For those struggling to grasp the phenomenom of Sarah Palin, and to determine the potential of Palinism, I submit the following equation:
I begin my proof by observing a smart review of Going Rogue, one you might not have expected to read under the New York Times logo, even in on-line only content. Offering an appreciation of Sarah Palin as an American character, veteran cultural observer Stanley Fish focuses on the book’s central motif of Palin running:
In the end, perseverance, the ability to absorb defeat without falling into defeatism, is the key to Palin’s character. It’s what makes her run in both senses of the word and it is no accident that the physical act of running is throughout the book the metaphor for joy and real life.
After playing with the metaphor for a paragraph or two, Fish concludes on a note perhaps less familiar to a Times readership than to typical conservatives:
The message is clear. America can’t be stopped. I can’t be stopped. I’ve stumbled and fallen, but I always get up and run again. Her political opponents, especially those who dismissed Ronald Reagan before he was elected, should take note. Wherever you are, you better watch out. Sarah Palin is coming to town.
The manner in which the underestimation, indeed the compulsive derision of Sarah Palin enhances the effect of her successes has been clear to non-Alaskan conservatives at least since her all-eyes-upon-her performance at the Republican National Convention of 2008. The comparison of Palin to Reagan is also familiar on the right. In Fish’s review, it comes across as wholly complimentary on the surface, because it’s explicitly cautionary for liberals, but it may betray Fish’s own partisan bias, since to him as for many liberal historians, Reagan and Reaganism were more symbol than substance, the deceptive offer of a pleasant dream that obscured a deeply flawed reality.
Even if the comparison can be seen in different ways, few Palin supporters will rush to disavow it. Most will prefer to bank it. As for Palin herself, she has directly aligned herself with Reagan, as a fervent admirer and as a would-be heir to his political legacy. When recent interviews have turned to economics, she speaks as a true believer in Reaganomics in statements that could be boiled down to “I’m in favor of what worked in the ’80s” – her main innovation being her emphasis on energy independence, a topic which in an odd historical turn had dominated American politics in the ’70s, but had all but disappeared by the time Reagan was inaugurated. When questioned in relation to national security, she is fond of quoting Reagan directly, deploying a statement of firm resolve that Reagan first proposed as an alternative to Détente, in discussion with his future National Security Adviser: “How about this? We win, they lose.”
WWTL captures the difference between Reagan and virtually the entirety of the foreign policy establishment of his day. For Palin, it underlines the contrast between her and our current president, a man who seems as put off by the word “victory” as Richard Nixon was by the word “love,” but its larger purpose is to associate what she offers – an indomitable and indefatigable American character in support of conservative orthodoxy – with what for large numbers of Americans stands as the last heroic period in our history.
You can be sympathetic to this view and still recognize it as a gross over-simplification. A Palinist might respond that simplicity would be far preferable to the complications fetishized by those who imagine that intellectualism – or, say, “smart power” – can ever be a good substitute for “common sense,” another favorite rhetorical reference point for Palin and other populists. And the Palinist might even be right, or more right than wrong: Common sense seems a lot simpler than technocracy, and is therefore quite consistent with a politics of smaller/limited human scale government. It perfectly suits the suspicions and the aspirations of armies of self-styled outsiders who believe that the federal government has expanded way beyond utility, and way beyond the best interests of the nation.
Yet this simplicity also recalls the image of Reagan advanced by his political enemies, of the “amiable dunce” who somehow bumbled his way to economic recovery, a second term, and the defeat of the Evil Empire. It’s how liberals wanted to see him, but their own political suffering at his hands – along with Reagan’s own letters and diaries and the testimony of those at the center of events – suggest a figure arguably closer to “The Real Ronald Reagan” of Phil Hartman’s iconic SNL skit, in which Reagan the folksy oaf turns into Reagan the polymath mastermind as soon as whatever reporter or other visitor has left him to his complex devices. The point isn’t that Reagan was, secretly, able to solve complex mathematical equations in his head, or some such, but that he was, as Steven Hayward emphasizes in his recently published second volume on The Age of Reagan, “one of the best-prepared men ever to become president.”
As Hayward details, by the time Reagan was elected, in addition to having been governor of the nation’s richest and most populous state, he had been active in national public affairs for thirty years, and had already run for president twice (seriously in 1976, half-heartedly in 1968). With this context in mind, it may be easier to understand why some keepers of the Reaganite flame – including Hayward, though not including Reagan’s son Michael – have resisted the idea that Sarah is our Ron. For all of Palin’s assets as a politician, and even stipulating that she draws upon much deeper and broader qualifications than her detractors acknowledge, she’s still a comparative newcomer on the national stage. In addition to being much younger than Ronald Reagan was in 1980, she lacks anything remotely approaching his political and intellectual track record and his extensive network of supporters and advisers. It’s no insult to Palin to suggest that she suffers by comparison to Reagan in this respect, just as it’s no great compliment to suggest that she’s better-qualified than our current president was on the day he took office.
There is also nothing in Reagan’s biography that compares to Palin’s resignation of the Alaska governorship, a move that I for one supported, but which I believe must tend to heighten insecurity about her among many voters. I further have to wonder whether it’s a factor that will loom larger under the very conditions – a failed Obama presidency – that would make a successful run by Palin as early as 2012 thinkable. Even assuming that Palin can politically overcome questions raised by her resignation, or under an outsider’s banner even turn it into a net positive (conceivable, not necessarily likely), it may further reinforce an even more important question: What are the chances that a Palin presidency would be successful? If she couldn’t gain sufficient support from the Alaskan legislature to revise the flawed ethics reforms that she had originally sponsored, but were being used to destroy her governorship and inhibit her rise to national prominence, what would her chances be with the US Congress and the national political and media establishment?
It’s a contingency worth anticipating for anyone considering an outsider run for the presidency, for Palin’s relative political isolation, made evident in her ethics law problems, is a familiar end state for outsider executives, at all levels of government and in other realms of life, too. It’s one of the oldest political, social, and religious stories. There’s a rightwing populist notion that the political equivalent of a neutron bomb, neutralizing the inhabitants but leaving the physical structures intact, would be better than liberal government, but a president with few political allies might very likely be overwhelmed by the permanent government whose customary practices and perquisites are deeply entrenched and well-defended.
