Rick Perry Touts Downhome Résumé

Barely 48-hours into the race and virtually the entire Democrat-Media-Complex has the hit in for Governor Rick Perry. For example, from Paul Krugman, "The Texas Unmiracle." And more at NYT, "In Texas Jobs Boom, Crediting a Leader, or Luck." Los Angeles Times piles on, "Rick Perry's big donors have fared well in Texas." Then there's all kinds of gotcha reports at Memeorandum. Perry questioned Obama's patriotism? OOH!! Wouldn't want to do that now, would we?



In any case, for a less antagonistic piece, see Wall Street Journal, "Touting a Downhome Résumé."

DES MOINES, Iowa—Rick Perry became an Eagle Scout and Air Force pilot after growing up as the son of a cotton farmer "from a little place called Paint Creek, Texas," whose house had no indoor plumbing. As Texas's longest-serving governor, he says he cut taxes and red tape and helped boost job growth.



Mr. Perry is betting heavily on that biography and his charm as he introduces himself to voters in the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.



With the GOP race suddenly shaping up as a contest pitting him and fellow conservative Michele Bachmann against the front-runner, Mitt Romney, Mr. Perry hopes to distinguish himself as the humble farmer who now runs the state with the country's briskest job-creation results ...

Sounds pretty good. More at the link.

Extremist NOH8 Campaign Exploits Christina Santiago Death for Crass Political Gain

This is disgusting.



They couldn't just given her a beautiful commemoration. They had to turn Ms. Santiago death into sick sympathy shakedown:

Tragedies like this just illustrate how important it is for couples to have the rights that allow them to celebrate their love and their lives now.



Christina and Alisha were one of the first couples to get a civil union in Cook County when civil unions became legal in Illinois earlier this year. Those who claim the issue of same sex marriages and civil unions can "wait" should think hard about that idea after reading stories like these. This beautiful couple only had a short few months together to celebrate their civil union -- but we take solace in the fact they at least had that opportunity to prove their love to the world, however brief.

A beautiful young woman is dead. And LGBT ASFL NOH8 couldn't simply commemorate her life with dignity. These idiots had to turn it into some kind of epic guilt trip about "only" a few months to celebrate a civil union.



People die. And always, every death reminds us for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.



A much more reserved article at Chicago Tribune, "Health center mourns staffer killed in Indiana State Fair stage accident."

Ross Douthat, Political Scientist

Douthat draws on political science research at New York Times, "Waiting For a Landslide." And for a second I thought he'd blow it, because "realignment theory," which he discusses, hasn't accurately explained, much less predicted, partisan trends for decades. But Douthat adds this, which is just right:

In reality, the next election may be no more transformative than 2008 turned out to be. The next Republican president may find himself as hemmed in and frustrated as President Obama has become. Meanwhile, America will still have a credit rating to fix, and a deficit to close.

More at that link at top, and Douthat had a great piece a few days ago on the debt deal, "The Liberals’ Dilemma." Note especially:

... American liberalism risks becoming a victim of its own longstanding strategy’s success. Because yesterday’s liberals insisted on making universal programs the costly core of the modern welfare state, on the famous theory that “programs for the poor become poor programs,” today’s liberals find themselves defending those universal (and therefore universally-popular) programs at the expense of every other kind of government spending — including, yes, programs for the poor. It’s a classic example of putting liberal political interests ahead of liberal policy priorities. In the short term, the insistence on ring-fencing Medicare and Social Security has left Democrats defending a system that often just ends up redistributing money from the younger middle class to the older middle class while accepting caps on programs that might do more (both directly and indirectly) to help downscale Americans get ahead. In the long term, by postponing any reckoning with the cost of entitlements, it’s making it more likely that the inevitable crunch will hit the poorest recipients of Medicare and Social Security harder than it should.

Read that whole thing. Basically, progressives will never cut entitlements because gargantuan socialist welfare states form the core of socialist existentialism.



Douthat's coming of his own as a New York Times columnist, by the way. He had cold feet or something after leaving The Atlantic, but he's been more consistent in posting some excellent commentary of late.

Diagnosing the Left

A must-read, from David Solway, at FrontPage Magazine, "Diagnosing the Left."

It should be clear by this time that there is no medium of intellectual exchange with the left, that facts do not matter, that logic is helpless to convince or to prompt even the slightest reconsideration, and that practically every counter-argument can be turned on its head and interpreted as confirmation of the original idée fixe. As I wrote in The Big Lie, this is a tendency or disposition that bespeaks the resurgence of a political romanticism wedded to motives rather than consequences, unachievable ideals rather than practical values. It consists largely of the cryogenized remnants of an antique crusade for unperturbed happiness and tranquility, actuated by a child-like desire for transcendence that is the curse of liberal political civilization, and that, in various spiritual and revolutionary forms, has caused untold harm and suffering in the past.

Ultimately, it amounts to a prepossession that resembles a species of clinical paranoia, associated with symptoms like unbridled hostility where disagreement is perceived, extreme sarcasm often rising to livid vulgarity, an intense need for control and the belief in personal infallibility. It is, in effect, a squalid amalgam of hubris and the herd mentality. Obviously, the disorder is not exclusive to the left, but it is on that side of the political spectrum where it manifests most prominently and insistently.

RELATED: "W. James Casper is a Coward, a Fraud, and a Liar."

And a perceptive reader, from out of the blue, comments on clinical progressive W. James Casper:

Suzie Q said...

Has it occurred to you ... that you are a stalker??

Seriously. This is pure sickness.

RELATED: "British Progressives Allege Melanie Phillips Took 'Part in the Norway Massacre'."

'The Left hasn't been this giddy since Rep. Giffords was shot'

That's Darleen Click, at William Jacobson's entry, "My challenge to Charles Lemos."

Along the same lines, Darleen has her interesting entry at Protein Wisdom, "Kind of sums up what passes for principle on the illiberal Left."

And more of this at POH Diaries, "Tragedy In Norway Compounded By Left-Wing Glee."

Plus, Mollie Hemingway writes a beautiful essay, "The Atlantic has this terrorist all figured out."

And then check this post from Power Line, "IN DEFENSE OF BLOND NORWEGIANS":

The relief–not to say glee–with which many liberals greeted the news that the Oslo mass murderer was a “tall, blond Norwegian” was palpable. Liberals pilloried those who ostensibly leaped to the conclusion, in the first minutes after the massacre began, that it was probably the work of Islamic jihadists. Scott noted earlier such attacks on Jennifer Rubin.

As far as I know, liberals haven’t attacked me for the post I did while the attacks were in progress. But what I wrote was, I think, typical:

The perpetrators of these attacks have not yet been identified, but they likely were Muslim terrorists.

Was that wrong? Not at all. Any time mass murder attacks take place, it is not just likely but highly probable that they are the work of Muslim jihadists. Over the last several decades, jihadists have launched hundreds if not thousands of terrorist attacks. They dwarf, in numbers, similar outrages perpetrated by anyone else. That is why, whenever a bomb kills innocent bystanders or an armed man guns down children, the first thing everyone thinks is that it likely will prove to be another instance of Islamic terrorism.

See also: "SOMEONE IS PUTTING WORDS IN JEN RUBIN’S MOUTH." (Via Memeorandum.)