The Media Research Center's War on Liberal Comedy

Does anyone else remember The 1/2 Hour News Hour, Fox News' short-lived "comedy" show that was billed as the conservative answer to The Daily Show? There are plenty of dismal reviews and embarrassing clips out there—more than enough to justify putting "comedy" in scare quotes—so I won't pile on. I only bring it up because The 1/2 Hour News Hour may be dead, but its spirit lives on.

I'm referring to NewsBusted,^[1] a video series produced by the Media Research Center—the same organization responsible for NewsBusters (obviously). Here's a sampling from a recent episode. Highlight the white text to reveal the punchlines, which I've hidden to avoid ruining the surprise. (Disclaimer: You will not be surprised.)

This year Tax Day falls on Tuesday, April 17. Tax Day, or as the half of Americans who pay no federal income tax call it…Obama Christmas.

Democratic advisor Hilary Rosen is under fire for saying Ann Romney, quote, "never worked a day in her life." Hey, if she really never worked a day in her life, Ann Romney would be…endorsing Obama.

Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen was suspended for five games after saying that he loves Fidel Castro. But not to worry, Guillen has just been offered a job in…the Obama administration.

And that's pretty much all it is, ad infinitum. Sometimes they have to take a convoluted route to get there, but invariably the punchline is little more than a lazy reference to some negative stereotype about liberals.^[2] The jokes are even less sophisticated than "Why did the chicken cross the road? (To get to the other side)," which at least has the decency to not deliver a punchline at all.

But that's just one front in the MRC's War on Liberal Comedy. While NewsBusted is fighting fire with (attempted) fire, MRC president Brent Bozell is fighting fire with self-righteous anger over fire's stubborn insistence on continuing to exist.

Bozell's columns and blog posts for NewsBusters serve as a handy guide to what you should be outraged about if you lack both perspective and a sense of humor. In January, it was "ABC smutcom 'Modern Family'". Then it was "the bohemian elite at NBC" for failing to protect America from seeing an upraised middle finger during the Super Bowl. Then back to ABC, because somebody told Bozell what GCB stands for.^[3]

And then, last week, this:

Come on, Jon. We dare you to prove you are an equal opportunity bigot. Your grotesque stunt displaying a Nativity scene in a vulgar manner to take a jab at Fox News is but the latest in a long line of unacceptable behavior and hypocrisy when it comes to the media’s treatment of traditional Christianity. Doing something similar with the Koran or the Torah is equally offensive. Since you’re so brave to offend Christians, are you equally brave to offend Muslims and Jews? We dare you.

Stewart thought he was being cute when he displayed a manger scene in front of a woman’s genitals to mock those allegedly ignoring the 'war on women.' If he’s such a daring political comedian, he should demonstrate his boldness by performing the same routine, but this time with a Koran and the Torah.

Otherwise he is not only a bigot but also an outright coward.

The amount of silliness on display here is almost overwhelming, so I'm just going to gloss over the question of which part of Jon Stewart's point—that everything has to be a "War" now, and it's getting out of hand, which is rather similar to a point I've made recently—Bozell failed to get. (I have the choices narrowed down to "every part" and "almost every part".)

That still leaves the fact that this is the president of an organization that dedicates its existence to the flagrantly partisan mission of "exposing and combating liberal media bias", and he sees fit to insist on non-partisan joke-telling—all while another division of the same organization produces (attempted) comedy that's substantially more partisan than anything I've ever seen on The Daily Show. It's too bad Bozell doesn't have the slightest ability to appreciate irony, because this is a good one.

1. According to the MRC:

NewsBusted™ is a weekly two-minute MRCTV comedy production that conservatives love and liberals love to hate. Featuring the comedic stylings of Jodi Miller, it is loaded with her irreverent, sarcastic wit and one-liners poking fun at the loony left.

I would take issue with virtually every part of that, up to and including the "weekly" part, as new episodes are actually posted twice a week.

2. Better over-analyzers of comedy than I have attempted to explain why conservatives have so much trouble being funny, but, for what it's worth, I think it's some combination of the following:
– The creators of NewsBusted (and The 1/2 Hour News Hour) are simply not very talented. And it's not helping things that the tendency (often fueled by conservatives themselves) is to look to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as the standards for "liberal comedy"—I can certainly think of other shows that are a good deal hackier and a good deal more single-mindedly liberal. (Not that NewsBusted compares favorably to Real Time With Bill Maher either, but that's a bar that's a little easier to clear.)
– The best political comedy shows, like The Daily Show and Colbert, put comedy first, and if the collective backgrounds and political leanings of the people involved cause that comedy to have a liberal slant, then so be it. The 1/2 Hour News Hour and NewsBusted put politics first, aiming to be the conservative counterpoint to the liberal version of themselves, which is not something that exists.
– Comedy is fueled by misfortune, and conservatives, almost by definition, have little to complain about. They can make jokes at the expense of those who do have things to complain about, but when your ideology involves telling those same people to stop complaining and learn some responsibility and get a damn job, the jokes tend to come off as more mean-spirited than funny.

3. Of course, he either doesn't realize or doesn't care that neither the "G" nor the "C" are meant to be taken literally:

Time TV critic James Poniewozik protested “I have a hard time believing that anyone will see themselves insulted by GCB: its target is not Christians but phonies.” Not so. There are certainly Christian hypocrites that can make for great grist in entertainment. But this show offers the viewing public no authentic Christians at all.

What else is there to say? Bozell's rebuttal to Poniewozik's point is a restatement of the point he's rebutting. We're through the looking glass.

War? War.

Is it just me, or have we started getting ourselves into new wars on just about a weekly basis? I'm starting to have trouble keeping it all straight, and I can't imagine I'm the only one, so I thought I'd put together this simple guide to the various wars Americans are fighting right now:^[*]

Hope that helps.

* In the interest of space I had to leave a few out, but let's not forget about those whose lives have been affected by the wars on abortion, adulthood, adverbs, Alzheimer's, America, Amish dairy farmers, anonymity, apostrophes, Arianna Huffington, Arizona, art, Asian carp, atheism, babies, bodily fluids, California's medical marijuana industry, cameras, capitalism, the Catholic Church, civility, climate change, cloud storage systems, coal, cockroaches, comparative effectiveness research, conservative women, conservatives in general, content farms, contraception, cookbooks, "copywrong", coral, Craisins, crony capitalism, democracy, Democrats, doctors, driving, the EPA, errorism, Facebook, fertility, Fox News, fracking, fraternities, frisée, fun, gay teens, general purpose computation, grandfathered unlimited users, graymail, GRUB, guns, happiness, headaches, heavy metal, hunger, hyperbole, I-4, icky lady parts, illegal immigrants, immigrants, infographics, invasive plant species, IsAnyoneUp.com, isolationism, journalism, the judiciary, leaks, lemonade stands, liberals, libertarians, Libertarians, liberty, light bulbs, linguistic diversity, men, microbes, "Mommy", money, mosquitoes, NDAA indefinite detention, the 99%, NLRB employees, the Oakland Raiders, Obama's faith, obesity, Occupy Wall Street, offshore wind, oil, organized labor, Orlando, Florida, pajamas, particulate emissions, peace, photoshopping, police, the porn industry, poor children, potholes, prehistoric peace, prostitution, PTSD, pubic hair, Reagan's defense policies, religious freedom, Republicans, Rod Blagojevich, Ron Wyden, the rule of law, the safety net, salt, schools, science, secrecy, sex, sharia law, snoring, SOPA, SpongeBob SquarePants, standardized tests, StubHub, supersized "alcopops", the Tea Party, teachers, teen sexting, Terra, Tim Tebow, the trifecta of tyranny, truckers, the truth, unemployment, veterans' benefits, vitamins, voter fraud reform, voting, Walmart, want, the War on Christmas, the war on the War on Christmas, the war on the war on the War on Christmas, the war on the war on the war on the War on Christmas, waste, weed, weeds, whistleblowers, Wisconsin's wind industry, wolves, workers, wrinkles, and, of course, war.

