"the GOP wants to take away your Medicare so it can give tax breaks to its rich friends the bankers and plutocrats."
Wow! Does that kind of sophomoric attack actually work in sophisticated NY? BTW, I had to look up the word plutocrat. Now that I know what the term means I am convinced that plutocrats don't have any friends. Republican or otherwise. They only know useful idiots that they help stay in office because they are, well, useful. Is Chuck Schumer actually a "big gun"?

NY-26 is the latest of the voluminous evidence that Republicans, with rare exceptions, remain pathetically unable to counter Democrat "scare" attacks of various kinds. This lack of brains, guts, whatever, goes back at least to the 1964 campaign and the video of that little girl picking flowers suddenly incinerated in the nuclear war Goldwater's "scary" polices were supposed to bring on. The Dems have employed the same tactics regarding Social Security, the Great Society, health care, etc., not only to win particular elections but also to create permanent political templates casting Republicans as greedy, hate-filled, racist, backward, war-mongering, "fat cats," whatever. Aided and abetted by the MSM, such templates form the "floor" of the debate so that Republicans and conservatives must begin by proving a nullity, i.e., that they "really are not" whatever template is being utilized against them.

In the face of this endless, decades-long barrage of negative attacks, caricatures, demonization, deliberate distortions, and outright lies, the GOP have been largely clueless as to how to respond forthrightly, courageously, and effectively. Reagan was the great exception, of course, but the Doles and McCains and Bushes have been more typical, shying away from counterattack in favor of bleatings about "reaching across the aisle" and fostering a "new tone" that is "less partisan" and "kinder and gentler" or more "compassionate." For obvious reasons, such pathetic whinings fail miserably, and the Damnocrats continue on their merry way of all-out attack, now to likely victory in NY-26.

Thanks to Mr. Batchelor for linking above the Kim Strassel article, especially regarding the endorsement of the bogus Tea Party candidate by another disgruntled GOPer who wanted to be the GOP pick to run in this special election. Once again, the WSJ reporting runs circles around the MSM frat-boy co-hosts, who have consistently downplayed the other crosscurrents in this special NY election and parroted the Dems & MSM narrative about this election being primarily a referendum on Ryan & Medicare.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703864204576319602625959850.html

"The Democrats have thrown in all their guns,"

Perhaps, but you know one thing for sure: they can't do this all over the country. They don't have the resources. NY 26th will be abpit as much of a harbinger of Damacratic revival as NY 29ths Bill Owens was.

"We have lost the language."

It's the explosion of lawyers and lawyer-like thinkin since the 60s. A lawyer's main tool in any dispute is framing. Ask any lawyer, and he'll tell you, "If you let me frame the issue, I win the debate." Cultural relativism plays a role here as well. If you can't count on shared assumptions, then every seemingly common place-term has to be defined by both sides and negotiated. Debasing language, loss of cultural hegemony and civility are rarely good things.

The POTUS hoaxes just keep on coming. There've been some doozies: the 2008 election, the birth certificate, Osama bin... I find this latest a scream, passing himself off as Irish.

One thing I think we should all be grateful for in Newt's implosion about the Ryan plan is it removed from everyone, including Ryan, any thoughts of leaving the House for a better paying job. I heard the All-Stars kicking around their idea that Ryan must run for Prez because he's the only one who can explain his plan reasonably and it will be the centerpiece of the Republican campaign in 2012.

Well, that's too bad that no one else is conversant enough to make its case, but as I see it, Newt has made it impossible for Ryan to run for anything but his own job, and given the wrath of the Damacrats, you can bet that if there's a #1 target in 2012, it won't be the Republican nominee, whoever the joker is. It will be Ryan, because that's a 2-fer: if they take out Ryan on the basis of his plan, they automatically take out the Republican contender.

BHO-Reid et al invoke demagoguery, emotional hot buttons and the "What, me Worry?" defense of imploding Medicare and exploding debt. The battle is tough and long, but ultimately, slowly the ship of state can be turned and its course corrected it course.

Ryan need not run for Prez. But 5 different 2 minute Ryan video ads can blanket hundreds of media markets and go viral on YouTube. The "woe is us" stuff here? Sorry, not for me. I am signing on with Levin, Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, Prager, Allen West, Mark Rubio, Steve Forbes, Steve Moore and other Patton-Churchillian battlers. HUGE, formidable corners have recently been turned... e.g., for AGW/ClimateChange; in Wisconsin and NJ; on domestic energy sanity; BiBi schools BHO, in the White House and before Congress. Bravi!

