Category Archives: Republicans

A Paul-Bachmann 2012 Ticket

Elections, Federal Reserve Bank, Foreign Policy, Politics, Republicans, Ron Paul, War

HOW FAR WE’VE COME. On February 20, 2010, I blogged about the reaction of the CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) regimists to a straw poll that placed libertarian Ron Paul in the lead. (http://barelyablog.com/?p=21977.) Granted, out of 10,000 conference attendees, approximately 2500, very motivated Paulites had voted. Still, I expressed my hopes that this informal gauge of the state-of-the GOP was significant, and that, finally, “the bums and their statist sycophants” would be tossed out and replaced with strict Constitutionalists such as Peter Schiff and Rand Paul. “The small Beltway Politburo that runs CPAC” was certainly worried.

With a smart strategy, this scenario is not implausible. As abcNews reports (http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2011/01/romney-wins-new-hampshire-republican-party-committee-straw-poll.html), “In the first ever ‘straw poll’ of New Hampshire Republican party committee members sponsored by ABC News and WMUR and sanctioned by the state Republican party, ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney took 35 percent of the 276 valid ballots cast. This is just 3 percent more than Romney took in the 2008 GOP primary, when he finished in second place behind Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Coming in a distant second was Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, with 11 percent. Paul took 8 percent in the 2008 GOP primary.”

Ron Paul can pull this off. But he needs the punch and the pizzazz of a Michelle Bachmann as second-in-command. Bachmann is cerebral (a quality poor Palin is without). She’s also beautiful, eloquent and is seldom fazed. Moreover, Bachmann is not wedded to the warfare state. She has officiated on enough panels with Paul, and is wise enough, to recognize the value of bringing moderate liberals into the fold by denouncing America’s forays abroad.

Hey, what do you know? On 09.28.09, I had already proposed a Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann ticket. The occasion? An address by Paul, introduced by Bachmann, about “The Ben Bernanke.” By that time, Bachmann had already beefed-up her knowledge of the Fed and was familiar with Tom Woods’ Meltdown.

Reps. Paul and Bachmann can neuter Mitt Romney politically, but they must unite to do so.

UPDATE II: House Republicans Talking Tactics & Tinkering Around the Edges

Debt, Economy, Elections, Politics, Republicans

No wonder neoconservative kingpin Bill Kristol (http://barelyablog.com/?p=33225) anointed House Budget Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan as heir apparent to the neoconservative project. Ryan is a strategist; he has more plans than principles. You and I do not want to see the debt ceiling raised. But for some reason, Ryan thinks that “tactic isn’t viable.”

Tactic? Come Again? Ryan believes that it has to be lifted (something to do with the neoconservative national-pride dybbuk).

He is, however, prepared to “tack on requirements for deep spending cuts as a condition of passage.” (http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/06/5779097-ryan-hints-at-debt-ceiling-strategy) Why, thank you, Sir.

No sooner do our overlords arrive in DC, than their campaign promises evaporate. (http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=579.)

(I’m placing hyperlinks in brackets, for now, because hyperlinks attached distort the blurb that propagates to my Facebook page. Any suggestions?)

UPDATE I (Jan. 14): When it comes to serious spending cuts, Republicans intend to tinker around the edges. John Stossel exposes just how little they will do to beat back the federal behemoth:

New Speaker John Boehner, leader of the Republicans who now control the House, says he wants to cut spending. When he was sworn in last week, he declared: “Our spending has caught up with us. … No longer can we kick the can down the road.”
But when NBC anchorman Brian Williams asked him to name a program “we could do without,” he said, “I don’t think I have one off the top of my head.”
Give me a break! You mean to tell me the Republican leader in the House doesn’t already know what he wants to cut? I don’t know which is worse — that he doesn’t have a list or that he won’t talk about it in public.
The Republicans say they’ll start by cutting $100 billion, but let’s put that in perspective. The budget is close to $4 trillion. So $100 billion is just 2.5 percent. That’s shooting too low. Firms in the private sector make cuts like that all the time. It’s considered good business — pruning away deadwood.
GOP leaders say the source of their short-run cuts will be discretionary non-security spending. They foolishly exclude entitlement spending, which Congress puts on autopilot, and all spending for national and homeland security (whether it’s necessary or not). That leaves only $520 billion.
So even if the Republicans managed to cut all discretionary non-security spending (which is not what they plan), the deficit would still be $747 billion. (The deficit is now projected to be $1.267 trillion.)
This is a revolution? Republicans will have to learn that there is no budget line labeled “waste, fraud, abuse.” If they are serious about cutting government, they will ax entire programs, departments and missions.

UPDATE II (Jan 16.): Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Majority Leader, was out and about … lobbying for an increase in the debt ceiling. Why, of course. Give a little, get even less. “Live and let live,” said the one leech to the other.

On Grief And The Aggrieved

Crime, Democrats, Etiquette, Pop-Culture, Republicans, The State, The Zeitgeist

In the aftermath of the Arizona shootings, our masters in modern Rome are foregoing “partisanship” (read principle) and are coming together to spend funds not their own to secure their sorry asses against the statistically minuscule chance that these royal behinds will come to harm. Curiously, House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson is commending House Speaker John Boehner for being “extraordinary in setting the right tone” for “a more enlightened way.”

“A more enlightened way” than what?” It’s almost as though Larson is the aggrieved party and Boehner a member of the offending group. Both parties have assumed these respective roles.

Indeed: “Republicans are clearly responding as if they feel somewhat incriminated,” said University of Michigan political science professor Lisa Disch. “On the one hand, they are acting very quickly to distance themselves from the incident, but on the other hand, they seem to be feeling as if they have been caught at something; caught at using rhetoric that is incendiary.”

On the topic of grief: A day after their child’s dreadful demise, the parents of the “9-year-old girl gunned down in Saturday’s shooting rampage outside an Arizona grocery store” were liberally granting interviews.

To me this is unsettling. We once used to grieve privately—at least initially. These days, there is nothing people will not share and express in public, and ASAP. They have no private selves.

This is part of our festering cultural commons.

Et tu, Boehner?

America, Elections, English, Founding Fathers, Multiculturalism, Political Philosophy, Republicans

Did I just hear John Boehner say that America was an idea more than a country? The representative from Ohio took the gavel, today, Wednesday, becoming the 61st speaker of the House of Representatives. Toward the end of his address, Boehner repeated the preposterous notion of America as a propositional nation.

The call to think about the US as an idea—rather than real flesh-and-blood communities animated by shared language, history and heroes—is the call of statism at its purist. For a rootless deracinated people are the most pliable, most miserable, and, thus, easier to control.

Faith in the propositional nation presupposes endless immigration. For, after all, this country is presumed to have had no particular requisite characteristics at its founding. And if early Americans had certain characteristics, these are taken to have played no role in the system of individual liberties America’s apparently amorphous founders established.