"Remember Mississippi"

Remember Mississippi!

 

The maneuverings to keep Thad Cochran in the Senate will not soon be forgotten.

By John Fund

How far did the establishment GOP forces backing Senator Thad Cochran go in Mississippi this week? Too far, and their tactics are likely to leave permanent scars in a civil war with Tea Party forces that are out of all proportion to the importance the establishment placed on saving one 76-year-old senator’s ability to please Washington’s K Street lobbying interests.
“This is a win for the establishment, but it’s a win with an asterisk, because it’s so tainted that it might be one of those things where they’re going to be sorry they ever won the runoff in Mississippi,” Craig Shirley, a political consultant and the author of two respected biographies of Ronald Reagan, told Yahoo News this week.
The key to Cochran’s surprising victory was a disproportionately high turnout in precincts with high Democratic registration. Mississippi law permits voters to cross party lines in primaries, but it prohibits members of one party who voted in their party’s primary to participate in a runoff of the other party. It also bars them from voting in the runoff unless they intend to support the resulting nominee in the November election — an unenforceable requirement, but one that showed that the intent of the election law was, in this case, to let Republicans determine their own nominee.
The tactics used to convince black Democrats to vote for Cochran included the same kind of race-baiting that Republicans have complained about for decades. “The Tea Party Intends To Prevent Blacks From Voting on Tuesday” was the headline on a flier that indefatigable journalist Charles Johnson (twitter #chuckcjohnson) discovered had been distributed in heavily black precincts before the June 23 vote. Along with that unfounded incendiary message was a list of issue comparisons between Cochran and Chris McDaniel. Cochran was credited with such unconservative positions as support for federal pork projects and food-stamp funding. The flier carried no identification as to who produced it, a violation of federal law.
Curiously, another flier put out by the pro-Cochran Mississippi Conservatives PAC last week described Cochran’s positions in nearly identical language as the anonymous flier and even carried an identical photo of the senator. The slogan that Thad Cochran “Supports All Mississippians” is the same in both fliers.
 “I don’t know who put it out,” former governor Haley Barbour, who raised boatloads of money for the Mississippi Conservatives PAC, told my colleague Eliana Johnson. “I can’t imagine the Cochran campaign did that.”
But the Mississippi Conservatives PAC did engage in its own questionable tactics. A mysterious robo-call went out to thousands of Democratic households just before the June 23 vote. The female narrator’s message was as follows: “By not voting, you are saying ‘take away all of my government programs, such as food stamps, early breakfast and lunch programs, millions of dollars to our black universities . . . everything we and our families depend on that comes from Washington will be cut.”
As the Washington Examiner reported: “It turns out that former Republican Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s pro-Cochran Super PAC, Mississippi Conservatives, shelled out $44,000 for an offensive robo-call urging black Democrat voters to vote for Thad Cochran in the Republican primary Tuesday.”
There has been much speculation about the offensive robo-call, which trashes the Tea Party for “their disrespectful treatment of the first African American president.” The female narrator claimed that Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel would cause “even more problems for President Obama.”
As I said, the wounds from all of this are likely to be long lasting.
“This just threw gasoline onto the flames of the civil war,” Richard Viguerie, the author of Takeover: The 100 Year War for the GOP’s Soul, told reporters this week. “What happened yesterday in Mississippi will resonate for years to come. It will become the battle cry, just like the Alamo. We will remember Mississippi.”
— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for National Review Online.

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Ok, here is the plan: We will keep the house so that is not an issue. We
need to forgo the Senate possibly because truth is, it doesn't matter
because obama will not sign a thing that has a hint against his ideology
anyway. We need to just purge the Senate of the rinos. In the fall we
should vote for the dem or write in against these rinos. The call should indeed be
"Remember Mississippi", as in Remember the Alamo. This is a chance to
take these monsters and sell outs to the woodshed. We need to vote
against Cochran, McConnell, Grahm, McCain, and Cornyn to boot amongst
many others. Yes it is drastic and risky but you don't win in the end by
half stepping at this point. We the conservatives cannot let them take our vote for granted simply because the rino is the candidate. Its better to fight against your known enemy and lose than to be shot in the back by those who were supposed to be on your side.

