Fighting Chuck Hagel–Not The Worst Idea Ever (Now With Update!)

Why?  Let’s let Robert Stacy McCain…I mean Bear Bryant Reincarnated…explain.

…conservatives should not hesitate to roast liberals for the hypocrisy and cynicism inherent in the “Democrats for Hagel” bandwagon. If that vicious bastard Andrew Sullivan supports Hagel, this is reason enough for any patriotic American to oppose the Hagel nomination. And the obverse of this brutal logic is that we must welcome every ally to our cause of defeating Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, in order to inflict maximum embarrassment on the Democrats. They might “win” — Hagel’s nomination may be approved by the Senate — but the conservative strategy must be aimed at making that “win” as damaging as possible to the reputation of the Democratic Party.

If we can’t beat them, at least make sure we hurt them.

I knew I was sorta miffed at this Jazz Shaw piece, but I really couldn’t figure out why until I read The Other McCain’s post.

The thing is, I sorta agree with a lot of Shaw’s argument.  Hagel isn’t the worst nominee Obama could pick for the job of Secretary of Defense.  The President could always find someone less qualified, more chicken-shit or more leftist than Hagel, so fighting him might not be all that productive.

Under certain circumstances, I’d probably counsel the same thing.  If it was early in Obama’s first term, fighting against Hagel would be more painful.  The GOP would’ve had a much harder time beating up on a Hagel nomination at that point, and it would’ve cost them more to do so.

However, floating the Hagel trial balloon now means a Republican nomination fight makes more sense.  Obama’s had far too many victories lately.  He won a bitter election just a few months ago.  He just got the GOP to cave on taxes during the fiscal cliff train wreck.  The President has momentum and the Republicans should being trying to halt it using any opportunity at hand.

What does a fight actually cost Republicans?  Congress’ approval ratings are a burning-hot eighteen percent.  Serious conservatives, people who at one point identified with the GOP brand, are kinda done with the party.  In a way, the Republicans almost have to have a fight, if only to remind people that they still exist.

Even more importantly, it’s not like Chuck Hagel is some beloved conservative stalwart.  Yeah, I guess he helped spike the Kyoto Treaty back in the day.  When pondering that, it’s also important to remember that the sun shines on a dog’s ass every once on a while.  Meanwhile Hagel was against the surge in Iraq.  Hagel has said no to a military strike against Iran, which won him the enduring respect of Iran’s mullah-run media.  Even fellow RINO maverick John McCain doesn’t like the guy.

Hagel has been wrong about a lot of stuff.  Wrong about military stuff.  That should be good enough for Republicans to pick a fight with him and his BFF Commander-in-Chief.

The era of Republican reasonableness should be over.  They have nothing to lose by confronting Hagel.  They have a lot to gain.  Obama is the one with his political capital hanging in the wind.  It’s time for the GOP get a win–any kind of win–against the President for a change.

UPDATE:  Linked by the great Dustbury, who makes this observation about Republican courage.

…if the GOP imagines that it might someday want to grow a spine, it would help if the party had some vague familiarity with vertebrae, doncha know.

If the Republicans really wanna show they’re brave truth tellers unafraid of their own shadow, I have a phrase they could use–free of charge:

“Sarah Palin-Bobby Jindal 2016″

Beardo The Weirdo Times 100

As a man who has rocked mutton chops, goatees, fu manchus, Van Dykes and a serious ten o’clock shadow from time to time, I have no problem with the hirsute look.  But this is just absurd.

Smitty over at the great Other McCain found this gem.  He calls this facial hair only Andrew Sullivan could love.  I dunno about that.  Even a smug overrated undersmart fake-conservative crypto anti-Semite with a tinfoil hat enthusiast’s obsession with Sarah Palin’s reproductive organs and a teenage Glee fan’s fascination with Barack Obama’s junk has standards.

Right? 

Seriously, this is the kind of beard that doucherocket Brooklyn hipsters aspire to in between jacking off to Pitchfork music reviews and hits of blow.  It’s really not cool.  In reality, that’s an awful lot of work and plumage puffing just to alert the world that you’re still not getting laid.

