When Glenn Beck was on Fox I loved his show, despite never watching it. What I loved about it is how he sent the moonbats into a frenzy. If you were a room full of strangers and wanted to ID the lunatics, just mention Glenn Beck. The lunatics would suddenly begin convulsing and screeching. Otherwise, I found Beck to be a bit of  a weirdo. He was a man on a grail-quest. Having seen his ugliness in the bottom of a glass, he was racing around looking for the antidote. Religion, followed by slaying the Progressive dragon was his thing on Fox.

Then he left Fox and started his own network. I give him a ton of credit for figuring out before everyone else where the future of media lies. From what I gather The Blaze has made Beck a millionaire many times over. Still, when I see him I get the sense he is still a man on a mission that he is still trying to unravel. This latest seems to fit the pattern.

Glenn Beck on Monday revealed the true extent of his health issues, saying he can no longer keep what has happened a secret from his friends, his staff or audience, whom he considers to be his family.

If you have sensed a change in Beck — maybe you even thought he was losing interest in his program — Beck said it is because he was told he may only have several functional years left, and his health conditions were causing such excruciating pain that it was difficult to do live programming.

“Tonight’s show is not for the casual fan or, really, anyone in the press,” Beck said. “This is a one-on-one between friends. No one in the media ever does a show like this, because it is crazy. … But I believe that by not talking with you openly, it destroys everything of real meaning and value — namely, our trust.”

“I have never lied to you, but I have omitted a few really important facts because — they scared me,” Beck admitted, beginning to swallow back tears. “I didn’t have any answers, and the answers I was being given at the time meant … the end of our time together.”

Not only is there a religious vibe to this, there’s a Jimmy Swaggart vibe to it. That’s an old school preacher move. The personal testimony has been a staple of the southern religious experience since forever. The preacher reminds his flock that he is their shepherd. Then he tells them he is not long for this world. Then the ushers pass the plate.

Beck said that five years ago, around the time of his Restoring Honor event in Washington, D.C., God began to tell him that he was standing in the wrong place. At around the same time, his health issues began, starting with vocal cord paralysis, eyesight problems and what doctors at first believed was a painful form of neuropathy.

“While I was at Fox, the pain would get so bad that my camera crew, our executive producer Tiffany and I, had worked out hand signals so they would know when to take the camera off of me,” Beck revealed. “We didn’t know at the time what was causing me to feel as though, out of nowhere, my hands and feet, or arms and legs would feel like someone had just crushed them, set them on fire or pushed broken glass into them.”

Beck said that while he was in intense pain, something unusual was happening that he actually thought was an advantage in his business: he only ever needed two to four hours of sleep a night.

“Doctors tell me that up until recently, I hadn’t had a real REM sleep in maybe as long as a decade,” Beck said. “I didn’t have a dream that I remember, except one in a decade. And quite honestly, this isn’t a symptom you look to fix if you have a ton to do. But the first sign of trouble I noticed was what I call a ‘time collapse.’ If we had met before, I couldn’t tell you if it was a month ago, a year ago or when we were in high school. I then began to lose names to faces and over time, entire conversations would go away.”

Beck said doctors told him it was normal for someone processing as much information as he was, and the phenomenon has been discussed by figures like Winston Churchill.

I guess we’re supposed to believe that Beck is a sort of stigmatic and a medium of some sort, with massive amounts of data flowing through him, to you, his followers. His suffering for you is, well, Christ-like, isn’t it? Well, the modern version, least ways. It is sort of a crucifixion-lite, where the savior nails himself to the cross metaphorically.

Maybe I’m being mean-spirited, but I’m skeptical. Adrenal fatigue, for example, is nonsense. It is not a real medical condition. It was cooked up by snake oil salesman to trick middle-aged women into buying crystals and colonics. My bet is the real doctors told him he was either faking or suffering from some sort of psycho-somatic condition.

I know this makes me a stone-hearted villain, but I think he is faking.

