Assortment

1) Ronald Radosh has some choice comments about Bill Ayers (my first-place nominee for Person Who Ought to be in Prison, But Isn’t).

2) The Other McCain - Robert Stacy McCain, to be exact – offers some good advice: don’t overthink the election. Various conservatives (whether genuine or knock-offs) are in a rush to dump many of our traditional views (in some cases, both social and economic), claiming that the recent unpleasantness represents a fundamental shift in public opinion that necessitates a host of changes in the Republican Party’s strategy. I am inclined to agree with the author that this is not true. John McCain was not considered to be the ideal Republican candidate, let alone the ideal conservative, by millions of conservatives and moderates who, nonetheless, voted for him anyway (nor was he obviously considered to be the ideal candidate by millions who just stayed home). And it was always unlikely that McCain could win against the combination of (a) an attractive black Democrat whose campaign was better organized and better funded; (b) a relentlessly hostile news media; (c) an economic meltdown; (d) the public’s disgust with the Republican Party, many of whose members were as profligate and irresponsible as the Democrats; and (e) George Bush, whose signal failure was his inability or unwillingness to articulate the reasons for his policy decisions on several fronts, thereby abandoning the field of explication to his enemies. The fact that Obama won is not nearly as surprising as the fact that he didn’t win by at least a dozen percentage points (in the popular vote). Mix into the stew the ignorance and variability of a substantial portion of the electorate – the sort of people who are prey to simplistic, emotional appeals – and, Bingo, you wind up with President-elect Obama. None of this seems to argue for radical changes in the Republican “brand” – although it does strongly suggest that there’s a lot of hard work ahead to make the brand trustworthy again, and also underscores the need for far better organization and for candidates who stand for something besides their own vaulting self-esteem. Individual liberty, free enterprise, smaller government and a strong, coherent foreign policy are likely to look a lot more appealing to people after four years of a Democrat monopoly; find somebody who can forcefully and cheerfully articulate these views and relate them to the daily lives of the voters, and we’ll probably even manage to rope in a majority of the dopey undecideds.

3) Now this is more like the Royal Navy that I like to remember.