Moe Lane blogs:

Congresswoman Giffords, of course, was gravely wounded in 2011 in a murderous attack by a madman that left six dead and thirteen injured. Since then, Giffords has made a remarkable recovery; unfortunately, it apparently has not been enough of a recovery, so she’s resigning in order to concentrate on her health.  The video below of the announcement both shows the extent of her injuries, and the impressive extent to which she’s already surmounted them: I don’t know if Congresswoman Giffords will ever heal fully, but she’s already doing much better than I privately expected.

Arizona’s governor has called for a special election in April to replace Giffords.

Another Congressional Democrat has also announced he’s stepping down for health reasons (though not until November), legendary moonbat Maurice Hinchey (D-NY).  Concurrently, as this ignominious headline notes, Hinchey’s wife has been changed with her second DWI in eight months.

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Just click:

“Probably the highlight of the night, crowd and Twitter went wild,” William A. Jacobson writes of Monday’s debate. Alas, as Seth Leibsohn adds at the Corner, if Gingrich “could run his campaign and non-debate moments the way he runs himself during the debates, he would deserve the nomination. But, too often, he does not.”

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“Mr. President, your very presence in office demonstrates Dr. King’s dream has indeed come true. But how devastated would Dr. King be to know the Americans who are still fomenting racism at the highest levels are the very people for whom he fought for and died?”

– Rep. Allen West (R-FL).

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The Washington Times reports their former editor, who was also an advisor and press secretary to Newt Gingrich during the heady Contract With America days has passed away:

Tony Blankley, a noted conservative author and commentator and former editorial page editor of The Washington Times, died Sunday morning, according to family sources. He was 63 and had been battling stomach cancer.

Mr. Blankley was an executive vice president of the Edelman public-relations firm in Washington, a visiting senior fellow in national-security communications at the Heritage Foundation, a syndicated newspaper columnist and an on-air political commentator for CNN, NBC and NPR.

He was also a regular weekly guest on “The McLaughlin Group.”

Mr. Blankley was editorial page editor of The Times from 2002 to 2007, and from 1990 to 1997 he served as press secretary and general adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

At the of the post is an interview Blankley gave to our Maximum Pajamhadeen during the early days of PJM’s existence.

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One of the benefits of the Iowa Caucasus was watching the MSM drop the mask and remind its viewers how much it really, really hates them. Even when it comes to slagging what was a Blue State in 2008. (See also: the Bitter Clingers harangue against liberal Hillary Clinton voters in Pennsylvania by Obama and the more fevered of his celebrity endorsers.) But one Iowa man armed with a video camera and plenty of NSFW-language dares to fight back:

After watching this video, it seems obvious why Iowa is the only state in the Union where Mandom is both legally sold — and required by law for men to wear. As for the rest of us, as Jim Treacher writes, “Can you handle this? (Hint: No. You cannot):”

Oh and speaking of Iowa, President Obama weighs in on his success there in 2008, and how he’s followed through on his campaign promises:

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Hear me now and believe me later that to understand the Great State of New Jersey, you need to click on the map below found by the Gormogons blog and study it carefully. It is absolutely spot-on — if more than a little brutal at times — when it comes to the state’s varied cultures, and where they reside:

As for how New Jerseyians talk, well, you’ve heard me on a bunch of podcasts and videos; I don’t think I have much of a regional accent, but you can decide for yourself. (My dad grew up in Yonkers in the 1920s, before moving to South Jersey after the War; I suspect both he and his sister, who sounded a bit like Eleanor Roosevelt at times, worked very hard long before I was born to lose their respective accents.) But as for the rest of Jersey, “If you want to hear the nuances in what is perceived as the monolithic NJ accent, go no further,” as one of the Gormogonians write. “This video can teach you more than you EVER need to know:”

The one outlier is the fellow in the middle of the clip who speaks with what appears to be a southern dialect at first listen; I can’t recall meeting anyone who talks with that specific accent when I lived in Jersey, so I can’t vouch for how common it is, or its main geographic location in the state.

