HORROR SHOWS THEN AND NOW

Steyn at Macleans on Tony’s Phony Trial:

“[F]or an advanced Western nation in the 21st century, war is only legitimate if you have no conceivable national interest in whatever war you’re waging. Kosovo meets that definition: no one remembers why we went in, who were the good guys, or what the hell the point of it was. Which is the point: the principal rationale was that there was no rationale. The Clinton/Blair argument boiled down to: the fact that we have no reason to get into it justifies our getting into it. Whereas Afghanistan and Iraq are [considered] morally dubious if not outright illegal precisely because Britain and America behaved as nation states acting in their national interest. And we’re not meant to do that anymore.

The cultural relativism of the dopier university campuses is to be applied globally.

That suits the enemy just fine.”

Highly Recommended non-horror shows: The new Ricochet podcasts with Mark Steyn, Rob Long and a cast of millions.

Also Kathy Shaidle’s new Talk Radio Watch column. Good stuff!

“I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”–John Adams, Letter to Abigail Adams (May 12, 1780)

“Have you ever found in history, one single example of a Nation thoroughly corrupted that was afterwards restored to virtue?… And without virtue, there can be no political liberty… Will you tell me how to prevent riches from becoming the effects of temperance and industry? Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly?”–John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, (December 21, 1819)

Victor Davis Hanson takes a Roman Holiday:

What made American culture boom through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were traditional American values like the Protestant work ethic, family thrift, limited and stable government, equality of opportunity rather than result, lower taxes, personal freedom, opportunity for advancement and profit, and faith in American exceptionalism. …

Our youth in schools are not so excited by the notion of creating 100 new nuclear power plants, creating new mountain reservoirs, building new railroads and highways, or eager to rebuild the steel industry, or dreaming of increasing food production or eager to mine more ores. Instead, the emphasis in our schools is more on race/class/gender engineering, regulation, redistribution, etc, all of which in classical terms is not necessarily wealth creation. …

We spend $45,000 to incarcerate the felon in California, to meet utopian court-ordered mandates. As imperial Romans, we are felt to be owed a standard of living, even as our own daily habits would no longer necessarily translate into such largess, even as those on the periphery have learned what made America so wealthy from 1950 to 1990. …

Many of us try to copy our grandparents and parents whose values and work ethic we increasingly eulogize. But against all that is that Roman notion of luxus, untold wealth and leisure that we see juxtaposed with shrill cries and accusations that we are too poor, exploited, and in need of someone else’s income. The wealthier we become, the louder and angrier we become that we are not even more wealthy. …

In short, what ruined Rome in the West? Lots of things. But clearly the pernicious effects of affluence and laxity warped Roman sensibility and created a culture of entitlement that was not justified by revenues or the creation of actual commensurate wealth — and the resulting debits, inflation, debased currency, and gradual state impoverishment gave the far more vulnerable Western Empire far less margin of error when barbarians arrived…

We could balance our budget tomorrow without a great deal of sacrifice; we could eliminate 10% worth of government spending that is not essential; we could create our own energy with massive nuclear power investment, and more extraction of gas, oil, and coal. We could instill a tragic rather than therapeutic world view that would mean more responsibilities rather than endlessly more rights. We could do this all right — but too many feel such medicine is worse than the malady, and so we probably won’t and can’t. An enjoyable slow decline is apparently preferable to a short, but painful rethinking and rebirth.

Decline the Decline.

REAL ESTATE-ISM
“The president’s reality problem”, Rich Lowry:

Obama came to office under fundamental misapprehensions that hamper him still. It’s not true that all that was keeping the Israelis and Palestinians apart was the lack of US engagement, or that the Iranians were amenable to getting talked out of their nuclear program, or that Guantanamo Bay was a pointless contrivance.

Nor is it true that government is a sustainable source of economic growth, or a more efficient allocator of capital than the market. This is why Obama’s stimulus program — inevitably, a dog’s breakfast of politically driven priorities — is such a shambles that his aides never utter the word “stimulus” anymore. It is on to the next program, a nearly $100 billion “jobs” bill that reflects the touching belief that to work as intended a program only has to be named appropriately.

What I Saw at the Tea Party Convention By GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS

Nashville, Tenn.

There were promises of transparency and of a new kind of collaborative politics where establishment figures listened to ordinary Americans. We were going to see net spending cuts, tax cuts for nearly all Americans, an end to earmarks, legislation posted online for the public to review before it is signed into law, and a line-by-line review of the federal budget to remove wasteful programs.

These weren’t the tea-party platforms I heard discussed in Nashville last weekend. They were the campaign promises of Barack Obama in 2008.

Oh.

That’s good.

Very good.

I only just realized that I inadvertently forgot to include a link to Mike Alexander in this post, so I figger this is as good a place as any to offer an apology for that error, seeing as how we’re kind of continuing the sorry Warmal Coldening-scam saga here:

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

• Data for vital ‘hockey stick graph’ has gone missing
• There has been no global warming since 1995
• Warming periods have happened before – but NOT due to man-made changes

…Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

Alas, this confession won’t shake the cultish dedication of the AGW religious faithful. Even this besmirched, corrupt priest still clings to his blind faith — demonstrating yet again the power of religious delusion.

I suppose we should all just be thankful that these particular fanatics haven’t inspired any suicide bombers. Yet.

Update! Boy, even an initially small chink sure can let in a lot of sunlight, can’t it?

Any of you AGW hysterics beginning to feel like complete idiots yet? Or is reality going to have to pulp your empty heads completely before you’ll admit you’ve been had?

“Trust science. By this we mean a true science, based on objectively established criteria and agreed foundations, with a rational methodology and mature criteria of proof – not the multitude of pseudo-sciences which, as we have seen, have marked characteristics which can easily be detected and exposed. Science, properly defined, is an essential part of civilization. To be anti-science is not the mark of a civilized human being, or of a friend of humanity. Given the right safeguards and standards, the progress of science constitutes our best hope for the future, and anyone who denies this proposition is an enemy of science.”–Paul Johnson, “Ten Pillars of Society”

Via Hot Air, the DNC’s Howard Dean:

“One of the most disturbing things about the Republican Party over the last couple of decades is that they just don’t believe in science any more. And that is not an approach that is likely to generate any kind of creative thinking. …People who use snowstorms as an example of why global warming doesn’t exist don’t understand the science and they don’t care.”

