PRESTOPUNDIT -- "Kerry in Cambodia" Wall-to-Wall Coverage

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

is running for President. At least he is in this computer game. An AP tech reporter describes the game.

AND AMERICA'S

favorite Republican is ... Rudy Giuliani.

Sorry Arnold. Your negatives are way too high.

JIMMY CARTER

GETS FISKED.

PEJMANESQUE READS "MY LIFE"

so you don't have to. Don't miss his "My Life" literary template.

A highlight -- this bit of Clinton de-bunking: "Clinton appears manifestly uninterested in getting down to the meat of any policy issue, making claims that My Life is manna from Heaven for policy wonks one of the more laughable assertions of this young millennium."

My own view is that most people mistook Clinton's world-class glibness for policy heft. Actually, Clinton was all about the glibness, and didn't do much heavy lifting when it came to policy.

(via Patterico).

LET'S BE BLUNT ABOUT AMERICA'S DEMOCRATS.

"Democrats have trademarked the personal attack, the attribution of base motives and the assassination of character as their m.o. .. There are no honest disagreements, no sincere policy differences. If you oppose the Democrats, you are evil, or racist, or insensitive, or .. a tool of big business." Mona Charen: Democrats fight dirty.

UPDATE: Bill Bennett has more on the dirty dog Democrats. Many of these folks aren't honest or decent people and we need to spend some time reflecting on the consequences for our country of this fact.

The coming Republican Civil War.

Andrew Sullivan thinks it's inevitable.

Steyn -- Tina Brown & Bill Clinton in heat.

".. in the Clinton era, the only naked guy with women's panties on his head and a dog leash round his neck would have been the President breaking in the new intern pool ..

.. Clinton is what you wind up with when you have Reagan's communication skills but nothing to communicate .. ".

.. Seven-eighths of the picture was Clinton with a big broad smile and his arms outstretched, like a cheesy Vegas lounge act acknowledging the applause of the crowd before launching into his opening number ("I Get a Kick Out of Me"). The gaunt, cadaverous fellow wedged into the left-hand sliver of the photograph proved on closer inspection to be Senator John Kerry .. ".

More MARK STEYN -- Bill Clinton in heat.

Is it "The Onion"?

"To counter runaway spending in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the conservative Republican Study Committee is considering a proposal to station a watchdog congressman on the House floor to curb expedited approval of money bills."

No, its Robert Novak on "The Free-spending Congress".

More evidence that the Libertarian Party has

jumped the shark.

UPDATE: Brian Doherty reports from the Libertarian Convention in Atlanta. A fine bit of reporting.

The Oregonian describes the statutory rape of 14 year old

by former Gov. Neil Goldschmidt as "an affair". The highly partisan Oregonian has long been a key arm of the Democratic party in Oregon, a state which flipped from stanch Republican to reliably Democrat in the 1970s -- at about the same time the news coverage of the Oregonian flipped from journalistically neutral to partisan Democrat. Quotable: "Finger-pointing has also turned on the Oregonian, the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper that dominates state politics and has the largest circulation in the Northwest. The newspaper has been dogged by questions -- from inside and outside the newsroom -- about why it was scooped and then seemed to allow its catch-up coverage to be spun by Goldschmidt."

The Democrat Left. "American [leftism] has grown cowardly and anti-democratic. It boldly spouts clich�s about "giving power to the people," but in reality it increasingly distrusts the people. Unable to win at the polls and unwilling to compromise on ideological objectives, [leftists]empower judges to fight their battles for them ..

We like to say that the increasingly ugly battles over judicial nominations are a sign of increasing partisanship in the culture, when in reality they are a completely rational outgrowth of the culture wars. Because from abortion to affirmative action to gay rights [leftists] have gladly ceded the unpopular choices to an imperial judiciary that is more or less immune to democratic correction. John F. Kerry says he's against gay marriage, but does anyone doubt that he would appoint precisely the sorts of judges who rubber-stamp the practice? Indeed, speaking of America's leading "multilateralist," one could say that the Democratic Party's fetishization of the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and "coalition-building" generally suggests that many [leftists] would like to outsource all their losing issues to undemocratic institutions and hence absolve themselves of any responsibility for unpopular policies .. ". more JONAH GOLDBERG.

Republicans. Richard Viguerie has a blog targeted at the regulate and spend "Washington" Republicans -- most notably President Bush. Here's his mission statement:

"America didn�t elect Republicans to just be better Democrats. In that simple statement lies the mission of this website. We are conservatives who have watched while Republican leadership has turned from the legacy of Ronald Reagan. We are conservatives who elect conservative Republicans to represent us in Washington � and then watch while they stop being Kansas Republicans or Texas Republicans � and start being Washington Republicans. We see them turn away from the goals of shrinking government and eliminating federal agencies and embrace the liberal idea of giving every one and every group exactly what they want .. What is a Washington Republican? A Republican that uses the people�s money to bribe us for votes � one who boasts of the increased spending projects he or she was �able to secure.� A Republican that campaigns on the principle of small government, and then votes for expansions of the welfare state .. ".

Click here for Viguerie's case against Bush and the "Washington" Republicans. (Thanks to Josh Claybourn).

Steyn on the Default Democrat. Quotable:

The Seventies - the Kerry decade - was the only point in the Cold War in which the eventual result seemed in doubt. The Communists seized real estate all over the globe, in part because they calculated that the post-Vietnam, Kerrified America would never respond. In the final indignity, when the proto-Islamist regime in Teheran seized the embassy hostages, they too shrewdly understood how thoroughly Kerrified America was. It took Mrs Thatcher's Falklands war and Reagan's liberation of Grenada to reverse the demoralisation of the West that Kerry did so much to advance.

The Wall Street Journal -- "the [Republican] party is morphing into what it once sought to unseat--big-spending politicians, interested only in holding onto power."

"They were all over Karl [Rove] on immigration and spending" -- Congressman Tom Tancredo, describing Republican Congressmen at a GOP Congressional retreat. Article: "GOP slams Bush policies at retreat". More: "Republicans at the retreat said immigration and overspending had emerged as the top two issues in their home districts. 'I just got the results of a poll in our district, and it's 2-to-1 against the president's immigration plan,' a House member said confidentially." Heh.

