Freedom Line Blog

Nobody in print (or cyberprint) has been as relentlessly and factually  brutal against Newt Gingrich than Wash Post conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin. The key thing is, she keeps digging up actual facts, evidence, history. Not a lot of extraneous opinion. Here’s her latest, on Newtonian ethics. One always wonders how the alchemy works that turns facts into information that actually sways public opinion. But it’s clear that unless the facts are published, there’s no chance for them to be absorbed. Indefatigable reporting like this merits applause.

Ashton makes great points about how the Trump debate could offer Rick Santorum one last chance to make a splash. He REALLY needs to carefully prepare some explosive sound bites. He actually has done very well in the debates at making overall, sustained points, in understandable fashion. But he hasn’t done so in ways that are memorable or galvanizing. I think sound-bite politics is a hugely unfortunate aspect of today’s campaigns. But it is an essential skill to master.  It’s actually not easy, because it needs to sound substantive enough to NOT sound gimmicky, but it needs to be a bit gimmicky in order to be memorable enough to do real good. It’s even harder when you need to do it against somebody who buries you in words the way Gingrich does.

In short, opportunity knocks, but it’s a heavy door to open…. or something like that.

Sheer genius, about the perils of Gingrich. Mark Steyn is funny as can be, and right on target, explaining way back right after it happened that Gingrich lost his speakership because he was weirdo, ninny and Grinch all at the same time. Amazing reading.

I hope Troy, Tim, and whomever else will weigh in on this, too, and that Ashton will have more thoughts as well, about Ashton’s excellent questions about Santorum’s viability.

The deal is this: Santorum, first, has indeed been creeping up the polls in Iowa, and earning several key local endorsements. But he can’t get a big break or make a big move, it seems. All along he’s been doing the kind of painstaking grassroots work that sets the predicate for victory but that doesn’t itself achieve victory UNLESS a spark is lit. It’s like patiently gathering firewood, of all kinds, from tiny kindling to great big logs, and building a spectacular would-be fire — but not yet having a match, or even any flint, or even a magnifying glass to concentrate the sun’s rays to set the whole thing ablaze. The man has an incredibly well-constructed organization in Iowa, but it needs to be lit on fire.

Part of his problem is that he has received so little chance in the debates to make an impression. I’ve actually counted the number of times in several debates that each candidate was allowed to speak, and Santorum comes out on the bottom every time. The moderators have just given him short shrift.

Second, while he has been almost universally praised for his knowledge and his articulation of issues in the debates, he hasn’t been praised for style points. He has come across as the ace high school debater outpointing everybody on stage, but not out-charming everybody. He seems a striver endlesslessly trying to prove himself, rather than somebody who exudes a particularly executive authority of the sort of person who just expects his right to lead to be taken for granted.

Third, he has the tag of a loser. It’s crazy, but it’s there. He lost his last race by 18 points. Never mind that Gingrich oversaw the loss of House seats in what should have been a year for big GOP victories in 1998, nor that Gingrich poisoned the well so badly in 1996 that no GOP candidate for president was going to win. Never mind that if Romney had had the guts, as Santorum did, to run for re-election in 2006, he would have lost by about the same margin. Never mind that Santorum still outpolled the GOP candidate for governor in Pennsylvania that year, and most GOP candidates for the House in their respective districts, nor that he was running in the worst GOP year (other than Watergate) in 3/4 of a century, nor that his opponent was the namesake son of the most popular Pennsylvania governor in 70 years, nor that registered Dems outnumbered Repubs in PA by a cool million people. Never mind that Santorum won in a big upset in 1990, that he beat another incumbent in 1992 (dedistricted into the same space), that he won a big upset for the Senate in 1994, or that he won another upset for re-election to the Senate in 2000, holding his seat by five points as GW Bush lost the state by four points. Somehow, none of that matters: He’s a loser, dontcha know, because, well, he lost one race. Crazy.

But in all his winning races, Santorum closed fast right at the end. He’s trying to do the same thing here, without much campaign cash but with plenty of hard work. It may look like a long shot, but only a fool would completely write off his chances.

