Jennifer Rubin, who, based on her lack of a brutal death at a random hot dog stand, must be a more pleasant person in real life than in her writing, wrote an impassioned plea this morning for Republican Party elders to step in and stop Newt Gingrich at all costs.

It is worth quoting in relevant part:

The voters in their infinite wisdom have just given a huge boost to perhaps the only GOP candidate who could shift the spotlight from President Obama to himself, alienate virtually all independent voters, lose more than 40 states and put the House majority in jeopardy.

We’d be looking at four more years of Obama’s economic policies, four more years of strained relations with allies, several new Supreme Court justices and an unprecedented power shift to the executive branch.

While straining credulity a bit with its rhetorical excess — Ms. Rubin is apparently unaware that there are fewer than forty states in the Northeast and on the Pacific Coast — her point is fundamentally valid. Newt Gingrich will mop the floor with Barack Obama in the debates, only to have his head handed to him in November. Informed voters might want to consider this a more intellectually satisfying form of the 2008 debacle, without the electric excitement Sarah Palin brought to the ticket.

(Not to worry: Newt Gingrich has compared himself to so many electrifying leaders that it seems reasonable to assume he will give one heck of an acceptance speech as he selects himself as the vice presidential candidate, too.)

I don’t want to dwell on Newt, who has Newt to do that for him, and better than I ever could. I want to dwell on the cause for this calamity, the source, the problem, the sticky wicket if you will, the mote and beam we must remove from our own eyes before seeking emergency treatment for punctured eyeballs.

I am speaking, of course, of Willard “Mitt” Romney, who, coincidentally enough, is like a mote and a beam in the sense that his physical composition and bearing are remarkably similar.

Newt Gingrich got his turn as not-Romney, then blew it. Done. Gone. Buried like an obscure thing of which Newt would probably insist on telling you at length as you tried to hide behind the coffee service and escape out the back door. By rights, we should be down to Mitt Romney versus my great aunt, a late entrant in the field who would catch the world by storm by insisting that every back yard have its own subsidized shine still.

Instead, we are back to Newt v. Mitt, which sounds like a fantastic name for a spell in the upcoming Fifth Edition of (Advanced) Dungeons and Dragons, but is instead a depressing reminder that we will likely look at four more years of Obama, regardless of the nominee.

And it is all Mitt’s fault.

I do not mean this in the sense that he “failed to put away” Newt. You can’t stop him, you can only hope he falls asleep after talking to himself in containment. I mean this in the sense that Mitt Romney managed to turn himself into even more of a walking caricature in just a handful of weeks. His hamhanded handling of his own corporate past — not to be confused with his hamhanded handling of his political past, which is a given — and his wealth have given voters who were preparing hemlock pies and resigning themselves to voting for a blob of clay with fantastic hair a reason to say, By God, no, I’m not going to eat that hemlock, and I’m not going to vote for this idiot.

Consider that the man who doesn’t even respect the electorate enough to lie to them in a consistent manner about his political beliefs, political formation, policy choices, gosh, the list goes on, does respect them enough to openly condescend to them by telling them that three hundred thousand dollars is basically a pittance.

You, Mitt Romney, and your cheerleaders in the press and Republican establishment (but not sainted Jen Rubin) are why there is a decent chance Newt, and not you, will cause the destruction of our party downticket in less than ten months’ time. (Think of this as being like what you did to the Massachusetts GOP, but on a grander scale, with more arson afterward.) You convinced the voters to run to a man who couldn’t even stay the head of the caucus he brought to power a mere four years before. You’re a Mormon with an all-American marriage who managed to get a guy with three living wives, I assume seven hundred mistresses, and the real love of his life rounding it all out in his mirror every morning to the point where socially conservative Republicans would chew off their own earlobes to vote for him over you.

AND THAT DOESN’T EVEN MAKE SENSE.

You are the problem, not Newt. You, not the voters. You, not poor Jennifer Rubin.

Now, Rubin is nothing if not intellectually honest and consistent. I therefore join in her implicit call — and call on her to make explicit her call — to reject the politics of fear, and to demand that you terminate your political campaign now, today. Well, after you read this, and talk Justin Hart off a ledge. But right after that.

And then. God willing, then. Then we will have someone else, someone more credible, someone — let us be honest — with worse hair, step forth to defeat the amphibian, with the chameleon out of the field. That person will then go on to lose to Barack Obama, but the downticket races will be saved.

God bless America. Erick-Woods Erickson for President, 2012.

This ad is not paid for or endorsed by Erickson for President, Ulrickson for President, or any other campaign group. No one at RedState is responsible for the content of this ad, and indeed, will probably hurt me the next time they see me.