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As Ken Gardner said on Twitter tonight, “ABC hyperventilates about Mitt’s $10,000 bet to Perry, but doesn’t mention Obama’s $30,000/plate fundraisers.”

That said, at Commentary, Jonathan Tobin adds, “Romney’s Gaffe Helps Gingrich Stay on Top:”

Romney’s flippant reminder of his wealth — he bet $10k as easily as most people would wager a $10 bill — at Saturday night’s ABC News/Des Moines Register debate was the most memorable moment at an event in which his goal was to put the heat on frontrunner Newt Gingrich​. But instead it was Romney who looked shaky and Gingrich relaxed and confident. Every time the former Speaker found himself in the cross hairs of either his opponents or the moderators, he held his own easily. Though he was pressed hard on his record on health care, the Middle East, immigration and his marital infidelity, Gingrich never faltered. Coming as it did after two weeks in which his poll ratings had soared and Romney’s declined, Gingrich could not have asked for a better evening.

The debate illustrated again that the “new Newt” is a formidable debater. Though he is still capable of getting off message and saying controversial things, rather than fly off the handle, the former Speaker’s steady demeanor and cool ability to hit back every time he is challenged has served him well. And on Saturday night, it was Romney who looked flustered, not Gingrich.

Though the debate began with a discussion of economics, this latest edition of America’s favorite political reality show sometimes got bogged down in odd sidebars. Among the most curious was the lengthy discussion of whether or not Gingrich was right to say that the Palestinians are an “invented people.” Romney tried to position himself so as to seem to agree with Gingrich’s pro-Israel opinion but at the same time claim that his opponent was acting irresponsibly and causing unnecessary trouble for both Israel and the United States.

But true to form, Gingrich doubled down by asserting that he was merely stating a historical fact. Even better, Gingrich compared his willingness to tell the truth to the Arabs to Ronald Reagan’s calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” That was a bull’s eye with Republican voters even if Romney might be right that it was not a prudent thing for a potential president to say. Though Gingrich may not have gained many votes on this issue other than with the hard-line pro-Israel community and evangelicals, by standing his ground, he won the point.

Daniel Pipes explores that last topic at the Corner, in both the long and short form — “For details, see a long article of mine from 1989 on the topic or a short one from 2000.”

Or as Roger L. Simon writes at the Tatler, “Gingrich Tells Truth about ‘Palestine’—MSM Goes in a Dither.”

GDS could well be running rampant over the next 11 months — can the New Newt return fire while still appearing calm under the ultimate pressure?

Related: Great moments in DNC-MSM (but I repeat myself) hypocrisy: “Former Clinton Adviser Stephanopoulos Asks Presidential Candidates if Infidelity Should Be an Issue.”

I wonder who helped George with his debate prep tonight.

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…I’d like to wish Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours from Ed Driscoll.com:

More on television and Thanksgiving from James Lileks.

(Originally posted at the PJ Lifestyle blog.)

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Mark Steyn on Thanksgiving, reprinted from 2007:

Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays. Christmas is celebrated elsewhere, even if there are significant local variations: in Continental Europe, naughty children get left rods to be flayed with and lumps of coal; in Britain, Christmas lasts from December 22nd to mid-January and celebrates the ancient cultural traditions of massive alcohol intake and watching the telly till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit. All part of the rich diversity of our world. But Thanksgiving (excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version) is unique to America. “What’s it about?” an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. “Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?”

Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for. Europeans think of this country as “the New World” in part because it has an eternal newness which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod? And just when you think you’re on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy slides over a nickel and tells the waitress “Gimme a cuppa joe” return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato. Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!

But Americans aren’t novelty junkies on the important things. “The New World” is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on earth, to a degree “the Old World” can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists. We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The US Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together. Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of “the west”‘s nation states have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas – Communism, Fascism, European Union. If you’re going to be novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel cappuccino than the Third Reich.

