“It’s Different When We Do It”

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CBS Charlotte:

Colbert: Sanford’s Win ‘Scares Me To My Core’

Angry about his sister’s congressional election loss to Mark Sanford, Stephen Colbert did the logical thing – and declared Sanford his new sister.

Supporting his sister following her defeat for one of South Carolina’s congressional seats, Colbert, host of “The Colbert Report,” took jabs at CNN, almost denounced his love for the state of South Carolina, and wondered aloud, comically, whether the lies leveled against his sister were a common part of political campaigns.

“This scares me to my core. I’m shaken. This was the first political campaign where I knew and cared about the candidate before they got into politics. I saw first-hand how her opponents smeared her with outrageous accusations I knew to be untrue,” he said on his show Wednesday night. “And that’s made me wonder if other campaigns have done this as well.”

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Is it just me or do you get the feeling he’s only kinda sorta joking? His schtick got old a long time ago. Once upon a time he used his on-screen persona to “speak truth to power”. But since Obama took office he’s been defending power. He pretends to be a conservative, but it’s all satire. Except satire is funny, and Stephen Colbert isn’t funny anymore.

You can search all you want but you won’t find me taking a position on the SC special election. That’s only partly because of my general policy of staying out of elections that I’m not eligible to vote in. If figure that the people in South Carolina should pick their own representatives.

I was not particularly concerned about the effect the election would have on which party controls the House of Representatives, and I doubt there are any tea leaves to read in that election regarding next year’s mid-term elections.

I am familiar with Mark Sanford’s recent fall from grace. It is a sordid tale of personal failing that as far as I am concerned has nothing to do with his ideology or party membership. In recent years there have been plenty of sex scandals involving members of both parties.

But if the voters of South Carolina want to give a disgraced politician a second chance, that is their choice. It’s not like it was kept secret from them until after the election. That’s why I don’t understand the pearl clutching over Sanford’s win by Meghan McCain and other Vile Progs. It’s just democracy in action.

Vox populi, vox Dei.

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Best Campaign Ad Ever

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This is even better than Carly Fiorina’s Demon Sheep ad from 2010!

(Via Legal Insurrection)

This is an open thread.

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DNC = WATB

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RNC ad with Obama and Newtown mother infuriates DNC

The Republican National Committee (RNC) and Democratic National Committee (DNC) clashed Wednesday over a new RNC ad that the DNC says cruelly exploits the Newtown shootings.

The ad, called “The First 100 Days,” criticizes Obama on the failure of his legislative agenda, including gun control, so far in Congress. It features a voiceover saying that Obama’s agenda has “already suffered a string of defeats,” and a black and white photo of the president reaching to embrace Nicole Hockley, the distraught mother of a victim in the shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse called the ad “disgraceful” in a tweet and “disgusting” in another.

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When you watch the video don’t blink or you’ll miss it. And the brief glimpse they’re talking about didn’t come from a memorial service, it was from the POUTUS Presser in the Rose Garden where he used some Newtown parents as stage props while he whinged about Senate Republicans.

If you politicize something, your opponents should be able to politicize it too.

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Chuck Roast

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Apparently I’ve been missing the show:

Chuck Hagel under fire at confirmation hearing

Chuck Hagel came under rapid fire from former senators at his confirmation hearings as secretary of defense on Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

He clashed with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former friend and Vietnam veteran, when he refused to give him a direct answer on whether the Iraq war surge succeeded. He apologized for using the term “Jewish lobby” in a rambling answer to a question from Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and stumbled in his answers on Iran.

Hagel’s answers prompted at least one prominent conservative, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), to announce he would oppose Hagel’s nomination.

“I’ve stated long ago I’ve been deeply disturbed by his previous comments and positions in regards to sanctions on Iran and in regards to direct negotiations with North Korea,” Rubio told Fox News during Hagel’s testimony. Obviously, statements he’s made about Israel…I just don’t believe I will be able to support his nomination especially after his testimony in the last hour here, he’s really not said anything that addresses those concerns to my satisfaction.”

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Hagel could go down as one of the weirdest nominees in recent history. He’s a Republican and a former senator, but the Republicans don’t like him. I’m guessing he gets confirmed by a fairly narrow party-line margin.

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Why Do They Always Seem To Want To Start At The Top?

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Yarmuth says Ashley Judd may run for office

Will she or won’t she? That’s the question many are asking about Ashley Judd possibly running against Kentucky U-S Senator Mitch McConnell.

Congressman John Yarmuth says he’s talked with Judd, who is from Kentucky.

He says the actress is weighing the possibility of running for office.

Yarmuth says he’s not interested in the seat, but it’s a top priority to find a good candidate to run against McConnell.

And, Judd may be eyeing something other than McConnell’s seat.

Yarmuth says, “I think she’s very interested in becoming a candidate for some office whether it’s next year against Mitch McConnell or it’s against Rand Paul whether it’s for some other office I don’t know, but she’s a very serious potential candidate.”

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I don’t mind celebrities running for office. They have as much right to run as anyone else.

But why do they always seem to want to start at the top?

