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Tuesday, June 8th: Primary Reflections

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Bloviating Zeppelin: Tuesday, June 8th: Primary Reflections

Bloviating Zeppelin

(in-ep-toc'-ra-cy) - a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Tuesday, June 8th: Primary Reflections


So, what do you suppose was the message transmitted by voters on Tuesday this week?

Some in the DEM/MSM are saying Tuesday was about nothing more than money.

Others on the Conservative side are saying it's more about dissatisfaction and actual diversity of thought, instead of lockstep Leftist fast tricks and disinformatione.

It was, frankly, an election consisting greatly of Republican women.

In California where I live, Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman will challenge the Great Leftist Giants in November: Fiorina vs Barbara Boxer for US Senate, and Whitman vs Jerry Brown for Governor.

Eric Hogue at KTKZ, 1380, in Sacramento has already called for a debate between Carly Fiorina and Barbara Boxer. If that occurs, you should/must listen! I'll announce this when and if it occurs.

An even more interesting combative exists in the state to the east of mine: Nevada. 60-year-old Sharron Angle had the temerity to take on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. And won that privilege.

From AP News about Sharron Angle:

The former school teacher and legislator grabbed the nomination after a brutal primary in which her rivals depicted her as too extreme to appeal to independents who often cast the decisive votes in centrist Nevada. She benefited when one-time front-runner Sue Lowden was widely mocked for suggesting consumers use chickens to barter with doctors.

Unemployed freight worker Tina Immormino, 45, of Henderson, said she voted for Angle "because we definitely need change in government and Harry Reid has to go. Everyone in Washington has to go."

Reid emerges as the prohibitive front-runner.

Democrats are already depicting Angle as a loopy fringe figure, more caricature than politician. With plenty of money on hand and deep-pocketed allies, Reid and his supporters are expected to use TV ads to quickly define Angle in the populous Las Vegas region - home to about two of every three state voters - where she is not well known.

The Patriot Majority, funded in part by unions and run by Craig Varoga, a veteran Democratic operative who did a stint on Reid's staff years ago, launched a website ridiculing Angle and calling her positions "completely out of step." Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Robert Menendez said Angle "cares more about promoting a strict social doctrine than helping grow the state's economy."

Is this a foreshadowing of things to come?

A note: I was heartbroken to see the John Eastman AG loss in California. But I suspect it was simply because so few people knew him and his proclivities. I can only hope that he will buck up and return.

But moreover, even the Leftists are wondering what they've purchased. Dorothy Rabinowitz writes in the WSJ (in my opinion this must be reproduced in toto):

THE ALIEN IN THE WHITE HOUSE
the distance between the president and the people is beginning to be revealed

The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president's earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill.

There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama's pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn't lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice—and for good reason.

Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric; Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.

A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

One of his first reforms was to rid the White House of the bust of Winston Churchill—a gift from Tony Blair—by packing it back off to 10 Downing Street. A cloudlet of mystery has surrounded the subject ever since, but the central fact stands clear. The new administration had apparently found no place in our national house of many rooms for the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind. Churchill, face of our shared wartime struggle, dauntless rallier of his nation who continues, so remarkably, to speak to ours. For a president to whom such associations are alien, ridding the White House of Churchill would, of course, have raised no second thoughts.

Far greater strangeness has since flowed steadily from Washington. The president's appointees, transmitters of policy, go forth with singular passion week after week, delivering the latest inversion of reality. Their work is not easy, focused as it is on a current prime preoccupation of this White House—that is, finding ways to avoid any public mention of the indisputable Islamist identity of the enemy at war with us. No small trick that, but their efforts go forward in public spectacles matchless in their absurdity—unnerving in what they confirm about our current guardians of law and national security.

Consider the hapless Eric Holder, America's attorney general, confronting the question put to him by Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) of the House Judicary Committee on May 13. Did Mr. Holder think that in the last three terrorist attempts on this soil, one of them successful (Maj. Nidal Hasan's murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, preceded by his shout of "Allahu Akbar!"), that radical Islam might have played any role at all? Mr. Holder seemed puzzled by the question. "People have different reasons" he finally answered—a response he repeated three times. He didn't want "to say anything negative about any religion."

