[Revised to correct numerous typos and improve the flow.]

I have long been fascinated by the contempt certain left-wing bloggers hold for Ann Althouse.  As I noted in a previous post, she’s “kind of like the South Park of blogging. . ., directing her snark at pretty much anything she finds amusing” regardless of politician affiliation.  She’s basically an equal opportunity riffer.

You wouldn’t think she’d earn the ire of any particular partisans.

Indeed, given the enthusiasm of left-of-center bloggers had for Barack Obama in last fall’s campaign, you’d think they’d love Althouse.  Having backed Bush in 2004, she came out for Obama last year, voting for him in the Wisconsin primary, one of the most decisive contests of the Democratic campaign.  Her support for their man helped give him added credibility, an example of his appeal to moderate Bush voters.

Not just that, she’s had kind things to say for a number of conservatives, even offered occasional praise for Sarah Palin.  They could use her to show how broad-minded people, having seen the strengths on both sides, prefer Obama.

But, maybe they just couldn’t stand her because sometimes she refrained from riffing Republicans and denounced Democrats instead. Her occasional praise of Republicans really got under their skins.  Her support for Obama was not absolute.   She did not see him as a messiah, but merely the better of the two candidates (in each of two contests, for the Democratic nomination and later the White House.)  And she’s aware of the President’s imperfections, criticizing him from time to time.

I think that’s part of the reason those bloggers can’t stand her; she’s only a lukewarm supporter of Obama and not a rabid critic of his opponents.

I believe, however, the real reason the mere mention of her name whips those bloggers into paroxysms of anger and invective is that right-of-center bloggers love her even though we often disagree with her.

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Chalk one post off the list.

Among the many posts I had planned was one encouraging the Alaska Governor not to challenge her fellow Republican Lisa Murkowski for the latter’s Senate seat (as some on the right have hoped and some in the media have speculated). Not only would it divide the party, but it would make it increasingly difficult for that accomplished executive to maintain her outsider status in GOP circles.

Part of Sarah Palin’s appeal is that she is not part of the Washington establishment.

This good woman will increase her standing as a future contender for national office by completing two successful terms as Chief Executive of the Last Frontier.  And if her next five-and-one-half years in office are like her first two-and-one-half, she’ll easily achieve this goal.

There’s no need any need for me to make that case in a blog post because Palin has made clear she’s backing Murkowski’s reelection campaign, planning to hold a fundraiser for the state’s senior senator after the state’s legislative session ends later this month. On Tuesday, Palin spokeswoman Meg Stapleton said said that the Governor “thinks the senator is doing a great job and that’s why she’s looking forward to hosting a fundraiser for her.”

While thinking about Joe Biden in contemplating my previous post, it struck me how hard the MSM tries to portray the Vice President in a positive light. They give short shrift to his past gaffes and errors of judgment. The former Delaware Senator has made gaffes that were he a Republican would have earned him the opprobrium of the chattering classes. He has been wrong about nearly every foreign policy issue in his 36-year Senate tenure.

Recall, this is the guy who told Katie Couric, “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”

At least when Sarah Palin was talking to the same news anchor, she admitted what she didn’t know (and got into trouble for that).  By contrast, Biden showed that he was clueless about U.S. history and the record of the most celebrated president of his party.

If the MSM devoted one-third the time to investigating Biden’s public statements as they did to reporting the private life of Sarah Palin’s family, they’d have ten times the material.

It should be no secret to readers of this blog that I am a huge fan of of the immediate past Vice President of the United States. Not only was Richard Cheney The Most Pro-Gay Vice President in U.S. History, but he was also a steady advocate throughout his tenure in the Executive Branch and in Congress of a strong national defense.

Without getting to the substance of his criticisms of the current Administration (which, for the record, I believe to be sound), I believe it entirely inappropriate for a Vice President (or anyone with a prominent position in the previous Administration) so soon after leaving his office to criticize the succeeding Administration. He should take a page from the man who tapped him as his running mate and choose silence when asked to comment on the current Administration.

I believe history would relieve Cheney of the harsh judgment the media has conferred upon him and he will go down as one of the better American Vice Presidents.  But, he doesn’t do his legacy any good by criticizing his successors so soon after he left office.