Really, America? Rick Santorum?

Ugh, alright, let's talk about Rick Santorum.

As someone who tries very hard to observe the principle of reciprocity—"we should respect the reasonableness and the goodwill of those with whom we disagree…even if we judge their opinions to be unreasonable and/or their views to be unjust or immoral"—I refuse to simply write Santorum off as a bigot. So I did some investigating, and it turns out he's not a bigot—at least, if you believe what he says when asked if he's a bigot.

Consider these two quotes from Santorum's interview with Piers Morgan last August:^[1]

There are a lot of things in society that are sins or moral wrongs, that we don't make illegal. Just because something is immoral or something is wrong, doesn't mean that it should be illegal, and that the federal government or any level of government should involve themselves in it. . . . If I was a legislator in the state of Texas dealing with the Texas sodomy law [that was overturned by the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas], I would've voted against it, because I don't think that's something that the state should involve itself in.

—————

The Catholic church teaches that homosexuality is a sin. I'm a Catholic, and I subscribe to the Catholic church's teaching. But that's not relevant from the standpoint of how I view these issues from a public policy point of view.

And this one, from an appearance on Fox News around the same time:

The bottom line is, we can have a public policy difference about what the proper marriage laws should be in this country and what's in the best interests of society, and not hate somebody or feel ill will toward anybody. As I've said many times, I have friends who are gay, I accept them as they are, but I disagree with them vehemently about what is in the best interests of society with respect to our marriage laws. . . . It's not personal, it's about policy.

Got it? He believes homosexuality is immoral, but he doesn't consider immorality a valid reason for the government to get involved. And because he subscribes to the teachings of the Catholic church (he's careful to point that part out, as if everything that flows from it is somehow involuntary), he believes homosexuality is a sin, but he doesn't consider sinfulness a valid reason for the government to get involved either. All that matters, he says, is what's in the best interests of society—a determination that should not be tainted by the biases of one's own moral and religious beliefs. Santorum, who of course has a healthy respect for scientific objectivity, judiciously examined the evidence on all sides and reached the conclusion that, strictly as a matter of public policy, THE GOVERNMENT MUST PUT A STOP TO GAY MARRIAGE BEFORE SOCIETY IS RUINED FOREVER.

Any resemblance his political views may have to his personal moral and religious beliefs is, apparently, purely coincidental.

One can't help but wonder, then, what is the basis for his political views? The closest thing I can find to an answer came during the January 8 debate:

We know there’s certain things that work in America. The Brookings Institute came out with a study just a few years ago that said, if you graduate from high school, and if you work, and if you’re a man, if you marry, if you’re a woman, if you marry before you have children, you have a 2 percent chance of being in poverty in America. And to be above the median income, if you do those three things, 77 percent chance of being above the median income.

Why isn’t the president of the United States or why aren’t leaders in this country talking about that and trying to formulate, not necessarily federal government policy, but local policy and state policy and community policy, to help people do those things that we know work and we know are good for society?

And again during the January 16 debate:

It’s very interesting, if you look at a study that was done by the Brookings Institute back in 2009, they determined that if Americans do three things, they can avoid poverty. Three things. Work, graduate from high school, and get married before you have children. Those three things, if you do, according to Brookings, results in only 2 percent of people who do all those things ending up in poverty, and 77 percent above the national average in income.

Clearly, that Brookings Institute study has had quite the impact. It's also a common talking point at campaign appearances, and there are implicit references to it on his website.^[2] The upshot is always the same: It has been conclusively proven (by Science!) that there is a threefold path to moderate success—get a job, get a high school education, and get married before you have kids (or is it just that you aren't supposed to have kids if you aren't married? I can't tell, and I'm getting a headache trying to figure out if it matters). Thus, the government should do everything in its power to promote those three things—even if it means depriving gay people of same-sex marriage rights, which has something to do with the third thing, I guess.^[3]

This is the form interventionist social conservatism has taken—say all the right things about condemning bigotry and valuing individual freedom and approaching the issues with an open mind, then reach the same moralistic conclusions as your garden-variety 20th century bigot. Santorum isn't even all that good at it, but, lucky for him, he doesn't have to be. We've had, like, 500 debates, most of which have been hosted and moderated by members of the Liberal Media, and at no point has he been asked any of the following:

• How, exactly, does being married cause a person's income to increase?
• Have you read the Economic Policy Institute's report suggesting you've confused cause with effect?
• Did that possibility honestly never occur to you?
• By the way, even if you're right about the benefits of marriage, what part of that Brookings Institute study makes you think its findings apply only to opposite-sex couples?
• And do we really need to explain to you, Senator, why it is that unplanned, pre-marital pregnancy isn't a huge concern in the gay community?
• Seriously, do you want us to draw you a picture? Because we'd be happy to draw you a picture.
• Wait a minute…that Brookings Institute study was released less than three years ago, but your political views have been fairly consistent since at least the early 90s. How did you rationalize your big-government moralism before 2009?^[4]
• Have you learned to travel back and forth through time, allowing you to read the report decades before it was released?
• Still, wouldn't you expect someone who has mastered time travel to understand at least the basics of how causation works?
• Also, you were recently asked, "as a champion of family values and keeping America strong, would you continue to destroy families by sending nonviolent drug offenders to prison?", to which you answered, "the federal government doesn't do that." Which country's federal government were you talking about?
• Was it Portugal's?
• Or are you actually that obtuse?

Instead, he gets questions that amount to, "are you a bigot?" His answers are simplistic and logically dubious, and they go unchallenged—not because he wins over his critics, but because nothing he says changes their perception that, yeah, he probably is a bigot. But there's also nothing to change his supporters' perception that he's not a bigot—he's just trying to do what's in the best interests of society. And until he's forced to defend his views in a real, meaningful way, I can't say for sure that his supporters are wrong.

In other words, if Rick Santorum wins this election, I'm going to blame the media.

1. Perhaps the most incredible thing Santorum said during the interview:

From a public policy point of view there are a lot of things that I find morally wrong—or, as you would use the term, sinful—that don't necessarily rise to the level that government should be involved in regulating that activity.

I would love to see what's on that list. I bet it makes Ned Flanders look like a libertine.

