That Hideous Strength:
Satan is a Democrat,
It is the Blue States that are Red, &
The Evil Empire Strikes Back

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West....
No rays from holy Heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently....
While from a Proud Tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

Edgar Allan Poe, "The City in the Sea" [provides the title for The Proud Tower, by Barbara Tuchman, 1966]

The shadow of that Hyddeous Strength
sax myle and more it is of length.

Sir David Lyndsay [c.1490–c.1555]; from Ane Dialog betwix Experience and ane Courteour [1555], describing the Tower of Babel [as quoted by C.S. Lewis, title page of That Hideous Strength, 1945]

When Republicans call something a lie, Democrats object that this is the sort of incivility that leads to political violence and terrorism. When Democrats call something a lie, this may well mean that Republicans have been accurately quoting Democrats, often extensively.

Enklinobarangus ()

I've decided that American politics is now hopeless. In the '90's I hoped that the Libertarian Party could succeed the Republicans or Democrats as a real electoral alternative. That didn't happen, and, considering what the Libertarian Party is like, I'm beginning to doubt that this is either possible or even desirable. In 2012, the Democrats are still busy trying to turn the United States into a basket case like Greece, if not Cuba; and they have minds, if such can still be called that, that are absolutely closed to any evidence of history, even current history, or even the evidence of their own recent claims and statements. Democrat politics is utterly dependent on loss of memory. It is the politics of senile dementia, and of audacious and astounding sophistry. Meanwhile, the Republicans are still unable to articulate some of the simplest economic truths; they react to their own faux pas by trying to out-socialize the Democrats (it can't be done); and they are still diverted into social conservative issues that are irrelevant to the current situation. There were particularly egregious examples Democrat lies and of the self-inflicted wounds of socially conservative Republicans in the 2012 election. There will truly be Hell to pay if the electorate is deceived into returning the Democrats to full power. My objections to these parties as well as the Libertarians are as follows.

• The Libertarians

  The Libertarian Party is the only modern political party within shouting distance of the principles of the Founders of the United States of America. Economist Walter Williams once said something like this while guest hosting for the Rush Limbaugh show. Come to think of it, I haven't noticed him guest hosting there lately. Yet Walter himself suffers from some of the problems evident in the Libertarian Party. The late R.W. Bradford, founder of Liberty magazine, one of the premier libertarian publications, nevertheless said that the Libertarian Party was doomed to be the marginalized vehicle of followers of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. This is even worse than it sounds, since many properly orthodox Randite "Objectivists" reject the Party, as did Rand, as having "stolen" her ideas. Thus, the Party cannot benefit from the whole Randite constituency.

  It is hard to bring myself to vote for anyone else, but I have come to agree with Bradford. There are four areas where the Party may be hopeless. It tends to be ideologically dominated by (1) isolationists, (2) anarchists, (3) gold bugs, (4) conspiracy theorists, and, curiously like Walter Williams himself, (5) defenders of Confederate Secession. These had been a problem for me ever since I joined the Party, but it was brought home in 2008. I had run for office as a Libertarian seven times -- four times for California State Assembly, 1994, 1996, 1998, & 2000, and three times for Congress, 2002, 2004, & 2006. In 2008, the LA Country election organizer sent out an e-mail to solicit candidates for the next election, calling for good "anti-war" Party members. Although no sensible person is gratuitously in favor of war, I had to tell him that I was not against the current war, involving Terrorism, in the way that he expected. He thought I might want to run for a State office, where the war might not be an issue, but I declined that also.

  For me, enough is enough. It may be often said that the United States should not be the world's policeman. Unfortunately, somebody needs to be the world's policeman, and that task tends to fall on the country with the greatest geopolitical reach. That used to be Britain. Now it is the United States. If nothing else, the Somali pirates tell the tale. For a while, libertarian anarchists were celebrating the "success" of Somalia as a country without a government. In fact, what we got was the reductio ad absurdum, not just of that argument, but of anarchism in general. The bad guys organize. Then they do bad things. To stop them, you need at least comparably organized force. When that force gets big enough and organized enough, with laws and a judicial system, then it is a government. The organization that used to police the seas was the Royal Navy. Now there are NATO ships off Somalia, but even when they capture pirates, they don't know quite what to do with them. The Royal Navy, which used to hang pirates on the spot, now sometimes releases them (like other NATO forces), for fear of violating their human rights. This is laughable, contemptible, and dangerous. It is the result of foolish and preposterous scruples that put the innocent at risk by confusing the traditional laws of war with those of civil justice. We see something similar in Afghanistan, where, so reports have it, captured members of the Tâlibân are now being read their Miranda Rights. This is a level of stupidity now to lay at the feet of the Democrats, but, of course, the Libertarian Party doesn't want American troops there at all. Better to let the Jihadists go ahead and plan more terrorist attacks against us -- after all, many Libertarians agree with the Left that the U.S. invited and deserved the attacks on 9/11. Harry Browne, whom I was happy to give my vote for President more than once, said something of the sort immediately after the event. This didn't quite make me a "9/11 Republican," but it seriously turned me off about Browne. To the Left, of course, our self-defense and policing of pirates is "imperialism" -- by which they cannot mean something like the Râj, since the United States does not wish to conquer and rule countries as did the European colonial powers, but they must think of it that way anyway, since they can only understand political events in terms of their Marxist-Leninist paradigm. A capitalist country engaging in self-defense, or the defense of civilization, is, by definition, "imperialist."

  The gold bugs are back thanks to the recession and a decline in the dollar. With the massive credit collapse of the housing bubble, the Federal Reserve has needed to create money to prevent a deflation. Of course, with the Tax & Spend Democrats back, they want more money just so they can flood the economy with their spending. They probably still believe that inflation causes economic growth (the "Phillip's Curve" popular during the stagflation of the '70's). By creating too much money, perhaps for this political purpose, the Federal Reserve can create an inflation. The gold bugs, however, don't like the Federal Reserve at all (it is part of the Conspiracy) and don't believe in the creation of money to prevent deflation. Indeed, the Federal Reserve is widely accused, and not just by gold bugs, of helping to create the housing bubble with low interest rates. In all of this, however, many have failed to remember what happened to Japan during the '90's. Interest rates there were effectively zero, but the economy stagnated and actually still experienced deflation. The decline of the dollar can be the result of loss of confidence overseas in the U.S. economy. If dollars held outside the country are dumped into circulation, this can also contribute to inflation. Thus, whether the Federal Reserve needs to create money or not simply depends on what we see happen to prices.

  What is true is that most people don't know or understand the workings of the Federal Reserve, or of any central bank. The interest rate we hear the most about, the "Federal Funds Rate," actually is the interest that member banks of the Federal Reserve System charge each other. This doesn't create any new money. The "Discount Rate," is what the Federal Reserve charges to create money and loan it directly to banks. My understanding, however, is that banks don't do this very much. The principal money creating activity of the Federal Reserve is to issue new money to buy assets for itself, including Treasury Bonds, on the open market. (The Treasury itself cannot create money.) The Japanese apparently were not doing enough of this. They were trying to generate economic activity with government "stimulus" spending. Republicans and, especially, Democrats have mostly failed to notice that multiple attempts in that direction didn't do any good. And we know why. As Walter Williams himself has said, taking water out of the deep end of a swimming pool and putting in the shallow end does not make the shallow end deeper. Thus, government "stimulus" spending must involve money either borrowed, taxed, or created, and that will come out of the general capital of the economy (or by devaluing that capital in the case of inflation), removing it from economic investments that are usually more productive than when politicians buy votes with pork-barrel projects. Thus, it is widely understood that the fraudulent stimulus ("porkulus") bill begun under George Bush and rushed through (as urgently needed) under Barack Obama has not and will not make much difference (except negatively) for the economy. It is a political show designed to get votes.

  The Federal Reserve also feeds into the world of the conspiracy theorists. The tragedy of the conspiracy worldview is that it directs attention away from the obvious and open activities of the enemies of freedom and Constitutional government. American politics is still simply the playing out the consequences of the New Deal destroying the Constitution. The heirs of the New Deal do not believe in a limited government of enumerated powers. In a way, it doesn't matter whatever else they believe in, whether that is the War on Drugs or Nationalized Health Care, or why. The Nation will not be back on course until those sorts of things are recognized as contrary, and properly so, to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. Yet this doesn't get said nearly enough, or clearly enough in public discourse. The conspiracy theorists are worried about the Rockefellers or why 9/11 is an inside job, and they don't seem to realize that they are themselves contributing to the smoke-screen by which the truth is obscured to the American people. They are as much part of the problem as any obvious statist like Jay Rockefeller.

  When Andre Marrou was the Libertarian candidate for President in 1992, a reporter asked him what the program of the Libertarian Party was. He answered, "the restoration of Constitutional government." That was a good answer and a good idea, but unfortunately it has never been the program of the Libertarian Party. The "principle" upon which the Party is founded, and to which members have been expected to subscribe in the "Pledge," is a utopian notion that government can be built out of purely voluntary relationships. Thus, the Party does not believe in things like taxes or eminent domain, or even, really, national armed forces. Since all these things, and more, are recognized in the Constitution, one cannot say that the Libertarian Party has any particular interest or commitment to the principles or historical considerations of Constitutional government. This means that the philosophical inspirations and touchstones for the movement are not primarily Locke, Jefferson, Madison, or even F.A. Hayek, but, as R.W. Bradford said, Rand and Rothbard.

  The idiosyncrasy and perversity of this ideology emerges with some regularity, but it is particularly conspicuous when the Civil War comes up. One thus commonly finds libertarians, like Walter Williams again, holding that the Southern States had a perfect right to leave the Union, that the Civil War was an act of tyranny, and that the 600,000+ deaths of the War made Abraham Lincoln one of the great mass murderers of history (a favorite accusation of paleoconservative columnist Joseph Sobran). There is a certain logic to this, if one begins with the premise that government is a kind of "contract at will" from which any party can exit at any time for any reason. This, however, is not quite what the Declaration of Independence says:

  Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing that Forms to which they are accustomed.

  So exactly what "Evils" were being suffered by the Southern States that moved them to leave the Union? Well, the threat of the Abolition of Slavery. As Ulysses S. Grant said, this in fact was "one of the worst causes ever." The evils were being practiced by the Slave States, not suffered by them; and they wished to leave the Union in order to continue practicing their evils without opposition. This being the case, the libertarian arguments in relation to Southern Secession try to ignore slavery in favor of other motives, like protective tariffs, for secession. I have examined this sort of thing elsewhere. The idea is bogus, and has been well refuted by a recent book, What This Cruel War Was Over, Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War, by Chandra Manning [Knopf, 2007]. Everyone, at the time, knew that the War was about slavery. I did not know there even were Regimental newspapers in the Civil War armies, but there were; and Manning has found that in speaking of the reasons for the War, they speak of slavery, not tariffs (as do private letters, newspapers, etc. etc.). And, of course, Lincoln would not have won the election in 1860 if the Democratic Party had not split in three parts and run three candidates (Northern, Southern Unionist, & Southern Secessionist). The split was over slavery (as the Whig Party had split), not over tariffs.

  Although Lincoln was an heir to Whigs and Federalists, and the defeat of secession did remove one of the threats that helped keep the Federal Government within its Constitutional limitations, the Civil War involved a noble cause and, especially through the Civil War Amendments (13th, 14th, & 15th), improved the Constitution. Focusing on the supposed evils of the Union cause, and ignoring that the cause was to abolish one of the greatest evils in history, slavery, not only conveys a message of perversity and moral confusion but, again, like the conspiracy theories, distracts attention from its proper focus, namely the outright destruction of Constitutional government in letter and spirit by the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt, despite building the Jefferson Memorial and putting Jefferson on the nickel, completely overthrew the Jeffersonian understanding of American government -- replacing it with the ideas, like unlimited Federal spending, that had been advocated by Jefferson's greatest enemy, the Federalist Alexander Hamilton. The New Deal undid the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800 and lodged a cancer in American government. The disease has grown steadily ever since, and never more rapidly than since 2008.

