RedStateEclectic

The Crowd-Pleasing-for-Dummies President

Credit.

Leaving education in the state's hands is a guarantee to keep the conscripts of such enlightenment so self-contentedly uneducated as to take pride nationwide - by democratic majority and other mean means - in their preposterous ignorance and to cheer the paragons of educationally acquired obtuseness as men of genius and compelling leadership.

In this respect Obama is the people's president (no less than Bush), and a dignitary truly worthy of representative democracy.

Writes Mark Steyn:

A great nation needs successful self-made businessmen like George Peck, and purveyors of scholarly excellence like Mary Somerville. It's not clear [well, it is - see above, G.T.] why it needs a smug over-credentialed President Solyndra to recycle "Crowd-Pleasing For Dummies" as a keynote address.

The source.

Hat-tip.

See also More Obarrassment.

Anti-Energy Madness

 

There is a global war on rational energy use going on, see only these two posts on German anti-energy madness at NoTricksZone - here and here. However, the anti-energy, anti-economy war is simply the result of the wealthiest states of the world using their wealth to indoctrinate generation after generation to ensure they do not understand, hate, and destroy the sources of their wealth.

There is a high cost of maintaining the statist creed amongst the broad populace.

Warren Meyer, the Coyote, writes at Forbes on Keystone XL:

Ostensibly, Obama made the decision to block the pipeline because of concern over contamination of the Ogallala Reservoir, a vast underground water source that makes much of Midwestern agriculture possible. And I am sure there are folks whose concerns are narrowly about the Ogallala or other enivornmental and NIMBY concerns along the proposed route. But the US has tens of thousands of miles of petroleum pipelines, many cris-crossing this same general area. There is nothing unprecedented or unmanageable about this particular line. Had these routing issues been the actual problem, the Obama Administration could easily have approved the line with conditions or route modifications.

But local environmental concerns were merely the public pretext for a decision that is much more troubling. Opposition to the pipeline began to rally among radical environmental groups long before any of them had the first clue about the pipeline route. The real goal of these groups was not to protect water along the pipeline route, but to make it impossible to develop new sources of oil in Canada.  Unable to stop Canadian oil drilling and tar sand extraction programs, environmental groups are now trying to block any pipeline that is proposed out of the oil producing regions.

Some would argue that these opponents aren’t anti-energy, they just want to shift energy use from fossil fuels to “green” energy like wind and solar. This is either disingenuous or unbelievably naive. The Keystone XL pipeline would have single-handedly carried more energy to the United States than the sum of all the green energy projects funded by the Obama Administration. And it would have done so entirely with private  funds rather than the Administrations increasingly ill-fated and ham-handed attempts at venture capitalism with taxpayer funds. The fact of the matter is that, for the foreseeable future, opposing fossil fuels is equivalent to opposing energy use.

The Keystone decision only makes sense in the context of a general push to limit energy supply and roll back our industrial economy and all its amazing gifts. Part and parcel of this same effort has been the growing opposition to natural gas fracking. Fracking is an underground procedure that has been used safely and succesfully for decades to extend the life of older oil wells. Fracking is one reason that serial predictions of older fields “running out of oil” have been repeatedly incorrect.

Recently, though, fracking has presented the promise of substantially inreasing our domestic energy supply by opening up new shale formations previously thought to be impossible to produce. With this new promise, anti-growth, anti-energy environmentalists have suddenly taken notice, and are gearing up to try to kill this exciting (and ironically quite clean) new energy source.

Read the entire short post.

Abstumpfung

In any decent and civilised political culture this alone - see Indefinite Detention - would trigger a major government crisis with the likely prospect of the government's removal. Today, it is almost non-news, some odd report quickly to be forgotten.

Similarly,

And it’s bizarre to see people more upset about peeing on corpses than with corpsifying them in the first place.

The source.

If anybody is upset about barbarian acts of this kind at all. Admirable from the point of view of manipulative dexterity, how successive governments have managed to "cultivate" a hatred of Muslims that blunts any sense of decency.

From conversations with Germans exposed to or involved in atrocities committed during the Third Reich, I gather they seem to agree that Abstumpfung is a terrible weapon - the gradual blunting of people's ability to perceive and respect the human dignity of the victims of choice.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 The source.

 

Also ponder this take.

One More Cobblestone on the Road to Barbarism

The problem are the people. They want big government. Big government is another word for "law" unto yourself. The difference between big government and proper government is the difference between arbitrary law and the rule of law. People believe solutions come from government as such. Justice, they believe, is produced by government. They believe, human beings are evil, unless they form a government. One of the tasks of big government is to remove the standards that allow you to recognise, challenge, and punish corruption, theft and other forms of injustice. However, the people prefer arbitrary legalism to consistent justice. They like big government to do the bullying, the deception and the theft that would be called by its true name if they committed such misdeeds in their capacity as ordinary citizen. The people of the Western "democracies" have been successfully deluded and conditioned to be morally rotten to the marrow. The more big government you get, i.e. the more politicised society becomes, the more lawless and barbarian will our societies become. And the political consensus of the majority vehemently approves of this sure road to barbarism and serfdom.

