Let's Make Poverty Less Enticing

The other day a shocking picture emerged when Michelle Obama went to a soup kitchen in Washington, DC. It wasn't a picture of her bulging biceps, which were mercifully covered, so David Brooks can rest easy and not have to worry about any more nightmares where the First Lady challenges him to arm wrestle. What was shocking was a photo of one of the homeless men she was serving taking a picture of her with his cellphone. Conservatives were outraged. At a time when Wall Street executives are being forced to give up their private planes, limousines, bathroom renovations and multimillion dollar bonuses, the idea that a homeless man has been allowed to hold on to his cellphone while others are making sacrifices is more than we can take.

"If this unidentified meal recipient is too poor to buy his own food, how does he afford a cellphone?" wrote the Los Angeles Times' Andrew Malcolm. "And if he is homeless, where do they send the cellphone bills?" Kathryn Jean Lopez pointed out that contrary to what many people think, the poor are actually very rich, which explains a lot. Michelle Malkin castigated the homeless man for "ruining what was supposed to be a sob story photo op of the compassionate Mrs. O catering to the downtrodden" and speculated that his phone bills are probably sent to Acorn.

Although some people pointed out that he may have recently come upon bad times and that he may need a cellphone, which could be of the cheap, prepaid variety, so that prospective employers can call him back, or that he may have been a worker at the shelter and not homeless at all, this is all just speculation. Kathy Shaidle, whose blog is aptly named Five Feet of Fury, has a more likely explanation, which she was able to extrapolate from this photo with a perspicacity that would have made the late traitor and On Photography author Susan Sontag proud. "Today's 'poor' are the rich Jesus warned you about: fat, slovenly, wasteful of their money and other people's," she wrote. "He spends all his (our) money on cellphones and, most likely, tattoos and drugs and booze and other crap, and has no money left for a home and food. And why should he bother? We pay for his shelter and food anyhow."

This is not the first time Ms. Shaidle, has taken on the menace of the poor. "The so-called poor have cars and cable tv and free medical," she wrote last year. "They live in America in the 21st century, where school is free and libraries are free and a bus ticket to a better town costs less than a bag of crack. If they're 'poor' it's because they were too lazy and stupid to a) finish high school and/or b) keep their pants on. Jesus had something to say about folks who didn't properly manage their money or other people's." Although I am not familiar with Jesus' admonitions against poor accounting practices, she has a point. Instead of waging class war against the wealthy who worked hard for their money, we should be attacking the poor. After a lot of unsuspecting investors were lured by the poor into putting their hard-earned money into credit defaults swaps and tricked into giving deadbeats subprime mortgages, which ruined our entire economy, haven't poor people done enough harm to this country?

I can't tell you how angry it makes me to think about extremely rude poor people all across this country talking very loudly on their cellphones in soup kitchens and unemployment offices, whining about all their financial problems so everyone can hear. I'm glad someone is finally speaking out about it. And while these poor people were rudely broadcasting their tales of woe to everyone within earshot, guess what they were eating? Mushroom risotto and Broccoli! Isn't gruel good enough for poor people anymore? Those poor people are eating better than I am. Is it really fair that I should have to eat the Pork Brains in Milk Gravy Mrs. Swift served up the other night to cut down on grocery bills and reduce my cholesterol intake, while these poor people are eating like kings?

And who is paying for poor people to live high on the hog while I am reduced to eating hog brains? Rich people like we might be some day if we work hard and win the lottery. Why should someone like Jim Cramer, who deserves to make more than $250,000 for all the great financial advice he has given the last few years, have to "take a pay cut for doing the same job." Shouldn't he in fact get a raise for telling people to continue plowing their money into the stock market as it was plunging downward, which probably helped slow the decline and prop it up long enough to help his friends get out without losing too much?

