When Mighty Casey struck out, he may have disappointed the fans of Mudville, but he didn’t insult them. He didn’t brand them racists. Or at least Ernest Lawrence Thayer—the poet who immortalized Casey’s big whiff—didn’t mention any such calumnious castigations in his delightful ditty of the diamond.

But this isn’t 1888—the publication date of Casey at the Bat. No, it’s 2011—the much more modern and much less civilized era of loudmouthed serial interrupters like “Hardball’s” Chris Matthews, who makes rude conquerors like Alexander the Great look polite by comparison.

Used as I (and I suspect you) am to Matthews’ cheesecloth logic and scattershot, half-cocked accusations, I make it a point to miss “Hardball” as often as possible. When Fate is kind, on any given week I am able to miss all five episodes of The Interrupter’s Diatribe-Disguised-as-Dialogue program. Not catching Chris’ hour of senile logorrhea gives one a rare feeling of euphoria—akin to finding a free parking spot in downtown Chicago on a Saturday night, or—back in the days when apartment life compelled me to frequent laundromats—finding a vacant dryer with time still paid for on it. Missing ”Hardball” is just one of those simple pleasures in life that puts a little extra spring in your step and a smile on your face. I’m grateful to MSNBC for affording me this little weekly bit of heaven on earth—missing “Hardball”—especially now that I can no longer thrill to missing “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” five times a week.

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I don’t regularly watch MSNBC, but curiosity got the better of me tonight. For no special reason, I found myself wondering what THE Place for Politics—I can’t bring myself to use the network’s new slogan—would say about the midterm elections the day after. So I tuned into The Rachel Maddow Show.

Let me first acknowledge that the puckish Ms. Maddow is has a certain insouciant charisma and seems quite comfortable on air–a natural.

Nevertheless, by the end of the hour, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the lass. If tonight’s menu is representative of the content and style of Maddow’s eponymous program, it was disappointing to see her obvious talent wasted on the wholesaling of bitter schadenfreude and age-old class-warfare.

Why do I say this?

In the show’s first segment, while positing that the newly House-dominant Republican party would be unwilling to compromise with President Obama on anything (a curious prejudgment), Maddow managed to work the recent BP oil spill into her monologue, ostensibly referring to inevitable upcoming House-Senate negotiations on energy legislation. (more…)

Tea Pluribus Unum.  The brew of individual liberty. What’s good for One is good for the Many.

That’s my simple message to Paul Krugman, who, along with Frank Rich, serves as the New York Times’ chief peddler of Tea-ophobia these days. If you watch ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday or read his columns, you are familiar with the Keynesian ravings of Krugman, who calls for additional government spending on a near-daily basis. If this were ancient Rome, he’d be named Stimulus Maximus and we’d mock him with scathing epodes at the monthly Bacchus festival.

But this is not ancient Rome, and 21^st-century Americans are a much kinder, nobler people, motivated by charity and gratitude. Therefore, I say, Tea Party supporters, it’s time to give back to Paul Krugman. It’s time to thank the Nobel laureate for statements such as these from his latest NYT op-ed (“Divided We Fail”):

Barring a huge upset, Republicans will take control of at least one house of Congress next week. How worried should we be by that prospect? …Future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness… So if the elections go as expected next week, here’s my advice: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Thank him? What on earth for?

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Joe Klein is one angry man. In fact, Joe’s so pissed-off I think he could shoot the next Twelve Angry Men sequel all by himself. Why is poor Joe so unhappy? Because we—well, actually, mostly you conservative women out there—are just so bleeping ignorant, that’s why. As an avid Tea Party supporter, I’ll be the first to admit I’m just a mindless dolt who consistently misspells the racist, dimwitted signs I bring to the rallies. Still, I’m not nearly as ignorant as you female Tea Party supporters. I mean, you’re really bleeping dumb!

