"Writing is a skill, not a talent, and thus one's ability as a writer can be improved by thoughtful effort. The problem with some people is that they graduate college as good writers, experience early success on account of that, and thus never devote themselves diligently to the relentless quest for improvement that could make them great writers."
Showing posts with label Crazy Cousin John. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crazy Cousin John. Show all posts
The time to confront the Federal dragon was at the point where somebody empowered the Federal government to do this sort of crap. That was 100 years ago. We're coming up on the 100th anniversary of the 16th & 17th Amendments and the Federal Reserve act.OK, props for the John Paul Jones reference. I guess you'd been sleeping below decks while decided it moral to have massive Federal debt, oh, your Entire Political Career, SIR.
If the goals of the "Not Yet Begun to Fight" movement are to scale back Federal power, then the fight is worth joining. Otherwise the bleating amounts to a fart in a thunderstorm, Senator.
Those 60 Senators who voted for cloture, including fellow USNA grad Jim Webb, may as well have been voting for their personal impeachment. That is how those 60 should be treated at the ballot box. I'm sure they figure we shall have forgotten, amidst the follow-on atrocities of this Congress.
And, if the people we have on the ballot in 2010 and 2012 are just another set of tools, gears and cogs to throw into the machine, then these 60 are correct: they're just doing their job. They are mere components in the machine. They will get consulting jobs, academic chairs, and think tank perches in support of the next 60 to follow.
Senator McCain, if you're sincere, and not merely offering a sop to the people whose Constitution has become a joke over the last century, a healthy chunk of which you've been an insider, then BE the John Paul Jones. Offer the insight, name the names. The sun has set on the genteel past of the Senate.
Forget the Bonhomme Richard. Here is an arguably more accurate image of the situation since the 2008 election:
Real leadership is going to entail as much sacrifice as you offered in Vietnam, Senator McCain. During the campaign, you still sounded the consummate insider. You could start by repudiating that insider shtick, and embracing Federalism.
If you rather sound like another beltway tool, then your rhetoric is mere bleating, Senator McCain. Which is why you didn't win the election.
Update:American Glob: "Liberty Died While You Slept"
Update II:HillBuzz: "Question of the Day: Is America Worth Fighting For?"
[T]here is not one site in operation today on the right side of the Internet that consistently produces original and dependable journalism. And why is that? Because conservatives don't do journalism. They don't respect it and they don't have the foggiest idea of how to produce. They're clueless.
Now, as every regular reader knows, my reaction to Carlson's May announcement was not one of enthusiasm. Announcing at a Heritage Foundation luncheon that you're going to create the "Huffington Post of the Right"? Bad move. As I said, it had better not suck.
The seven months that have since elapsed -- first a projected July launch, then October, then November, now Jan. 11, with an announced capitalization of $3 million -- have not exactly inspired confidence. Neverthless, it occurred to me this evening that, my own profound doubts aside, failure of DailyCaller.com would give the Eric Boehlerts of the world an opportunity for more of their "conservatives don't do journalism" gloating.
So I've resolved to stop slagging Carlson and his project. He's obviously got enough problems without my perching on the bust of Pallas by his chamber door, croaking proclamations of impending doom.
Not sure I agree with your decision to lay off Carlson.
Let me explain it by reference to Culture 11. I saw that as a debacle from the outset, but said so privately in an e-mail to a friend -- who had solicited me to write for the site -- and then mostly ignored them, until they started publishing idiot crap.
It would not be fair to continue slagging Daily Caller until we see whether it sucks or not. If Daily Caller turns out to be non-sucking, it will be a very helpful addition to the Right's online presence. And with $3 million in start-up capital, they're likely to be around more than the 6 months that Culture 11 lasted. As long as they are an ongoing effort of the Right, they are likely to have some beneficial impact.
I'm clearly on record about my doubts, so continued slagging would be redundant and vicious. And here's another analogy: John McCain. On the day Mitt Romney quit (Feb. 7, 2008), effectively ceding the GOP nomination to Crazy Cousin John, I resolved to vote Libertarian in November.
While much of mainstream journalism was swept up in the "historic Hope" theme, I noted with skepticism the Obama campaign's electoral calculus for winning without Ohio, and their belief that they might win Alaska (heh). And on July 14, I published this:
Evidence of conservative despair isn't hard to find nowadays in Washington. "We're doomed!" one veteran communications operative of the Right exclaimed last week when I asked her to assess the current campaign. Similar views are expressed privately by many other Republicans, including some professionally employed as part of the GOP election apparatus. Talking to them is like walking into the Redskins locker room before a Dallas game and being told by Washington players that the Cowboys are unbeatable. . . . Perhaps overwhelmed by the media enthusiasm for Sen. Barack Obama . . . many conservatives seem to have accepted the Democrat's victory as inevitable, or even desirable. . . .
You can read the rest, but the point is that I can't stand to see a team just lay down and quit. Although there was never any possibility I could vote for my erratic cousin, nevertheless I wanted to see the GOP at least try to win the election. And the fact that there were people on the Republican Party payroll telling me they had zero hope of winning -- well, it infuriated me.
So I kept reporting about reasons to doubt Obama's inevitability until, finally, on Oct. 7, I published "How John McCain Lost," explaining that his endorsement of the Wall Street bailout had irreparably doomed the GOP ticket. (A verdict that has since been vindicated by every other account of the campaign.)
Looking back on the 2008 campaign, then, despite my vehement opposition to Maverick's nomination, I gave the Republican every benefit of the doubt until it was finally time to stick the fork in.
Same deal with Daily Caller. The possibility that it might succeed requires me to hope for its success -- or at least not to be a cheerleader for failure -- so long as there is a chance the venture can accomplish anything useful.
The American Left sprang to Al-Arian's defense. Their efforts included articles in The Nation and Salon.com, whose reporter Eric Boehlert lamented "The Prime Time Smearing of Sami Al-Arian." . . . One FBI surveillance video of Al-Arian's fundraising tour of American mosques showed him being introduced as "the President of the Islamic Committee for Palestine . . . the active arm of the Islamic Jihad movement." . . . Al-Arian declaimed, "God cursed those who are the sons of Israel ... Those people, God made monkeys and pigs ... Let us damn America, let us damn Israel, let us damn them and their allies until death."
