I’ll make this short: The very same conservatism / classical liberalism that in 2010 propelled the GOP to historic gains in power — from the local level up to a retaking the House — was in 2011 rather unceremoniously reframed as hickish, unnuanced extremism by a GOP establishment that is every bit as interested in an expansive centralized government run by a permanent ruling class as are its progressive counterparts on the Democrat side of the aisle. And many of the right’s most high-profile pundits and opinion leaders have been complicit in the persistent peddling of just such an arrangement to the True Believing Hobbits they simultaneously despise and yet presume to speak for.
— the upshot of which is we may be forced to try and defeat an ideological coup whose aim it is to transform our free-market republic into a democratic socialist state run by a “benevolent” administrative matrix with a GOP presidential candidate who believes a powerful technocratic government is the primary solution to problems, who is the architect of a plan for socialized medicine since nationalized, and who has no discernible principles other than a desire to be elected.
So.
Good riddance, 2011. And let’s pray we don’t keep carrying our mistakes forward.
To a better 2012. Happy New Year, all!
My resolution for 2012: 640 x 480.
who is this cocksucker in our little white house what is so eager to decide what my “fair share” is what I have to do?
Damn right.
The good of 2011?
At least we are not Europe.
The bad?
That we must add at the end of that sentence the word, “yet”.
But still hope remains, faint and hard though it is.
Von Mises is not for the faint-hearted, for sure.
Happy New Year, y’all!
Happy New Year Protein Wisdom!!
Happy New Year to all; host, guest authors, and commentariat.
Here’s hoping that 2012 will our best year ever!,or that we can at least do our best to make it so.
May God bless and keep us all, and may He continue to bless the United States of America.
Happy New Year, Jeff. Hope you and yours have health and happiness in now and coming.
Poor Dick Clark. Speech slurred, trying so hard to sound normal. Still looks pretty good, though.
I suspect 2011 may wind up being a great year compared to those that follow.
I think things are going to be jaw clenching grim over the next year.
I told my wife we’re upping our food storage. Her only comment was that I keep a record of expiration dates so I know which stock to rotate. (The MF Global debacle has me spooked. I’m very concerned about supply chain disruptions creating empty shelves in stores)
Not quite Happy New Year to the PW commentariat. (hasn’t quite hit in CA yet)
Steyn forsakes the greeting for the question: Happy New Year?
2011 can suck my dick.
Bring on 2012.
I have a dick. Wouldn’t let a year like 2011 anywhere near it. No how.
Not to be a smartass, but my resolution is to be more realistic about where we really are and what is needed to get where we want to be from here. I think we need to focus far more attention on the House and Senate, a total change of direction like we need has to start there.
We could elect the second coming of James Madison himself and he couldn’t do shit with this mess.
Is it doom I’m feeling or is it just the Moet Chandon talking.
Depends, Sarah. Do you keep it in a pretty cabinet?
Steyn is correct, as per usual, on his ecomium of looming woes.
Let the record reflect, however, like all too many on the right, Steyn wasn’t letting debt worries melt the ice in his scotch during the Bush administration, whose financial depradations with respect to public finance could only have been topped by Obama.
What an awful, awful run we are on.
May 8, 2006, issue of National Review.
link
Agree with your first and last sentences. Stein did bitch even if most of his fire was directed at Bushes partners in crime, he did mention the outrageous spending repeatedly as did many others.
Happy New Year to Jeff and the PW commentariat!
2012 will be a rough year for conservatism/classical liberalism, I fear. Mittens will no nothing to advance the cause, that’s for sure.
This is a perfect example of why I am pretty much leaning toward Ron Paul. So what if he is “racist”, to most liberals you are already racist anyway – even if you really aren’t. My real point being that Paul is the ONLY candidate willing to say that the Fed is not only out of control but that it also needs to be reigned in. With Gingrich or Romney, you have in effect two guys that will continue to kick the can down the road a little further – if that is even possible by the time they take office.
Also, his foreign policy doesn’t really bother me. Maybe the states needs to draw down and let the other areas of the world settle their own scores. Sometimes when I look at the “big picture” in a historical sense, it just seems that we are only wasting time and money on places that refuse to get with the program.
We definitely do not need any large bases (air force or army) in western europe any longer.
Ron Paul is also the only candidate that would actually try to do SOMETHING about the welfare monster this country has caressed for the last 40 or 50 years.
Yeah, I know, I am more Libertarian than Conservative, so I am biased…but it seems to me that most “conservatives” really aren’t all that conservative – more like socialist lite policy wanks. Seriously, my grandparents were true conservatives. They would all gladly have voted Social Security and Medicaid out of existence. There doesn’t seem to be a conservative in existence that would even whisper that in a public park these days.
I wonder what Ron Paul would do if Israel nuked Tehran, Damascus, and mecca on his inauguration day?
The Vince Vaughan Award for Pithy Commentary:
Protein Wisdom
Do you think Israel would see Ron Paul being elected as a reason to nuke Tehran, Damascus, and Mecca?
I understand that Ron Paul has allegedly stated that he wouldn’t care if Israel was taken over by Arabs – but that is an allegation. GW allegedly raped fellow skull and bones initiates with a goat leg while free-basing cocaine from a pipe made from the bones of Barry Seal…but it still was an allegation wasn’t it?
