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- The gang at First Read says: "If Republicans take back control of the House and maybe even the Senate, it will return American politics to its standard state: divided government. ... Also since LBJ, the longest one party has controlled those three bodies is just for four years (1977-1981 and 2003-2007). And get this: Every time a party has had control of the three bodies, it ended in a wave election for the other side (1980, 1994, and 2006)." This is all true. But they make it sound as though the accompanying "waves" were specifically reactions to unified government. In reality, in each of their cases, more fundamental factors were at play.
- It must be tough being a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. So much liberal propaganda out there, selling out the country to our enemies, widespread discrimination against white Christians, and now the liberals' radio propaganda network has fired an honest man because he refused to bow to the tyranny of political correctness. After about nine blog posts and one article, National Review is making sure defunding NPR is a major issue for conservatives to care about. Fortunately all these un-American outrages will be tackled by the wise leadership of Speaker John Boehner next year.
- David Weigel blogs on Jill LePore's new book The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History, which traces the roots of the Tea Partiers to the tax revolts of the 1970s. I haven't read the book but plan to, and this thesis strikes me as quite persuasive. It's all well and good to note that the Tea Partiers are just the current incarnation of the same right-wing revolt that crops up every time there is a Democrat in the White House (or a Dwight Eisenhower). But it adds more depth to the story to note that the revolt does have a specific policy origin, namely the hatred of paying any form of tax.
- Remainders: Conservative politics really is like watching the same bad movie over and over again; economic illiteracy is pervasive; Peggy Noonan is possibly America's worst opinion columnist; David Brooks is possibly America's worst opinion columnist; and the banality of solving our Social Security "problem."
--Mori Dinauer
