Michael A. Walsh, in the New York Post, spills the beans on the damaging leak which has seriously compromised relations between British and American intelligence services.

So that “CIA coup” in Yemen against another al Qaeda underwear bomber turns out to actually have been a joint Saudi-British intelligence operation — which apparently was prematurely terminated thanks to flapping lips on this side of the Atlantic.

So the leak didn’t just blow our chances to nail the notorious bomb designer behind the plot, Ibrahim al-Asiri, and put the life of the double agent in mortal danger for no reason.

It also seriously damaged Langley’s relationship with its foreign counterparts, who now understand that operational security and the lives of their operatives mean nothing to us (not in an election year, anyway).

Which makes it even more important to find out: Who leaked?

The betting starts with former CIA official John Brennan, the White House’s deputy nationalsecurity adviser for counterterrorism. Shortly after details about the operation leaked to the Associated Press via unnamed “officials,” Brennan took to the airwaves to crow publicly about how the wedgie bomber was “no longer a threat to the American people.”

And the AP admitted it cleared its story with the feds in advance.

The uncharitable immediately saw this naked self-aggrandizement as a blatant attempt by the Obama administration to take political credit for something it had almost nothing to do with.

Read the whole thing.

Dan Greenfield describes the symbiotic relationship of three key manifestations of modernity.

Universalizing college has not universalized education; it has not made us a better educated country, only a dumber one. Universal education has led to dumbed-down education and meaningless degrees. The only way we could keep moving more and more students up the ladder was by making the ladder as short as possible. Promotion, populist education and educators who barely knew more than the students have taken care of the rest.

A college degree was once a mark of distinction, now it’s a checkmark even for jobs that don’t have any innate reason for requiring it, and fortunes have been spent by government and students just to “stay in place” with the jobs of yesterdays high school graduates going to tomorrow’s college grads.

The primary purpose of a degree in many fields is to provide demonstrable proof to prospective employers that you aren’t an idiot. A high school degree once served that purpose. Now not even a college degree does. But with a surplus of job-seekers, it’s a useful way to winnow down the stack of applications to people who can analyze the heteronormative subtext of a detergent commercial and have few options for employment because of their massive student loan debt.

Treating college as the new high school hasn’t benefited students who waste four years of their lives and pick up staggering debts which make it harder for them to buy homes and start families, but it has benefited the liberal arts infrastructure, which, despite the liberal spin, is just as good at handing out useless degrees with no career path as any for-profit college. And it has benefited the Democratic Party, which rightly sees college campuses as recruitment grounds and liberal-voter-training seminars. ...

Manhattan, home to Barnard, its sibling Columbia, NYU, Pace, and dozens of others, has one leading line of work, the restaurant business. The restaurant business doesn’t require a degree, just the willingness of pretty white people with student debt to wait tables at below minimum wage, and of some of the city’s three million illegal aliens to work illegally in the back. The city used to make things, now it makes sandwiches for Chinese tourists going to see a Disney musical on Broadway. Students dissatisfied with the low wages are, according to the erratically reliable New York Post, working at strip clubs. Fidel Castro boasted, that in Cuba, even the prostitutes have university degrees. Adopting the socialist degrees for everyone approach means we can now say the same thing.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

I’d call that a significant choice.

Ezra Klein offers the left’s intellectually bankrupt and futile response. Young Ezra has nothing to offer but emotionally manipulative appeals to sentimentality. The Obama budget must be supported, regardless of consequences or affordability because it spends lots of money on the poor. “The poor” are a species of Brahmanic sacred cattle whose interests trump reality.

It doesn’t matter if you bankrupt the country and strangle economic growth affecting everyone. If you fail to immolate the American economy on the altar of bleeding heart social consciousness, you are just mean!

Ezra is a member of the economic school that wants to raise taxes (and stifle economic activity) now. After all, as unidentified “experts” cited by the Associated Press announced today, no study accepted by the left proves that drilling (and thereby increasing petroleum supply) reduces gas prices.

If you are simply an irrational emotionalist, economics is whatever left-wing studies say it is, and the proper operation of any economy really consists of transfers of wealth from the more affluent to the less affluent members of society.

Hat tip to Bruce Kessler.

Hat tip to Theo.

Dan Greenfield explains how the left turns a political vulnerability into an electoral asset: they frame the narrative.

A debate on the availability of contraception, no matter how well handled, only served the narrative of one side. No matter how well the debate was conducted, it meant that the right was now fighting on the battlefield that had been chosen by the left. All it took was a few sexual insults lobbed Fluke’s way for the diversion to be complete. The right was now either retreating from sexism charges or engaging in it. The social issue was framed in exactly the terms that fit the left’s narrative.

Limbaugh’s apology was nearly as bad of an idea as his original statement. The only time you advance into an enemy’s choice of terrain is when you are confident of being able to fight there and win. You do not give up the high ground just to take a few potshots at the enemy. After a temporary satisfaction, you end up losing the battlefield and being drawn into a battle that you never meant to fight. When that happens, you circle around and take back the high ground, you do not surrender because then there is nothing left to fight for.

The left’s coalitions depend on portraying the other side as engaging in a war on their protected groups. Without that war, their whole feudal lordships suddenly become unnecessary. That means it is in their vital interest to define each policy conflict as a Republican war on a protected class. While it’s advantageous at times to confront them on this when their position is weakest and ridicule it, it wasn’t worth surrendering the coalition of religious freedom to take a few potshots at the absurdity of Fluke’s testimony. Fluke, like every organizer from a protected class, is there to represent an entire group. Attacking her quickly becomes a diversion into the left’s narrative of a war on women.

Religious institutions imposed the terms of the battle by rebelling against the mandate. That forced Obama and his cronies to try and dismiss the battle, refusing to fight on that terrain. But Republicans and even some Democrats insisted on rallying on the field anyway, calling for a battle. So Team Obama diverted the battle to the terrain of their choice. They set new terms of battle, an effort which initially failed, until Limbaugh gave them the talking point they needed.

It is now an uphill battle to return to the original battlefield. It’s possible, but the initial skirmish has gone to the left which was successfully able to dictate the terms of the engagement. Their narrative has no life though, until the right breathes life into it. The larger lesson though is about the terms of battle. It is about the strategy of political warfare.

To win in 2012, the left needs to mobilize its coalition. To do that it doesn’t necessarily need to win battles, it needs to successfully position them on its choice of terrain. It needs to be seen as the feudal lords protecting the rainbow peasantry from the hordes of the right. The purpose of the whole thing is to convince the peasants to support King Hussein, despite the disastrous economy and the general malaise, the abuses of power and all the other problems with his rule.

Both sides exploit a sense of vulnerability in the population during troubled times. The left excels at cross-sectioning the population into specific groups, dividing them up, and making them feel vulnerable as a class, as a group, as a gender, as a race. Organizers emphasize that victimization and offer them a sense of empowerment through the coalition. Or as Obama puts it, “Better Together.”

