Month: January 2008

In Defense Of Mark Steyn

This is one thing many bloggers tend to agree on:

People like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are some of the most pernicious commentators around. But equally pernicious, at least, are those who advocate laws that would proscribe and punish political expression, and those who exploit those laws to try use the power of the State to impose penalties on those expressing "offensive" or "insulting" or "wrong" political ideas. The mere existence of the "investigation," interrogation, and proceeding itself is a grotesque affront to every basic liberty.

“We Know These People”

As long as Mike Kelly is not around, there are my readers:

Look, Yglesias and Marshall are quite busy not readying themselves to own up to the fact that one of their main candidates is using surrogates (in this case, a black surrogate, a fiendishly clever move) to peddle the charge of cocaine use to scare off the white women. Period. That’s what she’s doing.

She’s peddling black stereotypes of the Dangerous Black Man against a guy who lectured at the University of Chicago School of Law, dammit. I graduated from the College at UC, so I know what she’s doing is monstrous.

She can afford to lose some of the chablis and brie crowd, but she can’t let Barack start arguing economic populism and start getting into the working class or the Hispanics.

The Clintons are banking on the fact that Black Voters won’t vote for Romney or Huckabee in November. They’re willing to burn their bridges now, because black voters have nowhere to go. They won’t even vote for McCain.

We knew the Clintons would eventually pull this bullshit because of what Barack would do to their black base: coopt it, then own it. We’re Republicans. We know these people. There is nothing they will not do to regain the Presidency.

Poseur Alert

"On exhibit is Sloss, Kerr, Rosenberg & Moore (2007), a video made in collaboration with four practicing New York City attorneys John Sloss, Chet Kerr, Scott Rosenberg and Thomas Moore. The work features the lawyers performing a movement and vocal score that references their work and lives. The rhythmic sequences illustrate the performative aspects of litigating, the pressures experienced while working inside the juridical system, the contest, the service and ultimately the lawyers individual humanity. Highly formal in its spatial design and patterning, the work becomes a kind of twenty-first century folk dance," – Alexander Gray Associates.

Republican Base Voters And McCain

A reader offers the various stages of grief:   

Shock or Disbelief: How could this be, his campaign was DEAD last summer?

Denial: McCain cannot win, Mitt Romney is the stronger candidate. American want to round up all Mexicans and put them in concentration camps.  He is against waterboarding, so he is not qualified to be a Republican.

Anger: I am sitting out this election or voting for Hillary! Just watch me do it!

Guilt: How did we ever let this happen? What did I do to allow the GOP to sink so low?

Depression: Pass me the liquor. I feel sick.

Bargaining: McCain better make things right with the base, he has to get approval from Rush, Hannity and then agree to have Fred Thompson as his running made to keep him in line (actually even I hope for that!).

Acceptance and Hope: Well, it is better to win the general than to face President Hillary in the White House for possibly two terms. GO MCCAIN!

The Clintons Roll The Dice

On their legacy, that is. Matt Bai:

Only they can afford to be concerned right now with their own historical legacy, about seeing all that they have accomplished on behalf of their party and its commitment to fairness and equality blown away in the space of a few months. No one else is going to protect all that for them…

No one expects Mrs. Clinton to stand down and let Mr. Obama make his case unchallenged. She could, however, send a clear message to the cogs in the machinery she’s built that there is a line she will not cross. She could tell her Nevada allies that the job of the Democratic Party she grew up in is to make it easier for people to caucus, not harder. She could tell Robert Johnson that he needs to apologize, the same way she forced Bill Shaheen, her New Hampshire co-chairman, to resign last month. She can make it plain to all those people trying to get jobs in the next Clinton Administration that there is way to win—a rough and combative way, even—that nonetheless won’t destroy all the good that the Clintons, at least for a lot of Democrats, have come to represent.