tusc

Go Dirty and Go Heavy

By William L. Gensert

You have to give respect to the Democrats, assuredly a merry band of pugilistic progressives. They know how to fight, and they are not afraid to get dirty. It is a lesson Republicans need to learn and an example they need to emulate. 
There are rules in life, universal rules that hold true the world over -- or at the very least, should. Most of modern civilization abhors violence against women and children, as well as cheating, stealing and murder and all those other things on those stone tablets Moses brought down from the mount.
Politics, however, is not life. In politics, the only thing that matters is winning. Republicans will need to win in order for America to have half a chance of preventing what remains of this glorious nation from sliding down Barry’s toilet of hope and change.
In the Presidential Debates of 2012, Mitt Romney had Obama on the ropes, unmasking him as the moron some of us have long maintained him to be.  Yet, he did not close -- he let up -- he played the political version of prevent defense, and it cost him the election and the nation a brighter future. 
While Barry’s boys were busy portraying poor Mitt as some sort of voracious capitalistic monster, eating babies for breakfast, while rejoicing at his ability to give an unemployed steelworker’s wife cancer, Mitt did nothing. He never fought back.
Mitt never took off the gloves, because he was determined to take the high road.
In a perfect world, the high road is a path all should seek to tread. Yet, when victory is the only consideration, the low road is a surer course to the finish line. In politics, no one cares how an election is won, only that it is won.
The Democrats know how to win and the Republicans do not. 
Mitt Romney is assuredly a fine and decent man. Always on the high road, he would have adhered to the Constitution and played by the rules. The man would have made a great president. However, ‘fine and decent’ hurt him in his battle against Obama, who has never cared about rules or the high road. Barry couldn’t find the high road even if he had some choom from his Punahou prep school days and a 10-pound bag of Oreos with directions on the back.
Yet, he surely knows how to campaign; and with Barry, it is always a negative campaign.  In his first electoral victory, in 1996, he had all candidates disqualified on technicalities, allowing him to run unopposed. In 1998, he again ran unopposed for the opportunity to face a first-time Republican candidate, Yesse Yehuda. In the general election, Obama was re-elected as state senator with 89% of the vote.
In his campaign to be a United States Senator, miraculously the sealed divorced records of his primary opponent, Blair Hull were leaked to the public. That was it for Hull.
In the general, Barry was lucky enough to run against another divorced candidate, Jack Ryan. Incredibility and again miraculously, the sealed custody papers from his divorce were also released, and that was it for Jack. 
I have called Barack Obama a moron, and made no secret of my visceral dislike for the man, but I have to give him his respect for his ability to fight dirty.
In fact, the entire Democratic Party fights the same way. They will do anything to win. Anyone running for office as a Republican can expect to see his or her first love sobbing on MSNBC the Sunday before the election. 
If I were stuck in an alley, back to the wall, facing three criminals meaning to do me bodily harm, I would want a couple of Democrats by my side. They are just as likely to be armed (gun control is for us, not them), and at the very least I could expect them to fight. 
With Republicans by my side, an animated discussion on the pros and cons of using violence as a means for dispute resolution would have surely ensued while my antagonists made short work of my face. Despite overwhelming opinion to the contrary, I like my face.
Yet…
I digress; this is supposed to be an article on strategy and tactics for the 2014 midterm elections.  
We all know the liberal game plan will be “inequality,” “the war on women,” “global warming,” “Obamacare is a huge success” and last but not least, “You’re a racist you tea bagging bastard.”   
Karl Marx famously said. “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
A good case can be made that Barry’s tenure has been not only farce, but tragedy as well. In keeping with this metaphor, Obama is a sad clown.  He convinced so many he would halt the rise of the oceans and transform not only America, but also the world into a better place. 
Emperor Obama’s reign has left us with a stagnant economy, a shrinking workforce, and higher energy costs, despite some of the largest oil and natural gas reserves on the planet. On the international front, America has become the laughingstock of the world, with the Russians and the Chinese embarrassing poor Barry on an almost daily basis. 
We are forced to suffer in silence, while the rest of the world laughs, because only Americans fear our solar-panel king.
This is a story that needs to be told, and electorally it is a huge opportunity. Obama is much less popular than he was in 2010 when Democrats took a “shellacking.”  Every Democrat running for anything needs to be tied to Barry and what he has done domestically and internationally to degrade the nation.
The Democrats have their war on women, accusations a racism against anyone who disagrees, income inequality, etc., etc., etc…
Yet they have an almost unseemly attraction to the “war on women” cudgel, repeating relentlessly the falsity that women make only 77 cents to every man’s dollar.
Despite proof otherwise, Barack Obama and the Democrats will beat that 77-cent woman to death in the months preceding the 2014 midterm elections. Negative is all he knows and with the firing of Jill Abramson, he and his party will throw the New York Times under the bus as evidence.

