After The Fall

The November elections may well be the most historic reversal of political power in modern history.  Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics thinks over 60 seats in the House could go Republican.  Dick Morris is ready to toss another 20 seats into the ante.  A more restrained estimate in the high 40s comes from Larry Sabato, who also reminds us the Senate almost always switches parties when the House does.

The usual caveats apply: campaigns will stumble, local issues will come into play, unforeseen events could change the minds of jittery voters, and skeletons have a habit of tumbling from closets around Halloween.  Still, it seems very likely the GOP will at least take the House.  Thanks to the Tea Party influence, some old RINOs will also be replaced by tough new war elephants.

What then?

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Impertinent Questions: The Church of the State

My new installment of Impertinent Questions is up at Death By 1000 Papercuts: The Church of the State.  Click here to check it out!

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History Written By The Losers

Winston Churchill once observed that history is written by the victors.  President Obama’s Tuesday night speech on the end of the combat mission in Iraq was an example of history being written by the losers.

There are few examples in recent memory of a political party being as comprehensively wrong as the Democrats were about Iraq, every step of the way.  The Democrats insist their miserable performance on the domestic economy should be measured against phantasmal scenarios of doom – the apocalypse that would have happened if they didn’t blow a trillion bucks on the “stimulus,” which “created or saved” zillions of jobs.  When it comes to military policy, however, they’re happy to believe Saddam Hussein was basically harmless, and would have minded his own business if left alone.  Their court jester, Michael Moore, made a movie depicting Iraq as a kite-flying paradise before the Americans showed up and ruined everything.  Their media allies floated stories, during the early days of the Iraqi occupation, tentatively suggesting things might have been better for the Iraqi people when Saddam ran the show.  After all, he left most of his subjects alive.

Although most Democrats supported the invasion of Iraq, they quickly changed their minds when public opinion soured on the war, and they saw a political opportunity.  This led to the tortured birth of the Idiotic Evil Genius narrative, in which the Democrats claimed George Bush was a simian cowboy moron who diabolically tricked them into supporting his neocon war for oil.  Mainstream Democrat politicians made common cause with the wilder fringes of the nutroots.  Anyone who remembers the melancholy Cirque du Soleil of the Kerry presidential campaign could only laugh at President Obama’s assertion tonight that “Americans across the political spectrum supported the use of force against those who attacked us on 9/11.”  In reality, a sizable chunk of the President’s party had no interest in the Afghanistan operation until it became a useful club against Bush’s Iraq policy.  I wonder how the Kos Kidz feel about Barack Obama declaring them completely outside the “political spectrum.”

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Impertinent Questions: Dollars for Dumps

I’ve begun a regular feature over at Death By 1000 Papercuts called “Impertinent Questions,” scheduled to run on Sundays and Wednesdays.  In the first installment, posted today, I ask: why not use the magic of the Cash for Clunkers program to fix the housing market?  Click here to check it out!

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The Honor of a Great People

Three hundred thousand people gathered in the Washington Mall on August 28, at the invitation of radio and TV host Glenn Beck, to discuss restoring the honor of the American people.  How did a great people come to lose their honor?

It certainly hasn’t been lost by all of us.  Individuals, families, and communities across America never broke faith with the noble traditions of self-reliance, responsibility, and adventure that forged this honorable nation.  Such people can be found in every neighborhood of every city… but the nation as a whole has lost its way.

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The Narrative of Hate

You hear a lot about the “hatefulness” of conservatives and Tea Party activists these days.  Lefty web sites were eager to pin the recent stabbing of a Muslim cab driver in New York on right wingers, since all opposition to the Ground Zero mosque is dismissed as vicious bigotry.  They were crushed to learn the perpetrator was a volunteer for an interfaith organization that supports the mosque.

Jim Treacher of The Daily Caller points out a hilarious post from Talking Points Memo, where the commenters cling desperately to The Narrative Of Hatred, even after learning the guy who urinated on a Muslim prayer rug was a garden variety drunk instead of a Tea Party storm trooper.  One TPM blogger was so upset by the blood-dimmed tide of right-wing fury that he ran off and firebombed Russ Carnahan’s office.

Ignoring this useless reality, MSNBC ties the wee-weed rug into “a spate of anti-Muslim incidents” and delivers the chilling warnings of a CAIR spokesman that fiery clouds of violent hatred are massing over the Religion of Peace:

FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko told msnbc.com that New York City has not seen a change in the number of hate crimes reported by Muslims so far this year, but every report is taken seriously.

But recent incidents — including the stabbing of a Muslim cab driver and the desecration of a California mosque — have some members of the Muslim community worried that crimes against Muslims could reach crisis levels.

“Without a significant response by mainstream political leaders, this disturbing trend will only continue to grow,” said Faiza Ali, a New York spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Even the Grand Old Party may fall victim of a hateful “insurrection,” as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne sobs from his fainting couch:

Republicans are in the midst of an insurrection. Democrats are not. This vast gulf between the situations of the two parties — not some grand revolt against “the establishment” or “incumbents” — explains the year’s primary results, including Tuesday’s jarring outcomes in Florida and Alaska.

… That the deficit increased primarily because of two tax cuts and two wars was not part of most conservatives’ calculation because acknowledging this was ideologically inconvenient. In the meantime, the election of President Obama by a demographically diverse coalition anchored among younger voters helped unleash the furies inside an older, overwhelmingly white and Southern-leaning GOP coalition.

