I don't need to tell the grown-ups out there the old saw that it's all about turnout. That old hackneyed piece of pundit-shit is . . . well, it's true, actually. I think Kerry's got the turnout advantage, on paper, based on the kind of anti-Bush sentiment rolling around. (It will quite an irony if Kerry cannot harness the Bush hatred and ride it to Pennsy Ave. If anyone can blow this, Kerry can.) Then again, long about 1984, everybody seemed to think Reagan was evil, a cretin, a warmonger, and/or a dolt with a Svengali wife; plus everyone in Europe hated his guts; and Ron had just pulled a trick in Lebanon that made Bill Clinton's Somalia bug-out look like a cooly considered decision; and on top of that Reagan had bowed to congress and agreed to re-raise taxes, thus pissing his conservative base all to hell. And the Gipper stomped Mondale with 49-state brutality. You just never f*ckin' know, do you?
Thursday, October 28, 2004
First, let's get to Best Performance by a Conservative: Eric Lindholm (aka Viking Pundit) has been on John Kerry's ass from jump city, and has done so with style as well as substance, ticking off Kerry's absences from the senate and his silly windsurfing-intellectual attempts to be unsquare. The blogosphere has rightwing commentary coming out its ears, and so much of it is awful stale retreading of what the NY Post's or JWR's columnists said today. Lindholm's stuff is pithy and fresh.
Biggest 180 of the Campaign Award goes to Sullivan, of course, who has formally endorsed Kerry. He's a good writer, Sullivan, but he's been a fart in the windstorm for the past year. For three and a half years, all we heard was "Bush gets it," over and over, comparing the president, more than once, to the original JFK. Sure, it hasn't been a great year to be a gay conservative. But Kerry represents everything Sullivan has railed against for three years. He's full of shit if he expects us to belive that he's suddenly found Kerry's nuanced positions credible.
Where Are They Now Award: Radley Balko gets this, hands down. He hasn't posted at his normal (read: frenetic) pace for quite some time, preferring instead to drop Mercutio's curse and offer links to his big league writings. His neo-prohibition article for Cato was, by the way, a fasciniating read, despite a title ("Back Door to Prohibition:
The New War on Social Drinking" -- needs an exclamation point or six) that made it sound like a hyperventilationist screed. But I miss the guy who could blog about Milton Friedman, John Hiatt, the Pacers, and the crappy life in DC in two paragraphs, no sweat.
I'm My Own Parodist: This one, stewing for a long time, is a bespoke award for Glenn Reynolds. Surely you've seen the satires of the professor's breezy, "indeed"-laden, "could-be-but-I'm-not-sure style. Some days it seems that Glenn is trying to outdo his parodists. Oddly, his MSNBC cheezblog typically has more actual protein.
The best outcome for the country might be that Bush wins the popular vote, but Kerry picks off some combination of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida -- thereby winning the electoral votes the way Bush did in noughty-nought. Kerry takes the presidency, but with the diminished standing and lack of mandate that Bush was going to have until 9/11 came along. For one thing, as Flyer points out, it could be a relatively painless way for conservatives to take a few years in the woodshed to re-evaluate their national platform. (E.g.: "Do they really want to be triangulating, me-too entitlementistas?)
For another (and this is an old point), the GOP congress is more likely to catch that conservative old time religion with a Democrat in the White House, which could be a real boon, considering how this congress has rolled over every time Bush wanted to firehose some money into something like drugs for the old farts or more federal meddling in education. (I mean, for god's sake, Bush and Ted Kennedy collaborated on NCLB legislation -- the f*cking authoritative stamp of idiocy.)
That said, I'm still voting for Bush. Here's why.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
It follows that, in a certain sense, Bush's defeat next Tuesday would be the
most crushing blow that organized conservatism has received since 1964 — or,
really, ever. Reagan, our most conservative president, was not repudiated when
he ran for reelection. Bush's father and Bob Dole had too distant a relationship
with conservatism for their defeats to be attributed, by conservatives or even
plausibly by others, to their conservatism; in the case of Bush's father, it was
easy to make the case that it was precisely his unconservatism that doomed him.