2. From Santorum's "Bold solutions for America’s families":

The family is the foundation of our country. We need to have an economic policy that supports families and freedom and encourages marriage.
…
I don’t believe that poverty is a permanent condition. How do we effectively address poverty in rural and urban America? We promote jobs, marriage, quality education and access to capital and embrace the supports of civil society.

3. Not a whole lot of room for controversy on the first two. That being employed is one of the keys to having an above-median income sounds like something Tim McCarver would say, and it's only marginally less obvious that having a high school education is important, too. We may never reach a consensus on how, exactly, but I think we can all agree that employment and education are to be encouraged.
    Also, it should be noted that Santorum hasn't actually stated a problem here. Even if we come up with the best possible policies for promoting employment, education, and marriage, it's still going to be the case that a single parent without a high school education is more likely to have a below-median income. He's engaging in the fallacy that conservatives often (rightly) accuse liberals of—defining a problem in terms of inequality, which makes it virtually impossible to satisfactorily resolve.

4. I'm guessing the answer to that question can be found in his book, which I assume is readily available at one of those warehouse stores right off the interstate, where you can find entire pallets of generic self-help guides, unfunny joke compilations, and autobiographies of middle-tier politicians for sale at a fraction of their original price.

A Growing Rift in the Republican Party

Here's the opening to Ben Shapiro's recent column for TownHall.com:

In 1831, Henry Clay formed a new political party. He called it the Whig Party. His goal was to ensure Jeffersonian democracy and fight President Andrew Jackson, a Democrat. Over the course of the next 20 years, the Whig Party achieved several presidential victories. But as slavery assumed more and more national importance in the political debate, the Whig Party began to shatter.

As Shapiro goes on to explain, the Whig Party was gone by 1860.^[1] The anti-slavery members in the North left to form their own party, and the pro-slavery members in the South left to form their own country. And now, seven score and twelve years later, Shapiro wonders if the unrecognizable modern-day descendant of that upstart Northern party is in the early stages of a Whig-like demise:

The center of the Republican Party cannot hold. With Mitt Romney's victory in the Florida primary, it's clear that large swaths of the Republican establishment have rejected the Tea Party; it's similarly clear that the Tea Party has largely rejected Romney and his backers. . . . On what basis will the party unite? On fiscal responsibility? Romney and his cohorts have said nothing about serious entitlement reform; the Tea Party, meanwhile, calls for it daily. On taxation? Romney has a 59-point plan that smacks of class warfare; the Tea Party wants broad tax cuts across the board. On health care? Romney and much of the establishment aren't against the individual mandate in principle; the Tea Party despises the individual mandate as a violation of Constitutionally-guaranteed liberties. On foreign policy? Paleoconservatives want a Ron Paul-like isolationism; neoconservatives want a George W. Bush-like interventionism; realists want something in between.

There is the very real potential for the Republican Party to spin apart in the near future. It could easily become a set of regional parties knit together by opposition to extreme liberalism. Chris Christie and his followers don't have all that much in common with Rick Perry and his followers. Never has that chasm been so obvious.

To recap, we have four issues identified as signs of the growing rift within the Republican Party:

• Entitlement reform. Tea Partiers won't shut up about it; Romney doesn't like to bring it up.^[2]
• Taxes. Tea Partiers favor "broad tax cuts across the board"; Romney has a convoluted plan including a number of prongs which, considered together, bear a vague resemblance to something that might, if you squint and the lighting is just right, be described as broad tax cuts across the board.
• Healthcare. Tea Partiers are staunchly opposed to the individual mandate at the federal level; Romney claims to be staunchly opposed to the individual mandate at the federal level.
• Foreign policy. Nobody can agree on anything.

I'm reminded of the debate from Futurama ("I say your three cent titanium tax goes too far!" "And I say your three cent titanium tax doesn't go too far enough!"). I mean, yeah, Romney's moderate in virtually every sense of the word, and I totally understand why so many Republicans are indifferent—if not outwardly hostile—toward his inevitable nomination. But let's not lose our minds here. Mitt Romney is not the harbinger of an ideological split in the Republican Party. He doesn't even have an ideology.

But, much like a wildly off-target golf shot that rolls to a stop ten feet from the cup on an adjacent hole, Shapiro is at least wrong in a strangely accurate way. I doubt anything can save his central comparison—slavery demanded a level of humanitarian concern and moral outrage unmatched by any contemporary issue, with the possible exception of slavery—but if we're going to insist on trying to find the closest parallel, I think we can come up with a few injustices more appalling than high taxes and mandatory health insurance. How about:

• Denial of same-sex marriage rights
• The War on Drugs
• Mandatory minimum sentences
• Torture and indefinite detention
• Capital punishment
• Restrictions on access to abortion and contraception

To name a few. Obviously, I'm talking about issues where libertarians diverge from conservatives—and the Republican Party in general. And yet, so many libertarians are nonetheless content to support a party that only sometimes aligns with their core values.^[3] I don't have any great insight into whether that uneasy coalition is about to fall apart, but why shouldn't it? The discord Shapiro's talking about—the manufactured panic over Romney—is little more than petty squabbling among conservatives about the ideal volume at which to be conservative. Meanwhile, they're continuing to ignore and alienate an entire bloc of voters who disagree with them in actual, substantive ways, and who probably should've left the Republican Party a long time ago.

1. Would it surprise you to learn that the Whig Party has been revived? Me neither. And I more than welcome this development, if only because it carries with it the possibility—however remote—of "Whiggery" re-entering the lexicon.

2. At least, that's what Shapiro says. Skeptical, I went to Romney's website, and I can see how he missed it—you have to go all the way to page 142 of "Believe in America: Mitt Romney's Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth" to find the section on entitlement reform. Shapiro must've given up somewhere around the chapter on "Human Capital Policy", which sounds a lot like a phrase a computer would produce in a valiant—but ultimately unsuccessful—attempt to pass the Turing test.

3. I'm sure this goes without saying, but, of course, all libertarians have exactly the same set of beliefs and priorities, and thus it's perfectly appropriate to broadly characterize them as one single-minded entity.

Newt Gingrich's Crusade Against Linguistic Diversity

Newt Gingrich has said many times that he favors making English the official language, but I've never been all that clear on why he feels this is so important. The issue came up again during Monday's debate, and Newt managed to clear up precisely nothing, but at least he threw out some numbers:

The challenge of the United States is simple. There are 86 languages in Miami Dade College, 86. There are over 200 languages spoken in Chicago. Now, how do you unify the country? What is the common bond that enables people to be both citizens and to rise commercially and have a better life and a greater opportunity?

A school spokesman confirmed to Politifact that there are indeed 86 languages spoken at Miami Dade College. A similar number (85) appears at the top of this PDF the school put together to show off how many international students it has. So Gingrich is right, but his point is…what, exactly? This is a college that's proud of the international diversity of its student body, putting it on par with every single other educational institution in the developed world. (Even Liberty Freakin' University, which is about to start construction on the Jerry Freakin' Falwell Library, brags of enrolling "over 900 international students from over 80 foreign countries.") Besides, most of those foreign students won't be allowed to stay here after they get their degrees anyway, which is a problem Newt actually recognizes and says he wants to fix.^[1]

His other claim—that over 200 languages are spoken in Chicago—is just as baffling, and it's something he's been saying for a while, if this 1997 column by the always delightful Pat Buchanan is any indication:

With 30 million immigrants since 1965, almost all now coming from Asia, Africa and Latin America, our European ethnic core — 90 percent in 1965 — is shrinking fast — to the delight of our president, who looks to the day soon when we are a nation of “minorities.” We no longer worship the same God, share the same ideas of morality, admire the same heroes or celebrate the same holidays.

