I wish that we had a court that was willing to overturn that disastrous decision. The health-care mandate would present an excellent opportunity to do so. As Glenn notes, it wouldn’t have been the first time that the court has followed a bad path for decades.
A Presage Of Things To Come?
Rick Perry shows Michele Bachmann how it’s done in her birth state.
I haven’t formed much of an opinion of Perry yet, other than that he can’t possibly be worse than Barack Obama. Am I put off by his religiosity? Sure, but that’s something that I’ve gotten used to, and I accept that I’m not going to get a serious presidential candidate in my lifetime who doesn’t at least pretend to be religious (though Barack Obama really pushed the envelope, and only survived the Reverend Wright affair because the press did everything it could to cover for him). Fellow agnostic Roger Simon agrees with me.
More thoughts on the Perry candidacy:
Perry is an exceedingly successful Texas politician. He comes from a place that is self-regarding in the extreme (I speak as a native of Oklahoma) and inward-looking. He has never operated outside its borders, and he may be unaware of its parochial character. If he is, he needs to wake up right away – and Mitt Romney is perfectly situated to give him that wake-up call.
Here is what Perry needs to do. He needs to anticipate the assault.
For example, if Obama’s people play anti-Texas prejudice against him, he should mock their advertisements. Indeed, he might do well to hit them hard the day they play this card – by preparing humorous advertisements ahead of time comparing Texas . . . with Chicago. They could touch on corruption, gangsters, population explosion and population implosion, political practices. And it could all be done with a light touch.
He has some other good advice as well.
“The Filthy Thing They Have Created”
Peter Hitchens pulls no punches:
As the polluted flood (it is not a tide; it will not go back down again) of spite, greed and violence washes on to their very doorsteps, well-off and influential Left-wingers at last meet the filthy thing they have created, and which they ignored when it did not affect them personally.
No doubt they will find ways to save themselves. But they will not save the country. Because even now they will not admit that all their ideas are wrong, and that the policies of the past 50 years – the policies they love – have been a terrible mistake. I have heard them in the past few days clinging to their old excuses of non-existent ‘poverty’ and ‘exclusion’.
Unfortunately, we have the same problem in this country. Fortunately, we’re not quite as far gone, at least in many states.
More (depressing) thoughts from Mark Steyn and Charles Crawford.
[Update a while later]
Thoughts on “liberal” psychoses.
TPIS In The News
Doug Mohney has noticed that Tea Party in Space has outed Orrin Hatch and other ATK senators.
A Storm About To Sweep Down
It’s going to be a very interesting race for the Republican nomination, and I suspect that whoever emerges from it will be the stronger for it, and ready to send the president back to academia.
A Primer For Rioters In Texas
…but probably not in London. Yet.
It’s an oldie, but worth a read: six non-lethal weapons that you’ll wish had killed you.
Tim Pawlenty Certainly Is Decisive
I like that in a presidential candidate.
Weirdos
I agree, there’s nothing weird about going to strip clubs, particularly if you’re on the outs with the girlfriend (though I’m probably weird in that I’ve only done so once in my life, dragged there by some other guys), but thinking that Lady Gaga is hot pegs the weirdometer for me. As he says, she may be quite attractive if you toss her in a shower and get all the paint off her, but I don’t know who she’s trying to appeal to with her public persona.
Remember When We Were Allowed To Win Wars?
Happy VJ Day.
And of course, it’s not just us. Israel isn’t allowed to win, either. That is the real cause of the continued festering in the Middle East.
[Update mid afternoon]
This seems related: Israel concessions on land are the wrong answer to the wrong problem.
What Has Happened To Obama?
…the question on every lip is—as the title of a much quoted article in the New York Times by Drew Westen of Emory University puts it— “What Happened to Obama?” Attacking from the left, Mr. Westin charges that President Obama has been conciliatory when he should have been aggressively pounding away at all the evildoers on the right.
Of course, unlike Mr. Westen, we villainous conservatives do not see Mr. Obama as conciliatory or as “a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election.” On the contrary, we see him as a president who knows all too well what he believes. Furthermore, what Mr. Westen regards as an opportunistic appeal to the center we interpret as a tactic calculated to obfuscate his unshakable strategic objective, which is to turn this country into a European-style social democracy while diminishing the leading role it has played in the world since the end of World War II. The Democrats have persistently denied that these are Mr. Obama’s goals, but they have only been able to do so by ignoring or dismissing what Mr. Obama himself, in a rare moment of candor, promised at the tail end of his run for the presidency: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
This statement, coming on top of his association with radicals like Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Rashid Khalidi, definitively revealed to all who were not wilfully blinding themselves that Mr. Obama was a genuine product of the political culture that had its birth among a marginal group of leftists in the early 1960s and that by the end of the decade had spread metastatically to the universities, the mainstream media, the mainline churches, and the entertainment industry. Like their communist ancestors of the 1930s, the leftist radicals of the ’60s were convinced that the United States was so rotten that only a revolution could save it.
And now they’re disappointed that they’re not getting one.
[Late evening update]
Sorry, went up to Lancaster to see the JetHawks lose big to San Jose (but we got a bobble-head doll of Fred Haise). There was a large contingent of XCORians who drove down from Mojave for the game.
Link was missing, but is there now.