Newt Loses to Newt

Newt goes kamikaze

by Scott Johnson    at PowerLine:  

A funny thing happened on the way to the New Hampshire primary. Newt Gingrich turned himself into a kamikaze pilot aimed at Mitt Romney. Rush Limbaugh characaterizes it slightly differently. He says that Newt is going Perot.

But why is Newt doing this? Peter Wehner has some thoughts predicated on the notion that Gingrich really believed that the Wheel of Fortune had actually stopped on him when he became the non-Romney of the week after Herman Cain.

Is it really possible that Newt failed to recognize the likely temporary nature of his fortune as the non-Romney of the week? I’m afraid it is. One thing we’ve learned over the past few days is that there isn’t much Newt believes in more than himself.

NOTE: In case you missed her assessment yesterday, I’m giving the last word to Michelle Malkin: “The abysmal incompetence of the non-Romneys.”

UPDATE: For a view from a slightly different angle, see Michael Walsh’s NRO/Corner post “The Battle of Bain.”

Victor Davis Hanson Considers Mr. Obama’s 99%…..Poor? Unequal? Both? Neither?

Victor Davis Hanson

 at Pajamas Media

Mr. Obama’s 99% — Are We Poor or Just Unequal or Both or Neither?

 The 2012 campaign is heating up and we can see the outlines of an impending us/them class war. But in our strange 21st-century world, lots of crazy things blur the president’s 1%/99% divide. We watch the super-rich struggle for ever creative ways of blowing their money to distinguish themselves from the rest of us (cf. Johnny Depp’s [$50 million in income last year] hosting of a creepy, expensive costume Halloween party at the White House, in the style of the idle 18th-century French court).

Meanwhile we see the “poor” near rioting over buying the first few pairs of Michael Jordan $200 sneakers, or mobbing for big screen televisions on holiday shopping sale outings. Are we mad that too many are really poor, or that too many are simply unequal, in the sense of not having what “they” enjoy — a “they,” however, that cannot quite figure out how all their money leads to all that much better a life? I am sorry, Mr. Obama, but for all the Vegas-junketeering, no-time-for-profit rhetoric, I simply do not believe the one-seventh on food stamps, or the 48% who pay no income tax, are suffering like the starving 19th-century Norwegian immigrants on the windswept Dakota plains of Ole Rolvaag’s epic Giants in the Earth.

Capital for What?

I am not suggesting that poverty or life in the lower middle class is not tough, only that in comparison to past centuries, hardly as tough. Being “poor” is certainly closer and closer to those for whom life is pretty good — and yet this blending of the classes is entirely ignored by our class warriors in Washington. Life in “poor” nearby Selma is far different from Warren Buffett’s. Or maybe it isn’t really — again, in the sense that I’m not sure he bathes, eats, dresses, or goes to the doctor in ways we out here cannot.

In the year 2012, would a retiree be living better off the interest of $1 million — saved over a lifetime of work as a self-employed contractor — or would the beneficiary of an average public pension? Would you prefer to be working at 62 at the DMV making $50,000, or a near-retired real estate agent, in a down market, at 62 surviving on the “earnings” from the $450,000 in your 401(k)?

Suddenly, the income from stored wealth seems almost nonexistent. I speak to a few affluent groups and often afterwards hear that those who retired in their early sixties, and who are now in their mid- or late-eighties, have no income. You say, tough luck? But most are gradually consuming their capital and selling off assets — a great leveling effect of the ages. (Just wait until the second-term Obama administration decides that non-interest-earning $300,000 in the bank qualifies you as rich, and thus ineligible for need-based Social Security payments: it is not just that you will be punished for playing by the rules, but the rules themselves do matter much any more.)

The value of capital not spent is in decline. The interest on it earns seldom over 2-3%. It is lost easily in today’s wild Wall Street. It won’t show much immediate growth invested in a depressed housing market. Saved capital declines faster in value than the interest it earns — given the recent soaring prices of food and fuel. What is so good about saving up for retirement? To try to get a once despised 6% on your savings is to risk it all. If the president had his way, the capital that earned almost no interest would be taxed away at death anyway.

Debt—What Debt?