Not that Palin has put herself forward as a bomb-thrower or negativist: She has clearly and repeatedly enunciated the outlines of a positive program – energy independence, national security, fiscal restraint, small government, local control. With the exception of the first point (as observed, energy was in effect a side issue for Reagan), the platform is pure Reaganism. It is therefore all the more worth recalling that, for all of Reagan’s skills and despite his elevated historical status, the Reagan Revolution lasted for only a brief moment in political time before even Reagan was forced to play defense, with his most effective opponents including the “tax collectors for the welfare state” in his own party. Reagan lowered tax rates, reduced regulation, and offered critical protection and political backstopping while Fed Chairman Volcker administered harsh fiscal medicine – but major elements of his domestic agenda were all stalled by 1982, never to be revived, something that movement conservatives of the time noted in despair.
Hayward’s biography persuasively suggests that Reagan’s greatness, or anyway his greatest contribution, on the domestic side was in breaking the ideological stranglehold that liberalism had held on political discourse for 50 years. He set new terms for our national political conversation – no small feat – and that also means we do not need to start where he did. If Palinism is going to matter as more than a political-cultural footnote, whether or not it proceeds under that name and with Palin herself in the lead, it cannot function as a re-play of the Reagan Revolution: Palin is not Reagan, and, in part thanks to Reagan’s contribution, the correlation of political forces today and prospectively is much different than what Reagan faced upon taking office.
This set of facts brings us back to our present moment and its uncertainties, and to my formula. What it’s meant to express is this: For Palin or any Palinist not just to run and win, but to succeed, she will need a congress and a country much readier than were the congress and the country of Reagan’s time to implement a Reaganist agenda.
QED
Comments 136
Here’s a couple of differences,Reagan was a big government,new deal Democrat before he evolved into a Conservative,so he had a real life understanding of their intellectual,philosophical differences. Reagan was never pushy about Religion,Reagan was ProChoice when he had to be. Reagan never lost an Election,and Reagan was very intelligent.
December 8th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
And, I voted for Reagan twice,and although I would love to see her run,getting my vote would be out of reach for the Pat Robertsonian,Ms Palin.
December 8th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Could you be more trite and predictable, Rex, to misread her entire record, that way. She’s more a Jacksonian with libertarian tendencies
December 8th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
trite and predictable.
Obviously Accurate.
December 8th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
It’s also at most half-true that Reagan never lost an election, since you have to discount two failed bids for the Republican nomination. Since he got one electoral vote in 1976 (faithless elector), you might even say he lost the actual election ;).
December 8th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
And isn’t She a conflict of interest for a separate church and state secular society? It should be unconstitutional for Fundamentalists to be elected to political office in the US,they are a biological violation of that separation.
December 8th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
And even if Reagan himself wasn’t “pushy” about his own religion, he was was clearly associated with the activists around the Moral Majority, and was a strong opponent of the Counterculture and all it represented, both when governor of Cali and after.
Though narciso is right that she governed more as a personally religious libertarian, for various reasons she has become more closely identified with her religious faith. However, if we’re handicapping 2012 or some future election, she can be seen as solidifying her base support well ahead of the eventual game.
If she runs, and no serious competitor for the social conservatives arises, she should be free to campaign toward the middle.
I think if she came out for an asset-based currency, Rex would have no problem overlooking her religiosity. On the other hand, I don’t expect her to that. I do expect her at least to try to pitch energy as a sound basis for reviving the American economy.
December 8th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
@ Rex Caruthers:
All we’d have to do is get rid of the 1st Amendment.
BTW, you seem not to have noticed that Ø was an adult convert to evangelical Christianity, and has frequently testified about having been born again and saved.
December 8th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
CK MacLeod wrote:
@ Rex Caruthers:
All we’d have to do is get rid of the 1st Amendment.
BTW, you seem not to have noticed that Ø was an adult convert to evangelical Christianity, and has frequently testified about having been born again and saved.
Was that after he was paling around with Ayers?
December 8th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
The conversion is said to have come before. The testimony was a feature of the ’08 campaign.
December 8th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
That “governed as a personally religious librarian” is a reference to libertarianisn?
December 8th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
@ fuster:
Huh? Also, you’re misquoting.
December 8th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Well I don’t think one could go through the trial by fire, that she’s gone through in the last year and a half, and not be more fortified in her faith. I don’t know of any asset that can support 12 trillion dollars in debt. It’s the glasses isn’t it, Froggy
December 8th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Grasses? Foggy or not, she’s just not faithful enough to make good on her promise to serve as Alaska’s Governor.
When the fire came at her, she proved to be better at running than anything else.
December 8th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
You know it is instructive to consider that the three pivotal races, the city council in 1992, the first mayor’s race in 1996, and the Governor’s race in 2006, were all times that the GOP was on the outs. it was only 2002, when she ran for Lt. Gov, where she lost, but parodoxically she ended up better off, in the middle of a major
Republican tide
December 8th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
@ fuster:
That’s just about as ridiculous and reductive as my pseudo-mathematical equation, cluck.
They also serve who won’t sit still and be a punching bag for loathsome freaks and dishonest operatives.
December 8th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
She left a capable team in Governor Parnell, Lt. Gov. General Campbell and Atty Gen. Sullivan. It was an unwelcome realization, that she came to, when she realized that the ethics code, she had devised in the aftermathof a huge corruption scandal, was used as a cudgel against her, this was not unlike the way that CFR was used against the McCain campaign, she’s less naive and more practical on that front
December 8th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Being serious but briefly, it really is a disturbing thing that she left.
If you believe she quit because of the cost of defending the ethics charges, and thinking that would be both trusting and generous, it must still make you wonder what such a response says about her ability to effectively govern anything sizable.
Alaska’s total population is roughly that of a single congressional district, isn’t it?
December 8th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
@ narciso:
She screwed up, got screwed around, and quit rather than fight it out?
December 8th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
You know he’s almost as pigheaded as that Warpublican fellow on that other Contentions blog, that had to close the comments. It’s a young state, whose development is restricted by government policies, but it’s as big as Texas.