From the diaries . . .

So with New Hampshire behind us (and with any luck, never again in front of us), and with my tendency to be overloaded with life to the point at which I catch up on things I meant to write two to fifty-two weeks after they are timely, I wanted to say something about the controversy which was and is best described as “National Romney Online.”

For those of you who don’t keep up on conservative tendencies to engage in circular firing squads, a summary is in order; for those of you who couldn’t give a rat’s anus, best just to skip this diary altogether.

In short, National Review — which backed Mitt Romney in 2008 after months and years of not-so-coyly talking him up — and which has not, in fairness, endorsed anyone as a publication yet, is perceived to be carrying water for the Mittster this time around. The battle was joined when Ramesh Ponnuru — arguably the brightest of National Review’s lights, and the editor with the greatest credibility among mainstream conservatives — endorsed Romney, albeit not without qualifications; the battle escalated when the publication as a whole went full-metal William Foster on Newt Gingrich for a thousand and one sins against conservatism and electability. In passing, the magazine took shots at Ron Paul (who hasn’t?), Michelle Bachmann, and Rick Perry; then took time to praise Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum, whose only apparent problem was a lack of executive experience. The didactic tone at the end of the piece seemed almost calculated to irritate any reader not yet enraged by the closing of the piece.

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Many of us received a spam email this morning from the Washington Post, announcing they’d hired yet another left-wing thug cheerleader (snazzy uniform optional) for yet another made-up reporting gig that will inevitably degenerate into yet another look-at-the-dirty-racist-conservatives event. After adding Greg “I Think Union Violence Is Progressive” Sargent and Ezra “The Constitution Is, Like, Really Old and Stuff” Klein, and the late Dave “Kyle MacLachlan After Floating Face Down in a Pool for a Day” Weigel, there is simply no way that the Post thinks anyone is buying the act, and is instead catering to a dwindling audience of baby boomers and Gen-Xers who still don’t get all this internet stuff, but want to be reassured that Republicans are icky. Hey, with the for-profit college goldmine running dry, the Graham family needs to keep from being roasted alive by the shareholders. If you can sell worthless degrees to poor kids, you can cater to left-wing geezers.

So, a big welcome to Think Tanked! If we’re lucky, we’ll hardly know you.

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From the diaries by Jeff

As a friend of mine recently put it, I join the gentleman from Texas’s remarks, and know that I cannot surpass them. I would, however, like to add something to them.

Any honest reckoning of the budget deal the House GOP appears to have reached must view it as a result of negotiations in which one side — the Democrats — believed they had the upper hand, and the other — the GOP — agreed. From the start, the brain trust that nominally holds the majority in the House made clear that they would brutally knife their own mothers to avoid a shutdown, because the memory of the last is burned into their pathetic neurons for all of time, and they believe they’ll suffer the way the last Republican majority did. I don’t believe that’s an accurate assessment of the likely fallout of the shutdown the submorons on the Hill clearly felt they needed to avoid, and I’ll discuss that, but we all need to remember: This is our fault, yours and mine, and every activist’s and voter’s who helped these clowns get elected.

That’s sort of counterintuitive, isn’t it? It isn’t, if you think about it.

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All too often, we miss the little things.

Cradle Catholics in this country disproportionately aren’t. Some obscenely large portion of those raised Catholic in this country — presumably “raised Catholic” means “baptized Catholic,” because practice has fallen off so much even among nominally active Catholics I’m not sure there’s a meaningful way to aggregate the practicing ones — no longer self-identify as Catholic. Amazingly, however, some who were raised Catholic keep being Catholic, and somehow instill the Faith in their children.

It’s a funny thing, American Catholicism. Jody Bottum, in his own way one of the two or three greatest Catholic observers of his generation, wrote a deeply moving observation on the shallowness and brittleness of American Catholic culture and practice in the wake of Vatican II and Humanae Vitae . But with due respect to Jody, I think, as often happens to faithful men and women who spend too much time in New York City and Washington, D.C., that Jody came to believe that the terrible state of Catholic practice in those two archetypical sinkholes was indicative of how the rest of us live.

It’s not. Parishes consolidate (this is a nice term for “close”) in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, traditional homes of immigrant Catholicism, and open in the new homes of immigrant Catholicism, American immigrant and variously-legal immigrant alike. Every Sunday, three, four, and sometimes five Masses happen, packed during the holiday seasons, comfortably unpacked during the deepest doldrums of Ordinary Time, and ranging from sparse to packed depending on the Mass time on every other Sunday. For all of Jody’s correct observations that the urban, parish-centered life that defined American Catholicism before the Second Vatican Council is a fading memory, somehow, we struggle on.

