Steve Sailer had  a bit on this absurd column in the NYTimes. The Left’s Führer worship has some weird twists. One is they have turned JFK into a liberal icon, despite the fact he would have thought they were crazy. There’s a fair amount of evidence that RFK saw them as pliable morons that he could mine for votes. Even booze addled eventually figured out how to use them for votes. We can’t know if JFK would have converted to liberalism, but we know he was not a liberal at the time he took one in the hat. We also know he was not particularly competent as a president and his approval numbers were below 50%. The Left would have us believe he was beloved by 90% of the public. Having listened to this crap for my entire life, I’ve had my fill of the Kennedy Klan.

Still, this column is exceptionally crazy. Right out of the shoot the authors let us know they are batshit crazy:

FOR 50 years, Dallas has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “Big D,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “city of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.

Yeah, the commie who pulled the trigger was driven to murder by  the culture of Dallas.

Political movements have a life cycle. Liberalism has gone through a number of reinventions over the last century because the current trends run their course and become stale. Wilsonian Democracy petered out with World War I and was replaced two decades later with the New Deal liberalism of FDR. That ran out of steam and was replaced with the New Left and the sixties identity politics. That fell apart in the 70′s and Carter stagflation. The Liberal Revivalism of today was a replacement for the largely defunct New Left. There are a lot of interesting things to explore here, but that’s a topic for another day. The fact that today’s liberal spasm is really a walk down memory lane for aging lefty boomers is worth a book or two, I bet. Anyway, the point is movements have a life cycle and they eventually either die or stagnate.

Conservatism seems to have stagnated and may very well be headed for the dust bin of history. A good example of this is National Review. It was one of the founding publications of the conservative movement, a response to New Deal liberalism. The insanity of the sixties breathed life into the movement eventually leading to Reagan and the conservative reformation of the 1980′s. Throughout those years National Review was the platform for radical conservative thinkers to spread their ideas. Today, it is a market platform for conventional mediocrities looking for talking head gigs on the cable channels. Anyone that is slightly edgy gets tossed out and the magazine mostly functions to promote dullards like Ramesh Ponnuro and Rich Lowry. Neither of who have said or written anything anyone has bothered to remember. As John Derbyshire once told me, they are just career men with mortgages and families.

One magazine is no big deal, but it is emblematic. They have a piece up by that slovenly old statist and parasite Newt Gingrich. For two decades now Gingrich has been peddling his brand of conservative and getting a warm receptions from the “movement conservatives.” The fact that there’s nothing remotely conservative about the old hack seems to be lost on everyone. Within living memory, the editors of National Review would have been railing against Gingrich and his crackpot ideas.  Today, the collude with him to sell books to the rubes. The gist Gingrich’s pitch is that the every growing state should meddle in your life so you do things Newt things are neat like inventing dinosaurs. You get the same nonsense from guys like Ramesh Ponnuru who want the state to whip you into having more kids and going to church more often.

That’s why the Right is dying. Young people, we are told, are more libertarian. The makeup of the typical Ron Paul rally says this is correct. But young people are always more libertarian. The young hate rules because rules favor old people. Reagan’s appeal to young voters was largely the result of his repetition of the claim that government was the problem and needed to be swept out of the way. That always appeal to the youth. Gingrichian appeals for new agencies to whip the young whipper snappers into shape sounds fogyish and crazy. It also sounds crazy to Gen X types who remember Reagan. The thought that keeps coming is how in the hell did the GOP become the “me too!” party? We remember when conservative ridiculed that sort of capitulation. Today, Conservative Inc writes books extolling the virtues of submission to our liberal masters.

I don’t know what comes next, but conservatism is dead. Liberalism appears to be blowing apart as it tried to defy the laws of arithmetic. What comes next is a mystery to me, but it sure as hell is not anything like what that slovenly old fool Newt Gingrich is peddling.

Way back when Obama was getting going, I could not help but notice that his platform was reactionary. Everything he talked about was in reaction to some slight or affront to liberalism over the last decades. It was if they were keeping a list starting in the Reagan years and were nursing a grudge over each and every one of them. Nothing Obama promised was rooted in sound public policy, but it was not rooted in traditional liberal orthodoxy either. Most was either the opposite of whatever Bush or Reagan had done or a promise to redress some failure to implement liberal dogma in the past.

