CPAC has hosted many unconservative members of the regime, McMussolini, for example.
• As part of the unholy McCain-Kennedy-Specter trinity, McCain worked to legalize 20 million deadwood illegal immigrants.
• He blessed Bush’s deficit spending and obscene stimulus package.
• By National Review’s count, McCain voted for higher taxes 50 time.
• He disparaged Mitt Romney for making it in the private sector.
On and on.
The Conservative Political Action Conference would be acting slightly less incongruously were they to blackball Christie for being the consummate backstabbing, slimy, opportunistic politician. Republicans who are not conservative are the norm—and certainly more common than the GOP’s Arlen Specters.
Meanwhile, CPAC and the Republicans have commenced a “slobbering love affair” with Ben Carson.
Bring back the vomitorium says I (I am well aware that the concept is misrepresented, but the misrepresentation is worth retaining. It’s a good one).
I have been able to avoid some of the solipsistic orgy over Obama—to say nothing of the obscene platitudes and paradoxes: The Ass With Ears spoke of “Preserving our individual freedoms” through “require[d] collective action.” Moron.
This morning, I gave a prerecorded interview to RT (Russia Today TV, where my Paleolibertarian Column features). It was a pleasant, polite, intellectually stimulating, and professionally conducted exchange.
Ideas were the focus, not personalities. It always is this way with RT.
My RT experience has been vastly different from my experience with American hosts. How? Well, the RT producer’s starting point is a familiarity with and interest in some of the work written by the interviewed individual. She’ll point out which aspects piqued her curiosity, what she’d like to explore on air, etc.
Wow. Intellectual curiosity and courtesy: What old-fashioned concepts!
On the other hand, inquiries stateside invariably begin with the host’s persona and perspective. As follows:
US host: “Like, hey, We want to interview you.” Ilana: “Sure, what about?” US host: “Check us out on YouTube. We don’t read.”
You are expected to come on a show and rap, move your mouth. If you’re as chatty and as self-absorbed as your hosts invariably are, then all’s copacetic. But if you’re a person who tends to use words sparingly and with attempted precision, you’re out of luck.
When my daughter was seven-years old, her school assigned her the task of describing her parents. On her father, daddy’s darling heaped unrealistic praise. For her devoted mother, this perceptive chatterbox of a child reserved a matter-of-fact appraisal. “My mother,” she wrote in her girly cursive, “is a quiet woman who speaks mainly when she has something to say.”
To that my friend, writer Rob Stove, responded: “If everyone rationed speech thus, the entire mainstream punditocracy would cease to exist.”
Amen.
If he’s having a good day, your host may just exhibit a limited interest in you, not in your output, by sending you some obscure link or file that has caught his attention. The idea is that his inner world and current preoccupations should become your own.
UPDATE (Jan. 21, 2013): The interview was on RT’s “The Truthseeker.” The process was fun and professional. The end result not ideal, as the sound conked-out on me and only a short snippet was harvested from the lengthy interview. There’s always a next time.
GUN LOBBY MADE ‘EM DO IT. Have you noticed how Democrats and their media lapdogs counter arguments for the natural right to self defense? They blame the “gun lobby.” Accordingly, it is not the gun owners who assert this right, but a monied gun lobby. This variation on the ad hominem argument allows these statists to bypass the debate about the right to defend life, liberty and property.
HOW LIKE DEMOCRATS. In arguing their case, tit-for-tat Republicans use the exact arguments their opponents use. Thus, instead of making a point against affirmative action and for individual merit, you find Fox Rinos like Dana Perino and Kimberly Guilfoile asking, “Where are the minorities” in Obama’s cabinet?
THE OBAMACARE SURVIVAL GUIDE. It’s a best-seller; # 47 on Amazon. I am sure that, like me, you know Obama-heads (doctors too) who shrugged off the idea that a further centralization of healthcare by “Obama’s Politburo Of Proctologists”— a modest healthcare expansion totaling $2 trillion—will cost them anything at all. I’m already feeling The Care. How about you? TAWE (The Ass With Ears) has sent the health care we had to hell in a handcart, for the ostensible benefit of less than ten percent of the population. In any case, if this “2,700 page law” made life easier, would the author of the ObamaCare Survival Guide be selling so many guides to so many perplexed people?
I once harbored hope that due to self-interest, the Stupid Party, Republikeynesians, may just tackle the 17th amendment (as in repeal it), a 1913 abomination that sundered the republican scheme of governance put in place by the Founding Fathers, whereby senators were to be elected by the respective state legislatures. But I was operating under the naive assumption that Republikeynesians may have had a stake in the Constitution’s original intent.
Since they don’t, it is understandable that Republican senators would align themselves with Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Senate Democrats in furtherance of Senate “reform.”
A group of liberal Democrats had been pushing Reid to trigger the so-called “nuclear option” on Thursday, the first day of the 113th Congress, to make it more difficult for the minority to stall legislation and nominees.
Say bye-bye to the legislation-stalling filibuster.
The filibuster is a powerful parliamentary device in the United States Senate, which in recent years has meant that most major legislation (apart from budgets and confirmations) requires a 60% majority to head off a filibuster. In recent years the majority has preferred to avoid filibusters by moving to other business when a filibuster is threatened …
Efforts to retard legislation are a good thing, unless the legislation being sabotaged is legislation to repeal and nullify other legislation.
“Junior Democrats, including Sens. Tom Udall (N.M.) and Jeff Merkley (Ore.),” have been successful in recruiting to their nefarious cause some familiar sickos such as the too-decrepit-to-filibuster (as in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington)”Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), as well as Sens. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and John Barrasso (R-Wyo.).”
This lot “favor[s] using the nuclear option, which they call the ‘constitutional option,’ to effect this change through a simple majority vote. But they need 51 of the 55 members of the Senate Democratic Conference to back them.”
It is a well-known fact that US Senators are comatose. But we’d like their legislative efforts to be as still as their comatose minds.
Indeed, both Americas deliberative bodies are in a comma, but that’s not because of a deficit in democracy driven, legislative Brownian Motion (besides which the Founders were no fans of democracy).
The news reports are as muddled as ever on this issue. Some reports claim that the colluding quislings wish to force senators who filibuster to actually speak on the floor. That sounds good. However, can “the majority leader call for a simple majority vote on the pending business once the debate stops”? That I do not know.