“Do you realize that there are 200 languages spoken in the Chicago school system? That’s an asset, not a liability,” Newt Gingrich recently burbled to Joe Klein. Oh. I thought the scattering of the peoples at the Tower of Babel, when the Lord confused their languages, was a punishment, not a blessing.

I don't know what's more fascinating—that Newt has been citing the same dubious statistic for at least 15 years now, or that apparently at some point between then and now he reversed his position on whether linguistic diversity is a good thing or a bad thing.^[2] Maybe he read Buchanan's column and had a change of heart.

Either way, it's unclear just what in the hell he's talking about, since I can't find a source for the claim or an instance where he's been asked to elaborate. The U.S. Census Bureau's latest data on language use shows that there are primary speakers of 137 different languages in the entire state of Illinois.^[3] That's a little south of 200, but it's still a big number, I guess. Although it should be noted that 27 of those languages have no reported speakers in the state who cannot also speak English "very well", and another 64 have at least one, but fewer than a thousand such speakers (including 30 languages with fewer than a hundred). So that leaves only 46 languages with even moderately sizable non-English-speaking populations, which would probably still sound like a lot if we weren't comparing it to the insane exaggerations Newt's been throwing around.

Speaking of which, back to the debate, where moments later Gingrich shared with us his nightmarish vision of an America that sits on the precipice of succombing fully to the ravages of polylingualism:

But as a country to unify ourselves in a future in which there may well be 300 or 400 languages spoken in the United States, I think it is essential to have a central language that we expect people to learn and to be able to communicate with each other in.

I don't know if this is intentionally manipulative or just ignorant (though in Newt's case I'm inclined to assume the former), but it has to be one or the other. For one thing, according to Ethnologue, the number of languages spoken in the U.S. is probably in the 300-400 range right now.^[4] And Newt's predicting divisiveness and incomprehensibility? I haven't seen it. Unless we're counting the Republican debates. [Rimshot]

Moreover, the number of languages in the world, much like the number of extant animal species or profitable daily newspapers, is declining at an unprecedented rate. Many of the languages spoken in the U.S., as you might expect, were around long before the Europeans arrived, and it seems a little unfair to lump Native Americans in with immigrants when you're spreading misinformation about people coming here and not learning the local tongue, but, regardless, all but a handful of their languages are pretty close to extinction—so that's a hundred or so things Newt won't have to worry about much longer. Indigenous languages brought over by immigrants from Africa and Asia make up another big chunk of the 300-400, and most of them are in similarly dire straits. And even languages with stable populations elsewhere in the world, often retained initially by entire communities of newly-arriving immgrants, tend to disappear within a few generations.

What, then, is Newt so worried about? Who can ever say for sure, but I think the big numbers are nothing but misdirection. There's only one language that stands even a remote chance of reaching the same level of importance in America as English, y todo el mundo sabe exactamente cual es. But Newt isn't willing to aim his rhetoric directly at Spanish speakers—at least in part because, despite all implications to the contrary, many of them speak English too—so he demonizes the whole universe of human language instead.

If the problem is that a lot of people are speaking Spanish, the complainer is accused (sometimes fairly, sometimes not) of being xenophobic, and possibly racist. But if the problem is reframed—if it's that people are speaking, like, hundreds if not thousands of different languages and making everything confusing as all hell, then that almost sounds like a sensible thing to complain about. Assuming there's anyone left who can understand you.

1. From Newt.org:

We have the best universities in the world, but many foreigners who come to study are turned away and sent back home as soon as they get their degree. It is foolish to educate someone well enough for them to start the next job-creating startup, only to force them to leave America and start their business overseas. We want the jobs here and that means we want the job creators here.

2. Actually, it seems more likely that Buchanan was just being haphazard with context. I'm willing to bet Gingrich's next sentence started with "but", and proceeded to make it abundantly clear that his previous sentence was merely a pre-emptive strike against charges of cultural insensitivity.

3. More or less. I counted only languages that are specifically identified, but there are also a few thousand people lumped into catch-all categories like India n.e.c. (not elsewhere classified), Pakistan n.e.c., American Indian, African, and Uncodable, so the count may be a little higher. On the other hand, languages like Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian—which exemplify the adage that a language is just a dialect with an army and a navy—are listed separately despite being mutually intelligible.

4. This includes 176 languages known to be the primary language of at least one living, U.S.-born person, and about 190 languages classified as non-indigenous ("spoken by relatively recently arrived or transient populations which do not have a well-established, multi-generational community in the country"). Unsurprisingly, the line between the two categories is rather hazy.

The Top Ten Fringe Candidates in the New Hampshire Primaries

As a long-time observer of politics and a long-time critic of the two-party system, I've developed a strong affinity for fringe and third-party candidates. We'll have to wait a few months before the third parties start to emerge, but Tuesday's New Hampshire primaries are jam-packed with fringe candidates for the major party nominations—there are 30 Republicans and 14 Democrats on the ballot—and I looked into all of them.^[1]

I'm excluding the major and semi-major candidates we're all already familiar with—though most wouldn't have made the list anyway. The rest were ranked according to a formula that combines the following two factors:^[2]

1. How interesting it would be—and not necessarily in a good way—if the candidate became just prominent enough to get some media attention and participate in the debates (but not popular enough to actually win—that part is important).
   
2. Intangibles.

Before I get to the top ten, honorable mention goes to Democratic contender Vermin Supreme, whose top issues include dental hygiene and traveling back in time to kill Hitler. I declared Supreme ineligible for two reasons: First, he's clearly just trying to be funny, and I'm all in favor of that, but it does distinguish him from the rest of the field (though I have my suspicions about a few). And second, his website starts playing music automatically, which is inexcusable.

Alright, here we go:

10. Timothy Brewer (Republican)
According to the Dayton Daily News, during a recent forum for minor candidates Brewer "vowed that speaking with Jesus through 'afterlife orbs' would solve the world’s problems," which is honestly not the worst idea I've heard in the last few months. The paper also reports that "[a]ttempts to reach Brewer about his candidacy failed." Really? Was he busy?

9. Bob Ely (Democrat)
Ely's website has a list of 24 reasons not to vote for him (for example, "I'll Dream Up Lots of Other Taxes"), but even better is his blog, which contains a single post that says, simply, "Nothing deemed blog-worthy". I'm not sure, but that might be brilliant.

8. Aldous C. Tyler (Democrat)
Heartbreaking news from the Tyler campaign:

I am truly saddened to be forced to announce that my bid for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States must come to a close. Due to a lack of logistical and financial support, I can no longer responsibly ask people to send their hard-earned money or spend their precious time on a campaign that simply has no ability to continue forward.

Yes, now it would be irresponsible for Aldous Tyler to ask people to contribute their time and money to his presidential campaign.

