"Revealed: Bush ancestor was heavily invested in kidnapping Africans into slavery."

I assume this report is true and that the tainted blood of the Bush clan is interesting, but why is it being revealed now?

Because Obama's in trouble, and it's the next thing that could be pulled out of the country's miscellaneous bag o' distractions?

Because Jeb's in that lineage too, and he's in the running for next President, and he said something embarrassing recently, so it was a good time to kick him?

Because the George Zimmerman trial is getting underway, and that hasn't worked out as well as some in the race-baiting industry had hoped, and maybe some unrelated racial disturbance would resonate?

Because Paula Deen said something really stupid about slavery, so the editors at Slate looked around in their storehouse of as-yet-unpublished articles and found one that had slavery?

Female politicians "have resorted to flexing their womb-manhood."

Writes Kathleen Parker, riffing on Sarah Palin's statement that "goes something like this: 'I’m more fertile than you are.'"

(If you scroll down you'll get to the actual quote: "I say this as someone who’s kind of fertile herself." Palin was reacting to Jeb Bush's recent awkward reference to the fertility of immigrants. Parker seems to like to rewrite quotes: What Jeb said "sounds an awful lot like, 'Hotahmighty, those people can’t tie their shoes without getting pregnant.'")

It wasn't just Sarah Palin who flexed her womb-manhood to make a political argument. Parker also points to Nancy Pelosi:

When challenged about the difference between late-term abortion and the killing of babies who survived late-term abortions at the hands of the convicted murderer Dr. Kermit Gosnell, Pelosi hid behind the skirt of her own bassinet.

Rather than answer the question, she invoked her five children and declared any discussion of abortion “sacred ground” to her Catholic sensibilities. Fecundity, apparently, triumphs over moral reasoning.

Parker acts as if Pelosi were claiming authority solely by virtue of her motherhood and declined to engage in "moral reasoning," but Pelosi was saying I believe in Catholic doctrine. She didn't just say she had 5 children. She said "my oldest child is six years old the day I brought my fifth child home from the hospital." That's offered as proof that she believes the doctrine — including the proscription against birth control. In my book, that translates into a statement of morality. Maybe some people don't think that's "moral reasoning," because it's the acceptance of religious doctrine (and not individual philosophizing). But clearly Pelosi was saying: I have very deep beliefs about morality here and my life as I've lived it vouches for the sincerity of these beliefs.

Parker's next sentence is:

Most likely, Pelosi is deeply troubled by what her politics requires and what her Catholic mother-heart tells her is true. 

Catholic mother-heart? Pelosi claimed she is a believing Catholic. Beliefs exist in the brain as well as in the emotions. You can call the emotions "heart," but it's still not just something her heart is telling her. It's religious doctrine that she knows and purports to accept. Now, of course, it's very easy to say that Pelosi cannot square her support for abortion rights with her Catholic beliefs. And Pelosi deserves that hit because she did have a how-dare-you shaming tone in her voice and she refused give an elaborate response to the questioner who wanted to hound her about Gosnell.

But I know what the answer is. It's that when the question is about enduring a pregnancy, the beliefs of the woman within whom that pregnancy exists are what matters. The true moral answer is that you should never have an abortion — that's the Catholic's religious belief — but the legal answer is that every woman has freedom of belief and her own beliefs control what she does with her body.

I think this is like what Jesus said about divorce:

The Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him, and saying to Him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?”

And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”

They said to Him, “Why then did Moses command to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?”

He said to them, “Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery.”

I know that Moses didn't say it, but one might say abortion is permitted because of the hardness of your hearts.

With 2 references to hearts — Parker's "Catholic mother-heart" and Jesus's "the hardness of your hearts" — I am reminded again of the Supreme Court's notion of what it called "the heart of liberty": "the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." That's the basis of the right to have an abortion: the individual's freedom of belief.

But where was Kathleen Parker going with this column? Two highly partisan women used their own personal fertility to leverage a political argument. Noted. The 2 women are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but they were arguing about different issues: immigration and abortion. Now, we know Palin is pro-life, and Parker declares Palin's position "more palatable," but she proceeds to knock her for "her coquettish reminders that her field is still tillable," which, Parker says, "diminishes her credibility as anything other than a one-liner comedienne." I take it that's Parker's way of stating the conclusion that women ought to refrain from flexing their womb-manhood.

I think it's fine to include one's own personal experience as part of a political argument. It's a problem if you do it badly. (You don't want your audience to perceive you as coquettish!) And it shouldn't be your only argument. (You don't want to seem to be saying I have more children then you, so shut up.) But talking about real-world experience gives depth, color, and credibility to a politician's speech. As with any political speech, you need to do it well.

"He said I'm way over the top in referring to the Obama administration as the regime. It's over the top."

"And to say that we're in the midst of a coup d'etat, that's going too far. It's just going too far, that it's unpatriotic, and it's not conservative. I'm not conservative and I'm certainly not patriotic because I'm portraying myself and all conservatives as anti-government."

So begins a Rush Limbaugh monologue, from yesterday's show. The critic he's responding to is WaPo columnist Michael Gerson (who was a Bush speechwriter). Rush says:

It's really, really bad what the IRS is doing to the Tea Party, but that's as far as Gerson's willing to go.  He doesn't want to extrapolate it might mean anything.  But to me it does.  I don't know what he thinks about it.  I think he thinks all governments engage in excesses, and some governments have individuals who go outside the boundaries and this is par for the course....

Gerson said: "It is one thing to oppose the policies of the administration; it is another to call for resistance against a 'regime' and a 'police state.'" Rush read that and said:

Who did that?  He means armed resistance. That's what he's not saying. Nobody's doing that.

