What proximate test of excellence can be found except correspondence with the actual equilibrium of force in the community -- that is, conformity to the wishes of the dominant power? Of course, such conformity may lead to destruction, and it is desirable that the dominant power should be wise. But wise or not, the proximate test of a good government is that the dominant power has its way.

Utah Senator Robert Bennett has lost the Republican Party nomination.  He finished in third place in the second round of voting behind Tim Bridgewater and Tea Party favorite Mike Lee.

I’ve been searching Bennett’s Wikipedia page to see where he may have angered his base.  According to the Politico “Bennett was dogged by his support for the Troubled Asset Relief Program and for co-sponsoring a healthcare bill with Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oreg.).”  Could that be all?  Bennett supports a flat tax, blames government meddling for high health insurance prices, wants to build a fence with Mexico and takes the Bushian view of war and terrorism.   The bill he co-authored with Wyden, however, looks like universal healthcare. “Although he has voted in favor of expanding funding to women and minority-owned businesses, Bennett has generally rejected affirmative action proposals involving quotas.”  Does anybody vote against funding women and minority-owned businesses and thus oppose the whole diversity agenda?  

So how do the two remaining candidates compare?  On the first issue, immigration, it appears both of them want to seal the Mexican border, defeat any amnesty attempts and revoke birthright citizenship.  Good enough.  The second most important issue is opposing empire.  While neither is exactly Rand Paul here, Bridgewater uses phrases like “cut and run” and “war against international terrorists whose goals are to kill us and destroy our way of life” while Lee seems a bit saner recommending that we “[ask] the hard questions on strategy” and make sure soldiers have a “clear mission,” which I read as no nation building.  Both say they love the Constitution.  Bridgewater’s website looks a lot better, indicating that he’s more competent and would be a more effective champion of conservative values.  Then again, he has a Twitter page, on which he writes like a twelve year old girl.

Thx 4 all of the candidates in this race - good run! And thank you to the supporters of other candidates who voted 4 me too

This video shows that Lee is good on states’ rights but has no charisma.  

However this ends up, it's always fun to see incumbents lose, especially when they're warmongers.

Update: It looks like the Tea Party went after Bennett partly because he voted for the Wall Street bailout.

The late, great George Kennan was not only one of the most influential and important diplomats in American history, but he was also a serious man of the Right in every important aspect of his thought. With regards to foreign policy, he combined humility with unsentimental realism. Kennan recognized the ideological threat posed by Soviet Communism, but considered the militarization of U.S. foreign policy and extravagant interventions in places such as Indochina to be an inappropriate and unnecessary response. He was particularly opposed to entangling American foreign policy objectives with ideological crusades. In an interview with The New York Review of Books in 1999, the 95-year-old Kennan remarked, "This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as un-thought-through, vainglorious and undesirable." What was Kennan's preferred alternative? He insisted, "I would like to see our government gradually withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights. I submit that governments should deal with other governments as such, and should avoid unnecessary involvement, particularly personal involvement, with their leaders."

What strikes me as indicative of the phoniness of the "conservative renewal" now being preached by FOX-news, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the movement noisemakers, is its inseparability from the group that ran this country between 2001 and 2008. It is hard to watch the GOP-peanut gallery parading as redeemers of the Right, without noticing familiar faces from the Bush II years. Assisting in the spectacle are Karl Rove, Cheney, and Cheney's kin, Bush's press secretaries, and in fact just about every GOP operative of the last decade who has been reinvented as a FOX contributor. No one from our side has been recruited for the show and as far as I can see, there is very little space there for Ron Paul-enthusiasts.

My GOP loyalist friends have explained that this repackaging of neocon-controlled and centrist, reaching-out-to-minority Republicans is necessary to build a new coalition. But these friends are so emotionally wedded to the GOP that they refuse to notice what is happening, even when Sarah Palin has been revealed as a feminist tool of neocon powerbrokers. Moreover, the GOP did not always behave in this truckling way. When Reagan became a serious presidential candidate, he did not suck up to those in the Nixon and Ford administrations who had pursued what Reagan considered a policy of appeasement toward the Soviets. Reagan would have nothing to do with Henry Kissinger, whom he rightly or wrongly linked to a misguided policy of détente.

I can't say that I have any expertise in the history of South Africa, or that of the Afrikaners. I learned most all of what I know about the slain leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, Eugene Terre'Blanche, from obituaries in the mainstream press. For these reasons, and others, I'm hesitant to write about this man.

A couple of things have stood out in the media coverage, however, which I think are worth commenting on.

Firstly, Terre'Blanche is almost always referred to as a "white supremacist"; indeed, this moniker usually appears in the first couple of sentences of every report. Now, it's true that a supporter of South Africa's Apartheid system can correctly be called a "supremacist"-- as well as advocates of Southern Segregation and Israel's military occupations, for that matter. But in these mainstream papers, the term "white supremacist" sounds like it roughly translates as "evil," "backwards," or even "probably deserved to die anyway."

I've never once heard South Africa's current president, Jacob Zuma, or Zimbabwe's dictator, Robert Mugabe, referred to as "black supremacists," even though both seek the aggrandizement of their people at the expense of others -- in the latter's case, to the point of outright confiscation of property. Israel, too, is engaged in actions that, regardless of what one thinks of them, are clearly designed to secure the prosperity of the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people. "Supremacist" seems to be a political term that can only be preceded by "white."

