It’s often hard to accept the truth, especially when that truth is scary — when reality seems to offer you no solutions, only poison from which to pick.
To paraphrase Lincoln, the teaching in the schools today will be the politics of tomorrow. The left has long controlled academia.
The media, our conduit of information, is largely controlled by the left.
As Plato wrote, “[w]hen modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them.” Just imagine what he would have said about far more influential television and the internet, two media through which popular culture — which the left controls — is imbibed.
A process is in motion, a disease besets us, and if you understand its pathology, you know that no amount of Hispandering or appeals to virtue (e.g., personal responsibility) with an electorate largely lacking in the quality will bear fruit. The remaining healthy acorns need to recognize this, stop trying to fertilize a tree destined for the sawmill, and instead prepare to seed new ground.
For Republicans, opposition to new intellectual property enforcement is starting to look like a political winner. It pleases conservative bloggers, appeals to young swing voters, stokes the culture wars and drives a wedge between two Democratic constituencies, Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
That prediction is starting to look pretty good. The conservative-led Republican Study Committee just put out a Policy Brief that questions forty years of bipartisan support for tougher copyright enforcement.
But I was wrong. Romney was the perfect candidate, and he was the president this country needed right now. It’s less disheartening that a president who wrecked American health care, quadrupled gas prices, added $6 trillion to the national debt and gave us an 8 percent unemployment rate can squeak out re-election than that America will never have Romney as our president.
Indeed, Romney is one of the best presidential candidates the Republicans have ever fielded. Blaming the candidate may be fun, but it’s delusional and won’t help us avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
The new book features footnotes, statistics and arguments, but it also boasts an easy-to-follow layout and uses catchy quotes to introduce many chapters.
The author draws upon a wide variety of pop culture icons, celebrities, films and television shows to state her case, including:
A chapter on lifelong Republican Johnny Ramone.
An analysis of three “South Park” episodes blasting the Left (on the extremes of the anti-smoking crowd; the smugness of environmentalists and liberal Hollywood; and the hypocrisy of green activists)
“The Lord of the Rings” and its conservative message
“Team America: World Police”
“Hip to Be Square” features quotes from “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone on atheism, militant Islam and standing up for George W. Bush; KISS’s Gene Simmons on class warfare and capitalism; Mickey Rourke on militant Islam; Kid Rock and the Sex Pistols blasting abortion; Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon and Muse’s Matt Bellamy on the hypocrisy of green celebrities; Johnny Rotten, Siouxsie Sioux, and Bob Dylan defending Israel; Charlton Heston on guns and on the dangers of political-correctness; Daniel Tosh mocking spiritualism in favor of religion; and The Beatles on leftist revolutions.
“Square” also features a chapter dedicated to liberal celebrities’ hypocrisy as well as a section listing conservative actors, directors, musicians, and other artists.
“Square” is the culmination of six years of Delgado’s research, offering a compact, one-stop reference that doubles as one, big ode to conservatism.
Ever since Mitt Romney announced he had selected Congressman Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential candidate, there has been much rending of sackcloth by pundits in Washington about whether or not his ambitious budget and entitlement reform proposals will help or hurt the GOP. However, Paul Ryan brings one other potentially decisive factor to the presidential race that few have even begun to reckon with:
What if Paul Ryan goes out on the campaign trail and the American people just decide they really, really like the guy?
Sure, he has plenty of superficial appeal—he’s youthful, handsome, articulate, uncommonly focused, and a sincere family man who has no real skeletons in his closet. Even his detractors would probably concede those superlatives, and these qualities certainly won’t hurt his electoral chances.
But at only 42, Ryan also has a surprising amount of political experience and success. He’s been elected seven times in a district that’s no cakewalk for a conservative Republican. In 2008, 51 percent of his district voted for Barack Obama. Ryan’s clearly had to campaign and hone his retail political skills.
