Jim Geraghty asks that provocative question in his Morning Jolt newsletter and concludes the answer is...not really.

It's a very interesting essay that I think gets near but not at the heart of the matter. Yes, the Democratic narrative is as he lays it out...

In the beginning, there was Bush, and Bush was bad. There was war, and it was bad; the war created the deficits, and so did Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. Because all the money went to tax cuts and wars, the government didn’t make necessary “investments” in “roads and bridges” and “green energy.” People couldn’t get health care. The oceans were rising.

Then we elected Obama, and it started getting better immediately! Okay, not everywhere, and maybe the progress and improvement was really hard to measure, but Obama inherited the worst crises of any president ever. Nobody could have generated better results than he did. The arc of history bent more toward justice, and better days are ahead, just you wait and seeÂ…

Now, you can come up with dozens of objections to those few sentences, but for the average Obama voter, thatÂ’s the gist of the state of the country from 2001 to today. ItÂ’s not all that different from your usual religious narrative, you have a fall of paradise (the election of Bush) the Devil (Bush), the messiah figure (Obama), the coming of a new kingdom and ultimate utopia. The purpose of the believer is to continue to believe in the redeeming messiah figure in the face of skepticism and doubt, because belief in him makes you one of the special and enlightened ones, and so on.

The problem for conservatives is the story starts before that. The internecine fighting we see today on the right isn't simply on how we should react to what Jim describes as "swarms of voters who believe that government – the very same government who had disappointed them and failed them time and again – will solve their problems." Our problem is we don't trust each other as conservatives. It's the "grassroots" vs. "establishment" fight were seeing and it predates "fiscal cliffs" and sequestration.

The Gingrich Revolution of 1994 eventually became the Hastert-Bush conservative malaise. Yes, the War on Terror dominated the Bush presidency but from No Child Left Behind to Medicare Part D and across the board spending hikes, many conservative felt betrayed. You can even argue it goes further back than that. The Reagan Revolutionizes saw their hard work to move the GOP to the right rewarded with...George H.W. Bush.

One reason so many on the right are unwilling to allow the governing part of the GOP/conservative coalition any room for strategic retreats is we've simply seen that when you give them an inch, they'll take a mile.

Conservatives hear how the GOP is a wholly owned subsidiary of the far, far right, we look at H.W. Bush, Dole, W. Bush, McCain, Romney (along with Lott, Frist, McConnell, Hastert and Boehner) and say, "if only!".

You can say, well they were elected and nominated by Republicans (including conservatives) and you'd be right. That's the problem. Most conservatives don't trust other conservatives or Republicans let alone moderates or liberals.

Until we find a solution to the fractured nature of the center-right coalition (beyond "we hate Obama"), the Obamabots are a secondary problem.

As for those Obama voters, yeah I trust them. I trust them to mindlessly internalize media propaganda. I trust them to continue to talk a good game ("polls show most Americans want a smaller government!") and then vote like the big government liberals they are.

That's why I think Jim's question misses the mark, it's not whether we trust them to be the people we think they can and should be but why to we continue to disbelieve them when they've been saying for longer than Obama's been around, "no, we're not those kinds of people".

Posted by: DrewM at 05:53 AM | Comments (420)
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Sorry guys, we were hit with a bit of a snow storm and I didn't have a chance to put a morning link dump together.

Instead, enjoy this VDH article.

Today’s Washington journalists are like J. R. R. Tolkien’s ring wraiths, petty lords who wanted a few shiny golden Obama rings — only to end up as shrunken slaves to the One.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:17 AM | Comments (170)
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Hump day. In honor of Laura W.

Posted by: andy at 03:26 AM | Comments (328)
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Jonah Goldberg at AEI: 'Cheer Up, The Worst Is Yet To Come'

This is an hour-long video but well worth watching. The first few minutes are stand-upy so you can skip to 7:00 if you want to get to the meaty filling. And yeah there are a lot of umms but that (mostly) smooths out once he gets rolling.

Here Jonah talks about why Romney lost (and points fingers) and makes some good points about where things stand now and what to do about it including the following:

• Why seeming like a rich, greedy prude is not a winning image.
• Missing fathers and the decline of baseball.
• The deep creepiness of 'Julia' and the naïve statism of John McCain.
• "One of the problems with the elite is that it refuses to preach what it practices."
• Why 99% of public policy debates = Locke vs Rousseau
• The category error of believing that the government can love you.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:12 PM | Comments (382)
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Hudak yesterday told a rape victim, Ms. Collins, that she was just "looking out for her interests" when she supports the same gun ban that got the Collins raped in the first place. You see, a man ill just take a gun from a woman anyway, and then use it against her, so Hudak is defending women here.

Additional questions for her here.

Posted by: Ace at 10:00 AM | Comments (202)
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Churchill's speech at Westminster College, this day, in 1946.

There were many fond references to hopes of the United Nations, sprinkled with fops about an"international armed force" based on Anglo-American dominance. There were references to our recent war cooperation with "my wartime comrade" Uncle Joe.

