The Michigan Debate: Candidates 9, Moderators 0; The Cain Affair

View 700 Thursday, November 10, 2011

Happy Birthday, US Marines

 

Happy Birthday, Marines!

Semper Fidelis,

Couv

Cheap energy = prosperity! Drill here, DRILL NOW!

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

The Republican Candidate Debate in Rochester, Michigan, went well for the Republicans. All of them, including Governor’s Romney and Perry. Romney looked and acted both principled and presidential; looking presidential is not news, but he came across as quite principled; more so than the media likes. As to Perry, he had a momentary fit of absentmindedness as he tried to remember the names of the Departments of the government that he would eliminate the day after his inauguration: Commerce, Education, and – and he couldn’t remember. Gov. Romney suggested EPA, and for a moment Perry accepted that, then recalled that it’s an Agency, not a Department. Given another chance to name the Department he would eliminate, he once again had a lapse of memory. Eventually he realized, as everyone who has listened to his previous speeches already knew, that it was the Department of Energy.

If I, with my wretched memory, could recall that it was Energy, I assume that the other candidates, and all of the CNBC moderators, knew precisely which Department Gov. Perry had in mind, but apparently Gov. Romney didn’t when he prompted Gov. Perry with ‘EPA’. After all this was over I began to mull over what I would do had I been one of the candidates.

(Actually, given my history, there’s no real mystery had it been me: I’d have said, loudly, “Energy” because that’s what I have done for most of my life, including a rather unhappy time in high school in which I corrected a classmate’s answer by saying aloud ‘Osmosis’, winning me the not very affectionate nickname of “Osmosis” for weeks; but that’s another story. It’s also why I have never run for office, although I have been a successful campaign director for both a Mayor and a Congressman. But enough rambling about me.) I am still a bit curious: I can understand the CNBC ‘moderators’ leaving Governor Perry to twist in the wind while they hid their grins, but why no one on the stage, or for that matter in the audience, didn’t simply say ‘Energy’ and get the embarrassment over with escapes me. Perhaps Speaker Gingrich thought it would be impolite: Newt. like me, suffers from a tendency to correct other people’s mistakes and I note that he has been very careful not to interrupt or otherwise break the debate rules. Newt is almost inevitably the smartest guy in any room he is in, and he has to be careful not to appear to be an irritating know it all. I don’t know the others well enough even to speculate on why they didn’t simply end Governor Perry’s misery.

But when all is said and done, while the incident was embarrassing, it was hardly definitive. It doesn’t show Perry more or less qualified to be President. We know that Perry has been an effective and re-elected governor of a prosperous state. We know that candidates can be dependent on a teleprompter and get elected. We know that Perry’s lapse of memory was both temporary and unimportant. We all, or certainly I, can cheer for a man who will eliminate those three Departments. I have reservations about getting rid of Commerce, and I doubt that he can do that one; but certainly Education has to go!

Newt’s tirade against the moderators brought cheers.

The CNBC “moderators” apparently believed this was a debate between the candidates and the media, with the CNBC moderators being the representatives of the media. They made little effort to conceal their own views and their antagonism to the Republicans. They didn’t do quite so much in trying to set the Republicans at each other’s throats as they have in the past – some of that may be due to Newt’s popularity in addressing that in previous debates — but they clearly believed that this was to be a debate between themselves and the Republicans, and that they held the upper hand. One of them, Jim Cramer, came off like – well the word I want may be libelous. Let us say that he may more than once have taken leave of his senses? Rush Limbaugh wonders if he escaped from a zoo, and advocates using a tranquilizer dart. The others were no better. The permanent moderator Maria Bartiromov displayed her hostility to all the candidates – particularly to Cain of course — and was generally smarmy towards all of them. But then what do you expect from CNBC? I think last night was the first time I had watched that channel in months, and no moderator’s performance made me want to see more.

Bartirmorov tried to engage Newt in some kind of slanging match, and showed that she’s not up to that task.

More after lunch: but my conclusion from the debate is that all the candidates are alive and well, any one of them would be capable of beating Obama, and any one of the would be infinitely superior to the current president. If they can all cooperate – and last night it appeared they can – we can look forward to at least some recovery from the past few years. I came away much relieved.

Lunchtime now.

Perhaps it is time to take assessment of the Herman Cain situation. We still don’t know anything, but the matter won’t go away, and it should be resolved.

There are several related questions of importance.

First, of course, is the question of truth: what did Cain do? Did he do anything at all?

Second, is what he did relevant to being President of the United States?

Third, is what he did relevant to being the Republican Candidate for President of the United States.

 

The problem with the first question is that we can’t answer it because we don’t know what he is supposed to have done. We have one specification from Sharon Bialek, but few clues as to what Cain is supposed to have done regarding Kraushaar and the two anonymous accusers. We know that Kraushaar received a termination settlement on condition that she go away and never come back, but we also know that the termination payment was considerably less than the cost would have been had formal charges been filed, no matter what the outcome. Many corporations make settlements like that. The larger the corporation the more likely the incidents.

