The Republican Opposition's Gnostic Rebellion: Or, why McCarthy's opponents should stop acting like a bunch of liberals

Makis E. Warlamis

The failure of Kevin McCarthy to secure the speakership of the U.S. House certainly doesn't reflect well on McCarthy. It is his first test as a leader: can he secure the support he needs in his own party? If he can't win his fellow Republicans, how can we expect him to command leadership in a chamber in which the opposition party has almost as many seats as his own?

Still, the main problem is not the opposing party, but the opponents within his own party who, without any alternative, are preventing McCarthy's installation as House Speaker. The only alternative McCarthy's Republican opponents are offering is some ghostly political democratic ideal, some non-McCarthy Shangri-La which will allow them to legislate in peace and eternal bliss.

It's enough to make smoke-filled rooms look positively attractive in comparison--and themselves like a circular firing squad. They're going to shoot themselves in the hope that some of the gore gets spattered on McCarthy.

Why should McCarthy's opponents be expected to sully themselves with the course political realities necessary in a parliamentary body? Every time you hear a politician rail against backroom deals and behind-the-scenes coalitions and cross-party alliances, make a mental note that this person is either being completely dishonest, or simply doesn't understand how politics works. In the first case he cannot be trusted and will end up engaging in the very behavior he condemns as soon as he's out of earshot; in the second case, he is a complete innocent who will never be effective and should be sent immediately to a monastery.

The legislative process has been aptly compared to a sausage factory for a reason.

McCarthy is not perfect. No one disputes this. Both sides know it. The difference is that his Republican opponents offer, as an alternative to McCarthy, some kind of ideal the details of which seem to elude McCarthy's most ardent detractors--some sort of Trumpian Shangri-La, some unrealistic Arcadian vision of ideal politics. It is the spectacle of a bunch of self-professed conservatives championing what Thomas Sowell has derisively called the "Vision of the Anointed."

The chief characteristic of this alternative is that it is not McCarthy. Beyond that lies the unknown.

Note that McCarthy's opponents are offering no actual alternative to McCarthy other than people who actually support him. There is no alternative except some dreamy political ideal that is so perfect it cannot even be described.

Is there a Swamp in Washington? Sure there is. Can it every be completely drained? Of course not. Such political swamps have existed time immemorial. And to think they can be completely drained is to cease to be conservative because it is to cease to be in touch with reality.

The problem with this kind of conservative ideal is that it is not conservative. Conservatives are practical and realistic. They are not dreamy and delusional. They acknowledge reality and try to find the best ways to ameliorate it. In economics they adhere to a few bedrock realities, like supply and demand and reject the idea that you can spend unlimited amounts of taxpayer money and not ever have to pay it back. In social policy they accept the simple reality that there are two sexes and reject the belief that there are some 75 different genders, the exact number depending on the time of day.

They accept the idea of Original Sin and that life and politics will never be perfect. Delusional perfection is the province of the Left: it is the Left's job to deny Original Sin and to constantly be casting some unrealistic vision of perfection that everyone knows really does not and cannot exist.

If the Republicans really want to succeed as conservatives, they should focus on the amelioration of the imperfect not the installation of the ideal. The Gnostic Republicans now making a bold stand against reality should stand down and deal with things as they are not as they wish they could be. 

Trump and Bush in Need of Remedial Insult Training

Most people think there are too many insults in the campaign for the Republican nomination for president. I disagree. The problem isn't too many insults: The problem is not enough good ones.

I could tolerate Donald Trump's insults if they at least evidenced some rudimentary level of wit. Unfortunately, what we have seen instead is petty schoolyard taunts. And George Bush is even worse. I mean, "Donald Trump is a jerk"? Really? Is that the best we can do?

Give me Carly Fiorina any day. Her razor sharp retorts are far above the blunt rhetorical instruments of the Trumps and Bushes.

Part of the problem is that we are Americans who don't have a very good mastery of our own language. If you doubt it, listen to a British sportscaster working a soccer game. They're actually literate people. They use words that Americans would have to look up (and ought to). None of the pedestrian descriptions you hear from our publicly-schooled color commentators--they're actually witty and creative.

I think some remedial insult training is in order here. 

One thing these people ought to do is to go and look at some of the classic political and literary comebacks. Here are three of which I am particularly fond:

George Bernard Shaw (a playwright, for the culturally illiterate Americans reading this, at a time when Churchill was low in the polls):  "I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend ... if you have one."

Winston Churchill: "Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one."

Or this one:

Lady Astor: "Winston, if you were my husband, I would poison your coffee."

Churchill: "Nancy, if you were my wife, I would drink it."

Or, my personal favorite:

Chesterton (upon meeting up with his old friend Shaw, a militant vegetarian who was skinny as a rail, before a speech): "Shaw, looking at you one would think there was a famine in the land."

