Tom’s Big Picture

As I referred to in a previous post, there’s an excellent little novel out there called The Hunt for Confederate Gold that talks in passing about the “control file” that is necessary for rising to the highest ranks of the federal government. Homosexuality, pedophilia, etc, are the norm in the power centers, as this is the only way the government can ensure that someone’s principles won’t get the best of them when exercising unconstitutional abuses of federal power.

There’s more evil at the root of the federal beast than the average American citizen can take in without unbearable doses of cognitive dissonance. Every now and then, though, a control file leaks out when its subject can’t control his behavior.

Well, Senator Craig from Idaho apparently likes to cruise men’s restrooms on his way home from Washington, which is unfortunate for his handlers. Limp-wristed Republicans like Craig and Lindsay Graham, the oddly unmarried and eccentric bachelor Republican senator from North Carolina, are always good for a pro-amnesty vote.

These are the results from the Iowa straw poll:

11th John Cox: 41 votes
10th John McCain: 101 votes
9th Duncan Hunter: 174 votes
8th Rudy Giuliani: 183 votes
7th Fred Thompson: 203 votes
6th Tommy Thompson: 1039 votes
5th Ron Paul: 1305 votes
4th Tom Tancredo: 1961 votes
3rd Sam Brownback: 2192 votes
2nd Mike Huckabee: 2587 votes
1st Mitt Romney: 4516 votes

Commentary-

Romney: expected, the mainstream “conservative” candidate. Republican caucus-goers (who I assume are similar to Republican convention-goers) are the particularly sheep-like followers in a follow-the-leader party (the Dems, on the other hand, are more fractious and rowdy with each other). These are the sort of people who pay twice as much for Tide because it’s the respectable middle-class brand of detergent, despite equal efficacy of less expensive alternatives; they’re also the sort of party-machine yahoos who supported a movement to draft pro-abortion, pro-reverse-discrimination Condi Rice for President because A) she’s black and respectable Republican types drool over the possibility sacrificing important conservative principles to get 10% of the black vote instead of 5% of the black vote (an electorally meaningless sum of 0.5%, mostly in Southern states the GOP would win anyway) and B) she’s a woman so she could beat Hillary. So that they voted for Romney, the Tweedledee marketed to them as the “conservative” is no surprise.

McCain, Guiliani, Fred Thompson: Refreshing to see that the base, foolish as they can be, are not yet sufficiently degraded to support people who actually don’t even pretend to be conservative. These candidates may be an attempt by the Establishment to test how much the base is paying attention, and thus how much they can get away with. Rudy in particular, with his 9/11 creds, was a real danger who might have seduced the pro-war Zionist (War Without End, Amen) wing of the party; given the eagerness of some evangelicals to support the pro-abortion, liberal, Christian-persecuting state of Israel, it would not surprise me to see them possibly support a pro-abortion, liberal, anti-Christian candidate who happened to support Israeli foreign policy objectives. The pathetic results of these candidates means that the base still insists on someone who at least lies to them about being a conservative. George W. Bush fit the bill, and now so does Romney.

Brownback & Huckabee: These are the “Religious Right” candidates. Unfortunately, both have their head up their rear on immigration. They’re the sort of deracinated, rootless Christians who support immigration because they believe it gives them more of an opportunity to make converts and witness. And since they have no sense of history or heritage, they care not that the inheritance left to our nation by our Christian forefathers will be given to foreigners, a fate the Bible describes as the worst sort of curse! Huckabee welcomes the curse in a particularly offensive way, cracking jokes about how people who “look like him” will not be the future of our country. These two epitomize the problem with an individualistic Christianity, where the ultimate goal is not holiness but rather so many converts made like notches on a rifle barrel, while “nice guys” like Huckabee sell out their children’s heritage and preach about how Jesus can help you achieve personal power. They are both liars as well, having now made conversions of convenience, as Tancredo so appropriately put it, “on the road to Des Moines”.

Huckabee is a former head of the Southern Baptist Convention. While most evangelical Christians I know are not immigration enthusiasts, the leadership of the SBC has drunk some serious Kool-Aid on the issue that needs some bottom-up sorting out, lest money given for God’s Kingdom continues to be funneled into worldly efforts like depriving our children of their inheritance.