You mean using a single weather event like Hurricane Katrina? Not only did Democrats blame the storm on global warming, they blamed it for Blackhawk Down!

We only began to mockingly cite storms as “proof” after years of this nonsense. Although the inevitable ice storm that follows every single Al Gore appearance is too settled to dismiss. The “debate” really is “over” on that.

Let’s start with the universally agreed-upon facts:

Dr. Dean is a doofus.

And he’s using “science” as a crutch. To him, science isn’t science, but merely something that “proves” all of his favorite policy preferences and attitudes. And attitudes are the opposite of science.

If you’re against everyone having their own nuclear weapons lab in their basement, are you “Anti-Science”?

Or have you instead just made a decision about the moral limits of applied science–just like those who oppose embryonic stem cell research?

California voters were told that if they only poured $3 billion down that rathole, it would take them to the Promised Land of jobs and cures. Turns out, it was bad ethics and bad science. And now they’re even more broke.

Let’s take Darwinism. Can science really tell you exactly what happened eons ago? Especially a science whose main talking point is about what is missing, i.e.; the Missing Link? As Chesterton put it:

They talk of searching for the habits and habitat of the Missing Link; as if one were to talk of being on friendly terms with the gap in a narrative or the hole in an argument, of taking a walk with a nonsequitur or dining with an undistributed middle.

The Other McCain:

We’re All ‘Bad Crazy’ Now

We note that, in announcing his parting of the ways with the Right, Johnson lumped “creationism” and ”climate change denialism” under the heading of “anti-science bad craziness,” suspiciously adjacent to “homophobic bigotry,” with all of these bad-crazy tendencies typified by the same personalities, including Sarah Palin and various figures of the Religious Right.

Hostility toward religion, and toward the traditional beliefs associated with religion, is a necessary correlation (if indeed it is not the origin) of fanatical Scientism. To deny the existence of God is to invalidate any supernatural authority in human affairs, which necessarily means that ultimate authority must reside in human hands. This all-encompassing human authority cannot be entrusted to religious people, as they do not accept the denial of God on which such authority is premised. So Christian conservatives like Sarah Palin and her supporters are viewed by the high priests of Scientism with a horror similar to what the mullahs of Iran reserve for the infidel.

What we are witnessing is therefore not actually an argument about what science has proven in regard to climate change or evolution or anything else. Rather, when we see defenders of the “consensus” seeking to employ government authority to impose policy based on claims of scientific expertise – while they insist that official recognition must be denied to skeptics who question such claims — we are witnessing a power-grab. Just as Lenin once made “All Power to the Soviets!” the slogan of the Bolsheviks, so now our own totalitarians cry, “All Power to the Scientists!”

Americans are instinctively suspicious of such tactics simply because these tactics express an anti-democratic impulse. Invoking the prestige of Science to carry an argument about public policy has the effect of disenfranchising everyone who is not a scientist.

Or, more to the point, a liberal.

Well, then how ’bout climate science? Mark Steyn:

Let Ian “Harry” Harris, who works in “climate scenario development and data manipulation” at the CRU, sum it up. Mr. Harris was attempting to duplicate previous results—i.e., to duplicate all that science that’s supposedly settled, and the questioning of which consigns you to the Climate Branch of the Flat Earth Society. How hard should it be to confirm settled science? After much cyber-gnashing of teeth, Harry throws in the towel:

“ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently—I have no memory of this at all—we’re not doing observed rain days! It’s all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I’m going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?

“OH F–K THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.”

Thus spake the Settled Scientist: “OH F–K THIS.” And on the basis of “OH F–K THIS” the world’s enlightened progressives will assemble at Copenhagen for the single greatest advance in punitive liberalism ever perpetrated on the developed world.

The anecdotal link between scientists and their government funding and prestige is fairly strong.

The link between liberals and their desire to use “science” to further their pre-existing preference for Mega-Government is even stronger.

But the scientific evidence for the Lost Freedom Theory, the result of a Government Big Enough to Think It Can Control the Weather, is proven, settled and repeatable.

Don’t be a Freedom-Denier.

If you want to clone, then clone. If you want to rule, then rule.

But quit calling your moral decisions and political policy preferences “science”.

You’re scaring the lab rats.

Reminds me of the slogan on an old HK shirt I have: “When lives are at stake, don’t compromise”:

The American people also support holding enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, a secure, off-shore military facility. U.S. taxpayers have already plunked down over $200 million to turn Gitmo into a state-of-the-art, Geneva Convention–compliant facility that even Obama administration officials concede is first-rate. There is no reason on earth to create a security problem inside our country when we have gone to Herculean lengths to create a perfect location outside our country.

The Left’s counter to this is the claim that Gitmo fuels terrorist recruitment. That is absurd, and, as I’ve said before, confuses a pretext with a cause. People in the Islamic world could not care less whether we are detaining Muslim terrorists based on civilian protocols or under the laws of war: They don’t know the difference. The Blind Sheikh’s disciples mass-murdered people in an attempt to extort his release despite the fact that he is in a nice civilian jail after having had his nice civilian trial. What offends many in the umma is that we are holding Muslim terrorists, period. They don’t care where.

The only people actually offended by Gitmo are leftists who regard it as a symbol of Bush-style counterterrorism. Those people are projecting their own obsessions onto our enemies. As is too often the case, Republican moderates are itching to placate these ideologues in order to show how they rise above the fray, reach across the aisle, and transcend all this partisan bickering. That is nuts.

We are winning on enemy combatants. We are winning on the fact that they should be treated like war prisoners and tried, if at all, by military commission. We are winning on the fact that they should not be Mirandized but should be detained without trial and interrogated as war prisoners. We are winning on the fact that Gitmo is a fine facility and a far better place to detain and try terrorists than any detention center in the United States. We are winning on these issues not because we are more politically savvy, but because our policies on these matters are the right ones.

There is no reason to compromise on this issue.

Can’t add a thing to that.

If the Repubs think there can be any compromise with the despotic liar, they’re fools:

Why hold such a meeting nearly a year into the health care debate? “Well,” he told Katie Couric, “I think that what I want to do is to look at the Republican ideas that are out there.”

