... And So It Begins

When it came to favouring Republican nominees this year, I wasn't a Romney man. I was on the record as saying that I thought Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels would have been the smartest choice. Daniels is smart and has a strong record that could have been effectively deployed against an incumbent president. He was also smart enough to call for a "truce on social issues," knowing that the GOP would be hammered on them by a Democratic party that couldn't exactly run on its economic record.

Of course, Daniels didn't run. Smart Republicans tend not to when there's an incumbent Democrat in the White House. Under those circumstances, there's one likely nominee that make a general election sort of close and a cavalcade of unelectable mutants. This is what happened in '96, when Bob Dole's closest challengers were Pat Buchanan and Steve Forbes, either of whom would have lost to Clinton by at least fifteen points even if Ross Perot wasn't around to swallow 10% of the Republican vote. The last time the GOP put up a credible field of smart candidates against an incumbent Democrat was 1980, when Reagan, Bush, Dole, Howard Baker and John Connally all ran for the nomination.

Of the Republicans who did run for the nomination this year, I thought Jon Huntsman was alone in being able to beat Obama. I wasn't alone in this thinking, the President's political team thought so, too. And while Team Obama has been called any number of things, stupid generally isn't one of them. Unfortunately, Republicans aren't as smart as Obama and I, and Huntsman was ignored until he was forced to drop out.

That left Mitt Romney and a cavalcade of mutants, including Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann. As I've been saying in public for the last three years, Romney was the only acceptable potential nominee that at least kept the general election close. I never thought he was going to win or anything crazy like that, but he was pretty much the only person who would keep the GOP from suffering a testicle-crushing '64 style blowout. Romney would keep the Republicans defeat under five points and would at least allow them to hold on to the House. Sure, he would lose and everything, but he would let the party lose with some semblance of dignity.

Is the supposedly conservative Tea Party wing of the party, at this point consisting mostly of naive bloggers and idiot radio talk show hosts, grateful for this? No. No, they aren't.

We're still about five weeks from election day, and they're already rolling out the narrative on who to blame when Romney loses. Let's see what Erick Erickson had to say about this on Tuesday, shall we?

There are a lot of elitist Republicans who have spent several years telling us Mitt Romney was the only electable Republican. Because the opinion makers and news media these elitists hang out with have concluded Romney will not win, the elitists are in full on panic mode. They conspired to shut out others, tear down others, and prop up Romney with the electability argument. He is now not winning against the second coming of Jimmy Carter. They know there will be many conservatives, should Mitt Romney lose, who will not be satisfied until every bridge is burned with these jerks, hopefully with the elitist jerks tied to the bridge as it burns.

So they are in a panic. They are now throwing Romney under the bus to spare themselves. They are now doing the, “It’s not us, it’s him” routine. For years these people have gotten by knowing that they could hold the base of the GOP in contempt while holding on to their precious positions of “thought leaders” within the conservative movement and have no consequence should things go awry.

Not now. They invested too much in Mitt Romney and now they are running scared. They seem to think that if they cry and scream loud enough and point fingers at Mitt Romney, they’ll again be protected from any sort of blame. They think the conservative movement will give them a pass just as the movement did with No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, Harriet Miers, TARP, etc.

The staggering irony is that those of us who did not want Romney are now the ones defending him to the hilt while the elitist jerks are distancing themselves from Romney as quickly as possible — both upset at what their media friends tell them is to come and upset that Mitt Romney might not actually listen to their sweet whispers as much as they originally presumed.

I don't remember anyone who wasn't Mitt Romney saying that Romney was going to win this election. I do remember a lot of people like me saying that Romney was the only credible nominee that wouldn't be abjectly humiliated by a wildly unpopular incumbent.

I think that it's incumbent of folks like Mr. Erickson to tell us which of the GOP candidates were going to do better than Romney is now. The truth is that they can't.

Rick Perry spent most of the primaries seemingly not knowing where he was or why he was there. Fact checkers had to actually lay off Bachmann because they were afraid that focusing on every crazy thing that popped out of her mouth would give the appearance of explicit bias. I'm amazed that they didn't extend the same self-protective courtesy to Cain, who was similarly delusional. Gingrich is almost mythologically sleazy and famous for inventing "life-long principles" on the spot, only to renounce them ten minutes later. And Santorum was defeated for reelection to the Senate by one of the losingest politicians in the history of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania by a fantastic margin.

Once people like Erickson essentially disqualified Jon Huntsman from even being a Republican, they were pretty much stuck with Romney. I'm also leaving aside, for the moment, six decades of GOP nominating history that dictated that it was Mitt's turn. Look at the biography of every Republican nominee since Nixon in 1960. One thing you'll notice is that, with the exception of Goldwater and the second Bush, they had all run at least once before winning the prize.

Erick is being shockingly dishonest when he says that "There are a lot of elitist Republicans who have spent several years telling us Mitt Romney was the only electable Republican."

History tells us something a little different. The first people that made the electability argument about Romney were in fact folks a lot like Erickson himself, who championed Mitt Romney as "the conservative alternative to John McCain" way back in 2008. Way back when, Romney was the boy of the self-styled "voices of conservatism," ignoring entirely that he was only running for president because his running for reelection in Massachusetts was almost a mathematical impossibility and that his reversals of principle were a lot fresher then than they are now.

It doesn't matter that these people are consciously lying about their role in creating Mitt Romney as a national figure, they're very deliberately establishing a narrative involving imaginary "Republican elites" as being to blame for everything. The self-declared "party of personal responsibility" is very deliberately creating a fantasy that absolves them of any responsibility at all.

I don't know if I've said this in public before, but in a perfect world Mitt Romney wouldn't have been the nominee this year: Sarah Palin would have been. The Tea Party types would have their dream nominee and Barack Obama would have kicked her sexy little ass from one of the country to the other and back again. Sure, it would've looked like the original cover of Appetite for Destruction, but it would have left these people with no excuses.

In all honesty, I don't think that "elitist Republicans" (which, loosely translated, means "sane people") are going to have the juice to stop the Tea Party true believers in the 2016 primaries. I can very easily see the jihadi wing of the party punishing the credible candidates who stayed out this year, like Daniels, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie (assuming that Christie doesn't get killed off by Cory Booker next year) for leaving them no other option than Romney. It took Bob Dole twenty years to go from being a losing vice-presidential candidate to winning the presidential nomination, so you can effectively count Paul Ryan out in '16, even if the GOP doesn't lose the House in 2014.

It's not at all outside the realm of possibility that they exploit the "My Turn" tradition of the Republican nomination to push a psychopathic zealot like Santorum over the top. And Santorum will lose a minimum of 35 states to a politically inept plagiarist like Joe Biden, assuming that Hillary Clinton doesn't run and win 40. I actually think that's the likely scenario three and a half years from now.

And you know what? I hope that happens.

The longer it takes for these people to be discredited forever, the more the GOP marginalizes itself nationally. They singularly refuse to recognize that it was the Bush policies that they liked, such as Iraq and the deficit-creating tax cuts,  that were directly responsible for the party's near-death experiences in 2006 and '08. But for those policies, and the party's insane defence of them, Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado would probably be fairly solid Republican states today.

Of the real swing-states in this election (as opposed to fantasies like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which Obama will win by at least five points and maybe ten) all but New Hampshire were states that Bush won in 2004. They started slipping away in '06 and were gone in '08. If the polls are even close to being right - and I believe they are -  Obama is going to win the majority of them this year.

Did John McCain run a terrible campaign four years ago? Sure. But that doesn't go even half the way in explaining how dramatically the electoral map has shrunk for Republicans in the last decade.

As I write this, Obama is seriously considering contesting Arizona and if he comes anywhere close to winning there, the bottom is going to fall out of the GOP's electoral prospects in a landslide.

To the extent that they exist at all, "the Republican elites" should take the next four years off and let the jihadis have it their way. To use an economic term, the "creative destruction of the marketplace" will take care of them - and their droolingly crazy nominee - in short order. At that point, the party can rebuild.

But if this nonsense carries on too much longer, there won't be a map left to rebuild with.

The Dirty Little Secret of Money in Politics

Here's something that you need to know about voters. We're idiots, each and every one of us. We spend so much time going insane about the inconsequential things in our public life that the enormous issues slip right past us.

You know who knows that? Politicians. And, being the masters of judo they are, they use our own stupidity against us. As a matter of fact, they've been doing it for decades with nobody noticing because the voting public consists almost entirely of ignorant assholes.

