| “The only thing the federal government can do to protect women is to pass a universal right-to-carry law. Everything else is just big government demagoguery.” | Red State, 2/28/13, on the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act | Annie Oakley’s America? |
| Obamacare is forcing insurance companies to charge more. These rate increases are coming about “the same reason Ghengis Kahn impregnated women all over Asia. Thanks to Obamacare, the insurance companies now can.” | Red State, 2/28 and 3/1 | “Risk premiums” are the latest excuse for hospitals and insurance companies to charge as much as they want to. Is this what happens when the “free market” is really unfettered? |
| Let’s keep the federal campgrounds open by leasing shale gas acreage in the Rockies | Karl Rove, WSJ, 2/28 | Let’s whitewater raft the fracking runoff! |
| “Mr. Obama and his circle divide the economy into separate parts. In the Obamaian universe, the units of the private economy—companies large and small—are satellites orbiting the great fixed planet of public spending. All material and economic life in the Obamaian model radiates out from a central source of public spending.” | Daniel Henninger, WSJ, 2/27 | Is this a call for the “maximum elimination of the public sphere, as prophesied by George Lakoff this week? |
| “For each F-22 Raptor not built, about another 20,000 families could receive food stamps for a month.” | Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2/28 | Politiscript irony alert: this sentence can be used by both the Left and the Right. Hanson of course is acidly riffing on Obama’s “redistributionism” and his reckless dismantling of the US defense system. |
| “A shortage of solar panels and windmills, not impending cuts in the US military….is Kerry’s idea of existential dangers on the global horizon.” | Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2/28 | They get another four years to belittle Kerry—here turning him into a Kerry/Gore amalgam |
| In 1982, Section 2 of the act was amended to say that the measure is violated whenever nomination and election processes “are not equally open to participation” by minority voters. And equality of participation is said to be denied whenever minority voters “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to . . . elect representatives of their choice.” And representatives “of their choice” has been construed to mean representatives who are members of the same minority. This expresses two tenets of progressivism’s racialism. One is identity politics: Your race is your political identity. The other is categorical representation: Members of a race can be understood and represented only by members of this race. By this reasoning the Voting Rights Act has become an instrument for what Roberts has hitherto called “a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” | George Will, Washington Post, 3/1/13 | “progressivism’s racialism”: a new wedge argument for perpetuating racial discrimination. It’s twisted logic seems to be that the mere act of trying to mitigate disparate racial outcomes is itself a form of racism. It’s like when Stephen Colbert archly says that he “doesn’t see race”, and thus is free to use any racial stereotype he wishes. |
Inside the GOP’s Parallel Universes, Feb. 28-March 3
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Politiscripts, by Richard Roth 