Mark Helprin has written an excellent piece on the opposition to John McCain from right-wing talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and other thorns in the liberal side, such as Ann Coulter. The latter has threatened to campaign for Hillary Clinton if McCain wins the nomination, a show for which I want front-row tickets.

His writing is sparkling — note the line about “bloody ink of a dying industry” — but the most intriguing of his points concerns the ratings boost that would come from bitching about a Democratic presidency, as compared to relentless defence of all things Bush. I fail to see how campaining for Romney or Huckabee gibes with such a motivation. Either way, that allegation is also the point that Michelle Malkin takes the most exception to.

Here’s a cut version of Helprin’s column, followed by Malkin’s rebuttal. Great reading, on both counts. Now, where were the claims of some monolithic right-wing dogma, or some vast right-wing conspiracy?

What a kerfuffle! Half a dozen talk-radio hosts whose major talent is that, like hairdressers, they can talk all day long to one client after another as they snip, have decided that the presumptive Republican nominee does not hew sufficiently close to their gospel.

As anyone who has listened to them knows, the depth of their thought is truly Oprah-like. And if a great institution of the left can weigh-in as it does in the choice of a nominee, why not its fraternal twins on the right? It doesn’t matter that Mitt Romney, suddenly their Reagan, became a conservative in a flash of light sometime last year, or that their other champion, a populist theocrat, is in many ways as conservative as Vladimir Lenin. The task is to stop the devil McCain.

As a mere print person whose words are not electrified and shot through walls, automobiles, pine trees, and brains, I realize that what I write in the bloody ink of a dying industry may be irrelevant. But from my antiquated perspective, something is very wrong.

Ostracism following tests of “right thinking” is a specialty of the left. Not that it doesn’t exist on the right, blooming with great malice especially on the radio. But in light of their prospects, conservatives have no room for it. For by their neglectful forfeit they have lost the battles of culture and education, and to remain other than an occult force they must express their beliefs through politics, from which, after November, they may be for a time excluded.

[…]

[The protracted Iraq war] and the economy threaten to throw the conservative enterprise back to where it was before Ronald Reagan or even William F. Buckley. Along comes John McCain, who has an 80% positive rating from the American Conservative Union but who as a truly independent soul does not fit, at the margins, some of the transient notions of what makes a conservative. Because of his independence and flexibility, he is the only Republican candidate who has a chance of winning, and thus preserving the core principles of conservatism, in relation to which he is unimpeachable. They are national security (in particular the strength of the military after Iraq and vis-à-vis China and a resurgent Russia), Constitutionalism (as in individual vs. collective rights), and the economy (free markets vs. government industrial policy).

One can agree or disagree with his peripheral positions, but political orthodoxy is political death. If those who are in a hissy fit about Sen. McCain would rather have Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, they will get Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton … and they will wake up to a great regret, as if in their drunkenness they had taken Shrek to bed.

But, guess what? Even if, as the country veers left, living conservatives gnash their teeth and dead ones spin in their graves, a small class of conservatives will benefit. And who might they be? They might be those whose influence and coffers swell on discontent, and who find attacking a president easier and more sensational than the dreary business of defending one. They rose during the Clinton years. Perhaps they are nostalgic. It isn’t worth it, however, for the rest of us.

So, rather than playing recklessly with electoral politics by sabotaging their own party ostensibly for its impurity but equally for the sake of their self-indulgent pique, each of these compulsive talkers might be a tad less self-righteous, look to the long run, discipline himself, suck it up, and be a man. And that would apply equally as well to the gorgeous Laura Ingraham and the relentlessly crocodilian Ann Coulter.

And from RealClearPolitics, parts of Malkin’s response:

The most anti-conservative rhetoric against conservative talk radio these days is coming from supposedly free-market conservatives. It’s disgusting.

[…]

It’s one thing to hear such petty snark coming from the left. Outraged that conservative talk radio has succeeded in the marketplace while liberals have bombed, and unnerved that new media outlets have upended mainstream journalism’s monopoly apple cart, liberals have long crusaded against the medium. […]

But now, we have establishment Republicans parroting liberal ad hominem rhetoric: Talk-radio hosts are talentless blabbermouths. Their listeners are mind-numbed robots. Or, as supposed free-market conservative and McCain supporter Phil Gramm put it in his broadside against talk radio in the Washington Post last week: “They say they have principles, but some of it is their ego and power, too. They’re well-known, and they’re used to having power.”

