Is this really as bad as it will get?

Writing at The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead suggests that the left may have peaked with the Obama administration.  He makes some good points, but I'm not quite as optimistic as he seems to be.  For one thing, Obama still has two years left in office with no threat of electoral consequences to prevent him from fully embracing the darker angels of our nature, so I expect things to get much worse still before they start to get better; the GOP won big in the midterms, but if they won't stop Obama from sidestepping Congress whenever he feels like it, then how much of a victory was it, really?

Mead is also much more dismissive of Elizabeth Warren's chances than I am.  Yes, she's a leftist kook with a practically nonexistent resume and a partially fabricated bio, but so was Obama; nobody thought anything of Obama either when he ran against presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton in 2008.  Mead thinks it was a unique set of circumstances (mainly Iraq and the financial crisis) that propelled Obama to the White House, but that theory doesn't really explain how Obama got reelected in 2012, does it?  I still think our problems as a country run much deeper than many of us would like to admit.

(Hat tip to @rdbrewer4 for finding Mead's article.)

The End Is Nigh!

Lots of people are freaking out because December 21, 2012 is supposedly the date that corresponds to the end of the Mayan calendar... but if you take leap years into account the world should have already ended several months ago, so I don't really expect the world to end tomorrow.

That's not to say I'm optimistic, though... after all, Obama will still be president tomorrow, the media will still be full of lying assholes, and most of the voting public will still be stupid and/or crazy.

Where have the 2004 voters gone?

I don't remember any Republican in 2004 telling me that it would be the end of America if John Kerry won the election.  2012 was another story... it seemed like I was being told every single day that it was the most important election in our nation's history.  Yet Mitt Romney still fell short of Bush's vote tally by about two million votes, despite the stakes being much higher this time than they were back in 2004.  Where the heck did all those Republican voters go?  How on earth does someone show up to vote against John Kerry but stays home when a president with a record worse than Jimmy Carter's is asking for a mulligan?

Republicans already have enough of an uphill battle winning over all the stupid and/or crazy voters out there... why make it any harder?  If you watched Romney wiping the floor with Obama in that first debate and came out of it thinking there was no difference between those two men, then you need to get your head examined (preferably by someone other than Dr. Ron Paul).

Conservatives need to stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, or we'll be out of power for the next 40 years.  I'm not saying we should nominate nothing but squishy moderates, I'm just saying we shouldn't be so quick to tar everyone with the RINO brush.  We can't let ourselves get as hysterical as some of the freaks on the other side, and then let that hysteria turn into apathy if we don't get our way on everything... we can't afford apathy in the face of political zealots who are quite happy to destroy the country so long as the GOP gets blamed for it.

Update:  Hmmm... Ramesh Ponnuru has an interesting take on the so-called "purge of conservatives" from committees in the House that has so many people calling for John Boehner's head.

Our long national nightmare is NOT over

So... Obama somehow managed to win a second term, despite having a record that should have gotten him tossed out on his ear.  What happened here?  I mostly agree with Ace's list of things that hurt Romney, but what's going on beneath all that?  The root problem, as I see it, is that we have far too many voters in this country who simply can't be reasoned with.

Many people on the left are Kool-Aid drinkers.  They are firmly decided yet decidedly misinformed, the type of people who refuse to even speak to anyone that watches Fox News.  They tend to think of themselves as highly-informed voters, but they deliberately seek out only the most rabidly left-wing media outlets and completely shun all dissenting opinions.  If they even acknowledge that there is another side, it is only to present a cartoonish caricature of their political opponents... they don't have any interest in knowing what anyone on the right really thinks about anything.

For some voters, their problem is not so much willful ignorance as it is an overreliance on emotional thinking.  They like to think of themselves as having an open mind, but their minds are so open that their brains have fallen out.  They don't necessarily shun opposing views, but it can still be very difficult to reach such people... they don't process information in the same way that logical people do.  You can hit them over the head with cold hard facts all day long and not even make a dent, because they base their votes more on how they feel than anything else... if the facts hurt their feelings, you aren't going to get very far with them.  The only chance you have to win over people like this is with appeals to emotion... and the very next day the Democrats would probably just win them right back again by appealing to class envy, hurling false charges of racism or homophobia, stoking hatred of Christians or Jews, playing on imaginary fears of wars on lady parts, or arranging a well-timed photo op.

