John Hawkins, of RightWingNews & ConservativeGrapevine and good friend to this blog, was generous in offering Dan and I a chance to participate in his “Right-of-Center” blog survey.
Right-Of-Center Bloggers Tell Us Who Is Screwing Up America – RightWingNews
We were asked to send a list up to 20 people of the folks we think are “screwing up America.” Forty-six other bloggers participated, and tied for first place…


My only complaint about the survey…. can’t I do anything without BoiFromTroy doing it too? *big friendly-competitive-rivalry grin*
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Once again, Senate Democrats blocked a final vote on the confirmation of John Bolton to be the United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

Despite what the liberals and Democrat Party want you to think, elections DO matter. And here’s an interesting report related to the last Presidential Election…you remember, the one that the President was re-elected by a majority of voters for the first time since 1988?
Loss of Middle Class a ‘crisis’ for Democrats – Washington Times

Although Mr. Bush’s popular-vote margin of victory over Sen. John Kerry in 2004 was less than three percentage points, the Massachusetts Democrat lost the middle class — defined by the report as voters living in households with incomes between $30,000 and $75,000 — by six percentage points. Among white middle-class voters, the gap was 22 percentage points.

Well, if Howard Dean keeps accusing all Republicans of being liars, bigots and criminals… I wonder how on earth the Democrat Party will ever begin winning national elections again since they’ve lost the middle class?

-Bruce (GayPatriot) — gaypatriot2004@aol.com

I might fall for this attempt at historic revisionism by the Senior Citizen Senator from West Virginia….
Byrd Laments KKK Connection – Associated Press (via AOL)
…if he hadn’t repeatedly used racial epithets in the recent past. (see: Senator Byrd’s N-word — John Derbyshire/National Review)
-Bruce (GayPatriot) – gaypatriot2004@aol.com

You’d think after “Gannongate,” that MSNBC wouldn’t be so blatant about announcing Norah O’Donnell’s apparent new job in the White House….

Hat tip: FishbowlDC
-Bruce (GayPatriot) — gaypatriot2004@aol.com

If leaders of the other party have innovative ideas, let’s hear them. But if they have no ideas or policies except obstruction, they should step aside and let others lead. . . . . One approach is to lead, to focus on the people’s business, to take on the tough problems, and that is exactly what our party is doing.
The other approach is to simply do nothing, to delay solutions, obstruct progress, refuse to take responsibility. Members of the other party have worked with us to achieve important reforms on some issues, yet, too often, their leadership prefers to block the ideas of others.

–President Bush (via Polipundit)

For as long as I have been a Republican, I have heard critics of the GOP tell me what my party is all about. I’ve heard that we’re a bunch of money-grubbing selfish businessmen, that we’re white Christians who hate Jews, that we don’t welcome blacks and on and on. And on. You’ve heard the criticisms. You’re familiar with the insults. You’re aware of the name-calling. Now the chairman of the Democratic National Committee has joined the fray, telling everyone what Republicans are.
On Monday, Hillary’s rhetorical mentor, Howard Dean claimed that most members of my party are “not very friendly to different kinds of people, they are a pretty monolithic party ? it’s pretty much a white, Christian party.” And yet so many who describe the GOP in such terms, it doesn’t seem Mr. Dean has spend much time among Republicans. Indeed, his latest broadside reflects not on the reality of my party, but rather appeals to the narrow prejudices of certain members of his own party.
Very often when I come out as a Republican, some express shock that I, who am fluent in three languages, read widely, and have a variety of intellectual and artistic interests, could identify with a party of troglodytes (or other such demeaning terms). These people insist they know what Republican are all about. We’re not people who read books and talk about ideas. We’re just supposed to self-righteous, greedy bigots.
But, like Mr. Dean, few of these people so firm in their convictions of what defines a Republican, have ever attended a Republican meeting — or taken the time to get to know real Republicans, to ask us what drives us, to learn of our interests and to understand our political views. Too many seem unwilling to challenge their own prejudiced views of the GOP, its members and supporters. Not familiar with Republicans themselves, they define us not as we are, but as they want us to be.
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Not content to be regarded as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history, Jimmy Carter now seems determined to become the worst ex-president in U.S. history. While Bill Clinton, the only other living Democratic president, has largely refrained from attacking his Republican successor’s foreign policy, Jimmy Carter has made it his business to lambaste President Bush. (Indeed, some of Mr. Clinton’s recent statements have shown support for Mr. Bush’s policies, even for the liberation of Iraq.)
Now this failed former chief executive is at it again calling on the United States to close down the Guantanamo Bay prison. To be sure, Mr. Carter did fault Amnesty International for calling the prison “the gulag of our time,” but by publicly asking his nation to shut down the prison, he only helps reinforce the false impression that American officials have committed gross violations of human rights there.
To be sure, allegations have been raised about inappropriate conduct by guards and investigators, but those charges have been investigated and when substantiated, the guards (and investigators) responsible have been disciplined or dismissed. The military has adopted new policies to prevent such violations from recurring.
Mr. Carter’s call, however, suggests that our government has not taken action against the allegations. Not only that. By addressing this issue in a public forum, he helps those who wish to exaggerate the severity of those allegations. If Mr. Carter were truly concerned with what was going on there, he could contact the White House privately and work behind the scenes to effect change. Unlike most Americans, former presidents have means to communicate directly with the incumbent and his closest advisors.
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It looks like New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has been drinking some of the snake oil served up at Howard Dean’s Democratic National Committee. According to the New York Times, at a “Women for Hillary” fund-raiser yesterday, the Empire State’s junior senator accused the GOP of “being mad with power and self-righteousness.” Seems she was a little mad herself in explaining the failure of her party, the Senate’s minority party, to stop this alleged power grab:

