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¡Viva los Republicanos!

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One of my hobbies is studying human belief. People, singularly and in groups, especially groups, will come to believe something to be true, no matter the facts. Their belief reaches a point where all dis-confirmation triggers a redoubling of their dedication to the cause. So much so it begins to look like madness.

So it is with the people running the Republican Party and their belief in winning the Hispanic vote. The math has been worked out for a long time now, but they persist in the belief that the party of gringos will be the party of the mestizos. It’s not just the party leaders, many of the rank and file buy it too. It’s what’s driving the Marco Rubio campaign.

Anyway, here’s a good example of it from Fox News Latino!

Congressman Mike Coffman has been studying Spanish for less than two years, but he launches into it with the seeming comfort and ability of a veteran speaker.

The Colorado Republican, who won re-election in 2014 in what was considered the most competitive House race in the country, drew some skepticism when he began taking Spanish and going to Latino neighborhoods and adopting a more moderate view of issues such as comprehensive immigration reform.

You see? He followed the Jeb Bush model and turned himself into El Jefe!

His district’s boundaries were redrawn in 2011, after the Census came out a year earlier, and suddenly the predominantly white, Republican area was ethnically diverse – including 20 percent Latino – and was winnable by a Democrat.

That made last year’s mid-term election, as Politico put it, “a proxy war for the national Democratic and Republican parties” in the battle for the growing Latino electorate.

Coffman, 60, does not deny that the need to reach out to Latinos, a community he concedes that he knew very little about, was non-negotiable if he was to remain in Congress.

But what began as a survival tactic, Coffman said, developed into a genuine interest and respect for Latinos and the Spanish language.

Just like Jeb Bush! What a coincidence!

I wrote about this last year. The facts tell a vastly different story. Sure, learning Spanish and soliciting votes from Latinos helped. The fact is he won because his opponent turned out to be a nut, the Latino and black votes were much lower than in previous elections and he did better amongst white voters. The telling fact is no one ever mentions his share of the Latino vote. The reason is he did no better than Republicans ever do with Hispanics.

To quote myself, the RINO fantasy is a world where pasty-faced blancos rule over a land of socially conservative brown people who enjoy authoritarian rule. The fact that California turned into la dictadura perfecta, to borrow Mario Vargas Llosa‘ description of the Mexican ruling party, never comes up. Maybe in addition to learning Spanish, the Jeb Bush GOP has some other transformation in mind.

The Struggles of Conservative Inc.

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The war on Christian pizza makers has the professional Right sorely vexed. I think most of their outrage is legitimate. They truly are offended by this latest assault on normal Americans. The fund raising by the pizza joint in Indiana suggests normal Americans are growing weary of the lunatics and their causes. Still, I think a part of what vexes the professional Right is their fear of stating the obvious conclusion.

That conclusion is you cannot have freedom of any sort without freedom of association. If you must get permission from the state to associate or disassociate from others, you have no freedom. The state may allow you some options, but everything you do must come with a permission slip. Otherwise, putting two people who hate one another in the same room ends up with blood on the walls.

Here’s a recent screed from National Review struggling to avoid stating the obvious.

Policies come to us with principles attached to them, and when debating public policy we should consider the principles not only of legislation that has passed but also of legislation that has been rejected. No one to my knowledge is discussing where the principles implied in the Left’s rejection of the RFRA lead. Responsible statecraft entails an examination of a principle’s logical conclusion. In the case of liberalism, the conclusions to which its principles lead help us see just how deeply opposed those principles are to the constitutional order we’ve inherited.

When the Left rejects the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it invites compelled speech. When photographers are forced under threat of fines to shoot weddings or religious services that they believe are immoral, the assumption is that we are sometimes legally bound to participate in certain kinds of speech, and the state becomes the arbiter of what that speech is in specific instances.

Well, no. Forcing someone to work for someone else is not forcing them speak. It is forcing them to participate. Put another way, it is compulsory association. The state is saying to the photographer, “We really don’t care about your opinions of these people. You must do what we say, act as we say or else.”

