Ann Coulter

Deport the GOP Establishment

On no issue is the elite/American divide so great as on immigration. For decades, a majority of Americans have wanted to decrease immigration. Not just illegal immigration — all immigration.

Nearly three times as many Americans support reducing immigration as want it to stay the same, according to Gallup polls. A grand total of 5 percent of the population want to increase legal immigration — 10 times less than want to decrease it. I myself would like to deport the people responsible for our current immigration policies.

Our official policy is to turn away scientists in order to make room for illiterate Pakistani peasants who will drop out of high school to man coffee carts until deciding to plot a terrorist attack against the United States. That’s this week’s immigration poster boy, Najibullah Zazi.

Zazi’s own step-uncle said of him: “He was a dumb kid, believe me.” Our immigration officials said, WELCOME, ZAZI!… Oops, sorry Swedish scientists and nuclear engineers — no room for you.

In February, Zazi pleaded guilty in a plot to bomb the New York City subway.

One of his co-conspirators, Zarein Ahmedzay, was welcomed from Afghanistan to America because he was willing to do a job no American would: drive a cab. Where are you going to find an American with a driver’s license?

This week, a third accomplice, Adis Medunjanin, was convicted in the subway conspiracy. Medunjanin came from Bosnia and became an American citizen — a priceless gift to The New York Times, which was then able to begin its article on his convictions: “An American citizen was convicted of a host of terrorism charges on Tuesday …”

For this we can thank the late, lamented Teddy Kennedy, who altered our immigration laws in 1965 to ensure massive immigration from the Third World while severely limiting the number of Europeans who could come here.

And that’s legal immigration. When it comes to illegal immigration, Americans are in a sputtering rage about politicians’ obtuse refusal to address the problem.

Democrats look at immigration as a way to increase their voter rolls, and Republicans look at immigration as a way to get cheap labor for big business. Any Americans who disagree with our all-Third World immigration flow are called “racists.”

This is why Democrats and establishment Republicans are desperate to talk Mitt Romney into flip-flopping on his immigration positions. He’s with Americans.

In a novel thought, Romney proposes that we grant citizenship to people who would make America a better place, repeatedly saying that he would like to “staple a green card” to the diplomas of foreigners who receive Ph.D.s in math or the hard sciences. He may be the first national politician in two generations who thinks we should use legal immigration to get our average up.

It would be as if the University of North Carolina recruited only the top basketball players in the county, instead of — out of fairness — taking players of all skill levels, and their relatives. What? They do that? Way to go, Carolina!

Romney is also one of the few politicians who acknowledge the danger of creating magnets for more illegal aliens streaming across the border.

During a primary debate last September, Romney said simply: “Of course we build a fence, and of course we do not give in-state tuition credits to people who come here illegally. That only attracts people to come here and take advantage of America’s great beneficence.” (These are the positions he took and enforced as governor of one of the most liberal states in the country.)

I would add that the absolute worst thing we could do is grant citizenship to illegal immigrant children brought here by their parents — as the various DREAM acts do. What stronger magnet could we devise than offering citizenship to a person’s children? (The parents will then become citizens, anyway, under our phony “family reunification” policy.)

Instead of drafting bills, such as the DREAM act, to give illegal aliens benefits, can’t we all agree that the very first thing we have to do is seal the border? Otherwise, it’s like mopping the floor before turning off the bathtub spigot.

First, turn off spigot; second, mop floor.

And surely no one wants any immigrants coming here and immediately going on welfare. (That would be like North Carolina actively recruiting the blind for their basketball team.) Can’t we all agree not to give immigrants government handouts?

Starting with those two policies is not only logical, but will force Democrats to admit they have no intention of ever blocking the border. Their dearest desire is for immigrants to arrive, become dependent on government and start voting Democratic.

Romney Doing the Job the Republican Establishment Won’t Do

The actual Republican Establishment –- political consultants, The Wall Street Journal, corporate America, former Bush advisers and television pundits — are exhorting Mitt Romney to flip-flop on his very non-Establishment position on illegal immigration.

Both as governor of Massachusetts and as a presidential candidate, Romney has supported a fence on the border, E-Verify to ensure that employees are legal and allowing state police to arrest illegal aliens. He is the rare Republican who recognizes that in-state tuition, driver’s licenses and amnesty are magnets for more illegal immigration.

These positions are totally at odds with Establishment Republicans who pander to the business lobby by supporting the cheap labor provided by illegal immigration, and then accuse Americans opposed to a slave labor class in America of racism. If this continues, America will become California and no Republican will ever be elected president again. Big business doesn’t care and Establishment Republicans are too stupid to notice.

If you’re not sure how you feel about illegal immigration, ask yourself this: “Do I have a nanny, a maid, a pool boy, a chauffeur, a cook or a business requiring lots of cheap labor that the rest of America will have to subsidize with social services to make up for the wages I’m paying?” Press “1″ to answer in English.

If the answer is “no,” illegal immigration is a bad deal for you. Cheap labor is cheap only for the employer.

Today, 70 percent of illegal immigrant households collect government benefits — as do 57 percent of all immigrant households — compared to 39 percent of native households.

Immigrant households with the highest rate of government assistance are from the Dominican Republic (82 percent), Mexico and Guatemala (tied at 75 percent), based on the latest available data from 2009. Immigrant households least likely to be on any welfare program are from the United Kingdom (7 percent).

British immigrants aren’t picking the tomatoes Karl Rove doesn’t want his son to pick. (That’s how he justified Bush’s amnesty proposal.)

You can either pay a little more for tomatoes picked by Americans or you can pay a lot more in welfare to the illegal immigrants who will pick them as well as to generations of their descendants.

Yes, many illegal immigrants work hard, but it’s not our responsibility if their employers don’t pay them a living wage. This is known as an “externality,” which we hear a lot about in the case of greedy businesses polluting the land, but not when it’s greedy businesses making the rest of us support their underpaid employees.

Romney is one of the few Republicans to recognize that there is no need to “round up” illegal aliens (in the lingo of amnesty supporters) to get them to go home. Illegal aliens will leave the same way they arrived. They decided to walk across the border to get jobs — and welfare, apparently — and they’ll walk back across the border as soon as the jobs and welfare dry up.

Obama has a similar plan, but instead of using E-Verify to stop illegal aliens from taking American jobs, he did it by destroying the entire job market. Hmmmm, drug-war ravaged Ciudad Juarez, or Obama’s America … I’ll take Juarez! Under the booming economy President Romney is going to produce, we’re going to need a really high fence.