I know it’s frustrating for many of you, it’s frustrating for me. Why can’t the Democrats do more to stop them? I can tell you this:I can tell you this: It’s very hard to stop people who have no shame about what they’re doing. It is very hard to tell people that they are making decisions that will undermine our checks and balances and constitutional system of government who don’t care. It is very hard to stop people who have never been acquainted with the truth.

Funny thing for a Clinton to accuse someone of “not being acquainted with the truth.” I do hope there is video footage of this event and the RNC gets a copy of it. It would certainly undermine Mrs. Clinton’s attempts to position herself as a centrist.
This is just another sad example of the mean-spirited accusatory rhetoric which has replaced debate in the Senate’s Democratic caucus. Mrs. Clinton’s angry string of accusations have no relationship whatsoever to actual Republican attitudes or policies. Indeed, I’m sure that she–as well as her husband and his allies–faulted such angry rhetoric when directed against him when he was president.
During the 1990s, many on my side of the aisle went a bit overboard in their criticism of President Clinton. Now his wife is proving that she’s no better than the worst of his critics. Perhaps she’s just showing her true colors. This speech certainly suggests that her attitudes are closer to those of Howard Dean than they are to those of mainstream America.
Alexander K. McClure offers some rather sharp criticism of Mrs. Clinton’s speech at Polipundit. Hat tip: Drudge.
UPDATE: Seems like NY Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin agrees with me that Hillary is a Dean Democrat. Hat tip: Polipundit.

While Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean garners headlines for his hateful anti-Repubilican rhetoric in his cross-country travels, Republican National Chairman Ken Mehlman has been getting little in attention in the national media for his trips across the country. According to USA Today, Mr. Mehlman “is courting black and Hispanic voters on a regular basis. . . . he has visited Latino neighborhoods and historically black campuses.”
In contrast his Democratic counterpart, Mr. Mehlman offers a positive vision of his party, recently speaking to an audience at Orange County’s Lincoln Juarez Opportunity Center, saying that the GOP’s “encouragement of home and business ownership, personal accountability and hard work vs. social service handouts are the American values that appeal to many Hispanics.” And while the RNC chair is putting forward a positive vision of his party, Howard Dean continues to badmouth his opponents, recently telling a Democratic audience in Washington, D.C. that Republicans could wait in line eight hours to vote because “Well, Republicans, I guess, can do that because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives.”
And this is just the latest of the Democratic chairman’s mudslinging. He has said he hates “the Republicans and everything they stand for” and accused us of being “mean.” Someone seems to be projecting here.
To be sure, there has always been mean-spirited rhetoric in American politics. Yet, most party chairmen have eschewed such language to focus on party building. They know that nasty rhetoric alone is not enough to win elections. Mr. Dean may well have a positive vision of what Democrats stand for, but his nasty rhetoric drowns out any more uplifting proposals.
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Just days after I watched a movie (which I had assumed) identified the real Deep Throat of the Watergate scandal, someone else comes forward and claims that he is the real Deep Throat.
As I was preparing a post on the topic, I read James Taranto’s Best of the Web. His thoughts are quite similar to my own:

President Nixon’s fall, after all, was a triumph for liberal Democrats and muckraking journalists–a triumph neither group has managed to equal since. . . . .
Yet consider what has happened in the years since Watergate. The Democratic Party suffered a series of electoral defeats and today is arguably in its weakest position since before the New Deal. During the same period, the press has seen a steady erosion in its public esteem.
This is in part because both the Democrats and the press learned the “lessons of Watergate” too well. The press is constantly seeking the next scandal, and the Democrats and the liberal left have taken to portraying policy disagreements as criminal coverups–the impulse behind both the Iran-contra scandal and the Valerie Plame kerfuffle.

