Larry Anderson at American Thinker:

In the next few years, one of two doors will open in America. Door Number 1: Progressive thought will be proven correct. America’s economy will bounce back, and we will become a semi-socialist, politically correct paradise — much like the European Union pretends to be. Or Door Number 2: America will face several years of extreme economic suffering and corresponding political upheaval at all levels of government.

Notice that there is no door number 3 in this deal — i.e., Republicans make gains in the House and Senate in the 2010 elections and make America peachy-keen. Not yet. If the political stars are perfectly aligned, maybe 2012. Let’s get the 2010 pipe dream out of the way before we see what’s behind doors 1 and 2.

Less than ninety Democrat seats in the House are (realistically) up for grabs. At most, the GOP could win about fifty of those districts. Optimistically, this means a GOP-run House with a minimal majority probably led by Speaker of the House John Boehner. This is the same John Boehner who called the first TARP bill a “crap sandwich” and then voted for it…twice.

Imagine, in a year or two, Timothy Geithner screaming to a GOP-controlled House that the banking system sky is falling (again) — and that if the Treasury doesn’t get a trillion bucks, the financial system will collapse. The, most likely, Democrat-controlled Senate is chomping at the bit to “save” America. What is to stop Boehner from eating another crap sandwich? He’s already had one…

Hope. Change.

PRINCETON, NJ — Conservatives have maintained their leading position among U.S. ideological groups in the first half of 2010. Gallup finds 42% of Americans describing themselves as either very conservative or conservative. This is up slightly from the 40% seen for all of 2009 and contrasts with the 20% calling themselves liberal or very liberal.

Michael Barone:

Eleven states voted yesterday in primaries and runoffs—the largest number of the year—and one way to look at the results is that no incumbent member of Congress lost his or her bid for reelection. So does this make 2010 less of an anti-incumbent (and anti-Democratic) year? Not really. I am put in mind of the story of the Teamsters Union business agent who was confined to the hospital. A bouquet was sent, with a note reading: “The Executive Board wishes you a speedy recovery, by a vote of nine to six.” Such was the voters’ verdict on incumbents on June 8.

Consider Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, renominated in 2004 by an 83%-17% margin and reelected that November by 56%-44%. One big headline of last night’s news coverage was that she won her Democratic primary runoff over Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter. But her margin was only 52%-48%. And in recent polling she trails 3rd district Republican Congressman John Boozman by a 59%-34% margin. Her runoff victory and her “I’ll keep fighting” election night speech may close the gap a bit in Jacksonian Arkansas. But not by much.

Or consider South Carolina 4th district Republican Congressman Bob Inglis. Elected in 1992, 1994 and 1996, he lost a Senate race to Democrat Ernest Hollings in 1998, then came back to win when his 4th district successor Jim DeMint ran successfully for Hollings’s seat in 2004 and won reelection in 2006 and 2008. So he’s represented the 4th district—Greenville and Spartanburg, basically, for 12 of the last 18 years. And on Tuesday he trailed Spartanburg County Solicitor (i.e., prosecutor) Trey Gowdy by a 39%-28% margin. That’s a devastating result for an incumbent in his own party’s primary: 100% know him and 72% voted for someone else. Inglis managed to carry his home base of Greenville County but by only 29%-24%. He lost Spartanburg County 60%-19%. Maybe he has a chance in the runoff since there are a lot more voters in Greenville County than Spartanburg County; but I doubt it. Gowdy’s winning tactic: he pointed out that Inglis has the most liberal voting record of any South Carolina Republican member of Congress (although only marginally more so than Senator Lindsey Graham’s), including voting for the $700 billion TARP bill in fall 2008.

Note also that 3rd district Republican Congressman Gresham Barrett, who also voted for TARP, did not fare well in his race for governor. He did in fact make it into the runoff, winning 22% of the votes to 49% for state Representative Nikki Haley (pictured above).

But he carried only 4 counties in his congressional district and lost the other 42 counties in the state to Haley. I am told that almost all South Carolina Republican politicians detest Haley as a cheap shot artist who takes demagogic stands against all other incumbents (in the mode of outgoing Governor Mark Sanford, last seen on the Appalachian Trail heading to Argentina; Sanford’s estranged wife Jenny Sanford as well as Sarah Palin endorsed Haley). But I suspect that Barrett may decide that extending this contest into a June 22 runoff is a waste of his time and psychic energy. The insiders-don’t-like-her theme doesn’t have the timbre of a winner.

Interestingly, Haley is the daughter of Sikh immigrants from India. If elected governor she would be the second Republican governor of a Southern state, after Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, to be the child of immigrants from South Asia. Who’d a thunk it? And when you’re putting your mind around that, consider that the leader in the Republican primary for the open South Carolina 1 seat relinquished by retiree Henry Brown is Tim Scott, who may be the most conservative and assuredly is the only black Republican in the South Carolina legislature. He led Paul Thurmond, son of the late Governor and Senator Strom Thurmond, by a 31%-16% margin; in third place with 14% was Carroll Campbell, son of the late Congressman and Governor Carroll Campbell.