Barack and Jill

went up the hill

Jill had a dollar on her,

Barack came down with 77 cents

as always, Jill carried his water.

The opening shot for control of the Senate was fired on April 17 when Obama took his Obamacare victory lap in the Rose Garden, bragging about 8.1 million sign-ups.  In his remarks, he actually called the ACA, “ObamaCare.” That was a tick, and it speaks volumes about our president and his understanding of the progress the ACA has made. In calling the law “ObamaCare”, he telegraphed his position with respect to the campaigns now getting underway for the 2014 midterm elections -- ObamaCare is a huge success and the debate is over. 
Have you ever noticed that the people who declare a debate over are always the ones losing said debate? 
Obama, showing a breathtaking lack of awareness, is proud of ObamaCare. His narcissistic solipsism, the sucking up of sycophants, the ululations of hagiographers and the ‘on their knees’ approach media has to all things Obama renders him incapable of any other interpretation.  In addition, the Dems are not far behind in their support and understanding.
Think about that, Barry and his minions are so out of touch they cannot see failure; they wait around until they get statistics that can be twisted into success, thinking we won’t notice.
He believes that campaigning on the success of ObamaCare will be a successful strategy.  I can’t wait.  ObamaCare is a con.  In order for it to succeed, the many must be willing to pay much more for much less, so that the few can pay not much less for not much more. Yeah, that’ll work.
In any case, every Republican running for the senate this year should label their opponent “the 60th vote for ObamaCare.” If running in an election for an open seat, their opponent “would have been the 60th vote for ObamaCare.”
A little Alinsky can go a long way. Mock and ridicule should be the order of the day in this election. Dig deep for any and all dirt on every candidate. 
If there is a “D” after their name, it has to be no holds barred. When they accuse Republicans of fighting a war against women, whether about abortion (sorry, it’s now become “reproductive rights”) or pay equity, it makes no sense for our candidate to defend himself.  Don’t’ respond, accuse.  I would wager that every candidate running for whatever in America has some wage inequality in their operation.
Make accusations, and let them stand, it’s the Alinsky way. Make the charge, and compel the Democrats to defend themselves. If it is possible to implicate the opponent in something involving a live boy (not that there’s anything wrong with that, age of consent withstanding) or a dead girl (which would always be wrong), do so, and do so vigorously. Search for it. It may be unseemly, but so what, scandal drives the vote.
The Republicans should not care about “Pinocchios.” It has never hurt Democrats; Barry got “Lie of The Year, 2013” with his “you can keep your plan” falsehood, to no appreciable damage. Ignore them.
There is a wave coming. It is literally (do I sound like Joe Biden) the best chance America has to stop the Obama juggernaut of willful idiots. Republicans need to catch that wave. They cannot allow progressives to define the issues. Republicans need to stop defending themselves and attack.
The progressive movement is at its weakest point since 2010. Simply refuse to discuss things on their terms, never defend, always attack. Tap into all those who lost their insurance, and whose premiums and deductibles increased dramatically, and all who couldn’t keep their doctor, in addition to losing their plan. The 8 million Barry brags about, includes some of those forced out of their plans by Obamacare mandates (estimates range as high as 6.5 million people) and makes no accounting for people who have not paid their premiums.
There is an ever-expanding group of people angry about what Barack Obama has done these last 5 years. These are the “people,” Republicans need to bring to the fight.  And they are legion, consisting of:
…all those who can’t find a job because of Obamanomics.
…all those who can’t buy a house because of Dodd Frank.
…all those who can’t afford the gas to get to their job or to heat their house because of the great one’s attempts to shut down energy production in America.
…and let’s not forget about Benghazi.
Conservatives need to attack, attack, attack.      
It’s the only way to win.
And, if they have to bend the truth, so be it. 
The insanity that is Barack Obama has to stop if America is to have a chance of survival. Today may be mourning in America, but if we can catch the wave in 2014 and the presidency in 2016, it just might be morning in America again. 
All we need to do is open our eyes and stop apologizing for who we are and what we believe in.
To Barack Obama, we need to tell him we never needed his “transformation” because America was never broken.

