Stephen F. Hayes says Rick Perry won last night’s Republican presidential debate in Iowa without even showing up.
They’re happy tonight in Austin.
It’s one of the most predictable and tiresome of the many presidential debate clichés: The candidate who didn’t participate won because the others were so weak. And yet that was the case in the Republican presidential debate here Thursday night. A Republican presidential field often described as weak seemed to confirm that conventional wisdom in a debate that featured many tough questions and many more weak answers. Rick Perry, who will announce his bid for the presidency on Saturday.
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Meanwhile, over at Twitter, I find that a rickperryfacts Twitter feed, collecting jokes along the lines of the Chuck Norris jokes, has been created.
Latest example: There are signs when you enter Texas warning the bears not to feed Rick Perry.
Pat Buchanan left mainstream Conservatism for the Paleocon fever swamps some years ago, and has rarely ever made much sense since, but today the old Pat Buchanan is back and in fine form. In fact, Buchanan identifies precisely the tactics of bluffing and intimidation that the mouthpieces of the establishment are using to try to frighten the Republican leadership (which holds all the cards) into surrendering on tax increases to the impotent, discredited-by-reality, and sinking-daily-in-the-polls democrats. Pat Buchanan is right: the level of shrillness of the MSM commentariat is directly proportionate to their desperation. They know they’re losing.
By refusing to accept tax increases in a deal to raise the debt ceiling, Republicans are behaving like “fanatics,” writes David Brooks of The New York Times.
Anti-tax Republicans “have no sense of moral decency,” he adds.
They are “willing to stain their nation’s honor” to “worship their idol.” If this “deal of the century” goes down, as he calls the Barack Obama offer, “Republican fanaticism” will be the cause.
“The GOP has become a cult” that has replaced reason with “feverish” and “cockamamie beliefs,” writes Richard Cohen of The Washington Post. The Republican “presidential field (is) a virtual political Jonestown,” the Guyana site where more than 900 followers of the Peoples Temple drank the Kool-Aid that Rev. Jim Jones mixed for them.
Does anyone think this an appropriate description of such mild-mannered men as Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman?
“The GOP’s Hezbollah Wing Is Now Fully in Control,” screams The New Republic over a recent lead editorial.
Other columnists charge the GOP with holding America “hostage” by refusing to accept tax hikes to avert a default on the debt.
What to make of this hysteria?
The Establishment is in a panic. It has been jolted awake to the realization that the GOP House, if it can summon the courage to use it, is holding a weapon that could enable it to bridle forever the federal monster that consumes 25 percent of gross domestic product.
To bully and blackmail the GOP into surrendering the weapon and betraying its principles and signing on to new taxes, that establishment has unleashed rhetoric more befitting a war on terror than a political dispute.
For how, exactly, are Republicans threatening the republic?
The House has not said it will not raise the debt ceiling. It must and will. It has not said it will not accept budget cuts. It has indicated a willingness to accept the budget cuts agreed to in the Biden negotiations.
Where the GOP has stood its ground is on tax increases. ...
The Republican Party has not said it will refuse to raise the debt ceiling. It has an obligation to do so, and will.
The House has simply said it will not accept new taxes on a nation whose fiscal crisis comes from overspending.
If the GOP keeps its word, raises the debt ceiling and accepts budget cuts agreed to in the Biden negotiations, the only people who can prevent the debt ceiling’s being raised are Senate Democrats or Obama, in which case, they, not the GOP, will have thrown the nation into default.
It is the establishment that is resorting to extortion, saying, in effect, to the House GOP: Give us the new taxes we demand, or Obama will veto the debt ceiling and we will all blame you for the default.
Katie Thompson, blogging at Cornell Law Prof Bill Jacobson’s site, makes the case for Rick Perry.
I think myself that Perry seems to be acceptably conservative, and he strikes me as a potentially stronger candidate than Romney, Pawlenty, and the others currently in the race. Perry has available as a powerful argument the fact of Texas enjoying spectacular growth in jobs, at a time when the only other place in the country that is in the same situation is Washington, D.C.
