But nooooooo, said Keehan. The bishops were being irrational and engaging in fearmongering.

Then came another “devout” Catholic, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius who ruled that health insurance provided by Catholic organizations had to provide “reproductive health services” and suddenly Keehan found that not only was she wrong, she was clueless.

Today, the Obama Administration announced that it was pressing ahead with its plan to require contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients to be included in all medical plans by the mechanism of having the insurance carrier provide those services for “free” regardless if the policy held by an employer covered those items. Who was first in line to affix herself to Obama’s fourth point of contact: none other than the egregiously stupid Carol Keehan.

Really one shouldn’t be surprised at this. In the interview linked above, Keehan basically endorses abortion:

Why did the U.S. bishops and other pro-life leaders oppose the final legislation’s approach to abortion?

Many people are uncomfortable with it because it will allow more people to be in plans that cover abortion, even though no federal dollars are used. That is not a happy thought.

On the other hand, it is also not a happy thought that women who are at 300 percent of the poverty level and below have abortions at four times the rate of women in any other socioeconomic group. We haven’t found ways to reach out to those women.

Lest you think I am unfair to Keehan, you need only to read her objection to HHS allowing minors to buy the abortifacient “Plan B.”

Back in December 2010, Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix withdrew Catholic standing from St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix and formally excommunicated Sister Margaret McBride for conducting at least one abortion at the hospital. Naturally, Keehan weighed in against the Bishop and the opinion of the actual doctor who advised the diocese on the matter.

Again and again we are seeing this behavior by a disturbing number of Catholics who really should know better. Their romance with Obama has become their lodestar and if endorsing abortion and inviting someone who declared that killing a child who had survived an abortion was just dandy to give a commencement address at Notre Dame was what it took to get that leg tingling then so be it.

These people may not yet be as vile as the kapos who led fellow prisoners to the gas chambers but they are certainly the philosophical fellow travelers of Pierre Laval and Vidkun Quisling.

From the White House statement:

Under the new policy announced today, women will have free preventive care that includes contraceptive services no matter where she works.

If a woman works for religious employers with objections to providing contraceptive services as part of its health plan, the religious employer will not be required to provide contraception coverage but her insurance company will be required to offer contraceptive care free of charge.

If we actually believe that in the real world TANSTAAFL is an immutable fact, who, then, is actually paying for the “free of charge” contraception and abortifacient cover. My guess is that the employer whose employees are getting the “free of charge” service is going to see their bill go up.

This is not a trivial issue. This is an attack, one of several staged by this Administration, on religious freedom. One hopes that the Catholic Church and other religious groups see through this charade and continue to oppose the supplanting of conscience by federal regulations.

Mitt Romney‘s 1992 Democratic Primary vote for Paul Tsongas — a technocratic modernizer and reformer, but very much a Democrat — raised some Republican eyebrows last week.

What hasn’t been mentioned: Romney’s vote formally enrolled him in the Democratic Party. more…

For anyone who either believes in leprechauns or that Mitt Romney is a conservative this should be of significance, especially since his minions haunted this site making much of the fact that Rick Perry was a Democrat before 1989.

The speculation is that Romney had originally intended to challenge Ted Kennedy in the Democrat primary then decided to run as a Republican. This makes his 1994 campaign strategy much more understandable.

According to a Romney campaign spokesperson, Romney “switched back.” One doesn’t know how Romney managed to “switch back.” According to the town clerk, Romney became an Republican only on October 19, 1993. The implication is that Romney had either never voted between his registration as a independent in 1979 and 1992 (so his vote in 1992 automatically enrolled him as a Democrat) or that he was a regular Democrat voters in those earlier elections and changed to Republican to run for Senate.

Now I’m off to National Review and Jennifer Rubin’s precious little blog to read some more on how conservative Willard Romney is.

… Today the department is announcing that the final rule on preventive health services will ensure that women with health insurance coverage will have access to the full range of the Institute of Medicine’s recommended preventive services, including all FDA -approved forms of contraception. Women will not have to forego these services because of expensive co-pays or deductibles, or because an insurance plan doesn’t include contraceptive services.

The cateory of “all FDA-approved forms of contraception” includes the abortifacients like the “morning after pill.” At the same time I couldn’t help but note that the group of health plans provided by “non-profit religious employers” who do not support contraception winnows the field down rather quickly to those provided by either the Catholic Church or one of its social service or medical subsidiaries.

The best is yet to come.

By way of full disclosure, I’m Roman Catholic. I’m a convert who became Catholic with eyes wide open rather than a “cradle Catholic” who was born into the religion. As such I’ve never ceased to be amazed at the antics of many of our Church leadership. I write it off to equal parts cognitive dissonance and a pathological desire to be popular.

The Democrat party has been anti-Catholic in its political positions since George McGovern ran for president yet the priesthood and heirarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in America tend to hail from Democrat constituencies. So on the one hand the Magesterium is teaching very traditional social values while on the other it is embracing without even a hint of credulity every lefty scheme that comes down the pike.

For instance, in 1983, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops declared nuclear weapons to be immoral and weren’t terribly fond of deterrence either. By 1988 they had decided SDI was destabliizing as was the US linking a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan to future arms treaties. When communist terrorists were trying to create a people’s paradise in El Salvador, many of our bishops ignored what was happening to personal libery under the Sandinistas in Nicaragua as they stumbled over themselves to create the “sanctuary movment”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_movement

Without putting too fine a point on it but there was no daylight between the position of the Magesterium and that of the Kremlin on these issues.

Not that they are all commies or anything. But there were MOVEMENTS out there that had freakin Pete Seeger singing protest songs and James Earl Jones and Ed Asner at their rallies. How could you not be in favor of these things?

Similar stampedes took place on global warming and immigration.

