Burying the lede

Ralph Z. Hallow reports on Crazy Cousin John's appearance before the Council for National Policy, but readers have to wait for the 11th paragraph before reading this:

The depth of disaffection from Mr. McCain among prominent members of CNP is so strong that some are already questioning the group's bona fides.

"It will say more about the state of the conservative movement than it does McCain," a veteran CNP member said. "If he is accepted at CNP, this will mark the official end of the conservative movement as we knew it."

Perhaps a little overdramatic, but that's the dilemma the McCain campaign presents to conservatives. If they endorse him, it undermines their credibility as conservatives. If they don't endorse him, they'll be accused of being spoilsports, "not a team player."

This is all McCain's fault. He took those non-conservative positions -- supporting campaign-finance "reform," voting against tax cuts, sponsoring amnesty for illegals, etc. -- with the full knowledge that those moves would make him anathema to major segments of the GOP base. He then sought the GOP presidential nomination, counting on crossover votes to win Republican primaries in New Hampshire and elsewhere.

He is responsible for what he's done, and no conservative should allow themselves to be guilt-tripped about it.

'Idol' gay gossip

Lisa De Moraes, writing in The Other Paper, has fun today mocking the Asssociated Press's breathless coverage of the "scandalous" discovery that "American Idol" contestant David Hernandez once worked as a stripper in an Arizona nightclub with "mostly male" clientele.

The real story the AP is pushing, of course, is not what Hernandez did to pay the bills in Phoenix. What they're trying to do -- and their reporter Derrik Lang is not being even slightly subtle about it -- is to turn "American Idol" into yet another venue for gay identity politics.

I think I speak for the overwhelming majority of Americans when I say that I don't care what or who David Hernandez does in his private life. He is a singer, and all that really matters (or what should really matter, from the perspective of the listener) is how well he sings. And I suppose Hernandez feels the same way.

The Gay Gestapo, however, won't let Hernandez have his privacy, because in their totalitarian worldview, privacy is not allowed. The Gay Gestapo demands that every homosexual in public life must declare his sexual preference, in order to serve as a "role model" for others. Those who wish to be discreet (or noncommital) about their private lives are condemned as cowards "in the closet," and thus traitors to the Great Gay Cause.

This ethos of identity and "outing" is totalitarian, as I say, because it demands conformity, tolerates no dissent, and relentlessly propagandizes. Notice that it wasn't some Christian fundamentalist morality squad that "outed" Hernandez as an ex-stripper. No, it was a Hollywood bureau reporter for the AP, that famous bastion of liberal media enlightenment.

I'm very much reminded of the "Is Kevin Spacey gay?" rumors of a few years ago. Kevin Spacey is a great actor, and it never occurred to me even to wonder whether he was gay until the Hollywood rumor mill started cranking about it. But the Gay Gestapo and its "outing" ethos insists that we all must know these things.

If some celebrity voluntarily decides to go public with their sex life, they're free to do so. Melissa Etheridge, Elton John, Boy George, Ellen DeGeneres -- hey, it's a free country. But this business of trying to force people to "come out" is absurd, and if the AP and Derrik Lang think they're fooling anybody about what they're doing, they'd better think again.

As for my own personal preferences ... well, Egotastic has some nice pics today of Kim Kardashian. So I'll "out" myself as being in agreement with Sir Mix-a-Lot about the aesthetic virtues of the ladies who've "got back."

Eyewitness testimony

My friend Sean Higgins of Investors Business Daily, guest-blogging at JeremyLott.com, offers this testimonial to the vocal prowess of the DC Karaoke King:

If you ever have a chance to watch Robert Stacy McCain perform Karaoke, you must take it. I don’t care if you are rescuing drowning puppies; go, just go.

Sean was in the house last week at Rockit Grill in Old Town Alexandria for my "Return From Africa" performance, which I opened with an all-out rendition of my signature tune.

With all due modesty, it wasn't bad. Peter Redpath of the Federalist Society and Richard Miniter also praised my initial performance. Later in the evening, however, exhaustion set in and my voice became so hoarse I sounded like Joe Cocker when I tried to sing Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl." I should have taken a nap that afternoon.

Race, Rush, Hillary & Hugh

Jonathan Chait, Matthew Yglesias and Maureen Dowd all depict the Democratic primary battle between Hillary and Obama in terms of race and gender.

