"Liberal Fascism" Hits the Shelves

I got an email today from Barnes & Noble to tell me that my Liberal Fascism is on its way.

But I almost wish I had decided to go out and buy it at the store. Author Jonah Goldberg reports that some buyers are getting the dead fish treatment from the liberal store clerks, as in:

“The clerk made me say the name three times. She looked for it. Couldn’t find it. I made her go in the back. They were still in the box apparently. She looked like she wanted ice tongs when she picked it up.”

Or this:

“I had to ask the lady at the info desk to look it up - she had trouble. Couldn’t find it under the title, but found it under your name, and walked me over to it. Handed it to me like she was handling a dead fish. Heh, that last part could be my imagination, but as a conservative who loves bookstores I always brace for the stereotypical lib clerk in the big box bookstore.”

The importance of Liberal Fascism is of course that, in the words of Daniel Pipes, it contradicts

the political spectrum that has shaped our worldview since the late 1930s, which places communism at the far left, followed by socialism, liberalism in the center, conservatism, and then fascism on the far right.

In the 1920s and early 1930s every fashionable was a socialist or a national socialist or a fascist. It was Stalin’s idea to call everyone he disagreed with a “fascist.” His followers immediately understood that there was something profoundly different between socialism and national socialism. And they wrote the history books to make sure everyone else did too.

But Goldberg’s book offers a new way of looking at political allegiance.

His revised political spectrum would focus on the role of the state and go from libertarianism to conservatism to fascism in its many guises — American, Italian, German, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, and so on.

You could also use the same spectrum to indicate the involvement of the little platoons, voluntary associations outside the political sector, with libertarians maximizing voluntary associations and the various fascisms eliminating them.

Winning the Obama Way

They say that the Clintons invented and patented the politics of personal destruction.

But then there’s Senator Barack Obama.  According to Kyle-Anne Shiver in the American Thinker Obama won his first elected office with a bit of fancy footwork.  He was running for the Illinois State Senate against the incumbent Alice Palmer.  Palmer had failed in a run for Congress and filed to run for her old job.  According to Shiver:

[Obama] sent his aides to the courthouse to carefully examine all of Alice Palmer’s signatures to see if enough could be disallowed to knock her off the ballot altogether.  And indeed, some of Alice’s signatures were fake.  The aides also found enough other fake signatures on opponents’ ballot initiatives to knock them off the ballot as well.

Well whaddya know?  That’s what you call the Al Davis way: Just Win Baby.

Then in 2004 Obama ran for the United States Senate and Obama was up against a multimillionare businessman Blair Hull in the Democratic primary.  Then came the bombshell, as David Mendell reported in the Chicago Tribune, and

multimillionaire Blair Hull plummeted from front-runner status amid revelations that an ex-wife had alleged in divorce papers that he had physically and verbally abused her.

Just Win Baby.

In the general election, Obama was up against wealthy, goodlooking Jack Ryan, According to CBS News reported Dean Reynolds:

Unfortunately for Ryan, he also spent time frequenting some shady bars in Paris where live sex acts were apparently part of the draw. Nor did it help that Ryan’s ex-wife alleged that he urged her to participate in said acts when they were married.

So Obama ended up running against perennial candidate Alan Keyes, who wasn’t even a resident of Illinois, and the rest is history.

Al Davis would be proud, don’t you think?

But we need another term for the “politics of personal destruction,” forever associated with the Clintons and their War Room. 

Because Obama is a nice guy, not like those evil Clintons.

Some people might say that Obama and the Clintons deserve each other.

What Is This Thing Called "Change?"

Dear old Rush is in better case today than he was Friday, on the day after the Iowa caucuses.

But he confesses to being flummoxed by all this talk of “change.” That’s because, as far as he can tell, a chap like Barack Obama doesn’t represent change at all, but just same-old-same-old adding another layer of government programs on the already rather substantial government program cake.

Rush is thinking like a political activist, not like an ordinary voter.

Voters are not saying that they want to change the government programs; they are just saying that they want a change at the top. They are tired and frightened by the “stress” of the Bush years, which has been one thing after another. First there was the tech bust and the biggest bear market in a generation. Then came the housing boom, which was reported as an exciting party but was probably, for many voters, very frightening. Now we have the housing bust and a possible recession. People are right to be scared of that Dynamic Duo.

Then there’s the Iraq war. Voters might be less worried about Iraq if the political parties had been united on it. But the Democrats, driven by their anti-war base, have been using the Iraq war for partisan political ends, and so the voters are torn and conflicted.

That’s why I keep saying that we need a Democrat in the White House in 2009. We need to know what Democrats would really do if they were in charge of the war on terror, and we need to know what they would really do in reforming the domestic programs of the United States.

Then Republicans could do some serious thinking and policy analysis. There’s plenty to do. The welfare state has been growing for 70 years and is more or less completely unreformed.

What do the voters want? Who knows?

The SST BizJet

Enough of the sainted Barack Obama starring in “The Fall of the House of Clinton.”  Enough of the end of the Romney campaign.  Or is it the mean-spirited John McCain and his Straight Snark Express.

Let’s talk about guy stuff, like a new $80 million business jet that’s designed to carry 12 important executives at Mach 1.6 non-stop for up to 4,600 miles.

Of course, it is nothing to do with prestige and getting there before the ordinary hoi polloi in their airborne Greyhound buses.  As Ben Webster reports, it has nothing to do with that.  At least that is what the chaps at Aerion say.