What would Strom Thurmond (born in 1902, allowed to parachute into Normandy in 1944 after getting leave for being too old, State’s Right Democratic candidate for president in 1948 as Trent Lott reminded us in December 2002) have thought of this? Or what would his father’s good friend and his own friendly acquaintance Pitchfork Ben Tillman (born 1847, governor 1890-94, U.S. senator 1895-1918, “censured by the Senate in 1902 for assaulting another Senator on the Senate floor,” as the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress 1789-1989 informs us) have thought? The mind reels. This is a great country and South Carolina, for all the trouble it has caused the rest of us, is a great state.

Pols turn — at least in words — against their union overlords. Politico:

Spurred by state budget crunches and an angry public mood, Republican and some Democratic leaders are focusing with increasing intensity on public workers and the unions that represent them, casting them as overpaid obstacles to good government and demanding cuts in their often-generous benefits.

Unlike past battles over the high cost of labor, this time pitched battles over wages and pensions are being waged from Sacramento to Springfield to New York City and the conflict is marked by its bipartisan tone, with public employee unions emerging as an intransigent public enemy number one in cities and state capitals across the country.

They’re the whipping boys for a new generation of governors who, thanks to a tanking economy and an assist from editorial boards, feel freer than ever to make political targets out of what was once a protected liberal class of teachers, cops, and other public servants.

Republicans around the nation have cheered New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose shouting match over budget cuts with an outraged teacher—“You don’t have to” teach, he told her without sympathy—became a YouTube sensation on the right last week.

And even Democrats, like the nominee for governor in New York, Andrew Cuomo, have echoed the attacks on unions.

Christie is merely the most florid voice for a calculated, national effort to fundamentally reshape the debate on the labor costs that account for the bulk of government spending at every level. And at the core of the shift is a perception among many political leaders that public anger at civil servants is boiling over.

“We have a new privileged class in America,” said Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who rescinded state workers’ collective bargaining power on his first day in office in 2006. “We used to think of government workers as underpaid public servants. Now they are better paid than the people who pay their salaries.”

The creep speaks.

In an unusually candid and sometimes biting assessment of his successor as attorney general, former Gov. Eliot Spitzer portrayed Andrew M. Cuomo as a man whose decisions have often been driven by political considerations and whose worldview has largely been shaped by the culture of Albany.

Spitzer was a bully who abused his AG power to obtain more power.

Ask the victims of his sketchy criminal charges who copped pleas rather than bankrupt their families with legal bills.

Robert Samuelson:

Some while back, I proposed a concept that did not stick. I called it “the politics of self-esteem.” My argument was that politics increasingly devotes itself to making people feel good about themselves — elevating their sense of self-worth and affirming their belief in their moral superiority. By contrast, the standard view of politics is that it mediates conflicting interests and ideas. The winners receive economic benefits and political privileges; the losers don’t. This an apt time to resurrect my rival theory because it helps explain, I think, why the health care debate became so inflamed.

The two theories are not incompatible. They can and do coexist. In fiscal 2010, the federal government will distribute about $2.4 trillion in benefits to individuals. Taxes and regulations discriminate for and against various groups. Politics shapes this process. But in truth, differences between parties are often small. Democrats want to spend more and don’t want to raise taxes, except on higher earners. Republicans want to reduce taxes but don’t want to spend less. Vast budget deficits reflect both parties’ unwillingness to make unpopular choices of whose benefits to cut or whose taxes to boost.

Given this evasion, the public agenda gravitates toward issues framed as moral matters. Global warming is about “saving the planet.” Abortion and gay marriage evoke deep values, each side believing it commands the high ground. Certainly, President Obama pitched his health care plan as a moral issue. It embodies “the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care,” as he said when signing the legislation. Health care is a “right”; opponents are, by extension, less moral.

Obama’s approach was politically necessary. On a simple calculus of benefits, his proposal would have failed. Perhaps 32 million Americans will receive insurance coverage — about 10 percent of the population. Other provisions add somewhat to total beneficiaries. Still, for most Americans, the bill won’t do much. It may impose costs: higher taxes, longer waits for appointments.

Read on.

Chicago-style politics at work.

Sen. Evan Bayh waited until one day before the filing deadline to announce his retirement, making it easy for the White House to choose who runs for Bayh’s seat — the hell with Indiana voters.

Hoosier politics took an unexpected turn Monday night when Democratic Senate candidate Tamyra d’Ippolito accused the White House of conspiring with party officials to secretly draft Rep. Baron Hill to run against her.

As the only other Democrat in the field, d’Ippolito became the presumptive front-runner for the Democratic nomination when Sen. Evan Bayh announced Monday that he would not seek re-election. Indiana Senate candidates must collect 4,500 signatures to appear on the ballot, including 500 from each of the state’s nine congressional districts.

As of 9:30 p.m. Monday d’Ippolito told The Daily Caller she was 1,000 signatures short and had volunteers across the state planning to work through the night to accomplish the goal before the noon deadline on Tuesday.

