Category Archives: Republicans

Weapons For The GOP Punditocracy

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Economy, Government, Healthcare, libertarianism, Media, Republicans, Socialism

The excerpt is from my new WND.Com column, “Weapons For The GOP Punditocracy”:

“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is advancing on the country with an $848 billion health-care bill in hand, which he hopes to bring to the Senate floor before he and cohorts go on holiday.

Yet the swiftest arrow in the Republican punditocracy’s Obamacare quiver remains this:

If the government can’t pull off the ‘Cash For Clunkers’ scam, how will it handle health care?

Or this:

If government can’t manage the gallery of the grotesque – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – how will it run a sixth of the economy?

When all else fails to persuade, they galvanize the argument from Hitler. Taking their cues from Rush Limbaugh, it is not uncommon for Republican commentators to pair B. Hussein’s health care with Hitler’s hobby horses: smoking bans, abortions, euthanasia and eugenics.

Hitler and the mismanagement by government of Medicare and Medicaid (but not of the military) – this is the Republican commentariat’s repertoire of riffs.

Anything but First Principles, with which the GOP has an oil-and-water relationship.” …

The complete column is “Weapons For The GOP Punditocracy.”

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Update II: What Conservative Chicks ‘Care’ About (Not Individualism)

Conservatism, Feminism, Gender, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Republicans, Sarah Palin

The salient thing about “conservative” chicks is how unconservative they are. Sexism, racism, homophobia—these concepts are engraved in their inherently liberal minds. The concepts are, of course, poisonous arrows in the quiver of left-liberal identity politics.

So it was that The View’s Elisabeth Hasselbeck was a prime mover behind the persecution of Imus, for politically unpalatable speech, alongside race hustlers Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, neocon sister Amy Holmes, and other sundry sorts of the left (Whoopi Goldberg, Maya Angelou, Naomi Wolf).

Palin is always shouting sexism, and has intensified her hissing ever since Newsweek published an appealing cover of her in running gear. Hasselbeck has been complaining about the sexism to which Palin is allegedly subjected. She did so recently on The View. Clearly, a liberal worldview is not the only malady to inflict conservative women. They are never original (other than Coulter, who is sui generis, and I have a soft spot for the Michelles Bachmann and Malkin).

Update I (Nov. 18): Another of these harpies’ trade marks is to conflate a love of war—any war waged by the US—with the conservative position. Does this pertain equally to neoconservative and so-called conservative men? You tell me.

Wait a sec, I already “told me”:

“… never once have the war harpies and their hombres in the ideological trenches indicated they comprehend how and who is paying for all this. I know they believe we’re not being taxed in lieu of the debt, a faith they base on Bush’s promise not to raise taxes. [A “promise kept by Barack, Bush’s loyal successor.]

Pro-war pundits, women especially, think that government can spend what it doesn’t have without any economic repercussions. They’re a lot like babies prior to acquiring object permanence: what isn’t visible doesn’t exist. However, government spending more than it collects in revenues is the cause of the deficit.

And ultimately of inflation.

However, there is no question in the small minds we’re discussing that a blind support for the experiment in “Eyeraq” is as American as apple pie. Ditto Democratizing our toothless, poppy-smoking Pashtun with smart bombs. The women of the neoconnerie have been instrumental in keeping their fans “tuned-out, turned-on, and hot for war.”

Don’t expect an understanding of economics with your “conservative” harpie/hottie of choice. Palin was given a pass by the equally compromised Bawbawa Walter when she said that the bailout bill she supported in her capacity as a VP candidate didn’t work out well. Who would have known!!

Bachmann and Malkin have firm positions for fiscal conservatism; the rest go with the financial flow.

Update II (Nov. 20): Some comments posters have alluded to my mention of first principles in the new WND column, “Weapons For The GOP Punditocracy.” I note that first principles and GOPiness do not mix.

Even less so do first principles and foxettes go together. Individual rights are subsumed in FP. You would be hard pressed to find a woman who thinks less of the paramountcy of the individual over the collective than a foxette.

She got uncontrollably (and repulsively) hot for “Murder with majority approval”—i.e., the war in Iraq—and oversaw the decimation of the population there (including an ancient Christian community).

She promoted through the argument from cleavage the specious, wicked, individual-averse idea of collateral damage. That collectivist calculus was a feature of the war cheerleading done by the freedom-loving Fox New foxes.

All the networks were complicit, but no where was the morally repugnant zeal more pronounced than on Fox New where words like “Breaking Baghdad,” “Decapitation,” and “Shock and Awe” were the order of the day.

So far war.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Martha MacCallum, one of the more rightist ladies, mull over the need for national healthcare and a national data base where bureaucrats can access private healthcare information. I’m sure readers who understand liberty (which is inseparable from philosophical first principles) will provide more examples (accompanied by hyperlinks) for Foxette fascism.

With few exceptions, Fox News generally favors the rights of the police—backed by the power of the state—in altercation with helpless individuals. When “Andrew Meyer, a journalism student, was pounced upon by campus police, tasered, detained overnight, and charged with violently resisting arrest (a felony), and disturbing the peace (a misdemeanor),” Fox beaus and bimbos had a good laugh at his expense. O’Reilly was in stitches.

The Drug War: It is the very crucible of the fight for individual liberties. Show me a Foxy Lady who sympathetically covered any prominent case (such as the one of the granny gunned down in her home by DEA agents because of alleged “drugs”). And don’t start me on the medical marijuana fear mongering at Fox.

