Open Threads

A Telling Comment

Joe Conason has a particularly telling comment in his latest offering:

Running to the justices who put Bush in the White House makes Forrester look like an utter weenie. He should stand up and fight. And he shouldn’t be too confident that Rehnquist and company will favor him. They may not want historians to record that this court tried to give Republicans control of the Senate as well as the White House.

That is it, in a nutshell- that is how they think. Not in terms of right or wrong, but in terms of winning and losing. Notice the pathology of the 2000 election- the Supremes “gave” Bush the White House. No mention that Gore et. al was wrong. Now they think that is Torricelli is kept on the ballot, somehow that is “giving” the election to Forrester.

Also note how the assumption of the political nature of the court is a forgone conclusion- that is because the Donks admit to packing courts with ideologues. They expect them to be politically motivated. Heya Joe? Shouldn’t the Supremes just settle the issue according to the law?

A Telling Comment Joe ConasonPost + Comments

Thanks, Your Highness

The Vatican renewed its opposition to war in Iraq on Wednesday, saying military action would only make matters worse and that a pre-emptive strike raised serious ethical and legal problems.

“It’s unilateralism, pure and simple,” the Vatican’s U.N. observer, Archbishop Renato Martino, said in comments published in the Italian newsweekly Famiglia Christiana.

Maybe it is just me, but does anyone else out there think that the Vatican should spen a little less time on foreign policy and a little more time keeping priests from sodomizing altar boys? Like, say, take five or six people from your foreign policy department, and task them out to screen out pedophiles and miscreants.

Just a thought.

Thanks, Your Highness The VaticanPost + Comments

Why Do They Always Have to Be Libertarians?

GREAT FALLS, Montana (AP) — Montana’s Libertarian candidate for Senate has turned blue from drinking a silver solution that he believed would protect him from disease.

Stan Jones,a 63-year-old business consultant and part-time college instructor, said he started taking colloidal silver in 1999 for fear that Y2K disruptions might lead to a shortage of antibiotics.

He made his own concoction by electrically charging a couple of silver wires in a glass of water.

Via the OpinionJournal.

Why Do They Always HavePost + Comments

Two new blogs on the blogroll:

Wylieblog and Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities. Who is this Robert Musil???

Two new blogs on thePost + Comments

Absolutely Amazing

You absolutely have to adore the sheer audacity of the Democrats. Their latest electoral hijinks are precisely why, even though I agree with them on many social issues and detest Repuiblican positions, I vote for Republicans. I think Democrats as a whole, and now it seems to the individual, are corrupt, vile, and evil. I thought with the passing of Clinton, they would rehab themselves from the years of lying and deceit. I was wrong.

Today, two Dems whose blogs I read are now in full-on backpedal mode. The first is Josh Marshall, who seems to spen his entire day parsing the words of different members of the Bush administration for the slightest inconsistency so he can yell out “Gothca!” Apparently he was used to the previous administration’s highly synchronized lying.

At any rate, today, Marshall spouts out this gem:

The Forrester campaign is now headed to the United States Supreme Court, the normal recourse of Republicans who can’t win elections with majorities but aren’t inclined to see that as the end of the story.

Hunh? What? Excuse me?

Let’s see if I have this right. Torricelli is the Senator, duly elected. He lies, cheats, and accepts bribes in office. The Senate determines he is so awful that they must publicly denounce him, but that he is not awful enough to be kicked out of the Senate (which should tell you something about the Senate). He runs for re-election, brushing aside the admonishment from the Senate Ethics Committee, with the total support of the Democrat Party Leadership. As late as last week, Tom Daschle was stumping for him. And then the bomb exploded.

A poll shows that Torricelli is 13 points behind his Republican (gasp) opponent. Cue the tears, cue the politicos, cue Bill Clinton. Torricelli announces he is not going to resign, but that he is withdrawing from the race “so that he will not lose the Democrat Majority in the Senate,” in a weepy speech in which he asks why we won’t forgive him for things he claims he never did.