However, d’Ippolito said she was informed Monday that Hill, a blue dog who represents Indiana’s 9th District in the House, already has the necessary signatures and is sitting on them until the deadline. She accused White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel of colluding with Hill and the Democratic party county chairs to secretly supplant her as the nominee.

Gary Andres:

I first encountered the word Zugzwang in a 1985 New York Times Magazine column by the late William Safire.  It’s a chess term that means “compelled to move, but imperiled by doing so.” The word’s political implications are profound.

For the past 25 years, I’ve regularly witnessed the repercussions of that hard-to-pronounce term.  During the 1990s, my friend Arne Christenson (who served as chief of staff to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich) and I would lament some thorny political problem faced by Republicans or Democrats and how being “compelled to move” would cause unavoidable collateral political damage.  Arne would just shake his head and say, “Zugzwang.”  We both knew exactly what he meant.

Barack Obama and congressional Democrats face their own version of Zugzwang today.  The party needs an energized and enthused base going into November midterm elections. That means trying to forge ahead on health care and other parts of a congressional agenda backed by liberals.  Yet moderate Democrats worry these ambitious plans portend electoral disaster.

Outside the Beltway, independent voters – a pivotal bloc that helped Democrats capture the congressional majority in 2006 and Barack Obama the White House two years later – tell pollsters today they agree more with the moderates.

So should Democrats and President Obama pursue an activist agenda and please the party base, or pull back the throttle and play small ball to attract independents?

They can’t do both.  Welcome to Zugzwang.

One reaction is paralysis – a little bit of this, a little bit of that.  It feels like movement, but to the outside world, it looks like you’re stuck.  Safire agreed.  He argued, sometimes the slogan of people in Zugzwang is ”Don’t just do something, stand there.”

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds reports

I attended this past weekend’s National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, and I came away feeling that I had seen something important. The Tea Party movement is part of something bigger: America’s Third Great Awakening.

America’s prior Great Awakenings, in the 18th and 19th Centuries, were religious in nature. Unimpressed with self-serving, ossified, and often corrupt religious institutions, Americans responded with a bottom-up reassertion of faith, and independence.

This time, it’s different. It’s not America’s churches and seminaries that are in trouble: It’s America’s politicians and parties. They’ve grown corrupt, venal, and out-of-touch with the values, and the people, that they’re supposed to represent. So the people, once again, are reasserting themselves.

Most of the attention focused on this weekend’s convention seemed to involve the keynote speaker, Sarah Palin. But though Palin wowed the crowd with red-meat attacks on overspending, weak national defense, and broken promises, the key phrase in her speech was this one: “All power is inherent in the people.”

And the biggest action item that she presented the crowd with wasn’t to support Sarah Palin, as most politicians would have asked, but to challenge incumbents in primary races. Primary battles aren’t “civil war,” she said. They’re the kind of competition that produces strength in the end.

This seemed to resonate with what I heard from conference attendees. Over and over again, I heard from Tea Party Activists that they were planning to take over their local Republican (and, sometimes Democratic) party apparatus starting at the precinct level and shake things up.

The sense was that party politics have been run for the benefit of the party insiders and hangers-on, not for the benefit of constituents and ideals. And most of the conference, in fact, was addressed to doing something about that, not to worship of Sarah Palin, with sessions on organizing, media skills, and the like.

Read on.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/OpEd-Contributor/Glenn-Reynolds-Tea-Party-Nashville-was-Americas-Third-Great-Awakening–83762647.html#ixzz0exq5oS46

For America’s first 125 years, it turns out, the State of the Union address was a written document. The Constitution (Article II, Section 3) says only that the president shall periodically “give” to Congress info on the SOTU and recommend measures judged “necessary and expedient.”

There’s nothing in there about pretending to enjoy shaking hands with lawmakers while trudging toward the well of the House.

Pre-Wilson, most SOTU messages were long documents that detailed executive branch activities. But Wilson wanted the presidency to be more dynamic, so he gave a shorter speech, in person. (Teddy Roosevelt wished he’d thought of it first.)

Since then, most have been gab-fests intended to showcase presidential initiatives in the most dramatic and attractive way possible.

“They’re NBA slam-dunk contests, food fights, and high school pep rallies, rolled together,” says Dr. Gould.

For a party that prides itself on being the voice of the people, the Democrats are wildly out of sync with Americans’ priorities.

From a Pew study:

Scott Brown:

“This will be the beginning of an election year filled with many surprises. When there’s trouble in Massachusetts, rest assured there’s trouble everywhere.”

Thus the pendulum swings back toward the center right. Already, the more moderate Democrats are feeling the heat.

Sen. Evan Bayh (D) of Indiana declared, before Tuesday’s election, that the far left has overtaken the Democrat party:

“It’s why moderates and independents even in a state as Democratic as Massachusetts just aren’t buying our message. They just don’t believe the answers we are currently proposing are solving their problems. That’s something that has to be corrected.”

