You tell ‘em, Mr. President

From the Washington Post:

“Some seem to believe we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Bush told the Israeli lawmakers. “We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

One of the greatest lessons of history seems to be that people who want to kill you will continue to want to kill you no matter how nicely you talk to them.  The Democrats’ response?

Democrats angrily called the comment a veiled shot at Obama, who has advocated dialogue with Iran and Syria, but not the Palestinian group Hamas.

[...]

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, used an expletive to describe Bush’s comment. He went on to say: “For this president to leave the country and unleash a political attack on Senator Obama and the Democrats cannot go unanswered. We’re not going to tolerate this swiftboating,”

So we shouldn’t call out terrible ideas because it would be a “veiled shot” at the person who holds them?  Give me a break.

Also, I love that swiftboating has now become a verb to deride any attack that Democrats don’t like.  It doesn’t matter whether the charge is true or not, it only matters whether Democrats think it is fair or not.  And the ultimate arbiter of what is a fair attack and what isn’t is whether it hurts the Democratic candidate or not.

Note to Democratic leadership:  Please feel free to grow up.  Any day now would be great.

 

Reason #287 I’m Glad the Republicans Don’t Have Primaries Like the Democrats

We’ve already seen the grievance-mongering, hysteria-driven case against Hillary Clinton dropping out of the race.  Now we have a more reasonable, well-researched one. Sean Wilentz at Salon looked into the Democratic primary system and concluded that Clinton would be the sure winner if the primaries worked like the general election did, with a winner-take-all system.

You should read the whole article, because it documents some of the electoral machinations of the Obama team - which are not exactly of the post-partisan standard we have been led to expect:

In Michigan, Obama’s supporters thwarted efforts to pass the legislation necessary to conduct a new primary. In Florida, campaign lawyers threw monkey wrenches to stop the process cold, claiming that a revote would somehow violate the Voting Rights Act, and charging that a proposed mail-in revote would not be “fraud proof.” (Obama himself, it’s important to note, proposed a bill in 2007 to allow for mail-in voting in federal elections.)

Instead, Obama’s campaign has tendered the startling proposal that he arbitrarily be allotted half of the votes already cast in Michigan and Florida. Of course, a large number of these votes — more than a quarter of a million in Florida alone — were not cast for Obama. He simply proposes that the party add these votes to his total, as though they were rightfully his. Saying that votes already cast for other candidates should go to him is a bold power grab, worthy of the Chicago machine organizations that claimed the votes of the recently deceased, their names gleaned from the voting rolls. By any definition of democracy, those votes do not belong to Obama; nor do they belong to Hillary Clinton, nor to Howard Dean. They belong to the voters. Obama can no more lay claim to them legitimately than his supporters can declare he has won the nomination before the remaining primaries take place.

So let me get this straight - Obama is willing to count Florida and Michigan as long as he gets half the votes?  Huh?  The article also notes that Obama has dominated the caucuses, which are dominated by those who can afford to go to the appointed location at the appointed time - leaving people like hourly wage earners without a fair chance at having their vote counted.

Whether you like Obama or Clinton, or wish the two of them would just go away, this is a good reminder that politics is politics - even the idealist candidate is going to play the game.

 

Stupidity Reigns in US Senate

The hint of recession is bad enough, but when coupled with a looming election, it becomes the perfect recipe for bad policy.

Far be it for Democrats to let a moment pass without trying to buy someone’s vote, and because the House already compromised with Bushitler on a mere $160 billion drain of the taxpayer’s money, the Senate Democrats felt it was incumbent on them to push for about $30 billion more, to be spent on the following:

… increased benefits for the elderly and veterans; subsidies for low-income families struggling with home heating bills and other energy costs; mortgage counseling for distressed homeowners; extended unemployment benefits; increased food stamps; and tax credits for alternative energy sources.

Harry Reid is all manner of pissed off that the President and his rapacious Republican comrades won’t even consider his ideas for new ways to grow the deficit in pursuit of a goal that will probably already have been attained by the time the policy takes effect.

“I can give you their own speech on unemployment compensation, on food stamps,” the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, said of his numerous conversations with the administration. “They don’t believe in them, O.K.? So there was no way to agree when they don’t believe that food stamps are important, when they believe that if you extend unemployment benefits it only keeps people from looking for a job, which is a little hard to comprehend. So the answer is, we tried to work something out with them and we weren’t able to do that.”

That’s funny, because I recall learning that increasing unemployment benefits actually does tend to increase frictional unemployment, because it makes it cheaper to reject job opportunities and wait for something better to come along. But I guess Mr. Reid, with his training as a lawyer, would probably know more about unemployment than the four Ph.D’s who wrote my Macroeconomics textbook. Nothing about Congress’ response to the economic downturn has been rational, so why should I expect Harry Reid to be?

 

A vote for Hillary is a vote for four years of awful speeches

Don’t believe me? Check out her N.H. victory speech. Some of my favorite snippets:

Over the last week, I listened to you and, in the process, I found my own voice.

I felt like we all spoke from our hearts, and I am so gratified that you responded. Now, together, let’s give America the kind of comeback that New Hampshire has just given me.

Way to sound more like Lifetime original movie than a U.S. Senator. Spoke from your hearts is right - as opposed to from your brains.

