Libertarian Leanings

Hate-Filled Comments

Professor Bainbridge says he owes Bruce Bartlett an apology.  Maybe so.

I still don't agree with some of Bartlett's current view on economics, which still strike me as "the sort of Keynesian economics he one would have found anathema." Likewise, I still don't agree with his decision to vote for Obama.

But he is clearly right that there has been "a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn't already."

You can see the problem in the many hate-filled comments to my post on why the GOP needs an academic elite or my post on why it's becoming embarrassing to be a conservative.

My curiosity piqued, I went looking for the hate-filled comments.  This was the only one I could find:

@ Sporklift Driver: What happened to me? I got pissed off. The party I have supported and the movement of which I have been a part for decades has been taken over by a bunch of people who are either lightweights (Palin and O'Donnell), ranters (Riehl and Levin), warmongers (all the neo cons), not to mention outright bigots (like Tancredo before he went independent). The GOP in which I grew up was full of smart guys like Jack Kent, Newt Gingrich, Steve Forbes, Howard Baker, Jim Baker, and, yes, Ronald Reagan.

Speaking of Ronald Reagan, one of his great lines was that 1980 debate when he said "I paid for this microphone." Well, I pay for this one, and I'm giving myself the last word.

Posted by: Stephen Bainbridge | 11/11/2010 at 10:55 AM

My emphasis above.

 

Progressive Love-Hate With Business

I take minor issue with Daniel Henninger.  

Calvin Coolidge once said, "The chief business of the American people is business." The Democrats just lost America because they forgot that.

Democrats did not forget.  Democrats deplore the American propensity for business, but they'll tolerate it, well regulated of course, for the sake of the campaign contribution and post-congressional career opportunity.  Business is a distasteful necessity that pays their way -- crass but necessary.  No, Democrats did not forget.  They just misjudged the resilience of American business. 

Mr. Henninger offers Exhibit B as evidence of liberal absentmindedness.

Exhibit B: The Obama ban on offshore oil drilling. It floated out of the White House, Energy Department and EPA without anyone thinking: "Whoa, this is going to kill hundreds of working-class guys and their families."

But his own Wall Street Journal contradicts the notion that the Obama administration was oblivious to the hardship a drilling ban would impose.  The administration really did think about how this was going to kill jobs, but not hundreds of jobs.  Thousands.

A federal judge who in June threw out an earlier six-month moratorium faulted the administration for playing down the economic effects.

After his action, administration officials considered alternatives and weighed the economic costs, the newly released documents show. The Justice Department filed them in a New Orleans court this week, in response to the latest round of litigation over the moratorium.

Spanning more than 27,000 pages, they provide an unusually detailed look at the debate about how to respond to legal and political opposition to the moratorium.

They show the new top regulator or offshore oil exploration, Michael Bromwich, told Interior Secretary Ken Salazar that a six-month deepwater-drilling halt would result in "lost direct employment" affecting approximately 9,450 workers and "lost jobs from indirect and induced effects" affecting about 13,797 more. The July 10 memo cited an analysis by Mr. Bromwich's agency that assumed direct employment on affected rigs would "resume normally once the rigs resume operations."

So there's my small quibble, but there's no argument with Mr. Henninger's conclusion.

Many activist Democrats don't want their party to do business with business until the terms of engagement change. They think once the ObamaCare entitlement flows through the veins of the private sector, its workers also will be the party's brides. What's left of the private "impulses of our life" to create industries will be sopped up with permanent public subsidies to alternative-energy entrepreneurs. With luck, this new "low-growth" economy will produce enough tax revenue to keep the party's watermills going for another generation.

There it was, the impetus for health care reform.  The plan was to harness vulgar old business for the betterment of Americans, through progressive reform.  It's a neat trick because progressive reform is inevitably an attack on the capitalist system -- business.  And now the economy won't grow.  Progressive Democrats are at a loss.  Bush is to blame, they say.  Yeah, that's it.

Dowd At Her Very Best

Maureen Dowd's column in today's New York Times is without question her best ever.  Too bad her brother wrote it.

The voters left no doubt about their feeling for his super-nanny state where the government controls all aspects of their lives and freedoms. Warning signs were up in the three elections held in Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey and with the noisy birth of the Tea Party. But the president, swathed in the protective cocoon of adulation and affirmation from the media and his own sycophants, soldiered on in his determination to turn our country into just another member of the failed European union — France without the food.