Okay, not always. Clint Eastwood ran for mayor of Carmel. Sonny Bono ran for Congress.

But look how many run (or at least talk about running) for governor, senator and president. That’s 151 positions in the entire country. Shouldn’t those jobs go to people with some experience at working in government? I’m not talking about playing a politician on television or in a movie. I mean real life experience.

There are lots of state and local positions celebrities can run for to get experience. Let them start there. If they do well we can consider promoting them.

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The Misadventures of Agent Orange

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Philip Klein:

Why on earth would anybody want Boehner’s job?

Ever since John Boehner’s “fiscal cliff” backup plan went down in flames on Thursday, there’s been a flood of speculation as to whether he can still survive as speaker of the House. But there’s a very fundamental question that a lot of people floating this possibility need to address: Why on earth would anybody want the job?
Boehner is in an impossible situation. Details aside, the bottom line is that Boehner won’t be able to negotiate any deal that will satisfy President Obama and pass the Democratic Senate that would also be remotely acceptable to House conservatives. So, if he shows a willingness to strike a deal with Obama that passes with Democratic support, he’ll be blasted by conservatives for caving. Should he refuse to negotiate, he’ll be lambasted as intransigent and take the brunt of the public blame for any consequences that come from a failure to reach a deal. And this isn’t limited to the current “fiscal cliff” debate. It goes for any future showdowns over the debt ceiling, a potential government shutdown, or any other issues that come up. This will be the case at least until after the 2014 election, should Republicans figure out a way to regain control of the Senate and shakeup the current political dynamic.

Most people would agree that it’s unlikely that, for lack of a better term, an “establishment” member of the House GOP caucus would challenge Boehner. So any challenge is more likely to come from a conservative frustrated with his lack of progress on cutting spending. But right now, if you’re a conservative in the House, the current state of affairs is quite good with Boehner in charge — at least as far as your career is concerned. You get to blast any deal that gets struck, reiterating your support for lowering taxes, reducing spending and reforming entitlements — all of which burnishes your “true conservative” credentials. You get to go home to your constituents and attack back door Washington dealmaking. And if no deal gets struck and Republicans get blamed for any consequences that ensue, it’s Boehner that will absorb punishment as the public face of the party. Sure, the media will generically blast “tea party extremists” — but no individual member will be singled out for blame. And individual members can argue that if only Boehner had listened to them and pursued a different strategy, Republicans could have won the showdown. But if you’re actually in charge, suddenly you’re the one in the cross hairs. You become tainted by the Washington process. And because everybody who is being intellectually honest knows that Obama will never sign on to a small government agenda, you’re destined to be ineffective and to lose your conservative street cred.

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John Boehner is turning out to be the worst Speaker of the House since Nancy Pelosi.

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Democracy For Dummies

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David Feith:

If Obama Loses

If President Obama loses re-election, it won’t be because of the weak economy, the unpopularity of ObamaCare, the fallout from Benghazi or any other policy-related matter. At least that isn’t how many Obama supporters on the left are likely to explain it. Instead, we’ll hear that he went down to defeat at the hands of America the Pathological—a country where bigotry, corruption and political dysfunction reign.

Americans got a taste of that reaction four years ago, when Mr. Obama’s election wasn’t certain. “Racism is the only reason Obama might lose” to John McCain, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg wrote at the time. The argument was rendered moot when the first-term Illinois senator trounced Mr. McCain (53%-46%), winning a larger share of white voters than any Democrat in 40 years and entering the White House amid echoes of Camelot and approval ratings above 70%. Now the racism argument is being readied in the event of a Romney victory.

[...]

Attributing an Obama defeat to racism, though, is a weak charge because he is, after all, the incumbent—and so his defenders will need to bolster the America the Pathological diagnosis. That’s where a larger conspiracy would come in: The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision handed the levers of power to plutocrats like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson.

“Is a ‘Citizens United’ Democracy a Democracy at All?” asked Katrina vanden Heuvel of the Nation recently. Team Obama already has suggested that the election was being bought. “You’ve got a few very wealthy people lining up trying to purchase the White House for Mr. Romney,” said senior White House adviser David Plouffe in October. Added campaign strategist David Axelrod: “They are trying to buy this election.”

Actually, the spending by GOP donors has been about making a case to voters—and the same is true of spending by the Obama camp and every other campaign there ever was. Public rallies, television ads, direct mail, online videos and the like cost money. Such political speech is the essence of democracy, not its undoing.

Of course some campaign rhetoric is misleading or downright dishonest. That’s why it is good that politicians, journalists and regular citizens are free to push back. Ultimately the public decides—that’s the whole point. Unless the public can’t be trusted to bear that responsibility, a critique that seems to be at the heart of the scaremongering about the plutocratic takeover of American politics.

[...]

Which brings us to the indictment that could ring loudest of all if Mr. Romney wins: America is ungovernable, democracy not up to the challenge. The United States is “a nation of dodos . . . too dumb to thrive,” Time magazine’s Joe Klein wrote in 2010, after opinion surveys showed the public insufficiently impressed by Mr. Obama’s economic stewardship. Days later, in a column called “Down With the People,” Slate’s Mr. Weisberg wrote that “what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament [is] the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.”