I’ve long thought that the tactics of pressure groups have exceeded the bounds of legality. The law is clear about interfering with the business dealings of others for the purpose of causing one of more parties harm. It is one thing for me to claim my soap will make your clothes cleaner than the other soap. It is quite another to disrupt the relationship between the other soap and its vendors in order to harm the business of the competitor. That’s what liberal pressure groups are doing when they start harassing advertisers in order to get them to stop doing business with a TV or radio show.

I made this point in a post about Limbaugh a while back. I was immediately visited by a bunch of spam from lunatics claiming to be concerned about my opinion on Limbaugh. These people are crazy and they go beyond stating their opinions into the realm of tortious interference, in my opinion. Anyway, it looks like Limbaugh is planning to sue the Democrats for defamation.

Radio host Rush Limbaugh has threatened to sue the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) for defamation, The Daily Caller has learned.

Limbaugh retained the services of lawyer Patty Glaser and demanded that the DCCC “preserve all records in anticipation of a lawsuit for defamation and interference” after the Democratic Party group led a campaign against Limbaugh based on out-of-context statements the host made about sexual assault. Limbaugh’s legal team delivered a letter to DCCC representatives Monday informing them of the legal threat. Limbaugh has also demanded a public retraction and apology.

The Limbaugh team is currently proceeding from the standpoint of litigating and has not yet made a decision as to whether the DCCC could make any concessions at this point to prevent the lawsuit.

The DCCC “has intentionally disseminated demonstrably false statements concerning Rush Limbaugh in a concerted effort to harm Mr. Limbaugh, and with reckless disregard for the resulting impact to small businesses across America that choose to advertise on his radio program” according to the GlaserWeil law firm’s letter to the DCCC, which was obtained by TheDC. “Mr. Limbaugh clearly, unambiguously, and emphatically condemned the notion that ‘no’ means ‘yes.’”

“Let’s be clear: Rush Limbaugh is advocating for the tolerance of rape” the DCCC stated in a September fundraising email after Limbaugh mocked Ohio State’s new mandatory sexual consent guidelines.

Limbaugh’s team said that the DCCC’s campaign against Limbaugh provides grounds for a defamation case, based on legal precedent.

“The DCCC may believe it to be immune from liability by quoting words, taken out of context. This is untrue,” Glaser said. “There is significant on point precedent in the 9th Circuit for holding an organization responsible for falsifying meaning through selective quoting. In Price v. Stossel, the court held that, if a party accurately quotes ‘a statement actually made by a public figure, but presents the statement in a misleading context, thereby changing the viewer’s understanding of the speaker’s words,’ that constitutes defamation.”

I think you have to judge any religion by its outcomes, intentional or accidental. Islam has some wise and beautiful elements to it. Much of the practical application of Islam is sensible, particular when applied to a tribal culture. That’s only part of the story. The other part is the butchery and forced ignorance that is the natural result of the full flowering of Islam. There’s a reason no Islamic society has produced anything of any value, other than things like suicide bombers and terrorism.

Marxism is another dreadful loser of a religion. The Soviet empire was good at keeping its people backward and ignorant, but not much else. Germans, despite there obvious faults, were able to reach the very pinnacle of human civilization, except when they were under Marxism. For fifty years Germans in the East produced nothing other than steroids to rev up their female athletes. Amazingly, East Germans even made bad cars while under the rule of Marxism. Then you have the enormous body count, which fills an entire book.

The weird religion of our current rulers has similarly strange outcomes. Steve Sailer points to a story in the old thyme lefty journal The New Republic extolling the glories of Qatar. People forget that the New Republic was founded by Malcolm Crowley, a fascist sympathizer who thought Mussolini was a leader FDR should emulate. But that was a long time ago and who can remember that stuff. I did not know the magazine was bought up by a Silicon Valley robber baron. Anyway, Steve’s point is the ruling class has no problem persecuting someone for not worshiping transvestites, but they are OK with slavery.