That overlengthy stroll through bush and glen, past the broken towers and mills of yesterday, is a prelude to telling you how very much we lost when Bernard Nathanson died earlier this week. Rarely has a man done so much evil in this world; even more rarely has he spent his every waking moment since trying to atone for that evil. The abortion regime owes so much to him; the pro-life movement does, too.

Catholics like to joke that we instinctively believe that the Bible only has about two hundred pages, broken up with hymns and intercessory prayers. It’s a joke to make Protestants feel better about us, to confirm their old cutting remarks after they left Tradition and the Magisterium and adopted sola scriptura . Every Catholic home — by the unqualified term “Catholic” from this point on, let’s assume I mean people who attend Mass weekly and don’t think the Pope is trying to force a theocracy down their throats — has a family Bible, used to record births and baptisms and weddings and ordinations and consecrations and deaths; to clarify not-infrequent arguments over doctrine; and to cover for those days when we can’t make it to Mass because of weather, illness, or unfortunate oversleeping.

A lot of us have a second Bible, one without the Teaching, but which is almost as well-worn. It’s not the Catechism (my family has a copy, but the ending doesn’t have a twist, so it’s no fun to read after the first time through), and it’s not the hagiography of John F. Kennedy Catholics of a certain age would keep on the coffee table to remind themselves of their votes for a man who was neither a very good man nor a very good Catholic. (Nor a very good President.) Because seven men (including a nominal Catholic) decided that it would be a good thing to invent a right to kill babies in the womb, that second Bible all too often involves abortion somehow. And that book was almost always written by Dr. Nathanson.

In my house, it was a copy of Aborting America , given to us by my youngest sister’s godfather. It was a later edition, with a cover I can’t find any more, with a foreword by Nathanson that expanded, in terrible detail, on what followed, and how his thoughts had evolved over time. My father and mother both read it cover-to-cover, and after that, it just sat there for months. My younger siblings couldn’t care less about that sort of thing for years, but I had been into politics since I was four. (In my third grade class in a suburb on the outskirts of the People’s Republic of Austin, I was the only kid in the room to stump for Reagan over Mondale.)

And it sat there and mocked me, because I couldn’t bring myself to read it. I was a ten year-old kid, and I knew intellectually that horrible things happened to children at the hands of the very people who are most charged with protecting them; but I didn’t want to read this. I didn’t want a graphic reminder of how awful moms and dads and doctors could be. And I started to get angry, as if this book was literally mocking me. (Hey, I was a ten year-old kid into politics. You’ve gotta figure there were issues.) Why the Hell should I care about this stuff? Why was it forcing its way into my life? Why are all of these people making such a big fuss out of this when there are starving people and people dying from wars and disease?

It says something about the quality of modern thought that so many nominal Catholics today rationalize along the same lines as an angry ten year-old.

The neat thing about being a kid is that you can and usually do talk yourself into doing just about anything. So I got so damned angry, I finally picked the book up and read it. I know I’ll hate this. I’ll say so when I’m done. That’ll show that jerk whom I’ve never met and who doesn’t even know I’m reading this.

Kids cry, even boys, over small things. That was the first time I’d ever sobbed from the gut. Nathanson did not spare details. The enormity of what was happening — and how it had happened, how Americans had accepted glib lies and the destruction of their centuries-old prohibition on the murder of the most defenseless with barely a shrug — shook me to my core. For the first time in my life, I, a child of the Reagan Revolution and all of its simple love of America, a kid whose parents had kicked their rears to make his life as comfortable and sheltered as they could, truly thought that maybe America had some evil in her, or at least a fondness for the cads.

I tell you all of this not to tell you a story of how I came, multiple times, to a John-Brown-at-Harpers-Ferry conclusion in my adolescence or anything as boring, predictable, and ultimately futile as that. I tell you all of this so you’ll understand the incredible work Nathanson did, his whole life after seeing a baby in utero in ultrasound. I tell you this because in the obscenely brief obituaries for this man, who went from a founder of NARAL to a man whose work littered Catholic (and non-Catholic) living rooms and coffee tables and dinner discussions and motivations for decades, you’d never know that he touched the lives of millions. I want you to understand the lesson of a life lived passionately working for evil — by his own admission, willingly and gleefully lying in its service — and then spent desperately trying to atone, to do penance at every turn, to undo the terrible thing he’d done.

The lesson of that life is that words and deeds matter. That something as simple as a book can change, can activate, can drive. That a life spent trying to right a wrong is not in vain, and to the contrary, can make a difference. The Silent Scream changed the terms of the debate on abortion; it made ready the soil that cheap 3-D ultrasounds have seeded and in which the pro-life movement is reaping good harvests.

