I have to admit that I was with W.C. on the candidacy of Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, even though he later changed course. Michelle Malkin got me thinking that maybe we should wait and see what the voters decide and that rewarding Democrat lite-types with further high office might not be in our best interests. In his retraction, W.C. nails it, saying that this year's contests are not Republican vs Democrat but Ruling Class vs the people. Further, you have to ask yourself, would having Mike Castle in the Senate have really helped? Knowing he will probably vote with the Dems on cap and trade and his history of supporting porkulus is hardly helpful. Might as well have your enemies out in the open and identified.
With Christine O'Donnell winning the Republican primary in Delaware, I think we are seeing the rise of disgust with the ruling class. As of this writing, O'Donnell was ahead of Castle 53% to 47%. It also shows what a political powerhouse Sarah Palin has become. I admit that she makes me nervous, but boy can she energize the grass roots.
Sorry I have been away from blogging for a while, work has been too much.
One more thing about the O'Donnell win. Everyone is writing off O'Donnell, but given the rising tide of disgust against the ruling class, O'Donnell could very well win. Under such a rising tide, wouldn't we want a true conservative in the Senate to give us some spine to start repealing Obamacare and stopping cap and trade?
Dean and I have both complained about newspapers not performing the political function envisioned by the founders. Just when we think all hope is lost, they uncover stories about pensions being the source of San Diego's budget woes, publicizing teacher impact on test scores, and uncovering the outrageous salaries for public officials in Bell, CA. Now the LA Times is confirming what we all thought, public officials in D.C. think themselves above the laws that ordinary Americans must obey. Not just Geithner, but 41 other White House aides owe the federal government $831,000 in taxes and federal employees owe the feds a whopping $1 billion. From the LA Times:
The Post's T.W. Farnum did some research and found that out of the total sum, just 638 workers on Capitol Hill owe the IRS $9.3 million in back taxes. As in, overdue. The IRS gets stiffed by the legislative body that controls its budget. How Washington works. . . . Privacy laws prevent release of individual tax delinquents' names. But we do know that as of the end of 2009, 41 people inside Obama's very own White House owe the government they're allegedly running a total of $831,055 in back taxes. That would cover a lot of special chocolate desserts in the White House Mess.
This weekend' s WSJ has an excellent piece on Scott Rasmussen, who has been described by the left as a Republican pollster. What I found most interesting was that his polls have some confirming data about the existence of a "ruling class" or "political class" party within America as differentiated from the mainstream or "country party" as Professor Codevillla describes it in his brilliant essay. To tell the mainstream from the political class, Rasmussen asks this:
Whose judgment do you trust more: that of the American people or America's political leaders? Has the federal government become its own special interest group? Do government and big business often work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors? Those who identify with the government on two or more questions are defined as the political class.His recent polls show huge gaps between the two groups. . . . While 67% of the political class believes the U.S. is moving in the right direction, a full 84% of mainstream voters believe the nation is moving in the wrong one. The political class overwhelmingly supported the bailouts of the financial and auto industries, the health-care bill, and the Justice Department's decision to sue Arizona over its new immigration law. Those in the mainstream public just as intensely opposed those moves.
Rasmussen makes the point that Obama and the Democrats misread the 2008 election results. Most people were expecting more tax cuts, as Obama kept promising, instead they got grudging tax cuts and huge new government spending. My take is that the public has become increasingly sophisticated and understands that spending will have to be paid for. Obamacare was sold on the CBO scoring that it would not increase budget deficits. The public knows better and further believes it will harm the economy. That the Democrats could think that using subterfuge to get a positive CBO score wouldn't be detected by the public is proof of how out of touch they are.
The Republicans look set to capitalize on Democrat hubris, but what will they do with it? I asked this in a different way yesterday. Here is how Rasmussen puts it:
Mr. Rasmussen tells me that understanding the tea party is essential to predicting what the country's political scene will look like. "This will be the third straight election in which people vote against the party in power," he says. "The GOP will benefit from that this year, but 75% of Republicans say their representatives in Congress are out of touch with the party base. Should they win big this November, they will have to move quickly to prove they've learned lessons from the Bush years."
The wedge issues like flag burning, school prayer better not make a come back if we see a Republican victory. I want to see more of the Freedom Coalition agenda and the Tea Party agenda. Only by reversing the growth of government, which is what mainstream America truly desires, will the Republicans maintain majority status.
The article notes that Mr. Rasmussen is the co-founder of ESPN, so it's hard not to like the guy.
