Eric The Blue

Newt ascendant; Hinderaker dismayed

With the Republican presidential nominating contest having taken another hairpin curve, it's time to check in with Power Line.  What do the boys make of it?

Here is John Hinderaker last Thursday evening, analyzing the CNN debate wherein Newt ripped John King a new one:

Newt Gingrich fell short because he didn’t dominate. Newt is very smart, and is a master of the one-liner. But tonight, while he performed well, he failed to outshine his competitors. Mitt Romney, in particular, was just as effective as Gingrich, at times more so, as when he accepted responsibility for being successful. My guess is that Romney won the South Carolina primary tonight. We will soon know whether that prediction is correct.

I'd say he underestimated the fat prolix little wanker named Gingrich.  He appears to have known it himself the next day, Friday, when, revisiting the previous evening's debate, he wrote:

. . . for the moment let’s just focus on the allegations by Newt’s second ex-wife that hit the press this week. Apart from all the other good reasons why Gingrich will never be President, Marianne Gingrich’s sensational allegations snuffed out any possible hope that Newt can beat Barack Obama in 2012. 

[Snip]

Newt makes matters worse by trying to have it both ways. He won’t discuss Marianne’s claims; instead, in last night’s debate he lashed out at the media for publicizing them and at John King for asking about them. The audience of rabid Republicans ate it up. But at the same time, Gingrich implicitly acknowledged how devastating his ex-wife’s stories are by asserting that they are “false.” By calling her a liar, he put her allegations into play. Which claims, exactly, are false? Presumably not everything she said in the ABC interview; then, what? Anyone who seriously thinks that Gingrich can run against President Obama in the fall without both 1) being dogged by such questions, and 2) being turned into a laughingstock, is, in my opinion, delusional. 

I love the dismissive reference to "rabid Republicans" and the final epithet, "delusional," which is also the title of the post.  John, these are your people!  He turns to the question of electoral viabililty:

It is painful to contemplate the extent of the GOP wipeout that would follow a Gingrich nomination. Would Newt carry a state? Wyoming, maybe? South Carolina? The Republican Party could kiss its hopes of retaking the Senate goodbye, and likely would lose control over the House, giving Obama carte blanche to devastate the country for another four years.

Oh, my!  Having miscalculated Newt's appeal to South Carolinia Republicans, he is now off his tether on a related matter.  The concentration of delusional wing-nuts in the general population, and their geographic dispersion, is sufficient to put Newt over the top in perhaps a dozen states.  But, at a high level, I think John's right: if Obama were to carry 38 states, that would be ten more than four years ago, which would put him well north of 400 electoral votes--a landslide for the incumbent during bad economic times.  What can be said about an opposition party capable of such a feat?  Moreover, Gingrich would likely be toxic at the top of the ticket.  He corroborates the misgivings of swing voters regarding the Republican party.  But, then, which of the-Republican presidential candidates doesn't?

John is silent on the obvious weaknesses of Romney.  The poor guy is flummoxed by the utterly predictable call for him to release his tax returns.  He's a manifest trimmer who will never be able to explain why, if Romneycare was good for Massachusetts, Obamacare must be repealed to save the republic.  He's a Mormon and a past supporter of abortion rights.  According to exit polls in South Carolina, Gingrich defeated Romney, 45% to 9%, among the quarter or so of the electorate who said that the religious beliefs of the candidates mattered a lot to them.  Since these are John's people, maybe he could explain the appeal of swingin' Newt Gingrich to the good Christian ladies and gentlemen of South Carolina.  It's certainly not an advertisement for Romney's vote-getting prowess.

John is up with a new post today, "Congratulations, Newt," that's somewhat mellower in tone, like Shakespeare in The Tempest.  Not that he's gone entirely soft on Newt:

So, congratulations to Newt, and on to Florida. Let’s just pray that Barack Obama’s second term didn’t start today. If Gingrich does get the nomination, this may turn out to be a year in which Republicans more or less ignore the presidential race, ceding Obama his second term, and focus instead on trying to hold the House and, if possible, picking up a seat or two in the Senate, along with doing the best we can in state races where the wipeout at the presidential level doesn’t swamp all efforts to elect Republicans.

I'm not sure that the details jibe with what he said two days ago about how Republicans, if they nominate Gingrich, can "kiss hopes of retaking the Senate goodbye." Since there are currently just 51 Senate Democrats, plus two independents who caucus with them, it seems that someone able to contemplate the Republicans picking up two seats could muster one more ounce of optimism.  It's not as if his calibrations are uniformly, meticulously fine.

But, you know what?  I'm going to put in a good word for John.  He's distinguishing himself from the Gingrich enthusiasts, who, I agree, are delusional.  Moreover, if the only sin is to bore, then John and all the rest of the brawling R's are as favored by God as they imagine.

I read Power Line so that you don't have to

There's a new look at the Power Line blog but the content is the same old sludge.  In a post entitled "Norway: A Postscript," John Hinderaker begins:

They are still counting the bodies in Norway, and it is probably unseemly to start making political points. . .

The rest of the post makes a political point.  The point is that someone other than the shooter should have had a gun.  This wouldn't happen in South Dakota, where he grew up.  Etc. 

Since I agree with Hinderaker about his unseemliness, let us put that question to the side.  The evidence doesn't support his point.  To say that it wouldn't happen in South Dakota doesn't count for much.  It hadn't happened in Norway until last week.  It was the bloodiest day on Norwegian soil since World War II.  Rates of gun ownership in Norway are not particularly low--a little less than half that of the United States, where the rate of gun violence is on a different order of magnitude.  We have a little more than 50 times the population of Norway and about 2000 times the number of homicides committed with guns.  The homicide rate in Norway is somewhat lower than in South Dakota. 

The "coverage" to which the post calling for more guns is a "postscript" began while the crime was in progress.  Hinderaker:

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

When that turned out to be false--well, I should let him speak for himself, since he doesn't allow that it was false:

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.

No, wrong.  Either Hinderaker is confused himself or else he's trying to confuse his readers (or maybe just appeal to their prejudices).  The logical connection between the "mass murder" of one sentence and the "hundreds if not thousands of terrorist attacks" of the next is, to put it charitably, weak.  Is he saying that he is justified,  hearing news of mass murder, in concluding that it is likely the work of Muslim jihadists, because there have been "hundreds if not thousands" of mass murders in recent years, almost all committed by Muslims?