This is familiar territory for progressives. As Herbert Croly, co-founder of The New Republic, wrote a century ago: “The average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.” So it has ever been thus: heads, our guy wins; tails, America loses.

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How ironic is it that the “party of the people” is run by a group of snotty elitists that don’t trust the people?

Democracy is a radical idea. “One person, one vote.” Even our Founding Fathers didn’t completely trust the idea, that’s why they wanted to limit the voting franchise to white male landowners. Right now the only requirements to register to vote is to be eighteen years old, a citizen and have a pulse. In the vast majority of cases nobody even checks to see if you are telling the truth.

We let crazy people vote, along with the mentally deficient. (Half of all eligible voters are below-average in intelligence.) Poll tests are illegal – you don’t have to be literate or even demonstrate that you understand what issues you are voting on.

The historical record of democracy is mixed. Over the years the voters have elected some real losers – the current incumbent being a prime example. But they have also elected some great leaders at key moments in our history. You could probably get the same results by picking names at random.

So why do we keep democracy? Why not restrict the voting franchise to educated people who understand the issues?

The answer is pragmatic: Because democracy works better than anything else that’s ever been tried.

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Good Policy = Good Politics

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Walter Russell Mead:

How Change Works

Our political parties may be ideological in some of their inspirations and their rhetoric, but they are pragmatic. If an approach to an issue works and pleases voters, political leaders try to bring it on board.

This is especially true at times of transition like the present. The classical progressive approach to social problems has long jumped the shark; this means that conservative and Tea Party activists can seize the political high ground if they can convert slogans and preferences into policies that work. If you can get better educational outcomes for less money, your ideas will gain traction. If you can provide necessary environmental protection while creating a more favorable business climate, your state will start to grow—and people around the country will notice.

The strength of a ‘natural party of government’ is that those who believe in the ideological principles of a political movement do, on a long term, sustainable basis, a better job than their opponents at developing policies that address the actual problems of the American people. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the key ideas of the Democrats (like Bismarckian social insurance programs, government as the umpire in an economy of stable oligpolies and monopolies, expansionary fiscal policy during the Bretton Woods era when the dollar was the global monetary yardstick) worked so well that Republican presidents like Eisenhower and Nixon worked within a basically Democratic policy framework.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the conservative ideas espoused by President Reagan seemed to work, and so a Democratic president like Bill Clinton made some long term Republican ideas (welfare reform, fiscal restraint) an important part of his governing approach.

But the point is that longterm power is less about shouting slogans and proclaiming ideological principles. It is about using your political ideology to build policies that work so well that your political opponents try to steal them. You know you are winning when the other side promises to carry out the main ideas in your vision.

In a politics and poll obsessed period like the closing days of a national presidential campaign, it can be hard to remember, but the principle is something that any serious political activist of whatever ideological stripe can’t afford to forget. In America, political power doesn’t flow out of the barrel of a gun, and it doesn’t flow out of a megaphone either. Real political power — enduring, transformational political power — is the result of good policy. Fix problems that matter, and the people will listen to your ideas.

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The Vile Progs were right about one thing – they could get away with all the lying and cheating if their policies were successful. Unfortunately for all of us, their policies failed.

Imagine if unemployment was down to 4.0% and the economy was growing at 4.0% (like when the Big Dawg was in office). Obama would be a shoo-in for reelection and Romney would be “taking one for the team” as token opposition.

The fact is most voters aren’t really into ideology, they are into whatever works. And they evaluate how well things are going based upon their own lives, not a bunch of data on the news. Unemployment is just a statistic unless you or someone close to you is out of work. And if you are unemployed you don’t care about statistics – you just want a job.

From a pragmatic standpoint the Clinton years were enormously successful. According to the ideological left they were the dark ages.

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Same World, Different Planets

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Rebecca Solnit is one of the lefty intelligentsia, if such a thing still exists these days. She has all the right credentials:

She skipped high school altogether, enrolling in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, when she passed the GED exam. Thereafter she enrolled in junior college. When she was 17 she went to study in Paris. She ultimately returned to California and finished her college education at San Francisco State University when she was 20.[2] She then received a Masters in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley[3] in 1984 and has been an independent writer since 1988. [4] She credits her education in journalism and art criticism with strengthening her critical thinking skills and training her to quickly develop expertise in the great variety of subjects her books have covered.

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I’m sure that Ms. Solnit is a very nice person and supports all the right causes, but I’m gonna save you the trouble of reading her latest opus. It’s very similar to a number of other articles and blog posts we’ve been seeing lately. Remember the “conversion diaries” of 2007-2008, where virtually every day someone would post a long-winded essay on how they were a dedicated progressive and had recently come to the realization that Hillary Clinton was a bitch and Barack Obama was The One?

I call these the “Obama sucks but we have to vote for him anyway” diaries. They all have different writers and different words, but the same message. They start off bemoaning Obama’s failure and inadequacies. Then they point out that the Republicans are really bad people. Then they conclude that we must hold our noses and vote for Obama in spite of everything.

