These Are the Days of Our Lives

Good grief. Here we go again. The damn globe will not stop spinning, and the women of the Democratic Party will not stop making a crass mess of themselves in public; but neither can Republican men be counted on to behave rationally. So what’sthematterwithMichigan? Well, for starters, Representative Lisa Brown couldn’t help herself yesterday on the House floor. At the end of a speech opposing restrictions on abortion, she said:

“Finally, Mr. Speaker, I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but ‘no’ means ‘no.’”

And she was censured. Found, in fact, to be in violation of House rules on decorum. Now, before you go getting your dander up because some woman had a consequence for such language on the floor, ask yourself if a similar comment made by a man could pass muster.  I doubt it. If some male rep who opposed, say, Michigan Representative Barb Byrum’s ridiculous amendment disallowing vasectomy except in case of a life-threatening condition had stood up and said “I’m flattered you’re all so interested in my penis” how would that fly? It would be front page news and for good reason.

Now come reports that both of these women have been censured, and disallowed to speak on the House floor, a penalty imposed by the majority Republicans. The ABC article linked suggests this is temporary and gives Republicans the chance to explain:

Adler said the Republican leadership’s verbal order barring the two representatives from speaking was nothing new in the Michigan state house.

“It was a rather common practice when House Democrats had control and would not recognize any Republicans to speak,” Adler said.

…

But Adler insisted Brown was not being reprimanded because of the word, but rather because of the context, which he said was “inappropriate.”

Still. How do you not know the optics will be bad on this one? Already this is being extrapolated and conflated in the progressive online community. What they are extrapolating and conflating is proof of the war on women, and that an ostensibly temporary and routine verbal order is now “indefinite.” Like, you know, detention. The American Taliban and all…

I don’t know what to think about all of this except it doesn’t freaking matter. As stupid as the actions on both sides are, they are also tiny issues when compared to the economy and joblessness and underemployment. I know, too, that these are the precious days of our lives and they’re being wasted by psycho-melodramas like this. WTF?

This is an open thread.

Sexism & Subtext in the Fluke-Limbaugh Incident

Cross-posted by request.

Talking about the events surrounding Sandra Fluke’s experiences on Capitol Hill and Rush Limbaugh’s subsequent disparaging comments and complete mangling of the issues is difficult, indeed. It seems that the original issues–women’s reproductive health and the segregation of it, as well as religious liberty–have been all but forgotten as familiar tribes have lined up along their well-trod trenches. The arguments now are about which side is waging more war against the women of the other side. At least we’re getting close to some truth-telling, finally, but I doubt it will do any good. Feminism, progress for women, women’s rights, whatever name you call it by, is now just another set of boxing gloves with which to beat up the other side. Each side is unshakable, unwilling to accept the critiques of their own side while perfectly willing to hurl critiques at the other side, displaying what might in other words be called hypocrisy.

The problem with this is that there can be no consensus, even as both sides seem to be agreeing that calling women sexually charged names and digging into their personal lives to find discrediting information that is wholly unrelated to the issue(s) at hand is a terrible, sexist thing to do, that it’s meant to be intimidating. Meanwhile, the discussion has been happening at the most publicized levels by a group of largely male reporters and commentators, some of whom are themselves guilty of similar disparaging comments and acts. When you look at news aggregator sites like Memeorandum over the last several days, it’s not the articles the women are writing that are populating the top half of the page. And this line of stories has dominated for going on five days now. With the all around intractability of the political classes and their respective bases, can any good come from continuing to rehash it?

I don’t know. There may be something to be said for repeatability, something Cynthia Ruccia has been writing about lately. Maybe if both sides keep screaming at each other, if the likes of Rush Limbaugh keep calling women sluts while the likes of Jerry Brown keeps calling women whores, and we keep being forced into conversations about it, something will change. I’m a bit skeptical, if only because I know how insidious and manipulative the discourse over women’s rights and progress has been for decades. I have been an advocate of the emerging feminism on the right, largely because I believe the battle for women’s progress will necessarily involve women from all walks of life, and because I think that many conservative women model feminist ideals very well, balancing family and jobs, and political duties and activism, and that’s practical and valuable. I also think it has expanded the dialogue about what feminism should mean, specifically to include economic and national security issues, and that strengthens feminism. We can’t keep complaining forever that we are treated with respect to our biology if we continue to frame our progress solely on the basis of biology. But I don’t want a conservative brand of feminism to mirror what’s happened with the close-minded thinking and abusive/coercive verbal style of so many feminists and their orgs on the left (see Malkin’s article for a run-down of examples). And that is, quite frankly, what appears to be happening.