It didn’t take a government administrator “rounding up” foreigners and putting them on buses to get 20 million illegal aliens here, and it won’t take a government program “rounding them up” to get them home.

While Romney’s views on immigration are wildly popular with Americans, they are extremely unpopular with the Republican Establishment sucking up to business interests — Bush, Rove, McCain, Huckabee, Perry, Gingrich, Giuliani, Krauthammer, Kristol, Gillespie, etc, etc.

(Maybe it’s the Establishment that’s been calling Romney “Establishment.”)

So now the elites are demanding that Romney “moderate” his position on immigration. To justify their underpaying the maid, they claim support for illegal immigration is crucial to victory! Obama’s ahead among Hispanics! How are you going to get the Hispanic vote? You’ve got to take Rubio as VP! And could somebody remind Esperanza to pick up little Chauncey from his play-date at 4:00 p.m.?

The truth is, a tough stance on illegal immigration can only help Romney, not only with the vast majority of Americans, but with any Latino voters who would ever possibly consider voting Republican in the first place.

As Romney said in one of the early debates, Republicans appeal to Latinos “by telling them what they know in their heart, which is they or their ancestors did not come here for a handout. If they came here for a handout, they’d be voting for Democrats. They came here for opportunity and freedom. And that’s what we represent.”

Romney crushed pro-amnesty Newt Gingrich in the Florida primary, winning a huge majority of that state’s substantial Hispanic population. And Gingrich promised Hispanics their own moon base!

Before the primary, Gingrich played up his support for amnesty, while accusing Romney of wanting to “round up” illegal alien grandmothers. The one thing every Florida primary voter knew was that Romney said he’d veto the Dream Act, giving citizenship to illegal alien children.

And then Romney won the primary with an even larger percentage of the Hispanic vote than Florida at large. Romney beat Gingrich statewide, 46 percent to 32. But among Latino voters, Romney routed Gingrich, 54 percent to 29 percent.

It’s not just Florida. In 2006, Arizona Hispanics supported four anti-illegal immigration propositions by 40 to 50 percent — which is a lot more than voted for pro-amnesty Republican presidential candidates John McCain or George W. Bush.

Among the propositions supported by Hispanics in larger numbers than they typically vote Republican was one making English the official language of Arizona (49 percent). As governor of Massachusetts, Romney pushed English-immersion programs. That’s my kind of Hispandering!

These are our Latinos — the ones, as Romney said, who came here for opportunity and freedom. Any race-mongering, welfare-collecting, ethnic-identity rabble-rousers are voting for the Democrat.

Negroes With Guns

Liberals have leapt on the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida to push for the repeal of “stand your ground” laws and to demand tighter gun control. (MSNBC’S Karen Finney blamed “the same people who stymied gun regulation at every point.”)

This would be like demanding more funding for the General Services Administration after seeing how its employees blew taxpayer money on a party weekend in Las Vegas.

We don’t know the facts yet, but let’s assume the conclusion MSNBC is leaping to is accurate: George Zimmerman stalked a small black child and murdered him in cold blood, just because he was black.

If that were true, every black person in America should get a gun and join the National Rifle Association, America’s oldest and most august civil rights organization.

Apparently this has occurred to no one because our excellent public education system ensures that no American under the age of 60 has the slightest notion of this country’s history.

Gun control laws were originally promulgated by Democrats to keep guns out of the hands of blacks. This allowed the Democratic policy of slavery to proceed with fewer bumps and, after the Civil War, allowed the Democratic Ku Klux Klan to menace and murder black Americans with little resistance.

(Contrary to what illiterates believe, the KKK was an outgrowth of the Democratic Party, with overlapping membership rolls. The Klan was to the Democrats what the American Civil Liberties Union is today: Not every Democrat is an ACLU’er, but every ACLU’er is a Democrat. Same with the Klan.)

In 1640, the very first gun control law ever enacted on these shores was passed in Virginia. It provided that blacks — even freemen — could not own guns.

Chief Justice Roger Taney’s infamous opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford circularly argued that blacks could not be citizens because if they were citizens, they would have the right to own guns: “[I]t would give them the full liberty,” he said, “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

With logic like that, Republicans eventually had to fight a Civil War to get the Democrats to give up slavery.

Alas, they were Democrats, so they cheated.

After the war, Democratic legislatures enacted “Black Codes,” denying black Americans the right of citizenship — such as the rather crucial one of bearing arms — while other Democrats (sometimes the same Democrats) founded the Ku Klux Klan.

For more than a hundred years, Republicans have aggressively supported arming blacks, so they could defend themselves against Democrats.

The original draft of the Anti-Klan Act of 1871 — passed at the urging of Republican president Ulysses S. Grant — made it a federal felony to “deprive any citizen of the United States of any arms or weapons he may have in his house or possession for the defense of his person, family, or property.” This section was deleted from the final bill only because it was deemed both beyond Congress’ authority and superfluous, inasmuch as the rights of citizenship included the right to bear arms.

Under authority of the Anti-Klan Act, President Grant deployed the U.S. military to destroy the Klan, and pretty nearly completed the job.

But the Klan had a few resurgences in the early and mid-20th century. Curiously, wherever the Klan became a political force, gun control laws would suddenly appear on the books.

This will give you an idea of how gun control laws worked. Following the firebombing of his house in 1956, Dr. Martin Luther King, who was, among other things, a Christian minister, applied for a gun permit, but the Alabama authorities found him unsuitable. A decade later, he won a Nobel Peace Prize.

How’s that “may issue” gun permit policy working for you?

The NRA opposed these discretionary gun permit laws and proceeded to grant NRA charters to blacks who sought to defend themselves from Klan violence — including the great civil rights hero Robert F. Williams.

A World War II Marine veteran, Williams returned home to Monroe, N.C., to find the Klan riding high — beating, lynching and murdering blacks at will. No one would join the NAACP for fear of Klan reprisals. Williams became president of the local chapter and increased membership from six to more than 200.

But it was not until he got a charter from the NRA in 1957 and founded the Black Armed Guard that the Klan got their comeuppance in Monroe.

Williams’ repeated thwarting of violent Klan attacks is described in his stirring book, “Negroes With Guns.” In one crucial battle, the Klan sieged the home of a black physician and his wife, but Williams and his Black Armed Guard stood sentry and repelled the larger, cowardly force. And that was the end of it.

As the Klan found out, it’s not so much fun when the rabbit’s got the gun.

The NRA’s proud history of fighting the Klan has been airbrushed out of the record by those who were complicit with the KKK, Jim Crow and racial terror, to wit: the Democrats.