Toronto has a mayor whose only real claim to fame was that he was wealthy enough to pay his own office expenses when his ideological opponents weren't. Inherent in that argument is that only the layabout scions of rich daddies should be public servants, as opposed to "regular people," but populist stupidity is such that it was a winning argument for Rob Ford.

Populists - no, strike that, everybody - on both the Left and the Right are outraged that politicians make as much money as they do. Never mind that anyone even remotely talented enough to get tens or hundreds of thousands of people of people to vote for them would make far more money in the public sector. When that isn't enough, we decide to go after "gold-plated pensions."

If you believe that, the overwhelming likelihood is that you're an asshole, haven't been paying attention, are part of the problem, or all three.

I'm going to make a wildly controversial statement here. It'll make almost everyone across the ideological spectrum absolutely insane, so get ready for it ....

Our politicians aren't being paid enough. Also, I don't give a shit about their pensions. And I say that as someone who has probably argued more strongly for realistically balanced budgets than anyone reading this.

If it were up to me, politicians would be paid a whole lot more and not only would their pensions be platinum-plated, they would take effect the second they left office.

On the other hand, I would strip a whole lot of supposed "rights" from our elected representatives.

Before I go any further, I should point out that you don't have a "right" to be a member of a parliamentary body, even if you were elected. Most Western constitutions give their legislatures self-regulating powers, which include who may or may more not be expelled from their chamber. You need not even be convicted of crime to be refused your seat or expelled from it, and no Court in the land is going to argue with that.

I'll start with the carrots that I'd hand out if I were in charge.

If you're a state or provincial representative, congratulations! You just got your pay raised to $500,000 a year. If you're a governor (or Canadian premier) or a member of the federal legislative branch, you're now making a million dollars a year. Presidents (and Prime Ministers,) along with Supreme Court Justices hit the goddamn jackpot with me. They make $3 million!

And all of you get to pay NO taxes on your government income! Pretty sweet, huh? Oh, and the same applies to political appointees, campaign operatives and the senior civil service. You win in a big, bad way under my plan.

But here's the stick.

None of you gets to own any holdings other the real estate that you personally occupy. No stocks, no bonds, no nothing. The potential for conflict of interest is way to high to be tolerated. No longer will will you be able to vote on matters that affect your net worth. After the huge pay raise I give you, your salary only goes up at the rate of inflation.

Moreover, none of you ever gets to register as a lobbyist. Ever. If you haven't followed the horrid tale of Jack Abramoff, you really should.



As for campaign staff, they're easy enough to take care of. Political campaigns are subsidized, in one way or another, by the government. The campaigns themselves are tax-free when they aren't directly subsidized and the donations are tax-refundable. If a campaign is found to have knowingly allowed a lobbyist to work for it - even as a volunteer - the campaign loses those subsidies and the politician is prohibited from being seated. If a campaign operative - even as a volunteer - attempts to later register as lobbyist, he or she is criminally charged.

Under my regime, lobbying transparency would be a lot tougher. Any meeting meeting between a lobbyist and a politician, a political staffer, or a member of the civil service, would be reported on the Internet within 30 days. That would include the type of activity, any money spent, and where it came from. The receipts would also be submitted,

Oh, and any and all violations of anything I've mentioned above would result in jail time. Let's say that political corruption is at least as serious as a drug offense. Well, you do exactly the same amount of time as a drug offender.

That brings me to campaign money itself, which I really don't care about. While I agree that money is speech and speech can be anonymous, it doesn't follow that this allows for anonymous money. Nor is there any judicial precedent to suggest otherwise. If one assumes that money buys influence, it seems only natural that the public know where the money comes from.

Nor would I inhibit independent groups from election spending. However, they wouldn't enjoy any tax exemption (as neither the parties or their contributors would) and they would be required to disclose the identities of their donors.

There is absolutely no logical reason that everyone should pay higher taxes because political campaigns, "issue advocacy groups" and their contributors get loopholes. Cute loopholes, such as "legal defense funds" will also no longer be tax exempt and donor disclosure will also be required. If you want to give to charity, give to charity. If you want to play politics, do it on your own dime!

Other than that, campaign spending would be wide open. Anyone could give as much as they want to whoever they want. It just has to be disclosed and you don't get it subsidized by anyone else.

Now, you may like what I think about this matter, but I think we can all agree that none of it is likely to get passed. At that point, it's your job to go to your local politician and ask them why they don't.

An Open Letter to the Liberal Party of Canada

Hey Grits,

Maybe you know me. I've been writing your obituary for several years now. When I first started doing so, I thought that the process would take ten to twenty years, but you've managed to surpass even my expectations. Uh, congratulations?

I finally finished reading Peter Newman's When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada last night and I was shocked to learn that my predictions of your demise were altogether too conservative. After having read that book, I'm shocked that you're not an actual corpse, as opposed to just being in a political oxygen tent.

To read Mr. Newman, one would have thought that your terminal stupidity would have ended you years ago. My educated guess is that your national brand is the only thing that's kept you even partially alive thus far. However, this is where things get difficult for you. Being branded as "The Natural Governing Party" is only worth anything as long as you were at least in Opposition. Now you're not. As a matter of fact, you only have 36 more seats than the Greens do.

I don't know why I'm writing this, other than I really enjoy showing off how smart I am. It's not one of my more attractive qualities, I know, but it remains one of my favourite ones. But I have a few suggestions as to how you people might resurrect yourselves.

Do I think they'll work? Probably not. In my opinion, you're too far gone and still entirely too arrogant, given your station. Do I think you'll even listen? No. No, I don't. You folks honestly believe that you got where you were by being smarter than everyone else, ignoring entirely that's also what got you where you are.

But I'm doing this more for me than I am for you. I like feeding my own ego and who knows, it might even get me laid.

My suggestions are as follows;

1) Lobbyists: Get rid of them. All of them!

More than any of the other parties, the LPoC has been dominated by scumbag lobbyists (or worse, scumbags who want to become lobbyists,) for decades now. Much of your nearly four-decade civil war can be traced back to staffers and mandarins that have placed their own careers over the future of the party.

While the Grits were the default choice of most Canadians, despite the careerist sleaziness inherent in your infrastructure, that was only true when there were no other plausible governing choices.

But even that overlooks some important history. Whenever the Tories have had a halfway competent leader, the Grits lost. John Diefenbaker and Brian Mulroney nearly crushed you into dust and it's entirely likely that Stephen Harper (who I heartily dislike) is going to do it once and for all. Since the days of Louis St. Laurent, the Liberals only won when the Conservatives went out of their way to lose. Remember that even the Sun King nearly lost to Bob Stanfield and actually did lose to Joe Clark.

People voted for you largely despite your party culture, not because of it. When the Tories lost, they went to you because there was nowhere else to go. That's no longer true. People like the NDP opposition far more than anyone thought they would.

That means that you're going to have to fundamentally reform your culture. No one is going to vote for a party controlled by people that use their position as a sinecure to a comfy life as a Yorkville or Bay Street asshole. And that supposes that Yorkville and Bay Street will even take to their bosom the assholes from the third-place party in Parliament anymore. After all, why would they?

The Harper government has already had two fairly significant lobbying-related scandals. My guess is that there's going to be a huge one at some point before they're finally defeated, whenever that might be.

You're going to want to be able to exploit that, which you can't do while your party remains a wholly-owned subsidiary of registered lobbyists. At least not while the purer-than-thou NDP is the national alternative.

You need to send the message, early and often, that the Liberal Party is no longer going to be the personal preserve of lobbyists. They won't be welcome in your campaigns and governments and, when your Members and operatives leave to lobby, they won't be welcome back. The New Democrats are populated with true believers. If you're not, you're dead.

I'm sure that there's no polling to support that, so you're just going to have to trust me, which you won't.

2) Start Acting More Like a Modern Party and Less Like a Cult: One of the most shocking revelations of When the Gods Changed was that the LPoC actually had $25 million on hand to refute the Tory "Just Visiting" campaign against Michael Ignatieff, which was itself only a $10 million buy. And here I was thinking that you were too broke, too lazy or too stupid to respond.

I was shocked to learn from Peter Newman that the money was there, but was earmarked for regional and constituent interest groups. For the love of Christ, your leader was turned into a goddamn pinata for two years because the Ukrainian Lesbian Liberal Alliance of Kapuskasing just had to get their tithing for the quarter.