My first choice for GOP nominee would be Paul Ryan. Ryan has done more to address the key economic issues which are going to be the focus of the 2012 race than anyone else. But Ryan (so far) isn’t running. The governor of the state excelling the rest of the country, by a wide margin, in economic growth is a very plausible second choice.
Katie Thompson makes also the telling point: Rick Perry is everything Barack Obama is not. And that’s exactly what voters want.
On the symbolic front, Thompson points out that Governor Perry stands out among GOP possible contenders in having a handgun named in his honor.
Apparently, while jogging in February of 2010, Perry drew a .380 Ruger he carries and dropped with one shot a coyote that was menacing the labrador retriever that accompanied him on his run.
On the box it comes in it says “For Sale to Texans Only.” It says “Coyote Special” on one side of the barrel and “A True Texan” on the other side of the barrel. The top of the barrel has a Texas star and a Coyote howling to a full moon.
There are all those other Republican candidates, whose names are vaguely familiar, but about whom one knows next to nothing. Looking over the news this morning, I noticed omens and portents pertaining to the candidacy of Jon Huntsman, so let’s start with him.
Mark Halperin, for instance, blogging at the New York Times, says that prominent movement conservative C. Boyden Gray has signed on board the Huntsman campaign in an influential role. Halperin draws from Gray’s affiliation the reasonable conclusion that GOP conservatives may be preparing to back Huntsman as the more conservative alternative to “moderate” front-runner Milt Romney.
Less positive from my own perspective, is a basically typical New York Times magazine puff piece by Matt Bai, treating Huntsman surprisingly sympathetically.
So, I turned to Google and spun up the Wikipedia article on Huntsman. Aha! Governor of Utah, that’s who he is.
He’s a Mormon, just like Mitt Romney. (Basically good. Mormons are crazy, of course, for subscribing to a 19th century Sci Fi religion but, hey! Mormons are also rock-ribbed tribal Republicans, gun-owning, capitalism-defending, fiscal conservatives, respectable and hard-working people, typically a lot more clean living than I am.)
He’s from Palo Alto, California. (We can look on the bright side, and recognize that he must therefore be well acquainted with how nice it is to have lots of money, the economic significance of technology, and the left coast dystopian future American needs to make every effort to avoid.)
He speaks Mandarin and became ambassador to China for Barack Obama, whom he (perhaps, in consequence) makes some effort to avoid attacking.
He supports same sex civil unions, but not Gay Marriage.
He has a good record of governing as a fiscal conservative, and he apparently does not demagogue on immigration.
He does, however, believe in Global Warming, and he signed one of those bogus initiatives to curb “greenhouse gases.” (So much for being such a great technocrat. In my view, Global Warming is a litmus test demonstrating both scientific literacy and real conservative principles, or the lack of both. I would not be happy voting for any Republican with a record of support for AGW superstition. This one is a big deal in my book.)
If you believe the Times’ story, he is under the influence of one of John McCain’s less-reliably-Republican advisors, a guy named John Weaver, a political pro and rival to Karl Rove, who has a hankering to move beyond all the tedium of political principles and ideology and on to mass market appeal via “bigness.”
By bigness, Mr. Weaver evidently means something resembling Ronald Reagan’s ability to attract the support of moderates and to occupy an effective leadership position that could get the country as a whole behind him. In my view, Reagan’s success was achieved by explaining what he meant to do, and why, and winning the argument. The alternative view, which the Times likes, means simply dropping all the theory and the principles off the sled and running as a pragmatic technocrat who solves problems. Amazing, isn’t it, the way the establishment intelligentsia always goes running to the shelter of good old-fashioned American anti-intellectualism and pragmatism, when it finds that it is losing the theoretical argument?