In the preface to “Negroes With Guns,” Williams writes: “I have asserted the right of Negroes to meet the violence of the Ku Klux Klan by armed self-defense — and have acted on it. It has always been an accepted right of Americans, as the history of our Western states proves, that where the law is unable, or unwilling, to enforce order, the citizens can, and must act in self-defense against lawless violence.”

Contrary to MSNBC hosts, I do not believe the shooting in Florida is evidence of a resurgent KKK. But wherever the truth lies in that case, gun control is always a scheme of the powerful to deprive the powerless of the right to self-defense.

Verilli Not Administration’s Worst Lawyer After All

The reason tea partiers carried signs saying “Read the Constitution!” was that we were hoping people would read the Constitution.

Alas, we still have Rick Santorum saying Obamacare is the same as what he calls “Romneycare”; the otherwise brilliant Mickey Kaus sniffing that if states can mandate insurance purchases, then we’re “not talking about some basic individual liberty to not purchase stuff” (no, just the nation’s founding document, which protects “basic individual liberties” by putting constraints on Congress); and the former law professor, Barack Obama, alleging that a “good example” of judicial activism would be the Supreme Court (in his words, “a group of people”) overturning “a duly constituted and passed law.”

I don’t know how a court could overturn a law that hasn’t been “passed.” Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a law, it would be a bill. If it hasn’t even been “constituted,” it wouldn’t be anything at all.

Of course the courts can overturn laws — constituted and passed alike! If anything, the Supreme Court isn’t striking down enough laws.

Suppose Congress passed a law (after constituting it) prohibiting the publication of books about Hillary Clinton. That would be a violation of the First Amendment and the courts should strike it down. Failing to strike down such a law would be judicial activism.

That’s the judiciary’s job, which has been pretty well established since the 1803 case, Marbury v. Madison, heretofore the second most sacred opinion in the liberal canon. (Roe v. Wade is the first most sacred.)

Marbury captured the imagination of liberals only relatively recently when they realized that, simply as a procedural matter, the courts have the last word.

The judicial branch isn’t above the other two branches — much less the states or the people. It is (one of my favorite words) “co-equal” to the other branches. Indeed, the judiciary was laughably described by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers as the “least dangerous” branch.

Anticipating nearly every form of government corruption, our framers specifically designed the Constitution to prevent tyranny. But they never imagined the perfidy of 20th-century liberals. (Probably because the framers didn’t have NBC.)

What liberals figured out — and were mendacious enough to exploit — is that there is no obvious recourse for the other branches if the Supreme Court issues an insane ruling. So, beginning in the 1960s, liberals on the court started issuing insane rulings on a regular basis. Rather than referring to the Constitution, some of their opinions were apparently based on the dream journal of Andrea Dworkin.

Soon every law student could recite in his sleep Chief Justice John Marshall’s line in Marbury: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.” So shut up and go home.

To take one example of a ludicrous ruling, at random, off the top of my head: In 1973, the Supreme Court announced that the Constitution mandates a right to abortion.

The Constitution says nothing about reproduction, contraception, fetuses, pregnancy, premenstrual syndrome, morning sickness — much less abortion. (As the tea partiers say: Read the Constitution!)

It does, however, expressly grant to the states those powers not reserved to the people (such as the right to bear arms) or explicitly given to Congress (such as the right to regulate commerce with foreign nations, among the several states and with the Indian tribes).

Obviously, therefore, the Constitution implicitly entrusted abortion laws to the states.

One hint that a “constitutional” right to abortion is not based on anything in the Constitution is that during oral argument, as the lawyer arguing for this apocryphal right ticked off the constitutional provisions allegedly supporting it — the Due Process Clause, the Equal Protection Clause, the Ninth Amendment, “and a variety of others” — the entire courtroom burst into laughter.

The ruling in Roe, incidentally, struck down the duly constituted and passed laws of all 50 states. (But that is soooo 53 million abortions ago …)

When conservatives complain about “judicial activism,” this is what they’re talking about: Decisions not plausibly based on anything in the Constitution.

Curiously, the only court opinions liberals really get excited about are the ones having nothing to do with the Constitution: abortion, nude dancing, gay marriage, pornography, coddling criminals, etc., etc.

Liberals try to hide their treachery by pretending that what conservatives are really upset about is the Supreme Court striking down any law passed by any legislature. This is a preposterous lie that could fool only the irredeemably credulous.

Which brings us to the brilliant ex-law professor, who manifestly doesn’t have the faintest understanding of the Constitution.

On Monday, President Obama shocked even his fellow liberals when he claimed that it would be “an unprecedented, extraordinary step” for the Supreme Court to overturn “a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” (Which Obamacare wasn’t.)

He added: “I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint.”

I guess now we know why Obama won’t release his college and law school transcripts!

It was so embarrassing that Obama attempted a clarification on Tuesday, but only made things worse. He said: “We have not seen a court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on an economic issue, like health care,” since the ’30s.

Except in 1995. And then again in 2000. (Do we know for a fact that this guy went to Columbia and Harvard Law?)

In the former case, U.S. v. Lopez, the Supreme Court struck down the Gun-Free School Zone Act — which was, by the way, a “duly constituted and passed law”! And then the court did it again in U.S. v. Morrison, when it overturned another “duly constituted and passed law,” the Violence Against Women Act.

Both laws were defended by the Clinton administration as “economic” regulations, passed by Congress pursuant to the Commerce Clause with arguments as stretched as the ones used to defend Obamacare. The Gun-Free School Zone Act, for example, was said to address the economic hardship, health care costs, insurance costs and unwillingness to travel created by violent crime.

Conservatives want the rule of law, not silence from the judges. Not striking down an unconstitutional law is judicial activism every bit as much as invalidating a constitutional one.

 

A Post-Racial Lynch Mob

Even after the Duke lacrosse case, Texaco executives allegedly using the N-word in private meetings — which turned out to be “St. Nicholas” — the Tawana Brawley case, not to mention virtual hailstorms of racist graffiti and nooses materializing on college campuses, all of which invariably end up having been put there by the alleged victims, the Non-Fox Media (NFM) didn’t even pause before conjuring a racist plot in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida last month.

Like Captain Ahab searching for the Great White Whale, the NFM is constantly on the hunt for proof of America as “Mississippi Burning.”

Over St. Patrick’s Day weekend, the month after Martin was killed, gangs in Chicago shot 10 people dead, including a 6-year-old girl, Aliyah Shell, who was sitting with her mother on their front porch.

One imagines MSNBC hosts heaving a sign of relief that little Aliyah was not shot by a white man, and was thus spared the horror of being a victim of racism.