Bayh, once discussed as a VP for the next-door smooth-talking guy from Illinois, predicts fellow Democrats will go into denial tomorrow if state Sen. Brown becomes U.S. Sen. Brown.

“The only we are able to govern successfully in this country,” Bayh warns, “is by liberals and progressives making common cause with independents and moderates. Whenever you have just the furthest left elements of the Dem party attempting to impose their will on the rest of the country — that’s not going to work too well.”

Well, they were warned by none other than Zell Miller in 2004.

Betsy Newmark:

This new book by John Heileman and Mark Halperin, Game Change, seems to be packed full of fun behind-the-scenes gossip. Who knows if the rest of the book is worth reading, but the tidbits that are being released sure are fun and, remarkably, they’re bipartisan fun. It’s about time that we move beyond what Sarah Palin did or didn’t do in the campaign and remember how much fun the Democrats were for a while.

Mark Ambinder has some of the juicy tidbits such as Hillary’s war room was set up to keep Bill out of trouble because of an affair with an unnamed woman that he was having. Come on gossip-mongers, help us out here.

And then Bill, that ultra-sensitive first black president, reportedly told Teddy Kennedy, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.” What a class act Bill is. But I guess that couldn’t have been a racist comment because we know that only Republicans are racist.

Ambinder adds in that the Clinton campaign was deliberately talking about cocaine in that infamous Hardball appearance that some saw as a racist slime attack by innuendo. It turns out that it was completely deliberate.

And in another story about the gossip in the book, Halperin and Heileman report that there was real hostility between the Obama and Biden camps during the campaign with Obama reportedly asking, “How many times is Biden gonna say something stupid?” Come on, Barack. Few can count that high. But Biden wasn’t taking the criticism lying down. After being criticized by his comment about how Obama was going to be tested, Biden joked, “I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t say anything about bitter people who cling to their guns and religion,”

Here’s an excerpt from Game Change about “Saint Elizabeth and the Ego Monster.” That would be Elizabeth and John Edwards in case you didn’t recognize the reference. Here’s a surprise: John Edwards is a shallow, narcissistic, despicable empty-suit. Some of us knew that right away when he first appeared on the public scene.

And then there’s Harry Reid’s insensitive comment about how he liked Obama because he was a light-skinned Negro who didn’t speak with a Negro dialect. Maybe Reid and Biden got together and talked about how clean Obama was. It’s a good thing that Reid isn’t a Republican because then we’d know he was a racist. Instead he’s just inept and thoughtless.

Obama has forgiven Reid for his seemingly racist gaucherie. But Jennifer Rubin wonders why Obama gets to be the one to give racist dispensation.

Reid is engaging in what’s textbook-definition of racism: evaluating someone on the basis of skin color. It isn’t up to Obama to wipe the slate clean. He is, after all, only the president, not the supreme court of racial justice. He might be the nation’s most prominent African American but he is not the spokesperson of an entire race, nor the nation’s designated spokesperson on racial matters.Ben Smith gives his comment on the book, noting that there is, unsurprisingly, one person who comes out without looking worse than his or her public image.

Having dug into the book — which is quite good — a bit, one disparity was hard to miss. The Edwardses, Clintons, Giulianis and others are depicted as vastly different from their public images. John and Elizabeth are a vain empty suit and Lady Macbeth; Hillary is as calculating, hard-edged, maladroit, and ideological as her critics have always maintained.

The one character who appears in the book as he’d like you to see him: Obama. Which, one way or another, explains why he won: He was either untroubled by the deep contradictions that dogged his rivals; or he was better at concealing them. (He is also the only candidate whose staffers remain with him, deeply invested in his image and unwilling to dish, which helps.)He doesn’t mention McCain. I suspect that we know enough about McCain by this point that there would have to be some really surprising anecdote to adjust how we think of him whether you like or can’t stand him.

LA Times

In assembling their 60-vote super-majority needed to proceed with healthcare reform, Democrats in the Senate had to secure the presence (such as it was) of Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.V.), who was wheeled into the chamber to cast his vote. Byrd is 92. “When he comes onto the floor and the members cheer and his face lights up, it just makes our day,”  Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) told the New York Times.

I wonder if Schumer would be so sunny if it were President Byrd being wheeled into the Oval Office. Yet as president pro tempore of the Senate, the nonagenarian former Ku Klux Klansman is third in line for the presidency. If a ceiling were to drop on Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi — a scenario at the heart of the political thriller “The Man” — Byrd would be plotting the U.S. response to terrorism and the burgeoning federal debt. Or not.

It’s outrageous that Byrd is in the on-deck spot but two for the presidency. The issue isn’t  age — Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is 89 and his questions from the bench remain pointed and probing — but infirmity. As the comparatively youthful (85) Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) delicately put it: ”We see someone who is a giant and who is not as well as we would like to see him.”

Victor Davis Hanson:

When it comes to the problems facing this country, an old slogan comes to mind: “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.”

High unemployment, the recession and a terrorist resurgence in Afghanistan are bad enough. But there are a number of problems on the horizon that could dwarf President Obama’s first-year trials.

