Lindsey Graham, Pitiful RINO

Pity poor Lindsey Graham.  Ok, well, don't pity him – rather, snicker at him for his stupidity in becoming the latest Republican senator to get caught up the crossfire of Democrat mid-term electoral calculations.

Mr. Graham, of course, is the Senator from South Carolina who styles himself as the second coming of the now former "maverick", Arizona Senator John McCain.  (McCain, we recently discovered, is now an ex-Maverick, having recently disavowed having ever been anything but a loyal conservative Republican in the face of a strong GOP primary challenge from former congressman J.D. Hayworth.) 

Senator Graham has spent the last six months engaged in a negotiation with Democrat Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and "independent" (but really Democrat) Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut on "climate", i.e., cap and trade legislation.  Keeping with the hubris of their massive egos, these three senators have proceeded on the belief that they, and only they, can devise the ideal solution to the non-existent "problem" of man-caused global warming, with Sen. Graham taking on McCain's former role as the poster child for Republican-in-name-only (RINO) stupidity.

The Kerry/Graham/Lieberman bill – we'll call it KGL for short – was set for a grand unveiling this past Monday, but a funny thing happened on the way to Lindsey's coronation:  Democrat election year politics intervened.  On Saturday, poor Lindsey issued a plaintive message announcing he was pulling out of his negotiations on the KGL bill – meaning, one supposes, that we will have to henceforth refer to it as simply the KL bill – due to the fact that the White House has now convinced Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to take up immigration reform rather than "climate" legislation next on the senate's agenda.  Graham's note went on to express his disappointment that the Democrats have chosen to yet again delay dealing with such a critical issue, after they had promised him that KGL would be next on this year's agenda.

Oh me, oh my, what is a poor RINO to do?

The only surprising thing about this shift in Democrat strategy is that it comes as a surprise to anyone, much less Sen. RINO.  The Democrat agenda is never about dealing with issues that are somehow important to the American people.  If it was, healthcare would have been far down the list of priorities, and "climate" wouldn't even be on the list.  After all, large majorities of the public adamantly opposed the healthcare atrocity, and that majority has continued to grow since the bill's passage, and "climate" legislation consistently places dead last in polls that ask respondents to the issues that are most important to them.  In most polls, it wouldn't even register as an issue at all unless the questioner specifically asks about it.

Immigration, on the other hand, does register in the collective public mind, and so, as the Democrat leadership in Washington looked at this year's remaining congressional schedule, and realized they were quickly running out of days on which issues could be brought to the well of the Senate for consideration, they had a choice to make.  Not surprisingly, they made the choice that they perceive will give them the greatest political advantage in November.  Despite Sen. RINO's complaints, it was an entirely rational choice.

For the Democrats, "climate" legislation is about one thing and one thing only:  placating the radical leftist "environmental" groups who contribute tens of millions of dollars to Democrat campaigns.  But while the radical greens control gobs of money, they don't control a lot of votes at the end of the day, and they can just as easily be placated through the regulatory processes at EPA and the Department of the Interior as they can through legislation.  So, although they give great lip service to it, for the Democrats, "climate" legislation is really a secondary priority, especially in an election year.

Immigration reform, on the other hand, is where the votes are.  One of the great looming problems the Democrats face in this year's elections is a great deficit in what pollsters call "voter enthusiasm".  The 

Democrat voter base always tends to experience lower turnout in mid-term congressional election years, and that is only exacerbated in years, like this year, when the Democrat voter base – made up largely of ethnic minorities – is less motivated to vote than the GOP voter base.

So, facing this election-year reality, the Democrat leadership in the White House and congress made the very cynical and simple calculation:  What better way to stir up the voter base than with a big fight over immigration reform?  It doesn't matter to the Democrats if they win or lose, it makes no difference whether a bill is ultimately signed into law or not – the fight is what matters in an election year.

So, the Arizona immigration bill that was passed late last week gave the President and Sen. Reid their opening, and they jumped through it, with Sen. RINO becoming the big loser in the whole process.

Gosh, don't you feel terrible for poor Lindsey?