This is where the cognitive dissonance comes in. When given the choice between seeming to endorse a religious conservative for office and seeming to endorse a heterodox leftist there is no limit to the contortions a large share of our bishops won’t put themselves through to help the lefty. To wit: by the black letter of the Catechism of the Catholic Church supporting abortion is forbidden. If a public figure does so this failure is compounded by “scandal”, that is, an action that could cause others to question their faith. The fact that there are very few bishops in the nation who have taken steps to discipline pro-abort advocates and politicians especially when they proclaim themselves to be devout.

The second strain is the want to be liked. For most of American history, Catholics were THE OTHER. It was a foreign religion practiced by all manner of foreigners who either couldn’t speak English (Italians, Poles, etc.) or who could barely speak it (the Irish, it goes without saying). What other religion still has amendments to state constitutions directly aimed at its religious schools?

Just when things were going well with JFK (another devout Catholic) in the White House, he gets killed and the whole counter culture begins. If there was anything less cool in the 1960s than being in ROTC it was being a Catholic who believed in monogamy and abstinence until marriage not to mention avowing any religion that did not use mind altering drugs. Being cool is still important and despite his views on abortion Obama, that epitome of coolness, was invited to give a commencement address at a Catholic university.

This mindset was most egregiously on display during the 2008 election. The Catholic heirarchy — and I have to digress here for a moment to emphasize that we have many traditional bishops in this country who have fought the good fight for decades — wanted to catch the Hope-and-Change wave and had a problem: Barrack Obama loves him some abortion. Not just plain vanilla abortion. He is in favor of partial birth aboriton. He is in favor of killing a kid who happens to survive the abortion procedure.

Demonstrating again a contortionist skill that would gain them employment at any county fair in the country the bishops issued a document called “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship.”

As first blush it looks like a strong statement in favor of life which would not have helped Obama, or any other elected Democrat for that matter, until one reads deeper.

34. Catholics often face dificult choices about how to vote. This is why it is so important to vote according to a well-formed conscience that perceives the proper relationship among moral goods. A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who takes a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, such as abortion or racism, if the voter’s intent is to support that position. In such cases a Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in grave evil. At the same time, a voter should not use a candidate’s opposition to an intrinsic evil to justify indifference or inattentiveness to other important moral issues involving human life and dignity.

35. There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position may decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons. Voting in this way would be permissible only for truly grave moral reasons, not to advance narrow interests or partisan preferences or to ignore a fundamental moral evil.

In other words if you feel like the opposition to the war in Iraq or midnight basketball or furthering the ends of labor unions or any other pet peeve are “morally grave reasons” you can vote for the pro-abort. And they got what they wanted: American Catholics gave a majority of their votes to Obama.

Then came Obamacare which gave the bishops a real taste of what happens when you create a moral equivalence between universal health care and abortion. You get them both.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops was heartbroken and gobsmacked, or gobsmacked and heartbroken, when they got the bad news about the elimination of an exemption for religious conscience in health plans.

President Obama telephoned Archbishop Dolan on Friday morning to tell him of the decision, said a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The pair had discussed the issue during a November meeting, during which the archbishop “got the message that they could work together,” said the spokeswoman, Sister Mary Ann Walsh.

The issue was likely to form the “backdrop to future relations,” she said. “It’s too big to ignore… the elephant is tramping around in the sanctuary.”

An administration official on Tuesday confirmed the call was made on Friday and reiterated comments made by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that the administration is committed to its partnerships with faith-based groups.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D., Conn.), a Catholic who supports abortion rights and access to contraception, said she thought the White House had handled the decision “very well” by being open to listening to religious leaders. “Contraception is about preventing unintended pregnancy,” she said. “I think that they did what they needed to do.”

So up until November Archbishop Dolan was being led to believe that he and the Obama Administration could work together and there would be a conscience exemption in the health care reform regulations and then he gets a call telling him that he’s been played for a chump.

It is really difficult to understate the cultural significance of this decision. If Congress doesn’t intervene and we end up with a pro-abort in the White House, which seems virtually certain regardless of how Obama fares in November, it is hard to see how this precedent will not be applied first to euthanasia, which seems to be the next big thing, and then to abortion. If left as it is, it really marks the end of independent churches in the United States.

The decision even managed to concern the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne, another of the “smells and bells” Catholics on the left, or Catholycs as my friend Tom Crowe terms them, whose collective ass gets tired when confronted with the whole issue of morality.

One of Barack Obama’s great attractions as a presidential candidate was his sensitivity to the feelings and intellectual concerns of religious believers. That is why it is so remarkable that he utterly botched the admittedly difficult question of how contraceptive services should be treated under the new health care law.

His administration mishandled this decision not once but twice. In the process, Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus and strengthened the hand of those inside the Church who had originally sought to derail the health care law.

Reading all of this I was reminded of one of my favorite jokes, involving a guy in a bar and leprechaun. I won’t retell it here because this is a family website but I will link to one of the many variations here.

And I’d like to ask Archbishop Dolan and a lot of other members of our heirarchy, “You’re how old? And you still believe in leprechauns?”

That isn’t an exact quote but it is very close.

We are constantly told by Romney‘s supporters, at least those who can still bear the humiliation of being associated with the man, that he’s conservative. Not only is he conservative but he governed Massachusetts as a conservative. Never mind the increased state support of abortion rights, Romneycare, carbon caps, and his opposition to a Traditional Marriages amendment that his wife supported. The fact that he ran to the left of Fat Teddy in 1994 is just… airbrushed or I suppose we could say they are PhotoShopped.

So how did he run for governor? In his own words he tells this particular group of voters in 2002

“I think people recognize that I am not a partisan Republican. That I’m someone who is moderate, and that my views are progressive.”

This is a man who, if elected, will throw conservatives and conservatism under the bus because he is a Northeastern liberal Republican.

There.

I said it.

Seven or eight months ago I would have called the nice guys in white coats if I’d even thought the thought but today it is not only thinkable it may be necessary.

I was just pondering Erick’s early morning post and it struck me that this is where I am:

I do know. And if I must choose between Mitt and Newt, I would choose Newt in a heart beat. It is hard to dislike a guy who can filet his opponent with a smile and a side of fava beans and a nice chianti.