Yglesias takes the cake with his assertion that Hillary won because of "the crucial racist vote." This is based wholly on an MSNBC exit poll that showed 20 percent of Ohio Democratic primary voters Tuesday said the race of the candidate was important, and of those, Clinton topped Obama by a 14-point margin, 57-43.

Question: Has Matthew Yglesias ever studied statistics? Because if my math is correct, 14 percent of 20 percent is 2.8 percent, which is surely less than the margin of error in that exit poll.

Given the inherent sampling problems, exit polls are very hard to read, and you certainly can't put a lot of faith in a 14-point gap on the 35th question in a survey. If you get a 2-to-1 margin on a question like that, OK, then maybe it's fair to declare that a "crucial" factor. But 14 percent? No way.

Besides which, you can't say those are "racist" voters, because there's no demographic breakdown of the respondents on that question. It's well known that many black Democrats are supporting Hillary because they don't think America will elect a black candidate. So it may well have been black voters (and Hillary got 12% of the black vote in Ohio, according to that poll) who gave Hillary her edge on that question. Either way, it's still just an exit poll, and as such, it's too flimsy evidence to justify hurling the word "racist" around (even if it's amusing to see Democrats called "racist" for supporting the wife of Our First Black President).

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt appears shocked at the thought that Rush Limbaugh's radio campaign to encourage Republicans to vote for Hillary in the Democratic primaries may have actually saved her hopes for the nomination.

The difference between Hugh and Rush, I think, boils down to this: Hewitt is a linear thinker, whose natural tendency is to plot the most direct and efficient path from Point A to Point B. Limbaugh, on the other hand, is an improvisational thinker, always considering contingencies and alternatives, trying to keep his options open as he looks forward to a future of unanticipated outcomes.

If you're a football fan, you could compare Hewitt to a classic dropback quarterback (Johnny Unitas) who stays in the pocket, counts on his blockers to contain the pressure and looks for the assigned receiver, whereas Limbaugh is like Fran Tarkenton or Ken Stabler, calling audibles, scrambling out toward the sidelines, changing the play even after the ball is snapped.

If you're a real football fan, you know that most Super Bowls are won by classic-type quarterbacks, who also account for most quarterbacks in the Hall of Fame. But there are exceptions to the rule, and in 1977 Stabler -- the left-handed wild man from Foley, Alabama, they called the "Snake" -- led the Oakland Raiders to victory in Super Bowl XI over Fran Tarkenton's Minnesota Vikings. (Tarkenton's in the NFL Hall of Fame; why Stabler has been snubbed three times by Canton is puzzling.)

So while Limbaugh's (tactical) endorsement of Hillary may seem mysterious to some people -- including a Johnny U. kind of guy like Hugh Hewitt -- I remain confident in Rush. His latest move make look as crazy as Stabler or Tarkenton scrambling on a broken play, but Limbaugh knows exactly what he's doing.

President? No, he wants to blog

Peach Pundit is the go-to source for all things political in my native Georgia, and it's from Peach Pundit's Jason Pye that I just learned Bob Barr is now blogging for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (Stephen Gordon of Third Party watch had this last week, but somehow I missed it.)

This is bad news for the "Draft Barr" movement in the Libertarian Party. I mean, what kind of libertarian would have anything to do with the Atlanta papers? It's like blogging for Pravda.

The AJC (known to locals as the "Atlanta Urinal-Constipation") used to be a great newspaper, before control of the operation fell into the hands of Anne Cox Chambers, a billionaire socialite who apparently hates everything about Georgia, right down to the kudzu and red clay.

That things had gone hopelessly wrong at 72 Marietta Street became obvious in 1994, following the death of Lewis Grizzard. (If you don't know who Lewis Grizzard was, I'll just explain that the most famous son of Moreland, Ga., was a hugely popular columnist and author, as funny as Dave Barry and as Southern as grits.)

At the time of Grizzard's death in March 1994, I was working at the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune. The speculation was rampant: How will the AJC replace Grizzard? Who will get the call to try to fill the gigantic shoes of the most popular journalist in the South? I figured the odds were they'd at least try to hire Dave Barry away from the Miami Herald. Yeah, Barry's from New York, but he is definitely funny.