The Tea Party Demonization Campaign Continues

The single most consistent truism in American political life is this:  If you see a liberal/leftist/progressive/ socialist/neo-fascist accusing conservatives of engaging in some unseemly behavior, you can be absolutely, positively certain that said liberal/leftist/progressive/socialist/neo-fascist is either currently engaging in the exact same behavior or has done so in the past.  This absolute truism has never been more starkly on display than in the ongoing effort by the Democrat Party and its propaganda arm in the old, tired, dying leftist news media to demonize the millions of ordinary Americans who participate in the Tea Party rallies all over the country.

A couple of weeks ago we detailed how several members of congress leveled obviously false charges that Tea Party participants in Washington hurled racial and homophobic epithets at them as they filed into the capital building.  That effort having been exposed as a fraud and failing to move the public opinion needle away from the Tea Partiers, the Democrats and their media agents redoubled their efforts last week, desperate to find some traction as the November elections grow ever more near.

The fun started with Chris Matthews, who believe it or not is still on MSNBC, hosting a show viewed by literally dozens of people late each afternoon.  Mr. Matthews went into a literal hissy fit – the kind only smarmy leftwingers can throw – after hearing Rush Limbaugh refer to the current administration as the Obama "Regime" on his radio program.  Matthews went on and on about how the use of that specific word is simply unacceptable in American public discourse, contending Limbaugh should be shunned for having used it to refer to any duly-elected American president, because in so doing he might incite those evil Tea Partiers to violent behavior.

One problem:  a cursory Google search on the term "Bush Regime" returned 1.4 million hits, including hundreds of examples of its use by Democrat members of congress, and several instances when Matthews himself used the term to refer to the George W. Bush Administration. 

Oops.

Next we had NY Times columnist Frank Rich, in his Saturday column, trotting out the tired and disgusting canard that the only reason why the Tea Partiers oppose the current President's policies is due to their inherent racism.  He went on to contend that race is in fact the sole motivating factor of the Tea Parties, and that Republican politicians who encourage the Tea Parties are in fact inciting violence and risking creating another Timothy McVeigh.  This from a guy who never had word one to say about the hundreds of real violent protests conducted by those on the far left during the Bush years, and who has never had a word to say about real race baiters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and the criminal behavior their acts have provoked over the years.

Not content to merely use media tools to drumbeat this "Tea Partiers = Violent Racists" message into the public consciousness, the Democrats trotted out the big gun over the weekend in the form of former President and Oval Office Fornicator Bill Clinton.  At an event recognizing the 15^th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing, the former Prevaricator in Chief built upon Rich's comparison of the Tea Partiers as one big Timothy McVeigh waiting to happen, stating that the rhetoric he is hearing from the Tea Parties today is reminiscent of the rhetoric he heard from the right prior to McVeigh's atrocity.  Those of us with long memories will remember that Clinton, on the advice of pollster Dick Morris, disgracefully used the tragic deaths of almost 200 Americans as a tool for attacking his political enemies, attempting to blame the event on conservative talk radio hosts like Limbaugh, instead of the abuses of the FBI under his own watch at Mount Carmel and the earlier incident at Ruby Ridge, as McVeigh himself attested to.

Not content with merely labeling millions of ordinary Americans as hateful, violent, racist terrorists, the Democrat demonization campaign continued onto the Sunday morning talk shows, where Time Magazine leftist nitwit Joe Klein accused Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin – and by extension, the Tea Partiers – of making statements that border on "sedition".  To quote Klein:  " I looked up the definition of sedition which is conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of the state. And a lot of these statements… rub right up close to being seditious."

Oh, ok, so now those on the radical political left would have you all believe that statements criticizing the taxing and spending excesses of this Administration and congress are somehow seditious in nature.   This is life in the liberal zoo carried to its logical conclusion:  any idea contrary to those held by the poobahs of American leftism must be criminalized in order to be shut down, because those on the left have no means of making any fact-based argument to refute them.

At long last, it has come to this.  November cannot get here soon enough.

Must be Global Warming, 2010 Part V

I swear, the most gifted fiction writer in the world could never make up the abject bullshit that global warming "scientists" belch out on a daily basis.  Now we're supposed to all cower in fear because there is just not enough air pollution around anymore to keep the planet cool:


Why Cleaner Air Could Speed Global Warming

Seriously, does anybody actually believe anything these clowns have to say anymore?  Amazing.