Rush doesn't like the way Gerson finds more in Rush's statements than Rush has literally said. But in order to say that, Rush must find something in Gerson's statements that Gerson has not literally said. And Rush is also going on about how President Obama is responsible for things that Obama hasn't literally said:

Herbert Meyer... the former national security official of the Reagan administration... described Hitler and Nazism, and he made the claim, 'cause his column focused on people hoping there's a smoking gun linking Obama to all of these scandals.  And Herbert Meyer said there isn't gonna be a smoking gun.  There is no memo.  Obama doesn't have to write a memo of instructions or desires 'cause everybody working for him already knows what he wants.  Everybody working for him is a miniature Obama, or a full-fledged Obama.  And as an example, Herbert Meyer used Hitler and the Nazis, and he said (paraphrasing), "Despite the fact that everybody knows that Adolf Hitler ran the Holocaust, you will not find one document where Hitler issues orders for the Holocaust to be carried out.  If we needed that to prove what Hitler was, we would never be able to prove it because it doesn't exist."

Rush goes on to complain about the mild-mannered campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney, whom he portrays as unwilling to go after Obama, and he's afraid that's where conservatives will do once again, as Jeb Bush lumbers onto the stage. Rush wants some tough dissent from the Republicans, but he must know that you can go too far with that and sound like a raving lunatic, which is what I think Gerson meant to say. Here's Gerson (from the second link, above):

Questioning the legitimacy of our government is the poisoning of patriotism. It is offensive for the same reasons it was offensive when elements of the left, in the 1960s and 1970s, talked of the American “regime.” 

And in Wisconsin, in 2011, when our duly elected Governor, Scott Walker, was protested by hordes of people who chanted "This is what democracy looks like" as they tried to interfere with what they'd convinced themselves was an illegitimate regime. And you'd better believe they compared Walker to Hitler:

What's so momentous that Drudge is going all "It Begins" over Jeb Bush?

Drudge is linking to:

In an exclusive sit-down interview with The Brody File, Jeb Bush says that, “Hillary Clinton is a formidable force on the left.”

Video at the link:



Jeb says: "Hillary Clinton is a formidable force on the left. I wouldn't discount her um her uh her ability...." I interrupt to say out loud: "I would discount your ability to get through a sentence."

"Still, Cruz and Christie possess a key similarity: an abundance of old-school manliness."

"Sure, one is a twangy Texan with that shit-kicking, boot-wearing thing going on (despite being a double-ivied, cosmopolitan kind of guy). The other is a Jersey bruiser, with a (much-discussed) physique reminiscent of Tony Soprano after a doughnut bender. But both are delivering a booster shot of testosterone to the GOP in a way few have managed to pull off of late...."

Writes Michelle Cottle in The Daily Beast (erasing Cruz's Hispanicity and Christie's stomach surgery).

Despite the centrality of this image to the GOP, however, precious few of its high-profile players now are apt salesmen for the manly brand....

As for the current team ... Mitt Romney: too much of a doofus. Paul Ryan: ditto, despite the washboard abs. Eric Cantor: too twitchy (manly men do not visibly vibrate with nervous energy). Marco Rubio: too boyish. Jeb Bush: too soft and measured. With his retro Mad Men groove, John Boehner has the potential to be a Don Draper kind of manly man, but he’s too darn weepy.

ADDED: I looked up "shit-kicking" in the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary. It means, "In early use: worthless, contemptible. Later: designating or characteristic of an unsophisticated person from a rural area; (also) tough, belligerent; cf."

1953   J. Harvey Salt in our Wounds vi. 87   You low-life..shit-kicking..useless bastard.
1972   J. Thomson in J. Malley & H. Tokay Contemporaries 189   A beer drinkin finger poppin shit kickin red neck.
1978   Jrnl. Folklore Inst. 15 264   Shit-kicking villagers wearing whatever it is that villagers actually wear these days.
1987   W. Styron Tidewater Morning in Esquire Aug. 88/2,   I, a shit-kicking Carolina yokel who, when I first met you, suspected you of being a neo-abolitionist.
1992   Playboy Nov. 111/1   He told me not to worry, in that shit-kicking drawl of his.
1998   Esquire May 42/1   This woman is one hot, shit-kicking feminist babe.
2002   L. Coady Strange Heaven i. 6   A pack of g.d. shit-kicking yahoos.

How does that relate in any way to Cruz?

"Rand Paul's 2016 presidential chances are better than most people realize."

Harry J. Enten analyzes the odds:

Paul the elder never won a statewide popular vote in a primary or general election. Ron Paul has his base, but never could really reach beyond it. His son, Rand, is simply a better politician. The one thing that Ron did have was an organization set up to help him get votes in the early states. He got 21% of the vote in Iowa and 23% in New Hampshire in 2012.

Rand, in my opinion, will likely inherit much of his father's organization. Assume that can give him 21% of the vote in Iowa and 23% of the vote in New Hampshire. It's quite possible that only high 20s are needed to win both states. One has to think that given Rand's political abilities, which his father failed to posses, he can win that extra 5% of the vote in each state to put him over the top.

Rand Paul winning either Iowa or New Hampshire, let alone both, would make him a big time power player for the 2016 primary season. It might even put him in a position to, dare I say, win the nomination.

Of course, the GOP seems unable to resist handing the nomination to the next establishment candidate in line. But who would that person be in 2016? It would need to be someone who ran before and seems pretty bland and moderate. Is there anyone like that hanging around right now? Paul Ryan seems insufficiently old. Jeb Bush? Oh, my lord, the answer is Jeb Bush.