Category Archives: Politics

The End of the Left

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Steve Sailer argues that American politics is a battle of the fringe against the core with the Democrats as the party of the fringe. They have built a coalition of blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, single white women and weirdos. That’s their base of support. The math says they get to about 40% support with that collection of voters. The fact that Obama’s support has never dropped far below 40% supports the argument, at least the maths of the argument. Sailer’s latest stab at this is here.

This is not exactly new.  The first flowering of the Progressive faith was in the 19th century following the Civil War and Reconstruction. As the nation industrialized, Progressive ideas gained steam. Labor unions, temperance movements, efficiency movements and, of course, European socialism crept into the minds of those in charge, as well as those who wanted to be in charge. By the 20th century, we had guys like Teddy Roosevelt running around babbling about the “Square Deal” and sounding a lot like Elizabeth Warren.

The First Progressive Era “ended” with Woodrow Wilson and World War I. If you look at the coalition that supported the Progressives a century ago, you see the same fringe versus core dynamic. It was more explicitly populist because the country was mono-cultural. Blacks had few voting rights and women had limited voting rights. The fringe, therefore, was immigrants, Catholics and the newly emerging working class, versus the WASP core. Whipping up votes amongst the Irish in Boston was easier if you took aim at the Brahman in charge.

I put “ended” in quotes in the previous paragraph because it is simply false to say the Progressive Era ended with Wilson. The Return to Normalcy certainly put an end to Wilson’s reign of terror, but the ruling class was still firmly in the grip of the Progressive faith. Harding and Coolidge were restrained in their politics, but Hoover was a Progressive and FDR was obviously a true believer. The One True Faith never really dies. It just goes into hibernation after periods of activity and  dis-confirmation. The atrocities of the Wilson era made “Progressive” a dirty word, but the crisis of 1929 opened the door for a newly minted version of the old time religion.

The New Deal coalition was built on the Wilson coalition of fringe groups, but those fringes were quickly becoming the majority. In the northeast, Catholics were dominating city politics and beginning to control state politics. The New Deal was also a vehicle for Jews to rise to power in politics and finance. Henry Morgenthau made it to ambassador under Wilson, his son was Secretary of the Treasury under FDR. During the Depression, that was the second most important job in America. This iteration of the Progressive coalition was the most stable owing to the fact it was based on stable, sensible people. It’s why it hung together for so long.

Sailer, I suspect, is looking at current events and thinking back to events of his youth. Steve is 55, so he was a kid when the Civil Right movement exploded into riots in the late 60’s. He was a teenager when the LAPD raided a house in his neighborhood looking for Patty Hearst. By the time he was noticing events, the weirdos, lunatics and insane had taken over the New Left and taken over the news coverage. To a man his age, the Ferguson riots and the explosion of crazy in the culture probably looks like a replay of forty years ago.

That’s not unreasonable, but I’m not entirely on-board with it. The New Deal coalition largely collapsed as a result of a resurgence of liberalism in the 1960’s. If you read any of the books by David Horowitz, the thing that’s important is the New Left explicitly rejected the Old Left as well as the New Deal. They thought the old commies from the previous generation were hopelessly lost, with their focus on organizing whites into a universal proletarian state. Similarly, they looked at the New Deal as a bourgeois compromise with the capitalists. The New Left that emerged in the 60’s and 70’s was about identity and culture, not money and property.

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The Business of America

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Obama is normalizing relations with Cuba and Conservative Inc is pretending to be flipping out about it. The usual suspects on the Right are focusing on the fact Obama is an Socialist, sympathetic to unrepentant radicals like the Castro brothers. The line of attack is about Obama’s anti-American impulses, which are real, but not really what’s at work here. Many on the Right are anti-citizen, which makes them anti-American, by definition, so their yelping now is a bit hollow.

