Today’s Lesson In Progressive Politics: Touré Outre

August 17, 2012

Fresh from the cesspools at MSNBC, the political commentator/author/critic Touré emerges with one of his trademark race-baiting comments. Touré, who only goes by his first name à la Cher, Madonna, and Hillary!, has long been notorious in political geek circles as an advocate for the hard Left and a champion at taking the most innocuous comments and feeding them into the race mill.

On The Cycle, the MSNBC show that in no way whatsoever is based on Fox News’s extremely successful show The Five, Touré made the following comment about Mitt Romney’s campaign against Barack Obama:

I know it’s a heavy thing, I don’t say it lightly, but this is ‘niggerization’. You are not one of us, you are like the scary black man who we’ve been trained to fear.

The first thing one notices is that Touré does say this lightly. He’s clearly been planning on dropping this bomb for awhile. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that this is very typical of the Left. Barack Obama is a black man, so any criticism of him is rooted in his skin color. It couldn’t possibly be the policies that the man espouses, and the programs he has put into law. It couldn’t be based on mounting debt, high unemployment, decreasing household income. No, for the Left, it’s always about identity politics. Because it’s Barack Obama, it’s racism. If the President was Hillary! it would be sexism. The Left does not see people as individuals, it sees groups of voting blocs. The black vote, the female vote, the gay vote.

The tendency of the Left to see people as groups and not individuals stems from a world view where everything is centralized, starting with the government. The Left wing conception of government is as a group of enlightened people who tell the other groups what to do and how to act. The people, for them, are just smaller, but equally centralized groups. It is a hive mind in action and it sees only other hives. It is the way shepherds view their sheep. At it’s heart, it is anti-human.

Any response I could come up with to Touré’s insipid and revolting comment would pale in comparison to this beautiful, powerful, and poignant response from Kira Davis.

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Posted by Blaknsam

Romney/Ryan

August 13, 2012

One of the (many) knocks that Mitt Romney has had to endure is that he is unfailingly dull and cautious. Most of the talking heads on the news programs were convinced that Romney was going to pick either Tim Pawlenty or Rob Portman as his running mate. The conservative base, meanwhile, was crying out for Marco Rubio and, to a lesser extent, Paul Ryan.

From the beginning, it was clear to me that Romney was going to have to choose a running mate who would meet with the approval of the Tea Party. A dull, safe choice like Pawlenty or Portman was going to neither inspire nor invigorate the conservative base of the GOP. It’s exactly why I feared those two choices. Portman is reliably conservative, and Pawlenty was a successful conservative governor but let’s face it: they’re as dull as dishwater.

To me, Rubio seemed the smartest choice. Young, handsome, Hispanic, from Florida, and completely Tea Party-approved. Rubio may still be where the future of the Republican Party lay. Right now I’m picturing him as the second half of the 2020 Ryan/Rubio ticket.

But Romney chose Paul Ryan, a lightning rod for the Democrats, a man who was accused of trying to destroy the social safety net, who has gone on record in great detail about cuts he wants to make to government, a man who has been visually represented in an advertisement literally throwing an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman off a cliff.

Bravo, Mr. Romney. Bravo.

Say what you will about Romney, the choice of Paul Ryan was the politically riskiest pick he could have made short of hauling Sarah Palin away from Sean Hannity for another attempt. Was it a smart choice? Time will tell. The Democrats are already blasting the choice, trying to paint Paul Ryan as an extremist right-wing nut. The hatchet job they are trying to pull off will make the character assassination of Sarah Palin look tame. I fully expect the lunatic Andrew Sullivan to write blog posts claiming that Ryan’s children are Midwich Cuckoos.

But Ryan’s place on the ticket proves one thing: Mitt Romney understands the stakes of this election. For a long time, I was unsure whether he fully appreciated the gravity in the black hole of debt with which Obama and George W. Bush have saddled us. Romney in the primaries talked a good game, but it seemed that he considered our rising debt and deficit as just another problem that needed solving, not an impending crisis of nation-shattering proportions.