  One can spend a lot of time with libertarians and never hear much about conflict between Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians in American history. They are far beyond that in the utopian stratosphere. The result is waste and misdirection and, in terms of the policies offered (e.g. abolishing taxes), an impression that one is dealing with crackpots. I just wish that the Republicans and Democrats had something better to offer. They don't.

• The Republicans

  The modern Republicans lack the courage of their (presumed and sometimes expressed) convictions. They usually praise the New Deal and make no real effort to restore Constitutional government. This has effectively made them co-dependents and enablers for the Democrats. Ronald Reagan at least promised to abolish the Department of Education, but then didn't, and didn't even seem to try very hard to do so. George W. Bush even vastly expanded the power and funding of the Department in his "No Child Left Behind" act. The complaint of the Democrats, of course, was that the Department still didn't get enough power or funding (nothing, to be sure, will ever be enough), while at the same time the act made some moves towards requiring competent teachers -- anathema to the Teachers Unions. But it is local control and educational choice (vouchers, etc.) that will keep the schools honest, not ultra vires Federal control.

  This gives us the Republican dilemma in a nutshell. Rather than be accused of not caring about education, or children, or poverty, or the environment, Republicans have conceded the principle to the Democrats that all these things are proper concerns of the Federal Government. Beginning with such a compromise, the Republicans hope that their good faith will be recognized, while they try to restrain the growth of this constantly bigger and more tyrannical Leviathan. Of course, the Democrats never recognize any good faith in Republicans, and their rhetoric never acknowledges that the Republicans have been compromising with them step by step for decades. The very idea that the New Deal was a mistake, a failure, and a project of pure tyranny has thus been left behind in respectable public discourse since the early '50's. The greatest successes of modern Conservatism, the election of Reagan in 1980 and the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, did not alter that in the slightest. George W. Bush exemplified the thanklessness and pointlessness of this approach, drawing nothing but bile from the Democrats and bien pensants, even while leaving office in the very act of promoting the absurd "stimulus" spending and the government nationalization of businesses that the Democrats have been happy to pursue with all their might since. George W. Bush thus made it possible for Newsweek magazine to announce, with a banner headline, "We Are All Socialists Now" [in August, 2010, Newsweek was sold for $1, yes $1, although, with its debts and liabilities, the magazine actually has a negative net worth].

  On 9 September 2009, the official Republican response to Barack Obama's speech to Congress promoting the fraudulent health care "reform" advanced by the Democrats contained the sort of fatal compromise that is all too typical of them. Part of the Republican proposal for "reform" includes the requirement that insurance companies accept people who have "preexisting conditions," i.e. if you are already sick, with no insurance, an insurance company will be required to insure you anyway and pay for the treatment of the problem you already have. Well, if you don't need to buy insurance until you get sick, then why bother buying it beforehand? Indeed. There is then no incentive to spend money on medical "insurance" until you need medical care. That erases the very meaning of insurance, which is a practice to pool risk, i.e. a group of people who may be subject to some harm pay enough so that it will cover those who will suffer that harm. But if risk is not pooled, and everyone waits to buy "insurance" until they need treatment or compensation, the actual cost for the "insurance" will be no less than if the "insurance" didn't exist. Thus, as the Democrats understand all too well, if medical "insurance" must cover preexisting conditions, then everyone must be required to buy insurance -- which is indeed part of the Democrat's health care "reform." The Republicans, by wanting to sound nice, by requiring coverage of preexisting conditions, play into the hands of the Democrats, since, if the Republican "reform" is accepted, it will cause skyrocketing insurance rates, or drive companies right out of the insurance business -- leaving the smiling Democrats with their socialized "public option" to come to the rescue. Good work. Rather than explain why preexisting conditions cannot be covered by insurance, let alone why this has nothing to do with the Constitutional powers of the Federal Government, Republicans go along, again, to get along.

  It is no surprise then that we see a "ratchet effect" in the growth of government and of socialism. Thus, the Democrats push through something, often with Republican support, that increases the power, spending, and taxing of the government (at any level). The results of this begin to alarm the voters, so Republicans are returned to power. They make a few changes and slow the growth of government power, taxing, and spending, but they really never roll things back to where they were. The "ratchet" of Republican timidity prevents fully undoing the damage caused by the Democrats. As with recent Republican Congresses (2001-2007), what we consequently get is "Democrat lite," which slowly begins to produce many of the same effects already experienced from Democrat policies. Republican spending began to go out of control. So where do the voters turn? The Democrats look like the only alternative. But if Republican spending looked bad, wait till the Democrats get their chance, especially after the frustration of years out of power. So the Republicans may eventually return to control; but will they undo all the new damage? Almost certainly not. They might look mean -- although the Democrats will call them that anyway.

  This all began with Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower was in general a good President, and he was loathed by right thinking Democrats, but he began the Republican slide into fatal compromises. He announced that he would not roll back the New Deal. He was able in practice to defuse its worst effects for a while, but he left in place the mythology that the New Deal had been successful and that the changes it introduced into the Constitutional theory and practice of American government were good and useful. The time bomb that Eisenhower thus allowed to tick away later exploded in the '60's, when the worthy cause of enforcing the civil rights embodied in the 14th and 15th Amendments became the means of eliminating civil rights in the on-going totalitarian project of the Democrats. I have examined the details of this elsewhere.

  But it is possible that Eisenhower did no greater damage than when he decided that Joseph McCarthy was getting to be too much trouble. Indeed, the mythology of the New Deal pales in comparison to the lies and misrepresentations that have grown up around McCarthy. The way history is now presented, one might miss that there were anti-Communist Democrats like John Kennedy, or that Robert Kennedy had been a lawyer for McCarthy, made McCarthy the godfather of his eldest child (Kathleen Kennedy Townsend), and quietly attended McCarthy's funeral. Instead, Joe McCarthy is one of the most reviled men in history -- far worse than his distant adversary Joe Stalin, who was busily engaged in mass murder and, as we now know, bestowing his permission and blessing on the North Korean invasion of the South in 1950. Yet all McCarthy did, in the whole course of his brief career in the spotlight (1950-1954), was to complain about Communists and security threats in the State Department, in the Army, and in some other Federal programs -- for instance, why Communist authors were prominently featured in American Information Libraries overseas. And he was quite right about all of it, as we now know both from declassified American documents and from the access to Soviet records that historians briefly had in the 1990's.

  McCarthy was popular and helped Eisenhower get elected in 1952. When he became a public figure in 1950, he exercised no power in the Democratically controlled Congress. The Democrats kept investigating and smearing him because of his (true) accusations about the State Department. With the Republicans gaining control of the Senate in 1953, McCarthy had a little more than a year to do actual investigations -- before Eisenhower decided (in a now popular turn of phrase) to throw him under the bus. Yet part of the common mythology about McCarthy is that somehow for years the Senator had been in charge of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, that he was responsible for the blacklisting of Communists in Hollywood, and that "McCarthyism" consisted of falsely accusing people of being Communists in order to silence liberalism. None of this was true, and even the substance of the Censure of McCarthy in 1954 was simply for having been rude to members of the previous Congress -- a sanction unprecedented in American history. No other charges against him could be maintained to any standard liable to win a vote in the Senate, even among Democrats.

  Yet now everyone "knows" that the Censure was for persecuting innocent people with false charges, especially those gifted and honest (Communists) in Hollywood. On a recent anniversary of the censure vote, an anchor on Fox News (Shepard Smith), supposedly the cat's paw of Conservativism, announced that McCarthy had "ruined the lives of hundreds of people". This was hardly possible in the brief period when McCarthy had any real power [note]. A recent McCarthy scholar enjoys statements like this at his lectures, because he then asks the audience, "Name one." Respondents, if they can name anyone, characteristically name people who had nothing to do with McCarthy (e.g. the Communist Dalton Trumbo) or people who, from available evidence, almost certainly actually were Communists (e.g. Annie Lee Moss). The iconic American writer Dashiell Hammett, who was quite openly a Communist, did appear before McCarthy's committee (as a Communist author) but avoided trouble by taking the Fifth Amendment -- he had previously gone to jail for simply refusing to answer questions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

  Having laid the groundwork for this mythology, we might ask what benefit Eisenhower derived from it. Well, the Democrats won Congress back in 1954 and kept control of all or half of it for the next 40 years. And children are taught in American schools that to be a dissimulating and treasonous agent of totalitarian tyranny and mass murder -- which is what members of the Communist Party were -- is morally laudable and politically exemplary. It is perhaps no surprise then that in 2009, twenty years after the collapse of Communism, socialist economics and totalitarian politics are more threatening and popular in the United States than ever. And after the eloquence of Ronald Reagan, the "Great Communicator," the Republicans have been unable to provide better Presidents than the inarticulate and uninspiring two Bushes -- who both began their Presidencies with oblique swipes at Reagan (the "kinder and gentler nation" and "compassionate conservatism") and who governed through constant (thankless) compromises with Democrats. The Bushes both proved to be the kind of "Country Club" Republicans, going along out of good manners, that all too easily become RINO's, "Republicans in Name Only," and then perhaps, like the despicable Arlen Spector, open Big Government Democrats.

  Every Republican defeat, as in 2008, results in advice from Democrats and RINO's that the Republicans have been too extreme and Conservative. General Colin Powell, an appealing person but politically inept, announced after the election that the American people wanted bigger government and higher taxes and, of course, the Republicans were running people who were too Conservative and ideological. This was a bizarre thing for him to say after the Republican Presidential candidate in 2008 was John McCain, a Senator who had been collaborating with Democrats and thumbing his nose at Conservatives for years. McCain was supposedly just the kind of Republican that Democrats could vote for. But, of course, they didn't. To be the Republican endorsed by the New York Times was all part of a con by the Democrats. McCain was so disliked by Conservatives that when Arlen Spector jumped parties, Rush Limbaugh exclaimed, "Take McCain (and his daughter) with you!" McCain's daughter Meghan, as it happened, someone who had previously registered as an Independent, had joined Colin Powell with the "too Conservative" complaint -- making her a darling of the Media. Meanwhile, McCain accompanied Democrat Russell Feingold to the Supreme Court on 9/9/09 to defend their Campaign Finance "Reform" bill. The "McCain-Feingold" bill violates the First Amendment, and McCain still does not seem to understand that he has handed the Democrats something they want more than anything:  the ability to silence political opposition.

  Not only do Republicans often lack the courage of their convictions, but they are often so disloyal that their collaboration with Democrats serves to directly maintain Democrat power. Stunning examples of this (apart from the obvious, like Colin Powell and former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan endorsing Barack Obama -- as Riordan had previously endorsed Democrat U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein) have occurred in California. In 1994 Republicans gained a bare majority in the California State Assembly. Nevertheless, the Democrat Speaker, Willie Brown, held onto his position by suborning one Republican after another, three in all, to vote for him. As the disloyal Republican would lose a recall election, Brown would move on to the next one. This continued almost all the way to the next general election in 1996, when the Republicans lost their majority anyway (and Brown was term-limited out). Democrats are very rarely so disloyal, and it is still hard to believe that these Republicans could have been so, especially in the face of certain electoral suicide. It is still not clear what incentives or threats were offered to them, or what they thought they were doing. It almost looks like they were Democrat sleeper agents who ran as Republicans just for such an eventuality as this.