In other words, Eric Boehlert defended a man as dangerous as Jeremiah Wright!
While I wouldn't go so far as to think ACORN flat-out stole the 2008 election (conspiracies scale poorly) I'm wondering if we should maybe chip in for a new tinfoil hat for Dan. His analysis in McCain/Palin: What Really Went Wrong? seems to think the McCain campaign was as clean and un-rigged as the stock market.
McCain was "Dead Man Walking" in 2007. Then he "magically" came back from the abyss in 2008, just as Michigan and Florida were magically removed from the Democratic primary equation, and both John Sydney and Hillary step aside for the charismatic Chicagoan.
Other than Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin was the only real shot of adrenalin for McCain. I'm speculating his coma was either:
Sarah was his Jeremiah Denton moment, only truly un-scripted piece, where he could lay the foundation for a resurgence he was incapable of leading.
Dan posts:
The people who know the most about McCain/Palin 2008 aren't the people willing to go on record for the media. While the top political players have their respective careers, for better or worse - for most on the campaign, to talk now would be a career ender. So all we are getting is two of the most polarized views from the top. In my experience, that never is where the real story rests. But it's all that we've got. Make of it what you will, I'd suggest not too much.
Are the people within the beltway really so removed from the economic realities? Do they really think there is a career left to save amidst the economic disaster and ideological drift currently afoot? I've met some of these people, and they don't seem quite that stupid. At some point, doing the Right Thing becomes as much a matter of simple pragmatism as an appeal to Altruism.
Maybe Sarah's book tour will and increasing popularity will be a driver. At some inflection point, the career wonks will realize that, if they can't ingratiate themselves with the potential newcomer, they'd better grab their book deal.
And about time, too. The occasion? The escalating war between Steve Schmidt and Sarah Palin. As I point out in the Hot Air comments, my paleocon nemesis Clark Stooksbury and I unwittingly played a signficant role in this strange little saga. (Reports of ghostly laughter, apparently emanating from the vicinity of Forest Hills Cemetery and clearly audible as far away as Collegedale and Ringgold, could not be confirmed.)
Meanwhile, also in the comments, I remind Hot Air's Christian readers that Allah seems to have a healthy sense of humor about himself and understands blogging as a commercial enterprise. There's something about the profit motive that can unite people despite their disagreements.
Kind of weird finding myself as the lynchpin holding together this unlikely alliance, the coalition known as . . . The Flemish Menace!
UPDATE: A friend just mentioned to me Thurday's profile of Lynn Vincent in the Politico, which amounts to free advertising for Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption, the favorite book of Adrienne's Catholic Corner. I'm hurt and disappointed that my good buddy Ben Smith didn't feel the need to call me and ask about Lynn -- who speaks fluent Belgian, I should mention. (If you don't get these inside jokes, be grateful. The people who do get them are wiping coffee off their computer screens.)
The Bailout Maverick and the rest of the Establishment, intend to continue moving left. Funny, isn’t it? Considering the only excitement McCain’s campaign could drum-up last year, was from Sarah Palin. And she’s still more popular than he is.
This is classic Crazy Cousin John: He did exactly one thing right during the 2008 campaign, and has been regretting it ever since.
The rise of Beck, Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and the rest has correlated almost perfectly with the decline of the G.O.P. But it’s not because the talk jocks have real power. It’s because they have illusory power, because Republicans hear the media mythology and fall for it every time.
Speaking of mythology, Brooks' history of the 2008 primary campaign is spectacularly wrong. John McCain got just 33% of the South Carolina GOP primary vote. In that winner-take-all primary, McCain barely beat the evangelical populist Huckabee (30%). And that was only because:
McCain had name ID and had been organizing non-stop in the state since 2001;
The "Anybody But McCain" vote was badly divided;
Southerners respect military service;
Romney was hurt by his Mormonism and "flipflopper" reputation; and
Republican primary voters tend to be older, and McCain owned the Clueless GOP Geezer Vote.
None of this had anything to do with Rush Limbaugh, and had everything to do with the failure of Republican Party leadership. This was why, on Election Night 2008, I wrote "You Did Not Lose," attempting to explain to conservative voters that the defeat of John McCain was not a failure of conservatism. McCain finished with only 47% of the total GOP primary vote, and was never the choice of the party's conservative grassroots core:
While the Democratic struggle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton captured all the headlines during the primary season, few pundits noticed the massive Republican resistance to McCain's nomination. For example, on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, McCain got 33 percent of the primary vote in Missouri, 32 percent in Tennessee and Georgia; in caucuses that day, he got 22 percent in Minnesota and 19 percent in Colorado. McCain's share of the total Republican primary vote through Super Tuesday was only 39 percent. Nor did the resistance end after McCain's most formidable rival, Mitt Romney, called it quits Feb. 7. As late as May 20 -- by which time McCain had been the de facto nominee for more than two months -- 28 percent of voters in the Kentucky GOP primary cast their ballots for other candidates or voted "uncommitted."
Nov. 4, 2008, was Crazy Cousin John's personal defeat, as well as a decisive repudiation of the Republican Party's leaders, who had utterly abandoned the legacy of Ronald Reagan in favor of the "compassionate conservative" agenda of Bushism, which was nothing but Brooksian "National Greatness" in evangelical drag with a Texas drawl.
For no matter how often their hollowness is exposed, the jocks still reweave the myth of their own power. They still ride the airwaves claiming to speak for millions. They still confuse listeners with voters. And they are aided in this endeavor by their enablers. They are enabled by cynical Democrats, who love to claim that Rush Limbaugh controls the G.O.P. They are enabled by lazy pundits who find it easier to argue with showmen than with people whose opinions are based on knowledge. They are enabled by the slightly educated snobs who believe that Glenn Beck really is the voice of Middle America.
"Slightly educated snobs" -- exactly which graduate of Jacksonville (Ala.) State University do you have in mind there, Mr. Brooks?
This endless anti-"populist" crusade for Big Government Republicanism has been a constant of Brooksianism since the neurasthenic geek first started pushing his disastrously influential "National Greatness" idiocy in 1997. That blunderheaded misconception of misinformed thumbsucking earned Brooks membership in The Republicans Who Really Matter, and he's been toiling diligently to destroy the Party of Reagan ever since.
