See Glenn Reynolds and Rich Lowry; my only contribution to this is a bit of confusion that this is somehow surprising. After all, we are talking about a movement that, when it throws tea into a harbor as part of a protest, does so with ropes attached so that they can fish the tea out afterward.
Because otherwise somebody will have to clean that up, of course. And it’d be the taxpayers who will have to pay to have it cleaned up.
Not having read American Taliban – and not particularly being interested in reading American Taliban, either – I don’t particularly plan to care overmuch about the blipping thing. But after flipping through these self-congratulatory missives on how the book sucks just as badly as they think that Liberal Fascism did, I have to say: Kevin Drum, Matthew Yglesias, and the rest of them seem rather blatantly upset that Markos Moulitsas can get books published and they can’t. Couple that with an existing desire to malign Jonah Goldberg’s (quite good) book – and if you wonder whether Jonah got under the Left’s skin with his insights, read their complaints and wonder no further – and you end up with this kind of petulant whining.
I’d be sympathetic, except that it’s Moulitsas, which means that this is totally deserved from a karmic perspective.
Moe Lane
PS: My colleague Dan McLaughlin wrote a very good article on this subject here.
UPDATE: I see that Jonah’s noticed this backward recognition, too.
Tell the truth, Spratt. You mumble when people ask you which district you represent.
It sounds like that book will get at least one South Carolinian purchaser: Spratt’s campaign manager Wayne Wingate, who is completely behind the idea that Osama bin Laden would receive widespread support from Republicans in SC-05. An opinion that Spratt apparently shares, given that he didn’t immediately turn on Wingate and lay him out on the ground for saying filthy trash like that about Spratt’s constituents.
Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s the report:
“If Osama bin Laden ran in this district as a Republican, he would get 38 to 40 percent of the vote in any election year,” says Wayne Wingate, Spratt’s communications director, as he walks alongside the congressman at the festival. “This is a very Republican district. So you’ve got that plus this tea party angst against any incumbent in the world right now.”
In point of fact, Mister Wingate – and Mister Spratt – if Osama bin Laden ran in SC-05 as a Republican somebody would come up to bin Laden and put a bullet in his brain. This does reflect a change from our past methodology of capture and interrogate, but better safe than sorry. After all, since January 2009 there’s been a growing understanding among the American people that the political party running things can’t exactly be trusted with keeping the really bad illegal combatants under wrap. Continue reading John Spratt (D, SC-05) and his American Taliban.
Ben Smith almost – almost! – gets it right in his exasperated reaction to that exasperatingly bad Vanity Fair hit piece about THAT WOMAN. Ben does recognize that there’s an astounding amount of bad and/or thinly sourced material written about former Governor Palin – the example he gave was of a reporter who criticized the Palin family for their treatment of Trig Palin at an event, even though Trig wasn’t actually there in the first place – but there’s one big, bad, paradigm-shifting assumption that he makes that fatally undermines his piece. To wit:
Palin almost never talks to neutral media outlets…
We have “neutral media outlets?” Since when?
…and I’ll be going away this afternoon. Best man for a wedding this weekend; posting sporadic.
In no particular order:
Yes, I’m playing the game and otherwise having fun. Still…
If you don’t feel like clicking through the links, allow me to summarize: ten more House seats shifted in the GOP’s favor, and so did three Senate seats, and so did four Governor’s races. Only one of them (WY-GOV) is now off the actual board, but Cook is now projecting a net +6 to +8 GOP in the Governors’ races, a net +7 to +9 GOP in the Senate, and at least a net +35 GOP in the House. The House is particularly of interest, as there are currently forty-five Toss-Up races listed by Cook right now, and only three of them are Republican seats.
Couple this with the latest set of regional race polls from Republican-leaning American Action Forum, and the truly atrocious (for the other side) enthusiasm gap that Democrat-leaning Public Policy Polling is finding, and Larry Sabato’s needed-to-slam-a-shot of whiskey-first prediction of a lost House and Senate on the edge, and you get… a lot of people blankly staring at their scratch papers or computer screens and thinking This can’t be right. I must have subtracted where I should have added, or something. Or maybe I made an assumption that I shouldn’t have. Things can’t be this bad for the Democratic party. Continue reading The last (probably) pre-Labor Day Cook rankings.
It’s a good choice on a variety of levels: Jennifer is a small businesswoman, twenty-year military veteran, state legislator, NRA member, Jeb Bush appointee… and, possibly most importantly, a Bill McCollum supporter. Jennifer was actually on Crist’s short list for a Senate appointment last year; for that matter, she was apparently even considered for the Lt. Gov position four years ago; all of which should help in the awkwardness that is the Senate and Governor’s races in Florida. On the issues: conservative, with what appears to be on first glance no major problems. She’s a great balance for Rick Scott, in other words, and a definite asset to the ticket.
Needless to say, the Kendrick Meek campaign despises her. and is trying to use Gov. Crist’s approval of her to shore up Meek’s liberal base in the FL-SEN election. Alas, that’s a tactic that might work – among progressives, at least – for a very depressing reason…
Moe Lane
Because, of course, the netroots aren’t having a bad enough day with this loser.
James Lee, the bomb-laden gunman who was killed by police in the lobby of the Discovery Channel, was once convicted and imprisoned for smuggling illegal immigrants into the country from Mexico.
They should, of course, count their blessings that this fellow didn’t actually get anyone killed – either with his guns, or his IEDs.
And he’s gone Full Metal Blunt on this one; not that I mind.
In fact, if you look at a Marxist Utopia — say, Cuba — what you’ll see is basically a plantation. At the top, you’ve got the Massa and his family — Fidel, Raul, et al. — followed by various layers of overseers — the Communist Party apparat, the secret police — and House Negroes — e.g., the state-controlled media — all living off the surplus labor of the Field Negroes, whose produce is disposed of not according to their own desires (that would be capitalism!) but according to their betters’. This, we’re told, is for the best, since they aren’t smart enough to make their own decisions anyway, and the Massa looks after them with food, housing, and health care. Slaveholders even defended their system as more humane and less exploitative than atomistic capitalism, conveniently ignoring the role of the lash, just as apologists for Marxism conveniently ignore the role of the gulag.
Because he’s talking about Commies, after all: and Commies Aren’t Cool.