Of course, the reason Andrew Walker of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the guy who wrote the piece in question, must fetishize speech is he cannot mention association. To do so, to draw the obvious conclusion from the events in Indiana and elsewhere, would risk his job and career. Rand Paul almost saw his career come to end in 2012 because he dared utter this conclusion.

The reason, ostensibly, is that letting stores refuse service to homos would lead to stores not serving blacks. That has things exactly backwards. Separate public accommodations in the South were falling apart on their own. Basic economics makes such practices self-limiting and self-destructive. The reason Progressives pushed through laws against private discrimination was to eliminate private association.

It’s rather amazing how easily Americans were willing to surrender their liberty, but there it is. Now, there’s no reason to think things like Christianity, private clubs, fraternities, etc will hold up much longer. After all, if you cannot deny admissions based on your own peculiar criteria, why have an organization at all?

The thing I think is vexing to the professional Right is the mounting proof that they were wrong about the Left. They were convinced that the “other side” (as if there are only two sides) was acting in good faith, but just need convincing. Recent events show that to be nonsense, but Conservative Inc. can’t bring itself to admit it.

Which leads to my final point. When the Left rejects the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it invites the imposition of state-enforced morality. The Left requires obedience and punishes dissent. It insists that all citizens must, against their will, act only in a manner that liberalism judges to be accommodating and politic. Anyone acquainted with progressive thought knows that it is founded on unexamined assumptions, but seldom until now have we seen its unhinged hostility unmasked, as the Left reacts to our defense of a cherished freedom written into our Constitution.

There’s no evidence from Progressives that they see any of this as a flaw or even unintentional. Yes, they fully expect to impose their morality – at gunpoint if necessary – on the rest of us. That’s how political cults operate. Hell, it’s how Christianity operated for over 1,000 years. But, admitting this is the case would point out that Conservative Inc has been wrong for thirty years now.

Non-payment of BBC License

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Here’s the difference between America and Europe. In the States, a TV tax would never fly. Instead, the government taxes the TV makers, the cable guys, the content providers, etc. Then they force the providers into including channels no one would ever watch like PBS or CNN. All of this shows up in the monthly bill. We like our taxes hidden so we can pretend to be free.

In Europe, they prefer their authoritarianism straight. In the UK, the man taxes you for TV service, regardless of your type of service. That tax goes to fund government agit-prop pumped out by the BBC. If you don’t pay the tax, they throw you in prison. That’s right. They don’t cut off the service. They throw you in jail. Over 10% of criminal cases are for failure to pay the TV tax.

The BBC is responsible for more than one in 10 criminal prosecutions. Culture Secretary Sajid Javid reports that 10% of magistrate court cases are for non-payment of the BBC licence fee. Non-payment is a criminal offence, punishable by a fine of up to £1,000. Every week about 3,000 people are fined for non-payment, and about one person a week is jailed for non-payment of the fine.

Women make up about 70% of those prosecuted and convicted, and half of those jailed for not paying the fine. When people fail to pay other utilities, such as energy companies, they are guilty of a civil offence, not a criminal one, and they cannot be prosecuted and fined for falling behind with their payments. Civil action can be taken for recovery, but without fines and jail terms.

Several newspapers have had reporters visit magistrate’s court to describe what goes on. They all tell harrowing stories of frightened, distressed people, mostly women, facing fines they cannot pay under threat of imprisonment if they do not. Many are single mothers, many on benefits. They have not paid the licence fee because they cannot afford to. The sum of £145.50 per year is huge for a young mother struggling to feed and clothe children. Many weep in court, unable to pay the fine for the same reason they couldn’t afford the licence fee; they don’t have the money.

Everyone with a TV, except the over 75s, has to pay, whether or not they watch BBC programmes. If people fail to pay for other services, such as a Sky subscription, for example, the service is withdrawn without them being taken to court and fined.

The reason for this, of course, is to make sure every citizen is getting their instructions. The BBC is about crowd control. TV serves the same purpose in the US, it’s just funded indirectly. Still, I can cut the cord and not pay anything. As an American, I will not be thrown in jail for not watching the agit-prop beamed over TV.

America! Yeah! We’re number one!

