Roger Kimball’s “Suicide Club” a good read, but fails to notice the Romney Growth

The Suicide Club       by Roger Kimball at Pajamas Media

Comment:   Roger Kimball, a devoted conservative, is not happy with the Republican field as it  remains in the  GOP presidential contest.    His general claim against the ‘kind of’ leader, Mitt Romney, whom  others might claim is choice of some kind of  Republican establishment, is Mr. Generic Republican.   Roger points to NBC/WSJ as betting on Newt Gingrich to get the Republican nod and then lose by 18 points to Marxist Obama.

That Newt would  lose to Marxist Obama by 18 points  if he were to be the Republican candidate is probably a good guess.

He will NOT be the Republican candidate.   He might pretend to be more conservative than Mr. Generic Republican, and in some areas he certainly might be.    But he is not a conservative person by habit as shown in his BIOGRAPHY.

Mitt Romney is a conservative man by habit.    Proof lies with   his family, his life in business, and I would also claim in most areas of his politics.    One sin, doctrinaire conservatives claim possesses Mr. Romney is his socialistic-like  stubbornness  for Romneycare.    Doesn’t bother me.   In Washington Romney’s friends and aides will be Republicans, mostly conservative.    He will want to please them and the American people.

Mr. Generic Republican has not been a politician all of his adult life.   He is primarily a successful business and family man.  Not a bad credentials even  these days.    One can tell in his earlier  debates he was swimming in rather chilly water.    He seems to be warming up rather than the water getting hotter.  He is gaining  confidence with winsome political skills.

 Mr. Romney’s biggest sins seem to be Romneycare when Governor of one of the most lefty states in America and he combs his hair too neatly. 

 I admit, I dislike  the perpetually dishonest Barack .    It could be that Newt’s acid tongue and skillfull bushwacking might win the day over Marxist Obama.  But,  I see them both as  bastards by nature in their politics.    Of course I prefer a  conservative bastard over a Marxist one, but I’d prefer to like my candidate as a person.  I’d like to believe he is honorable.   I’d like him to  be a good guy, rational,   conservative and a winner.   I have come to like Mitt a lot.

I do not see Mr. Romney as a bastard at all……Even in today’s world one doesn’t have to be a bastard to shine for  public approval to beat Obama.       Mitt Romney has a sound family, has earned his millions from his own mind and sweat, and is from  an recent immigrant background from both sides of his family.   His dad was never a Marxist.    His wife won’t be joining NBC to denounce her husband.    His religion is a huge plus except like most Protestant  ‘sects’,  believers are trained  to be humble about their successes, and to be productive  and honest workers in the eyes of man and God.     What is phony about Mitt Romney?   Even his hair is his own.   He lives as a model conservative.    Why can’t that be trusted?   He isn’t running for Governor of Massachusetts but to occupy the  White House as president of the United States.

 What the cauldrons of debate  have boiled thus far, is  a  stronger Mitt, more confident, aggressive,  and better able to describe his own talents and successes.    Talented and clever  Newt has no new talents to display.   Nor, frankly does the dishonest and duplicitous Barack Hussein.   He has had three years to show something worthy.     Americans are still waiting for the show.

Click here to view a Mormon elder 30 years ago describe the growing  threat from the atheist  Secular Church to destroy the freedoms and sanctuaries of America’s JudeoChristian believers and the soul of the Nation  itself.    His worries then face us as reality today.    I am not a Mormon, but do believe there is no institution in America that is MORE American in its values than the  Church of the Latter Day Saints.     Check it out for yourself.   It makes me very, very proud to be an American.      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKqVtXG8VOE

Let’ read Roger Kimball’s view on the matter:

John Stuart Mill famously described conservatives as “the stupid party.” The description has unwritten boundless hilarity among liberals for more than a century, but that is only because they (stupidly?) neglected to take Mill’s deeper message on board. Every true partisan of liberalism, Mill wrote, should pray for the enlightenment and acuity of conservatives if for no other reason than intelligent opposition tends to have a tonic effect on liberalism itself.