The Cult of Modern Liberalism is shot through with these bizarre contradictions. Liberals, for example, are crowing about recently passed marijuana laws, decriminalizing possession of weed. They forget that the Old Right was never in favor of drug laws and it was the Left that was behind Prohibition and the early war on drugs. But, weed is now a liberal fad so it’s OK. Contrast that with their never ending war on tobacco. A town in Massachusetts is now planning to ban tobacco entirely.

The cartons of Marlboros, cans of Skoal and packs of Swisher Sweets are hard to miss stacked near the entrance of Vincent’s Country Store, but maybe not for much longer: All tobacco products could become contraband if local health officials get their way.

This sleepy central Massachusetts town of 7,700 has become an improbable battleground in America’s tobacco wars. On Wednesday, the Board of Health will hear public comment on a proposed regulation that could make Westminster the first municipality in the United States to ban sales of all tobacco products within town lines.

“To my knowledge, it would be the first in the nation to enact a total ban,” said Thomas Carr, director of national policy at the American Lung Association. “We commend the town for doing it.”

Town health agent Elizabeth Swedberg said a ban seemed like a sensible solution to a vexing problem.

The vexing problem of people making informed decisions that the busy-bodies and pests don’t like.

“The tobacco companies are really promoting products to hook young people,” she said, pointing to 69-cent bubblegum-flavored cigars, electronic cigarettes and a new form of dissolvable smokeless tobacco that resembles Tic Tac candies. “The board was getting frustrated trying to keep up with this.”

Citing a report from the U.S. surgeon general, Swedberg said that if tobacco use continues unabated, 5.6 million American children who are younger than 18 today will die prematurely because of smoking. Change, she said, “has to start somewhere.”

The fact that they wish to ban things that are not smoking in order to keep people from smoking is lost on these people. Tobacco and anything related to it is bad because the Cult associates it with the type of white people who shop at Walmart and make fun of men who wear dresses. Weed is cool because it what young people like and you can now buy it at those quaint boutiques near that ski resort you went to in Colorado. Tobacco is what the guy fixing the lifts uses.

A sane person would ask whether it is better for the guy fixing the chair lift to be smoking a Marlboro or a jumbo? I’m OK with the repairman sucking on a cancer stick while he repairs the lift. Nicotine helps concentration. The same repairman doing bong hits before working on the lift is probably about to kill a bunch of people. Of course, he probably called out of work so he can play video games and eat chips all day, but that’s another story.

Greg Cochran first proposed that homosexuality is the result of an unknown pathogen. Here’s JayMan’s write up on it from earlier this year. The idea that pathogens could be the root cause of things like heart disease and insanity has been kicking around for a while, but I know of no serious science on it. Like a lot of speculative science, there’s no money in it until someone finds something concrete. There’s a lot of politics to science because scientists need money to do their work. There’s funding available for genetic research. There’s no money for locating the gay germ.

This may change things.

A virus that infects human brains and makes us more stupid has been discovered, according to scientists in the US.

The algae virus, never before observed in healthy people, was found to affect cognitive functions including visual processing and spatial awareness.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the University of Nebraska stumbled upon the discovery when they were undertaking an unrelated study into throat microbes.

Surprisingly, the researchers found DNA in the throats of healthy individuals that matched the DNA of a virus known to infect green algae.

Dr Robert Yolken, a virologist who led the original study, said: “This is a striking example showing that the ‘innocuous’ microorganisms we carry can affect behaviour and cognition.

“Many physiological differences between person A and person B are encoded in the set of genes each inherits from parents, yet some of these differences are fuelled by the various microorganisms we harbour and the way they interact with our genes.”

Of the 90 participants in the study, 40 tested positive for the algae virus. Those who tested positive performed worse on tests designed to measure the speed and accuracy of visual processing. They also achieved lower scores in tasks designed to measure attention.