Can Election 2014 Put the Nation Back on Track?

By Janice Shaw Crouse

The latest Rasmussen poll, released on Monday, April 14, indicates that more than half of Americans (52%) disapprove of President Obama’s job performance; worse, 58 percent view ObamaCare unfavorably (the highest level of disapproval in several months). Congress, too, comes in for censure with only nine percent of voters thinking that the country will be better off if incumbents are reelected.  This new poll reveals continued pessimism about the economy, direction of the country and disappointment with Mr. Obama’s presidency.  In February, a CBS poll showed that almost 60 percent of Americans (59%) are disappointed in the Obama presidency, an increase primarily among independents. There is the predictable dismay over the economy, ObamaCare, and foreign policy, but the most troubling -- and revealing -- area of concern is that Americans, by a wide margin, think that the country is on the wrong track (63%, wrong direction to 32%, right direction).
One of the most difficult challenges officeholders face is a voting public that thinks the country is on the wrong track.  It’s hard for politicians and pundits alike to accurately assess the origins of such judgments. Is it because of specific policy positions? Or, because Americans don’t like what they see happening around them?  Or, is it because people feel worse off than they did before?  Too many friends out of work?  Or is it because they see too many changes coming at them too fast, and they fear for their future prospects given ever more government regulation and intrusion along with the government’s massive budget deficits adding daily to the ballooning national debt?
I think the public’s reactions can be explained pretty simply with three statements: (1) The current administration is very divisive and controlling.  Anyone who disagrees with the prevailing, doctrinaire pronouncements of the reigning elite is slurred as bigoted, extremist, and/or ignorant and stupid. (2) Americans’ freedoms have been abridged in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. (3) Further, this administration has consistently politicized government in unprecedented ways. The situation involving CBS News investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson illustrates all three points. Attkisson recently resigned from CBS because of how the Obama Administration squelches journalists. She told Howard Kurtz of “Media Buzz” that the “chilling” manipulation of the Obama Administration interferes “in ways that have never come to bear before.” Attkisson reports that the “pressure on journalists for just doing their jobs” by this administration is the “strongest and most forceful in her 20 years on air.” She says they are “particularly aggressive,” “secretive,” and “manipulative” in going over the heads of reporters to their bosses and that the president’s “interference is unprecedented.”
Even Politico, an influential leftist website, acknowledges that coming days will reveal whether 2014 will turn out to be “simply a good year for the GOP or a rout.” There is no question that the public is angry and disgusted with “politics as usual” and there is deep disappointment with President Obama, even among those who did not vote for him but hoped that the first black president would do well.
As Politico points out, this summer will be pivotal.  The Supreme Court will issue its decision on the contraception mandate and religious liberty, probably in June. That decision will be a rallying cry for both the left and right in the days leading up to the 2014 elections. As Politico put it: “Upholding the mandate would incense social conservatives” and “striking it down would give Democrats an issue to galvanize women’s groups.”
Obama swept into office as the reincarnation of FDR, an aura that is long gone; all the luster of a conquering hero was eroded in short order. The man whose charisma and persuasive abilities drew record votes from youth and minorities simply blew it -- even while he presided over an entrenched liberal power base on the Hill (whose approval ratings are even more dismal than the president’s). The president’s cool demeanor became oblivious detachment from the political climate; his oratorical skills degenerated into wooden reading of the teleprompter screens; his “yes we can” attitude devolved into tribalism and race baiting. Everything that the “progressives” thought they had “won” is turning out to be like sandcastles crumbling before an onrushing tide of voter anger. Even worse, the administration and congressional leaders are responsible for the mountain of debt that is stifling economic growth and which will be an albatross around the necks of countless generations to come. The public is showing that they feel the sacrifice of individual freedom inherent in ObamaCare is too great a price to pay. Democrats have clearly over-reached in their frantic push to expand government control over the private sector.
Who could have predicted at the outset of the Obama Administration -- when the president rivaled John F. Kennedy in popularity -- that the mid-term elections would find the Republicans favored for massive wins, despite voter misgivings about them? Even more astonishing, who would have believed that Democrats and Independents would be distancing themselves from the president whose promise of national transformation would saddle our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren with tens of trillions of dollars in debt from radical policies, reckless spending, and out-of-control government expansion -- the extent of which most of us still cannot comprehend?
For most of us, the election of 2014 is not a matter of campaigns, rhetoric, or local outcomes; instead, the results that determine who controls the Senate -- and thus supports or blocks the president’s radical destructive agenda -- boils down to a question of whether this nation will survive. Ultimately, the 2014 election will go a long way toward revealing whether we can take a step back from the brink.