Paul Ryan is the serious face here. There is nobody in Congress who understands the budget, the deficit, and the debt more than he does. And he has gone on record with his solution. What Paul Ryan does as Romney’s running mate is force this election to be about genuinely big issues. This is a debate the Left claims they want, but in fact they are terrified of this. Ryan has a plan. It is not a perfect plan, but it is an excellent starting point. Ryan is not a perfect conservative, either, having voted in favor of some of the debt he now is trying to curb. But that is in the past and Ryan has seemingly seen the error of his ways and emerged as a budget hawk without sliding into the fantasy fringe of Ron Paul. The Democrats will scream and point fingers, accusing Ryan of everything from trying to destroy Medicare to forcing old people to eat cat food. Ryan will counter as he always has: eloquently, with facts and figures, charts and graphs, and a smile. I’ve watched Ryan on news shows for years now and he has never come across as someone who is less than completely reasonable and rational. The liberal opposition, meanwhile, has no facts, no charts, no graphs, and only vituperation. Most telling, they have no opposing plan of their own. As Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told Paul Ryan when asked about the debt: “We don’t have a definitive solution. We just don’t like yours.”

In their zeal to attack Ryan, the Democrats have moved away from their campaign strategy to keep this election about anything except economics. The Democrats have tried to make the election about birth control, about Mitt Romney’s taxes, about whether Romney put a dog crate on his car in the early 1980s. They have been loath to discuss anything to do with the economy because it is a losing issue for them.

By picking the poster child for entitlement and budget reform, Mitt Romney has shifted the focus of the election back to the issues that really matter. And while Romney is not comfortable with conservative speech, Paul Ryan makes the case for budget and entitlement reform with great eloquence.

The Democrats are falling all over themselves now in a rush to tell the world how happy they are that Romney has picked such a polarizing figure, that Romney’s choice is even worse than John McCain’s in 2008. This is a lie. The truth is they’re scared. They should be. Ryan is not some sort of monstrous ogre who wants to throw grandma into the snow. He is what the Left fears: a living, breathing rebuttal to the vapidity of their rhetoric and the absence of their ideas.

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The Dread Pirate Romney

January 9, 2012

The New Hampshire primary is tomorrow and Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Jon Huntsman are stepping up their attacks on Mitt Romney in the dumbest possible way.

One of Romney’s talking points is that he has knowledge of what it’s like to be in the real world. As the CEO of Bain Capital, he was in charge of a venture capitalist group that invested money into businesses and helped those businesses achieve success. This being the real world, it didn’t always work. Some of the companies Bain attempted to help went bankrupt. Many others went through what corporations euphemistically called “restructuring.” What this means is that a lot of people were laid off from their jobs as the companies, under Bain’s guidance, refocused their energies, eliminated divisions, and concentrated on core strengths. Sometimes this restructuring led to more success, which enabled the companies to hire new people in new jobs. This is the way of capitalism.

As someone who has watched the company he works for lay off more than 50% of its workers over the past six years, and whose own job is perpetually on the chopping block, I’m well aware of how this looks. Companies that lay people off are cast as villains, but this is nonsense. Being laid off hurts (believe me, I know) but, while it may feel otherwise, getting laid off is not personal. While I have no doubt that companies use mass layoffs to also get rid of undesirable employees, for the majority of people the layoff is about the job, not the worker. It is the job that is being eliminated, and this is not a judgment on the worker.

The cold hard reality is that companies don’t care about you. They don’t care that you just took out a new mortgage. They don’t care you’ve just had a fifth child, with two in college. They don’t care that your commute is two hours each way and costs you thousands of dollars a year. When you sign on with a company you are agreeing to do a job in exchange for money. You have the right to leave that job at any time, and the company has the right to eliminate or restructure that job.

For this reason, it’s disheartening to see Gingrich, Perry, and Huntsman ganging up on Romney for engaging in standard capitalist practices. These attacks on Romney are not just coming from Romney’s Left, they’re coming straight out of the entitled, unwashed vermin at Occupy Wherever. I expect Obama to make these attacks because he’s a far Left ideologue and is planning on running a class warfare-based race this year. But to see supposedly principled conservatives who claim they believe in a free market issue statements as stupid as Newt’s “I think that’s plundering. I don’t think that’s capitalism” or Perry’s quip that Romney’s only worry about pink slips was that “he was going to have enough of them to hand out” is downright revolting. I get it, Newt. I hear ya, Rick. Layoffs suck. But this is, in fact, capitalism. This is the free market. Companies like Bain invest money and offer guidance to improve the bottom line (profits, you see) of different companies. Sometimes improving profits comes at the cost of cutting expenses, and sometimes those “expenses” are people. But again…it ain’t personal.