But don’t believe me. Just read irascible Joe’s latest rant, “Ignorance as Authenticity,” immortalized for all time—or at least for a week or two—in Time. Mined from which, I bring you this nugget of angry Joe gold:

There is no way she [Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell] could ever be confused with a member of the elites; there is no way she could be confused with an above average high school student. Her ignorance, therefore, makes her authentic–the holy grail of latter-day American politics: she’s a real person, not like those phony politicians. In that sense, she—and the lifeboat filled with other Tea Party know-nothings—follow in the wake of our leading exemplar of ignorant authenticity, Sarah Palin (who seems every bit as unaware of public policy—she certainly never talks about it—as she was when a desperate and petulant John McCain chose her to be his running mate). There is something profoundly diseased about a society that idolizes its ignoramuses and disdains its experts.

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The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne has just given us a new line of attack on the Tea Party: now the movement is just a giant scam out to hoodwink the American public.

Is the tea party one of the most successful scams in American political history?… the tea party constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its numbers. …The tea party may be pulling a fast one on the country and the media.

The only one trying to pull a fast one here is Dionne—who’s playing fast and loose with the facts. More about that shortly.  But first, a question: “What makes a liberal deny reality?” There can be only two answers.

Either the liberal is so blinded by ideology that he simply cannot see the truth, or the liberal’s unwillingness to recognize painful reality compels him to try to minimize it. Paul Krugman falls into the first category.  A Keynesian crackhead from his salad days, Krugman believes the first stimulus was too small.

Dionne falls into the second. He can’t accept the inescapable truth that the Tea Party is here to stay. And so, Dionne does what most ideologically strait-jacketed liberals do: he minimizes. By the way, throughout his article, note how Dionne intentionally spells the movement in lower case (“tea party”), literally diminishing the group by not granting it upper case status. In comparison,“Republican” and “Democrat” get full capital letter respect in Dionne’s piece. Anyway, here’s E.J.’s  “proof” that the Tea Party is fringe. (more…)

E.J. Dionne reminds me of all those fin-du-siecle losers back in the late ’70s and early ’80s who still touted the supremacy of their 8-track tapes long after the industry had moved on to the smaller, more convenient cassette.  Demodé E.J. doesn’t realize the Republican Party has undergone a techno-ideological renaissance and that the antiquated political world he longs to revive—if it in fact ever really existed—is obsolete.

Here’s one of E.J.’s hoary 8-track conclusions:

After two decades in which moderates fled a party increasingly dominated by its right wing, the Republican primary electorate has been reduced to nothing but its right wing. O’Donnell, boosted by a last minute anti-Castle spending spree from the California-based Tea Party Express, pulled off her revolution with a little over 30,000 votes. That’s all it took to seize control of a once Grand Old Party in which the center no longer has the troops.

Dionne, starry-eyed piner after days gone by, has it all backwards.  O’Donnell didn’t seize the G.O.P. -– the G.O.P. seized upon O’Donnell, and on her dedication to party principles. Unlike Castle, she’s no spelunker; she doesn’t cave. The Republican party is experiencing a widespread Reaganesque rebirth and the old parameters no longer apply. (more…)

In her latest Hail Mary effort to replace the flag of conservative Reason with the flag of liberal Emotion, Maureen Dowd goes talons-out for Newt Gingrich, for “making outrageous, unsubstantiated comments to appeal to the wing nuts among us. “

Harry Reid tweets Lady Gaga while Newt Gingrich is truly gaga…The conservative who fancies himself a historian and visionary did not use his critical faculties to resist his party’s lunacy but instead has embraced it, shamelessly. He has given a full-throated endorsement to a dangerously irresponsible and un-Christian theory by Ann Coulter-in-pants Dinesh D’Souza.

For those who missed round one, D’Souza is the author of a new book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, a peek into which was afforded us thanks to the recent issue of Forbes, which published “How Obama Thinks.” D’Souza’s thesis: that Obama is acting out his Kenyan father’s anti-colonial resentment against the West.