After bloody long fights, math, facts, logic and backbone ultimately trump emotion and lies. Did we give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?? Has Hayek ever thrown in the towel against Keynes?

First example: AGW and climate change. Three years ago the GLOBE was gearing up for trading carbon credits. Financial giants were drooling. Many billions, maybe trillions of $ of world productivity was about to get siphoned off in trading fees, regulatory mire and industrial penalties and inefficiencies. Global resource MEGA-misallocations were imminent. The world was on the brink of genuine economic madness, fed by lies, demagoguery and junk science. It is hard to overstate the global waste that was about to happen. Scientific disputation existed only on a few rogue websites. Post East Anglia: different world. Climate Depot rocks. All those Inhofe minority Senate reports of AGW dissenters were vindicated. Cap and trade is dead. Sure, we cannot make all the screaming greeny nippleheads vanish. Assorted sphincters still trumpet lies about 99% scientific consensus. But the AGW sciences and polity corpse is rotting. The villains must now try to accomplish by subterfuge (e.g., EPA regs) what they were about to institutionalized globally, permanently. No, the battle is not over. But truth won out. Michael Mann's hockey stick is shattered. For all intents and purposes, so is he.

"But truth won out."

Not really. The AGW forces are getting over a billion annually. Governments and foundations like Gates and Ford et al. have not stopped larding scarce billions on AGW research entities and scientists. The US alone will spend $4 billion this year. Your declaration of victory is premature, I think.

http://www.thegwpf.org/the-climate-record/2239-how-much-money-are-us-taxpayers-wasting-on-climate-change-try-106-million-a-day.html

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/julia-gillard-says-carbon-trading-will-be-rort-proof/story-e6frg6xf-1226059107920

It's more than that in Europe where carbon trading is alive and well. And lets not forget the ethanol vote, plus the Government subsidized promotion of electric cars as the wave of the future while we scandalously sell our natgas reserves to nations smarter than we are who will used it for transportation.

AGW Hysteric turned warming critic Bjorg as reconverted back to AGW hysteria just when the AGW PR campaign needed him most. (Sort puts me in mind of that stat about independents and how they vote.)

If I could think of the name of that Aussie or Kiwi that John had on his show a couple years ago, who had all the stats about how much money governments waste on this junkscience, I could give you even more persuasive examples.

I have pestered Morano several times for data on how many companies and nations are drawing down on their commitments to AGW, but he never answers. I agree with you that Climatedepot rocks, but that's all it does. Bottom line: can you say, "ineffective?"

Care to try for another heartwarming example?

Corlyss: AGW - we never went for Kyoto; yes, the Euros have dug in earlier and more. Weenies. Bad for them, good for us. Yes, there is much AGW hysteria in the funding pipeline. Wasted. Pity. But the science is junk. Toothpaste is all over, tubes lost. Last I looked, Euro carbon credits prices were shadows of before. The Euro financial giants are getting killed -- their fees are putrid to what they expected. It will be a slow, painful death for them. Well deserved. We have dodged those stupid bullets.

When Ryan et al hammer on the trustees' guaranteed math of imminent Medicare bankruptcy, the current "dingbat" vote against REFORMING it will erode. It will be in the private interest of a majority of voters to face up to decide between higher user fees or service erosion/rationing. The funding math, through private interest and rationality, will cause a workably correct "collective" change. The alternative, confiscatory, massive tax rates to all, will not work. Atlas will move, hide or shrug.

The tax/budget "lesson" that the public is already accepting for teacher-state govt funding will transfer to health service funding. Much of the public seems to be aware that Canadian and UK health care stinks. A Ryan like reform will look better as time passes, with hard work, and the facile granny over the cliff ads will be seen with BHO as the driver rather than Ryan. Medicaid -- I know little about those dynamics at present. The SS reckoning is down the road a bit, but slow, sliding eligibility age hikes, and slower mandated COLAs, have huge benefits. Ultimately, the funding and benefit math drives self-interest to more rational rules.

"But the science is junk."

It doesn't matter as long a single dollar of taxpayer money is being spent on it. Powerful forces in Europe ally with like-minded individuals here, of which there are many, and voila! Hope and change! We elect a man who claims, "The planet will begin to heal!" with his election. Tell you what. You let me know the instant you see any articles that sanity returns to even one western government, on usustainable spending on this conceit. Please. I'm desperate for such news.

