District of Corruption

Just when you thought Christine O'Donnell couldn't get any better!

At least Sarah Palin came down on the right side of the Witchcraft Question. 

Christine O’Donnell is surely the biggest train wreck the conservative movement has yet produced.

Put aside, for the moment, her Young Earth Creationism and dictates against masturbation (an odd position, by the way, for an unmarried woman of 41.) Put aside the strange financial irregularities that have cropped up throughout her life (she received a BA from Fairliegh Dickinson this past fall after failing to pay tuition for 17 years.) Forget the alleged back taxes (everyone makes mistakes) and her strange accusations of burglary against her Senate opponent Mike Castle. Christine O’Donnell can best be summed up by the 6.9 million dollar “gender discrimination” lawsuit she filed against The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the venerable conservative think-tank and publishing house where she once worked. It seems that this putative “radical conservative” was planning on getting rich via Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

The opposition party getting swept into power on a wave of voter remorse during the first midterm of a new presidential administration is hardly a novel occurrence. It actually happens like clockwork, like a regular counter-trend within the structural shifts of political alignments.

• 1946 -- Truman administration: The Republicans achieve their first majority since the New Deal.
• 1954 -- Eisenhower: Democrats gained 18 seats and recaptured the House.
• 1970 -- Nixon: Two years before Nixon’s famous re-election landslide, the Democrats increase their hold on the House by 12.
• 1982 -- Reagan: With the economy in recession, the Democrats take 26 House seats.
• 1994 -- Clinton: the Republicans re-take the House in what would later be called a “revolution.”

(The 2002 midterm is the exception that proves the rule, as George W. Bush’s Republican Party increased its power in Washington, though only slightly (three seats); it appears that in that year, 9/11 Mania trumped the Midterm Curse.)

No matter how bad it looked for the GOP after Obama’s ascendancy, a rebound in 2010 could have been safely predicted. And history does not suggest that a victory in November will guarantee the Republicans anything in 2012.

A respondent to my comments about the leftist mindset of the GOP and movement conservative journalists stated an opinion that I’ve heard numerous times before. This view seems to me counterintuitive as well as undemonstrated: Republican strategists, and cooperative journalists, are flattering minorities and running down the ancestors of Southern Whites in order to appeal to White Republicans or swing voters. Wise “conservatives” (and here my respondent cites the GOP stratregist David Frum) understand that Whites would desert the GOP in droves unless their party continues to make an effort to be PC. Many Republicans and certainly swing voters would not vote for a party that was not marching in lockstep with the media in expressing horror over America’s evil racist, sexist, and homophobic past. Therefore the GOP is forced to act in such a way that while it is not likely to gain black support, it can hold on to its base by appearing as concerned as the Democrats about designated minorities.

The problem with this interpretation (aside from the fact that my respondent erroneously believes Karl Rove has deviated from it) is that there is no proof known to me that its proponent is correct. The vast majority of registered Republicans, according to all polls I’ve seen, think of themselves as being more right wing than the party they identify with. They ascribe the failure of their party to represent their views more fully to a justified fear of the media.

Although I think this reason is no more than an excuse to justify a bad electoral habit and misplaced loyalty, it suggests that GOP voters are not as far to the left as David Frum and Ross Douthat might hope. Steve Sailer has documented in his columns the progressive rejection of GOP candidates by White Christian males, who no longer bother to vote (see Sailer’s many VDARE columns on the subject). Presumably many of these abstentionists are expressing unhappiness with the Rove-Frum strategy being pursued by the Republican National Committee and those associated with that institute of funded wisdom. In my own once heavily Republican Lancaster County, the Republican turnout in 2008 was as depressed as the minority Democratic vote was elevated. Many of my Republican neighbors told me they wouldn’t “vote for that RINO McCain.” (The two-party monopoly in Pennsylvania managed to keep Ron Paul and Chuck Baldwin off the ballot.)

Yesterday, George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign manager and the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, revealed to The Atlantic that he’s gay. Mehlman now intends to become a public advocate for “gay marriage” and has already participated in a fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the organization that worked to overturn California’s Proposition 8 that had banned homosexual matrimony.

Mehlman claims that he “arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently”…  Political observers who weren’t daft, naïve, or self-deluded arrived at this conclusion many years earlier. The Republican chief’s sexual predilection was an open secret in Washington. And to be frank, he just looked it. Throughout Mehlman’s tenure at the GOP, there was a great deal of hand-wringing in the media about the “tragic irony” that the very party that wanted to restrict “homosexual rights” was run by …. a closeted homo.  (The assumption being, of course, that all gays must inherently support “gay marriage.”)

Just for the record, though I’d prefer not to have deviants in high office, I don’t get particularly exercised by the sexuality of politicians. That Mehlman and Bill Clinton are my enemies has nothing to do with the fact the one prefers men and the other can’t control himself around bimbos. If a statesman instituted the kind of radical, and currently unfeasible, political change that I desire, I could forgive bestiality.