What makes D’Souza’s quite logical interpretation of Obama’s psyche “dangerously irresponsible” to Dowd is, of course, the mere fact that she disagrees with it. If Maureen says it’s wrong, it’s wrong. Q.E.D., no further proof necessary.

Gingrich’s support for D’Souza’s theory—that you can only understand Obama “if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior”—made proud, loud Dowd howl louder: (more…)

If you’ve never seen the movie The Women, don’t feel bad. You can get a much better lesson in girl-on-girl bitchiness by reading Gail Collins’ much nastier New York Times op-ed “Sarah’s Amazing Race.”

With all the outrage over frivolous stimulus spending projects, the government should fund a study of the nexus between hatred of Palin and the absence of the Y chromosome in liberals like Collins. Finally we’d see stimulus money well-spent. Here’s the first of Collins’ ad feminam mud-balls:

… Palin is on a roll. She’s got her own TV show, not counting Fox News. And she twitters! Or somebody does it for her. Hard to tell which. Her twit on the president’s Iraq speech was: “may make u want to dig out ur old Orwell books so rewritten history can be deciphered.” On the one hand, the sentence construction does have that Sarah ring to it. On the other, how many of you think that Palin has old Orwell books hanging around the house? May I see a show of hands?

In this embarrassingly mean-spirited column, Collins drips elitist superciliousness like a human IV-bag. The above excerpt alone shows Collins staking out both Twitter and the entire George Orwell oeuvre as the sole property of the left. (more…)

Paul “The End Is Near” Krugman thinks conservatives are seeing witches but it’s really the Nobel Laureate who’s fighting his own liberal demons. In his August 29 New York Times op-ed, “It’s Witch-Hunt Season Again,” Krugman showcases both his traditional humorlessness and his peerless paranoia about what the inevitable Republican rout in the November mid-terms “will do to America.”

The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop witch-hunt by his political opponents… Now it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse. Let’s turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh: “Imam Hussein Obama,” he recently declared, is “probably the best anti-American president we’ve ever had.”… When people like Mr. Limbaugh talk like this, bear in mind that he’s an utterly mainstream figure within the Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house of Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly.  So where is this rage coming from? Why is it flourishing? What will it do to America?

Before proceeding, let us not fail to note that Krugman’s conceding at minimum a Republican take-over of the House implies an accompanying fear of loss of the Senate as well. No wonder poor Paul’s a pallid pundit these days.

Now let’s examine Krugman’s inability to understand satire. This is a common liberal malady brought about by years of wearing one’s bleeding heart all over one’s sleeve. While Krugman’s humorlessness is no doubt incurable at this point, there may be other liberals whose capacity for laughter can still be salvaged by examining the Krugman case. At least it’s worth a try. (more…)

According to his August 30 “Obama Needs to Relearn Politicking” column, E.J. Dionne thinks all Obama needs to acquire the legendary cult status of an FDR or a Ronald Reagan is to get in touch with his inner salesman.  In a refreshing (and rare) moment of liberal candor, Dionne concedes the President’s failure to sell his vision to the American people:

Obama and his party are also in a hole because the president has chosen not to engage the nation in an extended dialogue about what holds all his achievements together, or why his attitude toward government makes more sense than the scattershot conservative attacks on everything Washington might do to improve the nation’s lot.

Leaving aside the appropriateness of Dionne’s “scattershot” qualifier (some might argue those conservative attacks display, on the contrary, pinpoint accuracy), Dionne faults Obama not for what he has accomplished but merely for his inability to “to persuade free citizens of the merits of a set of ideas, policies and decisions [to] put what they are doing in a compelling context.” Seems like an odd complaint to make about a man purported by his supporters to be a gifted orator, and who never seems to shut up.

