Five Reasons the GOP Will Rebound

Over at CNN, John Feehery lists five reasons that the GOP will rebound. Numbers one and two of these reasons have been pretty well discussed, but three through five are (to me) fresher:

1. The party in power tends to overreach.


2. People want checks on power.


3. Crisis breeds renewal.


4. Talent senses opportunity.


5. The Republican Party is now the de facto Libertarian Party.

I think a lot of people on the left don't get number five and don't see how it is linked to number one.

The Sunshine Patriot

From Ace, this link to an article in the Seattle PI documenting the sudden fashionability of American flags in Seattle:

With newfound patriotism, Seattleites want to wave the flag, hang it from their homes and stick it on their cars.

"The thing that's kind of astounding to me is I never ever would have cared to own a flag," said Rosemary Garner, 42. "This is the first day in my life I actually feel this funny sense of pride about my country. It's a very foreign feeling, but it's a good one."

"It's just a rare feeling to feel that type of, I don't know, national connection," said Noah Kriegsmann, a 33-year-old builder from West Seattle. He feels that Obama's win will help America's standing in the world, and he bought a flag to fly on his truck, though he admitted it felt strange to see the flag in his hand.

"I have just historically felt shame for what the symbol of this country is internationally. Being in someplace like Morocco, and Canadians have their flag on their backpacks -- I would never ever do that," he said.

Well.

I'm glad that these people are finally able to love their own country. That's a positive. (I wonder how they would react to a traditional Northwest flag-burning by ski-masked anarchists. Hmmm?)

But the essence of love is that the beloved is worth love regardless of whether or not your expectations are being met. You can love someone even while you are being embarrassed by them, as the parents of small children and the children of aging parents know.

Part of love is sticking with the one you love through rough times. That's what distinguishes love from lust.

So to my newly-proud Americans I say, welcome back to the country that bore you, protected you, and whom you tore down with your childish behaviour. I hope that this time you can stick around.

William Ayres

This is all very inside baseball. If you haven't been following the presidential campaign since 2006, it may seem as though it is an argument in progress. It is. Feel free to skip.

Just a few posts ago I was wondering about Barack Obama, "Who Does He Owe?"

It seems as though one of the people he owes is William Ayres. As pointed out by Hillary Clinton, Obama used the position that he had in Ayres operation as a bullet point on his resume.

This is the absolute sticking point for me. My family calls me McCarthyite and say that I'm attempting to smear Obama with guilt by association.

And yet.

"I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough", and, when asked if he would "do it all again" as saying "I don't want to discount the possibility."

"We weren't terrorists," Ayers told an interviewer for the Chicago Tribune in 2001. "The reason we weren't terrorists is because we did not commit random acts of terror against people. Terrorism was what was being practiced in the countryside of Vietnam by the United States."

Oh, God. Do we think that the Red Brigade were random? Bader-Meinhof Group? Were all the pain and horror and death in the end for nothing?

Calling me McCarthyite isn't the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

MooveAlong.org

This is completely brilliant. MooveAlong.org

It's a goof site promoting the movie An American Carol.

Identity -Politics Hand-Grenades

This whole Democratic primary campaign has spun out of control.

From Mark Steyn, via National Review:

...Senator Obama embodies an idea: He’s a symbol of redemption and renewal, and a lot of other airy-fairy abstractions that don’t boil down to much except making upscale white liberals feel good about themselves and get even more of a frisson out of white liberal guilt than they usually do. I assume that’s what Geraldine Ferraro was getting at when she said Obama wouldn’t be where he was today (i.e., leading the race for the Democratic nomination) if he was white. For her infelicity, the first woman on a presidential ticket got bounced from the Clinton campaign and denounced by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann for her “insidious racism” indistinguishable from “the vocabulary of David Duke.”

Oh, for cryin’ out loud. Enjoyable as it is to watch previously expert wielders of identity-politics hand-grenades blow their own fingers off, if Geraldine Ferraro’s an “insidious racist,” who isn’t?

Good Riddance

And shame on those that gave this bad man a pulpit to pound:

He wasn't an Army Ranger. He didn't earn a Purple Heart. He didn't witness war crimes in Iraq.

The truth about Jesse Macbeth? He's a fraud, and he's now facing prison.

Macbeth, 23, pleaded guilty in a Seattle federal courtroom Thursday to making false statements to the Department of Veterans Affairs and altering his discharge papers.

Kicked out of boot camp after 44 days, Macbeth instead portrayed himself as a decorated soldier who served in both Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and was discharged due to post-traumatic stress disorder...

For several years beginning in 2003, Macbeth became a star of the anti-war movement by claiming he saw and participated in war crimes in Iraq.

He gave interviews to news reporters and was popular in blogs and the alternative media. In a video that was widely distributed on the Internet, a frail Macbeth dressed in camouflage told of killing hundreds of civilians. "We would burn their bodies ... hang their bodies from the rafters in the mosque," he said.

As part of the plea agreement, Macbeth admitted he had been lying. Anti-war Web sites have pulled his video.

Braaaains!

Several bloggers have posted this video by the Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace of their attempts to block a shipment of military equipment from the Port of Tacoma to Iraq.

The opening seconds of the video have someone (perhaps the camera operator?) chanting "No justice, no peace," so lifelessly that it sounds like a George A. Romero movie.