My darkhorse pick to fill the Grizzard slot at the AJC was Rick Bragg, who at that point was an Associated Press regional reporter. I'd been slightly acquainted with Rick when we both attended Jacksonville (Ala.) State University. Even then, he had been a working journalist for years, stringing high school sports for the local papers as a teenager before becoming a staffer for the Anniston Star.

Bragg eventually won a Pulitzer Prize (1996) and published a best-selling memoir, All Over But the Shoutin'. I don't know if Bragg had ever done humor, but he shared Grizzard's (generally underrated) genius for narrative writing. Also like Grizzard, Bragg was, and is, a newspaperman to his fingertips. The raw deal he got from the New York Times in 2003 -- over what's called a "toe-touch dateline" -- was a screaming injustice, and Bragg's decision to resign was fully justified.

Anyway, in 1994, after Grizzard's shocking death at age 47, I was kind of hoping maybe the AJC would offer that columnist gig to Rick Bragg. What happened next ... oh. Words can't express my mortification.

Rheta Grimsley Johnson. When that name was announced, my reaction was the same as thousands of other Georgians: "Who the ---- is Rheta Grimsley Johnson?"

Don't get me wrong. I'm sure Ms. Johnson is a nice woman. She's won awards for her writing, and occasionally she'll even write something funny. But no way could she ever be acceptable as a substitute for Grizzard. She's not even close. She's not even in the same journalistic universe.

Except for those rare times when he'd write a tear-jerker, Grizzard reliably supplied at least three laugh-out-loud lines per column. Sometimes, he'd get five good laugh lines into a 700-word column. Anybody who thinks that's easy has never tried to do it. I used to do occasional humor columns for the Rome paper, and getting three good laughs in 700 words is almost a miracle. Grizzard accomplished that feat column after column, three columns a week. He did this for more than 15 years, during which time he also published more than 20 books, did hundreds of speaking engagements, and appeared on numerous TV shows.

To replace someone like Grizzard with someone like Rheta Grimsley Johnson -- it was simply unthinkable, an insult, an expression of the AJC management's profound contempt for its readership.

It was that blunderheaded decision, in 1994, that made me realize that whatever future I had in journalism, it wouldn't be in Georgia. The state's largest and most prestigious paper had just pimp-slapped every literate person in Georgia, effectively announcing that the AJC had ceased to care about providing its readers with a newspaper that respected their interests and values. Yeah, there had been ill omens before then -- i.e., the absurd tenure of the pretentious Bill Kovach -- but the Rheta Grimsley Johnson hire was like a Vegas-style neon sign, 100 feet tall and bright enough to be seen from space.

The subsequent decline of the Atlanta papers was foreshadowed the day they announced that move in 1994. Perhaps other papers in the U.S. have lost more circulation or ad revenue, or laid off more of their staff. But all this has happened at the AJC during two decades when the Atlanta metropolitan area has experienced astronomical growth in population and wealth. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has declined for one reason and one reason only: It's a lousy newspaper that gets worse every day.

Why Bob Barr would associate himself with such a third-rate publication is hard to understand. Maybe he should try to pitch his blog to the Marietta Daily Journal. Yeah, Otis Brumby is a tight-fisted tyrant, but at least he never foisted Rheta Grimsley Johnson on his readers.

37.4%

What is 37.4%? That's the share of the popular vote that the first President Bush got in 1992 during his doomed re-election bid. The final results in 1992 were:

• Bill Clinton.........43.0%
• George Bush.....37.4%
• Ross Perot.........18.9%

That was the low ebb of the Republican Party in the modern era. While the 1964 Goldwater campaign was considered a disaster, good old AuH2O got 38.5% -- demonstrating, I would argue, that even an "extreme right-winger" (as Goldwater was depicted by the media in '64) is more popular than a clueless "centrist."

Back when Crazy Cousin John was still only one of five main candidates for the GOP nomination, this bit of history was in the back of my mind while I was trying to warn Republicans against the dangers of a McCain candidacy.

Another bit of political history -- Bob Dole's 40.7% in 1996 -- was even more in my mind, since there are so many similarities between the Dole and McCain candidacies. Both are war heroes, both were "Establishment" choices in overcrowded primary fields, neither was exactly a darling of the conservative grassroots, et cetera.

Some readers are now saying, "Wait a minute! The pitiful numbers posted by Bush 41 in 1992 and by Dole in 1996 both occurred in three-way races with Ross Perot getting more than 10% of the vote. Where's the third-party threat that could hurt McCain that way in 2008?"

