The real "crazy" talk

For the last year or so, there has been a constant drumbeat that the Tea Party is "crazy" and "extremist" and "dangerous". One of the biggest beaters of that drum has been Washington Post columnist and uber-Lib Eugene Robinson.

His latest column has no shortage of delusional and "crazy" talk itself. And interestingly, it's not because it's the usual boilerplate Tea Party bashing or 'Republicans are racist' stuff, it's crazy because he tries to defend the indefensible.

That's right. It's a love letter to Nancy Pelosi.

Let's parse some of the nonsense:

Losing elections is an occupational hazard for politicians, so there's no need to get all weepy about the Democratic officeholders who suddenly find themselves with more time to spend with their families. It would be more appropriate to shed a tear or two for the future of the country, what with the Tea Party brigade coming to town.

It didn't take long to get the jab in against the Tea Party. And he may claim there's no need to get weepy, but I'm willing to bet after last Tuesday Eugene did in fact get a little weepy.

President Obama still has the ability to set the nation's agenda - and also the power of the veto, in case of emergency. Harry Reid is still Senate majority leader - and after the way he punched and scrapped his way to victory, who wants to mess with him? As for John Boehner, he'll soon learn that his new job requires a more extensive vocabulary than "no."

I'm sure John Boehner's vocabulary comes from the same dictionary the Democratic party used from the years 2000 to 2008. Wouldn't you agree, Eugene?

This is the absurd double standard in American politics. When Republicans lose, they are supposed to concede, relax their principles, and rubber-stamp whatever the Democrats want to do. When the Democrats lose power, well, dissent becomes "patriotic" and they speak "truth to power" and their own crazy rhetoric gets overlooked by the Eugene Robinsons of the world.

But amid the wreckage of Tuesday's GOP rampage, there's one person for whom I feel awful: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She's losing her job not because she does it poorly but because she does it so well.

This is wrong on so many levels. But let's continue.

Pelosi would never ask for, or even accept, my sympathy - that's not her style. Her place in history was secure the moment she became the first woman to take possession of the speaker's gavel. Still, she squeezed every drop out of her four-year tenure. To string together a couple of sports cliches, she came to play and she left it all on the field.

As usual, the "historic" gender/race component of anything is the most important thing to a Liberal. Not the substance. Not what someone does. Not what they believe. She was the first female speaker. That's it. That's all that matters. Unless the "she" is a conservative.

I regret that the nation has never come to know the actual Nancy Pelosi. Most Americans are probably familiar only with the caricature that her political opponents sketched - the effete "San Francisco liberal" who knew nothing of America outside her mink-lined cocoon, where the taps ran with chablis and nourishment consisted of unpronounceable French cheeses, served on silver platters by waiters who were certainly gay, and quite possibly married.

Sounds about right.

That's not the Nancy Pelosi known to anyone who has ever met her. While the term "San Francisco liberal" is accurate, it's also true that she grew up - and learned the rough-and-tumble of politics - in gritty Baltimore. Her father, Tommy D'Alesandro, was a legendary "Charm City" mayor and political boss. Her education in how to count votes, and keep them counted, began at a young age.

Well, then, color me impressed. She was involved in politics from an early age? Her father was a big-time "political boss" in Baltimore? She was essentially born with a Democratic leader's congressional pen stuck in her power suit?

Only the most ardent water-carriers and out of touch beltwayers would make these points and think they are actually defending someone.

Mr. Robinson, this is exactly the problem that people have with the government in our country right now. This is one of the reasons you are seeing the rise of the Tea Party that you denounce as racist and crazy and extreme.

People are sick and tired of career politicians, born into this "show business for the ugly", entitled to rule instead of blessed to represent. People who have never run a business or met a payroll or waited tables or dug a ditch or lifted a finger to do anything other than carry a community organizer's clipboard – yet demand and command from their Washington perches more money, more liberty, more attention than us flyover rubes would ever really prefer to give them.

Kapish?

He goes on...

When she appears before the cameras, Pelosi often seems stiff and almost brittle. In person, she's warm and engaging - also funny, earthy and just plain good company. She tells a great story. She turns a mean phrase. Colleagues on Capitol Hill almost universally describe her as a good boss and simply a good person.

It was frustrating to hear Republicans demonize her in their thunderous public statements, then confess privately that they really liked her. Ain't politics grand?

And demonize her they did. In their midterm campaign, Republicans attacked Pelosi more often, and more brutally, than they attacked Obama. They made her the living embodiment of Evil Washington, or of limousine socialism, or of whatever alleged plagues that Democrats were supposedly visiting upon the body politic.