Events that do not rise to the level of "mass murder" are used to justify sweeping, and false, generalizations about mass murder.  9/11 was the work of Muslim terrorists.  Oklahoma City was not.  Nor the shootings at Virginia Tech.  Jared Loughner is not a Muslim jihadist.  The sarin attack in the Tokyo subway system was not perpetrated by Muslims.  In "the past several decades" there have been scores of terrorist attacks in northern Ireland, none by Muslim jihadists, who also had nothing to do with the killing of 380 schoolchildren at Beslan, Russia, in 2004.  And this Norwegian crackpot isn't a Muslim terrorist, either. 

Meanwhile, sidekick Johnson takes a feeble swing at James Fallows, whom he charges with "a swarm of foul-mouthed and openly anti-Semitic tweeters."   I take this as a kind of code for stating that Fallows has a dim view of the settlement movement in Israel.  Anyway, judge for yourself.  Rubin.  Fallows. 

  

In the news

At the Power Line blog, John Hinderaker, before going to bed last night, posted the following beneath the headline "BIN LADEN IS DEAD!":

Hallelujah! After years of hunting the son of a bitch, we finally got him.  Let's all smoke a cigar before we turn in.

UPDATE: Apparently we have the body, too.  What to do with it?  No ideas yet, but something really humiliating.

Precisely the kind of reaction that Obama's sober speech was intended to forestall.  Do something "humiliating" to the body?  We are like a nation of teenagers that until recently had one of our own for a parent.  The one moment of poetry in Obama's announcement came when, after a wooden recitation of 9-11 horrors, he said:

And yet we know that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world. The empty seat at the dinner table. Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father.

This called to mind, at least for me, the lyric to Bruce Springsteen's "You're Missing," from The Rising:

Pictures on the nightstand, TV's on in the den
Your house is waiting, your house is waiting
For you to walk in, for you to walk in
But you're missing, you're missing
You're missing when I shut out the lights
You're missing when I close my eyes
You're missing when I see the sun rise
You're missing. . . .

Morning is morning, the evening falls
Too much room in my bed, too many phone calls
How's everything, everything?
Everything, everything
You're missing, you're missing. . . .

The private side of a public catastrophe.  I have to say, though, that I hate the way the media seeks out on days like today anyone who lost a loved one on 9/11, as if their grief makes them experts on what we should make of it.  But maybe there is something to this notion.  I heard one guy tell his interviewer that he supposed the killing of bin Laden was a good thing but that his brother was still dead, too.  He seems more grounded than the Power Line philosophers.  Hinderaker quotes Nancy Pelosi, then comments: "It is unfortunate that many public figures are unable to view events otherwise than through a partisan prism."  Scrolling down, one comes  to a post in which sidekick Scott Johnson quotes, approvingly, Stephen Hunter.  The excerpted passage goes like this:

Any joy one might feel in the intelligence of our analysts and the bravery of our door kickers was significantly diminished by Obama's malignant narcissism. The first part of the announcement, evoking 9/11, was vulgarly overwritten as per Obama's view of himself as some kind of gifted orator. The adjective bloated compote was unworthy of the subject, banal and self-indulgent.

Then there were his tasteless claims of personal leadership, his over-emphasis on "I" and "at my direction." Clearly, all he did was sign off on initiatives other, better men had originated. He was ungenerous to Bush, who had to deal with this thing in real time under more pressure any president has faced since Pearl Harbor and wasn't helped by the treachery of the democratic party, as exemplified by then Senator Obama. Clearly, we staged from Afghanistan. We were able to stage from Afghanistan because of Bush and the intel that led to the kill was just as obviously developed over years of effort, begun by Bush.

Finally, the NBC worship of O on the lead-in was mentally and morally repugnant. They used this as an example to bash Bush, mocking the fact that eight years ago to the day Bush had been photographed under a mission accomplished sign, without reference to the fact that the sign referred to Iraq, not Afghan, not the GWoT. And that Obama's course in his presidency has been made so much easier by virtue of the fact that Bush won the war that Obama and his cohort so opposed and yearned for our defeat in.

Drop that partisan prism, Nancy Pelosi! Now!

On all things related to bin Laden, I trust Steve Coll, whose first reaction to yesterday's events is here.

There she goes again!

If you are interested in the circus that is American politics, you probably know by now that over the weekend Michele Bachmann, speaking in New Hampshire, the venue of the first primary election of the 2012 presidential sweepstakes, informed her auditors: "You're the state where the shot was heard 'round the world at Lexington and Concord." 

It's so tricky!  Two towns, Lexington and Concord, two states, New Hampshire and Massachusetts: how can anyone keep it all straight?  It would be, like, comprehending that John Adams qualifies as a founding father but that his son, John Quincy Adams, does not. 

Here is her defense, posted on her Facebook page: "So I misplaced the battles Concord and Lexington by saying they were in New Hampshire. It was my mistake, Massachusetts is where they happened. New Hampshire is where they are still proud of it."  What a zinger!  (Our socialist, Kenyan-born president carried both states.)  That was Saturday at 3:57 p.m.  At 9:56 p.m. she added, "By the way, that will be the last time I borrow President Obama's teleprompter!"  So hilarious I can hardly believe it took her just six hours to think of it.

Bachmann is such an embarrassment that I grew curious about what the Power Line philosophers might be saying about her.  Nothing, so far as I can tell, since before she delivered herself of some revisionist history in Iowa a few weeks ago.  I did however collect a few of Hinderaker's past Bachmann droppings.

"A tax litigator by trade, Michele is smart, articulate and telegenic."  (October 9, 2009)

"Bachmann is infinitely better informed than [Nobel prize-winning economist Paul] Krugman."  (January 11, 2011)

"Michele was, of course, a beginner at one time.  But that was some years ago."  (July 20, 2010)

"A former tax litigator, she is as shrewd a critic of the Left's would-be takeover of the economy as we have in the conservative movement."   (October 24, 2009) (God help them!)

Let us close with one I can agree with him on: "To say that the Palin-Bachmann alliance is natural is an understatement.  The two women have a great deal in common. . . ."  (April 7, 2010)

Power Line does Tucson

I've been coasting around at the Power Line blog as I know the Philosophers can be counted upon for trenchant commentary on the tragedy in Tucson. 