That is probably true. But there is a toxic assumption lying behind Mill’s strictures that is worth pondering.  It is this: the more closely one compares liberals and conservatives, the more it emerges that by “stupid” many liberals (including, I believe, Mill himself) mean “disagreeing with me.”  Liberalism, that is to say,  regards its political opinions not as opinions but as reflections of the state of nature: what any right-thinking (i.e., left-leaning) person believes. But your opinions, my conservative friend, are regarded not so much as opinions as some form of heresy. Here in a nutshell you have the motor behind political correctness and the staggeringly illiberal attitudes espoused by the elite liberal establishment.

There’s a lot more that might be said about Mill’s diagnosis of conservatives as “the stupid party.” You might, for example, want to ask the embarrassing question “stupid compared to what?” or — another embarrassing gambit — “What counts as liberal these days?” In any event, whether or not conservatives can really be described as “the stupid party,” I fear that Republicans, having repudiated the instinct of self-preservation, are shaping up as a kind of suicide club.  (H/t, Robert Louis Stevenson.)  I know, I know: if you were to create a Venn diagram of conservatives and Republicans, you would have less overlap than you might suppose. But if you are thinking about political realities — about how power is acquired, held, and exercised — Republicans, for the time being anyway, are the closest thing to conservative  players we have  in the game (as distinct from those quarter-backing from the bench).

This is not, it pains me to report,  a cheery fact. Conservatives look around and see that, when it comes to simple venality, Democrats nearly always take the palm.  The party that spoke up for slavery in the 19th century, segregation in the 20th century, and the neo-segregationist muddle that is multiculturalism, affirmative action, and political correctness in more recent years is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Entitlement, Inc., committed  not simply to a redistributionist but also centralizing, statist agenda, the pursuit of which licenses all manner of Alinskyesque  subterfuge.

Further: It is an irony of language that those who congregate under the banner of liberalism more and more associate themselves with policies that are inimical to individual liberty and its great enabler, democratic capitalism, while conservatives, committed to free markets and policies that promote self-governance and individual initiative, should be denied the moral lubrication of that coveted term. Russell Kirk was right when he said that he was conservative because he was liberal, i.e., committed to ordered liberty and the fiscal responsibility that underwrites it. But Republicans, having largely ceded the rhetorical high ground to the Democrats, have lost access to such clarifying formulations. (They have also, in the name of “compromise,” capitulated on . . . well, on nearly every important Democratic initiative.  See, e.g., Andy McCarthy’s depressing column about the fiscal side of this tawdry reality in “The Myth of GOP Stinginess.”)

These abstract observations have some very practical implications, seen, for example, in recent polling results.  Ponder this: a week or two ago polls aggregated by the indispensable RealClearPolitics showed a “generic Republican” winning against Barack Obama in the upcoming general election. Every particular Republican on offer, however, lost to Obama, Mitt Romney just by a few points, Gingrich, Santorum, and Ron Paul  by a larger margin.

As of Friday, the prospects for Republicans were notably gloomier. Mr. Generic Republican, in a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, was down by 5 points against Obama; Rasmussen and other pollsters showed Obama winning against all the Republican candidates by an even larger margin. Meanwhile, Gallup and NBC/WSJ have Gingrich out front to win the the Republican nomination. Nota Bene: he wins the nomination; he loses (according to one poll, he loses by 18 points) the general election.

Now, I acknowledge that it is early days yet. As British Prime Minster Harold Wilson famously put it, “a week is a long time in politics.” Those polls numbers might be wildly different come November. But the current numbers are not without significance.  They tell us, above all, that there is a great hunger that is not being satisfied. They also tell us that there is widespread unhappiness, not to say disgust, with the status quo ante. The Republican establishment seems unwilling or unable to take this on board. They are still playing the game with yesterday’s dice.  Some observant commentator described the Republican primary thus far as a sort of circular firing squad in which everyone was gravely injured, if not killed (farewell, Messrs Pawlenty, Cain, and Perry! So long Ms. Bachmann!).  Team Obama must be enjoying the bloodsport, but what about the rest of us?