Sounds familiar. Wasn't Bush sometimes stiff in front of the camera? I wonder, was Eugene Robinson frustrated by the Democrats "demonizing" Bush "in their thunderous public statements" as well?

Some of the votes she won looked impossible. On health-care reform, there appeared to be no way the House could ever be persuaded to pass the more conservative bill that had passed the Senate. At one point, she told me she could find only "maybe a dozen votes" for the measure. But she and Reid managed to find a workable set of modifications - and a clever parliamentary maneuver to pull the whole thing off.

I was at the Capitol that day when the House passed the landmark health-care bill. Tea Party groups were protesting outside, egged on by Republican members of Congress who came out onto a balcony and led the catcalls.

Pelosi did what was right for the country, and what's right isn't always what's popular. Democrats may decide they need a less polarizing figure as minority leader; if they do, well, that's politics. But I'd love to see her stay in the Democratic leadership - and I'm betting that eventually she'd find a way to take back the gavel that she pounds with such righteous authority.

Again, this is how you defend something? A "clever parliamentary maneuver to pull the whole thing off"? And this is supposed to make us feel all warm and fuzzy about Nancy Pelosi and Obamacare?

As far as doing what's "right for the country", well, I would argue that there are differing opinions on that.

We know that, to progressives, getting the foot in the health care door and then driving out private insurance so we can get to a full-commie single payer system seems like what's "right for the country". They've been telling us so for years, by the way.

But a majority of Americans do not agree with you, Eugene. A majority of Americans reject your ideas about the role of government in our everyday life. A majority of Americans, coincidentally, disagree with President Obama's ideas about that as well.

A majority of Americans made that very clear on November 2, 2010. If you still don't get that, Eugene, well, just wait until 2012. The message will likely be even louder and clearer.

The meaning of Massachusetts

It turns out conservatism isn't dead after all.

It was only a year or so ago we were being told that conservatism had been relegated to the ash heap of history. An obsolete and outdated philosophy bitterly clung to only by angry white tea baggers, racist rubes and gun-totin' hicks.

Recall Newsweek declaring that we are all socialists now. And Colin Powell's assertion that people wanted more government in their lives — not less.

Not surprisingly, rumors of conservatism's death were premature. In fact I'm not sure it can die in what remains a center-right country. But it can be temporarily abandoned. And it certainly was by a big-spending Republican president and congress during the early 2000's. Of course you could argue they had bigger things to focus on such as defending the country against the jihadist onslaught. But that is only a partial excuse.

In many ways we conservatives should thank Barack Obama for stirring the sleeping giant.

A good many people had become turned off to politics. Tired of the abrasive chatter and negativity. After eight years of Bush and the bitter 2000 election and truthers and other weird national distractions it could only be the election of a hard left ideologue — a true believer — to rattle us back to our senses. Had the Democratic party filtered out a pragmatic centrist it is possible none of the current hyper-partisanship would be happening.

But as I have opined before, the Democratic party is historically awful at vetting their candidates during the primary process. At least in the last couple of decades (See Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry). So while we were inundated with commentary that Bush had ruined the Republican brand and that conservatism would wander in the wilderness for a generation, when you look at the big picture, the truth is Bush's unpopularity and the GOP's following slide over those eight years were merely a blip compared to the larger thirty-year decline of the Democratic party.

A decline that has forged that party's angry identity and has led it far from the mainstream.

It is now a party that has allowed its leadership to ratchet their platform and policy way to the left. It is no longer the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers. No longer the party of the working man. It's the party of ex-60's radicals and neo-socialist Europhiles and Alinsky revolutionaries.

Kooks in suits. All adopting the appearance of normality. Becoming the man to beat the man. The modern American fifth column of the glorious workers revolution. Down with the long struggle. Patient. Creeping in. Hollowing out the capitalist system from the inside.

It has become something that many Americans find distasteful and scary. A party that welcomes the Cindy Sheehans and Ward Churchills and Noam Chomskys and the 20% or so (my estimate) of people who actually believe maybe we were behind the 9/11 attack — or at least deserved it. While the other 80% — Republican and Democrat — who still cherish the foundations and institutions and goodness of this country find that kind of thinking repulsive and offensive.

It has become a party that is both arrogant and ignorant at the same time. A party that believes it is entitled to rule instead of blessed to represent. More interested in fomenting victimhood in order to sustain voter rolls than to solve real problems.

I believe that while the natural born instinct of most Americans is to resist big government. It is also natural to resist a group which openly works to tear down this country.

The perception that the Democratic party of today doesn't take national security and American sovereignty seriously exists because, well, they don't. They are too busy domestically trying to transform this country into a sunlit dreamland where all needs are attended to by the State.