I see that John Hinderaker's take on the political views of Jared Loughner is somewhat fluid.  First, Loughner was a "nut"; then for awhile he had no coherent political philosophy; and now, in Hinderaker's most recent contribution to the new civility, he calls Loughner a "left-winger" before concluding that he (Loughner) "isn't the only untreated mental patient on the Left."

Oh, my!

As he sometimes does, Philosopher Mirengoff surprises me by edging toward the perimeter of the reservation.  He praises President Obama's Tucson speech, pushes back against some of the ridiculous bravado of his co-authors (persevere to "Paul adds" at the end of the post), and even apologizes for an instance of being influenced by the ambient sneer-snarl at Power Line.

I could agree with Hinderaker about Loughner being a "nut" and having no coherent political philosophy, so I guess it was inevitable that he'd have to move off that square.  But it seems to me that we need more words--"nut," since it aptly describes, for example, Sharron Angle, the most recent Republican candidate for US Senate from Nevada, who during her campaign spoke approvingly of "Second Amendment remedies," should not be applied to a mass murderer on one day and to a garden-variety tea-party dolt on another.  They aren't the same thing.  There is my contribution to the new civility.

But for some hard truths I recommend George Packer, who is especially eloquent on the charge that "Democrats do it, too":

In fact, there is no balance--none whatsoever.  Only one side has made the rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its grassroots movement and its midterm campaign.  Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intimidation, not-so-coyly conflating rights with threats.  Only one side's activists bring guns to democratic political gatherings.  Only one side has a popular national TV host who uses his platform to indoctrinate viewers in the conviction that the President is an alien, totalitarian menace to the country.  Only one side fills the AM waves with rage and incendiary falsehoods.  Only one side has an iconic leader, with a devoted grassroots following, who can't stop using violent imagery and dividing her countrymen into us and them, real and fake.  Any sentient American knows which side that is. . . .

 It's your side, Philosophers.

Power Line analyzes Nevada

I finally got around to checking out the election analysis of the Power Line philosophers.  Despite a series of posts entitled "Wasn't that a mighty wave, parts 1 to n," it was not as triumphalist as I had expected.  I'm not saying it wasn't ridiculous.  Here is the conclusion to Paul Mirengoff's postmortem of the Nevada senate race:

Most conservatives, including me, were overly optimistic about Republican chances in the Senate. This was due, I think, to our understanding that this was a wave election and our faith that the Senate vote would pretty fully reflect the wave.

It didn't in Nevada. The reason can be debated. The possibility that the Republicans nominated a much less than optimal candidate cannot be dismissed.

You have to love the way the author mincingly approaches, then flees from, the question of Sharron Angle's fitness for high office.  The possibility that the square root of 5 is greater than 2 cannot be dismissed.  The possibility that the author knows his blog is read by people even crazier than he cannot be dismissed.

How come John Hinderaker is posting so infrequently?  Almost his last contribution, back on October 24, ran under the title "Angle looks like a winner."  It's not as fun when he's on a sabbatical.

Power Line champions The Buckley Rule

The Power Line philosophers have been sparring with some of their readers over the question of whom real conservatives should support when right-nutters run in Republican primaries against "establishment Republicans"--the scare quotes here indicating that in the right-nutter lexicon the phrase is a euphemism for "Traitors to the One True Cause."

In contrast to Rush Limbaugh and others, the philosophers have promulgated the "Buckley Rule," named for William F. Buckley, Jr., founder and long-serving editor of National Review, who held  that in a Republican primary NR subscribers should cast their ballots for the most rightward candidate with a decent chance of winning the general election.  The philosophers angered many of their readers by suggesting that the Buckley Rule was a reason not to choose Christine O'Donnell, a right-nutter, over establishment favorite Mike Castle in Delaware's Republican primary election for U.S. Senate.

Although they aren't as crazy as some of their readers, I would not go so far as to say that the philosophers' embrace of the Buckley Rule makes them exemplars of hard-headed good sense.  They are saved from voting for O'Donnell only by their conclusion that the people of Delaware are more sensible than they are.  The Buckley Rule places a considerable burden upon those who would be governed by it.  They must be crazy enough to vote for a manifest crackpot.  They must also be lucid enough to realize when the good sense of the rest of the voting population precludes the possibility of their favored crackpot prevailing in the general election.

The trouble with Scott Johnson

I haven't placed a post in my "Power Out" category for awhile.  What are the philosophers up to?  Well, Scott Johnson doesn't like the Minnesota Poll, which, he says, seems "regularly to overstate Democratic strength."  The poll's latest offense is to find that Mark Dayton is 9 points ahead of Tom Emmer in our gubernatorial race.  Johnson relates the tale of how, in 2002, when Norm Coleman was running for US Senate against first Paul Wellstone and then, after Wellstone's death, Walter Mondale, he (Johnson) wanted to bet the poll's director that on election day Coleman would do at least five points better than "the final pre-election Minnesota Poll would show."  The director "wisely" declined, and Coleman, according to Johnson, outperformed the final poll by 9 points.

It is not really so surprising that a candidate should, on election day, surpass the support measured in a poll, where after all "undecided" is a choice.  Johnson doesn't appear to be saying anything more than that some undecided voters end up casting a ballot for the Republican.  So what?  He needs to be fact-checked, anyway.  The Minnesota Poll's last measurement of the 2002 US Senate race in Minnesota is here.  It shows Coleman at 44% and Mondale at 42%.  On election day, Coleman won, 49.5% to 47.3%.  What is Johnson talking about?

For the record, here is the final Minnesota Poll result of the most recent high-profile, statewide races in Minnesota, together with the actual result. 

In the 2008 US Senate race, the final Minnesota Poll showed Franken leading Coleman by 42-38; the result, of course, was a virtual dead heat, with Franken winning by the narrowest of margins.  The final poll of the 2006 governor's race had Democrat Mike Hatch ahead of Republican Tim Pawlenty by 42-39; on election day, Pawlenty won by 1%.  In the US Senate race that year, the last Minnesota Poll had Democrat Amy Klobuchar at 54% and Republican Mark Kennedy at 33%; Klobuchar won the election, 58-38.  In the presidential election of 2004, the last Minnesota Poll had Kerry leading Bush by 46-42; Kerry won the state by 51.1 to 47.6.  The last measurement of the 2002 gubernatorial race had Pawlenty ahead of Democrat Roger Moe by 41-28; Pawlenty won the election, 44.4 to 36.5.  In the 2000 presidential race, the last Minnesota Poll showed Gore at 41% and Bush at 36%; Gore carried the state, 47.9 to 45.5.