The path to victory lies in either gathering the largest coalition or in fragmenting the coalition of the other side. The left is not very good at the former, its own habits and tactics limit its scope, but it is quite good at the second. It gains power through disruption, through terror and intimidation, it plays on fears, pits groups against each other and then steps in as the mediator.

It would not be nearly as effective at this if it did not also control the culture’s narrative through the media, popular culture and academia, giving it control of highbrow and lowbrow narratives at the same time. This makes it more difficult to counter its narrative or to choose the field of battle and makes it that much more dangerous to abandon a strategic position for a target of opportunity.

Read the whole thing.

Even a political commentator as shrewd as Rush Limbaugh can be out-maneuvered by the left.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

I didn’t watch the whole thing, but in the portions I witnessed I thought everyone did rather well. It seemed to me that the contest for the GOP nomination process had really accomplished a few things: weeding out some less prepared and less articulate contenders and polishing the performances of the survivors.

My only dissatisfaction really revolved around so many of candidates attacking one another, and trying to gain a personal edge by means of cheap shots and obviously opportunistic assaults on one another’s previous statements and records. If it were up to me, I’d have boat-hooked Ron Paul out of there on the basis of a real excess of that kind of thing.

Personally, I still like Gingrich best. I think he tends characteristically to draw upon a broader understanding of history and political theory than anybody else, and I am much attracted by his imagination. Assuming we win in November, the next president’s task is going to consist of presiding over a major reconsideration of the federal government’s role and responsibilities, developing a much more serious approach to budgeting, and—in essence—managing the transition from the Welfare Entitlement State to a new version of an American growth and opportunity state. I think Gingrich’s superior knowledge and intellect would be strong assets, and I think his fecundity in producing new ideas and new approaches would be invaluable.

Romney, as I’ve noted before, delivers consistently the smoothest, most professional, and most attractive portrayal of presidential leadership. He speaks passionately in defense of capitalism. He is obviously a highly competent and thoroughly responsible guy, and though he has not run for office or governed previously as much of a conservative, his current embrace of, practically amounting to a death-grip on, conservative principles seems sincere. Watching Romney perform, one is forced to conclude that he would do a decent job. His would not be a really revolutionary administration. He would funk and compromise all the really tough calls, but he would generally do just fine.

It seems remarkable how much Rick Santorum has grown into the role of conservative movement champion and front-running candidate. In some earlier debates, he seemed a somewhat irrelevant dark horse outsider, and even more of a cranky traditionalist scold than Michele Bachmann. Now, he has picked up the mantle of the hero and he’s wearing it well. He is the living embodiment of clean cut, ordinary old-fashioned Americanism, and he expresses himself reasonably and with admirable clarity.

It is generally fun to hear from Ron Paul. He no longer really belongs up there, I thought, but it is a pleasure to see libertarian positions as totally heretical from the establishment perspective as going back to the gold standard and simply abolishing the EPA, advocated seriously in a presidential debate. Ron Paul has his own distinctive manner of speech and presentation. He reminds one of some very bright, well-loved, and barking mad uncle, who can (and will) speak for hours on his own particular bizarre obsessions and can actually entertain you in the process, despite your knowing perfectly well just how far from the reality we inhabit is the home of Uncle Ron. I do wish, though, that Ron Paul would climb down off his sanctimonious libertarian high horse, and quit abusing all his opponents in extravagant terms for conventional previous behavior or votes. There is an annoying streak of Puritan hypocrite in Ron Paul.

I don’t think last night’s debate changed the situation much. Jim Geraughty, in his emailed Morning Jolt, had the most to say about Romney:

Romney is, bit by bit, proving to be a better debater than people thought. Yes, he’s pretty shameless about going after opponent’s inconsistencies and unpopular positions that he himself held earlier in his career—but the audaciousness of it tends to leave the opposition flustered and infuriated.

Last night, he jabbed at Santorum, “When I was fighting to save the Olympics, you were fighting to save the Bridge to Nowhere.” Really, after lines such as that, people doubt Romney’s willingness to go after Obama? If nominated, Romney will probably lacerate Obama on the individual mandate, not cutting spending, insufficient support for drilling, demonizing the wealthy, and so on. Obama may coolly point out Romney’s past support for those positions, and I suspect Romney will just ignore it and point out that those positions are the wrong ones, and the American public opposes them. Would voters prefer the consistent man who stands for ideas they oppose? Or will they prefer a flip-flopper who currently holds the positions they support?

You and I—who have watched Romney debate as a passionately pro-choice candidate, brag that he would be better for Massachusetts gays than Ted Kennedy in 1994—look at his current emphatic finger-pointing during these debates, and think, “He might just be saying what he needs to get the nomination. I don’t know if I trust him. He sounds sincere now, but Massachusetts liberals probably thought he agreed with them in 2002, too.” But I suspect casual voters ignore anything before, say, last weekend. I suspect they put a whole lot more into a candidate’s nonverbal communication, and whether that conveys sincerity and constancy, than anything that would require them to, you know, read something. If you doubt me, look at Obama’s election.

Former democrat congressman (he lost in 2010) Alan Grayson is a loudmouth bolshevik, but he’s right on the results of the Florida GOP Primary.

[T]he GOP is leaving Florida worse than it arrived.

“I think there has been lasting damage,” he said. “I think that when Newt Gingrich parades around the country saying Mitt Romney is a liar and Mitt Romney parades around country saying Newt Gingrich is a liar, the conclusion most people draw is they’re both liars.”

I’d say though that it started in South Carolina, when the Gingrich campaign took the low road and started attacking Mitt Romney using the left’s anti-capitalist, class warfare arguments.

The massive counter-attack on Gingrich, featuring prominent Republicans, former Congressional colleagues, and conservative pundits, which stooped to utilizing bogus democrat party ethics charges fabricated in the late 1990s for purely partisan advantage was effective and appalling.

We came into this presidential campaign, essentially with an economy-based free “Elect One President” card which ought to have made this race a relative walk-over and a complete sure thing.

Our only problem has been the conspicuous absence, for many years, of a respected, confident and articulate, national figure conservative candidate. For some unaccountable reason, no one has come along to occupy the role once filled by Barry Goldwater and later by Ronald Reagan. Newt Gingrich, for instance, did not really enter the race with that credential. I tend to think that Sarah Palin may yet grow into the role, though she is not there yet. Her declining to run prematurely speaks well for her judgment, and Palin has since 2008 been doing the kind of thing no conservative since Reagan has done: she has functioned as a reliable and effective voice for the conservative movement, and has had regular impact on the national political debate from outside elective office.