We have Donna Donella who says she is emphatically not a “fifth accuser” for she has nothing to accuse Cain of. He once asked her to arrange dinner in a public place in Cairo, and Ms. Donella has a “weird feeling” about all that, but she only came forward because all the others did. All the others being two in number, one with a specification and the other with a formal complaint that resulted in her termination with compensation. The media makes Ms. Donella “the fifth accuser” in her despite. The story is told in The Frisky as well as other places, with the headline that a Fifth Woman Accuses Cain of Sexual Harassment, when Donella explicitly says she is not making any such charge. She just had a spooky feeling.

Another on line magazine says “Donella joins accusers Sharon Bialek, Karen Kraushaar, and two unnamed others.”

We have Sharon Bialek who looks less credible as time goes on.

And Ann Coulter has found links to Axelrod, who managed to find charges of sexual misconduct against other Obama political opponents back in Illinois – and oddly enough, Sharon Bialek and Karen Kraushaar have far more Chicago connections than they do to Washington or to Cain. And Kraushaar may have  long standing connections to Democratic politics.

As to whether any of the charges have relevance to the presidency whether true or not, they do now: Cain has left us no choice in the matter. He hasn’t said that the stories we have heard so far are misinterpretations. He has said that what was charged in the Bialek specification just didn’t happen, and while he doesn’t know what specifications are alleged in the Kraushaar case, he didn’t do anything wrong.

As to whether this affects his candidacy, it certainly does. If he can show that this is all political chicanery originating with people close to the President of the United States directed against a black conservative candidate, and it’s all made up, it will greatly strengthen his candidacy, both for nominee and for President.  If one of his accusers can come up with a credible specification – an allegation of a specific act – that is sufficiently disturbing, it will destroy him, not because of the act itself – it’s pretty clear that we have heard the worst, which is an alleged clumsy and thoroughly unsuccessful offer of sexual attention to a non-employee – but because Cain has made it so. Either he is the man he appears to be, and whom most of those who know him claim he is, or he is not. Clinton never claimed to be anyone but Clinton. Cain aspires to a higher standard of character.

Whether he can prove it in the court of public opinion – the only place this will be tried – is not known. The Axelrod attack machine makes the Clinton attack machine look tame and reasonable. We can look for more and more of this as the campaign goes on. And the longer it goes on, the more it will come down to this: is Cain the man he says he is? Because I don’t have any doubt that Axelrod is the man we all believe him to be.

Electric cars come to the forefront. Few seem to have noticed that using an electric car inevitably increases the CO2 in the atmosphere. It has to because the energy cycle is never more than 50% efficient and generally is less so. That means that in order to generate the electricity to go into the car, it must first be generated by the burning of coal. The coal to Kilowatts cycle is less efficient than the gasoline to horsepower cycle. The Kilowatts to horsepower cycle is also inefficient. The result is that burning gasoline directly produces less CO2 than burning coal and transmitting that to be converted into potential energy in batteries which is then converted to horsepower.

Note that the electric care is less polluting than an internal combustion car – but only if you do not define CO2 as a pollutant. If you think CO2 pollutes the atmosphere, then electric car users are polluters. I could do the numbers for you, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader because I am running a bit late.

If you have not seen Ann Jolis “A French Lesson in Free Speech” it is well worth your attention. Between political correctness and Muslim terrorism the whole tradition of free speech including blasphemous speech is very much in danger, here and elsewhere.

A Wall Street Journal editorial tells us that there is a proposed Federal regulation that would save 12 children a year by regulating the cords on Venetian blinds in private homes. It would incidentally raise the price of the blinds, and the profits of the blinds makers. I cannot believe that the cost of the program will be less than $!2 million a year. I also cannot understand why this is the business of the federal government, or where in the Constitution it makes cords on Venetian blinds a federal matter. No wonder we’re broke and getting broker.

I hate Firefox. It is a horrid memory hog, and it can take a long time to readjust itself once it glitches. I like the extensions and ad-ons but I am about ready to try something else.

Roberta reminds me that it is probably time for the Department of Commerce to go. There was a time when it did some important things for the US, but it is now mostly a source of regulations which we don’t need and which ought to be left to the States. Of course that brings us to the matter of the Department of Labor.

The Federal Government does a lot of stuff that may need doing but which we can’t afford. Most of that has been done in the past by the states, and that is the way this Republic was conceived. Having 50 semi-sovereign states means competition in taxes, regulations, and much else. It also makes it much more likely that you get consent of the governed; if a state government becomes intolerable, you can go to another state (as many are moving to Texas…)

And of course there are federal items like this: http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/health-care/8294-walnuts-are-drugs-

Surely that is a matter best left to the states?