Today--one day after Johnson denounced the Minnesota Poll--a different poll, showing Dayton even farther ahead of Emmer, was published.  Johnson has a post up about that one, too.  Money quote:  "It should be noted that the MPR/Humphrey Institute poll results tend to support the Star Tribune Minnesota Poll's, though it seems to me they raise similar questions."

It seems to me that he's a joke.

Paul Mirengoff is embarrassed (but not enough)

You know it's bad when, over at Power Line, Paul Mirengoff, citing this column by Stephen Bainbridge, wonders aloud whether It is now officially "embarrassing to be a conservative."  Bainbridge gives ten reasons why conservatives ought to be embarrassed, and Mirengoff, in his post, chooses to highlight these three:

1. A poorly educated ex-sportswriter who served half of one term of an minor state governorship is prominently featured as a -- if not the -- leading prospect for the GOP's 2012 Presidential nomination.

5. Thanks to the Tea Party, the Nevada GOP has probably pissed away a historic chance to oust Harry Reid. See also Charlie Crist in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, and so on. Whatever happened to not letting perfection be the enemy of the good?

6. The anti-science and anti-intellectualism that pervade the movement.

Three out of  three sound . . . --you know, "elitist."  It is enough to make you wonder whether Mirengoff reads the blog of which he is a co-author.  Anti-science?  Here's his friend and fellow Power Line blogger John Hinderaker lecturing on 19th-century intellectual history:

Modern leftism has always been anti-religious at its core. The three great intellectual movements of the nineteenth century, founded by Marx, Darwin and Freud, were all rebellions against the European religious tradition. Marx sought to secularize history, Darwin to secularize biology, and Freud to secularize human nature. All three movements pretended to be scientific, but in reality were pseudo-science. Hostility to religion was their essence and their motivation.

The only thing missing is the name of the mathematician responsible for having secularized the calculus.  Embarrassed Republicans have begun floating the idea that not all Republicans are embarrassing.  How convenient!  The apt objects of their embarrassment, however, tend to be closer than they imagine.

Wingnuts interpret song lyrics

Campaigning for re-election in 1984, President Reagan said Springsteen's "Born in the USA," like his own Administration, was bringing "a message of hope" to America.  A few days later Springsteen, introducing "Johnny 99" at a concert, speculated that the song, about an unemployed auto worker who commits a murder, was probably not one that the President had been listening to.  Actually, the President probably had not been listening to "Born in the USA," the hopeful message of which is captured in such lyrics as:

Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man

[Snip]

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says "Son if it was up to me"
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said "Son, don't you understand?"

[Snip]

I had a brother at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there, he's all gone

I remembered the "Born in the USA" dust-up yesterday morning when, temporarily in control of the home's electronic devices, I was listening to disc 2 of "The Essential Springsteen," which includes "American Skin (41 Shots)," about Amadou Diallo, the 23-year-old Guinean immigrant who on February 4, 1999, was shot and killed by New York City plainclothes police after he reached for what turned out to be his wallet.  The cops fired 41 shots and hit Diallo 19 times.  When the song was released, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association called for a boycott of Springsteen shows, and the right-wing commentariat denounced Springsteen--the Nihilist in Golf Pants, for example, cited the song in a listing of "Top 11 Lyrics that Prove Bruce Springsteen is a Leftist Scumbag."  Here is the song's lyric.  The last stanza is a refrain sung between and after the other two.

41 shots, and we'll take that ride
'Cross this bloody river to the other side
41 shots, cut through the night
You're kneeling over his body in the vestibule
Praying for his life

41 shots, Lena gets her son ready for school
She says "On these streets, Charles
You've got to understand the rules
If an officer stops you, promise me you'll always be polite
And that you'll never ever run away
Promise Mama you'll keep your hands in sight"

Well, is it a gun, is it a knife
Is it a wallet, this is your life
It ain't no secret (it ain't no secret)
It ain't no secret (it ain't no secret)
No secret my friend
You can get killed just for living in your American skin

The song lyric does not really present the interpreter with difficult hermeneutical issues.  One stanza is from the perspective of the cops who, horrified by their mistake, kneel over the fallen Diallo and pray for his life.  Another imagines the mother of a boy such as Diallo:  understanding that her son could be killed in a similar incident, she counsels him on how he must behave around the police.  The other stanza, a chorus, is in a communal voice of woe and suffering.  The "American skin" of the title refers to Diallo, the cops, us all. 

Bruce Springsteen, leftist scumbag! 

John Hinderaker once weighed in on this topic in a post that I wish I could say exhibited an unusual degree of unhingedness.  Richard Hofstadter did not foresee the portentous choices we would face while filling our iPods. 

Power Line: a natural disaster

I recently made fun of the Power Line philosophers for calling Rand Paul "not ready for prime time,"  as if the problem was a lack of seasoning.  Today, I wondered what the boys might be saying about the oil spill in the Gulf.  Turns out, they aren't saying much.  Hinderaker has a post comparing Obama to Cheney in his emotional chilliness.  After all, Obama played basketball on the same day he visited the Gulf.  That's frigid!  At least Cheney "oozed competence."  In another post, he links to Peggy Noonan, never a good sign, and asks, rhetorically, why anyone would have expected competence from Obama.  My favorite part of this post is Mirengoff's addendum:

PAUL adds: I doubt that liberals thought, in Noonan's words, that "Katrina was the result only of George W. Bush's incompetence and conservatives' failure to believe in government." I think they saw an opportunity to beat Bush up and took it. Now Republicans are using the same stick to beat Obama up.

This is part of a depressingly familiar phenomenon -- the politicization by Democrats of everything, with the Republicans (reasonably enough) following suit. We saw it with judicial nominees, to cite one example, and now we're seeing it with natural disasters.

Those Democrats are so mean that the poor Republicans can hardly keep up!  And you have to love the parallelism between Katrina and the oil spill, both "natural disasters."  Does he think the oil in the Gulf is to be attributed to a particularly windy day?  It almost makes me pine for "Drill, baby, drill."

What's new in wing-nuttery?

Between the office in which I work and the nearest Caribou shop is a financial firm that plays, continuously during business hours on a giant TV for the de-edification of skyway strollers, Fox News.  Yesterday, while I was on the way to get fortified for the last hours of the work day, the text at the bottom of the screen below the talking heads said: "American people have cut back, wonder when government will end the spending spree." 