Common Core's Dirtiest Trick: Dividing Parents and Children

By Bruce Deitrick Price

When you look back at New Math (ca. 1965) and Reform Math (ca. 1990), one of the most striking and persistent features was that parents could not understand the homework their children brought home.
Mystified parents were trying to advise mystified children.  The parents, presumably the wise members of the society, were helpless to say anything useful when confronted by the weird complexities of “reform” math, which has now been rolled forward into Common Core.
Here is a commonplace horror story that can stand in for millions of others: “When Mike and Camille Chudzinski tried to help their son with his homework earlier this fall, they were bewildered. The fourth-grader brought home no spelling lists, few textbooks, and a whole new approach to solving math problems. When he tackled multi-digit addition, for instance, Patrick did not just line up the two numbers and then add the columns, as his parents had been taught to do. Instead, he sketched out a graph with a series of arrows and marks that appeared at first to his parents as indecipherable as hieroglyphics.”
When we hear these stories, we typically focus on the comical oddity of adults not being able to do homework intended for children.  How is that even possible?  But the ramifications are anything but funny.  The real damage is that Reform Math opens up fractures throughout society.  Parents are cut off from their children.  Parents and schools are pitted against each other.  Students are alienated from their teachers and schools.
Sociologist James Coleman said that the most important thing in successful education is what he called "social capital."  Ideally, parents, kids, schools, and community are on the same page, working toward the same goals.  In this way the children feel they are doing appropriate and necessary things.  Energy is used to complete tasks, not to debate the merits of the tasks.
Imagine the situation in Reform Math when parents can’t do even elementary problems in arithmetic.  Adults are angry; children are stressed.  Parents have conferences with teachers, and they complain later in front of the children that the teachers couldn’t give them any satisfactory answers.  Why would children be enthusiastic about mastering something that their own parents find impossible and reprehensible? 
All of this tension and hostility adds up to the perfect excuse for the child to lose interest in math, and in school generally.  We hear lots of stories about children who are miserable at school.  We shouldn’t be surprised.
In short, Reform Math is bad not just because it doesn’t teach math; it’s bad because it’s a society-wrecker.  This is Common Core’s dirtiest trick. 
In an intelligently organized society, the schools would do everything possible to involve parents in their children’s education.  Our Education Establishment is doing the reverse.  Schools seem intent on making parents turn their backs on their children’s education.
Driving parents out of the equation means driving education out of the equation.
Today, whenever schools are not getting good results, the first excuse the Education Establishment offers is that parents don’t want to help.  This is diabolical.  The schools do everything possible to make parents give up on education, and then the schools blame the parents.
Professor Michael Toscano writes, “Educational success is also dependent upon closure between families and their schools. In the case of the CCSS, little real ‘social capital’ exists between parents and schools, because the standards were adopted out of the reach of parents and because they will remain out of their reach. This is a crucial mistake. Education must be a common good that emanates from the relations of families in a community.”
When New Math was first introduced 60 years ago and parents complained, the official propaganda was that the new methods were so sophisticated that parents simply weren’t ready for them.  Many in the community accepted the claim that children would finally benefit from being pushed in this way.  That was a mistake.  New Math was, for all practical purposes, irrational.  It soon self-destructed, and then we knew that it, not parents, had been flawed all along.
This pattern continues.  The community should use a commonsense “smell test.”  Schoolwork too complicated for parents is too complicated, period.  It’s not appropriate for children.
Common Core has embraced and recycled all the worst ideas from “reform” math.  One has to conclude that the people responsible are hopelessly incompetent or hopelessly ideological.
The more you reflect on the flood of horror stories, the more you feel that Common Core commissars must spend their time concocting ways to alienate children and defeat parents.  The basic taunt seems to be: “Hey, you parents.  You can gripe and complain and thereby look foolish in the eyes of your children, or you can cower in surrender as you learn to put up with the artificial nonsense that we have devised, thanks to millions in grants from the government (your taxes used against you).  Haha, suckers.  You can’t win.  Obama promised a fundamental transformation, and the first thing we’re going to transform is your sense of importance as parents.  You must learn that you are insignificant.”
The divide between parents and children is a far more critical issue than many imagined.  The proper priority is that homework should be specifically designed to bring parents and children together.  Common Core seems cunningly designed to do the opposite.  That’s the main reason it must be defeated.