Of course, campaigning across a small corner of Wisconsin is a far cry from being thrust on the national political stage. However, if Ryan’s campaign rally in suburban Denver today is any indication—one of his first solo outings on the presidential campaign trail—he’s managing the transition effortlessly.
For one, he does local color well. It doesn’t hurt that he’s been vacationing in Colorado for years. He speaks fondly of coming to Colorado to fish for “brookies and rainbow” and the fitness buff casually mentions he’s been “climbing fourteeners for over 20 years.” (I have many Colorado relatives, and had to explain to multiple members of the press pool that this was local slang for peaks in the Rockies that rise above 14,000 feet.) Indeed, it was these on-pitch references to life in the Centennial State that local newsradio powerhouse KOA had on loop the rest of the day.
Having won over the crowd with pleasantries, Ryan imperceptibly worked his speech to a crescendo. The famous wonk wisely didn’t stump on intricacies of, say, the Wyden-Ryan Medicare reform proposals. He made a series of moral arguments:
Guess what? Government doesn’t regulate happiness, government doesn’t define your happiness—you define it for yourself. That’s how we do it in America.
What we are offering is a very clear contrast, a very clear choice. What kind of country do you want to have? What kind of people do you want to be? We want that American idea, that opportunity society with a safety net that’s there to help people can’t help themselves, that’s there to help people get back on their feet who are struggling.
But it’s the opportunity society, the American ideal, where you can meet your potential, nothing is stopping you from meeting your destiny. Our job is to get the barriers out of your way, it’s not to look at people who are working hard, who are succeeding, with resentment. It’s to say, ‘here’s how to get things done, we want more people to be successful, because if more people are successful, America grows and we create jobs.”
At that point, the crowd in the Lakewood High School gymnasium cut him off, pounded the bleachers, and offered a full 22 seconds of applause. But they weren’t done yet—an older man in the crowd stood up, pointed at Ryan and screamed “Hey look, no teleprompter!” The crowd roared in approval, not because it was gratuitous swipe at the president, but because they were so grateful that Ryan was providing not just competing policy vision to Obama, but a substantive rhetorical alternative. And they clearly liked what they were hearing. Ryan finally continued:
When we know what we believe, we know what we need to do, and what we need is leadership. Here is our commitment to you—we’re not going to duck the tough issues, we are going to lead. We’re not going to blame others for our mistakes, we’re going to to take responsibility.
It should probably be noted that the other guy running for vice president was also campaigning today. Biden said Romney and Ryan are “gonna put y’all back in chains,” just in case the rhetorical contrast between leadership and blame isn’t clear enough.
But let’s not get cocky—Ryan is just starting out, and a lot could go wrong. Maybe he benefited from a friendly Republican crowd at the rally today, maybe next week he’ll botch a silly question on the nightly news and the media will pounce, and maybe by November he’ll have whithered under the spotlight and proven he’s Just Not Up To It.
Or more likely, these kinds of electric campaign appearances are harbinger of things to come. The Obama campaign should be very afraid.
After The Dark Knight, we already knew Batman was a Republican. In The Dark Knight Rises this son of privilege who made a fortune in his own right, stands up for free enterprise and individualism against the collectivist demagogues who stir up class warfare and vilify the wealthy. That’s right — this time he’s BatMitt.
Here are the political takeaways from The Dark Knight Rises:
5. Bane is not Bain.
Rush Limbaugh, who apparently hadn’t seen the new movie, initially wondered, “Do you think that it is an accident?” that the movie’s lead evildoer is named Bane in a summer of chatter about Mitt Romney’s former outfit Bain Capital.
But not only is the bad guy’s name a coincidence (it dates back to 1993), Bane is the opposite of Bain. The villain plots to destroy Bruce Wayne by attacking the Gotham Stock Exchange, then launches a Marxist revolution in which the lower orders strike down the financiers and the “oppressive” bourgeoisie. Bane even empties the prisons, though to his credit he doesn’t do what the Democratic Party would, which is to guide the mob to the nearest polling place and forbid anyone to check their IDs.