  Nevertheless, other examples of the sort have happened again in 2009. Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, having given up on early efforts at reform, began collaborating with the Democrats on spending and taxing. As spending went up, Democrat policies were also wrecking the economy, which meant that tax revenues have sunk steadily. With a two-thirds rule in the State Assembly for tax increases, they were not going to get passed without some Republican votes. The Republicans caved in, evidently as the result of a deal where particular Republican Assemblymen agreed to take the heat as long as they retained the support of the Party. This then became public. With recall elections now in the works (as against Anthony Adams), the support of the Party may not be enough. Meanwhile, the betrayals by Schwarzenegger and the Party to the Democrat big government conspiracy led to a special election in May 2009, where the Governor and Legislature tried to get voters to agree on several bogus "reform" measures that would lock in tax increases. Voters slammed them down hard, resulting in whining editorials from liberal newspapers about how California voters don't know what is good for them. The whole experience, however, leaves the Republicans discredited and in disarray as a genuine Opposition to the Democrats.

  More public and spectacular on the national scene has been the 2009 election in 23th Congressional District of New York. The moderate Republican incumbent was appointed to an office in the Obama Administration, so there was a special election to fill the seat. The New York Republican establishment, behind closed doors, decided to run State Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, whose voting record, according to the Wall Street Journal (11/2/2009), was "to the left of many Democrats." She was then endorsed by Newt Gingrich and other establishment Republicans; but the Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman, was endorsed by Conservatives, like Sarah Palin. It soon became clear that Hoffman would split the Republican vote and Scozzafava could not win. She dropped out of the race. But did she endorse Hoffman? Oh no. She endorsed the Democrat! According to Rush Limbaugh, this exposes the RINO's for what they really are -- Democrats. Scozzafava has behaved exactly like a sleeper agent or a double agent for the Democrat Party. When the Democrats in Congress are ready to pass socialized medicine and other outrages, this is the most despicable stab-in-the-back disloyalty since Arlen Spector. Since the Democrat then won the seat (for the first time in a century, even while Republicans won the governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia), Scozzafava perhaps can hope for some kind of Red Star commendation from the Democrats for her disloyalty.

  When Republicans do demonstrate the courage of their convictions, they often choose the wrong convictions and, like Libertarians, adopt pointless, Quixotic causes. Thus, for a few years many Conservatives have decided that their ultimate enemy is Charles Darwin. Although many Americans have religious reasons for not believing in Evolution by Natural Selection, and they are natural Republican constituents, the cause makes them look like fools to anyone properly informed about science. Nor has it even been shown to be any help in actual elections. Nevertheless, Ben Stein, otherwise a charming, appealing, and smart guy, wasted millions of dollars to make a movie promoting the "Intelligent Design" anti-evolution hoax. Weren't there any leftist documentary makers to refute? Like, say, Michael Moore? Al Gore? Couldn't Ben have shown us what the medical system is really like in Canada, Britain, or, for heaven's sake, Cuba? Apparently not.

  Despite this foolishness, the religious and socially conservative side of the Republican Party, although demonized by Democrats as the "religious Right," appeals to many Democrat voters. There was an astonishing demonstration of this in the 2008 election. The Democrats won California by a landslide at both State and National levels, yet Proposition 8, which overturned the California Supreme Court's establishment of gay marriage, won with some ease. And its margin of victory was largely due to the black vote, which otherwise went for Barack Obama by 96%. The next day, demonstrating gay activists were actually using the "N" word against black bystanders -- before activist leaders wisely directed everyone to attack Mormons instead. Something of the sort with gay marriage had happened a while back in Hawaii, which has been more or less a One Party State for the Democrats. The Hawaii Supreme Court instituted gay marriage, but then they were overturned by popular vote with a Constitutional Amendment.

  I have little sympathy for the causes of social conservatives, except where they object to efforts to silence religious expression in public spaces, or to the public funding of abortion. Otherwise, I might even vote for Democrats, as I used to before 1992, on issues like abortion (privately funded), gay marriage, drug legalization, prostitution, pornography, etc. Indeed, although I respect pro-life arguments, it has annoyed me to find pro-lifers in the Libertarian Party. I think it is appropriate that Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican Congressman, who is against abortion, is now in fact a Republican. However, I think that there is actually enough public support for social conservative causes, even among hard core Democrat constituencies, like black and Hispanic voters, that the Republicans are not really at a disadvantage with them on these issues. In other words, the Republicans do not fail with such voters (as they do with me) because of their social conservatism. Republicans fail with such voters because they are unable to properly articulate the truth about economics, government, and liberty, where the collectivist Democrats are only persuasive through sophistry, ignorance, and lies. I think the Republicans hope that they can win these Democrat voters with a socially conservative message -- and that is possible (it has won a few black social conservatives, like Alan Keyes or Armstrong Williams) -- but it looks more like these voters cannot be won over as long as they believe leftist Democrat propaganda on economics, civil rights, and government. That is just where Republican politicians, since Reagan, have done the worst job getting out their message. The best that can be said for the tongue-tied, unprincipled, and often feckless Bushes is that, at any rate, they were still better than Democrats. The "hog wild" spending of the Republican Congress, so outrageous and disillusioning at the time, suddenly looks like small potatoes now that the Democrats have gotten going. Never have we heard so much so quickly about "trillions" of dollars.

  In one key area the social conservatism of Republicans undermines a principle that otherwise should be a matter of prime commitment for them. The issue concerns the drug laws. All Federal laws prohibiting certain drugs are unconstitutional. This used to be well understood. When Congress wanted to prohibit opium in 1913 or marijuana and cocaine in the 1930's, they wrote the bills as tax laws (Catch 22 laws where it was impossible to legally pay the tax -- laws whose dishonesty raises a different question), since it was universally believed that the Federal Government did not have the authority to simply prohibit some kind of drug. The Supreme Court had ruled the opium law Constitutional on the grounds that it was a tax law. The prohibition of alcohol was effected by a Constitutional Amendment (the 18th, repealed by the 21st Amendment). Nevertheless, by the 1960's, the use of the Commerce Clause to regulate all activities that might "affect" commerce, led to the idea that the Federal Government had the authority to pass laws about anything -- since anything could be construed to "affect" commerce in some way. This was actually the end of Constitutional Government, since it meant that the Federal Government was no longer a government of limited and enumerated powers but a government of absolute and unlimited powers.

  Republicans were therefore faced with the unenviable choice between Constitutional Government and their own conservative, paternalistic desire, so clear with alcohol Prohibition, to protect people from their own vices. Their choice, of course, has almost universally been to go along, as in so many other things, with the Democrats, scrap the Constitution, and take credit for drug prohibition. Some conservatives, like William Bennett, have even made the absurd argument that alcohol Prohibition was actually successful. Since much of the public, thanks to years of propaganda from the Democrats and their subsidiaries, public education, the press, and the intelligentsia, no longer has much understanding or sympathy for the principles of limited government, the Republicans may actually be taking the more politically popular position. Indulging their socially conservative sympathies and constituents, however, means that Republicans, in all too typical a fashion, have abandoned any principled support of Constitutional Government. In 1996, Republican Presidential candidate Bob Dole got the idea to wave a copy of the 10th Amendment around at campaign appearances, indicating his support of the principle of a limited Federal Government. Unfortunately, this was about the first time that such a principle seemed to have occurred to him, since there was little he could point to in his legislative career that would testify to any awareness of it. In its own way, this was the perfect Republican moment, summing up their abandonment of Constitutional principle, their opportunistic me-to-ism of going along with the tyranny of the Democrats, and their (unwelcome to me) social conservatism.

  ---

  Republican Developments in 2010

  The political season of 2010 has produced some striking developments. Respectable, incumbent Republicans have lost their own primaries. Utah Senator Bob Bennett was rejected by his Party voters in May. Charlie Crist, the Republican governor of Florida, decided to run for the Senate, but it became clear that Marco Rubio would win the Republican nomination. While Bennett seems to have taken his loss in good grace, Crist decided to run for the senate anyway as an independent, creating the danger of splitting the conservative vote and throwing the election to the Democrat. This kind of betrayal and disloyalty had already been seen in the case of Dede Scozzafava, but Crist is a much higher profile figure. Soon before the election the story has broken that Crist was working on a deal with Bill Clinton to get the Democrat nominee, Kendrick B. Meek, to drop out, with Crist's promise that, if elected, he will caucus with the Democrats! Clinton seems to have confirmed this story, where betrayal is loaded on betrayal -- the betrayal of both Republican and Democrat voters who expressed their preferences in their primaries. Mr. Meek, however, although considering the deal, did not go for it.

  Crist would not remain alone in his disloyalty and selfishness. Republican Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski lost her primary in August to Joe Miller, who had been endorsed by Sarah Palin. Now, Senator Murkowski had originally been appointed to the Senate by her father, Governor Frank Murkowski, who lost his own gubernatorial primary in 2006 -- to Sarah Palin. There therefore seems to be all sort of bad blood mixed up in this business, and Murkowski decided to launch a write-in campaign to try and retain her Senate seat. Altough given little chance of success, this again threatens to divide the Republican vote and throw the election to the Democrats -- although it may turn out that Murkowski takes more votes away from the Democrat than from Miller.

  Although involving no incumbents, the primary for Governor of New York was equally upsetting to the Establishment. Republican businessman Carl Paladino, endorsed by the Tea Party, defeated Republican insider Rick Lazio. When Paladino said that he would take, not a broom, but a baseball bat to the job of cleaning things up in Albany, Democrat nominee Andrew Cuomo complained that this insulted the dignity of State government! So we certainly know where loyalties lie in the New York Governor's race. Cuomo is the son of former Democrat New York Governor (and Grand Old Democrat) Mario Cuomo and is married to Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert Kennedy. This is the Democrat Establishment in spades. Nevertheless, the polls in New York make it look like Cuomo will win -- like the dinosaur Jerry Brown in California -- which simply means that Democrat voters are more brain dead than even I would have given them credit for.

  Meanwhile, Arlen Spector, who, as we have seen, saw the handwriting on the wall back in 2008, that he had little chance against likely Republican challenger Pat Toomey, and simply jumped over to the Democratic Party. After this bit of opportunism, he ended up losing the Democratic primary to Joe Sestak! A great Sestak campaign bit was that Spector had changed Party "to save one job, and it wasn't yours." But I have not heard that Spector plans his own independent or write-in campaign. Heaven forbid that he should split the Democrat vote!

  No primary, however, seemed to generate greater repercussions than did the Republican Senate race in Delaware. The Establishment Republican candidate was Congessman Mike Castle. However, in September he lost decisively to political newcomer and unknown Christine O'Donnell, who had been endorsed by the Tea Party movement. Few gave her a chance of winning the general election -- as the Democrat has been helped when local television "forgot" to run O'Donnell's ads the weekend before the election! -- and her nomination set off considerable tut-tutting by Republican insiders and commentators like Karl Rove and Charles Krauthammer, who chided Republican voters for nominating a weak, ideological candidate.

  The sin, of course, is not in the voters but in the Republican Establishment, which has continued to support RINO's, the way Newt Gingrich endorsed Dede Scozzafava. Mike Castle had been voting with the Democrats again and again; and when he lost his primary, instead of immediately offering the traditional congratulations to O'Donnell, he received commiserating phone calls from Joe Biden and Barack Obama. One may certainly be forgiven for thinking that this reveals where his real sympathies lay. Voters throwing out Bennett, Crist, Murkowski, and Castle were simply saying that they were tired of voting for Democrats under the false colors of Republicans. If Rove or Krauthammer don't like that, they better see to it that loyal and proper Republicans are put forward by the Party.

  A considerable irony here is that Tea Party activists had previously been chided for considering the possibility of becoming a Third Party and challenging both Republicans and Democrats. This, we were told, would only split the conservative and/or liberatarian vote and give the Democrats the chance to win again with an electoral minority. Now we see how self-serving, for some, this argument was. When the Tea Party candidates win fair and square in the primaries, doing what the Republican Establishment preferred them to do, well then, it's all right for the losers to make up their own Third Party and split the vote that way! The likes of Crist and Murkowski do not receive nearly the degree of contempt from the commentators that they deserve and are not chided in nearly the same tones as the Tea Party for the help they may deliver to the Democrats.