Read my lips: David Brooks is not a conservative! He never has been and never will be. His entire career has been devoted to using his influence over the Republican Party elite to prevent conservatives from exercising influence over the party's direction.
Meanwhile, speaking of Republicans who have never been conservative, Politico reports that "Sen. John McCain is working behind-the-scenes to reshape the Republican Party in his own center-right image." And it ain't going to happen.
If the GOP moves leftward -- which is what the phrase "center-right" means -- it will implode or become irrelevant as an electoral force, because a majority of Americans still want what Phyllis Schlafly described so eloquently in 1964: A Choice, Not an Echo.
I like Glenn Beck -- which isn't the same as saying I always agree with Glenn Beck --and anyone who has been following this blog long enough knows how much I despise Crazy Cousin John:
I long worried that all the moonshine runners, snuff-dippers and bar brawlers in the Alabama branch of our family tree might feel I had failed to uphold our ancestral honor by working in the disgraceful racket that "journalism" has now become. Yet the two-faced, backstabbing, open-borders, bailout-endorsing crapweasel, Crazy Cousin John, has brought such odium upon our name that no one even pays attention to me.
By his disgraceful defeat and unprincipled politics, John McCain has disgraced not only himself, but has imputed an ineradicable stain to his innocent kindred. (The first time I was introduced to Ann Coulter, her greeting was, "A most unfortunate name.") And let's not even bring his idiot daughter into this, OK? If the blonde-joke punchline can't stop at three margaritas, that's certainly not my fault.
Since I'm quoting myself again, let me repeat this: Short, old, bald and grumpy is not a winning combination in politics. The fact that John McCain thought he'd be a better Republican presidential candidate than Mitt Romney -- tall, handsome, hirsute, cheerful -- tells you everything you need to know about Maverick's poor judgment in terms of basic electoral politics. Think about this: Why have you never seen me on TV? Because I suck on TV. I've done a few appearances, hated it because I'm not good at it, and don't want to do any more. I'm a natural on radio, however, and have appeared as a guest on scores of talk radio shows. So that's me: Never gonna be "TV-famous," doomed to perpetual obscurity.
A man's got to know his limitations. Crazy Cousin John never could accept the simple fact that everyone with the slightest media acumen could see: He lacked the fundamental telegenic quality necessary to be a winning presidential candidate in our era. He also lacks sturdy principles and emotional equipose, but from the standpoint of pure 50-percent-plus-one politics, those were secondary considerations compared to the clueless-old-coot vibe he emits on TV.
Ron Paul is not wrong about everything. Many people who don't count themselves "Ron Paul supporters" agree with Paul on a great many things, particularly liberty and the out of control spending in Washington.
Look, I covered the 9/12 March On D.C. I talked to scores of attendeesraaaaacists. If the policy of the march organizers had been No Beck Fans Allowed, you could certainly subtract 40%-50% from whatever you think the attendance was. And considering the degree to which the march was organized by free-marketeers, a No Ron Paul Supporters Allowed policy would have subtracted at least 40 staffers from the event.
People who want to talk about the "New Majority" or "The Next Right" or "Republican renewal" need to get used to the idea that the conservative coalition of the future will be a loud, rowdy and unruly bunch, composed of diverse people with disparate beliefs.
We need fighters, and I suspect Beck will fight 'til ev'ry foe is vanquished. Bob Belvedere gets it. Phyllis Chesler gets it. We defend truth and liberty against lies and tyranny. Every eye is upon us and we are surrounded by enemies as numerous as the grains of sand on the shore. Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer.
Of course, disdain from the dogmatic right will only help Beck. As it should. He should wear the scorn of Levin like a badge of honor.
If an endorsement from Sully doesn't convince Mark Levin to make peace with Glenn Beck (or, at least, with Beck's fans), what ever could?
BTW, I've met Mark Levin, who is the size of a linebacker and is one of the last conservative pundits I would ever want to have angry at me. If the Levin-Beck feud were a prize fight, my money would be on Levin by a first-round knockout.
"There was a provision in the bill that talks about a board that would decide 'most effective measures' to provide health care for people, OK?" --John McCain, ABC "This Week"
And if the "most effective measures" means Grandma gets a Brompton cocktail . . .
Ace of Spades mentions "integrity" in discussing his services last year "as an apologist for the horrible candidate John McCain." I traveled a good distance down that particular road myself -- I'd link some of it, if only it weren't so traumatically embarrassing -- but I knew when to pull the ripcord:
John McCain lost the election Sept. 24 and Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States. Nothing that is likely to happen between now and Nov. 4 can change this outcome. . . . Democrats are already rushing to promote Obama's coming victory as a mandate for their "progressive" agenda. Conservatives need to begin telling the true story of McCain's defeat, which must be admitted before it can be explained.
That was published Oct. 7 by The American Spectator, nearly a full month before the election. In fact, my spontaneous reaction Sept. 24 to McCain's stunt ("insane . . . I can't see the benefit, either in terms of policy or politics") was almost a perfect bull's-eye. And let the record show that, once everything was said and done, all informed analysts agreed with me that Crazy Cousin John's support for the bailout was the decisive turning point in his well-deserved defeat. (See also Doug Mataconis: "The McCain Campaign: What Went Wrong.")
The question has since been asked, by friends, whether I have any regrets. Short answer: None at all. I didn't vote for Obama and I didn't vote for Crazy Cousin John. Let other people apologize for their choices, but I have nothing to regret. (Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Bob Barr.) So I felt obligated to make this point in my reply to Ace:
If the Republican Party could nominate as its presidential candidate a man whose only apparent political principle has been the advancement of his own ambition and still win, what kind of cynic would call that a good outcome? When the GOP nominates the wrong man, the electoral debacle that inevitably follows cannot be interpreted as evidence that the party should nominate more scoundrels like that.
Lots of people disagree with me, and I have no problem with that. They have the right to be wrong. I understand that my habit of being 100% right all the time is annoying to people who are wrong. Yeah, it might be kind of boring if every other blog on the planet was nothing but a series of links like this:
Boring, yes. But accurate. What's the point of being a know-it-all if you don't actually know it all? Isn't that why people read Hot Air, because Allah knows everything?