I do want to bring attention to this passage because it encapsulates so much of what is wrong with modern progressive thought:

We are facing a radical right that has abandoned all interest in truth and fact. We face not only their specific policies, but a kind of cultural decay that comes from not valuing truth, not trying to understand the complexities and nuances of our situation, and not making empathy a force with which to act. To oppose them requires us to be different from them, and that begins with both empathy and intelligence, which are not as separate as we have often been told.

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Ask a progressive what they believe in and they’ll probably rattle off some high-minded ideals like “truth” and “justice”. But if you get them talking about what “progressive” means and it won’t belong before they start telling you what it is not. In other words, they define themselves in opposition to conservatism, or, more accurately, in opposition to what they think conservatism is. They also use “conservative” interchangeably with “Republican.”

Interestingly, defining yourself in opposition to other groups is one of the things authoritarians do.

But the real problem is that their definition of conservatism is wrong. In this case both sides are guilty of stereotyping the other. The left is not a bunch of America-hating socialists, and the right is not a bunch of greedy, racist Luddites. But you can find people who match those stereotypes – they really do exist.

Compared to many other countries our radical fringes are very small. Despite all the drama and histrionics, about 95% of the people in this country are within a few points of the political median. For political posturing purposes, both sides like to depict the tiny radical fringe of the other side as their mainstream. Conversely, the radical fringes tend to overestimate their numbers and influence.

We like to talk about the country in terms of “blue” states and “red” states, with blue representing the left/Democrats and red representing the right/Republicans. But the truth is the whole country is just various shades of purple. There is a little red and a little blue everywhere, and we mostly get along just fine, at least offline.

They play baseball, football and basketball in every area of the country. We watch the same movies and television shows. Everybody has eaten hamburgers, tacos, spaghetti and chow mein. They listen to Country music in the cities and Rap in the sticks. We all love our children and want the best for them.

The real difference between the two sides isn’t the destination, it’s the route. Both sides want better schools, the disagreements are over how to achieve that goal and how (and how much) to pay for it. But neither side is evil.

There are bad people, however. It seems like the worst ones end up in politics or prison – sometimes both. Neither side has a monopoly on morality or corruption. We’re all just people. We’re all Americans.

Barack Obama has failed miserably by every objective measure. Even his supporters admit it. He ain’t gonna get no better, neither. As Clint Eastwood said, “When somebody doesn’t do the job, we gotta let him go.”

If the new guy doesn’t work out, we’ll fire his ass four years from now.

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The Golden Age of Bullshit

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Via Legal Insurrection, a review of On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, “we have no theory.”

Frankfurt, one of the world’s most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.

Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner’s capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

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The best way I can define the difference between lying and bullshitting is that a lie is a single discrete intentionally untrue statement whereas “bullshit” is a constant mixed stream of lie, truth, half-truth and omission along with irrelevancies and distractions. A liar wants to convince you of something that is not true. A bullshitter doesn’t care whether it’s true or not.

In other words, Barack Obama.

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Remember when Democrats hated one-party rule?

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Americans’ Preference Shifts Toward One-Party Government

A record-high 38% of Americans prefer that the same party control the presidency and Congress, while a record-low 23% say it would be better if the president and Congress were from different parties and 33% say it doesn’t make any difference. While Americans tend to lean toward one-party government over divided government in presidential election years, this year finds the biggest gap in preferences for the former over the latter and is a major shift in views from one year ago.

[...]

Opinions on divided government have fluctuated over the years. When one party controlled both Congress and the presidency in 2006 and 2010, Gallup found near-historical lows supporting one-party rule. This suggests Americans may simply tend to prefer what they don’t have or see problems in whatever the current situation is. At least one chamber of Congress changed hands in the subsequent elections, and the increase in support for one-party government in 2008 foreshadowed an election that would give the Democrats sole control of the presidency and both houses of Congress.

[...]

Democrats (49%) are now more likely than Republicans (36%) or independents (28%) to favor one-party government. There may be several reasons for this. Democrats currently control the presidency and many Democrats may be frustrated that President Barack Obama cannot enact his legislative agenda without the help of a sympathetic Congress. Also, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to express faith in the federal government’s ability to handle domestic problems. Insofar as politically unified executive and legislative branches ease the passage of laws and the implementation of policies designed to solve national problems, Democrats would view this as a positive development. Republicans also favor one-party control over divided government, but by a smaller margin of 36% to 27%. Independents are split in their preferences between one-party (28%) and divided (30%) government.

Democrats’ preference for unified government rose significantly this year — to 49%, compared with 35% last year. Independents also became more favorable to one-party government this year, up seven percentage points compared with 2011. Republicans did not see a significant change.

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It seems to me that the preference for one-party rule kinda depends on which party you think will be on top. If your party is on the outs divided government sounds a lot better. For most of my life Congress and the White house have been split between the parties.