It is rich in resources, oil, gas, timber, those concrete things that this administration is quite ignorant of. She has been able to make progress on her initiatives like the new wells in the Chuckchi sea, which were the subject of the NY Times op ed that Couric
never got around to reading.
December 8th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
@ narciso:
It had to close it’s comments?
Sure most of the comments were worthless and ill-tempered, but so were most of the posts and nearly half the writers.
December 8th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
You seem impenetrable on this topic, cluck – that is, your approach to it seems immune to discussion. The “cost” of defending the ethics charges was much greater than the financial impact on her personally. She was pinned down in the state by fire from over the horizon, unable to advance a program, unable to participate in the national discussion.
I have conceded – as has she, as a matter of fact – that there may be an enduring political cost to the resignation, but the alternative was completely untenable, while the resignation was arguably of benefit to the state.
In addition to harm to her image, the ammunition it gives her critics and competitors, the event also points, as I suggested in the top post, to the down side of being an outsider. From outside of Alaska, it appears that she lacked a critical mass of loyal supporters in the Alaska legislature who could, in theory, have relieved her of the ethics related difficulties overnight. Between machine/Murkowski Republicans of the sort she had once embarrassed and overturned, and partisan Democrat adversaries, there don’t seem to have been enough allies left in a mood to rescue her.
In her book, she makes a passing reference to a lack of urgency in the legislature. Why she couldn’t or simply preferred not to take the matter to the people strikes me as an untold story. It has the appearance of something she doesn’t want to explore in the open.
December 8th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
I’m quite willing to let the issue drop, as long as you and the others and Palin, stop trying to suggest that she would be a desirable candidate for anything greater than Congressional office anytime sooner than six or ten years from now.
December 8th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Why should you drop the issue? I don’t care whether it concerns you. If she ever ends up running, you’re one vote. For purposes of discussion, I would find your statements on it more interesting if they showed some advancement beyond your initial knee-jerk responses.
The same goes for the constant recycling of the qualifications argument. Again, I fully concede that her qualifications aren’t up to Reagan’s, but I think they exceed those of many presidents and serious presidential candidates – including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, to name three. She’s far more qualified than Abraham Lincoln was, and probably more qualified than Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were. I could go on, but what’s the point? The president doesn’t “run the country” – that’s a myth, and to the extent there’s any truth to it, that’s a flaw in our current understanding of and approach to government.
December 8th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Note: Equation amended – it amuses me, but I’m thinking of dropping it entirely.
December 8th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Sure it doesn’t matter that she couldn’t run the country, since, as you say, the president doesn’t,
but she would still be Leader of the Free World!
Think of the anguish in Ottowa (even if they only have one vote.)
Thanks, for the clip from SLIH. Great exit line.
December 8th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Thanks for such a thoughtful piece, Colin.
The crux is her positive and buoyant nature.
We need people who are happy warriers to really take on the loathsome statists and wealth redistribution pfreaks and collectivist morons. Someone has to help people recognize that collectivism is a false and fundamentally flawed belief system, which pretends to offer security, while destroying everything which gives human life its potential and its dignity.
Ours may seem like a much harder alternative to the so called progressive nostrums, but our belief in individual freedom and responsibility is better than anything they offer. Unlike them, we do not accept hypocrisy. We say, “look, life is hard. There are no easy answers. No one owes us a living. Get to work. We don’t need a patrician class of Ivy League masters telling us what to do and handing out benefits. That is a path to slavery, destitution and death.”
Tough messages, but tough love is needed along with Mommy’s hankeys and bandaids. Tough love and hard truths are much easier to accept from people who smile and bubble with life.
Palin, like Reagan, is a positive force. Both are strong and big hearted and charismatic.
Reagan was a force of nature. Let’s hope there are many more like him waiting in the wings.
December 8th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
Much like what happened on Ross Douthat’s Atlantic blog, that I used to comment on,about two years ago.
December 8th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
@ fuster:
She’s extremely well-qualified to be leader of the free world. Some would say she already is.
December 8th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
As long as it’s not a world in this particular solar system, I wish her and her fans all the best.
December 8th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
we’re already in the ‘bearded spock’ universe, when you deficit spend to avoid bankruptcy, where you dither on military committments in order to reassure our allies, where you suppress oil and gas exploration, in order to become energy independent. Where you threaten the strangulation of every aspect of economic activiity to encourage jobs, where terrorists get civil trials, and the CIA men who captured them, risk prosecution. This is stupidity on a cosmic scale
December 8th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
@ Zoltan Newberry:
Do you mean collectivism in it’s original philosophic meaning or are you using to describe political views or the way it’s meant in economics?
I can rarely get straight what people mean when they use that word because even in any one of those somewhat different areas it’s got so many shadings.
In some ways, being a citizen or even having money makes you a collectivist.
December 8th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
@ narciso:
I refuse to live in a universe that allows dithering in order to get our allies to follow our lead and contribute their support to our efforts, especially when such dithering didn’t cost us anything.
Dithering won’t keep us safe, although those extra troops and proof of international support for continued fighting against terrorists doesn’t sound all that awful.
December 8th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Maybe you should ask Natan Sharansky, Fus.
Ask the guy about to have his heart harvested immediately after he is shot in the head.
How about a “rich peasant” in 1946 China or a Kulak in 1950 Russia?
Send a note to Dr. Biscet in Cuba.
December 8th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
@ Zoltan Newberry:
Thanks, Zolt. Political collectivism, communism in particular, it is.
Didn’t think that we were near to being overcome by it in this country, but I don’t think I would much like to even come close.
December 8th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Really, how many soldiers have died in the last three months, to mention the last six. Or about the scores dead in the NorthWest Frontier of Pakistan, while we begin to ramp up.
Obama is more the Chavez/Correa model rather than the Castro/Ortega one. But there have been than enough indications as to the particular contours of this ‘Rough Beast Slouching toward Jerusalem” and trust me, it’s nothing you want to really acquaint
yourself with. An uncle who drowned in the Florida straights, a distant cousin who survived the Bay of Pigs, inform my views
on the subject
December 8th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
@ narciso:
My sympathy to you and your family and to our dead in Afghanistan, but they didn’t die because of inaction in Washington in the last three months.
Many of the casualties came because we finally decided to stop sitting in camps and go out to challenge the Taliban after allowing them to regroup for the last couple of years.