More than thirty years ago, many Democrats, then the majority in both houses of Congress, as well as the mainstream media hated then-President Nixon with the same venom that many today seem to hate President Bush.
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Just minutes after 14 Senators worked out a compromise on judicial nominations, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid attempted to kill the nominations of two of the president’s nominees to federal circuit courts:

In the privacy of his Capitol office last Monday night, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., asked for commitments from six Democrats fresh from the talks. Would they pledge to support filibusters against Brett Kavanaugh and William Haynes, two nominees not specifically covered by the pact with Republicans?
Some of the Democrats agreed. At least one, Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, declined.

If AP has this story right and any of six remaining Democrats who agreed to the compromise have provided such a commitment to the Minority Leader, then it’ would be clear they broke their word–and lost no time in doing so. It would be another piece of evidence confirming that the Democrats are the real extremists on judicial nominations.
If any of the seven Democrats who joined the compromise vote to filibuster the aforementioned judicial nominees, the seven Republicans who joined them in supporting the compromise would the be duty-bound to vote to abolish the filibuster for judicial nominations. This time, they could easily show that while they tried to compromise, the Democrats broke their word.
Hat tip: Polipundit.

Barely three days after the Senate seemed to have resolved the impasse over confirmation of the president’s judicial nominees, the Democratic majority has returned to its obstructionist tactics in forcing a delay of the vote to confirm John Bolton as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Leaders of the minority party claimed that the “White House has stonewalled on information that might prove damaging to Bolton, whose brusque style Democrats said would be ill-suited to U.N. diplomacy. I actually think his brusque style would help the U.N. confront its own corruption and its hesitancy to act against gross human rights violations around the world.
Four of the seven Democrats who hammered out the compromise on judicial filibusters joined all but three of their minority-party colleagues in voted to filibuster Bolton.
The Democrats’ real goal here is to prevent the confirmation of Bolton who enjoys majority support in the Senate–and continues to do after the Senate has considered his nomination for nearly three months.
It has been nearly seven months since the president was decisively reelected to a second term, winning a majority of the popular vote, something only one incumbent Democratic president has done since the Second World War. And he did so as his party increased its majority in the Senate. When Bill Clinton was reelected in 1996 and Reagan in 1984, each man’s party respectively lost two seats in the Senate.
It’s time for the Democrats to accept the president’s reelection and stop trying to obstruct his nominees. They’ve had their chance to raise their objections in the Senate — to try to sway the majority Republicans. Even after they have failed to get majority support for their causes, the minority party is engaging in juvenile gamesmanship to limit the president from exercising his constitutional mandate to appoint federal judges — and certain executive branch officials.
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While I am delighted that the Senate is finally beginning to move on at least a few of the president’s nominees to federal appellate courts, I wish that Senate Democrats had agreed to up-or-down votes on all such nominees. Most are extremely competent jurists who would serve the nation well if confirmed to the federal bench.
There is, however, one nominee whose attitudes towards gays trouble me and whose confirmation I have opposed since I first wrote about the need to break the filibuster on judicial nominees. As Attorney General of Alabama, William Pryor, filed an amicus brief in Lawrence v. Texas, then before the U.S. Supreme Court, supporting the Lone Star State’s sodomy law. In his brief, Pryor linked “the choice of one’s partner” to adultery, bestiality, incest and child pornography among other things.
To be sure, Pryor has shown an ability to separate his personal opinions from his judicial responsibilities. As Alabama Attorney General, he did take then-Alabama’s Chief Justice to the state’s Court of Judiciary for defying a federal judge’s order to remove a display of the Ten Commandments from the state Judiciary Building even though he disagreed with the order. That is, he followed the law even if it was at odds with his personal beliefs.
But, the language of his amicus brief in Lawrence makes me concerned on how he will rule on cases affecting gay people once on the federal bench. I’m not convinced that he will be able to separate his personal views on gays from his judicial responsibilities. Therefore, I join Log Cabin in urging you to contact your Senators and ask them to vote against confirming Pryor to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Dreams into Lightning, a great blog I have just discovered, links a thoughtful piece by Keith Thompson, a man who began his “activist career championing the 1968 presidential candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy,” who backed George McGovern in 1972 and worked on the staff of then-U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D-0H) on his estrangement from the left. Read the whole thing, then check out Dreams into Lightning.