Have a great Sunday.

The 16 Year Cycle of Presidential Politics

I have long held the theory that each new generation of Americans has almost a genetic need to experiment with liberalism/leftism/progressivism/socialism or whatever '–ism' is being attached leftist ideology in this country these days.  Thus, every 16 years or so, as a new generation of American voters comes of age and the people begin to get bored with whatever moderate-to-conservative administration happens to be in power at the time, the country elects a leftist to the presidency, and waits to see what happens.

It generally doesn't take too long for the public to collectively recoil in horror at the terrible mistake it has made, and to then begin the process of correcting things at the polls.  It's very easy to go back in history and observe this apparently unavoidable cycle of American politics.

Let's begin in 1960, when a public tired of 12 years of boring prosperity under Truman and then Eisenhower elected the young liberal John F. Kennedy to the presidency.  Kennedy's liberal social policies and feckless, amateurish conduct of foreign affairs had his public approval rating on a downward trajectory by late 1963, and the country was well on its way to a correcting election the following year.  But then JFK was assassinated, and the public turned to Lyndon Johnson in a sympathy vote.  The Democrats were turned out of office in 1968, but not until Johnson had saddled the country with the massive escalation of the Vietnam conflict, and a set of Great Society programs that are still wreaking damage on the population to this day.

Fast forward 16 years to 1976, and a new generation of voters tired of the Watergate scandal turned to a liberal peanut farmer from Georgia.  The most incompetent presidency in the nation's history followed, resulting in the Reagan landslides of 1980 and 1984.  When George H.W. Bush prevailed over leftwinger Mike Dukakis in 1988, it looked as if the public had learned a lasting lesson from the Carter debacle, and might well avoid another disastrous flirtation with leftism.

But it wasn't to be.  In 1992, the magic 16 years after 1976, a public furious at Bush for breaking his "no new taxes" pledge in a shameful deal with congressional Democrats turned leftwards again, elevating Bill and Hillary Clinton to their co-Presidency.  This time the public caught on far more quickly than it had following the mistakes of 1960 and 1976, recoiling in terror as the Clintons attempted to socialize the healthcare system and implement a massive new BTU carbon tax.  Voters were so appalled by these and many other Clintonian initiatives that they awarded the Republicans with a massive congressional sea change election in 1994, turning both houses of congress over to the GOP for the first time in almost half a century.

Many anticipated that a personal repudiation of the Clintons would follow in the 1996 presidential contest, but Bill Clinton was smart enough to shove Hillary and her hard-core leftism aside, choosing instead to adopt the strategy of "triangulation" suggested to him by pollster and then-White House aide Dick Morris.  Thus, throughout 1995 and 1996, Clinton co-opted Republican positions on everything from military policy to welfare reform, and ended up being re-elected and presiding over a successful presidency for the most part.

All of which brings us forward now to 2008, sixteen years after Clinton's 1992 victory.  Another new generation of voters grew tired of 12 years of moderate-to-conservative policy, and also tired of a war in Iraq that had dragged on for 6 years.  Predictably, another lurch to the left occurred, this time elevating a true leftist radical to the presidency.

This time the public learned even faster than it had following the 1992 mistake, beginning the process of turning the Democrats out of office in November of 2009, as it recoiled in horror at the radical leftist, even fascist, policy pursuits of President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats in congress.  All indicators today point to the likelihood of another sea change election coming this November.  True, there are still more than six months between now and Election Day, but it's hard to see what could happen between now and then that would turn back this growing tide.

Should such a sea change take place this November, the question will then become whether President Obama will choose to moderate his worst impulses as Bill Clinton did following 1994?  At this point, there is no indication whatsoever that this President has a moderating bone in his body.  Bill Clinton was all about Bill Clinton, and was willing to do whatever it took to secure some sort of positive legacy for himself in history.  Leftist ideology was Hillary's deal, not his.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, is all about ideology, and transforming the country as he promised repeatedly to do during his election campaign.  Given that, there appears little chance he will divert himself from the Jimmy Carter-esque path to a one term presidency he currently finds himself treading.  Such a fate could not happen to a more deserving person.