Shaw (looking the 400 pound Chesterton up and down): "Chesterton, looking at you, one would think you had caused it."

It's too much to hope for I know. So will have to endure Trump's petty tweets and Bushes low-wit retorts. When is this thing over?

Why Rand Paul is Right: Republican hawks DID create ISIS

Kentucky U. S. Sen. Rand Paul's recent indictment of foreign policy hawks in his own party for "creating ISIS" has the neoconservatives in deep denial about their role in creating the mess which is now the Middle East. And of course their apologists were deployed this weekend to the news shows to explain how "strange" and "delusional" were Sen. Paul's remarks.

The normally lucid Charles Krauthammer said, "You know, sometimes, Ron Paul’s ignorance really astonishes me." [He meant "Rand"]

So, first, let's ask ourselves this question: "If George Bush II had not invaded Iraq (at the behest of Republican hawks) for what we now know were completely specious reasons, would ISIS exist?"

If you answer "Yes" to this question, then you are delusional: Your answer is strange and your ignorance should astonish even yourself.

If you answer "No," then you are in complete touch with reality.

Now of course, the particular part of Paul's remarks his critics are honing in on is the remark about where ISIS got many of its arms: “ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party, who gave arms indiscriminately, and most of those arms were snatched up by ISIS,” he said.

I think that's true too. But if you look at the full context of this remarks, you will see that his indictment is more far reaching than this and is directed at the failed policy of Republican neoconservatives that goes back "for twenty years."

I remember well the evolution of the Bush administration's position after 9/11 and in the months leading up to the Iraq War: The campaign started out as an effort to punish the people who perpetrated the attack on the Twin Towers and those harboring those who perpetrated it. That's why we went into Afghanistan.

Then, the agenda got much bigger: The Bush administration then decided it would go after all terrorists everywhere, whether they had been involved in 9/11 or not. In fact, by early 2001, so bloated did the administration's cause become that he announced in his State of the Union speech: "My administration has a job to do and we're going to do it. We will rid the world of the evil-doers."

Seriously. Go back and read the whole thing. Ridding the world of evil-doers. All of them.

And then there was the missionary cause of democracy which we were going to force everyone else in the world to acknowledge as superior. Or else. No one said it outright, but if you parsed the rhetoric of the time, you could have concluded that we were waging war on non-democratic forms of government as well.

It was this absurdly broad target that put Saddam Hussein in the cross-hairs. Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. Nothing. But he was an evil-doer. One of the many in the world whom we were going to destroy. So we did.

And that action created the modern Middle East crisis.

Someone on one of the Sunday programs attempted the argument that Paul had the chain of causation wrong. Okay, here's the chain of causation, and it isn't even terribly complex: The elimination of a strong and stable (if evil) government in Iraq, produced an unstable and weak government (if morally benign) in a Iraq. An unstable and weak government in Iraq was both the necessary and sufficient condition of the terrorist groups that began to thrive thereafter in Iraq. One of these groups is ISIS.

QED.

If there is a flaw in this chain of reasoning, could someone please point it out to me?

Since the "victory" in the Iraq War, it has all been downhill, with the possible exception of the Surge. But the other night, Fox's Meghan Kelly, claimed that we had "won" after the Surge. And she's criticizing Rand Paul for not making sense? That is about as bone-headed a comment as I can possibly imagine. The only way the benefits of the Surge would have lasted is if we had kept Surging into perpetuity―at a huge cost in money and manpower.

That may have kept Iraq stable for a while. But winning means you get to come home. If we had "won" with the Surge, then why wasn't it okay for Obama to bring the troops home?

The very fact that people like Kelly criticize Obama for giving away what we gained with the Surge is an indication that whatever we gained through the Surge was hardly permanent and certainly could not be described as a military victory.

So now we have a race for the presidency that features Democrats who were in favor of the Iraq War who now realize it was a mistake and Republicans who were in favor of the Iraq War who now realize it was a mistake.

What a choice.

And the only exception to that is Rand Paul. On the biggest issue of the past in regard to the Iraq War―whether it should have happened in the first place―Rand Paul is the only one who was right―just as his father (and presumably he too) was the only was who was right on the economic crisis of 2008 (He was the one congressman who accurately predicted the result of the housing bubble. His prediction was spot on).

That doesn't mean I'm going to vote for Rand Paul for president (I'm going to vote for the candidate who is the least cowardly in their defense of traditional marriage), but it does mean that the people who are now criticizing him on his remarks about ISIS (Krauthammer, National Review, Commentary magazine―former Iraq War cheerleaders all) are the very people who were wrong on the biggest issue in relation to the Iraq War―whether is should have happened in the first place.

