In a post featured in the HotAir headlines (and headed by a music video clearly intended to devastate the souls of all foolish enough to click), blogger Instapunk has used my “Go Ahead, Make Our Decade” post (also at the Green Room here) as a prime example of “Polyanna Syndrome” among conservatives, characterized in particular by the belief that the ongoing “political suicide” of the Obamacrats, most vividly on display in the Health Care legislation working its way through the legislative intestinal tract, may provide an opportunity far more important than any damage they have done or will yet do.
I referred to this idea in passing as “‘the worse, the better’ rightwing Leninism.” Instapunk calls it “absolutely dead wrong… no ifs, ands, or buts about it”:
It’s sheer giddiness to think that it’s somehow better for conservatives if the Democrats succeed in passing this truly horrendous healthcare bill. Madness, in fact. Yes, the Dems will experience huge losses at the polls in 2010, but even the rosiest of all possible electoral scenarios is nowhere near rosy enough to undo the damage the bill would cause. The Republicans could retake the House, but not by the majority the Democrats presently hold. It’s less likely, though remotely possible, that Republicans could retake the Senate.
Psychological diagnosis notwithstanding, Instapunk comes fairly close here to conceding my initial point – that (quoting myself and adding emphasis) “purely from a political standpoint, this should be a time for celebration.”
To be clear, we don’t differ much at all, as far as I can see, on the policy question. I readily concede that Obamacare if enacted and implemented would be a disaster for conservatives, for Americans, and by extension for the world. On this note, Instapunk rightly emphasizes that policy is in the end more important than politics, then adds a gloomy forecast regarding the latter ever turning sufficiently to overcome the former:
However, there’s no way on earth the Republicans could command the 60-40 majority that has made possible the currently imminent hijacking of one-sixth of the U.S. economy. Which means that there’s no way to get to the magic number that would be required for repeal.
To me, this logic suggests a fundamental misreading both of what we’ve seen transpire and of how American democracy works.
The history of Western democracy includes some truly stunning partisan wipe-outs, but we don’t need to dwell on what today seems a remote political possibility (as remote as, say, a ca. 60-Democrat Senate seemed in 2002). Dismantling, impeding, nullifying, and, in the end, fully repealing this bill does not require 60 Republicans or 60 conservatives: Greater legal, legislative, and historical minds than mine must already be studying the precedents and gaming the scenarios, but we can observe here that, if passing popular legislation in the Senate always required partisan super-majorities, we wouldn’t have had a major piece of legislation signed since 1979. We don’t know yet how the final votes in the Senate or for final passage after a House-Senate conference may go, but reversing them down the road would merely require a popularly backed majority joined by a passel of fence-sitters, perhaps including Democratic senators who in the current session vote for cloture but against final passage, perhaps including a few changes of heart. It could be as simple as that.
Looking further ahead, speculatively, the President himself would likely remain a roadblock to formal repeal, but, even prior to the election of 2012, the “damage control” that Instapunk describes, involving excision of particularly obnoxious elements of the bill, might effectively impede its implementation. Moreover, it’s well worth keeping in mind that removing the budgetary heart of the bill can be achieved via the Senate reconciliation process on a simple, unfilibusterable 51-vote majority (especially easy to justify if Obamacare finally passes on party line votes as narrow as Pelosicare’s in the House). If virtual repeal on this basis looks achievable as early as, say, 2011, the President might veto an O-care-destroying budget, while hoping for a re-play of the Clinton-Gingrich government shutdown confrontation of 1995, but such a battle could unfold in many different ways. After Obama is gone, a conservative president and conservative majority, at the crest of a continuing or revived conservative wave, could much more easily achieve effective or formal repeal.
The only reason to consider such outcomes impossible would be belief that the public will change its mind, that we do not face a looming fiscal and economic crunch, and that entitlement programs, once enacted, cannot ever be rescinded.
