Thought of the morning about the ACTUAL consequences of the Mark Sanford victory.

I was going through stuff looking for something else, and I came across this older piece by John Hayward over at, ahem, RedState:

“Aha!” cried liberals across the land, when the election returns from South Carolina came in, and the zombie political corpse of Mark Sanford had somehow managed to score a landslide victory over the vivacious Elizabeth Colbert Busch.  ”Now we’ve got you right where we want you, Republicans!  Your hypocrisy on family values will be your undoing!”

The idea is to tear off Representative-Elect Sanford’s zombie arm – the one he prefers to wrap around the trim waistlines of Argentinian cuties – and beat the rest of his party senseless with it.  The party of John Edwards, Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, and Anthony Weiner will ask the public how they could possibly support a party that would tolerate adulterers in its ranks.  When the public raises an eyebrow at these demands, Democrats will say you can’t accuse them of hypocrisy, because they’re not serious about all that “family values” stuff, no matter what they say in red-state campaign ads.

Continue reading Thought of the morning about the ACTUAL consequences of the Mark Sanford victory.

The Democrats spent $2M on #sc01 and all their base got was… what, not even a T-shirt?

Jim Geraghty did a perfectly acceptable job taking the Democrats to the woodshed for being blindsided in yesterday’s win in SC-01 (I will note, btw, that I in fact called it ahead of time), but I want to highlight this part:

It’s bad enough for the press to not know the district, but national Democrats don’t have that excuse. Today you’re hearing a lot of talk along the lines of, ‘oh, everyone knew this was a really conservative district and that Sanford would probably win.’ Well, you don’t spend more than $2 million ($1.2 million in donations to Colbert Busch, more than $929,000 on independent expenditures against Sanford) for a race you know you can’t win. Maybe this race really was unwinnable for Democrats, but this means that the DCCC and its allies have serious problems in assessing the terrain and determining which races ought to be prioritized.

Continue reading The Democrats spent $2M on #sc01 and all their base got was… what, not even a T-shirt?

My *guess* on SC-01 tonight.

Mark Sanford, by a bit.  This is frankly subjective, but I suspect that more people agree with me on this than let on: I’ve been reading a lot of ‘momentum swinging back to Sanford’ pieces by individuals and groups who aren’t particularly happy about that development.  Generally you’d be expecting more triumphalist posts by Democrats at this point if they thought that Elizabeth Colbert Busch was a shoo-in.  Or maybe even any.

This is a “If you put a gun to my head” kind of prediction, by the way: it’s hard to predict a special election result when there’s any kind of controversy and/or complication.  Which is why we have elections.  Anyway, I’d rather be the kind of person who will give an opinion when it means something even if it means being wrong every so often* than the kind who waits until the coast is clear and say I knew it all along.  What’s the freaking use of that?

Moe Lane

*“‘Every so often?'” “Hush, you.”

Let’s revisit Something Positive’s Political Press Confession Bingo!

This one dates back to 2009, when Governor Mark Sanford had to resign because he was ‘hiking the Appalachian Trail.’ To be very fair to Randy Milholland, the Bingo card was pretty fair and reasonably nonpartisan. Also, it was and is exceptionally cruel, but that’s more a feature than a bug.   Image after the fold (mind the language): Continue reading Let’s revisit Something Positive’s Political Press Confession Bingo!

This is not how normal people see the Sanford affair.

Randy Milholland of the webcomic Something Positive is not ‘normal,’ and he would probably be angry with me if I said that he was. But he is clear-headed, and he is not a political obsessive like, well, me – so the designation more or less counts in this context.

Besides, this is, like, wicked funny. Without being particularly partisan about it. Warning: the language is a bit rough, so it’s going under the fold. Continue reading This is not how normal people see the Sanford affair.

Sanford, nudism, and junior-high Babbitry*.

This isn’t a criticism of Ben Smith – what was he going to do, not run with it? – but the comments section of his post on the intersection of Governor Sanford and Naked Hiking Day certainly yielded a bumper-crop of Left-homophobes**.  No wonder the President thinks he can get away with not doing anything meaningful for gay right activists…

Moe Lane

*Literary reference.

**Provincial ones, too.  The European press is going to have a field day laughing at the way that the stereotypical American yahoos just can’t help but sexualize nudity.  Thanks, guys; that’s a great way to help our reputation abroad.

Crossposted to RedState.

State Rep. Nikki Randhawa Haley announces for SC-Gov.

[UPDATE] Welcome, Riehl World View readers.

[Note: Google hasn’t caught up yet. Her official campaign website is here.]

It’s official:

Haley Officially Enters South Carolina Governor’s Race

State Rep. Nikki Haley is adding her name to the list of Republicans hoping to become governor of South Carolina in 2010. Haley, a staunch anti-tax advocate, confirmed Thursday that she will mount a run for the seat currently held by Republican Mark Sanford, who is prevented by term limits from running for a third term.

“For more than five years I’ve sat in the statehouse and watched – sometimes in disbelief – as our state government has spent with abandon and in the process wasted taxpayer dollar after taxpayer dollar,” Haley said in a release. “I know what good government can look like. I’m running for Governor so the people of this state will know what it feels like.”

Continue reading State Rep. Nikki Randhawa Haley announces for SC-Gov.

Obama contacts DNC about Sanford request before contacting Sanford.

I had to have Protein Wisdom point out this fairly significant, and frankly insulting, thing that happened to Governor Sanford:

Last week I reached out to the president, asking for a federal waiver from restrictions on stimulus money. I got a most unusual response. Before I even received an acknowledgment of the request from the White House, I got word that the Democratic National Committee was launching campaign-style TV attack-ads against me for making it.

Just in case nobody’s ever mentioned it to the President of the United States, let me: you are a government official first, a Democrat second. That means that you take care of the former’s business before you attend to the latter’s. Doing it the other way around is inappropriate.

I can use ruder words and still be perfectly accurate, by the way.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.