4. “TDKR” is an indictment of the collectivists, lately known as Occupy.
The director of the current series of Batman films, Christopher Nolan, is cheeky about showing us where Wall Street bashing would go if it were led by a psychotic hulk in a mask instead of a feckless horde of weedy environmental justice majors. When one trader tells Bane that there’s no money at the stock exchange to steal, he replies, as an OWS protester would, “Then why are you here?”
Nolan has the Bane-iacs spoof the Reign of Terror to illustrate the necessary link between upending the class system and violence. Even Alec Baldwin won’t give up his property voluntarily. Meanwhile, the jewel thief Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) warns Batman that his system of haves and have-nots is headed for the ash heap of history, presenting herself as a crusader for the underclass who is helping to even out unfair wealth distribution. Batman, meet Robin (Hood). Only Batman can restore the old order, in which the cleverest and most able, like Bruce Wayne, are entitled to live in mansions.
3. Batman is an American Exceptionalist.
More than any other superhero, Batman is a reflection on America. He is the only masked marvel whose movies consistently earn tens of millions more in North America than in the rest of the world combined. (Sole exception since 1989: Batman and Robin. Maybe it was funny in Italian.) Action blockbusters typically make about twice as much overseas as domestically. EvenCaptain America (which was called The First Avenger in some territories) earned more overseas.
If Superman stands for the ungainly immigrant who came here after his people were wiped out in a holocaust and realized his full potential thanks to America, Batman represents the anti-collectivist. He captivates America for the same reason communism never caught on here, the same reason citizens hold firearms for self-defense instead of just hunting, the same reason we are the only country that questions the wisdom of socialized medicine. He is the avatar of a people whose primary wish is to be left alone.
Because they didn’t offer as much opportunity, freedom and hospitality to immigrants, no European nation grew as large and strong as we did. Hence European countries generally aren’t powerful enough to fight wars on their own, necessitating tangled webs of alliances and a keen interest in what the neighbors might be thinking. The US takes little interest in others’ politics and, protected by history’s two largest moats, can choose which wars to join, always as the senior partner or even alone if need be. The European Union constitution (aka the Treaty of Lisbon) is upholstered with guarantees about all the wonderful things the authorities can do for you in exchange for granting them more power; the US Constitution bristles with warnings about what the government can’t do to you. Even the European press is much less antagonistic toward government than ours, which patrols the night restlessly in search of wrongdoing.
2. Batman is a Capitalist hero.
Like Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller (or Iron Man, whose last film earned an unusually high 50% of its take domestically), Batman is the capitalist who doesn’t apologize for being superior to other men. In Europe, where the road to riches is paved with bureaucratic landmines and hard work has always carried an air of the unseemly, aristocrats like Bruce Wayne aspire merely to potter around in “the civil service” or spend the family fortune. Batman is an apostle of creative destruction who keeps forging ahead with the new — not a fairness freak who obsesses over how to divide up the existing. Christian Bale won the role because of his delightful turn as a hilarious parody of a heartless investment banker in the wicked black comedy American Psycho, and in playing Bruce Wayne he carried over much of that heedless all-American swagger.
1. Batman is a Burkean.
Bane’s desolate and ravaged Gotham, which Nolan portrays as the natural endpoint of an Occupy Wall Street-style uprising, is really just a dictatorship that pretends to be a people’s government, and The Dark Knight Rises is a ferocious rebuke to “leaders” who claim that popular backing and concern for the downtrodden justifies their seizing ever more power for themselves. Batman understands that, in the words of his fellow conservative Edmund Burke, “It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.”
In recent years, Hollywood conservatives have been as deep in the closet as 1950s gays. But Barack Obama, the man of hope and change, has changed that. The times are so terrible that more and more entertainment industry conservatives are coming out and risking irritating their fuddy-duddy liberal peers, maybe even losing a job or two into the bargain.