In reality, Obama is just doing the bidding of American business. The tourism rackets, gambling rackets and, of course, the bankers see big profits in Cuba. This news story from the spring lays out the case for normalizing relations so big business can cash in on Cuba. It is easy to forget that Cuba was a food exporter before Castro. They can also be a source of cheap labor for American business. Our rulers will also enjoy vacationing there as well.

This NYTimes story from 2010 reports on the machinations behind the long running drive to open up Cuba to American business. There are 11 million Cubans ready to buy Big Macs, Coke and whatever other crap we can sell them. How they will pay for it is a mystery, but presumably Cuba will quickly become a slightly better version of Puerto Rico. Cubans are better educated than Puerto Ricans so they should adapt quickly to American tourism.

Of course, the Democrats are reading the polls and seeing a shift in Cuban-American politics. Young Cubans don’t care about Castro. They care about getting on the victimization train. They look around at the free stuff other Hispanics are getting and they want in on the scam too. You can’t blame them for it. In a balkanized, post-national society, group rights count for everything. It will be a tribal spoils system so why not join the winning team?

I doubt Obama and the Democrats have thought it through on that end. This is just a money grab at this stage. 2016 is looking like a toss-up, with The Stupid Party probably nominating Jeb Bush. The Democrats don’t have to concede the election so giving the Chamber of Commerce a big fat gift will pay off down the road.

Stupid People With Money

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The IQ guys swear that high IQ strongly correlates to success. That’s tempting to believe until you start thinking about the fabulously successful people who were also incredibly stupid. Caligula is the guy who comes to mind whenever someone mentions intelligence and our political leaders. Caligula was clever at times, but no one would call him intelligent. He managed to screw up so much he was murdered after just four years as emperor. Granted, he was probably mad, but that just underscores the fact you can get pretty far without being terribly bright.

One of the most oddly successful salesman I ever met was very dumb. He sold auto accessories to retail stores and job shops. He worked hard, had a great personality and was willing to spend all day selling gaudy crap to people who had customers looking for gaudy crap. He was also a white guy willing to go into the ghetto. He made a lot of money because he had the right products and the right attitude. He had a big house and a Cadillac, along with an 95 IQ.

When I was a teenager, I talked my way into a graduate seminar on proto-Marxism taught by a guy who was jarringly brilliant. He spoke five languages, could write in seven. He had a masters in math as well as a PhD in history. I don’t think he had two nickels to rub together and I doubt he cared. He drove a car that looked like it would collapse in a heap at any minute. I’m not sure if he was the smartest person I’ve met, but he is a good example of how a high IQ does not necessarily mean a high status, big money or even success in a narrow field.

There’s that and then there is the fact that serendipity plays a determinative role at the extremes. Germanicus, the father of Caligula, was a smart and accomplished guy, but he was unlucky and just a click less smart than Tiberius, who had him killed. Caligula was outlandishly lucky to find himself in the role of emperor. Of course, his successor was probably the luckiest man who ever lived. Claudius was an able emperor, but his rise to power still fascinates classicists because of its improbability. His relatively long reign is just as improbable.

In modern times, we have seen some people hit the lottery and become billionaires, despite not being terribly bright. Mark Cuban is a good example. He is a hustler and a risk taker. He does not mind making a spectacle of himself in public. He also got outlandishly lucky when fools totting dot-com money bought his worthless company for billions. The Facebook boys were similarly lucky. The proof of that is MySpace is the same product, but never caught on like Facebook. Mark Zuckerburglar is not stupid, but he is not a billion time smarter than you.

That’s what we’re seeing here with the death of the New Republic. The venerable progressive journal founded by the Mussolini loving Herbert Croly was recently purchased by Facebook lotto winner Chris Hughes. That was two years ago and now he has decided to turn it in Gawker, because he likes saying the phrase “digital media property.” The staff resigned en masse this week, making a big show of it for each other.