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So, on looking closely at Jon Huntsman, I see that some good people whom I seriously respect are in the process of joining his team. He looks like a decent guy in most respects, but his record features strong support for the leading pseudo-scientific stupidity of our time, indicating that he is either a fool or an opportunist. (On which same basis, we know what Newt Gingrich is, for instance.)
He has hired a political strategist who is the personal embodiment of all the worst features of McCain-ism, a guy so bad that McCain evidently got rid of him during the 2008 campaign.
The stories are contradictory. Mark Halperin suggests that back-room forces of movement conservatism are planning to support Huntsman to prevent the too-moderate Romney becoming the nominee. Yet, we also have evidence that he is planning to run explicitly as the non-conservative in the race for the GOP nomination.
There is a bit more reason, judging by the volume of mainstream media sympathetic coverage, to suspect that the latter theory is the more likely. The strategy of running as a non-conservative will make the New York Times respect him, but I rather doubt myself that it will succeed in delivering the GOP nomination.
Alex Pappas, at the Daily Caller, quotes Bill Kristol on the unfinished GOP presidential race field.
Mitch Daniels’ announcement that he’s not running for president means Republicans may turn up the pressure on dream candidates like Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan and Chris Christie.
“It would be unfair to call the current field a vacuum,” said William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, in a blog post. “But it doesn’t exactly represent an overflowing of political talent.”
He predicted that “the odds are better than 50-50 that both Rick Perry and Paul Ryan run,” referencing the Republican governor of Texas and Wisconsin congressman, respectively.
Kristol also speculated that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton “may not feel they have to decide until after Labor Day—or maybe even until October or even November.”
In, in alphabetical order: Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Gary Johnson, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum.
Probably in: Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman.
Probably not in: John Bolton, Sarah Palin.
Out: Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, Mike Huckabee, Mike Pence, John Thune.
Declared out but still being wooed: Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Paul Ryan.
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Hugh Hewitt is taking the bizarre position that everything is hunkydory. By his lights, the GOP has a strong field of candidates, and besides “the top two contenders—Romney and Pawlenty—have essentially locked up the campaign talent and the money commitments necessary to mount a traditional campaign.”
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Barack Obama clearly doesn’t agree with Hewitt about the GOP field. As the New York Post reports:
President Obama’s re-election campaign is trying to dig up dirt in the Garden State.
Despite New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s repeated pronouncements that he will not seek the GOP presidential nomination, Obama operatives are compiling a dossier of what they call “opposition research”—material that could be used to damage Christie if he changes his mind, The Post has learned.
The Obama campaign is trying to keep its efforts from public view, concerned they would only elevate Christie’s already impressive standing within the Republican Party, sources said.
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I think Bill Kristol is dead on and Hugh Hewitt is dead wrong.
No member of a field consisting of Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Gary Johnson, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, and Jon Huntsman obviously represents a serious challenge to a polished and articulate incumbent democrat.
Of the actually known candidates in that list, Newt Gingrich is demonstrably unreliable on policy and in performance, Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum are too socially conservative, Ron Paul is a pacifist isolationist, Mitt Romney is a liberal from Massachusetts, and Tim Pawlenty (from liberal Minnesota) has a very mixed record as well.
To win in 2012, the Republican nominee is going to have to offer a serious alternative to Obamanomics. We can hardly defeat Obamacare with the record of a governor who created a similar system in his own state. Americans want prosperity restored. They do not, in general, desire to elect a president primarily devoted to a counterrevolution in public morals.
Paul Ryan is the best possible choice, it seems to me. The Ryan budget proposal represents the only serious alternative that anyone has proposed to the current out-of-control entitlement system. The choice between balancing the federal budget and national bankruptcy and decline is what the election needs to be about, and Paul Ryan is the best qualified Republican to argue our case to the American people.
Donald Trump is manifestly not all that bright. Educationally, he makes Sarah Palin look like Erasmus, and he has truly execrable taste: running to the Mafioso Miami school of interior design and that signature combover hairdo. But he has lately been doing great in Republican polls, while amusing a lot of the country by taking potshots at the mystery of Barack Obama’s unwillingness to release his long-form birth certificate.
