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checking in

If you want to revisit the last 8-years or so of protein wisdom — condensed into about 45 minutes — listen to the first 1:30 of Mark Levin’s show from last evening.  It has it all:  the ruling class vs. the rest of us; an unhelpful, quasi-Visogothic (and most decidedly Hobbity) attack on the GOP House leadership (who it turns out was conspiring with Democrats to exempt lawmakers and their staffs from being shuttled into ObamaCare exchanges); an answer to GOP establishment propagandists (read: camouflaged  liberals like the WaPo’s Jen Rubin, who have found their media niche lecturing conservatives on how to be better Republicans, which prescription, unsurprisingly, amounts to become liberals!); and, most importantly, the realization — apparently new to Levin and co., who I suppose can’t be blamed for not reading a site like mine, so thoroughly marginalized by “allies” on “my side” has it become — that the establishment right and the progressive left are working in concert, intentionally or effectively, it matters not which, to usurp the label of conservatism, claiming it for their own and then  attempting to map it onto what Jeb Bush first called “center-rightism” — the upshot being that the hard left becomes normalized, the RINO establishment plays at being its “conservative” bête noire in order to maintain the illusion of a two party adversarial system (rather than a system of gradations within the statist paradigm), and real conservatism and constitutionalism is completely marginalized, dispatched to the “fringe” where the “extremists” drag their knuckles and pound their hairy fists in a pique of regressivism.

— All of which means that you all are well ahead of the curve, and my work here today is done.  So I’m going to take advantage of Satch’s half-day at school and go out for lunch with the family.

I need the air.

 

62 Replies to “checking in”

  1. JohnInFirestone says:

    You mean, the Jen Rubin who penned “The GOP Must Get over Reagan” is not conservative?

  2. sdferr says:

    “This is what revolutions are made of!”

    Indeed, and possibly for the worse — as much or more than — possibly for the better. In other words, it may be worthwhile to dwell on thoughts of revolution, on the meaning of revolution, beyond imagining an outraged revolt.

  3. Blake says:

    What pisses me off most about all of the statists is that they think they can ignore 4,000 years of history, that somehow, our civilization is different and exempt from the lessons of the past.

    Fools, every single one of them.

  4. cranky-d says:

    The usual result of a revolution is the installation of a government as bad or worse than the one that was there before. The American revolution was an anomaly, only because there were a lot of great thinkers at that place in time who pushed for the best compromise the could for liberty.

    That would not likely happen again.

  5. leigh says:

    Why doesn’t Levin have his shows transcribed? I can read it a lot faster than I can listen to it.

  6. SBP says:

    “The American revolution was an anomaly”

    Well, they did have the Glorious Revolution (essentially bloodless) and Cromwell (much bloodier, but still no where in French Reign of Terror territory) as examples. But yes, I agree. It would not end well.

    If we were lucky we’d wind up with an Augustus rather than a Caligula, but in either case the republic would not survive

  7. dicentra says:

    camouflaged liberals like the WaPo’s Jen Rubin, who have found their media niche lecturing conservatives on how to be better Republicans, which prescription, unsurprisingly, amounts to become liberals!

    Or at least become less embarrassing to those who seek the good opinion of the lefties who surround them.

  8. dicentra says:

    Why doesn’t Levin have his shows transcribed?

    He doesn’t charge subscription, so maybe he doesn’t have the $$ to pay a transcriptionist.

  9. sdferr says:

    Why doesn’t Levin have his shows transcribed?

    I’ve figured it’s because it takes a village. Or at least an empire capable of affording the support of a village in order to do this. And Levin hasn’t reached empire status in his endeavors thus far. Give ‘im time.

  10. cranky-d says:

    I listen to podcasts while working. That helps.

  11. dicentra says:

    The American revolution was an anomaly, only because there were a lot of great thinkers

    That’s a huge part of it; the other part is that we were severing the umbilicus between us and our rulers, half a globe away. The institutions needed for civil society were already set up and functioning, so it was just a matter of redefining jurisdiction.

    When revolutions happen in situ, it’s usually because the existing institutions are corrupted by corrupt individuals and groups, and what’s required are purges—and those never work well unless they’re done according to the rule of law, which is impossible because the legal mechanism has become corrupted.

    Like Stalin’s purges and their kangaroo courts: they had the semblance of an orderly, lawful cleansing, but in reality were just another part of the horror.

    Even people who are not megalomaniacal psychopaths would have a hard time pulling off a good cleansing without wreaking havoc.

    We are in for such a hard lesson.