Maybe that's what Fox News viewers are wondering.  But they've been systematically dumbed down--by  Fox News.  If "people have cut back," and business has done the same, then government is all that's left to stimulate a shrivelling economy.  This notion that what's reasonable for an individual makes a good principle for government policy--it's just childish, churlish, and a crock of organic matter.

I prefer to get my right-wing talking points from Power Line.  I can't tell you how Fox News is playing the Rand Paul story but the philosophers agree that he's "not ready for prime time," which is a way of putting it.  Depend upon it, ladies and sirs, understatement is not an arrow in their rhetorical quiver.  Regarding Dr. Paul, the diagnosis is in: basically sound but needs seasoning.

The past few days at Power Line

Over at Power Line, flecks of white spittle fly off my monitor as I endeavor to take the temperature of the local branch of the lunatic fringe.  Hinderaker, in a March 31 post, asks in his title "Is Obamacare unconstitutional?" before following it up with one called "The Illegitimacy of Obamacare."  Yesterday his deconstruction of a CBS interview with President Obama included the following insights:

Note how Obama immediately starts talking about the "vitriol" of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. This is a bad joke: has Obama never listened to Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow et al.? I've never watched or listened to Beck, but Limbaugh is a more moderate and sophisticated analyst of the political scene than, say, Paul Krugman or E.J. Dionne.

Here is sidekick Johnson striving to be competetive.  The context is the claim that black Democrats are lying about being harrassed by race-baiting tea-party types:

Among other things, one of the involved congressmen is Rep. James Clyburn, a member of the House Democratic leadership and a past master in the cynical deployment of the race card. I conclude as have many others that these allegations were orchestrated by the Democrat/media axis to stigmatize the opposition to Obama's program of national socialism as racist and to suppress dissent. 

Ah, "the Democrat/media axis" and "Obama's program of national socialism" in a single sentence! Game on, Hinderaker!  Meanwhile, Mirengoff, the third philosopher, concludes, in a post entitled "March job numbers show improvement, but nothing dramatic":

Overall, the March report confirms that the job picture is improving, but suggests that the improvement is occurring slowly. 

Possibly he swallowed the valiums prescribed to his co-authors.  Or perhaps he is just approaching profundity from a different direction--"what every jackass knows" instead of "stuff crazy people say."

 

An eventful Sunday evening

On the night the House passed the healthcare reform bill, Amanda and I dropped the kids at gramma and grampa's and went to the show--The Blind Side, at the Riverview in south Minneapolis, where a ticket for a 7:00 show on Sunday evening is still $3.00.  If you stayed home and force fed yourself corn syrup for the show's running time, you'd be well past three bucks of corn syrup, so it is really quite a good deal.

What did I miss?  I don't doubt George Packer, who called the Democrats' speeches uninspiring and the Republicans'--paraphrasing lightly--rabid, fanatical, crazed, foamy.  What has become of my parents' G.O.P.?  Newt Gingrich tweets that healthcare reform will ruin the Dems for the next forty years, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Yes, what a shameful disaster that was!  No one has ever understood what President Johnson could have been thinking.  Do the Republicans have an argument that does not amount to offering political advice to the other party--the advice being, essentially, not to repeat their finest achievements?   I pick on Gingrich because he has a reputation for being a big thinker of deep thoughts, don't ask me why.  It would hardly be more ridiculous if Mitch McConnell or John Boehner were put forward as the Big Brains of the Republican party. 

Here is a question: who, from the front ranks of the Republican party, deserves to be taken seriously?  John McCain, on the morning after the vote, said that Democrats have "poisoned the well" and will get no cooperation from the Republicans.  What does that even mean?   They got no cooperation on healthcare, passed it anyway.  How's the strategy working, Senator?

These guys seem eager to sweep to power on the shirttails of the Democrats' achievement.  Why?  So that they can invade Iran and rerun the economy into the ground?  The Democrats' occasional victories have the effect of dividing the Republicans' failure into periods.

Over at Power Line, John Hinderaker directs readers to a site where they can pledge to support only candidates who will vote to repeal "Obamacare."  But Obama will still be president, and Republicans will not have 67 senators even if they win every single senate race, which they won't.  Being completely divorced from reality is what makes him such an apt spokesman for conservatism, American-style. 

Speak, oracle

In 2009 there were 19 homicides in Minneapolis.  This was the smallest number since 1983, when there were 18, and less than a fifth of the record 97 homicides in 1995, when people started referring to our city as Murderapolis.  Now we've had a horrifying start to 2010: five homicides, three in a single killing spree at a small grocery, in the first eight days of the year.

Back in the summer of 2005, Scott Johnson, one of the Power Line philosophers, wrote in the Weekly Standard that, thanks to one-party liberal rule, Minneapolis was returning to Murderapolis.  It seemed an odd claim.  There ended up being 49 homicides in our city that year.  In the eight previous years, the highest number of homicides was 58 (in 1997 and 1998) and the lowest was 43 (in 2001).  When David Brauer, a local journalist, pointed out that the facts of the case suggested that Johnson was hyperventilating, he replied thus.  Follow the link only if you doubt the following characterization of Johnson's "argument": when discussing whether serious crime is out of control in Minneapolis, the actual number of serious crimes is irrelevant--you have to take account of what any observer (like him) purports to see with his own eyes. 

R.T. Rybak was on the receiving end of Johnson's criticism.  He was the mayor back in 2005, he was the mayor for all of 2009, and he is still the mayor today.  Johnson is still shining reason's lamp on current events but, to my knowledge, has yet to address the events of the past week.  When he does, we will learn that some member of the reality-based community is to blame for our sorrowful start to 2010.

Browsing Power LIne

I haven't visited the Power LIne site for awhile.  What's new with those deep thinkers?

Yesterday, John HInderaker, taking note of Rush LImbaugh's health problems, wrote: "Let's all say a prayer for the well-being of a good man who has contributed more than almost anyone else to public discourse in our time."  Today he notes approvingly that, according to a Rasmussen poll, 58% of respondents are in favor of waterboarding the Nigerian man who tried to blow up an airliner as it approached the Detroit airport on Christmas Day.  The debate, says John, is over, "and Dick Cheney won."

Meanwhile, also today, Scott Johnson complains of "stretchers" in a Ben Nelson ad. 