The Democrats controlled both branches from 1961 until 1969 (8 years), 1977 until 1981 (4 years), 1993-1994 (2 years) and 2009-2011 (2 years). That’s 16 years. There was also about four years during the George W. Bush administration where the Republicans controlled both branches. The rest of the time at least one house of Congress was controlled by the party that did not hold the White House.

There were several months during the Obama administration where the Democrats held the White House and held a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The result of that was a massive GOP landslide in the 2010 midterms.

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“Mom says I’m the handsome one.”

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Peering into an uncertain future

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Walter Russell Mead:

But for people who are more interested in shaping the future, it’s important to grasp that this is one of those times when politics feels more important than usual but in fact matters less. The status quo doesn’t fit well and doesn’t work well so we look toward politics for answers, but the politicians don’t have what we need.

This is not anybody’s fault. As regular readers know, our view is that the US stands at an uncomfortable transition point between eras. We are between social models. The blue model of twentieth century mass production, mass consumption society based on stable corporate oligopoly, bloc voting and government regulation in a relatively closed national economy has foundered and it cannot, so far as we can see here, be restored. But we have at best only a very dim and incomplete sense of what could replace it.

This means that we are at a moment of maximum discomfort nationally, and we want our politicians and leaders to fix things — but that neither party really knows what to do. On the whole, the Democrats stand for restoring the blue model and Republicans oppose that and so far, so good. The choices between the parties seem to be growing more clear as the problems resulting from the decay of the blue model take a larger toll.

Yet neither party can offer the smooth path to a stable and affluent future that voters want. The Democrats know what they want but can’t deliver it because it is undeliverable. The Republicans know what they don’t want but are not able to describe the future they would like to see — much less show how they can manage the transition fairly and kindly because they don’t really know what the goal looks like.

Our problem is that the time isn’t ripe: the real work of our society right now isn’t about political competition. It is about re-imagining, reinventing and restructuring core institutions and professions. Our health care system is wasteful and poorly organized and if in the next generation we don’t fundamentally reorganize it the country will go broke. Our educational system from kindergarten through grad school needs a variety of upgrades and innovations. Mass employment through manufacturing cannot support the kind of middle class society it once did; conventional big box retail cannot do it; government employment and subsidies can’t do it. Americans must find new ways to organize themselves for work and production, and we must learn to produce different (better and more interesting) goods. We must complete the transition from a late stage industrial society to an early stage information society and it’s something that nobody has ever done before in the history of the world.

Neither party, it must be emphasized, knows what to do about these issues. To a very large degree the solutions are outside politics. Policy and therefore politics will play a significant role ultimately in either furthering or retarding the changes we need, but so much of the shape of the future is still unknown that nobody can really tell us what should be done and in what order to create the best possible conditions in which a brighter future most quickly and most stably emerge.

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I’m not convinced that an “information society” is a viable model, but we are in transition from an industrial society to something else. Politics will not control that change, it will reflect the change.

The institutions of society (government, religion, law) are by their nature conservative. They will resist change. The marketplace adapts first. Back in the Sixties they said that computers would change the world. They were right, but their predictions about how it would change were mostly wrong.

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It’s da rulz!

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Rick Moran:

The Rules Fight Food Fight

Any hope that Mitt Romney might have had that the Ron Paul faction of the Republican Party would mind their P’s and Q’s during his coronation at the GOP convention has come a cropper. And ironically, the revolt is the result of his own efforts to reform the rules to make sure that a tiny minority can’t overturn the will of the majority who voted in a state primary.

An old-fashioned floor fight is brewing over new rules pushed through by the Romney campaign that have the Ron Paul delegates up in arms, as well as several state party chairmen who believe that the national party is trying to seize control over the delegate selection process. For the insurgent Paul forces, the rules changes would prevent them from wreaking the kinds of havoc at state GOP conventions that led to chaos in Louisiana and bitter clashes between the factions at the Nevada and Maine state conventions. At issue is a rule that would allow presidential candidates to vet delegates in order to insure their loyalty, and another rule designed to squash incipient revolts like the Ron Paul insurgency that would require delegations from statewide caucuses and conventions to adhere to the will of the majority who voted.

The latter rule is what is angering the Paul people. With a brilliant organizing effort, the Paul campaign literally took over the state conventions in Nevada, Maine, and Louisiana, catching establishment Republicans unawares and sending their own delegations to the Tampa convention. In Louisiana, regular GOP party members didn’t take their demotion gracefully. They called in the police, who physically escorted some Paul delegates out of the hall, injuring several. The establishment Republicans then went ahead and held a rump convention where they elected their own delegates. The Maine and Nevada state conventions were hardly less peaceful, with the well-organized Paul campaign running rings around the establishment Republicans.

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Imagine if your state voted for Hillary Clinton but the delegates gave their votes to Barack Obama instead.

Oh, wait . . .

I’m not sure I have a handle on exactly what is going down in Tampa. But I know that democratic principles are more important than party rules. The voters get to decide, and their wishes should be respected.

Even if they vote for the wrong person.

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How should you vote?

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(This started as a comment at Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy on a post referring to Lola-at-Large’s post this morning.)