I have often said that I regard the Tea Party as the most vibrant and salubrious political phenomenon in contemporary American politics. Many people seem to believe that the Tea Party is a tool of the Republican Party. That, certainly, is what the Republican Party wishes you to believe. In fact, though, the Tea Party looks with jaded-eye upon Republicans and Democrats alike.  Their goal is smaller, less intrusive, government. If Democrats are the party of big government, Republicans, despite rhetoric to the contrary, have invested heavily in that franchise.  Hence the conservative unhappiness with the Republican field. And hence this melancholy prognostication: the Republicans’ only live hope for the 2012 presidential election is to endorse an articulate conservative candidate.  So far, they have failed to find him (or her).  Time is running out. The spectacle of mutually assured destruction that we’ve been treated to under the name of the Republican primary has offered some entertaining, if unedifying,  moments. Entertaining moments do not win elections. Principled conservatism does. Any takers?

George Will: Obama and his Military Metaphors Aspiring to Command Civilian Life

       Obama to the nation: Onward civilian soldiers!

                                by George Will    at   the Washington Post:

“War, said James Madison, is “the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.” Randolph Bourne, the radical essayist killed by the influenza unleashed by World War I, warned, “War is the health of the state.” Hence Barack Obama’s State of the Union hymn: Onward civilian soldiers, marching as to war.

Obama, an unfettered executive wielding a swollen state, began and ended his address by celebrating the armed forces. They are not “consumed with personal ambition,” they “work together” and “focus on the mission at hand” and do not “obsess over their differences.” Americans should emulate troops “marching into battle,” who “rise or fall as one unit.

Well.  The armed services’ ethos, although noble, is not a template for civilian society, unless the aspiration is to extinguish politics. People marching in serried ranks, fused into a solid mass by the heat of martial ardor, proceeding in lock step, shoulder to shoulder, obedient to orders from a commanding officer — this is a recurring dream of progressives eager to dispense with tiresome persuasion and untidy dissension in a free, tumultuous society.

Progressive presidents use martial language as a way of encouraging Americans to confuse civilian politics with military exertions, thereby circumventing an impediment to progressive aspirations — the Constitution and the patience it demands. As a young professor, Woodrow Wilson had lamented that America’s political parties “are like armies without officers.” The most theoretically inclined of progressive politicians, Wilson was the first president to criticize America’s founding. This he did thoroughly, rejecting the Madisonian system of checks and balances — the separation of powers, a crucial component of limited government — because it makes a government that cannot be wielded efficiently by a strong executive.

Franklin Roosevelt agreed. He complained about “the three-horse team of the American system”: “If one horse lies down in the traces or plunges off in another direction, the field will not be plowed.” And progressive plowing takes precedence over constitutional equipoise among the three branches of government. Hence FDR’s attempt to break the Supreme Court to his will by enlarging it.

In his first inaugural address, FDR demanded “broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” He said Americans must “move as a trained and loyal army” with “a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.” The next day, addressing the American Legion, Roosevelt said it was “a mistake to assume that the virtues of war differ essentially from the virtues of peace.” In such a time, dissent is disloyalty.

Yearnings for a command society were common and respectable then. Commonweal, a magazine for liberal Catholics, said that Roosevelt should have “the powers of a virtual dictatorship to reorganize the government.” Walter Lippmann, then America’s preeminent columnist, said: “A mild species of dictatorship will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead.” The New York Daily News, then the nation’s largest-circulation newspaper, cheerfully editorialized: “A lot of us have been asking for a dictator. Now we have one. . . . It is Roosevelt. . . . Dictatorship in crises was ancient Rome’s best era.” The New York Herald Tribune titled an editorial “For Dictatorship if Necessary.”

Obama, aspiring to command civilian life, has said that in reforming health care, he would have preferred an “elegant, academically approved” plan without “legislative fingerprints on it” but “unfortunately” he had to conduct “negotiations with a lot of different people.” His campaign mantra “We can’t wait!” expresses progressivism’s impatience with our constitutional system of concurrent majorities. To enact and execute federal laws under Madison’s institutional architecture requires three, and sometimes more, such majorities. There must be majorities in the House and Senate, each body having distinctive constituencies and electoral rhythms. The law must be affirmed by the president, who has a distinctive electoral base and election schedule. Supermajorities in both houses of Congress are required to override presidential vetoes. And a Supreme Court majority is required to sustain laws against constitutional challenges.