Why the pessimism? In short, we are doing nothing to prepare for the crises to come.

A global recession has led to low oil prices. Yet in this window of opportunity, America has not decreased its foreign-oil dependence. We are not encouraging domestic exploration. And we are still ambivalent on nuclear power.

But as the world economy recovers, oil will probably surge back over $100 a barrel, increasing our oil import tab by 25 percent or more. The Obama administration, though, mostly is obsessed with subsidizing relatively small amounts of wind and solar power. It likely won’t be long before angry motorists at the pump are demanding to know why we have not pushed for more development at home of still-plentiful natural gas and oil fields.

Meanwhile, other economic bad news may be just around the corner. Today, interest rates on short-term Treasury bills still are less than 1 percent. But they, too, will climb as business picks up and worries over American inflation spread.

If we have to pay foreign lenders 5 percent to 7 percent interest on our debt, as in the past, the increased costs will gobble up additional billions from our annual budget. Yet sadly again, we are missing this rare opportunity of low interest to pay off cheaply the trillions that we already owe. Instead, we are borrowing even more!

The war on terror is also heating up again. Fairly or not, the Fort Hood massacre sent the message that the United States is more worried about appearing politically correct in matters of diversity than hunting down radical Islamists on its home soil. Those who seek to copy what happened at Fort Hood will be encouraged. And those charged with stopping them discouraged and confused.

Such uncertainty was reinforced by the attorney general’s optional decision to try the architects of 9/11 in federal courts in New York City. At best, the confessed mass-murderer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will lecture the United States. At worst, one sympathetic juror could find the monster only 99 percent guilty, and therefore the court might fail to convict him of planning the murders of 3,000 innocent people.

Read on.

Byron York:

After years of trailing far behind Democrats, Republicans have now surpassed Democrats as the public’s choice in the 2010 congressional elections. In response to the latest so-called “generic ballot” question from the Gallup organization — “If elections for Congress were being held today, which party’s candidate would you vote for in your congressional district?” — the new results are 48 percent for Republicans versus 44 percent for Democrats among registered voters, and 46 percent for Republicans versus 44 percent for Democrats among adults nationwide.

It’s an extraordinary turnaround for the GOP. Last July, Democrats held a six-point lead. Last December, Democrats held a 15-point lead. At one point in 2007, Democrats held a 23-point lead, and for all of that year, 2007, Democrats held a double-digit lead.

The new Republican lead is the result of a dramatic move of independents toward the Republican party. In the new poll, according to Gallup, the GOP leads among independents, 52 percent to 30 percent — whopping 22-point margin. Last month, the Republican lead among independents was just nine points, and in July, the GOP lead was a single point. So among independents, the Republican lead has gone from one point to 22 points in less than six months — with much of lead accumulating in the last month.

Charles Krauthammer:

Sure, Election Day 2009 will scare moderate Democrats and make passage of Obamacare more difficult. Sure, it makes it easier for resurgent Republicans to raise money and recruit candidates for 2010. But the most important effect of Tuesday’s elections is historical. It demolishes the great realignment myth of 2008.

In the aftermath of last year’s Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics — most prominently, rising minorities and the young — would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed “The Death of Conservatism,” while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.

This was all ridiculous from the beginning. 2008 was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.

Exactly a year later comes the empirical validation of that skepticism. Virginia — presumed harbinger of the new realignment, having gone Democratic in ‘08 for the first time in 44 years — went red again. With a vengeance. Barack Obama had carried it by six points. The Republican gubernatorial candidate won by 17 — a 23-point swing. New Jersey went from plus 15 Democratic in 2008 to minus 4 in 2009. A 19-point swing.

What happened? The vaunted Obama realignment vanished. In 2009 in Virginia, the black vote was down by 20 percent; the under-30 vote by 50 percent. And as for independents, the ultimate prize of any realignment, they bolted. In both Virginia and New Jersey they’d gone narrowly for Obama in ‘08. This year they went Republican by a staggering 33 points in Virginia and by an equally shocking 30 points in New Jersey.

NPR is taking votes on who you think is right.

UPDATE: Now the White House has picked a fight with Edmunds.com over the efficacy of the cash for clunkers program.

My, what thin skin you have!

Jonah Goldberg:

There is much gnashing of teeth and rending of cloth these days about the death of civility.

Apparently, like Cupid with his arrow or a pixie with fairy dust, some magical sprite used to enchant America’s political combatants, ensuring that all public discourse was full of beg-your-pardons and please-and-thank-yous. But we have offended our little leprechaun. He’s taken his Lucky Charms and gone home, leaving Americans angry, cranky, and rude.

Or at least that’s what I gather from all this talk of lost civility. Personally, I’m not sure I know what people are talking about. When was this Golden Age of civility?

Was this glorious era of politeness during George W. Bush’s presidency? Funny, that’s not how I remember it.