Regardless, Dionne seems to hunger for some sort of Apple Store for Obama’s programs—a friendly place where, now that we own Obamacare (and its stealth take-over of the student loan program), Cash for Clunkers, GM, etc., we could have all these new-fangled Statist gizmos explained to us by an all-knowing, confidence-inspiring political geek squad.

Unfortunately for us, the Obama administration’s programs were not voluntarily purchased the way an iPhone or iPad is. They were thrust upon us by unilateral Congressional fiat. Case in point, Obamacare, which was foisted upon an unwilling electorate, a majority of which would love to see it repealed. Furthermore, unlike those nifty Steve Jobs gadgets, Obamacare is the opposite of sleek—a clumsy, massive, hydra-headed piece of legislation that an army of Apple support staff couldn’t explain in a year of daily classes. (more…)

A funny thing happened on the way to ABC’s This Week round table yesterday. The circle turned into a hexagon.

Instead of the usual balance of two—occasionally three—commentators from both political perspectives, ABC’s special Independence Day edition featured a 5-on-1 lib-to-con tilt. Crammed into the liberal corner were Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Cynthia “The People Are Stupid” Tucker, Bloomberg’s Al” Tea-Party Hater“  Hunt, Nobel-laureate Paul “Stimulus Maximus” Krugman, and Univision anchor/illegal immigrant amnesty proponent Jorge Ramos.

Looking a little lonely over in the cobwebbed conservative corner was Dan Senor, former Republican foreign policy advisor to “W,” husband of Campbell Brown,and founding partner of Rosemont Capital.

Hey, that’s a pentagon, not a hexagon. No, you just forgot to add Jake Tapper, the discussion’s—cough—impartial moderator. Now we’ve got all six sides of our wobbly table. Yet despite the flawed design of the furniture, nevertheless it was the “Senor moments” that carried the day.

One of the main issues addressed by our hexagon of heated haranguers was how best to foster economic recovery.

To no one’s surprise, all except Senor parroted the administration’s position that we desperately need more stimulus. Stimulus Maximus called the first stimulus bill—nearly a trillion dollars—a “half measure” (!) and says it’s time to double-down. Tucker, in a beautifully-timed fourth-of-July display of disdain for the muddle-headed hoi polloi (you and me), empathized about how “the people” were “confused” by the word “stimulus,” and praised Democrats for rightly rebranding the next handout as a “jobs bill.” To her, we’re too stupid to understand what “stimulus” means yet stupid enough to be fooled by the new marketing campaign. (more…)

No sign of desperation at CNN these days. Nooooooooo. After all, what TV producer wouldn’t jump at the chance to premiere a new prime-time political show this fall with a disgraced former attorney-general/governor-turned-high-end-john?

Yes, that’s right—CNN jumped first. They’ve just announced their new hour-long show with “conservative” 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner Kathleen Parker and 2008 Booby Prize winner Eliot Spitzer. This program has class writ large all over it. It’s low class—but it’s still class.

Once details of his secret life as “Client No. 9” in a haute-poitrine call-girl business emerged back in March 2008 (and after he subsequently resigned as New York’s governor), no doubt the TV offers just poured in for Eliot Spitzer. “The usurer hangs the cozener,” complains King Lear. And in Spitzer’s little tragedy of pimp and prejudice, the john hangs the hooker. (more…)

It’s like a doctor who smokes. You’d think the last person to be done in by his own words would be a journalist. Shouldn’t a purveyor of words know better?

Yet as today’s forced resignation by WaPo columnist David Weigel proves, “Physician, heal thyself” is one piece of advice that seems to be ignored by wordsmiths of just about all stripes these days. On the heels of Helen Thomas—or are they flats?—Weigel is just the latest to join the Oral Suicide Club.

What was Weigel’s offense?  Unfortunately for him, the man hired by WaPo to write about the conservative movement couldn’t resist showing his true anti-conservative colors on what he thought was a “private” journalist email list called Journolist — which was disbanded today by its creator, Ezra Klein. In a June 24 Betsy Rothstein story on Fishbowl DC, Weigel in his own emailed words reveals what Weigel unplugged sounds like:

This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.