I’ve met families in this state and all over our country who’ve lost their homes to foreclosures, men and women who work day and night but can’t pay the bills and hope they don’t get sick because they can’t afford health insurance, young people who can’t afford to go to college to pursue their dreams.

Apparently, New Hampshire is just one big sob story, which has been waiting for a savior like Clinton to come along and dry its tears with some more government hand-outs.

The oil companies, the drug companies, the health insurance companies, the predatory student loan companies have had seven years of a president who stands up for them. It’s time we had a president who stands up for all of you.

Any story worth telling has an antagonist, and the Democrats have several industries to choose from when looking for a villain. Thank God I have Hillary Clinton to save me from predatory drug companies that dare to make enough money that they can reinvest in more life-saving cures. Those bastards and their Research & Development costs are ruining this country.

I’m beginning to think that a Clinton presidency will be somewhere between a group therapy session and a breadline. We’ll all get to talk about our problems and our feelings while we wait for our next handout.

In other news, the Chamber of Commerce is getting sick of new-age Huey Longs shitting on business, big and otherwise, and is gearing up for a fight.

 

Clinton wins N.H. primary

The senator from New York took 39% of the vote with 89% of precincts reporting, narrowly defeating Obama’s 36%.

And the very same evening, my unsuspecting roommate and I were attacked by a three-inch cockroach with the look of a killer in its eyes.

Coincidence?  Or proof that the forces of evil have been unleashed in the world?

As a side note, my roommate and I have an agreement worked out wherein she vanquishes the roaches while I hide in my room.  In return for doing the dirty work, she gets to laugh her ass off at me later.

 

Two smart guys, and a feminist’s look at 2008

Up first is Thomas Sowell commenting on the presidential race:

By far the best presentation as a candidate, among all the candidates in both parties, is that of Barack Obama. But if he actually believes even half of the irresponsible nonsense he talks, he would be an utter disaster in the White House.

Among the Democrats, the choice between John Edwards and Barack Obama depends on whether you prefer glib demagoguery in its plain vanilla form or spiced with a little style and color.

The choice between both of them and Hillary Clinton depends on whether you prefer male or female demagoguery.

Yikes.  And demagoguery it has been, this entire primary.  Liberal commentators love to pull out the “Republicans run on fear” card whenever an opportunity presents itself.  Is it really more honorable to run on class envy, as the Democrats all seem to be doing?  None of them could be called anything approaching moderate when it comes to economic issues: without fail, they embrace higher taxes on the “wealthy,” protectionist trade policies and more government hand-outs.

The second smart guy is Arnold Kling, who compares the FairTax, which Huckabee has endorsed, to a consumption tax that he described about 4 years ago as an alternative to our current tax system.

Kling also puts forth the idea of a “semi-Fair” tax system, which would include elements of both an income tax and a sales tax:

The idea of freezing the income tax while leaving the sales tax up for grabs politically is to try to increase the public’s sensitivity to the cost of Federal programs. Right now, politicians can treat high-earners as an ATM machine, always there to dispense cash for “targeted tax cuts” or foolish spending programs.

Instead, the idea would be to fix the amount of “soak-the-rich” taxation permanently, with all of the variation at the margin coming in the sales tax. Thus, if a politician wants to raise spending or institute some form of “targeted” tax cut, the sales tax rate has to rise, and everybody has to feel it.

Compared with the FairTax, the semi-Fair tax would not reduce taxes on high earners–some of them might even face higher taxes. However, it would reduce taxes on work and increase taxes on consumption. That combination might encourage more saving. In addition, if the rules about keeping the income tax invariant and paying for new spending with sales tax increases could be made to stick, the bias toward higher government spending might be greatly reduced.

Now the question is how to get America to buy it.  As a self-described Huckabe-hater, I get the feeling that Huckabee endorses the FairTax as a way of winning over fiscal conservatives, not because he actually believes it’s good policy.  After all, the results of such a tax don’t really match up to his populist rhetoric.

And finally, Gloria Steinem opines that if Barack Obama were a woman, he/she would never be considered a contender for the nomination, because sexism is still more deeply rooted than racism.  In one sense, I agree.  If you wander around the liberal blogosphere enough, you notice that the same liberal men who hold themselves and others to the highest standards of racial political correctness are often blithely sexist, remarking on female commentators appearances rather than their ideas, and the like.

On the other hand, I don’t think that she’s asking the right question, or even using the right example.  I don’t think Barack Obama would be considered a serious contender if it hadn’t been for one good speech that thrust him into the spotlight, and a talent for crowd-pleasing rhetoric that has kept him there.  He is an anomaly in the process, not the sign of any real trend.

I  also think that Steinem seriously overstates Clinton’s qualifications:

I’m supporting Senator Clinton because like Senator Obama she has community organizing experience, but she also has more years in the Senate, an unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training in the White House, no masculinity to prove, the potential to tap a huge reservoir of this country’s talent by her example, and now even the courage to break the no-tears rule.

I’m not convinced that being First Lady is the equivalent of having real executive experience. Nor do I think it’s a particularly great example if she manages to win the presidency considering the fact that her success has been so dependent on her husband’s name and career.   It’s not a particularly compelling argument to say that men get a free pass on being unqualified while women have to prove more.  Liddy Dole managed to become a senator, for God’s sake, and was at one point a serious presidential contender.