7. Mark Callahan (Republican)
You know how the most vocal opponents of gay rights often turn out to be gay themselves? I kind of doubt a similar phenomenon exists among Birthers, but Mark Callahan decided to take preemptive action anyway:

There has been a lot of news and national discussion about President Obama's eligibility to be President of the United States, based upon where he was born. I can say with absolutely certainty that Americans will not have to worry about this aspect of my eligibility to be President of the United States during my campaign, nor if I get elected President of the United States in 2012. In the interests of full disclosure and accountability, I will state that I am currently 34 years old. I turn 35 on May 11th, 2012, well before the inauguration of the President in January 2013, thus still making me eligible to be President of the United States, according to the U.S. Constitution, Article 2, Section 1. I have consulted with the Federal Elections Commission, and they have confirmed that I am eligible, as long as I turn 35 by the time inauguration day comes.

There was a lot of eye-rolling at the FEC that day, I'd imagine.

6. L. John Davis, Jr. (Republican)
Davis appears to come from the "this problem will be easy to solve once we figure out how to solve the problem" school of problem-solving, and his website is a masterful exercise in using a lot of words to say nothing. Here's a highlight:

What makes a United States president? Does a mold make a president? If we had a mold, we could mold a president. But which mold would we choose? Would we all agree on the same mold? . . . What color should he be? I know the answer to this one. It’s the great American color: red, white and blue.

5. Randy Crow (Republican)
Alas, www.randycrow.com is currently unavailable, but I was able to find some information at Project Vote Smart. There's some fairly dull biographical stuff, and a questionnaire with dull revelations like favorite author (Hemingway), favorite color (blue), and favorite musician ("none jumps out"), and some dull political views, and then just as I gave up hope of finding anything interesting, there it is:

Flight 93 was inteded to crash into WTC-7 cover up the fact that WTC-7 had bombs placed in it, as did the other two buildings, to bring them down.

Well, alright then. Keep that in mind, potential Randy Crow voters.

4. Hugh Cort (Republican)
Cort's website has "2008" in its URL and Google tells me it may harm my computer, so I'll let that one remain a mystery, but I'm guessing it has a lot to say about Iran and bin Laden and nuclear terrorism, because that's pretty much all he talks about. He runs an organization called The American Foundation for Counter-Terrorism Policy and Research, and he wrote a book called The American Hiroshima: Osama's Plan for a Nuclear Attack, And One Man's Attempt to Warn America. The entirety of his platform, as far as I can tell, is that we need to destroy Iran before Iran destroys us. So he's like Newt Gingrich, but with a more sensible approach to judicial review.

3. Randall Terry (Democrat)
Most candidates convey their views by simply talking or writing about them, but Terry won't be reduced to such a simplistic method. Here's the introduction to his 11-page platform:

Randall Terry addresses 30 issues facing our nation. Mr. Terry has assigned a number value for each question/issue; sometimes he assigns two differing values, depending on the interpretation of the question at hand. In addition, for each position, he provides an explanation.

What follows is a strange hodgepodge of views that could easily have been chosen at random. He's in favor of amnesty, opposed to gay marriage, in favor of US involvement in the UN, opposed to environmental regulations, in favor of marijuana legalization, opposed to gun control, opposed to both the Patriot Act and civil rights for suspected terrorists…and on and on. I couldn't make sense of it. And at several points he expresses uncertainty over the meaning of a question, which is just…mind-boggling, because it's his own platform. And here's where I stopped trying to figure it out altogether:

I think everyone who loves freedom should drive a great big, safe, SUV…and everyone who wants us to be slaves to the socialist state should drive an ittybitty Hyundai.

2. Joe Story (Republican)
He calls himself "The Average Joe", and his website is www.theaveragejoeforpresident.com, so you pretty much know what you're getting here. Probably just a bunch of conservative talking points—fiscal responsibility, family values, etc.—watered down so as to make the basic ideas virtually impossible to disagree with, and some vague platitudes about the American way of life, right? Well somebody needs to tell Joe Story what "average" means, because holy crap:

"WE THE PEOPLE" must decide what our founding fathers meant by "Freedom of Religion". Could they have meant secular humanism "freedom from Religion" where anything goes or Islam the strictest cult known to man? The USA continues to remove the Judeo-Christian biblical laws that define the nations existence from the court houses and embrace Sharia law. How much longer before we look like London in flames or one of the Stone Age countries of Islam?

Yeah, so that's who this guy is—a hyper-Christian, anti-Islamic fanatic—and once that much is established there aren't really any more surprises, but I still enjoyed the misdirection.

1. Andy Martin (Republican)
Martin has a website, but I didn't link to it because there isn't much there, and also because he's a terrible, terrible person. Here are some excerpts from his Wikipedia page:

• His 1996 run for the Florida State Senate came unraveled when it was revealed that he had named his campaign committee for his 1986 congressional run "The Anthony R. Martin-Trigona Congressional Campaign to Exterminate Jew Power in America."
• Martin has filed numerous lawsuits, and has been labeled as a vexatious litigant by several jurisdictions. . . . In a 1983 bankruptcy case, he filed a motion calling the presiding judge "a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race." . . . When later pressed in an interview about his remarks, Martin claimed that the anti-Semitic comments were inserted into his court papers by malicious judges.
• On October 5, 2008, Martin was featured as a "journalist" on Hannity's America of the Fox News Channel. According to The New York Times, "The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government."
• Martin issued a press release shortly after Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that he had evidence Obama "lied to the American people" and "misrepresent[ed] his own heritage." Martin claimed that Obama was really a Muslim, was possibly hiding this fact "to endanger Israel,"
• On October 17, 2008, Martin filed a lawsuit in a state circuit court of Hawaii against Governor Linda Lingle and health department director Dr. Chiyome Fukino seeking to verify the state's official birth certificate of Barack Obama.

Basically, Andy Martin is the infamous Ron Paul newsletters, in (more or less) human form.

1. In case it doesn't go without saying, no, I didn't try all that hard to get a thorough sense of who these people are, because that would be as pointless as it is impossible. We're talking about nearly three dozen candidates, virtually none of whom have received any significant media attention. So if Timothy Brewer turns out to be eminently reasonable other than the "afterlife orbs" thing, good for him, but he doesn't have a website, so the afterlife orbs are all I have to go on.

2. The specifics of the formula will be kept secret, so as to preserve the illusion that it exists.

In Defense of a Bad Sports Town

Some relatively on-topic content is in the works, but I hope you'll indulge me a little here, because I grew up in the Atlanta suburbs and I'm a fan of all the Atlanta sports teams—even the ones that are now in Midwestern Canada—so it caught my attention when ESPN's Rob Parker did the journalistic equivalent of poking the entire metro area with a sharp stick:

It's not fair.

And, we know, it really shouldn't matter.

But Atlanta -- the city, not the team -- doesn't deserve a playoff victory over the New York Giants on Sunday.

It has nothing to do with football. It's deeper than that.

Without question, Atlanta is the worst sports town in America.

To be clear, this is some world-class trolling. Parker doesn't expect his article to be taken seriously in any meaningful way—his primary goal is to generate some publicity for himself, and his secondary goal is to get a lot of people riled up, just because it's fun.

