Left Coast Silliness

Tue   7 May 2002   8:18 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Flyover Blogdom]

National Review‘s Bill Whalen suggests that President Bush doesn’t need California in 2004, noting that California is “less-than-serious”. In the nation’s capital, the president wrestles with war, threats of terrorism, and a stubborn economy. In California’s capital, lawmakers should be wrestling with a runaway state budget deficit. Instead, what’s on Sacramento’s mind these days: Making it easier for the slavery descendants to sue California companies, and requiring all state public schools to drop their Indian team mascots. It’s the kind of inane political correctness that a serious wartime president doesn’t have time for. And maybe he won’t have to. Although the 2004 election is far off in the distance, one can easily build a scenario that has Bush easily reelected, without California’s help. Here’s how he does it. Bush won 271 electoral votes in November 2000, before the 9/11 attacks ended the prattle about his legitimacy, or his skills and stewardship. If the election were held today, it’s safe to assume that Bush would either lead or be within striking distance in the following seven states he narrowly lost to Al Gore: Oregon (a 7% defeat), Iowa (6%), Maine and Pennsylvania (5% each), Minnesota (2%), and New Mexico and Wisconsin (statistical dead heats). Those seven states will account for 64 electoral votes in 2004, nine more than California. Does the Bush White House go for broke and spend $15-20 million in hopes of winning California, which Bush-Cheney lost by 1.3 million votes, or spread the wealth in 7 less expensive states the ticket lost by a combined 313,000 votes? But that’s just the mathematical side of the California equation. There’s a second factor in play, and it’s the mental aggravation of a popular Republican president traversing the continent to confront the silliness that is America’s Left Coast — California, in particular. On the same day that Bush arrived in San Jose for a speech and a Simon luncheon, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story, “President and S.F. — Never the Twain Have Met,“ that dwelled on Dubya’s avoidance of the City by the Bay both as president and a presidential candidate. Never mind the fact that San Francisco was the least Republican county in California in the last presidential election — one in six San Francisco voters opting for Bush. Or that it remains a hotbed of hotheads. A week before the president’s visit, some 20,000 locals took to the street to march against U.S. policy in the Middle East and “the real axis of evil: war, racism, poverty” — turning downtown in an ocean of Palestinian flags. Apparently, this doesn’t matter to San Franciscans who feel it’s their right to have the president on their turf, even if it’s to dis him. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: give me time to get my father and brother (and his wife, kids and grandkids) out of California, then let’s all meet on the border with chain saws. Better still if we also give the mailbox bomber time to get there.

Down with Vegeterrorism!

Mon   6 May 2002   19:29 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Our Times] [Flyover Blogdom]

Best of the Web Today takes note of this Times of London article which claims, Scientists at the University of Bonn have discovered that plants do indeed cry when they are cut, moan when they are ill and gurgle when they are well. The more stress we subject them to, the more noise they make. Those dirty rotten vegetarians—sticking up for the underdog when they should be sticking up for the undergrowth! Or, as Taranto puts it, “Perhaps instead of vegetarianism, we should call it ‘vegeterrorism.‘“

Those Civilized Yurrupeens

Mon   6 May 2002   19:10 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [War] [Flyover Blogdom]

In contrast to an America where a maniac pipe-bomb maker roams the nation looking for a famous person to blow up, that funny Yurrupeen country with the windmills and the wooden shoes has just had a political assassination. A gay anti-immigration pol was shot six times by a gunman as yet unidentified. Pim Fortuyn’s supporters have been rioting, blaming the anti-anti-immigration establishment parties and their friends in the media for demonizing their man so that some unstable nutcase thought it must be okay to just gun him down. Although Fortuyn is being referred to as a “right-winger” because he opposes immigration, Financial Times notes, Mr Fortuyn had been campaigning on a ticket of ending immigration and reforming public services. Not only was he openly homosexual, but he made clear his sexual orientation informed his politics. He wanted to halt the arrival of immigrants from Muslim countries because he feared they were eroding the country’s tolerance of diversity. Thus leaving the politically correct crowd in a quandary: do they tut-tut over the wages of dissenting from the politically correct dogma on immigration, or do they howl over such a high-profile instance of gay-bashing?

The Traveling Terrorist

Mon   6 May 2002   19:00 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Wackadoodle] [Flyover Blogdom]

If, as it appears at last report, the suspicious items found in mailboxes near Hastings, Nebraska and Salida, Colorado are in fact mailbox bombs similar to those found in Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska over the weekend, they suggest that the culprit is traveling west, first on I-80, then via I-76 to Denver, and then on I-70. The notes say the bomber thinks he needs to take out one famous person in particular, without naming the person. Whoever he’s after, I think is probably on the West Coast somewhere.