So maybe the 1990s was the last great outpouring of loving kindness? Hmmm, no. At least I don’t think Clarence Thomas would say so. Nor do I think anyone who watched the Clinton show would claim it was a hallmark of sober debate on either side. Clinton’s minions attacked victims of his sexual aggression or revelations about his accomplices in his adultery as “bimbo eruptions.” Was civility the norm when Rep. Charlie Rangel said of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things”?

Was it the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was routinely dubbed a nuclear-trigger-happy “amiable dunce”? I was young then, so I’ll check with Robert Bork and see what he thinks.

Perhaps it was in the 1960s and 1970s? Sure, there was admirable civil disobedience in the beginning, but there was a lot more uncivil disobedience, what with all the domestic terror attacks and the protesters asking LBJ how many kids he killed today.

The 1950s? Who knew the McCarthy era was such a high-water mark of domestic tranquility? What about the 1930s? America saw its worst labor violence, and FDR had to put up with demagogues like Huey Long and Father Coughlin (who attacked him from the left, by the way). How about the 1910s, when Woodrow Wilson threw political opponents in jail? Or in 1919, when he dubbed “hyphenated Americans” (i.e. German-Americans) traitors? “I cannot say too often — any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic. . . . If I can catch any man with a hyphen in this great contest I will know that I have got an enemy of the Republic.”

Okay, enough of all that.

And yes, let me offer a sincere denunciation of rudeness for rudeness’s sake. Let me also concede that there is no shortage of bilious, nasty rhetoric on the right.

But here’s the thing. First, it was ever thus. American democracy has always been a hurly-burly. More important, a lot of the complaints about incivility today are really complaints from the people in power or their supporters in the media, aimed at the folks who won’t shut up and get with their program.

And there’s something distinctly undemocratic about that.

The civility caterwaulers claim that Obama’s opponents are trying to “delegitimize” the president, often suggesting that such efforts are racist. But what some see as delegitimization, others see as criticism. What strikes me as truly uncivil is the effort to demonize critics of the president with racial bullying.

In fact, I think Obama really does have a problem with dissent. In August he said: “I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way.  . . . I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.”

Moe Lane reports on Rasmussen’s latest trust (as in who do you trust the most to…) numbers.

Then there’s this:

Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) locked Republicans out of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee room to keep them from meeting when Democrats aren’t present.

Towns’ action came after repeated public ridicule from the leading Republican on the committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), over Towns’s failure to launch an investigation into Countrywide Mortgage’s reported sweetheart deals to VIPs.

For months Towns has refused Republican requests to subpoena records in the case. Last Thursday Committee Republicans, led by Issa, were poised to force an open vote on the subpoenas at a Committee mark-up meeting. The mark-up was abruptly canceled. Only Republicans showed up while Democrats chairs remained empty.

Republicans charged that Towns cancelled the meeting to avoid the subpoena vote. Democrats first claimed the mark-up was canceled due to a conflict with the Financial Services Committee. Later they said it was abandoned after a disagreement among Democratic members on whether to subpoena records on the mortgage industry’s political contributions to Republicans.

A GOP committee staffer captured video of Democrats leaving their separate meeting in private chambers after the mark-up was supposed to have begun. He spliced the video to other footage of the Democrats’ empty chairs at the hearing room, set it to the tune of “Hit the Road, Jack” and posted it on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s minority webpage, where it remained as of press time.

Karl Rove:

Millions of Americans watched President Barack Obama’s speech last night to a joint session of Congress. Much of it was familiar, having been delivered in at least 111 speeches, town halls, radio addresses and other appearances on health care. But his most revealing remarks on the topic came on Monday, at a Labor Day union picnic in Cincinnati.

There Mr. Obama accused critics of his health reforms of spreading “lies” and said opponents want “to do nothing.” These false charges do not reveal a spirit of bipartisanship nor do they create a foundation for dialogue. It is more like what you’d say if you are planning to jam through a bill without compromise. Which is exactly what Mr. Obama is about to attempt.

Team Obama is essentially asking congressional Democrats to take a huge gamble. The White House is arguing that ramming through a controversial bill is safer for Democrats than not passing anything. This is based on the false premise that the death of HillaryCare is what doomed Democrats in 1994. Mr. Obama told a reporter in July that the defeat of HillaryCare “Helped [Republicans] regain the House.” Former President Bill Clinton echoed that thought recently by saying “doing nothing” today is “the worst thing we can do for the Democrats.”

Actually, attempting to pass HillaryCare is what brought down the party. Voters rejected a massively complicated, hugely expensive government takeover of health care and the Democrats who pushed it.

In reality, it is riskier to be at odds with where Americans are than just standing by as an unpopular proposal goes down. The problem for Democrats is they are scaring voters by proposing a takeover of health care that spends too much money, creates too much debt, gives Washington too much power, and takes too much decision-making away from doctors and patients.

The political risk for Democrats is clearest among seniors. A late July Gallup poll showed they were the age group least likely to believe health-care reform would improve medical care. Seniors are coming out strongly against Mr. Obama’s health-care plan even though they’re already covered by government care. Perhaps it’s because, as a White House fact sheet makes clear, he wants to pay for his plan’s $948 billion cost over the next 10 years by cutting some $622 billion from Medicare and Medicaid.

