Argument By Snide Remark

Kevin Drum (pictured above) blogs for "Mother Jones," the venerable leftist rag that gave us "Pinto Madness" (1977).  Discussing the question of whether Mitch Daniels, Governor of Indiana, should run for the Republican presidential nominatiion, Drum writes:

But the usual question remains: how does he get through the primaries? When he hops over to Iowa, they'll expect him to denounce sharia law, make jokes about Obama's Kenyan birth, throw himself wholeheartedly into the culture wars, pretend that global warming is a liberal conspiracy, and make dire remarks about the specter of socialism taking over America. In other words, he'll have to act like a public clown, and if he doesn't do it, he'll lose. So it's pretty much a no-win scenario for him. If he's smart, he'll wait for 2016 and hope that the Republican Party has come to its senses by then. 

Noman doesn't take liberal advice to Republicans very seriously.  They already have their own party to ruin.  Offhand, Noman would reply that if Daniels believed as Drum did, that holding and espousing such beliefs are clownish, then Daniels probably wouldn't be fit to be the Republican Governor of Indiana, let alone President of the United States.  Moreover, on what grounds are any of these positions execrable?  Sneering aside, do liberals have anything to add to the public discourse?  Even a minute's consideration of Drum's list of topics that are supposedly beyond the pale of serious consideration indicates that you need to be a loon to peremptorily dismiss them, not to call for debate on them.

• Sharia Law - What's not to denounce?  If he means to say that conservatives fear sharia law in the US, he's wrong.  Conservatives fear Islamic terrorism--and dissipation of the public's will to fight it attributable to political correctness and insane liberal sentiment that ignores, dismisses, minimizes, or justifies it.  

• Obama's Kenyan Birth - Noman thought it was Indonesian.  Does Drum have information or evidence that the President himself, and the Governor of the State of Hawaii have not been able to produce?  Why should conservatives have to prove a negative when it should be so easy for liberals to prove the positive.  Perhaps lefties should perform the following thought experiment: Imagine that George Bush had been sired by a foreign revolutionary, and raised abroad in his youth.  Further imagine that he was unable to produce a US birth certificate in order to answer questions about his satisfaction of the Constitutional requirement.  Further imagine that his defenders attacked anyone who asked the question...

• Culture Wars - Drum seems to think that people he disagrees with should just give up, or, barring that, shut up.  Noman sees the light.  What a wonderful world the sexual revolution has actually brought us.  In just 50 short years we've liberated the culture from the evils of stable marriages, commitment and promise keeping, safe wombs, masculine men, feminine women, moderate politics, modesty, self-control, disease free love-making, and joyful procreation.  Alarums by Churchmen and others about the "Culture of Death" are just manifestations of misogyny, homophobia, and medieval superstition.

• Global Warming - What does this man make of the revelations at East Anglia, or of honestly verified data indicating that the planet has been cooling for decades?  Never mind.  The sky is falling; the sky is falling!  And the only 'correct' option is to immediately regulate procreation, shackle the free market, and forcibly redistribute wealth from developed to less developed nations.  Wait a minute. Weren't those the goals of the Soviet Union?

• Socialism Taking Over America - Nah.  President Obama is for the free market.  He says so, and that settles it.  We can forget that the Government just took over the 16% of the economy that is health care; nationalized two of the big three automobile manufacturers; forayed through the balance sheets and capital structures of the nation's biggest banks; took possession of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which between them own or guarantee $5 trillion of mortgages; assumed greater control of the credit allocation process via the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and is treating carbon--what humans exhale--as a regulable toxic substance.  Also, ignore government's deficit spending, which is projected to exceed receipts by well over $1 trillion dollars every year for a decade, and longer; the public debt, which skyrocketed from $9 trillion to $14 trillion during Pelosi-Reid's four-year fantasy party on Capitol Hill; and Democratic insistence on raising taxes as the answer to every public ill.  Nothing to worry about hear.  Let's MoveOn.org.

Noman says "three cheers for conservative clowns."  They're preferable to the alternative.  And may the Republican Party never come to its senses in the way Drum counsels.