re: "The ideologue’s fairy tale"

Karl at Patterico's Pontifications ("Harangues that Just Make Sense") considered election strategies for 2012.

Money quote(s):

"(T)he fact that the 7%-10% of voters who end up deciding elections are almost by definition not swayed by ideology does not lessen the importance of making the case for smaller government, economic freedom and personal responsibility."

The unstated (and mostly correct) assumption that the remaining 90+% of voters split evenly (more-or-less) between each of the two major candidates.

Most election years, that's true, regardless of whether those voters self- identify as Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, moderates or independents.

In other election years, one candidate (or party platform) is simply so discredited or another is simply so overwhelmingly popular, that this breaks down into a landslide. Wooing of "independents" in those years is unnecessary; they're self-wooed.

"(O)ne of the fundamental cliches of the progressive left is pragmatism, i.e., that they are simply doing “what works.” It is also one of the progressive left’s fundamental falsehoods.

The past century has been one in which progressives have put forth the idea that Soviet communism is what works, that Eurofascism is what works, that Maoism is what works, and that Eurosocialism is what works. The actual history of the past century is one in which Eurofascism was defeated in WWII, Soviet communism was defeated in the Cold War, Maoism has degenerated into a fascism and crony capitalism that only Tom Friedman finds attractive, and Eurosocialism is taking its own road to the dustbin of history."

5/6

re: "There never was an anti-war movement"

The Phibian at Cdr Salamander ("Proactively “From the Sea”; leveraging the littoral best practices for a paradigm breaking six-sigma best business case in the global commons, rightsizing the core values supporting our mission statement via the 5-vector model through cultural diversity.") notes the dog that fails to bark.

Money quote(s):

"(M)ost of us knew that anyway. It was an anti-Bush movement. War had nothing to do with it - it was all about the Left finding a way to regain power."

It's as if the whole circus of protests, sit-ins, demonstrations, &tc., was nothing but theater.

As someone who did not favor invading Iraq (but who followed his commander-in-chief's orders anyways), I find this particularly offensive.

(Off with their heads!)

re: "Obama and the new template"

Neo-Neocon is trying to make sense of something.

Money quote(s):

"I’m not advocating some sort of armed insurrection. I believe Obama can, and must, be defeated at the polls, and that the same thing has to happen to a significant number of Democrats in Congress. It seems an urgent matter to work for this."

"(T)he blogosphere represents only a small minority of the population. What we have in common here is that we pay more attention than the average person to political and world events; otherwise, we wouldn’t be spending all this time at our computers reading and writing. Whether as a group we’re more intelligent or wiser than people who don’t do this is unknown and unknowable, but we are at the very least more well-informed and more strongly motivated."

&

"(W)hat is “the worst?” For some of us, it’s that Obama is a puppet run by others on the Left who have nefarious plans of various sorts. For some (and again, I’m in this group I’m about to describe) he is mostly his own man, an ideologue of the Left who has grandiose ideas of how he will make this country into something between a European welfare state and Chavez’s Venezuela, grabbing greater and greater power for the executive branch, and cooking the election rules (through redoing the census, relaxing voter registration laws even further, and enlisting the help of ACORN in outright fraud) so thoroughly that he hopes that his wing of the party will never lose control. As for foreign policy, whether Obama be the pawn of others or the master of his own fate, his plan appears to be to weaken the US and its influence on the world stage, bowing to international groups such as the UN and other organizations that feature a preponderance of tyrannies, as well as selling out Israel.

To most people in this country, however, this sounds not only absurd but unhinged."

(Bold type added for emphasis.)

re: "Because We Have Nothing Better To Keep Obsessing About"

Jules Crittenden at Forward Movement just marvels.

Money quote(s):

"What a strangely marvelous thing it must be to be an enemy of the United States. Feted and exalted as folk heroes by Euro-weenies and the American left, lavishly rewarded by the United States itself upon eventual ultimate defeat, with a well-financed, no-heavy-lifting assist on the propaganda front.

For the record: The American Civil Liberties Union has filed exactly no lawsuits against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Saudi banking system, Pakistan’s ISI, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iraq’s former Baathist regime, the former Soviet regime, the current Cuban one, or any number of other associated entities for denying thousands of Americans their civil liberties or being complicit in the denial of a massive pile of American civil liberties up to and including life and the pursuit of happiness, though all of those entities at different times have operated and/or had assets and agents in the United States."

re: "Leftist cognitive virulence."

Col. B. Bunny at Eternity Road does not think it's cognitive dissonance.

Money quote(s):

"In the 20th century, the world stood knee deep in a lake of blood filled by every manner of leftist policy and inherent excess—revenge; torture; exploitation; starvation; the elevation of psychopaths (Che), drunks, and peasants; subversion (Armand Hammer); assassination; execution; organ harvesting; concentration camps; aggressive war; arbitrary justice; subservient courts; sponsorship of terrorism; diplomatic support for cretins and monsters; and pursuit of ideas of human nature and economics that would have been laughable if they hadn’t been pathetic and murderous.

But this was, from the beginning, invisible to leftists. They were convinced that the highest human good was (a) to support any unanchored freaks who could fit the words “brotherhood,” “justice,” or “capitalist pig” into every second sentence and (b) to pull down any structure erected by our ancestors to encourage the triumph of reason, to transmit knowledge, to encourage free inquiry, to restrain arbitrary government, and to liberate women and the poor from bonds both legal, customary, and economic. "

re: "Spend baby, spend!"

Great line today from The Warpiper ("Tooting My Own Horn"):

"The left would have criticized Bush for curing cancer."