In the car today, I heard the usually blast con ads on the radio. Got problems with the IRS? No problem, we can renegotiate that away. Too much credit card borrowing? No problem, we can settle it at half what you owe. That mortgage of yours unfair? No problem; we can renegotiate it for you and forgive some of the debt. Often there is a vague reference to some federal program that some of us are eligible for. Lately I heard ads from the Department of Agriculture, reminding me that if I belong to some such minority group, I can sue if I felt I was discriminated against. (Who are the “they” with all the money to forgive all the debt?). Are we back to the Catiline conspiracy and calls to “forgive debt and redistribute property”?

When In Doubt—Sue!

Then there are the law firm ads: have you suffered whiplash injuries, been turned down for a job, worked with asbestos, had a bad drug reaction to brand X, been discriminated against, had a pass made at you, fallen on a banana peel? If so, the local John Edwards-like law firm will sue on your behalf. Fresno has just announced that its latest lawsuit settlement has pretty much exhausted the city’s self-insured fund for the year (but is it not month 1 of 2012, with 11 more to go?), with over a dozen other claims pending. What happens when we all become litigants and we run our of targets? Who is play Germany to our Greece?

Like in Petronius’s Croton, where there were lots of con artists and far too few wealthy to con, things get ugly.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 | 8 Comments

 

(sent by friend, Brian Ross)

Shouldn’t Work at Bain make Romney THE Unanimous Choice for the White House Job?

DOESN’T THE BAIN JOB GIVE ROMNEY A HUGE ADVANTAGE OVER ANY OTHER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE OF THE LAST OR ANY GENERATION when once considers the financial crisis of  our once great and confident America?

Tough decisions will have to be made.

Who  else in American historyis better qualified to change the course of Obamarule economics hand outs,  his crony capitalism and bloated government all at tax payer expense than Bain-experianced, Mitt Romney? 

The Nation is going bankrupt, folks.    We cannot pay our bills.    We must remove the wheat from the chaff and get even better varieties  of wheat  to return to solvency and  cozy closer to wisdom.    Some fat must be made muscle.

Isn’t that kinda what this Mormon guy did within the bounds of Bain Capital?    Who else is better qualified to reorient the nation back into solvency.    Common, Mitt…..go for your TRUMP CARD……your experience at BAIN CAPITAL!

The following is from an article by Jonathan V. Last  at the Weekly Standard.   He is stewing about the Bank Capital thing.

“For Republicans who are boosters of Romney, this is a perfectly understandable reaction. But I would argue that for more disinterested conservatives, there is no positive duty to mount the barricades and defend Bain from being looked at critically. Here’s why.

(1) Mitt Romney is a very impressive—and genuinely decent—man. And his accomplishments at Bain are likewise impressive. For a variety of reasons (the general dislike of government, Romneycare) he chose to make his work at Bain central to his candidacy with constant and over-the-top talk about how he created “100,000” jobs. As such, he invited voters to look at what he did there and determine if they believe it was both (a) admirable and (b) germane to the presidency.

(2) Romney’s work at Bain differs in some important ways from how he has characterized it thus far. When Romney says that his goal at Bain was to “create jobs,” that’s not entirely true. As a private equity firm, Bain’s goal was to maximize return on investment (ROI) for a small group of high net worth investors. Sometimes that meant giving seed money to a promising start-up. Sometimes it meant rescuing a company and turning it around. Sometimes it meant finding revenue streams a company hadn’t realized—including government bailouts. Sometimes it meant off-shoring a company’s jobs. And sometimes it meant finding a company whose component parts were worth more than the whole—and dismantling it.

(3) Is it fair to take into account all this work, and not simply look at the top-line numbers? When voters evaluate a politician’s record, they look at both the whole and the parts. One or two tough votes can make or break a political career. By the same token, it’s perfectly reasonable for voters to look at a businessman and evaluate both the sum of his career and individual examples of his work. Would it be understandable for a voter to render a verdict on Bain based upon the few times when it shut down a business—in the way they might judge a legislator whom they generally liked, but cast a vote they vehemently disagreed with? I’d argue, yes.

(4) When people think “job creation,” they typically think about an enterprise that builds something. Bernard Marcus’s Home Depot, for instance. Or Steve Jobs’s Apple. Romney’s Bain was nothing like those firms. It was a hybrid venture capital/consulting operation designed to find hidden value in other companies and take advantage of it on behalf of its investors.