Try to remember that there were 25,000 US troops in Afghanistan at the start of 2007 and in 2008 the reinforcements of 7,500 brought it to nearly 34,000 at the end of the last administration.
December 8th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Actually, you don’t know that, it just pleases you to assume it, and to exclude a broad range of alternatives from consideration.
December 8th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Btw, where is the new thread, with presumedly the h/t prompted by my ‘bearded spock universe, reference’
December 8th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Actually, CK, I think that it’s probably more likely that they died because this administration beefed up the troops levels, and changed commanders and tactics.
McKiernan had barely enough troops to hold fortified positions and run patrols.
Even when Obama sent him more troops, he wasn’t much inclined to risk them in ground offensives to uproot the enemy and hold new blocks of territory.
It pleases me to think that McKiernan was relieved by Mullen and replaced by McChrystal to go on the offensive. We did in Helmand and found that the Taliban were stronger than we thought them to be.
Our KIAs are up because we’re active in engaging and patrolling, not because we’ve remained passive for lack of personnel.
December 8th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
@ fuster:
I don’t disagree with anything you say, but the effects that fall under the general heading of morale appear first at the margins.
December 8th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
@ narciso:
Not sure what you mean by h/t. Check the sidebar – scroll down to “Said on a Thread” (twas a feature suggested by Sully).
December 8th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Ah – you must mean the “next post” thingie down below. Hmmm… what happens when you click on it? Lemme check…
December 8th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
@ narciso:
fixed – stray apostrophe processing problem… will experiment with a hack that may supply option to put such posts in main page…
December 8th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Well
I
Never
December 8th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
I agree with Zoltan on this.
Totally!
December 9th, 2009 at 7:17 am
Wow Highlander…….you have descended into fullbore Palin dementia.
Fortunately, we live in a Republic manifested as democratic meritocracy, and Palin is simply bereft of an iota of Jefferson’s “talents and virtues”. She is a venal, vain, vindictive jumpedup yeoman farmer that quit her governorship in a fit of pique over people like Dr. Krauthamer telling her to go home, govern well, and read some books.
She is a Pre-tribulationist that believes in jesus-take-the-wheel, and a proud ignoramus that still larded her “book” with fake Aristotle and Plato quotes ripped from Quotegarden.
But she WILL be your nominee.
Pawlenty is invisible, Huck just morphed into Decaucus, and Petraeus has turned you down at least 20 times.
And there is a segment of the WEC base that now comprises the entirety of the “conservative” movement that would vote a satan ticket before they would nominate a mormon.
Besides……Palin has to run in 2012…she will be post menopausal in 2016, and no longer able to “cock-tease the rabble”, as Hitch so elegantly put it.
I think her neck is already getting crepey.
lol
December 9th, 2009 at 7:45 am
“Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice’ oh darn, that’s eugenicist in training, nishi, from the PW and Hot Air threads totally missing the point of last night’s exercise. I wonder if Glenn has instalinked this. BTW this is the architect of
the Obama plan;
http://newsrealblog.com/2009/12/09/ex-con-robert-creamer-designed-leftist-blueprint/
December 9th, 2009 at 8:08 am
@ strangelet:
Hi strangelet. Your ‘tude is creepier than Palin’s neck will ever be.
December 9th, 2009 at 8:09 am
Re reading that commentary, I was prompted to comment more by Rex’s response, let’s consider a counterfactual. If Carter had been defeated by Baker or Connally how might the Eighties have turned out differently. Also going back to 1968, Nixon who seemed to be the more traditional candidate, yet he wreaked a great deal of damage with wage and price controls and the pump priming of the 70s, which touched off the great inflation
December 9th, 2009 at 8:40 am
There’s no reason to think that Palin couldn’t go for every available surgery in order to keep hope avail until 2016 or wouldn’t love the tax deductions for same available to people who make their living on stage.
December 9th, 2009 at 8:48 am
spectacularly missing the point, froggy, although strangie has you beat for total non sequitors. When you will you understand that
her principles, her character, is much more important than her appearance
December 9th, 2009 at 9:05 am
@ strangelet:
Nice solid attack Strangelet; but your statement above is way over the top. Clearly Palin quit because of the unremitting trumped up ethics charge attacks by the shock troops on your side of the aisle rather than by Krauthammer. I’m not a big fan of that decision by Palin; but let’s keep the facts straight. She may not like the condescending attitude of Krauthammer and others on the right; but that wasn’t the reason she quit the governorship.
What I find interesting is that President Obama, his strings manipulated by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, has moved the debate so far to the left that even independents are supporting a populist reaction as embodied by Sarah Palin. It’s amazing to me that she’s scoring 46% or so favorability; but that’s what happens when a whole party abandons the middle and skirts over far one way, as the Democrats have done.
We’re in for interesting times. If present trends don’t reverse we may have the pleasure of seeing Sarah Palin face off against Hillary Clinton in 2012. That debate would probably outdraw the Superbowl for worldwide audience.
December 9th, 2009 at 9:05 am
@ fuster:
Just so long as Palin doesn’t go to the same surgeon who gave Hillary pins like a bowling alley.
December 9th, 2009 at 9:07 am
@ narciso:
My understanding is that inflationary economics were already baked in the cake by the time Nixon took office.
Alternative histories are always tricky, to say the least, as a lot would depend on when and how you subtracted RWR (never existed or was different in some way, died in a car accident in 1971?). The energy that fueled the “New Right” would have to have gone somewhere, and someone would have been put forward as a leader.
I think we have to assume that some things Reagan did would have been tried eventually, perhaps after additional years of a misery index economy. Without RWR I think we have to assume much higher taxes, somewhat lower deficits, resumption of inflation, probable life extension for the Soviet Union (with at least the possibility of a Communist geopolitical self-rescue).
Maybe the crisis would have gotten much worse, led to more radical responses, or passed a point of no return. In those days, a lot of people believed we were heading for apocalyptic catastrophe of one kind or another, though another group believed in capitalist-communist convergence…
December 9th, 2009 at 9:15 am
@ narciso:
If I didn’t fervently agree with you, I wouldn’t be quite as perplexed and troubled.
December 9th, 2009 at 9:19 am
@ Sully:
Hilary certainly is no pushover.
