Now, of course, voter ignorance or lassitude has long been a feature of and putative threat to democracy - and indeed autocrats who have predicted the demise of democracy have done so largely from a jaundiced, often mocking consideration of those vulnerabilities afflicting electorates - hell, the Founding Fathers themselves fretted over this issue at length. What worries though and leaves one doubting that past can be prologue here is that although in the past, sure, you had voter ignorance etc etc - still, those votes, however uniformed they might have been, were in general guided by fundamental principles and values that were at the end of the day a plus for the country - you know, things like strong work ethic, love of God and country, belief in family and marriage so on and so forth - you can't say that about the low info voter of today - I mean, a poll just published the other day made the absolutely startling claim that 34% of Americans never want to have a job - a hundred years ago you couldn't have found 34% of the population, hell, 3% of the population who had ever even just considered whether such an absurdity was possible. So that's disturbing.

But it's when you take the altered values of the low info voter and how this change inclines them towards outcomes that are relative to the past not so easily construed into looking like overall positives for the country and combine this with the simplistic seductive propaganda powers of new media that is biased towards a specific agenda that is by nature strongly motivated to encourage rather than question those negative outcomes - well, then you really start to run into problems I think as far as the health of your democracy goes.

Doom is not necessary - one can argue that the true genius of democracy is its ability to drive change and innovation and the way it empowers its citizens to effectively adapt to and accept those changes in what amounts to a constantly evolving process - and given that you can then argue that even though the system may seem somewhat broken right now, it will self correct - indeed, the disaster that is Obamacare and how it is changing peoples perception of Dear Leader and the progressivism he touts, may turn out to be the first instance of that self correction. Or it may not - you can look at the decline of Rome and see that a significant part of the problem was an abysmal failure to come up with kind of quality leadership required to meet the challenges it faced - sounds a whole lot like the America of today. For all the self propelling dynamism of democracy, much still depends on quality of leadership - and for us, where's that leadership gonna come from if the GOP commits ritual suicide and Hillary, blinded by ideological hubris, decides to govern as if Obama wasn't the worst president ever who left behind a mess in dire need of cleaning up? 

Key poll takeaways from Christie victory last night: in a state where only 39% of voters have a favorable view of the GOP, his favorables are at 64%; he won the women vote, not by much, but for a Republican just to win the female vote in a blue state is a big deal, especially when you're running against a woman;  and the biggest number of all - he won Latinos - again, for a Republican to do that in a blue state is a big deal - not necessarily an encouraging harbinger that reassures that the country is not with cold certainty doomed by demographics to be driven into ruin by a never ending liberal autocracy, but nice to see all the same - especially when compared to blacks who again demonstrated nothing can convince them to vote GOP. If I'm a Republican I don't even bother trying to appeal to the black vote - I mean, if they're not gonna come out for a guy like Christie, you can pretty much just write the black vote off - hell, I get the feeling most blacks would vote for an Islamist candidate before they'd go GOP. 

Ramesh Ponnuru makes a great point when comparing the electoral fates of Christie and Cuccinelli: it's not social conservatism per se that will kill you in current political/cultural environment - it's perception that you are obsessed with social conservative values, a perception which telegraphs to voters that you're an unyielding extremist, that's what will get you in trouble and cost you the trust of independents and moderates and minorities and women and make you the hapless punchline of the media. Funny thing is, understanding this should come naturally to Republicans since a distrust of extremes and a belief in the moderating effects of democracy against those extremes is fundamentally a conservative principle and indicative of a truly conservative view of how the world works - which is why so called 'true conservatives' who hate Christie for his 'moderation' are in reality cannibalizing true conservatism in order to feed their righteous anger. I get the anger - the enervating brand of liberalism espoused by Obama and his maenads is dangerous, debilitating stuff - but if we've gotten to the point where the extremes of anger and outrage are the only viable responses and effective countermeasures left to conservatives then, sorry, the game is already over, liberals will have us exactly where they want us as far as narrative spinning goes and the media enabled welfare state will have won - and if that's the case, might as well move on to a serious discussion of our plan B.

Does the New York mayoral race tell us something key about the state of the American voter? What I mean is, New York was driven very close to Detroit-like ruin by uber left wing politics only to be miraculously saved by conservative mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg - and yet Big Apple is all set in a seeming landslide to put another uber liberal back in power as if none of that recent history happened - why? Sure, New York is a liberal place and I guess it's possible that so much time has passed since the bad old days that people have simply forgotten - but I have trouble buying that - I think rather what we're witnessing once again is the death grip the cancer of identity politics has on the liberal mind these days - I think for many left wing voters in New York the fact that de Blasio is a white guy married to a black woman [and a poet no less - Jesus] and that they have a couple of charming biracial children is plenty reason enough to cast a vote for the guy. If true, it behooves us to ask the attending question: how can a democracy survive when its voters are that stupid, guided by notions that are so utterly detached from common sense and blindly committed to an ethos that seems to have no qualms whatsoever about playing down to that bestial ignorance in order to gain power?

