Category Archives: Conservatism

Establishment Enraged At Its Candidate, Romney

Conservatism, Economy, Elections, Media, Republicans, Taxation

“…for the sake of not abandoning his faulty health-care legacy in Massachusetts, Mr. Romney is jeopardizing his chance at becoming President,” the WSJ editorializes.

The editors have objected to Mitt Romney’s lack of objection to Obama and the gang’s framing of The un-Afforable Care Act as a tax. Capiche?

Romney is not remotely as coherent as the WSJ thinks he is in his most confused moments.

Mr. Romney should use the Supreme Court opinion as an opening to say that now that the mandate is defined as a tax for the purposes of the law, he will work to repeal it. This would let Mr. Romney show voters that Mr. Obama’s spending ambitions are so vast that they can’t be financed solely by the wealthy but will inevitably hit the middle class.

On the other hand, it is just possible that the WSJ is upset with the Romeny campaign for failing to hire as campaign adviser the ubiquitous Stephen Moore, popular commentator on Fox New and beyond, and author of “Bullish on Bush: How the Ownership Society Is Making America Richer.”

“We’re on its email list,” they whine, “and the main daily message from the campaign …[simply won’t cut it].”

Hint, hint.

UPDATED: Congress: A Repository Of Contempt

Conservatism, Constitution, Democrats, Ethics, Government, GUNS, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, Nationhood, Republicans

A contemptible Congress finds an equally contemptible cabinet minister in contempt of its proceedings.

How significant are these findings for the cause of freedom and justice? Not very.

Republican representatives, as they demonstrated under Bush—who, as I’ve often said, would have wrestled a crocodile for a criminal alien—don’t care about the rights of private property on the US Southern border any more than their Democratic partners-in-crime do.

Farmers, their families, and their best friends are imperiled daily on that border; have been long before Operation Fast and Furious commenced.

The Democratic brand of statism won out in the healthcare confrontation. Since what’s underway in the world’s greatest “deliberative” body is no more than brute politicking—Democrats should delight in their victory and downplay a slap in the face from opponents every bit as contemptible as themselves. That’s the logic of the game.

In the unlikely event that the Republicans win a significant political battle, they should do the same.

Unlikely because, Republicans have betrayed every single important principle that might have prolonged the survival of the republic. This is the nature of the Republican beast, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa included.

…the unconstitutional campaign finance-reform bill and “Sarbanes-Oxley Act” (a preemptive assault on CEOs and CFOs, prior to the fact of a crime); the various trade tariffs and barriers; the Clintonian triumph of triangulation on affirmative-action; the collusion with Kennedy on education; the welfare wantonness that began with a prescription-drug benefit that would add trillions to the Medicare shortfall, and culminated in the Kennedy-countenanced “New New Deal” for New Orleans, for which there is no constitutional authority; the gold-embossed invitation to illegals to invade, and the “camouflaged amnesty” (where illegals are born-again as “guest workers” and then placed on a fast track to permanent residence)—you name it,

Republicans have promoted it to the detriment of liberty.

REMEMBER: “The Democratic and Republican parties each operates as a necessary counterweight in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one set of colluding quislings to the other, and back.”

UPDATE (June 30): In reply to WCO: Have you read Into the Cannibal’s Pot, WCO? My book, the sub-chapter titled “Civil Wrongs,” in particular, should give you some answers to your question. Civil Rights legislation—property-sundering and sweeping—created a system of patronage and spoils. This is one reason Dixicrat concerns are no longer.

Blending In With The Girls

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Conservatism, Hollywood, Intellectualism, Media, Pop-Culture

BARACK OBAMA IS. So says one of Bill O’Reilly’s resident junk-science experts. For once, Bill’s body language bimbo makes sense. In demeanor (and dentition), Obama is one of the girls. He’s blending in, said Tonya Reiman, down to the way he crosses his legs, lady like.

O’Reilly, who devotes a large part of the program to recounting his many appearances on mindless forums like The View—and is among the conservatives who considers batty Bawbawa Walters worth courting—pointed out that he seldom crosses his (very long) legs when he visits the ladies. And he always leans in aggressively.

No doubt, O’Reilly, who is über-manly, has swagger. Obama, more of a metrosexual, saunters.

Rex Murphy, easily Canada’s finest political writer, has furnished us with the best description of the Bill O’Reilly Show: “the Shangri-La of Socratic disinterest.”

O’Reilly is intellectually incurious, chronically so. For scary, however, nothing beats a president who knows the ins-and-outs of the Kardashians, the most rear-ended reality stars on American TV.

BHO has more than once demonstrated—and made excuses for—how closely he watches a family that is repulsive, freaky, morally rudderless, inappropriately sexual and depraved. In the past, he had also entertained the big-boned sister (please don’t me make Google her name) and her basketball husband at the White House.

