Arguably the worst series of ideas I've heard in a while, I'm ever impressed to find the short-bus riding Chuck Hagel on board for the dumbest of the ideas presented. Let's see: Our goals are apparently (1) to increase government spending (2) increase Federal subsidies of local concerns (3) increase Federal ties to local concerns and (4) give urban political machines the tools they need to expand their usual raft of graft, corruption, cronyism, and electing Democrats.

Yup. Exactly what you'd expect out of a Republican.

When I was at RedState, there were only three bloggers who I felt should never have been given posting privileges of any sort, for different reasons. Each was a Josh Trevino addition -- but let me be absolutely clear about something here: So was I. (Er, that doesn't make anything better.) Let me try it this way: Josh scores so many hits, you'd expect a few misses along with them. Moreover, given that his intent in his part of the creation of the site was to create a broad coalition of center-right writers, you have to give him credit for actually following through, even though the results were uneven.

One, Sebastian Holsclaw, left after the changeover from the Scoop platform to the Drupal model RedState is getting ready to abandon. Sebastian's problem, as far as I was concerned, was that he was so out of touch with the community as a whole that his posts were like dropping a snare drum solo into a performance of Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. Bright fella, nice guy (from what I could see), decent-but-not-great writer, but just really out of step with the other writers and commenters.

The second, Charles Bird, still writes there. Frankly, I'm leery of sharing too many of my thoughts about him given his reaction to my departure, but that reaction is illustrative of two parts of the problem: Charles is and was a plodding, dim, extraordinarily conventional thinker, and his writing reflects it; but aside from comforting me that I wasn't the least capable talent on the front page of RedState, there's not much wrong with that. Bird's issues are two-fold, but inextricably intertwined: (1) Charles's blogging belongs first and foremost to that left-wing moron factory, Obsidian Wings, and it shows not only in his I-don't-expect-intelligent-reply style (and that he can't be bothered to change the hyperlinks in his work to redirect to his work on RedState), but also in the essential thrust of the work, which tends to be explicative to, for, and from the perspective of center-lefters. (2) Charles is more naturally comfortable with the Left, partially out of reflexive ideological sympathy, and partially out of the absence of two functioning prefrontal lobes; this in turn is why Charles has spent more than his share of time on his home site (the moron factory) taking shots at RedState. (I wasn't the one to whom he gave his cherry, if you catch my drift.) That post-semicolon part was the biggest reason I wanted him gone; sadly, as with my efforts to ban the (other) below-I.Q. 100 commenters at RedState, I was as much a miserable failure as Charles's teachers from kindergarten on.

(Yes, that's "not sharing too many of my thoughts.")

But I'm not here to address Sebastian or Bird. Instead, this is about John Cole.

A good friend of mine forwarded this a while back with the notation, "Pot, Meet Kettle." There's no point in excerpting it or commenting on it -- by now, anyone familiar with how John has degenerated will be able to sing along with it by knowing that he's upset with The Dread Rises for obsessiveness -- except to say that it's what prompted me to write this.

Flash back a loooong way. H.D. Miller -- remember him, anyone? Traveling Shoes? (H.D. has taken that blog private.) -- turned me on to him back in 2002 or 2003. Professor Miller would doubtless qualify as a wingnut in Cole's current lexicography, but back then, during an email exchange, he told me I should check out Cole's work.

I got a kick out of it. It was a fun read, he clearly didn't like my political priorities, but he clearly didn't like a lot of others', and he used to turn the odd good phrase. I was tickled when I found out I'd get to write with him at RedState, about two years later.

Now, this may surprise those of you whose experience with Cole is from mid-2006 on, but at one time, John was a fairly critical thinker. He pretty much always considered me a theocrat in waiting -- which isn't fair, I'm a monarchist if I'm anything -- but he was pretty up-front that (1) if I didn't bother him about it, he wouldn't bother me about it, and (2) that notwithstanding, common ground could make common fronts possible.