Humans’ bodies contain trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi. Most are harmless, but the findings of this research show that there some microbes can have a detrimental impact on cognitive functions, while leaving individuals healthy.

The study’s findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

When I was a young man, I used to hear old people say something along the lines that young people would listen to each other, but never to those older than them. The sign a young man was maturing was when he sought out the advice of older people. This always seemed strange to me. I knew young people were idiots, including myself. Taking advice from any of them seemed like idiocy to me. I was young and dumb, but not that dumb. If I needed help, I went and found an old guy.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that I was way dumber than I realized in my youth. While I was right to seek out information from older people, I was not very good at figuring out which old people were worth consulting. That comes with age and experience. As you get older, you acquire your own knowledge, but you also get better at figuring out who is worth listening to or reading. Number one on the list of people you ignore is young people. God bless ‘em, but they don’t know anything and they don’t know anyone who knows anything.

That all came to mind while reading this post by Charles Alphabet Cooke on National Review. He is out with a book called the Conservatarian Manifesto. From the post:

The book is in part a look at the growing number of self-identified “conservatarians” — those people whose worldview is broadly right-leaning, but who are dissatisfied with the Republican party and with much of libertarianism. I also make some suggestions as to how conservatives can update their offering, propose a framework within which their various constituents can once again co-exist, and take on the notion that there is such a thing as a “social issue” per se. At the book’s heart is a sustained defense of federalism and of a thriving and diverse civil society.

My first thought, was that Mr. Cooke is a little young to be offering up a new political philosophy. Last week he was riding his Big Wheel around the driveway. His writing has the feel of the college sophomore coming home for Winter Solstice, lecturing the family about the real world. Even when you agree with him you cringe a little.

Putting my mean spirited bigotry towards the young to the side, I was reminded of when Rod Dreher went bonkers a decade ago and tried to build a cult around breakfast cereal. His shtick was “granola conservatism” otherwise known as “crunchy cons.” He defined these individuals as traditionalist conservatives who believed in environmental conservation, frugal living, and the preservation of traditional family values. They also express skepticism about aspects of free market capitalism and they are usually religious (typically traditionalist Roman Catholics or conservative Protestants).

Of course, those of us who remembered when guys like Joe Sobran and Sam Francis were writing for respectable publications knew that conservatives were never capitalists nor prone to worship at the altar of free markets. Dreher’s “new” flavor of conservatism was just the original product with some of his own eccentric foibles sprinkled on top. It’s why no one remembers “granola conservatism” or Rod Dreher. It was the rantings of a young man in the sophomore stage of his life.

Cooke’s new brand of conservatism sounds just like libertarianism circa 1984. Thirty years ago libertarians were the guys who did not want to fight the Left over issues like abortion and they thought guys like Jerry Falwell were icky and gross. Libertarians famously broke with Reagan over, wait for it, the war on drugs. I know, it sounds crazy, but that was one of the main reasons Ron Paul gave for bolting the Republican Party in the Reagan years.

Cooke’s proposed new cult is basically 1980’s libertarianism with less of an emphasis on free weed. The obvious irrationality is the same we see with libertarianism. If people are to be free to organize themselves as they see fit, that means people will want their government to do a lot of things libertarians find unpleasant. The only sort of human that could live in a libertarian paradise is a person who detests his fellow humans so much he refuses to have anything to do with them. Otherwise, social creatures put rules on one another in order to facilitate mutually beneficial relations. That scales up to what we know as culture.

But, culture is tough intellectual ground to cover and most libertarians are simply not bright enough to master the material. Young people like Mr. Cooke have been marinated in Cultural Marxism since birth and that means they have a Pavlovian response to anything that bumps into culture. That response is to run and hide under the bed or, if they are a true believer, scream at the heretic until he runs and hides under the bed.

The only debates worth having in a civil society are cultural debates. What kind of people we choose to be is the only thing we can leave to the next generation. It is what they will stand upon as they decide how they will order themselves and how they will choose to be remembered. The reason these debates get so ugly and nasty is because they are so important. No one gives a crap about tax policy enough to lose a friend over it. People care about the culture and they are willing to fight over it, unless they are a conservatarian, I guess.

