Neoconservative poltroon Fred Barnes announces on Fox a very promising strategy for John McCain to become President of the United States– exploit hatred and fear of gays. McSame, solemnly declares the Very Serious Barnes, must pander to the social-conservative right by going after:

BARNES: In particular, gays in the military for one. We know Barack Obama is for allowing gays in the military, and Bill Clinton tried to do, but backed off. This is not a popular issue. Gay marriage is another one. These are both issues that I think McCain’s going to have to use. You can’t ignore the right. If he does, he’ll lose.

Sure, Barnes may be wrong as to the efficacy of such a foul strategy, as the analysis at the above link shows. But of course we must — in this “time of war” — demonize, ostracize and discharge decorated gay vets who have risked their lives to save other soldiers and civilians. True patriots only hate the troops if they have teh gay.
(more…)

The reliably authoritarian and retrograde Mark Levin over at NRO’s The Corner whines that he has: (more…)

The Club for Growth, having recently played a key role in knocking off anti-Iraq War and generally moderate Republican Congressman Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland, has turned next to corrupt Alaskan Congressman Don Young. Alaska, home to “libertarian Republican” hero and VP-hopeful Sarah Palin (Hello Ted), could become ground zero in the coming GOP civil war and a testing ground for the strategy of the Club for Growth role as financier and air campaign assistance for small government conservatives as they try to take over (take back?) the Republican Party. Alaska is, after all, a state where Ron Paul received 17% of the vote in the primary. Alaska had no problem kicking out unpopular Governor Frank Murkowski in favor of Sarah Palin back in 2006 and may well support her Lt. Governor Sean Parnell over Don Young. But here’s the monkey wrench in the Club for Growth-Ron Paulians attempt to reshape the GOP: Mike Huckabee. Who, BTW, finished ahead of Ron Paul in the “libertarian” state of Alaska. This is going to be a good race!

David Brooks has the admirable and rare quality for someone in his position of not being the least bit stingy in helping young writers he feels are talented get ahead in their careers, nor does he expect any sort of quid pro quo. Unfortunately, Brooks’ nose for talent has a very spotty track record, and the result is sometimes that the world would have been better off if he were more self-involved. For example, several years ago, after Brooks spent a semester guesting at Yale, he gave a plug in his Times column to the then unfinished biography one of his students was writing about Charles Hill, most recently late of the Giuliani campaign, a warmongering non-scholar and non-intelligent man who seems to have secured some sort of legacy lectureship ‘neath the elms. Anyway, because of Brooks’ plug, the book garnered attention from publishers that would have been unimaginable otherwise, and the author eventually cashed out for something in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. The ultimate product of Brooks’ generosity, however, was perhaps the worst “Yale book” ever written, and bear in mind that’s a class that includes God and Man at Yale.

(more…)

Okay Frank Gaffney, you want your chance to soil your sheets, Leonidas-style, over the silent and perhaps at this point irreversible Islamofascist conquest of America? You don’t need to resort to fantasizing about Muslim sovereign fund managers putting a hex on their bond issues, or, I don’t know, doing a universal find and replace of “New York” for “London” in whatever Melanie Phillips wrote this week. You don’t need to make up anything at all. Because it turns out that the most cunningly disguised Islamofascist sleeper cell ever has just planted the bloody banner of the false prophet Mahound and his demonic minions in a courtroom a mere stone’s throw from the Capitol: (more…)

You know, call me a naive youth, but I’d been holding out a little hope that Barack Obama’s weaselly hedging on the new (awful) FISA bill was just a tactic to allow him to mitigate the risk of voting against a bill the White House, the RNC, and the McCain campaign is suggesting could be the difference between whether hard-working Americans live or die. I.e., Obama could have been trying to make himself sound like the voice of centrist, moderate, non-ideological wisdom, emphasizing his support for the bill in general and expressing his opposition to telecom immunity sotto voce, so that when it came up for a vote, he could claim that the immunity-free legislation he supported was a sensible compromise, and that the Republicans were extremists who insisted on getting 100% of what they wanted or else they’d walk. That might not have been a very effective tactic, given that Steny Hoyer has already quite voluntarily allowed the Republicans to frame their 99% non-compromise as a centrist, moderate, non-ideological compromise, but hey, it would have been consistent with Obama’s usual manner of positioning himself when he takes the liberal side in a lost cause. (Cf. his vote against confirming John Roberts on the Supreme Court.)

