Hello and welcome to yet another edition of the most intense nightly read anywhere on the World Wide Web; the BitsBlog Nightly Ramble.
[1]
- THE CLIMATEGATE WHITEWASH CONTINUES: Myron Ebell explains. [2] Today’s must read.
- FOX CAVES? It certainly appears so. Any rumors you may have heard about Fox being some bastion of conservatism, are certainly dispelled with this incident. Dan Riehl gets into it. [3] He thinks that people remember this betrayal. I think he’s right.
- A RUMOR IS A RUMOR UNLESS IT’S FACT: (At which point the Obamites will argue it’s not fact) David’s already mentioned this, true, but I can’t resist getting a lick or two in. Elena Kagan, on Obama’s short list for John Paul Stevens’ seat on the USSC, is reported as being openly homosexual. Like we needed a report to give us the clue [4]. Of course, that this gets reported since the Obama White House into spastics. They immediately jumped all over conservatives, and amusingly, CBS, as well. Joyner gets this one right: [5]
[6]James Joyner
It’s all truly bizarre. We’re at the most gay-friendly time in American history and have, arguable, the most liberal administration ever on social issues. And yet they’re treating casual mention of Kagan’s sexuality as a smear orchestrated by the Right?
If anyone is to blame for anything, it’s always the right, with these morons. No matter what the subject is. This is simply one more instance of that pattern. Seems to me, that the real story here is that these people in the White House are deadly serious about what James correctly labels a completely bizarre defense. It tells me, among other things, that she was and possibly remains the top candidate for the position. Which, given the way -outside -the -mainstream politics of the Obama administration, shouldn’t surprise anyone at all. Maybe that’s why they’re being so defensive about it. They’ve once again been exposed as the far left radicals they are. This business was already known, folks. And Kagan being homosexual was also well known. So why all the smoke form the White House? More political spin. Period. Meanwhile, color me approximately as surprised as the day they forced Ricky Martin out of the closet. (yawn)
Eleanor Clift of all people has some thoughts on this point, through the filter of what had happened with Eric Massa, here in New York.
“It took just three weeks for upstate New York Democratic Rep. Eric Massa to resign his seat in Congress after accusations surfaced that he had sexually harassed members of his staff. The long trail of unwanted and often abusive advances that preceded his resignation—and why his alleged behavior went unreported for so long—highlights how much Capitol Hill is a feudal society, with each member the lord of his or her own territory.”
There’s always a leaning among staffers and supporters to hide or at least discount the reports of sexual behavior that’s out of the mainstream… the sense that doing so serves the left’s political goals. And that’s really the issue, here with Massa and with Kagan. Consider; If sensitivity to a “lifestyle choice” were the motivation would the Democrats have attacked Mark Foely? Was Clift making excuses for Foley and his staff as she did for Massa, I wonder? Would we have heard liberal Slimeball Alan Colmes going on night after night n his national radio show, about Massa’s denials that he was homosexual? Funny thing I don’t recall Clift saying word one abut that, though she may have. Clearly, in those cases and in this, the ‘higher political good’ is what’s being protected here, not someone’s sexual sensibilities. Sorry, what it is.
- THE CLINTONS AND POLITICAL EXPLOITATION: Fifteen years ago this week the big topic on everybody’s tounge was Oklahoma City and the bombing there. It’s interesting to note, that there are launched number of people on the left including Bill Clinton who are using this occasion as a club with which to attack the right. The New York Times, particularly has been trying to draw parallels between that attack, and the tea party movement. Only one problem. It turns out that the left, again Bill Clinton in particular, used OKC for their own political gain, then and since. Byron York tells us about it. [7]
[8]Byron York
What Clinton and his supporters do not talk about is the way in which Clinton, aided by pollster/adviser Dick Morris, exploited the bombing to make a political comeback from what was the lowest point in Clinton’s presidency to that time. (The Lewinsky scandal was still three years in the future.) In the days after Oklahoma City, Clinton and Morris devised a plan to use the bombing to discredit and outmaneuver the new Republican majority in Congress. . . . It was a political strategy crafted while rescue and recovery efforts were still underway in Oklahoma City. And it worked better than Clinton or Morris could have predicted. In the months after the bombing, Clinton regained the upper hand over Republicans, eventually winning battles over issues far removed from the attack. The next year, 1996, he went on to re-election. None of that might have happened had Clinton, along with Morris, not found a way to wring as much political advantage as possible out of the deaths in Oklahoma City. And that is the story you’re not hearing in all the anniversary discussions.
What York is describing here, of course, is nothing more than political leverage. It’s something that the Clintons did rather well. That lesson has not been lost on Obama. That’s particularly true, given that the two presidents share so many in the way of advisers. what is being attempted here is the control of thought. By attempting an association between the tea party movement and what happened in Oklahoma City fifteen years ago, what bill Clinton is attempting to do is discredit the line of thought embodied in the Tea Party. Anyone who thinks the government has grown too large, is immediately associated with violent acts against said government. First of all, I raise the question again, at what point is a violent act against the government justified? That’s the way that nobody ever seems willing to address. That aside, as Powerline suggests :
Clinton knows how false and dishonorable his charges are. But they worked for him, and he is helping Barack Obama set the stage for a similar political comeback in the event that some violent event might occur; or, perhaps, in the absence of any such event. So far, all of the violence associated with Tea Party or townhall events has been perpetrated by union thugs employed by the Democratic Party, but that hasn’t stopped the Democrats from claiming that it is the Republicans who are somehow violence-prone.
[9]Waco Texas... the direct result of Democrat incompetence
Exactly so, as I pointed out in last night’s Ramble.
Oh, lest we forget, what Clinton is really reminding us of is the massive incompetence and the massive over zealotry that they showed us in Waco Texas. It strikes me, that if Bill Clinton is trying to play the elder statesman, and the one promoting an anti-violent stance, he’s fallen rather short. What he’s providing is a reminder of the horrific deaths at Waco he and his imposed on peoplethe the whose politics he couldn’t deal with. Including women and Children. The incompetence of himself and his subordinates in that situation does nothing to sell him to the American people in that lofty role he’d like to claim.. Further, it tars the current Democrat administration with similar charges of incompetence, which given the state of our foreign affairs [10], our economy, and so on [11]is already at serious question. It’s not much of a stretch to wonder if the current administration doesn’t have similar tendencies. Particularly given what we saw in Michigan just recently.
As an aside, this situation as strikes me as definite proof, that the Democrats understand the implications of the Tea Party, far better than the Republicans do. No, I am by no means suggesting that the Tea Party is as the Democrats charge either all over Italy or covertly violent, racist, or any of the rest of the crap being thrown their way. What I am suggesting, is that they have a clear understanding that the tea partners are about limited government. They also understand, that they represent the vast majority of the American voter. They correctly see the Tea Party is a serious and possibly insurmountable threat to their power. And so, since they can’t see themselves getting out in front of that particular Lynch mob like it’s a parade that they’re leading, as Bill Clinton did back in the day on welfare reform for example, they going to attack mode. Trying to tie these people to a violent attack, is itself an attack, I believe. This thinking does much to explain the spin we see coming from the Obama White House and their official spokespeople in the lamestream media as demonstrated in a Beeler Cartoon at the Washington Examiner the other day.
[12]The Republicans, meantime, particularly the Rockefeller wing of the party, a remaining quiet as proverbial church mice, in the apparent hope that the whole thing will have just gone away when they come out from underneath their bed covers. I’d say the American people are ready for a conservative government. About as far right is we’ve moved 100 years is the center. We’re ready to take the next step.