As Jerry Seinfeld would say, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” Creative destruction is important to the macro economy. And by providing fat returns to Bain’s backers, Bain was simply liberating inefficiently used capital to be put to work by them in more efficient ways.

At least that’s one way of looking at it. Another would be that Bain liberated capital from one inefficient use and turned it into wealth, which was transferred to its investors. And which may—or may not—have been used more efficiently by them. No one really knows how it was used in the short-run and you have to be one of those “markets are always right” Republicans to assume that they put it to more productive use.

(5) So was Bain a bunch of job-creating capitalists, or a band of corporate raiders? The answer seems mixed—and again, there’s nothing wrong with that. You could make a sophisticated economic argument that access to capital is even more important than entrepreneurial genius in the grand scheme of things. That’s why poor countries with no capital never seem to catch a break even though they must—just by the law of averages—have had some brilliant entrepreneurs in their ranks.

But what is efficient isn’t always admirable. And the near-term results in a market are not always efficient, as the crash of 2008 shows. It is perfectly reasonable for voters to be allowed to examine Bain and determine (irrespective of their support of the free market) whether they find it compatible with the White House.

(6) Given all of that, why the collective Republican backlash over Gingrich bringing scrutiny to Bain? There are three possible explanations. First, Gingrich’s attacks are not perfectly fair and dispassionate. That’s certainly true. But, as Romney said during Sunday’s debate, “this ain’t beanbag.” And there was no a similar call for fairness earlier in the campaign when Romney, over the course of weeks, demagogued and distorted Rick Perry’s positions on Social Security and college tuition for illegal immigrants.

Second, the reporting on Bain tends to come from sources such as the New York Times. Like Gingrich, you cannot trust the Times to be exquisitely fair in every regard. But you also cannot discount everything they report simply because it’s in the Times.

Third, the conversation about Bain must be shut down for the same reason the primary process has continually been declared “over”—because the Republican establishment has decided that Mitt Romney must be the nominee and any attempt to derail that outcome must be quashed. That’s fine. The Republican establishment is certainly entitled to pursue its own interests.

But conservatives do not have a duty to aid them. We will have a series of elections and the voters will decide who the nominee will be. In the course of that process, the voters are entitled to take a long and detailed look at Mitt Romney’s chief stated qualification for the presidency.

And they can render a verdict on Romney’s work without conflating the specific case of Bain Capital with the free market itself.

Dennis Prager: “Newt Gingrich is Now in the Company of Michael Moore!”

MITT ROMNEY IS LOOKING  BETTER AND BEtTER EVERY DAY!

Mitt Romney’s opponents Gingrich, Perry, Huntsman, and  Paul,  are rallying around Michael Moore’s and Barack Obama’s  level of honesty.

“Very distressing!”   reports Dennis.   “What has happened” to our politicians….

(My view is these are professional politicians and/or the professionally secure people.   Only Mit Romey  has worked in the battles of free life calle private enterprise.    These antiRomneys have not been entrepreneurs.   They  have Marxism disease, but not at  the authoritarian level of of autocrat, Barack Hussein I.  

With the exception of Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney’s opponents are government folk.   Ron Paul is a loony swinging from Left to Right, up and down, has his mouth dictates.

Dennis claims the media headlines should be announcing:  “Repubicans Lie About Mitt Romney’s  Record.

Rick Santorum, as one would expect, did not join the Michael Moore-Newt Gingrich circle.

Sorry, Folks, Businesses Ravaged by Charity go Bankrupt, as Real Conservatives Should Know

One can expect the world’s great blabber mouths like Ron Paul and President Obama don’t pay much attention to reality and facts.    They generally appeal to the same brain dead folks certain of their own eminence.   

One would have hoped more from Newt Gingrich being able to contain his native drive to meanness.   So many Americans these days are funded by the American tax payers and vote to protect their own nests, they become senile forgetting  the societhy’s cleansing power of private enterprise……especially that part of private enterprise that isn’t corrupted by government such as Obamacare.

Even in this opinion piece from the Chicago Tribune giving ‘a look’ at Mitt Romney of 20 years ago, is  titled CREATIVE DESTRUCTION,  I write as a guy who started his own landscape garden business over twenty years ago.   It is a small enterprise and until the year before Obamarise we increased our gross income 15%  or more every year.    Since Obamarule each year we have been struggling to stay afloat frozen by the economy at half of that gross income.