Newt Gingrich thinks that Nancy Pelosi just gave him a great Christmas gift. She is so despised by conservatives, he thinks, that having her threaten to unleash dirt on him will make conservatives rally to his cause. But let’s think this out a little further: Nancy Pelosi knows the same thing. She WANTS it known that she wants to go after Gingrich, because she WANTS conservatives to rally to his cause, because she KNOWS he is so incredibly beatable — in part because of all the dirt that she and so many others have stored up about the guy.

So she’s playing smart politics by helping Gingrich now — because helping Gingrich now helps Obama later.

Meanwhile, there’s a problem with Gingrich’s complaint, here:

Gingrich said that Pelosi’s suggestion that she would reveal information from that investigation underscored that the ethics charges were politically motivated. “It tells you how capriciously political that committee was,” Gingrich said.

The problem is that Gingrich actually admitted having prevaricated to investigators for two solid years about the charges. Moreover, it wasn’t just Democrats who found him flagrantly guilty; it was his fellow Republicans, or at least three of the four of them, who joined the conclusion.

So how, pray tell, was it politically motivated?

All of which is just by way of acting as a fact checker….. Politically, of course, Gingrich is an effective salesman, in a way, of the Gingrich cause, which is the cause of Gingrich. World historical definers of and savers of civilization can’t be bothered with petty facts…..

I am so glad Ashton posted this latest outrage from the flagrantly corrupt, thuggish, Obama/Holder (In)Justice Department. If a Republican administration had done this, every editorial page in the United States — EVERY ONE — would have been yelling bloody murder about the trampling of the public’s right to know, etc.  Every major newscast would be lead with this story. Cue the dramatic music about the cover-up indicating that a crime MUST have been committed, and cue the race for someone to append the most clever “-Gate” ending as a name for the scandal.  But if Obama does it…. yawn.

This is serious. It appears criminal. And it must not stand. Go back and read Ashton’s post and the backup documentation. It’s an outrage.

This video of Gingrich from 2005 shows his true ideological colors, methinks.

A couple of months ago I reviewed the new book by former Bush aide Tim Goeglein, who headed outreach to conservative groups, for National Review. In my largely favorable review (unfortunately, available online only to subscribers; if you want to see the whole review and you ARE a subscriber, please look back and check it out), I wrote that perhaps the single most enjoyable parts of Man in the Middle was Goeglein’s fond, elegant and moving section on his fortuitous friendships with conservative intellectual forebears William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk. (Note: I also recommended Goeglein’s book during the American Spectator’s annual “books for the holidays” section in the December issue just hitting subscribers now.) Well, now NRO has run that whole section of the book on its web page. It’s a great read.

I found this to be a particularly important paragraph, one that too many conservatives no longer pay heed to, because too many so-called conservatives are indeed ideologues. Here’s the passage, with my emphasis added:

Russell changed my life by seeding my intellectual curiosity. I came to see that his external life was much smaller than his internal world, which was large, deep, and wide. He taught me to be wary of ideologues because they got in the way of a good life. He famously said that “ideology is anathema.” Conservatism, I came to see, because of the influence of Russell, was not an ideology but instead a way of life. There is no official or unofficial handbook for what constitutes conservatism, and in fact the conservative life is various.

This is also a good passage:

The glue of the American conservative movement is the Madisonian view that our framers created a government of strictly enumerated and restricted powers that give most power to the states and to the American people, not Washington and its permanent, ever-expansive bureaucracy.

I came to see the conservative intellectual and journalistic world as a vibrant place, peopled by talented individuals whose own diversity of opinion, outlook, and styles destroyed the myth that there was anything like unanimity on the American Right. Yet there was a singular devotion among all conservatives to first principles and to the idea of American exceptionalism best exemplified in adherence to and respect for our nation’s founding documents, none more so than the Constitution. That idea bound all American conservatism and was the foundation of some of the most fortunate, blessed friendships of my life.

Now, why do I share these now? Because conservatives need to take a broad view, need to see their cause as a broad-based movement that extends beyond politics into culture, and that fosters friendships as, second only to the family, the glue that holds culture together.