I think it's time we made the poor do their fair share and stop trying to soak the rich. Before we give the poor one cent more, they should be forced to prove that they have really hit rock bottom by selling everything they have, including their cellphones, flat-screen TVs, fancy clothes, cars and furniture. I know that if I became poor, the first thing I would do after putting the cat to sleep and pawning Mrs. Swift's wedding ring would be to sell my cellphone at the very least. And I certainly wouldn't expect to eat mushroom risotto. If we stopped making it so enjoyable to be poor, maybe we would have fewer lazy, greedy people who are just dying to live in poverty and leech off of the rest of us. Indeed, the reason for our economic decline may be that so many people want the benefits of being poor that they are dragging the economy down with them. We need to stop this rush to be poor before it is too late. So the First Lady should stop visiting soup kitchens and serving them gourmet food, which just encourages them. Only by making poverty less enticing can we hope to to save our economy.

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Electing a Scary Black Man President Isn't the End of the World

Isn’t this a great country? This year’s presidential election proves that anything is possible in America, even a scary black man being elected President of the United States. Whether Obama was elected because of enormous voter fraud, liberal white guilt, an influx of new and ignorant voters or some kind of mass hysteria is not important. For now all Americans should savor this victory for our country and for conservative values.

Some conservatives have gotten the mistaken impression that this election was some kind of repudiation of conservatism, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Thank goodness Michelle Malkin was there to go all Don Corleone and bitchslap the whiney, spineless conservatives who harbored such notions. “I’m getting a lot of moan-y, sad-face ‘What do we do now, Michelle?’ e-mails,” wrote Malkin. But this is no time for self-reflection and mea culpas, Malkin told her minions. “We do not apologize for our beliefs. We do not re-brand them, re-form them, or relinquish them. We defend them.” In other words we must double down on our beliefs no matter how distasteful some Americans find them to be. In fact, Americans were telling us that we weren’t conservative enough, that we need to get back to our core principles by being stingier and more callous. John Derbyshire, lamented that we probably would have won this election if only George Bush had deported 20 million illegal aliens and not visited mosques. But this is no time to regret the past. In fact, conservatives have a lot to be proud of.

For years conservatives have been saying that racism doesn’t exist anymore. The election of Barack Obama proves we were right all along. Throughout the campaign we reminded people at every opportunity that while it might be frightening that Obama is a socialist who pals around with terrorists, probably wasn’t born in this country and is secretly a Muslim, it made no difference whatsoever that he was black. “America actually is more post-racial than most realize,” wrote The Anchoress before the election. “Think about it. Obama can’t break 50%. Neither could Kerry, Gore or Clinton. So, Obama is being treated precisely like every other Democrat politician of the last 16 years. His race is not holding him down. His race is not propping him up. This should be cause for celebration, I think. We’ve clearly moved past race.” So even if Obama had lost the election it would have proven that racism doesn’t exist because white people lost elections, too. Still, some conservatives believe that more could have been done to prove that Obama’s race didn’t matter. Lisa Schifrin points out one of the reasons McCain lost was that he was too squeamish about the race thing and hadn’t yet gotten the word that we live in a post-racial society. “Some McCain aides had felt for a while that their candidate had had a deep reluctance to impede the election of the nation's first African American president. That he had, perhaps, pulled punches and failed to strike as hard as necessary to win this thing, for that greater good,” wrote Schifrin. “All Republicans who watched their candidate these past few months, must have been struck, as I have been, by the sense that he was holding back.” Although it’s true that McCain might have been able to win the election if he believed more strongly that race was irrelevant and brought up issues like Rev. Wright, other conservatives did not share his reluctance and in the end no matter what we threw at Obama, white people voted for him anyway. So with the election of Obama conservatives have been vindicated. Now that we have proved once and for all that racism doesn’t exist and that we live in a post-racial society, we never have to talk about race again. Sometimes you win by losing.

I know many conservatives are frightened by an Obama presidency but there are many reasons for optimism. While this election did not turn out the way we expected, Obama will probably really screw things up (I mean, worse than they already are). It’s not too idealistic to believe he could turn out to be a hopelessly incompetent President, maybe the worst this country has ever seen, and completely run America into the ground. We can already take solace in the fact that Obama has so much to live up to that it will be impossible for him to succeed. “Disillusionment will turn to a feeling of betrayal. And that will, in turn, convert to anger,” wrote Steven Den Beste hopefully. “Our mission for the next four years is to be in opposition without becoming deranged.” So all we have to do is let Obama take this country to hell in a handbasket without looking like we are too crazy. How hard could that be?