The Communications Revolution, like the Industrial Revolution, has created a lot of very rich people. Some of those rich people are super-rich, like Chris Hughes. The cultural elite of every society lives off the generosity of the financial elite. They don’t always live well, but the arts can only exist with the ascent and support of the monied elites. One of the fun parts about Nero’s biography is what we learn about the status of entertainers. In Rome, they were the bottom of the social order, even though they were supported by the ruling elite.

The current cultural elites have always lived in a world where the rich are willing to write checks for the privilege of mingling with the intellectuals. Journals like The New Republic never made money, but they got rich patrons to bankroll them so the writers could have nice middle-class lives. National Review, for example, purged all of their conservative writers because their patrons demanded it. Guys like John Derbyshire and Bob Weissberg refuse to go along with the official dogma so they were sent to the fringe.

The new money appears to be different from the old financial backers. The robber barons from Silicon Valley are not interested in hanging out with smug progressive writers. They want to hang out with ball players and starlets. That means the New Republic has to become a gossip site based in New York or Los Angeles, not a journal of dogmatic political thought serving the homely people of Washington. Never mind that there are plenty of gossip sites and the value of the New Republic lies in its ties to the Washington power elite.

It will be interesting to see this unfolds. The Cult is not going to take kindly to having their friends unemployed because some rich Nazi wants a different toy. Robber barons like Chris Hughes have the money to put up a good fight, but the Cult has the power of the state. They also know how things work, which apparently Chris Hughes does not. If he was half as smart as he thinks, he would have used TNR as a way into DC’s power elite. Then again, the Golden Rule says the man with the gold makes the rules.

From WW1 through the 1970’s we did not see the creation of great fortunes. Great fortunes are made at the start of great economic revolutions. That left a long time for the relationships between the cultural, political and financial elites to settle in place. The Communications Revolution has created a whole new batch of great fortunes. The first batch, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, etc were happy to ape the style and manner of the established great fortunes. That meant buying their way into the cultural and political elites, without making any demands. The second batch of great fortunes is not looking to follow that path.

We now have a lot of stupid people with money buying up elite real estate, physical and mental. That will not be without consequence.

Bend Over

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Here it comes. The great Republican sellout of their voters is coming earlier than anyone expected.

Trying to avoid a showdown over immigration, House Republican leaders are moving to make a deal with Democrats to pass a spending bill that would keep the government running past next week.

The emerging strategy follows legislation passed Thursday by the House declaring President Barack Obama’s executive actions to curb deportations of immigrants in the U.S. illegally to be “null and void.” That legislation wasn’t enough for some conservatives, who complained that the only way to stop Obama’s actions on immigration would be to forbid them in legislation that must pass if the government is to stay open.

Republican leaders are opposed to that course of action, fearing a government shutdown that they don’t want, and they plan to rely on Democratic votes to pass a bill to keep the government going.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said Friday that Democrats were committed to keeping the government open, but she warned that Republicans could lose their support if they include too many contentious so-called policy riders in the spending bill, on issues like school lunch nutrition standards and water quality.

“We haven’t seen the bill. But there are some very destructive riders in it that would be unacceptable to us and, I think, unacceptable to the American people,” Pelosi said.

“The responsibility to keep government open is theirs. If the bill is anything that we can support, we will,” added Pelosi, who has more leverage in the negotiations because of Boehner’s likely need to rely on her to deliver Democratic votes.

The spending bill would pay for the operations of most government agencies for a year while extending the Homeland Security Department operations only for a few months. Homeland Security includes the immigration agencies that would carry out Obama’s executive actions, so the approach would allow Republicans to revisit them early next year, once they have control of the Senate and a bigger majority in the House.

“We think this is the most practical way to fight the president’s action,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said.

Several conservative lawmakers sounded resigned Thursday to being ignored by Boehner, who with a bigger majority next year will have more room to maneuver around balky tea party lawmakers.

My friends on the Right get cross with me when I say there’s little difference between the parties. They pound their shoe on the table shouting “There’s a world of difference between the parties!” The fact that no one can ever point to anything where the parties differ all that much is ignored. People want to believe.