Wanna Demoralize The Left? Start With Denormalizing Them

Ace had a great post the other day that I meant to talk about, but I didn’t get to it.  Well, I’m getting to it now.

Here’s the money chunk.

…And at universities, in the pseudo-sciences, they are constantly attempting to “explain” conservative thinking as a type of cognitive dysfunction. Not willing to give into the faddish and ephemeral? Ah, well, a part of your brain is too small and won’t let you sample “new experiences.”

Note the normative assumption always packed into these claims: That the conservative brain is “too small” as compared to the liberal brain, defined as normative; the conservative measure represents a deviation away from the assumed norm while the liberal trait is privileged as the norm, or if not the norm, then the ideal.

No pseudo-scientist every finds that liberals have a bigger amygdala (or whatever) and are therefore “too open to new experiences” (a.k.a. too trendy, too faddish, too ephemeral in one’s sense of self). None of these guys ever says the liberal trait represents a deviation from the norm or ideal — no, they’re always the norm or idea. It’s always the conservative’s traits that need to be “explained” as a psychological defect or an actual defect with their physical brain structure.

Yeah, you should definitely read the whole thing.

That denormalizing process of conservatives and conservatism Ace talked about has been going on for a long time.  To pick just one example, think about guns.  For most of America’s history, gun ownership wasn’t really debated all that much.  It was only relatively recently that the Left got the bright idea to limit gun ownership amongst law-abiding citizens. 

A key part of the anti-gun strategy was to denormalize the idea of firearms.  Guns weren’t just supposed to be severely curtailed in the general population.  They were weirdo objects for strange people.  Whether it was geographic arguments (“Southerners are all gun nuts, of course”) or class justifications (“The uneducated are the only ones people who still have guns”) the goal was the same.  In fact, lefties were so hell bent on making guns abnormal they faked at least one scholar-researched book to make it look like America didn’t have widespread gun ownership in it’s history.

In general, the Left has had some success in making conservatism seem strange.  At the very least, they’ve reinforced amongst themselves the ‘Right=Alien’ arguments they always make.  For committed progressives, conservatives are not just political rivals anymore.  They’re the Other.

The thing is, the hard Left doesn’t make up a majority of American citizens.  Break it down on a state-by-state basis.  Even where they make up the largest percentage of voters, they don’t make up a majority.  From those perspectives, it’s pretty easy to see just how marginal the liberal ideology is in America.

Conservatives should take this vulnerability on the Left–specifically, their lack of numbers– and use it against them.  More importantly, how about we examine and highlight their own behavior.  For your viewing pleasure, courtesy of No One Of Any Import, are some lefty protestors barking at a recent Tea Party rally.

Blinkered, moronic and as charming as athlete’s foot ?  Where’s the sign-up sheet for that?

Lefties insist that they are the sane, logical and normal ones.  

Yeah, that dude is totally playing with a full deck.

Before we get too cocky, liberals have a few advantages.  They still control the MSM and they can still get some progged-up professors to create ‘science’ to prove their ideological biases.  These are no small things.  They can dupe a lot of the politically uncommitted folks out there.

However, conservatives have distinct advantages of our own. As stated before, the voter identification numbers are on our side.  Best of all, any time the Left goes out in public, they behave like the complete oddballs that they really are.  It shouldn’t be too hard to make liberals seem strange–because they are strange.  

Seriously, you have a group of people that are cool with one of their own shouting that he wipes his ass with the American flag every night.  Now that’s definitely a little bit of hyperbole on his part, but the fact remains that homeboy’s peers were copacetic with his sentiment that the American flag should be disrespected early and often.  Just a reminder:  THIS IS NOT NORMAL.

The Right can score legislative victories.  They can win elections.  But in order to really make inroads they have to start beating back progressive culture.  That means pointing out just how alien their ideology is when compared with the mainstream of American political thought.

ALSO:  Here’s the great RS McCain with a story about another Lefty weirdo.  How weird are we talking about here?  How’s about possible jail time sound? 

Seriously, click the link.

Green Jobs Get The Gas-Face

Say, how many green jobs does a million dollars buy you?