(more…)

So. Let’s say you’re a center-right pundit with a reputation you feel you deserve for non-partisan evenhandedness and ideological heterodoxy. Even for being a bit of a contrarian. So when Barack Obama torpedoed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance regime, that might strike you as a teachable moment for liberals. After all, the McCain-Feingold regime is simply the latest iteration of a post-Watergate regulatory framework ostensibly designed to curb unseemly financial influences on the political system, but has achieved, with every new iteration, more expansive criminalization of political speech. What it has not achieved is any halt in the growth of the influence of allegedly malign special interests. On the contrary, some iterations of campaign finance regulation have actually augmented special interest influence.

(more…)

Presumptive Democratic Nominee for President of the United States, Barack Obama, has apparently sold out by endorsing Steny Hoyer and the Democratic-controlled Congress’s plan to both give George Bush all the power he could want to eavesdrop on Americans’ international communications in secret, and grant retroactive immunity to lawless telecommunications companies (tho Obama says he will fight in the Senate to strip the immunity provision; that means he’ll make a pretty but futile speech, and then vote for a bill with amnesty that will pass the Senate, too). Well, yes, I am profoundly disappointed, but feel no sense of betrayal. Only a fool invests emotionally in any candidate; still greater fools expect the POTUS to be Our Savior. Indeed, such expectations of presidents have rendered the Executive office the danger it has become.

(more…)

Ross Douthat’s logic is ingenious when he explains how watching pornography is “on a moral continuum with adultery,” but I don’t think he goes far enough. For just as “a lot of people would say” there is “similarity between having sex with a prostitute while you’re married and paying to watch a prostitute perform sexual acts for your voyeuristic gratification,” there is also similarity between “having sex with a prostitute” and having sex with your spouse. Hey, it’s sex, right? The prostitute’s gender may well be your spouse’s gender (odds go down - ahem, sorry - you’re a Republican politician), which is one level of similarity. You, the prostitute and your spouse are all God’s children. And when we move beyond prostitution to intimate extramarital relations, we probably find between you and your concubine kinds of intimacy and tenderness that strongly resemble the feelings you have or used to have for your spouse. The conclusion is inescapable: just as watching hardcore pornography is “the equivalent of having an actual affair,” having an actual affair is the equivalent of monogamy.

I wonder if McCain made the little rabbit’s ears gesture to go with this statement:

And my friends there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people. So now what are we going to do. We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material.

Radley Balko makes a good catch…McCain’s quote is not just scary because the contempt he piles on Habeas Corpus, but because it betrays that McCain’s grasp of what Habeas is is disturbingly fuzzy. Is anybody else getting a flashback from that time he messed up Sunni and Shiite in Jordan and Joe Lieberman had to whisper in his ear?

Reason’s Matt Welch points out that McCain also gave another constitutional right the rabbits ear treatment a while back.

(more…)

One of the perks of belonging to a disastrous administration: the tell-all book deal: (more…)

Poor Karl at the “neo-libertarian” blog Protein Wisdom waxes indignant — nay, verily scandalized — about Glenn Greenwald’s superb job documenting the many millions of dollars flowing from telecoms to lobby (and even personally benefit) members of both parties in the U.S. Congress. Greenwald addresses the (sarcasm alert!) coincidental relationship between said expenditures on the one hand, and on the other, a congresscritter’s support for telecom amnesty in the matter of the telecoms’ violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by joining with BushCo to secretly spy on Americans’ telephone and email communications without warrants.

(more…)

Occasional commenter here, Chris in DC –who built a demand to start a blog with his incisive commentary at Greenwald’s site using the handle DCLaw1, and has now done so — gets it mostly right on what is wrong with the GOP’s election strategy, and what that party’s loyalists blindly or obstinately refuse to admit: (more…)

 Last week, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have enabled women  to more effectively sue employers over gender based wage discrimination.   The bill was intended to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear , which limited the ability of workers to seek legal recourse under Title VII by enforcing a statute of limitations of 180 days from the first instance of wage discrimination (despite the fact that this type of discrimination is often as subtle as it is insidious and therefore can take much longer to uncover).  John McCain was absent on voting day, but made clear through comments that he opposed the bill.  Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins had this to say about the bill, the vote, and the absent McCain’s stance in the debate: (more…)

No, not McCain. His good friend, real-estate developer and fundraiser extraordinaire Don Diamond.

Mr. Diamond is close to most of Arizona’s Congressional delegation and is candid about his expectations as a fund-raiser. “I want my money back, for Christ’s sake. Do you know how many cocktail parties I have to go to?”[...]

(more…)

The blogs respond to my post of yesterday. I respond to the blogs responding. That darn Mona says my participation here is “limited.” Limited! I’ll show her!

(more…)