As it happens, Trayvon Martin wasn’t shot by a white man either, but by George Zimmerman, a mixed-race Hispanic who lives in a diverse (47 percent white) gated community and tutors black kids.

But Hispanic is close enough for the NFM. They’re chasing the Great White Whale of racist America and don’t have time to check to see if the whale is actually a guppy.

Since the cat leapt out of the bag on Zimmerman being Hispanic, the media have begun calling him a “white Hispanic.”

Not being a race-obsessed liberal, I don’t particularly care, but it’s indisputable that Zimmerman is brown. I saw his face carved on the side of a Mayan temple in the Yucatan. Using his mother’s maiden name, he would be admitted to the University of Michigan law school on a full scholarship.

Apart from that, pretty much all that is known with certainty is that Zimmerman called the police to report a suspicious character in his neighborhood, and shortly thereafter he shot and killed Martin.

On the basis of little else, the media conjured a Hollywood script: A “white” man was “stalking” a little black kid — who could be Obama’s son! — confronted him, beat him senseless as the small black child screamed for help, and finally shot the kid dead, “just because he was black.”

Two weeks of nonstop hysteria later, it turns out that every part of that gripping plot is based on nothing that could be called a reasonable assumption, much less a fact.

The NFM’s theory of the case might be true, just as it might be true that the loud bang I just heard outside my door is Godzilla returning to terrorize Manhattan. I, like the NFM, have no facts supporting my theory. (Although mine is more credible because Al Sharpton is not involved and none of my facts are provably false, such as the NFM’s claim about Zimmerman being “white.”)

First of all, there’s no reason to believe Zimmerman followed Martin after the police told him not to, which is the linchpin of much excited reporting.

Zimmerman told the police, his friends and his lawyer that he walked back to his car after hanging up with the police and was waylaid by Martin. No witnesses have told the press otherwise.

We don’t know if -– as the NFM has baldly asserted — it was Martin yelling “Help!” during the struggle. Before the case became a nationwide sensation, the lead detective told the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel that the police had played all the 911 calls for Martin’s father, and he said the voice crying “Help!” was not his son’s.

(The father has subsequently retracted that.)

Before the shooting was even a twinkle in the eye of MSNBC, an eyewitness gave a detailed account to the local media, indicating that it was Martin who was on top of Zimmerman, pummeling him, as Zimmerman screamed “Help!”

The police report says Zimmerman’s nose was bleeding and his back covered in grass stains when they arrived at the scene. His lawyer and friends say he was treated for a broken nose the next day.

There’s no sense in arguing in public about such facts. The medical records exist or they do not.

Of course, the information contradicting the media’s fantasy comes to us only in the form of witness statements and police reports appearing in the press, not as evidence in a formal criminal investigation.

It’s hard to tell where the NFM’s suppositions are coming from inasmuch as they simply report their version as hard fact. But all their evidence seems to come only from Martin’s family and girlfriend. Can we start trying all criminal defendants based exclusively on the testimony of the victim’s friends and relatives?

Among the reasons to be suspicious of the media as impartial judges of the evidence is that they keep showing us snapshots from Martin’s childhood, rather than any recent photos.

Without doing research, the average person would think Martin was a slight 12-year-old whippersnapper at the time of the shooting, rather than a strapping 6-foot, 160-pound 17-year-old. Indeed, he was 3 inches taller than Zimmerman, according to the police report.

Why aren’t they showing us Zimmerman’s baby pictures? (And why didn’t we get to see baby pictures of the Duke lacrosse players? I bet they were adorable.)

CNN ceaselessly reported the allegation that Zimmerman could be heard in the background of one 911 call using an archaic racial epithet. Before playing the tape, correspondent Gary Tuchman first announced what the slur was supposed to be (“f*****g coon”).

There’s nothing like suggesting the answer in advance to improve reliability! Police should try that in lineups.

Then the same network that couldn’t find the Jeremiah Wright tapes for sale in a church lobby brought in “one of the best audio experts in the business” to enhance the tape — take the bass away here, add volume there — and played the 1.6-second loop again and again, just in case you were not suggestible enough the first time.

Still, all that can be heard on the enhanced tape is “cha-chu, cha-chu, cha-chu.”

But Tuchman wrapped up this demonstration by saying, “You know, it sounds like this allegation could be accurate, but I wouldn’t swear to it in court. That’s what it sounds like to me.”

To the small percentage of CNN’s audience with triple-digit IQs, it was comedy gold. The only thing missing was Tipper Gore playing the audio backward to reveal satanic lyrics.

(Incidentally, the Nexis transcript of the indecipherable “cha-chu” sound reads: “ZIMMERMAN: F*****g coons, f*****g coons. F*****g coons. F*****g coons. F*****g coons.” Except it doesn’t use asterisks.)

All this may give you an inkling of why we rely on the criminal justice system to determine guilt in criminal cases and not the fervid imaginations of the race-obsessed media.

Send Lizzie Borden to Washington

Any Republican governor of a blue state who manages to balance the budget without raising taxes should be a nominee for Mount Rushmore, to say nothing of president.

Mitt Romney was governor of a state so blue, it’s North Korea with more Irish people, and he balanced the budget without raising taxes.

Even Ronald Reagan raised taxes as governor of California, imposing a $1 billion tax increase his first year in office. It was the largest tax hike by a governor in the nation’s history, raising income, corporate, sales and inheritance taxes. Five years later, Reagan raised taxes again by another $1.5 billion.

To be fair, unlike liberals, he also provided tax rebates that, over his tenure in office, totaled $5.7 billion, including $4 billion in property tax rebates.

But even Reagan didn’t stop the growth of state government: While he was governor of California, the budget increased from $4.6 billion to $10.2 billion.

Republicans are able to contextualize Reagan’s record -– it was California! — but seem unable to contextualize Mitt Romney’s record, even though he had to govern a state far more liberal than California was half a century ago.

When Reagan was governor, the California Assembly was majority Democrat, but the Senate was evenly split between Republicans and Democrats.

Gov. Romney had to contend with a 200-person state Legislature that included only 29 Republicans.

As Reagan tax guru Arthur Laffer has admitted, Reagan’s specialty was cutting taxes, not spending. Reagan, he said, found “it hard to say no” and cutting spending is a “green-eyeshade budget thing,” that requires poring over budgets, whereas cutting taxes can be done in the abstract.

Romney is a green-eyeshade guy.

Like Reagan, Romney inherited a huge, Democrat-created budget deficit. The existing Massachusetts deficit was already more than half a billion dollars when Romney took office halfway through a fiscal year, with a projected deficit of $3 billion for the following fiscal year.