On Christmas Eve, in a post entitled "Arrogance, Corruption, Stupidity," he (Scott) summarized his views on the health care reform bill then poised to pass the Senate.  Struggling to express in words his distress, Scott resorted to quoting "Oklahoma's magnificent Senator (and Dr.) Tom Coburn."  In an addendum, John, speaking of the Dems, adds: "These are not people who can be compromised with or deflected from their drive toward socialism."

It should be said that in the long-ago days of March Scott was able himself to give poetic expression to his "despair" (his word).  "I feel utterly powerless," he wrote, "to do anything about the fellow in the Oval Office who combines infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity in roughly equal measures. It seems to me that every day he is responsible for assaults on the freedom and well being of the American people. I can't keep up and I can't stand to pay attention."

You understand.  It is Obama who is "infantile" and "grandiose."

Back to John, who, on October 14, called "our friend" Rep. Michele Bachmann "smart, articulate, and telegenic."  Unless describing her as "a tax litigator by trade" counts, he doesn't provide evidence of her brains or verbal graces, but probably had in mind, for examples:

• Her grave warning that America is "running out of rich people."
• Her shout-out to the black chairman of the Republican National Committee: "Michael Steele!  You be da man!  You be da man!"
• Her statement, "I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat President, Jimmy Carter.  And I'm not blaming this on President Obama; I just think it's an interesting coincidence."

It's an interesting coincidence, though of course not anyone's fault, that the friends of the Power Line philosophers are as crazy as they are.  No matter what planet you live on, Happy New Year from Eric the Blue!

Cooking the recent past

One of the Power LIne philosophers, Paul Mirengoff, knows that the "intelligence" regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was not cooked.  It was wrong, you see, but it wasn't any more wrong than the assessments of all our allies.  An honest mistake that does not seem to bother Mr. Mirengoff over much. 

One might wonder why, since all our allies concurred in the view that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction, hardly any followed us to war.  But it is not really such a great mystery.  There was no reason to rely on intelligence.  In November, 2002, Iraq had allowed the return of UN weapons inspectors onto its territory.  They were conducting their searches in unfettered fashion and had turned nothing up when their work was ended by our invasion.  If they had been allowed to continue their inspections, we would have found out, without a war, that Iraq did not have any weapons. 

There was a decision to go to war in Iraq and to make Saddam's weapons the casus belli.  The intelligence and facts were fixed to fit that policy.  The weapons were just a plausible pretext.  It's not that, had the "intelligence" been different, there would have been no war.  There would have been a different pretext.   It's not enough to say the intelligence was cooked.  The entire process was cooked.  First there was a decision for war, then an effort to find "intelligence" to justify it.  The "intelligence" was never for decsion makers.  It was for the rest of us.  The decision had been made. 

How coarse can you get?

Haven't perused Power Line for a while but I see now that on September 24 John Hinderaker wrote that, while the number of American politicians more contemptible than Walter Mondale is dwindling, Jimmy Carter's death would nudge his v.p. closer to the head of the class.  This was in the second paragraph of a post.  The first paragraph was about the regrettable coarseness of American politics.  Hinderaker is too self effacing to put forward his own example as a needed corrective but here he is replying to someone who once disagreed with him:

You dumb shit, he didn't get access using a fake name, he used his real name. You lefties' concern for White House security is really touching, but you know what, you stupid asshole, I think the Secret Service has it covered. Go crawl back into your hole, you stupid left-wing shithead. And don't bother us anymore. You have to have an IQ over 50 to correspond with us. You don't qualify, you stupid shit. 

Yet I have some regard for Carter and Mondale, who cannot draw on such resources of vocabulary and personal charm.  Perhaps they only seem contemptible in comparison.

Just say anything

Paul Mirengoff, one of the Power Line philosohers, the least crazy one, actually, writes:

Not long ago, President Obama demanded an end to all construction in and around Israeli settlements on the West Bank, including "natural growth" construction. Prime Minister Netanyahu, taking a position that Israelis overwhelmingly support, rejected this demand.

Needless to say, Mirengoff is with Netanyahoo, not our president.

It isn't clear to me what Israelis overwhelmingly support.  West Bank settlements?  So-called "natural growth" construction?  In any case, the claim about the overwhelming support of the Israeli public is itself unsupported, and in an effort to find out what Mirengoff might be talking about I typed into Google "Israel public opinion settlements." Return number one.  Return number two.

That qualifies as yet another power outage.

Franken! Finally!

In the end, Norm Coleman could not get his case before a single judge ready to ignore standing Minnesota law as it relates to voting by absentee ballot.  He was 0-for-3 with the three-judge panel hearing his election contest and, when he appealed their unanimous decision, he went 0-for-5 with the justices of the Minnesota Supreme Court, whose unanimous decision is here.

Power Line philosopher Scott Johnson doesn't care for it.  Oh, the various parties honorably discharged their duties under difficult circumstances, but he "strongly disagrees" with some of their decisions, and, further,

It should be noted, however, that the Minnesota Supreme Court decision gives no guidance to Minnesotans concerned about the prevention of the disparate treatment of absentee ballots in the future. While the decision is not wrong on its own terms, It is complacent in a way that is hard to understand.

Do you detect a certain straining to avoid the usual words?  We are told that "the decision is not wrong on its own terms" and, in elaboration of this cryptic assertion, that it "gives no guidance" and is "complacent."  Sounds to me like a call for an activist judiciary.  Johnson thinks we need guidance and he expects judges to supply it.  By "complacent" he means "content to apply the law," which is exactly what he thought judges should be before a Republican narrowly lost a race for US Senate.  

It's not that hard to understand.  Johnson is unable, or unwilling, to recognize his own creed.

Update: I am proven wrong

In my last post I predicted that the Power Line philosophers, having defended their friend Ed Whelan in his dust-up with publius, would be mum about their friend's apology for a deed they defended.  But not so.  They probably would have been wise to remain silent, however.  Mirengoff now adds an incoherent coda to the incoherent "analysis" of his original post.  He says his friend Whelan is a better man than he for issuing an apology that he, Mirengoff, would for very good reasons never have issued. 

What are we to conclude?  That if Whelan were as good a man as Mirengoff, who coyly pretends to think he is not as good a man as his friend Whelan, then he (Whelan) would comprehend as well as Mirengoff that real men do not apologize?

