UPDATE III: Rick Perry: Bush Only Prettier (Or Palin Without the Bra)

Bush, Elections, Republicans

William N. Grigg puts Rick Perry in perspective: “Why doesn’t everybody admit that the figure known as ‘Rick Perry‘ is simply Josh Brolin’s version of George W. Bush?”

Another way I’d describe Perry: Palin without the bra.

I imagine that Perry and Sarah Palin get on well.

UPDATE I: In reply to an unruly fight talking place on my Facebook Wall between neoconservatives and libertarians:

“First of all, Michael Farris, you failed to transcribe my facebook Wall post accurately; it’s ‘Palin without a bra.’ You misquote me, even though my post is above yours, more or less. No wonder you were too slack to look over my Articles and Blog Archives for my GOP ticket proposal. I’ve spilled plenty pixels over the past two years making practical proposals that comport with my principles, but are not way out in libertarian wonderland. Finally, all of you: keep a civil tongue in your head. I’m going to remove rude posts”

UPDATE II: SB: But all you are talking about is style, not substance. What about Perry’s policies? Have you examined the political similarities between Bush and Perry? (Btw, we libertarains cheered Bush when he started out. That was b/c he too waxed fat about the evils of big government and promised a humble foreign policy.) What you say here makes one thing plain: Give him the gift of the gab and a better face than the Ewok Bush, and a Republican estalishmentarian masquerading as a conservative will win you over. Never mind his political proclivities.

UPDATE III (Aug. 16): Mrs. Greenspan to the Rescue! Posted by Christopher Manion, at LRC.COM:

So let me get this straight. NBC news opens with the taxpayer-funded ObamaBust tour. Obama blows off a Tea Party guy who doesn’t like Joe Biden calling him a terrorist, and then unctuously schools Rick Perry for calling Bernanke a potential traitor (but they never mention why. Forbidden word: Inflation).
Apparently, Perry has purloined Ron Paul’s view of the Fed. Good for him. But not for Mrs. Alan Greenspan (a.k.a. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell), who parades an Obama spokesman and establishment Hot Tubber Karl Rove as the voices of reason — how dare anyone endanger the Fed’s “independence,” Mrs. Greenspan wails. (I am not making this up.)

MORE.

American Renaissance Review

Democracy, Ilana Mercer, Literature, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, South-Africa

Dr. F. Roger Devlin has reviewed “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” in the August 2011 issue of the American Renaissance. Dr. Devlin’s review is not a critical review, but a contents-driven one. And a good one at that, as he distills the facts of the book at a furious pace. Intelligently so too.

Unlike the many factoids that marred the skewed, diasporic, Jewey emphasis (utterly absent in my book) of Prof. Paul Gottfried’s review of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” (a copy of which was captured here on BAB), Dr. Devlin cleaves to the facts of the book. (Incidentally, rather than correct the Gottfried review so that it vaguely captured “Into the Cannibal’s Pot’s” impetus, the reviewer and editor showed their “courtesy” by simply removing the thing from Taki’s Magazine. My mother used to use the adjective “peruvian” to describe incivility. I believe that word was removed from the dictionary because politically incorrect.)

In any event, unexamined in Dr. Devlin’s review are interwoven points of political philosophy. What do I mean? As a classical liberal, for example, my complaint against apartheid is not that it “disenfranchised” or “denied the majority its democratic rights,” since “citizenship rights, after all, are not natural rights.” Rather,

It is natural rights that the law ought to always and everywhere respect and uphold. In its police state methods—indefinite detention without trial, declarations of a state of emergency—apartheid destroyed the individual defenses of equality before the law, the presumption of innocence, habeas corpus and various other very basic freedoms. That the apartheid regime contravened natural justice by depriving Africans of rights to property and due process is indisputable as it is despicable. Nevertheless, denying people political privileges does not amount to depriving them of natural justice.

(Into the Cannibal’s Pot, 2010, p. 231)

Dr. Devlin’s tack is conciliatory and is perfectly congruent with AR editor Jared Taylor’s surprisingly non-confrontational, data-driven journalism. (I intend to post about Mr. Talyor’s latest book at a later date.)

Perceptively, Dr. Devlin highlights one of the crucial points my book makes about democracy:

A prerequisite for parliamentary democracy is that majority and minority status should be fluid—that the ruling majority party should, at each election, be almost as likely to become a minority as to retain its majority. In a multiracial polity this does not happen. Parties represent racial groups rather than different philosophies of government, and elections become racial headcounts.

You can order this issue of American Renaissance here, where Dr. Devlin’s review is summed up as follows:

“In Into the Cannibal’s Pot, author F. Roger Devlin reviews an important new book by columnist Ilana Mercer entitled Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa. Mrs. Mercer, a South African emigré, has sounded a ‘fire bell in the night’ with her sobering analysis of a once thriving First-World nation that is now descending into the abyss of savagery, genocide, starvation, and hopelessness. Mr. Devlin also summarizes her critique of raw numerical democracy and her effort to set the record straight on the Apartheid system—and most poignantly, her warning to the people of the United States.”

UPDATE IV: Tim Pawlenty is a Weasel (Bravo LA Times)

Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Government, IMMIGRATION, Politics, Republicans, Ron Paul

Do I really have to debate The Debate? What can I add about the Republican spat in Des Moines, Iowa, that has not been rehashed already?