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Lola spent a lot of time and thought on her decision to endorse Mitt Romney. Was it well reasoned or merely rationalized?

Who can say?

Lola and I are internet friends – we have never met in real life. But we have been acquaintances for several years now. I believe her heart is in the right place and her intentions are good. I have absolutely no reason to suspect she is anything other than she claims to be.

I live in a blue state so I don’t have to choose between Obama and Romney. I can sit back knowing my vote won’t matter. I’m an idealist wrapped in the armor of cynicism. Each election I long for a hero but ultimately find myself trying to choose the lesser of two evils.

But I cannot gainsay anyone who votes their heart after careful contemplation. What more can we ask of someone?

As for “left” and “right,” they don’t seem to have much meaning anymore. For many people they are not ideologies, they are partisan identifiers.

There are a lot of reasons you can base your voting decisions on. Ideology is just one. You could base your vote on character, competence, experience, race, gender, party loyalty and/or religion. You could choose based on a single issue or on how the candidates stand on a combination of issues. Some reasons are better than others. You can cast your vote for which candidate is the coolest or smartest. You can take the advice of a person you trust or rely on your children or some celebrity to make the choice for you.

Lose your illusions. All candidates are human and therefore imperfect. You have to take the good with the bad, just make sure the good significantly outweighs the bad.

To me the three most important issues to base a vote on are character and competence. Ideology is important but it’s only a factor if the candidate passes the first two tests. Barack Obama has failed both of them.

In the past I chose party first and ideology second. Never again will I vote for a party. Four years ago I cast my vote for McCain/Palin. I have never felt a moment of regret or shame for that vote.

It wasn’t the choice I wanted, it was the only choice I had.

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How much do we owe each other?

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“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

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Those words Obama was speaking actually belong to Elizabeth Warren:

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“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

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Both Obama and Warren are correct but what they are making is a strawman argument. With the exception of a few Rand-y libertarians nobody is arguing that we have no mutual obligations to each other. Without an implied social contract we would live in a Hobbesian state of nature where life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”

At the other extreme would be pure communism, where there would be no concept of “private property” and everything would belong to everyone equally. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” That utopian vision hasn’t worked out so well either.

The dispute isn’t whether we need government:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .”

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The dispute is how much government we need, how much it should cost and who should have to pay for it. Most people would agree that we need infrastructure, police, firefighters, teachers and a military. But agreeing that we need those things doesn’t mean we agree how much we should pay for them. It also doesn’t mean we agree where control of those things should lie – i.e. at the local, state or federal level.

There is somewhat less agreement when it comes to social welfare spending. There is still a consensus on the need to help children, the elderly and the disabled, as well as temporary aid to the unemployed. Many people balk, however, at the idea of providing support for the able-bodied who will not work.

Like it or not, capitalism is the driving force in our economy. It depends on concepts like free enterprise, free markets, profits and private property. It provides the wealth that makes taxation possible. But too much taxation will kill the golden goose.

How much is too much?

As for who should have to pay for government that is a question open to endless debate. The poor have no money to tax. There are not enough rich people to pay for everything, even if we found a way to make them do it. That leaves the middle class.

It’s fairly easy to demagogue and convince people they are paying too much while someone else is getting off to easily because nobody wants to pay more than their fair share. But wanting to pay less in taxes does not automatically make you greedy, selfish or racist. Nor is there anything wrong with taking advantage of “loopholes” to reduce your tax burden.

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You can’t buff a turd

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Zombie:

The Little Blue Book: Quotations from Chairman Lakoff

George Lakoff, Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at U.C. Berkeley — and highly regarded Democratic tactician — has just released his playbook for the 2012 election. Titled The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic, it purports to be the ultimate insiders’ guide to liberal messaging and left-wing ideology.

[...]

He spells this out explicitly on page 17 of The Little Blue Book; in this passage, Lakoff explains to us the difference between progressive families and conservative families — and this difference is crucial to contemporary politics, because our moral values as adults are a direct result of how we were raised:

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According to this analysis, conservatives are conservatives because their minds and morals have been twisted by cruel parenting, and they seek to reconstruct this pathological family unit on a grand society-wide scale; whereas progressives naturally were raised by wonderful, caring co-parents to become wonderful, caring adults who seek to replicate this loving family environment for all mankind.

[...]

Lakoff is also the reason why liberals and conservatives never seem to be able to communicate with each other. This frustrating problem is no accident, nor a natural result of differing ideologies simply not seeing eye to eye. Rather, it’s a conscious behavior explicitly recommended by Lakoff over the years, and one which he hammers home repeatedly in The Little Blue Book. Page 43 contains the book’s core message:

“Never use your opponent’s language….Never repeat ideas that you don’t believe in, even if you are arguing against them.”

[...]

And many politicians, pundits and talking heads have taken Lakoff’s recommendation to heart. This is why conservatives and liberals can’t seem to have the simplest conversation: liberals intentionally refuse to address or even acknowledge what conservatives say. Since (as Lakoff notes) conservatives invariably frame their own statements within their own conservative “moral frames,” every time a conservative speaks, his liberal opponent will seemingly ignore what was said and instead come back with a reply literally out of left field.

