Barring any major revelations or an implosion of the Perry campaign, the Texas governor has the easiest path to the Republican nomination right now.  The majority of the candidates are on life support already, if indeed they were ever breathing on their own in the first place.  So, realistically it comes down to Perry, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Congresswomen and Tea Party darling, Michele Bachmann.  And, again barring any surprises, even with only a few days of being a candidate under his belt, Perry is the de facto frontrunner.  So, he’d better get ready for attacks from all sides and especially the most obvious one: the Dubya Connection.

 read more »

Just when my heart was about to heal and I was ready to move on with my life, a sadder, wiser man, a suitor comes a’ calling.  I want to, I really, really want to believe you’re the man for me, Rick Perry.  But I’ve just been hurt so many times before.  Sure, you say all the things that I like to hear:

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, I realized that the United States of America really is the last great hope of mankind. What I saw was systems of government that elevated rulers at the expense of the people. Socialist systems cloaked maybe in good intentions but were delivering misery and stagnation. And I learned that not everyone values life like we do in America, or the rights that are endowed to every human being by a loving God.

Oh my! Lincoln, Reagan, God, capitalism and country all rolled up into one.  There’s no denying that you have a way with words.  But, words are just words and may ex said a lot of the same words before he starting spouting dribble about “compassionate conservatism” and running up the national debt like the bill would never come due.  Those kinds of wounds heal oh so slowly! 

   read more »

In the most exciting and momentous period in the 2012 election cycle, the declared Republican candidates will come together to engage in another spirited debate on Thursday, August 10th and then will breathlessly await the outcome of Saturday’s straw poll to see who is REALLY the frontrunner in this talent-rich field of potential challengers to President Baracpdfkoadlfk…sorry, I collapsed under the weight of my own BS.  Yes, the candidates will debate again and then, two days later, there will be the Iowa Straw Poll which is said to count for something.  But, truth be told, it’s meaningless.  Even more meaningless than usual, I should say.  The fact is, the 2012 Republican primary season will not really start until the two elephants in the room step up to the microphone and make it official. Until either Texas governor Rick Perry or former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin step into the ring, the current crop of declared candidates are just placeholders.  The whole process is simply in a holding pattern, waiting. 

I say this not to disparage any of the declared candidates.  There is, generally speaking, nothing wrong with any of them.  As a matter of fact, I am in 95-97% ideological agreement with even the least palatable of them, and ANY of them would make a better president than Barack Obama.  But, they all represent the right message being carried by the wrong vessel.  The exception to this being the current frontrunner/co-frontrunner Mitt Romney.  The former Massachusetts governor is a photogenic and articulate vessel but with the wrong message or, at least, the right message but too little too late.  This a conservative year, a Tea Party year, and Romney is a Bush 41 candidate, the revenue man at the moonshine party!  He has been weighed down by the albatross of RomneyCare from day one and his unwillingness to repudiate what eventually became the template for ObamaCare won’t carry him past the Super Tuesday states if a popular, conservative alternative emerges.  If that happens, he will be competitive in Iowa and maybe even win New Hampshire, but his 2008 total of 11 primary wins will probably be 5 or less this time. The only state south of the Mason-Dixon Line that Romney won in 2008 was the purplish Florida and even a repeat performance of that is probably overly optimistic.  Again, IF a viable conservative alternative emerges, Romney will probably drop out about the same time he did in 2008, which was early February, unless his ego and personal fortune keeps him in until March.

On the other hand, if that challenge doesn’t emerge, Romney may benefit from the GOP’s “next-in-line” syndrome that gave us McCain, Dole, Bush 41, etc as well as the idea that he may have the best chance of shoring up swing voters in the general election.  He’s 2012’s safe candidate.

As far as the other declared candidates go:

            Michele Bachman: right message at the right time but the media has already succeeded in “Palin-izing” her.  The “crazy-eyed” Newsweek cover, her “gay curing” husband, and the fact that she is the next GOP woman after Palin, won’t be going away and would only ramp up if she were the candidate.  Sure, conservatives love her, but general election swing voters won’t and no matter how much the Tea Party may still love Palin, it can’t be denied that the Left’s caricature of her has become her de facto public image.  The same will happen to Michele Bachman. She will probably stay in the race, putting her eggs in the Super Tuesday basket, but probably won’t make it out of March.

            Tim Pawlenty: I find it REALLY hard to believe that this man was once considered the frontrunner! Again, he has the right message but its being delivered by a man who has all the charisma of a small town pharmacist.  He’s a distant third in the popularity contest behind Romney and Bachmann and probably won’t stay in past January. 

The rest of the declared candidates are all very good men, except for Rick Santorum who is a 2x4 in a suit, with good messages, but barring a miracle, most will be out after South Carolina, all will be out after Florida.

So, what of the “what if’s”? 

Sarah Palin is the most interesting because of the double edged nature of her standing in the party.  Among a large segment of the Right, an almost mythic quality has been created around her, one part Boudica, warrior queen, rhetorically slaying legions of liberals every time she appears on Fox News.  But also, one part victim who, since 2008 has had every aspect of herself and her family dragged out into the mainstream media and torn to shreds by jackals who seek nothing more but pure character assassination.