A 2009 report [PDF], by Hillard Huntington, executive director of the Energy Modeling Forum at Stanford University, also found that promoting green energy is not a jobs generator. Huntington calculated the number of jobs per million dollars invested in various types of electricity generation. A million dollars invested in solar power produces three to five jobs; wind 1.6 to 6.5 jobs; biomass 1.8 to 6.5 jobs; coal 3.7 jobs; and natural gas two jobs. It looks like renewables are often winners at job creation until Huntington points out that on average an investment of a million dollars produces about 10 jobs.

Amazing.  Read the whole thing as Ronald Bailey finds even more damaging info about one of President Obama’s favorite taxpayer-funded rat holes. 

I think conservatives have known on an instinctive level just how stupid green job ‘investments’ are.  This is the first time I’ve seen comparative data that spells out the exact amount of retardation eco-employment actually is.  The problem here is that nobody–not everybody’s favorite fake as fuck moderate Bill Daley, not Valerie Jarrett, not Turbo Tax Geithner–not a single Donkey Puncher stooge in the Bamster regime understands this basic economic fact.

We can talk all about the law of unintended consequences, the unsustainability of massive debt and all that other jazz. 

Or we could just take it from The Other McCain:    Keynes was wrong!

Amen, homie.  A-goddamn-men.

We bitch and moan about the horror wrought upon the world by Karl Marx and his legion of followers.  The socialist delusion is truly evil, of course.  What we often forget is that there are boatloads of slightly less disastrous ideas that have screwed up our country nearly as much as the communist delusion. 

Green jobs are just neo-Keynesian wack-off material with a psychotically-overpriced environmentally conscious friendly happy ending thrown in at our expense.

“…he was like a white Reverend Wright.”

Hitler Finds Out That Keith Olbermann Has Been Fired.

Inevitable. 

But still totally rad.

I found this over at The Other McCain.  Great find, RS.

UPDATE:  Gateway Pundit finds out that Keef Overbite has landed on his feet.

Tip o’ da cap to Alan Burkhart.

C-Span2 or MTV?

Who knew the stuffiest channel on the dial broadcast outtakes from “The Hills”?

Background:  Helen Rittelmeyer and Todd Seavey are two conservative think-tanker types.  They also used to be a couple.  Watch as Seavey slowly twists the knife into his ex.

 

Stay classy, Todd.

Rittelmeyer might be a world class bitch–I don’t know her, so I have no idea if she is–but Seavey is most assuredly a Grade-A doucheturd.  Consider that fact confirmed with extreme prejudice. 

You can feel Jonah Goldberg, normally a pretty cool dude, slowly realizing where Seavey was going with his passive-aggressive rant. 

Cringe-worthy?  A little.  Hilarious?  A helluva lot.

Krystal Ball, Please Explain The Sucking Of The Dick-Nose

Robert Stacy McCain finds Democrat Congressional candidate Krystal Ball having to explain some not so flattering pictures.

Wow.

On second thought, don’t bother trying to explain…well…anything.

Here’s the picture in question.

Well, the dude seems happy.  And waaaaaaay faded.  So at least something went right that night.  

As McCain notes, Ball immediately plays the Sexxxist Card.  That’s…interesting.  Somebody throwing out a picture of Krystal Ball fooling around at a kinda-randy college kid Christmas party is sexist.  Ummm, where the hell did that come from?  Of course, she gives us no explanation.  She just plows on through and starts yackety-yakking her campaign talking points. Like it’s not even sorta weird to just accuse her enemies of sexism because they post a sorta embarrassing picture of her.

I really don’t think this chick is all that bright.  Sure, she’s got herself a college degree–which might be part of the problem.  She strikes me as the type of student that heard more than a few trendy victimization terms in some of her soft science electives.  Worse, she really doesn’t understand the meaning of sexism, but she knows it’s not nice and it’s mean and it involves something about sex, so voila: “…this is incredibly sexist.”

