Capitol Weekly reports on an interesting recent political dialogue in California.

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, famously told the governor to “kiss my gay ass” at a Democratic fundraiser last month. Two days later, the governor responded in the veto message of one of Ammiano’s bills.

Earlier in the month, the San Francisco Democrat was at a boisterous Democratic fund-raiser when Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger stopped by to say hello. The governor, a guest of former Mayor Willie Brown, said a few words of greeting and extolled the virtues of bipartisanship. But Democrats, unhappy with the governor in their midst, booed loudly.

“Kiss my gay ass!” Ammiano shouted out.

Schwarzenegger smiled and left. But he was plotting his move.

On Oct. 11, the governor vetoed Ammiano’s AB 1176, with a seemingly innocuous and vague veto message.

Innocent enough. But when read on the governor’s Web site, the first letter of the last two paragraphs line up to spell out a clear, if crude message.

Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear said the hidden message was a “strange coincidence.”

“When you veto so many bills, something like this is bound to happen,” he said with a straight face.

What kind of people are running the Executive Branch and conducting American policy? Paul Mirengoff points out a revelation in Dick Cheney’s speech that a cursory reading could easily have missed, and points out how much this particular political exchange reveals about the ethics and character of Barack Obama and his administration.

In his speech last night to the Center for Security Policy, former vice president Cheney blew the whistle on some egregious dishonesty by the Obama administration:

Recently, President Obama’s advisors have decided that it’s easier to blame the Bush Administration than support our troops. This weekend they leveled a charge that cannot go unanswered. The President’s chief of staff claimed that the Bush Administration hadn’t asked any tough questions about Afghanistan, and he complained that the Obama Administration had to start from scratch to put together a strategy.

In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt. The new strategy they embraced in March, with a focus on counterinsurgency and an increase in the numbers of troops, bears a striking resemblance to the strategy we passed to them. They made a decision – a good one, I think – and sent a commander into the field to implement it. Now they seem to be pulling back and blaming others for their failure to implement the strategy they embraced . . .

In short, the Obama administration falsely claimed that the Bush administration had done no planning or analysis regarding the worsening situation in Afghanistan, even though it (1) knew this was false, (2) had asked the Bush administration not to disclose its work, and (3) relied in part on the same work it claimed the Bush administration had not performed. …

(W)hat Cheney described last night goes well beyond lack of class… (T)he rank, opportunistic dishonesty described by Cheney demonstrates an affirmatively bad character. And an administration craven enough to engage in it is a dangerous, potentially thuggish administration.

Hotline OnCall admires a very nice thank you gift recently delivered for services rendered during last year’s primary campaign for the democrat party presidential nomination.

It’s not often that a plum ambassadorship goes to someone who isn’t a career foreign service officer or a big bucks campaign contributor, but Pres. Obama has nominated Anne Slaughter Andrew to be the ambassador to the Republic of Costa Rica.

Hmmm.

The prospective diplomat is an Indiana Univ. trained atty who currently is Principal of New Energy Nexus, LLC, and, according to the WH release on her nomination, “advises companies and entrepreneurs on investments and strategies to capitalize on the New Energy Economy.”

But Andrew is also wife of ex-IN Dem chair Joe Andrew, who was tapped by Bill Clinton to be DNC from ’99 to ’01 who also was a big backer of then-Sen. Hillary Clinton in her ’08 bid — until five days before the must-win IN Dem primary last year, when Andrew with great fan-fare threw Clinton under the bus, endorsed Obama, urged all his fellow Hoosiers to vote for Obama and called up party leaders and fellow superdelegates (Andrew had that status to the Dem convo because he was an ex-DNC chair) to basically shut the nominating contest down after the IN primary and get behind Obama.

In a public letter that at times was melodramatic and angst-ridden, Andrew wrote: “Why call for superdelegates to come together now to constructively pick a president? The simple answer is that while the timing is hard for me personally, it is best for America. We simply cannot wait any longer, nor can we let this race fall any lower and still hope to win in November. June or July may be too late.”

Well, the contest did run until June and Obama still somehow made it to the WH. But for Joe, this was a selfless act: “My endorsement of Senator Obama will not be welcome news to my friends and family at the Clinton campaign… If the campaign’s surrogates called Governor Bill Richardson, a respected former member of President Clinton’s cabinet, a ‘Judas’ for endorsing Senator Obama, we can all imagine how they will treat somebody like me.”

Geee, somehow he managed to survive and somehow the current Sec/State must have an amazing amount of equanimity and grace not to have choked on this administration nomination.