The Great Realignment

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It’s been obvious for a long time now that the American political elite is undergoing a transformation. In the post-war period, the threat of global thermonuclear war froze things in place for a generation or more. One party was the coalition of novus civis, the newly minted members of American society. They were led, of course, by patricians like Roosevelt, but the foot soldiers were the ethnics who had arrived in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The other party was for the patricians. These were the core Americans who were white, Protestant and identified with the old Anglo-Saxon order. This party was, of course, led by patricians, like Rockefeller. Bush and Lodge. Their foot soldiers were the middle-class burghers who dominated the merchant classes.

The sixties saw that come apart as the ethnics became prosperous enough to join the middle-class. Once the ethnics could afford a house in the burbs and send their kids to college, they started to re-think their membership in the Democrat party. Once it was clear that the Progressive wing of that party was ready to start shooting the ethnics, it was not a long walk to the GOP, which is what happened in the 1970’s. The Archies were chased off by the Meatheads.

That’s where things would have stood if not for the end of the Cold War. Fear of a nuclear holocaust forced both parties to police their worst elements. A general agreement in the political class was that dangerous or reckless men must never be in the White House. Kennedy took two in the hat before he could blow up the world and that was as close as anyone was willing to get. The presidents from Kennedy forward may not have been great, but they were not loose cannons or reckless men unwilling to abide by the rules.

That changed when the wall came down. Bill Clinton was and is a vulgar degenerate and quite possibly a sociopath. He was nominated and elected because everyone felt it was safe to indulge in our worst instincts. Similarly, George W Bush was just spite for knocking off his old man eight years prior. Obama was the end of a long Progressive cuckold fantasy about the solution to race problems in America.

This coincides with the changing roles of the parties. The Democrats are now a purely ideological party. They seemed to be wholly disconnected from the normal operations of a political party in a liberal democracy. Obama pushes forward with polices that are not only unpopular, but positively dangerous to the country. For instance, the Middle East is on the brink of a regional war entirely due to his polices, that do nothing to advance American interests.

Coalition parties are the natural home for the religious. That’s why the American model has worked. You could be a Christian and a Democrat or a Jew and Republican. Allegiance to a party was about policy preferences, not group membership. Ideological parties require complete fidelity to the ideology. You can’t be a Progressive, for example, and oppose abortion or sodomy. That’s why Christians have been purged from the Democrat Party over the last two decades.

Jews are about to face the same dilemma, but from a slightly different angle. First there is the issue of Israel. Obama and the Progressives are about to give them the South Africa treatment. You can be sure that the word “apartheid” will be bouncing around the fever swamps and into the liberal press. The Jews are about to be declared the black hats and Netanyahu will be Die Groot Krokodil.

The other issue is the fact they are white, at least from the perspective of the coalition of the dispossessed. The Progressive cult awards piety points based on one’s distance from the evil white man. The typical Jewish male looks like a garden variety white guy to everyone else in the cult. More important, they are closer than the Muslims so the choice is easy, as far as Progressives are concerned.

Its why, ultimately, ideological parties are bad for Jews. There’s simply no getting around the ethnic loyalty problem presented by Jews in an ideological movement. One can stop being a Catholic, a Christian or a Shriner. You’re born a Jew. It’s the only religion that is also an ethnic group. For ideologues, Jews can never be trusted because they can never fully break from being Jewish. As the old Bolshevik saying goes, a man cannot chase two rabbits.

It is tempting to think that the Jews will just follow Archie Bunker over to the GOP. Maybe that will happen. I know a lot of Jews who are repulsed by what they see from the Left. But that assumes the GOP itself is not changing in response to what’s going on with its dance partner. The evidence suggests the GOP is, at the minimum, been destabilized, even as it is the majority party now.

The American system has always worked on the basis of two parties representing competing coalitions. Those coalitions agreed on the big stuff. They disagreed on the small stuff and how best to administer all of it. For the first time we now have a party that explicitly disagrees on the big stuff. In fact, one party appears to be defining itself as explicitly un-American.