Now while ideology is not a great thing, a governing philosophy is. In another part of the chapter that NRO ran, Goeglein noted that Buckley was a libertarian economically. Economic libertarianism, especially rooted in a constitutional/legal framework as Goeglein explained, is (with a minor tweak or two) the economics most conducive to mass prosperity and to the ending of blight, poverty, and suffering. So I believe. So most conservatives believe. I’ve digressed a bit, but the underlying philosophical substance Goeglein describes, while describing his friendships with two great men, is exactly the sort of broad-minded (free-thinking, of what one might also call a libertarian cast of mind) attitude that conservatives, and all Americans, ought to hold dear.

Fred Barnes has a great article in The Weekly Standard about how the trio of Republican House members his magazine first dubbed “Young Guns” back in 2007 is now perhaps the single weightiest force in Washington Republican politics. The three are Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan. “Cantor is majority leader, McCarthy is Republican whip, and Ryan is chairman of the House Budget Committee and the leading Republican voice on domestic policy,” Barnes wrote. ” [….] They knew Republicans had lost their way, ideologically and politically. And they were eager to promote House candidates from diverse backgrounds, with little or no political experience but a zeal for bold conservative reforms. ‘We focused our effort,” Cantor says, “on recruitment of people who wanted to run for the right reasons’.”

Now I haven’t always liked what Cantor, McCarthy or even Ryan have done or said, but for the most part, they (especially Ryan) have been tremendous forces for a revitalization of the GOP as a party of new ideas and bold, serious proposals.  But the key, bigger point emerges from this Barnes explanation: “[T]heir political skills were complementary: Cantor the party leader, McCarthy the strategist, and Ryan the policy thinker.” One of my biggest complaints through the years has been that far too few conservatives married practical politics well with policy expertise, and that fewer still knew how to breed those two skills together to produce something that looks good and will sell well in the public arena.

The next best thing to having one person able to do all three is to have one person who is really good at one or two of them and also wise enough to affiliate himself with the right person or people to do whichever of the other three functions at which he might be lacking.

Alas, it has been decades since we have seen a Republican presidential nominee even come close. Hence the clamor earlier this year for Ryan himself to enter the fray.

The search continues. But Barnes’ article well identifies not just the players but the troika of required skills. It’s well worth a close read.

Michelle Malkin’s cousin is still missing after eight months. Her column on it today is a tour de force.

Our DoJ whistleblowing friend J. Christian Adams speaks at Tulane University tonight, about a fight between Louisiana and the Obama InJustice Department. Note, please, the amazing percentages of people registered to vote in LA, but the Obamites don’t care. (Hint: It is literally impossible for more than 100% of residents to be registered to vote!) The otherwise rotten Sen. David Vitter, to his credit, has weighed in on this issue as well, and he is on target. Outside of Louisiana, meanwhile, just about every week brings more examples of how voter fraud is a real problem, even though the left claims otherwise.

Fred Barnes has a hugely important column out at The Weekly Standard, about how the leader of Occupy the Oval Office (my title, not Barnes’) has a long-running habit of favoring large interests over small groups and individuals. He sets the theme right here:

[T]he winners in the nearly three years of Obama’s presidency are the big guys​—​big business, big labor, and big government. Corporate profits have reached record levels. The influence of the biggest labor unions has surged in Washington, where it matters most. The federal government has grown in size and reach. Meanwhile, the weak economy has hurt small business, the country’s number one job creator. Temporary tax breaks haven’t helped, and the threat of new taxes and a fresh barrage of regulations have put a crimp in expansion and hiring.

Barnes is absolutely right.

Now, I don’t want to ascribe these next thoughts to Fred Barnes, because he probably wouldn’t want to be associated with their connotations even if the analysis on a factual basis is fair and in context. But this same favoritism for the big guys was part and parcel of my argument in the single most controversial column I’ve ever written, one that made Chris Matthews start sputtering on air (and that caused Tony Blankley to pile on rather than defend me) about how obscenely over-the-top I was. The columns was called “Il Duce, Redux,” and it very carefully outlined the ways in which Barack Obama’s economic approach, and some of his organizational/self-hagriographical tactics, followed the same path as Benito Mussolini.

