Moe Lane

…but I belatedly realized that it invested too much emotional energy in said nonsense. Eric Robinson is a sloppy writer and researcher who let his hatred blind him. The people who gave him a forum will now suffer through a time of embarrassment and corrections. The people who uncritically believed him have had their misogyny revealed, yet again. So let it end, there.

They’re worth my scorn, but not any more of my time.

[UPDATE] My RS colleagues insisted that I put the original back up. Bear in mind that I consider it a failure; not of my sentiments, but of my ability to hold my temper.

Precisely.

And I’m almost out of beer, too.

Via @mkhammer.

Moe Lane

PS: ‘Thundersnow.’

Thundersnow.

Volcano, Jimmy Buffett

I want to see Iron Man 2.

But I do not, in fact, have to.  And I don’t particularly like being called a racist by your comic book writers.

(Reminded of this by AoSHQ)

It’s not that the title of this article (“Obama Says Bipartisanship, But What He Wants Is GOP Surrender“) itself is so startling – as Ed Morrissey notes, it’s not exactly telling Republicans things that they don’t already know. It’s that this:

It’s a familiar refrain from U.S. presidents who can’t get their way in Congress.

“We must put aside our political differences if we’re ever to set our economy to rights,” said President Reagan in 1982.

“It is time to put aside partisan rivalries and work together for our nation’s future,” said President Reagan in 1987 in trying to get Congress to enact deficit reduction

“We must put aside partisanship for the sake of our nation,” said the first President Bush in 1990 in appealing for congressional cooperation on the budget.

“We must now put aside bitterness and rancor, move beyond partisanship,” urged President Clinton in 1993 in trying to get Congress to pass his economic plan.

What these presidential appeals for bipartisanship always mean is: do it my way.

…is showing up in CBSNews. Imagine that happening in the pre-post-Dan Rather days.

Moe Lane

PS: I almost called this “Waltzing Bear Watch,” except that this particular ursine is waltzing pretty well by any reasonable standard.  Blogging insiders will also note the opportunity for a jab that I passed up, mostly because I see no reason to boost the fellow’s anemic traffic.

Crossposted to RedState.

[UPDATE: By the way, the below link is to Demint's Senate Conservatives Fund's portion of the Rubio moneybomb. Said portion's sub-goal is 100K, and they're at 86.2K already.]

He’s trying to raise 787 thousand (in ‘commemoration’ of the 787 billion dollar ‘stimulus’ that the Democrats have wished upon the country): he’s well on his way, but it would be excellent if the Rubio campaign had to scribble an updated, higher fundraising goal all over their nice, clean design.

This primary is important enough to trigger my ‘throw in what money you can’ reflex: so go ye, and do the same.

(more…)

Mind you, Matt Welch reveals himself to be a rampaging optimist in his last sentence:

In the truer-believing regions of the progressive political world, the broad agenda of carbon price hikes, centralized health care, greater regulation, increased taxes, and government-mandated diversity in boardrooms are not just sound and moral policy. They are inherently popular, if only the usual obstacles to justice and reform can be neutralized or removed. Back when he was still considered a plausible stand-in for “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” (enough to win 2.7 percent of the presidential vote in 2000, much of it from progressives disgruntled at New Democrat policies), Ralph Nader insisted on a daily basis that his agenda was essentially “majoritarian.”

Such fantasies can serve as a salve when you live on the margins of the policy debate. And as long as you remain on the sidelines, the underlying proposals tend to go largely unchallenged. But now that progressive economic thought has its first real foothold in Washington since the 1970s, many long-marginalized ideas are being dusted off for real-world testing, from taxing stock transactions to “getting people out of their cars.” If we’re lucky, those debates will take place before the ideas are cemented into law. Better yet, maybe the growing unpopularity of central planning will dissuade the enthusiasts from inflicting their experiments on the rest of us in the first place.

Bolding mine, and no: that’s not going to happen. A scapegoat will be found. Remember: we are talking about a group that is currently claiming with a straight face that having a 59/41 split in the Senate, a 255/178 split in the House, and the Presidency is not sufficiently overwhelming to let them accomplish their goals.  Losing the House will not act as a laudable shock to their system; losing the House and the Senate will not do it, either.  Losing both Houses of Congress in 2010 and the Presidency in 2012 won’t do it.  God could descend from Heaven in all His glory (with Thorstein Veblen and William Jennings Bryan in attendance) and carrying a signed note from Franklin Delano Roosevelt telling progressives that they are being muddle-headed – and it won’t dissuade them from their belief structure.

Fortunately, it’s not them that we have to convince.  Just the centrist voters who are swiftly coming to understand that what they signed up for is not what they’re getting…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

January 20, 2009 for me.

