Wise words that many have forgotten. I’m sure that the anti-Zionist left will just think he’s an uppity negro, though.
[Update a few minutes later]
To commemorate the holiday, Alan Boyle has some useful links on the scientific bases (or not) of race. I agree that it’s much more a social construct than a scientific one.
[Mid-morning update]
An apt thought, that applies to fans of Mike Huckabee as well:
Identity politics is bad news. Today seems like a perfect day to reflect on that.
If Green Bay had won, the Super Bowl would have been one of the historic games in NFL history. We would have seen a team that was attempting to go undefeated throughout the season, with a hot-shot young quarterback, against the old man who led his team to the ultimate game, and was looking to a final win and retirement on a high note.
Unfortunately, it will now be just the former. No one outside of New York will care if the Giants win. It’s too bad for Eli Manning and his team, but now most of the nation will be cheering against them, because there’s no compelling story on the other side.
And poor Favre. He has to decide if he wants to take one more shot. As I was watching that game, it looked to me like the foremost thought of the players on both sides was, “Damn. Goddamn this is cold. When will this [bleeping] game be over?”
The Federalist Party is not currently in use.
[Update on Monday night]
Link seems to be broken, and Bill Quick’s site seems to have problems in general. anyway, here’s a new related follow-up post. I’ll try to update with more at a new post as things develop, but basically, the idea was to found a new party based on small government, since the Republicans no longer seem interested in it.
Regardless of the outcome of today’s primary, Fred Thompson says that he’s going on to Florida.
Why not? Unless he seriously underperforms the polls tonight, he’s still got a significant amount of support, given that the winner is unlikely to even get a third of the vote. When people drop out for various reasons, their votes have to go somewhere. Where will Huckabee’s voters go? Where will McCain’s, if the only reason to vote for him is his Vietnam record and the war and they ignore his other positions? Not Huck. Probably not Romney. Though Rudy is a possibility. I don’t think that this race will be anywhere close to settled this weekend.
There are a lot of people who will continue to send money to Fred as long as they think he has a chance. And there’s still a non-zero possibility that this thing could go all the way to Minneapolis with no clear winner, which means that in a brokered convention, Thompson could have an edge. If this is true, and he remains in, I might even put up a Thompson sign on my lawn in Boca Raton.
…by identity politics:
The union’s rank and file, the panelist explained, features a very large Hispanic contingent and there was simply no way this bloc was going to support a black candidate, no matter what the union’s leadership urged.
I remember thinking at the time how extraordinary this admission was, and how nuts the media would have gone if it had been uttered by a Republican voter. Instead, one black member of the focus group made what seemed a pretty half-hearted retort (really, a mild press for more of an explanation from the Hispanic panelist, if I’m remembering this right) before Luntz, looking uncomfortable (though maybe I’m projecting) cut the discussion off quickly and threw the coverage back to the Fox studio, where no one seemed anxious to wade into the matter.
It was remarkable to see members of the Party that lives and breaths racial and ethnic bean-counting slough this off as if it were just a fact of life. And maybe it is.
I continue to find the ongoing crack-up of the race/gender-obsessed Democrats fascinating. And I confess to no little amount of schadenfreude.
Romney did better among more conservative voters, while McCain and Paul each got about one in five moderates, who made up about 20 percent of the electorate.
OK, what kind of a “moderate” would vote for Ron Paul? I can’t think of any position that he takes that could be considered “moderate.” He’s what most people would call an extremist*. If someone called themselves a “moderate,” or someone whom the AP would call a “moderate” would vote for Ron Paul then the word has no meaning whatsoever.
And frankly, I find people who call themselves “moderate” to generally be people with no firm or coherent political principles whatsoever. All it really means is that they are neither “liberal” or conservative, so the media types find them difficult to pigeonhole. And given the large number of possibilities of positions one can have without being in either of those media pigeonholes, that means that we can’t draw any conclusions whatsoever about them. We need a different word for such people than “moderate.”
* Not that there’s anything wrong with that–so am I, on many issues. I’m just (as I think that Glenn Reynolds once said of himself) an eclectic one.
Romney did better among more conservative voters, while McCain and Paul each got about one in five moderates, who made up about 20 percent of the electorate.
OK, what kind of a “moderate” would vote for Ron Paul? I can’t think of any position that he takes that could be considered “moderate.” He’s what most people would call an extremist*. If someone called themselves a “moderate,” or someone whom the AP would call a “moderate” would vote for Ron Paul then the word has no meaning whatsoever.
And frankly, I find people who call themselves “moderate” to generally be people with no firm or coherent political principles whatsoever. All it really means is that they are neither “liberal” or conservative, so the media types find them difficult to pigeonhole. And given the large number of possibilities of positions one can have without being in either of those media pigeonholes, that means that we can’t draw any conclusions whatsoever about them. We need a different word for such people than “moderate.”
* Not that there’s anything wrong with that–so am I, on many issues. I’m just (as I think that Glenn Reynolds once said of himself) an eclectic one.
Romney did better among more conservative voters, while McCain and Paul each got about one in five moderates, who made up about 20 percent of the electorate.
OK, what kind of a “moderate” would vote for Ron Paul? I can’t think of any position that he takes that could be considered “moderate.” He’s what most people would call an extremist*. If someone called themselves a “moderate,” or someone whom the AP would call a “moderate” would vote for Ron Paul then the word has no meaning whatsoever.
And frankly, I find people who call themselves “moderate” to generally be people with no firm or coherent political principles whatsoever. All it really means is that they are neither “liberal” or conservative, so the media types find them difficult to pigeonhole. And given the large number of possibilities of positions one can have without being in either of those media pigeonholes, that means that we can’t draw any conclusions whatsoever about them. We need a different word for such people than “moderate.”
* Not that there’s anything wrong with that–so am I, on many issues. I’m just (as I think that Glenn Reynolds once said of himself) an eclectic one.
I didn’t want to leave California, which I consider my real home state, though I was raised and spent the first quarter century of my life in Michigan. But I also have mixed feelings about moving back. Victor Davis Hanson, a true native, explains why:
At some point we Californians should ask ourselves, how we inherited a state with near perfect weather, the world’s richest agriculture, plentiful timber, minerals, and oil, two great ports at Los Angeles and Oakland, a natural tourist industry from Carmel to Yosemite, industries such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and aerospace