So, the Democrats now need an extralegal solution to their crisis. So, tell me Josh? Who headed to court because you can not win the election the legal way? Remember, they went to court not to address any wrongdoing that was hurting their candidate, but for PURELY and NAKEDLY partisan motives- they were losing, and well, that just can’t happen. The system was going to work, and a sleaze was going to be voted out of office. Of course, the right thing to do would have been for the Democrat Leadership to try and fight Toricelli in the primary, but at that time he was way ahaid of any Republican and still able to raise gobs of cash.

Remember the old phrase to be careful what you wish for- the Democrats got their way with a Supreme Court ‘stacked with Republican appointees’ as Josh noted (court makeup 4 Dems, 2 Rep, 1 Ind), who determined law is less important that making sure a major political machine gets its way. And the public is responding. It is sleazy. It was unfair. It was stacking the deck. It is switching teams in the 4th quarter of the Superbowl. They probably lost two Senate seats in Middle America for their behavior.

Now they must start spinning. Matt Yglesias, who endorsed an ends justifies the means approach to winning the NJ seat, just to kep those evil Republicans out of control, is now a reformer:

“If anyone has any good suggestions as to how to reform the primary process to make it less of a rubber-stamp for incumbents, I’m all ears (and no, public financing of campaigns wouldn’t solve the problem since you could hardly just give public funds to anyone who decided one day he’d like to run for Senate).”

No mention of the ‘rubber-stamp’ committee that went behind closed doors the other day and selected (Gov. McGreevey’s term) Frank Lautenberg to replace Torricelli. Why reform the primary process, Matt? It means nothing- you guys have demonstrated you can do whatever the hell you want, anyway. The law is for other people and for circumstances in which the Republicans are losing. Thiscall for reform reminds me of Clinton/Gore- they break all the campaign finance laws on the books, and then find some shady things to do which aren’t on the books (“No controlling legal authority blah blah blah”). When they get caught, they stump for new laws to keep themselves from being crooked again.

Now Josh is asserting that the last minute supra-legal switcheroo will not happen again- not because he has any logic behind his assertion, not because he has a crystal ball, but because he knows the public is about to give the Dems a punch right in the poll numbers for this shady behavior. Josh really isn’t asserting, as much as he is hoping:

Some readers who have written in tell me that this is a recipe for electoral chaos, that every time a candidate looks like he’s going down the tubes he can just pull out and bring in a ringer. There’s a superficial logic to the argument. But such arguments toward practical effect must withstand some measure of logical scrutiny and this one really doesn’t. When filing deadlines come down how many candidates do you usually see rushing to cash out their candidacies? Right, not many. The sort of people who run for elective office just don’t do that sort of thing. And in how many of those cases is there another credible candidate waiting in the wings? Not often. If there were, that other candidate probably would have won the primary. Say what you will about what happened here, it’s hardly likely to become a pattern.

Whatever, Josh. That is what you guys said when you were trying to re-write election codes in Florida. You boys have your Pyrrhic- I hope you can survive it. And could you find a less smug picture of yourself to put on your website?

Absolutely AmazingPost + Comments

This may be the greatest column ever written. Thank you Mark Steyn. Normally I would quote something, but the whole thing is wonderful.

Oh, screw it. Here are some highlights:

But then Al Gore rose from the dead to demonstrate that his political antennae are still as reliable as a 1948 TV with busted rabbit ears.

and

The first candidate to win the popular vote without being popular?

and

Last week, Al decided he’s against a war with Iraq. Iraq, he argues, will distract us from Afghanistan. “Great nations,” he intones, “do not jump from one unfinished task to another.” America, says Al, can’t fight Iraq and mop up Afghanistan at the same time: We can walk. Or we can chew gum. But we shouldn’t try to jump from walking to gum-chewing until we’re certain we’ve completed our walk.

Go read the whole thing. Get drinks away from the keyboard first.

This may be the greatestPost + Comments

John McCain just stated on Hannity and Colmes that dealing with the U.N. on inspections in Iraq is like being in the movie Groundhog Day.

Snicker.

John McCain just stated onPost + Comments