And then there are those who can't really be bothered to think at all.  They are the product of a failed school system that doesn't teach kids how to think critically.  They know all sorts of things, but they don't know how they know them.  They might not seek out overtly political stuff, but most "straight" media coverage they get from our corrupt media is just a watered-down version of the delusional crap they would get from MSNBC...  and even when they try their best to avoid that sort of stuff, it still finds them anyway in dribs and drabs thanks to all the left-wing talking points that permeate pop culture.  They might call themselves apolitical, but they are Democrats by default.  Some of these people can be converted, but they have to be mugged by reality first.  That being said, if seeing both 9/11/2001 and 9/11/2012, and suffering through the worst economic recovery in our nation's history aren't enough to wake them up, then I don't know what will.

These are all long-term cultural problems we face here, they didn't just suddenly crop up on us overnight.  And it seems to get a little bit worse every single year.  I still remember my first run-in with this sort of thing... it was something that happened to me way back in grade school, but it stuck with me.

Ronald Reagan was running against Walter Mondale, and my fifth-grade teacher polled the class on who we would vote for... she gave us some ballots to fill out, but first she gave us a twenty minute lecture on the awfulness of Reagan and the wonderfulness of Mondale.  I didn't know very much about politics at the time, but I was vaguely aware that my father was a Reagan voter, and I knew what my teacher was doing was very wrong.  This was a push poll... I didn't know the proper term for it at the time, but I could see it for what it was and it made me very angry.  As it turned out, I was the only kid in the whole class who didn't vote for Mondale.  You'd think the teacher would be satisfied with how successful her push poll was, but no... she spent the rest of our time in class trying to track down and expose the identity of the sole Reagan voter.  I stayed quiet, hoping she would just give up and get back to doing her job, but she didn't stop until she got every kid in class but me to fess up to who they voted for... she finally found me by the process of elimination.  Then she got in my face and demanded to know why I voted for Reagan... so I got in her her face instead and called her every name I could think of, chasing her right out of her own classroom.  I hated her guts from that day forward, and I never blindly took the word of any teacher again... any respect they got from me they had to earn.

That was 1984.  I can only imagine how insufferable the teachers in that school are today, now that we're living in the Age of Obama.  We can argue about Romney's strategery all we want, but what are we going to do about all these other problems?  This isn't just about the next election.  I fear this will take generations to fix, assuming we haven't already reached some sort of tipping point.

Update:  Of course, folks on the right can be just as hard to reason with sometimes.  Apparently some people were so butthurt about how the primaries turned out that they stopped identifying themselves as Republicans, which was part of where all the confusion about the polls came from.  Also, by the sounds of it, Project ORCA turned out to be nothing short of a GOTV fiasco.  Oh well.  Maybe next time we'll somehow manage to get our act together, if the country lasts that long.

Update:  Ugh... I'm really amazed that I'm still arguing with brainwashed Dems who are 100% certain that Mitt Romney's position on abortion is identical to Todd Akin's, while also having to take crap from people on the right who see no difference between Romney and Obama.  It's almost enough to make me want to just say screw it and start picketing somewhere with some "Obama=Akin" signs.

A few predictions for election night

I predict Romney will win with at least 53% of the popular vote.  What that will mean in terms of electoral votes, I have no idea... but I will say that I think he'll win at least one state Bush failed to win in the 2004 election.  And I predict meltdowns galore on MSNBC, culminating in at least one of their hosts openly accusing Romney of stealing the election somehow.

Update:  Well, I guess zero out of three ain't too bad, huh?

Only five days left until Election Day...

Pay no attention to worthless polls based on 2008 turnout levels.  Don't let Obama distract you with his stupid, petty nonsense.  We can do this.  Get your game faces on:

(Found via Moe Lane.)