  12. sdferr says:

    There was something else about the American Revolution, I think. Something new. Something new the founders agreed together with one another about, agreed with the dominant public opinion about. What?

    A new purpose of politics: commerce.

    Formerly, the predominant purpose of politics was warring. Now, at the time of the Revolution, the purpose of politics was conceived to be the peaceful commission of commerce. Which, if we think about it, is precisely what Obazm hates about us.

  13. dicentra says:

    A new purpose of politics: commerce.

    The American Revolution resulted from the convergence of an awful lot of fortuitous events and conditions: those heretofore named and many others.

    Damn, we’re lucky to have it.

    Damn, we’re stupid to lose it.

  14. LBascom says:

    I’m hoping for a bloodless revolution where several states succeed and rededicate constitutional fidelity.

    Jesusland, if you will. With real boarder security to keep out the illegal aliens from California and NY.

  15. bgbear says:

    I think if more people under truly understood the term concern troll they would be a lot more ahead in the game. I have intelligent friends who will listen to CNN and not get what is happening.

  16. cranky-d says:

    Another problem now is that the purpose of politics is, apparently, to redistribute income. That’s a big part of the reason it won’t end well.

  17. dicentra says:

    I’d rather we herded them all into Cascadia and left it at that.

    Ok, not herded.

    Nudged.

  18. sdferr says:

    Jesusland is possibly a mite forward, at least from the view of a Hindi or y’know, the Juice, to say nothing of the potentially tolerable agnostics who might contribute. How about the nation of Afterlifia instead? Or maybe, Eternalia? Something vague enough that people could simply ignore any difficulties arising therefrom, or if they were to insist to personal attachment could include themselves by default.

  19. Shtetl G says:

    What pisses me off most about all of the statists is that they think they can ignore 4,000 years of history, that somehow, our civilization is different and exempt from the lessons of the past.

    Fools, every single one of them.

    Why do you think history has been so de-emphasized in modern education? Nothing new is happening. Our founding fathers , students of the enlightenment, were keenly aware of the limitations of direct democracy because. The fatal flaw with direct democracy is when the 51% vote to take from the other 49%. The Roman empire staved off this flaw for a long time by conquering other nations but once the expansion ended the jig was up. Our founding fathers devised a system that protected minority rights. Gridlock is not a bug but a feature.

  20. RI Red says:

    Lee, Jesusland is missing a tiny red dot in the north east. I wonder if it’s purely coincidental that there is a town in NH named Berlin?

  21. mondamay says:

    Only slightly off-topic:

    Anyone else kinda puzzled about the GWB tear-up when talking about America’s best days being ahead?

    Acting (0r ACTING!)?
    Ignorance of the principles the country was founded on, and how DC is unmaking them?
    Something else?

    Any thoughts?

  22. serr8d says:

    http://m.newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2013/04/25/gop-pollster-frank-luntz-denounced-limbaugh-levin-problematic-gop-future

    Who Is this Frank Luntz goblin?

    The leftists at Mother Jones are brandishing another secret tape. Pollster Frank Luntz, denounced as too conservative by liberals when he turns up on liberal networks, told a group of college students at the University of Pennsylvania this week that Rush Limbaugh and right-wing talk radio are “problematic” for the GOP and that he and Mark Levin were “killing” Marco Rubio for his immigration proposals.

    Democrats have “got every other source of news on their side. And so that is a lot of what’s driving it. If you take—Marco Rubio’s getting his ass kicked. Who’s my Rubio fan here? We talked about it. He’s getting destroyed! By Mark Levin, by Rush Limbaugh, and a few others.” This might be a surprise to anyone who’s listened to Rubio’s actual interviews on conservative talk radio.

    Luntz added, “He’s trying to find a legitimate, long-term effective solution to immigration that isn’t the traditional Republican approach, and talk radio is killing him. That’s what’s causing this thing underneath. And too many politicians in Washington are playing coy.” He also warned that if the GOP did not resolve its internal divides, it could lose the House of Representatives next year.

    Must be a GOP stalwart. KOS, MMFA and other leftist assholes are puckering for him, which makes him very embraceable by our pragmatic GOP.

  23. leigh says:

    The Bushes are crybabies, mondamay. I wouldn’t read anything into it other than Dubya was touched by the ceremony, the dedication of his library, the presence of his ailing dad and of course, the fact that he loves our country. He truly does.

  24. leigh says:

    That would be the ringmaster of Luntz’s Dunces, serr8d.

  25. serr8d says:

    “He was clear on this basic point: Right-wing media is not serving the national debate and not helping the GOP widen the party’s appeal beyond its declining base.”