Both of these candidates benefited from the religious vote, and one can only hope their surprisingly strong showing is because their supporters are unaware of their immigration stances, and thus the votes will be up for grabs to a Paul or Tancredo once their records are more widely known. Paul and Tancredo have more real conservative credentials, especially on issues Christians care about, than either Huckabee or Brownback.

Tom Tancredo: In a word, wow! He came in fourth behind the Religious clones despite a relatively small amount of funds to work with. I would be happy to be wrong in my recent analysis of Tancredo’s campaign. If he starts showing up strong in national polls or fundraising, I would send him money too, just like I did for Ron Paul.

Speaking of Paul, some of his more strident libertarian supporters had a conniption this week when Tancredo suggested that an appropriate response to Islamic nuclear terrorism might include attacking Mecca and Medina, the two holiest sites in Islam. Libertarians went wild, calling him a “fascist” among other things, despite the fact that besides Paul, Tancredo is the closest Republican to their anti-war and small-government agenda.

The reason they went crazy is, as I’ve said before, that Libertarians are partially autistic politically. They see everyone as individuals (or as Scott Adams rightly put it, in-duh-viduals) and get a gag reflex when anyone starts talking about the various human “teams” that are obvious to everyone else: nationality, race, religion, etc, the things that so define any given man that he has no choice but to have an irrational attachment to them.

Tancredo’s solution is more humane than a war where Americans will die, and provides a real deterrent. How else do you deter someone with an idolatrous, false and hateful religion? Attacking and destroying Mecca is a deterrent, as all Muslims know in their heart of hearts that Islam is a farce, a fiction conceived by an Arab stealing from Christianity and Judaism. The destruction of Mecca would demonstrate the fiction (and the powerlessness of their false tribal god Allah) and crash down their entire worldview and civilization. Since they don’t want that to happen, they just might not attack us.

Of course, threatening to destroy Mecca is not the same as destroying Mecca, but it might work as a deterrent. Combined with sensible immigration policies (e.g. no Muslims in America, and no Americans in the Middle East), it might just work. At this point, Islam is a pathetic little civilization with little real power (apparently, Muslim doctors- their best and brightest- in Britain are too incompetent to make a car bomb detonate- something that involves only the most basic of mechanical skills) and its actual power is puffed up in the media to accomplish neoconservative foreign policy ends on Israel’s behalf. But Tancredo is correct that Islam perceives itself to be in a struggle of civilizations with us, and if they can ever get over their fundamental incompetence (low IQ is a tough one), they are definitely motivated to hurt us.

Tancredo is also communicating a message beyond the message. We are told we are in a “War On Terror”, yet our President assures us that Islam is a “religion of peace”. Yet every time we see one of these “terrorists” on television, they all look the same, with the same swarthy Middle Eastern ugliness, the same ratty beard or asinine Arab mustache, the same weird-sounding language and faux bravado, holding guns they can’t shoot and weapons their civilizations are too backwards to manufacture. We don’t so much have a terrorism problem, to the extent we have a problem, we have a Middle Eastern Arab Islam problem.

And yet we’re over in their country, spending billions in grants to build their schools and bridges, pretending that we’re going to wake up in George W. Bush’s fantasy world where Iraqis are going to spontaneously organize themselves into a political order and that Baghdad will, real soon now, be as clean and orderly as Copenhagen.

The American people, in their heart of hearts, hate this situation. They believe in the threat of the “terrorists”, yet see a national government unwilling to name names of who and what is exactly the problem. Tancredo, with this statement, is communicating a subtext of ethnic solidarity with the American people. He is saying that he understands the score, that this is a “us versus them” situation and there’s no point in pussy-footing around the point as to who us is and who “them” are. It’s an extreme statement, better threatened than executed (bad policy IMO, and an inferior option to Ron Paul’s constitutional proposal of Letters of Marques and Reprisal), but as a political statement it is just the sort of thing the American people may want to hear as a subtext clue that Tancredo is their man.

Ron Paul: I have to admit I was a bit disappointed with Paul’s showing. I would think there would be enough Ron Paul fans to crash the straw poll and win it. But, upon further research, Paul only recently started in the state, and received more votes per dollar spent than any candidate.

A good day for the country, when Giuliani and McCain get trounced and two true patriots, Paul and Tancredo, finish above expectations. Now we need to see some poll numbers rise before the caucuses in January.