  I don't know if the Tea Party favorites will get elected, and I'm not happy with the social conservatism of some of them; but the criticism that the Tea Party candidates are "unelectable" rebounds on the Republican Establishment in the sense that the Establishment is responsible for supporting candidates like Scozzafava, Castle, etc., who are largely indistinguishable from the Democrats. Republican voters are sick of it. A faithless Republican Congress, with its spending and "earmarks" (i.e. pork barrel corruption), is just what set things up for the Democrat victories in 2006 and 2008. The Democrats, of course, have proven themselves worse, but the behavior of the Republicans put them in the wrong. So if the Republican Party wants "electable" candidates, they better stop with the RINO's.

  Meanwhile, the Democrats are put off their game. At first they wanted to think that the Tea Party was a cat's paw of the Republican Party -- "astroturf" instead of genuine "grass roots" to Nancy Pelosi (takes one to know one?). When it became undeniable that the Tea Party was as angry with the Republican Establishment as with the Democrats, then Democrats decided to smear them as racists, Klansmen, lunatics, extremists, etc. When the press discovered that Christine O'Donnell had said that she dabbled in witchcraft as a teenager, the Democrats exulted -- even though one would think that "Wiccan" voters would be a natural Democrat constituency. Conservative Christians worried about Satanism would be unlike to vote for Democrats anyway. But in general, since most Tea Partiers are pretty ordinary folk, as Bill O'Reilly would say, the Democrats just ended insulting and putting off a great many mainstream and independent voters.

  So the Democrats can only take comfort from their natural allies, the RINO's. After long propaganda campaigns that the Republican Party was run by Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck (both in fact long disillusioned with the Establishment), the Democrats now discover that these radicals are not real Republicans after all. Just as the Democrats helped, in their own way, John McCain get the Republican nomination for President in 2008, they now work, in their own way, to help the RINO's. They know their friends. Hence their contempt and spleen for Sarah Palin, who inadvertently was launched as a national figure by McCain, but who has been an anti-Establishment conservative her whole political career. This threatens the Democrats like nothing else, and we can tell from the devel of their contempt -- the mask of their fear.

  ---

  Republican Developments in 2012

  In 2012 the Republican Establishment once again demonstrated its seeming determination to fulfill the historic role of being a punching bag for the Democrats. The 2010 promise of the Tea Party not only failed to materialize but was itself damaged by the adherence or infiltration of social conservatives whose clumsiness and idiocy played into the hands both of the Democrats and of the Republican Establishment. Although the Republicans retained control of the House of Representatives, certainly as a result of continued Tea Party momentum, Speaker John Boehner kicked some Tea Party Congressmen out of their House positions and denied that there was a (significant?) Tea Party Caucus in the House.

  Boehner, like a lot of Democrats, wanted to blame the electoral defeat of Mitt Romney on the "extremism" evident in the Tea Party. However, Mitt Romney was himself a classic Establishment, Moderate, Country Club (literally) Republican candidate, and he justly had no one to blame for his electoral defeat apart from himself. Although appearing to be a pleasing and well spoken person and candidate, Romney not only demonstrated little in the way of drive, passion, or conviction, but he was unable to articulate the defense of a free market economy and limited government or to formulate telling criticisms of the Democrats. Like John McCain before him, he snubbed invitations to appear on shows like the "O'Reilly Factor," even the weekend before the election, and, like McCain again, didn't allow his Vice Presidential candidate (Paul Ryan) appear on the show either. Since O'Reilly draws a large audience and can be expected generally to be sympathetic to Romney, it is hard to understand what Romney thought he was doing. Either he thought that he didn't need to appear on the show, which is incredible, or he did not trust himself to face the kinds of questions that O'Reilly asks. Listening to even one speech by Ronald Reagan, one realizes that in comparison to the current batch of Republicans, Reagan's power as the "Great Communicator" not only put him in a different class of speaker, but he might as well have been Demosthenes.

  Mrs. Ann Romney told reporters after the Republican National Convention that the goal of the Convention was to demonstrate that, "We are not mean." This was pathetic. The goal of the Convention should have been to demonstrate that the Democrats are mean; and the defensiveness and cluelessness evident in Romney's remark was the equivalent of a "kick me" sign on Mitt Romney's back. And he was not the one to turn anything of the sort around. Instead, after the poor performance of Barack Obama in the first Presidential debate, to the open consternation of all Democrats and liberals, Mitt Romney behaved like a shark that, with blood in the water, decided to become a vegetarian. As with John McCain four years earlier, he showed himself to be the kind of Republican that Democrats were always saying they wanted Republicans to be like, but then of course would never vote for. Afterwards, of course, the Democrats talked about Romney as though he had been Sarah Palin.

  It was evident from the Republican primaries that a lot of Republican voters were eager for alternatives to Romney. Every time a new candidate entered the race, they would briefly surge ahead of Romney in the polls -- until some gaff or embarrassment would take them out of the race. Thus, at different times Republicans looked to Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum; and each time there was a kind of feeling in the air that the Party was about to be rescued from Romney. But each promise failed; and other Republicans, who then and now looked like good candidates for 2016, stayed out of the race. Why each challenger failed is itself of interest. Rick Perry was at least once unable to remember his own talking points. Since the question was about which Cabinet Departments he would abolish, and he had mentioned that it would be (only) three, one would think that the environment would be so target-rich that he could easily supply three in any combination. But he could only come up with two. Despite his success as Governor of Texas, and the success of Texas itself, Perry thus reinforced the stereotype of the stupidity of Republicans.

  Herman Cain, as a successful, articulate, and aggressive black businessman, deeply frightened the Democrats. From their bag of tricks they produced the sort of thing familiar from the treatment of Clarence Thomas, namely old charges of sexual harrassment. Having hanged black men during Segregation, often for bogus rape charges, Democrats now are content to smear their political prospects with harrassment charges. The cases had all been settled, the women involved mostly seemed reluctant to say anything, and I was never clear exactly what Cain was supposed to have done. One example was him telling an employee in an elevator that she was the same height as his wife. I don't understand how that was sexual harrassment. Perhaps there were more serious charges; and in any case it was enough to drive Cain out of the race. With Cain gone, the Democrats were able to return to their favorite smear of Republicans as racists. That the Democrats had just benefited from a classic racist stereotype of black men involved the kind of irony to which they are always deaf. The comic relief of the Democratic campaign, Vice President Joe Biden, upped the racial ante by telling a black audience that Republicans wanted to put them "back in chains." The Republicans, being Republicans, never thought to respond that the Democrats had already put black Americans back in chains. Obama had certainly done nothing to help black unemployment, or to improve black education (consenting instead to their continued use as hostages to the teachers unions in public schools), yet he continued to get away all his failures. Food stamps and free cell-phones seemed to be enough to win the black vote -- confirming the motto of the Democratic Party, "There's a sucker born every minute."

  Newt Gingrich could usually not be accused of stupidity, and there were marvelous occasions when he was able to nail the Democrats (and the Press) with sharp, brilliant, and fierce criticism. Yet Gingrich has always been his own worst enemy, and he was undone by the erratic and eccentric nature of his ideas and behavior. Thus, Gingrich had foolishly and inexplicably done a TV public service announcement with Nancy Pelosi, of all people, warning about Global Warming. If he thought this would make the Democrats like him, he may not be very smart after all. To Republicans, Tea Partiers, conservatives, and libertarians in general, it was an appalling lapse of judgment and perhaps evidence of deeper political confusion and priorities (like his continuing praise for FDR). With other such examples, and some new gaffs, enthusiasm for Gingrich faded rapidly, although he did not leave the race.

  Then there was Rick Santorum. A major issue of the 2012 political season was the decision by the Obama Administration that some Catholic institutions, like schools and hospitals, whose purpose was not sufficiently or purely religious, would be required to provide birth control in the medical insurance they offered their employees. Since birth control is contrary to Catholic moral teaching, and it would also encompass the "morning after pill," which is an abortifacient, i.e. it induces an abortion, which is contrary to the moral convictions, not just of Catholics, of most conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews, this led to some controversy. Catholic leaders felt betrayed by the Administation, which had previously assured them of its sensitivity to Catholic scruples (and with Joe Biden claiming to be a good Catholic). The Democrats, however, immediately jumped on the Catholic and conservative response as a "war on women." If mandated health insurance does not cover birth control, we were told, this was the hateful oppression of women by taking away their right to birth control. Interviews with "women's reproductive rights" advocates and activists, however, almost always revealed their real feelings and complaints, which were simply hostility for the Catholic Church and its moral teachings.

  In the face of this sophistry and vicious antipathy, the Republican Party rose in resolution, power, and fury -- like the French at the Maginot Line. To the "war on women," the Republicans simply never countered with accusations of a Democrat "war on religion" or a "war on conscience." Not even uninhibited personalities like Rush Limbaugh thought to use these characterizations. Yet conservatives are well aware of leftists assaults on religion and have written extensively about it. And even if they thought that a "war on religion" would appeal to too narrow a base, a "war on conscience" could be made into a electric issue for anyone. The Democrats had shoved Obamacare down the country's throat, and now they wanted to make people of conscience pay for the sexual behavior of other people, to which they have moral objections. The silence on this was deafening. And absolutely inexplicable.

  Then Rick Santorum entered the lists. His response to the Democrat campaign was that maybe birth control was not such a good thing after all. This gave the Democrats a second wind:  Republicans want to take away birth control!. Since this might well have been true about Santorum, it only dug the Republicans deeper into a hole that should have been there for the Democrats, not for the Republicans at all. Meanwhile, Santorum said nothing about the government despotically forcing Catholic institutions to abjure their faith. In all this, Santorum committed so many political sins that The Wall Street Journal said he should be charged with political malpractice. The worse sin, of course, was that he was saying irrelevant things that were off message -- if the proper message was that the government was forcing Catholics to do something contrary to their moral convictions. So perhaps he didn't understand what the message should have been. At the same time, the message that he did offer was going to be popular with very few Americans -- even most Catholics have no inhibitions about using birth control -- while at the same time playing right into the propaganda campaign of the Democrats, that Republicans wanted to take away women's rights. The damage that Santorum did to the whole 2012 Republican political effort is incalculable. In turn, Mitt Romney, who had nothing to do with this and was not even a conservative in the same vein (despite being a Mormon), did not have a clue how to reverse the message and retrieve the issue.

  The damage of Rick Santorum's cluelessness was magnfied by more embarrassments for the Republicans. One criticism of the Tea Party in 2010 was that several of its candidates were amateurs who inspired no confidence in voters. This was particularly true of Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, who had deposed an Establishment Republican candidate, and Sharron Angle in Nevada, who was up against the nitwitted Harry Reid. Both of them had no real political experience and also seemed to have backgrounds of erratic and marginal involvements with things like witchcraft, Scientology, or fringe political movements. They seemed more perplexing than threatening, but either way they gave voters little ground for confidence. Since the Republicans nevertheless won the House of Representatives in the election, their failures seemed more like growing pains than anything else for the Tea Party movement.

  Trouble, however, was brewing for the future. The stated program of most Tea Party groups (with no national organization, leadership, or unity for the movement), was for things like (1) fiscal responsibility, (2) Constitutional government, and (3) the free market. If the Republican Establishment was not reliable or enthusiastic on such issues, there was another Republican constituency that felt equally disrespected by the Establishment, namely social conservatives. Consquently, many social conservatives decided to hop on the Tea Party bandwagon. The most conspicuous person in that respect was Sarah Palin, someone who had shown herself to have some real political aptitude and promise, but who had also embarrassed herself with demonstrations of shallow knowledge on national issues and some of the sort of amateurism evident in O'Donnell and Angle. Even so, this might not have been too damaging, if some even more amateurish social conservatives had not managed to insert themselves into key elections.

  Thus, nothing hurt the Republicans and the Tea Party so much in 2012 as the candidacy in the Senate races of Missouri and Indiana of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, respectively. Mourdock had unseated the Establishment Republican incumbent, U.S. Senator Richard Lugar. Akin was up against a vulnerable Democrat incumbent in Missouri, Claire McCaskill. Both men destroyed their own chances of election and badly damaged general Republican prospects with truly idiotic statements about rape and abortion.