Republican Strategy?

Zoltan Hajnal, an associate professor of political science at U.C. San Diego, has written a book called "America's Uneven Democracy".  I found that out when I read his editorial column in the Wall Street Journal.  Based on his column there's no chance of me picking up his book.  The column is a pathetic string of unfounded assumptions, the major one being that there is some Republican strategy to ignore or attack minorities.

Relying on white support is not a new strategy for the party. In 2008, 91% of the votes that John McCain received in his presidential bid came from white voters.

The problem for Republicans is two-fold. First, whites may currently be the majority but they are a declining demographic. The proportion of all voters who are white has already declined to 75% today from 94% in 1960. By 2050, whites are no longer expected to be a majority of the U.S. population.

Second, Republicans are alienating racial and ethnic minorities—the voters who will ultimately replace the white majority and who they need to stay in power. In every national election in the past few decades, Democrats have dominated the nonwhite vote.

I'm surprised that the Journal actually printed the thing.  Among the grossest failures of his article is the absence of any explanation or support for his claim that Republicans are alienating minorities.  Professor Hajnal apparently hasn't noticed that the head of the Republican party is African-American -- Michael Steele -- and one of its most prominent rising stars is Hispanic -- Marco Rubio, Senator-elect from Florida.

On top of that, those predominantly white voters South Carolina and Florida elected the first African-American Republicans to congress since J.C. Watts, Republican of Oklahoma, retired in 2003.

One of them, Allen West, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army, prevailed in a tough fight in a South Florida district. The other, Tim Scott, is the first black Republican to be elected to the House of Representatives from South Carolina in over a century. They will be the first black Republicans in Congress since J. C. Watts of Oklahoma retired in 2003.

[...]

Mr. Scott, 45, was elected to the Charleston County Council in 1995 and the South Carolina House of Representatives in 2008. In the Congressional primary, this year he defeated both Carroll Campbell III, the son of a former South Carolina governor, and, in a runoff, Paul Thurmond, the son of former Senator Strom Thurmond, to take the seat in the First Congressional District, which hugs the South Carolina coast.

Mr. West, 49, has never held public office. Born and raised in a military family in Atlanta, he rose to battalion commander in Iraq. His 22-year military career came to an end during the war when he was relieved of his command after using a gun to coerce information from an Iraqi police officer during an interrogation. After retiring from the military in 2004, he moved to Florida, taught high school for a year and then went to Afghanistan as an adviser to the Afghan army.

John Thrasher, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party, said Mr. West won the battle to represent the 22nd Congressional District, which includes the coast of South Florida, because “he’s a great American patriot that resonated with people.”

“His opponent was Pelosi-Obama liberal,” Mr. Thrasher added, “and Allen gave them a different understanding of how government could be.”

Mr. West said he was more surprised that he won as a Republican in a district carried by the Democratic presidential nominee three elections in a row than as an African-American in a district with a white majority. But, he added, “I am honored to be first black Republican congressman from the state of Florida since Reconstruction. There is a historic aspect of it.”

Meanwhile back on the progressive plantation, Professor Hajnal takes another wild swing-and-a-miss at Republicans.

Republicans thus face a real dilemma. They may be able to gain over the short term by continuing their current strategy of ignoring or attacking minorities. But that is short-sighted.

Over the long term—as white voters become a smaller and smaller fraction of the electorate and Latinos and other racial and ethnic minorities become a larger and larger share of the electorate—any campaign that appeals primarily to whites will be doomed.

So here we go again with the same tiresome excuses for getting soundly thrashed in the midterms.  For the past two years Democrats have been calling the tea partiers racist, desperately and futily hoping that the charge would stick.  Sixty-plus house seats later we're seeing how that worked out.  The professor does not.

Professor Hajnal repeats the old incantations, conjuring up some nonexistent Republican plan for "attacking minorities" as a campaign strategy.  But he doesn't say it all that well, and he doesn't offer the slightest bit of support for what he says. 