David Brooks describes why Donald Trump strikes a deep cultural chord.
[T]here has always been a fan base for the abrasive rich man. There has always been a market for books by people like George Steinbrenner, Ross Perot, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Bobby Knight, Howard Stern and George Soros. There has always been a large clump of voters who believe that America could reverse its decline if only a straight-talking, obnoxious blowhard would take control. ...
He is riding something else: The strongest and most subversive ideology in America today. Donald Trump is the living, walking personification of the Gospel of Success.
It is obligatory these days in a polite society to have a complicated attitude toward success. If you attend a prestigious college or professional school, you are supposed to struggle tirelessly for success while denying that you have much interest in it. If you do achieve it, you are expected to shroud your wealth in locally grown produce, understated luxury cars and nubby fabrics.
Trump, on the other hand, is utterly oblivious to such conventions. When it comes to success, as in so many other things, he is the perpetual boy. He is the enthusiastic adventurer thrilled to have acquired a gleaming new bike, and doubly thrilled to be showing it off.
He labors under the belief — unacceptable in polite society — that two is better than one and that four is better than two. If he can afford a car, a flashy one is better than a boring one. In private jets, lavish is better than dull. In skyscrapers, brass is better than brick, and gold is better than brass.
This boyish enthusiasm for glory has propelled him to enormous accomplishment. He has literally changed the landscape of New York City, Chicago, Las Vegas and many places in between. He has survived a ruinous crash and come back stronger than ever.
Moreover, he shares this unambivalent attitude toward success with millions around the country. Though he cannot possibly need the money, he spends his days proselytizing the Gospel of Success through Trump University, his motivational speeches, his TV shows and relentlessly flowing books.
A child of wealth, he is more at home with the immigrants and the lower-middle-class strivers, who share his straightforward belief in the Gospel of Success, than he is among members of the haute bourgeoisie, who are above it. Like many swashbuckler capitalists, he is essentially anti-elitist.
Now, I don’t mean to say that Donald Trump is going to be president or get close. There is, for example, his hyper-hyperbolism and opportunism standing in the way. ...
But I do insist that Trump is no joke. He emerges from deep currents in our culture, and he is tapping into powerful sections of the national fantasy life.
In my own hyper-elitist way, I am every bit as anti-elitist (when our so-called elite is in question) as Donald Trump, and I have been enjoying the spectacle of Trump giving Obama a hard time.
I’d be delighted to have the GOP National Committee agree to give Donald Trump a special bit of air time late on election evening of November in 2012 to point his index finger, and on behalf of America, say “Barack Obama, you’re fired!”
But Donald Trump falls decidedly into Glenn Reynolds’ syphylitic camel category of candidates. We just have to hope hope that The Donald is sufficiently patriotic to get out of the way of a more serious Republican contender and does not decide to play the role of a Perot.
Pete Robinson reflects gloomily about Republican prospects, noting that the Republican base is bound to dwindle as the national illegitimacy rate skyrockets. (AEI article:)
Forty years after the Moynihan report, the tragic saga of the modern black family is common knowledge. But the tale of family breakdown in modern America is no longer a story delimited to a single ethnic minority. Today the family is also in crisis for this country’s ethnic majority: the so-called white American population….
Consider trends in out-of-wedlock births. By 2002, 28.5 percent of babies of white mothers were born outside marriage in this country. Over the past generation, the white illegitimacy rate has exploded, quadrupling since 1975, when the level was 7.1 percent. The overall illegitimacy rate for whites is higher than it was for black mothers (23.6 percent) when the Moynihan report sounded its alarm….
Today no state in the Union has an Anglo illegitimacy ratio as low as 10 percent. Even in predominantly Mormon Utah, every eighth non-Hispanic white infant is born out of wedlock.
Pete discusses these demographics over dinner in Hanover, New Hampshire with Mark Steyn, who points out that the dramatic changes to the American national character can be readily observed even in rural Northern New England.