Who in the fuck does that? The NDP doesn't, and the Conservatives sure as shit don't. Their interest groups pay them, not the other way around.

Lookee, you no longer have the filthy lucre of open-ended public financing to support you and your meaningless little interest sectors. If you don't start being grown-ups with your own money, nobody in the country is going to trust you with theirs. Unless I'm wildly mistaken, the Ukrainian Lesbian Liberal Alliance of Kapuskasing hasn't elected a goddamned soul to Parliament ever! If they want a seat at the table, they should be paying you.

Why would anyone vote for a party that has to use valuable time and money to bribe their own natural constituents?

3) Quit the Stunt Platforms: One of the things that killed Ignatieff was his wholesale repudiation of everything that Stephane Dion stood for. In turn, Dion repudiated everything Paul Martin stood for. And so on and so on.

All that accomplished was to confuse the part of the electorate that wasn't convinced that you're desperate. In the last four elections, you've managed to create the same messaging nightmare that Mitt Romney is suffering from today.

The "Family Pack" and "Green Shift" were stunt platforms that came out of nowhere and ultimately meant nothing. It was obvious to anyone that was paying attention that no one was going to vote for either.

The Liberal Party of Canada needs one issue - and only one - to break through. Luckily, you have only have one.

Stephen Harper has talked like the Tea Party while spending like George W. Bush. By all rights, you should own deficit reduction as an issue, given the Chretien-Martin legacy. Except you don't, because you've had two leaders in row trying to compete with Harper and the NDP on who can spend the most money on the most useless shit.

You Grits have one thing that you've done in the last thirty years that you can actually be proud of, and that's deficit reduction. Start acting on it. If you think that you're ever going to out-promise the NDP, you're kidding yourselves. If you think that you're going to out-demagogue Harper, there isn't a lot I can tell you other than that you deserve to be doomed.

The Dippers and the Tories are replacing you in the mushy-middle. And by the time that you finally get a permanent leader and (if) you get some cash in the bank, they'll have succeeded. There's only one issue that you have national credibility on that they don't. Use it.

4) Quit the Stunt Leaders: By the time you finally get around to electing your next leader, almost two years after your last one was humiliated, you will have had six leaders (counting Bill Graham and Bob Rae) in a decade. There have only been seventeen leaders since 1867, six of them between 2004 and 2013.

Here's where this gets serious. As Peter Newman points out, you've lost an average of thirty seats in each of the last four elections. If that trend continues, you'll be left with about four seats after 2015. Part of the problem is that you've gone into the last three elections with different leaders, whereas the Tories, Dippers and Bloc were constant in all of them.

I'll grant you that Dion was an accidental leader, elected entirely because he wasn't Rae or Ignatieff.

But Paul Martin was sold as the messiah, infused with everything that right about Chretien while lacking everything wrong. And he was dumped over the side, setting up a leadership race that no one in your party was prepared for, which is how you ended up with Dion. And then you dumped Dion over the side.

Then you went with Ignatieff, who was sold as The Smartest Guy in the World Who Wrote Books that Very Smart People Read. Except his only political experience was that Liberals didn't like him very much, as evidenced by the 2006 leadership race. Then the party let him twist in the winds of the "Just Visiting" ads.

I happen to think that you made an enormous mistake in basically excommunicating Bob Rae, who I think was uniquely qualified to run against Harper. Not only is the the smartest and most experienced politician in the Liberal Party, he's one of the smartest and most experienced politicians in the country.

But it looks like you're determined to anoint another "saviour" in the person of Justin Trudeau.

If you buy the lobbyist-spin doctor nonsense that the Tories are afraid of Trudeau, you're delusional! If you take away his last name, you find that he's about as qualified to be an MP as the "bartenders and college students" that you Grits can't stop mocking the NDP for electing. His professional life consists entirely of teaching drama to teenagers, who are rather expert in that without professional coaching.

Justin is the Conservative war room's wet dream. Not only do they have video of him screaming profanities in the House of Commons, they have him openly musing about supporting Quebec separatism. If you thought the "Not a Leader" and "Just Visiting" ads were a nightmare to contend with, just wait. It's gonna get a LOT worse.

If Team Harper is even halfway smart, they'll just refer to him as "Justin," except in Francophone Quebec, where his surname is probably lethal. And if the Conservatives don't go after the Trudeau name in La Belle Province, the NDP will. Their platform against the Clarity Act was practically designed to target someone with Justin's name. And if Trudeau is seen as going nowhere in Quebec, he's dead everywhere else.

You, in your infinite suicidal genius, have crafted leadership party rules that make it almost impossible for anyone to seriously challenge Trudeau. That means that he's going to cruise into a Martin-Ignatieff-style coronation, completely unprepared for the pain that the well-funded and popular Tories are going to lay into him. And where Harper doesn't hit Trudeau, Muclair will.

Given the stupid rules that your leadership has put in place, it's hard to see any serious challenger preventing another stunt coronation. Don't get me wrong, it'll be a huge news story, too. Most likely, it'll stretch out for six months and might even rake in a few bucks for you.

And I sincerely hope that you enjoy it. It'll probably be your last.

Libertarians for Romney?

Not only was I not a fan of Andrew Breitbart's, I was of the considered opinion that he was tremendously damaging to conservatism. Although he was far from being solely responsible for it, Breitbart became the face of a movement that serious conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley wouldn't recognize.

As Buckley or George Will have repeatedly demonstrated over the decades, there is no shortage of serious and factual ways to criticize liberals. But with the ascendancy of Breitbart, it became okay to mislead, selectively edit and, when all else failed, lie outright. He and his followers regularly engaged in hysterical rhetoric that more closely resembled what you would have heard from Democratic activists in the 1960s and 70s.

However, nothing succeeds quite like success, so Breitbartism spread like wildfire, first through the Tea Party, then the GOP as a whole. If you know anything about history or political science, it's virtually impossible to take these people seriously. People whose intellectual forefathers (and I use the word "intellectual" advisedly) were castigated and shunted aside by Buckley are increasingly taking over the movement and driving it into the ground so rapidly that it staggers the imagination.

One of the reasons that Barack Obama is winning this election instead of being ten points behind is the hysteria with which supposed conservatives attack him. Descriptors like "collectivist" and "communist" are used to attack the President, and most sane people just don't see it. Actual socialists despise Obama, to say nothing of doctrinaire Marxists.

In fact, President Obama isn't even an especially liberal Democrat. He could have used the TARP "stress tests" in the early months of his administration to nationalize or break up the criminal banks that destroyed the economy, and there were no shortage of liberals and Democrats who implored him to do just that. It's easy to forget this, but Cap and Trade and the Affordable Care Act started their lives as Republican policy proposals in the early 1990s. Bill Clinton refused to even debate either because he saw them as too "right-wing."

Average voters might not know that, but they certainly feel it. They instinctively feel that Barack Obama isn't anything even close to being the second coming of Leonid Breshnev or Raul Castro. Christ, he doesn't even match the rather tepid socialism of Salvador Allende.  Obama's lowest-ever job approval rating was in the mid-30s, and there's just no rational way to assert that roughly 37% of the American electorate is Marxist. I would actually have a hard time believing that that large a segment of the population actually knows what Marxism is. God knows that most Republican bloggers don't.

You haven't heard much from the Bretibart Empire since its founder's passing in March. This is mostly because Andrew himself was a showman. He knew how to play the media and make it pay attention. Without him, all that's left is paranoid raving on a very flashy and expensive blog. It's writers are little more than a collection of intellectual misfits who regularly insult the intelligence of anyone with a high school diploma. Oh, and they have a few radio talk show hosts, just to make sure that folks who didn't make it through high school get their intelligence insulted.

That brings me to Kurt Schlichter, one of Bretibart.com's writers. Over the last week, he's posted a missive so breathtakingly dishonest that it really does have to be read to be believed. It is in two parts, which you can read here and here.

Mr. Schlichter seems to understand that Mitt Romney's bid for the presidency is an increasingly losing proposition. With all of his nonsensical wailing about "collectivism," he seems to understand that he isn't going to draw many conservative Democrats and independents to his cause. So, he's going to the last place left to him, libertarians, who he also refers to interchangeably as "Ron Paul fans."