Funny. These trash-talking GOP politicians and pundits had no problem when conservative talk-radio hosts used their “ego and power” to help kill Hillary Clinton’s massive government health care takeover in 1994. They had no problem when conservative talk-radio hosts used their “ego and power” to galvanize support for the Republican revolution, two Bush presidential campaigns and the war in Iraq.

[…]

Helprin accuses conservative talkers who oppose McCain of rooting for a liberal presidency because their “influence and coffers swell on discontent” and they are “nostalgic” for the Clinton years. Translation: They’re all just greedy self-promoters who care more about themselves than the good of the country. Gramm leveled the same attack: “They’re people who put their dogma in front of the interests of the country.”

Cocooned conservative establishment snobs denigrate talk-radio hosts for preaching to the choir. But these same critics have no problem using the medium to market their own work. Ask their publicists. The message of the anti-conservative conservatives dissing talk radio: Self-interest for me, but not for thee.

No need to wait for a Clinton to take the White House. Clintonism is alive and well among conservative talk-radio haters on both sides of the aisle.

Excuse me while I fetch the popcorn.

I’ll admit, I follow US politics about as closely as a foreign amateur can sanely follow it. Okay, delete “sanely”. I deserve a free anorak. But this I don’t get.

Hillary Clinton has lent her campaign $5 million.

No, seriously. This is her campaign. But she wants her money back. Nevermind that a champion of the working class, campaigning against the filthy rich conservative capitalist scum with tax breaks, happens to have $5 million in spare change lying around idle. Why didn’t she send that to the IRS to fund universal healthcare?

But seriously, how do you lend money to a campaign? To your own campaign, of all things? Most people “donate” to a campaign. Isn’t she willing to donate? Doesn’t she have enough faith in the campaign? Does she expect to get the money back from suckers who have the conviction to donate in future?

And does this suggest that the GOP isn’t going to get the dream opponent, the one they’ve always wanted to beat just for the personal satisfaction of watching a Clinton go down, in the same way the Democrats would have loved to run against, say, Jeb Bush?

Does this suggest that Barack Obama, the rookie, has more money than the venerable matriarch of the Clinton dynasty? That she’s the underdog now?

John McCain took out a loan to finance his campaign. This makes sense. He’s going to have to pay it back, win or lose. But is Clinton’s campaign going to have to repay her if she wins? Even if she loses? This boggles the mind. It’s not like campaigns are for-profit companies. What sort of organisation is left to repay the debt if she loses? Did McCain even think to consider this eventuality when he sponsored McCain-Feingold?

I mean, how do you lend money to yourself to finance your own career?

I sure hope, if she wins, she’ll tell the rest of us this trick. It sure sounds wonderfully useful. “Look how much money I’m willing to lend myself! Surely, Mr Angel Ventura, if I trust myself this much, you can fund my idea for a non-lethal light-sabre design — named Taser-B-Gone — that I can sell by the gross to police forces around the world?”

Update: Al Giordano reasons that the money is already spent, that the Clinton campaign now faces a major budget deficit (making a mockery of her “fiscal responsibility” claims even before she can prove it to be empty rhetoric as president), and that she is running a “match the Clinton campaign” advert in which she describes the loan as a gift from Hillary and Bill. Whether that’s true depends on what the definition of “give” is, I guess.

Update: Tim Dickinson, writing for Rolling Stone, points out that Bill Clinton said this kind of self-financing “clearly violates the spirit of campaign finance reform”. Far be it from me to defend American campaign finance rules, of course, but if the Clintons want to use it as a club against political opponents, they should wield it more carefully, lest they accidentally bop themselves on the head.

A road sign in Newberry, South Carolina.

(Hat tip:  Kevin, over at Wizbang.)

On one level, I love the American election process. It’s long. It’s ruthless. It exposes every potential flaw in every candidate, be it character or policy, present or past. It forces them to take or explain positions on issues that matter to voters.

On another, I abhor the shallowness of much of the what we see. With “we”, I mean those of us who are separated from America by an ocean or more, away from the barrage of posters everywhere, town hall meetings every day and television adverts every hour. Where we should, in theory, be able to watch with some detachment, some time for analysis, some depth of coverage.