Apparently you weren't paying attention when I posted this story Feb. 11:

Bob Barr, who helped lead the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton, is the object of an alliance of conservative and libertarians seeking to recruit the former Georgia Republican congressman as a third-party presidential candidate.
Now an Atlanta-based activist with the Libertarian Party, Barr has repeatedly disavowed any intention of seeking the LP's 2008 presidential nomination. . . .
However, efforts to push a Barr candidacy were given new impetus last week when Rep. Ron Paul sent a letter to his supporters announcing plans to scale back his Republican presidential campaign and concentrate on his congressional re-election fight in Texas.
Several organizers behind the draft-Barr movement were supporters of the Paul presidential campaign. Last week, Barr introduced Paul at the 35th annual Conservative Political Action Conference, calling the Texas congressman "the Constitution's best friend" and "the gold standard of conservatism" in the GOP presidential campaign. ... (READ MORE)

An activist with the draft-Barr movement said last week the question now boils down to how much money they can raise, and how fast they can raise it. Given that they're tapping into some of the same online fundraising machinery that helped make Ron Paul's GOP candidacy so newsworthy, I'd be willing to wager that they'll clear that hurdle easily.

So think about that 37.4% number for Bush 41. Ross Perot was a pseudo-populist eccentric running on a vanity-party slate, yet in 1992 he got more than 18% of the vote. Now imagine Bob Barr -- a former member of the House Judiciary Committee, former federal prosecutor and one-time CIA employee -- running on the ticket of the Libertarians, the largest and most enduring third party in America.

The Libertarian Party holds its convention May 22-26 in Denver. The draft-Barr people know that if they want Barr to make a serious effort for the LP nomination, they've got to work fast. If the McCainiacs and the big-money GOP Establishment are not sleeping easily, it's not just indigestion from all that barbecue they ate Sunday.

There is an online Barr For President petition here.

Previous coverage at Peach Pundit and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Here is video of Bob Barr introducing Ron Paul at CPAC:



UPDATE 8:15 a.m.: Headline of the day (via Memeorandum):

McCain campaign stumbles early

Of media and 'experts'

The headline on this Associated Press item (via Memeorandum) is "Media Expert Decries Campaign Coverage," but whatever you say about Walter Shorenstein, his expertise is in real-estate development, not media.

The AP describes him as "founder of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University." More importantly, and far more relevant to the story, Shorenstein is a bigtime Democratic donor (to Hillary Clinton, among others), ranked among the top 20 political donors by Mother Jones in 2001.

Don Surber mocks the AP story:

Democratic fund-raiser complains about media bias.
A complaint about the media’s bias came from one of the Hill-raisers — Walter Shorenstein, “a prominent San Francisco-based real estate developer,” as the AP described him. . . .
Until Shorenstein is willing to take on the media for its bias against conservatives, this is more whining from a Hillary camp that underestimated the power of Barack Obama.

This story well deserves mocking.

Obama's bizarre claim

Dan Riehl catches Barack Obama pandering to paranoia:

"If there is an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney ..."

Say what? I'm having a hard time believing any such thing ever happened, but it surely doesn't happen routinely. Note that Obama uses the specific wording "Arab-American family" -- not an individual, not someone here on a work or student visa, but an Arab-American family, a phrase which to me signifies actual U.S. citizens, or at least long-term legal "green card" residents.

If any such persons indeed have been "rounded up without benefit of an attorney," Obama's campaign had better be prepared to provide their names and documentation of their case, because otherwise he's making a very harmful and irresponsible accusation.

It's almost as if he's trying to hand the nomination to Hillary.

UPDATE: Atlas Shrugs makes an obvious point: "CAIR would be screaming bloody murder."

My son, teen rock legend

Bob, one of my 15-year-old twin sons, demonstrates an original composition:

OK, so it's not to my taste -- I'm more into classic rock and R&B -- but I give the boy credit for having basically taught himself to play. Bob practices constantly, and while non-guitarists may not have noticed, he's learned "back-picking," which effectively doubles his speed. He reads tablature. Now, if I can just get him to learn the old classics by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, The Beatles, The Stones ... sigh.

Bob's twin brother Jim also plays (guitar, bass and a little bit of keyboard), but right now Jim's more into fixing up his old Dodge truck and talking to his girlfriend. You know how that goes.

