To quote someone we all know and love, let me be perfectly clear:  The mainstream media is the bought and paid for lapdog of the liberal Democrat elite.  It will not only never give conservatives a fair hearing but will actively distort, lie and slander in an effort to destroy any conservative it sees as a threat to its masters.  So why the hell do conservatives treat its members with anything other than contempt and allow it to set the agenda and exploit fault lines in the movement?

Easy – conservatives tend to be polite, reasonable people with a genuine interest in honest debate and a quaint belief in the efficacy of things like “facts” and “evidence” as a way to demonstrate the truth.  No wonder they get rolled.  The other side believes in none of those things – its only belief is that leftism must prevail and any other value is disposable if it turns into a liability.  The answer is conservative judo – understanding how the Left works and using its own weight and momentum against it.  We need to start being less like butt-kissing conservanerd David Brooks and more like butt-kicking conservastud Chuck Norris.

Conservative judo means going on the offense and keeping on the offense.  It’s not about reasoning with unreasonable people; it’s about using their own strengths against them to defeat them.  It has application to the GOP candidates for sure, but it also applies to those of us in the real world facing liberals every day.

The bizarre Rick Perry rock pseudo-scandal is a wonderful teachable moment for conservatives, mostly because the GOP candidates’ reactions allowed this contemptible lie to gain steam.  The Washington Post ran a story that some idiot wrote a racial slur on a rock at some ranch where Rick Perry hunted.  Now, one might observe that the facts and evidence show that about 30 years ago the Perry family got a hunting lease and promptly painted over the word.  One might also note that Perry was a Democrat at the time.  Moreover, the sources who disagree can’t agree on a different timeline and won’t give their names – inconsistent, anonymous hearsay is apparently acceptable when it comes to conservatives.

But none of this matters.  It’s not about “facts” or “evidence” or even “truth.”  It’s a calculated smear designed by a liberal rag to slander a leading GOP candidate.  Moreover, it is another example of a partisan political publication hiding behind the lie that it is an objective news source.  It is not.  The Washington Post, like the New York Times and the vast majority of mainstream media outlets, is an active collaborator with the liberal elite.  If it weren’t, Andrew Breitbart would not be the one breaking the story of Barak Obama’s game of patty cake with the expressly black supremacist New Black Panthers.

The question is, then, why the other GOP candidates tolerated this attack instead of coming to his defense – after all, this was an attack not just on Rick Perry but upon every conservative.  This was pure innuendo designed not just to trash one candidate but to feed a narrative that all conservatives are just one sheet away from an old fashioned cross burning of the kind dead Democratic icon Robert Byrd would have enjoyed in his pre-Senate capacity as a KKK Kleagle.

Herman Cain fell right into the trap.  A good man, it seems he did so here not in a short-sighted attempt to capitalize on the blow to Rick Perry but because he was genuinely disgusted with the idea that some nitwit would paint that sort of thing on a rock.  When asked about it (at the 3:42 mark) by Chris Wallace of Fox News, he responded that it was “insensitive.”  Well, “insensitive” is one word for it – Cain was being kind.  My saltier characterization would have included an adjective beginning with an “F.”  Cain later clarified that he was referring to the person who wrote it, and that he did not believe the Rock of Outrages represented Perry’s belief.  Too late.  The damage was done.

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As a trial lawyer, I appreciate the panicked attempts of the liberal elite and its mainstream media suck-ups to focus the upcoming election on the religious views of the Republican candidates.  I face – and defeat – this kind of tactic all the time.  But don’t underestimate it, and don’t think we can just ignore it.  Misdirection is a powerful tool in the arsenal of the desperate, and let’s face it – if the liberal demographic they’re aiming to terrify with the specter of a GOP nominee dedicated to the goal of becoming the John Lithgow of a Footloose-esque theocracy was smart enough to see through such a transparent appeal to raw bigotry, its members wouldn’t be liberal.

The problem for the liberal elite is that its guy has made such roadkill out of the economy in his attempt to transform America into a socialist utopia that if the 2012 election revolves around the fact that most Americans are struggling to stay afloat because of him, Obama is going to be sent packing right back to Bill Ayers, Reverend White, and the rest of his commie pals in his old Chicago neighborhood.