We Republicans and conservatives ought to be filled with optimism and resolve at a point in history when it is clear that we are going to have an opportunity to change the country’s direction for the better, but instead we seem to have no leadership, no principles, no really satisfactory candidates, and no class. We clearly have too damn many slime mold professional campaign operators, too many spiteful and grudge-bearing has-beens, and too little genuine leadership.

The Republican Party, the Conservative Movement, and the country want the kind of leader who makes, not only our economy, but our politics better, the kind of man who leads and inspires.

If Gingrich and Romney persist in what they’ve been doing, they may yet re-elect Obama.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

I caught most of yesterday evening’s debate, missing only the opening portion.

Personally, I found all the candidate’s positions generally agreeable and it was refreshing to hear, openly expressed, so many heresies from the consensus of the elect. All the GOP candidates acquited themselves well. I thought Romney has mastered playing the role of still-young-and-vigorous mature father figure to perfection. His voice and manner are remarkably pleasant and agreeable. One reflects that watching him spout generalities and persiflage at press conferences for four-to-eight years would probably be less painful than other alternatives.

Newt Gingrich, of course, is everyman’s bright, but bratty, younger brother grown old. Rick Santorum astutely identified Newt’s special instability and unpredictability, pointing out his lack of complete domestication as a drawback. Santorum was right, of course, that Newt Gingrich is a bit of a loose cannon, but I think myself that we are facing a crucial watershed moment in which what is vitally needed is a radical and far-reaching change of direction and fundamental revisions and reforms. I think that an unconventional person capable of original thought and willing to flout established opinion is precisely what the times require. Electing an enthusiastic nerd has genuine appeal as a proposition, I think.

Newt Gingrich is my favorite candidate, despite my having literally cursed his name and cast him out of my regard more than once, specifically because I think he has earned the front running position in the race. Newt Gingrich has, again and again, elevated the level of the conversation, clarified the issues, and moved the conversation beyond the media’s range of comfort. We should be supporting the candidate who makes the national conversation more intelligent.

Rick Santorum, despite my personal prejudices against traditionalists, deeply impressed me with his sincerity, intelligence, and combativeness. I did think he was a bit appalling in his position on illegal immigration, a regionally characteristic streak of Pennsylvania (Presbyterian-culture) fascism, came out in him on that one. I recognize exactly where this kind of morally delusive interest in following the rules for the sake of following the rules comes from. I grew up in the same state. People like Santorum are actually generally better than they sound. Beneath the (totally insane) insistence on always following all and every one of the laws and rules, they are generally quite good-hearted. Fill out the form they are insisting on being completed correctly, and they’ll give you the shirt off their back.

Even Ron Paul (who has frequently been the most self-righteous and obnoxious of the candidates) was pleasant to listen to. Ron Paul tends to remind me of a different back-home type, one’s clever, but slightly crazy, uncle, who has lots of theories and knows a whole lot about certain things, and who is very eager to tell you all about them. For a change, I thought Ron Paul added more pleasantness and good lines to the debate than extravagant accusations, and I was even beginning to lean to seeing him as a useful and creditable contributor.

Watching the debate conclude last night left this conservative Republican feeling happy and optimistic. I grew up in the same state as Rick Santorum, but I’ve come to appreciate the South. I’m decidedly comfortable with a key role, perhaps the decisive role, in selecting the Republican nominee being played by South Carolina.

James Taranto, astutely explains that, when Newt Gingrich unlimbers the anti-capitalist “You liquidated companies and killed jobs!” arguments against Mitt Romney, Gingrich is not just being cynical and opportunistic. He is as well (possibly even a bit intentionally) inoculating Romney and developing his immunity to the same kinds of attacks when they are delivered again later by Barack Obama during the actual campaign.

It’s shameful for Romney’s rivals—especially Gingrich, who should know better—to be engaging in this sort of class-warfare idiocy. As Charles Murray asked in an ironically nocturnal tweet: “How can a conservative attack Romney for Bain and sleep at night?”

Yet all that said, assuming that Romney is the eventual nominee, Gingrich is doing him a huge favor. ...

If Gingrich didn’t attack Romney over Bain now, Barack Obama would do so in the fall. In fact, Obama will do so in the fall anyway, assuming Romney is the nominee. Others on the left, such as some guy at the Puffington Host, are already doing it:

Romney’s statement [about firing people], and in fact his entire career at Bain Capital, shows that this whole Republican job creator mantra is, to steal a line from Newt Gingrich, pious baloney. The word pious fits because Republicans really do worship the top 1 percent and the Wall Street tycoons like Romney who manipulate money but don’t actually build anything or create net new jobs. In fact, not only do they not create them, they actually destroy them.

By attacking now, Gingrich ensures that it won’t be the first voters hear about the matter, which will take some of the sting out of the Obama attacks. He’s also acting as a proxy for the president—call him Barack Hussein Gingrich—giving Romney the chance to practice and improve his defense, something he unquestionably needs to do.

Contrariwise, if Romney is incapable of learning to defend himself effectively, Republicans are better off learning that now, while there’s still time to nominate someone else.

We’ve all seen this happen before.

Barack Obama’s intimate associations with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and former Weatherman Bill Ayers were major issues during the nomination fight and caused his candidacy to reel a bit, but Obama survived, and later in the real campaign his former radical associations had magically become transformed into old news, not significantly relevant anymore.

When Republicans will opportunistically use left-wing, anti-capitalist agitprop to bash one another in a group race to the abyss of demagogy?

Jim Geraghty’s emailed Morning Jolt arrived first thing this morning and did a splendid job of beating up on the idiots and scoundrels.

If Mitt Romney’s opponents embrace the rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street crowd any further, they’re going to start pooping on police cars.

So, here we are, on the day of the first primary, and the main objection to Mitt Romney from Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry is that he fired a bunch of people? They object to this more than to his liberal-softie-sounding rhetoric from 1994 and 2002? More than to his crusade to liberate us from the individual mandate of Obamacare in order to leave the states free to enact their own individual mandates? More than to the fact that he’s won exactly one general election in his life—in a year when the left-of-center vote was divided?

We’re hearing objections to private-sector layoffs from the party that wants to shrink government. How do we think all those employees of the federal bureaucracy will get off the payroll—mass alien abductions?

When you think about it, isn’t it possible that the layoffs implemented when Romney was at Bain constitute one of the boldest moves of his career? It was one of the times he was willing to do something unpopular because he thought it was right and in the long-term interest of the institution he was managing, instead of following the polls and telling people what they wanted to hear.

Much of the focus was on Romney’s comment that he likes being able to fire people who provide services to him if he’s not happy with the quality of the service. You know, the way you can’t with the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the way you can’t (or, at least, not without Herculean determination) with a crappy teacher at a public school. You can’t fire a tenured professor at a state university, whether or not he gives good value for his salary and benefits to students and the taxpayers. We can’t take our business to some other government without leaving the country.