His successor, however, has failed to use Cheney’s criticism to his advantage.  The classy thing for Joe Biden to do would be to say something like, “Well, he’s free to criticize us all we like.  But, hile he’s enjoying a retirement free from the burdens of office and with a government pension, the president and I have been busy seeing to the security needs of our nation.  To cite just one example. . . .”

Instead the incumbent Vice President chose to attack back, faulting Cheney for weakening America.  He should have just ignored the criticism and not responded in kind.

That said, Dick Cheney did a great job as Vice President.  He needs be patient and wait for passions to cool; in time, his real strengths and successes will again become manifest as he did those of the Gipper.  He only delays that day by rushing to criticize his successor.

His criticisms are sound.  He just let others articulate them in public.

UPDATE from Bruce (GayPatriot): I respectfully disagree with Dan on this one.  Since President Obama has been in full-throated “Bush’s Fault” mode since Jan 20, it is about time someone step up to the plate and stand up for the good decisions that were made by Bush & Cheney.  If it has to be Cheney, so be it.

There are too many lily-livered Republicans who forget about principle and are too consumed with politics to do the right thing.  Cheney is not one of them, thank God.

The most telling thing about the exchange between Barney Frank and a conservative student (which I blogged about yesterday and which has been making the rounds of the rightosphere) questioning him in a public forum at Harvard is how quick the Massachusetts Democrat is to attack.

How dare someone pose such a tough question!  How dare someone ask him to consider if he might have done something wrong.  Barney’s used to getting softball questions from an adoring media.  Tough questions mean someone <strike>is</strike> must be accusing him!  They’re part of some nefarious right-wing plot!

The Congressman accuses the student of “making an accusation which is totally inaccurate” and asks him to suggest what he, the Congressman, should have done.  That very response showed his arrogance.  He acted as if he never erred, well only once, just that one time when he took some bad advice.  That he would ask someone else to suggest his errors suggests a man who rarely, if at all, engages in any sort of introspection, rarely considers if he had done anything wrong.

His failure to address his misdeeds is particularly telling given his repeated defenses over the years of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) whose failure sparked the financial meltdown.

Instead of even considering if he had made errors over the years*, Barney rambles on about a “systematic right-wing attack to try and divert the blame for the deregulation.”  It’s all the right-wing, isn’t it Barney?  He doesn’t acknowledge his own failure to support (indeed, his active opposition to) increased regulation of the GSEs.

When I posted on Barney’s failure to acknowledge his mistakes (more that just a failure to acknowledge his mistakes, a failure to even consider if he had made any), a critic was quick to chime in that I was pushing a debunked myth.  He linked a post on the Community Reinvestment Act, something I didn’t even address in the post.  He then went out to attack Republicans.

In short, just like Barney at Harvard, this reader didn’t address the substance of the “question,” (well, in the reader’s case, the post) but was quick to attack his ideological adversaries.

No wonder the unhappy Mr. Frank is such a hero to the left.  Just like all too many of our critics who ignore the points of our posts and attack us instead, the mean-spirited man from Massachusetts ignores the question, accuses the person posing it and goes on a tear against the “right-wing.”

You think a guy so smart would relish such a challenge.  You’d hope that a guy so powerful would be able to acknowledge his mistakes.

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Monday night before bed, I pulled up a post I had written almost exactly three years ago, wanting to reference in a followup piece on comments and civility.  Had it not been for the Vermont legislature’s vote on gay marriage and a brainstorm I had about the readiness of some on the left to blame conservative talk radio, bloggers, & etc. for murder, I likely would have penned, er, pixeled, that post on Tuesday.

It seemed, however, that April 7 was destined to be a day where I would consider civil discourse and blogging.  When I had a moment to scan the various comment threads, I noted an increased level of vitriol on both sides.  And it upset me because, as per that aforementioned post, when I started blogging here

I had hoped that by posting to a blog with an open-comment thread, we might generate the kind of discussion that began that snowy night in the 1980s [when I had a great discussion with an "ideological adversary"], where, when we [the bloggers] rationally put forward ideas at odds with those of our left-wing peers, our critics would come to appreciate our arguments, even when they disagreed.

