The Massachusetts Senate Race

January 18, 2010

There really isn’t much I can say that hasn’t been said by more knowledgeable, wiser folk than me, but I’d be derelict in my duty of fighting The Clampdown if I remained completely mum on the subject of this fascinating Senate race in Massachusetts.

In November, Republican Chris Christie beat Democrat Jon Corzine in the Governor’s race in New Jersey, a shock that sent shivers down the spine of the Democratic party. New Jersey is a heavily “blue” state, so a Republican victory in the age of Obama was a stunning upset. Compared to Massachusetts, New Jersey is as red as a fire engine, though so it was considered a given that Democrat Martha Coakley would cakewalk into the empty Senate seat left by the death of Ted Kennedy. For the Democrats, this was a no-brainer. Coakley was popular, well-known, a Democrat, well-funded, and running for the seat previously occupied by the Liberal Lion Kennedy in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3-to-1. And only a couple of months ago, Coakley was up over her opponent by 30 points in the polls.

Well, as John Lennon said, life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. While the Democrats were readying the coronation of Coakley, and Coakley herself was spending the campaign laying on a feather bed while being fed grapes by manservants and having the DNC fan her with huge palm fronds, Scott Brown was running for office. Polls now have Brown with a slight lead, and the election is tomorrow.

Proving that they learned absolutely nothing from Corzine’s defeat, the Democrats are now blaming Coakley for running a bad campaign, just as they blamed Creigh Deeds, the Democrat loser in the Virginia gubernatorial race.

It is true that Coakley has not run a good campaign. Insufferable arrogance and a sense of entitlement will do that to a politician (e.g., George H.W. Bush in 1992). But Scott Brown has run a great campaign and, unlike New Jersey’s Chris Christie, Brown has been crystal-clear where he stands on the issues. Most importantly, he has made no bones over the fact that he will vote to kill the health care reform bill in Congress. This has been so blatant that the Massachusetts race has turned into a referendum on the health care bill. And surprise, surprise, surprise…the candidate opposed to the bill is now poised to win the race under the most daunting of circumstances.

Win or lose the election, the Republicans have won this battle. If the race can be this close in Massachusetts, the blue dog Democrats in D.C. are rightfully shaking in their shoes over their re-election prospects. As for me, I’m still inclined to think that Coakley pulls it out. The odds against a Brown victory are overwhelming. But I will be watching and cheering Brown on and will happily eat my words here on Wednesday morning. But the fact of the matter is that if Coakley wins by less than 10%, the victory goes to the Republicans. If Brown wins by 10 votes, the Democrats are, barring a miracle, dead in 2010.

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Posted by Blaknsam

Chuck Schumer’s X-Rated Smear

January 14, 2010

I try to keep it clean here, but in this case I can’t. A United States Senator, the shame of New York, Chuck Schumer has referred to Scott Brown, the Republican running for Senate in Massachusetts as a “far right tea-bagger.”

The phrase is “tea-partier.” A “tea-partier” is someone who believes in less government, lower taxes, and fiscal restraint. A tea-bagger is someone who lowers his scrotum into someone else’s mouth, which sounds a whole lot more like what the Democrats are trying to do to us than anything Scott Brown has to offer.

From Hot Air:

Please note: This is the same guy who spent weeks wetting his pants during his first Senate run when Al D’Amato called him a “putzhead” in a private meeting. I know Durbin’s probably next in line for majority leader when, not if, Nevada finally takes care of Reid, but Schumer’s really his heir apparent. Same nastiness, same cynicism, same snide, two-bit demagoguery. The difference is that Reid apologized for the “negro” comment whereas this will be defended with “who, me?” little-boy fake innocence about the double meaning of the word.

Almost every time this jerk opens his mouth I feel ashamed to be a New Yorker. You stay classy, Chuck.

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Posted by Blaknsam

This Man Is An Idiot

January 14, 2010

Rev. Pat Robertson has blamed the terrible earthquake in Haiti on…Haitians (with a little help from Lucifer). Apparently, the Haitians made a pact with the Devil to get out from under French rule, and they have been cursed ever since.

Pat Robertson needs to shut the hell up.

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Reid Eats Own Foot; Gets Caught Saying What He Believes

January 11, 2010

For those of you who didn’t know it, there’s a double standard between the ways that Republicans are treated when they say or do stupid things, and the way Democrats are treated. Shocking, I know.

The easy comparison that’s being made all over the blogosphere today is the way Trent Lott was treated when he said that Strom Thurmond would have made a good President, and the way Harry Reid is being treated when he said that a “light-skinned” black man with “no Negro dialect” would make a good President.

Trent Lott’s mistake in trying to say something nice about a man on his 100th birthday was to forget that when Thurmond ran for President back in 1948 he was a segregationist. My guess is that the political platform on which Thurmond ran, as bad as it may have been, was not even slightly in Lott’s mind. Lott had known Thurmond for a number of years, had worked with him, and befriended him. The 100-year old man whose birthday party they were celebrating was not the same Dixiecrat segregationist he had been 54 years earlier. I thought at the time that it was a stupid comment, meant harmlessly.

Still, Lott was virtually crucified for the comment and the first critics were Republicans and conservatives. Some of this may have been guided by ulterior motives: Lott was never a popular Senate Majority Leader among conservatives who saw him (rightfully) as a pork-crazy, wishy-washy, inept leader, and this was an excellent chance to kill the king. What the Democrats saw was also a political opportunity, but with a particularly malodorous strain. For the Dems it was less about killing the king as it was about tarnishing the entire Republican party as closet racists longing for a return to the good ol’ days of Jim Crow. Many conservatives and Republicans wanted Lott to step down so they could put one of their own in his place. The Democrats wanted Lott to step down as some sort of tacit evidence of a poisoned ideology coursing through the bloodstreams of all Republicans.