    “Damned Visigoths”, he said.

  26. sdferr says:

    Who Is this Frank Luntz goblin?

    He’s Dana Perino in an ugly mansuit and pullover v-necked sweater. A passel of sophistic flotsam, bobbing along on the surface of the troubled waters.

  27. serr8d says:

    Oh. George Jones is dead. So is the “Golden Ring”, mostly.

    http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=Q9KniULwvjE&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DQ9KniULwvjE

  28. leigh says:

    Ms. Perino was sobbing through her commentary at Dubya’s library yesterday. She had eyeliner all over her elfin face.

  29. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Pollster Frank Luntz, denounced as too conservative by liberals when he turns up on liberal networks, told a group of college students at the University of Pennsylvania this week that Rush Limbaugh and right-wing talk radio are “problematic” for the GOP and that he and Mark Levin were “killing” Marco Rubio for his immigration proposals.

    Well at least he had the good sense to not bite the Hannity that feeds him.

  30. leigh says:

    He finally shaved off that beard he was growing to hide his chins, too. If only he’d lose those sport coats and about 40 pounds.

  31. sdferr says:

    If only he’d lose those sport coats and about 40 pounds.

    He’d still be full of shit, so what’s the difference?

  32. leigh says:

    He would indeed.

  33. cranky-d says:

    It’s difficult for me to get mad at Dana Perino because I think she’s cute.

    I admit it, I’m driven by hormones.

  34. cranky-d says:

    Which isn’t me saying she isn’t dumb about some stuff.

  35. cranky-d says:

    Per leigh, as much as GWB screwed up on the money thing, you knew he really loved this country for what it was, not for what it could be with a lot of changes like our current president.

    He also really cared about the troops, and still does. I miss both those qualities.

  36. VekTor_ says:

    Gee, it’s almost like there’s an Overton Window, and it’s been shifted.

    How very odd!

  37. mondamay says:

    I guess I just see a basic incompatibility with “loving” something, and seemingly trying to poison it at the same time, or at least wean it away from the principles, protections, and laws of its founding. At the very least, Bush showed terrible judgement by letting Democrats write so much of his domestic agenda.

    This is a large part of why I can’t tell if the GOP is incredibly stupid or evil. I don’t much care most of the time, as the results are the same, but I had a moment yesterday where it struck me: “Does he just not know the country is done, and his own part in that?”

  38. leigh says:

    Peggy Noonan in yesterday’s WSJ had a stopped clock moment and observed that the dedication of Dubya’s library and the speeches by the various presidents past and present (*spit*) crystalized the moment America realized she has Obama fatigue.

    mondamay, I don’t know if you saw any of the interviews with the Bushes yesterday. Obviously, they had been taped, but there was one in which Dubya was asked about the leaders of the GOP. He replied that the party is leaderless and that it has been leaderless in the past (perhaps a jab at McCoot and Romney?) and had come out of that–I can’t remember the word he chose—and would be winners again. The man is an eternal optimist, if you ask me. I have some of that glass half-full thing to me, so I can forgive him for his Pollyannaism. Plus, I love him. That doesn’t excuse him for spending like a drunken sailor, of course. But, his unflinching love for the country, her people, her troops, her traditions is something we haven’t had since Reagan. I miss him.

  39. Ernst Schreiber says:

    At the very least, Bush showed terrible judgement by letting Democrats write so much of his domestic agenda.

    This is a large part of why I can’t tell if the GOP is incredibly stupid or evil

    There’s a lot of stuff going on here. In answer to your second observation, the GOP is both. I’m largely persuaded that the GOP has been infilitrated and suborned by Democrats in much the same way that the Democrats were infiltrated and suborned by Communists. Hence the party is both stupid, for letting itself be infiltrated, and evil because the people running it take their cues from people whose private interests and agendas are inimical to the true interests of the GOP.

    As to the first, I’m tempted to quip, what domestic agenda? but that’s not really true, is it? My guess is W. let the Pelosi Reid Congress run wild because it was better than spending the last two years of his administration bogged down in a messy fight over foreign policy when there was a war to be at least salvaged, if not won.

    I think the past couple of days of we think the Syrians have crossed the Red Line we laid out unilaterally, but we want to consult with the U.N. to be sure bears out the wisdom of that particular messy compromise.

  40. The GOP is stupid to the extent its leaders are stupid, and evil likewise. One fatal stupidity was going along with the open primaries idiocy; much of the evil is a result of that.

  41. LBascom says:

    Jesusland is possibly a mite forward, at least from the view of a Hindi or y’know, the Juice, to say nothing of the potentially tolerable agnostics who might contribute. How about the nation of Afterlifia instead?