  Todd Akin was the worse embarrassment. In order to show his Pro-Life bona fides, an issue that was irrelevant to his ostensible status as a Tea Party candidate, Akin ventured the opinion that we didn't need to worry about abortions as the result of rape because women did not become pregnant as the result of rape. He had been told this by a "doctor." Since it is obvious that women often become pregnant as the result of rape, Akin compounded his folly by making a distinction between "legitimate" rape, which presumably meant "real" rape, and the opposite, so that if the woman became pregnant, it must not have been "legitimate" rape. Thus, Akin managed to accuse every woman who has ever been raped and become pregnant of not having really been raped. There must have been some kind of willingness, invitation, or consent to the "rape."

  If Rick Santorum played into the hands of the Democrats, Todd Akin gave them a gift greater than any gold. This went way beyond political malpractice. The ignorance, stupidity, folly, and callousness of Akin's pronouncements gave the Democrats a brilliant and even true example of a "war on women." It was a body blow to Mitt Romney and to all Republicans and conservatives. And then, when his resignation from the campaign was demanded by all, Todd Akin had the arrogance and selfishness to refuse. Although his money was cut off, Akin stuck it out and went down to inevitable and ruinous defeat.

  This was so bad, I would not have blamed Mitt Romney if he had put out a contract, ordered a hit, and had Todd Akin killed. Indeed, he might have gained some respect from me that he never got otherwise. At least it would have shown that he understood the seriousness and outrageousness of what had happened. Desperate times call for desperate measures; and if Barack Obama can kill Terrorists with drones in Pakistan and Yemen, Mitt Romney might at least have ruthlessly taken out a man who seemed to prove true every lie of the Democrats. Akin did more than the Democrats could ever have done on their own to discredit the Republican Party, the Tea Party, and conservatives. And it sounds like he still never understood what he had done. I wouldn't blame Romney for having him killed even now, in revenge.

  The sin of Richard Mourdock was less egregious and, in comparison to Akin, was almost forgetable. Yet it was still gratuitously and irrelevantly off message and managed to hand to the Democrats a Senate seat in Indiana that they would not have had otherwise (Richard Lugar would have been relected), in a State otherwise now all but dominated by Republicans. And Mourdock got into much the same trouble for much the same reason, trying to demonstrate his Pro-Life bona fides, also in the case of rape, where it was entirely unnecessary to do so. He said:

  I believe that life begins at conception. The only exception I have to have an abortion is in that case of the life of the mother. I just struggled with it myself for a long time but I came to realize life is that gift from God that I think even if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.

  While one can understand this as a moral position, it is not something that is going to appeal to most Americans. Even Christians might reflect that God killed the baby of David and Bathsheeba in order to punish them. A rapist deserves more consideration than the King and Queen of Israel? If Mourdock thought that a Tea Party candidate should be saying such things, perhaps he should have left it to candidates like Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle, or Sarah Palin, who at least could not have been accused of hating women without some kind of cognitive dissonance. But no, the Republicans could not get women to say things that would sound foolish and unpopular, they had to be stuck with a couple of men, Akin and Mourdock, who were perfectly willing to fuel the Democrat narrative -- which is more or less that there aren't any women (or perhaps "legitimate" women) in the Republican Party, the Tea Party, or the Pro-Life movement.

  So Mitt Romney, undone and defeated by nonsense like this, and demonstrating no aptitude as a spokesman for capitalism, freedom, or limited government, went down to defeat. Yet fewer people voted for Obama than did in 2008. At the same time, fewer Republicans voted for Romney than did for John McCain in 2008. He was that bad as a candidate; for, despite the embarrassments just recounted, he also had multiple opportunities handed to him, of which he did not take advantage. Nevertheless, proper Tea Party candidates, like Ted Cruz in Texas, won election; and the Party miraculously held on to the House of Representatives, even if John Boehner then dismissed the significance of Tea Party Members. But since the election it has been Tea Party favorites, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz, who have generated all the Republican heat. And Paul is actually a libertarian.

  Just as disturbing as Romney's failures as a personality was the incompetence demonstrated in his campaign. The Republicans bought a software system to help them keep track of Republican voters and get out the vote on election day. It was not tested. And on election night, it crashed. The get-out-the-vote effort was crippled. Since Romney had been in earlier elections -- he had been elected Governor of Massachussetts -- we might have at least counted on him to be running an efficient campaign organization. No such luck. I never even heard any accusations that the Democrats had hacked and sabotaged Republican computers. Of course, they might have actually done that, but then Romney might have been too polite ever to mention it.

  And so there are lessons to learn. On the other hand, we begin to suspect that the Democrats may have succeeded in turning the federal government into something that will simply buy votes for them. The negative examples of France or Greece -- about which Mitt Romeny managed to say little -- has left many Americans unpersuaded that the Welfare State is a path to ruin. But it is. It is also, as F.A. Hayek put it, the path to serfdom -- exactly what the Democrats and socialists want. Such politics will be the ruin of the Nation, unless Republicans or Libertarians can get their act together.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!.." The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! "Jabberwocky," Lewis Carroll, 1872

---

That government of the government, by the government,
for the government, shall not perish from the earth.

---

The Democrats supported and defended slavery. They created, supported, and defended Segregation. And they created, support, and defend the Welfare State. Frankly, I don't see much difference.

Enklinobarangus ()

• 

  The Democrats, a.k.a. the Decepticons

  The Democrats are in a rage for socialism [note]. The degree of their frenzy seems to be owed in equal parts to (1) a level of self-righteousness that by comparison would make Christian fundamentalists look like libertines ready for the Playboy Mansion, and (2) simple and pure lust for power. Since the latter is a moral failing that Democrats like to charge their opponents with, part of their rage looks like a psychological defensiveness that probably reflects their sense of their own bad faith and dishonesty, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. Bad faith is evident, for instance, in the way they carefully avoid admitting that they are socialists. They know that people are aware of the meaning of socialism -- the ownership and control of everything by the government -- and that Americans especially have an immediate and visceral antipathy to that. Democrats think that if they talk about freedom (while promising free stuff) while in fact creating tyranny, they will be able to deceive enough people to get away with it. They have, indeed, been doing rather well with that strategy. And they have learned that it is possible to lie in the face of overwhelming evidence and still avoid exposure.

  [financial analyst Maria] Bartiromo did not just accept whatever Barney Frank said. She said: "With all due respect, congressman, I saw videotapes of you saying in the past: 'Oh, let's open up the lending. The housing market is fine.'" His reply? "No, you didn't see any such tapes." "I did. I saw them on TV," she said. But Barney Frank did not budge. Thomas Sowell, "Is Barney frank? In a class by himself," 19 October 2010, boldface added

  Thus, after the collapse of the mortgage and housing bubble, Congressman Barney Frank, confronted with videotape of he himself saying earlier that Federal mortgage lenders Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac were financially sound, and that only enemies of poor people and minorities were calling their financial health into question, nevertheless simply denied, in a bald-faced lie, that he had ever said any such thing. Bill O'Reilly, after showing Frank's earlier statements and receiving a similar stone-walled denial, called the Congressman a liar to his face. In terms of the response of his supporters and the public, it looks like Frank can get away with such absurd denials -- in 2010 he just won reelection again from the zombie voters in his Massachusetts district. But his defensiveness is obvious:  at a public meeting, where a student simply asked Frank if he accepted any responsibility at all for the mortgage collapse, Frank, rather than just answering "yes" (the truth) or "no" (the lie), immediately began verbally attacking the student -- as though the poor fellow were an paid agent of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (and Fox News). Nevertheless, we immediately know the Democrats for what they are when they use one of the code-words that signal their orthodoxy to the faithful. Democrats don't need to say "socialism" when they can say "social justice" (or, even better, "economic justice" or "economic democracy"), and the insiders know what that means.

  After outright transparent lies, we get the strategy of statements that are simply preposterous, but are presented in all seriousness and are apparently swallowed by loyalists and believers. A good example we see in the Wall Street Journal:

  For a laugh-out-loud moment on all of this, we recommend yesterday's performance by New York Senator Chuck Schumer on NBC's "Meet the Press." Mr. Schumer declared that "Barack Obama and we Democrats -- this is counterintuitive but true -- are really trying to get a handle on balancing the budget and we're making real efforts to do it." Counterintuitive? He said this four days after Senate Democrats lost a vote to add $250 billion to the deficit for doctor payments without any compensating spending cuts. ["The Spending Rolls On," 10/26/2009]

  The preposterous thing here is that any major Democrats, especially "Chucky" Schumer (reelected in 2010), worry in the least about balancing the budget. The only reason they ever complained about Republican spending or deficits is that they wanted to sucker people into putting them in power so they can have even greater spending and deficits. The Democrat explanation for all their failed programs is always that they didn't spend enough -- the programs were not "fully funded." Since their spending will never make their programs successful, they will, by necessity, always need greater spending. If they ever worry about paying for this, they only think about raising taxes. Indeed, when it was pointed out to Barack Obama by a reporter that revenue could be increased by cutting taxing, candidate Obama responded that "fairness" was more important than revenue. Thus, although the stock Democrat response is to deny that cutting taxes increases revenue (although one of the best examples of increased revenue is when Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, did it), Obama incautiously revealed, as he has done more than once, his real agenda -- attack wealth, attack capital, regardless of the damage it may do to all. Revenues may fall, unemployment may soar, the Nation may be impoverished; but the government, and the self-righteous Left, will prosper.

  Of course, when the Soviet Union owned everything in the country, there was no private economy to tax, and the economy still didn't work, Stalin decided it was time to kill people -- "wreckers" -- because sabotoge was the only explanation he could come up with for continued failure. The Democrats are not at that point....yet.

  A favorite rhetorical strategy of the Democrats, as with the mortgage bubble, is to introduce a policy or program and then, when it goes bad, act as though they had never done anything and/or that their program has nothing to do with what went wrong. This strategy goes back to the Depression, when the recession created by the collapse of the Stock Market, which was recovering by 1930 (unemployment was back down to 6%), was turned into a Depression by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff bill and then when the Federal Reserve allowed the banking system to collapse. This was actually the fault of Herbert Hoover and the directors of the Federal Reserve System. However, the Democrats wanted to blame it on "speculators" and on the banks themselves. Thus, when FDR came to power, what was wrong was misdiagnosed and policies were implemented, usually following in Hoover's footsteps (without any credit to Hoover, except privately), that prolonged the Depression through the rest of the decade. This failure is what the Democrats have never wanted to admit, and still will not admit. Roosevelt kept attacking business and finance until he wanted to put the country on a war footing and needed industry to manufacture war materiel. Then the anti-business rhetoric stopped and the crippling policies moderated.

  In the 2008-2009 collapse of the housing mortgage bubble, we get the same attacks on "speculators," finance, and banks, with calls for greater regulation of the credit and banking markets. We even see a version of this in Playboy magazine, in the course of a smear of the "conservative underground":

  Banks and mortgage lenders, left pretty much to their own devices after decades of deregulation, came to misbehave in a spectacular manner. They handed out mortgages to anyone. [Thomas Frank, December 2009, p.112]

  What the Democrats (and Mr. Frank) leave out is that banks, far from being left "to their own devices" by deregulation, were threatened by regulators (and Democrats) that if they did not make loans to underqualified, largely minority, borrowers, they would be subject to regulatory and legal sanctions.

