John McCain and Barack Obama were all smiles in today’s bipartisan (AKA doing what liberals want) meeting, but is John McCain the leader of the Republican Party now?  I hope for its sake that’s not true.  McCain’s constituents, the mainstream media, jumped ship during the election.  John simply has nothing to offer a rebuilding party except failed “maverick” policies that provide top cover for disastrous liberal policies.  And let’s be honest, had McCain pulled the election out, it would only have masked divisions between conservatives and RHINOS.

Get smart Republicans and dump McCain.  Your path back is by opposing Democrats, not helping them wreck the country.

From the moment Barack Obama announced his intentions to run for POTUS, I assumed that he would win.   The Clinton machine was worn out, and there were social forces and irrefutable facts that no “conservative” candidate could overcome.  Everything was in place when it came time to vote.  Briefly….

First, demographics:  Immigration and generational changes have eclipsed the Euro-centered, Post WWII electorate.  The young don’t care about Bill Ayers or radicalism any more than my generation cared about Tokyo Rose and Henry Wallace; the world of the young today is so bizarre and free-wheeling that nothing as tame as Jeremiah Wright can stand out and get serious attention.   Immigrants - most of whom have come here from despotic or chaotic countries - are seeking advantage through political power, and Barack Obama poses no threat to their conception of liberty.  They also don’t give a damn about Ben Franklin or Paul Revere, if you get my point.

Second, The Welfare State, or the same thing by other names:  Has grown in every administration since 1936, with a lapse during WWII.  All administrations have supported and expanded Human Resources and Defense ”superfunctions”, until it accounts for almost 62% of federal outlays since 1940 (adjusted for inflation). Everyone gets a piece, including those who call themselves conservatives.  Arguments about The Welfare State are window-dressing, because no faction or party seriously argues about its existence, and none attempt to define its sufficient size.

Third, popular conservatism itself, today, is a side show.   Buckley’s generation-long efforts to make conservatism respectable expired along with his sincerity, good sense and originality.  His heirs - like the bore George Will,  have made the essential muscularity of conservatism into a watery, disgusting gruel fit only for bow-tie wearing drama queens.   George W. Bush’s incoherence and government by passive silence has earned the detestation of almost every political perspective, especially the paleoconservatives.  Compassionate conservatism appeared to be ritualistic soul-cleansing, where things not belonging to you could be freely given to others.  Watch Barack Obama on this issue, too.

On the radio side, conservatism is dished up in the same old tropes, accompanied by country music, audio cuts of Ronald Reagan’s speeches and Wright’s squeals, and endless hammering on the anvils of American Exceptionalism and Rugged Individualism.  Together, their conclusions about why conservatism is moribund, is that voters dismayed by Republican cowardice and cupidity, punished them by voting for liberal Democrats.  Brilliant.   With analysis like this, we can win the T-Shirt slogan contest and forget the battle of ideas.

Speaking of ideas, that was McCain’s fatal problem.  He didn’t have any; he had a maverick personality, a biography, and expected us to generate ideas from there.  Obama projected plainly liquid and uncertain ideas, and his persona expanded like a Macy’s Parade balloon while McCain turned into a homunculus. Why this happened is unclear, and material for another post.

Right now I’m damned angry.   We’re exchanging one set of fools and poltroons who are clueless about the rationale, modes and aspirations of conservatism, for another set who are clueless about life, human nature, and the dangers in the world at large.  Great.

(Pat’s post below about Christopher Buckley’s endorsement of Barack Obama is the source material for what follows…The truth about Buckley being “sacked” from National Review can be found here.) 

Long ago, P.G. Wodehouse set himself the task of satirizing the historical tail end of the British hereditary aristocracy.  He did it  in the Jeeves and Wooster series, and the Blandings Castle saga.  Wodehouse’s male characters, when not plainly sinister like the fascist Roderick Spode, were a certain type of affable, facile, rich and well-educated, obtuse dopes, like Bertie Wooster and Gussie Fink-Noddle.