Once he ascended the throne it became even more clear. The whole reset nonsense with the Russians was particularly strange. The Russians accepted the fact they lost the Cold War and were pretty happy about it. After all, Reagan made them rich beyond imagination. They were not nursing a grudge against The Gipper. On the other hand, the liberal fanatics now in charge of American foreign policy were holding a grudge. They still resented the fact Reagan threw them overboard and confronted the Soviets, eventually bringing about the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Watching bemused Russians handle that stupid prop as a grinning nitwit babbled about resetting relations was priceless.

The last five years have seen a series of such moves by this administration. In foreign policy, doing the opposite of Bush is the default policy. They threw away the peace deal in Iraq. They tripled up on the pointless Afghan campaign. They threw over every ally we had left in the Middle East and embraced the Arab Spring nonsense. In Europe, all of our traditional relationships were cast aside to the point where even the French hate Obama. The Iran policy, as best I can tell, is an attempt to vindicate Carter and repudiate the Reagan critique of Carter’s foreign policy.

On domestic policy, we see the same things. ObamaCare is just a re-do of the failed HillaryCare initiative the Left pushed in the 1990′s. You really see the irrationality here. The Left was convinced that they were tossed over the rail by the Clintons and they were wrongly blamed for the failure of HillaryCare. Here, the mythology gets weird. The Left argued that the failure to pass a bill loathed by the public was the cause of the 1994 election. If only they rammed it through, it would have been fine. That’s what motivated them to ram through ObamaCare, despite strong public opposition and serious misgivings within their own party.

For the last five years, Liberal policy has been driven by reaction to the past or simply doing the opposite of what a handful of current Republicans advocate. From the stimulus bill forward, if Republicans are for it, the left is against it. If liberals of a bygone era were thwarted in their past attempts, then now it is time to pass it, even when it made no sense at all. Undermining welfare reform, for example, is counterproductive. That was the one “reform” in the 1990′s that made any sense and was embraced by both parties and state government. Liberalism today is nothing more than a grab bag of slights and grudges. Liberals are today’s reactionaries.

Way back I had a correspondence with Jonah Goldberg about this. His contention, if I recall correctly, was that American Liberalism may be in a final stage and about to expire. The surge of liberal candidates was a rear guard action signaling the end. I was dismissive simply because liberals never change their minds. They remain as fanatical in failure as they do in success. No amount of facts and experience leaves an impression on the liberal mind. That’s because we’re dealing with a religion, not ignorance. Someone who says they don’t like seafood can change their mind upon having tried a seafood dish. People who think utopia is just around the corner and we just have to force things into the right boxes to achieve it are never dissuaded.

Now Charles Krauthammer is peddling the same idea, this time blaming ObamaCare. I think he has a better argument, simply because detonating a bomb into the middle of the health care system – just when the Boomers are engaging in that system in numbers – is going to have fallout. One thing you notice as people hit their fifties and sixties is they become obsessive about health care. They learn all of the rules and regulation and become students of the economics. There’s an emotional attachment to the process because their health is at stake. People in our culture are irrational about health and death. Threatening that system just when the biggest voting bloc in the country is engaging the system is bad politics.

We’re seeing some unraveling already. Obama is down to 39% in the polls. The floor is 40% for a president. Below that means your own guys are abandoning your cause. Bush saw this when the Right finally had enough of his nonsense with the Harriet Myers nomination. His numbers fell into the low 30′s by the end of his presidency. Liberalism has never had broad support so some portion of the democratic base that is sympathetic, but not zealous, could be up for grabs if ObamaCare continues to implode. When all reports point to a looming recession in 2014, the floor could very well fall out from under Obama in the coming year.

I’m not willing to buy into the end of liberalism. I think it will happen when there is a viable, statist alternative. We have to remember that social democracy replaced fascism as a governing philosophy. Fascism grew up as an alternative to Marxism, which was a replacement for hereditary constitutional monarchy. The lesson of history is that the old is only swept away when there is something new to replace it. I just don’t see an alternative to social democracy on the horizon so I think the American Left will be kicking around for a long time. They just won’t be winning elections for another century.

At various times, I’ve rolled out my rule about interpreting statements by liberals regarding non-liberals. That rule is the title of this post and it goes like this. Take whatever they say, assume the opposite and you will get close to the truth. When liberals said the Tea Party was “AstroTurf” and liberal groups were genuine grassroots, you would flip it around to mean their gang was a rent-a-mob and the weirdos in the 17th century outfits were regular folks pissed off and making some noise. That was in fact the case. The Left has well funded “volunteer” operations to bus in protesters when needed. Often they are paid by their union, like we saw in Wisconsin with the teacher unions. It is a form of projections, for the most part, but in politics it is a way to shift the focus away from whatever crooked stuff their doing. One of the oldest tricks in politics is to falsely accuse your opponent of something. That way the story is about him denying it, not about you.

