The American people, opinions of the Ruling Class to the contrary notwithstanding, are not stupid. We knew this day was coming.

We knew it two years ago this Friday, when hundreds of thousands of us gathered across many locations, in numbers large and small, to protest what many in Washington still had the chutzpah to pretend wasn’t coming down the pike.

The mortgage bailouts. The massive — and in many cases futile — corporate/union bailouts. The nearly-trillion dollar package that make a joke of the word “stimulus”. We knew what all of that was leading up to.

Today, per all accounts, President Obama will ascend to the podium and tell us he has a great idea for fixing the problem of the deficit the majority of which he and his party’s Congress created.  He is going to raise taxes.

Of course he’ll try to sell it. He’ll make the case that, regardless of whether you agreed with all that spending, we have no choice but to pay for it now. He’ll try to make it sound to the average American voter that this tax increase will have no impact whatsoever on them. He’ll be lying, of course, but so what else is new. At this point it’s all we can hope for that he won’t repeat the cliches word-for-word about “making the rich pay their fair share” and similarly.

Today’s speech will embody everything we protested against on April 15, 2009. It is why we created the Tea Party, to establish a beachhead in Congress that, hopefully, will stand up to the president and tell him no.  No, Mr. President, we were voted here explicitly to see to it that you did not raise taxes on the American people and, if nothing else, we are going to live up to that duty.

We have spent two years preparing for this day. Today — of all days — let us not blink.

We all remember the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last year of course, and most of us probably remember how BP’s offer to pay for the cleanup was deemed insufficient and that BP was required to set up a $20 billion escrow account for damage claims.

What might be less well-remembered was the short-lived accusation by DFW-area representative Joe Barton, who termed the escrow requirement a “shakedown” and had the makings of a “slush fund”, comments for which he was quickly shamed for and made to back down from.

Well, guess what great uses some of that $20 billion has been put to, per an article today in the San Francisco Chronicle?

Tasers. Brand-new SUVs. A top-of-the-line iPad. A fully loaded laptop.

The sewer department in … Gulfport [Mississippi] bought a $300,000 vacuum truck that never sucked up a drop of oil.

More than $300,000 of BP money went to Kenny Loggins, the Doobie Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd for a pair of rock shows to promote the state’s oil-free beaches; BP shelled out an additional $260,000 in concert-related costs.

And in the story you’ll find more, such as the parish that accepted a $1 million advance, then put it away and billed BP as if they’d never received any such money. Or the parish president openly second-guessing himself for not taking as ruthless advantage of the bonanza as some of his neighboring parishes.

All of which leads me back to the question: When will someone apologize to Rep. Barton?

Everyone’s favorite morbidly obese maker of fictional documentaries, Michael Moore (@MMFlint if you must see for yourself), has “cleverly” crafted a series of tweets regarding tonight’s developments in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

A few samples of the master’s wit:

Every hour some Republican clerk “finds” new votes for the incumbent justice who lost. The elections is over! #lessonswelearnedFlorida2000

C’mon Repubs, once u were ahead in FL u declrd victry & got theCourt 2 stop any more counting. What’s the matter this time? #shoeontheotherfoot

Republicans created the rule: “Whoever declares victory first, wins!” When will Obama Justice Dept impound ballots and stop the shenanigans?

Moore’s point, such as it is, is that this week’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election is the mirror image of the Florida voting in the 2000 Presidential election.  Which it totally is, except for a few minor details (this list is probably far from exhaustive):

• The Wisconsin election drama has not yet lasted 24 hours. The Florida drama dragged on for 36 days, much of which had passed before the screams of “enough already!” started to ring out.
• Gore conceded Florida and the election after the automatic recount. Then he decided to “un-concede”. Prosser never conceded, Kloppenburg’s premature declaration of victory notwithstanding.
• In Florida, it was after the automatic recount that things started going haywire as election officials took it upon themselves to make up new rules to accomodate further recounts. In Wisconsin, there has not yet even been one official recount. The reversal came during the “canvassing” process, wherein the local election officials double-check their own results and correct any clerical errors that may have occurred. In this case, they found a lulu of a clerical error.
• The totals reported earlier today, showing Kloppenburg ahead by 202 votes, were never filed or declared official. In fact, as of this writing, no total has yet been declared official. Bush’s victory in Florida was duly certified a few days after the election.

There is one thing the two elections may well have in common when all is said and done, however.  All the controversy over Florida in 2000 turned out to be about nothing. At no point, even after the fact, did any recount, manual, automatic, hanging chad, pregnant chad, n’djamena chad, whatever, was a total produced that showed Gore ahead.  Similarly, even without the roughly 7400 votes that are the subject of controversy, David Prosser was already clinging to a slight lead based on other errors that had been corrected earlier in the day. Gore’s, and in all likelihood Kloppenburg’s, “victories” were, in the end, entirely phantom ones. Never existed, never will, exist except in the minds of the likes of Michael Moore.