All that said, he's absolutely right. Atlanta is a bad sports town. And it's perfectly fine with me if it stays that way, because this, according to Parker, is the alternative:

Giants fans -- even with a fresh Super Bowl in their memories after the 2007 season -- are living and dying with their team. Football is a part of their lifestyle, it's who they are. On Sunday, every single moment of the game will be pure agony until the clock shows all zeroes and the Giants have secured the victory.

My God, that's one of the most miserable things I've ever read. The pure agony of EVERY SINGLE MOMENT. The merciless gloom of a poorly-executed screen pass. The heartwrenching sadness of an untimely holding call. The unyielding woe of a failed replay challenge. The indescribable pain—OH GOD, THE PAIN—of a walk-off punt return.^[1]

Meanwhile, in a bad sports town:

Your typical Atlanta fan -- who is probably from another city since so few are actually from ATL -- will be preoccupied with something else. They might not even be sure what time the game is on.

In fact, at some point, they might ask a friend -- filled with sweet tea -- at a pork-saturated barbeque, "Are the Falcons playing today?"

Pathetic.

Yeah, just imagine those monsters—enjoying a sunny Atlanta day with a multicultural array of friends and neighbors, feasting on the delightful cuisine of their adopted hometown, shamefully unaware that somewhere nearby a local professional sports team is hard at work in pursuit of a trophy or cup or whatever. Unaware that the game is winding down and the exhaustion is taking over and the players are looking to the stands, desperate for the sweet performance-enhancing tonic that is tens of thousands of screaming color-coordinated lunatics. But, as always, there are no lunatics. There is only the cold, indifferent silence of the near-empty arena.^[2]

Anyway, this is where I started to wonder if Parker was secretly on my side, because he just tried to make a picnic sound sinister, and almost invariably that is the act of a person carrying out a scheme several orders of magnitude more elaborate than necessary. But everything else in his article—paragraph after paragraph of unfavorable attendance numbers,^[3] a recap of the Braves' late-season collapse, and a helpful reminder that the Thrashers must now be referred to in the past tense, which may still come as a surprise to a substantial number of Atlantans—points to the conclusion that yeah, he really does think that Giants fans, by virtue of being more "passionate", deserve a win this afternoon, and that Falcons fans deserve a loss.^[4]

Of course, any time a city is called out like that its sports fans lose their collective shit, so in a fit of morbid curiosity I scrolled through the comments on Parker's article for as long as I could tolerate the ESPN commenting community—almost three minutes—and found what appears to be a bona fide, hardcore Atlanta sports fan. Here's what "Skyonex" had to say:

F the transplants in this city. I'm born and raised here AS a FALCONS/HAWKS/BRAVES Fan. I could care less for all these transplants from all over the country and the recent influx of NO Katrina refugees. You know who doesn't deserve a win? Idiots in New York who have no idea how hard it is for ATL hardcore pro sports fans.

Hey Rob, take it from a TRUE FALCONS fan for over 20 years... We've had it tough and we deserve a win. More so than any Ain'ts fan or Giants fan ever will...

Sure, this person comes off as severely unbalanced and possibly racist (really? Katrina refugees?) and by all indications should not be allowed to venture outside alone, but does he not also exhibit the characteristics of the "real fans" Parker is extolling? His devotion to his city is intense to the point of utter disregard for human dignity. He's convinced that Atlanta's sports ineptitude (and there's been a great deal of it, to be sure) is an actual difficulty he's had to deal with in his life. And he believes this combination of blind devotion and imaginary suffering makes him somehow more deserving than fans in New York and New Orleans—as if they'd know anything about devastation and sorrow—of watching a specific group of professional athletes win a specific football game.

Point is, if that's what it would take for Atlanta to turn its reputation around—stadiums and sports bars and message boards full of despondent, entitled assholes (and I think that is what it would take)—then I don't want to see it happen. Rob Parker is merely the latest member of the sports media to chastise Atlanta by rehashing the narrative that being a good sports fan means supporting your team with equal ferver win or lose (instead of behaving rationally by rewarding good management and punishing bad management), and being upset that your neighbor still pulls for the team in whatever city he's from (instead of being proud that he'd rather live in your city than his), and conflating on-field misfortune with real trauma (instead of displaying the emotional maturity of an actual adult).

That's what the sports media wants from you, Atlanta. Don't let them win. They don't deserve it.

1. That's right, Giants fans. Here, click on this one too. Is the agony overwhelming yet?

2. But still the game goes on. The in-bound pass goes to Josh Smith and he surveys the court, looking for an opening, but in that place inside him where there should be strength and hunger and aggression there is only the unshakable feeling that nobody gives a shit—that on this court, in this city, there is no difference between winning and losing—and so he puts up a 28-footer that misses everything.

3. To the extent that there's an actual problem with Atlanta sports fans, I suppose it would be the attendance, but even there it's hardly a crisis. Sure, there's room for improvement across the board, but the Braves and Falcons are in the top half of their leagues, and the Hawks aren't terribly far off. Only the Thrashers truly suffered from poor attendance, and they were a last-place team in a sport nobody cared about—I'm shocked they lasted as long as they did.

4. If my experience is any indication, Parker isn't being hyperbolic with the "are the Falcons playing today?" stuff. And he was wise to put the Falcons there instead of the Hawks—people are generally aware of the Falcons, whereas ill-informed curiosity would be a whole new level of prominence for the Hawks. In 2008 a friend and I went to an Atlanta bar to watch Game 6 against the Celtics—it was the Hawks' first playoff series in almost a decade, and merely by making it competitive they were wildly exceeding expectations. With about a minute left and the outcome still very much in doubt, a dozen people at a nearby table brought out a cake and launched into "Happy Birthday", completely oblivious to the game.
    (My other memory from that night is that after the broadcast ended a Cheers rerun came on, and nobody in the bar cared enough to change the channel. Imagine if this was Boston and the show was The Dukes of Hazzard—Waylon wouldn't make it to "never meanin' no harm" before something violent happened to the TV.)

The New Favre

I'm still holding on to shred of hope for another Brett Favre comeback. In fact, as long as he never throws another pass for the Falcons, I'm all in favor of Brett Favre continuing to retire and un-retire every year until he's dead. Is that an unpopular opinion? I'm guessing so, but I don't care. I like watching him play football, and, more importantly, when he's in the public spotlight there is a veritable planetary system of silliness and hyperbole in constant orbit around him, and I find every bit of it delightful. It's the same reason I like cable news and living in Florida.

But it's been a full year since the last time Favre took the Favre as a professional Favre,^[1] and the chances of another un-retirement (which would be number five, by my count) grow slimmer each day. Someone needed to fill the void, and holy crap, did someone ever do just that, and then some.

To declare so early in his career that Tim Tebow is the new Favre would be an overreaction of Favrian proportions, so I think we should go ahead and do it. The variety and sheer mass of the nonsense drawn in by Tebow's gravitational field is greater than Favre can even dream of (and clearly Favre does dream of such things). There's the small mountain of "what if Tebow were Muslim?" commentary.^[2] The actually-kind-of-plausible theory that the Broncos made Tebow their starter as part of a Major League-esque scheme to lose on purpose. This. And on and on. But my personal favorite so far is an article by Townhall.com's Katie Kieffer, titled "Tebow Sacks Socialism":

Tebow has All-American character. He espouses capitalistic values that are foundational to America: Competitiveness, ownership, responsibility, hard work, optimism, faith and persistence.