Between now and the 2016 election, ObamaCare will become more entrenched and Obama will incrementally amnesty 20 million illegals. Occasionally we’ll hear shouts of protest from Weepy and Droopy, but they will do nothing about it. America faces the same problem the Brits are struggling with now. In America, there’s no party for the majority, just two parties trying to represent the elites. In Britain the void is being filled by UKIP. No such possibility exists in America so we’re doomed to state-party rule where the official parties are just the two faces of the ruling oligarchy.

Sending a Message

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By now everyone with a pulse and an Internet connection knows the Staten Island grand jury refused to indict a cop that may have choked a guy to death. It is unclear if that is what happened. The dead guy was a big fat slob with lots of health problems. It is not even clear the cop choked the guy. The video of it looks like the cops had an arm around his neck, but maybe not applying enough pressure to kill the guy. It’s impossible to know from the video. It looks like any other day to me. I’ve seen cops do that in my little slice of heaven dozens of times.

That does not mean the cops were right. There’s not enough here to think they committed a crime. Presumably the grand jury had medical testimony, witness testimony and legal testimony. Cops, unlike citizens, are permitted to use force to arrest someone, but there are rules they must follow and laws that govern their actions. The video is just one piece of the puzzle, but it is hard for me to say a crime was committed. I can’t even find a definite statement as to what killed the guy. There’s video of him on the ground in cuffs still alive so I’m guessing he was not strangled.

None of this matter much. The prosecutor took the evidence to a grand jury. They don’t do that asking for a no-bill. The old line about getting a  ham sandwich indicted is true, for the most part. Citizens put a lot of trust in the prosecutors. They also trust that the innocent will get a fair trial. That means there is a bias toward indicting the accused. When a grand jury fails to indict it usually means the case is laughably implausible. Of course, a prosecutor can take a terrible case to a grand jury for PR purposes like we saw in Ferguson, but that does not appear to be the case here. The city and the DA wanted this cop swinging from a light post.

The question is why the grand jury did not indict. My view of the video is not the same as the hysterics in the media. Reading the comments on some of these news stories suggests a non-trivial number of people watched that video and saw a combination of Bull Connor and Torquemada torturing a black man to death on the city street. Even assuming they are attention whores performing their public act of piety, the easy choice for the grand jury was to indict, but they chose the hard path.

My suspicion is we’re seeing the backlash to the race baiting the last few years. The Ferguson was so outlandish and offensive to decent people they are pushing back. Just as the silent majority rallied to Nixon, not because they loved Tricky Dick, but because they hated the forces of chaos unleashed by the Left, middle Americans are rallying against the latest push for chaos by the Left.

Today, the main political line of division in the United States is not between the regions of North and South (insofar as such regions can still be said to exist) but between elite and nonelite. As I have tried to make plain … for the last 15 years, the elite, based in Washington, New York, and a few large metropolises, allies with the underclass against Middle Americans, who pay the taxes, do the work, fight the wars, suffer the crime, and endure their own political and cultural dispossession at the hands of the elite and its underclass vanguard.
— Sam Francis

The men and women on that Staten Island grand jury live in the shadow of the elites. That’s where the firemen, cops, construction workers live. They are the people snotty New Yorkers call the “bridge and tunnel” crowd or prols by this guy. They are also the people called racists by the mayor for not wanting to deal with guys like Eric Garner every day. They are the folks who watch the rioting in Ferguson and wonder if that’s coming their way. Asked to choose between flawed cops and the kind of guys loitering in front of the bodega hassling the patrons,  they voted for the cops. They voted for order.

They sent a message.

Now That He Is No Longer Useful

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For a long time, Bill Cosby was the Left’s most celebrated ornament. He checked all the boxes for the Left in the 80’s and 90’s. His TV show was supposed to be the new model family for America. Cosby was the strong, sensible father married to a a smart and independent woman. Bill Cosby was Barak Obama when Barak was still Barry the African guy who sold weed. In fairness, the show was funny and entertaining without being preachy. Cosby made his money as a PG comic courting middle-class Americans and his sitcom was more of the same.

