David Frum, The Honest Conservative

Remember Jim DeMint?

Here's what American Enterprise Institute fellow David Frum has to say about that:

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.

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So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson:

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.
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There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

Ethics, what a concept!!

Nice article from The Hill, complete with "this doesn't comply with my programmed worldview, therefore it is a conspiracy!!1!!1!" comments section.

President Barack Obama scores well among ethics watchdog groups in his first year in office, though they’d still like to see more from the president.
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“What I find most encouraging is that there is a core group of people at the White House who genuinely care about these issues,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at Federation of American Scientists. “There is now ‘someone to talk to’ at the White House in a way that there wasn’t before. And we are already starting to see some results from those conversations, such as the Open Government Directive, and other emerging policies.”
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“The greatest surprise is just how extensively these revolving door restrictions apply,” said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen.

Funny thing about liberals

My observation so far is that conservatives will fall in line behind their leader no matter what he does or says. Liberals or progressives on the other hand are convinced that their leaders will sell them out at the earliest opportunity and interpret actions and words in the most negative way possible. While I get a little tired of all the cries of "traitor" and "sellout", it pretty much negates the argument I get from conservatives that I don't know the "real truth" because I only get info from the "Obama-loving liberal media" (hmm...[blank]-lover! where have I heard that before?).

I won't go into a diatribe about how the news media in the US is owned by large corporations and how that biases their product to the benefit of those corporations (such as profiting from war, via government contracts). But, I will say that there is a striking difference between watching Fox continue to cheerlead for the last administration's torture policies and watching Olbermann or Maddow take President Obama to task for not calling for criminal investigations into those policies. I think that a lot of the angst on the left is a product of getting their asses handed to them by the conservatives for most of the last 40 years, but the instinct is correct: question authority.