The struggles you see with the GOP trying to formulate a response to the behavior of the Democrats is what you would expect from people trying the old tactics only to see them fall flat. The software of the GOP is built for a different age to face a different opponent. That means the GOP will have to change to match the Democrats, but into what?

History does not provide reasons to optimistic.

The Math of Amnesty

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The last amnesty was thirty years ago and has been shoved down the memory hole. You never hear pols talk about it. The press never asks about it, largely due to the fact they are too stupid to understand it. That and the lessons of the last amnesty reflect poorly on the current push to pass another one. Everything about American public life operates like a marketing campaign so the facts are flexible.

The most important lesson from that last amnesty is that the numbers presented by the government will be wildly underestimated. When it was passed, the pols said the high number for amnesty was a million. It turned out to be 3.2 million. This was not due to deception. It was ignorance. The people writing these bills rely on lobbyists who lie on spec. Just listen to the current presidential candidates talk and it is clear they don’t know the first thing about the topic.

There’s also the bias against frank talk. The political class is convinced they must lie to the public in order to avoid getting in trouble. It is not without merit. No one likes the bearer of bad news so if you’re in the vote getting business it is a good idea to avoid delivering bad news. Mass communications and modern behavior science techniques have us swimming in a sea of deception now, but that’s a topic for another day.

The point is we have a complicated subject that is not a lot of fun for the sensitive types who dominate our public debates. Add in the bias to paint a smiley face on everything and the only things we hear from our rulers are based on the best case scenario. Bearing that in mind take a look at some of the numbers in this Pew study.

In a reflection of changes in the overall economy since the Great Recession, the U.S. unauthorized immigrant workforce now holds fewer blue-collar jobs and more white-collar ones than it did before the 2007-2009 recession, but a solid majority still works in low-skilled service, construction and production occupations, according to new Pew Research Center estimates.

The size of the unauthorized immigrant labor force did not change from 2007 to 2012, but its makeup shifted slightly. The number of unauthorized immigrants in management or professional related jobs grew by 180,000, while the number in construction or production jobs fell by about 475,000, mirroring rises and declines in the overall U.S. economy. The share of all unauthorized immigrant workers with management and professional jobs grew to 13% in 2012 from 10% in 2007, and the share with construction or production jobs declined to 29% from 34%.

Despite these shifts, unauthorized immigrant workers remain concentrated in lower-skill jobs, much more so than U.S.-born workers, according to the new estimates, which are based on government data. In 2012, 62% held service, construction and production jobs, twice the share of U.S.-born workers who did. The 13% share with management or professional jobs is less than half of the 36% of U.S.-born workers in those occupations.

Unauthorized immigrants made up 5.1% of the nation’s labor force in 2012, numbering 8.1 million who were working or looking for work, according to previously published Pew Research estimates (Passel and Cohn, 2014). But as this new analysis shows, they account for a far higher share of the total workforce in specific jobs, notably farming (26%), cleaning and maintenance (17%), and construction (14%).

Now, there’s no way of knowing the exact number of illegal aliens. Pew is estimating the numbers from Census figures. It’s not perfect, but it gives us a clue as to how many people will be seeking amnesty. If we assume that at least some of these people are married and some of those have children, the 8.1 million figure is the absolute low end. The final number will be higher, but how high?

The easy thing to do is look at the last amnesty. If they were off by a factor of three the last time, we’re looking at close to 25 million this time. The last time they based the one million figure on total illegal population, not just those working. That means the 25 million could very well be a low estimate as well.

Then we have the fact that amnesty will invite swarms of new immigrants. This is exactly what happened in the 80’s. The hint of it last summer resulted in the Children’s Crusade that saw thousands of kids brought over the border by slavers. Immigrants know the rules better than the government officials so they will not pass up a shot to bypass all the rules and get that precious green card and the welfare benefits that go with it.

Then there is fraud. The current system is designed to fail. If you try to work the system honestly, you will wait in line for a decade to get in the country. The vast complexity invites fraud from both sides. The immigrants want to game the system rather than wait in line. The hacks in the bureaucracy just want to push paper around without breaking a sweat. The result is lots of fraud.

