Monthly Archives: July 2010

Lack of resolve begets lack of resolve in Afghanistan

Those who believe that the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan has a good chance to succeed argue, quite plausibly, that we have an overriding advantage — the fact that most Afghans dislike the Taliban and certainly don’t want to be ruled by them. This advantage creates the possibility that ordinary Afghans will rise up and assist us in expelling the Taliban from their towns and villages. This sort of an »

Waiting for Lefty

William Jacobson has compiled an impressive list of apologies that are owed now that the left-wing blogosphere and Democratic media operatives have found the Religion of Context when it comes to Shirley Sherrod. We’re also still awaiting an apology (or corrrection, or clarification) from Matt Bai for his derogation of Tea Party protesters. Last week Bai wrote in the New York Times: The question of racism in the amorphous Tea »

The case against Elena Kagan

University of Colorado Law School Professor Paul Campos traces the bizarre ascent of Elena Kagan to the threshold of the Supreme Court. Campos suggests that she was, to borrow the expression from Death of a Salesman, “well thought of,” or at least well enough thought of. See, for example, Campos’s account of Kagan’s relationship with the University of Chicago Law School. But why? Campos writes “that there is nothing extraordinary »

Rorschach Test

The Breitbart-NAACP-Vilsack-Sherrod affair has become a sort of political Rorschach test; reactions to it tell us more, perhaps, about the reactor than about the principals. David Frum, who as far as I know still calls himself a conservative, is a case in point. He thinks the episode demonstrates “the shame of conservative media.” By which he means, apparently, Andrew Breitbart and a handful of bloggers, that being about the extent »

The Great Divide

The current state of American politics can be summed up in this poll data, published today by Rasmussen Reports: 75% of Likely Voters prefer free markets over a government managed economy. Just 14% think a government managed economy is better while 11% are not sure. Well, one would hope so. But here is the kicker: America’s Political Class is far less enamored with the virtues of a free market. In »

Shirley Sherrod, behaving badly

The conventional wisdom on the Shirley Sherrod story is, I think, that everyone (Breitbart, the NAACP, and the Obama administration) behaved badly. I think it’s more accurate to say that these players acted less carefully than they should have. Who actually behaved badly? I think the NAACP members who got such a kick out of Ms. Sherrod’s account of discriminating (initially at least) against a white farmer behaved badly. And »

The magic number in the senate, Part Two

In a post called “The Magic Number in the Senate,” I considered the prospects for obtaining, via the November elections, a Senate with enough conservatives to deny the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority. I reckoned that this would require a net pick up of four conservative seats. Determining that magic number required me to assess which current Republican Senators can be expected usually to vote conservative. I thought that, roughly speaking, »

Palin-backed candidate fails to catch fire in Alaska

I wrote here about Sarah Palin’s intriguing decision to back Joe Miller’s challenge to Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski. Palin announced that decision in early June. Nearly two months later, and one month before Alaska’s Republican primary, Murkowski holds a 32 point lead (62-30) over Miller. The poll was conducted by the Alaska based survey firm Ivan Moore Research. According to Politico, this firm used to work for Democrats, but now »

Keith Olbermann — too much even for the Journolisters

In today’s edition of “As The Left Turns” (courtesy of the Daily Caller) we find members of the Journolist turning against MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. A blogger named Lindsay Beyerstein puts it this way: When we liberals were fighting for political survival after 9/11, it was important to be disciplined and to pick our internal battles very carefully. Now that the Democrats are in charge and progressivism is ascendent, we can »

2012 is the constraint

It’s more than three months away, but the lame duck Congress has become Topic A. John raised the issue last night, speculating that the Dems might use the lame duck session to pass the “cap-and-trade” legislation that Harry Reid put on ice yesterday. Charles Krauthammer adds card check and tax hikes to the mischief list. John wondered whether some Democrats might have “pangs of conscience about jamming through major, unpopular »

From Buckley to Breitbart

William Buckley achieved notoriety, if not celebrity, with the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951. The book was a succès de scandale. In it Buckley attacked the undergraduate education on offer at Yale for its hostility to Christianity and its adulation of collectivism; he also sought to dispel the indifference of Yale alumni to their supervisory responsibility. In 1955 Buckley founded National Review as the voice of »

More problems at the RNC

The Washington Post reports that the Republican National Committee has filed amended financial reports showing about $3 million in debt for April and May that was previously unreported. Failure to disclose debt is not uncommon, according to a campaign finance lawyer quoted by the Post. But the Post’s source adds that a failure to report a debt of this magnitude is a big deal. To make matters worse, RNC Treasurer »

Bye-Bye Cap and Trade?

The Democrats say they are giving up on cap and trade legislation, for the time being, at least: Senate Democrats pulled the plug on climate legislation Thursday, pushing the issue off into an uncertain future ahead of midterm elections where President Barack Obama’s party is girding for a drubbing. It is interesting that this is now taken as a given. Rather than a long-awaited measure capping greenhouse gases — or »

Culture of Corruption

In 2006, the Democrats made the Republican “culture of corruption” a central campaign theme, with some success. This was jarring inasmuch as the GOP has historically been the party of clean government. While the Democrats haven’t cornered the market on corruption, I don’t think any serious observer would question that they are its foremost practitioners. So, with the news that Charlie Rangel, former chairman of the House Ways and Means »

More From the JournoList Archives

The Daily Caller has obtained the archives of JournoList, a list serve consisting of several hundred liberal journalists and others. It has been publishing excerpts from the archives for the last week or so; the messages published so far confirm the worst stereotypes of liberal journalists as an auxiliary of the Democratic Party, and especially of the Barack Obama campaign. Today’s installment shows how liberal journalists coordinated their response to »

Lindsey Graham defers, but to whom?

Lindsey Graham (R-Wash Post) has duly received praise from “constituents” Dana Milbank and David Broder for deferring to the president’s nomination of Elena Kagan. But Graham was not willing to defer to the nomination of Jim Haynes to the Fourth Circuit of Appeals by President George W. Bush. Graham did not just refuse to vote to confirm Haynes; he acted to prevent Haynes from even getting an up-or-down vote. Graham’s »

The scandal that wasn’t

You will recall that we were instructed on a daily basis during the second term of President Bush’s administration that the politicization of justice is a very bad thing. Indeed, it was a scandal of epic proportions. The occasion for the instruction was President Bush’s replacement of eight United States Attorneys in 2006. It should have been tough to make a scandal of the replacement of United States Attorneys. They »