Tag: jen rubin

#rsrh I call these ‘vodka bottle posts’…

…to wit, you start with a full bottle of vodka, a blank computer screen, and your pain.  You then start filling up the computer screen with words, with an eye towards seeing which runs out first: the pain, or the vodka.  In Jen Rubin’s case, I’m guessing that it was the pain, but not by much.

Sorry if this seems dismissive: it’s just that we go through this every. Four. Years.  Win or lose, it’s always the most awful Republican field since the dawn of time; the earth will crack and the flames of Perdition will wash across our candidates; and the very fabric of space-time itself will reconfigure into a portal from which the Dread Lord Azathoth will summon us all t0 be sanity-shattered servitors piping daemonic music for his court for all eternity. Continue reading #rsrh I call these ‘vodka bottle posts’…

Is Jen Rubin using Andrew Ferguson to sneak an anti-Perry sneer in?

Now, normally I don’t like to do this sort of thing when it comes to people who will be eventually on my side when it comes to an election. Truly, I do not. But while I was reading this Jen Rubin Washington Post article targeting the latest anti-Romney… excuse me, I meant to type out “Newt Gingrich,” there… I was struck by something in these two paragraphs:

Andy Ferguson, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and arguably the most dazzling writer on the right, has been a one-man killing machine. In a series of pieces on Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Jon Huntsman, he has systematically done in (or helped to do in) more Republican candidates than Think Progress, the New York Times and George Soros ever could.

In some cases, the effort was an intentional dissection of the candidate’s foibles. He wrote of the liberal elites’ favorite Republican: “Huntsman seems to have missed something big in the landslides of 2010. The reason for his Rip Van Winkle aura, to use still another metaphor, is that Huntsman spent most of the Obama administration out of the country.” His kickoff suffered from “hoary rhetoric [and] the overpackaging that can’t quite obscure the obvious lack of anything fresh to say.” At other times, Ferguson has simply caught the candidates unaware, letting them sink themselves (Daniels’s “social truce” and Barbour’s musing about the civil rights movement in Yazoo City).

Continue reading Is Jen Rubin using Andrew Ferguson to sneak an anti-Perry sneer in?

#rsrh The Two Obama Israel UN Letters.

It’s funny: while I’m willing to bet that everybody decent reading this post will look at this Israel-hating letter (via Jen Rubin, via Instapundit) and mutter “I’m not surprised to see that scumbag’s name on there” I’m pretty sure that we will all have different scumbags in mind.  For my part… it’s a tough call, but I’m going to go with Chas Freeman for my Special Scumbag: it takes a special kind of guy to encourage the ChiComs to punch their dissidents harder, but Freeman was up to the challenge.  I don’t recognize all the rest of the names, but the ones that I do recognize all provoke the same mixed revulsion/disgust/contempt.  Just not as strongly.

Anyway, Jen’s betting that President Obama’s more likely to go with the advice from these people, and I hope and think that she’s right.  I mean, yeah, I’ve had issues with every Democratic Senator on that list and everything – but given a choice between them and the people on the other letter, well…

Moe Lane

PS: I quite enjoy being hated by anti-Semites, thanks.  Any decent person would: it’s quite the pick-me-up.

#rsrh WaPo hires Jen Rubin of Commentary.

This is so shockingly a good idea on the Washington Post’s part that I’m wondering whether they’re feeling well.  I’ve met Jen a few times: she’s a devastatingly good reporter, and good people generally.  Putting her in on the online editorial side makes a heck of a lot of sense for the WaPo.  Too much sense, given that print news in general seems kind of determined to commit slow-motion suicide these days.  Ach, well, they can’t always do precisely the worst possible thing, right?

See also Dave Weigel, who is praising this from the other end of the spectrum.

Moe Lane

#rsrh Jen Rubin enjoyed last week.

It shows.  This one was probably my favorite:

This is what an eloquent first lady’s writing looks like: “Though some Afghan leaders have condemned the violence and defended the rights of women, others maintain a complicit silence in hopes of achieving peace. But peace attained by compromising the rights of half of the population will not last. Offenses against women erode security for all Afghans — men and women. And a culture that tolerates injustice against one group of its people ultimately fails to respect and value all its citizens.” Yeah, I miss her too.