This would seem to be a good, if grossly overdue, idea. Unfortunately, the prospects for a real back-and-forth exchange look bleak. Couric asked Obama if he’d be willing “to start at square one,” and he took pains not to answer. Subsequently, White House aides made it clear that the president would be bringing his own health care bill to the table. Then, the day after the president’s interview, his secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, stated that the president’s proposal wasn’t really conducive to being accepted in part or rejected in part. Sebelius said, “I think the president remains committed to the notion that we have to have a comprehensive approach, because the pieces of the puzzle are too closely tied to one another.” She added, “Pieces of the puzzle are necessarily tied together if you have a comprehensive approach.”

So if the president already has his own comprehensive bill in hand, and its interlocking pieces are not really subject to refinement, revision, or removal, one wonders exactly what Republicans’ role at the summit is. Is it to convince President Obama that they have a better plan, which he should therefore substitute in its entirety for his own? Sebelius offered another possibility, noting that the president is willing to “add various elements” to his bill. In other words, while his bill cannot be redesigned or made smaller, it can be made bigger—provided that the Republicans have what he thinks are good ideas to add.

This bizarre combination of claims is revelatory of the president’s outlook on politics. “Incremental gains” is a phrase foreign to his vocabulary, as is the notion of having Washington solve problems by getting out of the way and unleashing the initiative of individuals or communities. Rather, problems must be solved all at once, comprehensively, nationwide, from the top, by the federal government. This approach is largely divorced from practical considerations or, as Sebelius notes, from compromise. It is the approach of the theoretician, not the practitioner; of the academic, not the statesman; of one who prefers to decree or to gain acquiescence, rather than to negotiate or to persuade.

Obama is far more comfortable with such roles.

As President, Obama makes a damned good dictator. He wants the federal government involved in every last decision you make, from the major to the mundane. His approach is everything the Founders warned against, and despised. He is un-American to his very marrow. He is no friend of liberty; his “oath” to the Constitution was worse than hollow or meaningless; it was insidious, a deception. He is a tyrant.

When it comes to that if nothing else, those Democrat Socialists sure do get results, don’t they?

Vintage cool.  The benchmark.

Seriously – go to American Digest and check this out.

(And yes – the hat tip is to me.)

I’m just about speechless:

Going green will not be optional in Cambridge, Mass., if the Cambridge Climate Congress has its way. It will be mandatory.

There will be congestion pricing to reduce car travel. Curbside parking will be eliminated. There will be a carbon tax “of some kind,” not to mention taxes on plastic and paper bags. And the Massachusetts city, home of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will advocate vegetarianism and veganism, complete with “Meatless or Vegan Mondays.”

Those are just some of the proposals put forth by the Congress, which was created in May 2009 to respond to the “climate emergency” plaguing Cambridge. Once the Congress settles on its recommendations, they will submitted to the City Council.

“This emergency is created by the growth of local greenhouse gas emissions despite the urgent warnings of climate scientists that substantial reductions are needed in order to reduce the risk of disastrous changes to our climate,” the Climate Congress reported in proposals issued on Jan. 23.

And while you Cambridge ecoNazis are leading your docile little lemmings over the cliff, be sure to just ignore this inconvenient truth:

Dr. Phil Jones, the man at the center of the Climategate scandal, has for the first time admitted that the Medieval Warm Period could have been warmer than the present day, flying directly in the face of the stupid HockeyStick Graph that caused so much of the Climate panic in the first place.

…Here is why that is important. If there was a warmer Medieval Warm Period, then the current warming could be more likely due to natural variation, instead of CO2 and man-made, as the models don’t account for this earlier warmer condition. At the very least, the “certainty” and of doom and gloom warming predictions is overstated, as the world may have been warmer and the world didn’t end.

I CAN’T HEAR YOU I CAN’T HEAR YOU THE PSEUDOSCIENCE IS SETTLED TRALALALALA…

(Via JWF)

Dan explains:

Are you getting the picture? Because these are only a few of many faces that represent an image of the Tea Party movement the media seems willing, if not determined, to ignore.

“Determined” gets my vote. Because, as we all know, if they’re not liberals, they’re not “authentic.” The liberal media is there not to reveal the truth, but to suppress it whenever it rips the walls of their cozy cocoon asunder.

As Bill says (well, okay, he departed from the standard formulation of that old joke; sue me), their lips are moving:

During an interview on MSNBC Thursday morning, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs defended the Obama administration’s handling of Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Gibbs argued that the administration was right to treat Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant, instead of as an enemy combatant. “Just because you make somebody an enemy combatant [it] doesn’t make them talk,” Gibbs argued. He then pointed to an example from the Bush years to supposedly support his point.

“Jose Padilla was made an enemy combatant so that we could get him to talk,” Gibbs said. “And guess what happened when we made him an enemy combatant, he didn’t talk. He did talk when he was transferred back into a civilian court.”

President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, made the same point on Tuesday in an op-ed for USA Today. Brennan argued: “Terrorists such as Jose Padilla and Saleh al-Mari did not cooperate when transferred to military custody, which can harden one’s determination to resist cooperation.”

Brennan and Gibbs are wrong.

Or, to tell it more like it truly is, Brennan and Gibbs — and their filthy weasel boss — are lying. Hinderaker follows up:

Dishonesty has become the hallmark of the Obama administration. Obama and his cohorts know that most people have neither the time nor the inclination to research the truth of their public statements. Knowing, too, that the press is compliant, Obama believes that he and his subordinates can get away with just about any whopper they choose to tell.

Know it? They rely on it, and have since the very beginning. This is inarguably the most dishonest, devious regime in our history. Period. Which renders this not really off-topic at all:

In their heart of hearts, most Democrats think the solution to the nation’s budget problem is a massive tax increase; if they had succeeded on health care, some might have been willing to use that momentum to propose one. But in the current environment, with so much distaste for out-of-control government, the White House and congressional Democrats know full well that it would be complete political suicide for them to push a tax increase at this stage

Which brings us back to the president’s renewed interest in having Republicans share in, as he put it, “the burdens of governing.”