Mitt Romney has enormous issues as a candidate. In 2012, every one of the candidates has enormous issues whether it’s Newt’s personal baggage and ideological inconstancy, Santorum’s devotion to the dreaded “compassionate conservatism” I despise, Perry’s unserious promises and inarticulate babble during debates, Paul’s Chomskyite foreign policy views, or Huntsman’s eyebrows. It is fair game to attack Romney for Romneycare, or for his flip-flopping, or for his moderate stance in the face of approaching economic Armageddon. But the attacks on his tenure at Bain, designed to portray him as a rapacious pirate taking glee in handing out pink slips, are cartoonish and wrong. The attacks land blows not just on the frontrunner, but on the entire system that conservatives should be championing. The GOP candidates are making Obama’s case for him. They are using the same flawed reasoning, and Obama will be using the words of “conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry” to bolster his argument that Romney is a robber baron who doesn’t care about people.

Economic growth does not come without some temporary pain. It’s horrible for those who face unemployment, but a booming economy and rapid economic growth—virtually impossible under the anti-business regulatory nightmare of the Obama presidency—will make that pain easier to deal with, and a booming economy is only possible with a free market where groups like Bain Capital are willing to invest money in businesses that might not otherwise succeed.

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Rick, Rolling

January 6, 2012

Who would have thought, just a few short months ago, that it would be Rick Santorum and not Rick Perry that emerged triumphant from the Iowa caucus?

Not that Santorum actually won (or did he?), but finishing in second place behind the hair apparent Mitt Romney by just eight votes classifies as somewhat more than a moral victory and somewhat less than true triumph.

The race for the Republican nomination is considerably narrowed now. It’s really down to four: Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, and Perry. Perry and Gingrich are hanging on like Sergeant Snorkel hanging off a cliff-side tree branch. There’s no visible way up, but down is a very real possibility. Perry has all but given up on New Hampshire, and clearly staked out South Carolina as his Alamo. He will be victorious in South Carolina, or he will be gone. Gingrich is liable to stay in the race as long as his money, ego, and love of television cameras allows him to do so. His ego and autagonistophilia (there’s a $10 word I thought I’d never use!) are inexhaustible, but his money is distinctly finite. It’s likely that unless he somehow pulls off a victory in either New Hampshire or South Carolina, he’ll probably be gone by Super Bowl Sunday. Gingrich’s only chance is that he can so dominate future debates, and so thrill the conservative base with a steady diet of red meat, that voters will overlook his many foibles in their lust to see Gingrich and Obama go mano-a-mano.

The current resident of 2nd place in the New Hampshire polls is Ron Paul. I don’t count Ron Paul as a serious candidate. I like to joke that I agree with Ron Paul 97% of the time…95% on domestic policy and 2% on foreign policy. I am the conservative base, and would vote for Ron Paul over Obama. But I’d vote for Jon Huntsman over Ron Paul in the primaries. That’s how noxious I find Paul’s foreign policy views: a vomitous stew of blame-America-firstism, trutherism, and conspiracy nut musings. His foreign policy views are considerably farther to the Left than even Barack Obama’s…the guy who wants to decimate the U.S. military. Ron Paul has no chance of winning the primaries. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Bupkis. Fugghedaboudit.

I eagerly await the hate mail, but in your heart you know I’m right that there will never, ever, ever be a President Ron Paul. Nor should there be.

What all of this means is that at this moment there’s a two-man race going on between Mitt Romney and, surprise, Rick Santorum. Which means the time has come for Republicans to decide who is the best candidate of those two men to defeat Barack Obama in November. William F. Buckley’s rule of thumb was to support the most conservative candidate who was electable. In choosing between Romney and Santorum, the choice at first appears clear: Romney is the less conservative of the two, but is a polished debater, smooth talking, quick on his feet, the frontrunner with lots of name recognition, a former Republican governor of one of the bluest states in the country. Surely it’s Romney. Virtually every media talking head assures us that Romney is the only Republican who stands a snowball’s chance in Hell of defeating the suave, debonair, charming President. Even the conservative media is beating this drum. My friends The Gormogons posted a wickedly sharp treatise by Ghettoputer that called Romney “the turd in the punchbowl that is the Republican 2012 presidential primary field with the best chance of beating President Obama in the general election.” But is ‘Puter right?

Mitt Romney has been running for election for nearly 20 years, starting with a Senate bid in 1994. During that time he managed one win: governor of Massachusetts in 2002. He didn’t run for reelection in 2006 so that he could concentrate fully on a 2008 Presidential run. Had he run in 2006, he almost certainly would have lost. Romney’s failure to break out of the pack of Republican candidates this year is indicative of just how little emotion he stirs in the base. In the 2008 campaign, he lost to John McCain…the least inspiring Presidential candidate since Bob Dole stammered his way to slaughter in 1996. That’s right: Romney inspired the base less than John McCain, a man who infuriates Republicans on a daily basis.

Republicans need to ask: if Romney is so electable, then why doesn’t anybody want to elect him to anything?