I read Jim Geraghty every day mostly for laughs. He is a middle-brow Republican toady and C-List talking head. National Review gives him a space to talk campaign gossip. Predictably, he had a post yesterday denying the obvious in Virginia. That is the presence of a Libertarian straw probably cost The Stupid Party a seat.

The “Libertarians, without a candidate of their own, would otherwise vote for Republicans” theory is not so sound, and it’s not a factor Republicans should base a strategy on.

Those willing to vote Libertarian — as opposed to those who describe themselves as libertarian or having some libertarian views — are usually deeply attached to policy positions that are still pretty unpopular to Republicans as a whole — oftentimes (though not always) a quasi-isolationist or outright isolationist foreign policy, drug legalization (often well beyond marijuana), and gay marriage. Many (but not all) Libertarians oppose restrictions on abortion, habitually offer long diatribes about the Federal Reserve and the Gold Standard, and in some quarters, an inability to discuss U.S. foreign policy regarding Israel without lapsing into conspiracy theories and uglier sentiments.

Ah yes. Those people voting for third parties are “ugly” and we don’t want anything to do with them anyway. While it is true that most Libertarians are bat-shit crazy, most who vote for these guys just find the main party options too odious to support. The GOP had a chance to win in Virginia, but demanded that the candidate be a long time bagman with a long history of helping Democrats win policy debates. Asking conservative-leaning voters to support that flaming bag of poop is asking a lot.

What’s more, a lot of self-identified Libertarians see their policy differences with Republicans as key to their political identity; otherwise, they would be Republicans. To many Libertarians, the difference with Republicans is the point.

Nor is there much evidence that Libertarians fear that their vote will elect a Democrat. For all of of the alleged or potential flaws of voters who choose Libertarian-party candidates, they’re usually not stupid. They know their guy is in the single digits in the polls. They’re not voting in order to vote for a winner, and hearing Republicans complain that the Libertarian cost them the victory doesn’t make them feel guilty or a sense of regret. They may feel a bit of vindication in that result.

Why would anyone think Gillespie is different from Warner? Hod carriers like Geraghty imagine a world where placement of the 75th comma on page 1,822 of the 3,500 omnibus spending measure that grows the state by 10% a year in perpetuity is a battle worth waging. To people who would like to see one year in their lifetime where government actually shrinks in real dollars tend to think those fights are just a giant circle-jerk for the benefit of the hack-a-rama.

I take a back seat to no man in my condemnation of Libertarians. I think they are as nutty as Progressives. But, they vote their interests and that’s not something most conservatives can say these days. If you vote and you’re not a Liberal, you are either voting for a guy who honestly wants to murder you or the guy who wants to help him, but would like to be on good terms with you until the right moment.

It appears that no amount of facts or experience will kill some fantasies. The myth of the Latino voter is one example.

With President Barack Obama vowing to press ahead on immigration, prominent Hispanic Republicans are worried about the reaction of staunch conservatives. They fear it will harm the party’s ability to win over Latinos in the next presidential election and beyond.

This chart makes clear that Hispanics are not that important and no amount of pandering will change the party split.

But, when objective reality is infinity negotiable. why bother with facts?

While immigration was generally a muted issue in elections dominated by the Republicans, Obama promised the next day to move ahead on his own to remove the threat of deportation or grant work permits to an unspecified number of immigrants living here illegally.

“The initial reaction from Republicans is going to be very ugly and not well- thought-out, unfortunately,” said Alfonso Aguilar, former chief of the U.S. Office of Citizenship in the George W. Bush administration and executive director of Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles.

Immigration was a central feature of many races, but pretending otherwise is so much more fun.

Aguilar said congressional Republicans must offer a plausible alternative to the president’s plan, especially since the Republican- controlled House has shelved bipartisan immigration legislation. His call echoes those of some of the party’s potential 2016 candidates to reach out to Hispanic voters in some way.