A great example of this comes from a post by Steve Sailer. For as long as I’ve been alive, there have been theories about why there is a left and right in American politics. All of these theories claim the mantel of science and all of them come from the Left. Non-liberals simply accept the fact that people hold different opinions and philosophical outlooks. Liberals are always looking to prove they are not crazy. The formula goes like this. They assign to themselves qualities they wish they possessed, but don’t. “Open minded” always makes the list along with “smart” and “unconventional.” Who would not want to be a smart, open minded guy who is a little off-beat? Gosh that sounds just like the protagonist of every cool TV show and movie!

Then they usually assign some bad qualities to the mythical right-winger or conservative. I’ll note that liberals have a long list of words for non-liberal. You never hear liberals talk about the differences between libertarians and paleo-cons or neo-cons and paloes. To the liberal, they are part of the undifferentiated other on the other side of the wall. In some cases, they avoid this ploy and instead rely on their cartoon version of the conservative, which is usually a blend of the 1950′s sitcom dad and a prison guard. That’s what we see here. The conservative is highly disciplined, socially connected and pragmatic. That’s pretty much Ward Cleaver in a nutshell.

Once the basic descriptions are established, they lard it up with pseudo-science and rotten statistics. In a prior age, they would have psychiatrists put their stamp of approval on it. Today, the fake nerd is all the rage on the left so they conjure up a few characters from stats heavy social sciences. “82.5% of people with a standard deviation of….” Almost always a little digging finds that Doctor Nick Riviera relied on a handful of grad students he paid to answer some questions. But, he was kind enough to lard it up with jargon so the lefty can claim it is science.

Now, let’s look at the list of qualities that are allegedly liberal. Liberals are the most dogmatic people with very narrow opinions on just about everything. Open minded is, unsurprisingly, the exact opposite of a liberal. They think that by embracing things that normal people don’t like, that makes them open minded. In fact, it is the opposite. Liberals wall off a wide range of options for themselves because they are considered taboo or conventional. The fact that they tend to dress alike and repeat the same things should be a clue. Similarly, they never engage in unconventional thought, if that means non-liberal thought. When was the last time a liberal surprised you with a non-liberal opinion on something? When was the last time the NYTimes was unpredictable? Liberalism may be a fringe religion, but it has its conventions and relentlessly lashes the adherents so they conform.

The third one on the list is one of my favorites. Put a liberal in a room full of non-liberals and they become a shrinking violet. Reverse the roles and the liberals will harangue the non-liberal like a group of Crips attacking a Chinese delivery guy. Liberals congregate like all herd animals. They seek protection in numbers. It is why they are over represented in politics, soft-sciences and journalism. These are activities best done in groups. They are also high conformity activities which appeals to the hive mind. Activities like sports and soldiering have few liberals as they are not consensus driven. Success is easily measured and individual competition is integral to the activity. A rootless loner can be a great soldier, but a lousy English professor.

There you have an expanded definition of the Opposite Rule of Liberalism.

Alex Tabarrok has a bit of troll bait out on firearms and suicide. I call it troll bait because these studies are motivated by a desire to get picked up by the lefty media and therefore help the authors get famous.  A PhD, claiming a correlation between something lefty sees as a great evil and something that is bad, will get the ululating fanatics buzzing about him. In this case, guns and suicide is the formula. If it were a paper claiming to “prove” that religion makes you a bigot or lead in the water makes you hate socialized medicine, it would have a better chance of landing a lefty fruitcake from TV, but guns still work in certain quarters. If you can’t read the paper, it is not worth reading, you can read the food fight over it here. I contributed a few fist fulls to the debate.

The great bulk of these studies that claim some statistical correlation between one thing and another are junk science. The most famous of which is the claim that marijuana use leads to hard drug use. The fact that people prone to drug addiction would use the most common drugs first is hardly surprising. Claims that weed causes heroine use are easily disproved by the tens of millions of weed smokers who never use heroine. That observation leads to the True Scotsman tactic by modifying the claim to weed can cause heroine use in some people. That’s the equivalent of saying a flat tire can lead to bank robbery because it may set off a chain of events leading to a bank robbery. Only someone thoroughly marinated in ideological mysticism or comically obtuse can think that makes any sense at all. Either way, it is not science.