If you didn't get that right, you forfeit your right criticize Rand Paul on anything related to the Iraq War. Go away. Find someone to criticize who has a worse track record than you on the issue, not a better one.

The Great Republican Surrender: CPAC and the GOP's abandonment of social issues

Imagine you are a Republican living in the year 2027. CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Committee, is having its national convention and straw poll for 2028 Republican presidential hopefuls. But markedly absent from speeches and discussion is any mention of free market principles. Few mentions of the problem of big government. Little or no rhetoric about over-burdensome taxation.

The Party is almost almost silent on economic issues.

If you think that sounds preposterous, then ask yourself whether, twelve years ago, you would have thought the Republicans would have almost entirely given up on values issues, which, along with free market economics and a strong national defense, was one of the three fundamental pillars of post-Reagan Republican policy.

If you bothered to watch the coverage of the 2015 CPAC convention you would have noticed a loud silence on what used to be one the Republican Party's major themes. Other than a few fleeting mentions of marriage and abortion, there was mention of nothing other other than economics and foreign policy.

Even when candidates were asked about where they stood on same-sex marriage, they punted—or sounded like they were. When Sean Hannity interviewed all the candidates who showed up for the event, only a few had even a well-thought out answer on the issue, but the eventual winner of the straw poll, Kentucky's Rand Paul, sounded as if he had heard the question for the first time, saying little about the federal courts declaring martial law on the issue and talking instead about the virtues of civil unions.

"I'm old-fashioned," he told Hannity, "I think marriage is between a man and a woman, but I'm also open in a sense that legally I don't think we should discriminate against people and that if people want to have a contract with another adult, there's no reason why the law should discriminate and prevent them from having benefits, or custody, or seeing people in the hospital, all that stuff can be arranged through contracts [between] adults."

This is the comment of someone who clearly is uncomfortable talking about the issue and all and really doesn't want to talk about it. Just imagine if someone ask him about free market economics. Would he say, "Well, you know, I'm a believer in free market economics, but I'm also open in the sense that there are circumstances in which the government needs to get involved in markets and I don't think we should be against that."

Not on your life.

In the same interview in which Paul declared himself a "constitutional conservative," he seemed to express little concern about the wholesale federal court takeover of state marriage policy in violation Supreme Court precedent.

The worst thing that could happen to the Republican Party is happening: Long charged by its Democratic detractors with not having a heart, Republicans are now doing their best to prove their point.

Say "Hello" to the Materialist Right: Republican politicians who have nothing to say about the most deeply-held convictions of Americans, who can no longer connect with their voters on issues of the heart, who cannot spare time in their analysis of the ills of big government to address the ills of the family.

The Republican Party's social policy agenda used to be marriage, the traditional family, and traditional values. In states like Kentucky this still survives, albeit in etiolated form. But the national party has dropped all three, and they have nothing to replace them with.

Am I saying Democrats are winning on social issues? I sure am. But the reason isn't because they have a better argument than the other side; the reason is that they bother to make an argument and the other side doesn't. It's easy to win a battle when the other side doesn't bother to show up.

The banner under which the Republicans are marching on social issues is a white flag.

It is a shallow cliché among the less politically astute that people vote their pocket books. The decisive refutations of this view are too long to catalog, but the would include at least the last two presidential elections. The dirty little secret in politics is that people don't really vote their pocket books: They vote their hearts, and the candidate who knows that and exploits it wins.

Barack Obama. Bill Clinton. Check it out.

The libertarians now controlling the Republican Party think they can win elections by doing a political heart bypass operation. Economic issues and criticisms of Democratic foreign policy are what they think will win them national elections. But it won't work. Ask Mitt Romney how this worked out for him.

If the choice is between a candidate who only appeals to the intellect of voters on the one hand, and one who appeals to their sentiments on the other, they will pick the second one every time.

The Republican Party has a huge constituency of cultural conservatives who are simply being ignored by Republican rhetoric. The current crop of candidates knows this and their strategy isn't hard to discern: They are willing to say the absolute minimum they can to keep these voters in the fold. And where else are they going to go anyway?

But the fact is they do have another place to go: Nowhere. That is, they can just sit out the election. This is what more than a few people did the last time around and it resulted in a second term for Obama, whose foreign policy missteps would, in any other world than the one Republicans have constructed for themselves, have been enough for him to be defeated.

There has not been a major party realignment in some time, but if you read history, you know that it does in fact happen periodically. If you look at polling data it is very clear that there is a huge plurality of voters that don't go along with the Elen Degenereses of the world. So substantial is it, in fact, that under any other circumstances it would be considered a situation to exploit. To Republicans, however, it has become an advantage to squander.

I have never been an advocate of a third party, but it is becoming increasingly clear that if Republicans don't recapture their cultural soul, they will unwittingly undermine their position as a viable party and produce, however unintentionally, a third party--one that probably couldn't win many elections, but could certainly decide them.