So, the lib establishment’s strategy is crystal clear – play to the primitive prejudices of the Democrat base by doing its very best to convince them that should Perry or Bachman or Romney or any of those conservatives get elected, then Kevin Bacon shall boogie no more!

Bill Keller, editor of something called the New York Times, which used to be a newspaper of some note in the old days before the free flow of information, eagerly capered for his liberal overlords last week with a couple of columns that set out a series of questions to the GOP candidates about their religious views.

Note that these questions are only directed at Republicans – the liberals know that with a few exceptions the religious posturing of their Democrat favorites is a sham designed to appeal to the few sub-constituencies of the Democrat Party (like black women) who actually do hold sincere religious beliefs.  For most liberals – especially the base – religion is just one more wedge issue to be exploited in pursuit of a collectivist nirvana.

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[White House exercise facility]

MICHELLE:  Well, come in, people.  Geithner, Carney–get your skinny butts over here and spot for me while I press 250.  Everybody else, pull up a mat and sit so we can start.

JOE BIDEN:  Huh?  Why’s the Boss over in the corner in his PJs staring out the window?

MICHELLE:  Off the record.  He’s stressed out.  I’m running things until his therapist clears him for duty. Anybody got a problem with that?

DAVID PLOUFFE:  No Ma’m, but, uh . . . .

MICHELLE:  What happened?  Yesterday, he had to layup on the first par 5 at Burning Tree and couldn’t choose between a 6-iron and 7-iron.  Told his playing partners he wanted to sleep on it.  At dinner, a steward asked what flavor parfait he preferred for dessert.  Midnight, he was still muttering, “I like the strawberry, but the peach appeals to me, too.”

BILL DALEY:  Deteriorating decision-making skills.  It’s worse than when I came on board.  Hell, CIA knew where bin Laden was hiding since mid-2009.   The President couldn’t pull the trigger.  I had to use his autopen to sign the order okaying the Seal operation on Osama’s compound.

MICHELLE:  Hmmph.  Didn’t have a problem deciding on those chili dogs and stepping on my nutrition message the other day. (more…)

One of the reasons Harry Reid is trailing Sharon Angle in his bid for reelection is an inability to listen to Nevada voters. As Senate Majority leader, Reid was instrumental in the Senate passing bills such as TARP, Porkulus and Obamacare, all of them passed over the objections of his Nevada constituents (as well as most Americans).

Nevada voters shouldn’t feel bad about their Senator not paying attention to their desires, because as the video below illustrates, Reid doesn’t pay attention to interviewers either

You might think that a prominent veterans organization like the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) would actually reserve its political endorsements for, you know, veterans, or at least those politicians that actually demonstrate some level of respect for the military.  But you would be wrong.  And the problem is not just the VFW; rather, the VFW’s current lobbyist-driven fiasco simply serves to illustrate how out-of-touch the Washington in-crowd is with the feelings of us benighted souls dwelling outside the beltway.

In the Florida 22^nd Congressional District race, incumbent Democrat Ron Klien is running against Republican challenger Allen West.  Actually, he’s properly addressed as Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Allen West, a decorated combat veteran who commanded a battalion in Iraq until he was forced to retire after making a 9mm suggestion to a captured terrorist that it would be a very, very smart move to give up some information about future attacks against LTC West’s men.  Now, that’s not to say Congressman Klien does not have a distinguished military record of his own – to be fair, apparently he saw most of Saving Private Ryan on AMC once, though he found it pretty scary.

After due consideration- which apparently means the VFW’s lobbyists told it to do so – the VFW endorsed Klein.

Okay, sometimes an organization makes a mistake.  I mean, it’s not like the VFW decided to endorse, say, a liberal Democratic senator who tried to humiliate an Army general testifying by demanding that he call her “Senator” instead of the perfectly appropriate “ma’am,” or who allowed her fundraisers to be hosted by the likes of Hanoi Jane.  That would be, well, crazy.

Oh, wait.  The VFW is endorsing leftist Senator Barbara Boxer.  Yeah, the same Barbara Boxer who voted to undercut us troops as we sat out in the desert waiting for Operation Desert Storm to start.  Yeah, the same Barbara Boxer who undercut the troops by voting to cut and run in Iraq.  Yeah, that Barbara Boxer – the one who will be running around using the VFW’s shameful endorsement as a shield against the truth of her track record of contempt for our military.