Then there’s Rick Santorum, a man who the enlightened assure us is not electable. The intelligentsia present this assertion as if it were an indisputable fact, with the proof being that in his last race (Senate, 2006) Santorum lost by an 18% margin. Surely, they say, anyone this unpopular could never be elected President. But Santorum has won more electoral victories than Romney has. In a blue state with red tinting, he campaigned as a hardline conservative and won…first as a two-term Representative, then twice more as Senator. The 2006 election that is being held over his head was something of an anomaly: he was campaigning against a blue dog Democrat who shared a name and family heritage with a former, well-liked, governor, Bob Casey. The 2006 election was also the first election suffering from Bush fatigue, and a powerful anti-incumbent sentiment. It was a wave election, carrying the Democrats into power (they gained 30 House seats and 6 Senate seats). Santorum had also deflated the base with his endorsement in 2004 of the wretched and loathsome reptile that is Arlen Specter. To conservatives, this was akin to watching Harry Potter putting a “Vote for Voldemort” sign on his front lawn.

Whether or not a candidate is electable is a difficult thing to ascertain. All candidates have their issues, both pro and con. Romney is an uninspiring flip flopper with an unfortunate, and transparent, tendency to tell audiences whatever they want to hear. The fear is that he has no core principles, and it’s a valid fear. Santorum has come across in the debates, especially the early debates, as annoyed and surly, complaining about his air time. America does not want a whiner for President. Santorum is also intent on focusing on the social side of conservatism. At a time when millions of Americans are out of work, when there is instability throughout the Middle East and Europe, when our nation is so deeply in debt that a bankrupt future looks all too possible, Santorum makes sure we know where he stands on abortion, contraception, and gay marriage. These are important issues, but I’m far more concerned about reforming Medicare than I am about contraception. Sometimes Santorum’s deeply felt Catholicism gets the best of him. He needs to talk about jobs, jobs, jobs, debt reduction, jobs, debt reduction, debt reduction, and jobs. Instead he lets a media that hates him trap him into answering questions designed to make him look like a kook (because that’s what the media thinks of devout Catholics).

Note to Rick: When some pinheaded reporter asks you if you want to ban contraception the answer is not a treatise on your faith. The answer is “That’s a ridiculous question you should be ashamed of asking. Of course not. Now can we please talk about the economy?”

I don’t know who’s more electable. That will become clearer as the primaries continue. But it’s clear to me that Romney is less of a sure-fire win than his proponents would like us to believe, and Santorum is a greater threat to Obama than his detractors would argue. Rest assured, though. The Obama campaign is rolling down the streets like Megaweapon, ready to viciously and unfairly tarnish anyone the Republicans nominate. The Republicans need a conservative champion, a Beowulf to slay Grendel (and Grendel’s mom…I’m looking at you, Axelrod!). They need a man with the rock solid principles of Rick Santorum, and the business/economy-related focus of Mitt Romney. A bit of the carnivorous style of Newt Gingrich wouldn’t hurt, either. That combination would be truly unbeatable in November.

Consider that a word of advice to all the candidates.

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Is Romney Inevitable?

October 14, 2011

Fresh from another Republican debate watched by dozens of people on the Bloomberg network, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the race is Mitt Romney’s to lose. The question is: is this a good thing for the Republican party?

I haven’t decided who to support in this campaign for the same reason as many conservatives: there are reasons to dislike or worry about all of them.