Should a college degree be required to run for president?

Liberals are attacking Wisconsin Governor and possible Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker because he doesn't have a college degree. Has anyone looked recently at actual educational attainment of any of the people who actually have a college degree and actually been impressed?

Would Walker be more qualified if he had a B.A. from the Ohio College of Clown Arts? (an actual college)? Is a B.A. from many other random college around the country an better than the one from the Clown Tech?

Here's George Leef at the National Review:

Of late, the progressives, who always say that they’re against discriminating against people over irrelevant things, have been having a field day with the fact that Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, never finished his degree at Marquette. Howard Dean tut-tutted that this obviously made Walker unsuitable as president. (Never mind that a majority of voters in Wisconsin have now chosen him over properly credentialed liberals three times.)  

This prompted Glenn Harlan Reynolds to comment on the college degree obsession in his latest USA Today column. “An America that once prided itself on real-world achievement and practical good sense now runs largely on credentials,” he writes. 

I'm thinking of William F. Buckley's comment about preferring to be ruled by the last thirty names in the Boston phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard University.

The Democrats Deadly Dilemma: Why Obama and his Democratic allies are doomed

President Obama has committed the one unpardonable political sin: embarrassing your friends.

So far he has gotten away with anything he wanted no matter how much it cost the country. But now it is not just costing the country; it is costing his political allies. You can do just about anything in politics but that.

And because of this they are fleeing the sinking political ship like rats. Today, 39 Democrats broke ranks to vote for a Republican-sponsored bill that would do what Obama said he wanted to do in his speech yesterday (and what he promised before Obamacare was passed): keep your current health care policy.

But Obama says he is going to veto it if it comes to his desk. Why would the President veto a bill that would ensure that insurance companies could do what he promised they could do yesterday?

There is a very simple answer to this question: Although he wants to appear as if he wants insurance companies to be allowed to do this, he doesn't really want them to do it.

If insurance companies continue to offer the same health policies they offered before, then fewer healthier people will join the exchanges. And if they fewer healthier people don't join the exchanges, then, because of the high percentage of high-risk participants, rates on policies purchased through the exchanges will increase.

In other words, the very success of Obamacare depends on the success of driving people now insured through the individual market into the exchanges. But it also depends on people being able to keep their policies like Obama said they would.

In other words, the two criteria necessary for Obamacare to succeed are mutually exclusive:

If people are allowed to keep their current policies, then rates will increase, which will doom Obamacare. If, on the other hand, people are not allowed to keep their current policies, then they will rebel, which will also doom Obamacare. Since either people will be allowed to keep their current policies or they won't, either rates will increase or people will rebel. In either case, Obamacare is doomed.

There does not appear to be any way around the horns of this dilemma. In fact, something even worse is likely to happen.

In fact, the pressure of this dilemma has been to increase even more by the failure of the Obamacare website. What the failure of the website has done is bring about the worse possible outcome of the President's health care legislation. In most dilemmas, you are forced to make a choice between two unacceptable alternatives--in this case raising health care insurance rates or making people angry by throwing them off the plans you told them they could keep.

What the failure of the website has done is ensure that the President and his Democratic allies are impaled, not on one horn of the dilemma or the other--but on both of them.

Because of the technical problems that are preventing people from signing up for health care, it is everything but an absolute certainty that people will not get back their cancelled policies. Under the Presidents plan--and the Republican bill passed today--insurers are not required to keep offering these policies and there is no incentive for them to continue to offer them.

In addition, it will be almost impossible for the exchange to sign up enough people to keep rates low, even if the site is fixed before the end of this month--another promise Obama made which he cannot keep.

And the timing of things couldn't be worse for Democratic congressmen: The announcements of rate increases will arrive next September or October, right before mid-term elections.

High rates and lack of choice. Oh, and one more thing, because of the inauspicious timing of the Obamacare schedule, many people will be without health care policies on January 1, when, under Obamacare, they are required to have them.

If this political coffin needed another nail, there it is.

I'm trying to think of what is going on right now in the minds of those people who predicted just a week or so ago a drubbing of the Republicans at the polls next year because of the threatened government shutdown. In fact, does any even remember that now?

The Newest Left Wing Conspiracy Theory

The grocery store shelves may have been cleaned off. Supplies of water may be running low. Batteries may be hard to find. No, it's not fear of hurricanes and floods: it's liberals in panic mode because they think the theocrats are coming.

Remember Hilary's Vast Right Wing Conspiracy? Well, now there's a new conspiracy. Here is Terry Gross, host of NPR's "Fresh Air" waxing paranoidal:

An emerging Christian movement that seeks to take dominion over politics, business and culture in preparation for the end times and the return of Jesus is establishing a presence in American politics. The leaders are considered apostles and prophets, gifted by God for this role.

