Category: Politics

Van Jones has resigned from the Obama Administration.  You know, if the guy had been a communist in the 50s or 60s, I might have been able to look past it.  People can grow, and accept different ideas.  But he was an avowed communist in the 1990s.  The 1990s!  After everyone knew it was a failure.  Murderous failure.

No, you sir have no place in the Government of the United States, and I’m glad you realized it, albeit belatedly.  The Obama Administration should be ashamed it to even allow him in his cabinet.

I agree with Clayton Cramer that the spread of HIV within the gay and bisexual communities is a serious problem, and is related to frequent changing of sexual partners.  Know what might help change gay culture to a safer, more monogamous one? Gay marriage. Just sayin’.

UPDATE: I should probably clarify I’m not all that serious about this line of argument.  It was more meant to be a lighthearted jab at Clayton.  I do support legislatively enacted same-sex marriages, but I don’t think there’s any right to one.  The state has the power to define marriage within the limits of the 14th Amendment, which has always allowed the law to treat sexes differently in some instances.

Jon Hekne’s reveals his concerns about WND’s influence are largely the same as mine:

Almost everybody seems to have a misconception about what I’m doing here. I have not called for a reader boycott of WorldNetDaily.  I don’t think that would do much good, anyway.  Like Alex Jones, Joseph Farah and WND will have readers; there’s a market for the bunker mentality and criticism only rallies them. (shrug) It’s not my goal to persuade the true believers.  If they didn’t reason their way into it, they probably won’t reason their way out of it.

What I have argued is that credible organizations on the Right should not be supporting or encouraging the fevered swamps. If they do, the Right should not support them.  Most coverage seems to have misunderstood this.

That’s pretty much my position too.  Others have taken it to a slight toward grassroots.  There’s also this article by Conor Friedersdorf that Jon links to in his post:

The right’s fringe problem at this moment in time is one that elites have created as much as any crazy fringe righty. Outfits … deliberately play on the worst impulses of the conservative base, stoking their paranoia and misleading them about reality, all for the sake of bigger audiences and greater revenues.

This is a force I’ve spend a great deal of electrons speaking out against in the gun rights movement, so I am quite sympathetic to Henke’s sentiments on this issue.  The left has a specific advantage on this, because the media is more willing to bury the left’s lunatic fringe, whereas the cameras and microphones always seem to find ours.  As Mark Steyn pointed out at The Corner:

Er, okay. But the left is in power, and it’s got Van Jones the Truther in the White House. Which isn’t exactly the “fringe”. More of a lunatic mainstream, isn’t it? Which may be why The New York Times et al have decided there’s no story.

The MSM gives them a pass on their fringes, and their fringes do a better job of staying out of the limelight, whereas ours seem to seek it.  There’s always going to be a lunatic fringe, but it’s really a question of whether that’s a banner we should be walking under.  I don’t think we ought to be walking under a birther banner any more than a threeper banner.  Both will drive the movement away from the mainstream, and toward ruin.

Dave Kopel looks back at the controversy that surrounded Chester A. Arthur, and whether or not he was a natural born citizen of the United States.

Keith Hennessey was an assistant to President Bush on economic policy, and has written a really thorough analysis of where the Democrats can go from here on health care reform.  He lays out the possible paths, and gives his estimate of the chance of that particular path coming to fruition.  In addition to being informative, it’s a great look at how policy gets made in the sausage grinder of the political process.  I can’t recommend it enough.

Roberta X doesn’t like Jon Henke’s crusade against World Net Daily, because she thinks it reeks of the stuffy right worried that people are going to be programmed with wrongthink.  I can’t really speak for Jon Henke, but that’s not really my concern.  I know there’s an audience for what Joe Farrah is selling.  If there wasn’t, he wouldn’t be selling it.  That audience is really of very little concern to me, and I don’t worry all that much that there are people out there who think that Obama was born in Kenya.  I don’t worry all that much that people think they’ve been abducted by aliens.  I worry even less that folks might think that Elvis is really hanging out with JFK in an old folks home and battling the undead in their spare time.  But I am concerned with what banners the conservative movement marches under when we’re asking people to join us in helping build a governing majority.

There’s an important reason why this is a concern.  If you look at party affiliation in the United States, it looks something like this.  If votes went along straight party lines, the Democrats would never lose an election, and we’d be selling stylish, cheap furniture, boring, but remarkably safe and reliable cars, and developing a growing fondness for herring.  Yep.  We’d already be Sweden.  But we’re not.  Why?  Because conservatives enjoy an ideological advantage, in that most Americans can identify with at least some parts of the conservative platform.  But to get their votes, Republicans have to attract votes from people who are not Republicans.

Latest Gallup poll from 2009 shows that 26% of voters identify Republican, 33% Democrat, and 39% independent.  The party that’s doing the best job of attracting independents to their message at any given time is going to be the party in power.  There’s a lot of wasted ink in trying to figure out the key to winning independents, but if there’s one thing that’s probably safe to say about them, it’s that most aren’t really on board with partisan extremism.

My problem with WND and the birthers isn’t that they exist.  My problem with Joe Farrah isn’t that he makes money providing material the kooky right greedily devours.  It’s a free, capitalist country, after all.  My problem is that by trying to bring them into the coalition, and by lending Farrah and his audience legitimacy, we’re going to turn away the independent voters.  Voters who might be a little pissed off at what’s coming out of Washington these days — who might not want their taxes raised, and might not want their kids in debt to their eyeballs before they even get a job.  I don’t want them thinking that by voting for conservative candidates who might share many of these values, that they are by association endorsing the kooky ideas emanating out of the birthersphere.  The question in accepting any group into your coalition is do they bring more to the table than they drive away from it.  I think the answer with the WND crowd is no.