Orwell complained that Wodehouse’s creations made the British upper-classes seem nicer than they actually were, which was true.  P.G.’s toffs would trip over a chalk-line in the grass, fumble every ball and get every issue wrong.  But they were rarely of the mean and brainless species which includes men like John Kerry and, now, a few chattering -class conservatives like The New York Times token “conservative” David Brooks, and the gadly Christopher Buckley.  Brookes recently opined that Sarah Palin is a “cancer on the Republican Party”,  ignoring the auto-immune diseases killing the Republican Party without the help of a malignancy.     

Both the fictional and actual groups populated by Wooster, Brooks and Buckley seem to be governed mainly by matters of class and style.  Convinced  that their social milieu and status are permanent, they’re stupidly complicit with, even bemused by, their mortal enemies, and deaf to the winds of change howling around them. 

The broad scorn for Sarah Palin destroys William Buckley’s long-ago remark about preferring government by the first 500 names in the Boston phone directory rather than the faculty of Harvard.  Buckley retailed the progressive infatuation with The Common Man, but this was probably just an ideological festoon .  W.F. Buckley didn’t believe it, and neither does his son, Christopher.  

Wodehouse’s male characters gathered at The Drone’s Club, to hammer themselves silly with champagne and to rough-house in games of cricket played with wheat buns in panelled halls. Imagine a version of this ritual  with David Brooks pitching canapes to Christopher Buckley, and you get the picture.      

Buckley derides McCain for being “inauthentic”.  The masthead photo we see of Buckley, authentically fitted out for the chilly wilderness of Greenwich, in his fedora and dark coat, nibbling the stem of his tortoise-shell frame spectacles is of a man who prides authenticity?  His smug, leering self-satisfaction  is that of a man who’s just taken down two grouse with one shot of his new Purdy shotgun.  He has the authenticity of Ronald McDonald. 

He tells us he’s supporting Obama because Obama is Ivy League (ignore his caveats), and because Obama has a “first-class temperment”.  This is the quality that Wodehouse’s Roderick Spode would have called “breeding”; the standard by which clowns like Christopher Buckley would also judge horses, dogs and “gentlemen”. 

Scrape off the suede and gilt crust of Christopher Buckley’s political socialization and you don’t find Everyman, you find a buffoon wallowing in the cash and cachet of his forebears.  Note to Chris:  After 2500 years of counter-factual evidence, we’ve ditched the idea of a Philosopher King.    Especially of the Obama kind.

The latest meme being pushed by the media elite is that Republicans are angry and that this is somehow unheard of in presidential campaigns.

There were shouts of “Nobama” and “Socialist” at the mention of the Democratic presidential nominee. There were boos, middle fingers turned up and thumbs turned down as a media caravan moved through the crowd Thursday for a midday town hall gathering featuring John McCain and Sarah Palin.

[snip]

In recent days, a campaign that embraced the mantra of “Country First” but is flagging in the polls and scrambling for a way to close the gap as the nation’s economy slides into shambles has found itself at the center of an outpouring of raw emotion rare in a presidential race.

I’m shocked, absolutely shocked!

Who would have thought that McCain/Palin supporters think Obama is a socialist and that the biased mainstream media is for all intents and purposes the enemy.

Isn’t it funny how you never see media reports about all the moonbats comparing Bush to Hitler or spouting their insane September 11th conspiracies. Since the media ignores them, I’ll just repost one picture from a protest during the 2004 election.

I’ll take our angry republicans over their moonbats any day.

Right Wing Nut House has more here, including this:

I can’t tell you how much contempt I have for the Post and other media outlets who have been pushing this meme – that it is somehow dangerous, or racist, or indicative of something horribly ugly in the mindset of GOP supporters to show strong emotion at the mention of Obama. Not when similiar outbursts happen at Democratic rallies. Not when Democratic party partisans on the internet and elsewhere have whipped up a frenzy of hate against John McCain.

Has there ever been someone who screamed out about McCain “Kill him!” at an Obama rally? We don’t know because the idea that the press would report what one, lone, idiot shouts out at a rally of thousands is ludicrous – except if it is a McCain rally and then it becomes front page news.

Update: Stephen Hayes finds “unhinged democrats”. At least that is how the media would describe them if they were republicans.

