Tag: own goals

Why I don’t do own-goals.

While I am course happy to talk to any Republican candidate, and I am more than happy to be handed a big stack of deniable, legitimate* oppo on any Democrat, I have come to the conclusion that participating in anonymous oppo against my fellow-Republicans and conservatives is… unwise.  You get controversies.  Agitation.  People become… uncivil.

Best to avoid that.

Moe Lane

PS: As to why Chris Wallace won’t reveal who gave him the oppo about Cruz (even if he should): that’s because this way everybody will assume that the oppo was sent over by The Most Powerful Republican That I Personally Despise.  If it comes out that it was somebody on, say, the staff of a Beltway Bandit political group (which is where I suspect the oppo originated), people would stop getting ticked off at their favorite Hate Object.  Remember: Chris Wallace is not our friend.

*I am a partisan hack; I just won’t lie.  Which means that I don’t follow LBJ’s famous dictum to the letter; but if it’s at least plausible then sure, make the guy deny that he’s a pigf*cker.

Anti-Semitic stalking horses in NJ-09 Democratic primary?

It’s getting a little ugly in the NJ-09 primary.  To refresh people’s memory: the recent redistricting in New Jersey (which lost one seat) ended up with producing a situation where eight term Democratic Congressman Bill Pascrell is challenging eight term Democratic Congressman Steve Rothman for the NJ-09 seat.  Or perhaps it’s the other way around: the new district draws on both old districts pretty heavily.  Anyway, the race is becoming… ugly.

How ugly?  Ugly enough that people like local activist Dr. Aref Assaf are writing op-eds with titles like “Rothman is Israel’s man in District 9” (H/T: Powerline).  This is causing some consternation in New Jersey Democratic circles; while people reading this post may be by now more or less used – or resigned – to the idea that the activist Left feels increasingly comfortable with at least implying that pro-Israel politicians have divided loyalties*, it’s not necessarily as obvious to rank-and-file Democrats that things have gotten worse along these particular lines.  And it’s all being complicated by Pascrell’s disinclination to actually condemn the original article – something that has people wondering why.

Continue reading Anti-Semitic stalking horses in NJ-09 Democratic primary?

The Democratic knives come out in the House.

And, like all entertaining wars to the knife, this one has multiple factions. The ‘moderates’ blame the liberals for walking all over them; the liberals blame the moderates for going along with passing bad ideas like the stimulus, cap-and-trade, and Obamacare; the idiots (this may be a subgroup: there’s a bit of an overlap here with the first two groups) are claiming that this entire problem would have gone away with a little more marketing; and everybody blames the President.  Because really, why not?  It’s fairly clear by now that being on Barack Obama’s good side is not exactly inherently valuable.  They’re all right, of course: the Democratic debacle in the House represents a perfect storm of legislative cowardice, political greed, a grotesquely flawed group understanding of proper civic policy, and a White House that routinely demonstrates the organizational and administrative core competency that normally one associates with opium-raddled Victorian expatriate remittance men.  None of which helps them right now, of course; but it’s a lot of fun to point out.

As to solving their problem…  well, even if I wanted to I couldn’t.  Congressional Democrats are only going to be united by one person – the President – and just in case there’s still somebody who hasn’t noticed by now: the President is incompetent at leading people in directions that they don’t already want to go.  Which is not what the Democrats need right now.  So there’s no solution in sight, unless of course the President wants to start learning all of those boring, practical political skills that he should have started picking up a couple of decades ago…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

(Via @davidhauptmann)