This morning, when I read Nick’s post on how the left just can’t let social issues go, I wondered if this obsession accounted for the media focus on Michele Bachmann.  And not just the liberals in the MSM.  It seems that a day doesn’t go by without a liberal friend posting some damning accusation (usually exaggerated) about this charismatic conservative on Facebook.

Now, I’ll grant that many of her activities should draw scrutiny.  But, she has already been subject to more scrutiny than had Barack Obama at this point, indeed perhaps at any point, in the 2008 campaign.  She has her associations with some fringe social conservatives.  He has had his with some very radical leftists and sat for twenty years in a church helmed by a pastor who regularly spewed hate from the pulpit.

I think Nick’s onto something in suggesting that the media seek to focus on the social issues so as to avoid the Democrats’ failed economic policies — and to paint conservatives as fringe cranks more concerned with what people do in the privacy of their homes than as concerned taxpayers worried about a bloated, inefficient and intrusive federal government.

They want to make Mrs. Bachmann the face of the GOP — and not the Michele Bachmann who has shown a remarkable fluency on fiscal issues, but the ostensible crank who worked with someone who knows someone who praised someone else who once engaged in some truly inflammatory language.

Let me stress.  I do not back Michele Bachmann for the Republican nomination and will not vote for her in the California primary.   Given her past associations, I don’t think she has the capacity to unite the GOP. (more…)

Shortly after Bruce returned to blogging in June 2005, I found it uncanny how oftentimes he would post on topics that I had intended to post on, with a spin similar to that I intended to offer, but with a style that, well, a style that showed the difference between the two of us.

And then when I started blogging more often than he, oftentimes he would e-mail me thanking me for addressing a topic he had intended to address, oftentimes embedding the same video he wanted to embed or quoting the very column he sought to quote.

Today, I woke to find that Eric and Nick had respectively considered two of the issues about which I wanted to write today — though Nick approached the social issue question through Christine O’Donnell, I will (in my next post) be approaching it through the much and mercilessly maligned Michele Bachmann. Uncanny indeed!

As to Eric’s point, I was wondering if the president had any idea what his actual jobs approach would be. In the first two years of his term, he depended almost entirely on his party’s leadership in Congress to draft his key domestic initiatives.

Will his big speech just be another one of his big speeches, a lot of platitudes, emphasizing broad points, but providing no specifics? (more…)

If you haven’t seen Jamie Farr cum Larry King wannabe Piers Morgan getting into it with Christine O’Donnell, here is that video:

(apologies for the adverts at the beginning of the clip…apparently going on a quasi-news interview show to whore for a new book is matched dearly by a ‘news’ network playing commercials before even online videos)

I have no beef with Morgan being a tough interviewer, and I never really followed O’Donnell’s run for the Senate from Delaware. I realize she’s a social conservative and had run as such.

That being said, Morgan’s insistence on discussing not the debt problem, not the out-of-control runaway spending, not the unconstitutional interference of the current ruling class that led to historic turnover on Capital Hill in last year’s midterm elections; but rather topics such as DADT and gay marriage is a perfect example of why the Left keeps losing elections.

While controversy and drama are good for ratings, there’s also a seriousness in Leftists in the media like Morgan and others insisting on painting the Tea Party with an intolerant brush.

It’s the Alinskyite drubbing and constant drone about Tea Partiers being anti-gay, racist knuckle-dragging Bible-thumping social conservatives that the Left and the media (pardon my redundancy) are hoping to use to discredit their opponents rather than engage in the real argument that they know they’d lose: Is our government too bloated, is it doing things it shouldn’t be doing, and is it impeding our recovery?; or is it not big enough, not spending enough, and not regulating sufficiently?

The Left knows it can’t win that argument in a center-right nation, so they will search for social conservatives within the Tea Party movement (which, unquestionably it can easily find), and then generalize such positions broadly to paint us all as intolerant neanderthals hoping to cast homosexuals into prison.

Can anybody relate an experience at a Tea Party rally or other such event that even addressed social issues? Were gay marriage and DADT even topics of conversation (other than the court’s overreaching in many big cases, and the lack of 10th Amendment appreciation by the ruling class, that is)? I search and search Rick Santelli’s original rant on CNBC but can’t find either of these topics (nor religion, abortion, or race issues) having anything to do with his anger.

I, for one, am completely tired of hearing about social issues. Totally and completely. I can’t believe that with $14,000,000,000,000+ in debt and a new credit line of another $2,000,000,000,000 recently added on, three wars, 9.1% unemployment, GDP growth rate out of a recession at only 1.5%, housing failing, hiring failing, a credit downgrade, that to some morons, the issue of gay marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is actually pertinent.

As I had admonished them a couple weeks ago, the Social Left in America is ruining our Nation because they care more about their social issues than they do about the fiscal and economic strength of our country.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)