My own sense is Bush will collude with Boehner and McConnell to pass an amnesty of some sort. They will have to couch it in different terms and tart it up with phony-baloney enforcement language. The result will be the same. We will see 30-40 million foreigners handed citizenship papers by the end of the decade.

You better get working on your Spanish, esé.

Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, Chupacabra…

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…and the famous backlash coming your way. For as long as I have been alive, the Left has been wringing their hands, on your behalf, over the coming backlash over your unwillingness to fall in-line. You heretics keep making demands and supporting extreme right-wing extremists of the most extreme kind and one day, the backlash is going to get you!

Sen. Ted Cruz announced a bid for the White House on Monday, drawing praise from grass-roots conservatives but a fierce backlash from Hispanic groups that said they were appalled at the prospect of the first Hispanic to announce for president this cycle being such a firm champion of a crackdown on illegal immigrants.

The freshman lawmaker, whose father was Cuban, has been one of the most vocal opponents of President Obama’s immigration policy. He voted against a legalization bill in 2013 and helped lead opposition to the administration’s deportation amnesty over the past six months.

Announcing his candidacy at Liberty University, Mr. Cruz sounded familiar conservative themes and said he believes “God isn’t done with America yet.”

“I believe in you. I believe in the power of millions of courageous conservatives rising up to reignite the promise in America,” he said.

Mr. Cruz is the first elected Hispanic Republican in history to seek the White House, but Hispanic groups found little to celebrate in the groundbreaking moment.

“We reject Ted Cruz, which is sad, because while he is the first Latino to declare his candidacy, he may be the most anti-immigration candidate on stage during the debates,” Cesar Vargas and Erika Andiola, co-directors of the Dream Action Coalition, said in a joint statement. “While Ted Cruz has a Latino name and immigration in his past, that’s where the similarities between him and the Latino community end.”

At least they did not call him a coconut – yet. You know that’s coming. When Michael Steele ran in Maryland as a Republican, local black activist threw Oreo cookies at him. The local press applauded their efforts to expose a man who was not “authentically black.” They actually put it that way in one of the papers.

I love how these hacks are trying to define what is and what is not acceptable thought for Spanish speakers. The proof of their ignorance is right there. Anyone who has been around Latinos knows they hate it when people try and speak for them this way. They really hate it, almost as much as they hate being lumped in with blacks.

The fact is, most Hispanics agree with Cruz on immigration. Open borders and illegal immigration are bad for them. Talk to any legal immigrant and they will chew your ear off about the evils of amnesty and illegal immigration. In this regard, John Derbyshire is well within the mainstream.

I’m not a fan of Cruz for President. I think he makes a fine senator. I think he is right about a lot of things. His opinion on legal immigration is completely nuts, but maybe he is persuadable on that issue. We’ll see. The fact that a vociferous anti-amnesty candidate is going to be on the stage offers some hope.

Dave Brat was running on a number of issues, but what stuck was immigration. He rode that to a huge upset of Eric Cantor. If Cruz starts to get traction with immigration, events, as they say, can take over and we could see the other candidates jumping on the issue. It’s how issue shifts from fringe to acceptable.

Corinthian 15

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Shay’s Rebellion, The Whiskey Rebellion, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, The Know-Nothing Riot of 1856, The Boston Police Strike, Bonus Army March, Zoot Suit Riots, The Watts Riots. There’s a long tradition of men (and women!) taking matters into their own hands and striking out at the state or society over grievances.

Now, we have the Corinthian 15.

Mallory Heiney, a 21-year-old former student of the now-defunct Everest College, is part of a group of students refusing to pay back their student loans.

Heiney wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post in which she described the lies Everest allegedly told her as well as the insufficient education she says she received.

Heiney called Everest a “debt trap.” When she explained to her adviser that she couldn’t afford student-loan payments while in school, she was assured she could defer the payments on her $24,000 in student loans until post-graduation, according to her article.

That ended up being untrue, she said. Heiney said she was on the hook to start paying interest payments on her loans two months into her program.