So: I recognize that abortion is murder, as is dehydrating one's wife to death; he thinks people should be free to commit these kinds of murder. Fair enough. At one time -- back before he voted for, and endorsed, Alan Mollohan and Bob Byrd -- we could agree that the growth of the Federal government is, ceteris paribus, a bad thing, and that efforts should be made to stop this. Of course, at one time, he wasn't actively opposed to winning in Iraq, either.

The critical issue, though, wasn't whether he and I agreed, so much as that you could tell he'd thought things through before he wrote, at least a large percentage of the time. Here in blog-land, that's a fairly rare event.

(Dark, funny secret: One of my posts that most set off the orangutans who inhabit the American Left was actually a composite work of the then-RedState crew, including, probably most heavily but for yours truly, John as the foremost contributor. Hint: Think late-summer 2005, and "yard ape.")

What's particularly hard about all this is that John is now just one more lefty. I can read the few bright lefties out there and think, Hm, maybe I don't agree, but that is a good insight, or even, Ya know, I think I agree with that. It says something that there is now nothing interesting about Cole except his on-again, off-again fascination with RedState. Basically, he's turned his site into a group-blog, slightly-wider-ranging version of B. Fred State.

John left around the same time Sebastian did -- sadly, Charles chose to stay after the switchover, and curiously, continued to post to the front through all of the 2006 and 2007, even though he now claims his work was purely in the diaries -- which more or less dovetailed with when I was agitating for him to leave. (There was no connection between my attempts and his voluntary parting.) The common theme for the three was that all spent a fair amount of their time shooting at RedState from their home blogs, only to turn up at RedState and pretend nothing had happened. At the founding of RedState, the operating principle was that only what's done on the site matters as to fronting privileges; however, I took that to mean that political positions taken elsewhere were not taken into account. Maybe it had changed two years later, and maybe it hadn't; maybe I was right, and maybe I was wrong. Regardless, it says something about a man if he'll tell one public audience something awful about you, then pretend in front of another public audience that there's nothing amiss.

Why did John go nuts? I dunno. I sometimes think it's ObiWi disease; sometimes, I think John's meds have failed; yet other times, I suspect he's simply grown senile.

For whatever reason, there's really no intellectual or substantive difference between anything he writes and the sort of pedestrian work you can find any time Markos Moulitsas writes for his page, or what the intellectual pin-cushions at Obsidian Wings spew at theirs. He's become an indistinguishable howl in the crowd, and I don't think his broken principles, such as they were, sting him any more.

Damned shame, really.

Dear Idiot Supporters of Ron Paul:

Ha.

Ha.

If you can't even place higher than any of the Republican candidates who bothered to campaign in New Hampshire, it's time to consider that maybe, just maybe, you're not wanted in polite company.

Toss off, you Nazi sympathizers. You're well gone from my Party.

Never any of the best,

Thomas H. Crown

This dates to September 12, 2006.

Now, I happen to believe that the Republicans will hold the House and the Senate. Why? The Democrats picked almost as many duds this cycle as we did; the demographics and effects of the 2000 redistricting are still in place; and the Democrats are actually touting their surrender-monkey-hood as a selling point.

In other words, the Democrats are as stupid as ever. Thank God.

We would not, however, be in this pickle if the "Republicans" we elected actually governed as, well, Republicans. Let's rack up some non-achievements:

Spending: Let's not even go there.

The Budget Deficit: Ditto.

Holding the Party line on perhaps the most important cross-group issue of our day, the war on terror: Senators McCain, Graham, and Hagel, please pick up the white courtesy phone.

Substantive restrictions, or at least, the hints of them, on abortion: When pigs fly.

Immigration: Let me put it this way: This is not an immigration thread.

Stem Cells: Ditto.

Reducing so much as the rate of growth of the government: It is to laugh.

In short, every, single, last thing we send those jokers to do on the Hill, they at best do poorly, and usually don't do at all. (Amazingly, they still do it better than Democrats.)

But what's even more interesting is that if you look carefully, and imagine that each component of the Republican coalition is defined by primary-but-not-exclusive interest in one of those points, you'll see that every single faction is taking it in the chest.