(I thought it was almost impossible to fire any federal-government employee, but somehow Barack Obama is eliminating 80,000 U.S. Army jobs over the next ten years, from 570,000 to 490,000.)

“You like being able to fire people who provide subpar services? Well, don’t we all. In fact, there’s one guy in particular who I’m itching to fire in November,” quips Allahpundit at Hot Air.

In case you haven’t seen it elsewhere, here’s the outrageous outrage du jour, a Democratic attack so cheap and out-of-context that even lefty Greg Sargent felt obliged to defend Romney from it. The full, entirely unobjectionable quote: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. . . . You know, if someone doesn’t give me a good service, then I want to say, ‘I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.’” Surely, surely, only an especially desperate Democratic hack would stoop to twisting that.

Right?

Of course, Jon Huntsman jumped on it—as did Perry and Newt.

“Dying to know if second place in NH goes to the guy who disdains me or to the guy who latently disdains capitalism,” sighs VodkaPundit.

“They sound like a bunch of leftists. Listen to the rhetoric,” sighs Jedidiah Bila. She also quips, “McCain thinks SuperPACs are damaging the GOP field. I think most of the candidates are doing a good enough job of that themselves.”

Michelle Malkin entitles a post, “The abysmal incompetence of the non-Romneys.”

So that’s sorta, kinda an endorsement of Mitt, right, Michelle? (Ducks.) She writes:

If you were unfortunate enough to watch Saturday night’s GOP debate in New Hampshire, you saw a pageant of feckless non-Romneys fail to step up to the plate and forcefully challenge Mitt Romney’s presumptive claim to the GOP presidential nomination. Newt Gingrich, who has spent the last week whining about the liberal media, hid behind the liberal media when asked about attacks of Romney’s private-sector record at Bain Capital. . . .

All of that will get lost as the Occupy rhetoric seeps into attack ads by Republicans that will send tingles down the legs of anti-capitalists everywhere from Gingrich’s new favorite newspaper, the New York Times, on down. Click on that link to read about the $5 million boost to a pro-Gingrich super PAC (yes, super PACs—those evil entities that Gingrich was whining about last week after his Iowa drubbing) that will saturate South Carolina with Occupy-style demagoguery. With Newt’s explicit approval and endorsement.

“Obama’s re-election campaign’s going to be easy. He won’t have to make attack ads against Romney. He can just rent Newt’s,” quips Mark Evanier.

I have no great inclination to support Mitt Romney, but a bit more of this kind of thing and Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry may yet talk me into it.
—————————————————————
Mitt Romney “Fire People:”

]]> http://neveryetmelted.com/2012/01/10/who-needs-democrats/feed/ 0 http://neveryetmelted.com/2012/01/07/a-sign-of-weakness/ http://neveryetmelted.com/2012/01/07/a-sign-of-weakness/#comments Sat, 07 Jan 2012 15:23:42 +0000 JDZ http://neveryetmelted.com/?p=15926

John Podhoretz explains that Barack Obama’s end-run around the Constitution this week is really evidence of his political weakness and desperation.

President Obama’s executive power-grab this week — making four “recess” appointments when the Senate isn’t in recess — is a mark not of his strength, but of his relative weakness. He is asserting an authority he does not possess through the Constitution because he has precious little personal authority left to assert.

He had it and he lost it, and he can’t figure out how to get it back — so he’s just going to take it.

“When Congress refuses to act, and as a result hurts our economy and puts people at risk, I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them,” Obama said Wednesday as he trumpeted his installation of Richard Cordray as head of his new consumer-activism bureau.

This is rhetoric designed to thrill liberals and Democrats, who (like all partisans and ideologues) love what they take to be the “good fight,” and don’t particularly care how it’s waged. That’s true even if they spent eight years screaming about supposed unconstitutional actions on the part of the Bush administration, every one of which had a far firmer foundation in constitutional law than Obama’s unprecedented action this week.

They also love it because they think it represents an awakening by Obama to the nature of the obstructionist efforts against him (and a winning re-election strategy) when he says he’ll do “what I can” to combat Washington’s brokenness.

This supposedly a) acknowledges the public sentiment against the city whose most powerful resident he is, b) alleges he’s not the reason for the problems and c) places the blame on the recalcitrant Congress.

Maybe it’s the best hand Obama has to play, but it’s not a very good hand. For one thing, the voters who have turned on him don’t think he has exercised too little power, but rather too much — so bragging about doing things without congressional sanction may not play well.

Second, no matter how resolute he sounds, the fact that he has to act in a somewhat rogue manner is an expression of a profound loss of presidential authority — and one that he can’t successfully blame on Congress.

Obama lost his ability to push his agenda through Congress when he received what he himself called a “shellacking” in the November 2010 elections. That shellacking was primarily the result of massive policy overreach when he had a Democratic Congress in his pocket.

He spent 2009 and 2010 getting what he wanted: a trillion dollar stimulus. Auto-industry nationalization. And, of course, his health-care law. It was a wildly successful first 18 months — and it led directly to the bruising defeat he suffered as soon as the American people could render their judgment on those actions.

The independent voters who’d put him over the top in 2008 were horrified by the results. Exit polls showed a 24 percent swing among them, from 8 percentage points in favor of Obama and the Democrats in 2008 to 16 points against in 2010.

What may have been even more painful for Obama’s vanity was his discovery in 2011 that his rhetorical gifts had lost their oomph. He gave speech after speech on topics dear to his heart — and found, each time, that the talk was either ineffectual or actually convinced more people to oppose him.

Read the whole thing.

Podhoretz is perfectly right. Obama’s discreditable (and illegal) ploy is only a short-term strategy to gratify his base and keep the small body of support he still possesses behind him by making a strong gesture of partisanship that makes them happy. Who cares that his action will set a really terrible precedent? Who cares that the appointments will probably be struck down in court? Just as long as he can fire up the base.

Hat tip to Mark Scott.

They saved your right to continue to use Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulbs if you so choose. We won’t all have to sit in our living rooms bathed in the Orwellian florescent glare of the over-priced alternative bulbs favored by devotees of the modern cult of Gaia.

The Politico reports.

The shutdown-averting budget bill will block federal light bulb efficiency standards, giving a win to House Republicans fighting the so-called ban on incandescent light bulbs.

GOP and Democratic sources tell POLITICO the final omnibus bill includes a rider defunding the Energy Department’s standards for traditional incandescent light bulbs to be 30 percent more energy efficient.

DOE’s light bulb rules — authorized under a 2007 energy law authored signed by President George W. Bush — would start going into effect Jan. 1. The rider will prevent DOE from implementing the rules through Sept. 30.

But Democrats said they could claim a “compromise” by adding language to the omnibus that requires DOE grant recipients greater than $1 million to certify they will upgrade the efficiency of their facilities by replacing any lighting to meet or exceed the 2007 energy law’s standards.