Before I go further, I should describe myself for newer readers. Because I oppose radical or revolutionary change, I describe myself as a conservative, as opposed to a libertarian. I'm also of the mind that several libertarian proposals are simply impractical. But I have strong libertarian leanings. I don't believe that government - and especially federal governments - should be doing between a third and half of what they currently are.

I don't believe that the government should be involved in social or lifestyle issues, since those are always better left to even the most irresponsible of individuals than they are to a bureaucracy. In recent years, I've come to the conclusion that American foreign policy has become too expansive to be either militarily practical or economically affordable.

Just as Schlichter refers to libertarians and "Ron Paul fans" interchangeably, he also does so with "conservative," "Republican" and "Tea Party." I believe that's misleading.

When you explore their positions, you quickly learn that Republicans aren't interested in small government at all. The Tea Party, which was supposed to be a reaction to "big government conservatism," let their mask slip after their success in the 2010 midterm election. For all intents and purposes, they're little more than an extension of the religious right that failed a few courses in introductory economics.

Three quarters of the Republican coalition doesn't differ with the "collectivist" Democrats on the imposition of government power, just on what areas of life it should be applied. There's no end to the ways that Republicans want Congress to impose its will on both the states and the individual. A party that truly believed in the Tenth Amendment would never have passed the Laci Peterson Act. No libertarian would reverse four thousand years of legal tradition, to say nothing of "family values," in a vain attempt to raise Terri Schiavo from the dead.

Even after two disastrous military adventures in a single decade, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Republicans still want to go to war with practically everyone in sight, the consequences be damned. And when libertarians (and about a third of traditional conservatives) object, they're dismissed out of hand and ridiculed.

There's no separation between military and budget policy in the GOP, either. As much as they howl about the coming economic doomsday, Republicans insist on not only preserving current (and ridiculous) levels of Pentagon spending, they want to expand it, precisely so they can bomb first and ask questions later.

The GOP, as we saw from 1981-'86 and 2001-'06 don't represent libertarian values in the budget. Republicans, to their credit, are fantastic at cutting taxes. However, they unfailingly increase spending while doing so, thereby giving birth to awesome deficits. I've said this over and over again, but most of "Obama's five trillion in new deficit spending" is neither new or even Obama's. They reflect the growth of policies passed by President Bush and the Republican Congress combined with the exploding disparity between spending and revenue that resulted from the Bush tax cuts.

Few things are as amusing as the supposed Republican devotion to the constitution. Like GOP appeals to libertarians, you only see any evidence of that during even numbered years. Whenever given the chance, Republican presidents violate the Bill of Rights, often without consulting Congress, in the name of the "unitary executive theory," which also only seems to apply when Republicans are in office. If you believe in Republican fidelity to the Constitution, you just haven't been paying attention.

Kurt Schlichter, like Republicans generally, has a very childish and historically inaccurate view of libertarianism in the GOP. First, he seems to think that dissatisfaction with Romney is predicated on the treatment of Ron Paul. That serves magnify his arrogance and that of his party.

Of course, he brings nothing to the table for libertarians to support Romney other the boogeyman of Obama. He almost seems to admit that as soon as the election is over, the snake-handling and war-mongering wings of GOP will resume their control and libertarian policies and philosophies will return to being ignored when they aren't actively abused. The best part is that Mr. Schlichter spends a minimal amount of time pretending that anything other than that will happen.

Schlichter posits that libertarians have more in common with Republicans than they do Democrats. Of course, this is utter nonsense. Republicans and Democrats have a more common view of the role of government than either does with libertarians. I suspect that more and more libertarians are coming around to that view. It's hard to disagree with the Libertarian assertion that a choice between Democrats and Republicans is really no choice at all.

If Romney loses, it won't be because of anything that libertarians did or didn't do, although it would poetic justice if it worked out that way. If Barack Obama get's reelected, so what? Obama and Romney are both going to blow apart the military and destroy the economy, they're just planning on doing it in slightly different ways.

On top of being incredibly patronizing, calling libertarians who refuse to support Romney "the pouters, the angry and the attention seeking," Schlicther makes profoundly illogical argument: that libertarianism can't survive without Republicans.

More likely, the opposite is true: libertaianism can't survive being associated with Republicans. Libertarians have a constant world-view and, as we saw through the Bush years, Republicans don't. To this day, the GOP refuses to accept responsiblity for anything that happened during those years except in the most dismissive way. Continuing to associate politically with people like that ultimately makes libertarianism irrelevant.

Moreover, Schlichter's argument presupposes that the the Republican party itself survives as a long-term proposition, and I'm far from convinced that's the case.

All the way back in 2007, I wrote that demographics are going to be the death of the GOP. Republicans have insisted on being increasingly hostile to Latinos, just as Latinos were becoming a larger part of the electorate in key Republicans states. It wasn't all that long ago that California was a swing state, having voted for Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan twice. Proposition 187 fixed that forever.

Then the Democrats got smart and wrote off their quixotic struggle to win back the South and started focusing on the Mountain West and Southwest. And it worked, too. By 2010, you could drive from the Canadian border right into Mexico without setting foot in a state with a Republican governor. In doing so, they're also gaining ground in the former Confederacy, having a surprisingly good chance of winning Virginia and North Carolina this year.

Bush's 2007 immigration reform bill, McCain-Kennedy, was supposed to fix that, but the Republican House caucus was overtaken with animalistic stupidity and vitriol. Consequently, McCain did twenty points worse with Hispanics than Bush did, and Romney's taking 10% less of the Latino vote than McCain did.

New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado are becoming deeper purple and Arizona is becoming increasingly competitive. In less than twenty years, you're going to see that happen in Texas, at which point the GOP simply ceases to exist as a winning national political party. There just aren't enough Electoral College votes in the Deep South and the plains states to elect a president.

If you've been paying attention to Fox News and Republican blogs, you've already gotten a preview of what's going to happen when Romney loses. The narrative that he isn't far enough to the right is already developing, and the psychopaths are more than strong enough to fix that in the 2016 primaries. To keep a base that doesn't know that Medicare is a government program happy, the GOP is going to nominate a completely unelectable Neanderthal. As I write this, my money's on Santorum.

Schlichter makes a wholly unconvincing argument that if libertarians don't submit to a one-sided marriage of convenience with Republicans they'll become the Greens. In actual fact, that couldn't be further from the truth. In order to keep the supply-siders and snake-handlers in their tent, they've managed to dramatically shrink their demographic and geographic reach over the last decade. And there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that they'll reverse that suicidal trend once Romney loses and every reason to believe that they'll double down on it.

Maybe I'm overstating my case about the death of the GOP. But you'd do well to remember that I made exactly the same noises about the Liberal Party of Canada. I'd tell you to ask them how they're doing, but I'm afraid they wouldn't hear you from inside their oxygen tent.

Like power, history abhors a vacuum. Just as the abolitionists created the GOP out of the ashes of the Whigs, something will rise from the ruins of the GOP. Libertarians are uniquely positioned to do that in the next twenty years.

Kurt Schlichter speaks a great deal about libertarian principle but goes on to erect an endless parade of straw men in an effort to convince them to abandon it. And for what?  To elect somebody that most of the Republican party can't stand?  Mitt Romney isn't better than Barack Obama, he's just a different kind of bad. The fact that he has an R beside his name only matters if you're utterly without principle.

Were I able to cast a ballot in this presidential election, I would do so for Gary Johnson on the Libertarian ticket. If you're reading this, I hope that you'll consider doing so, as well.

Three of a Kind: Islamists, Liberals and Social Conservatives

Since North Africa exploded with a furious stupidity on Tuesday September 11, I've found myself more fascinated by the reaction to the event than I have the event itself.

Evil people do violent things, such as break things and kill people. Having said that, it's only ever newsworthy these days when American things are broken and their citizens killed. That seems to get everybody's attention, especially in an election year. And make no mistake about it, this is only getting the attention it is because the United States is in a year that ends with an even number.

If you want to know the great secret behind Islamism, I'll give it to you. By and large, these people are from the poorest, most repressive countries on the planet. More importantly, their populations are more often than not riddled with illiteracy. I'm actually surprised that so many other people are surprised that so many people in such a condition are consumed with religious fundamentalism.

Impoverished illiterates not infrequently conflate their religion with their manhood. In cases where stupid people find their manhood insulted, they not infrequently respond with furious violence. If you don't believe me, I suggest that you go down to your neighborhood tavern and find the biggest, dumbest-looking drunken lout you can find and tell him that you'd be more likely to sexually sate his female companion than he is. Be sure to count your teeth afterward.