This is the mess you get when the balance isn’t. It isn’t Donks and Republicants.It is Liberals and RINO’s voting to spend like drunks on social programs with no accountability; robbing one program to pay for another.

Now that Congress put the taxpayer out to dry, from where comes the money to pay for Medicare which is in the hole now. Social Security which is teetering on the edge and the prescription drug plan, you remember the one EVERYBODY clamored for, is in the red zone from the start.
Liberals and RINO’s, tell me your plan to pay the interest on T-Bills held by other countries? What are you going to do if they wish to cash in to ease their problems?
Now to the banking mess.

The fiasco we face does have a beginning and a time line of a perceptibly short duration.
We only look back to 1988, to a Democrat controlled congress. There is some Republican complicity too, in the FED by Greenspan and in Treasury. We need some names at which to point fingers; here is an ample supply. For the chimpy Loveable Liberal ALL are annotated to save you calling out bias, racist or liar. Makes the info easy for you, links to the WaPo, which as we know, is NOT biased.
Here’s the progression.

In 1990, the Fed, under former J.P. Morgan director Alan Greenspan, permitted guess who–J.P. Morgan–to become the first bank allowed to underwrite securities. [snip]
Four legislative attempts were made to weaken or repeal parts of Glass-Steagall from 1988-1996. One reason they failed is because smaller banks feared that opening the doors to allow banks to trade in securities would lead to the domination of larger banks–a fate that has come to pass.
The biggest change came in 1996 when Alan Greenspan issued a ruling allowing bank investment affiliates to have up to a quarter of their business in investments. [snip]

In 1986 a young man named Sanford Weill grew bored with Wall Street and purchased one of these subprime lenders, Commercial Credit, a loan company based in Baltimore. In his paper “Banking on Misery Citigroup, Wall Street, and the Fleecing of the South,” Michael Hudson notes Weill drove employees to sell more. [snip]
This kind of practice resulted in multiple lawsuits that surfaced in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Hudson cites one example:

Jackson, Miss., attorney Chris Coffer says, he obtained confidential settlements for about 800 clients with claims against Commercial Credit or its successor, CitiFinancial.

Starting with Commercial, Weill began wheeling and dealing until a little over a decade later he would head the largest financial institution in the world.

The Repeal of Glass Steagall

In the background of the go-go economy, the feeling grew among some economists and the financial community that Glass-Steagall hampered America’s financial competitiveness. Among the many voices favoring this was Alan Greenspan along with former Goldman Sachs partner Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary. In a 1995 speech and testimony to Congress Rubin signaled the Clinton Administration was ready to repeal Glass-Steagall:

“The banking industry is fundamentally different…[]…domestically, the separation of investment banking and commercial banking envisioned by Glass-Steagall has eroded significantly.”

Anyone who thinks the repeal of Glass-Steagall was forced on an unwilling Bill Clinton need only read Rubin’s testimony. A year later Sandy Weill set in motion the forces that would finally end Glass-Steagall. [snip]

Of course a NY Times photo of the event is with Clinton smiling is worth how many words?

Weill proposed the most audacious financial merger of in American history: he would merge one of the largest insurance companies (Travelers), one of the largest investment banks (Salomon Smith Barney), and the largest commercial banks (Citibank) in America. The problem was the merger was illegal in terms of Glass-Steagall. Independent Community Bankers of America CEO Kenneth Guenther captured the audacity of the deal in an interview with Frontline:

Here you have the leadership — Sandy Weill of Travelers and John Reed of Citicorp — saying, “Look, the Congress isn’t moving fast enough. Let’s do it on our own. …[]… And they pulled this off with the blessings of the president of the United States, President Clinton; the chairman of the Federal Reserve system, Alan Greenspan; and the secretary of the treasury, Robert Rubin.
And then, when it’s all over, what happens? The secretary of the treasury becomes the vice chairman of the emerging Citigroup.

Talk about a sinecure.
Then we have this marvelous statement from the bozo Rubin;

Curiously, one of those converts is none other than Robert Rubin who has stated:

If Wall Street companies can count on being rescued like banks, then they need to be regulated like banks.