Progressive (Leftist) Insurance

The right ideological credentials mean never having to say you’re sorry

By Victor Davis Hanson

How do you ensure that you won’t be ostracized, denounced, or fired if you are a media celebrity, captain of industry, or high public official?
For some, sexist banter is certainly no problem. Stand-up comedian Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a c–t and a tw-t, but suffered no ill consequences. David Letterman joked on air that Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old daughter had had sex with Alex Rodriguez during a New York Yankees game. There was no downside to that either. President Obama tosses around “sweetie” as he wishes. No problem with that. No one believes Barack could be condescending to women.
It is not just that sloppy speech can, with the right ideological insurance, become irrelevant. Inconvenient truths can be insured against too. Barack Obama’s female staffers make far less than do their male counterparts, at least by the quirky sort of standards that the president himself applies to others to win petty victories in his vaunted war against the war against women. Bill Clinton had sexual relations with a young staffer, in what feminists would call a classic exploitative situation of disparate power. Most such bosses would be fired for hitting on their young assistants. If Woody Allen were not insured as a left-wing filmmaker, he would have been ostracized out of Hollywood.
Racism is not necessarily a job killer either. How could it be, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed during the 2008 campaign that a “light-skinned” Barack Obama spoke with “no Negro dialect.” Joe Biden, himself a candidate in that election, said of Obama that he was the “first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.” Despite such racist drivel, a fully ideologically insured Biden was rewarded with the nomination for vice president.
No one asks Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to step down from the Supreme Court; but in a quite frightening remark, she quipped that she was surprised about the uproar over abortion: “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” Frankly, that seemed a savage thing to say, especially given the inordinate percentages of abortions among minorities and the poor. Why did an uncouth Don Imus go on forced sabbatical from radio for his racial crudity, but not, say, Stephen Colbert for his own racial buffoonery? Is it that Colbert is never dead serious in a way Imus always is? No, it’s that Colbert had taken out ideological insurance, Imus not so much.
As far as inflammatory race baiting goes, one can say almost anything one wants — with the proper ideological insurance: Collate these comments by Chris Rock (the Fourth of July is “white people’s day”), Morgan Freeman on conservative opposition to Obama (the Tea Party is “going to do whatever [they] can to get this black man outta here”), Jamie Foxx on Django Unchained (“I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?”), or Hank Aaron on Republicans who oppose President Obama’s policies (they’re like the KKK). Certainly racial venom is not a career ender for the fully insured. Jay-Z, a frequent White House guest, is not shy about wearing a Five-Percent Nation medallion, which reflects an ideology that considers whites inferior devils.
Insensitivity to gay concerns is supposed to be professionally ruinous. But, really, it is not either. Alec Baldwin occasionally lets loose with anti-gay slurs and seems to be doing fine. Barack Obama strongly opposed gay marriage far more publicly than did the head of Mozilla. No one asks our president to resign, or for that matter the legion of Democratic politicians who ran on the premise that marriage is properly only between a man and a woman. They all were fully covered by low-deductible ideological insurance.
Criminal activity is no barrier either. Last week, at a convention hosted by activist Al Sharpton, Attorney General Eric Holder whined to Sharpton’s audience that he and Obama have been treated unfairly, his subtext being endemic racial prejudice. But Holder’s host knows a lot about racial prejudice. At that moment, Sharpton — who concocted the Tawana Brawley mythology, defamed a district attorney, and was forced to pay libel fines for his slurs; who avoided taxes; and who helped incite a fatal race riot — was back in the news, and not for his long history of racism, homophobia, and religious bigotry.
The latest revelations about Sharpton suggest that he was an FBI informant against Mafia criminals, apparently in some fear that drug charges would be lodged against him. The fully insured Sharpton’s entire career has been predicated on racist language and demagoguery — again hardly obstacles to serial White House invitations. Holder, who called Americans “cowards” and referred to African-Americans as “my people” (try that, John Ashcroft), complained of rudeness and a general divisiveness in the country. Was he referring to Obama’s request of Latinos that they “punish our enemies” or his own racialist language? No matter: Holder pays his insurance premium quarterly with either an accusation of racism or a loud affirmation of his progressivism.