So when I'm right, right, right, right all the time, and other people are reliably wrong like clockwork (e.g., David Brooks), then maybe a good political strategy for the Republican Party would be to listen to me: Do the exact opposite of whatever David Brooks says to do. Cf."How to Think About Liberalism (If You Must)."
There was a time -- perhaps as recently as yesterday -- when my prophetic omniscience may have been incomplete. As of today, however, just call me Mr. Authoritative Truth. So believe me when I tell you that, even though Ace is wrong about this one thing, he isn't a total whore, no matter what David Frum says.
UPDATE II: Dan Collins is a genius, and also has some interesting arguments on ObamaCare. Everyone who cares about the future of the Republican Partythe conservative causeAmericathe world the universe should commit to memory every priceless word that Dan Collins writes.
Well, we’re not being screwed, these days. We’re being freaking gang-raped. . . . Does anyone really believe that a John McCain presidency would have sold out the country to the Unions? Does anyone really believe we’d have to be beating back the biggest power grab by the federal government ever?
Yes, and how did this happen? Because I voted for Bob Barr in Maryland? I think not. The GOP nominated as its presidential candidate the only candidate in the primary field for whom I could not vote. (S. 2611.) The most electable candidate in the Republican field, Mitt Romney, quit two days after Super Tuesday.
When the Republican Party nominates a guaranteed loser who -- surprise! -- loses, how is this result to be blamed on those who opposed the nomination, who specifically, accurately and concisely predicted what events would happen? I predicted it on Super Tuesday, and you may read "Bill Kristol & the Idiocy of Hope" -- from Monday, Nov. 3 -- and be assured that I have no regrets about that post, either.
How many times do I have to repeat myself? If you volunteer to be a doormat, don't complain about the footprints on your back.
If the Republican Party can nominate Bozo the Clown with the calm certainty that, on the day before the election, Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes and Sean Hannity will be lecturing conservatives about how important it is that they vote for Bozo -- "That clown is a Great American! He's pulled to within the margin of error in Idaho!" -- whose fault is it that the GOP gets its ass kicked and nobody takes the conservative movement seriously?
Obama, Pelosi and Reid are running roughshod over the Constitution, and this is to be blamed on me?
Fine. It's all my fault. Blame me. Or Sarah Palin. Or Rush Limbaugh. Take your pick. Since it seems absolutely essential to some people that the clueless GOP hacks who orchestrated this disaster never be held accountable for their errors, please don't let me me disturb the search for a convenient scapegoat.
But why keep searching? It was me. Mea culpa.
Whatever you do, don't blame John McCain, or any of the idiots at GOP-HQ who squandered $792 million on the 2008 Republican campaign -- hey, let's hire the Dynamic Duck Duo! -- because if you blame them, somebody might accuse you of trying to be "morally superior."
UPDATE IV: OK, excuse the outburst. I'm just tired, is all. Everybody knows exactly what needs to be done. Except me. I'm the only person in the entire conservative blogosphere who doesn't know anything about politics, or media, or campaigns.
So whatever you do, ignore me -- until it's time to blame me.
To demonstrate the basic problem with Purdum's article -- and much other press treatment of the Alaska governor -- let's turn to Page 9:
More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly.
Right. Did Purdum ever write about the narcissism of Bill "Better Put Some Ice On That" Clinton? Of course not. Nor has Todd Purdum ever written about the extravagant self-regard of Crazy Cousin John, whose "pervasive pattern of grandiosity" involved the "fantasy or behavior" of his quixotic presidential campaign -- a campaign that, Purdum observes, involved the belated and impulsive choice of a running mate for whom "no serious vetting had been done."
Digression: Why can't anyone from Team Maverick ever take responsibility for their own failures? It could be argued, given the disastrous result of his campaign, that everyone who supported him in the Republican primaries was guilty of flawed judgment. (Purdum notes that, after McCain clinched the GOP nomination, Palin didn't publicly endorse him -- evidence of superior judgment on her part, I'd say.)
The problem with the MSM is not that it has no standards, but that it has two standards. Or perhaps -- considering how the MSM savaged Hillary Clinton in the primaries last year -- we can now say there are three standards: One for Republicans, one for Obama, and one for Democrats who get thrown under Obama's bus.
But back to the Vanity Fair article: If none of McCain's aides had the foresight to anticipate his selection of Palin -- which would explain the lack of "serious vetting" -- whose fault is that? And if choosing an unvetted running mate was a blunder, whose blunder was it?
This is what the Blame Sarah First crusade by McCain campaign staffers is about: Exculpating them for their own bad judgment, including their decisions to join the McCain campaign in the first place. Make her the scapegoat, so they can walk away pretending that they're perfect.
Of all the decisions for which Sarah Palin has been criticized, saying "yes" when asked to be Maverick's running mate was most clearly a misjudgment. I'm sure she sits home in Wasilla late some nights and thinks of the answer she should have given:
"Are you kidding me? That guy's nuts. Besides, he's going to get stomped in November. Why would I want to associate with a RINO loser like that?"
Well, hindsight is 20/20, eh? If Sarah Palin is reading this: Governor, please pay close attention to Part I of the Vanity Fair critique, which includes a very specific recommendation. (No, not the part about the hand grenade.) My 2008 American Spectator articles about Sarah Palin:
I've tried to avoid the disturbing weirdness from Andrew Sullivan about the birth of Trig Palin. You'd think ignoring it might make it go away, especially eight months after the election. But no. He's still beating on this ghost of a dead horse. There's something very unhealthy going on here.
Read the whole thing. Allow me once again to suggest that the "very unhealthy" part of what's going on involves a matter of identity. Sully self-consciously identifies as gay, and he identifies Gov. Palin as Mom.
Could anything be more simple? (Perhaps Dr. Helen will dare to weigh in. She's a mom, too.) The unnoted imbalance in the Sully-Palin grudge match is that Sully's gay identity is politically protected in contemporary America, while Palin's maternal identity is not.
The War Against Mom is one of the most hideous aspects of postmodern misogyny.
It took a helluva lot of provocation -- Sully's accusation that I am an advocate of "genocide"(!) -- to make me finally take the risk of saying in my own name what Ace has been saying for months: Sully's got a problem that is not strictly political in nature.
