Category Archives: Republicans

The Take Offense Offensive

John McCain, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Reason, Republicans

Yesterday it was Elijah Cummings, today it’s John McCain who took The Offense Offensive on the road.

Like any good lefty, Sen. John McCain has officially taken offense at Young Turk Ted Cruz—but not for slights against his own sanctimonious self. No. Our noble neoconservative is too big for such pettiness. He’s taken up The Take Offense Offensive over slights Bob Dole is alleged to have been dealt by Cruz.

McCain the insufferable:

Sen. John McCain said Friday he doesn’t mind criticism from Sen. Ted Cruz, but he called on the Texas Republican to apologize for comments he made about former Sen. Bob Dole in a speech Thursday.

The Arizona Republican said he spoke with Cruz on the Senate floor after his remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday.

“I spoke to Ted Cruz. He and I have a cordial relationship about this,” McCain said on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on Friday. “He can say what he wants to about me, and he can say anything he wants to, I think, about Mitt [Romney], Mitt’s capable of taking it. But when he throws Bob Dole in there, I wonder if he thinks that Bob Dole stood for principle on that hilltop in Italy when he was so gravely wounded and left part of his body there fighting for our country?”

Cruz made fun of McCain, Romney and Dole’s failed presidential campaigns on Thursday, joking about “President McCain,” “President Romney” and “President Dole” in urging Republicans to stand for their principles and not repeat past mistakes.

McCain said Friday that Cruz should apologize.

Cruz is right. McCain is a distraction.

UPDATED: CPUKE 2014 Is Upon Us

Conservatism, Foreign Policy, Republicans, Sarah Palin

At least the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPUKE) is a little lighter on the bimbo factor, this year, but heavier with the weight of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. (CPUKE usually showcases retards like S. E. Cupp and assorted Townhall.com twits.)

The megalomaniacal Donald Trump, however, is pretty scary. “The business mogul is motivated by the sense that the nimbus of great power that surrounds the US is dissipating. It hasn’t occurred to him to search closer to home for the causes of America’s economic anemia—at Fanny, Freddie, and the Fed, for a start. Since Trump has no idea what’s potting, and is not eager to look in his own plate — he blames OPEC and China for the burdens of doing business in the US.” (From “Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense”)

The Trump plan to reclaim global greatness and glory includes a strategy America has yet to try: the use of force, of course. Strutting around on the world stage, showing those Russians, Saudis and Chinese who is boss: this may serve as a perfect panacea for the deficiencies in Trump’s persona, but is hardly a solution to US woes, at home or abroad.

Sadly, most other Republicans will echo these themes. Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY) promise to be the only impressive individuals in the scheduled lineup.

And Sarah Palin, once a real beauty, may have tampered with her face.

That’s about all from CPUKE.

UPDATE: Ted Cruz tells CPAC: ‘Stand on principle’:

“There are a lot of D.C. consultants who say there’s a choice for Republicans to make: We can either choose to keep our head down, to not rock the boat, to not stand for anything, or we can stand for principle,” he said. “They say if you stand for principle you lose elections. The way to do it — the smart way, the Washington way — is don’t stand against Obamacare, don’t stand against the debt ceiling, don’t stand against nothing. I want to tell you something — that is a false dichotomy. … ”

… Those principles, he said, include defending the Constitution, abolishing the IRS, expanding school choice, establishing term limits and combating “lawlessness” and corruption in the government.

The crowd for Cruz’s speech, which came first in the conference, was fairly small at first as attendees waited in line to get in. But it grew throughout the speech — and the biggest applause for Cruz came when he said the GOP needs to “repeal every word of Obamacare.”

MORE.

UPDATED: Procedural Mishap Turns Democrat Elijah Cummings Into M.O.P.E (Most Oppressed Person Ever)

Democrats, Politics, Republicans, Taxation

It’s in the nature of politics in this country. The terrifying Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has targeted conservative non-profits and conservative individuals. Yet a procedural silliness has made Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings the focus of attention, as the M.O.P.E (Most Oppressed Person Ever) in the IRS scandal. (The IRS is a scandal.)

Long story cut short: The American President’s Woman, Lois Lerner, who was likely involved in the “agency’s improper targeting of conservative groups,” has once again refused to talk, taking “the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination nine times during the House Oversight Committee hearing,” a constitutional right that ought not be available to state officials.

Rep. Cummings of Maryland began carrying on like a crazed man when “Congressman Darrell Issa of California” “shut down the committee hearing on Wednesday when the IRS official at the center of the scandal” refused to talk.

Issa … defended his actions and told reporters after the hearing: “He was not directing questions toward the witness and the committee [had] already adjourned.”

He later told Fox News that Cummings “was simply endlessly slandering the efforts of the committee.”

Members of both parties, though, have apparently criticized Issa’s actions.

MORE mindlessness.

UPDATE: Search engines are probably biased. It is not easy to find the text of the emails released in 2013, that “show that Lois Lerner “specifically singled out applications for tax-exempt status from organizations that described themselves as right-wing ‘tea party’ groups, and ordered that the politically sensitive requests should be held in limbo until the IRS could develop a coherent policy to address them.”

The Daily Mail online has excerpted fragments of the incriminating emails, barely:

The ‘Tea Party Matter [is] very dangerous, Lerner instructed her IRS colleagues in February 2011. ‘This could be the vehicle to go to court,’ she added, on the question of whether a Supreme Court ruling about the status of political donations from corporations might also apply to nonprofit groups.
‘Counsel and Judy Kindell [Lerner’s top advisor] need to be in on this one … Cincy should probably NOT have these cases.’

MORE.

And at The Blaze.

Analyze This: On ‘The Factor,’ Psychologizing Passes As Analysis

Conservatism, Democrats, English, Foreign Policy, Reason, Republicans, Russia

Bill O’Reilly, star of Fox New, has this Pavlovian response to any suggested comparison between Russian and American military bellicosity: he foams at the mouth. Why is it absolutely verboten, on The Factor, to compare Russia’s “excursion” into Ukraine to America’s naturally illicit and illegal occupations of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, on and on?

You’re in for a treat. In defense of their reflexive rejection of the reasonable, if inaccurate, comparison—for decades the US has been far more aggressive than Russia in its foreign policy—don’t expect argument from Bill, Juan Williams and the gang. What you get is a form of ad hominem, or psychologizing.

President Vladimir Putin, said (today, Monday, March 3) Bill, is a thug. That’s why he can’t be compared to “a good country” like the US. (Childish doesn’t begin to cover this stuff.) Apparently Bush and Obama are never to be called thugs.

Why, Billy? Because they’re American?

The other “argument” for the lack of validity of said comparison was that Putin seeks the recrudescence of the Russian empire (my usage; Bill and the gang did not use that word. Read about Bill’s valiant but botched attempts to promote English). Bill has read Putin’s mind, and knows he wants Russia to be an empire again. Hence we cannot compare the actions on the ground of the two countries.

If ever you doubted that liberals and conservatives are situated on the same foreign-policy continuum, listen to the prescriptions for Ukraine of leftist Juan Williams. On the same silly segment, the Fox News “analyst” recommended that the US freeze the assets of individual Russians, stateside and abroad, expel visiting Russians and stop Russians from traveling to the US, all in retaliation for the presence of Russian forces in Crimea (which is dominated by a Russian-speaking population). Williams, naturally, also wants to see economic sanctions placed on Russia.

Williams is an “analyst” in the same way Bill O’Reilly is a thinker.