The first two propositions are at minimum debatable, and the tides of opinion and economic projection currently seem in conservatives’ political favor – a very well-evidenced observation that provided the basis for my “Make Our Decade” post and to varying degrees for the positions of my fellow Polyannist-Leninists. As for the third point, on the supernatural immortality of entitlement programs, we hear and read variations on it frequently – sometimes offered with a knowing laugh, lately from conservatives who have been attempting to gin up opposition to O-care – but, if and when the bill passes and is signed, the embrace of this perspective would be defeatism pure and simple. It would also remain an exaggeration, because entitlements or their equivalent have repeatedly been cut or eliminated around the world and throughout history – though frequently, it must be admitted, only as a result of economic or political breakdown. The modern European welfare state has indeed been extremely difficult to unravel, but it hasn’t been around for very long. For most of the time that it has been in existence, progressivism, socialism, and their variants were historically new and on the rise, and were further supported by economic and political contingencies (including military and economic support from the US of A) that cannot last forever.
As for this specific entitlement, what makes anyone believe that any guarantee it entails or calculation it depends on will be sustainable for very long, much less become “permanent”? We will soon have to make some difficult fiscal choices on an almost incomprehensible scale, or have them made for us via national bankruptcy – under which latter situation all such entitlements would merely entitle the citizen to go searching with devalued dollars or theoretical guarantees for scarce to non-existent goods and services. The crisis of debt-supported, obligation-deferred, risk-displaced welfare state capitalism that exploded last year is not over. It’s hardly even in abeyance, and Obamacare promises to deepen and accelerate it.
Before the next reckoning is reached, a coherent political force can achieve things that previously seemed politically impossible. That sort of change, believed in or not, has happened before in history, several times in our own history, and sometimes far ahead of the schedule set by the change agents themselves. Furthermore, as has been pointed out by many observers ever since the polls turned decisively against Obamacare, no legislation this sweeping, partisan, and unpopular has ever before been passed. To use one of the Obama Administration’s favorite words, enactment of Obamacare would be truly unprecedented. We should therefore consider that unprecedented events tend to imply unprecedented responses, and unprecedented political events require and ensure unprecedented political responses: The only real question is how long the equal and opposite reaction can be denied and suppressed.
If Obamacare, on its own terms or as implicated in approaching fiscal catastrophe, remains anywhere near as unpopular over the coming years as it is now, there is no fundamental reason why it can’t be rescinded – piece by piece or all at once. I therefore remain convinced that the proper response by conservatives to its passage cannot and must not be despair – certainly not yet, certainly not while a popular wave against the prime perpetrators is rising, and not while the tools of democratic self-government are still within reach.
I can see why Instapunk and others might feel justified in calling me or anyone else out for unwarranted optimism as we stand on the Obamic “precipice,” but in my opinion defeatism and pessimism are far worse responses. This is a moment for sober judgment, and for confidence in one’s own beliefs and analysis, whichever best keeps you in the fight. It’s a moment to decide whether our message to the Obamaist progressives is going to be: “You win – we give up” or “We’re coming after you, and getting rid of your laughable, embarrassing, and repugnant health care bill (presuming you ever get around to passing it) will just be the beginning.”
Comments 58
It took decades to get a bill as flawed, hollowed-out. and dishonest as this to the finish line.
It won’t be repealed.
It’ll be screwed around with through amendation and through administrative oversight and practice, one way and another, for decades.
December 19th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
The problem is two fold, first, I don’t recall an instant of such an entitlement repealed certainly in the Anglosphere, and even less elikely in the Third World, with the possible example of post Allende Chile. Second the sheer number of taxes and regulations, will
be a straight jacket over any prospective
recovery, even if the benefits don’t start for a few years
December 19th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
narciso wrote:
Well, off the top of my head, in addition to Chile, we repealed entire Marxist governments in Grenada and Afghanistan. I don’t believe there’s been a heckuva lot of continuity or straight-line progress in Argentina over the years. Iraq is still a work in progress. It’s kind of unfair to keep the 2nd world off the radar, since it was the focus of our major rollback effort of the last 60 years.
Until Thatcher & Reagan, there had been something like a straightline increase in taxation throughout Europe. After them, tax cuts spread throughout what we today call the Eurozone.
Otherwise, you’ll have to define what you mean by “such an entitlement.”
Intensifying the fiscal and economic crisis that in my view will likely provide the central impetus to conservatives and central motivation for repeal.
December 19th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
fuster wrote:
You’re a terrific optimist about the sustainability of the system as it stands.