Bush. George Will hits a home run. Just go read it.

George W. Nixon Watch. Mickey�Kaus:

I recently talked with an old friend who is employed by the federal government at one of the important agencies. I asked how things were going at work. My friend said:

"I've never seen an administration spend money like this since the days of CETA. The money's flying out the door. I can barely keep up with it. ... They give money away on telephone calls! No documents. No budget. It's the worst I've ever seen it."

According to my friend, all this spending is designed to build political support. ... I've instinctively doubted that Bush is as guilty of excessive spending as the administration's critics (right and left) claim. Mainly, I figured, it was a matter of failing to restrain a congenitally spendthrift Congress. If what my friend says is true, I was wrong. We really are in a Nixonian situation--a president spending irreesponsibly in large part to buy support for a war. (Remember that the silliest excesses of big government, including the double indexation of Social Security benefits, occurred not under a Democratic president but under Nixon.) ...

Everything you ever wanted to know about John Kerry as told by a Boston Herald columist.

It's Friday, here's your weekly Krauthammer. Quotable:

.. upon returning to a world of mortal conflict with people who really want you destroyed, you instinctively want someone not new to the idea of war. There is far more instinct than logic at play here. After all, the two greatest wartime presidents in American history were Lincoln, who served at most four months in the Illinois militia, and FDR, who served not at all. Moreover, there are a lot of impressive warriors you would not want near the presidency. Douglas MacArthur, for one. Wesley Clark, for another ..

Daniel Drezner -- are we reliving 1984?

Virginia Postrel:

It's amazing how much damage those Bushes can do by being nice.

Mark Steyn does a truth exam on John Kerry.

"Look, if balancing the budget is called liberal in America, let's go.''

-- Presidential Candidate John Kerry.

The WSJ:

For the first time in his Presidency --and the first time in Washington since 1995 -- Mr. Bush is requesting that domestic, non-defense spending be restrained. This is only a proposal, and we won't know if the President means it ..

Think about that. This is Bush's biggest cheer leader in the press -- and they don't know if they trust him. This is a bellwether of the President's growing credibility problem. And it's not like the issue of credibility is one that comes out of nowhere with Bush. Unfortunately, even going into the Presidency Mr. Bush had a serious built in credibility problem with the American people -- one inherited directly from his father ("read my lips") and from his own history of -- shall we say -- lack of seriousness. Call him a man with a recovering case of trust-fund-itis. This background credibility problem pops out most dramatically when Bush is compared to Sen. Kerry. As Robert Novak puts it:

Most worrisome to Republicans is Kerry's war hero image while, in the words of one prominent Bush supporter, ''our guy was drinking beer in Alabama''.

For some, Bush's history during the Vietnam period gives him a lack of credibility on the issue of putting your life where your mouth is. It is this sort of background credibility problem which is feeding all of Bush's current political troubles. More Novak:

Bush may be facing the bane of incumbents: lack of credibility. That caused Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson not to seek another term and helped defeat Jimmy Carter and the senior George Bush for re-election [Novak should have mentioned that Nixon's credibility problem finished off Ford, when Ford got the stick of Nixon all over himself with the Nixon pardon. -- ed.] .. Bush is reeling from a double blow to his credibility. Failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq .. [and] the White House revelation that the new Medicare plan will cost one-third more than the president predicted ..

But the issue is much bigger than this. It's the issue of the whole fate of the country. No one has been fired or even reprimanded for the security and intelligence failures of 9/11 -- and ditto those concerning Iraq and Afghanistan. Over time when the expected doesn't happen, you begin to look for answers in personality and character of the President. Is he just not paying attention? Is he in a bubble (the current line of Klein, Sullivan and others in the press). Is he looking out for himself and not the country? Is he not smart enough? Is he spending too much time playing with the dog and fishing at the lake. Why no action?

And, talking about the fate of the nation, a bigger issue -- even if you can't imagine it yet -- is the seemingly unstoppable fiscal meteor impact of federal spending accelerating at the speed of sound -- with boomer retirements on the way -- an impending explosion of wasted capital and wealth draining debt which could cripple the working people of the country for generations to come.

And where is Bush's credibility on this one? On fiscal responsibility and free market economics his rhetoric has been utterly belied by his deeds. It's been "read my lips" all the way to the pig trough, and Joe and Sue Taxpayers have been played as suckers all the way. President Bush must be the only Republican President is known history who hasn't vetoed a dozen or more irresponsible spending bills sent to him by Congress. In fact, Bush seems to have lost his pen -- at least his veto pen. He's never vetoed any new proposal for massive spending increases coming out of Congress -- he's signed them all, with the spending pen, which never seems to get misplaced.

Here's Krugman on Bush's credibility problem:

Well, whaddya know. Even as the Republican leadership strong-armed the Medicare drug bill through Congress, the administration was sitting on estimates showing that the plan would cost at least $134 billion more than it let on. But let's not make too much of the incident. After all, it's not as if our leaders make a habit of faking their budget projections. Oh, wait. The budget released yesterday, which projects a $521 billion deficit for fiscal 2004, is no more credible than its predecessors. When the administration promises much lower deficits in future years, remember this: two years ago it projected a fiscal 2004 deficit of only $14 billion ..

This is going to be an issue that won't go away folks.

Professor Bainbridge wonders -- can fiscal conservatives cost Bush the election?. Bainbridge has an interesting link to a column on Bush's amnesty for illegals proposal by Phyllis Schafly. She doesn't seem particularly excited by the idea.

George W. Nixon Watch:

More and more, Bush reminds me of Nixon. He's not afraid to make the bold move in foreign policy. On domestic policy, Bush seems like he'll say or do anything, so long as it advances his short-term political advantage. If Karl Rove thought imposing wage and price controls would win Pennsylvania and Michigan for Bush, you'd see an Executive Order within 24 hours ..

-- Daniel Drezner.