One of the horrible realities of the Culture War is that in the past 30 years, the opportunistic political exploitation of the AIDS pandemic has converted the vibe of the gay community from Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street into the spirit of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally. The remorseless momentum of sexual politics has changed "gay" from a hedonistic personal proclivity -- Laissez les bon temps rouler -- into the totalitarian identity of the ubermenschen.
What is tragic about Andrew Sullivan's recent totalitarian turn is that he was one of the most famous victims of the brownshirt "outing" squad. Sully was forced out of the closet in the most vicious way possible and has evidently taken the wrong lesson from that experience. Rather than join forces with freedom-lovers like Tammy Bruce, who oppose the Ernst Rohms of the Official Gay Movement, Sullivan appears to have succumbed to a species of Stockholm Syndrome, adopting the mentality of his tormenters.
Sullivan seems to prosecute his crusade against Sarah Palin's privacy on the theory that, "If my sexuality cannot be private, no one's sexuality can be private." Thereby he advances the Orwellian specter in which all of us might as well post a YouTube video of our every sexual act, because there can be no privacy in the Big Brother state, where the personal is political -- and vice-versa.
It is not too late for Sullivan to renounce this evil, but he will not renounce it until he recognizes it as evil. Sorry that it took a "skilled attention whore" to point this out.
The consensus [among McCa8in campaign personnel] is that Palin's rollout . . . went more or less fine . . .
Wrong. The botched rollout set the stage for every subsequent error by the campaign staff. As I said within days of her announcement, they should have called an impromptu press conference immediately after her first Ohio rally.
The reporters would have had no chance to research their "gotcha" questions. The traveling media would have been pleased merely to be present at such a historic press conference, and would have hesitated to attack. The reporters from whom Palin took questions would have been grateful. And she would have bought herself at least a week before she could have been accused of "dodging" the press.
Republican "media strategists" don't understand the press, and for a simple reason: You could throw a hand grenade into a meeting of GOP "media strategists" with the calm assurance that among the dead and wounded, there would only be perhaps one or two who'd ever worked a day as a reporter.
If Gov. Palin wanted to hire a press secretary who really knows how a reporter thinks, she would get in touch with Audrey Hudson of The Washington Times, who once did a stint as a press secretary on Capitol Hill.
(BTW, that "hand grenade" stuff was just a figure of speech, not a serious suggestion. I disavow responsibility for any extremist who misunderstands the intent of such rhetoric. The legal department forced me to add this disclaimer. Damned lawyers.)
Sometimes I get questions about my name: "Should I call you Robert? Stacy? R.S.? What do you go by?" And I answer facetiously: "You can call me Mr. McCain." But I also answer to "Hey, Stupid."
Little Miss Attila tries "R. Stacy McCain," which was my byline until I moved to Washington. (Attila also says she was "a bit underwhelmed by Animal House," which makes me want to react like Otter when Mandy Pepperidge tells him it was "not that good.") Since I so frequently get questions about the name, I will endeavor to explain.
Using my full name as my byline is not an effort to be one of those Pretentious People With Three Names. I go by my middle name, but unfortunately, it got hijacked by girls.
This is not my fault. The well-known tough-guy actor Stacy Keach (b. 1941) is proof positive that "Stacy" used to be a perfectly respectable name for a man. The guy played Mike Hammer, for crying out loud. But shortly after I was born, "Stacy" -- along with virtually all other ending in "y" -- were taken over by the girls.
Like many other Anglo-American given names (including Sidney, Kelly and Lindsey), "Stacy" was originally a surname, a patronym. Genealogical records reveal no Stacy ancestors in my lineage and, while my mother never said anything one way or another about it, my assumption is that she borrowed the name of our family's pediatrician, the late Dr. Stacy Burnett of Atlanta. Who was also a man and who, I assume, was named for some of his Stacy family ancestors.
Coincidentally or not, I am the middle of three brothers in my family. My parents never had a girl, though I'm sure they wished they had, and one can forgive my suspicion that I'd have been named "Stacy" either way.
As fate would have it, I was born with hair that grew into golden ringlets, which my mother adored and refused to cut until I was about age 3. This was 1959-62, when most boys wore crew cuts. My father used to tell about going through the grocery store with Baby Stacy riding in the shopping cart, and all the ladies would exclaim, "Oh, what a pretty girl!"
Can you say, "overcompensation," Dr. Freud? I became a thoroughgoing hellion of a boy -- a crazy daredevil of boyish energy. This hellion streak was aggravated by the fact that my older brother Kirby, two-and-a-half years older, was the charming, clever, dark-haired joy of our mother's heart, so that I strove eagerly to match or outdo his efforts. For example, there is a scar over my left eye that is the result of 6-year-old Stacy's placing second in a rock-throwing contest with 8-year-old Kirby, whose hand-eye coordination was always far superior.
And of course, Dr. Freud, I was girl-crazy at a precocious age. Kirby was naturally attractive and, in my constant rivalry with him, I suppose I made myself less attractive simply because of my overeagerness to be liked by girls. The first girl I remember having a crush on, in kindergarten, was Priscilla Yates, a chubby brunette with big brown eyes, freckles and the cutest little gap between her front teeth.
Priscilla was followed in sequence by Carol Purdy (first grade, and also brunette), redhead Joanna Richardson and blonde Janet Howton (who shared my unacknowledged fascination in second grade), then back to Carol Purdy for a couple of years. There was also Carol's friend Rhonda Pilgrim and Ginger Whiteside, both blondes, as was the adorably dimpled Darlene Goza. Darlene was a cheerleader for my youth football team, the Sweetwater Valley Red Raiders, and one memorable night in 1970 became the first girl who willingly let me kiss her on the cheek.
OK, so you get the picture there, Dr. Freud. And then there were the playground taunts: "Stacy? That's a girl's name!"
My daddy left home when I was three And he didn't leave much to ma and me, Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze. Now, I don't blame him cause he run and hid, But the meanest thing that he ever did Was before he left, he went and named me "Sue." -- "A Boy Named Sue," written by Shel Silverstein, recorded by Johnny Cash, 1969
Now, it happens that I was extraordinarily intelligent as a child. If I live long enough to write a memoir, one chapter will be titled, "Confessions of a Former Boy Genius." Being born in October, I started first grade at age 5 and was nearly always the youngest boy in my grade. Which would not have been such a source of memorable woe, had it not been for the fact that I was also relatively small for my age.