Vera Lengsfeld (on the right) with well-known image of Angela Merkel in evening gown

Vera Lengsfeld, a 57-year-old Christian Democrat candidate facing a difficult race in a Berlin district against a Green incumbent, aroused controversy by producing and distributing the above poster, which informs voters: “We have more to offer.”

From the Telegraph.

Ryan Grim, at HuffPO, spills (a day before the book’s release) some of the interesting bits from Bush Administration’s speechwriter Matthew Latimer’s new tell-all Speech-less: Tales of a White House Survivor.

While Karl Rove was appearing on Fox News and writing op-eds as an independent political analyst, he was privately smearing Democrats. “Karl spread rumors through the White House that one of Obama’s potential vice presidential running mates — and a United States senator — had beaten his first wife. ‘Karl says it’s true,’ the president assured a small group of staffers. Then knowing Karl, he quickly added, ‘Karl hopes it’s true,'” reports Latimer.

For a commencement address at Furman University in spring 2008, Ed Gillespie wanted to insert a few lines condemning gay marriage. Bush called the speech too “condemnatory” and said, “I’m not going to tell some gay kid in the audience that he can’t get married.” (Of course, Bush ran his 2004 campaign telling that kid just that.)

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “adamantly opposed” any reference to jailed Egyptian dissident Ayman Nour when Bush traveled to Egypt to promote freedom. She won.

Bush, it turns out, is like millions of Americans: “I haven’t watched the nightly news one night since I’ve been president,” he said.

Laura Bush, says Latimer, “was secretly a Democrat for all intents and purposes, though it really wasn’t much of a secret.” …

Bush on Jimmy Carter: “If I’m ever eighty-two years old and acting like that have someone put me away.”

On liberal editorial pages and across the left-side of the blogosphere, conservative opposition to drastically increased government spending and Health Care Reform proposals, dissent at Town Hall meetings, and last weekend’s massive protest in Washington have all been diagnosed and interpreted as “anger” and “extremism” on the part of “White Males.”

David Harsanyi admires the left’s preemptive definition of political opposition as racism.

Who dictates what level of anger and dissent is allowable? Who decides what a clandestine racist sign looks like? Maybe someone like MSNBC’s Carlos Watson, who wondered if “socialism” was really about the nationalization of industry and hyper-regulation of the private market, or if it was just “becoming the new N-word.”

None of this has anything to do with the left’s paranoid belief that America is an inherently racist nation. It’s just that if you oppose more government dependency and expansion, you might as well be a Confederate infantryman. No, it doesn’t matter what you say, because we know what you really mean.

Read the whole thing.

Yesterday’s mass protest against federal spending was estimated by the comparatively neutral Daily Mail as made up of “up to two million.”* US Parks and Recreation estimated 1.5 million.

All this was not even front page news for the New York Times, for whom the numbers involved dwindled to mere “thousands.” The Washington Post more generously acknowledged “tens of thousands.”

The astonishing demonstration of massive popular opposition to socialism naturally proved a problem for the left’s commentariat. The preferred discounting technique was demonstrated by Think Progress: point to Confederate flags, identify expressions of opposition to Barack Obama as “racism,” describe open expressions of conservatism as “offensive” and “radical.”

Glenn Greenwald at Salon dismisses all opposition to Obama as illegitimate, coming from people with heretical and unacceptible views, worthy only of contempt and dismissal.

What I find amusing is the leftist Greenwald’s claim to proprietorship of “the country’s core founding values.” Since when was the left in favor of the framer’s republic of federalism, individual rights, personal responsibility, and limited government?

Nothing that the GOP is doing to Obama should be the slightest bit surprising because this is the true face of the American Right — and that’s been true for a very long time now. It didn’t just become true in the last few months or in the last two years. Recent months is just the time period when the media began noticing and acknowledging what they are: a pack of crazed, primitive radicals who don’t really believe in the country’s core founding values and don’t merely disagree with, but contest the legitimacy of, any elected political officials who aren’t part of their movement. Before the last year or so, the media pretended that this was a serious, adult, substantive political movement, but it wasn’t any truer then than it is now. All one has to do is review their behavior during the Clinton presidency — to say nothing of the Bush years — to see that none of this is remotely new. Nothing they’re doing to Obama is a break from their past behavior; it’s just a natural and totally predictable continuation of it.

UPDATE 23 Feb 2010: The Daily Mail, at some point subsequent to this posting, revised the estimate in its article downward to “As many as one million people.” The original estimated figure was also cited here.