And yet, Romney balanced Massachusetts’ budget each year he was in office and left the state with a surplus, without raising taxes.

To the contrary, every single budget Romney submitted included income tax cuts — all of which were rejected by the 85-percent Democratic Legislature. (The last time Massachusetts legislators approved an income tax cut was when it was attached to a bill raising their own salaries by 55 percent.)

Romney balanced the budget by slashing spending, eliminating ridiculous corporate tax loopholes and increasing user fees for government services consumed by only some citizens, such as court filings, taking the bar exam, boating, hunting and golf licenses.

He cut state spending by $600 million, including reducing his own staff budget by $1.2 million, and hacked the largest government agency, Health and Human Services, down from 13 divisions to four. He did this largely by persuading the Legislature to give him emergency powers his first year in office to cut government programs without their consent.

Although Romney was not able to get any income tax cuts past the Democratic Legislature, he won other tax cuts totaling nearly $400 million, including a one-time capital gains tax rebate and a two-day sales tax holiday for all purchases under $2,500.

He also vetoed more bills than any other governor in Massachusetts history, before or since. He vetoed bills concerning access to birth control, more spending on state zoos, and the creation of an Asian-American commission — all of which were reversed by the Legislature.

As Barbara Anderson, executive director of Citizens for Limited Taxation, said, “What else could he do?”

Romney left his successor, Deval Patrick, Democrat and friend of Obama, with a “rainy day fund” of $2.1 billion, more than tripled from $640 million when Romney took office. (Of course, as soon as Romney was gone, Patrick raided the rainy day fund, increased government spending and raised taxes.)

Meanwhile, when he was in Congress, Santorum wouldn’t even vote to eliminate federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. Santorum supported all sorts of big-government spending plans — No Child Left Behind, prescription drug coverage for seniors and the “bridge to nowhere.”

But you’d think we would at least have Santorum’s vote against federal funding for pornographers and deviants. Alas, no.

The NEA, you will recall, uses federal taxpayer money to subsidize crucifixes submerged in urine, photos of bullwhips up a man’s derriere, poems celebrating the Central Park jogger’s rapists, photos of amputated human genitalia, vomit, mutilated corpses and dead fetuses. (And that was just the children’s wing of the museum!)

But Rick Santorum voted against cutting funding for the NEA every time a vote was taken both as a representative and a senator — in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1997 and 1998. These weren’t accidental votes. Each one was deemed a key conservative vote on which members of Congress would be graded by the American Conservative Union.

There’s your “true conservative,” values voters.

Unfortunately, the more time a person spends in Washington, the more likely he is to consider it perfectly reasonable for the federal government to redistribute money from hardworking taxpayers to pornographers, con men, charlatans and thieves.

America is on a precipice. Unless we send Lizzie Borden to Washington next January, our country will begin an inevitable decline into a useless socialist country, with no money for national defense, no entrepreneurship, no new businesses being created, no new pharmaceuticals or cancer cures — just the endless redistribution of an ever-dwindling pool of wealth from the makers to the takers, overseen by career politicians like Rick Santorum.

Mitt Romney has spent no time in Washington. He was a rabidly frugal fiscal conservative in a state where cutting government spending was as foreign an idea as it is in Washington today.

Do you think a man who slashed government spending in North Korea, put the corrupt and financially bleeding Olympics on solid financial footing and rescued dozens of companies from bankruptcy would consider a photo of a bullwhip stuck in a man’s buttocks a wise investment of the taxpayers’ money?

 

Who is Sandra Fluke?

Did I miss the deadline for alternative opinions on Sandra Fluke?

What with liberal women constantly talking about their vaginas suddenly pretending to be offended by the word “slut,” and conservatives pretending to be as pussified as liberals about the nasty names they’ve been called, I never got an answer to the most pressing question about Sandra Fluke: Who are you again?

Was Fluke dragged out of obscurity after the women of America took a vote and chose her as our spokeswoman? Please, Sandra, we know how deeply private, publicity-shy and terribly busy with law school you are, but we need you to speak for us!

I don’t think that happened. Rather, Fluke is the latest in a long line of my absolute favorite liberal typology: hysterical drama queens.

From Murphy Brown to the Jersey Girls, Cindy Sheehan, Joe Wilson and the New School’s Jean Rohe, these fantasists inject themselves into a boiling-hot public debate and then claim victim status when anyone criticizes them.

At least since I’ve been keeping score, liberals had their first brush with the dark night of fascism in 1992, when Dan Quayle said of a fictional TV character: “It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown … mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”

Suddenly, it was 1939 Germany and multimillionaire Hollywood elites were the Jews.

At the Emmy Awards ceremony that year, the creator of “Murphy Brown,” Diane English, took the occasion to say: “I would like to thank our sponsors for hanging in there when it was getting really dangerous.”

Really dangerous? You want “really dangerous”? Try being a pedestrian crossing Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica when Diane English is being driven to the airport! (A year earlier, English’s husband mowed down the matriarch of Santa Monica’s Chez Jay, killing her, while driving his wife to the airport.)

Marge Tabankin, executive director of the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee, said: “The community feels targeted. It’s created a chill and fear reminiscent of the ’50s. Let’s face it: We feel we’re being used as whipping boys.”

Yes, Hollywood liberals have got balls to spare, and that’s why I admire them so much.

But the Academy Award winners of liberal martyrdom are the Dixie Chicks. In 2003, Chick Natalie Maines sucked up to a Bush-hating London audience by saying, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”

What an odd coincidence that the only city Maines attacked Bush in was London! In a way, it was lucky for the band that, in their entire 60-city world tour, Maines claimed to be embarrassed by Bush only in London and not, say, Lubbock, Texas.

But at least we had heard of Murphy Brown and the Dixie Chicks before they demanded we all stand in awe of their raw courage.

Fluke was an absolute nobody who simply thrust herself into the limelight. She’s more the Jean Rohe iteration of the liberal drama queen.

Rohe, you will recall, was the student speaker at the 2006 New School commencement proceedings, who bravely insulted the official speaker, Sen. John McCain.

As Rohe described her decision to attack the invited speaker, every person she talked to the day before the ceremony hated McCain with blind fury. At two graduation ceremonies a day earlier, attacks on McCain brought wild cheers from the audience.

Rohe’s resolve to tell the audience what it wanted to hear was only hardened when she was told there would be media at the event.

Sensing that fake heroism was within her grasp, Rohe explained: “It was something I didn’t want to do, but knew I had to out of an obligation to my own values” — such as the value of being popular, of getting a standing ovation and of being praised for her courage.