Instead, mixed among some very sensible comments, we had readers on both sides leveling ad hominem attacks on their ideological adversaries.  This is not the type of discussion I had hoped to promote.

Because of our capricious spam filter (which I have been tasked with reviewing), I have seen many such comments, which I would really rather let lie there and not rescue them.  But, ever since reading Ann Althouse’s post where she defended letting hateful comments stand on her blog, I have acted in the spirit of her (rhetorical) question, “Is it not better to have scurrilous ideas out in the sunlight where they can die?”

At the same time as I was concerned about the level of bile in yesterday’s threads, a reader e-mailed me asking me to “get” this “under control.”  And I’ve been trying to do that, posting this just two weeks ago:

All too often alas, those who chime in to defend Bruce or me compromise some very strong comments when they resort to ad hominem, using the term “libtard” or some such. In many cases, if they took the insult out of the comment, they’d have won the argument. . . . That need to get in that additional dig, while emotional satisfying, compromises their entire argument and gives our critics ammunition to attack them.

Or, as I said more simply three years ago, “Friends, you make a better case when you leave out the ad hominem.”

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Perhaps American Liberals will rally to the cause of another Islamic country making life for gays and lesbians more difficult, and perhaps more deadly….. (h/t – Infidels Are Cool)

MADRID, MARCH 24 – Morocco announces the end of tolerance with regard to homosexuality, is the title of the full page article in today’s El Pais, referring to the initiative which the Ministry for the interior in Morocco is using to ‘confront all actions which go against religious and moral values, within the framework of the law”.

An article with the headline in red on the front page of magazine Al Michaal triggered the reaction by the government in Rabat; in it a gay Moroccan couple tell the story of their wedding, reciting a prayer which comes before the reading from the Koran. The formula is very common in Morocco, between heterosexual couples as well, but it does not mean that the union is legal.

In a message quoted by El Pais, the Ministry for the interior registered “voices in the media which are trying to make a case for ignoble behaviour which is a provocation to national public opinion and which are against the moral values and teachings of our society”.  The government will carry act against these people “within the framework of current laws”.

Homosexuality is punishable in Morocco from six months to three years imprisonment, even though courts do not usually pass sentences for this kind of crime.  Nevertheless arrests of gays are commonly made as a ‘deterrent”.

Where is the Human Rights Campaign?  (*crickets chirping*)

Maybe they will only get involved when things in Morocco get REALLY serious.  You know like in Iran — where gays hang by ropes.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Okay all you patriots by The Bay, here’s your chance to voice your opposition to Washington, DC about their massive spending and the stealing of your liberty.

There will actually be a New American Tea Party in San Francisco on April 15.  Thanks for the tip goes to GP Reader EZnSF.

San Fran Tea Party Facebook page

Don’t Tread On Me!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Can this man ever admit his mistakes? When a student asks the unhappy Massachusetts Congressman, “How much responsibility, if any, do you have for the financial crisis?” the Democrat proceeds to blame Republicans, labeling the student, lashing out at the “right wing,” but sidestepping his question.

Sees Barney would rather blame the right wing than explain his own actions. To his credit, Frank did acknowledge the Fannie Mae reforms he helped pass in March 2007, but doesn’t address his efforts to thwart earlier Republican-sponsored reforms of the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) when it might have made a difference.

Kudos to this student for calmly challenging the mean-spirited Democrat. I guess he had expected more fawning from the Harvard crowd.

(H/t Reader Peter Hughes for alerting me to this Townhall post.)

UPDATE: Michelle: “His defensive bullying and sputtering and ranting about ‘right-wing attacks’ speaks for itself.”

UP-UPDATE: Calling this a “meltdown,” Glenn thinks Barney sounds “kinda defensive.”

To note (yet again)–Barney’s first impulse is to attack the student asking the question rather than consider his inquiry. And note which one does a better job of keeping his cool. So much in this clip, wish I weren’t so pressed for time today.

Michelle reports that some liberals “are organizing their own anti-Tea Party demonstrations“:

Liberal guru Joe Trippi and government-subsidized Bill Moyers are pushing the new initiative, titled “A New Way Forward.” Hey, wasn’t Obama supposed to be your New Way Forward? Way to go!