"Ultimately, the funding and benefit math drives self-interest to more rational rules."

If by that you mean, ". . . eventually they run out of other peoples' money," I agree. But personally, at that point, I see revolution, not a big college seminar or town hall meeting on "how do we, working together, get ourselves out of this mess?"

I too doubt that truth always emerges victorious. Indeed, I disdain all forms of belief in the Inevitable Future, such as Marxism, the Whig Theory of History, and the notion that free market outcomes must of necessity always be the most desirable ones.

Totally agree with you on this, even in respect to free market outcomes. All we can ask of the free market is not inerrancy but, well, freedom, so that in that same freedom people will try to develop ways to deal with adversity and create new and hopefully better outcomes. But there are no guarantees, just as there can be no "end of history."

I mention these as resources re: the spending on AGW by both governments and private enetities, not as a means of arguing with you. You represent the more hopeful side of my brain. :-)

http://climateshiftproject.org/report/climate-shift-clear-vision-for-the-next-decade-of-public-debate/#chapter-1

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/climate_money.html

It just goes to show you that elections are decided buy the 20% of voters also know as morons in the middle.

You're welcome. It's a keeper. Save it for future reference in subsequent debates. It confounds the liberals I used to debate elsewhere who thought Bush or the Viet Nam war or Reagan or the Cold War was the source of anti-Americanism. Except for the immediate aftermath of WW2, most Europeans have despised the US for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that they couldn't move here. A friend likes to say that Europeans despise us because we took the rabble they had marginalized and they made a nation unlike any before or now.

Tea party is like Ross Perot, cleaving the Conservative vote in two. It should be a movement NOT a party.

If Juan Williams is right, that over 55s care deeply about what happens to younger people who will eventually be on Medicare and that they are aslo deeply suspicious of the government's power to do whatever it deems necessary to the over 55s whenever they want to (and they are certainly right to be so), ain't no way that Ryan's plan will help the Republicans in 2012. The only way to entice the largest voting block in the electorate to accept the plan was to convince them that they would not suffer under the Ryan plan. Looks like Axelrod-Plouffe were right: do nothing and the Republicans self-destruct in their calls for righteous self-sacrifice.
____________________________________________________________________________

Hochul Win Is GOP Wake-Up Call

Democrat Kathy Hochul claimed victory last night in New York's pivotal House special election by asking supporters at a union hall: "Did we not have the right issues on our side?"

The crowd chanted "Medicare" over and over.

Medicare was Ms. Hochul's sole issue in the campaign, an she used every angle to bolster her claim that the budget passed by House Republicans and endorsed by her GOP opponent, Jane Corwin, would "essentially end Medicare." One ad from a liberal group showed a menacing figure shoving an elderly woman off a cliff.

Before the polls closed yesterday in the Buffalo suburbs that make up the district, Ms. Corwin allowed that she should have addressed the Medicare issue "earlier and differently." "I have to admit that when [Ms. Hochul] started making these comments, I thought these are so outrageous that probably no one would ever believe it . . .. Apparently some people did."

Republicans will console themselves by saying that the presence of a former Democrat running on a tea party ballot line cost them the seat. Ms. Hochul only won 47% to 43%, receiving a lower percentage of the vote in the district than Barack Obama got in 2008.

But they dare not ignore the fact that Medicare proved to be a potent issue for Democrats. "This election is a wake-up call for anyone who thinks that 2012 will be just like 2010," said Steven Law of the conservative group American Crossroads, which pumped $700,000 into the race to help Ms. Corwin. "It's going to be a tougher environment. Democrats will be more competitive. And we need to play at the top of our game to win big next year."

Some House Republicans will be rattled by the election result, as they should be. The district they just lost was once represented by Jack Kemp and has only elected three Democrats to Congress since it was formed in 1857.

Nonetheless, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California told me last night that while there will be no retreat on the budget they passed, he and his colleagues clearly have to do a better job explaining the Medicare changes to voters. "I tell my constituents that they know Medicare is in trouble and the only way for it to be there for their children and grandchildren is to update and modernize it," he said. "That seems to work, and we have to keep pounding that home."