Although many conservatives did not appear to realize what an enormous opportunity had been handed to us, they nevertheless accepted the news of Obama’s victory with a stoicism that should make us all proud. “Obama is NOT the Anti-Christ,” wrote Flopping Aces, reassuringly. “The Anti-Christ has an actual plan and millions of years of experience to call upon. Obama the President can claim NONE of these qualities.” Sultan Knish exuded a Zen-like calm as he anticipated the next four years. “Today I unpacked my winter clothes in preparation for a long winter, and a long winter is coming if not of the thermometer, then of the soul,” Sultan wrote with soaring poetic imagery, if not of the anger, then of the sorrow. “A man that represents not simply an opposing view but the view of those who oppose America and all it stands for, will sit in the Oval Office. Worse still he did not get there through a democratic election but through fraud, voter intimidation and every dirty trick culminating in a campaign that had little in common with conventional American politics and a great deal in common with the cults of personality cultivated by totalitarian dictators.” Atlas Shrugs waxed poetic, too, transforming herself into a Jewish, orthographically challenged e.e. cummings: “he says he is a democrat. i think he does so to hide that he is a committed marxist leninist who intends to impose a marxist dictatorhip upon this country, which advancig the interests of islam. he will attempt to either impose or import sharia, and sharia financing into this country. he is not my president. i do not accept him we have no deals, mr. obama and i, as he has vitiated them by a fundamental and far reaching fraud. he has evil designes and intents upon me and mine, upon thee and me.”

Obama’s epic fail of an administration will make President Bush’s term look brilliant by comparison. Unfortunately, President Bush has not gotten the respect and appreciation he deserves for keeping America safe after 9/11, protecting all of our other cities besides New Orleans and keeping our economy strong until the financial crisis. Pat Boone, who had such a wonderful career turning crude African-American noise into nice, wholesome Christian music (maybe he could revive his career by re-recording some of Obama’s speeches and doing the same for him), recently shared a very amusing and creative “Bush Resignation Letter” in which Bush explains how great he was to all the ingrates. “I'm fed up with you people,” the faux Bush says. “I'm fed up because you have no understanding of what's really going on in the world – or of what's going on in this once-great nation of ours. And the majority of you are too damn lazy to do your homework and figure it out.” The Wall Street Journal has already begun assigning blame for the Bush Administration’s problems where it belongs: to the American people. In an editorial titled “The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace,” Jeffrey Shapiro writes, “The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems.…Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty -- a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.” Of course, Mr. Shapiro and other conservatives will always stand by President Obama no matter how bad a President he is because we aren’t disloyal like liberals are. Obama will have to fail on his own without our help. Then we can all say, “I told you so.” I don’t know how much an Obama administration will have to screw up to make the Bush Administration look good, but we can all keep our fingers crossed.

Another bright spot in the election was that the success of Proposition 8 showed that while Americans are colorblind, they still hate gay people, even in California. In addition to Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California, similar propositions in Florida and Arizona succeeded and Arkansas passed a resolution banning the practice of forcing orphans to live with gay parents instead of in nice, comfortable orphanages. Conservatives should make vilifying gays the centerpiece of our platform in the coming years since it obviously still works. In fact, Proposition 8 got its strongest support from blacks and Hispanics, so once they get over the novelty of having a minority in the White House, we may be able to use this issue to win them over to the conservative cause.

