Ricochet and The State of the Union
I knew I’d be doing a Ricochet podcast this (Wednesday) morning on the State of the Union, so I watched the entire speech straight through. By the end of it, I was offering to betray our military’s field positions, change my religion and sign a statement demanding the U.S. get out of Viet Nam if they would just make it stop. What a cynical and disingenuous blowhard this president is! The speech seemed to me a complete fantasy, existing as it did in a world in which our country was NOT currently borrowing more money than it produces and in which “paying your fair share,” meant having your money taken away from you to fund things you don’t want and the government has no right to buy. GOP Governor Mitch Daniels’ response was like having water splashed in my face, waking me from a dream. Listen, I know he’s short and boring, but Daniels not only would have made a better candidate than Mitt or Newt, he’s a better executive than either Mitt or Barack could ever be. And here’s another thing: the social conservatives who beat up on Daniels because he said we needed to call a truce on their issues in order to bring people together to deal with the debt? They were wrong and he was right. Let me be more exact: they were a hundred per cent wrong and he was a hundred per cent right. They should make a pilgrimage to his state house on their knees, like the old women who climb the Sacred Steps in Rome, in order to apologize and beg him to reconsider getting into the race. You don’t like abortion? Who do you think your best president would be? Obama, Mitt or Daniels? Right, me too. Go stand in the corner.
You can hear me wax incredibly eloquent on these and other topics together with people who actually know what they’re talking about like Peter Robinson, Rob Long, James Lileks and Mike Murphy on the Ricochet podcast for 1/25.
What a cynical and disingenuous blowhard this president is!
Word.
“What a cynical and disingenuous blowhard this president is! The speech seemed to me a complete fantasy, existing as it did in a world in which our country was NOT currently borrowing more money than it produces”
The above is just other words for a lying sack of crap!
Barak the destroyer, loves killing and destroying things… says he will make things new… but all he really does is destroy… the rest is window dressing.
Satan has competition in the biggest liar contest.
I really H8 everything this man stands for.
Precisely: … “‘paying your fair share’ meant having your money taken away from you to fund things you don’t want and the government has no right to buy.”
Guess what, I’m not paying my fair share because I don’t see myself in a de facto forced charity that finances the poor based on the idea that America is a racist country.
I will not finance DREAM, I will not finance welfare, I will not finance the NAACP or La Raza, I will not finance transexual operations, I will not finance gay education in schools, I will not finance the Dept. of Education.
Well, as obviously flawed as he is, it seems our man could be Newt Gingrich, and he’s older and wiser and repentant and still has sand. I’d say go for Newt, who at least communicates the need to get some things done in the interest of our country, like balance the budget for one, a thing he’s spearheaded before and was richly rewarded for by our republican establishment overlords with shameful dismissal. But if he doesn’t make it to the nomination, maybe Daniels could be persuaded at a brokered convention.
As I listened to Obama’s dreams of making things more fair, the words of Klavan echoed in my head-
“Free people can treat each other justly, but they can’t make life fair. To get rid of the unfairness among individuals, you have to exercise power over them. The more fairness you want, the more power you need. Thus, all dreams of fairness become dreams of tyranny in the end.”
If tyranny is the result it’s not Obama’s fault- he didn’t have a choice, he had to do it.
The question is, if Daniels plays dead on social issues, and I will concede, for the sake of argument, that that is a good strategy, how will/would the media and 0bama admin go after him? And you know they would, you know they will.
Amazing, one mentions any name outside of Mitt/Newt and you get… nothing. This post has been up for a few days now, and we are at eight comments. I’m beginning to consider the argument that calling a truce on social values issues might need some brutal re-examination. Especially since there has been so much pandering by the only two names, the only two personalities that are being discussed out there, Mitt and Newt. Mitt ran against Kennedy for Mass. senate seat and defended abortion, and has now officially recanted. Situational politics. The Massachusetts senate race was in the nineties, and so on and so forth. Newt’s pandering, he thinks government is such a wonderful toy, and he wants us to believe all it takes is to have a better megalomaniac in the white house than say, Lyndon Johnson, and all will be well. And yet both Johnson and Gingrich are big on a government run, financed, and organized space program. Gingrich and Johnson want to run with the trends, rather than against them, so Gingrich won’t rock the boat as far as “a women’s right to choose”. Forget it.
In other words, social values issues have become a prop by which to symbolically rattle one’s symbolic saber, as Newt and Perry have done, all the while pursuing more government in republican hands. Not less. One could conclude cynically that social conservative issues are the last refuge of the republican scoundrel. Well, they are now. We are getting beat bloody over social conservative issues so it stands to reason that Daniels has indeed been right all along. Not only that, he has avoided the circus of “the one true real conservative” “electability” non-debate/debate that’s been going on at the fencepost all this time. That din of pure noise you hear out there is nothing but. Mitt/Newt, Newt/Mitt. If he, Daniels had run, he would be running in absolute obscurity, hiding away in plain sight.
Worst offender as far as pandering social conservative issues? Sarah Palin. It’s become so obvious now. She was planning to side with either Perry or Newt, but wait until poll results or primary results made the waters safe to endorse. If social conservative issues were important to her, she would have endorsed Bachmann or Santorum long ago. But, it seems she has much more in common with that other quitter Newt, and made a deal some time back to come out in support when the time is right.
This primary process has been poisoned, and is a complete wash, no one is happy, and the party is not unified. We don’t even have any idea what we will be getting. The contest is between two unfrozen caveman candidates, and someone like Daniels has, at the very least, demonstrated his fiscal wisdom and prudence, by not running, just to see all the money he has, versus all the money he wouldn’t have…. wasted. It’s all about personalities and rivalries, establishment versus…uh…someone else’s …uh… conspiratorial establishment- and the republican voter out there has played right along.
Republican messaging, such as it is, is so processed, it’s become like velveeta cheese. impossible to rescue.
We need to scrap this and start over. Social conservatism is an albatross around our necks, even if it otherwise shouldn’t be. I’m quite ready to go with someone who might be considered boring, because… just watch the video, obama has all the inane pizzaz in his corner, all you have to do is rope-a-dope him until he’s punched his sorry self out.