The Media Research Center compiles news clips from paranoid leftists on the Obamacare protests:

One shouldn't take any satisfaction in the American Enterprise Institute's firing of David Frum, for shortly after Frum got the boot, AEI hired another former Dubya speech writer -- "enhanced interrogation" enthusiast Marc Thiessen. Jonah Goldberg is also now an AEI fixture... (I can't say that I'm well acquainted with Thiessen's work, but there seems to be a lot of evidence that it's shoddy, if not mendacious.)

And one shouldn't conclude that AEI's firing of Frum proved that the institute is serious about opposing socialized medicine. Though I found Frum's argument in his now-famous "Waterloo" piece rather puzzling, he did hit the mark with this comment about think-tank hypocrisy on healthcare:

[W]e do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney's Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Indeed. On the fundamental issue of mandating health insurance, the differences between Obamacare and Romneycare are slight. (My friend Jack Hunter has a good video blog on this.)  

I'm beginning to get a sense of how Washington and the media outlets are going to spin the recent attack in the Moscow subway -- It's a case of "domestic terrorism" (and it has nothing to do with Muslims, all of whom are wonderful citizens.) And guess who the "domestic terrorists" are here in the United States: right-wing, gun-owning, Middle American Christians who don't like the government.

This story was posted today at the New York Times's website at 5:48 PM ET: 

WASHINGTON — Nine members of a Michigan-based Christian militia group have been indicted on sedition and weapons charges in connection with an alleged plot to murder law enforcement officers in hopes of setting off an antigovernment uprising.

In court filings unsealed Monday, the Justice Department accused the nine people of planning to kill an unidentified law enforcement officer, then plant improvised explosive devices of a type used by insurgents in Iraq to attack the funeral procession.

Eight of the defendants were arrested over the weekend in raids in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. A ninth remained at large, the Justice Department said. The indictments against them were returned last Tuesday. The defendants were identified as members of Hutaree, described by federal prosecutors as an anti-government extremist organization based in Lenawee County, Mich., and which advocates violence against local, state and federal law enforcement. The group saw local and state police as “foot soldiers” for the federal government, which it viewed as its enemy, along with participants in what they deemed to be a “New World Order,” according to the indictment.

“This is an example of radical and extremist fringe groups which can be found throughout our society,” Andrew Arena, an F.B.I. special agent in charge in Detroit, said in a statement. “The F.B.I. takes such extremist groups seriously, especially those who would target innocent citizens and the law enforcement officers who protect the citizens of the United States.”

A law enforcement official said that the alleged plot was unconnected to recent threats against Democratic members of Congress who voted for legislation overhauling the nation’s health care system.

The president wants to extend a ten-month moratorium on new settlements in the West Bank and has voiced opposition to the ones in East Jerusalem. Larry Auster is now sure that Obama's Washington is "an enemy of Israel" and that PM Bibi Netanyahu should declare so openly. Citing Commentary's Noah Pollak and Powerline's "Paul," Auster frets that once the administration's anti-Israel animus comes to a boil, actions like these might soon follow:

1) U.S. support for a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood, 2) active U.S. opposition to a strike on Iran, up to and including the Brzezinski threat of shooting down Israeli aircraft, 3) Israel's diplomatic isolation in the UN and Europe, and 4) an escalating administration campaign to portray Israeli "intransigence" as a threat to the United States' regional and international security.

In other news, a one-time volunteer to the Israeli Defense Force, Rahm Emmanuel, is still Obama's chief of staff and -- this just in -- former Obama aid Lee "Rossy" Rosenberg, another Chicago boy, has been appointed as the new head of AIPAC. Reports have also surfaced that Israel has captured Joe Biden's heart.   

With "enemies" like these... 

Amidst the torrent of anti-white press coverage surrounding the Tea Parties and Obamacare protests, Albany's Times Union has published a fair account of Obama's white male problem. In "White men shun Democrats," David Paul Kuhn eschews knee-jerk accusations of "racism" and instead outlines the statistical evidence and aims to find a race-neutral explanation for Obama's declining support among white men. In doing so he gets the issue about 50% right; he leaves race out of the white side of the equation but refuses to acknowledge the impact race has on Obama and his agenda.

Kuhn outlines the looming midterm crisis the Democrats face:

For more than three decades before the 2008 election, no Democratic president had won a majority of the electorate. In part, that was because of low support -- never more than 38 percent -- among white male voters. Things changed with Obama, who not only won a majority of all people voting, but also pulled in 41 percent of white male voters.

Polling suggests that the shift was not because of Obama but because of the financial meltdown that preceded the election. It was only after the economic collapse that Obama's white male support climbed above the 38 percent ceiling. It was also at that point that Obama first sustained a clear majority among all registered voters, according to the Gallup tracking poll.

It's no accident that the flight of white males from the Democratic Party has come as the government has assumed a bigger role, including in banking and health care. Among whites, 71 percent of men and 56 percent of women favor a smaller government with fewer services over a larger government with more services, according to ABC/Washington Post polling.

So, despite what many have said, Obama's unprecedented success among white men can be largely attributed to the political circumstances of the 2008 election and John McCain's shortcomings as a viable alternative, not his status as "post-racial." On the prominent issues at the time (economic stimulus and creating jobs) Obama and McCain were virtually identical, as they were on another issue that plays well with "angry white men," immigration. White guilt and the manufactured willingness to "look past race" and elect a black man certainly played a role, but this was no doubt aided by liberal-warmonger McCain and his policy prescriptions.