The WSJ on the conservative revolt against runaway Federal spending. Quotable:

while Messrs. Hastert and DeLay may have thought to use this [Republican Congressional] retreat to plot to pass their $72 billion energy bonanza, a group of fiscal conservatives, including California veteran Christopher Cox, has arrived to demand that the party return to its roots and start slowing the growth of government .. What would certainly help is a President who chose to lead. The Bush Administration seems to think that voters care more about tax cuts than they do spending .. But spending represents a claim on taxes, and Republicans will end up having to raise them down the road if they don't slow the growth of spending now ..

Mark Steyn on John Kerry:

"I�d written [him] off ever since last summer when he came to the Barge Inn in Woodsville and, in the strangest political entrance I�ve ever seen, walked through the door to cheers and flags and popping cameras and worked his way through the crowd pressing the flesh until he got to the men�s room, whereupon he went in, leaving the clapping and waving to just sort of peter out as we waited for him to emerge .."

and on John Edwards:

".. all his issues are weird trial-lawyer obsessions � you should have the right to sue your health insurer; credit card companies and mortgage lenders should have to explain their interest rates in bigger print. He sounds like he�s auditioning next year�s class action suits .. after a while, you begin to notice that while he�s got policies to address the fine print on your MasterCard statement, he�s got nothing to say about the great issues of the day.. In the crush as he was leaving, I asked him what he would do about Iraq.

�We need to get the UN in there,� he said.

�But they were in there. They pulled out because it was too dangerous.�

�We need to get Nato in there,� he said.

�But 21 out of the 34 countries with troops on the ground are, in fact, Nato members.�

�Hey, that�s what I love about these town hall meetings,� he said, shaking my hand. �You get to hear from the people.�

Read the whole thing and don't miss Steyn's Kerry & ketchup shtick.

InstaPundit reports from the Republican party grass roots:

Bush should worry, though, because his policies are alienating the base. Some of the right-wing mailing lists that I get are turning nearly as anti-Bush as they used to be anti-Clinton .. I've followed this list (it's basically a gun-rights list) for a while. It's a pretty good weathervane for the sentiments of a chunk of the right, and it has shifted notably against Bush over the past few months. I expect that Karl Rove thinks he can hang on to these people, and maybe he will. But from here, it looks like he's got serious problems with the base.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg suspects that Bush is intentionally putting a stick in the eye of his base in order to garner increased support among those who loath conservative Republicans.

And this from Tim Green: "The Bushes seem to be missing the point that the NEA is for many fiscal conservatives Exhibit A of spending seriousness: if you can't save pennies on chocolate-smearing performance artists, where can you save? They've obviously decided that being "pro-arts" is a good move toward moderate Repubs with money, and a cheap one at that."

And a Corner reader adds, "In exchange for such a minor price, Pres Bush shows that he's got a warm spot in his heart for the Arts (probably with some advice from the beauteous Mrs Bush) and stands up to those mean, awful, artless conservatives who want to use the money to buy lug nuts for fighter planes."

A bit of perspective from the California Insider. Quotable:

So John Kerry has won a convincing victory in New Hampshire .. Kerry accomplished that feat on the strength of about 85,000 votes cast by Granite State Democrats -- far fewer than the 122,000 votes my local state senator received in her last reelection campaign. Howard Dean won a solid second place, with fewer votes than my assemblyman � one of 80 in the California Legislature � got last time. And then there were John Edwards and Wesley Clark, fighting it out for third place with about 26,000 votes each, about as many as it took to finish third in the most recent race for the Sacramento city school board ..

Filmmaker Jim Taylor is running against the President as a "Real Republican" in the New Hampshire primary. Here's one of his TV spots. In another video Taylor speaks with a picture of Barry Goldwater in the background. Of course, this guy has also run for President as a Democrat -- a far Left Democrat. If you care you can read his bio here.

The revolt of the Republican base against a President perceived as betraying core principles gathers steam across the blogosphere. Quotable:

Now we must ask ourselves what's best for the party in November '04. It's not necessarily electoral success ..

It's Tacitus. Read more.

"among ideological and intellectual conservatives, emotional support for Bush is starting to ebb" reports Jonah Goldberg, just back from the New York State Conservative convention. Quotable:

.. if you pay attention to what conservatives are saying at meetings and in magazines, on the Web and at the think tanks, as well as what readers, friends, colleagues and sources say, there's a definite undercurrent of discontent with the president. For some it started with his plan to offer amnesty-lite to illegal immigrants. For others, it's his fence-sitting on gay marriage. For others, like me, it was his signing of the campaign finance reform bill even though he thought it was unconstitutional. Or maybe it was his support for steel tariffs. Or the farm bill. I forget. Anyway that doesn't matter. What unites pretty much all of these grumblers is a deep sense of, well, disgust with how much this administration is spending .. There may be good aspects to George Bush's "compassionate conservatism," though on the whole I never liked it, but it's clear that compassion doesn't come cheap at the Bush White House, on whose watch overall spending from 2001 to 2003 grew at 16 percent and discretionary spending went up 27 percent. That's double Bill Clinton's rate ..

And this:

yes, conservatives understand that the GOP is practically the only place they have a real impact in electoral politics. But I'm not sure George Bush understands how much he is asking from those who brought him to the dance.

oh, go ahead and read the whole damn thing.

Mark Steyn is running the political equivalent of a Democrat Party Presidential Candidate Dead Pool .. your chance to win an autographed copy of Steyn's The Face of the Tiger.

John Hood reports from the Republican base -- and they are not happy. Quotable:

The problem for Bush and the Republicans is that if the security issue gets muted during the 2004 campaign, a good chunk of their political base will get uncomfortable. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which the limited-government, free-market faction of their coalition -- including mainstream Reagan Republicans, old-style balanced-budget moderates, and small-l libertarians-- have been dismayed by Bush's dismal record on federal spending and entitlements. Non-defense discretionary spending under Bush and a Republican Congress soared by nearly 19 percent in two years, a rate not seen in decades and one making Bill Clinton look like Calvin Coolidge.

