Author: Andrew Sullivan

One reason I cannot take the Tea Party seriously as an actual small government movement is that they are not campaigning against nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, were overwhelmingly silent as Bush expanded the entitlement state far more recklessly than Obama, but above all their indifference to the claims of Bush and Cheney about executive power. All this "Don't Tread On Me" stuff is something I sympathize with, along with romantic ideas of individual freedoms protected by the Constitution.

But where were they when a US president seized a US citizen on American soil, made unsubstantiated charges against him, locked him away with no due process and tortured him until he became a quivering wreck of a human being? AWOL. Do you think they'd be AWOL if Obama did that to a white American citizen? And claimed he had inherent right to do so regardless of the other branches of government, habeas corpus or the rule of law?

Wendy Kaminer agrees:

Never mind the unaccountable power to detain, interrogate, and even assassinate people, without due process, adopted by both Bush and Obama. Never mind the shadow government spanning both administrations described by the Washington Post in its essential and largely ignored expose of the post 9/11 security state. You can only refer to the Tea Party's "devotion to limited government" with a straight face if you pay no mind to the awesome power of the 21st-century imperial presidency, which Tea Partiers and other right wingers from Christine O'Donnell to Liz Cheney support.

Justin Logan issues a challenge to Bill Kristol and friends:

I extend the offer of an open, public, live debate to the Defending Defense people:  Let’s debate the security of the United States, the strategy to best protect it, and the resources needed to fund the strategy. Any time, any place.

The overarching problem in this debate is that the big spenders keep inserting the red herring of defense expenditures as a percentage of GDP into the debate.  This is relevant only as it pertains to their claim that “current levels of defense spending are affordable,” but last time I checked the mere fact that something wouldn’t, in itself, bankrupt the country is not a sufficient conservative justification for a government program.

Propagandists rarely agree to public debates. But it would indeed be great to have one. Why doesn't Fox have a debate between a pro-defense spending conservative and a fiscal realist who thinks we have to retrench? Oh, never mind. CNN?

Sarah Palin hates puppies.

I guess this counts as hair-pulling by C-SPAN's standards. Appearing as panelists to discuss Jonah Goldberg's new collection of essays, Todd Seavey and Helen Rittelmeyer engage in a remarkable ex-lover spat:

Seavey clearly had some unresolved issues with the break-up and decided to take them out on Rittelmeyer during the event, which was being televised on CSPAN2. The result is the wonkiest, nerdiest Internet revenge ever. Here is Seavey’s bizarre soliloquy, punctuated by a surprised Rittelmeyer’s short responses.

Money quote from Seavey:

It might come as a surprise to some of you that we dated for two years, not just because we have ideological differences, but because there are probably some people in this room who also dated Helen during those two years, given how tumultuous it got.

Jonathan Bernstein speculates:

[O]f the modern presidents, the one that was least ambitious was probably George W. Bush, and that’s a good part of why he was a terrible president.  It’s rare to reach the presidency without aiming at it one’s entire life. 

Bill Clinton, as far as anyone can tell, was aiming for the White House from at least high school on.  George H.W. Bush was ambitious for a long time.  Ronald Reagan, remember, ran for president for about fifteen straight years before finally achieving it.  And one could argue (indeed, I would probably argue, although as I said it’s pretty speculative) that lack of intense ambition was a real problem for the younger Bush in the White House. 

Would a more ambitious president, one who was really desperate for the job, have found himself fighting two wars in a haphazard way in an election year? Would a more ambitious president have been so apparently indifferent to the fate of New Orleans?  Now, ambition isn’t foolproof, as a quick look at Richard M. Nixon will show.  But the greatest presidents were certainly quite ambitious.  In my opinion, you can’t be a great president without it.

So says the Vatican's official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano. Money quote:

"The Simpsons are among the few TV programmes for children in which Christian faith, religion, and questions about God are recurrent themes." The family "recites prayers before meals and, in their own peculiar way, believes in the life thereafter".

Some background on the NoZe Brotherhood from a Baylor grad whence the Aqua Buddha story, used on Conway's ad. Seriously, if Conway is deploying this as a weapon to call Paul anti-Christian, he's really contemptible. Money quote:

Please understand what Baylor alumni understand. It’s hard to take seriously anything that a NoZe says when discussing the affairs of the NoZe. But the whole point of the society was to make fun of Baylor and, especially, the top administrators. Obviously, that meant making fun of Baptist culture.

Some NoZe scribes were better at this than others. Were many of these satirical scribbles crass? You betcha.

“The key difference between the M.T.A. and my former escort agency is I operated one set of books and I offered on-time and reliable service,” – Kristin Davis, former Madam and candidate for governor of New York.

And there's much more where that came from here.

A reader captures it:

If the tea party had really wanted to change America they would have embraced all of us. Not just “real Americans”. The tea party just seems to be a group that wants the Rs to be even more ruthless than they are and cut every entitlement to the middle class and the poor. Especially the poor. However they do not seem to mind the corporate welfare that is shoveled out thru Congress and until a group really seriously addresses these issues then I guess we’re stuck dancing with the ones that brung us

Any attempt to reduce the power and size of government has to end corporate welfare and the insanely complex tax code that allows them to exploit the rules to stay ahead of the rest of us. Tax simplification and the end of all deductions now!