Fueled by conservative talk radio, Republicans made the last-ditch attempt to stop federal regulations from making their way into every Americans’ living room.

“There are just some issues that just grab the public’s attention. This is one of them,” said Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.). “It’s going to be dealt with in this legislation once and for all.”

Our self-appointed lords and masters on the left were not pleased.

White House… communications director Dan Pfeiffer [was] saying Wednesday that the House GOP plan would “undercut environmental protections.”

On Twitter, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) wrote: “I strongly oppose that language. I hope it’s deleted from any final bill that we pass.”

“This is just another poke in the eye,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.).

Libertarian (sounds like the modern California version to me) Jason Brennan is in a position make his liberals allies uncomfortable, when he connects the dots between liberal statist policy prescriptions and the kind of crony capitalism in which fat cat banks and corporations get to use the state as their servant and ally to build deeper regulatory moats and higher walls against competitors.

Dear members of the moderate left,

America is suffering from rampant, run-away corporatism and crony capitalism. We are increasingly a plutocracy in which government serves the interests of elite financiers and CEOs at the expense of everyone else.

You know this and you complain loudly about it. But the problem is your fault. You caused this state of affairs. Stop it.

Unlike we libertarianish people, you people actually hold and have been holding significant political power in the US over the past 50 years. What have you done with this power? You’ve greased the corporatist machine every chance you’ve gotten. You’ve made things worse, not better. Our current problems are your fault. You need to stop.

We told you this would happen, but you wouldn’t listen. You complain, rightly, that regulatory agencies are controlled by the very corporations they are supposed to constrain. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create power—and you people love to create power—the unscrupulous seek to capture that power for their personal benefit. Time and time again, they succeed. We told you that would happen, and we gave you an accurate account of how it would happen.

You complain, perhaps rightly, that corporations are just too big. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create complicated tax codes, complicated regulatory regimes, and complicated licensing rules, these regulations naturally select for larger and larger corporations. We told you that would happen. Of course, these increasingly large corporations then capture these rules, codes, and regulations to disadvantage their competitors and exploit the rest of us. We told you that would happen.

It’s not rocket science. It’s public choice economics. You recognized, rightly, that public choice economics was a threat to your ideology. So, you didn’t listen, because you didn’t want to be wrong. Public choice predicted that the government programs you created with the goal of fixing problems would often instead exacerbate those problems. Well, the evidence is in. You were wrong and public choice theory was right. If you have any decency, it is time to admit you were wrong and change. Stop making things worse.

You spent the past fifty years empowering corporations and the most unscrupulous of the rich. You created rampant moral hazard in the financial sector. You created the system that socializes risks but privatizes profit. You created the system that creates a revolving door between Obama’s staff and Goldman Sachs. There’s a reason why Wall Street throws money at Obama. It’s because you, the moderate left, are Wall Street’s biggest supporters. Oh, I know you complain about Wall Street. But your actions speak louder than your words.

Walter Russell Mead catches the New York Times moaning and groaning about the untidiness and imperfection, the awful messiness of productivity, wealth production, and new sources of prosperity.

The New York Times editorial page is doing its level best to kill any chance of American recovery and prosperity by crusading against anything anywhere that might help our energy woes, but sometimes its news pages inadvertently remind us that prosperity and energy development are closely connected.

This story on the “woes” of the midwestern oil boom shows how towns are throwing up housing for an influx of workers drawn by the breakneck development of new energy resources. In places the story exemplifies the whiny perfectionism so characteristic of millennial liberalism: everything has its down side and if we look hard enough we are sure to find it. (A Times story on Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana would not be complete without a reference to the economic plight of unemployed winemakers.) So a part of the country that hasn’t seen opportunity in decades is suddenly bursting with growth and new jobs, and the Times frets that conditions in the temporary housing are poor. Mourns the Times:

But now, even as the housing shortage worsens, towns like this one are denying new applications for the camps. In many places they have come to embody the danger of growing too big too fast, cluttering formerly idyllic vistas, straining utilities, overburdening emergency services and aggravating relatively novel problems like traffic jams, long lines and higher crime.

Via Meadia advice: get over it. This is what economic growth looks like. It is sudden, disruptive, often inconvenient. It messes with the status quo. New stuff gets built and not all of it looks like the Cloisters. All kinds of rough and hungry men flock to it; they sometimes misbehave. They spit on the ground, say unpleasant things about women, and generally fail to meet the behavioral standards of the Upper West Side.

Decline is so much more decorous.

Moe Lane marvels that, after so long a time, the Democrat Party’s New Deal coalition, consisting of “unions, city machines, blue-collar workers, farmers, blacks, people on relief, and generally non-affluent progressive intellectuals,” is being pronounced dead by the New York Times. The new coalition of the American left is simply writing off the white working class, period.

Whether you agreed with the New Deal program or not, you could always actually define it in terms that were internally self-consistent. Broadly speaking, it was a broad agreement among various groups that America’s most pressing problems could be managed and ameliorated on a broad scale through ‘expert’ and judicious government intervention; and that such intervention dampened the uncertainty and anxiety that might otherwise cause societal panics and economic dislocations. Again: you don’t have to agree with that (I don’t) to recognize that it existed as a coherent policy.

But now that has gone by the wayside, to be replaced with a system that . . . apparently plans to trade support for permanent government dependency programs for minorities, in exchange for legislating the fringe progressive morality of affluent urbanites. Aside from the utter lack of an unifying intellectual or moral framework to such an arrangement, it’s unclear exactly who benefits less from it; while it’s certainly not in minority voters’ long, medium, or short-term interests to become a permanent underclass, it’s not exactly clear that minority voters are even particularly ready to vote for a progressive social policy (as an examination of recent reversals in same-sex marriage movement in California and Maryland will readily attest). But then, that is not really the goal, is it? The goal is to re-elect President Obama—which is something that poor African-American and rich liberal voters both wish to do—and if that is accomplished, then anything else is extra. Which is just as well, because nobody really expects Obama to have much in the way of coat-tails this go-round.

Jim Geraughty, in his Morning Jolt email, responds:

Ah, but look, today’s Democratic party isn’t really about addressing economic opportunity or even dealing with America’s most pressing problems. For starters, many Democrats are not persuaded in the slightest that the annual deficit, accumulating debt, and ticking time bomb of entitlements are pressing problems at all. If Democrats really expected electing Obama would solve problems, they would be angrier with him than we are. No, for most Democrats, their political party is about a cultural identity. That identity is heavily based on not being one of those people—i.e., Republicans or conservatives. As far as I can tell, there are three inviolate principles in the modern Democratic Party:

Any form of consensual sexual behavior is to be accepted—if not celebrated. With that central belief comes the policies of abortion on demand for any woman at any age free, free contraceptives in schools, and gay marriage, and the insistence that Bill Clinton’s lying under oath about Monica Lewinsky didn’t matter because it was about sex. Complaining about explicit sexual content in pop culture reaching an audience that isn’t ready for it—e.g., Tipper Gore in the 1980s—is the sign of the square and the prude. As no less an expert political philosopher than Meghan McCain told us, “the GOP doesn’t understand sex” and has “an unhealthy attitude about sex and desire.” (Republicans are supposedly repressed and sexless, even though they generally have more children.)