It may be true that when voters care more about superficial style and sound-bite glibness, this suggests their real-life concerns can’t be all that grave. After all, who in Africa really believes that Americans have the faintest idea what poverty or hunger is? What political violence does to people and families? The shallowness of their electoral rhetoric is a measure of their contentment. I don’t mean to condescend; I salute them for that achievement. I don’t mean to oversimplify; there are substantial issues in play, but they don’t always resonate deeply with the figurative man on the street.

Read the rest of this entry »

This item, from James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, is one of the funnier contributions I’ve read:

How Clemenceau Crippled Clinton

A Los Angeles Times editorial ponders the difficulties of the onetime Democratic front-runner and blames them on … President Bush! Seriously:

For Clinton, the trouble is not emotion but, perversely, President Bush. So badly has this president performed that he has discredited not just his own administration but the very idea of Washington knowledge. Voters frustrated by the war in Iraq and anxious about the economy have turned on the man who brought us those troubles and on experience itself — and thus on Clinton.

But this is much too simplistic. After all, it’s not as if George W. Bush just sprang forth out of nothing. And if you look at history, it’s clear that the real culprit — perversely! — is Georges Clemenceau.

Clemenceau was the French prime minister in 1919 who at the Versailles conference pushed for the imposition of harsh peace terms on Germany, the loser in World War I. The hardships imposed by the Versailles treaty contributed to Hitler’s rise to power, leading to World War II.

World War II made a hero of Dwight Eisenhower (no wonder Mrs. Clinton can’t stand him), thereby making possible his election as president in 1952. This made it possible, 16 years later, for Ike’s vice president, Richard Nixon, to ascend to the White House.

If Nixon hadn’t been president, he would not have resigned, and Gerald Ford would not have entered the White House in 1974, which means he would not have been an ex-president in 1980, when Ronald Reagan invited Ford to be his running mate. Surely under such circumstances Ford would have accepted the offer rather than hold out for some ridiculous “co-presidency.”

If Ford had become vice president in 1980, George H.W. Bush would not have. It’s hard to see how George W. Bush could have ascended to the White House on the strength of daddy’s legacy if daddy were a mere former U.N. ambassador.

So you see, Clemenceau, with a little help from Hitler and every Republican president since World War II, caused George W. Bush to become president, thereby discrediting the very idea of experience. And to think, when Mrs. Clinton spoke of the vast right-wing conspiracy, people scoffed.

It’s also an excellent excuse to highlight the paper’s new online design, and the fact that the editorial page on free markets and free people is now, well, free. After all that ribbing about the New York Times’s failed TimesSelect subscription experiment, it’s about time the Wall Street Journal capitulated too.

The conservative Media Research Council has announced the Best Notable Quotables of 2007. The winner is truly funny, and most are very instructive. However, another entry from the MRC, which arrived in my inbox a week later, caught my attention.

It appears sexism against Hillary Clinton has to become a big issue. Whether it’s idiots falling for deliberate trolling, or defenders who need foils for attacks they can’t handle, accusations of prejudice become the last refuge of political hacks.

The original of a curiously sanitised piece by Jonathan Tilove in the Seattle Times of 29 November was a little different from what’s posted there now. The original was published in an MRC email on 26 December, but has not yet made it to its rather primitive-looking website. The MRC says that in excerpt, it reads as follows:

Sen. Hillary Clinton is facing an onslaught of open misogynistic expression. Step lightly through that thickly settled province of the Web you could call anti-Hillaryland and you are soon knee-deep in ‘bitch,’ ’slut,’ ’skank,’ ‘whore’ and, ultimately, what may be the most toxic four-letter word in the English language….Thanks to several thousand years of phallocentric history, there is no comparable vocabulary of degradation for men, no equivalently rich trove of synonyms for a sexually sullied male. As for the word beginning with C? No single term for a man reduces him to his genitals to such devastating effect.

I say bollocks. What a prick. For start, this schmuck surely knows that the C word is commonly applied to men, without reference to either women or their degree of sexual sulliedness? And what tosser removes offensive language from an article after it’s been published? I’d also challenge this dickhead to search the “thickly settled province of the Web you could call anti-Bushland”, and analyse the epithets found there. Hint: they’re not “clear-eyed” and “rosy-cheeked”. Not even with witty sarcasm. In fact, I’d wager he’d find a fair few of a character that would offend his delicate sensibilities.