Thoughts on the final debate

I was hoping that Obama would get clobbered on Benghazi in the foreign policy debate, but that didn't happen.  Romney's strategy seemed to be to just make himself look like a plausible commander-in-chief. I thought he succeeded in doing that.  Not only was he plausible, I thought he looked much more presidential than our current commander-in-chief.  Obama was behaving more like an internet troll than a sitting president.  If Obama's only goal was to show independent voters what a petty little creep he is, then I'd say it worked beautifully.

This was supposedly Obama's best moment:

All I got out of Obama's condescending answer was that he likes to substitute snark for substance.  At no point did Obama attempt to explain why the Navy was wrong to ask for the 350 ships that Romney was talking about.  Also, I doubt Obama's snark will play very well in Virginia.

I thought Romney's best moment came when he was talking about Obama's Apology Tour:

Obama didn't really have an answer for that, other than to lie and try to hide behind the corrupt media's skirt.  And he won't have an answer for all the coverage Benghazi gets over the next two weeks, either.

Romney's best town hall debate moment

Tuesday's town hall debate was mostly a wash.  Romney won on substance, but Obama won on style.  And by style I mean interrupting constantly and telling outrageous lies in that stupid voice that sounds like he's trying to do an impression of Fred Armisen's Obama impression.  

This was Romney's best moment:

Obama got a lot of shots in, but he didn't have any single moment in the entire debate that even came close to being as effective as that moment of Romney's.  Romney completely laid waste to Obama's pathetic record and all Obama could do was just sit there and take it.  What was supposedly Obama's best moment came during an answer to a question about Benghazi... but after the debate was over even Obama had to concede to the questioner that Romney's point was correct.  I have a feeling this point will be revisited in the next debate, which will focus on foreign policy issues.  Hopefully by then Romney will also have a better response ready for Obama's faux outrage.  And in the meantime the rest of us will be talking about Benghazi:

The Man Who Laughs

I really don't think Joe Biden's maniacal laughter during the VP debate did Obama any favors:

It's hard to take someone seriously when he's acting like such a clown during a serious discussion about Iran's attempts to get nuclear weapons.  Lots of people keep making comparisons to Jack Nicholson's portrayal of The Joker... it actually made me think more of Nicholson's performance in The Pledge, the scene where he is sitting there all looking disheveled and muttering crazy thoughts to himself.  But speaking of The Joker, did you know that a film based on Victor Hugo's novel The Man Who Laughs was the original inspiration for The Joker?

Predictions for tonight's VP debate

You should expect several obvious Obama campaign plants among the "undecideds" asking questions at the town hall tonight... they will try to put Ryan on the spot with stupid gotcha questions being asked by victims trying to play the absolute moral authority card.  At least one of these gotcha questions will end up backfiring on the Obama campaign in a major way, but they will be too dumb to realize it before it's too late.

Despite an entire week of debate prep, Joe Biden will still be Joe Biden.  He will say a lot of very dumb things but he will say them all with the utmost confidence. and the media will do their best to declare him the winner no matter how badly he does.  Biden will loudly blurt out some idiotic lie about Republicans, throwing his hands up in the air in exasperation... and then he'll put a big shit-eating grin on his face afterward.  Most of the media will call this absurd lie the best line of the night and the moment that Biden won the debate.  A few of the smarter lefty media folks won't even bother trying to defend Biden's awfulness, they'll just try to downplay the overall importance of the VP debate.

Paul Ryan will do great.  He'll make a lot of really great points, and back up what he's saying with a lot of facts and figures.  The media will do its best to portray Ryan's proficiency with math and familiarity with the budget as some sort of gaffe... they will try to say his reliance on numbers makes him seem cold and without empathy, or some such nonsense.  They will also try to find some terrible problem with Ryan's body language, even if there is nothing to find.

Update: Doh!  The VP debate wasn't the town hall debate, so you can scratch my first prediction... though I think that prediction will still hold true of the next debate between Obama and Romney.