Powerline weighs in with timely post

Two of the Powerline Philosophers weigh in on the Whelan-publius controversy.  Shockingly, they take the side of "our friend" Ed Whelan, the NRO commentator, former Scalia law clerk, and Bush legal advisor.  Mirengoff''s analysis is incoherent.  Hinderaker simply impugns the manhood of publius.

A few hours later, Whelan apologizes to publius.  I think it is safe to assume the Philosophers have spoken their last word on this topic.  It seems not even their friends are as crazy as they are.

Hinderaker looks into his crystal ball

Over at Power Line, John Hinderaker is not impressed by Obama's high standing in the polls:

What is really significant, I think, is that Obama's popularity is muted even though the ill effects of his policies have yet to be felt.  Taxes haven't gone up yet; inflation hasn't hit; deficits have not yet proved (as they undoubtedly will) to greatly exceed Obama's estimates; years of slow growth and elevated unemployment due to statist policies are still in the future; and foreign policy setbacks are yet to come.

Let us file this work of prognostication away with such golden oldies as his takedown of Paul Krugman for worrying, in August of 2005, about an imaginary housing bubble:

It must be depressing to be Paul Krugman.  No matter how well the economy performs, Krugman's bitter vendetta against the Bush administration requires him to hunt for the black lining in a sky full of silvery clouds.  With the economy now booming, what can Krugman possibly have to complain about?  In today's column, titled That Hissing Sound, Krugman says there is a housing bubble, and it's about to burst. . . .

[Snip]

Krugman thinks the fact that James Glassman doesn't buy the bubble theory is evidence in its favor, but if you read Glassman's article on the subject, you'll see that he actually makes some of the same points that Krugman does. But he argues, persuasively in my view, that there is little reason to fear a catastrophic collapse in home prices.

Krugman will have to come up with something much better, I think, to cause many others to share his pessimism.

And here he is in July of 2003 dressing down the journalist Robert Scheer, who dared to regard with skepticism Team Bush's rationale for war in Iraq:

When all the facts are known about Iraq's weapons programs--which will be soon--extremist critics of the administration like Robert Scheer will look very foolish indeed.

Sidekick Scott Johnson called the post from which this characteristically oracular pronouncement was culled "one of Power Line's greatest hits."  The supercilious curl of the lip has yet to be straightened by these serial exercises in unconscious self satire.

Local weather

Every time it's colder than usual, or snows before December or after March, you can count on Power Line Philosopher John Hinderaker to note that the local weather has once again confounded all the scientists who claim the earth is warming.  Saturday night, there was a significant snow fall in the south metro of Minneapolis, where Hinderaker lives, and his predictable comment Sunday morning was esthetically enhanced by a photograph of the snowy landscape in his neighborhood.  I want to call attention, though, to his claim, below the nice picture, that "the earth's climate has been cooling for the last decade."

What is he talking about?  He offers no evidence, but my guess is he's alluding to the fact that, according to the World Meterorological Organization, the hottest year on record is 1998.  So for ten years in a row we haven't broken the record.  Chris Mooney, replying to George Will, who in a column made the same claim as Hinderaker, points out that by this kind of logic "global cooling sets in immediately after every new record temperature year, no matter how frequently those hot years arrive."  He adds that at least seven of the ten hottest years on record have occurred in the 2000s. 

My mind is on baseball today and it occurs to me that, in the world according to John Hinderaker, Joe DiMaggio was mired in a slump at the conclusion of game 57.  His batting average kept sinking through about five straight at-bats!

Scott Johnson, tortured prophet, sounds the alarm

Over at Power LIne, Scott Johnson is "depressed."  The Democrats rule, wealth is evaporating, the mullahs of Iran are playing clueless Obama like a violin, and soon we shall all be wards of a "socialist" state.  Horrors!  Poor Johnson feels "utterly powerless to do anything about the fellow in the Oval Office who combines infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity in roughly equal measures."

What a difference a couple of months make!  No sooner have sufferers of Bush Derangement Syndrome been released from doctors' care than one of the Power Line philosophers raises his cape to pose as a doomed romantic hero of the vestigial sainthood of right-wing loons.  Such is the dire state of affairs sixty days into the administration of Barack Obama, a new Dark Age. 

Johnson's den is too far from the mouth of the cave to allow the sunny consideration that his healthy readers, if there are any, will have other candidates for proper nouns to which "infantile" and "adolescent" may apply.  Predictably, fellow philosopher Hinderaker calls the post "brilliant."

John Hinderaker boycotts the world

John Hinderaker, who at the time called himself Rocket Man, in August of 2004:

My tolerance for dumb-ass celebrities who want to tell me how to vote has dwindled down to zero. Springsteen (whom I once admired) is off my iPod. The Chicks, who are excellent musicians and superb live performers, are banned. To my knowledge, I've never listened to Pearl Jam, so their stupidity doesn't pose a challenge.

And then, of course, there are movies. Ben Affleck has been traveling around with John Kerry, lending his penetrating political analyses to the Democrat [sic] cause.

Isn't that sweet?

My point, I guess, is that I'm done with these guys. If I'm listening to the radio and a song by the Chicks or Springsteen comes on, I'm changing the channel. If Ben Affleck is in a movie, I'm not going. Period.

And, a few days ago:

Years ago, I attended many more cultural events than I do now. During the 1980s, I was a season ticket holder at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater. Over time, I became deeply offended by the fact that no matter what the play, whoever put the program together would find a way to work in an attack on the Reagan administration. The last straw was when I went to King Lear at the Guthrie. It was an excellent production, but my enjoyment of it was ruined by the fact that the program was turned into an anti-Reagan tirade. I wasn't even much of a conservative at the time, but the inappropriateness of the whole thing was too much for me.

I didn't "boo loudly," as Glenn suggests; I just quit going. I wonder how many millions of conservative and mainstream Americans have stopped supporting cultural organizations because of this sort of wanton left-wing politicization.

Prospects are dim for Rocket Man.  His world is narrowing, the availabe options declining toward zero.  Soon he may not be able to leave his subdivision.  He'll place himself under house arrest and watch Fox News sixteen hours a day.