This is what I call the Lunatic’s Gambit. It works like this. The Left decides some issue has to be addressed. It is so urgent that “doing nothing is no longer an option.” Then they offer up their crackpot plan to address the crisis. When normal people object to the crackpot plan, the Left begins demanding the other side propose an alternative they will accept, or else we just have to go along with their crackpot idea. In this case, merely stopping a Caesarian power grab by the executive is not enough. The GOP has to come up with some way to satisfy the fanatics or else they must stand aside and allow Obama to declare himself emperor.

But House Republican aides note that Speaker John Boehner and others have no effective way to tone down comments of members who stridently oppose looser immigration rules. Indeed, many of those members are proud to defy party leaders.

Boehner himself likened Obama’s remarks to playing with matches. “He’s going to burn himself if he continues to go down this path,” Boehner said Thursday, a day after Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell warned the president not to act without congressional approval. Such a move, McConnell said, “poisons the well” for potential bipartisan efforts.

A Congress controlled by the Republicans come January “will defend itself and our citizens from these lawless actions,” said Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions.

Aguilar and others are concerned that conservative firebrands will go further in their rhetoric, perhaps by calling for Obama’s impeachment or for mass deportations — creating a political sweet spot for Democrats not long after the Republican triumph at the polls and exposing a rift inside the party just as it assumes control of both chambers.

Well, I’m concerned that my neighborhood will be flooded with disease riddled peasants form the third world. That’s a concern Alfonso Aguilar does not have as he lives in a bunker community that is whiter than Reykjavik. If Alfonso Aguilar gets his feelings hurt because patriots say mean things about the open borders fanatics I can live with that. I can’t live in Tijuana Norte.

The trouble with the trip to Utopia is when you get there, not everyone agrees it is, in fact, the paradise everyone imagined. Since perfect social harmony is the hallmark of Utopia, those still grousing about the lack of perfection begin to look suspiciously at those saying they have reached Eden. Similarly, the people ready to settle into the garden look at the complainers as the final burr under the saddle of humanity. Both sides conclude that the only way forward is to get rid of the other side. Regardless of outcome, this cycle continues with all utopian groups until there’s no one left. Utopia, it turns out, is standing alone on the hilltop drenched in the blood of your former comrades.

The Cult of Modern Liberalism is suffering from the same trouble. What has kept the whole thing together is a hatred of the Trads, tradition Americans. They began with blacks and plutocrats. Then they started adding all sorts of weirdos and misfits into the coalition. The trouble with that is blacks are not all that fond of Jews and Homos. The Homos are not fond of one another. The feminists hate the Asians and the Homos. The weird thing about the Liberal coalition is they have only one thing in common, spiritually, emotionally and practically. That’s a distrust of Trads, particularly the pale penis people of the middle-class.

Obama reaching the White House was supposed to be the promised land. The trouble is few of his followers agreed it was the promised land. Six years later they are starting to take aim at one another.

Rose McGowan has declared an “indictment” of the gay community, claiming that homosexual men are “more misogynistic” than their straight counterparts and dismissing those who boycotted the Brunei-owned Dorchester Hotel collection as “delusional idiots”.

The American actress, who claims to have lived a life “heavily entrenched” in LGBT, was discussing the protest against the hotel chain with gay author Brett Easton Ellis in his weekly podcast when she made the comments.

The Dorchester Collection, which is owned by the Sultan of Brunei, has been the subject of boycotts since the controversial change to the penal code was scheduled to come into effect on 22 April 2014 that made homosexuality punishable by stoning to death.

Stephen Fry was among the first celebrities to attach themselves to the campaign.

The American Psycho author opened the conversation by calling the Dorchester Collection boycott a “form of narcissistic, self-victimisation, gay insanity” based on “illusionary and tenuous” reports about the Sharia law that ultimately led to the harming of “the people who simply work at the hotel”.