Which dovetails nicely into this item I’ve been meaning to post all week:

The Celestial Junk blog sums up the topic as “Blitzkrieg Without the Panzers;” Allahpundit at Hot Air explores the surrealism of the moment:

Via the Corner, it’s Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party catching Hannan-esque viral video lightning in a bottle by telling off the EUrocracy to its face. Your companion reading for this clip is Niall Ferguson’s op-ed in the Journal over the weekend imagining the “United States of Europe” circa 2021, after Britain has quit the Union and Germany has all but purchased the southern half of the continent. How sustainable is that scenario, though? As German hegemony over its satellites states deepens, so will resentment within those states at the loss of democratic sovereignty. What happens when, after years of backstopping the PIIGS economically and receiving nothing but resentment in return, Germany suffers a fiscal or economic crisis of its own and Germans’ resentment at having to bankroll Europe finally explodes? Greek or Italian hypernationalism is bad; German hypernationalism is a problem for the Pentagon.

As to Allahpundit’s question on German resentment at bailing out the rest of Europe, that’s a topic that Theodore Dalrymple discussed here a PJM in May of last year. For the “dek” of the article, I summed things up like this: “If for some inexplicable reason you wanted to reawaken German nationalism, how would you go about it? Theodore Dalrymple suggests a three-part strategy. And good news: current events have already set the ball rolling…”

Related: “Euro on ‘Death Watch’ After Investors Spurn German Bonds.” But then, Germany’s been an expert at euthanasia since the Weimar era.

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The gang from the home office gives thanks for the season:

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As Kathy Shaidle notes, “Nice comebacks to your asshat relative, esp. re: ‘America genocided the Indians, man’. Take notes.” And Tim Blair adds, noting a surprisingly small number of plastic turkey references in the legacy media this week, “That PJTV Thanksgiving turkey looks disturbingly real, by the way. Heretics.”

(Originally published November 26, 2009.)

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No, not that sin; that was Mark Block, Cain’s chief of staff. (But even as a non-smoker, I loved it; it reminded me of this classic New York Post cover for sheer in your face political incorrectness.)

Wes Pruden, editor emeritus of the Washington Times writes, “Mr. Cain’s sin is not that he doesn’t have the usual qualifications for president. Barack Obama established the precedent that presidents can attempt to do the job with on-the-job training. Mr. Cain’s sin is that he demonstrates, with considerable eloquence, that the notion that Republicans and other conservatives are mean-spirited bigots is the enormous lie of conventional media wisdom:”

Margaret Thatcher got it right when she said more than two decades ago that Mr. Reagan’s greatest accomplishment was that “he has achieved the most difficult of political tasks, changing attitudes and perceptions about what is possible.”

In a much smaller way, Herman Cain has also achieved that most difficult of political tasks. He, too, has changed attitudes and perceptions about what is possible. The most remarkable fact about the Cain phenomenon is that three years after Barack Obama’s incompetence began to reveal itself, the other party, painted in vivid color as benighted and bigoted, demonstrates that it will happily consider a black candidate, too. The prospect of a choice between a black Democrat and a black Republican is the tale that beggars anything Hollywood could imagine.

This reality owes nothing to the media, politicians of any stripe, or to the self-righteious elites. It owes everything to the ordinary men and women of the America that is great because America is good.

Now, how do we pass this notion on to GE’s chief spokesmen?

Related: “Herman Cain Sails Into Uncharted Seas,” Stacy McCain writes at the American Spectator:

What Cain is doing has never been done before, because it’s never been tried before. Harnessing the grassroots energy of the Tea Party movement to propel a political novice to the White House isn’t the kind of project that a professional operative like Karl Rove could be expected to endorse, and the odds of Cain’s success are a mystery even to experts like Nate Silver. And yet the expedition sails onward, into uncharted seas where dragons legendarily lurk.

Sail — and smoke — on.

Update: Bryan Preston writes that “Herman Cain’s ‘Smoking Man’ Has a Checkered Past,” and while he likes the ad, Bryan notes that Cain might not have been wise calling attention to Block’s background — but then, if Cain had Mother Teresa on his staff, AP would have done a hit piece on her. (Or bring in Christopher Hitchens to finish her off.) And more significantly, Ace notes that Cain is still learning issues on the fly. That’s much tougher to do when you don’t have a supine MSM to run interference for you, as another first-time candidate did in 2008.