For miles in every direction, Mark noted, lay country that until just a few decades ago represented the heartland, so to speak, of the flinty, resourceful, independent Yankee spirit. Now? “You’ll see lovely girls in the local high schools,” Mark said. “When you come across them again five years later, they’ll each have three children by three different fathers.” Then Mark told a story.
In colonial times, it was against crown law to cut down any pine that exceeded a certain girth—twenty-some inches, as I recall—because all such trees were reserved for the use of the Royal Navy, which required a ready supply of masts. Every time you see a colonial house with floorboards more than two feet wide, you’re witnessing an artifact of the American spirit—an act of rebellion. Mark pointed to the floorboards in the restaurant, some of which were certainly more than two feet wide. “Two centuries ago,” he said, “the families in these parts were felling trees in defiance of the crown. Today they’re raising their children on welfare checks.”
Woe to us all.
It probably is worth noting that both of the last two presidents elected by the democrat party may not have been born in wedlock. William Jefferson Clinton, given the name William Jefferson Blythe III at birth, is widely rumored not to have really been the offspring of the traveling salesman William Blythe II who perished in an automobile crash three months before Bill Clinton’s birth. Barack Hussein Obama is certainly of illegitimate birth, as his parents’ marriage was bigamous and invalid.
Barack Obama, Sr. had married Kezia Aoko aka “Grace” in 1954 and had already had two children, prior to his attending the University of Hawaii and marrying Stanley Ann Dunham in 1961. No divorce from Kezia ever occurred, and Barack Sr.’s first wife Kezia is still alive today.
The budget plan introduced by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan actually represents a serious effort to fix the entitlements crisis and close the enormous gap between government income and expenditures. I do not believe that I have ever seen, in my lifetime, so courageous a piece of legislation. Wall Street Journal
One can see the dramatic impact of this one hundred degree shift in politics in the fact that it immediately forced the New York Time’s substitute-for-a-conservative David Brooks right off the fence, and transformed him into a full-throated supporter.
Over the past few weeks, a number of groups, including the ex-chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers and 64 prominent budget experts, have issued letters arguing that the debt situation is so dire that doing nothing is not a survivable option. What they lacked was courageous political leadership — a powerful elected official willing to issue a proposal, willing to take a stand, willing to face the political perils.
The country lacked that leadership until today. Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes. Ryan is expected to leap into the vacuum left by the president’s passivity. The Ryan budget will not be enacted this year, but it will immediately reframe the domestic policy debate.
His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion. It will become the 2012 Republican platform, no matter who is the nominee. Any candidate hoping to win that nomination will have to be able to talk about government programs with this degree of specificity, so it will improve the G.O.P. primary race.
The Ryan proposal will help settle the fight over the government shutdown and the 2011 budget because it will remind everybody that the real argument is not about cutting a few billion here or there. It is about the underlying architecture of domestic programs in 2012 and beyond.
The Ryan budget will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.
The democrat-controlled Senate will probably decline to endorse moving to a sustainable federal government, but Congressman Ryan has framed the 2012 Electoral Debate. This is a budget that Republicans can campaign on.
PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE is not enthused with the Republican field. Well, based on the past two years I’d vote for a syphilitic camel if he ran against Obama. But I’d rather not have to. But remember, it’s early yet — at this point in the previous cycle, it looked like it was going to be Hillary vs. Rudy. And Barack Obama was just a nice young man who’d given a speech at the convention.
GEORGE WILL IS not so hot on Huckabee, Gingrich. I would vote for a syphilitic camel over Barack Obama in 2012, so therefore I would even vote for Huckabee or Gingrich. But I might try to talk the camel into running one more time.
I voted for John McCain, whom I despise slightly more than Huckabee and Gingrich, in 2008 myself, but that syphilitic camel had better take care to choose a good running mate. Without Palin on the ticket, I might very well have written in Donald Duck.
Fortunately for the camel, the ideal Republican VP choice is very obvious: Marco Rubio.