The international apostolic and prophetic movement was named the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, by its leading architect, C. Peter Wagner. My guest, Rachel Tabachnick, has been researching and writing about this movement. She says although the movement is larger than the network of apostles organized by Wagner, and not all those connected with the movement describe themselves as part of Wagner’s NAR, the apostles and prophets of the movement have an identifiable ideology that separates them from other evangelicals.

The occasion for all the alarm bells are two articles, one by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker, in which he dredges up a relatively obscure school of evangelical thought and somehow reads it into Michelle Bachman's campaign platform, and another by Michelle Goldberg at Newsweek, who extrapolates the Plot For A Theocratic Takeover Of The United States Government to include Texas Governor Rick Perry.

These writers purport to have discovered disturbing indications of the covert influence of something called "Dominionism," which in its weak form is simply the belief that Christians should take their values into the voting booth, and in its strong form is that, well, that you should take your religiously-based values into the voting booth--but that you should be up front about the fact that your doing it.

The strong form of Dominionism scares liberals. The weak form scares them even more because they can convince themselves that it's conspiratorial and  get themselves all worked up about it.

The general paranoid drift of these articles is that, lurking underneath the apparent mainstream evangelical beliefs of some Republican candidates is the plan to spring a theocracy on the voters once they are elected, thereby helping to bring about the Second Coming.

We may just be facing the prospect of hypersensitive liberals building bomb shelters and storing canned food and ammunition in order to ride out the coming takeover by apocalyptic evangelicals. There should be some special name for people who think we should all take shelter because other people think the end is near.

The Big Budget Lie: How a bigger budget deficit is being sold as a "cut"

Rand Paul is, well, a Randian, but at least someone is pointing out that the Budget Emperor has no clothes. THE FEDERAL DEFICIT IS BIGGER THIS YEAR THAN LAST YEAR.

The Republicans failed the first test, which was putting people in place who meant business on fiscal responsibility in the House by appointing the King of Earmarks, Kentucky's own Hal Rogers, as head of the Appropriations Committee.

Now they have failed the second test: Standing up to Obama and insisting on real cuts in this year's federal budget.

Three strikes and you're out.

Joe Biden defending Darth Vader on the TV

Vice President Joe Biden recently defended embattled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak on PBS's Jim Lehrer News Hour, setting off the red light in President Obama's office they have installed to alert them of the frequent occasions in which Biden blurts out something embarrassing so they can call the special crack White House "Biden Damage Control" team so it can put out the political fire before it spreads and immolates the entire administration thereby reminding everyone that maybe Sarah Palin would not have been so bad after all.

In any case, Chase Madar at the London Review of Books reports on Biden's additional meditations on other important figures:

Look, I know Darth fairly well, and Jim, I just want to mention that Darth has overcome asthma, some serious, serious asthma, and it’s just a really inspiring story, he’s written a children’s book about it, I gave a signed copy to my granddaughter for Christmas. Anyway our position is that before Darth blows up the planet Alderaan with his so-called Death Star, which is really just a large weather satellite with a few dual-use components, Darth should, you know, take some of that planet’s concerns into account. He should take their concerns seriously, and it should be a peaceful process. They have a right to protest against their planet getting blown up. But Jim, it’s a two-way street, and Alderaan shouldn’t be vandalising the Death Star’s weapon systems, which, of course, not that they exist. There’s been a concern that some of the more radical elements, you know, the Wookie Street, might try to do this. So no, we don’t think Darth Vader should resign. But if he does – if he does – we can find the recent appointment of Darth Maul as his acolyte Dark Lord of the Sith to be really, really encouraging from a human rights perspective. Just remember, the Empire is a fragile beacon of democracy in a turbulent universe.

Biden's other adulatory remarks on Cruella DeVille, Ozymandias, and Joseph Conrad's Colonel Kurtz are also discussed.

WSJ on pork barrel Hal

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article yesterday on the drunken sailor the House Republicans just put in charge of the nation's fiscal sobriety. It seems that the appointment of "Pork Barrel Hal," who the House Republicans just put in charge of the House Appropriations Committee, isn't exactly, well, popular with the Tea Party crowd, who thought they put Republicans in power to, you know, change things.

Rogers is the Kentucky congressman who had the Daniel Boone Parkway renamed after ... himself. Why? Because of the service he has rendered his community by funneling taxpayer money into his district. Yeah, Daniel Boone discovered the place, but it was Rogers who paved it.

Mark Meckler, national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, added, "You couldn't possibly choose to send a worse message to the people who just drove this election."

Over the past three years, Mr. Rogers has obtained 135 earmarks worth $246.4 million, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. He was the fourth-biggest earmarker among lawmakers last year.