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This clip is apparently twenty years old, but the timing couldn’t be better. During a period when the left has decided to jettison reality and hermetically seal themselves up somewhere between 1968 and 1972, Herman Cain takes their most revered gnostic anthem, turns it on its head, and completely takes the mickey out of it, proving some much needed comic relief during the Obama’s administration’s long slog into the dustbin of history:

As Allahpundit writes, “Watching it, two things are clear. One: Lennon’s ode to possessions-less brotherhood actually makes a hell of a corporate jingle. [No shocker there -- Ed] And two: The inauguration ball is going to be amazing.”

A new poll shows Cain beating Obama by two points.

And that was before this awesomely awesome moment. Rock on, Mr. Cain – Rock On.

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What a busy day for news; just came back from dinner, only to see at the top of my Outlook inbox an email from CNN’s PR person with the following subject header: “CNN reporting on death of Steve Jobs.”

I’m probably the last Windows guy at PJM, but Allahpundit has a moving encomium at Hot Air:

We knew it was coming but that doesn’t make it easier. Horrendous.

We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today.

Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.

His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.

Apple’s homepage tonight is a requiem for the departed. I’m straining to find a cultural analogy for Jobs and am struck by the fact that I have to leave the business/tech fields entirely to do it. You can do it if you go back far enough — Henry Ford and Edison pop to mind, but … that’s awfully far. The obvious modern comparison is to Bill Gates, but that doesn’t work. Gates, like Jobs, is capital-I Important to the computer age, but in sort of the same way that ancient cave painters were important to the development of art. Jobs started out as a cave painter too but kept at it until he turned into Rembrandt. I think Lileks is close to the mark in comparing him to Walt Disney; my first thought when I heard the news was that only Steven Spielberg’s passing today would hit quite as hard. The common thread among those three is that they all made magic, but Jobs put it in your hands so that you felt like you were the one making it. That’s the crucial difference between Apple and Microsoft — Gates made computers easier to use but Jobs made them objects of wonder. He made magic, literally. There’s no greater epitaph.

The first computer I ever used was an Altair 8800 at St. Mary’s, around 1976 or so. (One of our math teachers built it from a kit and mated it to first an old teletypewriter, and then to an old black & white TV set.) But as marketing gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout once wrote, nobody remembers the Altair 8800 as being the first personal computer, because of how difficult it was to built and program. Not to mention the name. Right from the start, Jobs knew that style and ease of use were the keys to success, as Stephen Green writes at PJM:

With the Apple II, Jobs made personal computers useful. In the mid-Seventies, home computers were build-it-yourself hobby boxes, useful only to the nerdiest nerds. By the time I entered middle school in 1981 there was an entire lab filled with Apple II Plus machines, and lots of fun software to run on them. The first computer “clone” wasn’t Compaq’s copy of the IBM PC — it was a cloneof the Apple II. An industry was born.

Three years later Jobs made the personal computer approachable with the Macintosh. He didn’t invent the GUI or the WIMP metaphor but he and his team made them useable and affordable. What most computer users took for granted in 1995 was deemed a “toy” by many critics when the first Mac arrived in 1984.

And last year, Jobs made the personal computer ubiquitous with the iPad. This third revolution is only beginning, yet still many critics deride this “toy” as a “media consumption device.” I do most of my photo editing on my fat, slow, first-generation iPad — and I’m outlining a novel on it, too. Others use it to create music, paintings and video. That’s some “consumption” going on.

As Noah Wyle said, portraying Jobs in 1999′s Pirates of Silicon Valley, passing by some protesting hippies, “Those guys think they’re revolutionaries. They’re not revolutionaries, we are.”

That seems equally apropos today, given the Occupy Wall Street types similarly stuck in a reactionary sixties time warp. But then, as Virginia Postrel recently wrote, by the early 1980s, “Steve Jobs Made Business Cool Again.”

