Month: February 2012

#rsrh The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly on this Byron York piece.

Executive Summary: Newt Gingrich doesn’t have an oppo research team that can and will find out basic details about the surrogates being used to attack Newt Gingrich*, let alone get those details out there for the edification of the voting public.

  • The Bad.  Well, obviously this is bad for Team Newt.  But it’s also potentially bad for the GOP, because if he does get the nomination then Gingrich will see no particular reason to change strategies for the general; and, speaking as an unaffiliated opposition researcher myself, there is going to be the Mother Of All Target-Rich Environments this go-round.
  • The Good.  On the other hand, if Romney gets the nomination then maybe we’re going to see a thorough airing of the Other Side’s dirty laundry in public for a change.  If: I am not entirely confident that Team Romney plans to get down there in the mud and go hammer and tongs at Team Obama.  I was sure that Team McCain would – especially after they ported in a Wasilla kinfe artist to take the traditional attack dog position in the campaign – and look what happened there.
  • The Ugly.  What the media will call the 2012 general campaign, if Romney decides to get down there in the mud.  And never mind that both party’s bases are kind of itching for a gutter war right now.

Via Hot Air Headlines.

Moe Lane

#rsrh Just a reminder: I’ll be at CPAC this week…

…and hopefully I won’t have an almost-broken ankle to content with this go-round.  As always, feel free to stop by and say hi, particularly if you want to buy me a beer.  And as usual, I mostly plan to spend this doing interviews.  I don’t think that I’ve ever really been at one of the panels.

CPAC’s site is here: it should be an interesting vibe this year.  On the one hand, people are ready to crawl over broken glass to vote Obama out; on the other hand, people want to see the second page of potential candidates.  It’s this sort of dynamic tension that really makes American politics so interesting, yes?

It’s healthy to sit in a outdoor cafe overlooking the Aegan sea…

…with a bottle of wine to hand and the sunset just beginning:

Too much sunlight is bad for the skin, but not enough may be a risk factor for stroke, according to a study presented here at the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke Conference.

Of the more than 16,000 black and white patients followed, those who lived in areas that had shorter exposure to sunlight had a 56% increased risk of stroke, Leslie McClure, PhD, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Ala., and colleagues found.

This is SCIENCE.  You may not argue with it.  Red wine and sunsets; SCIENCE demands that you do this.

It also recommends a nice antipasto.

A question for ANY GOP Presidential campaign out there…

…why are none of them talking about Operation Fast & Furious? And when I say ‘talk’ I mean ‘bringing it up at every opportunity, complete with raised voices and angry tones.’

Seriously. This is an easy issue to be on the right side of: everyone agrees – now – that it’s bad to create a sting operation where you facilitate the running of guns to Mexican narco-terrorists without proper safeguards (or indeed any safeguards at all); everyone agrees that it’s bad when guns that you’ve facilitated turn up at the murder scene of a US Border Agent; and while everyone may not agree that Attorney General Eric Holder is either a blithering incompetent or a malignantly corrupt callous bureaucrat, certainly virtually anybody who will be voting in the Republican primaries does.  As Mark Hemingway notes here: this should be a slam-dunk issue for a Republican candidate.  Particularly one who, I don’t know, might want to shore up his conservative credentials?

Hint, hint.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

#rsrh Hey, Obama Super Bowl interview tonight!

Interesting point from Allahpundit, here: tonight’s Obama pre-Super Bowl interview with Matt Lauer might actually be interesting, in a “let’s slow down to watch the car wreck” sort of way.  After all, three years ago the President used the interview to cut the footage for all sorts of Republican attack ads:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CRAMdUNo2Cg

So he’s got something to shoot for.

#rsrh Was the INTENT here to accuse JFK of being a sociopath?

Note that I’m using that term colloquially, not offering a clinical diagnosis.  But this is an incredibly unappealing portrayal of John F Kennedy: it relates the story of an ‘affair’ between a barely-legal White House press officer and a manipulative, domineering, insensitive, distant, and frankly cruel scumbag with Daddy issues and a profound inability to keep it in his pants.  If if is also a true account, then there are a number of former Washington press journalists that need to make public atonement for their part in covering it up at the time.

And when I say ‘atonement’ I mean ‘sackcloth and ashes.’  Also, I am not actually using figurative language.

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh Was the INTENT here to accuse JFK of being a sociopath?

#rsrh …I give up; the post will not gel. Just read this link.

(H/T: RCP) It’s via the San Diego Union-Tribune, and it’s pretty harsh about the White House’s decision to ignore the consciences of religious-backed organizations when it comes to mandating that health plans cover birth control.  Of particular interest is this sentence:

An Associated Press story Thursday depicted administration officials as surprised by the furor, with none ready to strongly defend the policy – and no one able to offer a strong rationale for exempting churches from birth-control coverage mandates on religious liberty grounds but not church-run organizations dedicated to religious values.

It’s almost as if the Obama administration doesn’t understand that people remember it when you lie to them in the past; and that if you do it often enough nobody feels obligated to give you the benefit of the doubt anymore.

Moe Lane

QotD, Extra Points For ‘Drunken Stupor’ Edition.

Via Lowering the Bar, via Instapundit, this is all that you need, really:

8.    [Defendant] was highly intoxicated on this date and time, and decided in his drunken stupor that it would be a good idea to shoot bottle rockets out of his anus on the [Alpha Tau Omega fraternity] deck, located on the back of the ATO house.

Variants of a certain phrase from the paragraph above appears multiple times in the legal document – indeed, it appears to have been, ahem, crammed into every place that it could conceivably fit.  Can you guess which phrase it was?

Moe Lane