I suppose it’s possible that someday our descendants will gather round to worship the brittle and yellowing stacked pages of the O-care bill, kind of like the mutant telepaths in Beneath the Planet of the Apes worshiping the Holy Bomb, without really understanding what it ever meant or was for. On the bright side, they’ll be unlikely to do as much harm if they try to set it off. On the dark side, it will already have done the damage.
December 19th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Zardoz.
It’ll be little noted nor long remembered. It’ll just be worked over, under and around.
We survived Social Security, we survived Medicare and Medicaid, we survived Reagan.
This’ll probably make us stronger instead of death paneling us, (except for you guys).
December 19th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
“Mr. Anchovy” the unfunded liabilities from those two programs, dwarf the planet’s GDP, so I don’t know what you mean by surviving.
Any additional program will not be any cheaper.
December 19th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
@ narciso:
You can call me Bruce. Accountancy was too racy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f_p0CgPeyA
December 19th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
It’s been a half century since the Feds have run a balanced budget,(Clinton’s “Surpluses” were Accounting Fiction). Everybody’s been spending like drunken sailors,on war and peace,and Why? Because there were no Economic Consequences until 2007,only political consequences for NOT SPENDING.
There is only one issue left, How we handle our Debts,every other issue is an evasion of the stranglehood that Debt has on every aspect of our society. And none of the options are pretty in a Democracy,in fact,too much Debt is the quickest way to go from a Democracy to a Dictatorship.
December 19th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
I would prefer that the bill be shelved than that we count on being conquered by aliens from Planet Palin. But either way its opponents’ advantage is that the liberal health care agenda has been so overweening that there is no likelihood of its hiding in the shadows, let alone in plain sight. And cradle to grave socialism is simply not yet baked into American political culture, and has even suffered reverses in its European homeland. (It isn’t Japanese either from what I’ve read.)
So the “don’t let a crisis go to waste” obsession could undo its propagators as Alinsky returns from the dead to bite his acolytes in the left behind.
December 20th, 2009 at 7:24 am
Ironic, isn’t it? After the Nelson debacle, the only remaining hope of stopping this monstrosity from becoming law lies on the Left. I have been studiously examining the reaction to the present bill at Daily Kos and Huff-Po, and the nutroots are as enraged at the Dims, but especially at Obama, as are the likes of Red State, Malkin, and so forth. Moreover they (the Left) have been mightily pissed off for some time, since September at least, and many since February when Obama publicly eschewed single payer.
The ideal scenario in a dismal landscape of options for conservatives, is a nutroot-provoked revolt by House Democrats in conference, which goes directly after those amendments Reid used to get Nelson et al. onboard. In Nelson’s statement of capitulation, he reserved the right to support cloture if something untoward happened in conference. Alas, relying on Ben Nelson’s word at this point in time is a chimerical hope, so long as Nebraska’s Medicaid entitlement is left alone.
In addition, Pelosi is already directing Democrats to shut up and leave the Senate bill untouched, and Emanuel has several times announced that there will be no trouble on the left, a remark that particularly incensed the nutroots. The White House is now deliberately provoking their base (for instance, by going after Dean) to pre-sell the final bill to the media, as much as to say that, if radicals left and right are against the thing, it must be a good bill.
In the past, I have several times enunciated what I call “Joe’s First Law of Politics”: There’s no such thing as untutored public opinion. All that matters is: Who’s doing the tutoring. Most of the unpleasantness in the bill is designed to kick in after 2013. Please note the date. Much of the popular opposition to the bill, I think we must admit, derives from uncertainty. The vast American center (about 60% of us) is pretty sure, but far from positive, that Obamacare is going to affect their present healthcare arrangements badly, but they can’t exactly say how, since nobody understands the damn thing (and that begins with Congress). I hardly need to point out that that is not a principled basis for opposition to socialized medicine.
Beween now and 2013, not much is going to happen to alarm them. I predict that uncertainty-engendered alarm will gradually dissipate, to be replaced with sullen acceptance. Meanwhile, the MSM will be “tutoring” them like there’s no tomorrow. At that point Mark Steyn’s ratchet effect will have kicked in to make the entire thing unrepealable. Ever. With but one slender hope, which I’ll return to below.