Votes win elections; boots on the ground win votes; but cultural shifts win both boots and votes. Two generations of the pro-life movement put boots on the ground in elections in no small part because a short, earnest, aging man put himself body and soul into righting an atrocity he’d helped create. That is activism of the highest order, and we are eternally indebted for it.

The Catholic Church, into which Nathanson was received over a decade ago, teaches that almost every sin is forgivable. (Let’s not have the debate about which sin is the unforgivable one; it’s fun, but maddening.) Putting to the side whether his conversion from a detached belief in the absence of God to a belief in a Triune God who suffered, died, and rose again for us all is sufficient to clear that stain from his soul — and based on what we understand from his friends and colleagues, he clearly never thought it was — I feel comfortable saying that if his penance was insufficient, we’re all damned.

God has taken you home, weary warrior. Requiem aeternam.

(If he won’t front it, I will. – Moe Lane)

While trying to drum up business on Friday, between meetings, I took the time to read U.S. District Court Judge Vinson’s decision on the constitutionality of the mandate. (Opinion here.) I have a few thoughts; however, fair warning: I refused to violate my personal ban on doing legal research — that is, free legal work — while blogging. Feel free to skip this on that basis.

It’s worth noting that I’ve been before Judge Vinson before, and even when he kicked my tail (and he has), I’ve found him to be a very thorough, very good, very cautious judge. I mention this because this isn’t the first time I’ve read a Vinson opinion on summary judgment, and while they’re rarely bloodless, they’re never so heartfelt, so earnest as this. It’s pretty remarkable — he obviously cared enough to try to make certain that his rationale was clear for the lawyers in the case and the Eleventh Circuit and Supreme Court. He clearly did the lion’s share on this, rather than merely turning it over to his clerk.

As an initial matter, I now completely understand why the left side of the political spectrum is treating this as one of the worst affronts in the history of law, reaching back to cuneiform: Aside from their usual, knee-jerk, scalded-cat if-we-like-it-it’s-constitutional/if-we-don’t-it’s-treason response to any event that disrupts their view of how the world should work, I think it’s important to remember that most of the geniuses opining on this are either non-lawyers or lawyers and law professors with no real connection to trial court judgments (which means, not real lawyers). This ruling reads like what it almost certainly is: An attempt to explain a decision the court knows will be controversial in a way lawyers (read: subsequent appellate courts) and more importantly, non-lawyers can understand. It fails on the latter count, precisely because it is doing so in the way that people who’ve been lawyers too long imagine is necessary to communicate to non-lawyers.

But the non-lawyers reading this are generally self-identified political experts, and for good and for ill, that means these days, they read a lot of Supreme Court opinions, as well as the odd Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, and they expect all opinions to read that way. Those tend to be written in a mix of aimed-at-lawyers and more informal writing style (in dissent, and sometimes in concurrence) that again, for good and for ill, we now take as a given. This is written like a history lesson, with each step taken seriously, calmly, and in an altogether different voice from an opinion that ends with “Breyer, J., concurring in the judgment.” In other words, it likely seems too informal, too personal, for skinning alive a cat on which so many on the left pinned so many hatreds and hopes. Thus, their reaction is visceral, as well as intellectual.

Also, Ezra Klein is an idiot.

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I have been reliably led to believe that some of you – perhaps over 30 per cent of you – are seriously considering electing Al Franken to the United States Freaking Senate. Now, we all thought it was very cute when you all elected Jessie “The Body” Ventura as your State’s governor — cute, because his idiocy/insanity didn’t have to affect the rest of us in the other 49 states. However, if you elect Al Franken to the United States Freaking Senate, he will get a say in how the rest of us are governed. I understand that sanity may be belatedly breaking out in your state, but this is not a matter on which we can afford to take chances. Therefore, let me take this opportunity to solemnly swear that if you people actually elect Al Franken to the United States Freaking Senate, I will punish you in the only way I know how.

I will move to Minnesota and become the most despicable, ambulance-chasing plaintiff’s lawyer in history.

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In light of the revelations that certain members of the ever-decent online Left* hacked in to Sarah Palin’s email account, we have learned that both the FBI and the Secret Service are investigating the matter. I’m sure some may wonder, Is it actually a crime to read someone’s email without their permission? Allow me to clue in any crying little girl who thinks that breaking into candidates’ email is just part of the normal vetting process: Yes, Andrea, it is a Federal crime. In fact, unauthorized access of email may run afoul of any one of three Federal criminal statutes, or a combination of the three (depending on the method used to intercept that email). And that means loads of fun for some of our favorite people in the whole universe.

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