  ...the recession is virtually solely a result of the federal government which, through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Bank, the threatened criminal penalties of the Community Reinvestment Act, and other efforts to deny the market, have so distorted the marketplace that literally trillions of dollars have been malinvested... When Chris Dodd and Barney Frank aren't self- righteously berating the private sector for the mistakes those two gentlemen inflicted on them, the chief cheerleader is none other than our increasingly classless president, Barack Obama. Ed Crane, President, CATO Institute, May 3, 2010

  This was backed up with tendentious statistical studies intended to show discrimination against minority borrowers. Lenders were thus coerced into making loans they would not have done otherwise. They would be accused of racial discrimination if the statistics did not show the right "diversity" balance in their lending, with all the evils of legal prosecution and bad publicity falling on them. There was a remedy for this, which was for lenders to pass on the risky mortgages, often packaging them with other securities to conceal or balance the liability. These became "toxic assets," which could be passed around like hot potatoes (with the danger that knowledge of their problems could later be used to accuse them of fraud). Insurance companies also tried to step in to protect the asset holders in case of default. However, the risk was badly calculated, and when the bubble finally burst, banks, brokers, and insurance companies all took the hit. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Federally chartered corporations that had been encouraging the lending, while soaking up many of the assets, under the protection of Democrat politicians (like Barney Frank and Maxine Waters), simply collapsed and now have been directly taken over by the government. Unfortunately, the policies that got them in trouble in the first place, risky loans, have deliberately been continued, because all the (Democrat) political pressure has been to do so. In January 2010, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been given a virtual blank check to go into unlimited debt. We are therefore going to see a new credit bubble forming. Meanwhile, the Democrats simply practice the Bart Simpson defense:  I didn't do it.

  Another area where Democrat responsibility has been deflected is in medical care. Medicare (for the old) and Medicaid (for the poor) were begun by Lyndon Johnson, with very unrealistic expectations about their cost. Of course, in Basic Economics, one learns that demand explodes for anything desirable that is offered for free. So now the programs are quickly headed for bankruptcy, even as they now only reimburse part of recipients' medical expenses (for which they need "medi-gap" insurance), while also limiting the compensation that physicians will receive for what they do -- with the result that some physicians will not treat Medicare or Medicaid patients. In Canada, where some provinces (Quebec) have simply capped the income of physicians, they often take the rest of the year off once they have hit the cap. Thus, for the most obvious economic reasons, Medicare and Medicaid can limit their costs only by price fixing -- an economic practice that then necessarily produces shortages (as, indeed, in Canada). But now enter the Modern Democrat, Barack Obama, whose argument for socialized, government run medicine is that it will reduce costs! Only in a country with a general ignorance of economics and history (the fruit of Democrat "education") could anyone actually get away with this. Indeed, I think most Americans already know that government ends up doing everything in the most wasteful and inefficient way, thanks to things like the dynamics of bureaucracies. People encounter this all too often in their own dealings with the government. The idea is simply preposterous, even if one was not aware of the dismal experience with Medicare.

  A generalized use of this "deflect the blame" strategy may be seen in an interview with Playboy magazine by the Communist Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present) shortly before his death. With images of decaying Rust Belt factories, Zinn asserted that Capitalism cannot maintain employment. This is rich. Democrats and labor unions, with obvious hostility, drive industries out of whole cities and States and then lament that "Capitalism" has failed to provide employment. No. A good example is that the laissez faire Capitalism of 1906 delivered 1.7% unemployment, the very year that Upton Sinclair's The Jungle portrayed hopeless hordes of the unemployed waiting for jobs at the meatpackers in Chicago. The real hopeless hordes of the unemployed are now in France, or Michigan, where socialism has reigned for decades. In 2008, Texas created more jobs than the whole rest of the United States put together. With no personal income tax, Texas is not famous for economically restrictive government. Thus, Texas grows, while Michigan, New York, and California shrink. The simple abandonment of large parts of Michigan cities like Detroit has been in the news lately. As we should expect, Zinn was an (Communist) ideologue who was simply blind to any actual facts or falsifying evidence.

  As the public has become alarmed about the Administration's intentions in the summer of 2009, and citizens have expressed outrage at "Town Meetings" called by Congressmen in their home districts, the response of Democrats has been curious. Their charge is that the angry citizens have been organized and planted by Republicans and Right Wing -- even Neo-Nazi -- groups. The irony and hypocrisy of this is stunning, although of a piece with the brazen arrogance of the Democrats. This is a President, after all, who is proud to have begun his career as a "Community Organizer," which means doing exactly what the Democrats are accusing the Ring Wing of doing now. Rush Limbaugh himself responded to these first accusations by saying that, even if the charges were true (which they weren't), "It's about damn time." The Democrats are the masters of the rent-a-mob, calling out often disruptive and violent protesters from organizations like the SEIU (the Service Employees International Union) and ACORN (the "Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now," which once asked to be exempt from minimum wage laws because, duh, they wanted to hire more people than they would be able to otherwise). The conceit of the Democrats is always that their protestors, whom Obama has now explicitly called to mobilize and attend these public meetings (when Democrat politicians will still actually hold them), show the spontaneous Uprising of the People, while their opponents can only be paid mercenaries (as with Barbara Boxer charging that the anti-socialism protestors were "too well dressed" -- obviously suits from the drug companies or insurance companies). Now we hear that Union members ("goons"? "thugs"?) have been threatening and strong-arming citizens who show up at the public fora. Democrats simply cannot believe, or don't care, that their promotion of socialism will evoke a genuine visceral and spontaneous reaction from Americans. They are also absurdly and hypocritically shocked and outraged that people should portray Obama or the Democrats as Nazis or Fascists ("We can't allow this incivil discourse!"), when we heard no such cautions for all the years that George W. Bush was portrayed as a Fascist, Nazi, or Adolf Hitler himself. The grotesque conceit seems be that, well, smearing Bush was true, while labeling Obama the same way is an intolerable misrepresentation, outside reasonable political speech! [note]

  What has happened to the Democrats is that they have become the Party of Government, where all of their purposes are to promote the interests of Government, as opposed to the interests of citizens. You can spot this when Democrats say "We are the government," meaning that the interests of government and citizens cannot possibly diverge. But then we see the divergence in action when Democrat policy protects and expands the power and privileges of politicians, in the first place (hence their opposition to term limits, usually quite popular with voters), of public employees (hence the support of Public Employee and Teachers Unions for the Democrats), and of people dependent on the government -- hence Democrat support for welfare, protectionism, corporate welfare, and the other spawn of rent seeking (e.g. the Trial Lawyers). Democrats want us to think that only Republicans promote corporate welfare, but we have recently seen their participation in that form of corruption in the corporate bailouts of 2009 -- and they have all but institutionalized corporate welfare for the corn lobby in subsidies and mandates for ethanol (e.g. the Archer Daniels Midland Company). The logical goal of Democrat politics would be to put all business under the control of the government, a goal now achieved with General Motors, and to render all citizens into helpless peons who receive all goods and favors from politicians. Political enemies thus can be immediately deprived of jobs, housing, medical care, etc., as in the Soviet Union.

  This danger was foreseen by John Locke:

  But in Governments, where the Legislative is in one lasting Assembly always in being, or in one Man, as in Absolute Monarchies, there is danger still, that they will think themselves to have a distinct interest, from the rest of the Community; and so will be apt to increase their own Riches and Power, by taking, what they think fit, from the People. ["The Second Treatise, of Civil Government," in Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett, Cambridge University Press, 1960, 1988, §138, boldface added]

  "A distinct interest" is now the whole story of Democrat politics. It is thus not surprising that one of the brainstorms of Democrat politicians is the "full time" legislature. This was accomplished in California under Democrat Party boss Jesse Unruh (d.1987). The idea was to create a "professional" body of law-makers, who would then, of course, be all the better and wiser for it. Now, of course, California is close to financial collapse, hemorrhaging jobs and businesses, while Texas, where the legislature only meets for five months every two years, has a budget surplus, with more jobs created there in 2008 than in the whole rest of the country put together. Texas, in short, is America, while California is a France wanna-be.

  After the lessons of history and economics, it is now impossible to be a socialist except out of ignorance or dishonesty. Deception, dissimulation, and dishonesty have been the bedrock of leftist politics for decades. If Communists in the '40's and '50's had publicly admitted they were Communists, all the mythology of "red-baiting" and "witch hunts" would have evaporated. If Alger Hiss had admitted he was spying for the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, decades of anti-anti-Communist rhetoric never could have happened. If Barack Obama admitted that he wants a "single payer" government medical system, and that the "reform" of the Democrats is designed to drive insurance companies out of the medical insurance business, the debate over "reform" would be a lot clearer. Obama denies this is what he wants, but then, like Barney Frank, he is on audio and video telling audiences not along ago that this is exactly what he wants and intends to do. Thus, it is not enough for the Democrats to be dishonest. They must rely on the ignorance of the public to get away with it.

  On the other hand, ignorance, unfortunately, is now the stock-in-trade of American education, at all levels -- as the Democrats and the leftist allies of the Democrats have seized the educational institutions -- from the worthless Schools of Education, to the accreditation agencies, to the professional societies (the Modern Language Association, the MLA, may be the worst), to the administrations and faculty of the schools themselves. The higher the education, the purer the Marxism and Leninism, although leftist anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism infuse all levels of education. One way this could happen is that most college students who go into education major in "education" rather than in any real disciplines. What they pick up otherwise is from the humanities, rather than the sciences, and they soon discover that courses, for instance, in English departments have little to do with literature and language and much to do, like Sociology and now History departments, with political propaganda.

  It usually doesn't matter how good the Economics department in a college may be, students get their economics in the form of "English Department Marxism," from professors who have no real education in economics, and usually even no rigorous philosophical education in Marxism (but may be active in the MLA). They get it all secondhand from "Theory," a cheap pastiche of Marx, Nietzsche, deconstruction, and other nihilistic knock-offs. Marx and Nietzsche, although sharing few values in common, nevertheless make a heady combined brew where everything is analyzed and explained in terms of power. There is no truth, knowledge, goodness, etc., simply power -- as Lord Voldemort says, "There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it" [Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling, Scholastic Inc., 1999, p.291]. The goal of leftist and Democrat politics then is to gain power by any means necessary.

  As "tenured radicals" have come to dominate academia, the press, and the intelligentsia, a major conceit of leftist and Democrat politics is how smart they all are. In turn, the common theme of trendy humor and opinion is how stupid Republicans are, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. After the Democrats took Congress in 2006, however, the American public has had a good chance to see a lot of Democrat politicians in action. What seems obvious about the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, or Barney Frank, then, is that they are just idiots. They make George W. Bush look like Albert Einstein. They will say anything just because they want it to be true, however absurd or incoherent it may be.

  The Democrats do believe that there are some smart Republicans, and their reaction makes it easy to detect such belief. Since the Democrats don't believe that Presidents like Ronald Reagan or the Bushes are smart, they suspect that there is some demonic and Svengali-like figure in the background pulling the strings. We learn of this from the vitriol of Democrat attacks. Actually, the people that the Democrats identify and attack often are Republican strategists who have hard-ball political skills that may be the equal of the Democrats. Of course, this is what makes them particularly threatening and motivates the Democrats, not just to identify and attack them, but to hope to eliminate them through smear campaigns or association with some kind of wrong doing. A good example of their approach began with Lee Atwater (d.1991), an advisor to Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In fact, Atwater's premature and sudden death from cancer may have removed Bush the Elder's anchor to political reality. Compromising with the Democrats and breaking his "no new taxes" pledge cost Bush his reelection, despite the great spike in his popularity over the successul liberation of Kuwait. It is inconceivable that Atwater would not have warned Bush away from his follies. George W. Bush, the Younger, then consistently benefited from the advice of Karl Rove. Guiding Bush through election and successful re-election, Rove earned an unprecedently level of spite and hatred from the Democrats. They also had reason to hope that they could entangle him in the bogus Valerie Plame affair. Although the Special Prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, determined quite early that no laws had been broken, he continued his investigation anyway. Since in this case, as in others, the investigation itself can generate offenses, if the testimony of anyone can be construed to involve lies (it is an offense to lie to Federal agents, whether one is under oath or not), one suspects that Fitzgerald maliciously continued on in the hope of bagging someone with such a complaint. Hopes were high among Democrats that Fitzgerald could snag Rove, and Rove worried about that himself. However, Fitzgerald could only make a case against another Bush adviser, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Libby was actually tried and convicted over conflicting testimony about conversations that no one at the time would have had any reason to remember. Bush then commuted his sentence but didn't pardon him, leaving Libby with a felony conviction. This was no tribute to Bush's courage. Rove meanwhile had moved over to Fox News, making him a public figure the way he had not been previously. As it happened, neither the Democrats nor the public noticed any sensible political adviser behind John McCain's clumsy campaign of 2008.