If the videos below are any indication — and there are dozens more just like them — members of Congress are getting an angry earful from constituents as they return to their home districts on recess.

Watching Rep. Tim Bishop twitch under the pressure, one can imagine him wondering just how representative of his district those folks are. One can imagine pollsters are quite busy answering that question. The results will be telling.

Let’s begin with Mark Sanford, the Republican from South Carolina who followed his bliss (ahem) all the way to Argentina.  Anyone who cares about the story already knows the details. He’s gonna pay, big time.

New York governor David Paterson got his position after his predecessor, Elliott Spitzer, had to depart because he got caught renting high-priced call girls. No sooner had Patterson taken office, he admitted to having an extra-marital affair–smartly calculating that he could preclude problems by fessing up in advance.

Now California faces the possibilty that Gavin Newsom, currently mayor of San Francisco, might run for governor. Newsom got caught bonking the wife of his campaign manager.

Alex Tourk, 39, who served as Newsom’s deputy chief of staff before becoming his campaign manager in September, confronted the mayor after his wife, Ruby Rippey-Tourk, told him of the affair as part of a rehabilitation program she had been undergoing for substance abuse, said the sources, who had direct knowledge of Wednesday’s meeting.

H.G. Wells figures prominently in Jonah Goldberg’s excellent (essential reading, actually) Liberal Fascism.

Fred Siegel at City-Journal has more.

Modern American liberalism, as it emerged in the 1920s, was animated by a revolt against the masses. Liberal thinkers accused the great unwashed of smothering creative individuals in a blanket of materialist, spiritually empty cultural conformity. The liberal project was, so to speak, to refound America by replacing its business civilization—a “dictatorship of the middle class,” as Vernon Parrington put it—with a new, more highly evolved leadership. But along with the ideal of the spontaneous, creative individual, liberals also embraced government economic planning, which depended on making people more predictable. The tension between the two aspirations was resolved, rhetorically at least, by proposing to place power in the hands of scientists, academics, artists, and professionals, a new and truly worthy aristocracy that could govern based on what was good for both leaders and the led.

These antidemocratic and elitist assumptions were nowhere better illustrated than in the extraordinary career of a Briton, H. G. Wells. Wells is best remembered today as the author of such late-nineteenth-century socio-scientific fantasies as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man. But he was much more than that. His political writing achieved extraordinary influence in America, not just through his defense of liberal freedoms such as free speech but through his hostility to population growth, capitalism, and democracy itself.

Herbert George Wells was already a renowned writer of fiction when in 1901 he published the nonfiction work Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. The book’s scientific prescriptions to cure social diseases turned the novelist into a seer, both in England and in America, where Anticipations had already been serialized in the North American Review. More than any other intellectual of the time, Wells spoke to two enormous nineteenth-century shifts: the growth of giant industries, which undercut the old assumptions about the sovereignty of the individual; and Darwinism’s concussive reassignment of humanity from the spiritual to the natural world, which begged for prophets of a naturalized humanity.

Numerous fin de siècle writers had looked backward at a century of material and mechanical progress, both to praise its achievements and to condemn its running sore, the seemingly permanent misery of the urban working class. But Wells looked ahead, asserting that the future as well as the past had a pattern. He argued inductively about the nature of what was likely to come, based on the way the telephone, telegraph, and railroad had shrunk the world, and he populated his predictions with a dramatic cast of collective characters. Some he loathed: the idle, parasitic rich; the “vicious helpless pauper masses,” the “People of the Abyss”; and the yapping politicians and yellow journalists whom he considered instruments of patriotism and war.

But if these people were leading the world on the path to hell, there were also the redeemers, the “New Republicans,” the “capable men” of vision who might own the future. These scientist-poets and engineers could, Wells thought, redirect the Darwinian struggle away from a descent into savagery and toward a new and higher ground. Building on the social and sexual ideals of nineteenth-century utopian reformers, Wells generated a complete cosmology, a scientific socialism to compete with Marxism, which, he thought, reduced the complexities of life to simpleminded slogans of class war. Outflanking the Marxists on their own ground, he called for a different kind of struggle, a “revolt of the competent” against the confines of conventional middle-class morality.

Read on.

The best source for understanding the ugliness of Obama’s Justice Department on the “torture” issue is Andrew McCarthy. From the Corner:

I have an article (posted on the homepage this afternoon) which recounts how the Obama administration is urging the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to adopt the same interpretation of federal torture law that it is investigating former Bush administration lawyers for developing.  (And why shouldn’t AG Eric Holder rely on the memo written by Jay Bybee and John Yoo in 2002?  After all, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals already adopted it as the law of the United States in a ruling last year — as I also recount in the article).

But now there’s more.  As Jan Crawford Greenburg reports at her ABC News blog, Legalities, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility — by playing partisan politics — has blown the critical filing deadline for referring Prof. Yoo for professional sanctions.  Don’t get me wrong, this is a very good thing — as I’ve been arguing, there is no legal or ethical basis to pursue this cockamamie investigation.  But this is an episode that should be studied given all the blather about how it was Republicans who politicized the Justice Department.

