NOTEBOOK: Are Romney, Obama running for president or king?

By David McElroy · July 29, 2012

Cleaning out the notebook…

I was in a restaurant a couple of days ago when one of the news channels showed a Mitt Romney speech live. I quit watching political speech long ago (even before I quit working in the field), so I’m not subjected to these things very often. It was brutal.

First, I can’t imagine why anyone would intentionally force himself to listen to such self-serving nonsense. From the way he talked, you’d think Romney believes he could just walk into the Oval Office and magically make anything possible, maybe by spreading pixie dust around the place. I found myself thinking that he sounds like a man who believes he’s running for king instead of someone running for president (at least in the constitutional sense).

Barack Obama is just as bad, of course. The sad reality is that people today seem to want that. They want someone to promise them everything, even if it’s not even remotely possible that the candidate elected can deliver. It’s disturbing.

It was a year ago this past week when I woke up to find that the hits on this site had already tripled the previous daily record by about 7 a.m. Unknown to me, one of my stories had been linked that morning by Instapundit, one of the most popular political blogs among libertarians and conservatives. The story was picked up by many other major blogs and even national radio talk shows, and by the end of the day, my story about an Alabama coal mine operator “going Galt” at a public environmental hearing had been read 30,000 times.

It was because of that story that many of you ended up here, so I’m really grateful to Glenn Reynolds for picking that story up. And I’m thankful to you for sticking around for a year if you were among those who first showed up that day.

Did you happen to see a little story I had earlier this week about three guys who died in the Colorado theater shooting while protecting their girlfriends? I mentioned that I think this is just an instinctive difference between men and women — and that men have the strong instinct to protect the women they love. (It’s certainly true for me.) Who would have thought what I was talking about was “benevolent sexism”?

That’s what some feminists on a message board thought about the story. You might find their thread interesting if you’d like a view into the minds of people who are desperate to explain away simple and basic differences between men and women. Here’s what the initial poster on the site said about it:

The author of the article believes that the actions of these men is something instinctual and I think this really begs for our attention. An instinct to protect a women is laden with the idea of benevolent sexism. For a while now I’ve felt that benevolent sexism is a catch 22 for men, but I am starting to think it is for women as well.

So it’s “benevolent sexism,” huh? I suppose it’s sexism to notice women’s intense instinctive desire to protect their children and it’s probably sexism to notice that differences exist between the sexes in various animals, too.

The little controversy reminded me of a thought-provoking interview from EconTalk last November with a social psychologist about gender differences. His study of various research shows that gender differences are real. (Duh.) Of course, he’s a man, so his conclusions can’t possibly be good enough for some people.

Since the shootings in Colorado almost 10 days ago, all the usual suspects have been trotting out their tired old arguments in favor of gun control. One of the most persistent refrains has been about the amount of ammunition that James Holmes had — thousands of rounds. Here’s a New York Times piece as an example.

Do the people writing these stories believe that preventing Holmes from buying thousands of rounds would have stopped this shooting? Are they really stupid enough to believe that he used thousands of rounds in the attack?

On a related note, do these people calling for banning guns know you can buy fertilizer and diesel and other ingredients to make bombs, too? If you really want to kill a bunch of people, you can do it without guns. It’s not difficult. Some people are just really emotionally invested in pretending that we can stop mass murder if we restrict gun ownership. If only we had some good old European-style gun control laws, like, say, Norway does, mass murders would never happen.

Have you noticed that more and more people have trouble just disagreeing civilly — without making issues personal? I’ve mentioned before that I used to have that problem. I’d hate to go back to feeling that way. It seems that the people I notice who do it seem like very unhappy and angry people.

A man in Georgia won a bet, but he did it the hard way. And, well, it was a pretty stupid bet to win. Incredibly, this nut was bet that he couldn’t set his face on fire. He swore that he could. His first effort failed, but the second succeeded. The images from a security camera provide details about a strange incident. How much alcohol do you suppose led to this? Ouch.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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