Religious fundamentalism works pretty much the same way, only with explosives. And those of you who believe that such sociology is operative only in the Muslim world must have missed much of the recent past in Northern Ireland, where bombs were used to settle religious differences with some regularity.

If anything, the Jihadis are most honest people in this debate. Say what what you will about them, but they actually are acting out the dictates of their Holy Book.  If you even skim through it, you'll very easily find religious justification for almost everything that they do. They might be murderous, sociopathic and wrong, but they aren't dishonest.

As a matter of fact, there isn't much in the Koan than isn't also in the Old Testament of the Bible, which is the foundation of both Judaism and Christianity. We just, for the most part, think that we got past it. If you believe the Bible to be the infallible Word of God, you have little choice but to believe that we've been terrible disciples, as is evidenced by the continued existence of Red Lobster and divorces that don't often result in stoning when said divorce is contested.

Mitt Romney is the first Mormon nominee for president. As recently as yesterday, he was pretending that his family were "refugees" from Mexico. However, he declined to tell you how they wound up south of the border in the first place.

The Church of Latter Day Saints were, under the tenants of their religion, polygamists who congregated mostly in Utah. Unfortunately, a condition of Utah's admission to the Union was the renunciation of polygamy. The LDS leadership then told their flock that God, in a remarkable example of serendipity, had changed his mind about multiple wives.

Mormon fundamentalists, including the Romney family, weren't buying it fled to Mexico where they could practice their religion, free of persecution, as was supposed to be their right under the First Amendment. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 forced the Mormons out and made George Romney, the future governor of Michigan and Mitt's dad, one of those who "are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it."

I only bring that up because the Romney family actually believed what their religion said was fundamentally true and wouldn't accept the accommodation their Church made with an expansionist government and were willing to sacrifice their homes to abide by it. It was only when circumstances presented them no other viable option that the Romneys renounced that central tenant of their faith.

Liberals (and not a small number of conservatives) want to excuse Muslim extremism because "the Enlightenment passed them by." Because of that, they say, we should shield them from anything that offends their religious sensibilities. This, of course, should be done in the name of pluralism.

This proves that modern liberals missed the entire point of the Enlightenment, which was to foster free speech and the exercise of reason at the expense of religion. Were it not so, we wouldn't enjoy neat things like astronomy today. Liberals are more than happy to stifle free speech and the quest for logical discourse in the name of keeping illiterate mysticists seven time zones away happy. The only problem is that the Enlightenment wasn't supposed to be "sensitive." The religious authorities at the time sure didn't think it was.

The simple fact of the matter is that they're never going to happy with us. They're upset by virtue of us being tin their lands at all, with our lust for their oil, love of their apostate strongman governments and refusal to stop shoving Nicki Minaj's tits in their face. Liberals want to turn back the Enlightenment for us because large parts of the Muslim world refuses to look into it themselves.

What is endlessly infuriating is Western social conservatives, who love to inflame Islamic radicals without recognizing that they believe in many of the same things. They'll put up images of Muhammad mere years after picketing The Last Temptation Of Christ with blatantly anti-Semitic placards directed at MCA's then-Chairman Lew Wasserman.

There's no end to the federal laws and constitutional amendments that social conservatives want passed based entirely on "biblical principles." Abortion, gay marriage, dancing in public. For all I know, if these people don't cotton to it and they want a law against it, goddammit! Why? Because Jesus wanted it that way!

It wouldn't bother me so much if religious types that wanted to pass legislation based on their theocratic beliefs if they were at least honest enough to read the full biblical prohibitions, which with uncanny frequency end with the phrase "punishment of death."

And there's no end to God's prohibitions that we've "grown out of;" such as working on the Sabbath, eating shellfish, or killing our children for dissing us. Human sacrifice, slavery and sex trafficking all things that are explicitly condoned in the Bible as well. There's absolutely no evidence behind creationism, but "Enlightened" types want its teaching mandated in public schools.

 By the way, there's nothing more amusing than critiques about religious fervour from a group that suffered a snake-handling death as recently as this past May.

We're demanding that the Muslim world, which is largely poor, illiterate and politically oppressed to "embrace the Enlightenment" when three-quarters of the people who are supposedly the beneficiaries of it won't embrace it themselves.

At least the jihadis are honest about it.

The Redemption of Monica Lewinsky

Have I mentioned lately that Bill Clinton is an idiot?

Don't get me wrong, he's a political genius and, and anyone who saw the Democratic National Convention earlier this month knows, the greatest performer of my lifetime, including Reagan. Watching him go when he's on a roll is nothing short of spellbinding.

But he just doesn't know how women think. For example, he ejaculated on and about Monica Lewinsky's now famous blue Gap dress and then assumed that she wouldn't keep it. Who does that?

When I blow my ball batter about, I just assume that any young lady in the vicinity is going to keep it. I'm often told how delicious it is and it may well be the secret of eternal youth. Not for nothing, but no woman who I've emptied myself on or in has ever suffered a serious illness and has actually been cured of any minor ailment that they may have been suffering at the time. I've often thought of selling my jizz at old-timey medicine shows, but the busybody assholes at the FDA won't let me. Any paramour of mine who has ingested my goo has immediately began singing "Yummy, yummy, yummy/ I've got cum in my tummy" at the top of their lungs for several hours afterward.

I never thought I was special in that regard. I just figured that all relationships worked that way. It was only in 1998 that I discovered otherwise.

His intellectual and political gifts - and his remarkable ability to lie - aside, former President Clinton is among the sleaziest individuals to walk the earth. Contrary to popular opinion, he assuredly didn't like women very much.

The late Christopher Hitchens put the lie to that myth when Clinton's defenders asserted that "everyone lies about sex." That may be true, Hitch remarked, but when men lie about sex it's often out of a Victorian impulse to protect a woman's honour. Wild Bill was different. He lied about sex in the most damaging and defamatory way to his partners imaginable. Whenever the President was romantically connected to a lady, he and his White House painted them as psychopathic whores.

 

 The fact that women supported Clinton to the extent that they did suggested that abusive relationships are a two-way street far more often than most people would have you believe. On the other hand, maybe it's a Southern thing.

Nearly fifteen years later, I still can't understand that. I've always considered a young lady's desire to google my knob among the greatest gifts one can get. Anyone who would want me to fire off a creamy twenty-one gun salute into their skull is most assuredly a friend of mine. To this very day, I love and appreciate every girl that has shared such an experience with me, even if I can't remember all of their names.

For several years I was dumb enough to enthusiastically support the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice as as a righteous cause. After all, justice is meaningless if some men are allowed to hold themselves above because of their office and associations.

It was only in July of 2007, when the Republican party asserted that Scooter Libby's perjury was unworthy of any serious punishment at all, that I changed my mind. Libby lied both to FBI agents and before a Grand Jury about the leaking of a CIA agent's identity to the Goddamned Liberal Media, which is considerably more consequential than a fib about cocksucking. Had I not already renounced my fondness for the GOP during the Terri Schiavo debacle, I would have done so when President Bush commuted Libby's sentence.

Clinton's continuing protestations of victimhood remain among the most stomach-churning spectacles I've ever witnessed. There was only one real victim in that strange and savage saga: Monica Lewinsky herself.

Everybody else involved - Clinton, his craven staff, the Office of Independent Counsel and the hypocritical fuck-monsters of the GOP - all pretty much got what they deserved. In so far as Clinton's passion for blowjobs was directly responsible for the election of George W. Bush and his monstrous reign of error, I suppose that you can argue that America itself was a victim as well, but the country sure enjoyed the spectacle while it lasted.

Miss Lewinsky was a good girl. She (and I hope that you forgive this unavoidable pun) strived mightily to keep her mouth shut. She perjured herself in the Paula Jones case to protect Mr. Bill and initially refused to cooperate with OIC. It was only after Kenn Starr threatened her and, it should be mentioned, her mother with decades in prison that she folded.

Monica was only an afterthought to Clinton. Even after he (sort of) admitted his wrongdoing on August 17, 1998, it still took him over a month for him to apologize to her, and he hasn't personally communicated his regrets to her to this day.