A slew of recent articles by conservative women or those who are sympathetic to conservative women have pointed out the gross hypocrisy of the outrage from a left that created and marketed products like “Bros before Hoes” and “Sarah Palin is a C*nt” t-shirts in 2008, as well as specific and recent examples of controversial comments made by some of the premier cultural contributors on the left, including old stand-bys like Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann, and Chris Matthews, as well as the acknowledged leadership of left-feminism such as Gloria Steinem, Patricia Ireland, and Naomi Wolf. And this is all good and well and worth pointing out, but where is the compassion? Why does only Malkin’s article start out with an acknowledgement that what Limbaugh said was wrong, which she promptly takes back by calling Fluke a “femme-a-gogue.” The points would be better made if the articles started out with the argument that, yes, it’s sexist to use verbiage and rhetoric like Rush Limbaugh did, and that’s WHY these examples should resonate with the folks on the left who do care about progress for women. And the lack of denunciation leaves one with a sick feeling that this may be a defense of Rush, instead of an indictment of our commonly accepted sexist discourse.

The left has not been any better.

Sarah goes rogue again

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Cannibals in GOP Establishment Employ Tactics of the Left

We have witnessed something very disturbing this week. The Republican establishment which fought Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and which continues to fight the grassroots Tea Party movement today has adopted the tactics of the left in using the media and the politics of personal destruction to attack an opponent.

We will look back on this week and realize that something changed. I have given numerous interviews wherein I espoused the benefits of thorough vetting during aggressive contested primary elections, but this week’s tactics aren’t what I meant. Those who claim allegiance to Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment should stop and think about where we are today. Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, the fathers of the modern conservative movement, would be ashamed of us in this primary. Let me make clear that I have no problem with the routine rough and tumble of a heated campaign. As I said at the first Tea Party convention two years ago, I am in favor of contested primaries and healthy, pointed debate. They help focus candidates and the electorate. I have fought in tough and heated contested primaries myself. But what we have seen in Florida this week is beyond the pale. It was unprecedented in GOP primaries. I’ve seen it before – heck, I lived it before – but not in a GOP primary race.

[...]

But this whole thing isn’t really about Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney. It is about the GOP establishment vs. the Tea Party grassroots and independent Americans who are sick of the politics of personal destruction used now by both parties’ operatives with a complicit media egging it on. In fact, the establishment has been just as dismissive of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. Newt is an imperfect vessel for Tea Party support, but in South Carolina the Tea Party chose to get behind him instead of the old guard’s choice. In response, the GOP establishment voices denounced South Carolinian voters with the same vitriol we usually see from the left when they spew hatred at everyday Americans “bitterly clinging” to their faith and their Second Amendment rights. The Tea Party was once again told to sit down and shut up and listen to the “wisdom” of their betters. We were reminded of the litany of Tea Party endorsed candidates in 2010 who didn’t win. Well, here’s a little newsflash to the establishment: without the Tea Party there would have been no historic 2010 victory at all.

I spoke up before the South Carolina primary to urge voters there to keep this primary going because I have great concern about the GOP establishment trying to anoint a candidate without the blessing of the grassroots and all the needed energy and resources we as commonsense constitutional conservatives could bring to the general election in order to defeat President Obama. Now, I respect Governor Romney and his success. But there are serious concerns about his record and whether as a politician he consistently applied conservative principles and how this impacts the agenda moving forward. The questions need answers now. That is why this primary should not be rushed to an end. We need to vet this. Pundits in the Beltway are gleefully proclaiming that this primary race is over after Florida, despite 46 states still not having chimed in. Well, perhaps it’s possible that it will come to a speedy end in just four days; but with these questions left unanswered, it will not have come to a satisfactory conclusion. Without this necessary vetting process, the unanswered question of Governor Romney’s conservative bona fides and the unanswered and false attacks on Newt Gingrich will hang in the air to demoralize many in the electorate. The Tea Party grassroots will certainly feel disenfranchised and disenchanted with the perceived orchestrated outcome from self-proclaimed movers and shakers trying to sew this all up. And, trust me, during the general election, Governor Romney’s statements and record in the private sector will be relentlessly parsed over by the opposition in excruciating detail to frighten off swing voters. This is why we need a fair primary that is not prematurely cut short by the GOP establishment using Alinsky tactics to kneecap Governor Romney’s chief rival.