Meanwhile, nobody is thinking about Mr. Stoner DickNoseBoy.  What about his dignity?  I for one feel he’s the real victim here.  He’s the one with a bright red dildo strapped to his face.  He’s obviously baked out of his skull.  Maybe he didn’t want to be subjected to Krystal Ball’s lewd advances.  If you look closely, you’ll see this young man has been forced to wear a choke chain; yet another clue that he was coerced by the predator known as Krystal Ball.  He might be smiling in this picture, but beneath that grinning THC-laden countenance, I think DickNoseBoy is hurting inside.

Would somebody please think about the young innocent men?

;-p

Left-Wing Rubes Get Called Out By Another Lefty Rube, Hilarity Ensues

Heheheheh.

Just when you think Democrats could not possibly become more absurd, they surprise you:

With each passing day, I’m beginning to realize that the crux of the problem for Obama is a handful of prominent progressive bloggers, among them Glenn Greenwald, John Aravosis, Digby, Marcy Wheeler and Jane Hamsher.

That’s from liberal New Media guru Peter Dauo, who evidently doesn’t realize how ridiculous that sentence looks to sane people.

Read the rest of the McCain piece for a happy slice of red meat thrown at the Obama-tons.

What’s going on here? Why is this left-on-left snippiness happening? Let’s break it all down.

Dauo is saying that progressive bloggers are the ones hurting Obama. How does this even sorta make sense? The Left-o-Sphere didn’t force the Bamster to pass the Porkulus. He did that all on his own. Health care deform? That was St. Barry’s clusterfuck; if anything, the juicebox mafia types in JournoList gave the President plenty of political cover for that debacle.

Far from the lefty bloggers not supporting the Bambi’s agenda, the liberals have been rather pliant when it comes to fronting for this administration. Dauo’s complaint is that they haven’t been marching in lockstep enough for his refined tastes. That’s some sweet tasty Stalinism right there.

Dauo thinks the liberal partisan hacks at FireDogLake and the rest of the douchenozzles just haven’t lied with the requisite fervor to make Obama a success. If only Jane Hamsher could’ve put out more White House press releases disguised as her own opinions, maybe the Golfer-in-Chief’s poll numbers would be above 60%. If only John Aravosis could’ve touted the blazing glorious successes of the stimulus bill–regardless of the reality of the situation–maybe the Democrats wouldn’t be in so much trouble now.

Boo-fucking-Hoo.

What Dauo and all the other hand-wringers that constantly fret over the pResident need to realize is that the only person to blame for Barack Obama’s failures is Barack Obama. The bloggers can’t write policy or read the teleprompter’s speeches or horse trade with congress-critters. The Hamsher/Atrios/Greemwald Axis of Progressive Propaganda can only shovel so much bullshit.

In the end it comes back to the fact that Barack Obama is a lousy CEO of America. I understand why the Peter Dauo’s of the world need to protect their President/boyfriend. But no amount of blame-game nonsense can shield Barack Obama from his own reckless spending, tone-deaf political instincts and lousy leadership.

Restoring Honor: Reflections on a Movement of Return

Thanks to Dave in Texas at AceofSpadesHQ

Doctor Zero:

We dishonor ourselves when we declare the rights and freedoms of our fellow citizens to be conditional, and subject to our needs.  Free people do not expect the State to confiscate and ration.  They don’t subcontract the design of the future to political appointees.  They understand such designs require obedience, and obedience requires compulsion.  You cannot “honor” a neighbor you deem unfit to manage his own affairs.  There is no honor to be found in the pursuit of a perfect State to rule an inadequate people.

Ed Driscoll:

Beck was certainly good-natured about techniques by the WaPo and others to play down the size of the crowd; as he joked to them during his speech,”I have just gotten word from the media that there is over a thousand people here today!” But these sort of techniques, combined with the increasingly hostile tone of the MSM regarding wide swatches of their readers, and coming after the same tactics were employed by the MSM to minimize the similarly massive crowds to Beck’s 9/12 rally last year, are starting to seem less like the epistemic closure of the MSM’s cocoon, and more like an exercise in magical thinking.