Liberals’ idea of questioning authority is to check with the authorities to see if a “Question Authority” bumper sticker would be popular.

So, back to Fluke: Who is she, and how did she become the spokesperson for American womanhood? If we’re allowed to submit names, I think we can do better than a Georgetown law student whose claim to fame is that she belongs to a college club on “reproductive justice.”

Pursuing a typical path to liberal heroics, Fluke was an utter nobody whom the Democrats substituted in a last-minute witness-switch to testify about contraception — as if her haircut isn’t birth control enough — at a hearing on “religious liberty.”

Despite her credentials as a heretofore unheard-of “birth control activist,” the Oversight and Government Reform Committee declined to accept this 11th-hour witness on the grounds that Fluke did not have appropriate credentials for any congressional hearing, much less one on religious liberty.

That was the Republicans’ first foray into “silencing” Fluke’s “voice.”

Nancy Pelosi used an even less appropriate committee to ensure that Fluke’s “voice” would be heard — the Democrats’ Steering and Policy Committee, the normal function of which is to give House Democrats committee assignments.

One longtime Democratic operative admitted privately that Fluke was the least-qualified witness ever to appear before a congressional committee.

As a result of the huge commotion the Democrats’ made of Fluke’s “testimony,” she was ridiculed the same way people in ridiculous situations often are. She was called some mean names: “slut,” “prostitute,” “law student” …

In full indignation, Fluke said her critics were trying “to silence women’s voices.” She said this on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and a number of other national media outlets.

Thus, Fluke became a liberal hero even braver than an actress standing up for abortion rights in front of a Bill Maher audience.

President Obama called Fluke and told her that her parents should be proud of her and to make sure she was OK. Hillary Clinton said conservatives were trying to control women. Bill Clinton called her to see if she had any plans for the weekend.

(Fluke seems to be holding up wonderfully under the nightmare of constant TV appearances. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d think she’s enjoying herself tremendously.)

I don’t care what liberals believe. Just please stop telling me they’re courageous for saying exactly what every non-Fox media outlet in America is dying to hear, or I’ll throw up harder than Rick Santorum did when he read John F. Kennedy’s speech.

 

Romney campaign dragged down by big boatload of delegates

Mitt Romney won more than twice as many delegates on Super Tuesday as Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum. The Non-Fox Media’s take-away is that Romney suffered a major setback Tuesday night.

No matter what happens, Barack Obama’s boosters in the NFM portray it as a debilitating blow to Romney. On Nov. 7, The New York Times‘ headline will be: “Romney ekes out narrow electoral victory, leaving race uncertain.”

To explain the widening gulf in delegates won by Romney compared to the others — he now has more delegates than all other candidates combined — the media claim that a vote for any candidate other than Romney is an explicit vote against Romney.

Of course, even the NFM can’t pretend Ron Paul’s supporters would pick Gingrich or Santorum, both big-government, career politicians, as their second choice.

But in what universe would the second choice of Santorum supporters be a two-time adulterer on his third marriage, who lobbied George W. Bush to support embryonic stem cell research?

And are we to presume that voters who have no problem with Gingrich’s $1.6 million payoff from Freddie Mac would be morally offended by Romney’s hard-earned wealth? That voters willing to forgive a man who called Paul Ryan’s Social Security reform plan “right-wing social engineering” could never trust Romney?

Why isn’t it possible that votes for Santorum are votes against Gingrich, and vice versa?

The NFM doesn’t explain. Reporting their hopes and dreams rather than the facts, they simply assert that all votes for Santorum or Gingrich are “anti-Romney” votes.

It’s not Republicans who are looking for the anti-Romney. It’s Democrats.

Obama is already spending millions of dollars on anti-Romney ads. Obama’s campaign adviser David Axelrod, is desperately tweeting anti-Romney messages all day long. In open primaries in Michigan and Ohio, Obama’s Democratic supporters came out to vote for Santorum or Gingrich. MSNBC hosts openly encourage Democrats to vote for Rick Santorum.

There’s a reason liberals are frantically searching for an anti-Romney candidate. While it’s true that any of the Republican candidates for president would be an improvement over Obama, it is not true that any of them can beat him.

It’s not easy to take out an incumbent president, even one far to the left of the voters, whose policies have directly resulted in millions of unemployed workers, as well as putting billions of taxpayer dollars in the pockets of his friends on Wall Street, at Solyndra, in public sector unions, etc., etc.

In the last century, only a handful of incumbent presidents have lost an election. Until Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, the last time a Republican took out a sitting president was in 1888, when Benjamin Harrison beat Grover Cleveland.

Inasmuch as Cleveland was a pro-business, conservative Democrat — known today as “a Republican” — and also because he was defeated more than a century ago, the Reagan playbook is the only one worth studying.

Reagan didn’t beat Carter by calling him a “radical,” a “socialist,” a “Kenyan colonialist” or a “fake Christian.”

He didn’t do it by running as a Christian warrior, though he was certainly a Christian. He didn’t prattle about contraception and stay-at-home mothers. And to the best of my recollection, Reagan never proposed colonizing the moon.

Reagan beat the odds and took out an incumbent by waging a charm campaign to win over independents, moderates and undecideds.

Reagan strategist and pollster Richard B. Wirthlin told The Washington Post that Reagan’s objective in his debate with Carter was to come across as a reasonable candidate who could appeal to moderates. Deputy campaign manager William E. Timmons told The New York Times: “Reagan will be calm, cool and collected.” Other Reagan advisers told the Times their strategy was to make Reagan look “knowledgeable and reasonable,” not rash or risky, in order to reassure undecided voters.

The sainted Ed Meese, Reagan’s chief of staff, said Reagan would simply “point out the failures of the Carter record.” Not call him a socialist or fake Christian. Just a failure.

(Reagan’s debate crib sheet: 1. Appear reasonable and calm; 2. Don’t propose colonizing the moon.)

Part of being smart enough to be president is being smart enough to know how to win. Presidential candidates: Leave the name-calling to professionals.

Portrayed by Democrats as a shoot-from-the-hip cowboy itching to get us in a hot war with the Soviets, a few weeks before the election, Reagan bought a half-hour of TV time to present himself as the very opposite of a firebrand.

The ad showcased testimonials from the likes of Henry Kissinger and a smiling Reagan reassuring voters that “the cause of peace knows no party.”

Reagan stayed out of the weeds on highly charged debates on social issues, although he was unequivocally pro-life and pro-religion.

One month before the election, The Christian Science Monitor reported that Reagan “ended a campaign week by dipping into the Bible belt … gingerly.”

