We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
A couple of months ago, I went on the record with my prediction of the US Presidential election would come out. Because so far it looks to be spot on, I am pleased to post a status report.
As I predicted, Kerry has lost ground since early August, and shows every indication of having, indeed, tested the top of his market for votes somewhere in July, somewhere in the high 40s. Current polling shows him with support somewhere in the mid to low 40s.
Bush has made up ground since August, having tested the bottom of his support in mid-August, and is now polling in the high 40s. My market timing was off a trifle on Bush – I thought he had hit bottom in late July/early August, but there was a bit of a lag before he started moving up to his current, fairly stable 5 – 6 point lead.
The Kerry campaign tried to ramp up a new negative attack on Bush (coodinated with CBS) based on allegations that he got special privileges as a National Guard pilot during the Vietnam war. Lost in the kerfuffle over the forgeries that were supposed to drive this story is the fact that this is well-plowed ground – this is at least the third time the Dems have tried to hang Bush with this one. Similarly, Kitty Kelly’s book supposedly detailing Bush’s wastrel past is merely an attempt to sex up a story that has already been put to the voters, and has indeed been coopted by Bush as a tale of sin and redemption. As I guessed, it appears that the Dems have nothing new to try to stick on Bush.
With five weeks until election day, I see nothing on the horizon that can fundamentally change the dynamic of this race (all caveats from my original post apply, of course). I will confess that my prediction of a narrow Bush victory appears to be a little pessimistic at this point.
I hardly know where to begin on this one (from Fox News).
While Bush has been campaigning as the best candidate to deter terrorists and protect the nation, Kerry portrayed him as out of touch with the situation in Iraq.
“With all due respect to the president, has he turned on the evening news lately? Does he read the newspapers?” Kerry said. “Does he really know what’s happening? Is he talking about the same war that the rest of us are talking about?”
This man thinks the Commander-in-chief should formulate war strategies according to what it says on CNN, and he is standing for president of the United States?
With all due respect to the Democratic candidate, has he never heard of military intelligence? Does he even know what the blogosphere is? Is he talking about the same universe that the rest of us are talking about?
Damn right, we are talking about different wars. This is the real one. And it’s not available in any newspapers.
I have just attached a comment to this posting by Bill Hobbs. It could all, as I explained in it, be nonsense, but since postings here have been a little thin of late, I thought it worth a copy-and-paste to here. But please understand that what follows is a think-aloud guess that only just now occurred to me, and that I would not feel personally wounded if it was immediately comment-banged into oblivion.
I am a Brit, living in London, and have watched the Dan Rather forgery story with fascination.
But until now, like Dan Rather himself, I had assumed that George Bush’s conduct in the National Guard was indeed not to his credit. But now I am starting to believe that this might have been entirely made-up nonsense.
Two things I am learning about your President are that (a) he loves to win, and that (b) one of his favourite methods for winning is to sucker his opponents into a battleground where they think they will win… and then kill them.
I get the feeling that Bush is now doing this to the Sadaamites in Iraq. Let them (and their cheerleaders in the West in general and among the Democrats in particular) think they are winning and that Bush is losing, let them choose what they think is the perfect battleground, and then crucify them. Operation Crucifixion is just now getting underway, if I understand present circumstances in Iraq rightly. Interesting timing, eh?
What this latest ABC story suggests to me is that maybe Bush is also doing something very similar to the Kerry Campaign re Bush’s service in the National Guard. He has suckered the Democrats into a frenzied focus on Bush the skiving daddy’s boy and fake warrior, only now to hit them with the story, at just the right moment, that this was actually one of Bush’s more honourable early episodes.
I hereby place a bet on your forthcoming Presidential election: f**cking Bush landslide. Thermonuclear. If Kerry thinks it is bad now, let him see how it all looks in another month. 25 point poll difference. Meltdown chez the Kerry campaign. Bush looking so smug the Democrats will be jumping off ledges.
As I say, I am only a watcher from a distance and this comment could itself all be made-up nonsense, and the worst sort of wishful thinking. But … well, we shall see. Just some late night thoughts.
Forgive me, I am not a regular reader of this blog [i.e. of Bill Hobbs’ blog], and if it and its regular commenters have explained/demolished all this at length already, then my deep apologies for the repetition.
The left thinks that the issues around the TANG service are relevant – Bush was AWOL then, Bush lied about WMD, both instances involve acronyms, and can’t you SEE the cloven hooves? It’s the same sort of thing that gripped the feverish elements of the Right in the 90s: Clinton winked at drug-smuggling out of Mena, therefore he sold nuclear secrets to the Chinese for campaign donations. ISN’T IT CLEAR? But that sort of nonsense was confined the margins; the editor of the Clinton Chronicles wasn’t sitting in the presidential suite at the 2000 convention like Michael Moore sitteth at the left hand of Jimmy Carter in 2004.
– James Lileks via Hugh Hewitt
It seems that the same idea has indeed gone out like a clarion call from many watchtowers and mountain tops and it must be a great time to be in the gun store business in the good ol’ U.S. of A.
