Elections

Two Nations.

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two nations

We have now become two nations, divisible, without liberty and justice for all.

As usual, I read another good Belmont Club post.

I get discouraged about the future when I see the stupidity of the youngest generation in college. The left is worried that Republicans hold most state offices. Why has this happened ?

That dominance — and what it means to the policy and political calculations and prospects for both parties at the national level — is the single most overlooked and underappreciated story line of President Obama’s time in office. Since 2009, Republicans have made massive and unprecedented gains at the state level, gains that played a central role in, among other things, handing control of the U.S. House back to the GOP in the 2010 election.

It’s just inexplicable. Why would the country that elected Barack Obama twice choose Republicans for those offices closest to their own lives ?

While the story at the national level suggests a Republican Party that is growing increasingly white, old and out of step with the country on social issues, the narrative at the local level is very different. Republicans are prospering at the state level in ways that suggest that the party’s messaging is far from broken.

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Reality Bites.

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Bevin

The sobering reality of the 2015 election is slowly sinking in. How could this happen to a party “on the right side of history ?”

Richard Fernandez, as usual, has some good ideas.

Perhaps the greatest damage that “progressives” inflicted on civilization was to make people doubt the reality of the facts, when it is of the ends that we are uncertain. It may be that progress actually consists not of following the verities of the Party Line but in doing the best we can at every instant of our lives. Free men are content to endure the mystery of what happens when they do their best. Only the progressives must have a worthless guarantee of success for incompetence.

The Progressives cheered a book about “false consciousness” by one Thomas Frank, called What’s the Matter with Kansas?

The New York Times bestseller, praised as “hilariously funny . . . the only way to understand why so many Americans have decided to vote against their own economic and political interests” (Molly Ivins)

Hailed as “dazzlingly insightful and wonderfully sardonic” (Chicago Tribune), “very funny and very painful” (San Francisco Chronicle), and “in a different league from most political books” (The New York Observer), What’s the Matter with Kansas? unravels the great political mystery of our day: Why do so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests? With his acclaimed wit and acuity, Thomas Frank answers the riddle by examining his home state, Kansas-a place once famous for its radicalism that now ranks among the nation’s most eager participants in the culture wars. Charting what he calls the “thirty-year backlash”-the popular revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment-Frank reveals how conservatism, once a marker of class privilege, became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans.

The Wall Street Journal even gave him a column for a while but nobody read it. The reaction to the election in Houston at HuffPo is illustrative.

A long list of local and national figures publicly came out in support of Prop. 1, including President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The measure also had the backing of companies like Apple and GE, as well as local businesses that wanted to avoid a backlash similar to what Indiana experienced when Gov. Mike Pence (R) signed an anti-gay “religious freedom” law earlier this year.

But these heavy hitters weren’t able to get past the catchy, fear-mongering slogans and images used by their opponents.

Yes, those stupid voters !

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Donald Trump unbound.

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I have been watching the phenomenon of Donald Trump and wondering if it can continue or if he will implode. So far he seems to be riding the wave of disgust with professional politicians that has dominated the Republican Party this year.

This post by Neo-neocon raises some questions.

What does Trump really believe ?

…Mark Levin excoriated Trump in this clip from 2011, but now doesn’t sing the same tune although the facts he sets out here have not changed in the least (it’s the topmost clip on the page, the one that’s 12:01 minutes long; I can’t figure out a way to embed it).

You can hear lots of fascinating stuff there. Trump likes Nancy Pelosi (5:14). He wanted her to impeach George W. Bush (5:25), because he says Bush lied about WMDs. At 6:27 he speculates that it would be hard to even imagine a worse president than Bush. At 7:26 you hear Trump saying President Bush is evil. He then contrasts Obama (who at the time he was speaking had been elected but not inaugurated), saying that Obama has:

“…a chance to go down as a great president…I think he’s going to lead through consensus. It’s not just going to be just a bull run like Bush did—he just did whatever the hell he wanted—go into a country and attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with the World Trade Center, and just do it because he wanted to do it.”

Is that our candidate ?

Now, there are many ways to criticize George W. Bush. Some of them are even valid. But what Trump is saying here: that Bush lied about WMDs, that he’s evil, that it’s hard to imagine a worse president, and that he attacked Iraq “because he wanted to do it” is—well, it’s not only straight out of the leftist playbook, it borders on evil in and of itself. What’s more, Trump shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the reasons Bush actually did attack Iraq.

We’ve been discussing this here in another post. Why would the Republican Party nominate a man who has said those things about the last Republican president ?

Then there’s this one with Blitzer from the 2008 campaign. It contained the “impeach Bush” remark:

BLITZER: [What do you think of] Nancy Pelosi, the speaker?

TRUMP: Well, you know, when she first got in and was named speaker, I met her. And I’m very impressed by her. I think she’s a very impressive person. I like her a lot.