Three miscreant California Democratic state senators — two charged with multiple felonies, one convicted of them — have only recently been put on leave. They are still receiving their state salaries. Since they are left-wing and of minority status, the scandals will soon be off the front pages, and calls for their resignations will be muted.
Lisa Jackson, the former EPA director, left the agency abruptly after it was disclosed that she had created a fake e-mail persona, among other things, to give herself (a.k.a. “Richard Windsor”) an EPA award for being a “scholar of ethical behavior.” Apple rewarded such ethical behavior by giving her a six-figure income as its new environmental liaison. Note well: Had Lisa Jackson Windsor expressed doubts about man-caused global warming rather than fabricated a false identity, then she might not have landed on a lucrative Apple perch — and might have been advised by Apple’s CEO to dump her Apple stock.
Does a poor record of achievement in helping minorities get one fired? Not really. In terms of minority income and employment, Barack Obama’s five years in the White House have been an abject disaster.
Is being rich, then, a class liability? That too depends on whether you bought progressive insurance. If you are a Silicon Valley billionaire who is loudly cool, hip, and left-wing, then offshoring and outsourcing is OK. No one worries that George Soros is a European pariah speculator who was convicted of insider trading in France in 2005, or that the fully insured Steyer brothers seek to trump the Koch model of giving millions to pet political causes.
The president deplores the Supreme Court’s striking down limits on campaign donations. He can do that because he hits the 0.01 percent up for quid pro quo cash in pursuit of noble causes. John Kerry married a millionaire, then a billionaire, and then tried to avoid sales and excise taxes on his huge yacht. That was a disturbing fact, but it was not brought up on the Senate floor — in the manner that Mitt Romney was falsely accused of being a tax cheat by Harry Reid. Reid long ago took out a huge progressive umbrella policy that so far has insured him against his libelous allegations, dubious financial entanglements, and racist statements.
Perhaps the most amply progressively insured operator in the world today is Al Gore. He pays high premiums for nonstop left-wing slurs (such as suggesting that a sitting president is in cahoots with Brownshirts). Yet it pays off when someone might lodge a claim against you. Imagine the following liability and the sort of ideological insurance necessary to defend against it: First, you hype a supposed climate disaster and then offer remedies for it — with your profit margin based on the degree of hysteria you have whipped up. Second, as a big-government, green liberal guru, you sell a failed cable-television network to a carbon-spewing, Islamist Gulf sheikdom, and rush the sale to beat a new hike in the capital-gains tax rate. Third, you ignore questions about why something so worthless might be worth so much to a mostly homophobic, misogynist, and religiously intolerant Middle East monarchy.
Gore’s insurance policies guarantee that he will never be shunned as a tax-dodging robber baron eager to grab petrodollars.
Sometimes progressive insurance involves far more than just liberal rhetoric. Perceptions, however superficial, matter as well. Had George Zimmerman just insured himself by taking his mother’s maiden name and Latinizing his first name, Jorge Mesa would not quite so easily have incurred liberals’ wrath in the Trayvon Martin case. Even the New York Times would have been stumped in its crude attempts to whip up racial hatred by reinventing Zimmerman with the neologism “white Hispanic.”
A Barry Dunham would not have had the resonance with liberals that the exotically multicultural brand of Barack Obama conveys. Even a preppy-sounding President Barry Obama would have had trouble playing golf so incessantly, in a way Barack does not.
Plagiarism is usually an absolute career killer. But you can take out progressive insurance against that as well. Just ask former plagiarists Joe Biden, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Juan Williams, and Fareed Zakaria.
Instead of paying monetary premiums, one supports the proper causes, says the properly cool things, joins the right organizations, and votes the correct way, and by those means purchases a liability policy against the careless mistakes, plagiarism, offhanded lapses, sexual peccadillos, gaffes, and bad jokes that otherwise could prove ruinous.
Complain about racists with the racist Jay-Z, blast the oil companies with the petrodollar billionaire Al Gore, frolic about with a young girl in the Oval Office with Bill Clinton, copy someone else’s work with Maureen Dowd, oppose the anti-abortionists with the eugenicist-sounding Justice Ginsburg — and you will never have to say you’re sorry.
For most people in the media, entertainment, politics, sports, and academia, taking out ideological insurance is a no-brainer.