The fallout is visible. Both sitting conservative members of Congress and candidates I've talked to in North Carolina, for example, freely express their disappointment in private and often in public forums. Radio talk shows, web sites, and other institutions that serve to channel activist energy at the grassroots exhibit significant disaffection. Even such Washington-establishment groups as the Heritage Foundation haven't shied away from savaging the president and the GOP with surprisingly blunt language. "The Republican party is simply not interested in small government now," says Brian Riedl, a Heritage Foundation budget analyst who has been particularly caustic. "They're worse than the Democrats they replaced."

UPDATE: Bush's speech proposed 30 new or greatly expanded programs for spending your money. And he offered not a single cut to any government program. And the Debt Clock keeps ticking. Quotable:

"[Bush] -- Giving Religion a Place at the Trough"

Catallarchy likens the President's State of the Union Address to a professinal wrestling event -- and concludes with a message for politicians. Call it an official SOTU reply from out of the blosphere.

UPDATE: Sullivan: "This is not Reaganism .. It's Big Government Moral Conservatism: fiscally liberal and socially conservative. It will please the hard right and the base. And it will alienate libertarians and moderates. It struck me as a speech that comes out of a political cocoon .." more.

UPDATE II: Tagorda: "Bush left no entitlement, no interest, no domestic initiative unturned. For every cause that aroused his empathy, he threw money in its direction .. as I bit into a fat sourdough burger, the President bit into my wallet with one pork-barrel project after another .. " more.

.. I had by then become something of a humor evangelist, espousing to anyone who would listen a variant of the Twelve Step philosophy: things are only as bad as the stuff you can't joke about ... more.

This is really good news. Quotable:

"The Constitution gives the president the power to veto legislation, and if Congress won't act in a fiscally responsible way, the president has to step in � but he hasn't done that .. If the president doesn't take a stand on this, there's a real chance the Republicans' voter base will not be enthusiastic about turning out in November, no matter who the Democrats nominate." -- Paul Beckner, president of Citizens for a Sound Economy

Tax crusader Grover Norquist unmasked. The Washington Post profile is here.

Rich Lowry:

According to WSJ today, Republicans had a 28-point lead over Democrats as party best able to �control government spending� in 1996. Now, their lead is just 2 points!

Has George W. Bush had you feeling lately like you've been played -- even just a pinch -- for a bit of a sucker? The Man Without Qualities senses he's about to have a Bush II SUCKER moment just as many experiended with Bush I and the "No New Taxes" pledge, and he's given a good stab at explaining why this matters. Quotable:

enervation [during the Bush I Presidency] came not just from the Administration's reversal, but from first causing supporters to personally support policies in dramatic terms, only to reverse those policies in circumstances that strongly suggested that the Administration had never cared about them other than opportunistically. SUCKER.

Read the whole thing -- and don't miss the part about "pillow talk" -- and tell me if it doesn't sound like The Man Without Qualities might be having a very interesting sex life ...

(Wash. D.C.) -- Bush Proposes $12.7 billion Program to Teach Limited Government Philosophy to School Children.

In a proposal widely seen as an effort to shore up support among limited government advocates within Bush's Republican base, the President today announced a $12.7 billion spending program aimed at teaching school children the importance of limited government. A source close to Karl Rove was quoted as saying, "This is just what the Administration needs to do in order to reach out to those voters who indentify ideologically with free markets and the original ideals of the Founding Fathers. We've got spending plans in place for everyone else in the Republican coalition. This was long over do." No reaction yet from anyone who actually believes in limited government or a free society.

UPDATE: Radley Balko responds -- Why Limited Government Republicans Should Vote Dean for President.

UPDATE 2: ScappleFace has news of another new Bush spending proposal.

UPDATE 3: Andrew Sullivan reacts to yet another Bush spending proposal: "LET THE KIDS PAY FOR IT: I'm talking about this $170 billion foray into space. After all, the next generation will be paying for a collapsed social security system, a bankrupted Medicare program, soaring interest on the public debt, as well as coughing up far higher taxes to keep some semblance of a government in operation. But, hey, the president needed another major distraction the week before the Iowa caucuses, and since he won't be around to pick up the bill, why the hell not? Deficits don't matter, after all. And what's a few hundred billion dollars over the next few decades anyway? Chickenfeed for the big and bigger government now championed by the Republicans. This space initiative is, for me, the last fiscal straw. There comes a point at which the excuses for fiscal recklessness run out. The president campaigned in favor of the responsibility ethic. He has governed - in terms of guarding the nation's finances - according to the motto: "If it feels good, do it.""

"Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest." -- Thomas Sowell.

The Tom Tancredo for President movement gets under way. Do these folks know that write-in votes are not counted in California unless the write-in candidate is officially registered with the Secretary of State? Time to get to work, guys. Who is Tom Tancredo? He's this guy. And he writes stuff like this. Quotable: "Bringing illegal Mexican workers into the Social Security System not only rewards illegal behavior, it also further endangers the fiscal health of our Social Security System .. ".

The Angry Clam has a message for the President. (PG-13)

Michaelle Malkin takes on Bush's open borders plan. Quotable:

the Bush proposal .. would allow untold millions of illegal aliens from Mexico to collect full cash benefits for themselves and their families from their home country -- without having to work the required number of years that law-abiding American citizens must work to be eligible for payouts .. this raw deal may well cost overburdened U.S. taxpayers $345 billion over the next 20 years. Probably much more ..

Read it all. Unbelievable stuff.

John O'Sullivan on George Bush's Open Border's policy, which O'Sullivan suggests is a plan to make America once again a land of low wage sweatshops.