As for Colin’s original point, which I have been some time getting to, there does seem to me something Pollyanish about it. Back in August, I wrote here that the battle was all but lost when the “Blue Dogs” failed to stop Obamacare from getting out of committee, adding that the real turning points were the elections of 2006 and 2008. I well remember Colin remonstrating with me that there was still time to stop it and that a lot could still change. I remember reflecting ruefully that, yes, a lot might change but also that one thing that simply would not change was the number of Democrats in the Senate, which we now clearly see is all that matters and has mattered.
So now Colin is back to positing things that “could change” over time that will undo the damage. I’m far less convinced by such arguments now than I was in August.
I wholeheartedly agree with Colin that pessimism and defeatism are not worth indulging, as well as being positively dangerous. So here’s the slender hope I alluded to above: In addition to taking back the House, we must elect at least 15 or 16 additional solidly Republican Senators by 2012, and hope that there will be four or five red-state Democrats who will join them in repeal of the present bill. It seems impossible, I admit, but as recently as 2005 there were 55 Republican Senators. To make the burden even more daunting, we must elect a Republican president in 2012 to avoid the truly impossible task of overriding a veto.
So yes, the task ahead is frightening, but at least it is an identifiable goal towards which to strive, and to the extent that it is so, it is practical. With respects to our esteemed moderator, it is far more practical than the future vagaries that he suggests may save us.
December 20th, 2009 at 7:32 am
And, the way to Joe NS’s unlikely undoing of this monstrosity:
Marches, town halls, demonstrations, petitions, we’re not going to take it anymore, disobedience, boycotts, strikes.
The anger has to be mobilized.
December 20th, 2009 at 8:07 am
@ CK MacLeod:
One hopes we, or more probably our descendents, won’t have to repeal Obamacare the same way; but one suspects we or they will.
December 20th, 2009 at 8:59 am
@ Joe NS:
Good points Joe. The leftist nutroots will scream; but in the end they’ll accept long slow destruction of the shining city on the hill given that they can’t achieve prompt destruction during this round of their assault.
December 20th, 2009 at 9:06 am
@ Joe NS:
Joe, I would agree with you if a) the heart of the matter wasn’t budgetary, b) yearly $1 Trillion and expanding budget deficits and roughly commensurate debt service in a stagnant or worse economy were sustainable, and c) America’s relative position in the world could be maintained under those circumstances.
If fully implemented, O-care would eventually Europeanize America, and I’m not referring to the sweet old Viennese ladies bringing their pooches into the coffee shops. Under current trends, and even without major upsets, that would be Europeanization at a degraded and deteriorating standard of living, or, as we used to say answering the knock-knock joke: European down my leg.
It’s almost imaginable, and doable – fortress socialist America aiming for Germany and landing on a slippery track backwards through social and economic history – but as of latest readings the people want something different.
December 20th, 2009 at 9:28 am
There is no way this could work, now matter how many teams you read Alinsky, yet theyare driving right into the minefield, around Gitmo, just like in Bad Boys 2
December 20th, 2009 at 9:44 am
I’m just not pessimistic enough perhaps.
Shouldn’t we be asking how to communicate better? How do we wake up America?
December 20th, 2009 at 10:02 am
@ Zoltan Newberry:
The challenge, according to the polls as of this moment, isn’t waking America up, it’s in keeping America awake. People already understand by almost 2 to 1 that this was the wrong way to go about “reforming” health care delivery. Most of the support is, I believe, purely partisan: It’s the play my team called, so I will cheer it.
Obamaism is a lot like that Soviet plane discussed on the Wall. It won’t fly. The more I think about this bill, the more it looks to me like another extremely expensive and ill-conceived Stimulus contraption that won’t actually change very much at all. Worse money after bad.
Our real problems lie elsewhere.
December 20th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Colin, the Dims can get all the money they need from the defense budget. In fact they will have no choice. And that relates to your second observation, namely, “Europeanization.” The two do go hand in hand, the “two” being ramped up domestic welfare spending and increasingly drastic cuts to the military budget, which uncontroversially, I think, sums up the preferences of Europeans since 1945.