UNRELATED UPDATE: To Nick: BAB is a low- or close-to-no-budget operation, written and “programed” by me, with the help of donations from a few generous readers. Unless our fortunes change here—not least that this scribe is no longer the sole “programer”—we’ll have to make do with the BAB format as it stands, I’m afraid.

UPDATE II: National Review Eunuchs (‘Why Come You Don’t Have a Tattoo?”)

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Free Speech, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Intellectualism, Journalism, Media, Race, Reason

The following is from “National Review Eunuchs,” my latest column:

In an interview with Brian Sack on GBTV, columnist and author John Derbyshire inadvertently anticipated his future in commenting about the dismissal from mainstream of another iconoclast, Patrick J. Buchanan:

“MSNBC is a private company. They can hire and fire who they like. But Buchanan is a serious guy who talks in a serious way about serious issues. Yet he is out of the national conversation. That’s bad.”

Not long after, Derbyshire was dismissed from National Review, where he freelanced. The “girlie boys” of NR had taken offense to “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” a column Derbyshire published at Taki’s Magazine. …

… National Review used to be conservatism’s flagship publication. These days its ideology reflects “Modern Republicanism’s” “dime store New Deal” proclivities (Barry Goldwater’s characterization). Launching oxymoronic attacks on Obamacare for “endangering Medicare”: that’s the extent of NR’s fight to free minds and markets.

… Tons of pixels have since been spilt in response to Derbyshire’s article and subsequent dismissal. The dimwitted discourse reflects a polemical landscape from which the Derbs of this world have been uprooted. None of John’s critics can write or reason as he does. None has his “range of historical and literary allusion,” as Mark Steyn observed. John Derbyshire’s is pellucid prose at its best.

A staff writer at The Atlantic epitomizes this fluffy, unfocused, Meghan McCain-like waffle (punctuated with a lot of, “I feel”) that lands you a job at a top publication. “As someone who places a high value on both robust public discourse and the fact that racism is now taboo,” he whimpered, “I won’t even try to mediate between these two except to say that Derbyshire’s piece was wrongheaded.”

That’s it? A feeble, frightened assertion is a substitute for an argument?

Such cyber-ejaculate gushed from other similar androgynous androids, possessors of the Y chromosome. The volume of bad writers safely ensconced in high places, and their voluminous, vapid output strengthened this conviction:

More so than enforcing conformity—ousting John was about safeguarding the future of mediocrity. …

… Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about.

The key to success in the scribbling profession is to strike the right balance of mediocrity in writing and thinking, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines, poorly.

Conservatism once had the genius of James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Frank Chodorov, and Felix Morley; now the brand boasts S. E. Cupp, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Rich Lowry, and their editorial enablers. (Perhaps NR will recruit Jedediah [sic] Bila in place of Derb?) …

Read the complete column, “National Review Eunuchs.”

If you’d like to feature this column in or on your publication (paper pr pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “Tweet” and “Share” the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT and “Return To Reason” on WND.

UPDATE I: “Why Come You Don’t Have a Tattoo?”

About “those androgynous androids, possessors of the Y chromosome,” mentioned in the column on John Derbyshire’s firing. Here is a typical example. His name is Alexander Nazaryan. he writes for the New York Daily News:

“Please, Lord, tell me that this is a joke. Please, please tell me that a human being did not actually think these things and, worse yet, think to write them down.”

Reading Meghan McCain has just about inoculated me to the above form of writing (for it is not a style in any recognizable way).

It conjures the scene in Mike Judge’s genius of a satire “Idiocracy.” To be precise, the dialogue Joe Bauer, the protagonist, conducted with the “‘tarded” doctor character, who discovers Bauer doesn’t have the identifying, state tattoo (listen to it HERE):

Doctor: “And if you could just go ahead and, like, put your tattoo in that shit.”
Joe: “That’s weird. This thing has the same misprint as that magazine. What are the odds of–”
Doctor: “Where’s your tattoo? Tattoo? Why don’t you have this?”
Joe: “Oh, god!”
Doctor: “Where’s your tattoo?”
Joe: “Oh, my god.”
Doctor: “Why come you don’t have a tattoo?”

Doctor: “Why come you don’t have a tattoo?”

[SNIP]

You want to slap this Nazaryan man in the face. “Settle down. Stop it man. Quit the hysterical hyperbole. Stop the overwrought outrage. Calm down and write a simple sentence countering the Derb column.”

UPDATE II: To the ladies, Jeniffer and Scherie: Saddling the state solely for the dysfunction of a segment of the population is a form of determinism. According to this formula, free will and individual agency get short shrift. For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society, and hard-core libertarians, who are also determinist, saddle the state. “The State made me do it” is how such social determinism can be summed-up.

By the way, according to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, white, middle America is in big trouble too. It isn’t as criminal as black America, but it is shot through with illegitimacy, laziness, unemployment, family and marital disintegration, etc.