December 9th, 2009 at 9:21 am
@ Sully:
Wouldn’t be betting on the little bleater going the distance in that arena, either.
December 9th, 2009 at 9:23 am
Well I’m assuming that Rockefeller or Romney had won, I wasn’t going to change the timeline that much. One could assume that the War expenditures would have contributed to the level of damage, but wage and price controls as a solution.
Ah yes, the Club of Rome, Ehrlich (whose Walter Bishop like disciple is Holdren) and Galbraith’s convergence.
December 9th, 2009 at 9:25 am
Well a little honesty is always appreciated, froggy. For what it’s worth, I was in favor of Hillary in the primary, because of what I had
seen of Obama, so did a lot of people because
he didn’t win a primary after Iowa, yet he still
became the nominee
December 9th, 2009 at 9:42 am
@ CK MacLeod:
One of the things that makes life so interesting is that we are without a doubt heading for an apocalyptic catastrophe. The problem is that we don’t know what form it will take or when it will arrive. And that’s a good thing; because most people like fantasizing about how dashing they would be and how interesting life would be after an apocalyptic catastrophe. Very few people fantasize themselves as being at the party under the Independence Day alien ship when the demolition beam goes off or imagine themselves being among the group that will fail to thrive during the period of civil disturbance after a high altitude nuke EMPs the electrical grid.
December 9th, 2009 at 10:31 am
@ Sully:
It’s a reverse of the phenomenon – I forget which comedian riffed on this – in which people “recalling” their past lives tend to place their former selves in the upper classes, among the heroic and famous, than, say, among the peasants, dying of the pox in childhood.
December 9th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Well the 70s had Irwin Allen, our decade is graced with Roland Emmerich (that word you are using…) a sign of de-evolution right there.A totally unexpected trope, of trying to associate her ascent with catastrophe which began with Supernatural’s dystopian turn toward a world where zombie plague has swept the Earth, so of course, there is a headline of President Palin, taking responsibility for Bombing Houston, and how
long before Law & Order, takes a page from
the headlines, about the Huntress
December 9th, 2009 at 11:29 am
I don’t monitor L&O, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if there had already been several episodes firing on Palin, Palinism, or Palinmania from various directions.
December 9th, 2009 at 11:41 am
@ CK MacLeod:
I’m familiar with the phenomenon because I researched it back in the seventies when I realized I had been Caesar Augustus in one of my past lives until that bitch poisoned me. To this day I’m careful about figs.
December 9th, 2009 at 11:41 am
@ narciso:
I think we can all agree that Houston should be destroyed; but I think Palin would more likely go after New York or DC.
December 9th, 2009 at 11:44 am
@ Sully:
I hope that Palin goes long before New York or DC.
December 9th, 2009 at 11:49 am
So many cities to destroy, so little time.
December 9th, 2009 at 11:56 am
At least, that’s how I felt when I was Attila in a prior life.
December 9th, 2009 at 11:57 am
Well they are doing a Beck inspired episode tonigt, with McGill the guy that was the other big guy in Animal House, who played a corrupt congressman in their take on the Jack Abramoff story, three years ago.
No she wouldn’t take out Houston, because it’s the main refining site for Alaskan petrol. Zombies would more likely hang around NY
December 9th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Why did you turn back anyway? Surely not because of the guy in the robe and white beanie.
December 9th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
@ Sully:
What can I say? It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Next time I’m communing with my eternal oversoul, I’ll see if I can get some more details.
December 9th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Palin is ELMIRA GANTRY ,a pseduo savior.
December 9th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
lol, the only reason Palin is popular a’tall is that she gives old white guyz wood….apparently including you, my delightful celtic homeslice.
…and when she doesn’t do that anymore, she’s a withered tomato in the dumpster of history.
December 9th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
No,. it’s not about that, it’s about leadership and principle and integrity. Something you don’t really see in the rest of the field. Barack Obama coasted on that one speech in 2004, and later the Philadelphia Speech, which was his evasion of his tutelage under REverend Wright
December 9th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
@ narciso:
Tell us about that tutelage. All I’ve ever heard was that he attended Wright’s sermons.
December 9th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
@ fuster:
We don’t need to replay all of that – do we, cluck? There’s no shortage of material out there on the Wright-Obama relationship if you really want to dig it up.
I think you have to engage in an awful lot of self-delusion to think that the Great Community Organizer was less than fully aware of what kind of creature Wright was. Whether what Ø got from him is best defined as “tutelage” is another question, though the evidence suggests that there was at least some of that in the area of how to be an effective neighborhood race hustler.
@ strangelet:
I don’t know why you want to embarrass yourself. I would delete your comment for its vulgarity, and would be doing you a favor, but since narciso has replied to it, I’ll let it stand for now – as representative of the quality of thinking typical of so many Palin critics, although “assailant” might be a better term than “critic.”
December 9th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
I rise to vigorously to the bait, I guess I’m making up for the dreck that has been posted
on Hot Air, under Allah’s supervision. So we have a new thread, to move on to
December 9th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
@ narciso:
You keep mentioning Palin’s principles and I certainly understand that she attempts to embody very traditional America, but that fails to address an awful lot of other things about Palin.
There are a bunch of qualifications that she lacks. She is, as of now, highly inexperienced, inarticulate, and intellectually average.
She makes a possibly attractive candidate, but what if she wins something?
December 9th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
That’s the nub of it, isn’t it froggy. You think it’s just a coincidence she was slandered and libeled to such a remarkable degree, before and after her acceptance speech, everything
from her faith, her fidelity, her integrity, was
fair game. Whereas someone who by rights would fail a basic background check slipped
through
December 9th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
@ narciso:
I really don’t understand what you mean about Palin being slandered to any remarkable degree.
The amount of vicious crap that she took is , sadly, routine.
I don’t know who it is that you think would fail a background check, narc, ’cause it’s pretty unlikely that any candidate escapes one.
December 9th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
@ Rex Caruthers:
Reagan certainly did lose elections. Reagan was “pragmatic” when he needed to be, as was Palin when she was a governor. By all accounts of people who actually KNOW Palin, even those who despise her political views, she too is intelligent.