The torch has been passed -- the English speaking worlds greatest writer -- MARK STEYN:

Like Susan Lucci at the Emmys, Howard Dean is getting better at putting a brave face on things. When Saddam Hussein fell from power, the Vermonter said churlishly, "I suppose that's a good thing." When Uday and Qusay bit the dust, the governor announced that "the ends do not justify the means." But on Sunday, Dr. Dean was doing his best to be fulsome, if you can be fulsome with clenched teeth. Nonetheless, he congratulated "our extraordinary military on an extraordinary victory and an extraordinary success." They gave Miss Lucci the Emmy eventually, and maybe by Labor Day next year, when the good doctor is thanking Don Rumsfeld for the souvenir vial of Osama's DNA he FedExed over, the voters will be feeling sorry enough to give Howard the prize, too. But this weekend that pileup of "extraordinaries" made the governor seem, well, ordinary.
It's odd that when something big happens, as on Sunday, the Democratic candidates seem irrelevant to the story, like asking a lacrosse expert what he thinks of the Super Bowl. They get interviewed and they trot out their lame clich�s, about the need to "internationalize" Iraq, by which they mean not Tony Blair, John Howard, the Poles and Italians, but Kofi Annan, The Hague, the French, the Guinean foreign minister, all the folks who proved unwilling and unable to deal with Iraq before the liberation and who have given no indication of being likely to do any better after. The Democrats' indestructible retreat to this dreary line gives them the air of a gormless twit in a drawing-room comedy coming in through the French windows every 10 minutes and saying, "Anyone for tennis?" You can't help feeling that, on the big questions roiling around America's national security, the Dems don't really have speaking parts: if this was Broadway, they'd have been written out in New Haven.

There was a revealing moment on MSNBC the other night. Chris Matthews asked Dr. Dean whether Osama bin Laden should be tried in an American court or at The Hague. "I don't think it makes a lot of difference," said the governor airily. Mr. Matthews pressed once more. "It doesn't make a lot of difference to me," he said again. Some of us think what's left of Osama is already hard enough to scrape off the cave floor and put in a matchbox, never mind fly to the Netherlands. But, just for the sake of argument, his bloodiest crime was committed on American soil; American courts, unlike the international ones, would have the option of the death penalty. But Gov. Dean couldn't have been less interested. So how about Saddam? The Hague "suits me fine," he said, the very model of ennui. Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude.

So what does get the Dean juices going? A few days later, the governor was on CNN and Judy Woodruff asked him about his admission that he'd left the Episcopal Church and become a Congregationalist because "I had a big fight with a local Episcopal church over the bike path." I hasten to add that, in contrast to current Anglican controversies over gay marriage in British Columbia and gay bishops in New Hampshire, this does not appear to have been a gay bike path: its orientation was not an issue; it would seem to be a rare example of a non-gay controversy in the Anglican Communion. But nevertheless it provoked Howard into "a big fight." "I was fighting to have public access to the waterfront, and we were fighting very hard in the citizens group," he told Judy Woodruff. Fighting, fighting, fighting.

And that's our pugnacious little Democrat. On Osama bin Laden, he's Mister Insouciant. But he gets mad about bike paths. Destroy the World Trade Center and he's languid and laconic and blas�. Obstruct plans to convert the ravaged site into a memorial bike path and he'll hunt you down wherever you are.

Howard Dean catapulted himself from Vermont obscurity to national fame very ingeniously. His campaign was tonally brilliant. He was an angry peacenik, an aggressive defeatist, he got in-your-face about getting out of Iraq. The problem with pacifism as a political position is that it's too easy to seem wimpy, wussy, nancy-boyish, pantywaisty, milksopping, etc. In that sense, his fellow Democrat, Dennis Kucinich, has a pacifist mien: I'm not saying he's a pantywaist or milksop, but he comes over as a goofy nebbish, as the Zionist neocons would say. The main impact he's made on the Granite State electorate seems to be his lack of a girlfriend, which has prompted a New Hampshire Web site to try and find a date for him. Somehow one is not surprised to hear this. By contrast, when Howard Dean, shortish and stocky, comes out in his rolled-up shirtsleeves, he looks like Bruce Banner just before he turns into the Incredible Hulk, as if his head's about to explode out of his shirt collar. Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus, but Dr. Dean is Venusian in a very Martian way. He's full of anger.
But only for peripheral issues. Ask him serious questions about the president's key responsibilities--national security and foreign policy--and the passion drains away as it did with Chris Matthews. David Brooks, visiting Burlington in 1997 in search of what eventually became his thesis "Bobos in Paradise," concluded that the quintessential latt� burg was "relatively apolitical." He's a smart guy but he was wrong. All the stuff he took as evidence of the lack of politics--pedestrianization, independent bookstores--is the politics. Because all the big ideas failed, culminating in 1989 in Eastern Europe with the comprehensive failure of the biggest idea of all, the left retreated to all the small ideas: in a phrase, bike paths. That's what Bill Clinton meant when he said the era of big government was over; instead, he'd be ushering in the era of lots and lots of itsy bits of small government that, when you tote 'em up, works out even more expensive than the era of big government. That's what Howard Dean represents--the passion of the Bike-Path Left.

Vermonters marked the end of the Dean era by electing a Republican governor and a Republican House. Even Vermont isn't as liberal as liberals assume. What's liberal is the idea of Vermont as it's understood across America: a bucolic playground of quaint dairy farms punctuated by the occasional boutique business that's managed to wiggle through the Dean approval process. A lot of those dairy barns are empty and belong to weekending flatlanders, the rest are adorned with angry "Take Back Vermont" signs, and the quintessential Green Mountain boutique business, Ben and Jerry's, wound up selling out to the European multinational Unilever. But these dreary details are irrelevant. To Democratic primary voters across the land, Vermont is a shining, rigorously zoned, mandatory-recycling city on a hill. And the only way up the hill is by the bike path.

Unlike Howlin' Howard and the Burlington Episcopalians, I'm agnostic on the merits of bike paths. But earlier this year, when the antiwar types held "Bridges to Peace" demonstrations on the spans across the Connecticut River between New Hampshire and Vermont, I couldn't help noticing they were very much a bike-path crowd. It was February and 20 below, so they didn't have their bikes with them, but they did have snowshoes and cross-country skis, for the activities that would occupy the rest of their weekends once they'd got a little light demonstrating out of the way. But, under their snowsuits, they were, metaphorically, wearing cycling shorts. They loved the '90s because you never heard a thing about macho stuff like war: it was all micro-politics, new regulations for this, new entitlements for that--education, environment, "social justice." For hard-core Democrats, the whole war thing is an unwelcome intrusion on what large numbers of people had assumed to be a permanent post-Martian politics. When you're at a Dean get-together, you realize they're not angry about the war, so much as having to talk about the war.