I don't think the case has been made against conservatism per se in this campaign as much as it has been made against Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, the real "Axis of Evil" so we're told. If Ramesh is speaking strictly of a tactical defeat in losing the White House, maybe he's right. Bush is a conservative, in the broadest sense of the word, and there's a chance that some narrow conservative goals might be pursued in a second term, but the inside baseball of "...Social Security reform, budget process reform, and other things that the President has endorsed" is only part of the larger strategy. Gaining conservative influence in the media and universities is just as important when it comes to advancing the conservative agenda. If Bush loses, it'll be the combination of incompetence and egotism that the Kerry campaign is hammering. The consrevative movement has plenty of problems, but I think it'll survive a Bush defeat just fine. In fact, it may cause a reevaluation of priorities that could be healthy.
A study suggests that U.S. senators possess stock-picking skills that even the
most seasoned money manager would envy. During the boom years of the 1990s,
senators' stock picks beat the market by 12 percentage points a year on average,
according to the study.
I'm shocked, shocked to learn there's gambling going on in this establishment. Via instafillin Megan McArdle.
Monday, October 25, 2004
Second, Emery credits Clinton's "famed war room" with saving Bubba's bacon more than once. Odd, then, that Kerry's war room is staffed by Clinton veterans like Mike McCurry and Joe Lockhart. They just can't seem to pull off the same magic. Of course, Clinton's "comeback kid" reputation was always a myth. 1992 was the original year of the dwarves. (I've mentioned the SNL sketch before -- here -- in which all the heavyweight Dems offer excuses for not running.) Clinton's famous comeback that year was his loss (though not by as much as expected) to Paul Tsongas in New Hampshire, who's main promise seemed to be that he wouldn't die before his term was up. (And he was wrong, actually; he would have died two days before the end of his term.) Think about it. The Dems got stomped in 1988 running a liberal Greek guy from Massachusetts against George Bush. Did anyone really think the Dems were dumb enough to run against Bush in 1992 with . . . a slightly-less-liberal Greek guy (with cancer) from Massachusetts?
Of course, Emery makes the fine point that Clinton could argue that his girl trouble wasn't a policy issue, whereas Kerry's idiocy seems mainly policy related. Still, the war room wasn't even all it was cracked up to be for Clinton (who simply ended up being the biggest midget). And even if it was, Clinton needed it, since a new shady liason, whether real estate or sexual, seemed to arrive nearly every week. Kerry doesn't need it, since the man is perceived to be entirely composed of spin by much of the electorate.
As for the day's news:
World Series? Like I care. I know I've lived somewhere too long when I begin to root against the home team, but honestly, I've always hated Boston.
IAEA declares nearly 400 tons of explosives missing in Iraq? Somebody check behind the UN's stacks of bribe money.
Blah.
As for the day's news:
World Series? Like I care. I know I've lived somewhere too long when I begin to root against the home team, but honestly, I've always hated Boston.
IAEA declares nearly 400 tons of explosives missing in Iraq? Somebody check behind the UN's stacks of bribe money.
Blah.
Sunday, October 24, 2004
"If anybody ever tells you that one vote doesn't count, you tell them to come
talk to me," he said"
Apparently one vote wouldn't have cut it, Al. Not if this is true.
"Last election, 27,000 of us voted, most of us for brother Al Gore," said Rev. Tom Diamond, of the Abyssinia Missionary Baptist Church. "The Republican Party threw out 27,000 African-American votes. By all rights brother Al Gore is the president-elect."
Well hell, the Supreme Court hasn't changed, and neither has Congress. Why should the Democrats even bother running? Bush has certainly got this one fixed as well, right?
The total waiting time for patients between referral from a general practitioner
and treatment, averaged across all 12 specialties and 10 provinces surveyed,
increased slightly this year; rising to 17.9 weeks in 2004 (from 17.7 weeks
in
2003). “This stalling of waiting times is not a good-news story. It is
important
to remember that these waiting times are the longest that
Canadians have ever
experienced and that they exist despite record levels of
health spending,” said
Nadeem Esmail, senior health policy analyst at The
Fraser Institute and
co-author of the survey.
Bush managed to get HSA's attached to the Medicare funding bill, so at least he recognizes that a free market solution is the only long term answer to the health care question. But that's sorta like putting a trailer for The Godfather at the end of Mickey Blue Eyes and saying you've made a good mob movie. John Kerry doesn't even mention MSA's/HSA's in his great plan.