Who doesn’t?  Well, the antiwar movement, of course.  Then again, they hated the liberation of Afghanistan, too – so we already were aware of their lack of judgment*.

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh Jen Rubin enjoyed last week.

‘Deem and Pass’ watch: Brooks on the ledge, Rubin on the sidewalk.

With regard to this despairing statement by David Brooks:

Deem and pass? Are you kidding me? Is this what the Revolutionary War was fought for? Is this what the boys on Normandy beach were trying to defend? Is this where we thought we would end up when Obama was speaking so beautifully in Iowa or promising to put away childish things?

…I do not say that Jen Rubin is sharpening her knife.

Maybe the rubes understand Obama fairly well, after all. They figured out quite some time ago that the entire campaign message — change, hope, post-partisanship, nonideological, fiscally sober — was a ruse. And they understand how immoderate both his methods and his aims are.

I personally am not out on a ledge. (But then I never bought the whole Obama campaign whoop-de-do.) Should this pass, I have infinite faith that the American people will deliver a mortal electoral blow to those politicians who thought they could shred anything to get their way. And then bit by bit — or in one fell swoop — the elected replacements for the shredders will rip out ObamaCare. So there’s no reason to be morose. Elections are great corrective exercises, and one is just around the corner.

That would imply that Jen would have been foolish enough to let the knife get dull in the first place.  She’s not the sort; and neither am I.  I still think that this bill will not pass – but at this point, we’ve got a fallback strategy in place, just in case.  And should quote-unquote ‘moderate’ Democrats really do decide to commit electoral suicide for the sake of their liberal leadership, I guess that we can accommodate them.

And relax about worrying about how we could possibly gut this next year.  The Democrats are doing us the favor of setting the procedural bar very, very, very low…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

‘Culture shock.’ (with an egregious HP Lovecraft reference!)

That’s what the always-interesting Jen Rubin over at Commentary is calling the increasingly-hysterical (in a non-funny way) reaction of Congressional Democrats to their own constituents:

…citizens got the idea that they could come out—in droves—and give their representatives a piece of their mind. It is all quite a culture shock for the lawmakers, who seem blissfully unaware that somewhere in just about every crowd there is someone with a video camera or a cell phone recording how they respond to criticism. And so far, it’s not a pretty sight.

…and it kind of fits. If you divide the fear into three distinct types – gross-out (purely physical flight reaction to the grotesque), horror (extreme apprehension and concern about a situation), and terror (sudden awareness that one of your fundamental assumptions about the universe is dangerously false)* – then the Democrats are largely exhibiting terror. People simply do not complain like this in their nice, orderly universe. The Democrats’ actions do not have consequences.  This cannot be.

Hence, the screaming of every slur that the Democrats can think of in response to a lot of people standing up in meeting halls and loudly proclaiming that they know the difference between rain and somebody urinating on their legs, thanks.  It’s almost certainly pure reflex from the cosmic terror: the Democratic congressional leadership must feel like they’re suddenly in the political equivalent of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Moe Lane

PS: IA! IA! IA!

*More or less stolen from Stephen King. Then again, he is an expert in the subject.

Crossposted to RedState.

Winning with ‘No.’

From last week’s article on the growing awareness of Democratic corruption, by the always-interesting Jen Rubin:

…with the growth of government and the enormous amount of cash sloshing through Washington, the corruption problem is about to get worse. The stimulus money could, according to the FBI, be the breeding ground for its own crime wave. If the experts are right and 10% of the $787B stimulus plan will be lost to fraud and abuse, then $80B worth of graft and the congressmen, officials, lobbyists, and donors with their fingers in the pie will make fodder for plenty of headlines — just in time for the 2010 races.

No wonder the MSM is nervously sounding the alarm. There is the prospect that the age of “liberal dominance” could come screeching to a halt before it’s even gotten up to speed. Not only does it portend an electoral train wreck and loss of a governing liberal majority, but it sheds doubt on the notion that government was the knight in shining armor needed to ride to the rescue when the free market “failed.” If bigger and bigger government gets us more and more crooks and tens of billions in fraud, then maybe there is a better way to go than inflating the size and scope of the federal government.

Continue reading Winning with ‘No.’