Month: February 2015

Tweet of the Day, This Is More Like Tweet Of The Month edition (@iowahawkblog).

I mean, speaking professionally this Tweet is master-level work. I want to use it to teach a class.

It’s perfectly designed for its target audience: David assumes that you know the story of the de Blasio Groundhog Murder (and Coverup) already, and that you know about Mike Bloomberg’s insane mayor-clown anti-gun posse – which means he can go with the joke without having to explain anything. I mean, sure, if you’re a first-time Twitter user who doesn’t follow politics you won’t get the jok… no, wait, there’s a picture of a groundhog about to savage a man’s ear. You’d still get the joke anyway.

As I said: I am impressed in a professional capacity with this tweet. It’s just that good.

Here we go again: the Left’s cargo cult obsession with the Tea Party.

Reading this Salon article on how progressives :rolling eyes: ‘need their own Tea Party‘ would make me feel sad, if only I was a better person.  I admit it: I enjoyed watching the author poke and prod at the silent engine of populism like a Twelfth Century Yorkshire poacher might poke at a parked spaceship.  The fellow knows that the thing is supposed to go zoom. He may have seen it go zoom.  The poacher even has an explanation of how it goes zoom that makes sense to him. But… no zoom.

But I am magnanimous: I will deign to explain.  You cannot ‘make’ a Tea Party; it makes itself. If people were as upset about ‘income inequality’ (as the Left defines it) as the Left thinks that people are, there’d be no need whatsoever for orgs or groups or coalitions or professional agitators to coax a movement into existence. The movement would spring up without them, and develop its own goals and causes.  …Which is really the last thing that the Left wants – look how quickly they turned that pathetic slave’s flattery known as Occupy Wall Street into the usual laundry list of bad policy life choices – so I suppose that there’s actually no point in explaining, after all.

Never mind?

Speaking *solely* on the politics of this…

…this entire vaccination issue is a pretty good example of how messy things can get when an issue abruptly switches over from You can safely pander about this to This is a third rail. In 2008 politicians could get away with smiling and nodding at the anti-vaccination people while backing up slowly. in 2015 it appears that they cannot.

So don’t expect this to destroy any actual political careers; taking seriously the anti-vaccination people was far too widespread a practice back then, on both sides of the fence. It’ll mildly embarrass the politicians getting caught out now, and that’s about it. Even the media can’t really pretend that it’s all one-sided.

Moe Lane

PS: I have no sympathy whatsoever for the anti-vaccination movement.

Be wary of *any* claims of a permanent partisan majority.

Seriously, this is important.  This is how we – and by ‘we’ I mean ‘all political partisans,’ for once – get in trouble: we decide that every new election means a straight-line advance from that moment.  Case in point: “THE EMERGING REPUBLICAN ADVANTAGE.”  Written by John B. Judis, it is not actually a horrible article. I even agree with its central thesis that the middle class is moving to the Republican column again, and that this is going to cause massive headaches to Democrats. I just don’t think that it’s going to last as long as Mr. Judis does.

Why? John Judis – who, by the way, never mentions in this article that he co-wrote a certain book called The Emerging Democratic Majority[***] – is a fairly hardcore liberal, if not progressive. And he’s got a problem, which is that while the Democratic party’s leadership is very acceptable to liberal think tanks and orgs, it’s increasingly becoming less popular among actual Democratic voters.  To someone like Mr. Judis, it is apparently inconceivable that in any fight between the two groups the think tanks might actually lose.  Which is, of course, nonsense on stilts.  To give just one example: when Nancy Pelosi fails to deliver the House again four times running in 2016 she’ll be removed from leadership even if it means holding her down and filling her suit jacket pockets with sea salt. I know that the Democratic party looks like a monolithic juggernaut from the outside, but from the inside it’s a deeply dysfunctional hot mess of competing interest groups and institutionalized incompetence, partially offset by the driving need of many people to just simply win at all costs*.

So what will happen? Well, what will happen is that (barring an asteroid strike or something**) the Republican candidate will win in 2016 – and never mind John Judis’s recommendations about what kind of Republican that candidate should be; The Emerging Democratic Majority, remember? – and a lot of people in the Democratic party will freak out. And then there will be a combination of events, mistakes, movements, and incidents that will – roughly six years or so down the road – convince the middle and working classes to give that nice Democrat a chance.  This sounds bleak, but it really isn’t: the Democratic party is long overdue for a New Left enema, and 2017 will be seen by many as an excellent chance to send the hippies packing. And, frankly, the GOP would be better off if the Democrats stopped looking like Abbie Hoffman and started looking more like Harry Truman. If for no other reason than we’d all breathe a little easier on foreign policy issues if the idea of letting the Democratic party run things for a while on that front wasn’t quite so much an imminent threat to the well-being of the Republic…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Yeah, just like the Republican party. That’s kind of the point. I hate to break it to people, but most of our enemies are fundamentally unworthy of us, too.

**We will now pause while various folks on the Right pound the table and shout that of course the GOP will lose the next Presidential election, because [INSERT REASON HERE]. Look, I’m conceding that an asteroid strike might do the trick, OK? – And I shouldn’t. Natural disasters and calamities are not the Democrats’ friend. Ask the Democratic party of Louisiana if you don’t believe me, assuming of course you can still find a member of that party at this point.

[***Clarification on this: Judis sidles around on the topic, but he doesn’t come out and actually say You know that book that I wrote, that made my career, and that you can still get on Kindle for more than five bucks?  Yeah, that book was absolute nonsense and you should never, ever read it. It’s useless as a predictive model, so nobody take it seriously. I mean, I understand why he didn’t put it quite that way, but still.]

Book of the Week: “The Man in the High Castle.”

I love The Man in the High Castle. I love it and will probably read it again this week and I don’t believe a word of the alternate timeline. Does this seem contradictory? It probably is, but I love the book anyway and I hope that the pilot episode of the miniseries adaptation of it wins that Amazon contest so that they can do the whole thing. Philip K Dick was simply that good a writer.

And so adieu to The Mote in God’s Eye, which was written by authors equally as good.