The Mindless and Disgraceful Alinsky Democrats

One of the most amusing pass times I've engaged in recently has been to observe as the Democrat Party and its press agents in the old, tired, dying, Dinosaur national news media demonize those who participate in the loosely-organized Tea Parties around the country.  The Democrats are in fact so frightened by the Tea Partiers that they have resorted the tactics preached by their apparent guiding philosopher, the late radical Saul Alinsky, attempting to brand all Tea Party participants as racist rednecks.

In the runup to their vote on the healthcare nationalization atrocity a few weeks back, several African American Democrats leveled accusations that some of the participants in the Tea Party rally that took place on the day of the vote had shouted racial epithets at them as they filed into the Capitol building.  Barney Frank, the gay pathological liar from Massachusetts, similarly alleged that at least one of the tens of thousands of Tea Partiers there that day hurled a gay slur at him. 

The leftist news media, as always utterly incurious about why these specific members of congress would choose to enter the capitol building at ground level, rather than use the tunnels they use about 99% of the time, breathlessly reported the accusations from these members of congress as fact (after all, they're all liberals, they wouldn't lie, would they?), and have spent the last three weeks tarring and feathering everyone who has ever participated in a Tea Party rally.

On the day of the vote, I told some friends that I suspected these accusations were fake, and after a few days of the demonization of the Tea Partiers, others began to wonder the same thing.  After all, dozens of members of the media recorded every step those members of congress took that day, and yet none of them managed to catch audio or video of a single racist or homophobic remark coming from the crowd.  Yet no one in the dinosaur media found this to be curious.

Andrew Breitbart, a journalist who runs the very successful website, Breitbart.com, realizing that there had to be hundreds of individuals in the area using either video cameras or cell phone capable of recording audio, decided to offer a $10,000 reward for anyone who could produce any evidence at all that any racist or homophobic remarks had come from the crowd.  After a week of getting no response, he upped the reward to $100,000.  To this day, there has been no response.

Why?  Because the accusations were clearly fake, staged by these Alinsky Democrats as a means of marginalizing a movement they perceive as a threat to their political future.  These fake accusations are based on these rules from Alinsky's Rules for Radicals:

RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

So, the Tea Party participants now become demonized as a bunch of lower-class, uneducated, racist rednecks.  Nevermind recent polling data that show a) more than 40% of Tea Partiers are political independents or Democrats, b) the average education level of Tea Partiers is virtually identical to that of the population at large, and c) the average income level of Tea Partiers is virtually identical to that of the population at large.  In the Alinsky Democrat view, Tea Partiers cannot be perceived to be a cross-section of the population at large because that lends them legitimacy in the eyes of others.

I think this Alinsky Democrat tactic will fail – and already has failed, in fact – with everyone who is not already a hopelessly smug, leftist ideologue.  Because most Americans are going to understand that an attack on the Tea Partiers is really an attack on middle America, that vast swath of the country that lies outside of the leftist media centers in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.  The Alinsky Democrats used the same tactics against Sarah Palin, and were largely successful in marginalizing her.  But Sarah Palin is one person – the Tea Partiers are millions of ordinary Americans, whose views are supported by millions more.

The Tea Party movement is the single most important political development of the last 20 years, and the Alinsky Democrats know it.  When 48% of those surveyed in a recent poll say their political views are closer to the Tea Partiers than to the President's, the Alinsky Democrats know they have a very real problem.

Lashing out and demonizing millions of registered voters, at a time when your party is already lagging behind in the polls, does not appear to be a recipe for success, regardless of what Saul Alinsky taught.

Meanwhile, from our Peace-loving nancy-boys at Greenpeace...

...we have this declaration of war on global warming skeptics like yours truly:

http://weblog.greenpeace.org/climate/2010/04/will_the_real_climategate_plea_1.html

Emerging battle-bruised from the disaster zone of Copenhagen, but ever-hopeful, a rider on horseback brought news of darkness and light: "The politicians have failed. Now it's up to us. We must break the law to make the laws we need: laws that are supposed to protect society, and protect our future. Until our laws do that, screw being climate lobbyists. Screw being climate activists. It's not working. We need an army of climate outlaws."