 

See also my first post here at RedStateEclectic The Destruction of Civilization - the Replacement of Justice by Politically Enforceable Interests and my recent Obama's Trendy Ignorance, the latter if only to admire the two brothers-in-arms, Obama and Corzine.

Prediction: 2012 (Part 1)

I’ve been contemplating whether to go down this path or not—I am a Paul supporter (although more reservedly so this year than 4 years ago, for a number of reasons).  I know that there are many—some of whom read this blog—who will take exception to what I’m going to write, but…

I’ve been trying to come up with some way that Ron Paul could snag the GOP nomination, and the odds seem long (although Intrade is giving him almost as good of odds as Gingrich).  Still, the deck sure seems to be stacked against him—the odds-on favorite is still Romney.

I put together a little graphic, using my handy-dandy spreadsheet, which shows the current RealClearPolitics averages in the first four primary/caucus states, as well as the national standings.

EDIT:  Updated for new national numbers (Gingrich gains, Romney falls, marginally):

Ron Paul is doing well in Iowa, although that would appear to be the state where the race is the tightest.  To suggest, though, that Ron Paul is going to “win” Iowa is probably to make too much of a leap at this point.  AND, even if he did WIN the caucus, the process does not guarantee delegates to the national convention (what the primary season is really all about).

In the Republican caucuses, each voter officially casts his or her vote by secret ballot. Voters are presented blank sheets of paper with no candidate names on them.^[6] After listening to some campaigning for each candidate by caucus participants, they write their choices down and the Republican Party of Iowa tabulates the results at each precinct and transmits them to the media.^[7] In 2008, some precincts used a show of hands ^[8] or preprinted ballots.^[9] The non-binding results are tabulated and reported to the state party, which releases the results to the media. Delegates from the precinct caucuses go on to the county conventions, which choose delegates to the district conventions, which in turn selects delegates to the Iowa State Convention. Thus, it is the Republican Iowa State Convention, not the precinct caucuses, which selects the ultimate delegates from Iowa to the Republican National Convention. All delegates are officially unbound from the results of the precinct caucus, although media organizations either estimate delegate numbers by estimating county convention results or simply divide them proportionally.

So, while caucus wins in Iowa would be a nice feather in the cap for the Paul campaign, they’re still a long ways away from being able to claim delegates from Iowa.

New Hampshire’s primary, which one would think—because of the state’s “live free” attitude, should be a strong place for Paul—looks to be (at this point)—a likely win for Romney, absent some major scandal in the next few weeks.  Even with a Ron Paul win in the Iowa caucuses, there’s only a week between Iowa on January 3 and New Hampshire on the 10th—that’s a big gap to make up in momentum in that short of a period of time.  It’s not impossible, but I suspect that in the next week to 10 days—in the pre-Christmas to New Year’s time period—that those who are only modestly engaged in the political system will largely tune out, so these numbers are probably not going to move dramatically before the caucuses and New Hampshire primary.

Let’s take the most positive view, though.  Let’s assume that Ron Paul can somehow both dominate in Iowa, AND come from behind and win New Hampshire.  Even then, the deck is really stacked against him, and I’m not sure how he can make up the ground.  Still polling in single digits in both South Carolina and Florida—both states where there is a significant military/neoconnish presence—he’ll be doing well, I think, to come in 3rd in those states.  I haven’t dug into the rules on those states delegate selection process, so I don’t know whether a 10%  or lower finish will net him any delegates; some states are winner-take-all, some are proportional (based on vote attained, although some have a minimum vote required to be eligible for delegates).  Regardless, the South Carolina primary is January 21 and the Florida one is January 31, which means that there isn’t a whole lot of time to pick up steam in those states.

I suspect Ron Paul will do better than last time, and will be a potentially larger force in the GOP Convention next year. But I just don’t see a path to victory.  I hope I’m wrong, but he is—I believe—still perceived to be too far outside of the Republican mainstream to pick up the nomination.  The people who listen to Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh on a regular basis hear words like “America blamer” and “Isolationist” tossed around where Paul is concerned, and they’ll start to believe that without exploring what that’s referencing.  

Thinking positively about Iowa and New Hampshire, though, here’s what I predict would happen IF Ron Paul finished strong in those states:

1) A win in Iowa: Governor Branstad and other Iowa politicians will say “Ignore that.”  Even more will be made of the newsletters that Eric mentioned here.  EDIT: They’re already getting nervous.  Since I wrote this, I’ve run into several articles making mention of the newsletters—including this one, which purports to quote some of the more incendiary language.