I, for one, can’t wait for this movie to come out.

I’ve long considered one of my personal strengths to be my ability to empathize with those I disagree with. Now, for the benefit those of you who haven’t yet heard Rush’s monologue on the topic, “empathize” does not at all mean the same thing as “sympathize”. To empathize, means, in a nutshell, the ability to understand the arguments and thought processes of others, even as you might vigorously disagree with them.

The gun control crowd, for example, is a simple case. Get rid of guns, get rid of gun crimes. And legally owned gun is potentially a stolen gun, so, safer to just make gun ownership illegal. I’ve probably oversimplified that somewhat, but I think I generally got the gist, and at any rate, I doubt any of the gun control advocates would actually disagree with either of the two previous statements. Of course, we on the right know full well that “getting rid of guns” simply isn’t that easy, that even if we did somehow manage it, something else would replace them as the weapon of choice, and that in the meantime law-abiding citizens are being placed at a major disadvantage to the better-armed criminal element.

The point of that last paragraph was to demonstrate an exercise in empathy, an explanation as to why the other side thinks their arguments are correct, even as we might strongly hold otherwise.

Unfortunately, I see empathy rapidly becoming a lost art.  Every time you hear — and we have all heard this more times than we care to count — that criticism of President Obama is necessarily rooted in racism, you are hearing a person with no interest in empathy. You are hearing a person who refuses to accept even the possiblity that the opposition is arguing from a rational standpoint.  That person does not know what we’re really thinking, and to all appearances doesn’t want to know.

It is hard to know what to do with such people. How do you deal with a person who seems to be absolutely and irrevocably convinced that you are evil?

But it gets worse.

Lately I’ve become aware of a new breed on the left, what I’ll the Unfathomable Left, a group with a mindset that I have to admit I find entirely baffling.

Personifying the Unfathomable Left is MSNBC’s newest prime-time host, Cenk Uygur.  Just to cite one example of his mindset: Cenk has asserted, without the slightest hint of irony, that Barack Obama is more conservative than Ronald Reagan was.

Just ponder that a moment.  It’s one thing for someone to be far enough left that even Obama does not satisfy their desires for leftward activism.  On that score we here at RedState might even sympathize; few if any viable GOP presidential prospects for 2012 really deliver the level of unabashed conservatism we would like to see.  It is the lot in life of the activist to never be satisfied.  That much one can grasp.

But to trace the recent political history of the United States from 1989 onwards, and decide that it represents such a radical shift to the right that the standard bearer of conservatism of the 1980′s would be on the radical left fringe today…?  Try as I might I cannot wrap my head around it.

And lest one be tempted to chalk Uygur’s point of view about some fairy tale about the Reagan years that might be his only source of knowledge about that era, I note that, the name of his Internet show “The Young Turks” notwithstanding, he is in fact my elder by several weeks.

Even though I never had the opportunity to vote for the man, I remember quite clearly what the Reagan years were like, how he conducted himself in office, what he accomplished, what the criticisms of him were, and so on.  So from where does Cenk Uygur derive such a radically different recollection of that era from my own? We lived through it together. Yet it feels like we spent that time on different planets.

Try as I might, I cannot empathize with Cenk Uygur.

A recent thread I saw, I think it was on Facebook, drove the point home that empathy is slipping my grasp.  A conservative on Twitter made the following observation (from memory, possibly paraphrased): “The Left wants to see the Right censored, while the Right wants to see the Left keep on talking.”

Again, perhaps an oversimplification, but what do you want from 140 characters.  But we understand what it being said here.  How long have we heard the cries from the Left that Fox News needs to be taken down?  How long has the Left taunted us with the idea that they might try to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine, thus badly hamstringing if not outright imploding conservative talk radio?  As for us on the right, sure, we cheered as Keith Olbermann took a fall, but we always wanted it to be — and wouldn’t have been nearly as satisfied if it hadn’t been — the result of MSNBC finally deciding that he was just too much of an albatross for them to endure financially.  And yes, we would like to see federal funding pulled for the likes of NPR and PBS, but anyone really think those institutions will simply blow away in the wind for lack of that source of funding?

Yes, some on the Left are of the mindset that federal funding is the basic way of showing support for something, and that therefore pulling said funding is effectively the same thing as trying to destroy it.  So, if one were to put the above tweet up for comment by a liberal audience, one would expect such arguments to appear.

But what I saw instead when someone actually did just that, however, threw me. There was no discussion, no attempt to point out the flaws in the statement, not even the citing of potential contrary examples like I just did. No, their reaction was unanimous and the mirror image of my reaction to just about anything Cenk Uygur says: “Buh?”