Heh 
(joyous tip of the hat to Freedom Sight for the link)
…well, arms shops actually.
The absurd ‘assault weapon’ ban which prohibited certain weapons on the basis of largely aesthetic criteria, has expired in the USA as of today. However as Dubya made it clear that if there had been enough support for extending the ban in Congress, he would have signed it into law rather than try and veto it, please resist the urge to feel much gratitude for his lukewarm support for the Second Amendment.
However it was passed before and could certainly happen again.
And so I urge all the redoubtable gun owning men and women of the USA to run, not walk, to their nearest gun shop and purchase nice Kalashnikov or AR-15 or Ruger Mini-14 or FAL or M-14 or whatever, plus a goodly selection of flash suppressors and high capacity magazines, thus ensuring that there are soooooo many of the damn things in circulation that any future ban will simply have no effect.
Use the power of the Buycott, have fun at the range, arm yourself to the teeth and, best of all, absolutely enrage advocates of gun control in the process.
I mean, how good it that?
Good stance and correct breathing: now that is what I call gun control
This is a day on which Americans must stop in the daily flow of life and remember our war dead. We should think not only of our fellow citizens who died in their thousands in those terrible few hours this morning three years ago, but also of the courage of those around the world doing their best to prevent or delay ‘the next time’. Each day which passes without another attack on our soil is a blessing we should cherish. It is another day in which millions may go about their daily lives, love their children and spouses, be kind to strangers and enjoy the blessings of liberty.
Make no mistake. Our turn will come again. Before this World War is over, there will be other grim days to remember.
As we have seen in Russia, not even children… not even infants are safe. These are monsters we battle. This is evil and depravity of a depth and kind almost beyond twenty-first century comprehension. Whether you wish to call them a mutation or a throwback or meme infested cultists of the damned makes no difference to me. I refuse to share a planet with them and I refuse to share the name Homo Sapiens with them.
I will never forget. And I will never, ever, forgive.
George Will, dorky docent of American conservatism, detects a return to the libertarian stylings of Barry Goldwater at the Republican national convention.
Four decades after a Republican convention in San Francisco nominated Sen. Goldwater, sealing the ascendancy of conservatism within the party, his kind of conservatism made a comeback at the convention here. That conservatism – muscular foreign policy backing unapologetic nationalism; economic policies of low taxation and light regulation; a libertarian inclination regarding cultural question – is not fully ascendant in the party. But the prominent display and rapturous reception of Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger demonstrated that such conservatism is not an insurmountable impediment to a person reaching the party’s highest echelons.
For structural and probably cultural reasons, it is highly unlikely that America will ever have anything other than a two-party system. For this reason, pragmatic libertarians will have to learn how to work the two-party system. For all their manifest shortcomings, the Republicans seem to be a more hospitable environment at this point.
But the domination of the Republican Party by cultural conservatives did make some other conservatives — libertarians and religious skeptics, among others — feel uneasy, even unwelcome. Being derided as RINOs — Republicans in name only — did not help. And the dominance of the cultural conservatives gave force to the Democrats’ and media’s caricatures of the Republican Party as a brackish lagoon of intolerance, a caricature that, like all caricatures, contained a trace of truth.
For all the rending of garments coming from the Democrats and the secular left, I see remarkably little in the way of actual state action implementing the allegedly theocratic cravings of the social conservatives since their rise to influence in the Republican Party. I certainly disagree with them on a number of points, but a careful reading tends to show that a great deal of what they want falls into the area of civil society, not state action. They have, of course, been infected to some degree with the virus of statism, but cries of alarm from the statist left that the Christian conservatives are attempting to implement state-mandated mind and social controls smack more of projection than anything else. Much of the social/cultural conservative agenda is defensive and reformist – they are animated by a desire to roll back what they see as a state-facilitated and noxious cultural of radical relativism and secular radicalism. Even their current flagship issue – the “defense of marriage” – boils down to preventing change from being imposed by state organs without democratic approval.
Interesting times, my friends, interesting times.
ADDENDUM: A few additional thoughts whilst standing in line for lunch.
In discourse, terminology is destiny. As a legal drafter, I always go first and foremost to the defined terms of a contract, regulation or policy. In bashing out the paragraph above on cultural or social conservatives, I mistakenly adopted some of Will’s terminology.
The bugaboo of the left (and their organ the Democrats) in the US is the “religious right,” and my comments in the paragraph above are directed primarily to this bugaboo. Aside from religiously driven moral concerns, though, the major driver of real social/cultural conservatism in this country is the puritan streak that has been handed down through the ages as the antithesis of the hedonistic American thesis.
In recent decades, this puritanical impulse has been mated to the statist impulse, yielding such unholy offspring as the radical environmental movement, the anti-smoking crusade, the nascent anti-fat crusade, and of course the drug war. You will note that the puritans reside comfortably all across the political spectrum in America, and have had a much greater impact on state activities than religious devotees. Neither the Republicans or the Democrats has really made any effort to take on the puritans, who in many ways have become a major bulwark for the cult of the state.