A little over an hour north of that Burlington bike path is Montreal, the visits to which (for kids' hockey fixtures and his appearances on a Canadian TV show) Dr. Dean cites, seriously, as his main foreign-policy experience. Montreal is home to North America's largest Iraqi �migr� community and on Sunday night the streets were full of honking horns celebrating Saddam's downfall. You don't have to go far to see the world beyond the good doctor's bike-path parochialism, but it's farther than most Dems are willing to go.

Last weekend was confirmation, if you needed it, that this is not a time for micro-politics. Many independents and a critical sliver of Democrats understand that, and, in a time of war, they're not prepared to stick with the bike-path left. When you put the pedal to the full metal jacket, it's no contest.

How "supply side" economics knocked the legs out from under limited government Republicanism -- CATO's Ed Crane (pdf).

Bruce Barlett on George W. Bush -- the New Nixon. Quotable:

It is a fact of life that perception is often more important than reality. This is especially so in politics, where people can be dogged by impressions even when they are completely untrue ...

I believe that President Bush is in danger of creating a perception about himself that may prove .. hard to eradicate if it is allowed to continue. That is the view that he is "Nixonian," having an approach toward politics and policy paralleling that of Richard Nixon. It is characterized by a willingness to subordinate everything to one's re-election -- to say and do anything to advance this goal, with no concern whatsoever for the long-term consequences.

I first discussed this equivalence back in August, after hearing Rush Limbaugh mention it and reading a July 7 column by William Safire in The New York Times. Since then, a number of commentators have noticed a similarity between the two presidents ..

[On Nov. 25] Limbaugh talked again about how Bush revives memories of Nixon. "This administration reminds me of Nixon," he told his radio audience. "He's following Richard Nixon's footsteps on domestic policy" by pumping up federal spending for any group whose votes can be bought. Limbaugh warned that Bush was endangering his support among conservatives who want limited, constitutional government, not new Medicare entitlements and other expansions of the state into our lives and pocketbooks.

Veteran Associated Press reporter Tom Raum wrote that Bush is "retracing the steps of Richard Nixon three decades ago" on Nov. 29. On Dec. 2, Wall Street Journal columnist Alan Murray said, "Presidents Nixon and Bush may turn out to be bookends to the conservative era, with their big-government drift." The former took office at the end of a liberal era when voters were not yet ready for conservative policies, while the latter took office at the end of a conservative era when they have grown tired of efforts to limit government expansion, Murray wrote.

Lastly, Newsweek reported in its Dec. 8 issue that it was now "conventional wisdom" that Bush is following the Nixon model: "Medicare bill passes, economy surges. Thanksgiving stunt a PR coup. Like Nixon in '72?"

This is very dangerous for President Bush. Nixon is one of the few presidents in history reviled almost equally by left and right ... With so many on the right comparing Bush to Nixon, it is only a matter of time before those on the left pick up on it and start making the comparison themselves. With the left's control of the media, it could soon be echoed far and wide. This will not be good for Bush's re-election or ability to govern. He can nip it by expending some political capital on an issue of principle.

Alan Kling explains why it's been a bad month for (true) liberals. Quotable:

I used to evaluate candidates for President by their taste in economists, on the theory that getting free markets right is at least half the battle. In 1992, Bill Clinton was taking advice from one of my favorite economists, Alan Blinder. So I voted for Clinton. Meanwhile, my wife evaluated the 1992 race on the basis of the candidates' taste in women. On the one hand, she saw Barbara Bush. On the other, she saw Hillary Clinton and Gennifer Flowers. My wife voted for Bush ...

David Boaz -- Bush betrays Ronald Reagan and Reagan Republicans:

In 2000 George W. Bush campaigned across the country telling voters: "My opponent trusts government. I trust you."

Little wonder that some of his supporters are now wondering which candidate won that election.

Federal spending has increased by 23.7 percent since Bush took office. Education has been further federalized in the No Child Left Behind Act. Bush pulled out all the stops to get Republicans in Congress to create the biggest new entitlement program -- prescription drug coverage under Medicare -- in 40 years.

He pushed an energy bill that my colleague Jerry Taylor described as "three parts corporate welfare and one part cynical politics . . . a smorgasbord of handouts and subsidies for virtually every energy lobby in Washington."

It's a far cry from the less-government, "leave us alone" conservatism of Ronald Reagan.

Conservatives used to believe that the U.S. Constitution set up a government of strictly limited powers.

It was supposed to protect us from foreign threats and deliver the mail, leaving other matters to the states or to the private sector -- individuals, families, churches, charities and businesses.

That's what lots of voters assumed they would get with Bush. In his first presidential debate with Al Gore, Bush contrasted his own vision of tax reduction with that of his opponent, who would "increase the size of government dramatically." Gore, Bush declared, would "empower Washington," but "my passion and my vision is to empower Americans to be able to make decisions for themselves in their own lives."

Bush was tapping into popular sentiment.

In fact, you could say that what most voters wanted in 2000 was neither Bush nor Gore but smaller government. A Los Angeles Times poll in September 2000 found that Americans preferred "smaller government with fewer services" to "larger government with many services" by 59 to 26 percent.

But that's not what voters got. Leave aside defense spending and even entitlements spending: In Bush's first three years, nondefense discretionary spending -- which fell by 13.5 percent under Ronald Reagan -- has soared by 20.8 percent. His more libertarian-minded voters are taken aback to discover that "compassionate conservatism" turned out to mean social conservatism -- a stepped-up drug war, restrictions on medical research, antigay policies, federal subsidies for marriage and religion -- and big-spending liberalism justified as "compassion."

When they're given a chance to vote, Americans don't like big government.