Now the tables are turned and it is the Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who has been caught trying his best to swallow his own foot. This time, however, the Democrats are fine with it, since Reid apologized (Lott did, also, to no avail), and it is just the Republicans who are clamoring for the head of Harry Reid.

I would compare Reid’s comments to Lott’s in this way: Reid’s comments were also stupid, but harmlessly meant. I don’t believe that Reid harbors racist tendencies and I don’t believe he’s got a white hood hanging up in his closet. He has apologized to Obama, and owes a mea culpa to the political class in general. I don’t believe Reid should be forced to step down. I do think he is a typical white liberal, who has spent many years pining away for what Rick Brookhiser termed “The Numinous Negro“, and who believes that the vast majority of voters (i.e., white voters) are racists who would be unwilling to vote for a man of too dark a hue. If there is racism in Reid’s comments it is the odd brand of self-loathing racism that bedevils many so-called Progressives: so unsure of their own hearts, they project their desperate need for approval and reassurance of their inherent goodness onto others in their own ethnicity. Now, of course, he is defending himself by accusing Republicans of being racist (not for the first time: he recently compared people opposed to health care reform as being like slave owners). Apparently to the Democrats, any opposition to the NAACP—one of the most radical liberal groups in the country—is racist.

My guess is that there were not too many Obama supporters who voted for him because he was light-skinned enough. But there is Reid thinking that the (white) people who swept Obama into office were so racist that they would consider the actual shade of darkness of Obama’s skin. Reid should probably be made to understand that the reason Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were never elected President (they both ran) was not because they were too dark-skinned, but because they were (and are) way outside of the mainstream of political thought in this country. Barack Obama presented himself to voters as being a mainstream candidate, though the truth turned out to be far different.

In the end, Reid has fallen victim to the identity politics practiced to near-perfection by the Democratic Party in America. Reid has assumed that all of America views people as he does: as mere representatives of ethnic groups. What he said may not have been racist in the sense that he was not suggesting any sort of superiority or inferiority of one ethnic group or another, but make no mistake: this is how Harry Reid, and the Democrats in general, really view the world.

Hot Air sums up the double-standard nicely, and Michelle Malkin’s got more here.

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The Fruit Of The Boom

January 4, 2010

A few days ago over at The Corner, Jonah Goldberg posted a simple blog post titled “Fire Napolitano.” He’s right, of course. Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano has been singularly unqualified for her office from the beginning. Michelle Malkin has an excellent post on Napolitano’s year-long record of idiocy and incompetence.

The new outcry for Napolitano’s head is because of her insistence that the “system worked” because a plane didn’t explode on Christmas day (she later retracted the statement when she found out that people were paying attention). The fact that Homeland Security had nothing to do with stopping the bombing, and that the very fact that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was allowed to board a plane in the first place demonstrates a clear failing of the system is lost on Napolitano. From her insistence that acts of terrorism be officially referred to as “man-caused disasters” to her smearing of conservatives and returning veterans as potential terrorists down to this asinine insistence that the system operated as expected on Christmas Day, Napolitano has demonstrated time and again that she is simply over her head. Homeland Security is not the department for political buffoonery, and Napolitano’s continued position as the head of that department can not help but reflect a lack of seriousness on Barack Obama’s part when it comes to protecting the nation.

But there is also a larger truth here, which is that the War on Terror has been infected with the poison of politics since September 12, 2001. While George Bush was right in prosecuting the war, there have been too many concessions in the name of political correctness.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab apparently had his bomb sewn into his underwear, in a style similar to Richard Reid’s shoe bomb. Because of Reid, all passengers boarding planes are required to take their shoes off. Because of a thwarted bombing plot a few summers ago in London, we can now no longer carry more than three ounces of liquids, shampoos, soaps, perfumes, colognes, etc. One wonders whether people will now be expected to drop their pants or lift their skirts in the aftermath of the attempted Christmas bombing. The usual suspects in Congress are already talking about how we need to make more widespread use of the X-ray machines that see right through your clothes and display your naked body on a screen for the security people at the airport to peruse. Arlen Spector was on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace suggesting that passengers all be frisked with a simple pat down.

Again, this is idiocy borne of the simple refusal to publicly acknowledge what we all know to be true: the terrorists are dark-skinned Muslim men, single, in their 20s and 30s, and traveling alone. Instead of doing the rational thing and casting more suspicion on those who fit the profile, we are insisting that little old ladies and young children be inconvenienced in the name of almighty political correctness.

Will this approach inconvenience some perfectly well-intentioned, law-abiding Muslims? Yes, it will. They should deal with it, and save their anger for those jihadists who brought this down on their heads.

The fact is that profiling was a commonsense tool used by police until someone thought to attach the word “racial” to the technique, and brought politics and heated issues of race to the mix. But racial profiling goes on all the time. Ask any cop in Harlem 30 years ago if they were on the lookout for white drivers at certain street corners and after a certain time of night.

The current school of thought is that when bad people do bad things, everyone needs to be held under suspicion so that we don’t single out any particular group or ethnicity. Because of this latest attempted attack, airlines are now forbidding people to use the plane bathroom with less than an hour to go in the flight, and are also forbidding people to cover themselves with blankets during that final hour. One can’t help but wonder what the result will be if one of these dark-skinned, Muslim men, between the ages of 20 and 40, traveling alone, manages to insert a pound of C4 into his rectum. We’ll all be submitting to cavity searches so that we can continue to feel really good about not profiling potential terrorists.

And that’s the really dirty secret of the whole charade: we are refusing to use commonsense profiling techniques so that we can prove to ourselves that we are not racist, and that everyone has the same equal chance of being a terrorist. We’d rather feel good about ourselves than protect national security.

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