Back in the 70’s, the argument for supporting Nixon was that he could win. He was a schemer and he was on the Left economically. 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. Goldwater getting crushed in ’64 made winning in 1968 the number one priority.

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 guy on the ticket instead of Reagan. 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 wrath of the voters is also nothing new. 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. 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.

The 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.

I recall John Derbyshire discussing his fondness for Anglican Hymns, despite not being an Anglican. He related a story from a friend who continued to attend regular services, despite no longer believing in God. The friend said it was out of loyalty to the old tribe. Similarly, Derb has a fondness for the Christian rituals of his people out of a loyalty to and fondness for the tradition. That, I suspect, is something all of us have for something or another in our lives. Maybe it is a holiday tradition or family tradition that no longer makes much sense or possibly never made any sense.

An example in my own life is the making of chipped beef on toast over Thanksgiving. My father loved that breakfast. It is classic enlisted man food that carried into the American working class after World War II. I have few fond memories of my father, but it reminds me of better times for some reason. It is a tradition I have upheld to this day. Again, there’s nothing rational about it, but there’s an emotional tug that is impossible to resist.

I’ve been thinking about that today as the election draws near. I have voted since I was able to vote. I’ve voted in off-year elections and municipal elections, even when the stakes were so low that barely anyone else bothered to vote. I voted in the 1990’s when it was clear to me the GOP was rejecting every lesson learned in the Reagan years and were sprinting to catch the Liberal Democrats. I voted when that stone stupid sock puppet George Bush was president. I even voted in 2008 when the choice was between a dimwitted neophyte with nothing more than race on his side and an insane old man who barely knows where he is most of the time.

In 2012 I went to my polling place with the enthusiasm of a man heading for the gallows. Romney was not much of an upgrade to Obama in my view, but I’ve had to select between worse choices. I once had Ted Kennedy as my senator and Joe Kennedy as my Congressman. Imagine that. Plus, the chance to maybe get rid of the execrable Barak Obama was something.

As I was walking in I spotted a school bus unloading a bunch of Aztecs and Mayans. An old white woman was handing them instructions and speaking to them in bad Spanish. Clearly the Democrat GOTV effort was set to eleven. Bussing in illegal aliens in a district with 99% Democrat electorate is going the extra mile.

Inside I got in-line behind a chubby white girl with a fuchsia afro and a tackle box full of metal in her face. She was furiously tapping on her phone to some other dimwit. Behind me the Mayans were filing in, jibber-jabbering to one another in Mam. The poll workers were shuffling around from station to station, doing something. Every once in a while one of them would bark out a command. The pointlessness of it was overwhelming. The nitwit in front of me and the Mayans behind would surely cancel my vote many times over. I walked out without voting.

That was the first election I had skipped as an adult and I felt bad about it, but I was done voting. It is one thing to hang with an old pointless custom out of sentimentality. It is quite another to infuriate yourself doing something you vaguely sense is doing you harm. I skipped the last primary, despite some nagging sense of obligation creeping in on me. The lack of contested races made it easier. I live in a one party state so not voting is a bit easier, but the old sense of obligation was creeping in on me again.

Still, that old sense of obligation is there. It is not that my vote counts or that I really care who wins. That’s not my fault. Forces beyond my control have made my citizenship worthless. What I can control is how I discharge my duties and obligations. That means I’ll probably stop at my polling place in the morning and cast my ballot. The choices may be awful and I may hate having to vote for any of them, but at least I will have done my duty. My country may not care much for me and citizenship may mean nothing, but I still can be a good citizen. At least I’ll have that.

You hate to admired the Left’s ability to rationalize disconfirmation. Unlike a religious movement, it has the ability to absorb defeats and turn them into building blocks for future assaults on their enemies. The Romans had a similar quality. Even after Cannae, the Romans were not defeated. The American Left is similar. No amount of evidence will break the spirit of the believers.

Facing a bad night this Tuesday, Joe Biden is already saying the results will force the other side to yield.

Vice President Joe Biden says he expects congressional Republicans to work to “get things done” if they win control of the Senate — and he notes the White House is prepared to give a little.

In an interview with CNN released on Monday, Biden said that while he still expects the Democrats to retain Senate control, he believes a Republican-controlled Senate will move beyond obstructionism.

“[G]oing into 2016, the Republicans have to make a decision whether they’re in control or not in control,” the vice president told Gloria Borger. “Are they going to begin to allow things to happen? Or are they going to continue to be obstructionists? And I think they’re going to choose to get things done.”