“We can’t wait!” exclaims Obama, who makes recess appointments when the Senate is not in recess, multiplies “czars” to further nullify the Senate’s constitutional prerogative to advise and consent, and creates agencies (e.g., Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board and Dodd-Frank’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) untethered from legislative accountability.

Like other progressive presidents fond of military metaphors, he rejects the patience of politics required by the Constitution he has sworn to uphold.”

georgewill@washpost.com

 

 

Is Obama Hiding Staff Deadbeats who owe Uncle Sam $833,000 in Back Taxes?

“Why isn’t this on the nightly news?”  my good friend, conservative Brian Ross asks.   He sent  the following Investors’ article:

http://news.investors.com/Article/599002/201201260818/obama-white-house-staff-back-taxes.htm

In nearly every talk of president Obama’s public life what he pretends as good in his speeches is contrary to his actions.   At best he can be most accurately described as disingenuous, duplicitous,  devious and dishonest.  

What can one expect from a devoted Marxist?

Is Beauty a Danger to the Marxist Rule of Equality?

 

HOW IS THE UNIVERSITY BRED, MARXIST SNOT FACTOR, COMING ALONG IN YOUR LIFE?

 

There is a snot factor in modern  human life.   It is one of the most powerful drives among today’s  human herds.     No one seems to have engaged in studies about this  human snot factor, perhaps because most of   its  origins  and of its poisons  emanate  from a culture’s ‘learned’, today’s modern university.

 

University people, as is true of all leftists, don’t like to examine themselves or ever be examined.   They are  ‘learned’.   Most  are Marxists and other kinds of leftists.

 

Snottery is an art form of  human behavior.   Snots are usually so pleased with themselves and their own personal achievements,  they  develop  disdain for those brothers and sisters and moms and dads  who have not been able to reach their exceptional  lofty heights.

 

Most snots live and work at university…….very likely  not, however,  in the natural science world of human inquisitiveness.    The farther one delves into the infinite small or into the infinite large as well as the inbetween, the more unlikely one is to believe that the universe centers around ones self. 

 

The main enemy of  universal snottiness is the human male.    It’s a problem of his birth.    He was born curious.

 

Snottiness is a new phenomenon in Western life, I am guessing.    When husband and wife, sisters and brothers have  lived, or have tried to live in the rurals throughout  the millenium, there is not much to get snotty about.    Survival is the name of their  game.   Every hour and day have their demands, some never before seen or experienced.

 

I am certain aristocrats of King Louie the fourteenth’s court  enjoyed the raptures of snottiness.   A couple generations later a queen of France was alleged to have said, “Let them eat cake”……the them being the rabble in the Paris streets and French countryside.   The  ‘snottied upon’ rebelled however, replying with tricks of their ‘low’ trade to take action they thought appropriate for the time and situation, rape, pillage and burn.     What was no longer thought  useful, was discarded.

 

Snots wield much power in modern  society.   Actually, many of them become so skilled in snottery they become supreme leaders of nations.   Barack Hussein Obama, present president of the United States is one of the most successful, most skilled snots in our  nation’s history.

 

Mr. Obama belongs in the ‘soft snot’ category of the species.   His is a sub-group of Supreme Snots, usually Marxists, the ones who are so pleased with themselves in  look and sound, they become determined to sculpt  their subjects  not to be clones, for that might  become a danger  some day, but to become  obedient children all playing the same games.

 

“Tough snots” are Marxists who don’t waste their time fooling around training folks to remain  hungry children.    Josef Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse Dung,  Pol Pot, are some of the ‘tough snots’ from history  whose names  come to mind.    They were so pleased with themselves, they  tried to eliminate all   those  whom they suspected   had  tendencies to become  snotty……those who ‘didn’t know their place’.     They were hugely  successful in their conquests….for a period of time.    Scores of millions of  snots and snots-in-the-bud  disappeared to make more room for obedient,   lefty children-for-life.