My feel on Palin right now is that she won’t run.  For one, she relishes the outsider role, and what could be more outside than not even being a part of the process.  Secondly, I think that she likes being looked upon as a sort of Tea Party Delphic oracle.  Every media talking head is probably beating down her door to do their show, raise their ratings, just to wax politically about her party and the political environment as a whole.  If anything, Sarah Palin may make the perfect RNC chair.  The Right loves her, the Left hates her, and she has credibility with what is currently the most dynamic movement in the country: the Tea Party.  That position may give her the best of both worlds.

On the other hand, Texas governor Rick Perry is almost certain to enter the race and to do it in a way to intentionally upstage all of the other candidates.  On Saturday, when Romney, Bachmann, et al are the Ames, Iowa state fair, shaking hands, gorging on corndogs and waiting on the results of the straw poll, Rick Perry will be in South Carolina totally invalidating the results of that poll and everything that has happened in the GOP race so far.

 It is presumed as of this moment that Perry will officially announce his candidacy this Saturday after weeks of will he or won’t he.  Well, he will! The question is: to what end?  Many conservatives are vesting a lot of their hope in what they want Perry to be, the “real” conservative, the charismatic candidate, the new Reagan.  Does this sound familiar?  It should.  Much of the same pre-announcement excitement surrounded actor, senator, lawyer and lobbyist Fred Thompson.  With his drawl, his folksy wit and belief in constitutional conservatism, he was to be the Ronald Reagan to John McCain’s Bob Dole establishmentarian Old Guard.  Sadly, the “Fredheads’” enthusiasm was short-lived.  Running a lackluster campaign from the start, Thompson was out of the race by late January, never having won a primary and only coming in second in one.

It should be proven very quickly if Perry is the savior of the party or just a footnote, but you can almost count on one thing: if Perry isn’t what many think he is, the nomination will almost certainly go to Mitt Romney.  If that is the case, God help the party and God help the United States of America. 

 read more »

I was talking with a friend of mine today, a good guy, and a smart guy. But a guy who, nevertheless, has fallen for the liberal line that all of our fiscal problems could be solved if we just raised taxes on the rich.  In short, he has taken to the "Fat Cat" theory of macroeconomics.  If we can just get the rich; the millionaires, the billionaires, the oil company executive, etc... to pay their "fair share," we could balance the budget, pay down the debt, fund entitlements until Kingdom come, and maybe even help me grow back the hair I’ve lost!  The exchange with my friend made me wonder, how many other smart, good people are being sucked into the Left’s class demagoguery in these rough economic times?  How many people look at the unemployment numbers, see their neighbors scraping by on food stamps and assume that the best answer is simple income redistribution?      read more »

The unholy union of politics and entertainment is nothing new. Politicians have been using entertainers to add a little luster to their own stars for nearly as long as politics and entertainment have existed. But, over the last few decades, and especially the last ten years, there has been a change in the relationship between those two seemingly disparate worlds. Certainly, the attitude of the entertainers has evolved. Rather than being supportive of the nation and mirroring its people and their values, the tinsel town of recent decades is nothing less than a virus, a reoccurring herpes blister on the face of the body politic.

The Hollywood that once sent its best off to fight for the United States (Clark Gable, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Alan Ladd, Robert Taylor, John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, George Stevens, and John Huston) has now mated with leftist ideology to spawn the likes of Michael Moore.

The Andrews Sisters, dubbed the “Sweethearts of Armed Forces Radio”, dedicated much of the 1940’s to supporting the troops and inspiring the folks back home to buy war bonds. Today we have Lady Gaga and her personal crusade to make the US military more gay friendly.

Sure, Conservatives do have something of a toehold in the entertainment world but nothing to match the bulkhead that has been built up by the Left. Why is that? Granted, the arts crowd does swing to the left but there is something about liberal politicians that lead them to glom onto celebrities like a teenager trying to get an autograph on a napkin or, even worse, a groupie trying to get backstage.  read more »

Many in the homosexual community sneer when anyone mentions a "gay agenda".  They claim that there is no such thing. There clearly is a gay agenda, even if its not easily discernable or even concisely articulated.. We see proponents of the lifestyle calling for things like equal rights (who can argue against that) and even marriage and adoption for gay couples. But a little digging into the gay rights movement will give you the bigger picture of what same sex marriage advocates are ultimately hoping to achieve. This is a movement that only begins with equal employment opportunities and protections but ultimately wants to reshape our institutions and our very society.

In 1972, the National Coalition of Gay Organizations drew up a “Gay Rights Platform” in Chicago. Among the notable goals of the platform was to seek to “repeal all legislative provisions that restrict the sex or number of persons entering into a marriage unit; and the extension of legal benefits to all persons who cohabit regardless of sex or numbers”. In other words, the right for homosexuals to marry is simply the first step in the eventual destruction of the institution of marriage. And this is not a position that has been dropped over the last three decades. The notion of opening up marriage to any number of people is still pointed to time and time again by gay rights advocates. If the gay movement gets their way anyone can marry any number of other people, regardless of gender and (we will soon see) of age and the taxpayers will be left to cover the cost to society of these unstable and harmful unions. Imagine, a “marriage” of 4,5,6 men and women, all suing one another for alimony, child custody and support, and everything else that can come from a nasty divorce. Now imagine that extrapolated across the country and throughout the court system.  read more »