After leaving office, Clinton got a gigantic sum of money to write an unreadable book, made a fortune on the lecture circuit, became a revered figure in his party and an elder statesman to his country. Starr himself got a book contract and each new job he got was cooler and more lucrative than the last. Most of the reptiles in the Republican party were happily reelected and went on to proposition teenage boys, fuck high-priced whores and get suck-started in Minneapolis airport bathrooms. The chief engineer of the Clinton impeachment, Newt Gingrich, was being regularly blown by a staffer at the time. When his wife learned about this, the Speaker asked for an open marriage. All of the above are why I think that the idea that "the government should set a moral example" is evidence of possible civic retardation.

The only person who suffered at all was Monica Lewinsky and her life was thoroughly ruined. She was in debt to her lawyers to the tune of millions of dollars, left completely unemployable and unable to have a long-term romantic relationship. More than even Clinton, her name quickly became a national punchline. Worst of all, there's probably nobody in the world that can relate to her predicament. In almost every way you can imagine, she's alone.

And for what? Blowing a married man? Shit, everybody else in that story did far worse as a matter of daily routine before they were fully awake in the morning. And each and every fucking one of them managed to profit from the experience.

Her loyalty extended even to 2009, when she finally said in an e-mail interview for Ken Gormley's book The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr (which I highly recommend) that the President continued to lie throughout the impeachment process.

Well, at long last, it's Monica's turn. She's shopping a book for $12 million (which, after adjusting for inflation, is about as much as Clinton got his singularly unreadable 2004 memoir.) And it promises to be humiliating for the former president and elder statesman.

Lewinsky never got explicit in past interviews about her Clinton encounters, but now plans to describe his “insatiable desire for three-way sex, orgies and the use of sex toys of all kinds,” one pal told the National Enquirer.

The purported details of the potentially embarrassing tome come after the Post’s Page Six reported last week that Lewinsky was shopping a tell-all to several publishers.

According to her friends, Lewinsky also will recount how Clinton referred to wife Hillary as a “cold fish” and “laughed” about their “non-existent sex life.”

She’ll also release love letters she wrote to Clinton.

“In them, she opened her heart about her love for Bill and how much happier she could make him,” said the source. “Some of what she wrote was so raw that she never sent them.”

 You know what? I hope that she gets the full $12 million and that every man, woman and child in America buys the book, making her wealthy beyond her dreams.

Of everyone involved in the tawdry Clinton legacy, Monica Lewinsky was the only person even approaching innocence. Was she naive and perhaps even remarkably dumb? Sure, and I'm pretty sure that even she would tell you that. But people forget that she was a 22 year old girl at the time that she was involved with the most powerful man in the world, and she wound up having her life ground through the gears of the federal government for over a year.

Miss Lewinsky did nothing that girls that age don't do each and every day and, for her trouble, she was bankrupted, personally destroyed and her reputation forever ruined. Everyone will forget that, say, Paris Hilton ever existed ten seconds after she dies, but Monica Lewinsky has to know that hundreds of years from now people will still be reading about her dalliances with Clinton.

No other presidential mistress in American history was exposed in real time. We only learned about the ones that we did long after it could do them real harm and, in most cases, after they were already dead. The most private moments of Monica's life were dragged into the daylight when she was just starting her adulthood and she's had to live with the devastating consequences of that ever since.

Can you even begin to imagine what that must be like? I certainly can't. Because of a purely private act in her very early 20s, Monica Lewinsky will soon enter her 40s and still have no real prospect of a career or a family of her own. For all anybody knows, she may still owe her lawyers money. Her legal fees must have been astronomical and, unlike Clinton, her earning potential was decimated. She made a few million in the aftermath of the fiasco, but I'd be surprised if it was enough to pay her bills and rebuild her life.

I know that I started this little article with innumerable blowjob jokes. That's because I'm a bad man and I couldn't help myself. But I have always felt a deep sympathy for Monica and always will. Yes, Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr ruined her life, but all of us were joyous spectators in it. And she didn't do anything to deserve that. Her punishment couldn't have been more disproportionate to her supposed "crime."

They say that America is the land of second chances. Bill Clinton sure as hell got one. I couldn't be more sincere in hoping that Monica Lewinsky does, too. Few people probably deserve it more.

"Our Long National Chick-fil-A Nightmare is Over."

In late July and early August, I wrote a couple of posts about American coronary factory Chick-fil-A's marketing fiasco regarding their corporate stand on gays. You can read them here and here.

One thing that should be made perfectly clear is that this wasn't about Dan Cathy's personal stands because the donations in question were made by Chick-fil-A as a business. Indeed, if the company was publicly traded, its stockholders would very probably have shown the Cathy family the door, if not actually had them executed.

You see, for businesses to involve themselves in public controversies that don't direct affect them is just bad business. No matter what you say, you're almost guaranteed to alienate half of your market. Who in the fuck needs that?

Of course, liberals just had to be liberals and refused to let the market take care of itself. A few mouthy mayors just had to threaten to complicate Chick-fil-A's future expansion, which immediately made this a First Amendment issue instead of whether or not Chick-fil-A were mouthbreathing tools. Even I took Chick-fil-A's side on that.

The reason that liberals are singularly incapable of bringing half the population to their point of view is that they have to make things far more complicated than they are and insist on a bureaucratic solution for everything, whereas normal human beings would much rather brawl it out in the marketplace of ideas. Not only is government not always the solution, it only very rarely ever is.

I remain convinced that, barring the fuckheaded interference of liberals, the market would have taken care of the story in less than a week. Yes, you might have had some semi-mongoloids who actually like looking like bigoted assholes marching in support of the company, but you would not have had Fox News, the fucking Tea Party and every glory-hound dickhead blogger on earth determined to make them a zillion dollars in a day.

Reasonable people would have thought about it and very quietly said to themselves, "I have close friends, co-workers and family members who are gay. I can't see a single plausible reason that some fucking fast-food restaurant would go out of their way to fuck with them, so I don't think I want to give them my money. If they want to make a public issue out of their superstitious stupidity, we'll see how well that works out for them."

That's how this story should have played out. And that's why everybody hates liberals.

Instead, we wound up with Fox News broadcasting a 24-hour marathon of people lining up for hours to throw money at Don Cathy. Even has-beens like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin managed to wring their lusted-after sixteenth minute of fame out of it.

And those people weren't wrong in doing so. It no longer was an issue of whether or not Chick-fil-A was evil, the question had become one of the power and reach of ward-heeling assholes in Boston, New York and Chicago. And that was a question people who wanted to call Chick-fil-A out weren't ever going to win. Ever.

After the hugely profitable "Chick-Fil-A Anti-Gay Day," the story gleefully disappeared. Even I dropped it, mostly because that's when I thought that things were going to get interesting.

And guess what?

Chick-fil-A has pledged to stop giving money to anti-gay groups and to back off political and social debates after an executive’s comments this summer landed the fast-food chain smack in the middle of the gay marriage debate.

The Civil Rights Agenda, which dubs itself the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy group in Illinois, said Chick-fil-A agreed in meetings to stop donating to groups such as Focus on the Family and the National Organization for Marriage. Such groups oppose same-sex marriage.

The LGBT collective said the Atlanta-based restaurant chain also sent a letter, signed by its senior director of real estate, to Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno.

Chick-fil-A said in the missive that its nonprofit arm, the WinShape Foundation, “is now taking a much closer look at the organizations it considers helping, and in that process will remain true to its stated philosophy of not supporting organizations with political agendas,” according to TCRA.

That still hasn't work out the way I would have liked because of the involvement of Moreno, one of the ward-heelers that threatened zoning prohibitions on Chick-fil-A. The yokels are still going to be able to say that they made a business decision solely because of government pressure. And by copying Moreno on the letter, Chick-fil-A furthers that narrative.

If private advocacy groups like The Civil Rights Agenda figure that they have the market juice to put a gun to Chick-fil-A's head, fine. After all, that's the kind of shit that the Family Research Council and the fucking awful Catholic League try to pull all the time.

But it's never going to be a clean victory for those of us who thought that Chick-fil-A were being mouth-breathers precisely because of the weight that the fucking government threw into the fight. Those of us who thought that the company was engaging in half-witted religious grandstanding are never going to be able to say that the marketplace actually won because we'll never be able to prove it.

Did I mention that this is why everybody hates liberals?

Because Randy Newman is Better Than You are

Romney's End, the 47% and the Enduring Big Lie of Republican Politics

If someone can explain to me how former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney can possibly win the presidency at this point, I'd love to hear it. The last three weeks have been among the very worst that I've seen in thirty years of following presidential campaigns. For all intents and purposes, Barack Obama is now running against Michael Dukakis.