The lefties have chosen April 11 to try and usurp media attention from the nationwide Tax Day Tea Party event on April 15. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

I wonder if the MSM will pay more attention to these counterprotests than they have to the Tea Party phenomenon.  The counterprotests do fit their narrative of what a protest should be.

Welcome Instapundit Readers!

In one of my favorite flawed* movies, the 1991 flick The Fisher King, Jeff Bridges plays Jack Lucas, a radio talk show host whose offhand on-air remark to an unbalanced listener causes that listener to go on a shooting rampage in a swank Manhattan restaurant, killing the wife of Robin Williams‘s Perry, causing the latter’s breakdown.

There, there was a direct link between the talk show host’s words and the actions of a deranged killer.  In the flick, Lucas searches for redemption as he befriends Perry, helps him find love while confronting the demons which have kept him at an emotional distance from his own girlfriend, Anne Napolitano (Mercedes Ruehl in an Oscar-winning role).

It seems that all too many on the left are eager to brand conservative talk show hosts, bloggers and opinion leaders as guilty as was Bridges’s screen character.  They seem to take their cues more from this movie than from the actual words of outspoken conservatives.

Now, they’re trying to “blame recent high profile shootings on those who believe in the 2nd Amendment” as if opponents of gun control actually encourage lunatics concerned about losing their weapons to shoot at cops.  Left-wing bloggers are accusing their conservative counterparts, in the words of one such blogger, of “stoking the fires of an atmosphere of hate that leads to police officers getting killed.”

Note how he uses that term, “atmosphere of hate.”  Its obscures the fact that he can’t find the direct statement of a Jack Lucas which spurred the killer to go on a rampage.

Such ambiguous language is nothing new for conservative-hating leftists in their eagerness to smear the right.

Just over ten years ago, Frank Rich rushed to blame social conservatives for the murder of Matthew Shepard.  Now, I agree that the one of the men Rich singled out, Gary Bauer, is a little loopy, but advocate of violence he is not.  Yet, that didn’t deter that angry columnist from blaming him for the killing:

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While some silly gay marriage advocates see a popular groundswell for gay marriage in court decisions, the vote today of Vermont’s legislature to override Governor Douglas’s veto of legislation providing for state recognition of same-sex unions is the first indication we have that popular opinion could be turning in favor of gay marriage.

Instead of turning to courts, we should be going through legislatures. I believe that is the better way to build a consensus for same-sex marriage as this process may well have shown.

Unlike California whose gargantuan legislative districts (each state Senate district has more residents than the entire population of the Green Montain State) prevent our state legislators from regular interaction with all but a handful of their constituents, Vermont has one of the largest state Houses in the country, with nearly twice the representatives of California’s corresponding house.  And the population of Vermont is approximately 2% of California’s.

Whereas our Golden State legislators respond more readily to interest groups than constituents, those in the Green Mountain State have such small constituencies that their own constituents have ready access to them.  And since their legislative responsibilities are not full-time jobs, they have to return to live and work in their jurisdictions.

In short, they’re going to hear from their constituents about their vote on gay marriage.

By the end of the month, the Vermont legislature will adjourn for the year and its legislators will return home (well, some legislators return from Montpelier each night while others goes back on the weekend) and face their constituents.  My sense is that they wouldn’t have voted for this bill if they feared a popular backlash back home.

So, the tide may be turning, in the Green Mountain State at least.

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A two-thirds vote to override the veto from Vermont Governor Jim Douglas was needed. The vote was 23-5 to override in the state Senate and 100-49 to override in the House. Vermont now becomes the first state to decide this matter by action from the legislature, bringing to 4 the total number of U.S. states allowing same-sex marriage recognize same-sex marriages!

Expect social conservatives to bemoan this apparent sign of the Apocalypse in 5…4…3…

– John (Average Gay Joe)

Only if Republicans hold firm in standing for the principles of fiscal responsiblity which helped us win elections in 1980, 1984, 1988 and 1994, principles with which Barack Obama made a rhetorical end run around the GOP in 2008, racking up the highest popular vote percentage of any non-incumbent Democat in 75 years.

Let me remind you once again that in the third debate, then-candidate Obama said “what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.“  Instead, he’s given us the exact opposite.