... Mr. Rogers, in an interview with Ed Lane, publisher of a Kentucky business newsletter, responded to his critics in 2006. "Pork is the bad word for making good things happen," he said.

If there has ever been fiscal restraint in Mr. Roger's neighborhood, no one has ever noticed it before. Mr. Rogers has been saying "would you be mine" to countless federal programs and getting his way for years now, and now claims, in the wake of the election, that he is a Tea Party convert.

Why will Hal Roger's appoint as House Appropriations chair be "good for Kentucky"?

The fox the House Republicans have put in charge of the nation's financial hen house received plaudits today from fellow Kentucky congressman Ben Chandler. Chandler said that the appointment of 5th district congressman Hal Rogers by House Republican leaders to head the House Committee that doles out federal money, would be "good for Kentucky."

Now why, do you suspect, might Roger's appointment be "good for Kentucky"? It will only be "good for Kentucky" if Rogers really hasn't sworn off federal earmarks like he says he has.

If Rogers, the quintessential pork barrel politician, really is a convert to the anti-earmarks cause, then he WON'T be good for Kentucky because he WON'T be bringing home the bacon like he has for virtually his whole career.

The only way he will be "good for Kentucky" is if he's the same Hal Rogers he has always been which he's now not supposed to be.

If I'm a chicken in this hen house. I am not sleeping tonight.

NEWS FLASH: Republicans didn't really mean it on fiscal restraint

The incoming Republican congressional majority leadership had its first big test of whether it really meant what it said about changing the big spending culture in Washington. It failed. Big time.

After telling Americans that it had marked earmarks for elimination, House leadership just put the poster boy for federal earmarks at the helm of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, the body that doles out federal cash. Hal Rogers (R-KY), who has funneled millions in taxpayer money back to his eastern Kentucky district has been selected as committee chairman by the House Republican Steering Committee.

When it comes to drunken sailors, Rogers ranks an admiral:

This fiscal year, Rogers sponsored or co-sponsored 50 earmarks totaling $93.4 million, ranking 10th out of the 435 representatives, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan research group that tracks money in politics.

There are all those newly elected Tea Party candidates? They should be screaming bloody murder about this.

Can the revolution be over this soon?

Other posts on this issue:

Even the foxes are chickens now: Hal Rogers still vying for Appropriation post

The fox is still scheduled to take over the hen house, arguing that he has truly sworn off chickens.

Earmark King Hal Rogers seems to be looking like the favorite to take over the House Appropriations Committee now that anti-Earmark Republicans have taken control of Congress. Rogers claims to have gotten religion on federal earmarks after years of bringing home millions in federal money to the fifth district of Kentucky.

According to Politico, Rogers is "promising reform and to keep in place the earmark moratorium." In a word, no more chickens for this fox.

The fox's conversion to a poultry-free diet came immediately following the election of a chicken majority. In fact, Rogers conversion to the Earmark cause came as soon as he realized that the Republicans were headed for the majority and his seniority put him in line to head the very committee that doles out the federal dough.

In fact, he beat the ever crafty McConnell in joining the anti-earmark cause. We're all chickens now.

Politico is saying that the infighting to get the House's most lucrative post is getting ugly. Seems that despite all the pledges to swear off chickens, there is something in the Congressional coop that they all want.

But it's not chickens. Honest.

HT: Bluegrass Bulletin

Rand Paul vs. Eliot Spitzer

Rand Paul vs. Eliot Spitzer on CNN. My favorite part is when Spitzer, who is tries to play gotcha journalist throughout the whole episode, asks Paul about his salary when he was a doctor. Paul asks Spitzer how he would feel about Paul going into has past. Ouch!

How to tell whether the Republicans are serious about fiscal restraint

If you think that majority control by Republicans automatically means that we have entered the era of federal belt-tightening, then you'd better sit down for a moment. We've got some bad news for you.

The job of taking care of the nation's financial hen house is about to be given to ... the fox.

Very few people noticed this during the election, but, with the Democrats out of power in the U. S. House of Representatives, the congressman slated to take the helm of the House Appropriations Committee is none other than Kentucky's own Hal Rogers. Rogers, who represents the 5th district and is a longtime Republican member of the committee, has used his post to direct a pipeline of federal cash back to his district.

Rogers is the congressional poster boy for federal earmarks. He is to fiscal restraint what Godzilla was to Tokyo. Can we mix more metaphors in description of the complete and utter absurdity of putting Hal Rogers at the head of the House Appropriations Committee at a time of Tea Party ascendancy? Yes we can: putting Hal Rogers in charge of stopping earmarks is like putting Madonna in charge of abstinence education.

Let this be the first test of whether Congressional Republicans are serious about their campaign promises.