OPR, like the Civil [ACM CORRECTION:] RIGHTS Division, is largely a bastion of the Left at DOJ.  But to get some things done, the career lawyers need sign-offs from political appointees, so they butt heads with the brass from time to time if a Republican administration is in power. Patently, they slow-walked the ethics investigation of Yoo and Bybee for years, waiting for President Bush to be on his way out and a more agreeable Democrat administration to come in.  In the waning weeks of the Bush administration, they tried to slide their report by AG Michael Mukasey — perhaps figuring he was on his way out the door and wouldn’t pay it much attention.  Wrong! As Jan Greenburg Crawford recounts:

It appears John Yoo cannot be disciplined or disbarred for writing those memos, even if the Office of Professional Responsibility says it has evidence he should be.

That’s because OPR’s five-year investigation—carefully timed for release only as Bush was leaving the White House and Obama was coming in—dragged on too long. As a result of that timing, OPR blew the deadline for referring possible misconduct allegations against Yoo.

John Yoo is admitted to the bar in Pennsylvania. But the Pennsylvania Disciplinary Board, which would investigate any complaints against him, imposes a four-year limitation for complaints.

Yoo wrote the memos in 2002 and 2003. This is 2009. You do the math…. (more…)

The Bulletin:

A lawyer involved with legal action against Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told a House Judiciary subcommittee on March 19 The New York Times had killed a story in October that would have shown a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign because it would have been a “a game changer.”

Heather Heidelbaugh, who represented the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee in the lawsuit against the group, recounted for the ommittee what she had been told by a former ACORN worker who had worked in the group’s Washington, D.C. office. The former worker, Anita Moncrief, told Ms. Heidelbaugh last October, during the state committee’s litigation against ACORN, she had been a “confidential informant for several months to The New York Times reporter, Stephanie Strom.”

Ms. Moncrief had been providing Ms. Strom with information about ACORN’s election activities. Ms. Strom had written several stories based on information Ms. Moncrief had given her.

During her testimony, Ms. Heidelbaugh said Ms. Moncrief had told her The New York Times articles stopped when she revealed that the Obama presidential campaign had sent its maxed-out donor list to ACORN’s Washington, D.C. office.

Ms. Moncrief told Ms. Heidelbaugh the campaign had asked her and her boss to “reach out to the maxed-out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN.”

Ms. Heidelbaugh then told the congressional panel:

“Upon learning this information and receiving the list of donors from the Obama campaign, Ms. Strom reported to Ms. Moncrief that her editors at The New York Times wanted her to kill the story because, and I quote, “it was a game changer.”’

Ms. Moncrief made her first overture to Ms. Heidelbaugh after The New York Times allegedly spiked the story — on Oct. 21, 2008. Last fall, she testified under oath about what she had learned about ACORN from her years in its Washington, D.C. office. Although she was present at the congressional hearing, she did not testify.

U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., the ranking Republican on the committee, said the interactions between the Obama campaign and ACORN, as described by Ms. Moncrief, and attested to before the committee by Ms. Heidelbaugh, could possibly violate federal election law, and “ACORN has a pattern of getting in trouble for violating federal election laws.”

He also voiced criticism of The New York Times.

“If true, The New York Times is showing once again that it is a not an impartial observer of the political scene,” he said. “If they want to be a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, they should put Barack Obama approves of this in their newspaper.”

From a profile of LA City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo:

…there is what is referred to as the “personal stuff”: Delgadillo let his wife drive his city car, and she got into an accident. The Delgadillos were forced to repay the city after charging taxpayers for the repair costs. The couple also faced the cutoff of their power and car insurance because they didn’t pay their bills.

“People make mistakes,” Delgadillo said. “I went through a rough patch. The state of California and the people have gone through a rough patch. I’ve learned from it, and I think people tend to forgive and forget if you take responsibility.”

Hot Air

The Democratic Party has to do something to distract people from the parade of flopped nominations in the Barack Obama administration, the botched diplomacy of Hillary Clinton, the Wall Street meltdown, and the insane spending spree of the Democratic-controlled Congress.  Rather than have people actually pay attention to what Democrats do, the party has decided to hold an anti-Rush Limbaugh contest — to gin up a slogan for a billboard near the Excellence in Broadcasting studios in Florida.  My friend Tommy Christopher reports that they’ve picked a winner:

The winning slogan, submitted by William C. of Camden, New Jersey, will let Rush — and the Republicans who’ve decided to follow his lead –  know that Americans aren’t hoping for failure.  They voted for a new direction in November, and they’re ready to leave behind the failed partisan attack politics of the past.

Um, say, like holding slogan contests to belittle conservatives?  I know that consistency isn’t a strong point with Democrats, but didn’t anyone read this for comprehension before sending it out?

Apparently they were too busy picking a slogan.  And here it is, the message that they believe will send Rush Limbaugh screaming into oblivion: