Internet Back Up

In case no one has noticed, the past few weeks have left the Earth disastrously absent of the Rougblog.

Living in the sticks of Northern Michigan, my only real option for a faster than molasses internet service is to tether my cell phone to the computer. Alas, the PdaNet driver became cobbled somehow a couple of weeks ago and I didn't have the time to tax myself silly over getting it straightened out. This event, though difficult to subsist through, will help casual readers to assign not only a relative value to all of my opinions (quite low) but also helps to illustrate my amazing computer skills (even lower.)

Over the next couple of days I'll get my thoughts down on the Treyvon Martin circus, on the SCOTUS's apparent cynicism toward Obamacare, and about the train wreck of a GOP whose best hope for electing a President this fall is precisely due to the fact that Obama himself is perhaps even more unelectable.

High gasoline prices. Check.

Obama delivering off-mic messages to Putin via Medvedev. Check.

A Mitt Romney staffer hinting at the campaign's desire to quickly get the nomination in the bag so that it can go about the business of cutting the conservative wing of the GOP loose while believing it can depend on its votes regardless. Check.

Another failed green energy company. Check.

All of these are simply different verses of the same old song. Give me a day or so to get back on pitch.

I'm guessing Monday.

Conservative Extremists

Tom Backers has a good post up over at Right Michigan.

The major impression most people get from their preferred form of media these days is that the Tea Party is made up of a collection of racist, homophobic, gun and Bible toting extremists so far to the right that they make Barry Goldwater look liberal; the younger generation will have to `Google' Goldwater, but in the print media, folks in my generation and those older will know who I'm referring to. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

There is so much truth to this--the media has hammered so relentlessly on the tea party and on conservatives that the truth of movement and its people has been obscured.

I replied in the comments.

It is truly an odd set of circumstances by which those who are fed up with a $15 trillion national debt, see troubles ahead for a health care system soon to be run by the same bureaucrats who currently run the postal service, and those who would like to see the departments of Energy, State, Interior, and Transportation collude on something other than how to make energy prices necessarily skyrocket, are seen to be the extremists.

Tea party activists are seen as too confrontational to compromise. We fall outside the mainstream, hate progress, and yearn for the days when choiceless women did nothing but bake pies and make babies. No wonder we are hated.

We hear this sort of drivel on every network news broadcast, on every cable news network (save sometimes FOX), on NPR, read it in nearly every major newspaper across America, and have to listen to it from both Democrat and establishment Republican leaders alike whenever we're unfortunate enough to have one of them find a microphone. As comrade Lenin said so many years ago, repeat a falsehood often enough and soon it becomes the truth.

Barbara Bush in a recent interview asked "when did compromise become a dirty word?" She was lamenting the polar opposites of both political parties, harsh rhetoric, and was largely criticizing the uncompromising desires of the tea party. (For Barbara's sake I'll clarify something...compromise is not a dirty word. The recession caused by her husband's compromise on his "no new taxes" pledge was downright filthy.)

Making compromises has never been the problem of conservatives--our problem has been that those for whom we have voted in the past too often already represent a compromise. In fact, the greatest single motivation I had for becoming more politically active was the selection of John McCain to represent conservatives in the last presidential election. Don't tell me that having that milquetoast bureaucrat sitting atop the ballot wasn't a huge compromise of conservative principles.

Conservatives are asked by the GOP to compromise at the ballot box and then the candidate we poorly select is asked to compromise further for the children or the elderly or the environment or for reproductive rights. This is how we end up with a $15 trillion debt--electing compromise candidates who make very stern faces while compromising even farther from a foundation built on shifting sand.

Perhaps no one wants that $15 trillion debt. But actually wanting to elect somebody up front who will do something about it--now that is extreme.

Staged Rush Outrage and the Cynical Left

Make no mistake...every progressive media personality, leftist politician, or socialist pundit that called tea party activists "teabaggers" were, with a quick wink and a sneer, announcing their contempt for conservatives by telling their audiences that conservatives like to dip their testicles into the mouths of one another.

That is what "teabagging" is and what a "teabagger" does. How funny it was for the ever clever left to be able to exude such contempt for all of America to hear without ever being held accountable for what was said.

Where was the media outrage when its own engaged in this sort of attack on opponents? Where was Jennifer Granholm's outrage? Where was Nancy Pelosi's? Where were the statements of David Alexrod and Valerie Jarrett? Did Barack Obama call anyone accused of being a "teabagger" to see if he or she was doing okay?

This latest Rush Limbaugh controversy is little more than the worst sort of cynicism being played out in a series of staged events while making it even more evident the world could end tomorrow by noon--and if it doesn't it probably should.

The political left is a shameless gaggle of disingenuous doofi intent on destroying the America that I know and love. They do it by framing the debate in a false light and then attacking their opponents on the merits of their concocted scenarios.

Rush Limbaugh called a 30 year old feminist activist a slut because she lamented that she and too many of her fellow Georgetown law school enrollees could not afford birth control. These are students that somehow manage to attend a $30,000 per year law school but cannot afford to pick up a box of Trojans every week or so. They want their Catholic university to cough up the money for their Yaz or their rubbers or their diaphragms.

There are apparently no agencies within necessary proximity to give these coeds their relief. There are no Planned Parenthood clinics. There are no women's centers. There are no government agencies available that do such work. No, it has to be the Catholic school. Rush's point, irrespective of his apology, is that these women want to have someone pay them (through the purchase of their birth control) so that they can enjoy sexual activity.

He then called anyone who would do such a thing a slut or a prostitute.

I don't see the problem. Lets be brutally honest. Acts of sexual gratification, repeated so frequently that a horny coed can burn through a couple grand of birth control over the course of two years, more closely resembles sluttishness than does a person believing our government ought to govern according to the founding documents resembles an act of teabagging.

One comment by Rush raises the nation's rafters while thousands of comments by the left brought about a chorus of crickets.

Rush said he was sorry because he lowered himself to the left's standards. Bah. Do it a few thousand more times and he might have a point.

Romney Perched Atop The Fulcrum

The fat lady might not be singing, but she's standing back stage with some salt water gargle and just the slightest touch of crimson rouge. While it is still a mathematical possibility that another candidate could sweep into the GOP catbird seat, with Mitt Romney having gathered as many delegates as he has unto himself at this point in the delegate season, it would take a near miracle for any other GOP candidate to knock him off the November ticket.

What a sad state of affairs this is.

I'm not going to go into the flaws of every candidate left on the GOP ticket other than to say that from a conservative standpoint, the most flawed is the one standing tallest. I say he is the most flawed because his years in government service indicate an to me that he is the biggest believer in big government solutions among all the other big believers.

An important part of his impending victory in the GOP nominating process has been his assurances that he is indeed a conservative. He knew that the conservative base of his party was jumping from one non-Romney candidate to another in sheer terror over the possibility of his carrying the GOP torch. This forced the man to pander to conservatives.

He needed to hold off a charging more conservative Santorum just as he had to put aside the charge of a more conservative Gingrich, a more conservative Perry, a more conservative Cain and a much more conservative Bachmann. (Ron Paul doesn't count in this regard as it appears the two have long been working on a back room deal with the avowed conservative Paul's contribution to the pact being unrelenting attacks on whoever is currently most threatening to Romney.)

But all of this conservative pandering is soon to change.

Romney believes, as do all establishment Republicans, that he can take the votes of conservatives in his party for granted particularly in this election when the need to defeat Obama is so great. Once he has locked down this nominating process he will then move toward attracting centrist and independent voters--a targeted audience that he is much more philosophically inline with.

We are very close to that point.

And this is when we will see what side of the fulcrum Romney lands on. Will he continue to try to soothe conservative voters when he believes they will be compelled to support him regardless, or will he begin to posture to those in the middle with whom he actually finds more common ground?

I believe now that super Tuesday has passed we are going to be seeing more and more of the latter. Contrary positions with the left will soften. So-called pragmatism will trump that of what were once important conservative ideological leanings. Global warming will become even more important as will compassionate immigration reform. Conservatives will simply have to suck it up and take one for the team. (By the way, this is the same thing we had to suck up during the McCain run.)

All of this is pissing me off in advance. It is a certainty that Romney will be taking my vote for granted. I'm certain he shouldn't.

Conservatives Lose a Hero and a Media Warrior

Rest in peace Andrew Breitbart.

Breitbart's story is one of transformation from that of a wrongheaded progressive into a keen conservative with insights that someone always outside of progressivism could never have gained. He used his experience from within the socialist machine to combat that same machine once he saw the light.

He was combative, insightful and always fearless.

I will miss his contributions to the cause.