I’ve made no secret of it, either. Lord knows that former President Bush wasn’t perfect by a long shot, and Lord knows that the libertarians have a point when they grit their teeth on the subject, but I knew that we were in for a long four years even before the current President was sworn in.

See RedState, The Other McCain, The Camp of the Saints, No Sheeples Here, Troglopundit, & probably a bunch more people before it’s all over.

In an era where they did their best to come up with euphemisms that fooled absolutely no-one, this one stands out.

Pass The Dutchie, Musical Youth

Ironically, if you trust Wikipedia – and it’s not about a hot-button item, so you probably can – ‘dutchie’ has entered into the world of drug slang itself.

Moe Lane

PS: Yes. It’s a song about marijuana. Surely you did not need to be told this.

(Via @seanhackbarth) I am conflicted about this:

On the one hand, it does seem tailor-made for a future edition of The Darwin Awards. Nobody got hurt there, but, well, it’s snowboarding from the back of a car at speed in DC at night. One step away from death or trauma at all times.

On the other hand… well, it’s snowboarding from the back of a car at speed in DC at night. I haven’t do anything that stupid-cool lately.

(Via Instapundit) I regret having to correct Jennifer Rubin – she is scary-smart when it comes to this stuff-  on anything, but I must, here:

It’s a well-known pattern for many Democrats, Harry Reid included, from Red or Purple states: talk a conservative game back home, make speeches on fiscal sobriety, and roll over for liberal leadership when it comes to actual votes. Usually they get away with it when the public is not so engaged, the legislation is not so controversial, and Republicans blur the  lines by defecting to vote with the bulk of Democrats. But here the public was vigilant, the legislation was noxious both in substance and in process, and Republicans held the line in their unanimous opposition to ObamaCare. So now these “centrists” are finding it hard to hide and explain why they threw in their lot with Reid-Pelosi-Obama. They may regret having “blown their cover” as faux fiscal conservatives for a bill that probably won’t pass and that is now the rallying point for an energized opposition.

The word ‘may’ has no business being in that paragraph. ‘Will’ is a much better choice.  James Taranto has more.  The bottom line for all of this is that we’re in the middle of yet another realignment – third in ten years, really.  Realignment One was post 9/11, and represented the perfectly respectable and natural desire of the American people to have, when hit, people in office who would hit back.  Realignment Two was 2006-2008, and represented a perfect storm of new campaign technologies meeting a mass centrist reaction to the previous alignment meeting a lack of enthusiasm among the rank-and-file of the current ruling party*.  Realignment Three is this one, and it’s centrists learning the difference between Bad and Worse.

And so it goes, and so it goes: the next Realignment will probably involve the existing, old liberal Democratic leadership being purged-by-retirement and being replaced with a generation who did not grow up being taught (for example) that the conquest of South Vietnam was somehow a good thing**.  When that starts happening, we’ll see how the political parties react.  Probably by writing books about how X or Y is inevitable…

Moe Lane

*Note that the war was pretty much irrelevant in all of this, except for draining money and energy from antiwar progressives.  In 2007 the Democrats were content to yell loudly and leave Bush in peace to win it for them; and in 2009 they pretty much went with the GOP plan because, well, we’re the go-to guys when it comes to hitting back.

**They will have instead not been taught about the conquest of South Vietnam at all, but that’s a worry for my kid’s generation.  I’ll settle for watching the Vietnam War activist contingent all die of old age.

Crossposted to RedState.

They ain’t laughing with you, Sparky.

Gibbs.  Boychik.  When she did it, it was funny.

A quick response and a clever counter-taunt to the sexual attacks made on her by your side’s cheer-leading squad.  Makes it clear that said attacks will not be taken seriously without a word even being spoken. The Netroots hate not being taken seriously, so that works.

But when you (belatedly) do it?

You just look like a dweeb.  One who can’t even write your own material.

No wonder the press room groaned.

Moe Lane

I was looking for fodder for a couple of light and fluffy posts, but I probably shouldn’t let this pass by without comment.

In an oped in USA Today, John Brennan — Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism — responds to critics of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies by saying “Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.”

The title of the op-ed is “We need no lectures” – which, given the fact that this administration rather stupidly read a foreign terrorist his Miranda rights, and has been trying to wiggle out of the consequences of it ever since, is self-evidently not true – is ably enough pushed back on here and here by AoSHQ, so I’ll just repeat something that I’ve written before.  The oddity of the current administration is that it’s as if the Democrats went out and found somebody who was just like what they thought George W Bush was – only, in this case?

It’s all true.

Weird.

Moe Lane