Unfortunately for him, he is now holding a very weak hand as he heads into discussions with his adversaries. His health-care program is so unpopular that Democrats themselves are walking away from it. He promised voters he wouldn’t raise taxes on the middle class, and his Democratic allies want to expand government, not contain or shrink it. So, unless he changes course, he is stuck with presiding over an unprecedented borrowing binge that threatens to cripple his administration.

To get out of this box, the president is belatedly trying to draw a larger number of Republicans into taking some of the blame for enacting controversial legislation.

More:

The format of the Feb. 25 summit has the feel of a quasi-debate, at least at the beginning. The president will give opening remarks, followed by remarks from a Republican leader and a Democratic leader, according to the letter.

The president will then moderate discussion on four topics: insurance reforms, cost containment, expanding coverage, and the impact health reform legislation will have on deficit reduction, the letter stated.

Obama as moderator? Are you fucking kidding me? The lying snake-in-the-grass — just about the only person in America, at this point, who has anything at all to gain from forcing his Big Takeover of the health-care system down our throats — the MODERATOR?

What the fucking fuck?!? And the Repubs are even considering running up to that football to take another shot at finally kicking it?

Hey, I have an idea: let’s sit down with al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the other Muslim terrorist groups and discuss peacefully resolving our differences at last. The discussions can be run by some wise and impartial soul like, oh, I dunno, KSM or bin Laden. Khameini and Ahmadinnerjacket can provide security.

If the Republicans go along with this charade — which, as ought to be disgustingly obvious, is a no-win situation for them no matter how it goes, or how well they handle themselves — they are fools. Simpletons. Morons. They’ll deserve all the pain the knife Obama is even now whetting up is going to inflict on them, when the Liar in Thief plunges it deep into their boneless backs.

This bum is punch-drunk and hanging off the ropes by his thumbs. Now ain’t the time for gullible Repubs to let him up for a breather, by retiring to his lair and letting him suck them into his statist schemes. No matter what self-serving lies Obama tells in the throes of desperation, he’s never been interested in real bipartisanship or Republican ideas for true reform, and is only calling for it now as a last resort. Now’s the time to keep kicking him in his empty head, until his lights finally go out for good. That means forcing the Democrat Socialists to try to ram through this boondoggle on their own, through whatever skullduggery they deem necessary — and then hang it around their necks in every campaign ad across the nation from now until Doomsday, whether they succeed or fail.

Saturday Steyn:

Strange. Not so long ago, car ads prioritized liberty. Your vehicle opened up new horizons: Gitcha motor running, head out on the highway, looking for adventure…To sell dull automobiles to people who lived in suburban cul de sacs, manufacturers showed them roaring round hairpin bends, deep into forests, splashing through rivers, across the desert plain, invariably coming to rest on the edge of a spectacular promontory on the roof of the world offering a dizzying view of half the planet. Freedom!

But now Audi flogs you its vehicles on the basis that it’s the most convenient way to submit to arbitrary state authority. Forty years ago, when they first began selling over here, it’s doubtful the company would have considered this either a helpful image for a German car manufacturer or a viable pitch to the American male.

But times change. As Jonah Goldberg pointed out, all the men in the Audi ad are the usual befuddled effete new-male eunuchs that infest all the other commercials. The sort of milksop who’ll buy the TDI and then, when the Green Police change their regulatory requirements six weeks later, obediently take it back to the shop and pay however many thousand bucks to have it brought it into compliance with whatever the whimsical tyrant’s emissions regime requires this month.

For an explanation of the “My Way” reference, you’ll just have to read the rest, pal.

STOP THE STINK!

“[T]he wildest hippie and the sternest member of the Politburo shared the same daydream, the daydream that underlies all Marxism: that a thing might be somehow worth other than what people will give for it. This is just not true. And any system that bases itself on such a will-o’-the-wisp is bound to fail. Communes don’t work. Cuba doesn’t either.”–P.J. O’Rourke

“The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and revamped education system then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so someone else can have more.”–Michelle Obama

Stink-stopper Steyn to Glenn Beck:

Yeah, I think she’s a conventional university socialist. And you’re right, I give enough of my pie to the federal government, and they waste most of that pie. So, when she’s talking about universal health care and revamping and reforming education, by any reasonable measure, American education is overfunded.

Put simply, the Obamas believe that some people have too much health care (and too much education) and government must take it from them and give it to the politically-favored. Same with the “Caddy”-tax; some people just have too much insurance, so government must take it from them and give it to the politically-favored–with an exemption for another politically-favored group, the unions, of course.

Michelle Malkin:

Former President Bill Clinton was rushed to the hospital for a heart condition and has reportedly received a stent. Best wishes for the former president’s recovery.

Now, a timely reminder: Stents don’t grow on trees. They were not created, developed, marketed, or sold by government bureaucrats and lawmakers. One of the nation’s top stent manufacturers, Boston Scientific, has weighed in on the Democrats’ proposed massive taxes on medical device makers:

Boston Scientific Corp (BSX.N) warned on Tuesday that a proposed tax in the U.S. health care reform bill that cleared the Senate Finance Committee last week could have serious consequences for the company, including job losses.

“The bill that came out of the committee last week makes absolutely no sense and would be very damaging to Boston Scientific, and the medical device industry as a whole,” Boston Scientific Chief Executive Ray Elliott said during a post-earnings conference call.

“In a nutshell, it would raise costs and lead to significant job losses. It does not address the quality of care but the political scorecard of savings.”

Elliott said that the company’s tax liability would be doubled, adding $150 million to $200 million a year, and it would be forced to make substantial cuts in research and development spending, which could result in 1,000 to 2,000 jobs being lost at Boston Scientific.

…“1,000 to 2,000 jobs”. Do we have ‘too many’ jobs, too?

Glenn Reynolds explained all the ways medical devices–and the freedom that produces them–helped his family:

The normal critique of socialized medicine is to point out that people have to wait a long time for these kinds of treatments in places like Britain. And that’s certainly a valid critique. I’m sure my mom and daughter would still be waiting for their treatments, while my father and wife would probably be dead.

The key point, though, is that these treatments didn’t just come out out of the blue. They were developed by drug companies and device makers who thought they had a good market for things that would make people feel better.