We incurred huge debt crippling us further, because I, charitably refused to cut staff……Eventually, there was no choice if survival  remained a possibility.   Anyone who ‘lets go’ any  employees, even the good ones as in our business, can be accused of CREATIVE DESTRUCTION!  

The following CREATIVE DESTRUCTION is from today’s opinion page of the Chicago Tribune:

Creative destruction

Hiring, firing and Mitt Romney

“Before he entered politics, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a fortune at Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he ran from 1984 to 1999.

Romney could have expected that Democrats would give him a hard time about his role buying, building, selling and sometimes closing businesses, which created — and eliminated — a lot of jobs. But he’s getting ripped by his Republican opponents, too.

“If you are a victim of Bain Capital’s downsizing, it is the ultimate insult for Mitt Romney to say he feels your pain when he caused it,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Monday. Newt Gingrich has echoed the sentiment that Romney profited handsomely while causing more pain than gain for workers.

For his part, Romney couldn’t have been more ham-handed on Monday when he said, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” Perhaps not so bad in context: He was talking about having the ability to change health insurers if an insurer doesn’t provide good care. But as a sound bite, oh, he’s going to hear this one again and again and again. And again.

Romney, of course, would rather focus on the jobs that were created during his time at Bain. He pegs that at a net gain of 100,000 jobs, though he has not substantiated that claim.

So, how to look at this?

Private equity is not evil. It is a natural part of capitalism. In its simplest form, its practitioners put money to work on behalf of investors willing to take a chance on expanding young companies or fixing troubled ones. When it succeeds, the companies prosper. When it fails, the companies shrink, or disappear.

Private equity is not constructed to be some altruistic job engine, and Romney shouldn’t pretend that it is. Success in private equity requires unsentimental decision-making. The goal is to produce a return on investment.”

 

Obama’s Ethanol Toys Funded by U.S. Tax Payers a Disaster for the Impoverished

The Renewable Fuels Disaster

from the National Center for Policy Analysis:

Deficit hawks, environmentalists and food processors are celebrating the expiration of the ethanol tax credit.  This corporate handout gave $0.45 to ethanol producers for every gallon they produced and cost taxpayers $6 billion in 2011.  However, the continuation of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which creates government-guaranteed demand for corn, will limit the effectiveness of the tax break expiration and continue to distort the market for corn, says Aaron Smith, an associate professor at the University of California, Davis.

• The RFS mandates that at least 37 percent of 2011-2012 corn crops be converted to ethanol and blended with the gasoline.
• The RFS has artificially stimulated the ethanol market for years, such that only a year after its introduction, 1.8 billion gallons of additional ethanol capacity was under construction.

The demand created by the RFS drives up the price of corn and related goods by diverting the use of corn toward non-food ends.  While the specific market distortion is debated, careful estimation can offer insight:

• In the 2005-2006 crop year (before the implementation of the RFS), 1.6 billion bushels of corn were used to produce ethanol; in 2010-2011 5.0 billion bushels were used, suggesting that 3.4 billion bushels are diverted to ethanol by the RFS.
• Because one-third of the caloric value of the corn is retained and redirected after ethanol production, only 2.3 billion of this 3.4 billion is moved away from food consumption (16 percent of total corn production).
• Estimates suggest that the market can absorb 5 percent more corn for every 10 percent price reduction, and this implies that the loss of 2.3 billion bushels of demand would drive down prices by 32 percent.
• It is also estimated that this price reduction would decrease the price of other commodities such as soybeans, wheat and rice by 20 percent as well.

The true cost of this price increase is not born by domestic grocery shoppers, but by international consumers of commodities; namely, the world’s impoverished.  Final estimates suggest price increases from 2005-2008 forced 105 million people below the extreme poverty line ($1.25 per day).  Thus, while the retirement of the ethanol tax breaks is a success, true relief lies in the elimination of the RFS.

Source: Aaron Smith, “Children of the Corn: The Renewable Fuels Disaster,” The American, January 4, 2012.

For text:

http://www.american.com/archive/2012/january/children-of-the-corn-the-renewable-fuels-disaster

For more on Environment Issues:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=31

Romney’s Years at Bain Smeared

Romney defends business record from

Republican rivals

 

(Reuters) – On the cusp of a widely expected victory in New Hampshire, Republican front-runner Mitt Romney fought to repel attacks on his business record on Monday as rivals in the presidential race tried to weaken him before a tighter vote in South Carolina.