The Gallup Poll finds “the devil you don’t know” running, at this point, perfectly even with Obama.
U.S. registered voters are evenly split about whether they would back President Barack Obama for re-election in 2012 (45%) or “the Republican Party’s candidate” (45%). ...
Results from a parallel question Gallup asked during the presidencies of George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush show both of those presidents performing better on this re-elect measure at comparable points in their third years in office than Obama does today. ..
[T]he poll suggests Obama is relatively more vulnerable than former President George W. Bush at this point in his presidency.
When Gallup polled voters in 2003 to test Bush’s reelection prospects, the Texas Republican led a generic Democrat 47-39 percent.
These kind of polling results suggest that any credible Republican capable of uniting opponents of the current president, not destroyed by scandal or a major gaffe, would be able to defeat Obama.
I sincerely wish that we had a demigod like Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan to run, but I expect most of us will be happy to settle for anyone reliably committed to the kind of economic principles required to fix the American economy who seems to possess sufficient determination to do the job.
Vote for them anyway, P.J. O’Rourke advises. The alternative is democrats, and they hate our guts.
Perhaps you’re having a tiny last minute qualm about voting Republican. Take heart. And take the House and the Senate. Yes, there are a few flakes of dander in the fair tresses of the GOP’s crowning glory—an isolated isolationist or two, a hint of gold buggery, and Christine O’Donnell announcing that she’s not a witch. (I ask you, has Hillary Clinton ever cleared this up?) Fret not over Republican peccadilloes such as the Tea Party finding the single, solitary person in Nevada who couldn’t poll ten to one against Harry Reid. Better to have a few cockeyed mutts running the dog pound than Michael Vick.
I take it back. Using the metaphor of Michael Vick for the Democratic party leadership implies they are people with a capacity for moral redemption who want to call good plays on the legislative gridiron. They aren’t. They don’t. The reason is simple. They hate our guts.
They don’t just hate our Republican, conservative, libertarian, strict constructionist, family values guts. They hate everybody’s guts. And they hate everybody who has any.
The inimitable Frank Fleming explains why the democrats are inevitably going to get massacred in the upcoming election.
During the second term of the Bush presidency people just got fed up with Republicans. They were idiots, they were no good at the whole fiscal conservatism thing (which is sort of the whole point of them), we had these wars that seemed to be going nowhere, and the economy was beginning to fail. They sucked, and people were sick and tired of them.
Thus people turned to the Democrats. And Obama.
Let’s just say they also sucked.
AMERICANS: “So, the economy is pretty bad and there’s high employment. You think you can do something about that?”
DEMOCRATS AND OBAMA: “We can spend a trillion dollars we don’t have on pork and stuff.”
AMERICANS: “No … that’s not what we want. We’d really like you not to do that.”
DEMOCRATS: “You’re stupid. We’re doing it anyway.”
AMERICANS: “That’s not going to help us get jobs!”
DEMOCRATS: “Sure it will; millions of them … though they may be invisible. You’ll have to trust us they exist. And guess what else we’ll do: We’ll create a giant new government program to take over health care.”
AMERICANS: “That has nothing to do with jobs!”
DEMOCRATS: “We don’t care about that anymore. We really want a giant new health care program. We’re sure you’ll love it.”
AMERICANS: “Don’t pass that bill. You hear me? Absolutely do not pass that bill.”
DEMOCRATS: “Believe me; you’ll love it. It has … well, I don’t know what exactly is in the bill, but we’re sure it’s great.”
AMERICANS: “Listen to me: DO. NOT. PASS. THAT. BILL.”
DEMOCRATS: “You’re not the boss of me! We’re doing it anyway!”
AMERICANS: “Look what you did! Now the economy is way worse, we’re even deeper in debt, and we have a bunch of new laws we don’t want!”
DEMOCRATS: “You’re racist.”
AMERICANS: “Wha … How is that racist?”