  On January 5th, 2010, we got a good example of shamelessly obvious falsehoods, again, from the Democrats. CSPAN had taken the unusual step of asking that the conference committee negotiations over the House and the Senate "Health Care" bills be broadcast. Something of the sort had actually been an Obama campaign promise. At a press conference, in the act of refusing to broadcast the negotiations, Nancy Pelosi said that "There has never been a more open process for any legislation." For a "process" that involved committee votes on bills that had not even been printed or offered yet, 2000 and 2700 page bills that were published only a couple of days before floor votes were scheduled, obviously with the intention of making it difficult for people to discover what was in the bills before the votes (and there were some remarkable bits of tyranny and corruption included), and with back room deals to buy votes with special exemptions from taxes (especially for Louisiana and Nebraska), it took remarkable gall for Pelosi to call the business an "open process." But the Democrats have at hand unlimited gall. Thomas Jefferson wrote, "If once they ['our people'] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves." But the Democrats often count on the public being "inattentive to the public affairs." It is impossible that Pelosi could expect people to believe her statement without relying on them to not know what had been going on [note].

  Meanwhile, most academic leftists are unable to write intelligible sentences. They load them with a specialized jargon, in the tradition of Hegel and Marx, in a way that provides a substitute for any real thought, and they expect people to regard this as profound. Usually the public never hears examples of it, which is fine, since academics only need to impress other academics. But if one reads this stuff with the understanding that it is all about the promotion of naked power, its mysteries usually become obvious enough.

  My first political memory is of my aunt telling my mother that someone had vandalized her "I Like Ike" bumper sticker while she was parked at the beach. That must have been in 1956. Unfortunately, this sort of thing has turned out to be all too characteristic of the shameless conduct of Democrats and the Left. Schools for such acts are, indeed, American universities, where theft, vandalism, disruptions, and even assaults are generally tolerated by administrators, as long as the targets are conservatives or libertarians. Far more outrage is expressed over outrages by the Right, which not uncommonly turn out to have been faked by Leftist radicals, just so that La Raza, etc., can have something to scream "racism" about. Enklinobarangus ()

  And when it comes to power, the Democrats know their hardball. This is where, to be sure, they make the Republicans (except the occasional Atwater and Rove) look stupid. Everyone knows about Democrat political machines, whether historically in New York or Kansas City, or with a long tradition in Chicago; and many people know about the Democrats stealing elections, including the 1960 election, where Illinois and Texas went for John Kennedy just because Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, and Duval County, Texas, cooked up enough votes to swing the States. (Richard M. Daley, J's son, has been Mayor of Chicago since 1989.) What is different now is the open and shameless way in which the Democrats have learned to do it. As with Barney Frank on the mortgage collapse, they've discovered that the more open and outrageous the lie, the better the chance they may have of brazening it out. It is an infantile attitude, but they have discovered its usefulness. This may have started in 2000. The election was close, and the outcome would be determined by Florida, where the vote itself was very close. The strategy was adopted of successive recounts. With each recount more Republican votes could be disqualified and more Democratic votes "discovered." This was done so openly that in one news report, the vote counter held up a ballot that had no vote for President and said it would be counted as a Democrat vote because the other votes were for Democrats. There was a furor that the computer card punch ballots were unfair because people didn't check whether the "chad," the small piece punched out, had actually come out and detached. The implication seemed to be that the Democrat voters, being stupider (the opposite of the usual conceit), were more strongly affected by this. The result, however, was that vote counters could make subjective judgments about votes that, obviously, the vote counting machines would not have done.

  As the Florida Supreme Court was going to allow endless recounting in the whole State, contrary to all State and Federal law, the United States Supreme Court stepped in and stopped the farce. The Democrats, having brazened out their own attempt to steal the election, then began screaming that the Republicans had stolen the election. This went on for years -- even until today. Meanwhile, the Democrats have perfected their strategy and have now stolen two major elections. In 2004 the Republican Dino Rossi won the Governor's race in Washington State by a small margin. The Democrats then began endless recounts, especially in urban districts with Democrat officials, until the Democrat, Christine Gregoire, moved ahead and could be proclaimed the winner.

  The next case would be of greater national significance. In 2008, Minnesota Republican Senator Norm Coleman won his race by 725 votes. After eight months of recounts and challenges, Democrat comedian Al Franken ("Stuart Smalley") was credited with a victory by 312 votes. Perhaps an all too typical Republican (i.e. a chump), Coleman, instead of appealing to Federal Courts, conceded defeat, as Richard Nixon had in 1960. The result was firm Democrat control of the United States Senate, enabling them to pass national socialist medicine, or whatever else they want, and override all opposition -- until Ted Kennedy died and Republican Scott Brown won the Senate race for a replacement, to the astonishment of the Nation, in January 2010. Massa-clue-less voters had suddenly wised up.

  It is remarkable to me that people in a democracy would want to steal elections, but I have no doubt that the Democrats are willing to do this, as historically they often have. Indeed, since 2000, they have learned that it is possible to openly steal an election, while accusing the Republicans of doing it. This is no less brazen than Barney Frank denying that he made statements that he has been shown making on video. Well, he got reelected in 2010, so not all of Massachusetts has turned over a new leaf.

  Sometimes self-righteousness and lust for power may not be enough to explain this sort of thing. Or, since the most radical Democrats and their supporters are clearly Communists, it is obvious that they have no respect for elections, majorities, legality, democracy, free speech, or anything else that would stand in their way. But I am also perfectly willing to consider the possibility that Supernatural Evil is involved, as in the N.I.C.E. ("National Institute for Coordinated Experiments") institution of C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength [1945]. Much of what the Democrats do looks like N.I.C.E., in both its rhetoric and its police state reality [note]. If I were a Christian, and if I thought that abortion or homosexuality were morally wrong, I think it would be hard not be believe that Satan, as in Lewis' novel, was personally behind Democrat politics. The mix of lies, seduction, death, sterility, and corruption seems Satanic in its combination of fair face and vicious substance, hedonism and rot, glowing rhetoric and iron fist. As it is, self-righteousness and lust for power will have to suffice, and Thomas Jefferson understood the dynamic well enough:

  Mankind soon learn to make interested uses of every right and power which they possess, or may assume. The public money and public liberty, intended to have been deposited with three branches of magistracy, but found inadvertently to be in the hands of one only [as in administrative law], will soon be discovered to be sources of wealth and dominion to those who hold them; distinguished, too, by this tempting circumstance, that they are the instrument, as well as the object of acquisition. With money we will get men, said Caesar, and with men we will get money. Nor should our assembly be deluded by the integrity of their own purposes, and conclude that these unlimited powers will never be abused, because themselves are not disposed to abuse them. They should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when a corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price. Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic, and will be alike influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and claws after he shall have entered. [Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1784, boldface added].

  Unfortunately, there is no modern politician with the wisdom of Jefferson, the wolves are among us, and the teeth and claws are in us. These are the Democrats, supposedly the heirs of Jefferson's own Party. It is all their project. The worst that can be said about the Republicans is that they have largely gone along with it and (since Reagan) have grossly failed to articulate the danger. The worst that can be said about the Libertarians is that they are off in a utopian Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, muttering about gold and the Confederacy, while Democrats and most Republicans urinate on the Constitution every day.

  The result is that I don't know where the American people can turn. The Democrats are liable to get their way just because they are the most ruthless and shameless in the mix. Even if they drag down the economy into another Depression, they may still get away with it. FDR did, and we know that Obama is expected to provide a New New Deal. So we may be entering a very long night of decline, corruption, decay, and tyranny in American history. We will really know it when the Democrats commission a monument to Fidel Castro in Washington. I am sure, after the Congressional (Democrat) Black Caucus went to Cuba to praise and adore Castro early in 2009, and Representative Diane Watson recently made the statements below, that they already want to do it.

  It was just mentioned to me by our esteemed speaker, "Did anyone say anything about the Cuban health system?"

  And lemme tell ya, before you say "Oh, it’s a commu-," you need to go down there and see what Fidel Castro put in place. And I want you to know, now, you can think whatever you want to about Fidel Castro, but he was one of the brightest leaders I have ever met.

  And you know, the Cuban revolution that kicked out the wealthy, Che Guevara did that, and then, after they took over, they went out among the population to find someone who could lead this new nation, and they found... well, just leave it there [laughs], an attorney by the name of Fidel Castro... [Democrat Member of Congress Diane Watson, 27 August 2009]

  Since what Castro "put in place" in Cuba is a totalitarian police state, one properly wonders about the nature of Watson's political values. Also, by the way, Castro was not some lawyer minding his own business who was then "found" by the "Cuban revolution" to lead it. He was the leader already.
  

  ---

  Democrat Developments in 2012

  Most of the comment here on the 2012 election and the behavior of the Democrats is in regard to the Republicans and their own behavior. However, there was one incident that all by itself may be taken as characteristic of the Democratic Party, its mentality, and its conduct.

  Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was and is the Chair of the Democratic National Committee. At a "training session at the Democratic National Convention to instruct Jewish Democrats" in 2012, she said that she had been told by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren that "what the Republicans are doing is dangerous for Israel" and very troubling to the Israeli government.

  When this became public, Oren released a statment saying, "I categorically deny that I ever characterized Republican policies as harmful to Israel." Wasserman Schultz then responded that she had said nothing of the sort and was "deliberately" misquoted by a "Republican newspaper." Unfortuately for Wasserman Schultz, the reporter of the story, Washington Examiner columnist Philip Klein, had her statements on audio tape. He had not misquoted her, and she had said exactly what she had been reported as saying.

  Thus, Wasseman Schultz was exposed in a double lie, first to misrepresent the Israeli Ambassador, and then to falsely deny that she had perpetrated that misrepresentation. Even the generally liberal Washington Post awarded the DNC Chair "four Pinocchios," , for lying.

  The lesson here is what happened next. Nothing. Wasserman Schultz did not resign in disgrace. She did not apologize. No Democrat complained. She is still the DNC Chair. Being caught in a barefaced double lie evidently meant nothing, and the accepted Democrat response for all involved was to shamelessly and brazenly ignore the whole business. The Democrats, both professionals and constituents, are simply not embarrassed by such lies. One wonders if Democrat voters (the "low information" voters) even pay enough attention to events to know about it all.

  This may not be as absurd as Barney Frank denying he said things that he had just been shown saying on video. But it is all of a piece. It does not matter what the truth is. Democrats can just say anything, however mendacious, outrageous, or demonstrably false, and they can and do expect to get away with it. One wonders if they derive confidence from the "post-modernist" epistemology that there is no truth, only power. The more brazen the lie, and the more trival the consequences, the more effectively is Democrat political power demonstrated. The proper "truth" is simply whatever will discredit and defeat the Republicans. Not surprisingly, it is a totalitarian and Orwellian mentality. The continuation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as the Chair of the Democratic National Committee means that the Party and all its leadership are comfortable with the exemplary leadership of a shameless liar, a person evidently without honor or conscience, honesty or sincerity. Again anyone might be forgiven if the thought crossed their mind that this would be most pleasing to the Father of Lies, as a demonstration that the work of evil at some point does not even need to conceal the effective use of open lies as a means of conquest. The Democrats are well past that point, and Satan would be proud.

• Libertarians:  Ideological crackpots, tilting at windmills, who nevertheless are the most sensible people, and the only true Jeffersonians, around -- an appalling circumstance.