Since it was Rubin who played a major role in the deregulation this statement is nothing short of incredulous.
As the record shows, Rubin had a great deal to regret. [snip]

(The link in the quote goes to Paul Krugman who has an antenna full of pigeons)
Before you say it, yes, Gramm was the Chairman of McCain’s committee since tossed off the campaign.

Senate Banking Committee Chair Phil Gramm, House Banking Committee chair James Leach, and Virginia Representative Thomas Bliley introduced bills in the Senate and House under the benign-sounding name of the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, becoming the key sponsors of the bill as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act,
The Senate voted on this and it passed. Biden voted for the repeal, McCain didn’t vote. 90-8 was the roll call in favor.
Finishing up, here are some questions I’d like answered.
Obama has already stated he would not reinstate Glass-Steagall. When asked Barack Obama notes:
Well, no. The argument is not to go back to the regulatory framework of the 1930’s because, as I said, the financial markets have changed substantially.
Also, four of Obama’s top six contributors include Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and–guess who–Citigroup. Another biggie, Fannie Mae fat cat Franklin Raines chatting up the Obamoe although the Obamoe lies about it. (Get it here in the WaPo)

This mess is getting tougher, not easier and still may crush the economy. While we wait, perhaps Hillary might tell us what she thinks of the repeal of Glass-Steagall; Would she roll back the repeal? It is a toss up between Monica and this for the greater ignominy.

“All I know is that I am not a Marxist” - Karl Marx 

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” - Groucho Marx

Conservative radio pundits and some of their callers, along with a few bloggers, have described Barack Obama as a “Marxist. ”  If  by “Marxist” they mean that Obama’s politics are a brew of socialism, authoritarianism and radical egalitarianism, they’re right.  But I see no evidence that Obama believes in violent overthrow of our capitalist system, or in any of the real complexities Marxism aims at the stupid, the envious, the unbalanced, the power-mad and the credulous. 

True, the Black Liberation Theology of Trinity United is infested with Marxist class dynamics and socialism; it offers up some Marxian and Neo-Marxist musings on the subject of consciousness, hermeneutics, violence as means, and an entire honey bucket load of dialectical excreta.   But I doubt that Obama is a BLT believer; its spurious but powerful demands for charity and sanctioned humility compete with his personal vanity, his insight, and his desire for the good life.  We will not see Barack Obama in any real egalitarian arrangement.

As for Marxist orthodoxy, it’s difficult today to find any political philosophy, Left or Right, which doesn’t incorporate some of the prejudices, social values and processes which shaped the pseudo social-science built by Karl Marx.  Some hard, utilitarian market-love adored by conservatives is, in ways, Hegelian/Marxist.  It’s impossible to define or isolate Marxist “thinking” as the sole property of Marx.   

That’s because so little that Marx wrote about, or formulated, was actually original or creative; it consisted of pages of intellectual theft, and the elaboration of ideas and concepts broadcast by his predecessors, collaborators and contemporary superiors, among whom the primary concerns were human liberty and dignity.  The elements of “Marxism” were everywhere before Karl Marx grew his first beard.     

His ideas floated atop an age of rationalism, where eventually Darwin and Freud would add their own gears and wheels to the “scientific” study of mankind.  That Marx’s clockwork absurdities, his  observations and predictions have survived at all into our age of deconstruction is puzzling.  A lot of it is simply obvious and mundane, while its emotive theorizing and puffery continue an egalitarian road blazed by Rousseau, and the communard, utopian silliness of thinkers as far back as Plato.  

The reason I doubt that Obama is a Marxist is that Marxism has fallen on hard times and Obama is no consumer of the second-rate.  Marxism appears in a few places, like shiny scales dropping from a rotting fish - leftist riffraff, for example, who gorge on the lard of weirdo capitalism, then show up to protest in mass-marketed fancy-dress, and assert their devotion to a dead, 19th century socialist failure and crank. Laughable.  

You can also find Neo-Marxism in that intellectual burger joint, Critical Theory,  where brainy work is found for otherwise unemployable socialist academics. Critical Theorists question everything, including Marxism, except the dialectical process which makes Marxism possible.   Hello? Why?  Because without it, Critical Theory would be 100% charlatanry rather than just 99%. 