It started with the most important speech of his career being overshadowed by an aged actor delusionally berating furniture. The wildly uninspiring Democratic convention produced an unexpected bounce for the incumbent, which threw the GOP into a panic. Romney then humiliated himself with a premature and almost unpatriotic response to the North African conflagration. And then his own campaign started cannibalizing itself for the good folks at Politico.

Then a secretly recorded tape of the candidate at a fundraiser started making the rounds last night. If you haven't seen it already, here you go.



This precipitated another crisis in the campaign. A presidential candidate doesn't schedule a press conference at 10 PM because things are going well.

This should have been the easiest thing in the world for Romney to smooth over, especially given his notable dexterity with principle. All he had to do was say, "Look, it was a private event with sophisticated donors who are generally well-versed in tax policy. In such situations, I often use shorthand and in no way was I actually writing off half of the fucking country, nor would those donors have tolerated it for a second if I did, if only because it would have been epically dumb politics."

Nobody would have been thrilled with that kind of damage control, but it would have contained it to maybe a two-day story. Instead, he went before the press and doubled-down on his remarks, thereby walking directly into the Obama campaign's  (and, to be fair, Romney's Republican primary opponents) carefully crafted narrative of Mitt as an aloof, plutocratic asshole.

To the extent that anyone remembers anything at all about the Republican convention that doesn't involve Clint Eastwood, it was their mighty attempts to paint the nominee as a caring, giving man - a good guy who has strived to do right by friends and strangers alike and now wants to do right by America.

This tape, and Romney's response to it, effectively negates that. The GOP wasted tens of millions of dollars in Tampa. Worse, the Left's caricature of him has been reinforced in ways that they could never have pulled off on their own.

It might be the most fantastic and public suicide note in the history of presidential politics. I've never seen a losing campaign say that half the electorate are cunty layabouts, let alone a winning one. As a general rule, politics is an exercise in making as many friends as you can while cultivating only the enemies who best serve your own narrative. Mitt Romney either doesn't get that or he's the single most ineffective communicator in all of Christendom.

I follow any number of prominent Republican partisans on twitter, and their response to this tape last night was hilarious. It seems to consist of two parts;

1. Obama's "bitter clingers" remark during the 2008 Pennsylvania primary
2. "Why should Mitt be punished for telling the truth?"

Neither of those are going to be particularly effective, I can pretty much guarantee you that.

The "bitter clingers" comment didn't hurt Obama as badly as it should have for a few reasons.

First, the quote was contrary enough to Obama's image at the time that it was seen as an isolated incident.

Second, it's important to remember that he was running against Hillary Clinton at the time, who had far higher public negatives than he did. In the spring of 2008, 50% of America believed that she might have actually been the Antichrist.

Third, Republicans wanted to run against Obama in the general because they thought that he would be easier to beat than the Clintons, who terrified them. At a minimum, they wanted the Democratic primaries to last as long as possible in the hope that it would split the party. That being the case, the McCain campaign, the RNC and conservative media waited months before highlighting "bitter clingers" in any significant way. The drawback of that was that they looked desperate when they finally got around to it.

The "47% narrative" that has built up over the last three years is a much bigger deal and I'm not at all surprised that liberals, who think that they're much smarter than they actually are, didn't put that one to bed as soon as it popped up.

It was invented by Erick Erickson of Red State and CNN, and like most of his inventions, it's only partially true and the parts that aren't fiction speak ill of Republicans more than anyone else.

In fairness, Mr. Erickson is actually a better than average writer and would probably be a pretty good novelist. It's only where facts come up that he falls down, making him a sub par propagandist at best.

Republicans are most successful when they're cheery optimists. Look at the three most politically successful Republican  presidential candidates of the 20th century: Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. What all three of them had in common was their belief that America was great and could only get greater. They sure as shit didn't actively run against half of the population. By watching them, you knew that they actually liked America and Americans. For all of his faults (and his faults were legion,) that was also true of George W. Bush.

Modern Republicans seem more comfortable running on the Goldwater-Nixon model, which is being indignant at the country. As Nixon proved, that can work, but only under a very specific set of circumstances. For it to be successful, you need to convince people that the "silent majority" is being victimized by both "the elites" and their own fellow citizens. It also helps if you're running against an opponent more pessimistic about America and generally unlikable than you are, and three years worth of polling shows that that just isn't true in this race.

There's none of that optimism in modern conservatism, especially in the GOP-Tea Party. Not only are they constantly whining, they're perceived as pretending that they're victims of those less fortunate than themselves. They were declaring the end of America within three months of losing an election and openly blaming their fellow citizens for it. They're bitchy in ways that make even Perez Hilton blush and that they've done as well as they have speaks more to the communications failures of the Democrats than it does their own stupid message.

More importantly, the narrative of the "53%" is counter-factual nonsense. Actually, it's worse than that. It's blatantly dishonest.

Very few Americans "pay no federal taxes." Almost all of them pay a shitload in payroll taxes, which are far more regressive and broadly applied than the income tax. Payroll taxes were also helpfully doubled by President Reagan and Alan Greenspan in 1983 in a effort to save Social Security.

The Republican "53%" also ignores that it was their own fiscal policies that created that situation. Reagan's own 1986 Tax Reform Act took 4 million people off of the rolls entirely. The 1981, 2001 and '03 tax cuts removed millions more. And Republicans spent a generation actually bragging about it! Even today, they're hysterically promising not to raise anybody's taxes, while actively running against Americans that they (wrongly) say pay no taxes at all.

If you're going to look at the 47%, you might want to look at seniors, who collect the lion's share of federal benefits and, by virtue of being retired, pay almost nothing in taxes. According to the IRS, "Generally, if Social Security benefits were your only income for 2010, your benefits are not taxable and you probably do not need to file a federal income tax return."

Is the GOP going to go there? I highly doubt it. Retired men are one of the few winning demographics that they have left with any growth potential.

Then there's the matter of where the "47%" actually lives. And trust me, it is decidedly not in Mitt Romney's political interest for you to know this. That's a really, really problematic map for Mitt Romney.

The states in red have the highest percentage of "non-payers." The states in green have the highest percentage of payers. I trust that you'll immediately figure how that might be problematic. Of those ten states, only New Mexico can be counted as a "blue state" and Florida is the only swing state. The remaining eight couldn't be more Republican unless they started actually executing everyone to the left of Rick Perry.

Then there's the states themselves. There's a real disparity in what states send to Washington on taxes and what they receive in benefits and spending. That doesn't look good for Erick Erickson's "53%," either. At least not politically.

Of the bottom ten states (not counting Puerto Rico,) in federal taxes to benefits -New Mexico, Mississippi, West Virginia, Montana, Alabama, North Dakota, Maine, Maryland, Alaska and Virginia - six have been heavily Republican since 1972. Only three (New Mexico, Maine and Maryland) are considered "safe" Democratic states this year.

To adopt the GOP "53%" rhetoric, if you live in the former Confederacy or Idaho, the overwhelming odds are that you're a leech and Mitt Romney doesn't want your fucking vote! You're precisely the kind of people that makes life so miserable for zillionaires like him and the only reason that his effective tax rate is as high as 13%.

The fact that the Democrats, and liberals generally, are too stupid or too afraid to point this out is the only reason that this election is as close as it is. The Tea Party, imbued as they are with every logical  fallacy known to man, took over the Republican party without a fight.

His white undershirt and cute handwritten sign aside , Erick Erickson's three jobs are being on the radio, TV and running a blog that's owned by a fairly large publishing house, none of which exactly qualifies as grunt work. He's hardly in the economic hurt locker, but he likes to pretend that he is, just as he's a media elite that likes to piss and moan about media elites. While I doubt that he fits in Mitt Romney's definition of "middle income," I'll bet you that he makes a whole lot more than most of the people reading this are. And, If nothing else, at least Mitt Romney isn't silly enough to portray himself as some kind of working class hero.

I'm mystified by the chronic inability of liberals to demolish this shitty thinking and populist fuckheadery, but I've never thought much of their political skills to begin with. Recent U.S political history shows that liberals win elections because only when conservatives go out of their way to lose them.