America is a deeply racist country, even though you have to look far and wide to find anyone who openly expresses the belief that one race is superior to another. Everybody recoils when Imus says something snide and obnoxious about the Rutgers womens’ basketball team. Racism is never found in the central tenet of affirmative action, that minorities must be judged by a lower standard, or in the until-recently all-white lineup of MSNBC, or in the claims that Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain are Uncle Toms, or in the career of Robert Byrd. The fundamental belief of the Democratic party is that racism remains a serious problem in America today, and that the problem is found entirely in the GOP.

Credentials are to be respected, and any scoffing or skepticism at, say, the Ivy League is a sign of anti-intellectualism, ignorance, jealousy, and insecurity. Those who go there are indeed the best and the brightest; undergraduate and graduate degrees from those schools are key indicators of one’s intelligence, good judgment, and overall character. The success of dropouts Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg are strange anomalies, and no serious reevaluation of the higher-education system is needed. As Rush Limbaugh observed, Bill Clinton said he wanted a cabinet that “looked like America” and declared he had achieved it after assembling a group that consisted almost entirely of Ivy League-educated lawyers.

Everything else is negotiable. For a while, it appeared that Democrats were organizing themselves around the principle that almost every dispute with every other nation and group can be resolved through “tough, smart diplomacy.” But now President Obama has started killing foreigners left and right, and not too many Democrats complain at all. Obama even used a drone to kill an American citizen, Anwar al-Alwaki, with nary a peep. Don’t get me wrong, Alwaki had it coming, but this is precisely the sort of don’t-bother-me-with-legal-details-I’m-fighting-a-war philosophy that Democrats spent seven years denouncing.

You think the Democratic party cares about wealth? Come on. In their minds, George Soros spending his money to help out his political views is noble, but the Koch Brothers are evil incarnate. Higher taxes are good, but no one will complain if Tim Geithner or Charlie Rangel cut corners on paying them. One might be tempted to argue that the righteousness of unions represent an inviolate principle to Democrats, but in New York, Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo is trimming here and there and living to tell the tale.

No, the party really is about identity politics now—us vs. them. And everybody knows which side they’re on.

The Hill says Michele Bachmann was trying to distinguish her candidacy from Newt Gingrich’s by offering this proposal.

She did. I’d say that she proved something very important about herself and her candidacy by advocating a policy so economically disastrous, so historically philistine, so morally repugnant, and so practically impossible.

Even in times of political adversity, even in times of defeat, it is usually agreeable to be conservative and Republican, because we have the better arguments on our side. We know that we are right. Our opponents are fools and knaves, who enjoy whatever successes they achieve by placing themselves on the side of entropy, on the side of water flowing downhill, who appeal to selfishness, self-entitlement, to group and class prejudices, to all the worst aspects of Human Nature.

Illegal Immigration as a political issue has successfully turned American politics on its head, making some Republicans and some conservatives on that particular issue into dangerous crazies, every bit as intellectually derisory, every bit as deluded, every bit as self-entitled as liberals.

What kind of person can endorse the rounding up, the arrest, the forcible transportation, and the involuntary exile of millions upon millions of men, women, and children? I’d say someone willing to contemplate violence and coercion on such a scale as an exercise in pure regulatory enforcement would be a moral monster.

Nativist conservatives attempt to justify their extravagant levels of outrage over illegal immigration and their embrace of fantasies of force and violence on an immense scale in two ways. They try pointing to the relatively modest real association between actual crime and illegal immigrants, and since the reality is not adequate to their purposes they then systematically confuse violent crimes associated with illegal drug importation and trafficking with illegal immigration. They also appeal to the rule of law and demand that our laws be enforced.

It is true that any unskilled laboring community originating from a poorer and more primitive foreign society is always going to include some real percentage of petty criminals, undesirables, and political agitators, and its ordinary members are, more frequently than the native born, going to litter, get drunk, and stand around outside playing salsa music. But it is perfectly obvious that the overwhelming majority of today’s wave of immigration, just as in the 1900s and 1850s, has come here to do work that needs to be done which native born Americans are typically unwilling to do.

Conservatives are right that it is important to maintain the rule of law, but when you find that decades go by and the law isn’t really being enforced, it is time to recognize that we are dealing with a case of laws which Americans demonstrably do not desire to be enforced.

America is culturally at root a Northern European, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, and outside certain exotic indigenous subcultures, a decidedly law-abiding society. A lot of Americans don’t lock their doors when they go out even today. In a lot of parts of this country, if you drop your wallet on the street, someone will try to return it.

We do have a cultural problem, though, with laws produced by special interests and by ideologues and with laws expressive of our dreams and fantasies and wishful thinking, which get passed without proper thought for the consequences or intellectual scrutiny. Current immigration laws have no real relationship to our important principles, identity, or ideals, and even less to our national economic needs and requirements. They came about by compromises, by accretion, and by ideological politics. There was no grand national debate in which Americans as a whole thought the matter over, debated alternatives, and finally took a democratically arrived at position. Like Topsy, our current regulations just grew.

Jonathan Chait, in New York Magazine, discusses the history of liberal dissatisfaction with incumbent democrats at length.

Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president. an apologetic Chris Rock said earlier this month. “I believe wholeheartedly if he’s back in, he’s going to do some gangsta shit.”) Obama has already given up on any hope of running a positive reelection campaign and is girding up for a grim slog of lesser-of-two-evils-ism.

Why are liberals so desperately unhappy with the Obama presidency? ...

Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president. ...

For almost all of the past 60 years, liberals have been in a near-constant emotional state of despair, punctuated only by brief moments of euphoria and occasional rage. When they’re not in charge, things are so bleak they threaten to move to Canada; it’s almost more excruciating when they do win elections, and their presidents fail in essentially the same ways: He is too accommodating, too timid, too unwilling or unable to inspire the populace. (Except for Johnson, who was a bloodthirsty warmonger.)

Is it really likely that all these presidents have suffered from the same character flaws? Suppose you’re trying to find dates online, and everybody you meet turns out to be too ugly. Might it be possible that the problem isn’t the attractiveness of the single people in your town but rather your standards? ...