Thus, he is the progenitor of and primary advocate for the main reason why liberalism fails to win the public debate: Because it never directly confronts, disproves or negates conservative notions — it simply ignores them.

[...]

And this is Lakoff’s fundamental flaw, which unfortunately exactly coincides with his fundamental thesis (in other words, his thesis doesn’t have an error — it is an error). By intentionally refusing to challenge, disprove, understand or even acknowledge the existence of the other side’s argument, you allow that argument to grow in strength and win converts.

This would not be true if the other side’s argument were inherently weak or fallacious, which I assume is at the root of Lakoff’s blunder; he must assume that conservatives don’t have valid arguments or positions, but rather nothing more than sneakily effective ways of misrepresenting erroneous or ridiculous beliefs. In Lakoff’s universe, you can extinguish such beliefs by ignoring them completely, thus depriving them of oxygen.

This strategy of Lakoff would work if two things were true: First, that the conservative position really and truly did not have a valid point behind it; and second, that the conservative position did not have enough of a platform to reach the general public. In order to prop up his thesis, Lakoff must pretend (and insist that all his readers also pretend) that the conservative position is beneath contempt, even beneath ridicule. That solves the first potential problem. But the second one is vexatious to the liberal; Lakoff and his ilk simply cannot stand the very fact that conservative ideas are even allowed to be enunciated in public. Giving conservatives a soapbox is dangerous, even if (as Lakoff presumes) conservative arguments are nothing but a pack of lies and psychological disorders; if lies and lunacies are repeated often enough and cleverly enough, then they can successfully win the hearts and minds of the general public.

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The article is quite a bit longer and I don’t agree with everything in it, but I want to thank Zombie for addressing one of my pet peeves. Too many liberals are obsessed about the messaging and ignore the message. Between that and the “Shut-up is why” school of debate it is annoying to watch them blow opportunity after opportunity.

Lakoff’s theory has a lot to do with the failure of OWS – it was all messaging, no message. It was a protest without a defined purpose run by rebels without a clue.

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Could FDR get nominated today?

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The Weakly Standard:

Democratic Heretics

[...]

Four years later, the protest wing of the Democratic party was in the saddle and delivered the nomination to George McGovern. Whatever similarity might be discerned between the Tea Party and the antiwar movement, the Tea Party has not remade the Republican party in anything like the way the New Left remade the Democrats, or else Ron Paul or Herman Cain would be the nominee instead of Mitt Romney.

LBJ is only the first of many supposedly liberal heroes who would be unacceptable to the liberal base today. Start with Franklin Roosevelt. Despite his New Deal programs, he piled up a considerable record of statements that would be anathema to contemporary liberal orthodoxy. “The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me,” he told Congress in 1935, “show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief .  .  . is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” A liberal can’t talk about our welfare state that way today.

FDR opposed public employee unions. In a 1937 letter to a public employees’ association, FDR wrote: “All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. .  .  . Militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees.”

FDR, an Episcopalian, made the kind of remarks about religion that send the American Civil Liberties Union into paroxysms of rage when someone like George W. Bush or Sarah Palin says the same thing today. During World War II, FDR wrote a preface for an edition of the New Testament that was distributed to American troops: “As Commander-in-Chief, I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the armed forces of the United States.” On the eve of the 1940 election, FDR said in a campaign radio address: “Freedom of speech is of no use to a man who has nothing to say and freedom of worship is of no use to a man who has lost his God.” Today, the left-wing fever swamps would call this “Christianism.”

Environmentalists would stoutly oppose FDR because of his massive public works projects, such as the giant habitat-destroying dams on the Columbia River and in the Tennessee Valley. The car-haters of the left decry FDR for promoting urban sprawl and road-building. Historian James Flink wrote, “The American people could not have done worse in 1932 had they deliberately set out to elect a president who was ignorant of the implications of the automobile revolution.”

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Okay, I admit TWS is a wingnut site, but they have a point. FDR was a foreign policy hawk, he smoked cigarettes and he had a mistress. He was rich too.

If he were alive today, could FDR win the Democratic nomination? Ronald Reagan was a “liberal” New Deal Democrat and a supporter of FDR. Years later he said “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.” Does that sound familiar?

The only two-term Democratic president in my lifetime is Bill Clinton, and the Progs call him a Republican. They also bashed Hillary for being too conservative.

What do you think?

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Peepul R Stoopit

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Danps at Corrente provides an example of a common meme:

Slogan and bromide open thread

One of the things liberals are terrible at is messaging. We tend to start discussing issues by going Full Wonk, and that isn’t very appealing to the largest part of the population. If you want to engage on an issue you need to get your rhetorical foot in the door first, and that means finding a quick, punchy way to grab the average citizen’s attention.

So I thought I’d throw open a thread for brainstorming. Come up with something that could fit on a bumper sticker and (important!) is an actual policy prescription or direct action most people can take. No “visualize world peace” or anything like that. Make it short, make it punchy, make it relevant.