The actress, who herself held a defiant anti-boycott party at the Beverly Hills Hotel over the summer, agreed, then condemned the campaigners for failing to fight against the human rights abuses on behalf of women in Arab states, too.

“Gay men are as misogynistic as straight men, if not more so,” she said. “I have an indictment of the gay community right now, I’m actually really upset with them.”

What we are seeing now is the various groups packed into the positive rights pyramid looking around wondering if this is all there is and concluding that the real problem is the other misfits in the coalition. Ms. McGowan has decided she would rather spend her time with the pale penis people than her fellow benighted. Blacks and Asians seem to be coming to the same conclusion. Lunatic on lunatic violence is sure to follow.

The first takeaway for me is the toughness of Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin. For the Cult, having an extreme right-wing extremist in the governor’s mansion is a click worse for them than a Jewish lesbian as mayor of Mecca would be for Muslims. Wisconsin is the spiritual home of the Cult. For instance, as soon as Obama became the leader of the Cult, his first act was to go to Madison and give a speech to the faithful. Walker’s success is a sin against nature in the minds of the faithful. That’s why they threw everything in the bucket at the guy.

The lesson to be drawn from Walker’s success is two-fold. One is that no state is majority Liberal. Liberal states have a lot of fanatics, but they are not a majority. They are just better organized and perhaps more fanatical. The majority in any state will be sensible people. Walker’s appeal is based on responsible and prudent government. That’s why he has succeeded in a place thought terminally hostile to common sense.

The second part of this is that Walker never just made the green-eyeshade argument. He connected his policies with people’s sense of decency and fairness. Public sector unions are expensive and unnecessary. People can live with that if the product is good. Walker made the connection between bad product and the unions. You can sell better and you can sell cheaper. Better and cheaper sells itself. That’s why a mundane guy like Walker can withstand the best the Cult can throw at a man and still win.

Another takeaway is at the other end of the scale. Scott Brown managed to lose to a wretched old bag in a state generally amenable to moderate Republicans. He suffered from one unfixable problem and that is the fact he just moved to the state last week. New Hampshire is a funny state. A lot of voters there would have a tough time voting for a Masshole, regardless of his opponent. Granite Staters are an ornery bunch. There was simply no way Brown could explain away the fact he moved to New Hampshire just to run for Senate.

His bigger problem was self-inflicted. Brown had nothing to sell. Conservative Inc is always prattling on about electability, but one part of electability is having a reason to run. The Karl Rove approach of never uttering a discouraging word or taking a difficult stand, results in bowls full of mush like Brown. Brown should have picked a couple if issues and pounded those relentlessly. The voters who saw him as a carpetbagger would at least have had second thoughts about voting against the Masshole. Instead Brown played it safe and is now looking for work.

The other thing I find interesting is what went on in Maryland. In fifty years the state has had a Republican in the governor’s mansion for six years. The Democrat running this time is the Lt. Governor and backed by the full party and had Obama in to stump for him. He’s also black, running in a state that is the fourth blackest in the nation. His opponent was a guy no one knew until yesterday. Larry Hogan is still an unknown to most voters. His victory is due entirely to the fact he is not black and he is not a Liberal Democrat.

The other unique thing about Maryland is it has a large black middle-class that is suburban. The collapse of Baltimore and Washington first led to white flight and then to black flight. Those black people living in the burbs enjoying middle-class life are finding it hard to keep it real when it means tax hikes and a tough economy. All around the country black turnout was down. More frightening if you are a Liberal Democrat is 10% of those who did vote voted Republican. In Maryland, the share was most certainly higher.

Finally, and this is for the optimists, this may signal the end of the Left as we know it. In the 60’s and 70’s, Liberalism ate itself. In 1980 Reagan ran against Liberalism. He turned it into an epithet. The Cult did not fold up; they simply hid out in the Democratic Party, which still had loads of normals and even a fair chunk of conservatives. Mass media was dominated by Liberals willing to run interference for their coreligionists in office. Liberal pols could talk one way at home, but be pure moonbat in DC and no one was the wiser.