The former venture capitalist did himself no favors in the homestretch to Tuesday’s first-in-the-nation primary with remarks that sounded like he enjoyed firing people – and rivals were quick to seize on the unfortunate choice of words.

When telling business leaders about how he wanted individuals to be able to choose their own health insurance, Romney said: “If you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”

In reaction, former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman quipped: that was another thing “that differentiates Governor Romney from me. Governor Romney enjoys firing people. I enjoy creating jobs.”

Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, was ahead more than 20 points in New Hampshire, even though polls early Monday showed a slight erosion in his lead over his nearest rivals. Libertarian Ron Paul retained the No. 2 spot, while the moderate Huntsman and social conservative Rick Santorum made gains.

The small northern New England state is likely to give Romney his second victory after an eight-vote squeaker over Santorum in Iowa, making him the first Republican candidate who is not an incumbent president to win both states. It also will give legs to a second-place finisher, who could be any of the five other candidates.

But much of the focus in the Republican campaign already is on the January 21 primary in South Carolina, a more conservative state where Romney’s rivals are planning a barrage of critical ads to try to derail his march to the party’s presidential nomination.

A fundraising group supporting former House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich has said it will release a 27-minute documentary that portrays Romney as a job cutter when he was a venture capitalist in the 1990s. A three-minute trailer for the video was posted on YouTube as Gingrich stepped up his criticism of Romney.

Romney has sought to cast himself as a job creator, someone who can charge up the U.S. economy at a time when the jobless rate, though improving slightly, sits at 8.5 percent. It’s a rate that could put Democratic President Barack Obama on shaky ground in this election year.

The flap over the firing comment threatened to drown out Romney’s repeated defense of his time running Bain Capital, a firm that bought companies and restructured them.

“I’m happy to describe my experience in the private economy and the fact that if you take all the businesses that we invested in over our many years over 100 different businesses that collectively net-net added over 100,000 new jobs,” he told a news conference.

‘CORPORATE RAIDER’

In a remarkable turnaround in a party known for being friendly to business, Republicans seeking to slow Romney down are sounding more like populists as they bash Romney’s work as a venture capitalist.

Gingrich and other Republican rivals have dubbed Romney a corporate raider who killed jobs.

The trailer to the anti-Romney documentary, “When Mitt Romney Came to Town,” portrays Romney as being part of a band of ruthless businessmen.

“Mitt Romney was not a capitalist during his reign at Bain. He was a predatory corporate raider,” says the trailer, which like the film was produced by Winning Our Future, a pro-Gingrich group.

Texas Governor Rick Perry chimed in from South Carolina, where he hopes to revive a flagging campaign that almost ended after a dismal showing in last week’s Iowa caucuses.

“There is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failure and sticking it to someone else is the way you do business,” said Perry. “It is the ultimate insult for Mitt Romney to come to South Carolina and say he feels your pain.”

Romney also has a 12-point lead over closest rival Gingrich in Florida three weeks before that state’s Republican primary but more than half of likely voters still might change their minds, according to a poll released on Monday.

SLOWING DOWN ROMNEY

While many analysts suggest that Romney is on the verge of nailing down his nomination, an onslaught of money and attack ads could slow down a front-runner who has failed to capture conservatives in a fractured party.

Even before New Hampshire residents cast a vote, South Carolina is shaping up as the main battleground.

In the latest example of how so-called Super PACs, political action committees with no donation limits, are shaping the campaign, Winning Our Future plans to spend $3.4 million on ads in South Carolina, a source familiar with the PAC plans told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

After a similar attack on Gingrich by a pro-Romney group helped drive down Gingrich’s support before the Iowa caucuses, it’s certain that Romney will be the main target of Winning Our Future’s ads.

Romney weathered well a bruising debate on Sunday in which his opponents criticized his ability to defeat Obama in November and represent Republicans’ conservative core.

In two New Hampshire debates over the weekend, Gingrich hit Romney with allegations that Bain destroyed companies and fired workers, erroneously crediting a story in The New York Times. The story, “Romney’s steel skeleton in the Bain closet,” actually was published by Reuters.