It really is amazing to watch. The people could rise up, drag Obama from the White House and hang him from a lamp post and the Left would respond by saying it is proof the mob has to compromise. When the shoe was on the other foot, the Left suggested that the remaining Republicans commit suicide, right after murdering their families. After all, the people had spoke and the Left was the winner.

It is why the GOP will do exactly that, compromise. Many in the GOP admire the tenacity and togetherness of the Left. Time and circumstance keep them on the outside, but they wish they could be in the club. Middlebrow stiffs like John Boehner look at the Left in the same way the shopkeeper looks at the aristocrat. That’s the bait. Obama and Biden will sweet talk Boehner and McConnell into thinking this time they will get invited to the party, right after they sign off on whatever it is the Left wants.

When all hell breaks lose after the grand compromise, the rubes like Boehner will be shocked to find out that their new friends are laughing at them behind their back on the pages of the Washington Post and New York Times. Newt Gingrich was famous for falling into this trap. The pudgy dork with bad hair and the weird name always wanted to hang out with the cool kids. That was his weakness. That and donuts.

It is easy to see why sensible people choose to vote Republican. Despair is a sin and something to be avoided, whenever possible. Trudging off to vote for the least dangerous option at least offers the hope of postponing the bitter end for a little while longer. At the same time, you cannot blame people for thinking that a vote for the GOP is a vote for prolonging the agony. Look at this story from New Hampshire.

Stephanopoulos will be hosting Thursday night’s debate between former Sen. Scott Brown and Shaheen, despite this conflict—he’s on video as a political activist accepting Shaheen’s endorsement of President Clinton—and another conflict. As Breitbart News reported on Tuesday, Stephanopoulos has a longtime personal and political relationship with Shaheen campaign adviser Mandy Grunwald.

Stephanopoulos has a history of flubbing debates, and he is widely credited with creating the “war on women” in a 2012 GOP primary debate—inserting the issue of contraception into the debate when nobody was discussing it at all.

Why in the world do these people keep falling for the same gags? Stephanopoulos was a prominent Clinton rump-swab and the chief toady for years. Brown may as well have agreed to have Wasserman-Schultz moderate the debate. Maybe she was busy. How about Shaheen’s husband? How about Brown agree to be blindfolded and gagged for the debate so he cannot respond?

This happens all the time with the GOP. Romney signed off on the obese woman from CNN moderating a debate, despite her being a far leftist. Her lunging to the defense of Obama in the debate may very well have saved the day for Obama. Instead of talking about Obama’s defects, the post debate coverage was about the moderator slapping Mitt around at the end. It is why they are called The Stupid Party.

Democracy is a system where the very dumbest citizens are given the power to decide the fate of the people. The smart fraction fights with one another in an attempt to convince and cajole the stupid into selecting wisely. Sometimes it works, most times not, but given enough time the stupid will live up their reputation and the democracy murders itself. Massachusetts is a good example.

Forget about Charlie Baker crying. The ones who should be crying are the voters.

Would you rather win the Lottery or the election?

What’s your signature dish in the kitchen?

What’s the best Halloween costume for your opponent?

Those were actual questions in a debate that will be the last time most voters see Baker and Democrat Martha Coakley in a televised, face-to-face confrontation.

Baker’s cry will get the most attention in this bizarre debate showdown. And that’s not a bad thing for a Republican accused of being a heartless budget cutter. Baker’s cry did not look contrived — he looked like a dad watching the last scene of “Field of Dreams.” And it certainly won’t hurt him among the most important voters in this race — women.

But let’s face it, the question — when was the last time you cried? — was designed to get the candidates to cry. Great for a Barbara Walters interview, but for a gubernatorial debate?

There’s nothing wrong with asking an offbeat question that could show voters a more human side of the candidates. But the gimmick has gotten old fast. Pretty much every debate now ends with a “What actor should play you in a movie?” question.

But now we need to know whether Baker or Coakley would throw away the election with a chance to be rich. Is there any chance either of them would go with the Lottery? No, even Coakley wouldn’t be that clueless.

And there were other head-shaking moments. Like one of the panelists repeatedly pressing Baker or Coakley to take a “pledge.” Apparently just saying you’re against something is not enough anymore. Now you have to pledge not to do it.

There were some telling moments in the debate that will probably be more significant than Baker’s weep show. Baker looked like his old, snippy self at times — not his best side. When Coakley joked she had heard Baker’s question before, the Republican shot back, “Sort of like the ones you asked me before?”

But the crying pretty much wiped out that moment.

