The Republican Old Boy Network

August 25, 2009

As Barack Obama’s popularity continues to drop, and as more and more people start to wake up from the fairytale slumber they entered as Obama sang the “Hope and Change” lullaby, it is becoming increasingly apparent to me that Obama will be a one-term President.

If the Republican Party can remove its head from deep within its own posterior.

I’m not a Republican, but since Conservatism and Federalism aren’t welcome in the Democrat party, and a third-party candidacy is a ticket to defeat, the Republicans remain my best hope. You have no idea how much this fact depresses me.

When I look at the current state of the Republican party, I see a party that is starting to ascend once again. It’s a slow process, and deservedly so. The Republicans have no one but themselves to blame for their minority status. They fell in love with the idea of a Big Government under the leadership of that “Compassionate Conservative” George W. Bush (no great thinker, he). They started to spend and spend some more. They started to believe their own hype and the scandals started coming. This allowed the Democrats, who had been a minority for 12 years, to convince people that it was they who were the party of fiscal discipline. The Democrats pointed to the balanced budget of the late ’90s and reminded everyone that it was a Democrat in the Presidency. They left off the fact that it was actually the Republicans who balanced the budget; it was Bill Clinton who signed the bill. As the aftermath of 9/11 led into first one, and then a second, war, and Compassionate Conservatism became the Gospel of the Republicans, the balanced budget became a thing of the past.

Then the Democrats took over in 2006, and it’s been Spendapalooza ever since. G.W. Bush was loath to veto any spending bills because he was so wrapped up in his gauzy haze of Compassion. Now Barack Obama is in the White House and the projected deficit over the next ten years is $9 trillion dollars. And he wants to add even more money to this unsustainable debt.

The citizenry of this country is starting to get upset, at both the President and Congress. This is a golden opportunity for Republicans. But will they take it?

For 2010, the Congressional outlook for the Republicans is pretty good at this admittedly early point. Some predictions have the Democrats losing as many as 25 House seats. I think if they continue doing what they’re doing, they will lose more. The Senate Majority leader, Harry Reid, is down by double digits in polling against his Republican opponents. Call out the instigators, because there’s something in the air; the revolution’s here.

What concerns me is the Republican Old Boy Network when it comes to the Presidency. The Democrat party is all about new faces. A Senator from Massachusetts, a governor from Georgia, a governor from Arkansas, a community organizer from Illinois. Leaving aside the obvious choices of a VP following his President, most of the Democrat nominees for President over the past 50 years have been people who came out of the blue. They may have had some press prior to their running, but they were still largely unknowns before the campaigns. Kennedy, Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, Dukakis, Clinton, Kerry, Obama. These were all people who rose in the ranks and then exploded on the national scene.

The Republicans, on the other hand, have a tendency to view the Presidency as the last rung on the ladder for hard working guys who have put their time in and who deserve a promotion. Eisenhower, a great general and war hero who was known by every American, Nixon who was Eisenhower’s VP, Goldwater (the exception that proves the rule), Nixon again, Reagan (ran and came in second in the primaries in 1976), Bush (VP under Reagan), Dole (a man who’d spent 28 years in the Senate, run as VP with Ford, ran for President in 1980 and 1988, and who was advanced to the Republican candidacy in 1996 despite the fact that he was older than Methuselah, stiffer than a good martini, and less articulate than Bobo the Chimp), George W. Bush (family name, heritage), and John McCain (see Dole, Robert). I excluded the accidental president, Gerald Ford.

The point is that the Republicans have a tendency to view their Presidential candidates as the guy whose turn it is to run. I can see them now advocating for Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin in 2012. None of these three are a good choice. Romney is a dubious conservative whose stiffness and unbreakable hair (and lame jokes about same) will look even worse next to the smooth huckster Obama, Huckabee is an even more dubious conservative whose down home folksiness somehow rings false, and Palin will not be able to overcome the stereotypes (at least not by 2012…let’s see her in 2020 after she’s written a few scholarly books and articles and has made a name for herself from out there in the wilderness like Reagan did in the 1970s).

But if history is a guide, the Republican party will nominate one of these three to run in 2012. Why? Because it’s their turn.

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Posted by Blaknsam

A Black Day For The UK

August 24, 2009

Oh, brother…I mean, sibling. The sheer stupidity of this is overwhelming.

These are the people on whom the Democrats and Barack Obama want us to model ourselves.

Notice this paragraph:

The clampdown in the public sector has angered some of the country’s most popular writers. (highlighting mine)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I’m not working for The Clampdown.

Truth is, the Chairmen of these various groups and boards are taking a broad look at a major problem that, until now, has been white-washed out of the view of most of Mankind. The black hole into which this problem has disappeared has now been addressed in a masterful way. These phrases are little more than the white elephants of an old lexicon, and while the bold men who finally addressed this problem will be derided as the black sheep of a tolerant United Kingdom they can tell the shrewish harpies who lampoon them not to get their knickers in a twist. Once the population mans up and decides to accept the Newspeak, the United Kingdom will be free of black-hearted fellows who might otherwise offend with their ungentlemanly speech.