In this case you see the usual suspect latching onto that which they believe validates their brand of witchcraft. The statistical methodology is sound and it is hardly shocking that more guns would mean more suicides. Guns are a great tool for killing yourself. It is exceedingly rare for someone to survive a gun shot to the head. People often panic and call for help when taking pills or slashing their wrists. They have ample time to contemplate their act before and during its commission. The time involved also makes discovery more likely. Once the hammer goes click, that’s it for you unless you miss, which is not likely. Therefore, better tools means better results. That explains both the rise in gun suicides and the over all rise in suicides.

It does not show that guns cause suicide. That would mean forming metal into a particular shape has some influence over the psychological well being of humans. Only a lunatic would think such a thing and the lunatics understand this to some extent. They modify the claim to, “well the availability of the gun can lead some people to rashly elect suicide when they otherwise would have time to be talked out of it.” The fact that we have zero evidence to support this claim gets brushed over as that’s not the goal. The goal is to claim that guns make people crazy enough to kill themselves. That will then be waved around to scare people into supporting their gun grabbing schemes.

In real science, cause and effect are tested. In fake science like this, cause and effect are inferred or implied, depending on the claim. In this case, the implication is guns cause suicide as the author goes out of his way to make the claim that other forms of suicide declined in his study. The implication is that while the non-gun owning depressed were bouncing back to health, the gun owners were offing themselves in record numbers. That’s why it is both not-science and troll bait. You only do a study like this to tempt the lunatics in the press into discussing it. I bet the press release is a bald claim surrounded by a feast of pseudo-scientific jargon. That’s the common trick with troll bait studies. That way the press guy is impressed with the jargon, but has easy copy to cut and paste into his story.

I just watched Around the Horn discuss this. I must confess that I have never heard of Matt Barnes until just now. I had to look up his profile to find out if he is black. He is half black. According to this bizarre database, that makes him a Halfro. or, a Halfrican. You gotta love the Interwebs. I thought it was OK for black guys to use the magic word in public, but it appears they changed the rules and now it is off-limits for everyone. Well, everyone except rapper, I guess. Still, he is half black so I would think he gets a pass for it. maybe a half apology is in order.

This seems to be flying around the Interwebs. It is a good example of why IQ is not a particularly useful measure in post-reality America. Touré is obviously a blockhead, but he is very good at ingratiating himself with upper middle class white liberals. He is more than willing to perform for them on TV for money. That’s a skill in enough demand to make him a modest star. If American society were ruled by more rational people, Touré would be picking up gum wrappers or a toll taker. Instead, he is a minor TV star.

I’ve long said that liberalism is a suicide cult. Surprisingly, the chattering skulls who talk to and about these nuts on a daily basis are mystified by the behavior of the Left. Despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, they continue to think liberals are rational people who are simply mistaken. Here’s a good example from George Will:

ObamaCare was never intended to remedy anything. I suspect the people who wrote this thing knew, to some degree, that there was never a large cohort of people wanting insurance and unable to get it. The poor have Medicaid. The old have Medicare. That leaves young working people who don’t get insurance through work for some reason. I’ve been working for over 30 years and have always been offered insurance through work. Even McDonalds offers health insurance. The fact is the claims never made any sense. The middle class person needing health insurance, but unable to get it is like big foot, often discussed but never seen.

The real goal of this thing was destruction. The Left is always looking to burn down the existing order. Liberalism is rage dressed up as an ideology. People join mass movements out of self-loathing. Liberalism allows those who rage at their condition to be a part of a movement that promises to vent the collective rage against the world. That’s why all communist propaganda uses images of war and revolution. They promise to break down the existing order and replace it with some ill-defined utopia. The latter is not the selling point. It is the former that gets the convert. They just want to kill people and break things, because they hate themselves and hate everyone around them.

The fixes that will emerge for ObamaCare will all fall into this theme. None will be designed to remedy the destructive elements of the bill. That would simply require repeal of those pieces. Instead, they will offer of new programs that will wreak even more havoc on the system. Premium support, for example, ensures prices for everyone will spike. That’s how subsidies work. The more subsidies offered for education, for example, the faster prices have risen. If public subsidies tamped down prices, college tuition would be effectively zero today. So the fix to ObamaCare will actually be more gasoline on the fire.