In your original post you observe that the European welfare state hasn’t been around for all that long. Here I must demur. First of all, the original for the European welfare state is Bismarck’s Germany. Yikes! By 1880 the idea was taking hold all across Europe that cradle-to-grave social insurance for all citizens was a government’s statutory responsibility. Clearly the Bismarckian formula was meant to blunt the appeal of the growing socialist movement (the first Socialist International was held in 1869, I believe). The convulsions of 1848 were then still quite vivid in the imaginings of European monarchs and statesmen. And I never tire of pointing out to my friends on the left that the practical blueprints for the society they so crave to see realized here were drawn up, not under the auspices of their world-historical, rights-of-man heroes of the French Revolution, not in Scandinavia, but by a man synonymous with a most illiberal Blut und Eisen autocracy. They are always unimpressed, I should add, insisting that there is no “meaningful” connection between a government that infantilizes its citizens and a citizenry that behaves like an infant, mouth agape and awaiting the next sugar plum.
But I am digressing. I italiczed “statutory” above for a particular reason. Europeans were Europeans long before 1880, by which I mean they were hopelessly class-ridden and subservient, with a bred in the bone instinct of deference to government. There’s no sense blaming them, but some men had actually literally to separate themselves physically from Europe for those obnoxious, millennia-old inclinations to lose their grip. What, I venture to inquire, was serfdom, the politico-economic system of Europe for a thousand years, if not a vast collection of nanny statelets all across the European continent? The mutual obligations of suzerain and vassal are embedded deep within the historical culture and, I suspect, even in the DNA of Europeans. The troublemakers and malcontents – who, it is not implausible to suggest, must have been radically askew, aka genetic mutants, relative to the bulk of the population – left Europe or were driven out or, as in the case of Australia, were “transported” to the ends of the earth. In fact I would argue, that absent an instinct to subservience to your betters, there is no distinctive pan-European culture. It’s true that Asia, which invented the kow-tow, the pranam, and the full-frontal, eyes averted prostration before the man on the throne, for time out of mind presented a much more extreme version of abject behavior, but so much the worse for Asia. It doesn’t change what went on in Europe for two-thousand years. Blame the Roman Empire, if you will, which inculcated worship of an emperor at sword-point into Europeans for the first time in their history.
It was only in the Nineteenth Century, with more or less secure nation states in existence, that the statutes finally caught up with the culture. What was required to push Europeans into whole-heartedly embracing full legal dependency on the State was the exhaustion wrought by two horrific wars fought to the death within 30 years.
So the question is an anthropological one: Are Americans exhausted? In King Harry’s words, has our “mettle been bred out”? The inheritance, genetic and otherwise, of the Anglo-Saxon riffraff, troublemakers, renegades, and, in their generality, of those men and women having the robust and tumultuous instincts of unruly desperadoes with an eye to the main chance who framed this Republic’s laws and stamped its culture with the virtues of their vices, is scarce on the ground these days. We may already be “Europeans,” and quite open to statutory certification of the unpleasant – and embarrassing – fact.
December 20th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Joe NS wrote:
From an historical perspective, 120 years from inception to the present isn’t very long, especially since what we can call the “mature social welfare state” has existed for only a small part of that period, and has been supported by demographic and economic assumptions that are becoming obsolete.
If we’re all Europeans by now, in keeping with your long historical view, then we should be clear that it doesn’t equate with modern European levels of consumption: It’s the Old World in the bad sense, without any material guarantees, with highly vulnerable fundamentals, and with bitter rivals and adversaries, barbarians not only at the gate but within the walls.
I’m not convinced at all that most Americans are like those Obama-money ninnies waiting for their handouts. We’ll see which side wins the developing struggle, regardless of how “it” looks on paper: Like we say in sports fandom, that’s why they play the games.
December 20th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Are Americans exhausted?
Nothing is more exhausting than dealing with unsustaneable Debt. Individuals,Families,Cities,Counties,States,the Federals,many public and private companies and other organizations are feeling the gravitational pull of Debt. (For example,at the moment,10% of those still working,their companies are owned by Hedge Funds). The question for our leadership is how we manage the inevitable Downsizing of our Debt,and who is going to get the Haircut,and what will be the Cost of those Haircuts. BTW,Bernanke and Geithner aren’t up to the job.