The program also allegedly failed to provide her with a quality education. She said her teachers did little more than read aloud from textbooks, and she was unaware of basic concepts required to pass her nursing licensing exam. She said she was able to pass only by “spending hours researching the test questions online and watching YouTube videos.”

Heiney and 15 other students who attended the Corinthian College system have banded together to fight what they describe as predatory student-loan tactics by the financial aid offices and a failure to provide quality education.

The members of the group, referred to as the Corinthian 15, feel justified in their refusal to pay back their loans. They believe they are fighting for students everywhere who are manipulated by unfair university practices and are riddled with student loan debt as a result.

“In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus,” Heiney wrote in her article. “This soon led to the revolutionary Montgomery bus boycott. If those who came before us can take a stand in the face of persecution, harassment, beatings, imprisonment and even death, I will certainly stand in the face of wage garnishment and a tarnished credit report.”

Ah yes, Rosa Parks. That’s who comes to mind whenever I think of former students not paying their school debts. At least she did not compare herself to Jesus. I guess that’s something to celebrate.

Other former students are joining in, at least publicly, so maybe it is a thing. Then again, default rates are through the roof, over 15% according to various sources. It seems to be a tough figure to pin down because of the blend of private and federal lending. This report is the best I could find in five minutes of searching. Banks look to keep default rates below 2% as a rule. Anything higher is considered a problem.

Howling lunatic Elizabeth Warren is back again with another scheme to hand tax payer money to students who are in debt. That’s really not quite right as her scheme is about transferring tax payer money to her pals in the academy. No one ever seems to ask why college has become so wildly expensive. It’s just assumed to be an unalloyed good. No price is too high for the laying on of hands at the academy.

The sad reality of American higher education is that it has become a workfare program for the lesser lights of the managerial elite. If you have something on the ball you head off to the law of finance. If you are not terribly bright you end up in the economics department at local college. Most of what goes on at our colleges has nothing to do with training young people for productive work. That’s why tuition rates have skyrocketed.

But, that’s a subject we’re not permitted to discuss.

Now, whatever sympathy I may have for young people and their families facing modern college costs, I’m having a tough time mustering empathy for Ms. Heiney. The outsized sense of self-importance displayed by this young woman, the ring leader of this micro-protest, is a bit much. She is an adult and she foolishly entered into a bad contract. That’s not the fault of the taxpayers or the people who lent her the money.

That’s the trouble with the moaning about college debt. The people doing the moaning seem to be in a perpetual state of adolescence. Generation Onesie, raised by helicopter parents, expects the rest of us to pick up after them, tend to their boo-boos and organize our lives around them. The vibe that comes through in these stories about school debt is an overweening sense of entitlement.

Ironically, the institution inculcating this solipsism in the young is the source of their troubles, the colleges and universities. Go onto a modern college campus and it is a weird Potemkin village that operates nothing like the world around it. I always get the same feel as I get when I’m at a resort. It’s West World for young adults.

Elite universities are the worst. Just look at the graduation rates of these places and it is clear that failure is not an option. No one ever bothers to notice that schools allegedly offering the most challenging and rigorous education, have a near zero attrition rate. BUD/S training prides itself on its 65% failure rate. Ranger school is similar. Duke, in contrast, takes pride in its 99% graduation rate.

Ms. Heiney, who no one would mistake for an Ivy League graduate, nevertheless assumed that all that was required of her was to sign some forms, show up as requested, repeat what was was told to her and the world would be her oyster. This is the thread that runs through all of the complaints about school debt. No one takes responsibility for anything. Instead, strangers are expected to pick up the bill for the mistakes of these people.

One of the best lines Penn Jillette ever uttered was that government makes weasels of us all. You see it with college. The massive government loan system has turned the colleges into dependency rackets. Everyone involved is looking to separate the suckers from their money. The process produces waves of young adults expecting a good life at the expense of others.

The simplest and quickest way to end the problem is to end the government role in financing college. In short order, colleges will get cheap again, so that young people from modest backgrounds can work their way through school. Of course, we’ll need to find something for the Womyn’s Studies gals to do, which is why this will never happen. The ruling class needs a place to dump its misfits and that’s the college campus.