As I said in my speech in Iowa last September, the challenge of this election is not simply to replace President Obama. The real challenge is who and what we will replace him with. It’s not enough to just change up the uniform. If we don’t change the team and the game plan, we won’t save our country. We truly need sudden and relentless reform in Washington to defend our republic, though it’s becoming clearer that the old guard wants anything but that. That is why we should all be concerned by the tactics employed by the establishment this week. We will not save our country by becoming like the left. And I question whether the GOP establishment would ever employ the same harsh tactics they used on Newt against Obama. I didn’t see it in 2008. Many of these same characters sat on their thumbs in ‘08 and let Obama escape unvetted. Oddly, they’re now using every available microscope and endoscope – along with rewriting history – in attempts to character assassinate anyone challenging their chosen one in their own party’s primary. So, one must ask, who are they really running against?

- Sarah Palin

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One of the things that was so disturbing about 2008 was the lengths the Democratic party leaders were willing to go to to ensure that their pre-chosen candidate “won” the primaries. You would think in this modern era that the role of the party would be to ensure a fair and open process so that the party voters could choose the person they want to be the nominee.

The reality is that neither party’s leadership believes in democracy. They want Soviet-style sham elections.

This is not to say that the leaders of the two parties should have no input or influence. But they should not control the outcome. Right now we are facing the likelihood of a rigged election where both candidates are Wall Street favorites.

I am no fan of Newt Gingrich but I am a fan of principles. The GOP establishment should take their collective thumb off the scale and let the voters decide.

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Panic in the Pachyderm Party

Andrea Mitchell: Romney Adviser Said Party Elites Will Find Alternative If Romney Can’t Win Florida

“I talked to a top Romney adviser tonight who said, ‘Look, if Mitt Romney cannot win in Florida then we’re going to have to try to reinvent the smoke-filled room which has been democratized by all these primaries. And we’re going to have try to come with someone as an alternative to Newt Gingrich who could be Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, someone.’ Because there is such a desperation by the so-called party elites, but that’s exactly what Gingrich is playing against,” Andrea Mitchell said on NBC tonight after the debate.

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Damn voters. What the hell makes them think they have any input in this process?

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Circle the Wagons

Nancy Pelosi’s daughter produced a documentary about the campaign of a Texas governor with little chance of winning the nomination. That governor was George W. Bush. His father was president just 8 years earlier, John McCain was the presumptive nominee, and his brother Jeb was considered the rising star in the next generation. On the other hand, Democrats rallied around VP Gore as the presumptive nominee and president. That didn’t work out so well.

American history has more examples than not of unexpected candidates winning elections. Despite this, political parties have been trying to game the choice of nominee since a public primary system came into being. In 2004, a large field of Democratic contenders was whittled down to John Kerry just because he used enough of his wife’s fortune to win the last minute of the ad war in the tiny state of Iowa.

Republicans are making the same mistake with the inevitability of Mitt Romney. Tea Party groups were arm twisted early on into supporting Romney if he became the nominee, even though they have been surprisingly loyal toward any GOP nominee. There are more examples of institutional Republicans turning on primary winners with tea party support. Voters want a fair fight where people actually get to make some kind of choice.

Circling the wagons only works against a small force. Otherwise, it just puts everyone in a smaller kill zone. Picking the “right” candidate too early is often a short-sighted and hasty choice. If the parties want to go back to smoke-filled back rooms to choose a candidate, they should. It would be cheaper for the country.

The Center Cannot Hold

We could use more hindsight these days. Three years after the fact, we learn that Henry Paulson manipulated hedge funds even before he was given the sole authority over Republican killer TARP. Around the same time, Barack Obama was running for president with even closer ties to Jeremiah Wright than even Sean Hannity lead us to believe in 2008.

This won’t sink Obama’s chances of winning in 2012, but it does exemplify his silly 2008 campaign. The problem with running under the guise of not being like the last president is that you probably have no actual skills to bring to the table. Like Carter before, when the voters learn that you’re a lousy president, you have no ideological consistency to develop your base.