And who can forget the exhortations on jihad by John Brennan, Mr. Obama's chief adviser on counterterrorism? Mr. Brennan has in the past charged that Americans lack sensitivity to the Muslim world, and that we have particularly failed to credit its peace-loving disposition. In a May 26 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Brennan held forth fervently, if not quite comprehensibly, on who our enemy was not: "Our enemy is not terrorism because terrorism is just a tactic. Our enemy is not terror because terror is a state of mind, and as Americans we refuse to live in fear."

He went on to announce, sternly, that we do not refer to our enemies as Islamists or jihadists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam. How then might we be permitted to describe our enemies? One hint comes from another of Mr. Brennan's pronouncements in that speech: That "violent extremists are victims of political, economic and social forces."

Yes, that would work. Consider the news bulletins we could have read: "Police have arrested Faisal Shahzad, victim of political, economic and social forces living in Connecticut, for efforts to set off a car bomb explosion in Times Square." Plotters in Afghanistan and Yemen, preparing for their next attempt at mass murder in America, could only have listened in wonderment. They must have marvelled in particular on learning that this was the chief counterterrorism adviser to the president of the United States.

Long after Mr. Obama leaves office, it will be this parade of explicators, laboring mightily to sell each new piece of official reality revisionism—Janet Napolitano and her immortal "man-caused disasters'' among them—that will stand most memorably as the face of this administration. It is a White House that has focused consistently on the sensitivities of the world community—as it is euphemistically known—a body of which the president of the United States frequently appears to view himself as a representative at large.

It is what has caused this president and his counterterrorist brain trust to deem it acceptable to insult Americans with nonsensical evasions concerning the enemy we face. It is this focus that caused Mr. Holder to insist on holding the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan, despite the rage this decision induced in New Yorkers, and later to insist if not there, then elsewhere in New York. This was all to be a dazzling exhibition for that world community—proof of Mr. Obama's moral reclamation program and that America had been delivered from the darkness of the Bush years.

It was why this administration tapped officials like Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Among his better known contributions to political discourse was a 2005 address in which he compared the treatment of Muslim-Americans in the United States after 9/11 with the plight of the Japanese-Americans interned in camps after Pearl Harbor. During a human-rights conference held in China this May, Mr. Posner cited the new Arizona immigration law by way of assuring the Chinese, those exemplary guardians of freedom, that the United States too had its problems with discrimination.

So there we were: America and China, in the same boat on human rights, two buddies struggling for reform. For this view of reality, which brought withering criticism in Congress and calls for his resignation, Mr. Posner has been roundly embraced in the State Department as a superbly effective representative.

It is no surprise that Mr. Posner—like numerous of his kind—has found a natural home in this administration. His is a sensibility and political disposition with which Mr. Obama is at home. The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.

They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America's moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.

The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the good. A country governed by leaders too principled to speak the name of its mortal enemy needs every infusion of reality it can get.


I don't think I could possibly have expressed this in as accurate a fashion as that of Ms Rabinowitz.

There is MUCH to be said and written about The Truth.

November, here we come.

BZ

12 Comments:

Blogger Bushwack said...

California missed a golden opportunity to begin the repairs to this nation by not electing Eastman. I am sick. But again this is California and it's very evident that most people in this state are clueless.

Wed Jun 09, 06:39:00 PM PDT  
Blogger Bloviating Zeppelin said...

But do not give up, Robert!

I suspect that Eastman will be back, and we cannot ignore his future aspirations.

This was but one attempt.

And an attempt where predominantly most persons didn't KNOW him.

He wasn't a NAME.

It is up to YOU and ME to MAKE him a NAME, sir!!

BZ

Wed Jun 09, 06:47:00 PM PDT  
Blogger Chris said...

Well, let's just hope the party flip flopper Gubna Charlie Crist here in Fl gets the can. We only have a smooth talking spanish guy (R) Marco Rubio and a southern bell woman who is a (D) running against him. Fl is going to be in bad shape soon. All of our canidates are scum. Florida is going to become the sister of California.

