Category Archives: Conservative

The Great Wait Has Begun

By | | , , , ,
3 Comments

The Wait

America’s friends and enemies alike are waiting for the results of the 2012 election as much as Americans themselves.  Perhaps more.  Much is at stake, but for many reasons, the most valuable tactic of delay is the least-mentioned.  The clock is running out on Obama, and those who can wait are holding out in civil fashion for better days.  Those who cannot are scrambling to survive.  But if Obama wins in 2012, all bets are off.

Abroad

The American right is not much given to complaining about its government overseas, so that the perennial threats made by famous but inconsequential people to move abroad are not a feature of unpopular democrat administrations.  Neither are tens of thousands of YouTube videos and online still photos with perky … Continue reading →

A Dark Horse Approaches

By | | ,
1 Comment

I’m just thinking out loud.

The appalling awfulness of King Obama’s rule is settling in as a fact among a growing percentage of a formerly free people.  The Republican field is not bad, but nobody has gotten the base past a threshold of both queasiness and numbers, although several have beaten one metric or the other.

One reason I feel so free to thump on candidates currently running is the suspicion that the only way to get more into the game is to not accept the current slate.  So you’re darned right I don’t like Romney, Newt or any of the rest of them.  I can’t even keep straight who has declared yet and who has not (without taking a refresher).

So this is completely non-scientific.  I just … Continue reading →

Sarah Palin: Media Nemesis (3 of 3)

By | | , ,
Leave a comment

Part 1
Part 2

I think I know what Palin is doing: I’ll never know for sure until proven wrong or the post-game reports starting in mid-November 2012.

[pullquote]she is going to draw the media out, to give the conservative candidates a series of shots to take[/pullquote]

I think that she is going to draw the media out, to make them keep going over the top in their hatred and bias, to give the conservative candidates a series of shots to take at the media.  Along the way, she will be more than happy to sideswipe RINOs, and I like it.

Her mere existence is … Continue reading →

Sarah Palin: Media Nemesis (2 of 2, er, 2 of 3)

By | | , ,
Leave a comment

Part 1

Fox on the run

Things are developing even as I write.  Sarah Palin’s bus tour has taken off, with that fox leading a pack of ten to fifteen barking cars of the mainstream media.  MSNBC’s Martin Bashir demands to know what she’s doing, and charges her with violation of federal law for having a flag motif painted on the bus.  CBS’s Ryan Caruso insists that the situation is unsafe, and blames Palin for not telling the media where she’s going.  She rode in front at Rolling Thunder, to which CBS dutifully records the irritation of a few RT office-holders, and this demonstrates the essential divide: CBS is talking to the “national legislative director” for an organization’s … Continue reading →

Sarah Palin: Media Nemesis (1 of 2)

By | | , , ,
Leave a comment

The MSM accomplished what it set out to do; to destroy Sarah Palin.  In doing so, they have destroyed themselves.

[pullquote]It is this media which brought us Obama and ObamaCare, and any fight against it is a good fight[/pullquote]

The approaching season of politics is an opportunity for Palin to pursue her goal, and I think I know what it is.  She will use the occasion of a Presidential campaign to wreak vengeance upon the media: her campaign or somebody else’s.  Assuming I am correct (humor me), that may sound inappropriate or cynically manipulative, but this is the fight of fights which the right should be engaged in.  While the debt has become the most visible threat to our future, and the totalitarians currently in office are the … Continue reading →

Tea Party Dilemma

By | | ,
Leave a comment

The Tea Party constellation of groups and individuals is in a state of flux.  Central to the change is the strategy to take in 2012; pragmatism or dogmatism, and frankly, it will require both.

I suppose this vexes every political movement, but the pragma/dogma dilemma is particularly striking the Tea Party groups.  On one hand, the Tea Party is largely a subset of traditionally Republican voters, with a healthy dose of libertarians and Constitutional fundamentalists thrown in.  These are the people who found the Republican party too passive and pliable in years past.  This makes them a naturally ideological movement, prone to reject a reasonable candidate with a decent shot at winning because he or she fails one or more hot-button tests.

[pullquote]they were still furious at Republicans, … Continue reading →

Newt Gingrich Unhorsed

By | | , , ,
Leave a comment

Newt Gingrich was an overpowering force on the Op-Ed pages, and could have provided crucial support over the next two years.  He was always an establishment man, but his personal baggage meant that he could not return to the front.  He cast away an important back-bench responsibility in pursuit of a post more glorious but impossible to attain, and is now hopelessly on the defensive.   Newt is already defeated, because he should not have run.

For some reason, he chose to denigrate a damned good plan and along the way, to wound a man who is under a sustained personal attack from the other side, even from the President himself.  Gingrich now says that he supports “improving the plan”, but for a man who has had twenty … Continue reading →

Disappointed in Newt Gingrich

By | | , ,
3 Comments

I have always liked Newt Gingrich.  He gave an address in 2002 at some dinner somewhere, and this was the first “Podcast” I ever heard.  This was perhaps the height of his oratory, in the days when “federal chipmunk” featured in many of his speeches.  I have long been impressed with his ideas and his presentation.

I saw him as a magnificent piece of field artillery, able to deliver withering fire in support of any truly conservative position from behind the lines, perched on the editorial pages with a commanding view of the valley below.  Military minds know not to scoff at the big guns in the rear of the battle area just because they are in the rear:  the ability to bombard the enemy at a time … Continue reading →

GOP v TP

By | | ,
Leave a comment

Ignoring primary nastiness and so forth, the real problems are things like chairmanships and votes.  14-term representative Hal “Prince of Pork” Rogers is the chair of the House Committee on Appropriations.  Before he was even selected for the job, he mocked the Tea Party and took them to task for not winning 100% of the elections for the Republican party.  I guess that 80% of what was in play just isn’t good enough.

Playwright David Mamet: Conservative

By | | , ,
1 Comment

I almost titled this post “Glengarry Glenn Beck”, but just didn’t have the heart.  And it’s really the opposite of the point.

I adore the movie adaptation of Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross.  I’m afraid it’s the only Mamet that I am familiar with, although I retain a quite favorable impressionof him  from an interview by Dennis Prager.   That interview is not available online, at least through a cursory search, but I recall that Mamet was still, as the Weekly Standard refers to him in the last decade, in “mid-conversion”.  That’s a great time to talk to people, by the way, as they are charged with new ideas, and in no small degree of inner turmoil, which makes for great conversation.

Here’s an embarrassingly long quote from … Continue reading →