Michelle Malkin tells it like it is:

I have watched and listened to many establishment Republicans and TV talking heads deride GOP Senate candidate J.D. Hayworth as a “clown,” “charlatan,” and a “huckster.”

I have watched and listened to many purported “Tea Party” spokespeople and limited-government lobbyists defend entrenched GOP Senate incumbent John McCain as a “conservative” “hero” who will shrink government and defend our borders.

Hayworth was far from a perfect candidate. But there is no bigger clown, charlatan, and huckster Republican serving on Capitol Hill than four-term, 24-year Big Government fixture John McCain.

After burning through a whopping $21 million in campaign funds to hold on to his seat, McCain is poised to claim a primary election victory over Hayworth tonight.

Some victory.

To stave off Hayworth, the reborn conservative McCain not only had to throw $21 million down the drain. He had to thrown his own old “maverick” self off the bus, start talking like Tom Tancredo, appear on cable news non-stop, disavow all his good friends in the “Eastern press” whose approbation he thrives on in off-election years, and pander shamelessly to the grass-roots conservative base that he has despised, undermined, and spurned for more than two decades.

McLame stubbornly refused to admit his own individual responsibility for supporting the pre-socialization of the economy started under George W. Bush and continued under Obama. Fellow Republicans whitewashed McCain’s fiscal irresponsibility record, including his support for:

*The $700 billion all-purpose, earmark-stuffed TARP bailout;

*The $25 billion auto bailout;

*The $300 billion mortgage entitlement bailout; and

*The $85 billion AIG bailout; and

*The costly, intrusive, junk science-fueled Climate Change agenda.

McNasty attacked Hayworth with more verve and vitriol than he ever could muster up for that “decent man” that “you don’t have to be scared of” — Barack Obama.

The most notorious Johnny-come-lately on border security in Washington, McAmnesty couldn’t get enough of the very same fences he openly cursed in front of open-borders crowds.

His cynical embrace of Arizona’s SB1070 enforcement law fooled no one who is fully informed about his radical, sovereignty-sabotaging ties.

Flashback January 2008: Remember?

Shamnesty peddler John McCain taps former Mexican government official/shamnesty advocate Juan Hernandez as his presidential campaign Hispanic Outreach Director.

Hernandez is a fellow at McCain’s “Reform Institute.” What has he been working on there for the past year?

“Dr. Juan Hernandez serves as a Senior Fellow of the Institute’s Comprehensive Immigration Reform Initiative.”

That is: Shamnesty.

Among the immigration projects at McCain’s Reform Institute: An art contest in which students depicted their protests against a southern border fence.

The winner on the American side of the border?

Here:

The grand prize winner incorporated the specious open-borders propaganda comparing our fence to keep trespassers out to the Berlin Wall designed to wall people in:

Is this what McCain believes in his heart, too? No wonder he cursed the “goddamned fence.”

According to FOX News, the Democrats' “Divide and Conquer Strategy” has “Backfire[d]” and Sen. Harry Reid’s “racially-charged campaign comment” has elicited nothing short of a media “uproar.”

The obscene remark in question was uttered by Reid at a Hispanic gathering promoting English education; it reads as follows:

I don't know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, OK?

I’m, of course, relieved to learn that the Democrats have been foiled in their attemtps to stereotype Mestizos, but it appears that the only people who’ve expressed “outrage” at Reid have been White Republican operatives and FOX News celebrities. In a Google news search, I was unable to find a notable Hispanic who was insulted by Reid’s comments and who also wasn’t Florida senatorial hopeful Marco Rubio.

As the GOP has become the White People’s Party demographically, its various spokesmen have become ever more fearful of pointing out what’s in front of their eyes and ever more eager to play the great game of accusing one’s opponent of “racism.”

A young libertarian friend of mine Thomas Woods is, no doubt, making a fortune on his latest book, Nullification: How to Resist Tyranny in the 21^st Century, recently published by the Republican-affiliated Regnery Press. Those who are promoting this work are for the most part GOP publicists and FOX-news celebrities. The relevant historical part can be summed up as follows. At the time of the founding, such statesmen as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison believed that states retained residual powers beyond those specified in the Constitution. Among these non-enunciated powers was the right of state legislatures to interpose themselves between the people and a federal law they believed to be improper. The interposing legislature could then nullify what it considered to be an arbitrary assertion of federal power.

Not all of our early leaders believed in such a right; and advocates of a strong federal union such as Washington, Hamilton, and Adams clearly opposed the nullification doctrine. Still it persisted -- and not only in the slave-holding South but even more conspicuously in New England. There the pro-English Federalists, once having lost power to the Jeffersonian Democrats in 1800, warmed to the idea of greater state power, and particularly after the Democrats propelled Americans into the (at least in New England) unpopular War of 1812. Those who appeal to the nullification doctrine have generally been regions or groups that have lost in their bid for control over the federal government, and that generalization is as true now as it was in the past.