Must say find all this talk from liberal foreign policy types about how Iran is ready to negotiate etc etc ludicrous stuff and deeply troubling if they actually believe what they're saying. Understand, I'm not maintaining Iran isn't open to making a real deal here - my point is if Iran believes its goals are dependent on a nuclear capability then that is all that matters no matter what they may say - they will say and do anything to reach that goal if they view it as necessary. So that's the key - coming to understanding of whether or not Iran sees its strategic goals as being dependent on acquiring nukes. Only those in direct contact with Iran or with access to deep intel on Iran can know the answer to that question - someone on the outside looking in is just making an educated guess, and that guess, if not addled by delusion, would at the moment strongly suggest Iran definitely sees its future as being dependent on nuking up - which is why I say it's absurd for liberal foreign policy types who do not have access to the inside info to talk as if optimism viz negotiations is a reasonable position. It's not - it's wishful thinking.

Do you think at this point that the liberal media even has the ability, the capacity to acknowledge or even just simply see that the reason Obama lied about his health care law is because he felt pretty damn confident he could get away with it, felt pretty damn confident that his media cohorts would be there for him and dutifully enable any narrative he might choose to spin - and that the only reason this scheme hasn't worked out is because they so badly botched the roll out of the website that the Jon Stewarts et al felt they had no choice but to actually god forbid speak the truth or else risk being made to look utterly ridiculous? What objective observer doesn't believe that if that website were running at merely let's say a measly 25% efficiency that that would have been judged good enough for most of the liberal media and that they accordingly would have obediently backed up Obama's lies in much the same way the NY Times, which apparently has abandoned notions of shame altogether, just did, claiming in an op-ed that Dear Leader didn't lie but merely misspoke - sort of like saying Peter didn't deny Christ, just was having a bad day and misspoke a few times about knowing that Jesus fella.

I think this is an apt, nail on the head little piece from Peter Wehner that zeroes in on the ugly, disturbing reality that is Obama and keys in on the thing that truly troubles me here and has all along: the media and press as indentured supplicants under Dear Leader. That Obama is a lying left wing ideologue willing to say and do anything no matter how dishonest it is in order to promote his agenda is not the problem - you're gonna get people like that in a democracy, people guided not by a rational pragmatism, the quality that most defined the Founding Fathers, but rather led astray by an excessive belief in the dubious merits of a chauvinistic ideology, or an excessive, megalomaniacal fondness for the sound of their own voice - or both - Ted Cruz is one far as I'm concerned - no, the real problem here is that if the press and media are captive participants in this charade and have willingly surrendered their objective critical voice in order to serve a specific agenda which is a bad thing in and of itself but grievously bad, tragically bad when that agenda happens to also be horribly misguided and riddled with lies and falsehoods then you've got to a point where the first amendment has essentially been undone and you no longer live in a proper democracy. That is where we are right now under Obama - and if you don't see how troubling a thing that is then, sorry, your intelligence has been sacrificed in the name of ideological comfort. 

Here's my suggestion  on what to do about immigration reform and more specifically amnesty - propose to do substantial reform now [because let's face it the system is broken regardless of one's views on the over represented Latino influx] but leave amnesty as something to be taken up after the 2016 election. Two reasons for this, and I'd just come right out and state these reasons: one, don't trust Obama, hell, can't trust Dear Leader - the disaster that is Obamacare allows you to make this charge legitimately, ie make it without immediately being called a racist by the New York Times; and two, assuming the GOP does not succumb to a suicidal urge and nominate someone like Cruz or Paul in 2016 but rather intelligently goes with a broad appeal candidate that may also be a minority and possibly even a woman [I'm thinking of Martinez, Haley and Jindal here] who says all the right things on possible ways forward viz amnesty - having done that, let's see how Latinos vote in the election - if after having put forth a near perfect candidate Hispanics still overwhelmingly vote left, then that will be it, that will tell us that the doom sayers viz amnesty granting etc etc are right - that granting amnesty would forever move the country left and essentially ruin us.

That seems reasonable to me - if conservatives [mainly the business community seeking cheap, reliable labor] who support amnesty do so because they believe the GOP can appeal to Latinos with the right candidate, then let's put that belief to the test in 2016 before we agree to something that could radically change this country and not for the better.

Of course, two problems here: getting that perfect candidate unsullied through the Republican primary is going to be difficult, especially if Cruz is in the race throwing ideologically intemperate bombs everywhere [which is why I suggest taking the man on now and not waiting till the primary season is upon us]; and then the other vexing problem is an irreversible push of the country left is not the only issue with amnesty - there are a lot of studies out there showing the deleterious effect all this cheap labor is having on upward mobility in this country - and also, possibly related, studies showing that Latinos do not embrace higher education or education period as a way to improve one's lot in life the same way as Asians and other cultures do - so amnesty could prove a huge problem in a country that no longer has the industrial and manufacturing jobs available to support a low skill middle class.