Besides, how anti-feminist of Tilove to think that Mrs Clinton is too fragile as a woman to tolerate the sort of ribald political rough-riding that typifies the more puerile corners of the interwebs.

2007 turned out to be a pretty good year for George W. Bush.

Late last year, voters turfed Republicans out of Congress over either lack of spending restraint or dissatisfaction with progress in Iraq or both, depending who you ask. (Robert Novak: war; Alan Greenspan: spending; Rush Limbaugh: both, and liberals suck; Reason magazine: both, and government sucks.)

This electoral loss, which meant Bush could no longer rely on a compliant Congress to send him only bills he likes, merely reinforced the view that Bush now is a lame duck, unable to govern effectively. (CNN: Is Bush already a lame duck?; Lou Dobbs: Beware the lame duck; The Guardian: ‘Lame duck’ Bush faces struggle to push through new agenda; The Telegraph: Allies desert ‘lame duck president’; Dan Froomkin: How lame a duck?)

A few voices ran against the media herd, but looked like wishful thinkers. (Christian Science Monitor: Bush’s lame-duck advantage.)

But on Friday, Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal, and Steve Huntley of the Chicago Sun-Times (apparently independently) noted that Bush hasn’t had a bad 2007 at all. Moore’s item is worth quoting in its entirety:

Bush on the Comeback Trail

Just as Newt Gingrich was the best thing that ever happened to Bill Clinton, so Nancy Pelosi has become a great political asset to George W. Bush. Mr. Bush is on a roll legislatively and even his poll numbers are inching up while Congress’s have sunk into the teens. There’s nothing like having a foil in Congress to rehabilitate a president. Just ask Harry Truman.

This time last year it would have been inconceivable that Mr. Bush would have a successful 2007, or that Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Congress would have fewer than one-in-four voters approving their performance. I’ve made a list of Mr. Bush’s policy victories over the Democrats:

1. S-CHIP — Mr. Bush vetoed the Democrats’ bill expanding middle-class health care subsidies and Democrats were unable to override that veto.
2. Alternative Minimum Tax — Democrats passed AMT reform without the offsetting tax hikes they had threatened.
3. Energy bill — What was a monster at the beginning of the year is now just a fairly harmless CAFE standards bill. Environmentalists are fuming.
4. Hate Crimes Legislation — Mr. Bush blocked it. The Congressional Black Caucus is furious.
5. War funding — Mr. Bush prevailed without any pull-out date. At the start of the year this looked impossible.
6. The Budget — Mr. Bush mostly prevailed on domestic spending totals.
7. No new taxes — all of the Democratic tax proposals were killed, including tobacco taxes, hedge fund taxes and energy company taxes.

It pretty much looks like the White House ran the table. Merry Christmas, Madam Speaker.

As I’ve noted before, US economic and foreign policies matter most to me as a foreigner: whether Americans permit gays to be married, guns to be carried or God to be harried doesn’t keep me up at night.

During the 2004 presidential elections, I said to a friend that perhaps the US needs a presidential term under a Democrat, if only to remind the people in general (and Republican voters in particular) that the Democrats aren’t very good at low taxes, low spending, light-touch environmental regulation and effective foreign policy. Either a John Kerry in 2004, or a Hillary Clinton in 2008, would achieve this goal, and as a result, cement the longer-term rise of the GOP. It now appears that Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco leftist in charge of the ineffectual Democratic Congress, may have achievedachieve this in just two years. Especially if the Democrats nominate Clinton (admittedly, Dennis Kucinich would do too), my money’s on a Republican presidential election win just less than a year from now.

Update: Repaired a grammatic blunder in stating Nancy Pelosi’s term: either she “may have achieved it in just one year”, or she “may achieve it in just two years” — my phrasing was inconsistent, and the former may yet be undone by a sparkling Congressional performance in 2008 (when Martians may land and I may win the lottery).

It is true that the Republicans, in the US, haven’t had a stellar record on government spending since 2000. It has a high standard to meet, if it is to match its own rhetoric. It has been vulnerable to attack over profligacy, and in particular over Bush’s refusal to veto fat-laden bills. (Or rather, his inability to do so in practice because he has no line-item veto.)