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Posted by Blaknsam

Requiem For A Clunker

August 24, 2009

Today marks the final day of the “Cash For Clunkers” program. The program has been touted as being wildly successful, popular, a brilliant example of the government stimulating the economy, etc. Let’s really look at these claims.

Was it successful? Yes, in the sense that something along the line of half a million new cars were sold (I’ve also seen estimates up to 700,000). But is that really the measure of success?

The program was a government giveaway of taxpayer dollars. The essence of the program was simply this: trade in your old car and the taxpayers of the United States will give you up to $4500 dollars towards the purchase of a new car. The fact that people took advantage of this is about as surprising as the fact that children scrambled to pick up nickels thrown by John D. Rockefeller, and that’s actually one of the pernicious aspects of the program: it treats adults like children being rewarded for cleaning out their garages. The program was popular with those who took advantage of it (and took advantage of other taxpayers, by the way). Why wouldn’t it be? They got free money…and a lot of it. Was it popular with the millions of people who did not participate? I haven’t done surveys, but I’ve asked around. A few people I know think it’s a good idea, but the overwhelming majority of people I’ve spoken with are appalled at the entire concept. Judging the popularity of a money giveaway by the smiling faces of those who received the money is not exactly a fair yardstick.

One of the main reasons for the program was to give a shot in the arm to the failing automakers (GM, Chrysler, Ford) and also promote “green” automobiles, but most of the cars sold were foreign cars and standard internal combustion vehicles, so the program failed on both counts. As far as the environment is concerned, the program was, if anything, anti-environmental.

For starters, the program only applied if you bought a new car. Used cars were not allowed. From an environmental standpoint, the cost of producing a new car is considerably higher than the cost of an existing car in the amounts of energy required. A truly environmental agenda here would have required the participant to buy a pre-existing car. Secondly, the law forced the dealership to destroy the turned-in clunker within 48 hours, despite the fact that these cars could have been sold overseas in developing countries and in places like China where people are desperate for cars. The destruction of the cars uses energy, as well. And since the cars were destroyed, and not even allowed to be dismantled and sold for parts, they deprived the auto dealers of a potentially lucrative source of income. There are also many lower-income people in this country who might have jumped at the opportunity of replacing their clunker with a somewhat better clunker.

You also have what I call the “mortgage paradigm” at work. How many lower income people traded in their clunkers for cars they could not afford because the government was willing to give them so much money? Many considerations go into buying a car: the cost of the car, the cost of insurance, the cost of gas, the mileage, etc. Were there people who bought more car than they needed because the government gave them money? This was what happened with the housing crisis…too many people buying more house than they could afford because interest rates were so low. My guess is that the number of recently purchased cars that end up for sale a year from now will be somewhat higher than normal as people sell off their shiny new Camrys and replace them with…used clunkers.

Then there’s this: the program was announced with great fanfare and was going to cost $1 billion dollars and run from August until November. At the end of the day, the program cost at least $3 billion and ran from August until August. There are other additional costs as well. The government has had to hire people and outsource paperwork. The dealers have been working around the clock to try to keep up with the paperwork on their end (and only about 2% of dealers have gotten their money back). Destroying the cars costs money. Being unable to sell the used clunkers either as cars or as parts is a loss of potential revenue. This program has cost at least three times what the government estimated and has ended two months early even as dealers are starting to pull out of the program on their own.

This “wildly successful” program has been an absolute debacle, a shining example of government causing problems and not solving problems.

And when it comes to putting our nation’s health care system into the same hands that brought us this sham of a program, Barack Obama smiles and says, “Trust me.”

Spoken like a used car salesman.

Further reading: Michelle Malkin has additional info here, and news about the next one: Cash For Appliances. Hot Air has the goods on Federal workers being reassigned from the FAA’s air traffic control unit to deal with this program. Over at Liberty Log, J.P. Muhlenberg brings up some of the same concerns.

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Posted by Blaknsam

Rich Lowry On The Gullibility Of Americans

August 21, 2009

At NRO, Rich Lowry hits the ball way, way out of the park with this excellent column.

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Posted by Blaknsam

The Shame Of MSNBC

August 21, 2009

After showing video of a man wearing a gun at an Obama protest rally, MSNBC anchorette Contessa Brewer decided to inject race into the equation by fretting over the prospect of white people bringing guns while a “person of color” was in the White House. The talking heads stood there nodding at each other and expressing real worry over the prospect of Barack Obama ending up another Martin Luther King:

You guessed it. The guy with the gun, who was carefully framed by the camera to avoid showing his skin color, was black.

Michelle Malkin awards MSNBC the “Cone Of Shame” and Hot Air has more here and here.

After this report, MSNBC ran this special report about other serious concerns.

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Posted by Blaknsam

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