In the end, hard to see any sane reason why a conservative - aside from the businessman searching for cheap, reliable labor for his gadget factory - would want to rush ahead with amnesty. Instead, let's state the problems associated with it openly and clearly and then propose a reasonable way forward. Again, the disaster that is Obamacare has created a rhetorical opening for the GOP despite Cruz's best efforts to ruin it - it'd sure be nice if conservatives could put that opening to good use.

Lowry and Ponnuru note the obvious that so many on the right seem incapable of acknowledging or simply refuse to acknowledge: 

The tendency arises from legitimate frustrations. The federal government seems constantly to expand even as — and sometimes because — it proves itself incompetent. Republicans have done precious little to reverse or even halt the trend. Obamacare is a disastrous and unpopular law; but if the Republican party has a strategy for bringing about its eventual end, it has been kept well-hidden.

So it is entirely reasonable to search for new ways to tame the welfare state rather than keep doing what has been done before. The Republican consultant class has often seemed to suffer from an almost clinical deficit of imagination. And the Republican party’s leadership could certainly use the occasional poke with a cattle prod. If the conservatives behind the defunding crusade now turn back to fighting the Senate’s immigration bill with the same passion and commitment, they will again be denounced by Democrats, the press, and some Republicans as a mindless wrecking crew. It shouldn’t stop them.

The key premise that has been guiding these conservatives, however, is mistaken. That premise is that the main reason conservatives have won so few elections and policy victories, especially recently, is a lack of ideological commitment and will among Republican politicians. A bigger problem than the insufficient conservatism of our leaders is the insufficient number of our followers. There aren’t enough conservative voters to elect enough officials to enact a conservative agenda in Washington, D.C. — or to sustain them in that project even if they were elected. The challenge, fundamentally, isn’t a redoubling of ideological commitment, but more success at persuasion and at winning elections.

It's natural for extremists to have a Manichean view of the world - in fact it's no doubt necessary for them since strict dualism serves best the unreasonable argument detached from coarse reality - and the extremes of the left are just as bad as the extremes of the right in this regard. But as above points out, similarities of cause and effect end there for two very good reasons that put the GOP at a distinct disadvantage and that conservatives need to come to terms with if they hope to survive as a political force: one, the culture increasingly leans to or is openly tolerant of the left in its sympathies; and two, this lean left is especially true of the media and press and that particular bias is never going to go away. It's not that the extreme right is wrong in perceiving liberalism as a threat since untempered by conservative pragmatism and realism it definitely is a threat - what they get wrong is belief that the shallow comforts of outrage that translate into ideological rigidity are an intelligent or even simply a viable way to combat the threat. If we get to the point where such extremism is our only way forward against the predations of the welfare state, then the country will already be lost since such extremism is fundamentally undemocratic in nature.

No, the smart way forward is to nominate people who know how to get elected given the current environment and just as importantly know how to effectively govern given the current environment  - look no further than Reagan and Obama as telling examples: they both we're pros when it came to knowing how to get elected, but only one of them knew how to govern - and that's the difference between a country living up to its great potential and a country in seeming decline on all fronts.

[I will say this though, if it's Christie vs Hillary in 2016 and Christie unlike Romney runs a great campaign that any objective observer would wholly agree was the superior campaign relative to Hillary's and yet she still wins because the media, as with Obama, refuses to acknowledge her flaws and weaknesses - well then, all bets are off - we'll be entering dangerous terra incognita at that point where one half of the country will start to see us as having fallen to a liberal coup enabled by the media - and I have no idea what happens then]

I must say that I find it offensive, galling in the extreme that Jon Stewart is winning kudos for his attack on the Obamacare rollout - reasonable people unstained by ideological bias have known all along that this thing was trouble for many reasons [ie not just implementation], so why is Stewart being credited for being either too stupid or too blinded by bias to have figured this out long ago? But more than that, let's remember it's because of the shameless cheerleading of Obama in the 2008 primary over Hillary by people like Stewart that we're stuck with this mess in the first place - I think naive fools like Stewart, who acted as if by simply electing the black guy president we'd be ushered into a golden age of absolute wonderfulness, should be held accountable in some way for the damage they've wrought, which at the very least should amount to not lauding the misguided idiot for finally having the good sense to curse the shit he so went out of his way to step in.

Furthermore, let's look at what he said in his little monologue: he bewailed the great misfortune of this botched rollout denying us a perpetual left wing domination of our politics, which aside from making the curious and rather incoherent point that somehow it's a bad thing that liberal incompetence has denied us a future of never ending tyranny under liberal incompetence, reveals two significant truths viz the liberal elite: screw the poor and downtrodden, they consider the real value of government controlled health care to be the vast political benefit it rings up for liberals; and that come the end of the day they'd really prefer it if the country were ruled by a one party oligarchy instead of a democracy where you're forced to actually do horrible democratic things like engage with and tolerate people who don't happen to agree with you. The instincts of liberal idealism are fundamentally autocratic in nature, that's what Stewart's belated bellyaching reaffirmed to moi.