Update II: What Conservative Chicks 'Care' About (Not Individualism)

Conservatism, Feminism, Gender, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Republicans, Sarah Palin

The salient thing about “conservative” chicks is how unconservative they are. Sexism, racism, homophobia—these concepts are engraved in their inherently liberal minds. The concepts are, of course, poisonous arrows in the quiver of left-liberal identity politics.

So it was that The View’s Elisabeth Hasselbeck was a prime mover behind the persecution of Imus, for politically unpalatable speech, alongside race hustlers Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, neocon sister Amy Holmes, and other sundry sorts of the left (Whoopi Goldberg, Maya Angelou, Naomi Wolf).

Palin is always shouting sexism, and has intensified her hissing ever since Newsweek published an appealing cover of her in running gear. Hasselbeck has been complaining about the sexism to which Palin is allegedly subjected. She did so recently on The View. Clearly, a liberal worldview is not the only malady to inflict conservative women. They are never original (other than Coulter, who is sui generis, and I have a soft spot for the Michelles Bachmann and Malkin).

Update I (Nov. 18): Another of these harpies’ trade marks is to conflate a love of war—any war waged by the US—with the conservative position. Does this pertain equally to neoconservative and so-called conservative men? You tell me.

Wait a sec, I already “told me”:

“… never once have the war harpies and their hombres in the ideological trenches indicated they comprehend how and who is paying for all this. I know they believe we’re not being taxed in lieu of the debt, a faith they base on Bush’s promise not to raise taxes. [A “promise kept by Barack, Bush’s loyal successor.]

Pro-war pundits, women especially, think that government can spend what it doesn’t have without any economic repercussions. They’re a lot like babies prior to acquiring object permanence: what isn’t visible doesn’t exist. However, government spending more than it collects in revenues is the cause of the deficit.

And ultimately of inflation.

However, there is no question in the small minds we’re discussing that a blind support for the experiment in “Eyeraq” is as American as apple pie. Ditto Democratizing our toothless, poppy-smoking Pashtun with smart bombs. The women of the neoconnerie have been instrumental in keeping their fans “tuned-out, turned-on, and hot for war.”

Don’t expect an understanding of economics with your “conservative” harpie/hottie of choice. Palin was given a pass by the equally compromised Bawbawa Walter when she said that the bailout bill she supported in her capacity as a VP candidate didn’t work out well. Who would have known!!

Bachmann and Malkin have firm positions for fiscal conservatism; the rest go with the financial flow.

Update II (Nov. 20): Some comments posters have alluded to my mention of first principles in the new WND column, “Weapons For The GOP Punditocracy.” I note that first principles and GOPiness do not mix.

Even less so do first principles and foxettes go together. Individual rights are subsumed in FP. You would be hard pressed to find a woman who thinks less of the paramountcy of the individual over the collective than a foxette.

She got uncontrollably (and repulsively) hot for “Murder with majority approval”—i.e., the war in Iraq—and oversaw the decimation of the population there (including an ancient Christian community).

She promoted through the argument from cleavage the specious, wicked, individual-averse idea of collateral damage. That collectivist calculus was a feature of the war cheerleading done by the freedom-loving Fox New foxes.

All the networks were complicit, but no where was the morally repugnant zeal more pronounced than on Fox New where words like “Breaking Baghdad,” “Decapitation,” and “Shock and Awe” were the order of the day.

So far war.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Martha MacCallum, one of the more rightist ladies, mull over the need for national healthcare and a national data base where bureaucrats can access private healthcare information. I’m sure readers who understand liberty (which is inseparable from philosophical first principles) will provide more examples (accompanied by hyperlinks) for Foxette fascism.

With few exceptions, Fox News generally favors the rights of the police—backed by the power of the state—in altercation with helpless individuals. When “Andrew Meyer, a journalism student, was pounced upon by campus police, tasered, detained overnight, and charged with violently resisting arrest (a felony), and disturbing the peace (a misdemeanor),” Fox beaus and bimbos had a good laugh at his expense. O’Reilly was in stitches.

The Drug War: It is the very crucible of the fight for individual liberties. Show me a Foxy Lady who sympathetically covered any prominent case (such as the one of the granny gunned down in her home by DEA agents because of alleged “drugs”). And don’t start me on the medical marijuana fear mongering at Fox.

Stiglitz Stinks

Debt, Economy, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Economy, Republicans

“In 2002, Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel economics prize winner and two co-authors (Jonathan Orszag and Peter Orszag), published an article (‘Implications of the New Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Risk-based Capital Standard’) in Fannie Mae Papers. They argued that Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s risk-based capital standard made it very unlikely that the two GSEs (government-sponsored enterprises) would ever require a government bailout. Their results suggested that ‘the risk to the government from a potential default on GSE debt is effectively zero,’ even in ‘the financial and economic conditions of the Great Depression.’ The authors apparently underestimated the possible credit losses from a deep recession, besides ignoring the possibility that the quasi-nationalized housing market and the GSEs could themselves generate a recession. Fannie Mae and presumably the learned authors are not especially proud of this paper, which has disappeared from the GSE’s site,” but our friend Pierre Lemieux, Canadian economist and libertarian extraordinaire, has reproduced it on his site.

So what if Stiglitz is wrong most of the time? Other than some libertarians and devotees of the school of Austrian economics, most pundits make a perfectly good living being mostly wrong.

Public goodwill runs eternal for these failed “experts.” Neoconservative talking twits had been wrong all along about the invasion of Iraq; They consistently dished out dollops of ahistoric, unintuitive, and reckless verbiage. Yet they’ve retained their status as philosopher-kings.

Why not left-liberals like the Keynesian Stiglitz? (Not to be outdone, Republicans are also Keynesians. Or Republikeynsians.)