Being the wee lad on the grade-school playground required survival adaptations, especially when you're the smart-aleck class clown. Ignorant Yankees up here in D.C. think I'm a wild dangerous redneck but, as any of my childhood friends would tell you, a real redneck would whup my ass. And many did, or tried to, anyway.
You see, older brother Kirby has always been a fighter, and he considered whupping my ass to be sort of a proprietary fraternal privilege. If I did something sufficiently stupid (which certainly wasn't unheard of) as to actually deserve an ass-whupping, I was on my own. But woe unto any bully who thought he was going to pick on Kirby McCain's little brother without facing the most severe and violent repercussions. So I had that going for me. Plus, I had a fiendishly quick mind.
Never much of a fighter -- "Turn the other cheek" made a strong impression on me in Sunday school -- I did become adept at wrestling, so that I could usually keep from getting hit more than once in a fight. (Man, I've been sucker-punched so often . . .) And I also developed a knack for befriending guys whose tough reputations could help ward off attacks on their smart-aleck little friend. Enter D.W. "David" Brook.
Now, it's kind of ironic that every week on this blog, I celebrate "David Brooks Fisking Day," when my best childhood friend has such a similar name. My friend's name, however, was Brook, not Brooks, even though in middle school our posse of hoodlums was notorious as The Brooks Gang. And his actual first name isn't "David," either, but there is no need to go into that here. He is the only one of my friends to call me "Bobby," and I call him "D.W.," and if he hadn't grown up to be such an eminently respectable citizen of his community, man, could I tell you some stories on him. To say nothing of the stories he could tell on me. But I digress.
From 'R. Stacy' to 'Robert Stacy' An aspiring cartoonist as a lad, who used to make a nickel or a dime selling unflattering caricatures of unpopular teachers, I took to signing myself "R. Stacy McCain," and maintained that as my byline when I made my debut as a rock-music critic for the Jacksonville (Ala.) State University Chanticleer in 1981. That byline followed me all the way through until, in November 1997, I left the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune to join the staff of The Washington Times as an assistant national editor.
Working in small-town Georgia newspapers over the years, I'd sometimes have to deal with readers who called up asking to speak to her, this "Stacy McCain" girl who'd written some story they wanted to gripe about. Such misunderstandings had been relatively rare, however, because (a) these were small towns, where most readers eventually had a chance to meet me personally, and (b) from the time I joined the staff of the Cahoun (Ga.) Times in the fall of 1987 until I departed for D.C. a decade later, I had my own column, which was accompanied by a thumbnail mug shot that made it obvious that I was a guy. Or else the ugliest woman in the newspaper business, not excluding even Helen Thomas.
Of course, my secret hope was that my award-winning ability as a columnist would eventually land me a regular spot on the op-ed page of The Washington Times, a hope frustrated by circumstance. My advice to would-be D.C. newspaper columnists: Never go to work doing news for a paper. The high (and transparently phony) wall between "news" and "opinion" in D.C. means that, if you want to be a newspaper columnist in the nation's capital, your best bet is to get a Ph.D. and hire on at a think tank. "Journalist" and "columnist" are almost mutually exclusive in Washington. To my knowledge, neither George F. Will, nor Charles Krauthammer, to name a couple of examples, ever did a day's work as a reporter. Again, however, I digress.
Because my photo would never appear in The Washington Times, and because D.C. is not the kind of place where I could hope to meet every reader, it seemed the smart thing to switch from my accustomed "R. Stacy McCain" byline to "Robert Stacy McCain." Whereupon, relieved of the problem of people calling to speak to "her," I suddenly became aware of a previously unanticipated problem: Some other guy named McCain.
Crazy Cousin John When I got to Washington, I would often find myself in a situation familiar to any D.C. journalist: On the phone with a government receptionist who was paid way more than me and who understood her job to be making sure nobody ever spoke to her boss. It was perhaps unethical when, after the government receptionist finally agreed to take a message and asked me how to spell my name, I would reply, "Robert Stacy -- S-T-A-C-Y, no 'e' -- M-C-C-A-I-N," like the Arizona senator." (Ethics, schmethics, I always say.)
Now, if the receptionist asked if I were related to the senator, I'd honestly answer, "No." But usually they didn't ask, and their bosses usually returned my calls.
However, in February 2000, as the GOP primary battle between George W. Bush and John McCain was heating up, one of my bosses assigned me to do some research on the Arizona senator. During the course of that investigation, I read his book Faith of My Fathers, and discovered that we were in fact distant cousins, descendants of a McCain whose name appears on the 1790 Census of South Carolina. (I learned to do research spooling microfilm in libaries, and geneaology was a keen interest of mine for a while in the early '90s.) My investigation of John McCain never turned into an actual story because he flamed out in the South Carolina primary and then befouled himself by attacking Christian conservatives in a notorious speech in Virginia, but . . . knowledge is power, eh?
You might say I'm a victim of reverse nepotism, having suffered for the unsavory reputation of my more famous kinsman. John McCain's vicious backstabbing habits made the family name an epithet among conservatives. It is a fact that, although Rush Limbaugh at times over the years would read my news articles on his radio show, it would always be "there's this story in The Washington Times." He never once said my name, obviously because he figured it would confuse his listeners, who had learned to associate "McCain" with all that is treacherous and unworthy. Sigh.
So this explains why when I launched this blog, I called it "The Other McCain" and have habitually referred to the Republican from Arizona as Crazy Cousin John. Under no circumstance would I want to be confused with that son of a bitch or any of his RINO supporters. (Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Bob Barr! ) Since Crazy Cousin John bears an enormous burden as the incompetent fool who lost the election and inflicted the Obama presidency on America, I congratulate myself for having had the foresight to distance myself from him as best I could.
Having now spent half a day explaining my name, I will tell you that I spent a lot of time thinking of what I should name my own children, and my children all have very classy names: Kennedy, Bob (Jr.), James, Jefferson, Emerson and Reagan.
Each of those names, including their middle names, has a little story behind it. For example, I was a raised a Georgia yellow-dog Democrat, remained so until my mid-30s, and my Ohio-born Republican wife was gracious enough to let me name our first child Kennedy Catherine McCain.