Last November 45 percent of the voters in the most liberal state in the Union, Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts, voted to abolish the state income tax.

In January, Oregon's liberal electorate rejected a proposed tax increase, 55 percent to 45 percent.

The three factors which have taken today's Republican Right "far from the conservatism of most of the 20th century".

A fascinating insiders look at Ronald Reagan.

Lingering southern racism likely cost Bobby Jindal the governor's office in Louisiana.

Native born Americans would have to get Mexican, African or Iraqi citizenship to receive benefits to match those being given to non-Americans, both at home and abroad. George Bush and state governments are basically saying "screw you" to the citizens who actually own the country and pay the bills.

In my estimation, the effort by some conservatives to read Arnold Schwarzenegger out of the Republican party comes down to one thing, and really one thing only -- it's really all about the cutthroat power politics of abortion.

The most significant fact about this political guillotine is that abortion policy has nothing to do with it -- because the issue of abortion has nothing to do with anything in the real world. Not nationally, and especially not in California. A governor of California's position on who will win "American Idol" would have more effect on the world than a California Governor's position on abortion. In other words, it has none. Zip. Zero. So what is this national effort all about? It's about cold, calculating back-alley, knife fighing power politics -- i.e who gets control of the Republican party machinary and who is allowed on the Republican ballot. Simply put, the anti-abortion powerbrokers want exclusive control of the Republican party and the Republican ballot -- even if this means effectively killing the Republican party as a state-wide entity in many states, as has been attempted in Oregon, Washington and California. You can be a fifth or sixth generation Republican, more conservative than Ronald Reagan, but if you don't pass the abortion litmus test, your chair at the Republican table will be kicked out from under you. And in my judgment, kicking the chair out from under good folks you haven't been able to persuade is nothing but political and moral stupidity -- especially when the Republican party would go down in flames nationally if it came to be widely perceived that the Party stands really for nothing -- except a non-majoritarian position on abortion, widely rejected in many regions of the country.

Take a look at what the Republican Congress and the Republican President have and haven't done and ask yourself, are these people "conservatives"? Consider. Does this Republican Party stand for a government that protects the citizen from bigger government? -- simple answer, no. Does this Republican Party stand for a government that takes less out of the national pie? -- simple answer, no. And has this Republican party done what will be needed to protect the citizens of the country from foreign nationals? -- simple answer, no.

So why do the national "conservatives" stay on board with this party -- why do they want to call this party "conservative"? One word answer: abortion. "Conservatives" and many Republicans have sold their souls for a crack-pipe dream in which abortion politics brings them both national political power -- and a world in which abortion if constitutionally outlawed. But note well -- these are mutally exclusive ends. National political success for the Republican party will continue only in a world were the hope of an anti-abortion constitutional amendment continues to be dead-on-arrival. Democracy requires persuasion, and persuasion of the kind required is nowhere -- nowhere -- on the horizon.

But consider for a moment just how bogus the abortion litmus test is for deciding "who is a Republican", or more commonly, "who is a conservative". If you are going to have an abortion litmus test for "who's" a conservative, then you will need to say that Barry Goldwater was not a conservative, and if you are honest, you'd have to say that that Governor of California who made abortion availability the law of California -- Ronald Reagan -- is not a conservative. And ditto the idea that an abortion litmus test can tell you who is a "real" Republican, and who is not. Barry Goldwater not a "real" Republican? Gerald Ford not a "real" Republican? George Bush I in the 1970s not a "real" Republican? California governor Ronald Reagan not a "real" Republican? Give me a break.

Barry Goldwater was "Mr. Conservative" -- the very paradigm of a conservative -- and the issue of abortion had nothing to do with that title. So don't be fooled. The abortion litmus test that the national "conservatives" wish to impose upon Californians isn't intellectually substantive -- it's about politics, cold, brass-knucked politics, and nothing more.

Worth quoting:

Conservative dismay over Taft's liberal agenda led directly to massive Democratic gains in Congress in 1910 and his own loss in 1912. The same dismay over Nixon's liberal agenda led to massive Democratic gains and his ouster from office in 1974.

I am sorry to say that I see Bush traveling the same path. He has concluded that the Democrats are very likely to nominate a candidate so far to the left as to be unelectable. Howard Dean's ascension to the head of the Democratic pack supports this conclusion. But ironically, rather than making Bush feel more comfortable pursuing a conservative agenda, he continues to move left on domestic issues -- especially the budget-busting prescription drug subsidy bill.

Bush has also signed into law a campaign finance reform bill that most conservatives view as blatantly unconstitutional, endorsed an education bill written by Ted Kennedy and initiated more trade protectionism by any president since Nixon. But against these, Bush continually plays his trump card: the war against terrorism. And just as Nixon played the anticommunist card in terms of the Vietnam War, it has been enough to keep most Republican voters under control -- so far.

The only substantive difference between Nixon and Bush, in terms of policy, is that the latter cut taxes while the former raised them. Of course, there are also important personal differences. Nixon was sleazy and dishonest, while I don't believe that such can be said about Bush. But if it turns out that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- the reason why most people who supported the war supported it -- then he is going to have a "credibility gap" as big as Nixon's to overcome.

Even so, I think Bush is a "lock" for re-election, regardless of whom the Democrats nominate. Yale economist Ray Fair predicts he will get 56.7 percent of the vote based on economic data already in hand. If the economy does better than expected, his vote total will only rise.

But conservatives still need to ask themselves: to what end? Do we want another Taft or Nixon, who imposed liberal policies no Democratic president could achieve as the price for keeping a Republican in the White House? It is a question worth asking.

-- Bruce Bartlett. The set-up to this is worth clicking for.

Arnold Schwarzenegger for President -- Sen. Orrin Hatch is working to unblock the road to the White House.

Rush Limbaugh gets it. As I've been pointing out here, George Bush's domestic politics is far more Nixonian that it is Reaganesque. Rush had a very good analysis of all this on his radio show today, which I listened to while feeding the new one. He seems a bit confused, however, on the federal judges decision to let everyone vote in the race to replace. As Calinfornia Insider notes, this decision is pretty much common sense, and no big deal. Rush was quite open about the fact that he hadn't thought much about the issue, so he gets an honest pass.