The latter is not a problem for the latest Hollywood con to come out, Clint Eastwood, who just publicly endorsed Romney with the words “the country is in need of a boost.” (No kidding!) Clint has arguably been America’s finest director for the last decade or so. The likes of Sean Penn abandoned their bourgeois lefty politics in a heartbeat to work with him. So no job issues for Clint.
And everyone has known Eastwood was a man of the right for years now. He just hasn’t made a very big deal about it, unlike the mouthier libs. He has more class. Clint is a figure out of old Hollywood when stars shut their mouths and did their work.
So his coming out is not inconsequential. One wonders what his peers — the Redfords, Beattys, etc. – think. Some of them are such knee-jerk liberals that they probably just put it down to Clint imitating his make-my-day character and don’t give it another thought. But I suspect not all. The extremity of the economic situation is not lost on all these people. They just don’t have the guts to speak. Walking around Hollywood now is not like it was a year or two ago. You don’t hear anyone publicly defending Obama. What you get mostly is silence and a seeming desire to change the subject.
Whether Clint is the stalking horse for more major entertainment figures to start coming out for Romney remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: After three plus years of the Obama administration, it’s easier for Hollywood conservatives to declare themselves, not harder. What an irony.
On Wednesday, Mitt Romney told Brian Williams, the NBC News anchor, that he will not announce his VP pick while he is abroad:
I can tell you I’m not gonna announce it this week. While I’m overseas, I’m not gonna announce my vice presidential running mate. But when the decision is made, I’ll make that announcement. It’s not made yet. But I can’t tell you when it’s gonna be. That’s something which we’ll decide down the road.
Romney refused to be bullied by Williams, who was indirectly responsible for the Editgate scandal which supported Barack Obama’s racially charged response to the Trayvon Martin incident, and who once stuck his finger in President George W. Bush’s face.
When Williams tried to hector Romney and paint him exactly the way the Democrats would want, asking him if he was looking to choose “an incredibly boring white guy” as VP, he was in for a surprise. For a guy who has a reputation as a boring robot, Romney showed a facile, sharp sense of humor, swiftly eviscerating Williams: “You told me you were not available.”
The forms, filed with the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission during Romney’s run and tenure as Governor, show various Romney investments in Bain Capital funds and membership of boards until 2003. After 2003 time all of Romney’s assets became listed in a blind trust. While the years 2001,2002 are 27 pages long each, after 2003 the forms are just seven to ten pages long.
One of the great electoral shifts that saw Ronald Reagan win the White House for the Republicans in 1980 and 1984 was thanks to a segment of voters who became known as the Reagan Democrats.
These were white working-class men and women who had been traditionally regarded as being in the Democratic party camp and who switched in their millions to support Ronald Reagan. The former governor of California’s messages, particularly on the cold war, social issues and immigration, resonated well and in 1984 the then Democratic Party challenger, Walter Mondale, was estimated to have secured the votes of just 31 per cent of working-class white men.
In his first attempt at the White House in 2008, Barack Obama is reckoned to have won 39 per cent of this grouping which was the party’s best performance since the Reagan years.
Now, four years on, things are looking very different. In an excellent analysis, Ronald Brownstein for the National Journal suggests that this grouping could be turning sharply against the president.
It is always dangerous drawing conclusions from demographic sub-sets in individual surveys. Where, however, the same trend is seen across a range of pollsters then you can have more confidence that something is happening.
Brownstein notes that in the latest Quinnipiac survey just 29 per cent of non-college educated white men say they will vote for Obama. In this week’s ABC/Washington Post survey the proportion was just 28 per cent. Those are sharp declines on four years ago, particularly as many working-class white men are in the so-called “rust-belt” states of Ohio, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin. Pennsylvania, also a crucial swing state, has a high proportion as well.
He observes that the reasons are straight-forward. Many working class white men are culturally conservative; are deeply sceptical of government and are struggling in the economic downturn.
The strongest grouping for the President are college educated women, with whom Quinnipiac has support at 52 per cent and the ABC/Washington Post poll at 49 per cent.
