Category Archives: Elections

The Drag Queens of Politics—No Offense to Drag Queens—Must Repent

Bush, Democrats, Elections, IMMIGRATION, Liberty, Regulation, Republicans

A host of minor Republican politicians and functionaries took to the stage at the 2012 Republican National Convention to speak to the values for which they and the GOP ostensibly stand.

Unlike these representatives, I was speechless. I didn’t know that these politicians stood for smaller government, fiscal responsibility, sound money, individual freedom, and fewer regulations.

My God! Where have these freedom fighters been all my life?

Back on terra firma, last I looked, the repugnant “W” Bush and his band of merry bandits had pushed the unconstitutional campaign finance-reform bill and “Sarbanes-Oxley Act” (a preemptive assault on CEOs and CFOs, prior to the fact of a crime); various trade tariffs and barriers; a Clintonian triumph of triangulation on affirmative action; they colluded with Ted Kennedy on an education bill; sponsored a prescription-drug benefit that would add trillions to the Medicare shortfall, and approved the Kennedy-initiated New New Deal for New Orleans, for which there was no constitutional authority.

Bush handed Obama “almost $11 trillion in Treasury debt, and deficits of more than $1 trillion.” “W” also looted at least $1 trillion from the insolvent Social Security trust fund. His contribution to the mortgage meltdown cannot be overstated. Under “W”, the right to pursue happiness became a right to happiness and a home.

(“Republicans Repent!“)

Then there was the perpetual warfare into which Genghis Bush plunged this country.

I am well aware that the GOP is the party of promiscuous, indiscriminate immigration. Bush issued gold-embossed invitations to illegals which he and the McCain-Kennedy-Specter unholy trinity camouflaged as amnesty (where illegals are born-again as “guest workers” and then placed on a fast track to permanent residence).

Ironically, for their more or less open-borders policies, the GOP will get no return at the ballot box. Perception is reality. Democrats have been successful in painting Republicans as xenophobes.

Besides, as hard as they try, Republicans cannot beat Democrats in the art of robbing Paul to pay Pedro.

Republicans are the drag queens of politics. Peel away the pules for family, faith and fetuses and one discovers either, what economist and political philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe calls “neoconservative welfare-warfare statists and global social democrats. Or, conversely, national socialists of sorts, who fuse economic protectionism, populism and support for the very welfare infrastructure which is at the root of the social rot they decry.”

They can’t expect freedom-loving Americans to believe them. Unless they repent, publicly.

Said Saint Augustine: ‘The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.’ The Republican Party has done the devil’s work. To embark on the good, it must come clean about the bad.

RNC Rules Against Insurgents

Elections, libertarianism, Republicans, Ron Paul

Ron “Paul’s quick tour of the convention floor was evidence that his supporters aren’t exactly the type to give up easily,” reports Kevin Glass, Managing Editor of Townhall.com.

These supporters are being made to cede to RNC bosses:

“Team Romney has mounted a campaign to change some of the RNC rules that critics allege would make it more difficult for insurgent candidates like Paul to make waves”:

Rep. Ron Paul’s delegates are trying to mount a floor fight over new GOP rules designed to limit the ability of insurgent presidential candidates to amass delegates to future Republican conventions.
They are getting help from other delegates, though it is unclear whether they can rally enough support to challenge the rules on the floor of the convention Tuesday.
Mitt Romney, the party’s presumptive nominee, has plenty of delegates to win any floor fight. Nevertheless, party officials agreed to ease the new rules on Monday in an effort to appease some disgruntled delegates. Still, the dispute could provide an unwanted distraction for party leaders who would rather focus on promoting Romney and defeating President Barack Obama.
“It’s so heavily scripted. This is not the forum in which they want to air the proverbial dirty laundry,” said Juliette Jordal, a Paul delegate from Minnesota.

Get Off Your Knees, Mitt Romney

Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections, Etiquette, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Politics

First they accuse him of being too stiff and inhibited. Then, when he loosens up and does some impromptu stand-up, bloody liberals squeal that Mitt “Romney’s ‘birther’ line was no joke.”

Yes it was a joke. And a funny one at that. Romney kidded to a crowd in Michigan that, “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that I was born and raised.”

That’s funny. Now get off your knees Mitt Romeny and quit apologizing for joking, for doing a hard-day’s work, for making money, for exercising the prerogatives of private property and the fiduciary duty of a CEO managing private property and firing people, for investing wisely and utilizing tax havens (blessed places that they are), on and on.

Get off your weak knees, man!