That’s not a bad epitaph for an entrepreneur, either.

Great question by the Anchoress: “I wonder if [Jobs] is the last capitalist we’re going to be permitted to admire for his creativity, his invention and his sheer genius?”

Update: Read. The. Whole. Thing.

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Dear Mr. Freeman,

My name is Ali Akbar. I’m a 26 year-old African-American small business owner and a tea party activist. . . .
I idolized you as a boy. Growing up without a father, you were one of the strong black men in my life who gave me a model to follow. Each of the characters you played had dignity and confidence. I tried to emulate the strength you projected. . . .

I’ve attended dozens of tea party events. I’ve helped organize them, and I’ve even spoken at a few. The tea party is not what is often depicted in the news. It is people of all colors who are terribly concerned about the direction that America is heading. We don’t trust big government to make decisions for us. And we fear that the present administration’s spending is going to lead our country down a path to insolvency, much like what Greece is currently facing. . . .

I’m hoping that you’ll come to a tea party in Tennessee — the place of your birth. Really anywhere in the country that works for you; I’ll set it up with the one of the thousands of activists I know around our great country. I’d be delighted to introduce you to good people who will welcome you with open arms, disagree with you, and then feed you some of the best barbeque you’ve ever tasted. . . .

To paraphrase what I wrote the other day before Akbar’s letter hit the Blogosphere, I’m sure Freeman won’t take Akbar up on his offer, for the same reason that Keith Olbermann couldn’t accept the Dallas Tea Party’s video invitation last year. It’s much tougher to demonize a group once you’ve met them in person, and discovered they’re as flesh and blood as you are. Best to leave them mysterious and scary — and at a distance, instead:

Oh, for those same reasons, presumably Akbar’s offer won’t get any traction from sites such as the Internet Movie Database, which were quick to run Freeman’s attack last week.

I’d love to be wrong on both of those assumptions, though. Over to you, Morgan!

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Obama fancies himself a leftwing version of President Reagan (but then, Obama has all sorts of “Disquieting Heroic Fantasies,” as Peter Wehner recently noted at Commentary). But whereas Reagan could see the bear in the woods, as one of his subtlest campaign ads from 1984 highlighted, Obama never saw the bear before it was too late, Jonah Goldberg writes today in the L.A. Times: 

“You woke the bears! Why did you do that?”

That’s from one of my favorite scenes in “Anchorman.” In the Oscar-robbed film, Ron Burgundy (played by Will Ferrell) loudly leaps into a bear pit to rescue his girlfriend and then falsely blames her for waking them up.

Watching President Obama these days reminds me of that scene.

In March 2010, liberal columnist Peter Beinart argued that, for decades, Democratic politicians treated America’s innate conservatism like a slumbering bear: If you make no sudden moves and talk quietly, you can get a lot done. But if you wake the bear, as Democrats did in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the ursine silent majority will punish you.

But Obama promised to change that. He was tired of the timid, almost apologetic talk. He was going to be an FDR, or at least a Reagan for liberalism. He was going to “fundamentally transform” the country. And to those who counseled that Democrats can’t govern that way, Obama and his followers responded with shouts of “Yes, we can!”

You might think it was those shouts that woke the bear, but that’s not what happened. After all, Obama enjoyed stunning popularity when he entered the Oval Office.

No, it wasn’t words but deeds that roused the beast. The poorly crafted, deeply partisan stimulus was like a sharp stick to the bear’s belly. But it was “Obamacare” that ended the hibernation.

Despite his deployment of every rhetorical weapon in the progressive arsenal, Obama could never make the thing popular. At town hall meetings, the bear growled and snorted, in a posture that the experienced psephological woodsman understands means “leave the bear alone.” The Democratic response was to mock the grizzly. Nancy Pelosi even called the town hall protesters “un-American.”

By July 2009, Gallup found Americans had attitudes that were “conspicuously incongruous with the results of the 2008 elections.” The 2010 midterm elections showed just how incongruous.

And as Moe Lane wrote yesterday, responding to veteran pollster Stu Rothenberg finally waking up to reality, “Why is Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012 only now in doubt?”