A Gore For All Seasons

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In an unreasonable age, when crazy people seem to be a feature of the dominant culture, who better to lead the Empire than a man suffering from mental illness? As a practical matter, it is a bad idea to put crazy people in charge, but given what’s happening it would be poetic to put a madman in charge. We often hold up guys like Caligula and Commodus as examples of what happens when the ruling class falls into chaos. America is now run by ululating fanatics so putting Al Gore on the throne makes sense.

Democrats need a debate about where their party goes next. Obamacare’s passage marked the rough completion of the social safety net that liberals began constructing during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. The end of the Iraq War drained Democrats of their foreign policy fervor. The rapid acceptance of gay marriage has robbed them of the next civil rights fight. There is work left to be done in all these arenas, but over time, the party will need to discover new dreams, much as Republicans have found the Ryan budget.

I’m a bit torn on Ezra Klein. Serious people on the Left don’t seem to think much of him, but, but they don’t publicly trash him. I think of him a flaky millennial airhead, but I’m not his target audience. Even so, he does hit on something once in a while and this is a good example. Progressivism has been seriously short of practical ideas for a long time and now that they have exhausted health care, they are running on fumes.

They also need bogeymen. When this Progressive cycle started, they had Bush and the Iraq War to motivate them. Then it was the Tea Party and now it is white men. Hating the pale penis people is not without its merits, unless your a white man. Of course, Jewish males are finding out that they cannot play the victim card as they have been declared white.  So, the Tribe needs to  wind down the war on whitey and find a new villain.

The closest thing Democrats have to an organizing concern is income inequality. But their solutions are neither sufficient to the scale of the problem nor quickening to the pulse. Raising the marginal tax rate on dividend income is not the clay from which political movements are crafted.

To many Democrats, the fight the party needs is clear: Hillary Clinton vs. Elizabeth Warren. But the differences between Warren and Clinton are less profound than they appear. Warren goes a bit further than Clinton does, both in rhetoric and policy, but her agenda is smaller and more traditional than she makes it sound: tightening financial regulation, redistributing a little more, tying up some loose ends in the social safety net. Given the near-certainty of a Republican House, there is little reason to believe there would be much difference between a Warren presidency and a Clinton one.

The most ambitious vision for the Democratic Party right now rests with a politician most have forgotten, and whom no one is mentioning for 2016: Al Gore.

Gore offers a genuinely different view of what the Democratic Party — and, by extension, American politics — should be about.

Climate change is a real and growing threat to the world’s future. In 2009, nearly every country in the world agreed that global warming must be held to less than 2 degrees Celsius. We’re on pace to blow through that — warming the planet four degrees or more is horrifyingly plausible. No one really knows what that kind of temperature change — a swing that approaches the difference between most of human history and the Ice Age — would mean for humankind. The World Bank says there is “no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.”

Income inequality is a serious problem. But climate change is an existential threat.

The key to picking a bogeyman is making sure you can control him. That means making sure the bad guys does not look too much like you. that’s even easier if the bogeyman is supernatural or imaginary. Villains are not much use if you can actually beat them. Imagine if in Barman #1 the police rounded up all the goofy villains in one shot. What’s the point of having Batman around? A good bad guy is alien and impossible to ever defeat.

Climate change has the advantage of being as fickle and elusive as the weather, because it is the weather. No matter what happens, the Gaia worshipers can point to the heavens and swear Gaia is angry with us. If it is unusually cold, man is causing global cooling. if it is too hot, it is global warming. If it is normal, it is a temporary respite, because climate change is always lurking around the corner. There’s a crisis for all seasons.

The thing with Gore, peace be upon him, is that he has purged himself of all the deviationism he picked up in the Clinton years. He has submitted himself to the self-criticism sessions and has emerged like a butterfly, a pure man of the one true faith. The big thing here is Gore could shift the focus from the corrosive war on whites, which is dangerous to guys like Ezra, and refocus attention on something less like Ezra.