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Illinois Governor Pat Quinn made it official: Illinois will have a special Senate election just for the lame duck session.  Thus Illinois joins Delaware and West Virginia (both having special elections) as the three states whose winners on election day will—barring a disputed election result—be seated for a lame duck session in December.  A fourth, Colorado, is less clear but may also be in play.

The lame duck session looks increasingly likely—and increasingly ambitious.  Sen. Kerry continues to stress that cap-and-trade will be on the agenda, and Sen. Harry Reid (who may be a lame duck himself after Election Day) confirmed it to the Netroots Nation audience, saying: “We’re going to have to have a lame-duck session, so we’re not giving up.”

Along with cap-and-trade, a lame duck will likely consider the recommendations of Obama’s deficit commission — a package that will include enormous tax hikes and could draw the support of some departing Republicans like Judd Gregg of New Hampshire George Voinovich of Ohio, and Robert Bennett of Utah.

And organized labor, seeing the lame duck as their last chance for a legislative return on their political investments for years, will also demand lame duck action.

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Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) has falsely accused  the Tea Party of having ties to the Ku Klux Klan.  Speaking at the NAACP convention, she said: “All those who wore sheets a long time ago lifted them off to wear Tea Party clothing.”

Now is the time to speak some Truth to Power.

It would have been far more truthful for the congresswoman to have admitted the fact that all those who wore sheets a long time ago lifted them to wear Democratic Party clothing.  Yes, the Ku Klux Klan was established by the Democratic Party.  Yes, the Ku Klux Klan murdered thousands of Republicans — African-American and white – in the years following the Civil War.  Yes, the Republican Party and a Republican President, Ulysses Grant, destroyed the KKK with their Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

How did the Ku Klux Klan re-emerge in the 20th century?  For that, the Democratic Party is to blame.

It was a racist Democrat President, Woodrow Wilson, who premiered Birth of a Nation in the White House.  That racist movie was based on a racist book written by one of Wilson’s racist friends from college.  In 1915, the movie spawned the modern-day Klan, with its burning crosses and white sheets.

Inspired by the movie, some Georgia Democrats revived the Klan.  Soon, the Ku Klux Klan again became a powerful force within the Democratic Party.  The KKK so dominated the 1924 Democratic Convention that Republicans, speaking truth to power, called it the Klanbake.  In the 1930s, a Democrat President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, appointed a Klansman, Senator Hugo Black (D-AL), to the U.S. Supreme Court.  In the 1950s, the Klansmen against whom the civil rights movement struggled were Democrats.  The notorious police commissioner Bull Connor, who attacked African-Americans with dogs and clubs and fire hoses, was both a Klansman and the Democratic Party’s National Committeeman for Alabama.  Starting in the 1980s, the Democratic Party elevated a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), to third-in-line for the presidency.

Speaking more Truth to Power, the Republican Party has been a resolute enemy of the Ku Klux Klan, terrorist wing of the Democratic Party.

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The death of Senator Robert Byrd on Monday has upended the administration’s cap and trade offensive, as observers of West Virginia politics suspect his yet-to-be-named interim successor will defer to the state’s pro-coal politics on pending climate legislation.

Byrd, whose unprecedented fifty-one-year senate career bore out a series of outright and often stunning political evolutions, had warmed in recent years to overhauling the nation’s climate regulations despite broad opposition from his home state. His death, and the loss of a reliably-Democratic vote, has forced Senate leadership to reassess the viability of the White House’s aggressive climate legislation push in this difficult election year for Democrats.

“It is a tougher road, believe me,” Senator Dick Durban, the Democrats’ chief vote whip, said Monday. “A 58-vote majority is not as good as a 59-vote majority.”

Wildly popular and the leading candidate for the seat in 2012, West Virginia’s Democratic Governor Joe Manchin has not yet floated the names of potential replacements, saying only that he will not appoint himself. Instead, Manchin will tap an ally whose politics–and posture on coal, the state’s bread and butter issue–mirrors his own.

Though among the first governors to endorse then-Senator Barack Obama’s presidential bid, Manchin has been in open rebellion against the Environmental Protection Agency and the president’s legislative agenda to reconstruct the environmental regulatory regime. It’s his rebellious streak–a level of insubordinance on climate issues that has further endeared Manchin to voters in an otherwise hostile cycle–that Capitol Hill Democrats worry may derail the fragile cap and trade coalition they have assembled.

