I have to share this little piece of brilliance from Ed Driscoll
about how the progressive left has become the Margaret Dumont of the political world. You’ve probably suspected progressives have become the ninnies they have always claimed to despite, reactionary whiners whose sense of outrage is more sensitive than the motion sensors at Monty Burns’ mansion, but it’s nice to have it all laid out in front of you. Kudos, Ed!
For well over a century, the goal of bohemian modern art was “épater le bourgeois” — shocking the bourgeois — but as David Brooks noted a decade ago (before he became a would-be presidential fashion critic), today’s wannabe bohemians are the bourgeois. The average person who drops in on the Museum of Modern Art is rather jaded these days when he views the output of this week’s newest would-be Mapplethorpe, but look at how easy it is to shock the left:
- A liberal on Fox News? Shocking!
- A conservative on ABC? Shocking!
- Mention God in a non-ironic fashion? Shocking!
- Depict Mohammad? Shocking! (Except when it isn’t.)
- Republican victories? Shocking!
- Support small[er] government? Shocking!
- Conservative Hollywood actors? Shocking!
- Conservative musicians? Shocking!
- Question this week’s global warming dogma? Shocking!
- A family movie? Shocking! (And fascist!)
- An action movie in a non-PC-approved historical setting? Shocking! (And fascist!)
- Investigative journalism tactics against Democrat institutions? Shocking! (And distasteful!)
- Democrats who support the “wrong” candidate? Shocking! (And racist!)
- Disagree with the president? Shocking! (And racist!)
- Fast food? Shocking!
- Bottled water? Shocking!
- Soda? Shocking!
- Calling Democrats Democrat? Shocking!
For a gang that prides itself on being “reality-based”, progressives sure do have a tough time handling reality without falling to pieces.
Tags: Progressives
I know I probably shouldn’t, but I almost pity Nancy Pelosi.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said today she has “no regrets” one day after a Republican landslide stripped her of the power that defined her historic tenure as the first female speaker of the House.
The California Democrat, who won a new two-year term in Tuesday’s election, said she has yet to consider what she will do now.
“I’ll have a conversation with my caucus, I’ll have a conversation with my family, and pray over it, and decide how to go forward,” she said in an exclusive ABC News interview with “World News” anchor Diane Sawyer. “But today isn’t that day.”
I’m going to guess that today was the day for a lot of hard drinking and rocking in the corner in a fetal position. The regrets will come after that conversation with her caucus, many of whom won’t be back in January. I imagine that will give most of them a far looser tongue than they’ve had for the past two years. Oh to be a fly on that wall.
Tags: Nancy Pelosi
This is simply stunning video. I can not imagine how much time and effort went into making it but I’m certainly glad it’s here.
Farrell added a few details about where he took the photographs used in the video and how he put it all together. Check it out.
Tags: Space
For those of you who who have been neck-deep in the election up to today, I regret to inform you that the work week still has two more days remaining. For the rest of you, please try to treat your politically-inclined friends well today. No teasing them about how you’re fresh as a daisy while they’re bleary-eyed from sitting up until 4 AM waiting for the Alaska Senate returns.
- Speaking of the elections (and I don’t plan to do much more of that, thank you very much) the Republican Party looks has to look awfully appealing for blacks, Hispanics, or women who feel a little used and abused by the other guys.
- On the other hand, Blue Dog Democrats have to feel just the tinest bit abandoned. Ditto Democrats who thought we’d just let them run up our utility bills to fuel their own fantasies of Climatological Armageddon. George Soros can’t be very happy either.
- Could earmarks and Obamacare be the first things the new GOP majority take up in January? Goodness, I hope so.
- Remember that whole “the rich got way richer” thing we’ve been hearing from the progressives lately? Well, it turns out that most of their numbers were wrong, thanks to a $32 billion blunder by the Social Security Administration.
- At least the President’s providing some poor schmuck some stimulus.
- Remember when the President said he’d return science to its rightful place? I’m beginning to think he meant the dumpster behind the White House.
- Comet Hartley 2 seems to be giving us quite the light show in the night sky. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to do some meteor-watching over the next couple of nights. You could be richly rewarded.
- If you miss that, and you have a telescope handy this weekend, train it on Jupiter for one of the cooler celestial dances you’ll see all year.
Tags: Linky Love
Think the buying power of your dollar stinks now? Wait until Ben Bernanke and the rest of the Big Brains dump a trillion dollars’ worth of invented money into our economy with nothing whatsoever to back it up.