But are we sure he’s the guy?

Battered old infantrymen don’t get invited to a lot of elite parties, especially ones that involve a lot of fun people and really good food, so when I accepted such an invitation last year to a small gathering featuring Newt Gingrich there was no way I was going to turn it down. I’ve never been a Gingrich fan, per se. I loved it when he was Minority Whip and hijacked the nascent power of C-SPAN to excoriate Tip O’Neill’s majority and when he drove Speaker Jim Wright from power. And then there was the metaphorical storming of the castle in 1994. Great theater, to be sure, but against that has to be balanced the failures of 1995 through 1998. Failures that can largely be laid at the feet of Mr. Gingrich.

On a personal level, I found his treatment of the Battle of Gettysburg (Gettysburg, co-authored by Gingrich and William Forstchen) to be much more insightful than 99% of the historical works and wanted to bend his ear about a pet theory of mine.

The party was everything it was billed to be and more.

My key takeaways were: 1) Newt is an extraordinarily smart guy, 2) he knows that, 3) he won’t rest easy until you know that, and 4) he’s not a guy with natural leadership talent. I’ve been in similar environments with (okay, I’ll name drop) Bobby Jindal and John Boehner and they both fill a room with their presence and have the rare ability to make you think they are really interested in the point you’re making, regardless of the merits of the point.

The other thing that was really obvious is that he is an idea generating machine. The man has the savant’s ability to tie together disparate threads and weave a convincing narrative and seemingly plausible ideas from those threads. Note I said “seemingly plausible.” This set my teeth on edge because I served under a couple of guys like that in the Army and they kill organizations. A constant stream of ideas from the boss will just flog an organization into numb indifference. You stop doing anything because before you can accomplish Idea A you’ve received directions for implementing Idea N. Or as General Sir Alan Brooke said of Churchill, “Winston had 10 ideas every day, only one of which was good, and he did not know which it was”.

When he intimated he was going to create an exploratory committee for a prospective presidential run early in 2011 I had two thoughts 1) he’s kidding, right? and 2) he has a new book coming out.

As the campaign season began, I was a resigned if unenthusiastic Romney supporter. But, as I feared, the people fluffing Romney were so odious that supporting Romney during the primaries became impossible.

My personal choice is Rick Perry for a variety of reasons. Unfortunately for the country, there are a lot of people out there who correlate glibness with intelligence. It’s a false correlation on a lot of levels. I’m afraid, however, Rick Perry blew a winning hand with his debate performances. Anyone who says he is dumb should evaluate where they are in their career versus where Perry is before slinking away in shame but one of the features of our age is that a meme can be created in seconds and no amount of effort will change that. As the poet said:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit,
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

So while I hope Governor Perry can pull this out, I’m not willing to bet $10,000 on it.

This leaves me between Romney and Gingrich.

The more I see of Romney the less there is to like. His much touted business experience amounts to serving a company which specialized in the financial equivalent of Arab slave raids rather than creating products and jobs. I don’t see his business experience as being superior to that of Gingrich who has developed several successful companies. Romney’s tenure as Massachusetts governor was not only not conservative but it was disastrous for the State GOP. When Romney took office in 2003 the Massachusetts House had a 136D/23R mix. By his last year in office that mix was 141/19. While one can argue that nominating liberal judges, supporting gay marriage, initiating carbon caps, and imposing a health insurance mandate were all mitigated by Romney — I think that is booshwah but I’ll stipulate it for this essay — one thing that was his responsibility as governor was electing Republicans. There is no way to blame the decimation of the Massachusetts GOP on anyone else.

What we’re left with in Romney is a clear picture of a man with no guiding principles beyond self interest. That is a recurring theme at Bain, as Massachusetts governor, and in now two runs for the presidency. He seems by all accounts to be a pleasant guy, unless you actually refuse to genuflect in his presence as Brett Baier discovered, and good family man. Of course, if you’re his dog, you better learn to like the view from the roof of his car.

I have a lot of doubts about Gingrich. He has a self destructive tendency. He has hubris by the truckload. He does not, in my estimation, build deep loyalty in his staff. Infidelity… While his changes in positions, to me, are mitigated by the fact that his bread and butter since 1998 has been in being quotable and provocative. This stands in contrast to Romney’s innumerable positions which were taken either while he was running for office or in the single instance in which he was actually elected to something. But still I do have concerns over what next great idea a President Gingrich may come up with. Different contexts and different causes for worry.

Beating an incumbent is always difficult and Obama looks to be the most beatable incumbent since Jimmy Carter. But we always have to keep in mind that we are defending a House majority and we are within striking distance of taking the Senate in 2012 as well as trying to take the presidency. Which, between Gingrich and Romney, will do the best job of winning seats down ballot. There is no question. Gingrich ended a half century Democrat monopoly in the House. Romney could not run for re-election in Massachusetts. Yes, Romney is not a professional politician but it is the voters not Romney that have seen to that.

In the final analysis, I think Gingrich will become a street brawler in order to win and I think Romney thinks the position is owed to him. Against Barack Obama I know who wins and in the final analysis we are in this to win.

When the man involved is fabulously wealthy and from a prominent family with privileged upbringing it is just insulting.

Still stinging from his rather bizarre offer to gift Governor Rick Perry $10,000 during the last of the interminable debates — I say gift rather than bet because Romney‘s book did get the Soviet May Day picture treatment before his latest attempt to become a professional politician — the Romney campaign has now set out to make Mitt v 467753.1: Romney the common man.
From Politico: Mitt Romney Begins Humanizing Campaign

In the past 24 hours, the former Massachusetts governor has talked about his father, experiences while working as a missionary that weren’t even in his memoir — and twice in two days, he’s brought up the Mormon faith that he’s until now largely steered clear of.

For a candidate who’s developed a reputation for stiffness after years spent focusing on his professional background and business expertise, it’s a sizable rhetorical pivot — and one that coincided with a renewed effort by his GOP rivals and Democrats to make an issue of his personal wealth following the the awkward $10,000 bet he offered Rick Perry during Saturday night’s debate.