I don’t think Obama is a Republican. I’m unconvinced that he is some kind of socialist. I can see everything he has done (or failed to do) as an attempt to pay back his donors and constituents, in that order. He got his money from Wall Street and his ground forces from government employee unions and the SEIU. He only started fighting for tax increases on the rich when Congress cut him off. Is he a Cloward-Piven type of radical who wants to destroy the American system of government? It doesn’t matter. a fully corrupt politicians will do the same thing as that kind of radical, overspend until the country collapses.

The debate over taxing the rich is over. The rich no longer have enough to cover the annual costs of the government. We must reduce spending regardless of what taxes are increased on higher incomes. Revenue increases are secondary to spending, much like the debate over what to do about illegal aliens is secondary to how to secure the borders. Obama created the Stimulus, the Stimulus created the Tea Party.

Now that Newt Gingrich is basking in the limelight, the fools at MSNBC’s Morning Joe are trying to get Jon Huntsman next in line when Gingrich falters. Joe Scarborough is using the scorched earth strategy, calling Newt and Romney liberals compared to Huntsman, even though Huntsman is the candidate who refuses to even call himself conservative. Maybe some Republicans and Democrats who oppose Obama think a right of center Republican is the best foil for Obama, but they’re wrong.

When Carter ran for president in 1976, he won on the fact that he wasn’t Richard Nixon or part of his administration. Plus, the GOP stupidly nominated Ford over Reagan because Reagan was too polarizing. Carter’s vision for American was of a screwed up place that needed a lot of work and his administration reflected it. Reagan may have had a radically conservative vision for America, but at least he had a vision. We all know how George Bush 41 felt about the “vision thing.”

Voters may not like Obama much, but Wall Street still plans to give him money and unions still plan to campaign for him (and give him money). The Republicans need people to turn out to counter that. They need a candidate with a vision to rally behind and a willingness to point out all the flaws of their opponent. Of course, that person is Sarah Palin so I’ll be waiting for her endorsement. Please don’t pick Mitt Romney.

Primary Colors

“Primary Colors” was a thinly veiled tale of the 1992 Clinton campaign. Names may have been changed, but no one was innocent. The thing that strikes me watching the movie in retrospect is that it completely ignores the general election. It goes from Stanton getting the goods on Picker to the Inaugural Ball.

I think this is the Republican primary of 2012. If the party plays enough of their cards right, there is nothing the Obama campaign can do to win reelection. There’s a powerful and scary thought. It’s all in the GOP’s hands.

The wannabe elites, the people who talk about the dumb electorate and how perfect Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney would be at beating Obama, wish for a Republican Party that ended with Richard Nixon. It was a party that was all about fighting the commies abroad and liberal ideology at home. In the 70s, good Christians were Democrats. Michele Bachmann met her husband while they campaigned for Jimmy Carter.

Now the party is a combination of Reaganites, Goldwater types and Rockefeller Republicans. John McCain was a Senator in the Reagan era. In 2012, the one to hold that mantle is Newt Gingrich.

It’s finally Newt’s turn to be at the top of the polls. He’s also one of the only candidates who didn’t do any one thing to get there. He just managed to stick around long enough for people to listen to him. He debates policy, he criticizes Obama, but he has little negative to say about his opponents. Gingrich follows the 11th Commandment.

Perry has all the support and qualifications to run, he’s just not good at the whole speaking and thinking thing. Michele Bachmann’s ideological baggage is keeping her below 10% now. Ron Paul is close, but he’s reached his peak now that he’s talking about a third-party run. Herman Cain is now pretty well telegraphing he wants to be Vice President.

Newt Gingrich is just what a Republican would want in a candidate, except that he’s Newt Gingrich. His baggage is extraordinary, he’s despised by Clinton Democrats and his post-Speaker history is repellant to Republicans. Still, in a field with so many twists and turns and no clear frontrunner, the message is helping the messenger.

The Best Game of Chicken Ever

He's all in now

Herman Cain offered no alternative histories. He offered no apologies. He had no stories to recall. His denial was that nothing happened.

The media loves the idea of proving a negative. If nothing happened, why can’t Cain produce evidence of that? One idiot reporter asked if he would undergo a lie detector test. Not a bad idea, but exactly what questions would prove he was telling the truth? What if one of the accusers passed one? You’re back to square one.