December 20th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Oh – and that’s a big “no way.” You could disband the entire armed forces, tell the soldiers to keep, sell, or leave their equipment and get their own tickets home, and it wouldn’t come close to covering the entitlement gap, even presuming that in the meantime nobody made any trouble for the world economy (which might hit our bottom line a tad).
December 20th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Wow! I thought I was a bit of an extremist. Over at Hotair there is a whole secessionist cadre.
Relax. Take a deep breath. A poster over there hit on the political flaw in the Democrat plan. The taxes and fear start immediately; but the benefits don’t flow until after 2012.
The Demo will be prepared with a clever quip in answer to a variant of the old Reagan line – “are you better off for health care than you were before Obamacare was passed? – but surely a clever debate coach can come up with variants that will sale home to the people who will by then be realizing that a bureaucracy is growing but still there are tens of millions without insurance and tens of millions facing much higher premiums as the “no preexisting conditions” stricture gets closer.
Secession is a final option not even worthy of discussion until after political uprising is tried. The Senate and House need to be 60/40 Republican (or Tea Partry and Republican) by December 2012.
December 20th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
@ Sully:Secessionists, huh?
How cute.
Death panel ‘em and put their brains in those jars with the AB labels.
Prolly get three per quart jar.
December 20th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
It’s like Mal Reynold’s crew at the valley of Serenity Valley, against the Alliance
December 20th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Hey- Weekly Standard Blog picked up your post, Colin. We’re so proud.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/12/repealing_obamacare.asp
December 20th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
I don’t know who I dislike more: the secessionists or the “petitioners.” One petition I was encouraged to sign had the phrase, “We the undersigned pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to remove from office any senator that votes for this [ObamaCare] bill.”
Oh, right, I’m going to pledge my life to remove someone from office. I believe that’s the al-Qaeda/Hamas gambit. What a bunch of overwrought crap.
December 20th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
@ Barbara:
Thanks for the tip Barbara: I go off to a family Xmas gathering, and return home a shining star, that’s what I are.
I’m just grateful that John McCormack edited out the transition I flubbed, and I wish that I’d worked a little harder on that passage. But, then, how was I to know that it was destined for immortality?
December 20th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
I agree the secessionism talk is mostly kind of silly, especially when it’s “all the liberals there,” “all the conservatives here” stuff, and formal secession seems unlikely, to say the least, but there ARE centrifugal forces pulling at the US that severe and extended economic and other dislocations could exacerbate. Give us a lost war or two, hyperinflation, or other classically de-stabilizing events… who can say what is and isn’t possible?
December 20th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
@ Barbara:
It’s over the top; but at least that petition is straightforward. The health care petition lefty folks pushed at me last summer was as vague as could be. They found it semi-treasonous that I insisted on reading it before eventually not signing. Clearly such an analytical sort as me wanted nothing more than to see grandma die for lack of treatment.
December 20th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Congrats on the Weekly Standard pickup CK. It’s well deserved. The post is wise.
Some of that secession stuff over at Hot Air may be related to something I mentioned the other day. A smart disrupter agrees with his quarry and pushes it toward a cliff. He or she is the opposite of a troll.
December 20th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
@ Sully:
Don’t think it was an agent provocateur in this case: The ringleader who started it, venividivici, is a pretty smart guy – just very far right. And there are secession movements in existence, both left communitarian (Vermont) and rightwing 10th Amendment/nullificationist (Texas). Then there’s of course the Alaska Independence Party that Todd Palin belonged to, and that I believe elected a governor. Not ready to take up arms, but it has the idea of holding a vote on secession in its program.
It seems wacky, but if things get wacky, then wacky might start to seem normal. I think the default position of a lot of Americans would already be, sure, if Utah wants to do it’s own thing, why not? You’d have to start over explaining from scratch why it would be worth fighting a bloody war to keep them in the family.
December 20th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
The Alaskan Independence Party is not about secession, it’s the third force between the two major parties, it did elect a governor on it’s own, a cantakerous Ross Perot like figure named Walter Hickel, Nixon’s peacenik Interior Secretary, and the man behind the original TAP line that Biden voted against. There was one crazy character named Vogler, who had violent sympathies but he ‘assumed room temperature; back in ’94. Hickel was more likely the inspiration for Mr. Palin’s affiliation with the party, rather than the former figure,they don’t suffer fools gladly, and the local party is well full of fools
December 20th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
I agree that AIP isn’t really “radical,” but around the time that the controversy first came up, just like Steve Schmidt I found on their web page the call for a vote on independence.