• Republicans:  Who think that it is more important to attack Charles Darwin than to enforce the Constitution or stand for principles that will make the Democrats and the media call them names. There was some hope that the Tea Party could change this, but their promise has been at least blunted by the folly of social conservative infiltrators. The Establishment Republicans were heartened by this, despite their record of running two compromising "moderates" in a row, McCain and Romney, who went down to decisive defeat. This is an indication that the Establishment will continue in its old ways. Indeed, when Rand Paul filibustered to clarify Administration policy on using drones to kill American citizens in the United States, McCain rose to complain that this could make Americans fear their government. News flash, John, a lot of Americans, like me, already fear our government. It is already an active system of tyranny.

• Democrats:  I will not mince words. The Democrats hate almost everything about America, including the very ideas of limited government, individual rights, private property, self-defense, free enterprise, free speech, etc. While Democrats, both politicians and voters, might deny this with indignation, we see it clearly in the Brain Trust of the Democrats at American universities, including law schools. A history of classism, slavery, sexism, ablism, sizism, lookism, homophobia, Islamophobia, etc. naturally discredits everything about America and its history -- but these are only minor idiosyncrasies in Islâmic fundamentalism, which of course is fully redeemed by its hatred of America (and, well, Jews). Any Democrats who do not agree with attitudes like these, it is time for you (especially if you are Jewish) to get out of that Party. If you don't believe that the Party involves attitudes like these, it is time to get wised up.

That's it in a nutshell.

The Age of Reagan, 1980-2008

Anti-American Americans

The Practical Rules of Bureaucracy

The Post-Modern Left

Six Kinds of United States Paper Currency

Political Economy

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Copyright (c) 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

It really doesn't matter which number McCarthy used. There were security risks in the State Department, and McCarthy wanted to know why they were there and what was being done about them. The centerpiece of McCarthy's speech was actually an attack on Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who, even as Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in January 1950, expressed his support for him -- "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss." It is still part of leftist mythology that Hiss was neither a Communist nor a spy. Harry Truman himself later expressed doubt about Hiss's guilt. Yet the evidence against him at the time was decisive and damning, as it still is. One might wonder even today about the judgment and motives of anyone defending Hiss. The Democrats, including Truman, just did not like the political embarrassment; but it was not absurd for someone like McCarthy to wonder at the time if the protection of security threats and Communists was as much a matter of sympathy as of ass-covering. There is no doubt that someone like Acheson, ironically, felt a class connection with Hiss, sharing Northeastern and Ivy League backgrounds -- the beefy and brawling Whittaker Chambers was just declassé (attitudes we still get from the Modern Democrats, vacationing on Martha's Vineyard -- "Marxist Vineyard" -- and sneering at "fly-over country," i.e. the Heartland). Something of the sort had already happened in 1939. When Whittaker Chambers left the Communist Party, he quietly went on with his life -- although prudently saving some incriminating documents in case they became necessary. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, however, when the Communists became allies of those they had always claimed were their greatest enemies, Nazi Germany, Chambers became alarmed enough to tell his story at the State Department. This included information about Hiss's espionage and membership in the Party. The story got all the way to President Roosevelt, who literally laughed it off. Joe Stalin would not be spying on us, and certainly not through such a fine upstanding man as Alger Hiss. Communists then (and now) must have had a good laugh that the class solidarity of the well-born, privileged, and wealthy protected a man who worked to destroy them.

The phenomenon of clueless Conservatives accepting the premises of Leftist political narratives continues in 2012. A column by Theodore Olson, "Obama's Enemies List," appears in the February 1 Wall Street Journal. Olson, a lawyer who represents Koch Industries, writes about the Obama Administration targeting David and Charles Koch as part of President Obama's reelection campaign. Since the theme of the campaign is How Evil are the Rich, the Koch brothers, who contribute to various conservative and libertarian causes and think tanks, have been openly attacked. The cutest example is that the Democrats wanted to call the Koches to testify before Congress about the Keystone XL oil pipeline, whose building Obama had recently cancelled to curry favor with the "back to the Pleistocene" environmentalists, even though the Koches had nothing to do with the pipeline.

Nevertheless, Olson can't resist calling the Democrat practices the equivalent of "McCarthyism":

When Joseph McCarthy engaged in comparable bullying, oppression and slander from his powerful position in the Senate, he was censured by his colleagues and died in disgrace. "McCarthyism," defined by Webster's as the "use of unfair investigative and accusatory methods to suppress opposition," will forever be synonymous with un-Americanism. Army counsel Joseph Welsh's "Have you no sense of decency?" are words that evoke the McCarthy era and diminish the reputations of his colleagues who did nothing to stand up to him.

Lies about Joe McCarthy will indeed "forver be synonymous with un-Americanism" as long as people who should know better, like Mr. Olson, continue repeating them. Olson may need to be reminded that McCarthy held no "powerful position in the Senate" from 1950, when he entered the public eye, until 1953, when the Republicans took over the Senate. He then only had a year to conduct his investigations. What were the examples of "bullying, oppression and slander" from that year? Most of the inquiries involving Joe McCarthy, before 1953, and then in the "Army-McCarthy Hearings," when Joseph Welsh -- in the middle of his own "bullying" questioning of Roy Cohn -- voiced his grandstand-for-the-cameras reproach to McCarthy, were directed at Joe McCarthy, first by Democrats and then in the end with the cooperation of the Einsenhower Administration and the Republicans in the Senate, who were very far from doing "nothing to stand up to him."

Even worse is the implication that McCarthy was censured for "McCarthyism," as so defined. But this is now a familiar political technique of misrepresentation. Martha Stewart was not convicted of insider trading, although most people probably think so. Scooter Libby was not convicted of "outing" Valerie Plame, although the Democrats got their Hollywood friends to even make a movie saying so. And Joe McCarthy was not censured for accusing innocent blushing liberals of being Communists; yet Theodore Olson presupposes that this is something that "everyone knows" to be the case. Indeed, the Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954, which we are given to understand discredited McCarthy, where not only directed at him, instead of by him, but also resulted in clearing him of the charges at issue (which involved favoritism for a friend of Roy Cohn).

And what "opposition" was being "suppressed" by McCarthy? Certainly not the Democrats, who never shut up, any more than they do now. Communists? Well perhaps that should be stated openly:  "McCarthy inconvenienced people who were spies and agents for the Soviet Union." We can't have that. Like the famous rhetorical question of Joseph Welsh, the context of "McCarthyism" makes its whole presentation, by Academics, the Press, Leftists, Liberals, Democrats, and now Mr. Olson, a lie. They are the ones lacking any sense of decency -- like Democrat National Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in January 2012, still repeating the canard that the lunatic Jared Loughner shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords because of the "incivility" of Conservative political rhetoric. But as a supposed Conservative, Olson has no excuse. He should be aware of several recent books setting the record straight about McCarthy. No, like Paul Greenberg, he is pandering to an audience that is going to hate him anyway and is just going to use his endorsement of the McCarthy myth to help perpetuate it.

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"Fabian" refers to the tactics of Quintus Fabius Maximus, who dealt with Hannibal by avoiding open battle. He became know as Cunctator, the "Delayer." Fabian tactics, as adopted by Fabian Socialists, were thus to avoid open battle but achieve victory by small incremental advances. Medicare and Medicaid, although disappointing to those who wanted socialized medicine immediately, nevertheless were steps in that direction, inevitably leading to big pushes for full socialism, as in 2009. Since Medicare and Medicaid are bankrupt and have helped push up the costs of medicine, these outcomes can actually be used, ironically, to promote more socialism.

Americans who want to reclaim the proper use of "liberal," and help expose the Democrats as socialists, may use the term "Classical Liberal" for their views. Otherwise, "libertarian" is available, although this then does not contest the use of "liberal" and also implies the stranger and more radical libertarianism, as we have seen, of Rand and Rothbard. All these varieties of views are examined by way of the diamond quiz.

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Republicans and Democrats immediately saw this as a potentially embarrassing and damaging statement. It made Obama sound like a "redistributionist," who thinks that income in capitalism is "distributed" unfairly and that it is the job of the government to take from the rich (and from business) and give it to the poor. This is a popular idea among the Cargo Cult economic thinkers of the Left. Thus, we can't allow Joe's plumbing business to do too well, because obviously this can only come from exploitation of the workers. So part of the fruit of Joe's success would be better spent by the government. The idea that capital and private investment create wealth for all is a principle foreign to this ideology.

The reaction of the Democrats to this tells us so much about them. There is no doubt that they think this way, and Obama too. Their anger therefore was simply at being exposed as thinking what they actually believe. They always walk a fine line there. They want their core supporters to hear the radicalism of their ideology straight but then don't want that to get out to the public. The most damaging admissions are thus often statements to private groups that may get informally recorded on cell-phones and then released to the Press. Thus Obama, speaking to a private group in California in April 2008, said of Pennsylvania voters losing jobs in old industrial towns (because of Democrat anti-business policies, of course), "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." This was immediately seen as condescending and disparaging of people who believe in gun rights, religion, and only legal immigration -- and are probably racists (while the Obama Administration itself has policies that are increasingly protectionist and anti-trade). The Democrats, of course, see guns as Fascism (unless, ironically, in the hands of the police), religion as the "opium of the masses," illegal immigrants as Democrat voters, and job losses in the Rust Belt as due to greedy capitalists.

To Democrats, a "smear" against them is to honestly represent their views and policies, even with direct quotes (which can be denied, as we saw with Barney Frank). To Democrats, "suppressing free speech" directed at them means any speech that simply contradicts what they say, or actually believe. Violence against conservative speakers, which may literally prevent them from speaking, on the other hand, is "free speech." This is all the Orwellian Double-Think of the Marxist politics of Herbert Marcuse, now part of the Democrat playbook.

But nothing is more remarkable than what happened to Joe the Plumber. Eliciting an embarrassing statement from Obama made Joe an enemy. Democrats and the Left immediately went after Joe. So we learned that "Joe" wasn't his real name (he is Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, obviously using his middle name for dishonest purposes). He wasn't a licensed plumber (he worked for one). He owed some back taxes (like several people nominated to be in the Obama Adminstration). Some Democrat Ohio bureaucrats even began (illegal) investigations, to try and find anything else to discredit him. The pointlessness and infantile vindictiveness of this is just astonishing. In fact, it doesn't matter if Joe the Plumber turned out to be Charles Manson. The issue is what Obama said, and what it said about him. Joe himself was irrelevant. Yet many Democrats figured that there was something suitable and useful about discrediting or smearing Joe. He had done something that could result in hurt or embarrassment to them, so it made him, however senselessly, a target. Even if there were nothing else about the attitudes or actions of the Democrats, this reveals them, or at least their public agents and representatives, as morally vile and despicable people.

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As it happens, before the Iraq war, I saw Tony Blair at a meeting of European leaders challenge them to deny that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He said, "You all know" that he has them, because their intelligence services all had the same information. Now, if "Bush lied," not only was Tony Blair lying also, but the leaders of France, Germany, etc., who never helped out in Iraq, must have been so deceived by all these lies that they didn't even have the gumption to stand up and call them lies to Tony Blair's face. Indeed, one of the other "lies" attributed to Bush, that Iraq had been seeking uranium from Chad, was information supplied by British intelligence. We went through a period of denials that Iraq had done this (the absurd and dishonest Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame controversy), but in the end it looks like the British were correct. Even if we don't need intentionality for lying, Bush would not have been lying. The Democrats, however, are never so honest as to remember Tony Blair or his challenge to Europe -- much less admit that Saddam Hussein was someone who deserved to be deposed, WMD's or not. See the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, the former President of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari, for his thoughts about Saddam's WMD's.

Meanwhile, the European Left likes the idea that Blair was "hoodwinked" by Bush into participating in the war. That doesn't square very well with the idea that the British supplied false intelligence to Bush.

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