Yurrupeen Money Funds Terrorism

Mon   6 May 2002   13:11 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [War] [Flyover Blogdom]

The Times of London has found that Old Stinky has been spending euros (yuros?) to the benefit of the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the outfit organizing and carrying out human-bomb attacks during the late intifada. The European Union provides ten million euros (£6.25 million) each month towards the salaries of staff at Mr Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. Much of that money comes from British taxpayers. According to the Israeli authorities, “vast sums” have been covertly channelled from the monthly EU grants to Fatah gunmen and members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. An Israeli Cabinet minister says this isn’t the Yurrupeens’ fault, but that’s not true. They have known all along, or ought to have known all along, that Yasser Arafat is a terrorist; if they thought they could give millions of euros to him and not have it used for terrorism that’s their own stupidity.

Ozzy
Mon   6 May 2002   11:41 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Humor?] [Flyover Blogdom]	The bad news is Ozzy Osbourne was celebrated at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. The worse news is that he did not, as we hoped, bite the head off a live reporter.

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

Mon   6 May 2002   10:03 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Flyover Blogdom]

Steve Chapman’s column on TownHall.com offers another twist on my item, below, about Hawaii’s proposed gasoline price cap. (Link goes to archive page.) Since mid-March, the average fee nationally for unleaded regular has risen to $1.39 a gallon—which is up from $1.11 in February. Painful, huh? Actually, you might consider the current price grounds for cheering. It’s down 30 cents from a year ago. There is no cheering, though, on Capitol Hill, where memories are short and demagogues are plentiful. Last week, a Senate investigative subcommittee released a 396-page report lamenting the recent instability of petroleum prices and accusing oil companies of shamefully manipulating markets to gouge consumers. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the Hawaii legislature voted to put controls on pump prices, starting in 2004. It didn’t occur to the lawmakers that one reason the state has the highest gasoline prices in the country is that it has the highest gasoline taxes. Corporate profiteering, bad; government profiteering, good. Seems congressional jackasses aren’t the only ones that need to look in the mirror.

Give ‘Em Zell
Mon   6 May 2002   9:45 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Flyover Blogdom]	InstaPundit excerpts this speech by Georgia DINO Senator Zell Miller, mincing no words about “Arming America” author Michael Bellesisles. For those who haven’t seen the exposes of Bellesisles (in which InstaPundit’s Glenn Harlan Reynolds has been a leader), it turns out the book’s claims are phony, based either on biased readings of historical records, or on records that never existed.

Crouching Omar, Hidden Taliban

Mon   6 May 2002   7:58 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [War] [Flyover Blogdom]

I just have to wonder whether the remnants of the Taliban have, perhaps, been emboldened by the squishiness of the Bush Administration on Old Stinky and the Israel/Palestine mess? We know these people are like most predators, drawn to any sign of weakness. And of course anyone with an ounce of sense knows that if human-bomb attacks succeed in Israel they will be used elsewhere—including the U.S. Without a doubt the Taliban don’t see why they were equated with terrorists if Old Stinky doesn’t also qualify.

We’re Better than Those Silly Yurrupeens

Sun   5 May 2002   22:30 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Flyover Blogdom]

Rich Galen’s May 6 issue of Mullings offers some interesting comparative insights between the American political system and that of the funny Yurrupeen country with the cheese and the wine. When I came back to Washington after my hiatus from politics, I met with an associate of former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. I asked him how O’Neill spent his day. His answer surprised me: “Managing the coalition,“ he said. The Democrats had an enormous advantage in numbers but it included very conservative Southern Democrats and very liberal Northeastern Democrats. If your political party has a membership of 12 people, then it is pretty easy to get everyone to sing the same words almost all of the time. But if your party wakes up one day and finds itself as the majority party then it is likely it will contain members who don’t agree with each other all the time - or very often. The European model of politics calls for anyone disagreeing with someone else within a political party to split off an form a new party; one which will welcome only members who swear allegiance to every semi-colon of its manifesto. In France, this resulted in the multi-party left seeing their votes fragmented into useless splinters. In the US, this happens only occasionally. Ross Perot siphoned off votes on the Right from George H.W. Bush in the election of 1992. Ralph Nader drained off votes from Al Gore in 2000. In American politics, the trick has always been to “manage the coalition.“ Sometimes the Left carped at President Clinton’s policies - notably on the issue of welfare reform. But they voted for the Democratic ticket on election day. The Right makes news now and again complaining about President Bush’s policies - immigration and education come to mind - but they will vote for the Republican ticket in the end. There is a big upside to our way of doing things, but it does have its downside as well: the Republicans sometimes get too comfortable with their certainty about conservative voters, and the result leads to things like the embarrassment of 1998—when conservatives found other things to do on Election Day, and what was supposed to be a big Republican gain in both houses of Congress and in statehouses across the nation, turned out to be as close to a great day for Democrats as they could get without actually taking back control of these institutions. In Yurrup’s parliamentary systems, coalitions of similarly minded parties are often what makes government possible. But support is no less fluid in the American system; it just works a little differently.

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