The "Kennedy" was actually less in tribute to the slain president (his funeral, when I was 4, is my first clear memory of seeing something on TV) than it was a quest to find an elegant, distinctive name. Say her full name aloud, and the effect is obvious -- the triple alliteration, the rhythmic cadence, and the "president-and-a-queen" factor all work to the same purpose. Furthermore, we were at that time living in Calhoun, Georgia, where my radio DJ buddy Kevin Casey was "K.C. in the Morning," and it occurred to me that if my daughter ever aspired to a career in Top 40 radio . . .
However, in agreeing to let our first child bear a Democratic name entirely of my own choosing -- I thought it up one afternoon while driving to Chatsworth to cover a football game -- my longsuffering bride insisted that our next daughter should be named "Reagan." Four sons and 13 years later, Reagan Elizabeth McCain weighed in at a whopping 11 pounds. Again, the president-and-a-queen motif, the attention to rhythm and, as I'm typing this, Our Little Princess is playing Barbies in the den.
Back during the fall of 2008, Jeremy Lott was assistant online editor at The American Spectator and urged me to write a column about Crazy Cousin John. I started it, but never finished it, because I became so enraged when I recalled the Kennedy-McCain Illegal Alien Shamnesty Bill.
That worthless two-faced son of a bitch named that un-American piece of treasonous villainy after my daughter and it would have been inappropriate during the height of a presidential election campaign for a conservative journalist to vent his spleen upon the Republican candidate over what was, after all, a deeply personal insult. So I held my peace. But I swear to God, if I should ever own a campground, lady visitors to McCain's Rural Retreat will have the privilege of attending to calls of nature in the Meghan McCain Outhouse. (The men will just use The John.)
So that's my story. I will add only that, for several years in the late '60s and early '70s, my mother worked as a bookkeeper/secretary in the Atlanta offices of RCA Records. Through that job, she had the opportunity to meet many of the big names in music, including Johnny Cash, whose autograph adorned the album that included a song that my parents thought was hilariously funny. In retrospect, I guess they kind of had a point.
He said: "Now you just fought one hell of a fight And I know you hate me, and you got the right To kill me now, and I wouldn't blame you if you do. But ya ought to thank me, before I die, For the gravel in your guts and the spit in your eye, 'Cause I'm the son-of-a-bitch that named you 'Sue.'"
By Smitty Monique is not a member of the Senator McCain fan club. She thinks she may have found a use for him. The Puffington Host has a convenient caption contest going on at the moment. We could, say, hijack that: "Joe, do you really think I make a good cautionary tale? Should I have listened to Thomas Jefferson:
'In matters of style, swim with the current; In matters of principle, stand like a rock.'
I started this blog and named it with the specific idea of distinguishing myself from the short, old, bald, grumpy geezer who -- exactly as I said from the get-go -- (a) was not conservative and (b) could not win in November.
This is clear proof that Crazy Cousin John's RINO ways have imparted a stain to the family honor -- and let's don't even talk about Meghan and "stain" in the same sentence, OK? A long-serving U.S. Senator and war hero has now become more of a disgrace to our name than me, perhaps the most notorious right-wing journalist in America.
I long worried that all the moonshine runners, snuff-dippers and bar brawlers in the Alabama branch of our family tree might feel I had failed to uphold our ancestral honor by working in the disgraceful racket that "journalism" has now become. Yet the two-faced, backstabbing, open-borders, bailout-endorsing crapweasel, Crazy Cousin John, has brought such odium upon our name that no one even pays attention to me.
Rush Limbaugh won't even mention my American Spectator articles on his radio show, because the very name "McCain" has become an epithet among conservatives. If it weren't for The One Thing Crazy Cousin John Did Right, I could never forgive him for the shame and embarrassment he has cause me.
And I should mention, BTW, that this Fox Forum article was sent to me by Atlanta's lovely Carol Purdy Fields, whom I had a crush on in third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade . . .
So says the Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb, talking about his six months on the John McCain campaign. I profoundly disagree -- I don't like the Beltway revolving door between politics and media, even ideological media -- but I don't want to argue about that. Some highlights from Goldfarb's interview with Columbia Journalism Review:
I thought from the beginning that we would lose.
Well, duh. I said so after Super Tuesday: "McCain is not a conservative, he will lose in November . . ."
I am not convinced that Sarah Palin hurt the campaign. People think that this decision was made in some kind of vacuum. I'm not convinced that a McCain/Romney ticket would have outperformed a McCain/Palin. Well, maybe if we'd done Lieberman we would have been down fifteen points after the convention instead of up four. I'm not convinced that Palin, even with all her weaknesses, wasn't the most plausible ticket you could have put forward this year.
Well, any ticket headed by John McCain was in deep trouble, no matter who the running mate was. And McCain cut his own throat with his bailout stunt, so any attempt to shift blame to Palin is scapegoating, period. The fact that McCain even considered putting Lieberman on the ticket illustrates how this year's defeat is 100% McCain's fault.
Lots more good stuff in the interview, including Goldfarb's denunciation of the anti-Palin leakers inside the campaign. He ought to denounce them by name, because they deserve to be persona non grata henceforth.
John McCain's 24-year-old daughter told a New Hampshire blogger this week: "Sarah Palin is the only part of the campaign that I won't comment on publicly.”
As Harry at MyPalPalin.com points out (scroll down to his "special feature"), this is a stark contrast to Meghan's unabashed enthusiasm for Palin during the campaign:
Back on August 30, 2008, Meghan McCain wrote in her own blog, " ... Dad's choice of Governor Sarah Palin as his nominee for Vice President is a moment on stage I will never forget. She and her family are so down to earth and so much fun. I could not be any luckier to have these wonderful people join us on the road. I had the pleasure of spending the day with kids Bristol, Willow, Piper and Trig. Not only do we have a new Vice Presidential nominee, but I have three new awesome girls to share the road with. I am looking forward to spending more time with them hanging out on the Straight Talk Express." . . . Then on September 16, during a Larry King TV interview, King asked Meghan what she thought about her father's selection of Sarah Palin for vice president, and Meghan answered: " ... I'm very, very pleased with it. I love her. I'm really excited about it." . . . King asked Meghan what specifically she liked about Sarah, and Meghan said, "First of all, she's really chill. She's really nice, really friendly. She's really up on pop culture, which I always respect. She's very smart. She doesn't act entitled, which unfortunately sometimes you get with some politicians. She's just like your average girl, like just a mom. But she's very, very shrewd, very smart. I've heard her talking about issues.” . . . Now it’s the middle of January, 2009 and Meghan gushes to a nameless blogger that there’s nothing about the election she would change, that “it was the most liberating experience of my life," but says she will not respond to any questions about Gov. Palin.