While even Romney’s wife apparently thought the offer to bet Rick Perry was somewhat bizarre:

When a reporter asked Romney whether he regretted offering the bet, he tried to play down the incident with humor. “After the debate was over, Ann came up and gave me a kiss and said I was great,” Romney said, adding that his wife joked to him: “There are a lot of things you do well. Betting isn’t one of them.”

It seems that Romney was most galled by the juxtaposition of this challenge to Rick Perry’s story of being raised on a cotton farm.

Today, from the Politico story, we have this jewel:

“Most of the apartments I lived in had no refrigerators,” Romney told a crowd of 300 at a VFW hall here Sunday afternoon, launching into a long anecdote about life as a Mormon missionary in France that touched on the difficulties of shopping before every meal and living in buildings without a shower.

“If we were lucky, we actually bought a hose and we stuck it on the sink, and we’d hold there with the hose and the big bucket underneath us in the kitchen and wash ourselves that way,” Romney said. “And so, I lived in a way that people of lower-middle income in France lived and said to myself, ‘Wow, I sure am lucky to have been born in the United States of America.’”

One hardly knows what to make of this. In 1965, Mitt Romney was selected to undertake a missionary assignment in France (quick! what else was happening in 1965 but not in France) he drew a salary and lived in the manner of a lower middle income French family. He stayed in places that didn’t have a proper toilet or refrigerator. He had to shop every day. The freakin horror of it all.

If we ever needed more evidence that Romney is an out of touch rich guy in search of a hobby, this story gives us all we need. I understand next week the campaign is going to leak that Romney secretly likes to chow down on whitefish roe instead of Beluga caviar.

“If Governor Romney would like to give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain, then I would be glad to then listen to him. And I will bet you $10, not $10,000, that he won’t take the offer.”

It is about time someone said this.

As I’ve noted before the whole “flip flopper” line of attack from the White House is kabuki directed a GOP primary voters. The real line of attack will be “Romney vs The 99%.” How Romney handles this particular line of attack will be a clue as to how badly he would get beaten as the GOP nominee. I suspect just as Romney and his lemmings have convinced themselves his multitude of sacred principles are irrelevant they will also convince themselves that Americans don’t care about friends and neighbors losing the jobs so Romney and his friends could pose with currency stuffed in their clothes.

This is just to take a brief time out from politics to reflect on the event that, arguably, more than any other in that century determined America’s role in the world.

None of us here at RedState saw this coming. Yeah, all of Romney’s oppo drops somehow made their way into NRO after a bit of stenography by Katrina Trinko but we thought surely they won’t make the same mistake they did in 2008 when they essentially ended up atop Romney’s car in the same crate as his dog. They won’t go back to the days of KLo’s palpitating heart being audible every time you read an NRO article. We were wrong. That’s where they are.

Jim Geraghty thinks he was maltreated by me in the story. I think Jim protests too much.

From Geraghty’s daily newsletter, “Morning Jolt”, which excerpts this story at Campaign Spot:

Unsurprisingly, those who preferred somebody besides Newt loved it; Newt fans insisted that it was A) evidence that NR will endorse Romney B) evidence that I’ve been bought off by Mitt Romney C) a tirade (somehow quoting Newt constitutes a tirade) D) RINO!

It’s just so farshtunken tiresome.

Streiff at RedState suggests I’m a “gnome,” scoffing, “I’m sure there is an army of gnomes out there, this very instant, researching every exotic statement Gingrich has uttered in his career. This will be a full employment plan not only for those gnomes but their children because every time Gingrich has had a thought he has told a newspaper somewhere about it.”

Of course. I suppose all true conservatives shrug nonchalantly at the thought of a candidate and potential president who feels the need to publicly proclaim every thought that comes into his head.

First and foremost, thanks for the link and the traffic. It is always appreciated and hopefully those stats will push me into the five-figure bonus range this year.

There are two other points that need to be addressed.

The term “gnome” wasn’t directed at Jim, no matter how short he may be, it was referring to the people who slave away in the oppo research operations of campaigns. Jim says he personally found the quotes he used in his story yesterday and was not the beneficiary of an oppo dump.

The second point to be made is more important. Apparently pointing out the obvious, that since he left the Speakership, Newt has been paid good money to say edgy and outrageous things makes one a Gingrich supporter… which at this stage I am not. If we take Geraghty’s argument to its logical conclusion then any lawyer who has worked both sides of an issue is a flip-flopper. The point is that Gingrich’s livelihood since leaving Congress has depended on being a lecturer or pundit that could be guaranteed to say thought provoking things. Some of those things sounded stupid even at the time.

Does the fact that some of these statement, and by some I mean a lot, conflict with his current positions make him a Romneyesque flip-flopper. I don’t think so. Gingrich differs from Romney as a flip-flopper in an important way. The multitude of positions Romney has taken have all — 100% of them — occurred in the context of Romney either promising to do them if elected or doing them the one time he managed to get elected. This is the pattern of a man with the impeccable sense of direction of a weather vane. Gingrich, and I say this from having spent several hours is a small group setting with him, likes to toss out ideas as “what ifs” and play with them. They are different behaviors in the way that the discussion you have with a used car salesman or telecom telemarketer is different from the discussion you have with a bunch of friends over a few beers. It is a different context.

Geraghty is apparently unable to fathom what I believe should be obvious to anyone and pulls the victim card by acting as though he has been read out of the conservative movement (“I suppose all true conservatives shrug nonchalantly”, oh, puuhh-leeze). No one who has read RedState more than once believes that I have 1) either called myself a “true conservative” or, more importantly, 2) been called a “true conservative” by anyone.

He goes on to max out his victim card by using the ever popular appeal to authority, he points to Mark Steyn’s opinion.