(Additional reporting by John Whitesides in South Carolina and Ros Krasny and Sam Youngman in New Hampshire; Writing by Mary Milliken; Editing by Alistair Bell and Doina Chiacu)

Dennis Prager: Leftism Makes you Meaner

 This following article and a catalog of Dennis’ articles can be found at dennisprager.com or at the Dennis Prager Show:

 

“Only a fool believes that all those with whom he differs are bad people. Moreover, just about all of us live the reality — often within our own family — of knowing good and loving people with whom we strongly differ on political, religious, social and economic issues. That said, I have come to believe that the more committed one is to leftism, the more likely one is to become meaner.

Two examples in just the past week offer compelling evidence.

Prominent left-wing commentators used the way in which Rick Santorum and his wife handled the death of one of their children to attack — make that mock — the former Pennsylvania senator.

In a lifetime of observing and participating in political debate, I have seen a lot of meanness. But one just assumes that some things — not many, just some — are off limits to political pundits and activists.

Among these few things, one has to believe, is the death of a child.

But I was wrong.

In 1996, Karen Santorum gave birth to a premature baby boy who died two hours later. After spending the night in the hospital with their baby son between them, the grieving parents brought the lifeless infant home for a brief period because, Santorum explained, it was important to them for their other children to “know they had a brother.” The Santorums didn’t want Gabriel Michael Santorum to be an abstraction to his siblings.

First, Alan Colmes on Fox News: “Once (voters) get a load of some of the crazy things he’s said and done, like taking his 2-hour-old baby who died right after childbirth home and played with it for a couple of hours so his other children would know that the child was real …”

Colmes was then interrupted by Rich Lowry: “You are mocking him. They lost a child, Alan. That’s very serious and it’s not something you should be mocking on national TV.”

Colmes’ response: “I’m not mocking the losing of the child. But what I’m saying is I think it shows a certain unusual attitude toward taking a 2-hour-baby home who died to play with his other children.”

In addition to engaging in a cheap and mean shot, Colmes simply made up the notion that the Santorums had brought the baby home for their other children “to play with.”

The next day, Eugene Robinson, Pulitzer-Prize winning left-wing columnist for The Washington Post, said on MSNBC, Santorum is “not a little weird. He’s really weird. Some of his positions he’s taken are just so weird that I think some Republicans are going to be off-put. Not everybody is going to be down, for example, with the story of how he and his wife handled the stillborn child whose body they took home to kind of sleep with and introduce to the rest of the family. It’s a very weird story.”

Four times Robinson calls Santorum “weird,” using the story about the death of the child as evidence. He was wrong on an important detail — the child was not “stillborn.” And, like Colmes, he made up a mocking detail — that they took the child home “to kind of sleep with.”

The meanness of these comments is self-evident, as Alan Colmes realized and later apologized to Santorum. Robinson, on the other hand, never apologized — as RealClearPolitics, which has no political agenda, correctly reported — even though repeatedly challenged to do so on MSNBC.

I raise these issues for only one reason: to provide further evidence of my belief that leftism makes more than a few of its adherents meaner people.

I have had many interactions with Alan Colmes, and while we always differ, I never found him to be mean-spirited. I still don’t think he is mean-spirited, and though I am not the directly offended party, like Santorum, I accept his apology, because I believe he meant it.

So why did he say what he said?

Because leftism fills many of its adherents with contempt and hatred. It takes a person of great character and self-control to continually imbibe and mouth the mantras of the left — that everyone on the right is sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, islamophobic, racist and bigoted — and not become a meaner human being. If I believed just about everyone with left-wing views was despicable, I would be meaner, too.

In a previous column, I wrote about Thomas Friedman making one of the classic anti-Semitic libels when he wrote that the reason the Senate and the House gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu standing ovations was because “that ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

How does a Jew write an anti-Semitic libel? Because he’s on the left.

That was the reason Rep. Andre Carson said that members of Congress who support the Tea Party want to see blacks “hanging on a tree.” Because he’s on the left.

Leftists’ meanness toward those with whom they differ has no echo on the normative right. Those on the left need to do some soul-searching. Because as long as they continue to believe that people on the right are not merely wrong but vile, they will get increasingly mean. The problem for the left, however, is that the moment it stops painting the right as vile, it has to argue the issues.”