But under a national healthcare plan, the “market” will consist of whatever the bureaucrats are willing to buy. That means treatment for politically stylish diseases will get some money, but otherwise the main concern will be cost-control. More treatments, to bureaucrats, mean more costs.

It doesn’t always work that way, of course. The rise of proton-pump inhibitors like Nexium or Prilosec has made ulcer surgery a thing of the past. But to the bureaucratic mindset, those pills are a cost, and ulcer-surgery expenses can be dealt with by rationing. Let ‘em eat Maalox while they wait.

As someone in the business, Tigerhawk has been all over this issue:

We admit, we’re looking forward to the “I have breast implants, and I vote” bumper stickers.

In the end, the Democratic elite are using the excuse of health care reform to impose their own sense of aesthetics on American life.

Any way you look at it, the proposed tax is a calculated effort to divert capital from the medical technology industry to other uses in the economy, because new medical technology drives costs that are now going to be assumed by the government (or at least will be if the Senate leadership gets its way). Of course, innovative medtech also extends and saves lives, and makes them more comfortable and more productive. Which is, after all, the point of medicine.

* The tax will raise health care costs. It would be assessed against thousands of products ranging from eyeglasses to stethoscopes to a hospital beds to artificial heart valves to advanced diagnostic equipment. Such a tax would in turn increase costs for consumers, physician practices, hospitals, and patients.. While on paper it may help balance a Congressional Budget Office scorecard, the real effect will be to raise health care costs-exactly the opposite of a key goal of health reform.

* This tax is counterproductive and burdensome for patients. Much of this $40 billion tax will end up being passed on to patients, especially patients who are the sickest and need complex, high cost technology. It does not make sense to finance health reform by taxing the countless products necessary to treat every patient who walks through the doors of a physician’s office, hospital, or nursing home. Bearing the burden of illness is tough enough on patients and their families; but to financially penalize patients for their efforts to get better seems particularly wrong.

Not to mention his hilarious and cutting parody of the Jack Nicholson rant from “A Few Good Men”:

Senator, we live in a world that has patients, and those patients have to be treated with technology. Who’s gonna invent, develop it, and build it? You, Senator Sanders? You, Senator Reid? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for high health care costs, and you curse new medical technology. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That new medical technology, while expensive, saves lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about in front of cameras or in committee hearings, you want me on that production line, you need me on that production line. We use words like innovation, quality, and safety. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent helping injured people. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and walks by virtue of the very medical technology that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a biomedical engineering degree, and get to work inventing better medical devices. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to.

Imposing a huge new tax on medical devices in order to provide medical devices is crazy. Imposing a huge new tax on insurance in order to provide insurance is nuts. It would be like trying to feed people by imposing a grocery tax. Or employ people by a new tax on jobs–which this is also! This is “destroy the village to save the village”-territory.

It would be like trying to house people by passing a huge new tax on mortgages, which is essentially what the government did by forcing lenders to make NINJA loans: no income, no job, no assets– just Other Peoples’ Money. The result: the Socialized Mortgage Meltdown.

Shall we have a Socialized Medicine Meltdown, too?

Hey, taxers; leave those stents alone!

That’s what it amounts to in the end. Well, unless you want to make the argument that manipulating the political system to protect union boodling and power-buying at the expense of educating children isn’t evil, but is merely run-of-the-mill piggish self-interest instead:

On the final day of the National Education Association’s convention last summer, its outgoing general counsel, Bob Chanin, gave a speech for the ages. After sharing fond recollections of his 41 years as the NEA’s top lawyer, he switched gears and started lobbing grenades at “conservative and right-wing bastards,” including Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. The NEA and its affiliates, by contrast, were “the nation’s leading advocates for public education and the type of liberal social and economic agenda that these groups find objectionable.” Chanin’s glowing portrait of the NEA was wildly wrong, of course, but so was his characterization of the union’s opponents. People of all political stripes—not just right-wing “bastards”—are starting to realize that the single biggest impediment to education reform is the NEA itself.

Take the nation’s 4,000 charter schools—public schools that operate with less red tape, fewer suffocating union rules, and a higher percentage of minorities and poor students than regular public schools do. In California, 12 of the top 15 public schools are charters, including three in Oakland that cater to exceptionally poor children. Los Angeles charters’ median score on California’s Academic Performance Index was 728 in 2008, compared with 663 for regular public schools.

Who are the “right-wing bastards” who support charter schools? Well, there’s Los Angeles’s liberal-leaning school board, which looked at its large number of failing schools and voted 6–1 to turn 200 of the lowest performers into charters. There’s Steve Barr, a card-carrying Democrat who served in the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis and who now operates 17 successful Green Dot charter schools in L.A. And don’t forget Democrats for Education Reform, a political action committee that supports charters and that says, in its statement of principles, that American public schools, “once viewed romantically as avenues of opportunity for all, have become captive to powerful, entrenched interests that too often put the demands of adults before the educational needs of children.”

“Entrenched interests” is a thinly veiled reference, of course, to teachers’ unions like the NEA, whose position on charter schools is very clear. According to a resolution adopted at last year’s convention, “NEA shall oppose any initiative to greatly expand the growth of charter schools”—though “by no means should this effort conflict with the ongoing and necessary work of organizing charter school teachers.” Unfortunately, this “necessary” work hasn’t helped students. A study of charter schools in Boston by Harvard economist Tom Kane found that “students accepted by lottery at independently operated charter schools significantly outperformed students who lost the lottery and returned to district schools. But students accepted by lottery at charters run by the school district with unionized teachers experienced no benefit.”

Believe it or not, it actually gets worse from there. Meanwhile, another ingot of unalloyed common-sense brilliance from Doc Zero along those same lines:

The National Education Association is the largest union in America, and one of its most powerful political forces, donating millions to Democrat candidates and spending millions more in lobbying…including over a million dollars in donations to the criminal organization ACORN over the last two years. The NEA also provides invaluable political indoctrination, inserting propaganda for statist causes like global warming into education curricula. In exchange, the Democrats are universally sworn to oppose vouchers and school privatization, no matter how much it hurts other constituencies they profess to care about.  There are many fine teachers among the ranks of the NEA, but their individual merits vanish beneath the vast corruption of the union establishment.