Then in the 2000’s Cosby went off the reservation and started saying bad things about black people. I would assume Cosby’s politics are to the left, but he is clearly from the other side of the culture divide. Cosby comes from the Booker T. Washington tradition in black America. That’s the belief that blacks get their place at the table by being so good whites have no choice but to acknowledge them. Cosby never played the victim card and often railed against those who did play that card. That made the Cult very uncomfortable in the 2000’s and Cosby fell out of favor.

That I think is why they have decided it is time to run the rape stories about him. Cosby is old and mostly retired now. He has become particularly ornery about his politics, which makes him a bigger problem. I have no idea if any of it is true. I’m naturally skeptical about this stuff. But, the story as presented suggests there’s something to it.

Bill Cosby, in the midst of a serious PR crisis as accusations about him sexually assaulting women make headlines around the world, has decided to stay silent.

In an interview on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” that aired Saturday (where Cosby and his wife appeared to talk about loaning works to the National Museum of African Art), Cosby, 77, didn’t say a word when host Scott Simon asked him about the allegations. In the past, Cosby has repeatedly denied these claims.

“This question gives me no pleasure, Mr. Cosby, but there have been serious allegations raised about you in recent days,” Simon said, without specifically saying what the allegations in question were.

There’s a long a pause. “You’re shaking your head no. I’m in the news business, I have to ask the question: Do you have any response to those charges?” Simon said.

Another long pause. “Shaking your head no,” Simon continued, and said again: “There are people who love you who might like to hear from you about this — I want to give you the chance.” And again, no response. (Listen to the audio here.)

The interview comes a couple days after Cosby’s name quietly disappeared from the “Late Show With David Letterman” guest line-up for next week. Cosby was supposed to appear on the show on Wednesday. Then, late this week, his name was gone and replaced with talk show host Regis Philbin.

There’s no word on whether the cancellation was Cosby’s idea or the show’s. Letterman’s publicist told the Associated Press that “We can’t comment on the guest booking process.”

Letterman remains in good standing with the Left, despite his own habit of assaulting female interns and coming retirement. It’s perfectly plausible that word is out that Cosby is on the proscribed list. The degree of cooperation within the Left across media companies is well documented so this is probably a coordinated attack on the Cos.

It’s why I’m skeptical about Cankles running for president. The Left never forgets and they never forgive. Like Nixon she may outmaneuver them to win the primary, but like Nixon she will learn that there is no beating the Left in the log run. If they are willing to take out a revered figure like Bill Cosby, they will have no qualms about taking down a bitter old hag at the end of her career.

The Muslim Veto

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When the Left decided that the word “religion” was bad, they quickly forgot their reason for the declaration. It had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with Christianity. In fact, in Lib-Speak, the word religion is a synonym for Christianity. The trouble with that is they forgot that their own whack-a-doodle belief-set is a religion and they lost the ability to properly deal with a religion that is willing to take them on, toe to tow. They now find themselves giving ground to Muslims on their home turf.

Montgomery County Public Schools will remove religious labels from school holidays, but members of the Islamic community say the adjustments to the school calendar do nothing to gain parity and a day off for the Muslim holiday of Eid.

The school board approved the school calendar for the 2015-2016 school year Tuesday. The calendar will no longer reference specific religious holidays but rather state simply that school will be closed on dates that correspond with holidays, such as Eid, Yom Kippur and Christmas.

Saqib Ali, a former Maryland state delegate and co-chair of Equality for Eid, was not happy with the board of education’s action Tuesday.

“Equality is really what we’re looking for,” Ali said. “Simply saying we’re not going to call this Christmas, and we’re not going to call this Yom Kippur, and still closing the schools, that’s not equality.”

