Category Archives: Elections 2008

The Measure Of McCain

Elections 2008, Intelligence, John McCain, Republicans

Steve Sailer has IQ on his mind, and so should we:
“Will McCain, who finished 894th out of 899 at the Naval Academy and who lost five jets, return competence to the White House? To paraphrase Oscar Wilde (and, no, Oscar was never a fighter pilot), to lose one plane over Vietnam may be regarded as a heroic tragedy; to lose five planes here and there looks like carelessness.
More seriously, what’s the largest organization that McCain has ever managed? And how did he do at it? And is he suddenly going to learn how to be an excellent manager at age 72?
I’m not looking forward to having to choose between one politician who can’t be criticized because he was a POW and to question him is to not support the troops and another candidate who can’t be criticized because he’s black and the perpetually fragile self-esteems of 40 million African-Americans are assumed to depend upon everybody saying nice things about him. The point is not that McCain and Obama aren’t fine fellows, it’s that in a country of 300,000,000, we ought to expect the Presidential candidates to be worthy individuals and that yet they still must undergo corrosive analysis.”
posted by Ilana Mercer on 02.03.08 @ 1:30 am

Update: Readers have pointed to other solid interviews conducted over the months with the candidates, such as MTV’s, of all places. I would add the Google or Yahoo’s executive’s interview with Paul—and the others. Fine stuff. This demonstrates, once again, that if in search for genius, always look outside what I call the Media-Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex. Sycophants and parasites all.

Derb On The Irrelevance of Libertarianism

Elections 2008, libertarianism, Political Philosophy, Ron Paul

In “High Priests of Pomposity Pan Ron Paul” I contended that whatever was revving the Ron Paul Revolution, it was not the ideas or the “energy” of Beltway libertarians, represented by the Cato and Reason claque. In fact, there was almost no overlap between “the [Ron] Paul and the [Virginia] Postrel solitudes”:

“Ron’s Revolutionaries have coalesced around the illegal, immoral, and unconstitutional invasion of Iraq, against America’s hegemonic overreach, and for a sovereign, less ‘cosmopolitan,’ America.
Beltway libertarians, conversely, are moved in mysterious ways by gaping borders, gay marriage, multiculturalism, cloning, and all else ‘cool and cosmopolitan.’”

John Derbyshire goes further. In a new VDARE.com column, Derb contends that, “Paradoxically, Ron Paul’s candidacy is proving the irrelevance of libertarianism.”

Particularly courageous, given the commentariat’s general allergy to the truth, is Derb’s daring defense of Paul’s association

“with people, fifteen or twenty years ago, who thought that we were all better off when homosexuals had to be discreet, and that black Americans are prone to civil disorder, and that Martin Luther King was a philandering plagiarist, and that the Confederacy had a right to secede from the Union, and that the Korean storekeepers of Los Angeles behaved in true American spirit when they defended their property with guns against rioters. People really seem to have believed such things! And Paul gave them space in his newsletters! Euiw!”

As I’ve said in this space, “Derb’s Da Man.”

Derb also adds an “affirmations of undying political correctness” to his indictment of the Girls and Girly Boys of the Beltway.

That has to be particularly painful to a collective—and they do act and think as one—that likes to think of itself as ultra-rad (man).

The article is “Paradoxically, Ron Paul’s Success Proving Irrelevance of Libertarianism”

The Manchurian Candidate & The Mindless Twat

Elections 2008, John McCain

He has been endorsed by the New York Times, which has also endorsed Hillary, and Bill says Hill has a crush on him. Need I say more about McCain? That’s enough for now.

What else? Have I told you how much conservative commentators repulse me? There, I’ve said it.

Not so long ago Peggy Noonan labored, in her “responsorial, stream-of-consciousness ramble,” as I wrote in the droll “Lethal Weapons: Neocon Groupies,” to lovingly depict her man Bush’s every inch, from his furrows to his genitals.”

This “Court Courtesan’s high-flown linguistic banalities” were taken as seriously at the time (2004) as her belated condemnation of Bush today (2008), 4 years hence.

The silly twat even wrote a column she titled “He’s Got Two of ‘Em.” Now she accuses her mucho-mucho man of “destroying the Republican Party.”

A society that elevates Noonan and Bush to the heights they’ve achieve sans much merit stands accused.

And do commentators who’re on the ball as the events unfold, not years after the fact, get a bit bitter occasionally? You bet.

Why McCain the Manchurian Candidate: A former POW who was brainwashed by communists to betray his own and worse? Hmmm…