…These events are entirely predictable, because where the supply of votes and political cash from unions meets the demand from Big Government, a transaction is bound to occur. In a centralized state, the power of a political collective is vastly greater than individuals, or most corporations. Plenty of big companies spend cash buying political influence, producing all manner of mischief…but they can’t deliver the kind of packaged voting power that a labor union or racial grievance organization can provide, because they cannot compel – or even encourage – their employees to vote a certain way. The NEA and AFSCME have a lot more than dollars to spend in the political marketplace.

This kind of thing is inevitable, as long as we allow political control over industry, and place huge amounts of tax money in the hands of our government. The depth of corruption can be measured with the value of a congressional vote…or the presidential seal. Despite its overwhelming presence in every aspect of our daily lives, Big Government acquires many characteristics of anarchy, in which the diminishing resources of a moribund economy become the spoils for feuding warlords.

And voila, here we all are: stuck with an incompetent, dysfunctional, hideously expensive, and bureaucratically bloated national “education” establishment that can be neither reformed nor removed. When it comes to corruption, economic enfeeblement, and raw liberal-fascist tyranny, the old crime-novel admonishment to cherchez la femme should be updated to a more modern refrain: look for the union label.

FROM THE BALCONIES OF HEAVEN

“Senator, I want to make it plain, this. No, as I say, we reserve the right of dissent, but when that dissent takes the form of actions that actually aid the enemy, the enemy that is engaged in killing our forces, such as avoiding the draft, refusing service, blocking troop trains and shipments of munitions as we’ve had here in this country by some demonstrators, this is going beyond the dissent that is provided in our present governmental system, whereby any American can stand up, protest, can convey his feelings to the legislature or to the duly organized government in an effort to get the government to change its course; but again, it must stop short of lending comfort and aid to an enemy that is presently engaged in forceful activities against our country.”–Ronald Reagan, debating Bobby Kennedy

“Who the f—- got me into this?”–Bobby Kennedy, after debating Ronald Reagan

Paul Kengor:

On May 15, 1967, there was a fascinating debate between California’s new Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, and New York’s new Democratic senator, Robert F. Kennedy. … It was produced by later 60 Minutes brainchild Don Hewitt and hosted by CBS News correspondent Charles Collingwood. The debate was watched by a huge audience: 15 million Americans.

There was total agreement, including among media sources who revered Bobby Kennedy, from the San Francisco Chronicle to Newsweek, that Reagan overwhelmingly won the debate. “To those unfamiliar with Reagan’s big-league savvy,” reported Newsweek, “the ease with which he fielded questions about Vietnam may have come as a revelation.” Newsweek judged that “political rookie Reagan … left old campaigner Kennedy blinking when the session ended.” Not having a crystal ball into the tragic year ahead for Kennedy, Newsweek pondered whether the debate might be a “dry run” for a future set of “Great Debates” between these two promising presidential aspirants.

The late historian David Halberstam acknowledged that “the general consensus” was that “Reagan … destroyed him.” Lou Cannon, in a 1969 book on Reagan and California assemblyman Jesse Unruh, agreed that “Reagan clearly bested Kennedy.” Another of Reagan’s first biographers, Joseph Lewis, recorded that the “tanned and relaxed” Reagan “talked easily and precisely without a hint of uncertainty or hostility,” and “deflated” the “anguished” Kennedy, who “gulped in restrained agony” when answering questions. Kennedy, said Lewis, “looked as if he had stumbled into a minefield.” …

Reagan performed so well that his presidential boosters sought to use clips from the debate during the 1968 Oregon presidential primary, and requested a copy from CBS. Kennedy, however, reportedly did not want the video to be made available; CBS, naturally, acceded to his request. Kennedy himself conceded defeat to Reagan, telling his aides after the debate to never again put him on the same stage with “that son-of-a-bitch.” Kennedy was heard to ask immediately after the debate, “Who the f—- got me into this?” Frank Mankiewitz was that aide, as Kennedy was quick to remind him a few weeks later: “You’re the guy who got me into that Reagan thing.”

* ITEM: Reading the writing upon the wall, or perhaps the tea leaves on the harbor, Rep. Patrick Kennedy announced he will not seek re-election, only days after declaring Sen. Scott Brown’s victorious candidacy for the “Kennedy seat” a “joke”.

* ITEM: Failed ballet dancer Ron Reagan, Junior repeats the Pelosi Slur, smearing millions of decent Americans as Hitler-ites for participating in Tea Parties. Junior claims his father would disapprove of Tea Partiers, even though they espouse the limited government principles he spent his whole adult life defending and promoting.

Michael Reagan answers:

“Unlike my brother, I campaigned with and for my father in 1976 and in 1980 — and I feel more qualified to say what he would and would not have supported. He would be applauding the grassroots organization of this country and Sarah Palin for making herself available to elect conservative candidates.”

Clearly, the spirit of Reagan is with these tea-partiers, patriots and everyday people.

I don’t think it’s stretching it too far to give Ronnie some credit for sending Patches packing.

After all, beating Kennedys had gotten to be an old habit with Ronnie.

Such is the power of timeless Reagan principles that it continues…even to this very day!

UPDATE: “Barely-related”; Krauthammer:

When John F. Kennedy pledged to go to the moon, he meant it. He had an intense personal commitment to the enterprise. He delivered speeches remembered to this day. He dedicated astronomical sums to make it happen.

At the peak of the Apollo program, NASA was consuming almost 4 percent of the federal budget, which in terms of the 2011 budget is about $150 billion. Today the manned space program will die for want of $3 billion a year — 1/300th of last year’s stimulus package with its endless make-work projects that will leave not a trace on the national consciousness.

As for President Obama’s commitment to beyond-lunar space: Has he given a single speech, devoted an iota of political capital to it?

Obama’s NASA budget perfectly captures the difference in spirit between Kennedy’s liberalism and Obama’s. Kennedy’s was an expansive, bold, outward-looking summons. Obama’s is a constricted, inward-looking call to retreat.

Fifty years ago, Kennedy opened the New Frontier. Obama has just shut it.

He can’t slip the surly bonds of Chicago.

Good line here, referring to the mid/late-70s Buick Centuryand their mighty — as in, mighty weak — V6’s:

First of all, it only put out a measly 110 horsepower–four more than my wife’s ‘97 Civic!–which wouldn’t be too bad except that it was sitting in nearly two tons of family car. You didn’t check your watch to get a 0-60 time, you checked your calendar.