Although I personally wish there were more power-sharing among levels of government, I consider the current appeal to nullification to be a childish ploy. Unlike the early Democrats, the GOP has never been a states-rights party.  It became a national force for decades as the party that crushed Southern secession in the Civil War, and then it pushed the federal government toward overseas expansion, high tariffs, and Prohibition. I can’t think of any Republican president in my lifetime who worked to increase state power at the expense of the federal government, due allowance being made for toothless tax-sharing gimmicks put forth by some Republican presidents. Now we have a Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, who invokes the Tenth Amendment and who speaks about state power that should never have been ceded to the federal union. But Thomas’s presence on the court is not the result of his predilection for the Tenth Amendment. He is there because George Bush Sr. wished to appoint a Black who would not be on the judicial left.

I’ve come to the conclusion that discourse among American conservatives has degenerated into little more than “values” button-pushing. Mention the Culture of Life, and you can argue for just about anything -- including open-borders immigration.

Take this from Cesar Conda, Dick Cheney’s former assistant for domestic policy, who is pro-immigration for lofty, moral reasons that have nothing to do with his ethnicity:

As a pro-immigration conservative (yes, I know, we could fit in a phone booth), I am opposed to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R., S.C.) proposal to end birthright citizenship for babies who, through no fault of their own, are born in this country to illegal immigrants. Innocent children shouldn’t be held responsible for the sins of their parents.

In terms of why not amend the Constitution: The Fourteenth Amendment rejected the idea that someone could be a person but less than a person legally, as well as the idea that citizenship can be made dependent on race. It is of enormous symbolic importance. There is no data supporting the claim that significant numbers of women deliberately cross the border to give birth in the United States in order to take advantage of this provision.

Further, the Republican party would be committing political suicide if it were to endorse ending birthright citizenship, as it would cost the party Latino votes, which are crucial in Florida and in several Western states. It could also hurt the GOP’s prospects in the upcoming mid-term election by diverting attention from the Democrats’ record of over-spending, over-taxing, and exploding the national debt. Given inexorable demographic trends, the GOP could be rendered politically irrelevant, certainly at the presidential level, for generations.

But wearing my other hat as the co-chair of the Susan B. Anthony List’s executive committee (though speaking strictly for myself), my biggest fear is that Graham’s proposal, if enacted by constitutional amendment or by statute, will lead to more abortions: Undocumented immigrants with unplanned pregnancies might choose to have abortions instead of risking apprehension by the police or government immigration agents (not to mention possible deportation down the line) at the hospital maternity ward. Some women terminate their pregnancies for less serious and sometimes superficial reasons. It also might encourage women to have unsafe births outside of a hospital setting.

Senator Graham’s plan to end birthright citizenship is not only substantively and politically flawed, but it undermines a bedrock principle of modern conservatism — preserving the sanctity of life. Republicans and conservatives ought to think long and hard before embracing such a controversial proposal.

Perhaps Cesar will next inform us that Americans who desire immigration restriction “don’t support the troops” because closing our borders would keep out Iraqi migrants and refugees, and thus imply that they are not ready for democracy, which would demoralize our fighting men and women currently expanding the blessed form of government in the Middle East. This seems no more ridiculous than the argument above.

When I first came across Rich Lowry’s column “Shirley Sherrod and American Progress,” I wondered whether I might have stumbled upon a parody of NR thinking written by Paul Gottfried in one of his lighter moods. Or perhaps Lowry had written it as part of an elaborate plan to induce severe indigestion in poor Paul, putting the tireless right-wing critic of conservative movement out of commission.

Regardless, even Lowry found it difficult to depict this well paid, well fed, and pampered federal bureaucrat as oppressed by angry white mobs. He thus chose to retell a sob story he’d read in one Taylor Branch’s turgid biographies of Martin Luther King Jr. about a black man who was attacked by mean, illiterate rednecks after he flirted with one of their white mistresses. Lowry then concludes,

It’s why the story Shirley Sherrod told at the NAACP conference was a heartening one, contrary to the distorted impression created after conservative activist Andrew Breitbart released a videotape without crucial context. Working at a rural nonprofit, Sherrod initially turned away a desperate white farmer on racial grounds before realizing that was wrong.

It was a tiny morality tale that could stand for an epoch of racial progress in the South.

Shirely Sherrod doesn’t seem to have a been a good bureaucrat -- she didn’t help the “superior”-talkin’ white farmer, even if she later felt that this was “wrong” -- and she has dedicated her life to something, one would think, Lowry opposes -- securing for blacks federal goodies, suing companies and the federal government on behalf of blacks, and securing for herself life-time employment as a black advocate. But it seems that by dent of her being black and Southern, she is connected to a to a long, storied history of righteous martyrdom, and as a good conservative of the reigning civic religion, Lowry is tasked with writing about her in hushed-tones.