DEMOCRATS: “Now you’re getting violent! Stop being violent and racist, you ignorant hillbillies! And remember to vote Democrat in November.”
So the Democrats sucked. But not just plain old, usual politician sucked, but epic levels of suck where it’s hard to find an analogue in human history that conveys the same level of suckitude. It was sheer incompetence plus arrogance — and those things do not complement each other well. We’re talking sucking that distorts time and space like a black hole.
It’s Godzilla-smashing-through-a-city level of suck — but a really patronizing Godzilla who says you’re just too stupid and hateful to see all the buildings he’s saved or created as he smashes everything apart. Or, to use Obama’s favorite analogy, you have a car stuck in ditch, so you call the mechanic, but the only tool he brings with him is a sledgehammer. And then he smashes your car to pieces and charges you $100,000 for his service. Finally, he calls you racist for complaining. Obama and the Democrats have been so awful, it’s hard for the human brain to even comprehend.
But the Democrats will counter that the Republicans also suck. And while this is true, it’s not really going to help them. As I pointed out before, both a dog incessantly barking and a zombie apocalypse are things that everyone would agree suck. Yet no one during a zombie apocalypse, while hiding out in a boarded up mall, would turn to the other survivors and say, “We don’t want to kill all the zombies; then we’d have to go back to being woken up at night by that annoying dog next door.” But this is the best argument the Democrats can come up with.
– Stop job-killing tax hikes
– Allow small businesses to take a tax deduction equal to 20 percent of their income
– Require congressional approval for any new federal regulation that would add to the deficit
– Repeal small business mandates in the new health care law.
Cutting Spending:
– Repeal and Replace health care
– Roll back non-discretionary spending to 2008 levels before TARP and stimulus (will save $100 billion in first year alone)
– Establish strict budget caps to limit federal spending going forward
– Cancel all future TARP payments and reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Reforming Congress:
– Will require that every bill have a citation of constitutional authority
– Give members at least 3 days to read bills before a vote
Defense:
– Provide resources to troops
– Fund missile defense
– Enforce sanctions in Iran
Full text pdf (as I write this, I’m waiting for 17 minutes of download to finish)
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A lot of people, including most prominently Don Surber, Erik Erikson, think it is too damned long, too platitudinous, and not what it should be.
Doug Ross offered a superior, and far more concise, alternative version:
We pledge that every action we take will be gauged by the answer to a single question: Does it show fidelity to the Constitution, our highest law?
With that as our guide, we solemnly pledge the following as our first actions:
• We will repeal the Democrat health care bill and, if vetoed by the President, will de-fund every aspect of that bill until such time as the American people have input into a sensible health care reform process.
• We will slash the size of the federal government bureaucracies (Commerce, Education, Energy, the EPA, Labor, etc.) by 20% in 2011 with a goal of reducing each by 50% over the next three years, thereby saving hundreds of billions of dollars.
• We will secure the border with physical fencing suitable to repel drug smugglers, human smugglers, and terrorists, while encouraging legal immigration and enforcement of the law.
• We will confront the entitlement crisis—Social Security and Medicare—by preserving benefits for those who depend upon them and moving to privatized options for younger workers. Anything less condemns future generations to mountains of debt and economic catastrophe.
• We will strengthen our armed forces, space and missile defense programs to retain our unparalleled superpower status.
• We will begin the process of paying down our debts, spending within our means every year.
• We will ban public sector unions, which exist solely to wage war against the taxpayers who fund their operations.
Put simply: we intend to adhere to a strict interpretation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Faith, Family, and the Founding. That is our creed.
And for your support and with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
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The Pledge finally downloaded.
I must say that I find it difficult to believe that the guys who produced this bloviating document, loaded down with pretentious, trite, and irrelevant photographs (the Statue of Liberty! Mount Rushmore! even a cowboy) and padded with quotations from people like Ronald Reagan and Bob McDonnell who actually had something to say, are really going to reduce the size of anything.
Reducing this Pledge to specifics and essentials would have been a better start.