While I enjoy Steyn and Limbaugh I don’t necessarily think either has a pipeline to the truth. In some cases they are simply wrong, such as Rush’s recent full-throated defense of an indefensible Herman Cain. In this case Steyn gloms onto some obscure reference from another oppo drop (also in NRO) based on a 1997 essay in The Weekly Standard. He fails to mention that Gingrich wrote the foreword to Rick Perry’s Fed Up. How are we to reconcile a statement that seminar notes written by Gingrich in 1997 are more important to determining his views of government than a 2010 book foreword? You can’t and be credible.

There is plenty of fertile ground out there to criticize Gingrich. Whether any of it rises to the level of a deal breaker with GOP primary voters remains to be seen. His personal travails and ethics problems in Congress are baked into Gingrich’s public persona. We already know this. This eleventh hour effort by the Paul and Romney campaigns to paint Gingrich as a flip-flopper is simply a self-beclowning at which both those campaigns are deadly efficient.

The truth of the matter is that absent some catastrophic foot shot or, more likely, spectacular organizational equivalent of the China Syndrome that brings the campaign to its knees it is increasingly easy to see Gingrich running away with the nomination.

Personally, I don’t consider Gingrich to be a movement conservative by any stretch of the imagination but we are coming down to a point where a candidate must be chosen. If it comes down to Romney or Gingrich there is no doubt in my mind that Gingrich is a stronger candidate and will do less damage to our cause if he wins than will Romney.

A sample

In June 2005, the New York Times raved about a “balanced and thoughtful” report from a bipartisan task force headed by Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader, declaring, “Lawmakers should take the time to at least thumb through this report, especially those who have been demanding Secretary General Kofi Annan’s resignation, supporting the ill-conceived nomination of John Bolton as the United States ambassador to the United Nations and backing the latest benighted attempt to withhold America’s legally obligated dues.”

In October 2005, Gingrich called for “universal but confidential” DNA testing.

In April 2006, Gingrich appeared to suggest that too many U.S. troops were in Iraq.

I’m sure there is an army of gnomes out there, this very instant, researching every exotic statement Gingrich has uttered in his career. This will be a full employment plan not only for those gnomes but their children because every time Gingrich has had a thought he has told a newspaper somewhere about it.

In the long run, I think this exercise is a wash because anyone who supports Gingrich has already factored in his stream of consciousness style.

Earlier today I posted a story on why I believe that contrary to what the Establishment would have us believe that Mitt Romney is actually the least electable candidate in the GOP primary. As today is a slow day I decided to follow up this well-received post with a supplementary one.

Not only is Romney not exciting the GOP base… which he has to do if is to win the primary… but his history leaves him open to an attack that will resonate with middle America.

The above photo features a younger Mitt Romney (in the center, naturally) when he was part of Bain Capital. Get used to seeing it. It will be on busses and billboards across the nation if Romney wins the nomination. And it will be the image people take into the voting booth on Election Day.

(h/t to izoneguy for the tip)

Moderator Wolf Blitzer opened Tuesday’s Republican debate by introducing himself and adding, for some reason, “Yes, that’s my real name.” A few moments later, the party’s most plausible nominee for president said the following: “I’m Mitt Romney, and yes, Wolf, that’s also my first name.”

But it’s not. Mitt is the candidate’s middle name. His first name is Willard.

And people wonder why this guy has an authenticity problem?

For a while Dem strategists have been making public pronouncements on Romney’s seeming inability to distinguish fact from fiction and his near pathological instinct to make his audience believe he is just like them. Even Jon Stewart has poked fun at Romney’s flip flops.

When the election season started I was convinced that even though I did not like Romney, he was the most electable candidate in the pack. Since then I’ve changed my views. Romney can’t win in a general election because very few people, outside the 20% who like his hair and a handful of devoted fluffers, will vote for the man.

He will lose a lot of conservatives because we fear that he will energetically return to his past persona as a liberal New England governor if he is elected. As the GOP winning the Senate in 2012 is very close to a “gimme” we have to ask: can conservatism survive a President Romney and a Senate Majority Leader McConnell?

He will lose a lot of GOP, as opposed to conservative, support because he is a supremely smarmy and untrustworthy character whose core value is defined by a strong belief that he should be president and nothing more.

While Plouffe and Carville are validating our feelings about Romney’s squishiness, the real attack, the one that will strip away the moderate center that Romney has been relying on is waiting in the wings.

Obama can’t attack Romney as a flip-flopper because many of the flips and flops Romney has held dear at one time or another are actually Obama’s own positions. The Romney response to that line of attack in a national election is easy: I held that position then but have sense developed information that makes me believe it was incorrect and I have changed it and everyone want’s a pragmatic president who can change his mind, right?

The main attack will be on Romney’s long time affiliation with the corporate chop-shop known as Bain Capital. In an environment were most people are concerned about their jobs and virtually everyone is angry at Wall Street, Romney will be the perfect poster boy for the 1% that the “99%” rails on and on about.

So abandoned by conservatives, the GOP, and moderates who is left as his logical constituency? The same tiny group of admirers that follow him today.

I don’t know if Newt Gingrich or Rick Perry can beat Obama. What I am positive of is that Mitt Romney cannot win a general election against any national Democrat figure. The only saving grace is that he probably can’t win a GOP primary either.

Michele Bachmann just weighed in on “Debategate,” telling Whispers that the media is trying to pick the Republican presidential winner, cutting voters out of the process.

“There’s always a suspicion of maybe a bias and I guess this just confirmed it,” she said of a CBS memo before Saturday’s debate, which suggested that the Minnesota Republican congresswoman would be ignored during the foreign policy chatfest.

The memo, she said, “demonstrates that the media wants to choose who our nominee will be and who the next president of the United States will be.”

After Herman Cain’s EPIC editorial board session with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, his supporters are making the same claim.

This is just wrong. While I wouldn’t deny that the media favors candidates of both parties in a flavor-of-the-week style, I’ve seen no evidence that they are terribly successful or adept at actually picking them. In 2000, John McCain was the media favorite. In 2008, Mitt Romney held that mantle. For 2004, John Kerry was the triumph of electability as the media swooned in quick succession over John Edwards, Wesley Clark, and Howard Dean.