I’ll set aside my ideological loyalties (which are with Ron Paul), and comment some on style and character. (Readers already know that I’m fuming because, given the status of the written word in news reports, there are no online transcripts. Just YouTube.)

Tim Pawlenty revealed himself to be a weasel. But no one in the media is making a call on character. Pawlenty is terrified of Michele Bachmann, and for good reason. She’s the man he is not. However, his tactics are underhanded.

Via FoxNews:

Pawlenty responded “to Bachmann’s relentless repetition of her claim to leadership in Washington, pointing out that Democrats had rolled up legislative victories for most of her time in Congress and passed multiple bills over her objections, sometimes using her as a foil.”

This Pawlenty argument is plain wrong, maybe even devious; it’s the argument a consummate politico will make. What do I mean? Take Ron Paul. He celebrates victories in the arena of ideas. As he has pointed out, more and more of his rivals are moving in his direction, and adopting the truth where they once dubbed this truth kooky. On the Federal Reserve banking system, for example.

So the fact that Bachmann has not gotten her way with a cowardly Congress says nothing much at all about her “leadership.” After all, most of her Tea Party colleagues in the House voted to raise the debt ceiling for a mess of pottage, a meager cut in the rate of government metastasization.

“If that’s your view of effective leadership with results, please stop, because you’re killing us,” Pawlenty snarled Bachmann.

In other words, what Pawlenty has implied is this: if cleaving to the right ideas doesn’t penetrate the wrong heads, a real leader should “stop” agitating for the truth as he or she sees it. By the Pawlenty logic, Paul ought to have given up ages ago on talking sound money and foreign policy.

Pawlenty stuck out as particularly statist.

More later.

UPDATE I: MY Straw Poll Prediction. The 2011 Iowa Straw Poll: My sense is that R. Paul and M. Bachmann will win out. This win will highlight even more my long-standing contention that, to take the country back, these two have to collaborate.

UPDATE II: VALIDATED. I called the straw poll (above) 36 minutes ago, as the Talkers pontificated on the TV. Isn’t it time to stop reading and listening to television’s political whores, who never call anything as it is? I describe these Big Mouths’ shtick in the post, “Talkers fear Losing Top-Dog Status.”

Not one (as far as I can tell) of the paid pundits on TV predicted that Bachmann and Paul would win. Yet I’ve been saying the same since “September of 2009, when this column had already picked the GOP’s winning ticket: Ron Paul for commander-in-chief; Michele Bachmann as second-in-command.”

But I’m afraid that the voting public is probably right. For a winning ticket, the order of the ticket needs to be reversed. Bachmann is just that talented. It’s not my choice, but it’s reality.

The Ames Straw Poll results:

Bachmann secured 4,823 votes, narrowly besting Texas Rep. Ron Paul who had 4,671 votes. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty was chosen on 2,293 ballots, placing him third. … Part country fair and entirely political, the Ames Straw Poll has helped take the pulse of a campaign’s strength since 1979. It’s also the first opportunity for the tens of thousands of voters who weighed in Saturday on which GOP president candidate they support.

UPDATE (Aug 14): Clearly the candidates know very little about immigration policy and the labyrinth of visas the bureaucracy peddles. Most American know nothing about the topic. Herman Cain had a good line about there being a path to American citizenship: legal immigration. Back to Mitt, who complained that here in the US, we qualify PhDs in physics and then send them back “home.” Nonsense. The US has “unlimited access to individuals with unique abilities through the open-ended O-1 visa program … that is if the US really wanted it.”

Read about the O-1 visa (awarded to my spouse).

Gary Johnson on immigration? He’s just insane.

UPDATE IV: BRAVO LA TIMES. A transcript of the Iowa debate at last. I was looking for the Newt Gingrich segments, because the man did make a few vital points, but of course, reporting being what it is, I could not locate his words verbatim.

“… repeal Dodd-Frank, repeal Sarbanes-Oxley, repeal Obamacare.”

Very good practical points. “The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, courtesy of the Republican Party, cost American companies upwards of $1.2 trillion. The capital flight it initiated caused the London Stock Exchange to become the new hub for capital markets. Given America’s habit of forcing its habits on others, SOX struck fear into quite a few Liberal Democratic hearts in the House of Lords. Lord Teverson worried about the ‘increasing danger of regulatory creep from American regulators that threatens [Britain’s] own light-touch approach to financial regulation.’”

Cannibal Kindle Copy

Ilana Mercer, South-Africa, Technology

To all the Kindle customers of “Into The Cannibal’s Pot,”

Amazon assures me that the newly formatted, splendid Kindle copy that I worked to upload is now available. The errors of the previous copy have been corrected.

Kindle Direct Publishing informs me that, “Any customer who purchases [“Into The Cannibal’s Pot”] for the first time will get the revised edition.” And that their “technical team is working towards automating the process,” whereby “customers who have already purchased a Kindle book can automatically download the revised content.”

Amazon will also attempt to notifying customers who previously purchased a less-than-optimal Kindle copy of my book that a well-formatted copy is now online.

The “Search Inside the Book” feature for both The Cannibal’s ebook (Kindle) and hardcopy should be activated shortly.

Best to all,

ilana