But Mr. Rasmussen has an interesting entrepreneurial story. He grew up in Massachusetts and New Jersey, the son of a sports broadcaster. Absorbed with hockey in high school, he joined his father in working for the New England Whalers. They would often bemoan that they couldn't get the team's games on broadcast stations. In 1978, trapped in a traffic jam on the way to the Jersey shore, they came up with the idea of an all-sports network on cable TV.
Using $9,000 charged to a credit card, they created the Entertainment Sports Programming Network, or ESPN. They soon scored a major investor in Getty Oil and launched in 1979. Within a few years, they had millions of viewers. Mr. Rasmussen was 22 years old.
I was never excited about my Republican choices for governor in the primary. Both Poizner and Whitman seemed bent on trying to outdo each other by turning up the volume on illegal immigration, hypocritically I might add. Regular commenter Road 'Dawg alerted me to this little gem from the Whitman campaign.
I'm not going to translate, it's too disgusting considering the ad campaigns during the primaries. Listen to the following clip and enjoy the irony of hearing Pete Wilson, the force behind Prop 187, endorse Meg.
So we have a conundrum, do we let left wing moonbat Jerry Brown take the governor's mansion or do we let another hypocritical, ruling class Republican, disappoint us? As your unofficial chief ideologist, I need your input. The comments section is open, except for roy_b.
Left Coast Rebel alerted me to very important analysis that sheds light on the real need for the Tea Party movement to save America by restoring government operating with the consent of the governed. If that sounds overblown, I suggest you read the article by Professor Codevilla in the American Spectator. The article is long, and LCR has a nice summary.
"Consent of the governed," you might be asking, "don't we have elections?" Indeed we still do, but that doesn't mean that a minority party, composed of both Democrats and Republicans (but not everyone in either party) cannot retain a grip on power through gerrymander, vast bureacracy, regulation and taxation. The shibboleths of this group are a political correctness and a belief in the stupidity, racism and religiosity of the governed, called the "country class" in the article. Consider this:
While Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters whom they distrust, the American people's realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well nigh revolutionary attitudes. But only the realization was new. The ruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008.
Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that "we" are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained.
The point is this: though not one in a thousand of today's bipartisan ruling class ever heard of Adorno or McCloskey, much less can explain the Feuerbachian-Marxist notion that human judgments are "epiphenomenal" products of spiritual or material alienation, the notion that the common people's words are, like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, is now axiomatic among our ruling class. They absorbed it osmotically, second -- or thirdhand, from their education and from companions. Truly, after Barack Obama described his opponents' clinging to "God and guns" as a characteristic of inferior Americans, he justified himself by pointing out he had said "what everybody knows is true."
Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof.
By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty.
Ordinary people have also gone a long way toward losing equal treatment under law. . . . The bureaucrats do not enforce the rules themselves so much as whatever "agency policy" they choose to draw from them in any given case. If you protest any "agency policy" you will be informed that it was formulated with input from "the public." But not from the likes of you.
If self-governance means anything, it means that those who exercise government power must depend on elections. The shorter the electoral leash, the likelier an official to have his chain yanked by voters, the more truly republican the government is.
Codevilla hits a home run in describing the problem. He is less sure about the exact form that a roll back of the ruling class' power will take. Given that the "Ruling Class" is a minority party of about one third of the electorate, its demise, while not assured, certainly seems possible.
In my view, and that of LCR, the "Country Party" as opposed to the "Ruling Party" is represented by the Tea Party movement. Why does the NAACP smear us with racism, with zero evidence? Because it is their natural belief as members of the Ruling Party and they realize that the Tea Party, by energizing the majority, is a real threat to their power. Why does the Ruling Party hate the Second Amendment? Because a citizenry with guns is just a little less manageable. Why do they want to control health care? To force us into dependency. Why is the financial reform bill incomprehensible, with the only sure outcome, hundreds of new regulations not subject to legislative review? To vest more power in the unelected bureaucracy and increase the power of government. Why doesn't the federal government enforce the border? Because millions of potential new voters, not steeped in our traditionally skeptical view of government, will be dependent on and grateful to the ruling class. Viewed through this lens, it all starts to come into focus. Sarah's video production using Muse's Uprising is clearly the appropriate theme song of the Tea Party, because it is time for an electoral uprising. We must throw Republicans over the side who are really part of the ruling class. This is why victories by the likes of Sharon Angle and Rand Paul are important. And we need to light a fire in the belly of ordinary Democrats, who still believe in the limits of constitutional government, so they can rid themselves of those in their party who do not.
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