Bachmann’s argument seems to believe that the little attention paid to her in the last debates is an effort by the media to crush her candidacy. To the contrary, the little attention paid to her is a function of her campaign that is about one degree away from rigor mortis. Why is she in that postion? Because the media gave her a soapbox in an earlier debate and she marginalized herself. The Milwaukee JS invited Herman Cain to an editorial board session because they were under the illusion that he was a serious candidate. If his self-swirly didn’t disabuse them of that notion, nothing will.

The media didn’t make Rick Perry forget his points. The media hasn’t made Romney take at least three positions on every issue of interest to conservatives. The media didn’t put Newt Gingrich on the sofa with Nancy Pelosi. All the media can do is work with the material the candidates give them.

The media only likes one thing more than a good story: selling a story whether good or bad. If anything, the failing of the debates, other than there being one every night, is that implausible candidates like Huntsman, Bachmann, Santorum, and Paul are still invited. It is hard to reconcile this clown car aspect of the debates with a desire by the media to do anything but have more debates to cover.

This whining and caviling about the media choosing a candidate is ridiculous. It is an excuse made by losers and for losers.

One can nearly say that the Berlin wall disappeared just about as fast as it went up. It started when the East German army and police closed the border between the Russian sector of Berlin and those sectors administered by the United States, British, and French just after mid-night on the night of August 12-13, 1961 in response to an order signed by Walter Ulbricht. Berliners awoke to find their city divided.

It ended in much the same way. At a news conference on the afternoon of November 9, 1989 Guenter Schabowski, spokesman for the East German regime, announced that effective immediately that travel to West Berlin was permitted. It was broadcast at 7:17 pm and within minutes the six crossing points were jammed with hundreds, if not thousands, East Berliners demanding to leave. The border police stood aside and that was it. The Wall was over.

What follows is a story told just for the sake of telling. So proceed at your own risk.

I have a very soft place in my heart for Berlin.

Berlin was my first assignment to a tactical unit as an Army officer. I’d spent a year and a half as a basic training company cadre and had begged and wheedled my way into being “levied”, as it was called, for Germany. I arrived in Frankfurt/Main after about 24 hours of traveling was pointed toward the train station and caught the “duty train” for Berlin. The train had to transit the intra-German frontier after dark. The train left Frankfurt around 8pm and I stayed awake to watch the crossing. Besides, if you’ve ever gone for a prolonged period without sleep you are aware of the that second wind you get, when you suddenly feel as though you aren’t tired. We made the epic crossing at Marienborn around 3am and all I saw of the ENEMY that September morning was a bored border guard under the yellow sodium vapor light standing on a platform. At Marienborn the West German electric locomotives were replaced with diesels for the run to Berlin. We arrived around 6am, I was now on my second day without sleep in a uniform that had been worn for about 30 hours.

A duty driver delivered me to my new home, Fourth Battalion, Sixth United States Infantry and McNair Barracks, aka The Gator Farm (why, you might rightly ask, would a barracks in Berlin, hardly tropical, be called the “The Gator Farm.” During my time there the Berlin Brigade was composed of 2d, 3d, and 4th battalions of the 6th Infantry all billeted at McNair Barracks. The 6th Infantry crest featured an alligator.)

I quickly found myself, and by quickly I mean around noon, assigned to Charlie Company as a rifle platoon leader and was taken by the other officers to the mess hall for lunch. One of them gave me a ride to housing and from their to transient quarters where, about 60 hours into my trip, I was able to shower and change clothes (ever worn nylon socks and corfram shoes for three days and took them off without a breathing apparatus handy? I don’t recommend it).

I had visions of crashing until the next day but that was not to be. Shortly after five there was pounding on my door and I was hauled out, stuffed in a battered VW station wagon, and headed out for a night on Berlin with about a dozen other officers from the battalion. The driver was our intel officer who acquired fleeting notoriety a couple years later for answering the door dressed in a toga and wearing an Afrika Korps helmet much to the surprise of the MPs who had been called because our party was too loud. Food. Beer. The midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the rickety firetrap Tali Kino in Kreutzberg, in what I found out was known as the “Turkish Sector” of Berlin. The crowd was all Germans, fully costumed as only Germans can be when they really throw themselves into something. I’d been to two goat ropes and a county fair and never seen anything like that before. More beer and food at a corner kneipe under the gaze of a sleepy barman who was willing to put up with us as long as we were spending money. Back to transient quarters, shower, change, and catch the shuttle to McNair Barracks to meet my platoon for physical training at 5am. The enlisted guys had a good idea of what I’d experienced as the brigade lieutenants had a reputation for hard living and were interested to take measure of the new el-tee.

And so it went. For over three years. Six week deployments to Major Training Areas at Grafenwoehr, Hohenfels, and Wildflecken. Local training the Grunewald where everyone navigated by the concrete block markers rather than map. Participating patrols along the Berlin Wall. Standing guard mount at Clay Headquarter Compound and Spandau Prison. Promotions to first lieutenant and captain. Moving from a rifle battalion to brigade staff. The occasional bar brawl. Celebrating Pearl Harbor Day at the Officer’s Club Brunch and being braced by some Japanese-American lieutenant colonel who didn’t have the refined sense of humor of a bunch of infantry lieutenants. Girls. Wow. Yeah. Girls.

Berlin was a great place for a young officer. It is hard to explain the intensity of the long days… and long nights… without acknowledging the Wall. We lived less than 400 yards from the Wall, I could see into East Germany from the windows of my platoon bays. We trained in the shadow of the Wall, Parks Range, our major in-city training site, had the Wall as on of its borders. The Wall defined everything we did.

One of the privileges you had in Berlin was being able to visit East Berlin any time you wanted so long as you were 1) in uniform and 2) entered and egressed via Checkpoint Charlie. I made one such trip with my girlfriend, a “local national”, and watch in amazement as to exit Berlin she had to fill out papers, and make cash payments, as series of five different windows in one building. Each of the windows was manned by a uniformed border police woman (imagine Chris Farley — while alive — playing the role of a female prison guard) — the same one. She moved from window to window. It was like a Peter Sellers spoof on a totalitarian state.