ABC News also denied having made a 1M to 1.5M estimate.

Michelle Malkin sheds more light on the numbers controversy.

We were arguing about the bailouts on my class email list, and a liberal classmate noted that George W. Bush started them. Bush was a conservative, he argues, so bailouts are conservative.

My classmate writes:

If Bush is actually a conservative, why did he go along with the bailout?

And if you now say, he isn’t or wasn’t, how can you be so rigid in your identifications of political categories, like “liberal” or “conservative.” Bush sounds like a quantum experiment, he’s a conservative until he isn’t? Is that your Schrodinger cat experiment? Your polemics are so absolute, but the reality is less so.

Reality is less consistent than my politics. George W. Bush ran as a Republican. I think he had some conservative views, but do remember he was always a “compassionate conservative,” the kind of politician striving to be a “uniter not a divider.” GWB’s record is very mixed from a conservative point of view. He was most conservative with respect to siding with ordinary Americans in the culture wars against the leftwing coastal elite. He seems to have had a visceral antipathy to the same elite from which he traces his own roots, and I find that basically the most lovable thing about George W. Bush.

He had ambitions to reduce taxes and to fix Social Security and health care, but Republicans in Name Only rendered his Congressional majority meaningless. Bush got temporary tax cuts (which will soon be expiring, God help the economy!), and got neither of the others.

9/11 turned Bush into a Big Government president. He created the preposterous Department of Heimat Sekuritat. He allowed political correctness to reign in airline security, confiscating nail clippers and searching blue-haired grannies from Nebraska, while continuing to allow Muslims on US flights. He waged two wars, which he conducted in a politically correct, Wilsonian manner, losing the support of the public at home and failing to rebuke domestic treason. He never explained their goals and objectives well enough, and he was too slow. The US public gets tired of wars that take too long. He kept the country safe after 9/11. No second successful mass attack ever occurred, but he also never caught bin Laden, and I do not think he actually did democratize the Middle East.

His panicky bailouts were a terrible departure from Republican principle. And, in the final analysis, we are obliged to conclude that George W. Bush received the support of a comfortable American majority in favor of lower taxes, smaller government, less political correctness, a balanced budget and a strong national defense. He accomplished little, and he managed to throw away that majority and lose Congress and the White House to a radical democrat party rump, so scary left that a lot of people believed the GOP needed only to point to them and it could enjoy an electoral majority in perpetuity.

The framers in Valhalla are doubtless distressed to see a radical community organizer and representative of the corrupt Daley machine sitting in the White House apologizing to Muslims and trying to make America into a socialist welfare state. George W. Bush will have a lot of explaining to do when he sees them

Charles Krauthammer muses over how exactly it came to pass that the Chosen One lost his mojo. His conclusion? As always, it was Hubris that brought the fortunate and previously successful man of destiny’s progress to a crashing halt.

What happened to President Obama? His wax wings having melted, he is the man who fell to earth. What happened to bring his popularity down further than that of any new president in polling history save Gerald Ford (post-Nixon pardon)?

The conventional wisdom is that Obama made a tactical mistake by farming out his agenda to Congress and allowing himself to be pulled left by the doctrinaire liberals of the Democratic congressional leadership. But the idea of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pulling Obama left is quite ridiculous. Where do you think he came from, this friend of Chávista ex-terrorist William Ayers, of PLO apologist Rashid Khalidi, of racialist inciter Jeremiah Wright?

But forget the character witnesses. Just look at Obama’s behavior as president, beginning with his first address to Congress. Unbidden, unforced and unpushed by the congressional leadership, Obama gave his most deeply felt vision of America, delivering the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president. In American politics, you can’t get more left than that speech and still be on the playing field.

In a center-right country, that was problem enough. Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one’s own image.

Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party town-hall resistance.

Obama’s reaction to that resistance made things worse. …

Read the whole thing.

Marc Ambinder identifies Health Care Reform as a classic example of the kind of policy fight a president can’t win.

I think he’s right. Socialized health care is a goal that the left can neither relinquish nor hope to win.

As the prospects for bipartisan agreement in the Senate fade, the need for Obama to unify Democrats will increase. Right now, though, he is losing Democrats from both wings of the party, even as independents soften and conservatives mobilize. Obama’s ratings in the Pew survey declined slightly from July to August among moderate Democrats (down two percentage points) and sharply among liberal Democrats (down nine percentage points).

These poll numbers suggest that health care is becoming the classic issue that wounds a president: one that unites his opponents and divides his own side. Obama probably has little hope of changing the first half of that equation; when Congress returns he’ll probably need to focus more on improving the second.