Progressives remain steadfastly delusional, but there is a method to their madness.  In describing a Republican demographic doomsday scenario, the political science professor maps out a real strategy, but it's the progressive strategy.  Sadly enough, stoking the fires of racism, class warfare, and hatred is their only hope.  Progressives can't succeed without it.  Since they have absolutely no idea of what to do about the economy, what else can they do to get elected?

No Democrats

The choice is clear.  The national referendum on the Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda is on for tomorrow, when voters will choose between the Democrat and whoever is the most likely of the other candidates to beat the Democrat.  Off hand, I can't think of any race where that's not the Republican.   But how did it come to this?

We arrived at this point because we have a Democratic president and Democratic congress a who are determined to transform America, and we have an electorate that is determined to prevent them from succeeding at it.  Never in my lifetime have Americans felt so threatened by Washington as they do on the eve of this election.  

Our leftist president and his congressional allies took advantage of a financial crisis to push through a partisan agenda, which when all is said and done, was a brazen power grab.  Health care reform's individual mandate sits at the very heart voter fears.  Since it requires a person to buy a product or face government imposed penalties, the indivual mandate represents an unprecedented assertion of federal government control over the individual.  Democrats are the authors of that authoritarian legislation.

The rationale behind health care reform, aside from the usual stuff about compassion, was that it was supposed to bring government spending under control.  President Obama claimed it would bend the health care cost curve down, and since health care takes such a big chunk of the federal budget it would reduce government outlays.  As you might imagine, there were some who were skeptical. 

In what might best be described as a tactical blunder, Democrats took to accusing anybody who asked how all this was supposed to work of being a racist or just plain stupid.  They seem, even now, to be surprised that a lot of people would find this offensive.  Then came their strategic blunder.

Health care reform was advertised a weapon in the fight to bring down the deficit.  That didn't play well in Peoria, since Democrats were busy tripling the deficit with stimulus bills and bailouts.  This took a big problem for the Democrats and made it bigger, because all of this was going on while the economy was in the toilet.  Voters wanted Washington to cut the big spending and focus on jobs and the economy, but instead Democrats rammed through health care reform.

And it wasn't as if voters hadn't dropped a hint or two along the way.  A house-from-a-helicopter sized hint came in the form of Scott Brown's defeat of Martha Coakley in the special election to replace Senator Health Care himself, Ted Kennedy.  It was priceless.  Brown won that seat by advertising himself as the 41st vote against health care reform.

But Democrats passed it anyway.  There were the bribes.  Special exemptions for Lousiana and Nebraska became known as the Louisiana Purchase and the Cornhusker Kickback respectively.  There were betrayals.  Pro-life Congressman Bart Stupak vowed to block the bill if it didn't include language to prevent federal dollars from supporting abortions.  Yet he voted for it over the objections of his constituents on a promise from Obama that there would be an Executive Order to make up for what the bill lacked. 

Finally there was the legislative trick.  Differing versions of the health care bill, one from the House and one the Senate, never went through conference committee to have their differences ironed out.  Had the bill gone to conference committee the revised legislation would have to go back to both the House and the Senate for final passage.  The Senate version had been passed before Scott Brown won his special election, which meant Democrats couldn't risk allowing a conference committee bill back to the Senate where Republicans with Scott Brown seated could block it.

So Democrats used a legislative process called reconciliation which is ordinarily reserved for budgetary issues, and the House passed the Senate version. Voters got the message, loud and clear.  Democrats were not interested in what the voters thought or wanted.  The Democrats wanted health care reform and they would have it. 

And that is what is at stake in the election tomorrow.  If tomorrow's vote leaves them in power, Democrats will take it as voter validation of all of the corruption, betrayal, and chicanery that went into the passage of health care reform.  In that event voters could expect even less respect from legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, than we get now. 

In order for the prevent that from happening, voters must defeat Democrats with their ballots.  If the latest opinion polls can be believed Americans are ready to do just that.  Tomorrow the most important vote is the vote against any Democrat.  The party must be punished. 

If we voters fail to punish the Democrats, and punish them severely, we can expect to be ignored from here on out.  And worse, we can expect to say goodbye to the America we know.  Democrats will transform it in a way that is intended to guarantee Democrat majorities.  We will become a European style social democracy with an entrenched ruling class.  The Democrats. 

So tomorrow when we vote remember this:  No Democrats.

Barney, Fannie, and Freddie