"Coleman is casting wider net for votes"

"Coleman is casting wider net for votes" declares the headline at the top of page one of yesterday's Minneapolis newspaper.  It isn't hard to understand why that would be.  He's behind by 225, and the issues his attorneys had heretofore raised would, if they were all resolved in Coleman's favor, leave Franken still ahead.  So they're looking for more.  His legal team's method is to request from local election officials thousands of pages of documents, which, if produced, they will no doubt mine in an effort to uncover something--anything--that can be used in their election contest.  What they got is not enough.

The Star Tribune article quotes Scott Johnson, one of the Power Line philosophers, on the alleged ineptitude of Coleman's lawyers.  Power Line has itself, however, been all over the place on the recount.  On December 30, John Hinderaker summarized the maneuverings up to that point before concluding:

One way to look at the situation is as follows: most likely, Coleman is "ahead" currently by around 80 votes (assuming that he eventually wins the duplicate vote issue). So, unless Franken gains a net of 80 votes or more on the absentee ballots, Coleman is likely to win the election contest.

That would have been one way to look at it.  Franken, however, gained not 80 but 180 votes when the wrongly rejected absentee ballots were added to the tally, causing Scott Johnson to write, on January 3:

I wonder whether Senator Coleman may now choose not to file an election contest following the declaration of Franken as the winner of the recount on Monday. . . .  My guess is that [Franken's 225-vote lead] will give rise to some sober rethinking on the part of Senator Coleman, whose only recourse is an election contest.

Turns out that it was Hinderaker who had been "rethinking."  On December 30, with Franken ahead by 40 to 50 votes, he concerned himself with the 130 ballots from heavily Democratic precincts that, according to Coleman, had been counted twice; on January 5, with Franken's lead now somewhat north of 130, he turned his attention to "highly legitimate issues surrounding the election which have not yet been addressed by any body."  These highly legitimate and unaddressed issues included, in addition to a now insufficient number of allegedly twice-counted ballots, 654 more absentee ballots that had been rejected on election day.  By January 6, Johnson, extolling Hinderaker's "lucid exposition of the issues still at play," was no longer speaking of "sober rethinking" in the Coleman camp.

Hinderaker's argument is lucid only in the sense that it's easy to see how weak it is.  By his own account of the State Supreme Court's ruling--

On December 18, the Minnesota Supreme Court ordered the state's county election officials to "identify for the candidates' review those previously rejected absentee ballot envelopes that were not rejected on any of the four bases stated in [Minnesota statutes]." That process is now apparently complete, and the counties have identified 1,346 such ballots. They are conventionally referred to as the "wrongly rejected" absentee ballots.

The Supreme Court further ordered the campaigns to try to agree on which of these ballots were, indeed, rejected in error. As to all ballots where such agreement is reached by the county and both campaigns, the votes will be tallied as part of the recount process. As to any ballots where a dispute remains, the dispute will be resolved in the election contest that presumably will follow the recount.

--the 654 ballots have been addressed.  The Supreme Court held that election officials are to identify for the candidates' review wrongly rejected absentee ballots, which ballots would then be opened and counted when the two sides, inspecting them one at a time, agree that the vote should count.  That happened, and Franken's lead surged to 225.  The 654 votes Hinderaker is talking about were not identified by election officials. They were identified by the Coleman campaign.  According to the Star Tribune article, local officials, striving to be fair to Coleman, have gone back and reviewed again the ballots he wants counted, and determined again that all were correctly rejected. 

What is the chance that the judges hearing the election contest will overturn a process prescribed by the Supreme Court and then scrupulously executed by election officials?  Not even the Power LIne boys were pursuing this line of attack--until Coleman's deficit grew beyond the number that could be overcome if all his other claims were accepted.

There's one other thing you don't learn at Power Line.  On the morning after the election, Coleman appeared in public, claimed victory, expressed his confidence in the election system, and indicated that Franken, to spare taxpayers some dollars, should forgo the recount provided for in state law.  He was asked whether, if he were in Franken's place, he'd take his own advice.  He answered that he would, because the time for healing had arrived.

Christmas power outage

I might have mentioned, while advancing the idea that unmanned men are ripe fruit for the right-wing, that John Hinderaker's moniker at Power Line is, or was, "Rocket Man."  What's he been up to lately?  Last I checked, he was Christmas shopping at Barnes & Noble.  His steady hand ever on the pulse of the nation, he draws cheerful (to him) conclusions about the state of public opinion based on a conversation with a book store clerk, who is having a hard time keeping Michael Medved's latest offering in stock.  Never mind the results of the last couple national elections.  Medved is sold out and Rocket Man saw no one browsing Barbara Ehrenreich or Howard Zinn!

Power outage

When online I sometimes check out the Powerline blog--for the same reason, I think, that in college I signed up for a course in abnormal psychology.  What has gone wrong with these fellows?  I don't know, but it sure is fun, in a creepy sort of way, to root around on their site, typing into their great search engine the names of eminent members of the reality-based community.  Today I tried "Hendrick Hertzberg," the New Yorker magazine's brilliant political writer, and learned, from John Hinderaker, that he (Hertzberg) is "wholly unmoored from reality," "an ill-informed idiot."

The occasion was a dust-up from last fall when the Minneapolis newspaper printed an editorial that appeared to have been lifted, in part, from a New Yorker piece of Hertzberg's in which he had declared, around the time of the election, that the Bush administration had: sought to suppress scientific truth, overseen a festival of bribery, subcontracted environmental policy to corporate interests, replenished the ranks of the poor--you get the idea.  Hinderaker huffs that if the newspaper is going to plagiarize it should at least try to find someone half-way intelligent, and he proceeds to rebut Hertzberg, point by point.  I say "rebut" but Hinderaker's performance is so lame that, unless he is unmoored from reality, he cannot possibly have persuaded even himself.  Take his punchy riposte to Hertzberg's claim that, under Bush, the ranks of the poor have been replenished.

"Replenished the ranks of the poor"? Poverty rate in fifth year of Clinton administration (1997):13.3%.  Poverty rate in fifth year of Bush administration (2005): 12.6%

Surely Hinderaker must understand that this "fifth year" comparison is completely bogus.  In fact he could only have selected it because it is bogus.  That has to be what attracted him to it.  The fact of the matter is that the poverty rate declined during each year of the Clinton administration, then reversed course upon Bush's ascendancy, and has risen every long year of the current occupant's incumbency.   The sinking Clinton line crosses the rising Bush line in the fifth years of their respective terms, and, in the world according to John Hinderaker, this absolves Bush of the charge that he has "replenished the ranks of the poor."