The proper channels have failed. It's time for mass civil disobedience to cut off the financial oxygen from denial and skepticism.

If you're one of those who believe that this is not just necessary but also possible, speak to us. Let's talk about what that mass civil disobedience is going to look like.

If you're one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this:

We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.

And we be many, but you be few.

Bring it on, Shirley.  I'll be happy to introduce you to my little friend, Mr. Sawed-off 16 Gauge.

Sheesh.

A Low Degree of Equanimity

Equanimity.

About 20 years ago, my boss at the time recommended me for a promotion.  A partial basis for his recommendation was that I possessed, in his view, a "high degree of equanimity."

I read that and thought, "Wow, that's great!  Who would have ever thought I would have a 'high degree of equanimity'?"

And then, about 2 seconds after that, I realized I didn't know what the word meant.  So I looked it up.  Turns out this is a fancy word used to describe a person who exhibits 'grace under pressure'.  Cool.  I'll take it.

Since that initial exposure to 'equanimity', it has become one of my favorite words, mainly because it turns out pretty much nobody else knows what it means, either.  I can only conclude that this particular word is not a standard feature in high school vocabulary curricula.  

For a while back in the early '90s, I'd toss the word into columns here and there just for fun.  But then I thought, what's the use in that?  I mean, I'm trying to get a point across in these things – generally speaking, of course – so what kind of sense does it make to use words that people aren't going to know?  It doesn't, so I quit doing it, at least consciously. 

I do still use it in business memos from time to time, with mixed results.  Back in 2004, I used the word in a memo that was distributed to the executive team of the company I worked for at the time.  The next morning, I noticed a reply had come in from the company's CEO. 

Now, for a guy in my position, attracting the attention of your CEO can either be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the context.  In this case it was hard to tell, because the note read "You are the first person I've ever seen use the word 'equanimity' in a business memo.  I'm impressed.  Don't do it again."  He was just joking.  I think.

I bring this all up because it occurred to me during the last few weeks that our current President, Barack Obama, is not in possession of a 'high degree of equanimity'.  He often appears sorely lacking in this quality, in fact.  This reality becomes especially apparent when the President finds himself without the crutch of his near-omni-present Teleprompter.

We saw a great example of this just on Saturday, in fact.  At a townhall meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, the President became flustered when a woman complained about the myriad tax increases contained in his healthcare nationalization law, complaining that "we are already over-taxed".  In response to this question that his trusty thugs, er, aids had clearly failed to screen ahead of time, Mr. Obama launched into a rambling filibuster that went on for 2500 words and lasted more than 17 minutes.  This answer was so extraordinary in its disjointedness and lack of logic that even the liberal Obamatons who run the Washington Post felt compelled to publish an article dedicated to it in the paper's Sunday edition.

Then there was the interview on Fox News with Brett Baier, the first interview ever conducted with this President in a truly journalistic manner, i.e., an interview in which the questions were actually tough, and the person asking them was willing to follow up when the President refused to answer directly, or did not know the answer.  In this interview, one or the other was pretty much always the case.  It became readily apparent that the President did not want to directly answer questions about what was actually in the healthcare legislation, and in fact that he did not even know what was actually in it.  He became ever more testy as the interview when on and he was caught in a seemingly endless series of prevarications and information voids.

No doubt that will be the last interview Mr. Obama ever grants to any media source that has not agreed to serve as a member of his propaganda bureau.  He has since gone back to conducting cozy puff pieces on NBC and CBS in which he is shown playing basketball, and taking questions about how his wife maintains her buffed arms, and how his daughters are adjusting to life in Washington.

Faced with tough polls in the wake of the healthcare nationalization vote showing that upwards of 60% of the population disapproves of the rank atrocity, the President has lost all semblance of grace.  The speeches delivered at a seemingly endless procession of staged townhall events have taken to sounding more like Comedy Central monologues than presidential addresses.

As the November elections grow nearer, with no sign of the polls presaging a massive repudiation of Democrats around the country moderating, one senses a level of near-panic setting in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The President needs to work on his own equanimity, because the pressure will only get worse from here.