Back when I was a teenager (WAAAY back), my grandma had one of these pieces o’ crap, and I ended up driving her around in it a good bit. So I can testify to the one hundred percent unexaggerated accuracy and non-hyperbole of that statement, and this one:

Story: I was heading back west from Idaho to Seattle on the flat, straight interstate of eastern Washington and the car would not go above about 57 mph. Was there a problem with the engine? A mysterious loss of power? Bad vacuum seals? No, there was a stiff headwind. Forget about going uphill with the accelerator pedal off of the floor.

No foolin’; off of the floor, and through the firewall. Hey, there’s a reason I’m a blue-oval man, guys.

Well, whaddya know. I suppose we’ll be seeing measures of OUTRAGEOUSLY OUTRAGED OUTRAGE!! and derision from the Left roughly equal to that expressed so far over Handnotegate, when they find out liberal hero Diane Feinstein did the same thing back in 1990, no?

Of course, it doesn’t prove she’s a moron, anymore than it does with Palin. Feinstein was doing it to cheat during a debate, so it merely proves she’s a Democrat. For proof she’s a moron, all we have is…absolutely everything else she says or does.

Update! Creepshow indeed.

I tried my first Rye Whiskey tonight, Old Overholt.  If anyone knows some other good brands they like, put me some knowledge in the comments.  And don’t even bother with Ri.  I can fairly sense the pretentious nonsense rolling off those bottles in waves, and I’ll be damned if I pay $47.00 for 750ml just to look good.

FRANK CHURCH, THAT IS

Larrey Anderson:

[W]hen I a teenager, I thought Frank Church walked on water.

By accident — or maybe it was fate — my opinion of the senator from the great state of Idaho, and of his politics, started to change. I heard Frank Church deliver two speeches in two different parts of Idaho. (This would have been in the summer of 1974. I had returned to Idaho from Cambridge for the summer and was working on some political campaigns.)

Senator Church’s first speech was given early in the day at a college in liberal northern Idaho. He banged on the podium and, in his stentorian voice, promised the (mostly progressive) audience that he would do whatever it took to protect the newly granted woman’s right to choose under Roe v. Wade. The crowd (mostly young college students and their professors) went wild.

The second speech was presented in conservative (and mostly Mormon) eastern Idaho. Instead of banging on a podium, Church clutched the edges of the dais. Tears swelled in his eyes as he told the audience how precious were the lives of the unborn. The audience was emotionally enthralled by his oration.

There was a reporter who attended both speeches with me. He was a liberal friend and confidant of mine. The reporter seemed unperturbed by (and unaware of) the glaring inconsistency in Church’s speeches and the senator’s “stand” (whatever it was) on abortion.

“Aren’t you going to write about what Church said?” I asked the reporter.

“Said about what?” he responded.

“About abortion. Frank was all ‘rah, rah’ for Roe v. Wade this morning. Now he is crying about dead babies.”

“So?”

“So he is lying.”

The reporter thought for a moment before he replied. “He’s not lying. He’s a politician. He is telling his audience what they want to hear. Do you understand how much this man has done for Idaho? For hell’s sake, he got you into Harvard.”

“Sounds like lying to me,” I shot back.

“You need to spend more time around politicians.”

Sure enough, not one Idaho newspaper picked up on the discrepancy in the two speeches. As far as the media was concerned, Frank Church was too big to fail.

Mr. Anderson goes on to explain how Church gutted our intelligence capabilities, once again a popular idea in liberal circles. By leaking secrets to the Times, Church helped get many of our foreign informants arrested and killed. He continued to play two-faced con-games on voters until it finally caught up with him:

Because of the duplicity of Senator Church (and a willingly protective media), it took Idahoans twenty-four long years to figure out the real Frank Church and finally dump him.

We now have the internet and the “new media.” Politicians like Frank Church have no place to run and hide and lie. Are you listening, Ben Nelson, Harry Reid, Mary Landrieu, and Blanche Lincoln?

In this regard, things weren’t better When I Was a Kid(tm.)

You betcha — and this is it:

Six days ago, the big news out of Texas was that Tea Party activist and gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina came within the margin of error with Kay Bailey Hutchison, who barely clung to second place against incumbent Rick Perry. Today, Glenn Beck suffers heartbreak when Medina more or less cops to being a 9/11 Truther as well as a “constitutional conservative” candidate. “I think some very good questions raised have been raised in that regard,” Medina replies when Beck asks whether she believes that the American government was in any way involved in bringing down the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. Medina says she won’t take a position on a question where “good questions have been raised and haven’t been answered,” even though they have been answered for years. Beck and the others in his studio can’t quite believe their ears…

This is the same way Ron Paul has played footsie with the Truthers for the last few years as well, and it’s not uncommon among Paul followers. Given the fact that conservatives demanded that Barack Obama remove Van Jones for essentially saying the same thing — something Beck doesn’t hesitate to point out — shouldn’t conservatives rebuke Medina for the same thing?

Damned right we should. There simply is no room in any sane, serious political movement for ignoramuses and nutjobs who are so mired in paranoia as to cling to the moronic shibboleths of Trutherism — or for conniving sleazebags who mince around the edges of it in order to appease a group of people who aren’t worth a moment’s consideration in the first place. In fact, the second group, no matter their undoubtedly negligible numbers, is probably worse than the first.

With friends like these, the Tea Partiers would be their own worst enemies. Medina might have some good ideas otherwise — just as Ron Paul does — but 9/11 Trutherism is or at least ought to be a deal-breaker. Period. Anyone plumping for this offensive, sleazy, and just plain stupid crap, in any way, shape, or form, ought to be not just ignored, but outright ostracized.

This woman just said a truly outlandish, outrageous, heinous thing — one that no amount of backpedaling, rationalizing, or “clarification” can erase. Texas can do better. So can the Tea Partiers. In truth, so can damned near anybody.

HOW SHOULD I KNOW?

Ask Maxwell, Chief.

…’cos if we were really smart, we would have kept those comic books, held on to those baseball cards, stored those old cars in the garage and attended the Ralph J. Kramden $chool of Bus-Driving.