Leave aside the fact that only a complete idiot would believe the deficit has increased primarily because of tax cuts and wars, and heed the wisdom of Dionne’s warning to his beloved Republican Party.  Last Tuesday’s primaries were the most horrific bloodbath since Blade walked into a vampire disco.  Rick Scott ran a “brutal campaign” to become the Republican nominee for Florida governor.  A terrified Lisa Murkowski was crushed by “right-wing power” and is now huddled beneath her desk, waiting for the murderous avatar of Joe McCarthy to come and devour her soul.  John McCain barely survived his primary by “modifying long-held positions to appease hard-line conservatives,” and unleashing Darth Palin on the fearful voters of Arizona.  Meanwhile, Glenn Beck prepares to lead a horde of his followers across the sacred ground where only duly authorized heirs to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. may walk.  They will spend the weekend dressed in ghoulish makeup and tattered baseball outfits, marching in circles around Congress and taunting Democrats to come out and play.

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Equality Before The Law

The Washington Post brings us news of an Obama Administration report to the United Nations, confessing our “less than perfect” human rights record:

In its first-ever report to the U.N. Human Rights Council on conditions in the United States, the State Department said Monday that some Americans, notably minorities, are still victims of discrimination. Despite success in reforming such inequities as slavery and the denial of women’s right to vote, the department said, considerable progress is still needed.

Those “successes in reforming the inequities of slavery and the denial of women’s right to vote” occurred 145 and 90 years ago, respectively.  Obama Administration functionaries must have a highly refined disdain for their own country, in order to bring them up as a way of giving a little pat on the head to an ugly, backwards nation.  There hasn’t been much progress on human rights in America since we passed the Nineteenth Amendment, but thank heavens Barack Obama is finally on the case!  He inherited the throne of a miserable country, but perhaps his enlightened leadership can work us up to a solid B+.

The Administration report lists the daunting issues it must overcome to reach the human-rights plateau occupied by China, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and the other deeply concerned members of the U.N. Human Rights Council:

High unemployment rates, hate crime, poverty, poor housing, lack of access to health care and discriminatory hiring practices are among the challenges the report identified as affecting blacks, Latinos, Muslims, South Asians, Native Americans and gays and lesbians in the United States.

As DrewM at Ace of Spades notes, none of these things are “human rights violations.”  The nature of the real violation is implied: resistance to the progressive agenda that will supposedly eliminate these unpleasant realities of life.  The essential absurdity of multiculturalism is the need to drag America down until it can be treated as equal to the thug states infesting the United Nations.  That’s how we end up with the Obama Administration moaning about “lack of access to health care” as a human rights violation, in a report submitted to a council that includes Saudi Arabia, where a court has ruled that a man’s spinal cord can be severed as punishment.

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The Phantom Priority

After the passage of his massive health-care plan, President Obama promised a “hard pivot” to dealing with our flagging economy.  Job creation was said to be his new “top priority.”  Politicians make a habit of declaring lots of top priorities.  Mark Knoller of CBS News recently put together an amusing list of thirteen items the President has declared to be his top priority.  The promise to put the economy first was repeated loudly and often.  It will still be ringing in the ears of voters when they clean Democrats out of Congress with an electoral leaf blower this autumn.

In reality, job creation and economic growth are nowhere to be found on this Administration’s list of priorities.  The “hard pivot” was actually the feeble ring of ruby slippers clicking together.

Anyone who seriously considered job creation imperative would, at a bare minimum, refrain from the wholesale destruction of industries.  Michelle Malkin gives us the bomb damage assessment from the Obama War on Jobs: dereliction of duty on border security, the offshore drilling moratorium, pulling onshore drilling leases, shutting down auto dealerships, and the burden of paying for health insurance “reform” which has become a sucking chest wound in the U.S. economy.  The offshore drilling industry will take decades to rebuild, as equipment begins to move permanently out of U.S. waters.  The Administration knew the ban it fought so hard to impose would kill 23,000 jobs.  Obviously the preservation of those jobs was not a “top priority.”

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The Sanctification of Awful Men

Saturday brought the bizarre saga of Sweden announcing a rape charge against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, then withdrawing the warrant within a matter of hours, downgrading the international media hurricane to a tropical storm of “molestation” charges.  Molestation isn’t “severe” enough to get you arrested in Sweden, so it was all much ado about nothing.

Some have speculated this was more than just a bureaucratic snafu.  Was the Swedish government co-operating with the military and intelligence services of the United States, hoping to discredit Assange with false rape charges?  I hope nobody working for the CIA is incompetent enough to believe that would work.  Even hard evidence of rape would not “discredit” a hero of the international Left.

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The Truth About America

Sometimes people say there’s no way America can pull out of its death spiral.  No matter what polls may say about the national mood turning against those pushing us into submission and bankruptcy… no matter what brilliant ideas for national renewal might be advanced… our character has become too flawed.  We’re too easily stampeded, too gullible, and too dependent.  The Left tells us we’re too bigoted and simple-minded to bear the leadership of the free world any longer.  We’ll end up pressed against the corpse of our insolvent government, furiously suckling our last droplets of benefit and subsidy, pausing only to snarl at any foreigner who approaches.

It’s not hard to find evidence against that dismal analysis.  With the official conclusion of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the truth about America is riding home with our returning combat veterans.

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