That’s not what we see today. For the first time in our history we have a purely ideological party. If you run as a Democrat, you are a Liberal. There’s no party to give the Cult cover because the party is the Cult and the Cult is the party. If the people are turning on Liberals, it will bring down the Democratic Party, unless they shed the Cult, which is unlikely. Maps like this one and the fact that the Democrats control very few state houses now, suggest the Democrats are about to become a fringe party, based in a few coastal cities.

Back in the 70’s, the argument for supporting Nixon was that he could win. He was a train wreck morally and his domestic policy ideas were no different from the Liberals. Unlike the doves on the Left, he was a hard headed realist when it came to foreign policy, particularly with the Soviets. In the 40’s and 50’s, Nixon was a staunch red hunter so no one could question his commitment to fighting the commies. The fact that Goldwater was crushed in ’64 gave the conciliatory wing of the Republican Party to argue that Nixon was the best shot at winning anything nationally.

Amazingly, the same arguments were used to defend Ford against the Reagan challenge in 1976. Mild, stable Jerry Ford was what the country needed, not the rash Goldwater conservative. Much like we have seen recently, the party elders stepped in to put their guys on the ticket instead of the Reagan revolutionaries lurking in the grassroots. Ford lost to Carter and the nation dipped further into the dark funk known as the 70’s.

The point of this miserable walk down memory lane is that the old line about electability is not new. The party brass protecting their guys from the voters is nothing new either. This has been a dilemma facing sensible voters since the Great Depression. The guys they want to support are thwarted by the party and they are left with two options that they don’t like. The argument is you have to support the least odious choice or the most odious choice will win and you don’t want that, do you? Sounds familiar right now, I’m sure.

The old Buckley line was that you should vote for the most rightward leaning candidate that can win in the primary and then vote for the most rightward leaning candidate in the general. That sounds good and you hear a lot of sensible people saying it in this election cycle. “Candidate X may be an open borders fanatic but they are better than the Liberal Democrat! If you are holding out for the perfectly pure candidate, the bad guys will win!” I’ve had this said to me a few times of late when I point out that most of the Republican offerings are just slightly less liberal than their opponent.

This has been the pattern for my entire life. The Liberal Democrats march further into lunacy while the Republicans trudge along behind them, like the retarded little brother tagging along behind his older brother. Ted Cruz, for example, is now considered a way out on the fringe conservative. Liberal tourettes includes the uncontrolled shouting of “Ted Cruz” along with “Koch Brothers” and “Tea Party.” Yet, in the 1980’s, Ted Cruz would have been a moderate Democrat. That’s how far things have gone in three decades.

If you look at Federal spending in 1968 (circling back to Nixon), adjust for inflation and population to arrive at a spending per capita number in today’s dollars, the leviathan was between a quarter and a third the size it is today.

In the Nixon era, the EPA was created along with OSHA. Outside of the IRS, no federal department has done more damage to the freedom of Americans than the EPA. OSHA is a close second. Of course, the money printing robbed millions of their savings. Watergate looks mild by comparison, but it was the cherry on top of the compromise sundae foisted on us.

The point of all this is that the preferred strategy of the Republican Party and Conservative Inc. has resulted in a steady destruction of self government in favor a corporatist, custodial state. The success of these guys tonight promises to keep that line on the graph heading north until it runs off the page. Our elections have become a perverse game where heads you lose-tails they win.

As I write this the chattering loons on MSNBC are fighting over who gets to hang themselves from the light boom. I’m not going to lie and say I’m not enjoying the site of the heavily sedated lesbian trying to keep it together. Still, I’m not inclined to think this election will make any difference. The long slow walk to the cliff will go on unabated. I will probably live long enough to see Republicans glowingly quoting Obama as a model for their brand of sensible conservatism.