Kevin Williamson, way back in 2009 I think, predicted that ObamaCare would collapse and either be repealed or drastically altered. His reasoning was that any attempt to rearrange 1/6th of the US economy was going to end in disaster. The public would be furious and the politicians of both parties would sprint to remedy the problem. Throw in the fact that the mathematics never made sense and it could not last and therefore would not last. I wish I could find the article as it should be framed as an honor to the one man who may have predicted the whole thing. At least it looks like he nailed it, assuming my recollection is correct.

I thought about that when I saw this. We’re seeing a lot of soul searching on the part of Democrats now that the poop has hit the fan with the exchanges, rate hikes and cancellations. Democrats probably believed the marketing from the Left. The argument that this disaster was part of the plan to advance single payer does not hold up. If these guys were that clever, they would not be running for the hills right now. They would have come up with a more clever way to march us to their preferred scheme. As is the case with all conspiracy theories, we have to believe that the conspirators are super geniuses who make elementary mistakes. The people who wrote this bill are not geniuses. They were true believers who thought it would work. They convinced the politicians of it.

Now they have a big problem. Obama and the White House probably don’t care. Obama has always been oddly indifferent to politics. Steve Sailer has thoughts on that, but I’m not sure he is right. Obama is most likely just a guy who does not play well with others, particularly the type who is in politics. As the Israelis have learned, the Democrats in Congress are learning that they cannot rely on this administration to guard their interests. That means they have to figure out how to cut their own deal with the GOP. It also means they may have to cut Obama loose, so to speak. Inside the party that is going to be very difficult. When you have spent the last five years calling anyone who opposed Obama a racist, how do you oppose Obama without opening yourself up to the same charge?

Then there is the natural divide within a party when facing a midterm. Safe Democrats will hold a different view than vulnerable Democrats.  Mary Landrieu will have no choice but to become a vocal opponent of ObamaCare if she expects to remain in the Senate. On the other hand, Elizabeth Warren can be the defender of the faith as she has no fear of the voters. Harry Reid can scheme against both sides to help those with a chance to win over those who are in hopeless races. Landreiu, if she is not careful, could find herself getting the cold shoulder from her party in 2014. That sort of stuff makes it very hard for the party to navigate. At some point, they will have to land on a strategy to unburden themselves of this fiasco.

The trouble is they were not prepared for this. The whole game of social democracy is that people like free stuff. If every free stuff scheme has something close to a majority getting their beak wet, then there’s never a majority in favor of getting rid of it. There may not be a majority getting welfare, but there are plenty of others willing to support what they view as riot insurance. “Better to give them housing and liquor money than have them burning down the city.” The middle class goes along with socialism because they fear social unrest more than the IRS. With massive money creation and borrowing, social democracy looks like the cure to all of life’s problems. The trouble here is there is no benefit. No one is getting the free stuff or the protection from those wanting free stuff. ObamaCare is just a wrecking ball through the existing order.

That’s why the theory in the Forbes article seems right, but the Democrats are not there psychologically. Again, they thought this was going to work. They have spent the last year calling Republicans Hitler loving child rapists. How in the hell can they now expect any help pulling their nuts out of the fire? How can they get their foaming at the mouth supporters to agree to the biggest walk back in political history? Even the most cynical politician has to know this is impossible. Therefore, the more likely scenario is they own it. They put out the word to the press to sell it and they roll out a massive PR campaign next year that promotes the program and blames the GOP for its defects.  They have no other choice.

ObamaCare will collapse, just not now.

This miserable troll accosted me on the MR site today. His wrote:

This coming from a person who, from a very brief perusing of their repulsive blog, thinks that women have used their right to vote in ways that displease him and therefore should have said right revoked; thinks that black people won’t vote for white people despite the fact that this is empirical hogwash; and who openly expresses skepticism of democracy in general linked to virulent sentiments about blacks and Mexicans.

Normally I’d ignore the hysterical queen, but he is a good example of what I had in mind in my prior post. Private racism should be ignored. If black guys prefer not to associate with white guys, that’s their business. If Spanish guys prefer to live apart, that’s their right. The line to draw is in the law. The law should be color blind. Trying to force people to be colorblind in their private lives just opens the door for miserable bigots like Squarely Rooted to make a pest of himself in public. It would be nice if people were fair minded, but the cost of enforcement is way too high. I’d rather live next to Reverend Al than a dirtbag like Squarely Rooted. At least Reverend Al is honest.