Nation-Building

Today, Massachusetts votes for a Senator to replace Ted Kennedy in a special election scheduled on the eve of President Obama's first anniversary in office. The expectation is, to put it bluntly, that Republican challenger Scott Brown will probably defeat incumbent Martha Coakley (who was appointed to fill the empty seat after Sen. Kennedy's passing last winter). The immediate impact of a Coakley loss would be to reduce the Democratic coalition by one, from a filibuster-proof 60 to merely 59. The thinking goes that this imperils President Obama's entire governing agenda, kills health care reform, and is a preview of further losses this November (where the Dems are already expected to lose seats in both the House and the Senate). The spin from the right is that a Coakley defeat is a victory for the oppressed masses who reject Obama's socialist agenda and vindication of the Tea Party movement. But a Brown victory is more likely to come from depressed Democratic turnout, ...

So much economic hand-wringing , yet all its good for is to reiterate the same tired stale posturing from liberals and conservatives alike. Here's the basic problem. 1. Domestic spending can't go down. It's a fantasy to imagine that even draconian cuts would be tolerable or politically viable. Like it or not, Americans want their social services and safety nets. All the conservative handwringing about Socialism is a Red herring, pun intended. Anyway discretionary spending (non defense, non medicare, non social sec) is a tiny fraction of the overall budget anyway so theres very little to cut; American services are actually an incredible bang for the buck, especially compared to European counterparts. 2. Defense spending can't be cut. The world is a bad place. We have to spend a lot of money in a lot of places for basic reasons of security and global policy. Isolationism doesnt work; 9-11 proved that. Bottom line: we need resources to deal with the crap out there and that...

Yesterday's nationwide Tea Bagger tax protests seem to have been reasonably successful, with total turnout probably at least a couple of hundred thousand people. Despite dogma by the conservative blogsphere that the media was ignoring them, it seems that coverage was everywhere - including on NPR , which even interviewed Glenn Reynolds . One of the more fairly written articles about these protests was at The Daily Beast, which pointed out that there was also a substantial Obama Derangement Syndrome (ODS) mentality running through them: But when I saw the giant placard which read “Hussein = Commie,” the time had come for some counseling. The guy holding the sign looked like he could have come over on the subway from Williamsburg, wearing a hoodie, sunglasses, and an iPod. I asked him if the sign was serious. Oh, yes. “Every-time he opens his mouth he spouts textbook Marxism, Communism, Socialism,” said the man who initially gave his name as “Barry Soetoro”—Obama’s name when he ...

The GOP is in full obstructionist mode regarding the economic stimulus plan - there's an excellent summary at myDD of the GOP's general strategy: The GOP's main contention has been now for over 30 years that by reducing the top tax rate on personal and corporate income that a large increase in aggregate total savings would result. Yet the savings rate of American households has been declining for more than a decade and it now stands at the lowest level of the post-WW II era. Since 2003, the combined annual net savings of households, businesses, and government have declined to about one percent of gross national income. So if increasing the savings rate is the goal so as to thus increase investment, cutting taxes hasn't worked. And yet the GOP continues to pitch the idea that tax cuts lift the economy. Well, the Democrats are batting now and they shouldn't swing at balls outside the strike zone. To continue the metaphor, this is the GOP's set up pitch. They wan...

During the election, the McCain campaign slogan was "Country First". This was seized upon with glee by GOP partisans as a rebuke against Obama, who (it was implied) put himself first instead of his country. Now, however, in losing the election, these same fair-weather patriots would prefer that McCain put Party above Country - clearly their concept of Country was a subset - the so-called " Real America " - that shared their political views and agenda. John McCain's principles and patriotism have now become a point of contention instead of pride for these small-minded partisan fools. Case in point - RedState has already told McCain to go " suck a lemon ". A more official rebuke comes from Rick Santorum, former GOP Senator for PA, who frets that John McCain might seek to re-burnish his credentials as a maverick by working amicably with president Obama: McCain was once the mainstream media darling, back when he joined Democrats on a host of issues. H...

Given the remarkable assertion that the Left is insane, offensive, and totally without moral restraint, whereas the Right is beyond compare as scions of civil discourse, and any evidence to the contrary of either is utterly non-representative, let me offer some counter-examples culled from sources that I believe we can indeed reach consensus on as representing the "mainstream" right. Obama had a gay love affair (front page post by RedState.com Editor) Obama's memoir was written by William Ayers ( recommended diary at Redstate.com, post at The Corner @ National Review) Obama's got something to hide regarding his birth certificate (user diary at RedState.com, promoted to front page by Editors) Obama's got "ties" to Osama bin Laden - Virginia GOP Chairman Rick Frederick Obama guilt by association with Marxists , Communists and Terrorists , Islamic Radicals . Obama was a drug dealer (Dan Riehl) Obama desecrated the memory of the victims of 9-11 becau...