No, Obama is worse than a Marxist.  He’s a modern “progressive”,  a clever, wildly ambitious believer in the ever-progressing good society.  He believes that group life is a process, and that he’s going to have something to DO with it!  In his world, nothing can be left alone to develop, mature or even regress on its own.  He’s interested in YOU, and that should scare the hell out of you.    

Palin’s hubby and son not Republicans

Democrats may be blasting Sarah Palin as a doctrinaire conservative, and Republicans may be embracing her for the same reason, but her husband and oldest son are independents.

Or more precisely, their party affiliation is listed as ”undeclared” on voter registration records reteieved from the Alaska Division of Elections. [snip]

Leave it to the media to ask the wrong question, probably on purpose. Donk or GOP really have no meaning anymore. The question is, “Are they Conservatives or Liberals?” “Guess!”
Registering undeclared means you don’t get batches of garbage mail and solicitations for funds.

Here’s a photo of Palin welcoming PETA to Alaska.

Gotta love it!

The Middlebury Institute has promoted Vermont secession. Nothing they have provided shows a grasp of the intricacies faced in this process even if it passed.
Today, Vermont is a cassava root ahead of being a Third World Nation; if not for the earmarks dragged in by Sen. Leahy, it would be one.

These numbers below are probably close, given the level of education in this country.

Secession, Ignorance, and Stupidity:

A recent Zogby/Middlebury Institute poll shows that 22% of Americans believe that “any state or region has the right to peaceably secede and become an independent republic.” Belief in states’ and regions right to secede was especially common among blacks (40%), Hispanics (43%) and people aged 18-24 (40%). Interestingly, Political liberals (32%) were more likely to believe in a right to secession than conservatives (17%). 18% of respondents say they would support a secession movement in their own state, including 24% of southerners.

Constitutional law professor Ann Althouse claims that these poll results show that “all these people [who believe in a right to secession] have the law wrong and don’t seem to know the basics of the history of the Civil War.” She concludes that the pro-secession survey respondents are “fascinatingly stupid.” [snip]

I certainly agree with Ann that much of the public is shockingly ignorant about American history and constitutional law. This is one aspect of the more general widespread political ignorance that I have often written about on this blog and elsewhere (e.g. here and here). At the same time, I don’t think that ignorance is necessarily a sign of stupidity. [snip]

I agree with Althouse, fascinatingly stupid is a mild term however. I think the largest majority of them are clueless to what will be in order.
Unlike Althouse, I would encourage them to secede while they still know everything. And once out they cannot return. Citizenship is revoked.

First lets look at the demographics and their political suasion (this is important): from above

• Blacks–40%
• Hispanics–43%
• 18 to 24–40%
• Political liberals–32%
• Conservatives–17%

There are two groups, which I suspect fit in the prior numbers but listed separately:

• Own state respondents–18%
• Southerners–24%

The odds are good that each group has their own ideas as to how and where to form their country. This may cause some discombobulation in some areas for an unknown duration. For the sake of this discussion, all is amicable; selection and agreement is with minimal delay. People leave who wish to and others arrive all done equitably.

Government

With your own country, you need to form a government and some form of document of guidance. This will be by ballot or bullet. Given the liberal’s past history and for that matter most of the world, I’ll let you guess which method forms the ruling body.

Monetary system

Every country needs to have a means of settling internal debts, trade on the world markets and negotiate as something other than a third world nation. Or did these secessionists think they would use Sam’s money? It doesn’t work that way; you are a sovereign nation, act as one. All we have to do is change the color of the currency, declare the old valueless and issue the new in our banks. Don’t be stupid and think the Government hasn’t all ready printed the necessary notes. Those from the military remember MPC’s being changed to shut down black markets overnight.

Infrastructure

Roadways, airports, hospitals and rail lines are in place. All the new country needs is to equip and staff the existing structures and maintain them. Who says the professionals doing this work now are going to stay there. How will they be paid, housed, fed?
Forget keeping the National Guard equipment, guardsmen stay if they wish, but they are no longer paid nor receive any federal benefits if they do. Why should they, now they are foreign troops.