No wonder when Democrats talk to the media, they remind us of the congressional Republicans sorry spending record over the past decade.  They seek to compromise the credibility of Republicans so as to reduce the impact of their criticism of their own spending spree.  But, just because Republicans overspent in the first few years of this century doesn’t excuse Democrats from their current profligacy.

Especially given the presidential campaign of the nation’s leading Democrat.

The contrast between Obama’s campaign rhetoric and his budget, now approved in slightly amendedd form by the Democratic Congress, has made it a lot easier for Republicans.  Jennifer Rubin think it’s “given Republicans plenty of running room” and quotes Bill Kristol’s explanation:

And the Republican Party is united in a principled way. I don’t think people can look at it — independent voters can’t look at the Republicans now and say they’re just being opportunistic or, you know, knee-jerk anti-Obama.

They object in principle to this massive expansion of government’s role in the economy, taking over the health care system, et cetera. And I think it allows — I think he’s allowed the Republican Party to recover more quickly than one would have expected and conservatives, actually, to recover more quickly than one might have expected after the 2008 elections.

In the Senate vote on the President’s budget, even the recent Republican renegades (Collins, Snowe, Specter) returned to the fold, keeping the caucus united.

By overreaching on spending, the President has made it easier for Republicans to regroup and recover. The longer Republicans remain united against the president’s spendthrift policies, the more ready our party will show that they’ve learned the lesson of the last two elections, the more quickly our party will restore its good name.

Obama who, in his campaign, recognized that Republicans were vulnerable on the spending issue hasn’t learn the lesson from his own electoral success.  Which might make it quite difficult for him to repeat it.

It’s not who you think it is.  Commentary‘s Peter Wehner reached this conclusion (the title quote) not as did counterparts in the MSM (when they reached a different conclusion) by considering their own reactions to former President George W. Bush and listening to the angry voices of their social peers, but by reading the polling data.

His data comes from poll commissioned by of the most respecte firms in the business, that of the Pew Research Center. Their findings reveal that:

For all of his hopes about bipartisanship, Barack Obama has the most polarized early job approval ratings of any president in the past four decades. The 61-point partisan gap in opinions about Obama’s job performance is the result of a combination of high Democratic ratings for the president — 88% job approval among Democrats — and relatively low approval ratings among Republicans (27%).

Guess blaming Bush and attacking Republicans hasn’t helped endear him to Republicans.  Ol’ Rahm might want to reconsider slamming Rush Limbaugh.  His buddy James Carville might want to reconsider going after the Governor of Alaska.  Wouldn’t be prudent.  Not gonna help the President live up to his campaign rhetoric.  (As one former President might say.)

Jay Cost believes Obama may pay a “political price for contributing to the rancor . . . not simply because his governing style has been highly partisan to date, but also because he explicitly promised during the campaign that it would not be.“   And the partisan edge to his Administration may cause many of the young voters so enthusiastic about his candidacy to turn away from him.

In his campaign, he tapped into the idealism of their youth, promising to be a different kind of politician, one who transcended politics.  Very early in his term, he has turned out to be quite the opposite.

So many faulted his predecessor for his go-it-alone approach.  (I grant that George W. Bush did not reach out as much to Congress, even when his own party ran he place, as he should have done.  See Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration for a good discussion of this.)  Imperfect though W was, he never bashed his domestic political adversaries rhetorically as his successor has done, especially not when he was abroad.

Americans are starting to take notice.  At the rate we’re going, Bush could be rehabilitated in time for his sixty-third birthday.  But, America will remain divided.

Glenn links this observation by Jehuda on The Rhetorican:

You know, for a political faction that is “irrelevant” and “out in the wilderness”, the Right seems to really get on the Left’s nerves.  It’s like the Left isn’t quite convinced that the current state of things will last very long.

Has this guy been reading our comments?

He’s definitely onto something.  Maybe it’s just in the nature of some leftists to resent their political adversaries, but they do seem quite insecure about their success.

Words to ponder.

Michelle Malkin’s post today on those who would sabotage and/or smear the Tea Party protests got me wondering if there were a way to measure the success of these protests against increasing taxes and government spending.