At RedState, a rare call for civility: In fact the more vilified people are for breaking ranks the greater the backlash against the incivility. We have to keep the discourse respectful. Because the more we look intolerant, the more independents move away from our thoughts and our views. It doesn't do the Country any good to attack someone as being dishonorable, unpatriotic, or somehow Treasonous for not checking the person with the (R) by their name. The response in the comments is instructive. In November, watch the whining begin. The true conservatives are girding for a long winter, while the zealous Republicanists are in total denial. Country second, party first, indeed.

Joe Klein : Maybe I'm getting old, maybe it's that I've seen this act so often before, maybe it's that the people I talk to when I go out on the road really are having a harder time paying for things like health care, gasoline and college tuition, but I'm finding the Republican attempts to derail the conversation from the actual state of the country really depressing and disgraceful this year. They practice Orwellian politics of the crudest sort. They are trying to sell a big lie -- that the election is about the social issues of the 1960s, or Barack Obama's patriotism or his eloquence, or the "angry left," when it's really about turning toward a more moderate path after the ideological radicalism and malfeasance of the past eight years.

The Obama-Clinton horserace on the left seems headed towards fabled " brokered convention" status which has long been the holy grail of preesidential punditry (though in practice, is hardly worth cheering for its anti-democratic nature ). But in many ways the dynamic on the right is more important, since the very future of the Republican Party itself is at stake. The main issue is whether "conservatives" are truly a movement or just another faction within the GOP coalition. Prior to Romney's dropping out of the race, the view among the party elite was that McCain's ascendancy represented raw political expediency over genuinely conservative ideals - witness this roundtable between contributors at RedState.com where despite a few voices to the contrary, the mainstream answers affirmatively he question, " did the primary process fail conservatives? ". However, Josh Trevino's comments after Romney's withdrawal strikes rather deeply at the p...

I couldn't resist highlighting this one . John McCain will create 20 million new Democrats by jackbenimble The damage to conservatism of a McCain win will be irreversible. We can't just keep importing poor, ignorant people from the third world and expecting them to vote anything but Democrats and socialism. Poor ignoarnat people ALWAYS vote for socialism. Prior to the Reagan Amnesty California had voted Republican in 9 out of the 10 prior elections. The Reagan Amensty turned California irreversibly blue and the McCain Amnesty will be 6 to 10 times larger. We can't lose anymore Red States and expect conservatism to ever win again. A win by John McCain would be a tactical victory and a strategic loss that would doom conservatism. I'd rather have a tactical loss and have conservatism survice to fight another day. What do rich "ignoarnat" people ALWAYS vote for, then?

The TNR has a lengthy article on Ron Paul , looking beyond the short horizon of his campaign and at the years of newsletters he has written over the years with his political screeds, and concludes he is "angry". Ron Paul is not going to be president. But, as his campaign has gathered steam, he has found himself increasingly permitted inside the boundaries of respectable debate. He sat for an extensive interview with Tim Russert recently. He has raised almost $20 million in just three months, much of it online. And he received nearly three times as many votes as erstwhile front-runner Rudy Giuliani in last week's Iowa caucus. All the while he has generally been portrayed by the media as principled and serious, while garnering praise for being a "straight-talker." From his newsletters, however, a different picture of Paul emerges--that of someone who is either himself deeply embittered or, for a long time, allowed others to write bitterly on his behalf. His advers...

Eteraz provides a nice summary of the muslim problem afflicting the GOP: One of Giuliani’s people complains about “the difficult problem” that is “the rise of the Muslims” and wants “to chase them back to their caves.” [ Link ]. He further refuses to distinguish between good and bad Muslims. After all, “they are all Muslims.” Here is the video of him at the Guardian. Here is Talking Points Memo’s review of it all. The staffer has been fired, but there’s a bigger problem. The GOP’s severe lack of awareness — I was going to use the word “ignorance” but I’m being nice — vis a vis Islam and Muslims is really hurting it. Just the other day Romney said he could not accept a Muslim in the cabinet. This comes on the heels of the 2004 survey by Cornell which I discussed in my piece at Jewcy Magazine where 40% of Republicans wanted American-Muslims to register their whereabouts (why not jus...

August 19th , op-ed in the New York Times by seven soldiers of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne serving in Iraq: In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are -- an army of occupation -- and force our withdrawal. Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities. We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through. September 12th : NYT reports that two of those soldiers have made the ultimate sacrifice for their na...