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With the passing of West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, the defining narrative among politicos will — after a few hours’ decorum — emerge as does Byrd = Kennedy? That is to say that, while so many West Virginians would never vote against Byrd, now that he’s gone there are plenty of the same Blue State voters who would vote against a non-Byrd Democrat in this Age of Obama.

I don’t follow West Virginia politics closely but assume their version of Scott Brown would be Rep. Shelley Moore Capito. His or her identity, as well as whether the same phenomenon would play out, likely depend on if the election is held this fall, vs. 2012: there are some murky legal issues to sort through involving how long a placeholder would hold the seat. Still I’m pretty sure it will be someone staunchly anti-cap-and-trade (in both parties, in fact; the last West Virginia politician to show insufficient zeal against the scheme, Rep. Alan Mollohan (D), recently lost in a primary).

Cap-and-trade of course is the vehicle by which the president vowed to cause your electricity prices to “necessarily skyrocket” as part of his effort to “bankrupt” the coal industry and anyone who sought to continue burning coal for that one-half of our electricity that it provides. Incidentally, today’s Wall Street Journal also notes how Obama’s anti-coal jihad just cost about 1,000 jobs in Wisconsin; West Virginia needs no such reminders yet as they pile up they also cannot help but be relevant.

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From the Associated Press:

Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a fiery orator versed in the classics and a hard-charging power broker who steered billions of federal dollars to the state of his Depression-era upbringing, died Monday. He was 92.

A spokesman for the family, Jesse Jacobs, said Byrd died peacefully at about 3 a.m. at Inova Hospital in Fairfax, Va. He had been in the hospital since late last week.

At first Byrd was believed to be suffering from heat exhaustion and severe dehydration, but other medical conditions developed. He had been in frail health for several years.

Byrd, a Democrat, was the longest-serving senator in history, holding his seat for more than 50 years. He was the Senate’s majority leader for six of those years and was third in the line of succession to the presidency, behind House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

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From The Hill:

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) has been admitted to a Washington-area hospital and is in “seriously ill” condition, his office said in a news release Sunday.

The statement said that Byrd, 92, “was admitted to the hospital late last week suffering from what was believed to be heat exhaustion and severe dehydration as a result of the extreme temperatures.” The region has experienced a stretch of temperatures in the 90s with high humidity.

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Rand Paul’s controversial remarks about the 1964 Civil Rights Act illustrate what I have been saying for years, that Republicans would benefit tremendously from knowing and appreciating the heritage of our Grand Old Party.  That landmark legislation was the culmination of a century of efforts by Republicans to protect African-Americans from their Democrat oppressors.  Let’s look at the facts.

On his deathbed in 1874, Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA) told a Republican colleague: “You must take care of the civil rights bill – my bill, the civil rights bill.  Don’t let it fail.”  In March 1875, the Republican-controlled 43rd Congress followed up the GOP’s 1866 Civil Rights Act and 1871 Civil Rights Act with the most comprehensive civil rights legislation ever.  A Republican president, Ulysses Grant, signed the bill into law that same day.

Among its provisions, the 1875 Civil Rights Act banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.  Sound familiar?  Though struck down by the Supreme Court eight years later, the 1875 Civil Rights Act would be reborn as the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

During the twenty years of the FDR and Truman administrations, the Democrats had refused to enact any civil rights legislation.  In contrast, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which had been written by his Attorney General, a former Chairman of the Republican National Committee.  The original draft would have permitted the federal government to sue anyone violating another person’s constitutional rights, but this powerful provision would have to wait until the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  The bill had to be weakened considerably to secure enough Democrat votes to pass, so violations would be civil, not criminal offenses, and penalties were light.  Vice President Richard Nixon helped overcome a Democrat filibuster in the Senate.  The GOP then strengthened enforcement with its 1960 Civil Rights Act.

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After my article last week, Michael Steele and the Southern Strategy, now is time for some truth-telling about the Democratic Party.  The Democrats’ own southern strategy was far, far worse than even worst accusations aimed at the Republicans.

In his recent speech criticizing the GOP’s so-called southern strategy, RNC Chairman Michael Steele scored big points… for the other team.  Instead of criticizing his own party, he would do well to focus the public’s attention on the appalling heritage of the Democratic Party – the party of slavery and big government, socialism and the Ku Klux Klan.