I’m confident that BHO hung out with more than a few old line “black separatists” when he was coming up in the world.
December 20th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
Schmidt, there’s a character who was so intent
on surrendering to afellow who makes Kerry look competent, that he allowed Axelrod’sastroturfing efforts to saturate the internet,to sink in for weeks at a time, without rebuttal. So consequently he ends up teaming with Plouffe to teach people how to run successful campaigns
December 20th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
That’s the Tsar I’m used to.
I’m sure that Sara Palin hung out with pimps and devil-worshippers while she was coming out in the underworld.
Now, a certain person might say stuff like the above and a certain Tsar would wonder why anyone would be rotten and stupid and deranged enough to do so.
December 20th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
@ fuster:
Dude, BHO speaks openly in his own autobio about all the far leftists and other cranks (he may even mention the separatists specifically) he encountered while searching for direction in life, and, if you’ve had any experience in big city politics, then you know that on the local level the Democratic Party is full of those types. In the old days not too long ago, they were often directly supplied by honest-to-god Communist front groups, both old-fashioned CP and every shape of splinter faction. I used to get shouted down by them at carefully packed organizing meetings. I also used to go out organizing with them. They used to try hard to recruit me and my friends – CWP, RCP, DSA, the whole alphabet soup, not to mention the seventeen flavors of Trotskyite, and the laborites slumming with the peaceniks.
The New Party that BHO got his start with was an amalgam of black nationalist, DSA, post-CP, post-Freeze/Jobs for Peace activists. Their first manifesto was, IIRC, pure popular front communism with a heady aroma of black nationalism.
I don’t hold it against BHO, but I know how things were for a “community organizer” with political ambitions. I knew guys a lot like him, just not quite as favored by fate: big fish/small pond up and coming guys who needed to and could afford to hold themselves a little apart and above the grunts, especially if they were well-suited to marketing the program to the “underclass.” Some of them are still active. Just one golden child so far has grabbed the brass ring. If Van Jones had had a little more self-control, was a little older, and was maybe a little lighter colored, frankly, it could have been him.
Doesn’t make BHO a Manchurian Candidate. Doesn’t mean he believes all of the same things CWP or DSA or the New Party believed, but it’s where he came from, and it shows from his wife to his appointments to his lies and obfuscations, and in all of his reflexes.
December 20th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
If those are the people he keeps associating with like Van Jones, hand selected by Valerie Jarrett, or Mark Lloyd, who thinks that Chavez’s Venezuela, ‘is a wonderful democratic revolution’ only prevented by evil counterrevolutionary media like Globo (read Fox) and their puppets like Alicia Machado (read Sarah) SEIU’s Andy Stern, former SDS, who speaks of the reactionary nature of the US Chamber of Commerce, this is a bug not a feature
December 21st, 2009 at 5:11 am
@ CK MacLeod:
“Directly supplied by Communist front groups?” Are you kidding? BHO SHARED AN OFFICE with Mike Klonsky: http://tinyurl.com/yct78z7
December 21st, 2009 at 6:31 am
Now Klonsky’s technically a Maoist, with the former PLP, where Lyndon Larouche emerged from, so that it makes it all good (sarc) but softpedaling the nature and extent of this project of ‘fundamentally transforming America’ does no good.
December 21st, 2009 at 6:46 am
CK, I am new to your site but love the article.I have been making some of the same points to friends but not so well laid-out as you,Thank you.
December 21st, 2009 at 7:36 am
The only hope is that since no benefits begin until after 2012, that people get ticked off about paying the taxes which start now and decide to kill it out of spite.
I tend to agree with Steyn’s analysis. These things never die, as fuster also notes, they just get ammended.
The one real wild card – fiscal. Medicare is going into default in the next decade. That could change it all.
Also realize that AHIP and Big Pharma allowed this to happen – so, go generic when you can to pay Pharma back, and tie up the insurers with phone calls and emails and delayed payments. If the government is going to make them Guido, might as well make them earn it.