I carefully distinguished my point from the facile tactic of using a Nazi boogeyman as a straw man:

To be clear, none of this is to even come close to equating the Obama administration with Nazism. The conflation of Nazism with fascism is a gross misunderstanding of history; the original fascism and Nazism are entirely different breeds of vipers, with the latter being far more deadly.

No matter: Some of the media went ape, as if I had used incendiary rhetoric even though I was making a a valid historical point while taking pains to keep the rhetoric down. It is worth noting, again, that my major point of comparison came from Wikipedia’s description of economic fascism:

Trying to handle the crisis, the Fascist government nationalized the holdings of large banks which had accrued significant industrial securities. The government also issued new securities to provide a source of credit for the banks and began enlisting the help of various cartels…. The government offered recognition and support to these organizations in exchange for promises that they would manipulate prices in accordance with government priorities. A number of mixed entities were formed… whose purpose it was to bring together representatives of the government and of the major businesses.… This economic model based on a partnership between government and business was soon extended to the political sphere, in what came to be known as corporatism….

Back to Barnes:

“If you are big in today’s Washington, you lead a charmed life,” Washington consultant David Smick says.

In Obama’s case, there’s more to the gap between what he professes and what his administration has produced than meets the eye. Yes, his hypocrisy is breathtaking. But it represents the way he prefers to govern. Dealing with a few big institutions, even if they are dinosaurs, is easier than consulting more widely. So is relying on government to remedy every national ill, rather than letting markets, private groups, and individuals play pivotal roles.

“What an irony for an administration that claims populist roots,” Smick says. “Policy prescriptions for the most part use the top-down approach. Bring out the GE guy and various big labor bosses to deal with the jobless nightmare when the bulk of the solution involves fostering small business start-ups.”

Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric’s CEO, happens to be chairman of Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. GE is famous for having paid no corporate income taxes in 2009 and 2010 and shipping thousands of jobs overseas. The council’s membership consists of 23 corporate chiefs, two labor leaders, one economist, one biologist, and zero representatives of small business.

For contributions to his reelection campaign, Obama has tapped the segment of big business he’s referred to as “fat cat bankers”: Wall Street. According to the Washington Post, he has raised more from financiers and bankers than all of the Republican presidential candidates combined. He’s raised more at Bain Capital than Mitt Romney, who cofounded the firm.

Whether or not one wants to compare this approach to the economics of Italian fascism, it certainly should be worrisome for all of us.

Now that he is surging in the polls, Newt Gingrich is likely to come under renewed scrutiny. Jennifer Rubin was nice enough to quote me extensively in this blog post, but she also wrote a whole lot more worth reading, including this:

It is far from certain whether Gingrich will hold up under scrutiny any better than Herman Cain, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), and Texas Gov. Rick Perry did. Unlike Perry and Cain, he won’t be perceived as lacking a basic understanding of the issues. But soon he will need to fend off questions about his years in Congress, his support for the individual mandate and the ethical lapses. He will need to address a slew of not-very conservative positions he has taken over the years on everything from TARP to cap-and-trade to illegal immigration. Frankly, he’s been to the left of most of the GOP field on a number of issues.

Rubin also extensively quotes some reader comments, here. Some are rather devastating, such as reasons 4 and 5 from a longer list from somebody named ChrisFord:

Many people remember him as so personally dislikable and intemperate in the 90s he was rejected out of hand for a Presidential spot in 1996 and 2000. That unpopularity lingers, outside Republican ranks, showing him far behind Obama in getting the moderate and independent vote.  Outside the policy wonk area, Newt has shown horrible executive and organizational skills. He has raised little money, despite all his inside the Beltway connections, and his whole staff quit on him last summer over his conduct.