Friday, October 22, 2004
A presidential election is all at once too important and too trivial to be treated like the Super Bowl, no? It feels (this year more than before, but not much) like the concept of listening to the candidates and making a choice has been replaced by picking your team at the outset and cheering for them all the way, watching every statement like a Fourth and Goal plunge up the middle. And this is certainly true of both sides, and probably of me at times as well. Is it the fault of the media, the candidates, 527's, PAC's? Is it the hypercompetitive nature of American culture, or is it that the issues we face today have so completely divided the public that the only possible result is a perfect balance between "The Left" and "The Right" with the fight escalating to a violent peak. What's the end game? How much worse can it get?
So what's the choice? I don't know. I live in North Carolina, a state that is not going to go Democratic in the Presidential election, just like Eno lives in the People's Republic which will never go Republican. I used to say I didn't consider a "protest vote" to be a viable option for me. There's no party or person who completely embodies my political thoughts (I'm sure this is true of just about everyone else) and the idea of picking one candidate inevitably involves some measure of compromise. I made a conscious compromise in 2000 supporting Bush, and I'd be okay with doing it again today if I thought it was the same bargain, but it's an entirely new calculation today, harder and more complex than before.
Now I'm beginning to realize that if making a compromise is inevitable, and if my vote really won't swing the electoral balance, maybe this is really one year where I could make a third party vote. I don't know, though. Still thinking
I doubt your vote is going to make the difference in Pennsylvania, but it's a battleground state so I don't know how you'll factor it all in.
I'm not sure if it's the polarizing effect these two candidates have on the public, whether it is the lingering effect the laywers guns and money had on the 2000 outcome, or if the ever-growing, never-sleeping media has simply run out of things to say, but I cannot take the over-analysis of every little point, quote and otherwise insigificant event, and how each may or may not affect what happens on Nov 2.
Just take a gander over at The Note today and you'll see the following: questions over whether the Boston Red Sox will swing the race in favor of Kerry; how Theresa's "real job" quote is insulting and yet reassuring to both working and stay-at-home moms (people forget: if Hillary couldn't derail Bill [so to speak], why do they think Theresa can do much to JFK, when she's at worst, delusional?); Kerry reassuring us all he'll not give any quarter to semi-sentient life forms, be they fowl or non-specific embryonic stem cells (does Chris Reeves' wife one-issue opinion really make a difference here?); and of course, Florida will once again, be the unfortunate center of the universe come that fateful first Tuesday in Nvember (it seems four years wasn't enough time to work out the kinks in the voting process).
What will make up my mind? I don't know. I haven't yet heard the candidates' position on briefs or boxers (of course, they may not want to alienate those who wear underwear - no danger offending me then...).
MORE: And don't forget the combined hysteria of the election AND the inevitable flu pandemic to produce one of the more idiotic campaign attacks in recent memory.
John Dvorak at PC Magazine is similarly frustrated, though I'm not sure I agree with his conclusion. The webside folks at Big Media sites are desperate to protect their jobs, since they make no money for the parent company. These constant registration requirements are an attempt to collect as many names as possible, so they can drag a list of email addresses back to their master, like my dog does with the occasional dead bird, hoping they'll get a pat on the head and a cookie. I have no use for the bird, and companies have no real use for all the information they collect, but I admire the pooch's effort to please. Think the folks at NYT are as easily pleased by their pets?
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Although it seems Kerry's just as hard to understand in the "language of love."
Monday, October 18, 2004
“We feel that something illegitimate was done with the Court’s power, and such an extraordinary situation justifies breaking an obligation we’d otherwise honor,” one clerk told the magazine. “Our secrecy was helping to shield some of those actions.”
Now, if these clerks had some evidence of Karl Rove sneaking envelopes of Benjamins to Rhenquist late at night, then I'd say there was something worthy of publication. But the fact that these clerks are spilling their guts years after the event, only to express their un-solicited opinions, and that VF is publishing only to coincide with this election, stinks to high-heaven of the bias of which main stream media so vehemently denies exists.
Even for me, this is ridiculous.