Is Ken Adelman suggesting that Bush & co. are essentially corrupt? It sure looks like it. Money quote:

While it's infuriating that Saudis bankroll terrorist fanatics, that's a fact about a foreign country that we must confront. But it's more infuriating that the Bush administration spikes this critical information and continues to consider -- as Secretary of State Colin Powell chummily put it -- Saudi Arabia as "a great friend to the United States for many, many years and a strategic partner." This happy face stance would surely succumb to Bush's realism and moralism, were it not for Saudi money ...

If the leaders of the Democratic Party were themselves "a little bit more on America's side", the Saudi issue is the kind they could take and run with to the White House. Don't hold your breath.

Andrew Sullivan:

BUSH AND GOVERNMENT: He's no conservative in a small government sense. Spending billions we don't have, piling on regulations, burdening businesses, Bush is turning into a Nixon in domestic economic policy. He will regret it. So will we.

Sullivan is commenting on the CATO story about Bush's exploding Federal Registery -- which The Agitator was plugging this morning, and which Instapudit pugged this afternoon. Pretty typical for Sullivan -- a day behind and no "speading of the wealth" -- or credit -- around the blogosphere. I didn't pick up on the story because very clearly 9/11 needs to be factored in and I haven't seen that work done yet. The Washington Post article is here.

Lobbyists form lobby for lobbyists -- TheAgitator has the scoop -- and the must be read to be believed press release. ScrappleFace, eat your heart out.

Dean's campaign manager follows up on advice from emailers, and hits a jackpot on the Internet. Money quote:

Meetup.com was founded nearly a year ago as a Web site for strangers in the same area to meet and share common interests. Scott Heiferman, the chief executive, said: "We never thought it would be used for politics. We figured we would attract Lord of the Rings geeks and poodle owners."

"Diversity Training" -- it's a racket and a jobs creation program, and it's utterly counter-productive. So argues Peter Wood, who suggests " a 12-step program for Corporate America.

First comes the spending -- then will come the taxing.

"I don't need Bush's tax cut. I have never worked a [bleeping] day in my life."

Patrick Kennedy. (via the indispensible Drudge).

"no state...shall deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law"

-- Sandra Day O'Connor edits the U.S. Constitution. Peter Kirsanow has a helpful analysis of some of the details.

I don't think there's a 12 step program for this:

"Hi. My name is John Cole, and I still think running deficits is bad."

Don't miss the rather dramatic graphic from Reuters.

It looks like the Clinton's did kill Vince Foster. But they didn't use a gun ..

The Bush team has a well-earned reputation for dishonesty in the scientific community. Fooled me once, shame on me ... fooled me twice ... ???

Would Hillary Clinton make a good President? Brad DeLong weighs in:

My two cents' worth--and I think it is the two cents' worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994--is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn't smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.

So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse selection pressures it would put on the nation's health-care system...

Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch--the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.

Interesting.

Another state does it -- billions in spending cuts and zero tax increases. The goons in Sacramento have no excuses.

Tax and spend tweedle-dees and tweedle-dums:

State legislatures controlled by Republicans increased spending an average of 6.54% per year from 1997 to 2002, compared with 6.17% for legislatures run by Democrats. State spending rose slowest -- 6% annually -- when legislatures were split, and each party controlled one chamber. Inflation averaged 2.55% annually 1997-2002 .. Spending was higher when one party -- Republican or Democratic -- controlled the legislature and the governor's office, the analysis shows. States spent 14% less when Republicans and Democrats had to fight each other to pass a budget. The most frugal combination: a Republican legislature and a Democratic governor.

a man who deemed Britain as much a threat as the Soviet Union, whose advisers included Soviet spies, and who once described a Siberian slave-labor camp as a "combination TVA and Hudson's Bay Company."

Know who it is? A hint -- he very nearly became President .. and his name will grace a visitors center in Hyde Park, NY.

David Horowitz is looking for help on his Anti-Chomsky Reader for Encounter Books. David writes:

We are looking for authors to cover Chomsky's writings on the
following subjects: Latin America ("Turning the Tide"), East Timor,
the Global Economy and the War Against Terror (Iraq, the PLO, Chomsky's
peculiar definitions of terror etc.)

I'm guessing there's someone reading PrestoPundit who could cover at least one or two of these for David. Drop him a note at: dhorowitz@earthlink.net

Australia demands regime change in Zimbabwe.

The Club for Growth goes after RINOs -- Republicans in Name Only ..

Christopher Hitchens replies to Sidney Blumenthal.

Daniel Drexner suggests that the Demo part may be "incapable of competently discussing matters of grand strategy", and he's rooting for Dems aiming to reverse the pathology. And, no, this doesn't make Drezner a Demo, he assures us, just someone who cares about his country.

Debra Saunders on the logic of the California recall:

The latest Field poll found that two-thirds of state voters don't like the governor. And the mechanics work against him: On the very day voters go to the polls to vote up or down on Davis, they also vote on his possible replacement. By law, Davis can't run to replace himself.

Because the court struck down McCain-Feingold, Congressman Darrell Issa is now legally allowed to use his own substantial resources to help bankroll the recall. (Image that -- under McCain-Feingold it was illegal for Issa to use his free speech right in the campaign to let folks hear the case for recalling Gray Davis - something that's absolutely needed to save the state of California from complete fiscal meltdown.)

Californians, prepare to give the death penalty to the car tax. And don't forget to recall Gray Davis. John and Ken are rallying the So-Cal drive-time troops.

Veteran newsman Peter Collins attacks Peter Jennings for manipulating network news copy in order to make a favorable impression of communist rule in Nicaragua According to Collins:

"what Mr. Jennings wanted was for me to make a favorable pronouncement about the 10 years of the Sandinista revolution and he called me up, massaged my script in a way that I no longer recognized it"

One doesn't know what to say, or where to start. Read the whole article. There's more on the CNN scandal as well.