A few things worth mentioning here. Montgomery County is a liberal stronghold. Many of the Cult’s famous members live there. For instance, Chris Mathews lives in the whites-only town of Chevy Chase Village, which is in Montgomery County. It is not Marin County, but more a respectably WASP version of it. The same beliefs, but far less ostentatious.

The big item in that selection is the quote from the savage. The savage says they are looking for equality, which is total nonsense. Islam does not play well with other religions. That’s a fact backed by 1400 years of evidence. The savage is also doing what the Left has always done in America. That is, equate a microscopic minority with the vast majority. There are very few  Muslims in America, but they demand equal footing with Jews and Christians, who are orders of magnitude more populous.

Again, we see the similarities between Islam and Liberalism.

Of course, this just points out two things. One is the Founders made an error regarding freedom of religion. It was an error they could not foresee. They never imagined Christian Europeans surrendering to savages on their own lands so they never thought to ban the savage and his religion from America. It’s too late to ban Islam from America, something that will happen one day, but not now. Instead, we should ban all immigration from savage controlled areas. Some will slip in, for sure, but keeping these people in their 50 or so countries should be a priority.

School board members said they were sympathetic to the desire to have Eid recognized and close schools but that legal precedent in Maryland bars them from closing for religious purposes.

“We can’t close for religious holidays. We can only close for operational purposes,” like high absenteeism, school spokesman Dana Tofig said.

That explanation doesn’t sit well with Zainab Chaudry, with the Council on American Islamic Relations.

“What’s really concerning to us is that similar conditions weren’t placed on any other faith community,” Chaudry says.

In the 1970s school officials decided to close on Jewish holidays because of high absenteeism.

But school board member Michael Durso said that the schools effectively close for a religious reason: the schools had high absenteeism because of a religious holiday in the community.

Noting the attempt to move away from favoring religions by instead referring to school days off as “winter break” and “student holidays,” Durso said as long as the Islamic community’s concern for parity wasn’t somehow addressed “it comes off as insensitive, and I just think we cannot afford to be in that light”.

That drew applause from parents who filled the seats in the board of education’s meeting room.

The adoption of the 2015-2016 school calendar does give students the day off on Eid but only because it happens to fall on another school holiday, Yom Kippur.

Several school board members, Chris Barclay, Judy Docca and Michael Durso, made it clear that they want to see a permanent policy change but that discussion would continue.

Board member Judy Docca acknowledged Tuesday’s action does little to satisfy a community that’s been waiting for years to see a change.

The fact that the vast majority of people in the County now have to flush their culture down the drain to satisfy these savages who don’t belong here is never mentioned explicitly. As I’ve said many times, I’m not a religious person. I come from a culture and people who have been shaped by and inspired by Christianity and that heritage is important to me. It is important to the overwhelming majority of people in Montgomery County.

So, the people there should adopt the Islamic solution. That means beheading the school board members for apostasy and then chasing every Muslim out of the county. That way, we can all celebrate Islam together one last time and also get our country back.

Instead, look for the Muslim Veto to come to your town next, as soon as you get your first Muslim.

Limbaugh Sues The Cult

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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.”
This is long overdue. I think you give a lot of room for political combatants to whack one another around, even if it veers into outright lying. In politics, one man’s lie is another man’s holy truth. Defamation is another matter. The Left often just attacks bogeymen gratuitously. It is way to shift the focus from them onto some other. When that bogeyman is a real person and they are saying untrue things about him, then they have crossed a line.
Let’s hope the court awards Limbaugh a trillion dollars.

The Stupids

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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, because they think people care about it. 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.

Takeaways From The Election

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The first takeaway for me is the spine of Scott Walker. For the Left, 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 Left. 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.

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 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 economic argument. He connected his policies with people’s sense of decency and fairness. Public sector unions are expensive and unnecessary. 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 Left 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 is an outsider. 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 just moved to New Hampshire.

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 interesting thing 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 crazy.

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 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 Left 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.