Barack Obama is going to win in seven weeks not because he's such a charismatic supernova of a president. Christ, most liberals can barely stand him. Conservatives are going to lose because Mitt Romney is such mealy-mouthed swine. But the overwhelming likelihood is that we're not going to get wiped out. At least not yet.

That's likely to change in the very near future. This "47%" horseshit isn't just counter-intuitive, it's counter-factual, and demonstrably so. Republicans aren't going to be running against nutless wonders like Barack Obama forever. At some point, liberals are going to find themselves another Bill Clinton who will be able to rhetorically demolish the Republican base as not only bitchy welfare queens, addicted to their own self-imagined victimhood, but as ungrateful ones to boot.

If you look at your history, the United States has moved considerably to the right since 1960. Democrats, it should be remembered, were for broad-based tax cuts long before Republicans were. By any realistic measure, Bill Clinton - even at his worst - was more of a fiscal conservative than George Bush and his Republican Congress. Even Obamacare was essentially invented by the Heritage Foundation, the 1994 Republican Senate and Mitt Romney. As, for that matter, was Cap and Trade.

Newt Gingrich was ruined because he was more of a revolutionary than he was a conservative, and the Tea Party is even worse. Primarily because their demographic base is older than the national average, they want their entitlements and giant tax cuts while leaving the burden of the cuts on future generations. That this is precisely what they routinely accuse liberals of doing.

And those old people aren't even the Greatest Generation anymore. Now we're talking about the boomer assholes who did a grand total of nothing for the country. The same folks, including Mitt Romney, who did everything they could to avoid serving their country in Vietnam now couldn't be more determined to perverse the welfare state for their generation, the consequences of their own reckless disregard for everything on their own kids and grandkids be damned.

As I write this, the Occupy Wall Street tools are largely discredited and marginalized. In large part, that's because they don't have a charismatic leadership voice. The Right is making a terrible miscalculation in thinking that they someday won't.

Bill Clinton's demolition speech at the DNC should have been a huge warning sign to thoughtful conservatives. There are giant factual holes in the Tea Party's demagoguery that are going to kill us in the not-too-distant future.

For Once, Rick Santorum is Right!

If you go back through my archives, you'll see that I said early and often that Mitt Romney would be this year's Republican presidential nominee. If you go back far enough, you'll probably find out that I said it before John McCain won the 2008 nomination. I had this argument innumerable times on other blogs with people who said that I was out of my fucking mind, but I was right and they were wrong. I love it when that happens.

In fairness, that prediction wasn't a result of my being so much smarter than everybody else. It just means that I pay attention. Who gets the GOP nomination for the Big House is among the most predictable things on earth. Despite their repeated assertions that America is a "meritocracy," the Republican party functions in ways that union hacks everywhere would recognize. Specifically, you get the nomination when it's your turn.

Romney finished behind McCain in 2008, so it's his turn now. The same was true of John McCain. Bob Dole, George H.W Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Bush 41, Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon won the nomination from the vice-presidency. There were only two nominees of the last ten - over the last fifty-two years - that weren't the next in line: George W. Bush and Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was nominated because Nelson Rockefeller had been recently *gasp* divorced, and Bush won the prize because no sane party would ever nominate Steve Forbes or Pat Buchanan.

Given that half-century of history, I'm not at all uncomfortable saying that there's an 80% chance that the Republican nominee for president in 2016 is going to be Rick Santorum. Actually, I'd say that the chance is better than 80%, since Santorum won more primaries than Forbes and Buchanan combined. (There's no clear anology in terms of delegates because the GOP stupidly changed it's rules from "winner-take-all" to a proportional model that repeatedly screwed Democrats.)

Moreover, when Mitt Romney loses, I can almost assure you that they won't self-examine their quandary and come to the conclusion that their loss - including what I now strongly believe to be losing the opportunity to retake the Senate - was a result of the party having lost it's fucking mind and forcing otherwise electable nominees to take strange and savage positions that serve only to alienate broad swaths of the electorate.

Oh no, they've already telegraphed their intentions. They'll intone - as several of them already have - that you just can't trust moderate Republicans. They'll cite Reagan's victory in 1980 and go on to every subsequent GOP loss (conveniently ignoring George W. Bush's dual victories and what Karl Rove at the time prophesied as a 'permanent Republican majority) as evidence of this. Of course, they'll ignore shitloads of history in doing this, but they aren't exactly famous as political scholars, or even dependably honest people. They're ideologues and fiction not infrequently gets in the way of facts, both on the left and the right.

Here are some facts for you folks. In 1992, George H.W Bush was challenged from the right in the primaries by Pat Buchanan and in the general by Ross Perot (the first major candidate to make the deficit an issue.) Precisely the same thing happened to Bob Dole in 1996, except Dole also had the albatross of Newt Gingrich around his neck as well. John McCain was so terrified of his right flank that he reveresed at least a decade's worth of policy positions (some as recent as a year earlier) to appease them. The fact that he froze during the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and named a highly fuckable moron as his running mate didn't help matters.

Yes, Reagan won, but he ran against an unpopular incumbent who had faced a strong primary challenge and an independent general election candidate that siphoned off 6% of his vote. Historically, it would have been difficult for Reagan to lose under those circumstances.

Even during the 2010 election, most of the Tea Party\s superstars got their asses kicked in the general, including Sharron Angle, Ken Buck, Joe Miller and Christine O'Donnell, who were either too psychotic or stupid to be elected, or too far to the right of their electorates. But you try convincing Republicans of  that. I've given up.

Beginning on November 7, I think that you'll see the GOP move even further to what they think is "the right." Rick Santorum is their natural choice.

More importantly, Santorum will also have a political inrastructure and fundraising apparatus in place by them. If you think that Chris Christie or Jeb Bush are going to ride to the rescue, you're kidding yourselves. Neither would run against a candidate as weak as Romney, let alone one who is guaranteed to have an institutional advantage in Iowa as Santorum.

And Santorum is already telegraphing how he's going to be destroyed by anyone that the Democrats put up.

“We will never have the elite smart people on our side, because they believe they should have the power to tell you what to do,” said Santorum, adding, “So our colleges and universities, they’re not going to be on our side. The conservative movement will always be – and that’s why we founded Patriot Voices – the basic premise of America and American values will always be sustained through two institutions, the church and the family.”

The annual conference features 80 speakers over the course of three days and is sponsored by conservative organizations such as the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation and Liberty Univeristy.

I should say that the "Values Voter Summit" has always driven me up the fucking wall. That's because all voters are "values voters," including even the remnants of the goddamned Manson Family. You may not like thise values, but they're values nevertheless.

I've never before heard a supposed movement leader say that smart people will never support him. That's not only new, it's revolutionary! We may have the prospect of a presidential nominee wearing a "I'M WITH STUPID" T-shirt during his convention speech.

If you want to look at where the Democratic "War on Women" meme began, look no further than the Tea Party. Once a ton of their assholes got elected at the state level, they ignored entirely that theirs was supposed to be an entirely economic message and went all jihadi on abortion. In states like Texas, Virginia and Pennsylvania, they tried passing  trans-vaginal ultrasound mandates that served no medical purpose, but did nicely humiliate ladies who liked to fuck. And they did this while protesting a "government intrusion into health care."

Santorum brought those issues into the presidential campaign, speaking out against not only birth control but amniocentesis, which is a rather revolutionary move.

The Santorum and Tea Party wings of the party aren't very good at reading polls or census results. Smart Republican strategists aren't shy about sayng that this might be the last presidential election in which that the GOP can rely on old white guys. As it is, the supposedly moderate Romney is losing with blacks, Hispanics, gays, single women, and anyone with a college education.

As it is, Mitt Romney is struggling mightily to win back George W. Bush's incredibly narrow electoral map. Yet Rick Santorum thinks that he's going to win it, which is adorable. This is beause, later on in his stupid Christanist speech, he whittled his base down further;

Santorum also criticized the libertarian wing of the Republican party who “don’t want to talk about social issues,” saying that “without the church and the family, there is no conservative movement, there is no basic values of America.”

 There it is, then.

If the Republican party's likely next nominee is outright declaring that that libertarians have no place in the movement, let's see how the movement does without them.

From this day forward, let's let Team Jesus have the Republican party. Libertarians or small-govenment conservatives should either sit this election out or vote for Gary Johnson. Then, in 2016, they shouldn't voe in the Republican primaries.

Give the nomination to Santorum.  Let the religious right take over the party. Then let's see how well it does in an elecion.

I'll bet it doesn't go well.