You know, I have been to Israel, it’s a fucking wonderful place – and to be honest with you – had America and Europe not stuck it’s nose in Israel’s business, Israel would probably still control the Sinai, wouldn’t it? So I am sure that Israel knows that its friendship with the US is a horrible catch-22 where their military successes are treated as political failure and they are then punished for winning Which is a very American thing lately – to be punished for winning – look at GW’s Mission Accomplished fiasco. If I were GW at that time I would have told the entire press to suck balls and accept the fact that I kicked some ass – hell – if he would have done that he would probably go down in the books as the greatest POTUS ever. Instead, we have the current conservative crisis where it “can’t say this or that” or “can’t do this or that” because of someone elses special interest. I want someone invested in the interest of my kind. People who think the Feds are too big and are stumbling around like a blind idiot God destroying as many hopes and dreams as possible.
I mean find me a conservative candidate aside from Ron Paul that doesn’t agree with the forlorn and plainly stupid “road map for peace” that has been jogging along since what …fucking Nixon???
If we cut aid to Israel we can’t pressure them to stop building homes in “Palestine” – can we?
Indeed, I would imagine that the ONLY reason Israel even accepts our current agreements with them is because we make such kick ass weapons. Maybe we should look at this realistically, the real question is this; would Ron Paul cut off military sales to Israel? If not, then who cares?
“Do you think Israel would see Ron Paul being elected as a reason to nuke Tehran, Damascus, and Mecca?”
No, not really. Much more likely that Israel is nuked by Iran, with a Ron Paul administration as an important consideration in the decision.
I flipped the script to wonder if President Paul would react differently to Israeli aggression, juxtapositioned with the more likely scenario of Arab aggression destroying Israel.
The men who spoke to me were interested in my sun-burnt nose, the delays I had experienced, the number of miles I had traveled.
The women wanted to examine my one dress in which I had traveled around, the cloak and cap I had worn, were anxious to know what was in the bag, and all about the monkey.
No wait, that was 89-90.
Don’t mind me. Carry on.
Israel is one of those problems what’s only a problem if you fix it I think.
The status quo is probably optimal for everyone involved.
“Ron Paul is also the only candidate that would actually try to do SOMETHING about the welfare monster this country has caressed for the last 40 or 50 years. ”
But he would soon find that the only thing a President can really do by himself is entertain Congress, who no doubt would find him highly amusing.
President really doesn’t matter until we retake Congress. All this infighting and bickering about Presidential candidates right now is only a distraction.
Well, I don’t know anything about the left hind foot of a happy, but when I knew that my train had run safely across a bridge which was held in place only by jack-screws, and which fell the moment we were across; and when I heard that in another place the engine had just switched off from us when it lost a wheel, then I thought of the left hind foot of a happy, and wondered if there was anything in it.
One place, where a large crowd greeted me, a man on the limits of it yelled:
“Foot’s full of it, by golly, Nellie.”
“But he would soon find that the only thing a President can really do by himself is entertain Congress, who no doubt would find him highly amusing.
President really doesn’t matter until we retake Congress. All this infighting and bickering about Presidential candidates right now is only a distraction.”
Obummer seems to get every single trillion he has asked for.
Spork,
My recollection is primarily one of benign neglect; you seem to remember a fiscal hawkism. It matters little.
GWB’s fiscal policy was comedy, pure and simple. He had one, however, where as BO doesn’t even pretend to acknowledge that the issue exists.
Being an accomodation for those of you penciling in your itineraries at home.
4525 miles @35 mph
3524 miles, of course.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/286704/repo-men-kevin-d-williamson?pg=4
“Wall Street can do math, and the math looks like this: Wall Street + Washington = Wild Profitability. Free enterprise? Entrepreneurship? Starting a business making and selling stuff behind some grimy little storefront? You’d have to be a fool. Better to invest in political favors. As Schweizer points out, until fairly recently the Blackstone Group, the world’s largest private-equity manager, had spent only about $250,000 a year on lobbying, which to me sounds like one part-time K-Streeter and a lot of lunches. After a friendly encounter with Senator Schumer, the firm saw the scales fall from its eyes and began to spend millions of dollars a year on lobbying — and hired Senator Schumer’s former staff counsel, along with dozens of other Democratic staffers, to do its lobbying. (Senate Republicans will get their chance, don’t you worry, as soon as they’re back in the majority.) You’d think that the Blackstone Group, along with the rest of Wall Street, would be happy with its investment. But the pinstripes gang is suffering from a collective case of buyers’ remorse: Sure, the insurance guys got the keys handed to them with Obamacare, and the structured-finance guys still are sitting securely behind their fortifications of impenetrable complexity and staggering leverage, and the investment banks got to underwrite a lot of “Build America Bonds” and nonsensical stimulus financing. But they want more — that is their nature. And they’re sizing up a cozy little investment in Mitt Romney, a fact that should give Republicans pause.“
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/columbia_offers_occupy_PKetTw1QSVVk23BllNN0DL
Those parochial school kids protesting in Denver may have already earned themselves some sweet Ivy league college credit! Yeah, 2011 sucked.
Yes Williamson noted the bad: http://evilbloggerlady.blogspot.com/2011/12/wall-street-repo-men.html
But NRO also noted what worked: http://evilbloggerlady.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-iraq-was-won.html
[…] not just Iowans. Paul has picked up a lot of support — even, notably (well, to me, at least), regular readers of this […]
In fairness to Steyn, the deficit spending exploded after Nany Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barney Frank, Charlie Rangle, and the rest of that crew of geezers finally got their greedy, grubby, hands back in the piggy bank after twelve long impatient years.
—And the impatience showed.
I’m pretty sure Steyn was also a critic of No Child and Medicare Part D as well.