Speaking to a group of religious broadcasters, Reagan said: “Because you are professionals, I know how much you respect and strongly support — as I do — the separation of church and state.” (Though at other times during the campaign, he also said that that principle should not mean separation of country from religion, adding, “We are a nation under God.”)

It was Reagan’s opponent, Jimmy Carter, who played up the fact that he was a born-again Christian — albeit a born-again Christian who took 25 years to say that he was not “convinced” that “Jesus Christ would approve abortion.”

Bravely spoken, sir!

For Evangelicals concerned about a Mormon president — or any Christians still trying to make sense of the Carter presidency — recall that Martin Luther said he’d rather be governed by a smart Turk than a dumb Christian.

Reagan’s charm campaign worked so well that even the liberal U.S. News & World Report remarked that Reagan “presented a more reasonable, pragmatic image than in 1976.”

Reagan was able to sell challenging ideas to moderates because he wasn’t being constantly upstaged by loud-mouthed idiots attacking him for being insufficiently pure (as governor of California, he raised taxes more than any other governor in U.S. history and signed the most liberal abortion law in the country) or muddying the water with utterly irrelevant battles about contraception.

Liberals never dreamed that they would get so much assistance from alleged conservatives in undermining Obama’s most formidable opponent!

The Problem With Santorum

Even when I agree with Rick Santorum, listening to him argue the point almost makes me change my mind.I also wonder why he’s running for president, rather than governor, when the issues closest to his heart are family-oriented matters about which the federal government can, and should, do very little.

It’s strange that Santorum doesn’t seem to understand the crucial state-federal divide bequeathed to us by the framers of our Constitution, inasmuch as it is precisely that difference that underlies his own point that states could ban contraception.

Of course they can. States could outlaw purple hats or Gummi bears under our Constitution!

State constitutions, laws, judicial rulings or the people themselves, voting democratically, tend to prevent such silly state bans from arising. But the Constitution written by James Madison, et al, does not prevent a state’s elected representatives from enacting them.

The Constitution mostly places limits on what the federal government can do. Only in a few instances does it restrict what states can do.

A state cannot, for example, infringe on the people’s right to bear arms or to engage in the free exercise of religion. A state can’t send a senator to the U.S. Congress if he is under 30 years old. But with rare exceptions, the Constitution leaves states free to govern themselves as they see fit.

In New York City, they can have live sex clubs and abortion on demand, but no salt or smoking sections. In Tennessee, they can ban abortion, but have salt, creches and 80 mph highways. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work.

And yet when Santorum tried to explain why states could ban contraception to Bill O’Reilly back in January, not once did he use the words “Constitution,” “constitutionally,” “federalism,” their synonyms or derivatives. Lawyers who are well familiar with the Constitution had no idea what Santorum was talking about.

He genuinely does not seem to understand the Constitution’s federalist framework, except as a brief talking point on the way to saying states can ban contraception. Otherwise, he wouldn’t keep claiming, falsely, that Obamacare is the same as Romneycare.

Rick! We’re conservatives! We believe the states can establish a religion — and the federal government can’t.

If he truly believed in the Constitution, Santorum wouldn’t be promoting big social programs out of the federal government, such as tripling the child tax credit exemption and voting for “No Child Left Behind.”

No federalist can support this man.

Most recently, Santorum assailed Obama for saying everyone should go to college by responding: “What a snob!”

No! No! No!

Santorum’s response merely reinforces the insane liberal worldview that going to college is the preserve of our betters, a hoity-toity proof of social class, a desirable consumer product like a Louis Vuitton bag.

This isn’t the ’20s, when only the upper classes went to college. These days, every idiot who can scratch an “X” on his checkbook assumes hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to make himself less employable by taking college courses in — for example — “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame” (University of South Carolina, Columbia), “GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender and Identity” (University of Virginia), “Arguing With Judge Judy: Popular ‘Logic’ on TV Judge Shows” (University of California, Berkeley), “The Phallus” (Occidental College), “Zombies” (University of Baltimore), “Comics” (Oregon State University), “Harry Potter: Finding Your Patronus” (Oregon State University), and “Underwater Basket Weaving” (University of California at San Diego).

My fellow Americans, Meghan McCain has a bachelor’s degree.

It’s not snobbery that compels liberals to promote college for all; it’s a scam to manufacture more Democratic voters, much like their immigration policies.

Is a Valley Girl who takes courses in Self-Esteem at Cal State Fresno (an actual course at an actual college) a finer class of person than a skilled plumber with approximately 1,000 times the earning capacity and social worth of the airhead?

No. But she is more likely to vote Democratic.

Encouraging everyone to go to college creates an all-new class of people entirely dependent on the government, which is to say: reliable Democratic voters.

First, the taxpayer subsidizes the wasted human space teaching these moronic courses (at prices far outpacing inflation), and then the taxpayer pays the incomes of the graduates who are resigned to filling ever-growing no-show, self-paced and self-evaluated government jobs.

Who else would employ a graduate with a degree in Women’s Studies, Early Childhood Education, Physical Education , Sociology or Queer Studies but the government?

Santorum can’t be the one arguing for our side.

Even when he’s asked to defend his own blindingly obvious point, Santorum manages to blow it. A few weeks ago, George Snuffalupagus asked Santorum about a perfectly reasonable quote from his book “It Takes a Family,” where he suggested “that a lot of women feel pressure to work outside the home because of radical feminism.”

Santorum disavowed the quote and gallantly blamed it on his wife: “Well, that section of the book was co-written, if you want to be honest about it, by my wife, who is a nurse and a lawyer.”

Mrs. Santorum is neither listed as a co-author nor thanked in the acknowledgments of the book. (Rick should read his book! It’s probably chock full of interesting quotes like that.)

Then, when asked about another criticism of radical feminists from his own book, he said: “I don’t know — that’s a new quote for me.”

My imaginary beagle could have defended Santorum’s book better.

(The only worse quote in the campaign so far was from Newt Gingrich explaining why he denounced the Paul Ryan plan on Social Security as “right-wing social engineering.” Newt went on Fox News and said: “Let me say, on the record: Any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood.”)

It was the same thing with Santorum on gays serving openly in the military. Again, Santorum is right — but he still manages to lose the argument.

Back in October, when Chris Wallace was interviewing Santorum on “Fox News Sunday,” he fell into a trap a 14-year-old high-school debater wouldn’t have walked into, by agreeing with a quote — without knowing who said it.

Wallace asked Santorum if he agreed with the following quote: “The Army is not a sociological laboratory. Experimenting with Army policy, especially in time of war, would pose a danger to efficiency, discipline and morale and would result in ultimate defeat.”