That's right. Tebow is a symbol of the virtues of capitalism. This is a person who, as far as I know, has never publicly weighed in on free market economics, or virtually any other political issue for that matter.^[3] So, what does Tebow have to do with capitalism?

In a capitalist society, leaders—whether they are the President of the United States, the CEO of a corporation or the quarterback for a football team—take responsibility. They don’t blame Congress, their shareholders or their fans. They focus on improving themselves and working harder to compete for a winning result.
…
Unlike Tebow, President Obama refuses to accept responsibility for the economic destruction he has unleashed via socialist policies like ObamaCare, bailouts, net neutrality regulations and by blocking oil production.

Probably this is just poor wording, but I did wonder for a second if there was a press conference where Tebow took responsibility for the recession and somehow I missed it. It wouldn't really surprise me if he did, simply out of politeness.

Anyway, more from Kieffer:

Football is competitive. There are winners and losers. Talent and hard work win; incompetence and laziness lose. Football rewards innovative risk-takers and analytical thinkers, not sentimental whiners. By instilling capitalistic principles, football builds leaders. In contrast, by discouraging competition, socialist principles encourage people to do the bare minimum, shirk responsibility and reject leadership.

Tebow lives his life in a way that embraces capitalistic principles and he is a leader because of his strong character.

Am I reading this wrong, or is she calling Blaine Gabbert a communist? Regardless, it's fantastically twisted logic. If the point is that successful athletes personify the basic principles of capitalism, then the quarterbacks we should be exalting include Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, and, ahem, Ben Roethlisberger. If the point is that "innovative risk-takers" are rewarded, then that ignores a fundamental tenet of capitalism, which is that sometimes they aren't (and nevermind that much of Tebow's NFL success can be attributed to being risk-averse).

Moreover, and I realize I'm well past the point of taking this too seriously, but football really isn't capitalistic, for the simple reason that in football there will always be an equal number of winners and losers.^[4] There can be no growth—average win totals are stagnant from year to year (at least, until the league goes to an 18-game schedule). Thus, playing to win is strategically identical to playing to cause your opponent to lose. In capitalism those two things are often different, and, at least in theory, you're always better off playing to win. If your competitors manage to win too, good for them.

But I'm not here to pick apart ill-conceived analogies. Well, I am, but also to say that I'm very much enjoying this, and I'm excited to see where it goes. What conservative talking point will Tebow's unconventional brand of marginally-above-average quarterbacking be shoehorned into next? Will his fearless running style be used to justify military intervention somewhere overseas? When a replay official overturns a Tebow touchdown, will Newt Gingrich cite it as further evidence of the threat judicial review poses to American values? And how long until he becomes a pawn in the ongoing War on the War on Christmas? The sky's the limit.

1. That was an homage to (or perhaps a ripoff of) this outstanding Deadspin headline: Tim Tebow Tebows 59-Yard Tebow To Force Tebowtime.

2. Answer: The amount of inexplicable animosity he generates by being openly Christian (and the counter-animosity his fans have for his detractors, and the counter-counter-animosity his detractors have for his fans) would look quaint by comparison.

3. Oh yeah, the abortion thing, when Tebow revealed that (a) he wasn't aborted, and (b) he's happy about that. These are both things that were already self-evident, but I guess when you say them out loud you're going to turn some heads.

4. Not to mention the flagrantly Marxist nature of the draft.

Newt Gingrich's Crusade Against the Courts

As I've pointed out before, politicians love issues that allow them to exploit fears and emotions without alienating large blocs of voters. Few such issues have given conservatives as much mileage in recent years as immigration, and Newt Gingrich should be commended for breaking from the ranks. Not only has he articulated a humane, reasonable immigration policy, he has also rejected one of the most reliable tools in the conservative arsenal for scoring cheap political points. So he uses the courts instead.

Gingrich describes his attitude toward the courts in section nine of his 21st Century Contract with America, which begins with the intriguing proposition that the Constitution serves as both the framework for the federal government and a set of power rankings:

The Judicial Branch did not come until Article III because the Founders wanted it to be the weakest of the three branches.

Thus, the Legislative and Executive branches get to square off for the championship, while the Judiciary will take on the Ratification Clause in the Fiesta Bowl.

Anyway, back to Newt:

The Federalist Papers explicitly recognized that the Judicial Branch would be weaker than the Legislative and Executive Branches. In Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton wrote reassuringly that the Judicial Branch would lose any confrontation with the two elected branches:

“the judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power; that it can never attack with success either of the other two.”

The Founding Fathers felt strongly about limiting the power of judges because they had dealt with tyrannical and dictatorial British judges.

A good rule of thumb: Never take a 25-word excerpt from a 223-year-old essay at face value. Short and to the point? Just one semicolon? No pointlessly elaborate double- or triple-negations? That's not the Alexander Hamilton I know. Here's the whole sentence (and here's a link to the full text):

It proves incontestably, that the judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power; that it can never attack with success either of the other two; and that all possible care is requisite to enable it to defend itself against their attacks.

Something tells me Newt didn't omit that last clause for the sake of brevity. It seems Hamilton's point wasn't that the judiciary should be weak, but that because it neither writes laws nor commands armies it is inherently weak, and therefore additional protections must be in place to ensure its equality with the other branches.

Newt's insistence that the judiciary was intended to be the weakest branch is, at best, dubious, but even more dubious is his insistence that the judiciary is now the strongest:

Since the New Deal of the 1930s, however, the power of the American judiciary has increased exponentially at the expense of elected representatives of the people in the other two branches. The judiciary began to act on the premise of “judicial supremacy,” where courts not only review laws, but also actively seek to modify and create new law from the bench. The result is that courts have become more politicized, intervening in areas of American life never before imaginable.

Really? The power of the judiciary has increased at the expense of the other two branches? We are talking about the same legislative branch that now uses the Commerce Clause to do any damn thing it wants, right? And the same executive branch that has decided it can unilaterally go to war? If anything, the courts have struggled to keep up.

But that's not how Newt sees it, obviously, and his campaign recently released an issue paper detailing his fears. From the introduction:

If the Supreme Court ruled that 2+2=5, would the executive and legislative branches have to agree? Would we have to pass a Constitutional amendment to overrule the Court and reassert that 2+2=4?

Yes, we would. And while we're at it, we should also pass an amendment prohibiting toddlers from serving on the Supreme Court.^[1]

Still, Newt's right that it can be scary to think about how much power is held by just nine people. And they aren't even elected, so those seats can be held by anyone! Well, anyone who can secure the nomination of the President, who is elected by a college of 538 citizens, who are in turn elected by the voters of each state, and who can then secure the approval of the Senate Judiciary Committee and at least 51 members (60 if the filibuster's in play) of the full Senate, each of whom are elected by the voters of their states.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the scariest thing about the Supreme Court isn't that the Justices are unelected; it's that they're chosen by the people who are.^[2]

But that's a discussion for another time. Much of the issue paper (which, at 54 pages, could really use a table of contents) is devoted to making the case that on issues like national security and marriage (and probably others—seriously Newt, table of contents next time) the courts have abrogated their duty to uphold the Constitution. These are, of course, among the most controversial issues of our time. Legal scholars have written thousands of pages in support of a variety of approaches to the constitutional questions they present. So when Newt says "[w]ere the federal courts to recognize such a right [to same sex marriage], it would be completely without constitutional basis," he's stating an opinion, not a universally-accepted truth. 2+2=4 is an accepted truth. That the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection doesn't extend to discrimination based on sexual orientation is not.