Sarah Palin (quoted by RS McCain):

In cities and towns across our country, you’ll find monuments to brave Americans wearing the uniforms of wars from long ago, and look down at their inscriptions, you’ll see that they were so often dedicated by mothers. In distant lands across the globe, you’ll find silent fields of white markers with the names of Americans who never came home, but who showed their dedication to their country by where they died.

We honor those who served something greater than self and made the ultimate sacrifice, as well as those who served and did come home forever changed by the battlefield. Though this rally is about “restoring honor,” for these men and women honor was never lost! If you look for the virtues that have sustained our country, you will find them in those who wear the uniform, who take the oath, who pay the price for our freedom. . . .

William Stout:

Glenn Beck held his rally to restore honor and to celebrate the troops who sacrifice so much for us. Google honored that ambition by publishing deceptive maps on its site which directed you to FDR’s monument. Al Sharpton, who apparently did not have a black woman who was falsely accusing another of rape to support, said that Beck was stealing Martin Luther King’s legacy because Beck dared to hold his rally on the same day and at the same location where Dr. King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech. Others on the left have even attacked Dr. Alveda King, Martin Luther King’s niece, by accusing her of trashing her uncle’s legacy. Want more? How about this as reported by Fox News on their website, “Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington’s delegate to Congress, said she remembers being at King’s march on Washington, which she said prompted change and ended segregation in public places.”Glenn Beck’s march will change nothing. But you can’t blame Glenn Beck for his March-on-Washington envy.” When the left spews vitriol in quantity, one can be assured that the people of America have awakened and is aware of their deeds.

Stupid Old Race-Hustling Bigot Al Sharpton:

“His (MLK) speech says clearly that he wanted to see a nation where the federal government protects us from those in states who would not uphold our civil rights. You can’t have a march telling government to leave us alone, and say you are reclaiming a march where they came to appeal to the government to protect us. They are having an anti-government march, on the day that King came to appeal to government. You can’t have it both ways.”

Michael Stone, Portland Progressive Examiner:

The Beck/Palin medicine show was classic American flim flam, a religious con writ large. The program at the Lincoln Memorial Saturday focused more on God than government. The whole thing was a shallow farce, a charade designed to massage Beck’s inflated ego.

Beck’s attempt to position himself as an heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy on the 47th anniversary of the legendary “I have a dream” speech was disgusting, and alarming.

Palin, speaking at the Beck rally, said “I hope Dr. King would be so proud.” Palin hopes in vain. Dr King would not be proud; he would be puzzled, disgusted, and sad.

Sinclair Lewis wrote: “When Fascism Comes To America It Will Be Wrapped In The Flag And Carrying A Cross.” Beck and Palin make the words of Lewis manifest, threatening to turn King’s dream into a nightmare.

 Mr. Evil Matt:

Here’s the rub for the left.  Beck and the clergy are going to go out and spread the ideas of individual freedom far and wide.  It can’t be stopped. The government can take Churches, and the ideas will be preached in the streets, and in home churches.  They are going to teach their children, both their own, and others.  They will be immune to the left’s propaganda machine.  The left’s rotting and corrupt institutions will not contain this, nor can they turn it back.  Essentially, you cannot kill an idea.   In the end, the people that hold these ideas simply will NOT OBEY a socialist government.

Socialism, “progressivism,” fascism, no matter what you call it, are jealous systems.  They are so control oriented, that they cannot tolerate true diversity of ideas.  They fail miserably when their lies, and the results of their policies, are exposed to the light of day.  So, they try to control information, schools, and threaten/discredit those who dissent.  We see all of this happening now.  They have to control and indoctrinate everyone, or they fail.  They have to “convert” or silence everyone-we do not.  They also have to either ban, or co-opt religion, as they cannot even tolerate the people having any source of power higher than the state.  If the people believe that their rights descend from God, and not from the state, they aren’t going to go along with those rights being limited.  They are going to resist the nanny state.  They are not going to accept the elites at their word.  Our adversaries, therefore, have spent the last few decades trying, via Cultural Marxism, trying to eliminate or distort the meaning of our religions and of our Republic.