I have no idea whether Palin could ever be another Reagan, but I do know that those who accuse her of being too conservative in her policies and not intelligent enough are grossly underestimating her.
December 9th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
@ fuster:
The ferocity of the attacks on Palin is unprecedented. I couldn’t even give a modest favorable review of her book on Amazon without being inundated by trolls who had reviewed or posted nothing before Palin’s book. I was called a liar and a shill just because I said I enjoyed the book. Then there’s Trig… Andrew Sullivan is still foaming at the mouth on that. His latest rant was just yesterday on CNN http://blogs.standard.net/2009/12/the-lefts-trig-palin-obsession-makes-it-to-cnn/
December 10th, 2009 at 1:22 am
lol
The truth is often vulgar.
Highlander, Palin is wholly bereft of any of the talents and virtues that delineate one of Jefferson’s natural aristoi.
Andy Jackson would have told her to go home and take care of her kids….and he would have shot Todd for a dirty seccessionist.
Srsly, do you think it a good idea to give the nuke launch codes to someone that believes in using Israel and the Jews as staked goats to bring on the Rapture?
We just a trillion dollar Gog/Magog war that killed nearly 5000 american soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and left Iraq as another islamic state that declared a national holiday when the ‘Mericans left their cities.
PS….the surge didnt work.
December 10th, 2009 at 7:03 am
No posting from Max Blumenthal’s deranged Huff Po comments don’t constitute proof, Ole Hickory would recognize a kindred spirit, and he’d beat the tar out of you, for being such a louse. The AIP is Alaska’s third force, they actually elected a Governor, Hickel, and he didn’t push for secession.
December 10th, 2009 at 7:16 am
@ narciso:
That is Atlantic writer, Ashkenazai Jew and Israel supporter Jeffrey Goldberg.
More vulgar truth.
December 10th, 2009 at 7:20 am
@ CK MacLeod:
Palin was not insufficiently vetted on her experience or abilities….she was insufficiently vetted on her malleability.
She wouldn’t play Galatea to Team McCain’s Pygmalion….she went “rogue.”
The only way she could get into the oval office was riding Sick Grandpa’s coattails before the electorate got a good look at her.
Then the GOP leadership figured they’d have 8 years for her makeover…if McCain kicked in office, so much the better.
December 10th, 2009 at 7:27 am
It sounded so far outside of Goldberg’s usual commentary, than again, as he admitted in his memoir, Prisoners, he really thought the Palestinian question was about ’67, when it is really about ’48, or more likely ’17, and Balfour.
So defending Israel from a second Holocaust, from a real millenarianist like Ahmadinejad is considered crazy, good to know.
December 10th, 2009 at 7:30 am
@ narciso:
Andy Jackson would never hit a grrl.
I repeat….he would have told Palin to go home and take care of her kids….you know I’m speaking the truth, Highlander.
December 10th, 2009 at 7:30 am
@ narciso:
Goldberg and I, along with the sane half of this nation, believe Israel needs defense from both Nejad and Palin. The jews get this….I’m surprised you don’t.
December 10th, 2009 at 7:34 am
Neither you, nor Jeffrey Goldberg, nor Sam Tanenhaus speaks for “the Jews.” The editorial you quote is drivel. Before the people like the writer or writers gain the “right to be right,” they should seek the ability to be taken seriously.
As for the “nuke launch codes,” sometimes you write like you were born yesterday. This mode of attack on believing Christians was very popular in Reagan’s day, tying this back to the top post, and, as we know, Reagan did more in reality and fought harder to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war than anyone since the bomb was first built. The approach supports an ugly tradition of presumptuous and ignorant commenting on matters of faith for which the commenter has zero understanding and puts paranoia in the place of decency. That many of these same critics will plead 12 ways from Sunday, or Mahdi, for us to set aside the explicitly and demonstrative aggressive character of Islamism suggests fear of the political potential of Christians. It is as deeply un-American a politics as imaginable (see “Freedoms, first”), and it’s not surprising that it’s advanced by displaced Brits still yearning subconsciously for an established and unassailable faith.
Goldberg’s reply to Palin, as I recall was based on a reflex response to Palin’s off-the-cuff reference to immigrants “flocking” to Israel. Many people thought she must be exaggerating, making things up. It turned out that she was more right than the critics were about immigration rates. Beyond that, the coalition of (some) Jews and evangelicals was a also a feature of Reagan’s day, and has been a part of the conservative coalition ever since. To turn philosemitic tendencies on the part of evangelicals into virtual antisemitism, by way of forced readings of prophetic texts, is a typical defensive inanity of intellectuals who never seem to notice how petty and brute-stupid their intellectualisms are. We already know that a good intellectual can think a blue sky black and move time backwards by power of mind alone.
You’re making me sorry I ever recommended the book on Andrew Jackson to you, strangelet, but it’s odd to see you backing your idea of his pre-feminist views. Your comments elsewhere do suggest your’re comfortable with his institution of blind party-line voting, one of the worst innovations in the history of Congress. Keep it up, and you’ll start finding justifications for slaveholding and for the betrayal and annihilation of the native tribes. Next, what?, Obamacare coverage for bleeding cures?
You apparently spend so much time reading bilious bigots like Hitchens and lunatics like Sullivan, that you’ve come to think bile and reflexive lunacy are the same thing as critique.
December 10th, 2009 at 9:06 am
@ CK MacLeod: the proof is in the voting.
Do you deny that Bush tried to sell Chirac on a Gog/Magog war in MENA?
Or that Bush’s rasputins, Cheney and Rumsfeld, capped their briefings to him with bible quotes?
This is America….we supposedly have a separation of church and state….but what we actually have is a situ where one party’s base is near wholly comprised of white evangelical christians who believe they have some sort right to impose religious doctrine on other citizens in the form of law, and where churchs (catholic and mormon) operate as PACs and political extortionists.
December 10th, 2009 at 10:47 am
@ CK MacLeod: what you need to understand, Highlander, is that Palin is simply killing your party. She is a glossy candy shell filled with electoral poison for the demographics you need to court going into the 21st century; minorities, the college-educated, and youth….and Jews.