And that's what this all comes down to. The problem he's describing—judges usurping the other branches, creating their own laws, ignoring the Constitution, etc.—is very serious. It just isn't real.^[3] Clearly, Newt doesn't like some of the interpretations courts have applied to the Constitution, and in many cases neither do I, but I remain unconvinced that there's an epidemic of judicial roguery going on. There is, perhaps, an epidemic of judges interpreting the Constitution in ways Newt Gingrich disagrees with, but the solution to that is not to launch a crusade against the judiciary. The solutions are to (a) become President and appoint judges you like, and (b) calm the hell down, because there will always be people in positions of power who disagree about things.

But then he'd have to find something else to get people riled up about.

1. Of course, the Court doesn't have jurisdiction over disputes of simple arithmetic, but you wouldn't expect a toddler to know that.

2. Interesting that the officials who play a role in the judicial nominating process—the President and the members of the Senate—originally weren't elected by the people. Senators, of course, were chosen by state legislatures until 1913. The President is elected via the intermediary of the Electoral College, and a state's Electoral College delegation was, and still is, selected by a method of each state's choosing. Until around the 1820s a lot of states let their legislatures make that decision as well.

3. Well, some of it is real, but the severity is vastly overstated. Aside from the preposterous 2+2 hypothetical, the most absurd judicial overreach I've seen Newt talk about is that story out of San Antonio, where Judge Fred Biery ruled that a high school valedictorian couldn't include a prayer in her speech and that the school couldn't use terms with religious connotations like "amen" or "benediction". The ruling was overturned by a higher court two days later.
    So now Newt wants that judge impeached, which is fine, I guess—I suspect there's more to the story that we aren't hearing, but I don't care enough to find out—but how is that a major issue? (Answer: It's not. But the more Newt talks about it, the stronger the implication that this is a widespread problem, rather than a few isolated events.)

The Anti-Immigrant Republicans

In a recent column for Townhall.com, Bruce Bialosky took issue with a Wall Street Journal editorial on immigration:

They finish the editorial by stating – and here is where the WSJ editors join hands with the left – “Immigrants bring vitality and skills to the U.S. economy.” This clearly implies what liberals have alleged for years: that Republicans are anti-immigrant. I have never once seen a statement by a Republican presidential candidate against immigrants, and the editorial did not (and could not) cite one.

He makes an interesting point. We all know the default setting for a Republican candidate is extreme and uncompromising intolerance for illegal immigration, but is it really fair to call them anti-immigrant in the more general sense?

Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich have expressed support for establishing English as the official language, a non-solution to a non-issue that would serve primarily to reinforce the misconception that many who come here don't bother to learn English. Promoting the learning of English isn't inherently anti-immigrant, I suppose, but intentionally promulgating a false stereotype probably is, so that one's kind of a wash.

Herman Cain has been making what may or may not be jokes about lining the border with terrible death traps, but, you know, it's not like there'd be any visa-holders among the fatalities. Cain is also in favor of Alabama's new immigration law, which is a disaster in many, many ways. But, again, the law doesn't target legal immigrants—parts of it target undocumented workers, and parts of it target everyone with an accent or brown skin, regardless of citizenship or immigration status.^[1]

And then there are the sins of omission. The current immigration system is woefully ineffective—many who hope to immigrate legally are forced to wait in absurdly long lines, and even more are told there's no line they're eligible to wait in—and with a few exceptions (most notably Gary Johnson), the Republican candidates have shown no signs of giving a crap. For all their talk in other contexts of market forces and supply and demand, they've been inexcusably ignorant (or willfully dismissive) of the connection between economic conditions and immigration patterns.^[2]

Of course, even the candidates who use the harshest rhetoric on "illegals" are careful to avoid saying anything that can be construed as hostile toward legal immigrants—they're running for office, for Pete's sake—but they haven't said much in support of expanding the avenues for legal immigration either. Instead, they play into fears about illegal immigrants streaming across the border and having babies and taking our jobs and wallets and healthcare and whatever else isn't bolted down, offering only the occasional "first we need to get illegal immigration under control, and then we can talk about the dysfunctional visa process", as if there isn't a causal link between the two.

This is all to say that I think the Republican approach to immigration is, at best, severely misguided, and at worst, a shameful case of exploiting and exacerbating a genuine humanitarian problem for political gain.^[3] But hey, that's just my opinion, and it still doesn't answer the doubly-subjective (in terms of both policy and semantics) question of whether it's fair to characterize the hard-liners as anti-immigrant.

I found my answer when I went to the candidates' websites to see what they said on legal immigration. Not a whole lot, as it turns out, other than a few vague reaffirmations of their general support for the concept, but something else caught my attention:

Rick Perry:
As part of a broader tax reform strategy, I will also ask Congress to eliminate direct subsidies and tax credits that distort the energy marketplace. My plan levels the playing field, ending Obama’s anti-growth policies and opening a competitive marketplace to benefit American citizens.

Mitt Romney:
President Obama has neglected the fundamental tasks of creating jobs and growing our economy. Instead, he’s focused his efforts on an anti-jobs, anti-growth agenda that has significantly expanded the role of the federal government.

Michele Bachmann:
Researchers, entrepreneurs and investors across America have been paralyzed by this president’s anti-business policies that have created severe uncertainty. As president, I will signal by way of leadership to innovators, that the time has come to once again unleash the genius of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ working to create the wealth of the nation.

Newt Gingrich:
The fact is, we are not going to close the deficit and move towards a balanced budget unless we follow the policies that foster the economic growth necessary to create jobs.The first and most immediate step would be to employ the policies that encourage investment, create jobs, and reward innovation and entrepreneurship -- exactly the opposite of the Obama anti-jobs policies.

As long as the Republican candidates consider Obama anti-jobs/business/growth for favoring policies likely to be ineffective, or that betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation, or that come off as thinly-veiled attempts to distract and deceive voters, I'm going to go ahead and call them anti-immigrant for exactly the same reasons.

Seems fair to me.

1. The provision requiring law enforcement officers to check a detainee's immigration status applies only "where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States", and officers aren't allowed to consider race, color, or national origin "except to the extent permitted by the United States Constitution or the Constitution of Alabama". This is in no way the same as saying officers aren't allowed to consider race, color, or national origin.

2. And yet, they seem to think there is a connection between the ability of people to move to where economic conditions are better and the height of the physical obstacles we put in the way.

3. Politicians love issues that (a) people are ill-informed about, (b) arouse strong emotions, and (c) allow them to blame problems on groups lacking political power, and immigration is all three. If only there were some way to depict that graphically.