 

Modern Western snottiness has devolved from the good old  days of  ‘tough snot’ rule by  loudly denouncing the bloody parts of snottiness past.      It’s  bad for publicity in places which still hold elections.     In the USA Snot-in-Chief, Barack Hussein Obama promised “Change We Have Been Waiting For” for ‘his’ people to win his throne for the moment.     The promise  of Obamachange was that  half of the population would never  again be pressed  to pay taxes.    Instead, these folks would be trained to become eternal children, prayerfully forever snotless, and always obedient to Obamarule in exchange for food, shelter, and controlled knowledge.   

 

(Note, the adverb, ‘prayerfully’, inserted into the sentence above.    Like the major snots,  i.e., those who rule snottily,  whether the Mao hard line, or the Barack soft line,  Marxists DO pray…….They pray to themselves, the only god they have ever known.)

 

It is likely most, perhaps  all  peoples ‘above’ the enslaved peasant,  have snot moments….in speech, writing and thought.   “Why aren’t all  people like ME” moments with the required condescension added.      All of us have our own special knowledge, some vast and shallow, others narrow but deep and  any mix in between.   However, snots and snottiness can be ugly, very ugly.   

 

So much of today’s American ‘ugly’ both in thought and deed’, come from the ‘Liberal Arts’ madrassas of its universities……These institutions have become leftwing snot havens, taught by snots of the worst kind, by those  toned with all of the hates of the worst slaughters in the human experience……Marxist class hate.   

 

These university snots  preach Marxism.    They preach that everyone must go to the Marxist ‘churches’ not just on Sunday, either.    This  Lefty  faith must be preached in texts, by video, throughout all worlds of entertainment,  in church and synagogues, in all places where snots gather.    Snots must be made to snot-think alike for  peace’s sake!

 

Most gross snots are incurious…..and so, are likely to be female, either by sex or training.     They are so totally pleased with their own snotstatus, they find no need to ‘look’ further in life beyond being served. 

 

Personally, I have had long bouts with lefty snottiness.   I first  sensed the disease  after I graduated from my first round of college.    I saw it in others while I was at college.   The professors then, knew so much more than I did, that is to say, in the world I felt I wanted to imitate and compete, they had a right to be snotty, I thought.    I knew I was practicing snottiness when pontificating among my peers, but so were they.  

 

Then I went into the military as a nobody.   It was one of the greatest experiences of my life.   The snot was still in me, but I had to learn to  keep it under control which helped me recognize  its symptoms.    After service I re-entered university to qualify for a trade…..I became a teacher.    I remained somewhere between the snooty and snotty for the next several years by remaining at university as a teacher.     Eventually, I purposely chose to enter the ‘real’ world…..a world I had never really known since my childhood, the world of the everyday guy and gal and their families.

 

I learned to admire and respect guys who could remove part of my car to examine and solve problems.    I met builders of houses, not just the plat makers, but the ‘nail’  and ‘saw’ men and the salesmen  and their families as well.   They had other interests than I, but in their fields they were knowledgeable,  honest, and everyday commanded a duty to do good work.    They were proud people.    I became very proud of them and by that, lossed so much of my snot power.

 

Later, I chose to ‘teach’ in a black school community, where the daily exercises  for survival  were entirely different.   There was no peace.   Ugliness was always in the air and around the corner.

 

 Yet, there was faith and  nobility among those folks of that neighborhood, mostly women, trying to make the best for  a good, loving life in  a cage  of  crime and violence, lies and pretense where snottiness was a mere mosquito bite.

 

With all of this special experience, I remained a lefty snot.   I returned to university and toned up my self assurances working on another graduate degree which kept me on campus for the next 15 years.   I remained lofty left.

 

The epiphany of my life occurred in a world I had never really known or respected.   I had never learned it in school.  