Update: Lots of folks on the left want to think Biden won the debate.  I think it's very telling that so many Democrats seem to think being a good debater means loudly interrupting and acting like a clown.  He may have won the hearts of Democrats with his buffoonery, but I don't think he did himself any favors with independents.  I was right about Biden throwing up his hands and blurting out a stupid lie about Republicans... he did that when he tried to put 100% of the blame for the "Great Recession" on the GOP, despite the fact that Democrats controlled both houses of Congress when it happened.  I'm sure most Democrats loved hearing that sort of garbage, but I have yet to find one who's willing to call it the best line of the night.

Update: I was right about them trying to call Ryan cold.  WaPo's Richard Cohen calls Ryan "cold", "plastic" and "too actuarial"... but Biden was somehow both "real" and a "hack with heart", whatever the hell that means.

Romney 1 - Obama 0

I've seen Mitt Romney debate before, so I knew what to expect... but based on Barack Obama's pathetic performance in last night's presidential debate, he must have been expecting to debate John McCain all over again.  He was wrong. Very, very wrong.

Obama's never really been challenged by anyone his whole life.  Now he had to suffer through one actual debate and he completely fell apart.  I can't wait to see how badly he does in the next one.

BREAKING: Obama voters are dumb

It's amazing how strongly people can feel about things they aren't even really trying to understand:

And then there's this bold fresh piece of humanity:

Good lord... yes, be sure to vote because we needs to keep Obama in president.

Creepiest campaign manager ever...

Here is Barack Obama's super-genius campaign manager posing in the creepiest campaign photo that I've ever seen in my entire life:

What the hell was he/she/it thinking?  Yeah, tell me again how weird and out of touch you think Mitt Romney is.  Meanwhile, Obama's campaign manager is so creepy looking that anyone who sees him immediately has to reach for the brain bleach afterwards... he looks like he should be the President of NAMBLA or something, and yet he really thought it would help the Obama campaign to put this picture of himself out there.  Self-awareness is definitely not his strong suit.

How Obama chose to spend 9/11

No, this isn't some stupid Obama impersonator playing a joke, this actually happened today:

 

What the hell?  This is the only interview he gave today, and they don't even mention that it's the anniversary of 9/11.  Yeah, tell us again how weird you think Mitt Romney is, Mr. President.

And if that's not enough, there's the administration's utterly pathetic response to the events that took place in Cairo and Benghazi today... not to mention the pointed snub of Benjamin Netanyahu.  Sadly, John Bolton's description of Obama as the first post-American president becomes more and more apt with each passing day.

No one could have?

In his DNC speech the other night, Bill Clinton tried to excuse Obama's failure by claiming that no one could have fixed this economy in only four years.  Hmmm... "Nobody Could" sure does seem like a strange reelection slogan for a guy who got into office with "Yes We Can", doesn't it?

If no one could have fixed it, then why the hell did Obama promise us that he could?  He even gave us this handy chart:

Obama's party controlled both houses of Congress from 2006 to 2010.  Once Obama came into office, he got his precious $800+ billion stimulus bill passed right away.  He got everything he wanted.  It didn't work.  Can we please have a president who doesn't hate Capitalism now?

Paul Ryan's RNC speech

Paul Ryan's speech at the Republican National Convention was pretty amazing... here's a snippet:

Will Obama dump Joe Biden?

It's always amazed me how many people try to claim they voted for Obama because they thought Sarah Palin was too dumb to be president.  Really?  Joe Biden is a functional retard, and Obama can't be very bright himself if he thought Biden would be anything other than a tremendous embarrassment.

Meanwhile, Palin was the only person on either ticket in 2008 who had any executive experience at all, and she proved she could hold her own against Biden in a debate.  I relish the thought of Biden having to face off against Paul Ryan... we can surely expect Ryan to run circles around Biden, unless Obama dumps Biden to put someone else on the ticket.  But I really doubt that Obama is smart enough to do that or humble enough to admit it was a mistake to ever pick Biden in the first place.