Business and Industry

Whether you have any industry and business depends on the tax structure. The tax structure depends on the country’s monetary system. If you cannot pay the employees in something other than rubles, your industry moves. No industry, what do you trade for things you need?

Basic services

Most of the listed above believe they will get the same basic services they get now: socialized medicine, welfare, WIC, food stamps, public schools Section 8 housing, police, fire and emergency response and working telephones. Yeah, think about that, working phones,

I encourage the above groups to opt for nationhood; pure emotion drives it and it drives it right into the Swamp of Stupidity.

If this should happen, we need to know who occupies what areas. All borders with new nations are fortified like the Korean 38^th parallel until and if treaties are negotiated.

(Political liberals)
New England–The Democratic Republic of Gated Communities (Might contain NYC, Long Island and NJ)
Who will mow the lawns and plow the snow, I haven’t an idea. After seeing what happened in South Africa, nobody but the swells will live there. That is all ready graven in liberal stone.

(18 to 24)

Southern CA—High Kingdom of Surf
Dude, like it will be soooo tomorrow and full of tatts.
It will be until we shut off the water for non-payment and shut off the power so they can conserve to their heart’s content.

(Hispanics)
Florida—Sovereign State of Sunny Sombrero
They can mow lawns, pick oranges and smuggle illegals to surfeit.

(Blacks)
Louisiana—Chocklit Empire
With Chief Nagin as the Wonka Man and Jesse “Fillin’ Man” Jackson as Minister of Appointees with Al ‘Mouth’ Sharpton as Minister of Graffiti, a government with portfolio is formed. This former state, having been run by liberals and Donks for years won’t know the difference except there won’t be any money.

(Conservatives)
I haven’t a clue who these individuals are. Guessing says Bible people so
Del Rio, Texas.
If that is wrong, then the panhandle of Idaho. They’ll all fit and you’ll never see them again.

John McCain spent most of his career bashing conservatives, cultivating media “friendships”, and celebrating his maverick image.  Therefore, the NY Times rejection of his Op Ed because it’s not “Obamaish” is just laced with bitter irony.  However, I’d be curious to know how many rewrites Obama did on his piece before it was accepted.  Truth be told, and as clearly implied by the Times response that Obama’s piece just “worked” for them, they treat every utterance by Obama like he’s giving the Sermon on the Mount.

When it’s all said and done, I wonder if the wedge McCain drove between himself and the base for media approbation will pay off?  I’m skeptical that he’ll get more independents and liberals than the conservatives he turned off with his “maverick” ways.

Republicans have traded the “compassionate conservative” for the “populist capitalist”:

“John McCain is a populist. He believes in free markets; he believes in limited government and having the free enterprise system produce the jobs and the prosperity that he seeks, but he does think, as did Teddy Roosevelt, that you do need government there with some oversight and some regulation to avoid excess.”

It’s an odd message for a man whose base doesn’t trust him.  If McCain thinks he can win by trying to attract disaffected Clinton voters while driving conservatives away, he’s got another thing coming.  Those people are going to vote for the liberal, not the quasi-liberal.

The Democrat Party, that is. But first, conservatives are deluded if they believe, as Sean Hannity claims, that domestic drilling and “energy independence” are the path to less expensive gasoline. Crude oil is a commodity, subject to commodities speculation. Engine fuel prices that are lower than world market prices result from government controls, such as in Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, where you fill your tanks with a wink and smile.

Government control is the only conclusion one can draw from Hannity’s leap from domestic exploration to lower prices at the pump. Increased supply wouldn’t account for a large reduction in price with consumption growing in India, China and other developing countries. Government control is not a conservative viewpoint (If there’s something I’ve missed, I’d welcome a comment) There are other reasons to develop domestic energy sources.

It’s a complicated issue, nevertheless. THIS from Powerline illustrates the party divide on domestic energy development, but how much of the price increase is due to restrictions? I don’t know. Does anyone?

Senator Chuck Hagel sounds more like a blame America first leftist than a Republican senator:

SPIEGEL: You are, then, an advocate of America relying more on soft power than on the military?