    Yeah, I was going for the borders than the name.

    How about “American States of the Founding”? The blue states would have to come up with something else too, no longer being “United”. Should stick with Ameritopia…

  42. LBascom says:

    more going for the borders…

  43. Blake says:

    LBascom,

    How about “We’re cool with you until you try to tell others what to do Land?”

    Also known as “FOAD Land.”

  44. geoffb says:

    On Obama and Syrian chemical weapons. This at Belmont Club clears it up.

    The probable truth is that Obama was never prepared to take any large scale action against Syria for any reason any more than he is prepared to stop the Iranian nuclear bomb. Damascus has now called his bluff so the challenge is to find some way to run while seeming to keep the field.

    Foreign Policy has found the administration’s probable exit route. It notes that while Obama appeared to draw a “red line” in reality he did not. Like any lawyer he inserted a qualifier into his ultimatum that really renders it a penultimatum or a pen-penultimatum or a pen^i-penultimatum where i is an index > 1 but less than infinity. The exit word is “a whole bunch”. Assad has to violate the warning a “whole bunch” of times, which can be 1, 10, 100, 1000 — it’s all up to the President.

    The White House has long insisted that President Barack Obama’s “red line” that would trigger … something … on Syria is crystal clear.

    But as my Washington Post colleague Max Fisher notes, it’s about as clear as mud. Obama first said in August: “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”

    Personally I don’t think he does calculus. Likely had real trouble with geometry and algebra too.

  45. leigh says:

    He has mathemagic, geoff. There’s nothing it can’t do.

  46. SBP says:

    Most of them have trouble with arithmetic (e.g., why continuing to spend money that you don’t have is a bad idea).

  47. How about “We’re cool with you until you try to tell others what to do Land?”

    Also known as “FOAD Land.”

    Gomlia*

  48. sdferr says:

    Strange.

    Remember the “Islamic Mass Murder Memorial Debris Field Mosque” proposed for construction in lower Manhattan, nearby the site of the former World Trade Center attack?

    It’s now more than simply a metaphor, that title of the Debris Field Mosque. Part of the landing gear of one of the planes (surely the second plane, given the direction) has been found wedged into a narrow space between the Mass Murder Memorial Mosque and the adjacent building! The search for body parts there has now begun.

  49. newrouter says:

    ” Mass Murder Memorial Mosque ”

    would’ve have been perfect object d’art for the lobby. allan ackbar.

  50. dicentra says:

    What pisses me off most about all of the statists is that they think they can ignore 4,000 years of history

    4000 years ago, people were superstitious fools who thought that lightning was caused by an angry god pitching a fit. They thought sickness was caused by evil spirits.

    We, however, have put me on the moon, harnessed electricity, abolished slavery, and denounced racism/sexism/homophobia/xenophobia.

    </category_error>

  51. Bob Belvedere says:

    Forgive me for being late to the discussion of Revolutions…

    While many of The Founding Fathers called what they did a ‘Revolution’, in fact, they were wrong in their word choice.

    A Revolution is when all the existing institutions of a society/nation are torn down, to be replaced with entirely new structures based on the Revolutionaries’s Ideology.

    What The Founders sought was a Restoration of their rights as Englishmen. They had no desire to do away with all of the existing institutions, but, rather, to eliminate some, reform others, and create new ones based, not on ideas conceived in the sterile laboratories of their own minds, but on (1) a study of past republics that had failed and why they did so and (2) on Real World experience [Common Sense]. As Pitt The Elder said before the House Of Commons in 1766:

    The colonists are the subjects of this kingdom, equally entitled with yourselves to all the natural rights of mankind and the peculiar privileges of Englishmen…The Americans are the sons, not the bastards, of England.

    So, what we had occur here was not a Revolution, but, first, an attempt to have the government of the British recognize what Mr. Pitt declared and, second, when our pleas were ignored and said government began to employ their Army against us, we were compelled to effect a separation:

    …Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

  52. sdferr says:

    New thing:

    Art. I, Sec. 9, cl. 8

    No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State.

    Could even be called revolutionary.

  53. Blake says:

    PW Poll:

    FOADlandia or Gomlia.

  54. Blake says:

    Dicentra, okay, so, statists don’t ignore history so much as create the narrative that fits their world view.

  55. bh says:

    This one here at the moment, nr. It’s my understanding that the cheaper one works just as well, btw. People say it can circulate 8 gallons of water without any problem.

  56. bh says:

    Sorry, wrong thread.

  57. […] checking in | protein wisdom […]

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