Thu Jun 10, 06:07:00 AM PDT  
Blogger Old NFO said...

Re Nevada- Reid will buy the election once again... sigh... Is it November YET???

Thu Jun 10, 10:06:00 AM PDT  
Blogger Dave Miller said...

BZ, given that California, however much to the chagrin of many, now has a Latino voting block of about 20% of the electorate, I do not think Carly will be defeating Boxer anytime soon.

The positions she had to take, moving right and involving Pete Wilson in her campaign, guarantee that she is starting at an almost 18% disadvantage.

That means she is going to have to win almost 60% of the remaining voters in the state, a tall order for any candidate.

As for Sharron Angle, I think she is toast here in Nevada. Her viewpoints will not play at all in Clark County, home to the biggest population centers.

She favors the reopening of the Yucca Mountain debate, which Harry Reid has been instrumental in blocking for years. Nevadans hate Yucca Mountain and support for it political suicide.

Couple that with the fact that the most conservative newspaper in the state, the RJ, certainly no friend of Reid, named her the worst legislator in Nevada twice, and I think she has a real uphill battle.

I do tend to think Meg Whitman has a decent chance in CA, if only because Jerry Brown is a pretty weak candidate.

Thu Jun 10, 12:43:00 PM PDT  
Blogger Bloviating Zeppelin said...

Dave Miller: thanks for visiting and thanks for taking the time to comment. That's interesting about Nevada as, of course, I don't live there and don't have my finger on the true pulse of that state. Given, however, those factoids about Yucca Mountain and Harry Reid. That said, do you think Reid will take it again? I'm not so sure about Fiorina. I think we may be surprised about that.

BZ

Thu Jun 10, 03:12:00 PM PDT  
Blogger Bloviating Zeppelin said...

However, Dave, I should like to point out Rasmussen:

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections/election_2010/election_2010_senate_elections/nevada/election_2010_nevada_senate

Angle: 50%
Reid: 39%

She's ahead.

BZ

Thu Jun 10, 03:35:00 PM PDT  
Blogger Dave Miller said...

BZ, I'll be surprised if Reid loses. Look, any state really has to think long and hard about whacking a Senator with that much clout, for a rookie.

Nevada did that many years ago, axing Howard Cannon for a guy named Chic Hecht. He was horrible in Washington, and for Nevada. Seniority counts.

Besides, both the other candidates, Lowden and Tarkanian, were pretty strong in saying that Angle would have no chance against Reid. Now what do they do? Say they were only kidding?

This is a mess for the GOP.

The GOP would be better off to wait this one out, and focus on keeping Ensign's seat after he is forced to resign.

Thu Jun 10, 04:09:00 PM PDT  
Blogger Bloviating Zeppelin said...

Dave, wish I knew the Nevada insider stuff. I'll just have to trust your thoughts on that. But I'm just not sure on Reid v Angle.

There are, clearly, wheels within wheels.

BZ

Thu Jun 10, 04:39:00 PM PDT  
Blogger Karen K said...

It will be very interesting indeed to see what happens.

We know one thing though: the Left is getting very desperate.

Thu Jun 10, 05:16:00 PM PDT  
Blogger Greybeard said...

Christie "couldn't win" in NJ, BUT HE DID, in this new environment.
Scott Brown had no chance at all taking the seat left vacant by the swimmer, BUT HE DID, didn't he?

For that reason I'd like to make you a wager, Dave.
Will you hold the cash BZ?

Fri Jun 11, 01:03:00 AM PDT  
Blogger A Jacksonian said...

This isn't your father's.... hey wait a second... this IS your mother's GOP!

There, that is what we are looking for... and the Leftist Feminist movement thinks that women running for office is now a bad thing. If they are conservative or don't keep up the multi-culti feel good party line. Yet I always thought that women achieving great things was a great thing for women to do.

And as many women get to do the check writing in the family, fiscal conservatism gains a new face to it: mom telling you that you can't afford the lovely government services you want.

This will be a fun three years.

If we can survive them, that is.

Fri Jun 11, 04:51:00 AM PDT  

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