 

Late in my life I turned to private enterprise.    I turned to this world unsnottily.   It was to be my own struggle for survival.    I was totally  ignorant of everything  in this enterprise  except

the subject of my business…..landscaping gardening.    I had the fire, but didn’t know how to control it and what to do if and when the fire  caused trouble.    There was no room for snot, and I knew it.   I was alone in my task.   I’s loose sleep reminding myself of that fact.

 

But the business grew.   I had to hire, and the guys I hired  had to become skilled quickly.   And they did…..and had to be properly paid……so properly, that in order to continue success in ‘my’ business, I discovered that they would get paid first and I, last, and I got nothing those times  when there wasn’t enough money    for payroll. 

 

I am often  still a snot, especially about lefties   like president Obama.   I hate the disingenuous, the dishonest.   In my life and business I learn they cannot be trusted.   They are the worst snots of all…….

 

……..except for those lefties who are so pleased with themselves, so certain of their superiority of their  goodness   forcing  equality among peoples,  that they censor  the beautiful from our lives, whether it be the beauty of  music, art, garden,  language, thinking,  behavior, or God.     Such beauties are contrary to the word of Marxism, for if something is universally  beautiful, it suggests that something, then, could be universally ugly.    This truth exposes the ugliness and falseness of the Leftwing god, Marxism.   

 

I little bit of personal snottiness is a help to make us unique as individuals.    Snottiness can become  a  mental disease  and  a grave  threat to mankind  when it becomes politicized  and its leaders cannot tolerate others, especially those who seek truth.  

 

Test this assumption of mine regarding beauty  yourselves, dear readers……Is what you hear (click below)  more beautiful than many  other sounds you perceive with your ear?    If so, should it be censored from our human’s lives because its beauty might be  a threat  to Marxist  ‘forced’  equality?

 

 

Click on this site: http://www.clarrissegill.com/videoclips/amazing_grace.php

 

Obamaview of American Industry while Speechifying

The following was sent from Lisa Rich in California……Lisa did not not the source:

 

 

“When Barack Obama gives a speech, whether it’s a State of the Union address or a campaign pitch, an unfavorable fact check is practically de rigueur.  However, Obama’s effort to make his point on corporate taxes got so badly botched on so many points that actually negated his entire argument that taken together they make for a rather potent Obamateurism.  The Cato Institute did the research that Obama should have done for himself:

Claim: “Right now, companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas.”

False: There are no such breaks. Instead, we punish U.S. and foreign businesses for investing and creating jobs here.

Claim: “If you’re a business that wants to outsource jobs, you shouldn’t get a tax deduction for doing it.”

 

False: There is no such tax deduction.

Claim: “No American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas.”

 

False: America is not a prison camp. Besides, imposing a 40-percent tax rate on corporations that invest here is not a “fair share.”

Claim: “From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax.”

 

False: We’ve already got a corporate “alternative minimum tax,” and it’s an idiotic waste of accounting resources that ought to be repealed.

Claim: “It is time to stop rewarding businesses that ship jobs overseas.”

 

False: We penalize them for locating jobs here. Besides, the overseas operations of U.S. companies generally complement domestic jobs by boosting U.S. exports. …

Claim: “If you’re an American manufacturer, you should get a bigger tax cut. If you’re a high-tech manufacturer, we should double the tax deduction you get for making your products here. And if you want to relocate in a community that was hit hard when a factory left town, you should get help financing a new plant, equipment, or training for new workers.”

 

False: It’s a horrible idea to create special breaks for certain types of government-favored businesses. It would simply encourage the exact type of tax game-playing and lobbying that the president decries. What’s a “high-tech” manufacturer? What’s an “American” manufacturer? What’s a “manufacturer”? How “hard hit” do towns need to be?

Obama managed to get only one thing correct about the corporate tax: it’s the highest in the free world.  That’s why every effort to reform it, whether from Republicans or from the President’s own deficit commission, proposes to reduce it.  The Bowles-Simpson committee gave those recommendations to Obama more than a year ago, and Obama has yet to act on it.  And he’s given two SOTU speeches since, apparently without bothering to read the report or the laws he’s demanding to change.”