In a post today on Powerline, Paul shoots down the Democratic argument that the reason the minority party has filibustered so many of the president’s judicial picks is due to the “president’s uncompromising approach to his appointments,” that they are blocking the confirmation only of “extremist” nominees. He noted that the president renominated two judges appointed by President Clinton (Roger Gregory and Barrington Parker) who had not been confirmed by the Republican Senate in that Democrat’s second term. And while Democrats joined Senate Republicans in confirming these appointees, they, from the first days of the Bush Administration, blocked many conservative appointees.
I can’t remember any of the first President Bush’s nominees whom President Clinton renominated when he took office in 1993. That’s because there were none. The current President Bush was the first president in history to re-nominate “a failed circuit-court nominee originally nominated by his predecessor from the other political party.” After a divisive election, he renominated those two Clinton appointees as an olive branch to Democrats.
But, as Bradford A. Berenson in a post on National Review’s new Bench Memos blog who writes

The Democrats took the olive branch the president extended and slapped him in the face with it. They immediately held hearings for, and confirmed, the two Democrats among the nominees and then held up the rest, refusing even to hold hearings for a long time on most of them. They then complained incessantly (and, for the most part, falsely) about not having been adequately consulted by the White House with regard to these nominations. And they executed the play suggested by Professor Tribe, Marcia Greenberger, and others at a Democratic strategy session on how to block Bush judicial nominations — a session held before the president had even taken office — when they scheduled hearings under Senator Schumer to try to legitimize the notion that judicial nominations could be blocked on ideological, rather than competence grounds.

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Is West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, quite possibly the most anti-gay member of the United States Senate, losing it? Check out the audio on Radioblogger. Once there, just click on byrdesther and judge for yourself.
Hat tip: Hugh Hewitt

Once again, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) shows its inability to understand conservatives when, in its release today of the Family Research Council (FRC)‘s “Justice Sunday,” Executive Director Matt Foreman writes, “there is no difference between the leaders of America’s anti-gay industry and those leading the anti-filibuster campaign. They are one in the same.”
Foreman’s comments show a tremendous misunderstanding of the American conservative moment, indeed, of today’s of Republican Party. It is not nearly as narrow as he thinks. To be sure, as this Justice Sunday rally showed, most social conservatives, a number of them with strong anti-gay views, are helping lead the anti-filibuster campaign. But, many others leading this campaign, including a number of elected Republicans and representatives of conservative legal organizations, are far from anti-gay. Some are strict constructionists, others libertarian. They merely like most of individuals the president has appointed who, as judges, would apply the law rather than legislate from the bench.
Many other supporters of the anti-filibuster campaign oppose filibustering the president’s judicial nominees because we want to stop Democratic obstructionism in the Senate. At the same time, we are troubled by the rhetoric that Christian conservatives are using in this campaign. Cathy Young calls FRC event a “grotesque religio-political circus.”
I am not the only opponent of the filibuster who is not part of what Foreman calls “American’s anti-gay industry.” In an editorial this morning, “Nuke the Filibuster,” “THE LA TIMES” editorialists also oppose Senate Democrats’ tactics, writing

Practically every big-name liberal senator you can think of derided the filibuster a decade ago but now sees the error of his or her ways and will go to amusing lengths to try to convince you that the change of heart is explained by something deeper than the mere difference between being in the majority and being in the minority.

While hardly seeing “eye to eye with the far right on social issues” and while opposing “some of these judicial nominees,” “THE TIMES” urges “Republican leaders to press ahead with their threat to nuke the filibuster.” Indeed, the TIMES wants the Senate to go further and “nuke the filibuster for all legislative purposes.”
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Just One Minute asks: “at some point, the lack of an alternative Democratic agenda had the potential to become mildly embarrassing – sure, they are against Bush’s Social security reform, and his judges, but what are the for?” He does list the Senate Democrats’ nine-point plan which seems long on vague policy goals, but short on specifics. Check it out! Hat tip: Instapundit.