2) A win or surprisingly strong showing in New Hampshire: more pressure will be placed on 2nd tier candidates like Bachmann and Santorum to withdraw.  The gloves will come off, and the GOP establishment machine will go into full throttle operation.  The implications about Ron Paul’s supposedly racist past, the “anti-Americanism”, his “crazy” ideas about government, his “isolationism”—all of these will become more overt in the weeks heading into South Carolina and Florida.  Lindsey Graham will be the South Carolina attack dog.

3) If the GOP hasn’t managed to completely trivialize Paul by the end of January, and a clear frontrunner hasn’t emerged (Romney or Gingrich?), deals will start being cut to try and consolidate the the “establishment” vote.

Ron Paul will not be the nominee of the Republican Party.  In my gut, I think it’s going to be Romney.  He “looks” like a Republican, he doesn’t have the baggage that will eventually diminish Gingrich, and much of the Party establishment (including Nebraska’s Governor and our Republican Senator) has gotten on the Romney train.  I don’t think he’s the most principled candidate, but I think that ultimately he’ll look like the “best” and “safest” candidate to many Republicans.

So, what happens to the Paul folks?  This is one of the questions that a lot of us have been trying to answer for 4 years now.  Because Paul supporters tend to be more idealistic than the typical Republican activist, they have a very hard time holding their noses and playing nice with people they don’t agree with “for the sake of the Party.”  Because they tend not to want to “rally ‘round the nominee”, they have trouble (at least in a lot of places) establishing a firm foothold in the Party, where the goal is to “elect Republicans”—not necessarily principled ideologues.

It seems to me that the tension in the GOP with the Ron Paul contingent is not going to lessen anytime soon.  Many Ron Paul folks believe (rightly, in many instances), that they and their candidate are treated unfairly by the establishment—that the game isn’t being played on a level playing field.  That perception certainly doesn’t increase the likelihood that they’ll want to to be “team players” in the GOP.  But, unless they become team players, they’ll have trouble really being anything but “outsiders” who can’t be “trusted.”

Ron Paul could, of course, help improve that situation—by throwing his endorsement to whoever wins the nomination…but I’d be surprised if he did, because then he’d be a “sell out” to his supporters (not to mention that he has too much integrity to do that). 

But, let’s argue that Paul has gotten a fair shake by the establishment this time.  He’s been included in every debate.  He’s gotten a lot of media attention (in spite of what some supporters argued was a “black out”).  What more do his supporters want?  This is politics.  You can’t demand that everyone agree with you, or see your way of looking at this—you have to compete and convince in the “free market” of ideas; and if your ideas aren’t convincing, maybe it’s just not your time yet.  So do you take your ball and go home?  Or are you a good sport, and keep playing, in the hope that an opportunity to win or comeback will come along sometime?

I don’t think Ron Paul will run a 3rd Party race if/when he loses the GOP nomination.  I suspect that he’ll assume his role as “elder statesman” of the liberty movement as he moves into retirement.  A 3rd party race for Paul would be destructive for his supporters who have made inroads into the Party, as well as being damaging to the political careers of his political (and familial) heirs, e.g. Rand Paul.  Not to mention that he’d probably have trouble getting on the ballot in some states because of “sore loser” laws.

It is obvious that Gary Johnson is going to run as a Libertarian Party candidate for President.  IF he gets that party’s nomination in May, I think it likely that many Paul supporters will move in his direction for the General Election (some will move quietly, since they’re working within the GOP; some more vocally). 

Johnson’s campaign has the potential (assuming he gets the nomination—not a “done deal” by any stretch of the imagination) to help to grow the Libertarian Party in a way that other LP candidates haven’t done.  The largest vote percentage that the LP has ever gotten was just over 1% in 1980.  Johnson might not be able to do better than that, but then, again, he might.  He’s a personable, yet not flashy kind of guy.  If the LP has been building around the country, he could—at the very least—help them to build their base.  Imagine a LP Presidential candidate going around the country, campaigning with LP candidates for Congress or state office; imagine local news coverage of both, bringing into more popular view the idea that neither of the two major parties really means what they say—either on matters of fiscal responsibility, smaller government, or individual liberty. 

Some will argue that a Johnson run (or a Paul run 3rd Party) will doom the Republican candidate to defeat, by splitting the GOP vote in key states.  Maybe, but I think that a REAL libertarian draws from both the fiscal conservative/socially moderate portion of the GOP, as well as from the socially liberal/civil libertarian/fiscally moderate portion of the Democratic Party.

Johnson won’t win—much as I’d like to see him do just that.  But he could usher in the beginnings of a REAL realignment of the parties, as the anti-statist remnants of both parties move for a time in a different direction.  Whether that means that Barack Obama would win a second term—or whether the Republican nominee could win—I don’t know.  But whichever happens, a strong showing by the LP (especially if there were strong showings at all levels), could result in some serious shifting of loyalties.  It won’t happen overnight, but critical elections—which this could be—can mark the beginning of a realignment pattern.

I’ll have some less long-winded predictions next week.