Worth noting. Steadfast loyalty isn't a prominent trait in Crazy Cousin John's branch of the family.
There is a new scam online: People who claim to be Republicans putting up Web sites to solicit donations. Do not give these RINOs money! They only push liberal open-borders and bailout agendas (and lose elections to Democrats). Ace has the details of the scam that any Nigerian would be ashamed to attempt.
UPDATE: My friends, I've been linked at Cold Fury.
That other McCain -- the one who lost the election -- owes Republicans a concession speech, says Pete Parisi:
As is customary on election night, Republican presidential nominee John McCain called his rival, Barack Obama, to concede defeat and graciously wish the Illinois Democrat well as he prepares to move into the White House in January. The Arizona lawmaker then delivered that same message to disappointed supporters gathered in Phoenix and on national television. Now, two weeks later, it's time for Mr. McCain to make a second concession speech — this one to his fellow Senate Republicans, when they gather Tuesday [Nov. 18] to organize their conference for the 111th Congress — conceding that he ran the most incompetent campaign in memory, apologizing for it and urging that the party's 2012 nominee not to make the same mistakes if the GOP is to have any hope of wresting back the White House four years from now.
A Republican candidate could have won the presidency this year.
McCain made a huge mistake in picking Sarah Palin.
Now, on the first, I hate to say that anything is impossible, but it was clear from the beginning that "Bush fatigue" created a 40-mph headwind for the GOP, and Cillizza quantifies this factor:
In the national exit poll, more than seven in 10 voters said that they disapproved of the job Bush was doing; not surprisingly, Obama resoundingly won that group, 67 percent to 31 percent. But here's an even more stunning fact: While 7 percent of the exit-poll sample strongly approved of the job Bush was doing, a whopping 51 percent strongly disapproved. Obama won those strong disapprovers 82 percent to 16 percent.
The intense loathing of Bush among the electorate -- even among many conservative Republicans -- is something you're not going to perceive if your head is stuck inside a Sean Hannity echo chamber. Bush is the least-popular president since Nixon.
Yet, in my "never say never" mode of trying to figure out some way the Republicans could win, I felt that McCain missed a perfect opportunity to create distance between himself and the president when he jumped in to support the $700 billion bailout. The bailout was not conservative, it was unpopular and it was morally wrong. If Maverick had voiced a "libertarian populist" critique of the bailout, it might have -- might have -- made a difference politically, but it certainly would have sparked a debate where he would have been on the side of the angels.
Now, as to the Palin pick, Cillizza is correct that she energized "cultural conservatives" and was a net plus to the GOP ticket, but he injects some confusion into the argument with this:
[T]he data appear somewhere close to conclusive that Palin did little to help . . . McCain's attempts to reach out to independents and Democrats.
Here it is important to distinguish conceptually between the effect of (a) Palin herself, (b) Palin as presented by Team Maverick, and (c) Palin as perceived through the media lens.
Palin could have been a figure appealing to independents and Democrats, if Team Maverick hadn't insisted on hiding her from reporters for weeks after her selection as running mate. It was that boneheaded decision which did the most to drive the media negativity toward Palin, and it was the media negativity that prevented her from having crossover appeal.
As someone who is both a conservative and a journalist with 22 years in the business, I began complaining on Sept. 2 (three days after Palin was announced) that the McCain campaign was mishandling her media strategy.
When the campaign released a statement about Bristol Palin's pregnancy, I suggested -- in a fit of paternal indignation -- that if Bristol were my daughter, I'd have put her and Levi the Baby Daddy into a press conference and let them explain themselves. That sounds crazy, and maybe it was, but direct confrontation is often the best public-relations strategy. When you're dealing with a story so big that it is obviously going to blow sky-high no matter what you do, you might as well call a press conference and meet it head-on. (Even if you're going to lie: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky!")
The McCain campaign sent Palin to do high-stakes interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, before Palin had held even one press conference with the reporters on the trail. That is so wrong that I can't even begin to explain how wrong it is, and whoever made that decision was suffering from the worst case of recto-cranial inversion in the history of media relations.
I don't care how much you hate "the media," the poor faceless schlubs -- wire-service and newspaper reporters -- who are out there covering the campaign on a daily basis ought to get at least an occasional press conference with the candidates. I'm convinced that a lot of the negativity toward Palin was a result of the resentment felt by ordinary reporters over their lack of access. Palin is a likeable personality, she started out in the TV business, and if she had been allowed to deal directly with the press, the result would have been a lot better than sending out idiot "spokesmen" like Tucker Bounds to speak on her behalf.
So the fact that Palin did not make much headway with independent voters in this campaign (a) is not necessarily her fault, and (b) doesn't prove she can't reach independent voters in a future campaign. Since the election, she's held press conferences, handled them well, and made it clear that she "gets it" in terms of what the McCain campaign did wrong.
UPDATE: Linked at Pirate's Cove, where today's patriotic pinup is enough to make me stand up and salute!
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"When R.S. McCain talks about gonzo journalism, he knows what he’s talking about." -- Chapomatic
"You are reading Robert every day, aren’t you? If you aren’t, you’re missing out, folks. The guy brings the good stuff every day." -- Jimmie, The Sundries Shack
". . . the one-of-a-kind Robert Stacy McCain, whose blog should be on your must-read list, if it isn't already." -- Dyspeptic Mutterings
"The most enthusiastic blogger I have yet to meet." -- Pam Geller, Atlas Shrugs
"The guy has to be the hardest working dude in DC. I've yet to meet someone here he doesn't know." -- Dan Riehl, Riehl World View
"The fount of wit and wisdom, Robert Stacy McCain." -- Brian C. Ledbetter, Snapped Shot
"A very sharp mind and strong writing that pulls no punches." -- Matthew Archbold, Creative Minority
"One of the most important conservative writers working today." --Donald Douglas
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