Actually, Rubin had a trifecta of hard-on-Gingrich posts. Here’s another:

When invited to explain why he thinks Romney is merely a good manager and and not a change agent, Gingrich declined. His willingness to sign onto Perry’s notion about reducing all foreign aid to nothing didn’t show him to be a deep thinker. This is an easy applause line, the sort that Gingrich would normally say is beneath him. To be frank, the assessment of many that he “won” the debate reflects the ease with which many are beguiled by Gingrich’s professorial tone. What he says is far less impressive than how he says it.

Carter Eskew, a Democratic consultant to be sure, also hit Gingrich. And now a new e-book, by people who are seen as center to center-right, may cause him more problems.

Then again, if you are surging into first place in the polls, none of this may bother you right now. Truth is, Gingrich wouldn’t be receiving such renewed scrutiny if he hadn’t pulled off a political near-miracle by coming back from the political dead. It seems somebody forgot to put a stake through his heart when they buried him.

Bill Bennett today offers what for him are prototypically thoughtful comments on the increasingly sad allegations against Herman Cain. The gist of his comments is that the growing number of allegations against Cain show that this isn’t just a “high-tech lynching,” and that Cain’s handling of it, by making utterly baseless allegations against the Perry campaign, is very disturbing:

I have watched long enough and held my tongue long enough to give him the benefit of the doubt, but can no longer say this is a witch hunt, “a lynching” to use his word, or any other euphemism. There are allegations out there that matter and they have stacked up. For we who led the charge against Bill Clinton on a number of related issues to continue to blame the media or other campaigns or say it simply doesn’t matter makes us the hypocrites as well.

To that, I add this thought: If these allegations against Cain are UNtrue, then this is one of the vilest episodes in American political history. The lady’s allegation today is so graphic that if it is a lie, it is absolutely sickening. What really puzzles me is that if these allegations ARE true, I don’t see how Herman Cain could possibly have thought he could run for president and not have these stories come out. I mean, I can sort of see Cain thinking that two vague allegations of the “you are the same height as my wife” sort would not be any reason at all to keep him from the presidency. But if he is a serial lout whose loutishness includes two official allegations of harassment of anywhere near the sort as the non-harassment loutishness described today, it makes NO sense for him to put himself in the public eye. He HAD to know these things would come out.

Oddly enough, today’s allegation of under-skirt exploration makes me more inclined, or at least WANT to be inclined, to believe Cain. This is probably a perverse psychological reaction from me: I just can’t bear the thought of somebody who seemed so admirable turn out instead to be not just a borderline serial harasser, but a serial serious harasser and groper.

Is it just me, or is today’s allegation just too “over the top” to be believable?

UPDATE: To be clear, I am not saying that I found Ms. Bialek personally to be not believable. She did not come across as a liar. I am just saying that I don’t want to believe both that Cain would have been such a serial lout and that he would run for president if he had been like that. In short, in a vacuum, on paper, its just hard to believe today’s accusation. Watching and listening to Ms. Bialek is NOT, however, a vacuum. She did not acquit herself badly.

This is rich: EPA’s illicit-power-aggregating Lisa Jackson says Republicans are “jack-booted thugs.” Well, well, well. As I have repeatedly written, the EPA is the home of the armed, crazed, dangerous agents who sometimes impose a reign of terror on innocent people. If Ms. Jackson wants to see a thug, or a thugette, she needs to look in the mirror — if she doesn’t mind being frightened. Then she should look down to see her own footwear. Was she sleep-walking when she put on those jackboots?

Last week I wrote here about Sen. Ron Johnson’s proposals to save $1.4 trillion over ten years. Today, for the University of Mobile, I add that to proposals by Jeff Sessions, Tom Coburn, Paul Ryan and others to show that significant savings shouldn’t be all that hard.

At The American Spectator, where the Cain debate is being waged with great ferocity, I posted this long blog entry about the latest controversies surrounding our favorite pizza man. Upshot: Cain needs to get his act together and start handling his public appearances better, start doing some serious homework on issues, and drastically improve his campaign operation — regardless of whether there is any truth at all to the sexual harassment allegations.