Obama's poll numbers are in the toilet

The Obama campaign has thrown everything at Mitt Romney but the kitchen sink.  For weeks on end we've heard nothing but constant bitching and moaning about Swiss bank accounts and Romney's time at Bain Capital.  Romney has even been called a felon by these lunatics.  (Naturally, the people promoting insane conspiracy theories about Romney's time at Bain seem to have no problem whatsoever with Obama taking campaign donations from Bain.)

And what does Obama have to show for this relentless campaign of dishonest attacks?  The latest CBS/NYT poll shows Romney in the lead for the first time... it's only a one point lead, but the internals of the poll look terrible for Obama.  And the latest Rasmussen poll has uncommitted voters giving Obama a paltry 29% job approval rating.

Please, give us more of your idiotic conspiracy theories, and keep telling small business owners that they didn't build anything... let's see if we can widen Romney's lead to double digits.  Then maybe Obama will start to tell us we should spread the poll numbers around because it's good for everybody.

Biden goes off message on the economy

Obama says the private sector is doing just fine... Joe Biden seems to disagree:

This is not a depression, or even a recession, at least not based on the standard way of measuring such things... the problem is, it sure feels like a recession to most people because the jobs still haven't come back.  Maybe we aren't supposed to call it a recession, but we sure as hell can't call it a recovery when there are no jobs.  So then, what do we call it?

The Happiness Index

President Obama promised us that passing his so-called stimulus bill would keep the unemployment rate below 8%... and how did that work out for everyone?  He got his bill passed, but we still ended up with unemployment stuck above 8% for three years straight, and the Misery Index has been above 10% since November 2009.

The recession ended in June 2009, but only in the most technical sense... when at least 76% of the population thinks we are still in a recession, that should tell you something about how weak the economy really is.  This hasn't stopped Obama from repeatedly trying to claim credit for bringing about some sort of miraculous economic recovery.  If this is what he thinks a successful recovery looks like, then I'd hate to see how bad things would have to get for him to ever admit failure.

As bad as unemployment has been and continues to be, the official unemployment rate leaves out several pieces of data that would paint an even bleaker picture of the unemployment situation.  The alternative ways of measuring unemployment have their uses, but the 1994 changes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics made to these methodologies can sometimes make it difficult to compare apples to apples.

I thought it might be interesting to see what would happen to the Misery Index if it could also account for those who have become so discouraged that they simply gave up looking for work.  Instead of trying to rejigger a new Misery Index by using the U4 unemployment rate in place of the standard rate, I decided to just turn the Misery Index on its head.  Instead of adding inflation to unemployment, I subtracted inflation from the employment-to-population ratio... I call this the Happiness Index, since it's a sort of Bizarro version of the Misery Index.  I averaged the monthly data for each presidential term going all the way back to Truman's second term, and then created this graphic to show the Happiness Index for each term:

Are you happier now than you were four years ago?

Obama's term is not yet complete, but I included his average so far just for the sake of comparison... you have to go back to Reagan's first term to find a worse number than Obama's, and Reagan was at least moving things significantly in the right direction.

Despite the 9/11 attacks and the bursting of the tech bubble, George W. Bush's first term still managed the second highest Happiness Index shown here... the numbers for Bush's second term are not as good as his first, but are still the fourth best.  While Bush was in office, we kept hearing the phrase "jobless recovery" over and over again, but so far it looks like the best Obama can do is not nearly as good as Bush's worst.

Update: Oh, so the lousy economy is all Bush's fault?  Fine... let's see what happens to the numbers when you take the first year of Obama's term and place it at the end of Bush's second term.  This would give Bush a slightly lower Happiness Index of 59.35 percent, and bring Obama's number down to 55.99 percent.  Why stop there?  Let's also place Obama's second year in office at the end of Bush's term and see what happens.  This would give Bush 58.94 percent and Obama 55.14 percent.  It seems like the more of a grace period we try to give Obama, the worse his numbers get.  This is because Obama's monthly Happiness Index didn't hit bottom until 2011, when it reached 54.53 percent in both August and September... you have to go all the way back to March 1984 to find a lower monthly number.