-- John Fund

The lesson I draw from the NY-26 outcome is that Paul Ryan now MUST run for President. It's obvious that he is the only Republican of any stature who can get the job done. More importantly, Ryan increasingly has no choice but to run.

First, Ryan is the only office holder of either party -- cf. Bill Clinton of all people -- to bravely define a new direction for the country, especially to stave off impending financial doom. Second, even allowing for the fact that Jane Corwin is just another dull-witted emissary from the moribund NY State GOP, it appears that only Paul Ryan has both the brains and the guts to effectively communicate his policy plans, especially on Medicare, to the American people and defend them from Democrat distortion and demagoguery. If he's really serious about saving this country from financial and social ruin, it is becoming clear that he dare not leave this vital task to anyone else, and the best way to ensure his control over it is to declare for President and run his own campaign. Third, having heard it said that Ryan hasn't much foreign policy expertise, a remedy for that is ready to hand -- how would a Ryan-Bolton ticket grab you?

Lastly, I think Ryan has the fighting spirit to actually wage the war that American politics has become, especially now that he is being backed into a corner by the Democrats and their friends the RINOs. Like it or not, they have made Ryan the very face of Conservative Perdition and they will continue to abuse and attack him as such, whether he simply stands pat on where he is now or even tries to climb down from his policy positions.

Overall, I think Paul Ryan needs to respond to a desperate situation for the country just like the immortal Col. Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine did on Little Round Top. As portrayed in the movie Gettysburg, Chamberlain declares to his men, "We can't shoot . . . we can't retreat . . . so we'll charge . . . FIX BAYONETS!!!!"

Such things as logic, argumentation, and rational self-interest are all very well and good, but the main tools required to achieve power are emotion, desire, and vanity.

Ideological battles are a process of seduction, not of rational persuasion.

Respectable conservatives have allowed themselves to be defined in purely economic terms, although even here they fail miserably.

For instance, the GOP has don nothing to reach out to a potentially huge and vital constituency, that of college graduates groaning under the weight of student loans so massive as to prevent them from starting families until they are in their mid-thirties.

But I digress. Respectable conservatives are even stupider than their enemies on the left accuse them of being.

"For instance, the GOP has don nothing to reach out to a potentially huge and vital constituency, that of college graduates groaning under the weight of student loans"

That's not a sign of stupidity. That's a sign of smart allocation of resources. The 18-30 demo NEVER turns out in numbers greater than 20%. I hope the idiots like Springsteen, the Google Twins, and Zuckerberg spend tons of money recruiting a demo they already own and which doesn't materialize. http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/voter-survey.htm. True, it might make a difference in a tight race, but not in the places where that demo congregates.

Here's some census data for you. http://www.census.gov/prod/2006pubs/p20-556.pdf You'll be particularly intrigued by the delta between total votes and total votes by citizens.

In any case, my main point was that the real battleground is in the area of emotion and aesthetics, not accounting. It is here that respectable conservatives have ceded the high ground, the low ground, and all the ground in between.

" "Vote for me and avoid a lifetime of debt slavery" is a pretty good campaign slogan, although a professional could no doubt come up with something catchier."

I like it!

And I agree with your premise about emotions, as you might have deduced from my comment above about the Republican's vision problem. They also have a communications problem. Bret Baier asked Ryan to explain his budget as quickly and succinctly as he could. It took over a minute just to hit the hilights. This to a world that natters on about its life in 147 characters! This to a nation most of whom were raised on Sesame Street's 10 sec. jabs at their consciousness.

"Henry Kissinger has notoriously said of his own ethnic group that any people that has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong."

The only thing that Jews did wrong was to be a minority in racist Europe.

If the Republicans were smart, they would seek to undo Griggs v. Duke Power Company. This assault on credentialism would not only appeal to the core GOP demographic, but also serve as a way of reducing the power of that leftist bastion, the academic-industrial complex.

But they are not smart.

Had Kissinger qualified his witticism in proper academic fashion, then it wouldn't have been a witticism any more. As the saying goes, if you dissect enough butterflies, then pretty soon there aren't any more butterflies.

Well, in all fairness, her parents converted to Catholicism to escape the Holocaust while she was an infant and raised her Catholic. She didn't discover she was born Jewish until late in her life. I'd cut her a break on that one. There's plenty of "agnostics" out there to pick on. And a few like the ones in HRW & AI involved in the most agressive criticisms of Israel and even the US.