And then, recalling how the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had inflated the number of signatures it had gathered on petitions supporting the president’s budget, I realized they provided us a benchmark.  Now, if 642,000 people, the amount of petitions the Democrats claimed to have by counting each signature three times, show up next Wednesday to protest that spendthrift budget–and it promise of future red ink and tax hikes, then we can consider the tea parties a resounding success.

We, however, don’t need that number to succeed.  We simply need to have more people protesting the president’s budget than signed petitions supporting it:  214,000.  Unlike the DNC’s Organizing for America which grew out of the Obama’s presidential campaign, the tea party effort is just getting started.  We don’t have a long-established organization in place with the resources of a national political party possessing a database of 13 million supporters.

Not just that, to sign a petition supporting the president’s budget, you didn’t need do so at any set time or in any set place as those protesting the budget at tea parties must do.

So, let’s exceed Obama’s number and get a quarter-million people to the protests.  Join me next Wednesday, April 15 from 3 to 7 PM at the Santa Monica pier.  My goal is to get ten GayPatriot readers & friends to the gathering.

If you can’t join me in Santa Monica next week, let me know your town and I’ll find a party for you!

While Ivan Pavlov’s studies of the digestive systems in mammals led the Russian scientist to a discovery about canine reflexes, my post referencing his experiment helped confirm one of my observations of the reflexes of some of our critics.

I noted how some on the left react to gay conservatives in the same manner that Pavlov’s trained dogs react to a dinner bell.  The canines drool.  The leftists hurl the same insult.  When I mentioned that observation, not one of our critics faulted those who have such a narrow-minded reaction to gay people who don’t subscribe to the gay political orthodoxy.

They all were quick to justify the name-calling.  It’s one thing to disagree with our ideas.  It’s quite another to ascribe our political views to some kind of psychological disorder.

It would be nice if those who spent so much time on this blog could at least acknowledge that we’re not self-hating.   I mean, why do they spend so much time on a blog where, they believe, self-haters post on a regular basis?

Just a thought.

At the heart of the two most serious books on either side of the gay marriage debate is a question we should all be asking as we wrestle with whether or not states should extend the benefits of marriage to same-sex couples.  Both Jonathan Rauch in Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America and David Blankenhorn in The Future of Marriage consider whether such recognition strengthens the institution or undermines it.

Rauch, as his title suggests contends it strengthens marriage.  Blankenhorn disagrees.

It sometimes seems Rauch is alone in making that argument.  He understands the purposes of marriage and how the institution benefits society.  By contrast, most of his fellow gay marriage advocates see the institution as a right to which they are somehow entilted.

Yet, as I wrote on Saturday, while most advocates may not understand the meaning of the social change they’re promoting, many of the institution’s practitioners do, as this comment to Bruce’s post reveals.  The writers simply acknowledges that his 24-year gay relationship has been “monogamous.”

Would it that other advocates use that word which practically everyone in our culture understands inheres in the very definition of the institution*, but which all to which all too many advocates wish to give short shrift (if that) for fear of offending someone in the gay movement.  Or maybe it’s not just a fear of offending, it’s a rejection of the notion altogether.

No wonder some see gay marriage as an assault on traditional marriage.  Those who often promote it portray marriage as just a union of two loving individuals, dispensing with many of the qualities which have long defined the institution.

Yet, when we talk about gay marriage as most of its “practitioners” experience their relationships, we often get a different reaction from its skeptics as this comment to my post on the exclusion of gay conservatives from gay marriage confabs indicates:

I am a straight, conservative and married man. Until about a year ago, I – shamefully – was opposed to gay marriage. It was the line of reasoning in this blog that has caused the change in my heart. Thank you and please keep up the fight. Seems to me that married gay people, serious about their own vows, would only strengthen the institution of marriage.

This reader helps make the case for Jonathan Rauch’s argument.

In the end, I believe it boils down to whether or not we see gay marriage as a political goal or a social ideal.  If we talk about it as a social ideal, as does Jonathan Rauch, we might realize more quickly the political goal.

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After long thought, I have decided to follow up on an idea I first articulated in a post in October 2006 and change my blogging moniker.  As soon as we work out the technical details, I will start blogging under the new moniker, possibly as soon as this week.