It’s got so bad, I’m told, that the Democrats are now the party of fiscal responsibility, and if I’m a small-government libertarian, I should prefer to see Democrats in charge in the US.

Luckily, some people keep track of these things. Witness the House and Senate “RePORK Cards”, published by the Club for Growth, for example. It ranks senators and members of Congress on their voting record against pork barrel spending. These votes all involve amendments to bills aimed at removing discretionary spending earmarks on totally unrelated items.

Some highlights from the Senate, where 15 anti-pork measures came to a vote:

• Only three senators received a perfect score of 100% (and were present for a majority of the votes). All three are Republicans. A fourth, John McCain (R-AZ), was only present for two votes.
• Thirty-six senators scored below 10%. Of those, two are independents, the other 34 are Democrats.
• Next lowest on the list, at 11%, is the junior senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, who voted for one anti-pork amendments out of the nine for which she was present. Barack Obama scored 33%, or two out of six.
• Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) scored a 53%; Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) scored a 7%, voting for only one amendment.
• The average Republican score was 59%; the average Democratic score was 12%.
• Thanks to this dismal voting record, only two amendments were successful: one to cut funding for spinach growers from the Iraq Supplemental Bill, the other not to spend $1 million on a museum dedicated to the Woodstock Festival. Those that failed included funding a visitors’ center in Louisiana instead of providing shelter for victims of Hurricane Katrina (and they bash Bush over Katrina?), millions of dollars for bicycle paths instead of using the funds to improve bridge safety, and $100 million for the 2008 Republican and Democratic nominating conventions (go figure).

In Congress, where 50 anti-pork amendments were considered, these figures stood out:

• Sixteen members scored 100%. All of them are Republicans.
• The average Republican score was 43%. The average Democratic score was 2% — on average, Democrats voted for one anti-pork measure out of 50!
• The only Democrat to score over 20% was Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) who received an admirable 98% grade.
• 105 congressmen scored a round zero, voting against every single amendment. The “Pork Hall of Shame” includes 81 Democrats and 24 Republicans.
• The Democratic Freshmen — the new blood that was going to restore fiscal responsibility to Congress — scored an abysmal average of 2%. Their Republican counterparts scored 78% on average.

Let nobody ever again tell me (a) to support a Democrat for their spending restraint, and (b) to believe Democrats when they promise to clean up Congress. The only positive from this report is that Americans can hold their representatives accountable for their wasteful spending. Let’s hope they do so.

Left-liberal politicians, media and chattering classes not only claim there is no progress in Afghanistan and Iraq, but need this politically. This traps them in the perverse moral bind that good news for America, Afghanistan and Iraq is bad news to them. It reduces their chances of defeating the hated George W. Bush. (Shh, don’t let on that he won’t be running in 2008.)

Here’s another brief overview report, from writer Ann Marlowe. Is Afghanistan threatening to challenge for first-world status? No. Did it ever? No. Will it soon? Not likely. But are things getting worse, as Democratic politicians claim? Writes Marlowe:

Sen. Hillary Clinton has cynically charged that we are “losing the fight to al Qaeda and bin Laden” in Afghanistan. But on my eighth trip to Afghanistan (last month) I saw that the trend lines are up, not down.

Read it and judge for yourself.

Thank goodness for the left-liberal rabble. Watching American politics would be so tedious without them. The YearlyKos convention is an event organised by Markos Moulitsas, a blogger who believes “the medium” — as opposed to the message sent from his own little sulking corner for disillusioned Deaniacs and Netroots nuts — must be defended against “right-wing attacks”.

Expressing their solidarity and self-importance, and their scorn for anyone to the right of Stalin, some attendees booed Hillary Clinton, despite her dinkum socialist and activist credentials. Granted, she’d cancelled a meeting with bloggers, but her campaign called it a “misunderstanding” later: turns out she wasn’t going to make that meeting in the first place. Also, she consorts with… lobbyists!

It would have been farcical enough, without the headline over the accompanying photograph at Salon.com: Cheerful boos for Hillary (non-subscribers must watch Flash ad). Earth to Salon.com: when someone gets booed, the mob does not mean to express cheer. Even if The Party’s pet pamphleteers can’t bear the thought that a Democratic presidential hopeful might face hostility from someone other than the vast right-wing conspiracy.

The Angry Left is clearly nothing to sneeze at. Anyone have other clever ideas what that expression might signify?