I was in the Pentagon when the Wall came down. I have to admit I was surprised. I’d traveled behind the Iron Curtain. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that the Poles didn’t fully grok, as they say, the whole concept of communism. I though, however, that the East Germans would be hanging in there long after the Russians had embraced market capitalism. They would be commies until the last dog was dead.

As they said at the time, Poland took 10 years to throw off communism, Hungary 10 months, East Germany 10 weeks, and Czechoslovakia 10 days.

So now more than twenty years after the fact the wall is gone. Pieces are scattered everywhere. I have a small bit that our battalion gave to officers when they departed. And a much larger bit stored inside.

The fact that we have a story that was reported by Politico, or Pravda for that matter, is irrelevant because we know what they reported was correct. At some point in his tenure as president of the NRA, Herman Cain was the subject of two complaints of sexual harassment that resulted in settlements in the $35-45K range being paid to the complainants and the parties are bound by an non-disclosure agreement. The fact that we don’t know anything about the substance of the complaints is the responsibility of one man: Herman Cain. Through a period of four days Cain has engaged in evasions and outright lies over the events. But no one on the right seems to care very much about that as honesty is now a bug rather than a feature in our candidates. Because Politico.

Already people are lining up to accuse the women involved of being dishonest and predatory. We’re told they are anonymous allegations. We’re told that Cain can’t respond to unknown allegations. This is just crap on its face The women aren’t anonymous. The allegations aren’t unknown. The women and allegations were sufficiently known to allow the NRA to cut them checks. We, the American public, are kept in the dark because Herman Cain won’t ask the NRA to release all sides from the non-disclosure agreement. Because Politico.

Herman Cain’s pattern of lying about these incidents began in 2003, by his own admission, when he told his campaign manager there was one incident while he knew there were at least two settlements. This isn’t important. Because Politico.

We’re told that most sexual harassment claims are frivolous and people who make them are just paid off, willy nilly, to leave because of the expense of litigation. Is that true in your company? How many of you have wives, daughters, etc., who have sued their boss for sexual harassment just to collect the money? Can I have a show of hands? But we KNOW these cases are frivolous, even though Cain refuses to cooperate in getting the details out. Because Politico.

Cain and even ordinarily sensible guys like Rush Limbaugh are claiming that Cain is the victim of racism over this, do we really think any WHITE Republican would have received this level of support in a similar circumstance? No. But the allegations are racist. Because Politico.

This is just ridiculous.

Unlike my colleague Leon, I don’t see where anyone but Herman Cain has a responsibility to be concerned about Cain’s future political viability. A career which I have to note has not extended to actually being elected to anything in the past. He has created this mess and it is incumbent upon him, alone, to get out of it. We have enough bored dilettantes running for office out there as is so I find the loss of one underwhelming.

Herman Cain is running for president. It has been reported, quite accurately, that he has been the subject of two sexual harassment settlements. Yes, we all know that this particular accusation has been abused but we also know that sexual harassment does take place. It is incumbent on Cain to come clean on the facts and circumstances and let the voters judge. If he doesn’t he deserves whatever treatment he gets.

Regardless of the actual facts in the case, Herman Cain’s total absence of honesty and integrity since Sunday should be a clue as to the character of this candidate. It also serves as a clue to the truth of the allegations.

This is not a case of letting “the liberal media” choose our candidates. This is a case of a man who wants to be president having over a decade to prepare a response to an obvious question and refusing to do so. And when he is confronted, rather than candor and truthfulness he engages in attacks, lies, and evasions. We’ve elected two men like that to the White House in the past two decades and in both cases we’ve found that their behavior in office is, unsurprisingly, the same as it is out of office.

There is no way under the sun this man gets my vote for any office at any time.

Here at RedState we are nothing if not customer centric because of the requirement to pay extortionate salaries to all the front pagers. So here it is. The SEX in Sex Scandal. Courtesy of that hotbed of liberalism, Pajamas Media, and that raging commie Roger Simon. Just the good parts, visit the link for more.

Adding to the ongoing Herman Cain sexual harassment controversy, two sources have now confirmed to PJ Media that a female employee of the National Restaurant Association told associates she had been brought by Mr. Cain to his Crystal City, Virginia residence where she alleged “he had taken advantage of me.”

…

According to both sources, Mr. Cain and the woman had been with a large group for a long evening of food and drink at the Ciao Baby Cucina, a restaurant near NRA headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C. This was a normal routine, as the trade association worked with the food and beverage industry. Afterwards, Mr. Cain allegedly took the woman by taxi to his apartment, where she spent the night and woke up in his bed.

The attorney for the women who received settlements is meeting with the NRA today to ask it to waive the nondisclosure agreement. Cain has yet to agree. Doing so would be a good start.

[UPDATE: PJM has revised the story, visit them for the revised story.]

“He has no core,” Plouffe said in an unusually sharp attack for a White House official. “You get the sense with Mitt Romney that, you know, if he thought .?.?. it was good to say the sky was green and the grass is blue to win an election, he’d say it.”

Exactly so. And today the Washington Post set out to show how this is true on the front page.

The article is titled As governor, Romney tried to reassure the left and is a must read.

On abortion:

Mitt Romney was firm and direct with the abortion rights advocates sitting in his office nine years ago, assuring the group that if elected Massachusetts governor, he would protect the state’s abortion laws.

Then, as the meeting drew to a close, the businessman offered an intriguing suggestion — that he would rise to national prominence in the Republican Party as a victor in a liberal state and could use his influence to soften the GOP’s hard-line opposition to abortion.

He would be a “good voice in the party” for their cause, and his moderation on the issue would be “widely written about,” he said, according to detailed notes taken by an officer of the group, NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts.

“You need someone like me in Washington,” several participants recalled Romney saying that day in September 2002, an apparent reference to his future ambitions.