Conservatives are an interesting counterexample. While they are certainly capable of expressing frustration with Republican presidents, conservative disappointment is neither as incessant nor as pervasively depressed as the liberal variety. Conservatives are at least as absolutist as liberals in the ideological demands they make upon their leaders… At the same time, they are far less likely to turn against their president altogether. They assail the compromise but continue to praise the man. Conservatives did turn against George H.W. Bush after he raised taxes. But they stuck loyally with his son well through his midterm election. They remained consistently loyal to Nixon and Reagan. They’ll circle the wagons around Romney, too—trust me.

Why? Because conservatives are not like liberals. They think differently.

Chait shouldn’t be surprised.

Liberalism really amounts to a fanatical enthusiasm for 19th century fantasies involving the achievement of a Utopian society with no form of unhappiness or inequality, brought into being by the calculative powers of human reason operating through the rule of the collectivist state by scientific experts.

If electing the democratic candidate the liberals rallied behind fails to bring about a completely successful socialist revolution, silencing conservative opposition forever and eliminating capitalism, the market economy, and the economy of scarcity; if the entire population is not promptly converted into accepting the editorial perspective of the New York Review of Books in its entirety; if their president cannot crush the kulaks; then he, too, is going to wind up, rather like Capitalism and American society, being compared to an impossible fantasy yardstick of imaginary perfection and condemned.

Chait is, in essence, perfectly correct, but if one removes doctrinaire Utopian fantasy from the politics of the American left, the philosopher is bound to wonder: what exactly would remain?

Conrad Black observes the liberal media redirecting its fire from Herman Cain in the direction of Newt Gingrich, and shrugs indifferently. It is already obvious to any intelligent observer (like Mr. Black) that Barack Obama (absent divine intervention) has no real hope of being re-elected and that the election of 2012 is destined to be a genuinely transformative election, sweeping all of the consequences of the election of 2008 onto the ash-pile of history.

For me to achieve a degree of optimism from this procession of accident-prone Republican candidates might seem aberrant or a worrisome sign of cabin fever, but it isn’t. The grace of revelation came in two mighty flashes of celestial light, a few seconds apart, thunder to follow closer to next November. Whatever obloquy may be rained down on the well-tended topknots of the Republican hopefuls, it will not excuse or reelect the administration described by one commentator a few weeks ago as “the worst since before the invention of electricity.”

This administration will have produced $5 trillion of deficits, which will have the economic consequences of a 500 percent increase in the money supply in four years, without any serious effort to suggest how it is going to close the spigot, much less repay any of the accumulated debt. Only someone more familiar than I with the most fantastic realms of fiction could find adequately recondite metaphors for this level of fiscal irresponsibility. There has not been a hint of entitlement reform; no interest in a reforming budget or in changing the actuarial assumptions or vesting conditions of Social Security; no comprehensive analysis of municipal, county, or state debt, as Harrisburg, Pa., and Jefferson County, Ala. ($3 billion) went down in the last two weeks like tenpins; nor an effort to tackle the $1 trillion student-loan debt bomb. The administration continues its glazed pall of official prevarication in a reassuring monotone.

There has been no serious effort even to make the 10 percent token reduction in the projected decade of deficits required by the outcome of the debt-ceiling fiasco. The president clings to his arithmetic of the 99 percent and cozies up to the infantilists of Occupy Wall Street (even as he continues his dalliance with the stragglers among his limousine-borne Wall Street groupies). And Treasury Secretary Geithner, having been struck dumb like Zechariah in the temple for the last two years, recovered his voice to exhort the impecunious Europeans to join America in the St. Vitus’s Dance of spending confected trillions of virtual electronic dollars/euros. ...

At least Herbert Hoover acknowledged that a depression was in progress, and Jimmy Carter spoke of a malaise (of which his presence in the White House was the principal symptom). The president and other administration spokesmen seem supremely confident that all they have to do to retain immersion rights in the public trough for another four years is hammer the piñata about the 99 percent and incant the name of the preceding president.

As long as there is an alternative that can speak and tie up its shoelaces in the morning, I do not believe that this administration can be reelected. It is so unrelievedly incompetent that its fecklessness is more a matter of sadness and embarrassment than of the rage that engulfed George W. Bush. This, I surmise, is why the liberal establishment, the Times editorial writers and columnists, the Hollywood groupies, the rich fundraisers, don’t detect that the ship is sinking, and still squeal with delight as the Republican challengers fail to generate more than tentative or reluctant enthusiasm. But they are reading the wrong dials; there will be a Republican nominee. The country will not reelect this mockery of an administration, and whoever the Republican is will be elected and inaugurated, even if he has operated an open-air dog kennel on the wings of an airborne aircraft while groping relays of stewardesses.

And the other illuminated revelation, which came swiftly after the first: The voters will not only be disposing of a failed administration; they will be approving the Republican platform, which will call for radical tax simplification and reduction, entitlement reform, serious health-care reform, real spending reductions, incentives to increased domestic oil production and natural-gas use, and an absolute commitment to preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear military power.

It will be a drastic reform program that will signal that the United States is awakening like Brünnhilde, however unlikely the Siegfried, finally resuming world leadership, acting on its budget and current-account deficits, and behaving like a Great Power and a textbook case in self-government for the first time since President Bush Senior. The effect of the change will be electrifying. ...

The new president may have an imperfect CV and too-perfect hair; Speaker Boehner may surpass Mr. Obama’s historic favorite, Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh, in his proclivity to burst publicly into tears; the White House may be as boring and banal as it was under George W. Bush (though that is unlikely, especially in syntactical matters); but America will lead in policy terms, if not in the personality of its leader. Problems will be addressed and the mere anarchy of abdication compounded by smug official sophistry will no longer be loosed upon the world. Mr. Churchill’s bust may come back to the Oval Office, and FDR’s address at D-Day, including the godly references that the Bureau of Land Management feels disrupt the spirit “of the elegant memorial,” may yet be displayed there. The night will end and glorious will be the dawn, in Washington. I have seen the future, and in it, people work.

Read the whole thing.

From Eric Ames, at Ricochet, who goes on to observe:

It is the fundamental problem with the leftist complaint about income inequality: if they truly are worried about income inequality, then they are not worried about the actual welfare of real people. They are just mad that some people have more than others. If they take this seriously, it means that fixing poverty is no less an acceptable policy goal as making everyone poor. After all, if the gap is what is important, it shouldn’t matter how much anyone has so long as nobody has more than anybody else.

This goes right back to George Will’s point on the difference between the right and the left; the right wants equality of opportunity, the left wants equality of outcome. The whole Occupy movement, in fact, smacks of an irritating “it’s not fairism.” It’s not fair that there are winners and losers, so let’s make everyone a loser.

The progressive vision of the world seems to hold unshakable faith in expert studies as revealing the truth. This vision also assumes that people, being naturally good and rational after Rousseau’s doctrines, will always make the right choice if they have the right information. The progressive views supposedly false information that could lead people to choose something the experts have ruled the wrong choice (e.g. advertising by Pepsi, or Tobacco companies for that matter) as a dire threat to freedom. It’s like good marketing for something the experts don’t like is coercion in the progressive mind.