Lost in the drama of election night coverage was the fact that Gabriel Malor, one of the pseudononymous co-bloggers on the blog of CPAC Blogger of the Year Ace of Spades, chose this night to come out of the closet and was duly slapped down by conservatives sticking to their principles. “Could we have a moment of silence for those poor fools who were happily married or engaged yesterday and today are finding out that they don't have squat?” Malor wrote. “Prop 8 was much more personal than some silly high-speed train or hospital funding. People are hurting today. And I'm one of them.” Commenters at Ace of Spades, where ribald anti-gay humor has always been one the features that makes the blog so delightful, were shocked. “Did Gabe just come out of the closet?” exclaimed A Different Dave in Texas. Apotheosis did his best to take it in stride with a nervous attempt at humor: “I'm sorry you're hurting, Gabriel. I'd offer you a hug, but...y'know. Just a beer or something, man? We're cool, right?” But while some commenters offered him sympathy, others stuck to their core conservative principles. “Wow. I'm really hurting for all the guy who want to marry their sisters. The gals who want to marry their Doberman Pinschers. The pain. The hurt,” wrote Dang sarcastically. “I'm not a hard hearted person, but I'm also not going to lose sleep about the democratic process working to the disappointment of some. That's just the f---ing breaks,” said Nom de Blog. Moronizer was having none of it: “So you got ‘married,’ knowing full well that it might get voided. Boo hoo.” And Religious Zealot wanted Malor to stop acting so gay about it: “I don't deny that Gabe and others are hurting, it's just that it's a drama-queen reaction.” I hope that in the coming days the bloggers at Ace of Spades will redouble their efforts to make fun of gays lest people start speculating about the sexual preference of the other co-bloggers and regular commenters there. Better to nip this thing in the bud before it spreads.

Even though Ace of Spades was not able to have any effect whatsoever on the election, it wasn’t for lack of trying. And Ace of Spades will continue to be the go-to blog as conservatives grapple with their principles in this brave new world. If there is one thing that distinguishes conservatives from liberals it’s that we don’t believe in demonizing our opponents unless it’s absolutely necessary. “McCain lost honorably, as he wanted. I guess that's what really matters in the end,” Ace of Spades wrote after the results came. Ace of Spades never lost his honor or dignity even as he did his best to warn Americans that they were about to elect someone who was “the same kind of socialist race hustler as Jesse Jackson,” was so close to terrorists that one even wrote his book for him and had a mistress that the mainstream media refused to report on no matter how much he tried to push the story. Now Ace and his "moronbloggers," as they call themselves, will lead the way in showing why conservatives are better than liberals. “I love this country too much to do to President-Elect Obama what the left did to President Bush, John McCain and Sarah Palin. We’re better than that,” wrote Ace’s co-blogger Slublog. “Demonization is not essential to opposition.” Conservatives can try other things, too.

Of course, conservatives are not going to be afraid to give President Obama constructive criticism when necessary, while we wait for 2012, when we can all get behind the Sarah Palin/Dan Quayle ticket (yes you can say you heard it here first: Palin will be the Republican nominee in 2012 and she will select Dan Quayle as her running mate to add experience and gravitas to the ticket). When Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992, Bob Dole famously said "Good news is, Clinton's on his honeymoon. Bad news is, his chaperone is Bob Dole." That was before the Internet. President Obama is going to have the whole conservative blogosphere as his chaperone.

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Can John McCain Be Stopped?

Like most conservatives, I spent Super Tuesday curled in a fetal position in my bunker. The idea that John McCain will get the Republican nomination is beginning to sink in and it is more than many of us can bear.

Many conservatives hate John McCain even more than we hate Hillary Clinton. Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter have said that they might vote for Hillary if it came down to a choice between her and McCain. James Dobson the head of Focus on Family, released a statement outlining the reasons he could not support McCain, including McCain's opposition to a Constitutional amendment protecting marriage, his vote for embryonic stem-cell research, his opposition to tax cuts, his sponsorship of the campaign finance reform bill and his membership in the Gang of 14, which prevented the appointment of some conservative judges. Even worse, says Dobson, McCain "has a legendary temper and often uses foul and obscene language." Dobson is hoping that Dick Cheney will decide to run for President.

Townhall columnist Lee Culpepper believes that McCain doesn't have the character to be President. "None of us know for sure what McCain experienced during his time as a POW," wrote Culpepper. "All we know is that he survived and came home while many other POWs did not. What was it about McCain that was different? Was it family heritage or was it his proclivity for compromising to get what he wants?" It's a good question. What kind of compromises did McCain have to make to survive his brutal captivity in Vietnam? Perhaps if McCain had not survived being a POW that would have reassured conservatives that we can trust him. I'm sure Lee Culpepper wouldn't have made it back alive.