But as a minister without portfolio, he called it like he saw it, and he laid out the future of the Cold War.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone -- Greece with its immortal glories -- is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation. The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place. The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.

He just couldn't see far enough past that, to our present dilemma.

Not bad though. Who could have, back then?
more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:46 PM | Comments (30)
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And then there's this:

Sheryl Attkisson is revealing bits of her report at her twitter stream: @SharylAttkisson

Posted by: Ace at 05:20 PM | Comments (140)
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For those of you following the Year of the Comet, the first entry worth looking for, PANSTARRS, should be visible right after sunset in the Northern Hemisphere perhaps as early as March 7th, but certainly by Sunday, March 10th.
Morons and ettes living in Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and points south of roughly Charleston/Atlanta should get a good look of the comet about 3-5 degrees above the Western horizon:

more...

Posted by: CAC at 04:44 PM | Comments (68)
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The mystery of the Huge Ammunition Purchases becomes less mysterious when you consider the surprising fact that apparently virtually every branch of the government has its own investigatory sorta-police force.

Which is its own issue. But not the one we were thinking about.

For example:

Last year, the Social Security Administration put out a procurement request for 174,000 rounds of “.357 Sig 125 grain bonded jacketed hollow point pistol ammunition,” prompting a few on the Internet to work themselves up into something of a frenzy.

[O]ne could reasonably ask why the Social Security Administration would need any ammunition at all. Are the elderly especially unruly these days? Jonathan L. Lasher, in the SSA’s external-relations department, explained to the Huffington Post that the ammunition is “for the 295 agents” in the outfit’s office of inspector general “who investigate Social Security fraud and other crimes.” Divide the rounds by the number of agents, and you get about 590 per agent; in a given year, that’s about ten rounds a week. “Most will be expended on the firing range,” Lasher continued.

This pattern continues in other agencies:

Forty-six thousand rounds also sound like a lot for the National Weather Service. (Actually, the ammo was requested by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric AdministrationÂ’s Fisheries Office of Law Enforcement, which is overseen by the same department.) In reality, itÂ’s not that much. The service has only 63 armed personnel, which brings the purchase out at around 730 rounds per officer.

Which actually still seems like a lot of ammo, to me. If I can Trust Hollywood, police detectives tend to be lackadaisical about hitting the firing range. Are these guys hitting the range and shooting 100 shots seven times per year? Seems like a lot.

This actually seems like a waste issue we should address. If these guys are really firing that much at the range, fine. But it does seem high to me. I'm assuming these are not serious law-enforcement or security personnel who would be engaging in a lot of target practice as a basic part of their job duties.

Posted by: Ace at 03:27 PM | Comments (321)
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In. Credible.

You're a dumb little girl and you don't know what you're talking about. Why don't you stop talking, dumb little girl?

Katie Pavlich previously reporter her story. I'm going to quote some of it, but you should probably read it all.

Amanda Collins is a young rape survivor. While in college in 2007, she was raped 50 feet away from the campus police department office at the University of Nevada-Reno and was lucky to get out alive. Her attacker was James Biela, a serial rapist who raped two other women and murdered another. He attacked her at gun point in a gun free zone. At the time of the attack, Collins was in possession of a concealed weapons permit but was not in possession of her firearm due to university policies prohibiting carrying concealed weapons on campus.

...

"I was legislated into being a victim," Collins said.

Well, that's a hell of a story, and a hell of an inconvenience for the Bullets-Don't-Work-On-Criminals crowd. Fortunately, Democratic State Senator Evi Hudak was there to propagate this theory:

"Well, I just want to say statistics are not on your side, even if you had had a gun. You said that you were a martial arts student, I mean person, experience in taekwondo, and yet because this individual was so large and was able to overcome you even with your skills, and chances are that if you had had a gun, then he would have been able to get than from you and possibly use it against you," Hudak said.

Collins responded by saying, "Respectfully Senator, you weren't there...I was there, I know without a doubt in my mind at some point I would have been able to stop my attack by using my firearm. He already had a weapon of his own, he didn't need mine."

Ms. Hudak probably doesn't know what "semi-automatic" means, given that she seems unclear that a gun a projectile weapon usable at range. She seems to not understand the rapist was interested in a live girl, not a dead body, and that Collins, however, would have been quite interested in a dead rapist. As rape must be conducted at touching distance, but shooting can occur at touching distance to hundreds of yards away, I'm a bit flabbergasted by this notion that a rapist would obviously just take a gun away from a woman.

Is he going to deflect bullets with his Sith hands, too?

Dana Loesch notes that guns are used 2.1 million times a year to defend against crime, and 10% of those cases -- 210,000 per year -- are cases of women defending themselves against sexual assault.

Allah takes Hudak's "statistics" argument for what it is: A simple statement that some women are just going to have to be raped -- 210,000 women per year will have take one for the team -- for the Greater Good of disarmament.

Posted by: Ace at 02:23 PM | Comments (272)
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