I’d politely encourage everyone to think twice about rewarding the Examiner with any traffic or links for a while. I know the temptation is high to follow up hot hot Byron York scoops, but please resist it.

Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller has unearthed other examples of Weigel’s bias, including a macabre death wish for Rush Limbaugh and other injudicious anti-conservative remarks. (more…)

Eugene Robinson, a stage four Obama apologist at the Washington Post, thinks the Republican party is “all shook up” over Joe Barton’s portrayal of the Obama-BP “meeting” as a shakedown. Strange words coming from an MSM Obama shill who himself ain’t nothing but a hound dog.

Going all in for the President— the Constitution and Bill of Rights be damned—Robinson has once again bravely chosen blind “stand by your man” allegiance over objective journalistic reason. From Robinson’s June 22 “All Shook Up for BP” column:

A group comprising roughly two-thirds of all Republicans in the House takes the position that President Obama was wrong to demand that BP set aside money to guarantee that those whose livelihoods are being ruined by the oil spill will be compensated. In other words, it’s more important to kneel at the altar of radical conservative ideology than to feel any sense of compassion for one’s fellow Americans. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how today’s GOP rolls.

This logic is twice flawed. First, in Robinson’s murky thought world, following the Bill of Rights amounts to “radical conservative ideology.” Did he miss Article VII of said Bill?  The one that states:

Nor shall [any person] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

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It’s hard not to feel sorry for Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift. She’s like the unlucky girl who keeps trying oh-so-hard but never makes the cheerleading squad. In column after column Clift seems to be angling for some future sinecure in the Obama administration a la Jay Carney, who left Time to work as communications director for Joe “Big F—ing Deal” Biden. But so far, no luck.

How else to explain this woman’s latest effort in sis-boom-bah journalism? Like a good little cheerleader, Clift flings her pom-poms in an acrobatic effort to distract from the real issue—Obama’s woeful handling of the Gulf catastrophe—with a gratuitous attack on the Tea Party, Dick Armey, and defenders of the Constitution in general.

What Would the Tea Party Do?

They object to Obama. Fine—but it’s worth asking how they would handle something like the gulf oil spill.

In actuality, no, it’s not worth asking what the Tea Party would do. The Tea Party is a movement, not a person. But in light of the fact that the average Tea Party candidate running in any of the various races around the country has more practical business experience than President Obama—who has none—smart money would take the odds on the Tea Party candidate versus the Community Organizer any day—even on an oil-slippery track.

After her opening move, Clift flashes her brightest Obama smile: (more…)

Wilder Publications, a small publishing company based in Redford Va., is offering on Amazon.com a rather unusual compendium of The Constitution, The Declaration of Independence, and the Articles of Confederation. The Wilder edition of our country’s founding documents comes complete with a prefatory warning label:

This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work.”

The outcry— not only from the right—has been predictably vociferous. There’s even a Facebook page urging a boycott of Wilder Publications and also offering interesting information regarding its owner, Warren Lapine, including some of his favorite Facebook pages. Other displays of outrage against Wilder are numerous and easily located via a simple Google search.

With all due respect to them, however, Lapine’s detractors have it all wrong. Rather than revilement, we owe Wilder Publications a huge debt of gratitude for this useful and long overdue caveat lector. Wilder Publications has just invented a new genre of literature: safe history. (more…)

Thursday night at the White House, we Yanks gave Sir Paul McCartney the Gershwin Prize—the equivalent of the Purple Heart for songwriting—and in a brief info-mercial for British deference and class, Sir Paul gave this short, gracious speech in return:

Just before we leave, I wanna just say one more time that it’s a fantastic honor for the Gershwin family to give me this incredible award and for me to be awarded it by the Library of Congress. And in fact after the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is.