The most critical part of coalition politics is, obviously, keeping the coalition intact and pointed in the same direction. In theory, the Republican coalition does this by giving, on a regular basis, some, but not all, of the things each faction wants; they are then inclined to look at the alternative, realize they wouldn't do nearly so well there, and stick with the pack. The point, in other words, isn't to make any faction happy; it's to keep each faction less unhappy than they'd be elsewhere.

As members of the Stupid Party, however, I think we can safely say that our elected representatives played hookey the day they were teaching coalition politics in school. Let's look at the one thing that most of the coalition agrees on, to some extent or another: Judges. Let's see, we got Roberts and Alito. We got some, but not all, of the judges Bush sent up. Where are the rest?

Oh, right. A group of Republicans led the fight to kill them, to protect their prerogatives. And that's the issue on which Republicans have performed best.

The dumbest part about the Party's poor performance on all things Republican is that it has each faction convinced that it's getting uniquely screwed. Had they done their jobs right, we'd all think we're getting equally screwed.

This is why, frankly, we're stuck debating whether the social cons got everything they could have asked (and should therefore get to the back of the line) in Bush's (limited) stem cell ban or his first veto (or is it Terri Schiavo?), when of course, at best, these were bandages on horrible wounds in our polity. Or whether the fiscal cons got tax breaks out the yin-yang, so they should just shut it. Or whether the small government types got theirs ... well, ok, in fairness, except for maybe the tax breaks, no one's making too much noise about them. Or the hawks are getting theirs with an uneven prosecution of a war in two failed Muslim states. And don't even get me started on the immigration folks. And so on. [Full disclosure: I think these divisions are artificial and stupid in the extreme, but that's a blog post for later.]

In other words, the continued success of the Republican coalition is driving the coalition into the ground, largely because the people elected by the coalition aren't acting very Republican. Hats off, folks. And a big round of applause to the Democrats, too stupid, too weak, and too lazy to put a spine into our Party. When historians talk about the death of the Democrat Party years from now, the very next chapter will be the death of the Republican Party ten years later.

This post is from November 8, 2006.

Properly, today should be a day of quiet meditation, and consolidating forces. It should be a day we regroup, and start planning for 2008.

To the pits of Hell with that. I have some long knives, and it's time to start plunging.

We lost a tenuous governing majority because we killed ourselves, slowly, with a thousand tiny cuts. We lost Iraq because we simply had to give verbal aid and comfort (I choose those words deliberately) to the Democrats as they hauled out every last cliche from the antiwar movement of the 1970s. We kept abortion on demand the law of the land for at least another seven years because we had to try to fund the use of human beings as research matter. We guaranteed increasingly painful entitlement spending because we wanted to beat the Democrats to the punch on free drugs for seniors. We guaranteed profligacy by being progligate ourselves.

The Democrats did not win this battle. We locked our finest spears in the ground and plunged ourselves upon them.

This dates to November 13, 2006.


Oh, this is simply priceless. With Ken Mehlman retiring, we need a new RNC Chair.

We could have had a promising up-and-comer with a great life story, fantastic political skills, and odds-on-sharps like you wouldn't believe.

We could have had a dirty machine politico, who may make us all cringe a little at what he's willing to countenance, but who is used to the odd knifefight with a K-Bar and a rusty razor, and who could help us work our way back into the majority.

We could have had a lobotomized sea lion, who would at least know to bark to get some kind of fish on command.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next best thing (by a little) to making Kevin Phillips the new RNC Chair: Bonehead Martinez. Yes, that's right, Bonehead, who with a five-point Bush win in trending-Red Florida at his back, barely managed to beat one of the more anodyne, bland Democrats to run for the Senate outside of Massachusetts; Bonehead, who managed to take a dicey political situation in the Terri Schiavo affair and make himself into a Google search result; Bonehead, who if asked to eat eggs over easy and shave at the same time, would end up with shiny whites and yolk smeared in fork-tine streaks across his face; Bonehead is going to be the RNC Chair.

And if gets better! He's going to multitask!

This was brought to you today by the same morons who griped all last week about do-nothing leadership in the House, only to ... wait for it ... prepare to vote in the same losers!

I'm proud to be a Republican today.