From their point of view, nothing could be any more obvious that the exact opposite of the tweet was the truth of the matter.  So obvious was it, to them, that it didn’t even merit the slightest hint of discussion.  At most, just a general agreement that the more conservatives are allowed to talk, the more rope they produce to hang themselves with (new tone!), which of course explains why the highly expressive Tea Party movement only resulted in driving the independents ever deeper into Democrat hands and thus allowed them to extended their majorities in Congress last year… oh wait.

But my point with that last example is not to poke holes in their logic but to show, again, how empathy has been lost.  They simply cannot grasp our mindset and accept that it is even terrestrial in origin, any more than I can do for an increasing number on their side.

There is another word for a person for whom one has no empathy: enemy.

Nothing lasts forever. Someday, one would hope many centuries distant, even the Great American Experiment will have run its course and given way to something else. Something, one hopes, even better than what this country has had to offer its citizens, but hopefully that will not be our choice to make.

I keep invoking “hopefully” because even now I see the seeds for the eventual fracturing of this nation being planted.  It is partially expressed in the very name of this website, Red State, which stands in contrast to its opposite, the blue states.  While some pundits may try to gloss over the distinction with the glib assertion that most states are just varying shades of purple, that is merely an effect of our more mobile society.  In this day and age people with wildly differing political views could easily be next-door neighbors.  Depending on their level of sociability they might not even know it.  Just a few weeks ago, someone living less than ten blocks away from me had the “honor” of having his crude insult direct at Andrew Breitbart retweeted by Breibart for the world to see.  It was a stark reminder to me how someone can be your neighbor, yet live in an entirely different world.

We, as a nation, are fast entering a very Disunited State.  And it pains me that, for all these words I have written about it, a cure for this condition eludes me. I’d suggest a striving for honesty, but how can we do that when we cannot even agree on what Truth is?  What good does it do to tell the Left to stop lying about racial motivations within the Tea Party when to all appearances they believe in them wholeheartedly?

Annoying advertisements notwithstanding, I have see the true end of America.  It won’t happen next year, it probably won’t happen in our lifetimes, but it will happen, and now I have seen a vision of how it will happen.

Alas, I am out of answers.  I can only hope those yet to come will have more success.

Today’s worthy read from TheStreet:

In seven states, imports are the top five vehicles. All seven went for Obama in 2008: California, New York, Florida, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island.

And note also that, with the exception of Florida, those are all quite deep blue states, not swing states.

In a sense this is really not all that surprising, any more than the other observations that red state preferences swing heavily towards trucks and SUVs, or that the ultimate automotive expression of progressivism, the Toyota Prius, is big on the left coast.

And I am emphatically not saying that the blue states’ buying preferences make them any less patriotic than their red state counterparts.  There are far stronger examples to support that contention anyway.

But what I would like to note is the message the UAW ought to be taking away from this: your customers vote Republican. Obviously this is a massive generalization; the UAW does have some stake in Toyota, Nissan and other foreign automakers with operations in the US.  But their influence with them is nowhere near what it is with Detroit’s Big Three, where, on a plant tour, one could easily be excused for wondering if the company’s name is “Ford Motor Company” or “UAW Inc.”.

But the point remains that people you, dear unions, support politically do not, as a rule, support you back with their buying habits.  This partially explains why, for example, the Chevy Volt has thus far been a colossal flop.

Just something to keep in mind the next time the call goes out to make complete jackasses of yourselves in some state capital.

As scipio62 blogged yesterday, the left-wing website AlterNet posted a pseudonymous article that trashed businessman and RedState favorite Herman Cain with several vile racial slurs on the way to leveling the tired charge of being an “Uncle Tom” that the left routinely slaps on any African-American who decides to favor the conservative point of view with respect to American politics.

Now there may be a temptation — for this blogger anyway — to leave open the possibility that the article, penned under the name “Chauncey DeVega”, is some kind of aberration that would meet swift condemnation or at the very least a quiet distancing with the suggestion that “Mr. DeVega” take his screeds somewhere else.

No such luck.  Overnight, AlterNet came to “DeVega”‘s defense:

We understand that some are offended by DeVega’s choice of words. We note, however, that most of the consternation generated by DeVega’s post has come from right-wing supporters of Cain who have focused on the language of his post and not the substance of his claim that Cain lends cover to reactionary right-wing forces.

Of course, neither AlterNet nor any of its left-blogosphere brethren would hesitate to be all over any language slip-ups of Cain or anyone else on our side of the aisle.  (Lest we forget: “macaca”.)