There were two articles on the Rittenhouse Review which rather interested me:
Firstly the blog’s author, James Capozzola, displays what I can only describe as a very healthy disdain for democracy (which I certainly share) by applauding the fact that people in Pennsylvania will not be allowed to vote for Ralph Nader for President of the USA. I have commented on this subject before on Samizdata.net.
Now if only Kerry and Bush could also be disqualified…
Secondly, there is an article which mentions that the 427th Transportation Company (based in Pennsylvania, hence being of particular interest to Philadelphia based Rittenhouse Review) was deployed to Iraq with insufficient body armour and GPS sets. He approvingly notes that after he reported on this, one of his readers privately purchased a GPS set and intends to mail it out to Iraq for the unit to use. I too heartily approve of this and would love to see a significant proportion of the military’s funding gradually replaced with voluntary subscriptions, something I would happily contribute to myself. However I must take issue with the phrase:
Imagine it: The U.S. military, notably reservists, relying on family, friends, neighbors, and perfect strangers to fill gaping holes in the Pentagon supply chain.
I would prefer to think of it as ‘members of society with a vested interest in survival and an affinity for the people defending them’, rather than the more pejorative ‘perfect strangers’, filling the spaces left in the Pentagon’s supply chain which are theirs to rightly fill.
Does anyone believe that Michael Moore actually had this conversation?
I mean, with an actual live human being, and not just in his own head.
Alice Cooper, that paragon of conservative values and restraint is… backing George Bush! Methinks the more wingnut elements of the Republican Party will probably have rather mixed feeling about that particular endorsement.
Well at least his reasons are hard to fault. Why? Because so many musicians are backing Kerry and…
If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal. Besides, when I read the list of people who are supporting Kerry, if I wasn’t already a Bush supporter, I would have immediately switched. Linda Ronstadt? Don Henley? Geez, that’s a good reason right there to vote for Bush.
Not quite enough to get me swooning for Dubya, but damn, one can find strangely compelling wisdom in the most unlikely places. 
I recall, shortly after I first got myself on-line, frequently seeing the phrase ‘ROFLMAO’ appear on various chat rooms and fora. I had not a clue what this term meant but, after a little judicious detective work, I discovered that is was an acronym for the phrase ‘Rolling On the Floor Laughing My Arse Off’.
Well, I was ROFLMAO when I read this:
TORY leader Michael Howard has been barred from the White House and told he will never meet President George Bush, it emerged last night.
The bombshell ban was slapped on Mr Howard after he called for Tony Blair to quit over the Iraq War….
What particularly upset the White House was Mr Howard’s comment: “If I were Prime Minister I would seriously be considering my position.”
They were also angered when the Tory leader accused the PM of “serious dereliction of duty”.
Mr Rove, who speaks with the President’s full authority, said: “You can forget about meeting the President full stop. Don’t bother coming, you are not meeting him….”
And it has deeply damaged the decades-long alliance between the Republicans and the Conservative Party.
Senior US Right-wingers blame Mr Howard for undermining the coalition in Iraq and say they are privately rooting for a Labour victory in the next election.
A Tory source said: “They see Tony Blair as a true ally against terror and the Tories as a bunch of w*****s.”
Wherever would they get that idea??!!
Although the cause of this spat is laid at the door of Mr Howard’s apparent equivocation over Iraq, I get the feeling that the real friction lies elsewhere. Strange as it may sound, I have been reading what sound like reasonably reliable reports in the UK press about squadrons of young British Conservative activists hot-footing it off to the USA to work in the Presidential election campaign…for the Democrats!.
In the interests of accuracy, I think it ought to be said that this is far more about the Tories trying to pull some sort of rug from under ‘Teflon Tony’ than establishing any sort of link with either the US Democrat Party or Mr Kerry. But in any event, it is still a deeply ill-judged political blunder. The article alludes to an ‘alliance’ between US Republicans and British Conservatives and while I think that ‘alliance’ is too strong a term, there certainly has been a traditional affinity between these two centre-right Anglo-Saxon political tribes.
That being the case, one wonders what these jet-setting young Tories were hoping to achieve by throwing their lot in with Mr Kerry? There is nothing to suggest that a President Kerry would somehow undermine Tony Blair. If the Tories cannot make a dent in him at home, then how are they going to land any meaningful punches on him via Washington? And if they imagine that they are going to be the subject of any outreach by either the US Democrats of the Guardian-reading classes at home then all I can say is that they are even stupider than they look (and they look fairly stupid).
In short, the British Tories have managed to alienate one of their few powerful friends for no gain whatsoever and, since I assume that the leadership either gave their blessing to these transatlantic jaunts or, at the very least, turned a blind eye, then it merely reinforces my view that the British Conservatve Party is in the hands of buffoons and political pygmies.
I understand that the streets of New York will be plagues this week by throngs of the Great American Unwashed wearing ‘George Bush=Hitler’ T-shirts. I do not imagine that any such items of radical apparel will be making an appearance at the next Tory Party convention. However, I do wonder if would get any sales with a ‘Michael Howard = Chief Wiggum’ version?
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