“There is a saying that you can tell the men from the boys by the price of their toys,” said Brian Barents, Aerion’s vice-chairman and a former supersonic fighter pilot for the US Air Force. “But while prestige is a factor, this is primarily a timesaving tool to make executives more productive.”

Yes.  Of course, no ego stuff here, merely hard-working executives trying to be more productive!

To get a flavor of the design, you should go to Aerion’s website.  But think about this.  First of all, this 12-seat plane will have Pratt and Whitney JT8D engines.  That’s the turbofan that powers the twin-jet100-seat MD-80!  Got enough power, chaps?

Length	148 ft
Width	62 ft
Max Speed	Mach 1.6
Max Takeoff Weight	90,000 lbs
Max Fuel Weight	45,400 lbs

Imagine that!  The plane is half the length of a football field. Half of the takeoff weight will be fuel.  Well, when you strap on a couple of 20,000 lb thrust engines, what do you expect?

How soon will it be when everyone who is someone will have to have one of these?

The Horse-race After Iowa

The glorious thing about presidential politics in the US is that it really is an open process.  An outsider really can come in and change the politics of the United States.

Last night two outsider candidates came in and beat the establishment, politics-by-the-numbers candidates.

Of course, Harvard-educated Barack Obama isn’t really such an outsider, and neither is Governor Huckabee.  But they certainly cleaned the clocks of insiders Clinton and Romney.

In an NRO Roundtable Richard Brookhiser pointed out that Mike Huckabee is not a religious-right candidate in the mold of Pat Robertson.

In one important respect, Huckabee’s supporters have made a wiser choice than their soul-mates 20 years ago. Their man has been a governor and a lieutenant governor.

Of course, as Daniel Casse remarks, the left thinks that they’ll make hamburger out of Mike Huckabee.

I don’t know what Huckabee means for conservatism. But it promises a helluva party for the angry Left. Since Thanksgiving, the New York Times has been positively giddy about the possibility that the GOP was firmly in the hands of a genuine Bible-thumper.

If the Left thinks that, they had better be careful.  The Democratic base may be violently secular, but the moderate general election voters are not.  Mike Huckabee is a wily politician, and very good at negative politics.  He could eat the Angry Left for lunch.

Going forward, I am reminded that for most of us, what matters most is that the candidates we don’t like lose.

On the Democratic side, I can live with Obama, but I really don’t like Edwards and Clinton.

On the Republican side, I can live with Huckabee, Romney, or Giuliani.  But I really don’t like John McCain.

So I’m rooting for the independent voters to pile on for Obama in New Hampshire.  Don’t disappoint me, fellas!

Conservatives Need Not Apply

The august New York Times has decided to give conservative William Kristol a column on the editorial page.  Not a bad idea, you’d think. Kristol represents a fairly centrist big-government conservatism that ought to go down fairly well with the big-government liberals that read the Times.

But you’d be wrong.  The NYT readers are beside themselves. Writes Harry Stein, author of How I Accidentally Joined the Right-wing Conspiracy, the reaction was

Sputtering fury. Vicious name-calling. Denunciations of the Times for this unspeakable act. Threats to cancel subscriptions and otherwise exact revenge.

Editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal was surprised.

Kristol “is a serious, respected conservative intellectual—and somehow that’s a bad thing. How intolerant is that?”

Er, yes.  Intolerant.  And liberals are experts on that.  But maybe Rosenthal doesn’t really understand his readers.  Not like we right-wingnuts understand ’em.  Because, you see, we get to experience the incoming rounds from them, every day of our lives.  Says accidental conservative Stein:

Can Rosenthal truly be so unaware of the character of his own core readership? Does he actually believe that they’re open to challenge, or even reasonable back-and-forth? Doesn’t he read his own paper’s letters page? “David Brooks can write the mildest column in the world,” Bernard Goldberg observes, “and the letters to the editor act like he’s Hitler.”

I know.  It’s all too delicious for words.

But I blame Al Gore.  It was he who stirred up the party faithful after the contested 2000 election and, characteristically, never really conceded the election.  Democrats decided it wouldn’t hurt to keep their partisans in a frenzy.

In my judgement, this was a strategic error, one that prevents the Democrats from making sensible course corrections from their left-wing orthodoxy.

But first, they get to win in 2008.  Then watch it all fall apart.

On the Day Before

Tomorrow, Friday, January 3, 2008, they will start counting the first votes in the 2008 presidential election. All the hype will start converting into Ws and Ls.

In the Republican race it seems that the most professional candidate, the guy who has spent the money and built the organization, and plotted the most detailed strategy—Mitt Romney—is challenged by two candidates without much of either.

In Iowa, Mike Huckabee has come to challenge Mitt Romney, but lacking money and organization has had to rely on stunts like announcing that he’s not going to run his negative ad. Now he’s off to Burbank, CA, to appear on the Tonight Show.

In New Hampshire John McCain has been working the local media and has come up in the polls.

Can stunts and media attention beat organization and ground game? We’ll soon know the answer.

My guess is that organization and strategy will win out and that after Iowa and New Hampshire Mitt Romney will be in pole position.

But what do I know? We should never forget the first rule of wisdom. It applies also to politics: Nobody knows nuttin’.

What about the Democrats? I’m not sure that I care. I don’t have a dog in that fight. But at least Democrats have a decent choice. They have a Lover in Obama, a Hater in Edwards, and a Clinton in Hillary!