But worse than that is the doubling down on the implication is that Cain is merely here to “provide cover” for “right-wing forces”.  The very possibility that Cain himself might be a “right-wing force”?  Absurd!  Unthinkable!  He can’t possibly be espousing these views for his own ends!  And why do they say that?  Because he’s… he’s…

Do go on, Mr. “DeVega”.  Please continue, editors of AlterNet.  What is it about Herman Cain that leads you to the automatic assumption that he is not his own man, expressing his own views, and with his own aspirations to apply them in occupation of the highest executive office in the nation?

Let’s let Mr. “DeVega” speak for himself on the matter, as the editors of AlterNet invited him to do:

In my original post I referred to Herman Cain and other black conservatives as “race minstrels” and “mascots” for the White conservative imagination. I stand by this observation.

There’s a lot more to it than that, but this gives you the gist.  No apologies.  No regrets.  They truly believe that if your skin is beyond a certain shade then they are entitled to your political loyalty, and if you deny them that you are effectively betraying yourself.

Welcome to the “post-racial” era.

A sixteen-, maybe seventeen-year-old me was cruising around Plymouth, Michigan one Saturday afternoon.  I have no idea why, or if I even had a reason other than experiencing the joy of having my own car to drive at such an age and just seeing where the roads my parents would drive past but never turn off on actually went.

All I remember about that day was what came on the car’s radio.  It was a message from the president of the United States… to me.

Probably it went down in history as just another weekly radio address, but to be it was profound.

President Reagan spoke of a dark aspect of our nation’s history, that of racism. And his message to my generation — to me — was simply: see it out of existence.  Banish it from the thought patterns of this nation.  Live the colorblind society that Martin Luther King dreamed of.

It was all I could do not to literally verbalize a “yes, sir!” at the radio, so meaningful was his call to me.  It was the first time I felt actually addressed as an independent person with a say, or at least future say, in the course of this nation.

Looking back, nearly twenty-five years later, I’m a bit heartbroken to see that in many ways we as a nation seem more obsessed with race than ever. An entire industry exists to combat this mystical advantage that having a paler shade of skin supposedly grants people.

And as hard as I try to hold up my end of the bargain it all seems so hopeless at times. One of my greatest fears is that someday we will get pushed too hard and that there will be a backlash against affirmative action and everything that derives from it, of a kind that will end very poorly.

But I still cling to hope, that somehow — I honestly don’t have any idea how — we can find a way to back down from this national obsession without things swinging back the other way again.  In my life it is only halftime, if that, and there remains much time to see President Reagan’s orders through.

We can still win this one, for the Gipper.

This entry probably isn’t going to contain anything profound here.  Just an explanation of where I’ve been and why I dropped off the map here at RedState.

Honestly, after the election I was flat burned out.  I kinda knew I would be and just resolved to shut politics as much out of my life as possible from November 3rd until January 1st. A little distraction in the form of a slice of insanity known as National Novel Writing Month kept temptation away for a while, then came Christmas and all the anxieties that come with that.

I was all set to start 2011 fresh and then… my job moved on me. Or rather, is in the process of moving. Either move from Texas where I’ve spent more than a third of my life, to Alabama, or spend the whole year teaching people in Alabama how to do my job while I wait for the axe to fall.  Not a fun choice.

Either way, the Internet will be there for me when the dust settles, so I’ll be back.  It’s just taking longer than I planned.

See you all soon enough. Don’t go raising taxes without me!  Or with me!

While taking the lazy route (i.e. Google) to looking up the election results on Fox News, I came across a blog on the LA Times website that just encapsulated everything that’s gone wrong in the rest of the “mainstream media”.

“Fox News Strangely Subdued” at the GOP triumph, reads the headline. Tell me, Mr. LA Times blogger, has it occurred to you that maybe — just maybe — they’re acting the way a news organization is supposed to act? That, whatever their personal leanings might be, they’re able to set those aside and actually report news in a straight, even-handed tone that actually lets the viewer (in the words of its much-maligned slogan) decide?

I admit I didn’t watch any other networks for reference, although I would have checked out ABC News had they not folded under pressure and cancelled Andrew Breitbart (and then implausibly denied ever planning to have him on in the first place). Nevertheless, from what I heard second-hand, the coverage was, well, not quite so even-handed. Admittedly, I heard a lot more about the train wreck that was MSNBC than I did about the broadcast networks, but since until recently they were branding themselves “the place for politics” I don’t know that it’s totally unfair to cast them as representative of the non-Fox News major media.

But this diary isn’t really about them anyway. This was about the LA Times expecting Fox News to be breaking out the confetti while reporting last night’s election results, because, one presumes, that’s what they would do (and in many cases did, in 2008).

All of which I think says as much as anything about the bad rap Fox News routinely gets. Just like some will continue to believe Sarah Palin was responsible for things Tina Fey said, Fox News will, to some, never be anything other than what its enemies want it to be, actual evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.