What worries me the most is that Bernanke, who has not exactly been on the cutting edge of correct about the various financial disasters visited upon this economy in the past three years, does not appear to be the least bit worried about the inflation that must result from such a mad maneuver.
Look, I’m no financial genius, but this strikes me as just another big government stimulus attempt that’s destined not only to fail but to fail in such a majestic way that our grandchildren will still be able to admire the wreckage as they’re working their fingers to the bone to pay off the debt.
Tags: Ben Bernanke, Economics
How effective was the Tea Party Tuesday in fielding and backing winning candidates? Pretty darned effective, I’d say.
For all the talk of the Tea Party’s strength – and there will certainly be a significant number of their candidates in Congress – just 32% of all Tea Party candidates who ran for Congress won and 61.4% lost this election. A few races remain too close to call.
In the Senate, 10 candidates backed by the Tea Party ran and at least five were successful. (Race in Alaska has not yet been called.)
In the House, 130 Tea Party-backed candidates ran, and just 40 so far have won.
Oh, I know. This is an MS-NBC story, which means it’s intended to disillusion Tea Partiers and build a new post-election meme that the Tea Parties are really no big deal. What other approach is left after an election season that showed the Tea Parties weren’t racist maniacs, that they represented a broad streak of disgust for totalitarian government, and actually had a considerable about of political power?
But let’s look at the situation clearly. This was the first Tea Party election; the movement didn’t even exist 30 months ago. Tea Partiers are not a monolithic block of voters organized under a central command structure like a political party and they’re certainly not united under a broad platform. They held no power inside any major political party, they did not have a war chest of hundreds of millions of dollars, they did not spring from the ruins of an established party, and they were certainly not brimming over with experience operatives able to shepherd candidates through the rough patches of a long campaign season.
Yet they won 32 percent of all their races in their very first outing. That’s impressive by any reasonable measure. If the Tea Parties were a rookie shortstop, we’d be fitting them for a Rookie of the Year award and a trip to the All-Star Game. Don’t believe the left-wing downers at MS-NBC. The Tea Parties were a legitimate and strong political force and they will continue to be so for as long as the need exists.
(via memeorandum)
Tags: 2010 Election, Tea Parties
I promised you all an Election Day summary post this morning and, after spending a few hours recovering from a marathon day at my polling place yesterday, running a couple errands, and combing through way too many pieces that said the same old things in the same old ways, I think I have a few real gems for you.
I’m still a bit amazed at just how large the Republican victory was. Don’t let anyone fool you; what happened at the polls yesterday was a full-throated rebuttal of the Democrats’ aggressively totalitarian policies. It was also a 200-foot warning billboard written to the Republicans in the ruined careers of arrogant politicians who thought they could get away with ignoring America forever. If the current leadership of the GOP thinks it is immune from the sort of humiliation the Democrats received, then we’re going to have to do this all over again in a couple of years, and we’re going to be even more ticked-off about it.
- Everyone in the Republican leadership, and those who fancy themselves Tea Party “leaders” need to read Melissa Clouthier’s piece today. In fact, if you read no other election analysis, read this one.
- Even after getting a historic electoral beatdown, the President still won’t shut up long enough to listen to America. This is his Presidency in a nutshell; he can not restrain his desire to tell us what we believe, to lecture us about what we think.
- This wave election couldn’t have happened without self-described independent voters. Remember, folks, America has always had an independent streak and independents are, at their core, conservatives. Yesterday, that’s how they voted.
- A view from across the pond says we saved America, and perhaps even the world.
- If the “Tea Parties are Racist” meme wasn’t dead before, it is now. Anyone who tries to peddle that story today is simply a liar, and you can tell them I said so.
- Interested citizens could glean quite a lot from the President’s press conference today and John Boehner’s speech last night. Neither one impressed me, though only one should have.
- The economy is still the first priority of the new Congress. This isn’t a bad plan to emulate.
- The victory might be deeper than anyone reckoned. Republicans wrested control of 20 state legislatures and 10 Governors away from Democrats yesterday. Now, Republicans have the majority of both houses of state legislature in 26 states. Limited government and fiscal sanity starts with the states and we now have a much better chance of realizing both in the very near future.
- Lastly, it wasn’t “net neutrality” that killed the political careers of these 95 losing Democrats. It was publicly allying themselves with the execrable and quite possibly insane Kos.
Tags: 2010 Election, Linky Love
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