But I was surprised that she didn’t do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush. It was almost — it just seemed like she was going to really look to impeach Bush and get him out of office, which, personally, I think would have been a wonderful thing.

BLITZER: Impeaching him?

TRUMP: Absolutely, for the war, for the war.

BLITZER: Because of the conduct of the war.

TRUMP: Well, he lied. He got us into the war with lies.

Is that what we want ? I am very concerned about illegal immigration, as I have previously pointed out.

I have been pessimistic about the future of the country for a while. Recently, I have been very pessimistic.

One of the arguments for the impossibility of an event is lack of previous failure. “It never failed before and thus can never fail ever”. The Washington Post’s editorial board invokes a variant of this logic to refute Donald Trump’s border policy, arguing there are so many illegal immigrants it is too expensive to deport them all, leaving no alternative but to accept more.

Naturally, the WaPo is certain they know what could happen.

A useful case study is California, whose economy accounts for about 13 percent of U.S. gross domestic product and whose 2.6 million undocumented workers include almost a tenth of the state’s workforce.

We had an interesting demonstration several years ago. The Mexican activist organizations decided to stage a “strike by illegals” to show how dependent on them California, and specifically Los Angeles, was on the work illegal aliens (although you can’t call them that). They decided to stay home for a day or two. Traffic congestion dropped to tolerable levels and we have been trying, unsuccessfully, to get them to stage another “strike” ever since. That, plus their use of Mexican flags at protests, have now been abandoned as tactics.

I am all for controlling illegal immigration but is this what we want as our representative on the national stage ?

Is Obama Our Punishment?

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Obama was an unusual candidate for president in 2008. I had serious questions in 2008.

One criticism of Obama is that his portfolio is mighty thin. He has no record. Well, he actually does and and here it is. Pretty interesting.

It’s a lengthy record filled with core liberal issues. But what’s interesting, and almost never discussed, is that he built his entire legislative record in Illinois in a single year.

Why was that ? In 2002, the Democrats took over the Illinois legislature, not because of Bush as the reporter says, but because the Republican governor got caught selling drivers’ licenses to truckers with bad driving records. A disastrous truck accident splashed the whole story across the newspapers and the Democrats took over in the next election.

The white, race-baiting, hard-right Republican Illinois Senate Majority Leader James “Pate” Philip was replaced by Emil Jones Jr., a gravel-voiced, dark-skinned African-American known for chain-smoking cigarettes on the Senate floor.

Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama’s. He became Obama’s ­kingmaker.

Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio ­program.

I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.’”

“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”

“Barack Obama.”

Obama ended up in the US Senate because the GOP Senator, Peter Fitzgerald, did not run for re-election. Why ?

While State Senator he was a member of a group of conservative state senators elected in 1992 who often challenged the leadership of the Illinois Republican Party and were dubbed the “Fab Five”, the group also included, Steve Rauschenberger, Dave Syverson, Patrick O’Malley and Chris Lauzen.

After a hard-fought primary victory against Illinois Comptroller Loleta Didrickson, in which the latter had the support of most national and state-level Republican leaders, Fitzgerald defeated first-term Democratic incumbent U.S. Senator Carol Moseley Braun in 1998, and served for one term in the U.S. Senate. He was the first Republican in Illinois to win a U.S. Senate race in 20 years, and the only Republican challenger in the country to defeat an incumbent Democratic senator in the 1998 election cycle. Although Moseley Braun was dogged by negative publicity of corruption charges, Fitzgerald defeated her by only 2.9%.

Fitzgerald is a staunch conservative on such issues as opposition to abortion (except to save the life of the mother), gun control, gay marriage and taxes, but on some issues, particularly environmental issues — he opposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge throughout his tenure in the US Senate — he broke with conservative colleagues. He was one of only a handful of GOP Senators to support the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation.

He was a “maverick” and was not supported by “the Illinois Combine,” a term coined by columnist John Kass to describe the bipartisan corruption in Illinois politics that has brought the state to bankruptcy.

I called former U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, the Republican maverick from Illinois who tried to fight political corruption and paid for it. For this sin, he was driven out of Illinois politics by political bosses, by their spinners and media mouthpieces, who ridiculed him mercilessly.

Senator, what do you call that connection that Stuart Levine describes from the witness stand, you know that arrangement across party lines, with politically powerful men leveraging government to make money — what do you call it?

“What do you call that Illinois political class that’s not committed to any party, they simply want to make money off the taxpayers?” Fitzgerald said. “You know what to call them.”

What?

“The Illinois Combine,” Fitzgerald said. “The bipartisan Illinois political combine. And all these guys being mentioned, they’re part of it.”

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Carly’s a movie fan

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Tonight I got an e-mail from Carly, subject:

Not just another face in the crowd!

I wonder if she saw it at the Stanford Theater. David would not be amused.