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Walter Russell Mead has a little fun with everybody’s favorite excitable faux-conservative turned reliably leftist uterine detective and budding theologian:

I remember a United States where Andrew Sullivan’s darkest fantasies were fulfilled — and I’ve watched us move steadily away from that for nigh on sixty years.  (Yes, kids, people can be that old and still blog, but that’s only because my teams of underpaid, starving research associates can transfer my cursive Gothic script from the parchment I like onto one of those computational devices you young people use.)  In more than half a century of watching the ebbs and flows of American politics, I’ve seen this country steadily become more tolerant, more thoughtful, more open and in many ways more just.

The Christian right that apparently keeps Mr. Sullivan up at night shivering with fear is a pathetic, compromising bunch of namby pamby wimps compared to the holy warriors of my youth.  If Focus on the Family or even Michelle Bachmann scares him so badly, he should try listening to a standard Sunday morning sermon on AM radio circa 1956 — or read how Time magazine covered homosexuality back then.

Sullivan doesn’t, I think, get the whole sweep of American life.  On a couple of issues — abortion comes to mind — the social policy consensus is creeping a bit to the right, but generally speaking the Christian right today stands for positions that were considered fairly liberal not all that long ago.  Liquor by the drink, gambling, lesbian and gay equal rights, premarital sex, birth control, pornography, interracial marriage: on a whole variety of issues, some noble and important, some hedonistic and perhaps a bit more questionable, the United States has moved steadily and inexorably toward a more permissive and open stance.

The Christian right has often fought that trend, but over time the right moves left as the center moves on.  Divorcees were once shunned outside a handful of big cities in this country and many states made divorce very difficult to get; these days, the right worries about keeping its own marriages intact more than about interfering with other peoples’ lives.

But the paranoid left in America has deep, deep roots, particularly in its desire to feel persecuted by someone — anyone! — on the right. As Tom Wolfe wrote in “The Intelligent Co-Ed’s Guide to America,” reprinted in 1980′s The Purple Decades, back in 1965, he was on a panel debating “the Style of the Sixties” at Princeton University, along with Günter Grass, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Krassner, and avant-garde filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos:

The next thing I knew, the discussion was onto the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folks waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck. I couldn’t make any sense out of it. I had just made a tour of the country to write a series called “The New Life Out There” for New York magazine. This was the mid-1960’s. The post-World War II boom had by now pumped money into every level of the population on a scale unparalleled in any nation in history. Not only that, the folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history. For that matter, Krassner himself, in one of the strokes of exuberance for which he was well known, was soon to publish a slight hoax: an account of how Lyndon Johnson was so overjoyed about becoming President that he had buggered a wound in the neck of John F. Kennedy on Air Force One as Kennedy’s body was being flown back from Dallas. Krassner presented this as a suppressed chapter from William Manchester’s book Death of a President. Johnson, of course, was still President when it came out. Yet the merciless gestapo dragnet missed Krassner, who cleverly hid out onstage at Princeton on Saturday nights.

Suddenly I heard myself blurting out over my microphone: “My God, what are you talking about? We’re in the middle of a … Happiness Explosion!” That merely sounded idiotic. The kid up in the balcony did the crying baby. The kid down below did the raccoon … Krakatoa, East of Java … I disappeared in a tidal wave of rude sounds … Back to the goon squads, search-and-seize and roust-a-daddy …

Support came from a quarter I hadn’t counted on. It was Grass, speaking in English.

“For the past hour I have my eyes fixed on the doors here,” he said. “You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow.” Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening.

He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”

He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

Not very nice, Günter! Not very nice, Jean-François! A bit supercilious, wouldn’t you say!

I don’t think ‘The Christianist Nightmare” will be descending upon Europe — or America — anytime soon; both continents have a rather more potent form of religious fundementalism to worry about these days, one that Andrew once wrote about quite successfully in his earlier days. Whatever happened to that Andrew, anyhow?