So who better to refute Sir Paul than Sir Paul? Therefore here’s my little act of amateur music criticism to McCartney, written in words he can easily understand. Here it is, Sir Paul. Come and get it.

Dear Prudence,

Scratch that. That’s definitely not who you are.

Dear Nowhere Man,

Help! I don’t want to spoil the party, but I’ve just seen a face of yours I never expected to see. Baby, you’re a rich man, but bashing George W. Bush is just so yesterday. Libs have been doing it here there and everywhere, eight days a week, for ten years now. All you had to do was act naturally, not foment a whole revolution. (more…)

Joe McGinniss has broken no law by renting the house adjacent to Palin’s. McGinniss is technically within his rights to become Palin’s next-door neighbor.

And of course, being technically within one’s rights is a perfectly valid justification for a complete lack of common decency and respect for one’s fellow human being, is it not? Apparently Wasilla Alaska’s newest resident thinks it is. Unabashed champion of ends-justifying-means tactics Saul Alinsky would be proud.

At age 26 in 1970 McGinniss was the youngest writer to have a bestseller on the New York Times bestseller list, his The Selling of the President, a study of Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. Surely McGinniss’ past laurels absolve him of any perceived effrontery in his treatment of Palin and her family. Surely the public’s burning need for McGinniss’ future vivisection of Ms. Palin trumps any right she and her family have to enjoy—unintimidated, unobserved, unfettered— the five months during which McGinniss has rented the adjacent home at 1160 W. Lake Lucille Drive. (more…)

As the nearly two-year-old Palin piñata-fest demonstrates, for the devout liberal the intersection of Sorority Street and Politics Avenue is left-turn only.

To no one’s surprise, Sarah Palin remains the left’s First Lady of political feminae non gratae, the gold standard. The needle on the left’s Feminometer moves from the safe green left-hand side (Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi) to the beige neutral middle (Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins) to the hazardous red-hued right-hand zone (Michele Bachmann) to the far-right crimson danger area (Sarah).

Palin’s status as the left’s lead whipping girl is not news. What is news is that women like Eleanor Clift (Hell hath no fury like a liberal feminist scorned) are using the same elitist Palinesque prejudices to bash this year’s crop of wrong-turning conservative women.

One of them is Linda McMahon, the Republican candidate for the Connecticut Senate seat soon to be vacated by writing-on-the-wall-peruser Chris Dodd. Here’s Clift in her May 28 column “2010 Likely to Bring a Crop of One-Term Senate Wonders:” (more…)

After more than 20 agonizing months in exile at an undisclosed location, Mayor Ed Koch’s runaway mind made a daring escape from its captor, Obama-mania, this week and has at last come home safe and sound. At 85, the former New York mayor’s mind—a little haggard, a little road-weary—nevertheless appeared to be in full control of its former lucidity after a long stint in captivity to the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s New World Order.

Before discussing their safe reunion with the Mayor’s body, let’s recall the day the Kochian faculties took their abrupt and surprising leave of absence, stunning New Yorkers who still harbored fond memories of their Greenwich Village bachelor mayor. It was September 9, 2008 when Mayor Koch—after supporting Hillary Clinton throughout her failed primary—wrote this:

So the issue for me is who will best protect and defend America. I have concluded that the country is safer in the hands of Barack Obama, leader of the Democratic Party and protector of the philosophy of that party.

That was Day One of captivity for the mayoral mind. The Koch endorsement of Obama was not solely founded on defending America from the threat of terrorism, as it had been, for example, when he endorsed George W. Bush in 2004, stating then “the overwhelming issue for me was international Islamic terrorism, including al-Qaeda.”

No, on September 9, 2008 Koch’s mind already displayed significant traces of Stockholm Syndrome support for Obama’s full-fledged progressive agenda, along with what would become the liberal’s fail-safe prescription, a strong injection of Sarah-phobia: (more…)