Much of that is about to be undone

CNN (Via Jim Treacher): 

Lots to digest there. You can skip the Sharpton crap and Michael Stone’s whiney little diatribe.  Everything else is well worth a read.  Go ahead.  I’ll be here when you come back.

First, if the professional Left didn’t hate Glenn Beck before, they sure as shit do now.  You can’t organize a high-profile rally, have 500,000 (if not a million) conservative-ish people show up to Washington and do it on the anniversary of MLK’s ”I Have A Dream” speech and just think you can get away with it.  The Left truly believes that they ‘own’ Dr. King’s social and political legacy.  According to their self-fulfilling narrative, liberals are the rightful and only true caretakers of Dr. King’s place in America.  Seeing some Faux News barely closeted bigot palling around with MLK’s niece, making inspirational speeches and having the audacity to take Martin Luther King’s words seriously is gonna be too much for the pouty progressive caucus to bear.

So watch for attacks on Beck to ratchet up dramatically over the next few weeks.  Every vile slime-job tactic will be thrown at him…as usual.  This will of course just raise Beck’s prestige even higher.

More importantly, American conservatives are totally freakin’ stoked.  Hundreds of thousand of right-wing peeps sweated out a hot day in DC to see Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin give a warm bear-hug to American exceptionalism, traditional faith and the enduring allure of freedom.  That’s pretty amazing, when you think about it.

Not only is the Right pumped, this rally should act as a valuable counterpoint to the Obama Administration’s socialism-soaked rhetoric and deeds.  Remember that Obama in 2008 was…at least in the left-of-center mind…supposed to rally citizens under the banner of progressivism with his mellifluous speeches and soaring rhetoric.  This grand communicative ability was subsequently supposed to ease the American voter in the warm snuggly embrace of full-on double rainbow big-gubmint liberalism.  Forget the fact that the Grand Orator Obama idea was a total media fabrication.  On some level, the Left bought that scenario and expected it to occur.

Think about it:  Could President Obama credibly give a speech in 2010 that delivered the type of unadulterated patriotism on display at the Restoring Honor rally?  Not after two years of trashing America’s history bolstered by pedantic sneering.  Could the President believably discuss racial healing as expressed by Dr. Alveda King?  Not after two years of having his subordinates pump out the obnoxious notion that Americans who oppose him are unrepentant racists.  Could Barack Obama give a full-throated defense of the American military? Not after two years of pathetic dithering in Afghanistan mixed with naked contempt for the mission in Iraq.

More importantly, could President Obama even hope to rally anybody but the most doe-eyed leftist dupes to his causes in August 2010?  Fat chance.

The Restoring Honor gathering was a repudiation of what President Obama has done to this country.  Specifically, it was a ringing rebuke of the charmless arrogance and far-left ideological tone of Obama’s administration.  The folks at Glenn Beck’s rally are crying out for a return to the America of the Constitution and to an unadulterated love of country.  They know they won’t get any of that from Obama.  But I think it’s safe to say that these people know where they could get it in 2012.

Light Blogging

This weekend was sorta rough.  Preeping for a party, then rocking out sorta took it’s toll.  I’ve found that I barbeque and swim waaaaaaay better when I’m drunk.  Blogging?  Eh, not so much.  Turns out skull-collapsing hangovers don’t make me more productive, it just makes me annoyed and lippy.

Then some work/home issues stuff kinda got me messed up as well.

Sooooooooo…I guess that’s just a roundabout way of saying:  I suck.  Sorry.  I’ll do better tomorrow.

Also, to those of you who have blogspot pages, I’ve been trying to comment on your sites but I keep getting error messages.  Is my computer retarded or is the problem on your end?  I dunno.

In any case, here’s some great work by RS McCain.  Read the whole thing.  Trust me.

Welcome ‘Other McCain’ Readers

Hey, thanks for stopping by.  You are hereby allowed to move about the cabin freely. 

Just this one time and just for you bad-ass visitors, I’ll post a semi-naughty video for your amusement.

Oh wait, I’d probably post this anyway.

Anyhooooo, thanks again for making Blog De KingShamus a stop in your travels on the world wide web of goofiness.  Big ups to Robert Stacy McCain; muchas gracias to you sir.