Evolving conservatism

Anthony Esolen on the election:

I fear that the battle, not always but all too often, is between a radical materialism and a softer materialism, a radical worship of Progress (to where, is never specified) and a softer worship of Progress. For instance, I saw the former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, on television with Geraldine Ferraro, the two of them commenting upon the difficulties of being a woman in national politics. One of them said, "There are still some Neanderthals out there who believe that it is impossible for a woman to have a family and raise her children properly while embarking on a political career. We hope that they will soon evolve beyond that position." Those italics are mine. Note the assumptions here. People in previous generations were bigots. What they actually believed about the relations between men and women, and their roles in private and public life, can be dismissed with a sneer. We, who divorce half of the time, when we bother to marry in the first place, we whose cities are sinkholes of sexual and familial chaos, we can safely ignore the so-called wisdom of past ages. We have evolved, don't you see. Just as, I suppose, our understanding of freedom has evolved beyond that of that fellow Jefferson -- that ascetic and patrician landowner, to use William F. Buckley's words, whom we can call upon to justify denuding the public square of all expressions of religion, but otherwise dismiss.

The person who made that comment, of course, was Governor Palin. I guess I shouldn't single women out for the collapse of our political thinking -- that we are not producing even an eloquent and somewhat addled populist like Bryan, or a stubborn constitutionalist such as Cleveland; and those fellows are rather dwarfed by the political intellects of the Adamses, or Jefferson and Madison, or Webster and Calhoun. Yet I wonder sometimes what a Palin or a Pelosi can be thinking. Are they entirely unaware of the great (and sometimes failed) statesmen of the American and British past? Are they not embarrassed by the vulgar cackling of the commentators on that show that is inevitably on the screen when I go to the doctor's or the dentist's, The View? Cackling which makes Rush Limbaugh appear like Demosthenes. Or are they aware in the slightest of the collapse of the American family, which in certain sectors of our population is evident in the disappearance of responsible men, the should-be fathers of their communities?

...Ah well. The fiscal conservatives have no idea that they lack a proper understanding of the human being and of the common good, and that they therefore play the secularist's game on the secularist's own turf. The social conservatives have either bought the idea that "government," for good or bad, means management by bureaucrats from afar, or have bought so much of the sexual revolution that their residual opposition to killing children remains utterly unmoored from any consistent vision of what a good human life or a virtuous and just human community looks like.

Read the rest here.

Why a Republican victory on Tuesday won't solve our problems: An introduction to Red Toryism

As soon as we get this Tea Party thing out of our system this Tuesday--which is simply the attempt to replace one form of political individualism with another--let's talk about Philip Blond and Red Toryism.

Blond, a British cultural critic who runs Res Publica, is an influential British thinker who is closely associated with Prime Minister David Cameron. His economic views, which incorporate Catholic social teaching and the economic thought of Hillaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, are the basis of "Red Toryism."

Red Toryism rejects both the valueless, plutocratic capitalism that infects much of conservative thought as well as the quasi-moralist socialism articulated by the left. The right, he says, is controlled by monopoly capitalism that concentrates capital in the hands of a small economic elite, while welfare state socialism plays its part in the system of monopoly capitalism by trying to redistribute some of the capital of the economic elite back down to the poor and lower middle classes through a huge government bureaucracy. They are the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of the capitalist system, each with its captive constituency that returns it to office again and again--and gives each a turn in power from time to time, as is about to happen in America.

There's got to be something more than a Republican Party that takes money from the middle class and gives it to the rich in the form of corporate welfare to assuage it's big corporation constituency and a Democratic Party that takes money from the rich and gives it to the poor in the form of socialist welfare to get re-elected.

Blond is leading a movement in Britain which advocates steering a course between capitalist conservatism, which serves the interests of big business, and welfare state socialism, which serves the interests of big government.

The original proponents of this "middle way" between monopoly capitalism and state socialism were Chesterton and Belloc, who called it "Distributism." They advocated this view from the offices of the periodical the New Witness (later, the Eye Witness). The principles of Distributism were set forth most notably in two books: Chesterton's The Outline of Sanity and Belloc's Servile State. It stressed the important of individual ownership of property as the central economic principle and the institution of marriage and the family as the central social unit.

Many of the ideas underlying Distributism can be seen in the various agrarian movements of the 20th century and is central to the writings of the Kentucky writer Wendell Berry.

A third political way like Red Toryism is simply absent in America, but the possibility of something like it arising is latent in the social conservative movement. Social conservatives play the same role in the national Republican Party as minorities play in the national Democratic Party: they are in thrall to their respective parties, who use them for their own political purposes but in large part don't really have any serious intention of advancing their agendas.