(Via Karl of Patterico’s Pontifications, who writes, “I would say [Mead's essay] will leave a mark, but it won’t.  Sullivan is long past the point where things that do not feed his paranoia and conspiracy-mongering leave much of an impression.  The former maverick is increasingly a one-trick pony.)

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No, it’s not “Wham Bam” — besides, that’s two words. At the Corner, Robert Costa writes that it’s “Rebuke,” a word that appears in quotes from such divergent sources as Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), the Washington Post, and The Politico.

Related: John Podhoretz on “The Wipeouts in New York and Nevada:”

Both Turner and Amodei made the president the chief target of their campaign ire, and the Democrats in both races ran as far from Barack Obama as they could. And they were wiped out anyway.

These may prove to be among the most suggestive special-election results in modern American history. The Democratic candidate Harris Wofford​’s win in the 1991 special for Senate in Pennsylvania proved a harbinger of Bill Clinton​’s victory in 1992, and Republican Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts in January 2010 presaged the shellacking in the midterms last year. If Obama loses next November, the writing on the wall will have appeared tonight.

Hugh Hewitt spotlights this quote in The Hill, not exactly a Tea Party/VRWC-friendly publication:

A Democratic strategist said Obama has become such a problem for down-ticket Democrats that he was wary of encouraging candidates to run next year. “I’m warning my clients — ‘Don’t run in 2012.’ I don’t want to see good candidates lose by 12 to 15 points because of the president,” said the strategist.

At the Tatler, Bryan Preston declares, “Time of death for the age of Hope and Change, 11:58 pm eastern, Sept. 13, 2011.”

It’s up to all of us next year though, to ensure that it doesn’t rise from the dead like Young Barackenstein.

Update: Do you smell what Barack’s cooking? “Election year 2012: smells like Democrat doom,” this London Daily Mail headline reads, meaning — at least for the moment — the stench is powerful to reach across the Atlantic.

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I predict a tectonic shift among American Jews and within the Democratic Party if Obama doesn’t quietly retire. All the spinning in the world can’t spin away the trend of Scott Brown, the Tea Party victory of November 2010, and now the Turner earthquake.

Many Democrats are awakening to the reality that their party has been hijacked by a radicalism completely unfamiliar to their parents’ and grandparents’ Democratic Party.

An internal, partisan civil war is now brewing in that party. What I think tonight is less important than what Joe Lieberman, Bill Clinton, Evan Bayh, and the rest of the former, and now defunct, reasonable wing of the Democratic Party is thinking tonight.

– Andrew Breitbart, Anthony Weiner’s blog noire.

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Spin Debbie Wasserman Schultz! Spin like there’s no tomorrow!

Even before the votes were counted, Republicans said the closeness of the contest showed Democrats are abandoning Mr. Obama heading into the 2012 election season.

Democratic party leaders insisted the loss wasn’t a harbinger of things to come. “It’s a very difficult district for Democrats,” said Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, noting its Democratic margins there tend to be the second lowest of all the districts in New York City.

House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio), dismissed that idea.

“This is a very seriously Democrat district,” Mr. Boehner said. “This is not a district that Republicans have any right to believe we could win.”

Meanwhile, DWS chats up the NYT:

But Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said the district’s large concentration of Orthodox Jews made it unusual and meant the race had few national ramifications.

“In this district, there is a large number of people who went to the polls tonight who didn’t support the president to begin with and don’t support Democrats — and it’s nothing more than that,” she said in a telephone interview.

According to the Washington Post, NY-9 has been held by a Democrat since the 1920s,  back when Ty Cobb hit .401 for the Tigers, blogger Dale Franks adds on Twitter. Making it previously a very difficult district for Democrats in much the same way that “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, for, you know, historic reasons.”

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“GOP wins in NY House race, seen as Obama rebuke,” reads this dull as dishwater AP headline. Linking to it, Matt Drudge reminds us why, as Don Surber recently wrote, he remains America’s News Editor:

At Hot Air, with Republican Mark Amodei currently up by 20 points in Nevada, Allahpundit releases the beloved Humbot.

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