As ridiculous as it sounds, Gore has won a lot of elections and he grew up in politics. If not for his nervous breakdown, Gore probably would have won in 2000. But, Gore is a white guy and it is hard to imagine the SJW’s standing aside while Hymie the Robot attacks Hillary Clinton in the primary. Vagina trumps Gaia on the piety pyramid. That’s just another reason to hope it happens. Moonbat on moonbat violence is the best.

The Prophet Algore Resurfaces

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Way back in the 2000 election, I was pretty sure Algore was having a nervous breakdown. His bizarre behavior in the debates suggested he was losing his grip under the strain of the campaign. His Zelig act in the second debate was one of the more disturbing things I’ve seen in politics. We came very close to putting a madman in the White House. Well, a different sort of madman than usual.

His Old testament prophet act following the election confirmed it for me. He went off into the wilderness, grew a beard and gained fifty pounds. Then, he came back with the good word, as it were, on global warming. His whole act had the feel of a guy thinking he is on a mission from God.

As his crusade grew more craven and ridiculous, he has faded from public view. That and Chocolate Jesus in the White House made the Prophet Al a redundancy. But, with Obama heading to the dustbin, it looks like the prophet is back with the good word again.

Damsel in Distress Syndrome

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Steve Sailer has a post up about Hillary Clinton. I Posted something there which will be approved whenever Sailer decides to roll out of bed. The Unz site has a lot going for it, but the commenting system is a dumpster fire. Anyway, after posting it I thought about it some more and here are some things I should have added.

I never thought Hillary Clinton was all that interesting. In my work life, I’ve encountered her type many times. That’s the bitchy, middle-aged professional woman that is always pissed off because she cannot reconcile feminist orthodoxy with her reality. These are the broads who were marinated in feminism in college, but married well nonetheless.

They still have the feminist nonsense in their heads about how they can compete with the boys and take down the patrimony, but the reality is they just married well. Their husband makes a good living so they can live the life, but also “have a career.” In the case of Hillary Clinton, her career was being a screw up, who had a highly successful husband.

All the way back to Arkansas, Clinton seems to have been in over her head. The scandals with the shady land dealers are a prime example. Bill’s finger prints were never on those things. The same is true of the law firm shenanigans. The only thing anyone could ever pin on him were the bimbos and that’s nothing new in Southern politics.

As she enters the Bob Dole phase of her career, she is slightly more interesting. Instead of the bitchy middle-aged “professional” woman, she is a a boozy old gal that is a feature of the Washington cocktail circuit. These are the women who have been married to politicians their whole lives and have a cultured cynicism that comes from years of disappointment.

Like Bob Dole, she is probably a hoot after a few drinks, but you can always sense why no one in the political class thought enough of them to put them in charge of anything. They are the sort of people who never ask, “What if this doesn’t work?” As a consequence, they get jammed up on minor stuff.

This e-mail scandal is a classic Hillary bungle. The old rule in politics is “never write when you can speak, never speak when you can nod.” There’s nothing wrong with having a private e-mail account. It should have been two steps removed from the boss. Hillary should have dictated her correspondence and never e-mailed anyone in her official capacity, other than to send birthday wishes.

But, that’s been the story for three decades or more with this woman. As I mentioned on my Unz post, everyone forgets why Clinton lost in 2008 to Obama. Her and her people failed to account for the rule changes the DNC implemented for the 2008 primary. The Clinton team was operating under the old rules, prior to proportional allotment of delegates.

I’m going to play amateur psychiatrist here. I wonder if this serial bungling is a way to get attention from her husband. When I worked in DC, I saw this quite a bit. The wives of politicians are often just furniture. They stand next to hubby on stage and for photos, but otherwise hubby thinks about them as much as he thinks about the coffee maker.

There are more than a few drama queens in the political wife club. It’s how they get the attention of their husbands who spend all of their time with their staff. Hilliary’s scandals are the one thing she and Bill share together. Maybe there’s a damsel in distress syndrome going on here that drives these unforced errors.

I remain skeptical about her chances to be president. There’s a Bob Dole ’96 vibe here. The party does not have anyone ready that they trust and it is not looking like  good year to run anyway. May as well let the old broad have her day in the sun as the first female nominee. Otherwise, everyone will just go through the motions.