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I guess we’re just too smart for our own good. Obviously, we’re right and they’re wrong. If people aren’t convinced of our superiority they must be booger-eating morons. We need to “dumb-down” our message so they can understand. What’s the matter with Kansas? Why do these inbred hillbillies keep voting against their self-interest?

Danps gives a couple examples. Here’s my favorite:

Slogan: 15:1
Policy prescription/direct action: Make a nationwide standard for the maximum student/teacher ratio in public primary and secondary schools to be 15:1.
Effect: Smaller class sizes, especially in lower income communities that need it most. Focuses attention on classroom environment instead of standardized testing or privatization. Provides guaranteed national funding to those places (including, ahem, some entire states) that abdicate their responsibilities in that regard.

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I don’t know what the ideal student-teacher ratio is, but “reducing class size” has been offered as a panacea for years now. We’ve been trying to “fix” education since before I was born. We keep increasing the workload, lengthening the school day and school year, and cutting back on things like sports and art. Are kids any smarter?

If we reduce class size to 15:1, how long before someone suggests 10:1? 5:1? 1:1?

Nobody wants their kids to be illiterate. But how much money are we willing to spend on their educations? How much would it cost us to implement a 15:1 class size ratio? How many more teachers will we need? How many more classrooms will we need to build?

Assuming we do it, what’s the pay-off? How much will that increase test scores?

But getting back to the original point of this post, is someone stupid if they are unwilling to pay more in taxes to reduce class sizes some more? What if they don’t have any kids? What exactly is their self-interest?

Would teachers be willing to take a 25% pay cut to fund more teachers?

BTW – Ever notice that conservatives don’t call voters stupid?

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Money isn’t everything

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Molly Ball:

It’s important to remember, as Democrats cope with their failure to topple Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in Tuesday’s recall, that this was a fight they chose.

Unlike the vast majority of elections, which occur on a regular schedule, the recall was a fight the left picked on purpose. They picked it because they thought they could win. And they were wrong.

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If you are following events in Cheeseheadland, you know that the official verdict by our betters in the intelligentsia is that money made the difference. Those big bad Koch Brothers stole our democracy with their filthy lucre.

The basic theory goes like this:

A. People are stupid.

B. With enough money you can convince them of anything.

C. The 1% have more than enough money.

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Money is important in politics. It can provide a big advantage. But it can’t do everything. If it could, the 1% would only give money to one party.

Every one of us gets bombarded with advertising on a daily basis. You have to get pretty far from civilization to find a place where you don’t get exposed. It is on television, radio, the internet, in papers and magazines, on billboards and the sides of buses.

Some of it is political. Most of it is not. One of the most common products we see advertised is beer. But beer ads don’t make you drink, and if you do drink they don’t determine which brand you buy.

Advertising works best on new products. If you know nothing about a product the only source of information you have might be the ads. But once you try the product you form your own opinion of it. No matter how many ads you see, if a beer tastes like shit you won’t drink it.

The same thing applies to candidates.

Scott Walker was elected in a close race in November 2010. Since then there have been numerous protests, lawsuits, recalls and news stories involving Walker. If I am hearing so much about it out here in California, imagine what the citizens of Wisconsin have been dealing with.

Additionally, consider this – have you heard any allegations that Walker ran a deceptive campaign? Is it an unfair advantage if you spend more money but tell voters the truth?

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Smear Job

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The smear:

Integrity: The Child Scott Walker Left Behind

Bernadette Gillick was a college freshman in 1988 when she first met Scott Walker. It was spring semester, and she had just transferred to Marquette University. She was assigned a room in O’Donnell Hall (then a women’s dormitory), which she shared with her new roommate, Ruth (not her real name). Ruth was dating Scott Walker, who was 20 at the time, and, according to Bernadette, Ruth was deeply in love with him.

Midway through that spring semester, Bernadette alleges, Ruth found out she was pregnant. She informed her boyfriend, Scott, and initially he was supportive. That support changed to callous indifference for his girlfriend’s predicament after Scott informed his parents of the pregnancy.

Bernadette reports that at this point Scott began denying that he was the father of the baby, and when Ruth said she was considering an abortion, he claimed he didn’t care, as he wasn’t the father anyway.

Bernadette remembers being present when Ruth was dealing with the wrath of Scott’s mother, who allegedly admonished Ruth for trying to “ruin [her son's] reputation.”

“I supported her [Ruth] as he [Scott] went from encouraging her to get an abortion, to telling me it was in my best interest to keep my mouth shut, to denying that he was the father and having his own mother call her and tell her to stop erroneously accusing her son of paternity,” Bernadette recounts.

It was a “horrible time” for her friend. “Imagine her being 18 years old and pregnant, walking around Marquette’s Jesuit Catholic campus with her boyfriend denying he was the father,” says Bernadette.

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The truth:

“Daniel Bice, the ‘Watchdog’ reporter of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online interviewed the anonymous woman who had the baby, but she adamantly denied that Scott Walker was the father according to a comment by Daniel Bice to the linked story.”

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Remember the good old days when lefties took pride in being the good guys and playing clean?

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