Entries for October 2008

My Thomas Jefferson Street colleague Jack Farrell has done his best to vindicate the impact of Barack Obama's proposed tax hikes on personal income. Leaving aside Jack's reliance on the assumptions of the Tax Policy Center (which he fails to note is a decidedly left-leaning organization), his conclusion seems to be: Only a few "millionaires" would get whacked, so what's the big deal?

Fine, Jack believes income taxes should be raised. But to what end? As best I can tell, he simply holds that some people make "too much."

After taking a barb from liberal journalist Elaine Lafferty for her dim assessment of Sarah Palin's intelligence, my Thomas Jefferson Street colleague Bonnie Erbe responds:

There's been precious little good news for conservatives lately, but Monday brought a hint of sunshine. Sen. Ted Stevens, the top Republican on the Appropriations Committee, was found guilty on all seven counts of corruption by a Washington, D.C., jury.

The longtime pol failed to disclose that he received things of value—notably, construction work on what he calls his "chalet"—from an Alaskan company to which he steered contracts, and for that, he is legally guilty. But in a broader sense, he is also morally guilty for turning the public coffers into a candy jar and corrupting his nominal party.

My old boss Robert Novak is fond of saying that there are three parties on Capitol Hill: the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Appropriators. And while Stevens's conviction will no doubt play to the GOP's disadvantage in the coming week, his exit can serve as a useful and necessary reminder to Republican lawmakers that, in the words of Barry Goldwater, they have worshiped false idols.

The historian Edmund Morris has an op-ed in today's New York Times in which, by cherry-picking quotes from Teddy Roosevelt, he attempts to make the case that America's 26th president would support Barack Obama.

Like those silly op-eds that are written in the open-letter style, this colloquy formula is nothing more than a crutch for someone too lazy or muddled to write a persuasive piece on his own. Morris's article, however, is detestable not just for its pedantic structure but for its perniciousness.

Writing in the Kansas City Star, columnist Lewis Diuguid gets to the heart of why Team McCain describes Obama's tax pledge to "spread the wealth around" as socialist:

The "socialist" label that Sen. John McCain and his GOP presidential running mate Sarah Palin are trying to attach to Sen. Barack Obama actually has long and very ugly historical roots.

And what might those "ugly historical roots" be? Might they include Marx, Engels, Mao. and the economic, mental, and physical enslavement their grand ideas wrought?

No, it turns out that socialism's real ugliness came from those who fought against it. Just as with McCain and Palin today, the capitalist pigs' opposition to socialism was really a foil for their racism. As Diuguid attempts to explain (emphases his):

What will be the fate of the Bush administration's deal with North Korea? One victim will be the false notion of paper containment when the hermit kingdom surely cheats on the arrangement. Another more satisfying victim will be the "pragmatists" who, despite common sense and history, championed the deal. More immediately, however, there is State's "terror list" itself, which by North Korea's removal is revealed as a joke.

My Thomas Jefferson Street colleague Bonnie Erbe is reveling in the right's reaction to Christopher Buckley's decision to vote for Barack Obama. Buckley, of course, is the son of the late conservative godfather William F. Buckley Jr. but also a bright mind in his own right, so his defection deserves to be noticed.

Bonnie takes a few jabs at conservative reaction, which is justifiably indignant but, admittedly, in many instances downright nasty. Well, yes, the right has its share of impolite radicals too.

Far more important, however, is the substance of Buckley's dissent.