Obama on the run

Peggy Noonan went scurrying back toward what she perceived as the center in the last election, and she is finding, only months later, that Barack Obama and the democrat Congressional leadership are anything but centrist.

Peggy Noonan is not buying the left’s talking points about “astroturf” and hired senior operatives sent by the Insurance Industry and Rush Limbaugh. She thinks the American people are really becoming scared, scared of deficits, scared of irresponsible policies hastily enacted, and scared of the impact upon themselves of vast expansions of remote federal power.

To her, Obama and the democrats appear to be in serious trouble.

We have entered uncharted territory in the fight over national health care. There’s a new tone in the debate, and it’s ugly. At the moment the Democrats are looking like something they haven’t looked like in years, and that is: desperate.

They must know at this point they should not have pushed a national health-care plan. A Democratic operative the other day called it “Hillary’s revenge.” When Mrs. Clinton started losing to Barack Obama in the primaries 18 months ago, she began to give new and sharper emphasis to her health-care plan. Mr. Obama responded by talking about his health-care vision. He won. Now he would push what he had been forced to highlight: Health care would be a priority initiative. The net result is falling support for his leadership on the issue, falling personal polls, and the angry town-hall meetings that have electrified YouTube.

In his first five months in office, Mr. Obama had racked up big wins—the stimulus, children’s health insurance, House approval of cap-and-trade. But he stayed too long at the hot table. All the Democrats in Washington did. They overinterpreted the meaning of the 2008 election, and didn’t fully take into account how the great recession changed the national mood and atmosphere.

And so the shock on the faces of Congressmen who’ve faced the grillings back home. And really, their shock is the first thing you see in the videos. They had no idea how people were feeling. Their 2008 win left them thinking an election that had been shaped by anti-Bush, anti-Republican, and pro-change feeling was really a mandate without context; they thought that in the middle of a historic recession featuring horrific deficits, they could assume support for the invention of a huge new entitlement carrying huge new costs.

The passions of the protesters, on the other hand, are not a surprise. They hired a man to represent them in Washington. They give him a big office, a huge staff and the power to tell people what to do. They give him a car and a driver, sometimes a security detail, and a special pin showing he’s a congressman. And all they ask in return is that he see to their interests and not terrify them too much. Really, that’s all people ask. Expectations are very low. What the protesters are saying is, “You are terrifying us.”

Read the whole thing.

When certain centrist Republican commentators were seen abandoning the defense of George W. Bush and endorsing Obama over John McCain, one cynic observed that it is always nice to be so obviously winning that all the trimmers, conformists, and opportunists are busily scrambling to climb on board your political side.

New York Times token conservative columnist David Brook’s defection last Fall was one of the minor landmarks on the road to Republican defeat. But, now, not even a year later we find David Brooks scurrying down the ropes and right off the good ship Obama, with a column remarking on the decline in public support for the Chosen One’s policies and predicting his thorough and well-deserved comeuppance.

Why, welcome back, David. Save a seat for Peggy Noonan, will you?

In March, only 32 percent of Americans thought Obama was an old-style, tax-and-spend liberal. Now 43 percent do.

We’re only in the early stages of the liberal suicide march, but there already have been three phases. First, there was the stimulus package. You would have thought that a stimulus package would be designed to fight unemployment and stimulate the economy during a recession. But Congressional Democrats used it as a pretext to pay for $787 billion worth of pet programs with borrowed money. Only 11 percent of the money will be spent by the end of the fiscal year — a triumph of ideology over pragmatism.

Then there is the budget. Instead of allaying moderate anxieties about the deficits, the budget is expected to increase the government debt by $11 trillion between 2009 and 2019.

Finally, there is health care. Every cliché Ann Coulter throws at the Democrats is gloriously fulfilled by the Democratic health care bills. The bills do almost nothing to control health care inflation. They are modeled on the Massachusetts health reform law that is currently coming apart at the seams precisely because it doesn’t control costs. They do little to reward efficient providers and reform inefficient ones.

The House bill adds $239 billion to the federal deficit during the first 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It would pummel small businesses with an 8 percent payroll penalty. It would jack America’s top tax rate above those in Italy and France. Top earners in New York and California would be giving more than 55 percent of earnings to one government entity or another.

Nancy Pelosi has lower approval ratings than Dick Cheney and far lower approval ratings than Sarah Palin. And yet Democrats have allowed her policy values to carry the day — this in an era in which independents dominate the electoral landscape.