To no avail, I screamed at the TV: “NO! DON’T AGREE! IT’S PROBABLY A HITLER QUOTE! SAY YOU’LL USE YOUR OWN WORDS!”

Santorum agreed with the blind quote only to be informed that it was a quote from someone arguing in 1941 against blacks in the military. (I didn’t catch the segregationist’s full name … Franklin Delano something.)

He still could have recovered by demanding to know if Wallace was suggesting, therefore, that the Army IS a sociological laboratory and a splendid place for social experimentation in time of war, but Santorum just shrugged sheepishly and mumbled something about how that was different.

The problem is not Santorum’s conservative positions, it’s that he can’t defend them.

What’s their problem with Romney?

As governor of one of the most liberal states in the union, Mitt Romney did something even Ronald Reagan didn’t do as governor of California: He balanced the budget without raising taxes.

Romney became deeply pro-life as governor of the aforementioned liberal state and vetoed an embryonic stem cell bill. (Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich lobbied President George W. Bush to allow embryonic stem cell research.)

Romney’s approach to illegal immigration in Massachusetts resembled what Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona is doing today, making her a right-wing heroine.

Romney pushed the conservative alternative to national health care that, had it been adopted in the 49 other states, would have killed Obamacare in the crib by solving the health insurance problem at the state level.

Unlike actual Establishment candidates, Romney has never worked in Washington, much less spent his entire life as a professional politician. He’s had a Midas touch with every enterprise he has ever run, including Bain Capital, the Olympics and Massachusetts.

The chestnut about Mitt Romney being pushed on unsuspecting conservatives by “the Establishment” is the exact opposite of the truth. The Establishment, by any sensible definition, is virulently opposed to Romney — and for completely contradictory reasons.

The entire NFM (non-Fox media) hate Romney because he is the only candidate who stands a chance of beating Obama.

Meanwhile, many of the pillars of the conservative establishment also implacably oppose Romney. Fox News is neutral, but its second-highest-rated host, Sean Hannity, is anti-Romney, as is prominent Fox News contributor Sarah Palin — who has also offered herself up as a possible presidential nominee at a contested convention. (Wouldn’t a former candidate for vice president on a major party’s ticket be part of the Establishment?)

The No. 1 conservative talk-radio host in America, Rush Limbaugh, is critical of Romney, and another top conservative talk-radio host, Mark Levin, is adamantly against Romney — though both Limbaugh and Levin supported Romney as the conservative alternative to John McCain in 2008, and Romney has only gotten better since then.

Purely to hurt Romney, the Iowa Republican Party fiddled with the vote tally to take Romney’s victory away from him and give it to Rick Santorum — even though the “official count” was missing eight precincts. Isn’t the party apparatus of a state considered part of the Establishment?

I’m not sure what part of the Establishment supports Romney. Is it Romney supporter Christine O’Donnell, erstwhile tea party candidate for the U.S. Senate from Delaware? Am I the face of the Establishment? (If so, the country is going to be just fine.)

I would think that the pristine example of the Republican Establishment is Weekly Standard editor and Fox News contributor Bill Kristol. But he wants anybody but Romney, even proposing that we choose someone not running by means of a contested convention.

Who are we trying to get nominated in a contested convention, anyway?

Without having seen this mystery candidate in action, how do we know he won’t be another Rick Perry? You’ll recall that Perry was the dream candidate until we saw him talk.

In 2008, Romney was enthusiastically supported not only by Limbaugh and Levin, but also by Sean Hannity, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage and many others who now seem to view Romney as a closet liberal. This is especially baffling because there is no liberal candidate in the Republican primary this year.

Just four years ago, one Republican candidate for president was avowedly pro-abortion (Rudy Giuliani). One had opposed Clinton’s impeachment and tort reform (Fred Thompson). One supported amnesty for illegals, restrictions on core First Amendment speech, federal laws to combat nonexistent global warming, and opposed Guantanamo and the Bush tax cuts (“tax cuts for the rich!”) and called waterboarding “torture.”

That last one was our nominee: John McCain.

This year, every Republican candidate for president opposes abortion, promises to repeal Obamacare, opposes raising taxes, and on and on. Only one candidate is strong on illegal immigration, which is second only to repealing Obamacare as the most important issue facing the nation.

That’s the alleged liberal, Mitt Romney.

Conservatives scratch their heads wondering how the NFM can convince millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans paying $3.57 for a gallon of gas that the economy is improving simply by repeatedly saying so.

But then a large minority of those same conservatives are completely convinced that Romney is an Establishment candidate simply because they have heard that repeated so often.

As we say to dunderhead liberals: What we’re looking for here is facts, not chants or epithets.

But instead of popping Champagne corks over our final triumph over Rockefeller Republicanism, some conservatives are still fighting old wars, rather like an old cold warrior prattling about the Soviet Union after the rest of us have moved onto the war on terrorism.

This strange new version of right-wing populism comes down to reveling in the feeling that you are being dissed, hoodwinked or manipulated by the Establishment (most of which happens to oppose Romney) the same way liberals want to believe that “the rich,” the “right-wing media” and Wall Street Republicans (there are three) are victimizing them.

It’s as if scoring points in intra-Republican squabbles is more important than beating Obama. Instead of talking about the candidates’ positions — which would be confusing inasmuch as Romney is the most conservative of the four remaining candidates — the only issue seems to be whether “They” are showing respect for “Us.”

Striking a pose as the only true fighter for real Americans may be fun, but this is no way to win elections. This is Sharron Angle on a national level.

The obsession with sticking it to the Establishment (which includes Christine O’Donnell, but excludes Bill Kristol) by voting for a loose cannon demagogue or a crusading Catholic who can’t seem to move the conversation past contraception is as pie-in-the-sky delusional as anything dished by Democrats carrying on about “green jobs.”

If saving the environment is the best way to create new jobs, then it could be true that being a hard-core environmentalist nutcase is the best way to appeal to the mass of independent voters.

Similarly, if reducing contraception use, lobbying for Freddie Mac and promoting huge government programs such as moon colonies and No Child Left Behind are the best ways to create jobs, then it could be true that Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are our strongest candidates in a general election.

Of course, it might also be true that dousing yourself in fairy dust does not guarantee that you will find the perfect mate and get the perfect job.

We’re being asked to hand Obama another four years in the White House in order to “send a message.” To whom? And what message? That we’re morons? Message received!

Meanwhile, Romney cheerfully campaigns on, the biggest outsider and most conservative candidate we’ve run for president since Reagan, while being denounced by the Establishment as “too Establishment.”