But a free society will not long endure if every time “studies” say particular behavior is harmful, the federal government is called in to curb free speech because it might influence people in a direction contrary to contemporary science. Even the most teeth-destroying sugar water supplier deserve to make an argument for their product. To paraphrase Voltaire’s phrase, I may disagree vehemently with your advertising, but I’ll defend to the death your right to advertise.

Read the whole thing.

I reluctantly watched some of last night’s GOP debate.

How did the Republican Party get tricked into adopting a television entertainment-based pre-primaries system in which an astonishing superfluity of candidates, many with no realistic chance of winning the nomination, are invited to respond to questions selected by intensely partisan representatives of the liberal mainstream media, obviously chosen with the intention of inflicting the most damage to Republican candidates, individually and in general? Who is running the Republican Party that goes around agreeing to have our party’s debates hosted by MSNBC and CNN? Let’s fire that guy fast.

It’s obvious to lots of Republicans that this endless series of “Welcome to the Thunderdome” debates in which gleeful liberal commentators invite GOP candidates to enter the arena and beat up on one another is not the best thing in the world for us.

Last night, we saw again how these debates are conducted in an atmosphere of intimidation with the media’s version of GOP orthodoxy used as a weapon to bully candidates into knuckling under instead of arguing their own positions with anyone daring to speak independently (as Rick Perry did in an earlier debate) being Gotcha’d, awarded failing performance grades and described as having made a gaffe.

Republicans have been successfully mau-maued by liberals, and by our own dumbass law-and-order petite bourgeois wing, into making illegal immigration, really insane Anti-Hispanic immigration nativism, a bedrock, party identifying issue. Rick Perry, who excelled originally in having a more intelligent and honest perspective, was seriously damaged and finally bullied into mouthing typical politician’s platitudes on the same issue.

Perry attacking Romney for “hiring illegal aliens.” (Romney used a lawn service, instead of mowing his own lawn. His lawn service—like most lawn services throughout the country—employed low-skilled Hispanic workers, some of whom were not legal immigrants. The horror! You can, I think, divide Republicans on immigration politics between those accustomed to have enough money to employ a lawn service and those who mow their own lawns.) This was a depressing low point in the debate, particularly since it was combined with an unseemly competition to display manliness by trying to talk over one another. Romney actually kind of won by invoking civility.

Romney, I thought, was definitely the candidate one would prefer to hire to play the role of president in a movie. Herman Cain continues to surprise. He is far more articulate and capable of holding up his end of a policy debate than many professional pols. He also tends to be the best dressed guy on stage. His double-breasted blaser and bright yellow tie was a refreshing change from the classic candidate’s dark suit and red (maybe blue) power tie.

Ron Paul openly indulged in class warfare politics of envy, manifesting once again the appallingly common perfect congruence of what calls itself “libertarianism” and leftism. Why is this guy even there?

Santorum was surprisingly good, and he seems to be receiving too little attention and appreciation. He ringingly defended traditional American culture and values, and he came up with a clever argument (“I won running as an arch conservative in a swing state. If you can win in Pennsylvania, you can definitely beat Barack Obama.”) as to why he would be a superior candidate.

Bachmann looked and sounded good, but her hypermoralism didn’t really fit in, and I did not hear her very much.

Gingrich is definitely the wittiest and best debater of all the candidates. Unfortunately, like Bachmann, his presence and participation was really just that of an afterthought. If all these absurd debates really were deciding something, Gingrich ought to be winning.

Perry is significantly less smooth and practiced, less comfortable under the microscope, and less glib. He does not seem to know how to move fluidly off his prepared game plan, and he seems a bit abashed about his regional accent. Herman Cain has fun using ethnic dialect and accent when he wants to. Perry clearly feels at a bit embarrassed at having a heavy Texas drawl and is trying to minimize it.

Republicans need to start encouraging unserious candidates to quit wasting everybody’s time. Get Ron Paul, Huntsman, Bachmann, and Gingrich out of there as soon as possible.

Republicans ought to hold debates in friendly venues with friendly or completely neutral moderators.

Watching last night’s debate, I suppose I thought Romney and Herman Cain both demonstrated why they are doing well, Perry demonstrated what his problem has been, and beyond that, I thought I was not much the wiser. I am not persuaded that we ought to be nominating Mitt Romney. I see no point in the presence or participation of a lot of those candidates. I am not sure that these numerous debates may not be doing more harm than good.

“’In conclusion,’ wrote Robert Constable, ‘it is important to face up to Professor Parkinson’s charge that a high rate of tax on earned income draws off creative and inventive energy, too much of which, he claims, is now unproductively employed in devising new methods of tax avoidance. There is some evidence to support this assertion; but the assertion itself demonstrates and strengthens precisely those attitudes of mind which modern social philosophy is concerned to discredit and destroy. For personal ability or talent must no longer be regarded as a means to personal enrichment but as a commodity, held in trust by some fortunate individual, whereby he may serve and enrich mankind. Indifferent to monetary returns, such an individual should find his satisfaction in the exercise of his skill (grateful that it releases him from the drudgery by which most men must earn their livelihood) and in the knowledge that he is providing pleasure or amenity for his fellow human beings. Such grace, I fear, is still far to seek; and it will certainly not be found in any quantity as long as influential writers like Professor Parkinson continue to regard society, not as an area of tillage to be held and harvested in common, but as a barren and bloody arena in which men mangle one another in pursuit of acclaim and gold.’

That, thought Constable as he lifted his head, is putting it a bit strong. Although there are real gladiators, the iron men of industry and commerce, for the most part the circus is occupied by perfectly decent fellows who are hoping, in return for a conscientious display of talent, to achieve a quiet independence and retire to a Sabine farm. But then again, thought Con¬stable, if society is to be truly co-operative there is no place even for such temperate self-interest as this. It’s not the economics of the thing that matter so much as the moral attitude . . . the idea that one will make a part of human society for only so long as it takes to raise enough money to opt out of that society and buy a pretty house on the hill way up above the noise and the suffering and the stink. If society were justly ordered, thought Constable for the millionth time, if wealth were fairly spread, then no ability would win enough money to escape the suffering and the stink, and all ability would therefore be used to mitigate them. This, then, must be the argument for heavy taxes on earned money – that independence, even when earned, is a crime against humanity.”

Hat tip to Theo.

Besides, he knows that billionaires are getting a lot of money, just out of greed, and he’s learned on-line that “they pay twenty five cents in taxes for every dollar we’re taxed.” Except this young man undoubtedly doesn’t pay income taxes. But what does that matter, you can say whatever you want, he has his couple of sound bites and he wants free tuition.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.