And for every lib out there who thinks big business is conservative and Republican, realize that it isn’t – they are left wing statists who like certainty. Nothing scares them more than individuals screwing with their cash flow. The only thing that allows them to do guarentee this cash flow is big liberal government. Otherwise they would actually have to earn it.
December 21st, 2009 at 8:04 am
InstaPunk here. I responded to your Hotair post in an Update of my original post, at the same url as the link above.
We disagree more about tactics than policy. Key word: Dunkirk.
Respectfully,
IP
December 21st, 2009 at 9:16 am
@ Robert Laird:
Hi, Robert, welcome to our humble warren. I see you were caught by an error, which none of us had noticed, in which the post was mis-attributed at HA (on the main page/left column version only?) to Allah Pundit. You should probably update your own blog so that poor Allah isn’t later on forced to explain how one of the internet right’s leading pessimists could fall victim to Polyannaism.
I’ll respond in a main page post a bit later to your thoughtful reply, especially since I am unable to resist war analogies!
December 21st, 2009 at 9:34 am
@ CK MacLeod:
There’s probably a War Analogy Resisters’ League, if you want help with that.
December 21st, 2009 at 9:48 am
@ fuster:
If there isn’t, there probably should be.
December 21st, 2009 at 10:23 am
@ Christopher:
Thanks, Christopher. Apparently your blog name-link got cut off. It’s here if anyone wants to check it out.
December 21st, 2009 at 10:49 am
There is a problem with this definition, of Leninism, Lenin understood that the failure of reform was a precondition for reform, but that was not anything he did. Hence the SR killing of Stolypin, the consequences of the Russo Japanese war, this seems to be the opposite of what is happening
December 21st, 2009 at 11:30 am
Cool. Allahpundit corrected his error without ever linking the InstaPunk post that caused it.
Got it.
I’m guessing the “Green Room” is something like the “Lousiana Purchase” and the “Nebraska Knockup” — or whatever they’re calling it.
Politics is everywhere.Tired of it. INSTAPUNK IS THE ONLY RIGHTY WEBSITE THAT GETS NOTHING FROM NOBODY EVER.
Not advertising. Not organizational know-how. Not political juice. Not nothing.
Nothing.
December 21st, 2009 at 1:30 pm
@ Robert Laird:
But. . . but. . . you just imported and savored the sublime wisdom of our CK. Surely that’s a commodity more priceless than pearls and gold, let alone mere advertising or political juice.
December 21st, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Good point, Sully!
December 21st, 2009 at 3:39 pm
No blog is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
John Donne (with just one little mod)
December 21st, 2009 at 4:00 pm
@ Sully:
There’s little chance, short of one damn big earthquake, that CK will be washed away by the sea.
Maybe a hosing misadventure or an overly enthusiastic infusion at one of his tea parties, but may he rain o’er his subjects semi-long.
Stow the bells.
December 21st, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Stow the bells, the froggy says,
Still their knells, MacLeod stays,
Unless the earth, should suffer quake,
He’ll hold his berth, not from it break.
December 21st, 2009 at 6:45 pm
@ Sully:
Sometimes,Sully, you’re good.
Other times, such as this, you’re better.
I’ve got some evidence here
that the Tsar’s long been composing letters.
http://www.stuartngbooks.com/jaffee_clods_letters_mad_cv.jpg
December 21st, 2009 at 6:50 pm
@ Sully:
I love John Donne. I had the pleasure of sitting in on a Brit Lit class at Providence College when they were going over a couple of Donne’s poems. The prof recited them from memory, natch. “No Man is an Island” is, however, one of Donne’s least sexy poems. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Even his religious poetry tends to be, er, passionate.
December 21st, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Providence College, a fine and private place.
December 21st, 2009 at 7:41 pm
@ Barbara:
I like Donne also. Of course, No Man is an Island wasn’t written as a poem, so naturally it isn’t as sexy as this:
MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.
December 21st, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Of course, some of his opinions are controversial in the present day:
Ends love in this, that my man
Can be as happy as I can, if he can
Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom’s play?
That loving wretch that swears,
‘Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds,
Which he in her angelic finds,
Would swear as justly, that he hears,
In that day’s rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres.
Hope not for mind in women ; at their best,
Sweetness and wit they are, but mummy, possess’d.
December 21st, 2009 at 9:18 pm
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