December 10th, 2009 at 10:52 am
You think the oil for food program, directed at major figures in France, like Charles Pasqua, didn’t have a little to do with it. The kind brokered by the likes of Baathist businessmen like Auchi, who was tied to Obama benefactor Rezko. Chirac whose long time Iraq ties were so clear that the Tammuz 16 reactor was nick named “O Chirac”.
Look by your statements, you admit to beingextraordinarily misinformed about her public record, but if you think she really is poison, you should encourage her progress, as much as possible, and not in the backhanded wayyou are doing here.
December 10th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Why deny it? The proposition as offered is jejune.
Scandalous to those belonging to the religion of Extremist Secularism, I suppose.
You seem to have a twistedly hostile view of the role of religion in American life, and complete amnesia or ignorance about its role in American democracy. What would satisfy people like you, apparently, is censorship of all religious views in the public square and of religious inspiration even in private discussions among officials.
The kind of atheism you preach is inimical to freedom of conscience, free association, and the moral life of a nation, any nation – one reason, arguably, that the greatest genocidall murderers in all of human history have been atheists.
You’re an anti-Christian bigot, strangelet. Like most bigots, you’re unshakably convinced that your bigotry demonstrates your superiority to the objects of your contempt, when to anyone who doesn’t share your assumptions, it has the reverse effect. Please re-read the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, then get back to me.
By the way, not that it matters greatly, but in the latest polls, Jewish approval of Ø is nearing 50%. I may have more to say on this subject when I’m done with Norman Podhoretz’s book on Jewish liberalism.
And your opinions about Palin and the Republican Party would be more interesting if you hadn’t already revealed your possibly congenital intellectual disfigurement on the subject of Palin many times over.
December 10th, 2009 at 11:20 am
@ CK MacLeod:
Keep it going!! Always love an argument too stupid for words expressed with lots o’ them.
What’re going to say from the lil demon tells you that being anti-Christian isn’t bigotry, it’s plain old common sense or that Christians have murdered far more folks than atheists have during the last 1000 years?
December 10th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, killed fewer people than Christians did, are you really that stupid, don’t answer that you’ve already done it..
December 10th, 2009 at 11:37 am
@ narciso:
You could look it up and add. It’s not even close.
December 10th, 2009 at 11:50 am
@ fuster:
Considering that the atheists have had only one century to the Christians’ two millennia, even if I accepted your assertion – which is too vaguely defined to be made sense of – the atheists/anti-Christians have been playing an extraordinary game of catch-up. And you may or may not choose to notice that I did not offer a raw population tally – presuming even that one would be supportable. I referred to the greatest genocidal murderers of all time.
December 10th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
And Hitler needs to be added to narciso’s dishonor roll. The Nazi genocide was carried out on behalf of an expressly anti-Christian ideology.
December 10th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Well I thought of that. but then the retort would be it was carried by Catholics and Protestants, so I wanted to focus exclusively,
on atheist inspired philosophies
December 10th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
@ narciso:
That many of those following orders thought of themselves as Christians doesn’t make those orders or the intentions or justifications of those giving them any more Christian. Hitler was an enemy of Christianity, and one of his goals was the eventual destruction of Christianity. It’s interesting that the residual Christian beliefs of Germans eventually became a hindrance to the war effort, since, to the dismay of the security services, the populace, rather than being enraged at the allies for the bombing campaigns of the late war, widely expressed the sentiment that they were just punishment for the immorality of Nazism.
December 10th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
And it’s also no random factoid that such resistance as there was within Nazi Germany to the Nazis after they took power was often motivated by Christian faith – most famously in the White Rose group and in the person of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
December 10th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
You can write ’till them fingers fall away. You’re never gonna be able to wash away that the few pagans atop the Nazi hierarchy were overwhelmed by the Christianity of the Nazi masses, not merely the Christianity of the German population.
The decent German Christians opposed to the Nazi program and the German war of conquest were few.
December 10th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
@ fuster:
That doesn’t in the least make Nazism a Christian ideology or the Holocaust a Christian project. Nazism was an anti-Christian ideology that took over a Christian nation. By your absurd logic, the (undefined and unspecified) murders you wish to assign to Christianity can in some large part be reduced by the proportion of non-believers, apostates, and non-practicing Christians in whatever army. The armies that fought Nazism, including even the Red Army, were largely made up of self-identified Christians: Were they “Christian murderers” or were they on the right side of a war? If the latter, then Christianity wasn’t implicated except to the extent that it was too weak in Germany (and elsewhere). The Christian victims of Nazism far outnumber the victims identified with any other faith. It’s not a point anyone bothers to make because it’s deemed a virtual irrelevancy.
Nazism and Communism were gross moral failures originating in Western civilization. We can say that because we still follow the Judeo-Christian moral codes they violate. The Holocaust, the destruction of Central European nations, and for that matter the Great Purge and the starvation of the Kulaks were not the result of too much Christianity.
December 10th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Also, that’s wrong. They were very many. Like many citizens, and victims, of totalitarian regimes they were frightened into passivity and coerced into submission, and they often experienced contradictory emotions – patriotic support for victory, shame about the conduct of the war. The Nazis, among others, were very well aware of the fact that, despite the propaganda, they were distinctly in the minority.
December 10th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
fuster, read this book:
The Third Reich at War
December 10th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
He doesn’t care about the facts, CK, and it’s rather across the board, on Islamism, health policy, the religious foundation of this country.
December 10th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
guess you haven’t heard this.
nah nah hey hey
doesn’t matter what they say
as long as they don’t vote that way.
Nope.
I have nothing against actual christians….you know, that believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ?
I am an anti-EVANGELICAL bigot.
December 10th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Radical Christianism, as practiced by those Nazis, was out to destroy the West.
December 10th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
@ strangelet:
Bigotry of any kind is not welcome here.
@ fuster:
Mere ignorance we can handle, within limits. If I thought you could support the notion – or really any notion – I’d invite you to attempt to justify the equation of Nazism with “Radical Christianism.” It’s an obscene joke. You might as well call Nazism “Radical Judaism.”
December 10th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
This might not be the Christianity you think of, Obama believes in Black Liberation Theology, which similar to Liberation Theology, with racism added. In Liberation Theology Jesus is the prophet of Marxism, who is going to save the oppressed poor. And this prophet status is similar to that which Muslims, Jehovahs and Mormons regard Christ as (not God-Man), but just without the Marxism of LT or BLT.