Massachusetts is home to many great colleges and universities. Tens of thousands of very bright people move to Boston every year for work. Yet, this is the best they can do for governor. One Senator is a pathological liar and the other has not lived in the state for decades. They have one of the most corrupt legislatures on earth. There’s your choice for governor. A blubbering fool or a semi-retarded hack.

I’m always skeptical about memoirs and tell-all’s, because the writer is highly motivated to lie. In the former case, self-promotion is at the heart of a memoir and no one promotes the negative things about themselves. The tell-all is the dead tree version of click bait. The writer says bad things about people or reveals embarrassing things about a public institution in order to sell books. In both cases, the bullshit ratios are way out of whack.

Sharyl Attkisson left CBS claiming they are a bunch of lefty hacks, something we all knew for decades. Her tell-all is being flogged by Drudge. He has a link to this story in America’s Paper of Record.

A former CBS News reporter who quit the network over claims it kills stories that put President Obama in a bad light says she was spied on by a “government-related entity” that planted classified documents on her computer.

In her new memoir, Sharyl Attkisson says a source who arranged to have her laptop checked for spyware in 2013 was “shocked” and “flabbergasted” at what the analysis revealed.

“This is outrageous. Worse than anything Nixon ever did. I wouldn’t have believed something like this could happen in the United States of America,” Attkisson quotes the source saying.

Maybe. It is also possible she is just like most users and foolishly loaded all sorts of spyware on her laptop. Most people have no idea how their PC works. Apple users are the worst because they think they know how it works, even though they don’t. People see this stuff on TV and they think “hackers” can magically take over your PC.

She speculates that the motive was to lay the groundwork for possible charges against her or her sources.

Attkisson says the source, who’s “connected to government three-letter agencies,” told her the computer was hacked into by “a sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that’s proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency.”

The breach was accomplished through an “otherwise innocuous e-mail” that Attkisson says she got in February 2012, then twice “redone” and “refreshed” through a satellite hookup and a Wi-Fi connection at a Ritz-Carlton hotel.

The spyware included programs that Attkisson says monitored her every keystroke and gave the snoops access to all her e-mails and the passwords to her financial accounts.

This is pretty common stuff. The #1 way people load malware onto their PC is by opening an attachment. Once it is loaded, it sits there calling home and updating itself. It’s why you should never put your personal stuff on a laptop, by the way.

“The intruders discovered my Skype account handle, stole the password, activated the audio, and made heavy use of it, presumably as a listening tool,” she wrote in “Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington.”

This I doubt. This is the sort of thing you see on TV, not in real life. Loading spyware to take over a webcam is one level of clever. Stealing a Skype password and then re-engineering the program to function as a listening devise is quite another. It’s not impossible, but to deploy that type of resource on this woman sounds unlikely to me. There’s a small number of people able to do this work and they are in high demand.

Attkisson says her source — identified only as “Number One” — told her the spying was most likely not court-authorized because it went on far longer than most legal taps.

But the most shocking finding, she says, was the discovery of three classified documents that Number One told her were “buried deep in your operating system. In a place that, unless you’re a some kind of computer whiz specialist, you wouldn’t even know exists.”

“They probably planted them to be able to accuse you of having classified documents if they ever needed to do that at some point,” Number One added.

Again, this reads like a bad TV script. There are no hidden places in your operating system. There are places where code can be hidden away, but not documents. The value in hiding docs on her computer is also questionable. If you can go to these lengths to frame her, you can just have her killed in an accident, which is much easier than this.

If you cover the foreign policy operations in Washington or Europe, you are being followed, wiretapped and scrutinized. This has been true for a long time. Counter intelligence is a part of every nation’s toolkit and that naturally sweeps up the reporters. Most of the people talking to reporters are mid-level bureaucrats lacking the security clearances to access the good stuff. It’s very rare for a high level career spook to be known to the press, much less have a relationship.

Where the high level leaks come from are from the political class. The guys like Richard Armitage who are part of the permanent Washington policy elite. They are the guys spilling the beans to reporters about some program or policy. A gal like Attkisson is not privy to those people. She’s meeting the low-level nobodies at the Starbucks so they can dish the local scuttlebutt. They may know some things so this sort of reporting can leave a mark, but it is not worth the trouble of deploying A-level technicians to exploit her laptop.

Sextus Julius Caesar I was the man who killed the Roman Republic. He was not  the Julius Caesar, but he was the man who started the line that would eventually give us the Julius Caesar. In 208 BC, no one could have possibly known that a man of his line would bring down the Republic. If they did, he would have been murdered along with all of his kin. We can never know these things. You just have to hope you get lucky.

No one could have known that an eccentric school master would found a line whose men would bring about the end of the American republic.