It's not just the possibility that McCain made some sort of deal with his captors in Vietnam and is actually a Manchurian Candidate that makes conservatives not trust him. McCain has consistently been soft on illegal immigration, the most important issue to conservatives today. Although McCain now says he realizes that Republican voters want border security first, he seems reluctant to support rounding up millions of illegal immigrants and deporting them and throwing thousands of people who employed them in jail, which is what most conservatives want. Although McCain has done some pandering to conservatives in this campaign, earning an endorsement from the late Jerry Falwell, for example, unlike Romney he seems to feel really bad about it, which worries us about his sincerity. McCain needs to show that he really has had a change of heart on immigration, perhaps by calling a Hispanic reporter "Macaca," for example.

Another issue that worries conservatives about McCain is torture. Conservatives believe that we are not torturing people enough, while McCain says that he is against it. Sure, he did capitulate to the Bush administration and worked out a "compromise" that would let them waterboard a few people, but it's clear that his heart really wasn't in it. Conservatives are glad that McCain not only supports the War in Iraq but wants us to be there for 100 years and his joke about bombing Iran reassures us that under a McCain administration, there might be more wars we could rally around. Maybe McCain would even settle a few old scores by invading Vietnam and doing it right this time. But it's difficult to see how we could win these wars, or the War on Terror, if we cannot torture more people.

If McCain is bad now, just wait until the general election when he goes even further to the left to appeal to independent voters. Will he change the name of the Straight Talk Express to the Gay Talk Express?

Some conservatives are hoping that it is not too late to stop McCain and they have thrown their support to Mitt Romney, but so far it hasn't worked. Romney would be doing a lot better if Huckabee dropped out. And he would be doing even better if Huckabee and McCain dropped out. Unfortunately, it's likely that both will stay in the race so he needs to make some changes. So far he has spent only $1.6 million per delegate, which is pretty insulting to a typical Republican delegate. Democrat delegates can be bought with donuts and a cup of coffee, but Republican delegates don't come so cheap. And although Romney has changed his positions on many issues to appeal to conservatives, he's going to have to do a lot more. He now opposes abortion, gay rights and illegal immigration, but he has remained stubbornly consistent when it comes to his religion. The base of the party thinks that Mormonism is a cult, which is why he has been having so much trouble getting the evangelical vote. If Romney announced that his views on religion had "evolved" the way his views on abortion did, and he left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and converted to Southern Baptist that might be the key to victory. (Update: Romney has announced he is pulling out of the race.)

If Romney can't save us from McCain, who can? Many conservatives supported Fred Thompson as the real conservative in the race. Unfortunately, once he announced he was running, he plummeted in polls. But now that he has dropped out of the race, many conservatives are looking at him again. He seems to do so much better in the polls when he is not actually campaigning, so there is a possibility he will have a late surge. If we could keep him on the ballot but make sure he promises to stay home, he could achieve an upset victory.

But while there still is a glimmer of hope that McCain will not get the nomination, most conservatives are resigning themselves to the idea that he will. If we are forced to make a choice between McCain and Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, what should conservatives do? John McCain's mother has said that conservatives should just hold their noses and vote for McCain and one company has introduced John McCain noseplugs to make it a little easier. Michelle Malkin is trying to rally her troops to vote for conservatives farther down the ballot in the hopes that someday one of these conservatives can be groomed to run for President, but many conservatives will probably be too deflated to summon the energy to get out of the house on election day.

Instead of voting to make things not quite as bad as they could be, however, a better strategy for conservatives would be to make things as bad as they possibly could be. One of the things we learned in Vietnam is that sometimes you have to destroy the village in order to save it. And the only way to save this country and the Republican Party at this point may be to destroy them. Though John McCain would destroy this country, he might not destroy it enough. So some patriotic conservatives have decided to become "suicide voters," pulling the lever for Clinton or Obama instead of McCain. I think this is a good plan and, taking a page from Malkin, conservatives should also vote for the most liberal candidates they can find in every contest in November. Let's hand over the entire government to the liberals and then see how the American people like it. They deserve it after treating us the way they have when conservatives have done so much for this country. And after a few years of liberal government, I'm sure they will come running back to conservatives, begging us to return to power. So from now on, I am going to be supporting the most liberal candidates I can find. That oughta show 'em.

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