Catholics have known of the dangers of Liberation Theology, it caused alot of problems in South America. Pope Benedict issued another statement on it this week when he spoke with South American bishops, as reported in CNA.
In addition, the Ratzinger had previously issued in 1984 an Instruction letter “Libertatis nuntius” where he discussed the differences between Christ (the God-Man) liberating us from Sin, and the false liberty offered by Marxism of class warfare with Christ (a Prophet-man) as thier material hero.
December 10th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
@ strangelet:
I think you’ve been drinking too much kool-aid. I know lots of members of that party who are decidedly not evangelical christians. And I know lots of people who characterize themselves as evangelical christians but are not millenialists.
December 10th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
@ Cromagnum:
Obama hates black people and black culture.
I read it on-line, or something.
What magazine was that a link to? I found it very upsetting that someone would use a picture of Uncle Sam looking like he’s taking a dump
December 10th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
@ fuster:
Im glad you read, FWIW citing is better if others are to partake in your reading excercises, otherwise you are as good as you remember yourself to be.
If you have seen this Statue by Auguste Rodin, then the picture is what it might look like if uncle sam were doing the same, rather than sphincter excercise to evacuate the bowels.
December 10th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
@ fuster:
I think the presence of strangelet has acted on your mind. The notion that the Nazis were practicing Christianism, radical or otherwise, is so far around the bend it boggles the mind.
Nazism was itself a religion, wholly unrelated to Christianity. If anything the true believer Nazis were pagans akin to the ancient Romans.
Interestingly the militant atheist movement, in attempting to remove God from life, is arguably spawning a new sort of paganism that vomits forth so called ethicists like Peter Singer. he of “The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.” Singer would have fit in quite well at the Wannsee Conference.
December 10th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
@ Cromagnum:
I try never to miss a Rodan. Never heard o’ this Augustus guy. Which movie was he in?
December 10th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
@ Sully:
And they woulda destroyed it , too if the Jewish bankers that control America hadn’t used their special monetary superpowers to stop them.
Otherwise European Christianist fanatics, and their herds of ilk, would be running around rampant.
Lord alone knows what might have happened to us here if they, the Fasco-Christianists, had gotten their hooks into the Mormons, who’re just waiting here to become a fifth-column wheelhouse of renewed Danite atrocianating.
December 10th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
@ fuster:
Fortunately we don’t have to worry about bankers, Jewish or otherwise, using special powers, now that government bureaucrats are firmly in control of the big banks. And we don’t have to worry about the government bureaucrats because, per your assertions vis a vis health care, government bureaucrats are always fair, just and wise since they’re not corrupted by the profit motive. And if they’re not fair, just and wise we can always appeal to other government bureaucrats to bring them into line.
December 10th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
@ Sully:
We call those other govment bureaucrats “Yer Honor” and you don’t have to sign an insurance company contract alienating most avenues of redress.
December 10th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Never turn your back on a man in a dress or a woman holding a hammer.
December 10th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
@ Cromagnum:
I’ll read the American Thinker piece soon, though I was speaking in the original comment more to Ø’s self-presentation during the campaign and I believe in his books.
I’ve always assumed that his fans mostly believed he was lying blatantly – putting one over on the simpletons. I guess it’s just as believable that he “accepts” Christ as a prophet or symbol in the way you describe, but chooses to accentuate certain evangelical-sounding elements of his faith when before earnestly religious audiences, as with Rick Warren during the campaign – in some ways it wouldn’t be that much different from sounding more like a black preacher when preaching to blacks.
I don’t really know – does anyone? – how many people voice the magical-sounding sentiments on cue while retaining skeptical distance on one level or another. What Obama actually does with his faith – how he uses it or seeks to use it, how whatever content of it informs his behavior – is another question, more properly political. It would probably remain the only politically relevant question to consider if his supporters weren’t constantly holding up other believers for ridicule and calling for them to be suppressed and excluded.
December 11th, 2009 at 12:34 am
@ CK MacLeod:
December 11th, 2009 at 10:16 am
@ strangelet:
“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”
Niccolo Machiavelli
December 11th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
@ strangelet:
“There is no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt. ”
Niccolo Machiavelli
December 11th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
The completely objective and unbiased international judges are on the verge of declaring Sully the winner by a knockout in this super-high stakes Machiavelli quote-off.
December 11th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Frag Niccolo.
Tis a night for Rodan and company.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9dj8m_mendi-rodan-conductor-1929-2009-sol_music
December 11th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
@ Sully: ahh, but the WECs are the ones holding their religion in contempt….the prosperity gospels and mega-churches, the machinations of the Family and the C-street creeps are antipathic to the teachings of Jesus Christ.
I can agree with that quote.
December 11th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
@ Sully: lol, i <3 Geithner and Rahm…and Summers is in my tribe….we both are aspergers positive
I approve of Petraeus and Holder.
And also of Francis Collins.
Who are you seeking to disparage?
December 11th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Geithner is a tax cheat, so is Daschle, the Solis clan, etc, Emmanuel is an ill tempered
Alinskyite operative, has nothing to do with
ethnicity, it has to do with competence and integrity
December 11th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
@ CK MacLeod: don’t think so Highlander….at least not yet.
Obama is a machiavellian pragmatist–this is an old argument betwixt you and me.
December 11th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
@ narciso:
lol, narcisco judges “ethics”, while I base my evaluation on intelligence and skill.
The Prince is not required to be “ethical”.
December 11th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Well then, the TARP program that was his baby how did that work out. How the Treasury handled the stimulus, under Sheriff Joe, when certain families avoid taxes in Third World countries, they punish the whole country, here they make him the head of the IRS
December 11th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
@ strangelet:
Don’t know much about Rahm; but Geithner is surely the first self admitted tax cheat to be Treasury Secretary and Summers is a notorious misogynist.
I’ll never forgive him for making that Harvard Professor cry.
December 13th, 2009 at 7:36 am
lol
I’ve already been called a sex traitor for defending Summers.
He was just speaking truth.
i loathe boutique feminists only slightly less than WECs.
December 14th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
@ strangelet:
Truth is no defense before the bar of political correctness. He should hang, and not by the neck.
December 14th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
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