Hagel: That’s the way we will make progress. We have to use our economic and also our cultural strength. Trust is the crucial currency in international relations. We willfully diminished the value of this currency and we now have to rebuild it. Trust is more important than anything else. North Korea was a part of the Axis of Evil, but now the United States is using the instruments of diplomacy in the Six Party talks.

We “willfully diminished” the value of trust in dealing with nations like North Korea and Iran? Bill Clinton trusted the North Koreans, but they continued their uranium enrichment activities anyway.   Hear, see, and speak no evil is the coin of trustworthy international diplomacy after all.

Hagel certainly sounds like a man bucking for a job in the Obama administration. It’s depressing to see the country club Republicans throwing in the towel.  No wonder conservatives are abandoning the GOP.

He hasn’t done a damn thing to avert this drift.

McConnell: Dems will ‘turn us into France’

The Senate’s top Republican says Democrats’ sights are set on European-style socialism, and derided likely Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama’s claims of being a unifier… [snip]

McConnell finishes off by saying:

Mr. McConnell, who over the years expressed discomfort as Mr. McCain broke with conservatives on campaign-finance reform, taxes and immigration, said the decorated Navy fighter pilot nevertheless will win support from the Republican base, and the contrast with Mr. Obama boosts Republicans’ confidence that they can keep control of the White House.

Whatever McConnell is ingesting has to be highly regulated or quite illicit. The funny ’shrooms couldn’t cause this aberrant a vision.

Surveying and evaluating the plight of the Republican Party is a land office business right now.  But it isn’t a complicated matter, either.  The dilemma facing the Republican Party (and not Republican voters, who are mostly conservatives) is the dilemma faced by every non-adapted and enfeebled entity in history, whether ideological, national, tribal or animal.  Vital conditions change. And when they do, that big, boney sail on your reptilian back will become a fatal liability for your species unless you’ve sired a few agile, energetic members with smaller sails.   It’s safe to say that the lumbering Republicans haven’t.   Their plodding bloodline is nearing the end. 

In the present case the conditions which elevated The Republican Party to majorities in the first place had most to do with the decline in favor of  ’60’s liberalism.  Republican pols were the ugly, scrawny suitors who got the prom date because the jocks were expelled for drunkeness, not because the target of a girl’s libido had changed from muscles to bi-focals.   The girl just hoped that there was something exciting inside the lamentable shell.

Ronald Reagan even boosted the mood of  foolish expectation, and a generally colorless and indistinct party gained high ground without instituting a single change in itself, without defining and pursuing a single new idea, or clarifying its central positions on any major policy position that Democrats hadn’t already appropriated or devised on their own.   The Contract With America was a dream.

As I write this, a Conservative radio spokesman claims - without comprehending the irony -that the party can save itself by (a) declaiming the Hannity Six on the steps of the Capitol Building, and (b) returning to their “core principles”.   Well, if the party pols had core principles they wouldn’t have abandoned them, and then (a) wouldn’t be necessary. Moreover, doing (a) after reclaiming core principles formerly abandoned  would be correctly perceived as a masquerade by craven losers eager to retain power.  Just as an aside, if twelve million conservative fans of this guy think this will save the Republican Party, things are worse than I think.

An even more serious influence at work is this:  It’s Lindsey Graham Disorder. Graham doesn’t just ooze insecurity, he’s composed of ooze and the insecurity follows.  Liberalism is cool, and Lindsey isn’t, which is why he shmoozes with liberals. Liberalism is the bridge from reality to fantasy.  We live in a fantastic age, where almost every public event and entertainment affair, even  politics, ministers to the need for escape, for status and prestige and comfort.   The Republican Party hasn’t a chance in this environment, nor does it deserve one.

The end is near for Mrs. Clinton. Her Indiana win wasn’t the seismic shift needed to convince super delegates that they should abandon Barack Obama. It’s just a matter of time before her campaign succumbs to a lack of time and money.

Liberals must be ecstatic at Obama’s ascendancy. They have the nation’s most liberal senator one step away from the presidency. Conservatives can only shake their heads as the Republican Party nominates a quasi-liberal. Maybe McCain can battle Obama for the independents, but will conservatives support him? I certainly don’t see or feel much conservative energy or enthusiasm for McCain or the Republican Party. There’s not much about either a conservative can get excited about.