For your edification, the story about Mitt’s “naughty” joke ran as a top news headline on all the liberal websites. Breaking News.

ABC:

Police Kill Gunman Outside Empire State Building
Romney Touches ‘Birther’ Issue He Avoided Before

CBS:

Multiple people shot near Empire State Building
Jury orders Samsung to pay $1B to Apple
Romney says “birther” joke wasn’t a swipe at Obama

UPDATED: Hit The Road, Schmo* (Some Ferguson Facts)

Barack Obama, Economy, Elections, Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Media, Neoconservatism

“A member of this global, glamorous elite; people who are at home in London and New York” is how Byron York wryly (and aptly) described economist Niall Ferguson (6 minutes into this clip). Ferguson has penned a Newsweek article, Hit The Road, Barack: Why We Need a New President, which has infuriated the Obama-Head media. The Washington Examiner’s York set the scene for Ferguson’s defiance: “It is very fashionable among [this global elite] to support President Obama.”

From the perspective of the libertarian, Professor Ferguson’s piece is unremarkable (although, as I have said before in covering him, Ferguson’s knowledge is formidable).

On foreign policy, Ferguson accuses Obama of not being enough of a statist, which this neoconservative equates with statesmanship.

However, for a member of establishment intelligentsia to openly admit that Barack Obama doesn’t understand the issues about which he is supposed to decide; to intimate that he is the affirmative action appointee: Now, that is remarkable.

“You can’t just march in and make that argument and then have him make a decision,” Summers told Orszag, “because he doesn’t know what he’s deciding.” (I have heard similar things said off the record by key participants in the president’s interminable “seminar” on Afghanistan policy.)

Except, I have to wonder who’s the real Schmo? The man who was led to believe that he was up to the task throughout his “career” trajectory, or the enablers and sycophants who enforced Barack Obama’s self-delusions.

I recall that when, in April 15, 2011, I wrote ‘You Can’t Fix Stupid,’ readers patiently explained to me that BHO was not stupid, only evil. (Even IQ ace Steve Sailer might have been gulled.) No. I’ve always maintained that Obama was cunning, but not clever.

But there is much more to the article. Read it.

(*Schmo: From Yiddish, dull, stupid, fool.)

UPDATE: Non-writers, or armchair scribblers, will be cavalier about the comprehensiveness of the Ferguson piece. I am not, for obvious reasons. I disagree with Ferguson on many issues—for example, he cites “official” unemployment figures, rather than real joblessness, which not even the U6 statistic covers.

In addition, his notion of GDP is in all likelihood off too; official GDP numbers are a gambit.

And, as far as the Killer Drone’s actions abroad go, Ferguson objects not so much to the stealth killing of innocents, but to the loss of “crucial intelligence” assets caused by BHO’s “assassination program.”

As for Ferguson’s China fear mongering; that was addressed in an earlier critique: “Chinese mercantilism is not free trade, but is it not better than American militarism?” You bet it is.

On and on.

I understand that all Ferguson’s condemners believe they could have bested the Prof. Still, Ferguson has done a serious service in so far as he has offered the first damning case against BHO from the perspective of mainstream.

Interesting excerpts:

…the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak. Meanwhile, since 2008, a staggering 3.6 million Americans have been added to Social Security’s disability insurance program. This is one of many ways unemployment is being concealed.
…In his fiscal year 2010 budget—the first he presented—the president envisaged growth of 3.2 percent in 2010, 4.0 percent in 2011, 4.6 percent in 2012. The actual numbers were 2.4 percent in 2010 and 1.8 percent in 2011; few forecasters now expect it to be much above 2.3 percent this year. Nearly 110 million individuals received a welfare benefit in 2011, mostly Medicaid or food stamps.
…Welcome to Obama’s America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return—almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.
…By the end of this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), [government debt] will reach 70 percent of GDP. These figures significantly understate the debt problem, however. The ratio that matters is debt to revenue. That number has leapt upward from 165 percent in 2008 to 262 percent this year, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund. Among developed economies, only Ireland and Spain have seen a bigger deterioration. Under this president’s policies, the debt is on course to approach 200 percent of GDP in 2037—a mountain of debt that is bound to reduce growth even further.
…Yet the public mistakes his administration’s astonishingly uninhibited use of political assassination for a coherent strategy. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, the civilian proportion of drone casualties was 16 percent last year. Ask yourself how the liberal media would have behaved if George W. Bush had used drones this way. Yet somehow it is only ever Republican secretaries of state who are accused of committing “war crimes.”