…
Melissa Kogut, the NARAL group’s executive director in 2002, recalled Wednesday that as she and other participants in the meeting began to pack their belongings to leave after the 45-minute session, Romney became “emphatic that the Republican Party was not doing themselves a service by being so vehemently anti-choice.”

The abortion rights supporters came away from the meeting pleasantly surprised. Romney declined to label himself “pro-choice” but said he eschewed all labels, including “pro-life.” He told the group that he would “protect and preserve a woman’s right to choose under Massachusetts law” and that he thought any move to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision would be a “serious mistake for our country.”

Gay marriage

In an Aug. 25, 1994, interview with Bay Windows, a gay newspaper in Boston, he offered this pitch, according to excerpts published on the paper’s Web site: “There’s something to be said for having a Republican who supports civil rights in this broader context, including sexual orientation. When Ted Kennedy speaks on gay rights, he’s seen as an extremist. When Mitt Romney speaks on gay rights he’s seen as a centrist and a moderate.

“It’s a little like if Eugene McCarthy was arguing in favor of recognizing China, people would have called him a nut. But when Richard Nixon does it, it becomes reasonable. When Ted says it, it’s extreme; when I say it, it’s mainstream.”

Climate change

Romney backed incentives for buying efficient vehicles, tougher vehicle emissions rules and mandatory cuts in emissions linked to global warming.

The plan not only called for reducing the state’s overall greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2010 and cutting them another 10 percent by 2020, but it said that “to eliminate any dangerous threat to the climate .?.?. current science suggests this will require reductions as much as 75-85 percent below current levels.”

…

In March 2003 he pledged to buy up to $100 million worth
of electricity from renewable sources. That month, he declared, “the global warming debate is now pretty much over.”

Did conservatives learn anything from this? Not really. We’ve long known Romney was an unprincipled flip flopper. In fact, the most cogent defense I’ve seen of a Romney candidacy was made by Michael Gerson who argues, essentially, that Romney has held so many positions that he can’t flip flop anymore. While he may not come up with any new positions, I’m less sanguine than Gerson about him revisiting some old ones.

In fact, I would nearly go so far to say that one of the worst fates that could befall conservatism is that in January 2013 we find ourselves with President Mitt Romney and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. We can survive on or the other, we can’t survive both, and McConnell isn’t going anywhere.

I had conversations yesterday via email with journalists for the Washington Post, Roll Call, National Journal, and The Hill about their private thoughts on this. Every single one shared the same following views: First, they are all sure, to varying degrees, that Cain’s story originates from a National Restaurant Association board member or senior staffer, not a campaign. Second, nearly all of them had heard rumors about “Herman’s got women issues” before Politico broke it, 2-3 weeks ago. Two of the journos I spoke to identified those rumors originating from DC, particularly K Street – not from Boston or Austin. Third, and most notably: each one noted how bizarre the Cain camp was handling the matter… and this was before Block went on Fox News to demand the Perry Campaign apologize for leaking the story (based on no more evidence than the timing of hiring of Anderson).

Key take away. “Herman’s got women issues.”

About the time the third woman alleging sexual harassment by Herman Cain while he was president of the National Restaurant Association was coming forward another drama was playing out in Iowa. This is a story that no one would have known about had the mole Team Perry inserted into Cain’s campaign as freakin Campaign Manager not mentioned it.

In a cryptic comment made at National Journal’s Election 2012 Preview event Tuesday, Mark Block, Herman Cain’s campaign manager, made reference to an incident involving Cain and a receptionist for a radio talk show host.

Asked by panel moderator Beth Reinhard whether he could guarantee that there’s not more information forthcoming about his past, Block began his answer with a blanket denial, followed by what seemed to be a description of an unreported recent incident involving Cain.

“Mr. Cain has never sexually harassed anybody. Period. End of story,” he said. “As the hours go by, it’s interesting that we even hear from a radio talk show host of Iowa that a receptionist thought that Mr. Cain’s comments were inappropriate.”

The radio talk show host in question is Steve Deace who is hugely influential in Iowa conservative politics. And Deace is not happy.

We don’t know what occurred in Deace’s studio but whatever it was led him to hold a press conference and make this statement:

“When a man will not lead it is almost always because he is compromised in his private life — almost always,” Deace said. “That has been my experience in general, regardless of your subculture, race, creed color, what part of the country you come from that a lot of times when you’re wondering why a man will not show moral consistency and step up and lead it’s because he’s compromised in his private life.”
He said that Cain’s behavior should be a signal to Republicans everywhere to more thoroughly scrutinize him.

“Do we really know who this gentleman is? Do we really know?” Deace said. “That’s a question everybody ought to be asking themselves before they go vote for the first time in these primaries.”

“Herman Cain should have lost the Republican nomination before Politico even came out with this story on Sunday,” he said. “Herman Cain should have been done.”

I’ve made no great secret of my skepticism about Herman Cain. From his sophomoric “9-9-9″ plan to his muddled response on just about any subject you wish to mention from abortion to Chinese nukes to the Iranian nuclear threat. The man simply isn’t ready to play on the national stage, not from want of experience but from want of temperament. That same lack of discipline and logical incoherence is reflected in his campaign hires. J.D. Gordon, his spokesman, set the wheels turning with his disastrous interview on FoxNews and now his manager, Mark Block, has taken a minor local story and given it national prominence.

I don’t know what the facts are in these cases because sexual harassment covers a lot of waterfront and can be as much a factor of generational differences as anything else. The fact that Cain lied to Curt Anderson about the number of complaints back in 2003, information helpfully provided by Cain himself, the fact the number of women is now three, not one or two, and the fact that Mark Block says Cain will not support waiving the Non-Disclosure Agreement leads me to believe this is the tip of a Clintonian iceberg. None of these are the actions of a man with nothing to hide and they explain quite well why Mrs. Cain is not on the campaign trail.

What I do know is that this cannot be stonewalled. With ten days notice any marginally competent campaign could have come up with a strategy to deal with the issue that did not involve the candidate berating or yelling at reporters.