It's all about draining wealth from the private sector, friends.  There ain't no goal of reducing debt and deficit, not on the MEC's part.

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Senator - and soon-to-be-Secretary of State - Global Test was called out for what he is early on

Scott Johnson at Powerline reminisces about being a foolish young lefty in college and hearing Kerry speak.  This would have been 1971, when Global Test was heading up Vietnam Veterans Against the War.  He still had his years of end-running official US policy toward the Sandinistas (a link in the Powerline post to a 2004 NRO article by Jay Nordlinger about this), or accusing the US of torturing Iraqis ahead of him.  But a guy who was sitting near Johnson saw what GT was all about:

One of the students right next to me in the audience stood up to walk out on Kerry’s speech and shouted to Kerry as he approached the steps descending to the first floor of the Hop: “You phony. You’re just in this to promote yourself.” Kerry was only momentarily flustered, bending down to the microphone and asking the guy to stay and talk after he’d already made his way down the steps.
At the time I couldn’t believe the obtuseness of the student; I bought Kerry’s act completely. In retrospect, however, that student may have been the most perceptive person with whom I’ve ever crossed paths.

Because evil is a constant presence in this fallen realm

John Podhoretz at Commentary has about the best take on the Connecticut massacre I've seen so far.  Yes, the shooter was mentally ill.  Still, there was an impulse inside him that existed not due to anything he'd experienced during his developmental years or any biochemical abnormalities.
As Podhoretz says, ensuring the protection of the weak and innocent is the core of the body of values that makes Western civilization distinct.  Some new ban on whole categories of guns will not enhance that protection.

Friday, December 14, 2012

This could be problematic

Chuck Hagel is increasingly being talked about as a possibility for SecDef.  This might prove to be an obstacle:  He sits on the board of a bank that allegedly violates sanctions against doing business with Iran.

The fact that he seems to be cool with Hamas and Hizbollah ought to be creepy enough to disqualify him.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

The regime's propaganda arm gets its battle plan

Great IBD editorial on the Dec. 4 White House meeting of the Most Equal Comrade and MSNBC freedom-hatred mouthpieces Maddow, Schultz, O'Donnell and Sharpton.

Monday, December 10, 2012

One of the most blighted states in the nation tries to begin to heal itself and rediscover freedom and prosperity, and all the Most Equal Comrade has to offer in response is radical demagoguery

The MEC visits Michigan and excoriates it for passing a right-to-work law, saying mockingly that it gives workers "the right to work for less money."  Less money than what?

This guy makes all decent human beings on the planet want to puke at the merest glimpse of his totalitarian mug.

That wasn't very nice or elevated, was it?  Sorry.  I've had it with this creature and anybody who supports him.  He is so wrong for Western civilization.

Well, at least it was just another ineffective progress-hater conference

The Doha green confab was, as these things always are, a bust.  No big new treaty to replace the shopworn Kyoto document.  Just a general agreement to keep pestering the normal-people world and waste its money.

A little scrutiny reveals . . .

 . . . several instances in the Palestinian art exhibit currently on display in the entrance hall to UN headquarters in NYC of the entire state of Israel being depicted as Palestine.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

How's this for reckless and presumptive?

Geithner's proposal to, should no fiscal-clif agreement be reached, take it upon himself to readjust withholding tables for the nation's payroll people.  Um, Secretary Wack-Job, the taxpayers will owe that much more money come the following April 15.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

This is what passes for an appropriate technique of persuasion among FHers

On the heels of that Asner-narrated video about rich people, Oil Change International and The Other 98 release a video entitled "Exxon Hates Your Children."

The DeMint move

Jim DeMint's decision to vacate his Senate seat and assume the presidency of the Heritage Foundation triggers a few questions about the political climate and overall culture in post-America.  He really must feel that he can be more effective in the position he will assume next month.  What does that say about the degree to which the Republican party has lost power in Washington?   What new strategies is the think-tank world - particularly Heritage - considering to impact public perceptions?

I must say, he certainly got my attention when he and current Heritage prez Ed Fuelner were on Rush's show today when, in response to Rush's quip about John Boehner not having a hand in any kind of forcing-out of DeMint, the Senator said, with a chuckle, "It might work a little bit the other way, Rush."

The way to expose a FHer proposal to the light of day

Mitch McConnell says, "Well, okay, let's vote on the MEC's proposal as it stands - the debt-ceiling powers, the tax hike on the top 2 percent, the additional stimulus spending."  Reid says "no dice."

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Okay, Mr. Speaker, if it's not an ideological purge, what is it?

The Hill is reporting that there was no Pub opposition to Boehner's "here-are-my-testicles-on-a-platter" offer to the Most Equal Comrade.  Except that a few paragraphs into the Hill piece, one finds some reportage about just that.  But, why was there so little that the piece's hadline could read thus?  Because Boehner had removed a slew of pro-fiscal-sanity folks from committee chairmanships.

Mr. Speaker, you don't even attempt to negotiate with Freedom-Haters.  Their real goal is the stamping out of all you hold dear.  Your destruction is their laser focus.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

If he feels that his two latest birdbrained moves are not being adequately explained, he'd better get his sorry a-- in front of a microphone pronto

John Boehner is none too effective, shall we say, at dispelling the notion that he suffers from chronic Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.  His two latest moves - sending yet another "compromise"-laden offer to avert the fiscal cliff the White House (which, thankfully, appears to be DOA) and removing pro-fiscal sanity House members Amash, Schweikert, Heulskamp and Jones from their committee assignments - pretty much obliterate the recent perception that he had some spine and some principles.

As I say, if being considered by conservatives and / or the general public as a freedom-cherishing man of conviction is important to him, he'd better access a forum for explaining himself, and yet this afternoon.


Sunday, December 2, 2012

Why the H-word Creature is every bit the poisonous being that the MEC is

In a Friday speech to the Saban Forum, she castigates Israel for a lack of "compassion" and "generosity" toward Palestinians.

Says Israel needs to do more to "understand the pain of an oppressed people."

Such Western self-hatred had the immediate effect of emboldening the Jew-haters of the region:  Upon returning from the UN's vote on Palestine, Abbas declares the Jerusalem the eternal capital of the newly  proclaimed Palestinian state.