The social policy of Red Toryism, being a fundamentally Christian movement (Blond is a trained academic theologian whose mentor was John Milbank of Radical Orthodoxy fame), is understandably conservative (in the true sense of that word). Blond explains his pilgrimage from the left:

My leftish affiliation ended. Many of my left-wing friends suddenly seemed to me to be right-wing….Despite all their rhetoric, all they really believed in was unlimited choice and unrestricted personal freedom. They seemed in important ways to have been stripped of integral values and to have embraced a rootless cultural relativism…They seemed to delight in abortion, for example, and made a fetish to choose, as if this were a real exercise of human freedom and unimpeded will, but they hated fox hunting because they thought it was cruel.

In America, Distributism is currently being propounded at the Distributist Review, which has recently reviewed Blond's book.

If we're going to have a real revolution, it's going to have to be into something better, not just one of two versions of same political individualism.

Why the political impetus is always to the left

I have not had much to say on the current election, mostly because, much as I love politics as a spectator sport, other things have interested me more. But I had a thought today about the current election situation that exemplifies the different way liberals and conservatives operate.

The accepted wisdom is that Democrats are more clannish and practice more party loyalty and that Republicans are more issues-oriented, sometimes resulting in long-running ideological feuds that damage the party. To a certain extent this is true. But there's an interesting wrinkle to this general thesis.

George F. Will has talked about the liberal "ratchet effect"--the idea that our culture moves left by increments, but never right, the long-term result being a significant leftward movement over time.

Why is this? I think I know.

The success of Democrats over the long term is illustrated by the current election. Democrats are getting hammered over the health care issue. Now you have to ask the question: did they know they were in for it when they voted for it? I think the congressmen who voted for it had to know that they were going to pay a price for their votes. But they voted for it anyway. And their leadership knew, as they bribed and cajoled their way to victory in the vote that the chances of their party being put out power was increased by doing so. They may not have known that it would be as bad as it has turned out (the continued economic crisis being the aggravating factor), but they had to know it was going to hurt.

But they also knew that, even if they were defeated at the polls, the legislation would never be fully reversed. A good part of it would be here to stay.

This is the difference between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans: liberal Democrats are willing to stick their necks out for their ideological agenda, knowing it will hurt them in the short run. Republicans are simply not willing to do this. Heck, their not even willing to do much on issues like same-sex marriage or abortion, where the public is on their side!

I can think of several times when liberal Democrats have forced through big, sweeping pieces of legislation they knew would hurt them in the next election cycle. In Kentucky, this happened in 1990 with education reform--a big, sweeping, unpopular measure with a huge tax increase that cost them lots of seats in the next election. They did it anyway.

When was the last time conservative Republicans stuck out their necks for a big, bold piece of legislation that pushed things in a conservative direction in the teeth of public opinion and for which they would have to take hits? I can't think of a single one. Even when conservative Republicans have opinion polls on their side, they have a bunker mentality. Liberal Democrats never have a bunker mentality, even when their agenda is unpopular.

A lot of Democrats will lose seats this election, but the health care legislation will never be repealed. It may be curtailed, but never repealed. Some of it will stay, and ratchet will move leftward just a little bit more. But there is never any ratcheting to the right because there is so little willingness to sacrifice for conservative ideas.

This is why the left will win in the end. It's all a matter of dedication and willingness to sacrifice for your ideas. Some have it, and some don't.

The Democrats vs. the states

The chief cause of most of our national legal and political problems is the loss of power by states to the federal government, a shift that has taken place mostly as a result of Constitutionally illegitimate court decisions compounded by cowardly politicians who have let it happen. The recent dust-up over Illinois Gov. Blagojevich's appointment of Roland Burris to fill Barack Obama's U. S. Senate seat is only the latest example of politicians who simply ignore the existence of the Constitution.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has threatened to refuse to seat Burris. Now whatever your view of Blagojevich or Burris, there is one thing that we know without a doubt: the Constitution leaves it up to the states. Reid has no business telling Illinois what to do. Blagojevich is still governor (even though most of the rest of us wish he weren't), and has perfect right to make the appointment.

Whether Burris serves as Senator from Illinois is a matter for the people of Illinois to decide, not the U. S. Senate. Reid and the rest of the Senate need to keep their greedy hands off of Illinois's Senate seat.

Where is Congress when you don't need them?

Thanks to Cartago Delenda Est for this one. I have been wondering the same thing: Where do these quasi-governmental agencies like the Fed get the authority to spend tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money on bailouts? Where I come from (the U. S. of A.) the House of Representatives has the power of the purse.

Where is Congress?

Here's my theory: there may be some Constitutional ground for QUANGOs (QUAsi-Non Governmental Organizations) to determine spending--but I'd sure like to know what it is. But, regardless, the reason Congress isn't involved is because they don't want to touch this with a ten foot pole.

This is a result of the invertebrate nature of politicians in general, who want someone else to take the responsibility when it really belongs to them.

In other words, nothing new here.