George W. Bush had the same problem with the National Guard Memo. Some disgruntled Democrat created a memo out of thin air using the default settings in Microsoft Word and CBS held onto it like a junkyard dog (fake but accurate) until the story actually improved Bush’s standing. Luckily, the veracity of the document became so questionable that a few conservative websites were able to prove a nearly impossible scenario, if not a negative. Then again, some politicians just play chicken. Gary Hart dared the press to follow him around, and they found some Money Business.

Now Cain has laid down his marker. He’s either innocent and these allegations will fall apart or he’s guilty and some real evidence will show itself. I don’t for one minute think that he’s both a major sleazeball and managed to hide all evidence of the fact. Those two things just don’t go together.

Marco RINO: Rubio sells FL to Romney for VPship?

 

Typical Two-Faced Twinkie?

From The Other McCain:

When Florida defied Republican National Committee rules to move the state’s 2012 presidential primary from an RNC-approved March date to Jan. 31, conservatives immediately suspected that state party insiders had orchestrated the move to help former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney thwart the momentum of Tea Party-backed candidate Herman Cain. Some Florida activists focused their suspicion on moderates in state party leadership – allies of Senate candidate George LeMieux and of former Gov. Charlie Crist — as orchestrating the change in the primary date. The move was seen as helping the centrist Romney, whose superior fund-raising resources would enable him to score an early knockout in the Sunshine State before Cain could fully leverage the boost he got from an upset victory in a Sept. 24 Florida GOP straw poll.

I disagree a bit about this being just about blocking Cain. This was also to freeze out Palin. She was looking to be the last one in, but an abbreviated campaign period impacts her.

Also, by moving the Florida primary up, by RNC rules it loses half of its delegates. I am not sure if it is still winner-take-all. In either case, the net effect is that Florida GOP voters will have less impact on the selection of the GOP nominee. But by doing this the Florida GOP insiders have a major role in selecting the next GOP nominee. This is what I call selling out.

 

Yet while the moderate Republican faction in Tallahassee was immediately blamed for the primary date-switch, only insiders knew that a key factor was a push from inside the staff of the Tea Party’s own 2010 hero, Sen. Marco Rubio. GOP sources in Washington and Florida say that Rubio’s senatorial chief of staff, Cesar Conda, has been a major force in persuading Florida Republicans to move their primary to January.

“Cesar used to be with Romney’s campaign,” one informed source explained to me in an interview today, adding: “Conda used his contacts to push the primary to the 31st because they want Romney in.”

Conda’s loyalty to Romney was highlighted in a Politico story by Scott Wong last week: “At least six past and current Rubio Senate aides, including chief of staff Cesar Conda and his deputy, Terry Sullivan, worked for Romney’s 2008 presidential bid, establishing a direct link and a line of communication between the front-runner for the 2012 GOP nomination and the front-runner in the Republican veepstakes. There’s also a trail of fundraisers, donors and consultants who have overlapping relationships with Rubio and Romney.”

In a March 2010 column for National Review, Conda defended the so-called “RomneyCare” Massachusetts health insurance program. A former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, Conda was originally an ally of Crist, as the St. Petersburg Times noted when Conda was picked as Rubio’s chief of chief in January 2011:

Like many Republicans, Conda once thought Charlie Crist would be the next senator but later distanced himself from the former Florida governor, saying he lacked conservative credentials.
Conda has worked as a lobbyist and analyst for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and founded the Washington office of Navigators, a lobbying/consulting firm where another top Rubio adviser, Todd Harris, also worked.
The firm’s clients included GlaxoSmithKline, At&T, Visa andCitigroup, which got $45 billion under the bank bailout.

 

Conda sounds like a typical opportunistic political staffer to me, someone who knows which side his bread is buttered. Watch your back, Marco.

Some have speculated that, by delivering Florida for Romney, Conda would not only help Romney lock up the 2012 presidential nomination, but also secure the 2012 vice-presidential pick for Rubio.
…
Reports that Rubio — or at least Rubio’s top aides – are working behind the scenes for Romney, who is seen as representing the RINO (“Republican In Name Only”) moderate wing of the party, will be a bitter disappointment for conservatives who supported Rubio’s insurgent campaign last year.

I hope the Tea Party is taking note and making lists. Rubio is their darling for defeating Crist, but it turns out that he was never really into them.