An ideal and just and "fair" society forcefully created by redistributive social and economic change. A great societal realignment to atone for centuries of imperialist oppression and other perceived global sins. Utopia, at long last — or at least Switzerland.

While the rest of us who live in reality understand that while improvement is a necessity, perfection is a fantasy. And in some cases not a harmless one.

Now the mask is off. And many people — including independents and blue-collar Democrats in Massachusetts — are rejecting what they see. If this is not a repudiation of the current administration's stated agenda what else could it possibly be?

With such a stunningly quick reversal in national opinion, then, how do you explain what happened in 2008 anyway? I'm not sure it can ever be completely understood. But essentially Barack Obama rode an anti-Bush, anti-war wave into office with just the right mixture of superbly canned happy talk about hope and change, GOP missteps and media worship on a level not seen before. No one — except for a few of us — seemed to want to question seriously whether this person was actually right for the job. Whether this former street radical and liberal law professor and cultural Marxist actually deserved to be given the privilege of leading this great nation and the solemn honor of commanding her armies.

It always seemed to me that Obama was just the same old stale populist leftism we've heard for years. Platitudes and cliches. Tired and empty and meaningless words. But many were just taken in by the American Idol marketing, followed the conventional wisdom, and dared not be called out as someone who didn't appreciate the historical significance. After all, if you disagreed with Obama the candidate or didn't care for him, you had the added racial guilt to live with.

Those of us who felt we had the correct sense seem to have been proven right. That this is a man that is all about words and appearances and less about substance and action. So after a year of our President's constant and sometimes bizarre speechifying the backlash has culminated with the stunning victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts. A Republican from a deep blue state. A regular guy. A moderate. An average American who drives a truck and believes in limiting government and reducing taxes and treating terrorists as terrorists. A citizen legislator who understands that government does not increase the standard of living of people — liberty does.

The result of this victory seems to have many of the left in a simultaneous state of confusion, denial and delusion.

Well, as our President's former pastor would say, the chickens are coming home to roost.

BBC questions Global Warming

Amazing. Just amazing to see the BBC of all sources printing a story which questions Global Warming. They rightly point out that indeed there has been zero increase in global temperatures since 1998.

When the BBC starts running stories like this, you have to wonder how long the Global Warming mongers have to pass their prosperity-killing policies.

Thomas Friedman officially goes off the deep end

Until he adopted the global warming scheme as his life cause, I was actually a fan of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. I thought his writings and views on the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict were among the most intelligent and sharp you could find.

But in the last few years he's gone further and further into koo koo land, and the final push over the cliff and into the abyss of lunacy took place a few days ago in his latest column.

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

So, there it is. Communist, oppressive, human-rights-abusing, protest-'discouraging', soul-crushing China is the model for which we free people in democratic America should now be looking to. Because, despite those inconvenient 'drawbacks', their 'enlightened' leaders really know how to get stuff done.

From the 'top down'.

You almost don't know where to begin. So I'll just let it speak for itself.

As with my previous post, there's been a lot of the Liberal-Progressive mind exposed here lately. Call it Libs Gone Wild, if you will. Naked and joyous to the world.

It's both amazing and horrifying at the same time.

Jonah Goldberg nails it here.

UPDATE: But, once again, it should be noted any time someone is complaining about the GOP being the party of "no": The GOP does not have the votes to stop any legislation the Democrats want to pass.

The GOP is not what is stopping Obama and his merry band of Dems from passing their paradigm-shifting, massive entitlement programs during a recession and two wars. What is stopping them is that they simply lack the political courage to ram these things through on their own. They want the political cover of 'bipartisanship' when these ideas inevitably fail.

"They may not know what's good for them"

Andrea Mitchell, of state-run MSNBC, recently had one of those unguarded moments when the true impulse of the Liberal mind reveals itself:



She means you, by the way. The sheep. The cattle.

Only the elite minds of Washington and New York are enlightened enough to guide all of you rubes in flyover country.

Right?

This really shouldn't surprise anyone who understands how Liberals think and view the world. Notice how easily the words rolled off the tongue.

Leftists constantly pat themselves on the back for their 'good intentions' and concern for the poor and downtrodden. Problem is, it's all bull.

The real motivation underlying the Liberal-Progressive mind is quite simply the urge to control. The urge to tell you how to live your life. The urge to force. To dominate.

Moments like this one crystallize that notion.

Friends on my side often complain about the obvious bias in the state-run media. I say fine. Set them free. Let them show their true selves.

They seem to be doing it more and more lately.