Oh, well–you live and you learn. Hopefully.

Ed Driscoll:

Michael Barone asks the 3.8 trillion dollar question: “How could such smart people do so many stupid things?”

Mr. Barone:

[T]he cultural issues that had occupied so much of the political landscape for a dozen years had been eclipsed in importance by the financial crisis and the deepening recession.

So Obama was faced with a fundamental choice. He could either chart a bipartisan course in response to the economic emergency, or he could try to expand government to Western European magnitude as Democratic congressional leaders, elected for years in monopartisan districts, had long wished to do.

The former community organizer and Chicago pol chose the latter course.

Dr. Zero diagnoses thusly:

In a socialist economy, their best-case scenario is modest growth and profits, since windfall success will turn them into political targets. The worst-case scenario is economic collapse brought about by Obama’s manifestly incompetent team, and his primitive wealth-destroying ideology. …

Static theories of redistribution and “social justice” never account for the changes in behavior they produce. Money given or taken today produces a response tomorrow, which can be very different from the desired goal of social engineers. …

No one mourns the investments that weren’t made, technologies that weren’t developed, or new markets that weren’t opened. The Left not only ignores the future, it proceeds as if we don’t have one… or as though it’s so inescapably awful that the only moral course of action is spreading the misery, so it will be easier to endure. …[T]heir economic theories are like a school of physics that assumes nothing in the universe will ever move.

Of course, even an Einstien could say stupid stuff sometimes:

“To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.”

Prof. Einstein fled the Third Reich like a drowning rat seeking daylight, which was smart–but that’s no reason to besmirch those Jews who fought back in the Polish ghetto as “ordinary murderers”. This is armchair moral equivalence, from the safety of the suburbs. (Safety provided by 82nd Airborne as a Public Service.)

Michael Rubin, on some pretty smart fellers:

Here’s the conclusion from a CIA assessment entitled “The Costs of Soviet Involvement in Afghanistan,” from February 1987:

“Despite the increasing trends, however, the economic costs resulting from these operational developments are unlikely, in our view, to be of sufficient magnitude to constitute a significant counterweight to the political and security implications the Soviets would attach to withdrawal under circumstances that could be seen as a defeat. Indeed, we believe the recent rising trend in economic cost is more a reflection of determination in Moscow to counter a better armed insurgency and this shows continued willingness to incur whatever burden is necessary.”

So there you have it. Right before the Soviets decided to withdraw, the CIA concluded that nothing could force the Soviets to withdraw. …a natural conclusion from this document — perhaps the one which the Agency was pushing — was that we could not win by sponsoring insurgency in Afghanistan; perhaps diplomacy would be better. Men like Charlie Wilson may have been in the minority, but fortunately they were in the right place at the right time and had a president serving over them like Ronald Reagan.

As CIA-man Max Baer noted, Washington then blew it, and could not send him Pashtun translators to debrief the refugees. But they did offer to send him a four-person sexual-harassment team. Even I know that’s not smart. And worse, under Affirmative Ignorance, they actively wanted to not know who was behind so many terrorist bombings; that would be “Iran”.

Scientists are smart, right? You’ve heard of “blinded by science”–but don’t even get me started on “science by the blinded”.

This guy was pretty smart for a longshoreman:

“Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.”–Eric Hoffer, ‘The True Believer’

Being called a nihilist means nothing to me. heh.

Hadley Arkes explains how Reagan’s mind, like Lincoln’s before him, naturally sought out and went down paths trod by more classically-trained thinkers.

Mac Owens from 2001:

The key to Mr. Reagan’s success as president is to be found in a famous 1953 essay by the British philosopher, Sir Isaiah Berlin. In that essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Sir Isaiah categorized writers, thinkers, and human beings in general according to the dictum of the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Ronald Reagan was clearly a hedgehog.

The one big thing that Mr. Reagan knew was that the United States was a fundamentally decent regime that constituted the only hope for freedom and prosperity in the modern world. He knew that the “idea” of America was undermined at home by a shift away from individual effort and liberty to reliance on the government and that it was undermined abroad by ideology of communism. The focus of his presidency was to unfetter America. The position of the United States today is a tribute to his success.

The Creased-Pants Crowd of the day marveled at Reagan: “He knows so little and accomplishes so much.”

And now we have in our current “professorial” president, a “Reagan-in-Reverse”:

He knows so much and accomplishes so little.

“One of the great achievements of this administration.” Yeah, one of so, SO many. Do these wormy, loathsome cocksuckers have any shame at all?

And again, it ain’t misunderstanding, it’s misrepresentation:

The Tea Party movement is not “anti-tax.” It is against confiscatory taxes, outlandish taxes, excessive taxes – choose your adjective. But this “anti-tax” nonsense is the same kind of obnoxious slander as calling people who favor strong borders “anti-immigration.”

The Tea Party movement is not driven by social conservatism. That doesn’t mean you won’t find plenty of tea partiers who are devout advocates of protecting the unborn and traditional marriage – it’s just that the Tea Party engine is driven first and foremost by a desire to return government to its proper constitutional limits and run it with a lot less money. Anyone driven by that passion is welcome in any roomful of tea partiers, no matter what views they may hold about God and gays.

That is, by the way, part of why the movement is so strong. If it were to adopt some litmus tests for admittedly important social issues, it would see its ranks dwindle mightily. Electing people to bring back fiscal sanity in 2010 and 2012 will require the help of millions of voters who may be centrist, libertarian or even socially liberal. How do you think Scott Brown won in Massachusetts?

Finally, the Tea Party movement is not some subculture of bug-eyed lunatics. Any political movement is going to have some characters ranging from colorful to occasionally unhinged, but the insulting tone of much of the coverage of the movement would have you believe that these are fringe extremists who could snap at any moment.

Well, the truth is, they have snapped already. The sound we are hearing is the proverbial camel’s back breaking after years of reckless spending, punitive taxation and usurpations of liberty that have crippled every citizen’s opportunity to enjoy the full promise of what America is supposed to be about: freedom and opportunity, with the least government necessary to maintain an ordered society.

This is as good an explanation as I’ve seen yet, and anybody who still doesn’t get it after reading it with anything like an open mind is doing it on purpose. Read it all.