This photo shows Bob (L) and Jim (R) together. They're both smart and funny and good-looking. Some things are just hereditary, I guest.

Adios, Tim Goeglein

"I've been plagiarizing all my life. It's called learning."

-- Hunter S. Thompson

The discovery (for which Nancy Nall deserves credit) that White House aide Tim Goeglein plagiarized material in columns he published in his hometown paper has led to his resignation:

A longtime aide to President Bush who wrote occasional guest columns for his hometown newspaper resigned on Friday evening after admitting that he had repeatedly plagiarized from other writers. ...
The aide, Tim Goeglein, had worked for Mr. Bush since 2001, as a liaison to social and religious conservatives, an important component of the president’s political base. ...
“This is not acceptable, and we are disappointed in Tim’s actions,” a White House spokeswoman, Emily Lawrimore, said Friday morning, hours before Mr. Goeglein resigned. “He is offering no excuses, and he agrees it was wrong.”
Mr. Goeglein, 44, is little known outside Washington. ...
With Mr. Bush traveling to his ranch in Crawford, Tex., for the weekend, the White House issued a statement late Friday saying that the president was disappointed and saddened for Mr. Goeglein and his family.
“He has long appreciated Tim’s service,” the statement said. “And he knows him to be a good person who is committed to his country.”
Mr. Goeglein had been publishing guest columns on the opinion page of The News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne [Indiana] for more than a decade, according to the paper’s editor, Kerry Hubartt.

Plagiarism is unacceptable in any context, but it's simply inexplicable that anyone would plagiarize for a column. Almost by definition, the columnist is expressing his idiosyncratic perspective, or else -- in the case of a news-oriented columnist like Robert Novak -- reporting exclusive information. To use the format of a personal column as a venue for plagiarism strikes me as utterly nonsensical.

Surely, Goeglein must have some explanation. Perhaps the column for the Indiana paper was just an attempt to maintain a print presence in his hometown, so that when his White House gig ended, he'd still be a known quantity (and valuable commodity) back home.

Whatever the reason, it was an unworthy abuse of the press, and a fraud perpetrated on readers.

More reaction at Outside the Beltway, Hot Air and Memeorandum.

Ron Robinson on Buckley and bias

Thursday evening, Young America's Foundation President Ron Robinson was at the Magic Gourd restaurant in Washington to teach an activism seminar for members of the George Washington University YAF chapter.

Robinson's presentation was about the nature of media bias, but his mind was clearly on the recent death of William F. Buckley Jr., the "conservative icon" to whom Robinson paid tribute on the YAF Web site:

"William F. Buckley Jr. was the founder of the modern YAF movement and a longtime friend of Young America's Foundation. The staff and board of Young America's Foundation send our thoughts and prayers to his family and friends."

While waiting for the event to begin, Robinson talked to me about what a tremendous loss Buckley's death is for the conservative movement. Later, during his remarks to the GWU students, he related anecdotes about Buckley, including the National Review founder's famous 1965 response when asked what was the first thing he would do if he won election as mayor of New York City: "Demand a recount."

Robinson told the GWU students that Buckley would be proud of the work their YAF chapter was doing on campus. And while even liberals praised Buckley at his death, it wasn't always so, the YAF president reminded the students. When he was in high school, Robinson said, one of his teachers told him Buckley was "more dangerous than Hitler."

The notion that conservatives are dangerous and menacing is propagated chiefly through the news media, and Robinson's presentation consisted of more than 100 slides showing covers of Time and Newsweek magazines, contrasting how liberal and conservative figures were portrayed. A November 1994 cover of Time featuring Newt Gingrich with the headline, "MAD AS HELL," was one example.

"How did you become a conservative?" Robinson asked the GWU students. "I bet it wasn't because of an overload of conservative teachers or professors. I bet it wasn't because of anything you saw on ABC, CBS, NBC 'Nightly News.' I know it wasn't because of anything you saw on the cover of Time or Newsweek."

With the assistance of Ron Robinson, YAF's national headquarters staff and local supporters, the George Washington University YAF chapter -- led by seniors Sergio Gor and Iris Somberg -- is becoming a model for conservative campus activism nationwide. Thursday's seminar was attended by more than 30 members, including freshman Joe Sangiorgio, whose notes on Robinson's presentation were essential to the preparation of this report.

A featured post at Memeorandum -- thanks!