But as one of the first people to really delve into the details of his 9-9-9 plan (largely because in theory I REALLY liked the plan), I want to say a little more about this latest controversy. Here’s the deal: Sober reflection and analysis, and sober questions and answers, are called for. It remains a horribly disturbing thing to see so many conservatives rush to judgment on both sides (but mostly circling the wagons in defense of Cain), and to do it so emotionally, in a time when over-emotionalism can play right into the hands of the Left and get us stuck with issues, candidates, positions, or images that can do great damage to conservative prospects in 2012 (and beyond). Conservatives need to train ourselves to react more dispassionately, or at least to channel our normal emotional reactions into constructive actions.  Pickett’s Charge was a horrendous failure. ‘Twould be best for conservatives not to see every controversy as a reason to charge, quite vulnerably, across a mile of open ground.

I loved Tim’s column the other day on rising support for the individual right to bear arms.

It just so happened that right before I read it, as my computer was stuck in an “update,” I was reading Richard Brookhiser’s new biography of James Madison while I waited for my ‘puter. Within a page of where I began that hour’s reading, I came across this from Brookhiser: “In Federalist # 46, [Madison] had even warned that Americans could resist an oppressive government thanks to ‘the advantage of being armed, which [they] possess over the people of almost every other nation’.”

Yes, being armed is an individual right, and yes it is both for personal protection AND for the radical eventuality, which we hope never to need, of resisting an oppressive government.

And if anybody at the Obama Department of Justice wants to Shanghai me for exercising my First Amendment rights about the meaning of the Second Amendment, and to accuse me (falsely) of inciting insurrection… well, bring it on, baby, bring it on. For the record, I am inciting nothing, but merely explaining that the Second Amendment’s origins did indeed include the notion of protection against government. It’s a purely objective analysis. And it’s a lot safer to write about guns this way than it is to deliberately seed the realm of drug lords with firearms, which is what Eric Holder’s minions appear to have done. My freedom of speech is far saner and safer than their idiocy of action.

So now the Daily Caller reports that 17 congressman have called for the scalp (figuratively speaking) of Attorney General Eric Holder. To which my question is, why only 17?!?!?

Ashton asks me if I know of businesses eager to expand. The answer is no. Or, rather, “Bleep no!” And today’s news about the dollar falling even farther will worry them even more. Obama regulatory policy, Obama/Reid fiscal policy, and Bernanke’s recklessly inflationary monetary policy all have given businesses the willies. Now comes word that consumer confidence, already low, has fallen even more precipitously. Nothing will give businesses confidence until the leftists in the executive branch are gone.

That said, I agree wholeheartedly with the main thrust of Troy’s excellent column about tax reform — bold reform of individual income taxes is desperately needed, and Mitt Romney’s failure to propose such a thing is another horrendous mark against him — but I disagree that individual tax reform should come first in this horrid economy, and I disagree that only four people still have a chance to win the Republican nomination.  Individual tax reform, no matter how designed, will take tremendous time and effort to work through the legislative process, with all sorts of trade-offs along the way. And in this economy, the problem isn’t really coming from individuals, it’s coming from a failure of corporations to re-invest the mountains of cash on which they now sit.

All of which is to say that the best way to cut the Gordian knot, for the current economy, is to completely eliminate corporate income taxes in one fell swoop. Almost as good is to cut them in half, and eliminate them entirely for manufacturers, as Rick Santorum would do.  Which leads us to the failure to mention Santorum as a real contender for the nomination. A word to the wise: Check out his grassroots organization in Iowa. It’s the single best one to date.

Sure, voters are focused on how their taxes, not corporate taxes, will change. That’s why 9-9-9 proved so sexy. But they care about jobs as well, and if the sale is made right, they’ll see that the good jobs will come fastest from corporate tax reform, not individual tax reform. All Santorum need add when he’s discussing his tax proposal is that he has always supported various versions of the flat tax, that the idea isn’t anything new, and that so many off-the-shelf flat-tax plans have been out there for a quarter-century that the exact details don’t matter. He’s for a flatter, simpler individual tax code, period. But you don’t worry about income taxes if you don’t have a job, and a one-stop corporate-tax slash is the best way to achieve that.