  • Rick Perry doesn’t seem like he really wants the job. I think the pressure to join the race appealed to his ego and got him thinking Big Thoughts, but his heart’s not in it. He clearly is spending no time on debate preparation and is on a neutrino-paced ride back to Austin and the job with which he’s done well.
  • Jon Huntsman has, in Jonah Goldberg’s phrase, a face that you just want to punch. He’s insufferable and arrogant, and the least conservative candidate in the field.
  • Ron Paul is right on many issues that have absolutely nothing to do with foreign policy. His foreign policy stance is a toxic stew of isolationism, blame-Americaism, and outright denial of reality.
  • Newt Gingrich is the smartest guy in the room. Also the one with the most baggage. He’s simply unelectable to high office, and suffers from some of the same sense of intellectual self-importance that makes Obama so arrogant.
  • Gary Johnson is…I don’t know who Gary Johnson is. Some dude who’s running for President and has a smaller chance than I do.
  • Michelle Bachmann is a fighter as she tells you at every single opportunity. One gets the feeling that right now she’s tracking somebody down so that she can pin him to the wall and tell him what a fighter she is. The trouble is that there may have been a lot of battles she waged in the House, but there are no victories. She’s also gaffe-prone and so doctrinaire in her beliefs that I’m not sure she’d be capable of compromising, even if it meant she got 99.9% of what she wanted. Whenever I see her talking policy I think of George Costanza talking himself and Jerry out of a deal with NBC by insisting that the show be “about nothing” despite what the network executives want. I think Bachmann is right on a lot of issues, but her campaign is unraveling at light speed (i.e., slightly slower than Perry’s).
  • Rick Santorum is where my heart lies. He’s about as solid a conservative as you can get, he’s got a good resume (a great resume includes a gubernatorial stint), he’s been good in the debates. I’d happily cast a vote for Rick Santorum in November 2012. The problem here is that I’m probably not going to get that chance. His campaign is cash poor and being run out of a camper parked on a front lawn somewhere in western Pennsylvania. He is the only candidate talking about the morality of how economics affects families, and I think that is a great issue that can be easily sold to a lot of people who are feeling the pinch. Bad economic policies do more than hurt your pocketbook, they can also tear at the societal fabric. What Santorum lacks is star power and charisma. Sadly, that’s a lot more important now than it was when, say, Grover Cleveland was running for President.
  • Herman Cain is the single most likable candidate. He’s sunny, optimistic, funny, smart, and has the best “rags-to-riches and I beat the Big C, too” backstory of any of the candidates. He’s got some problems, though. His “9-9-9” plan will not work. Period. End of sentence. It’s a lousy plan that is based on unrealistic projections. He is clueless about foreign policy and doesn’t seem inclined to learn. While he has many great lines, he’s not really a great debater. Whatever the subject of the question, he turns it back to “my 9-9-9 plan,” which has crossed the line from “talking point” to “mantra” and is likely soon to jump the shark. Also, we learned in 2008 that the presidency is not an entry-level job. His business experience, like Romney’s, is interesting but not conclusive. Government is not business, and the President is not the national CEO. It’s one thing to be CEO of a company and have your employees implement your desires. It’s another to deal with coequal branches of government.

Which brings us back to Mitt Romney, one of the most inauthentic politicians I’ve ever laid eyes on.

First it must be acknowledged that this is not the same Mitt Romney who ran in 2008. Somewhere in the past three years Romney has loosened up, become an excellent debater, and has gotten much more comfortable in his own skin. Maybe that means that the Romney we see now is the real guy, that he’s finally letting his conservative freak flag fly. Maybe he’s just been in some coaching sessions with media consultants.

But Romney is a very bitter pill for conservatives to swallow. Obamacare, the solar-powered windmill conservatives have spent two years tilting at, is not much more than a CinemaScope remake of Romneycare. Nominating Romney removes, or at least damages, that issue for Republicans. Romney also has a well-deserved reputation for flip flopping on various issues, most famously abortion. He gives the impression that he will agree with whatever the majority is telling him. In liberal Massachusetts, Romney was a liberal Republican who partnered with Ted Kennedy (as did George W. Bush and don’t think for a second I’ve forgiven him for that). Now he sounds like he’s wearing a tri-corner hat at a local Tea Party, and questions about his liberal record are deflected or treated as if they are irrelevant.

Mitt Romney is not the inevitable candidate. Yet. The Republican primary voters are still looking for, in John Podhoretz’s words, the “Not-Romney” candidate. Today it’s Herman Cain. Previous winners have included Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry. It’s possible that Cain will give way to Santorum, the only truly viable Not-Romney left, but it is most likely that when the dust settles Mitt Romney’s perfect hair, smile, and endless record of prevarication will be the only things left.

This isn’t necessarily the end of the world. As a candidate in the general election, I would support Romney. That’s an easy choice given the alternative. The key to Romney’s success as a conservative politician will be the makeup of Congress in 2013 and beyond. A conservative House passing conservative bills to a conservative Senate who passes the bills to President Romney will likely result in conservative policies being implemented. A divided Congress or, God forbid, a liberal/Progressive Congress, will co-opt Romney and he will govern from the center, much as Bush 41 and Bush 43 did.

I can live with Romney as the candidate, though he’s very far from my first choice. His candidacy does raise the stakes, though. With Romney in charge, it will be more important than ever for conservatives to maintain or increase their control of the House and to gain control, preferably filibuster-proof control, of the Senate. An “important to have” Congress under a conservative President like Santorum, Bachmann, or Cain becomes a “must have” Congress under President Romney. It would do the Tea Party well to remember this if they’re thinking about sitting out the election: Romney isn’t the only name on the ballot, and President is not the only office needing to be filled.

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