“The Republican Party, on the contrary [to the Democrats], holds that this government was instituted to secure the blessings of freedom, and that slavery is an unqualified evil.  [Republicans] will oppose in all its length and breadth the modern Democratic idea that slavery is as good as freedom.”

In this classic speech, Abraham Lincoln condemned the pro-slavery policies of the Democratic Party.  The founders of our Grand Old Party knew to call Democrats ‘slave-ocrats.’  And another Republican, Robert Ingersoll, observed: “Every man that loved slavery more than liberty was a Democrat.”  One of Lincoln’s friends, Rep. Owen Lovejoy (R-IL), had this to say:

“The principle of enslaving human beings because they are inferior, is this: If a man is a cripple, trip him up; if he is old and weak, and bowed with the weight of years, strike him, for he cannot strike back; if idiotic, take advantage of him; and if a child, deceive him.  This, sir, this is the doctrine of Democrats and the doctrine of devils as well, and there is no place in the universe outside the five points of hell and the Democratic Party where the practice and prevalence of such doctrines would not be a disgrace.”

Very definitely, slavery was a southern strategy of the Democratic Party.

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Washington is abuzz these days with talk of “reconciliation” a word in our usual lexicon that suggests bringing people together. In this case, however, it is a larceny of language. It is divisive and not conciliatory and it is, understandably, creating anguish and outrage among those who understand the subterfuge at play here. Political mischief is about to run amok as this corruption of Senate rules becomes the strategic center piece President Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress will utilize to ram their health care bill into law.

To be sure, the reconciliation process has been used a number of times during the past thirty years, usually without much angst or controversy. It has, essentially, been used in the past to remove legislative stumbling blocks to initiatives with fairly strong bi-partisan support. American tradition as well as old-fashioned common sense has generally dictated that consequential legislation enjoy broad bipartisan consensus and, in fact, the most ambitious reconciliation bills of the past have been, more often than not, popular on both sides of the aisle. In these cases, reconciliation was used for procedural reasons, not to force through a bill that couldn’t get 60 votes. It has, however, never been used to advance legislation that a substantial majority of Americans have said they do not want. Nor should it be.

It was one of the wisest and most respected of Democrats, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who warned his colleagues, “Never pass major legislation that affects most Americans without real bipartisan support. It opens the door to all kinds of political trouble.” It appears that the Administration and the congressional Democrats are, indeed, going to open the door to all kinds of political trouble. To paraphrase Professor Harold Hill who once bellowed in the musical comedy Music Man, “There’s trouble right (there) in River City”…the river now being the Potomac and the city being our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.

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I don’t like life long politicians any more than the next guy, but the suggested remedy to the problem, term limits, are a bad idea.

First of all, term limits strike me as a smack in the face to the idea that we should be allowed to choose whomever we want to represent us, for as long as we want them to represent us. Much like the disgustingly offensive campaign finance “reform” where politicians decided to punish the average voter because elected officials are too greedy and corrupt to keep their hands out of the cookie jar, term limits seem equally offensive in a similar way.

Why should the voters of one state have to say goodbye to a good legislator simply because the voters of another state repeatedly elect a creep?

Voters in Colorado might not like the fact that voters in Massachusetts continually reelected a hypocritical, drunk, manslaughtering, liar to term after term after term, but that is their right. Massachusetts voters clearly have no shame, but under the constitution, they have the right to be greedy scum buckets interested only in the pork their clout can achieve. (Our apologies to anyone in Mass who had the dignity and ethics to vote against Kennedy before death finally drove him from office)

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The other day  I made the assertion that Barbara Boxer (D – Tiny Town) was the stupidest member of the United States Senate.  I may have spoken too soon.  Here’s a serious challenger:

Yesterday, in his desperate attempt to win friends, influence people and reach across the aisle as he tries to bring the senate’s version of a “health care” bill to a vote, Sen. Harry Reid (D – Las Vegas) decided to go for broke.  Speaking in his trademark tremulous, reedy voice that makes that of his predecessor, the homunculus from South Dakota, Sen. Tom Daschle (D – IRS), sound like Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River,” the punch-drunk former boxer compared Republican opposition to the proponents of slavery and segregation.  “When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone, regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today…  History is repeating itself before our eyes.”

No words of mine can possibly do justice to the magisterial presentation of the Sage of Searchlight, so please have a look and listen before we continue:

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