View the whole slideshow here.

I have just a few, lemme get them out:

• It’s weird and creepy that he sparked up a long distance Internet romance. Seriously, I’m a little weirded out by that.
• It looks like his marriage was already falling apart. Sanford and his wife were vacationing separately. This shit happens, and it’s unfortunate. It’s also why one doesn’t go around moralizing about other people’s homes, especially as a politician.
• We haven’t had a presidential election that didn’t involve a divorced candidate since 2000. Before that it was 1993. And before that it had been 1988, and before that 1976. I don’t think that what appears to be Sanford’s impending divorce will necessarily preclude him from a Presidential run, though it may preclude him from getting evangelical support in the primaries.
• It would appear that the South Carolina Republican Lieutenant Governor André Bauer ratted him out. But to what end? Sanford is term limited. Whatever their past differences, this is not exactly the time for Republicans to be turning their firing squads on each other. The Lt Gov needs a serious lashing from party higher-ups.
• As of right now, Sarah Palin is the only contender for the Republican nomination in 2012. Not sure what to make of that. On the one hand, this may make her nomination easier. On the other hand, the attacks on her and her family will likely only intensify as a result of what appears to be Sanford’s dropping out of contention. As for me, I should hope there’s more than one option in candidates next go-around.
• One final thing: I believe that one reason why men in particular get disgusted with politicians who engage in dalliances is that they question the value of the “other woman”. In Clinton’s case, Lewinsky was overweight and not very attractive, which engendered disgust in him (“You mean THAT’S the best you can do? You cheated on your wife to get THAT?”). In Spitzer’s case it wasn’t just that she was a prostitute but that she was a ridiculously over priced prostitute (“You paid WHAT???”). Sanford may be able to redeem himself if his Argentine girlfriend is sufficiently good looking, much like Giuliani did.

I think that’s it.

UPDATE: Emails between Sanford and his lover have been published. I’m assuming neither of them released the emails. Seems to me there is a clear privacy issue here, if not a copyright issue…

I have deeply mixed feelings about this whole Letterman thing. If you’re unfamiliar, Letterman basically made a joke about Sarah Palin’s daughter being raped by a New York Yankee. And then followed it up with another joke implying that another of Palin’s daughters was a prostitute having something to do with Eliot Spitzer. The first joke appeared to have been made about Palin’s 14 yr old daughter, but rather than apologize when called on it, Letterman basically said he got the daughters mixed up, and that people should be able to take a joke.

The National Organization of Women gives their roundup and condemnation here.

That has caused at least one former-liberal turned conservative, Cynthia Yockey, to call for conservatives to get über-organized, and engage in an intense letter writing campaign to get Letterman fired. After all, that’s what liberals do, and having just switched sides, she views Republicans as giving up too easily:

Sebastian says it will take 30 days of daily letter-writing to CBS and Letterman’s advertisers. That’s because for the first two or three weeks, they’ll just wait for the tempest to blow over. Not only do we have to keep it up, we have to make it build. This is our line in the sand. Letterman MUST BE FIRED NOW!!

Yockey goes on to list the address of the companies who advertise with Letterman, attempting to start a campaign to take him down.

On the one hand, I do admire the fighting spirit, and I do believe that Republicans can use more of it. Republican legislators in particular have a way of negotiating with themselves before going to negotiate with Democrats, and once they’ve done that, there’s very often little left to support. It’s this fact that has supporters demoralized, particularly after eight years of Bush (more here).

But on the other hand, this type of tactic has long bothered me, and is, in a sense, the very tactic used by Letterman himself against the Palins. The tactic I’m talking about is social ostracization. By turning people who hold particular viewpoints into social pariahs, the Left hopes to end debate on subjects where they will lose. For democracy to work properly, we need to be able to debate everything, come to some conclusions, and then move on. And in our country’s history we’ve openly debated things that today we would consider absurd to debate, things such as whether we should own slaves, whether blacks should have citizenship rights, whether women should be allowed to vote, whether alcohol should be legal, and many more. And in each instance, we reached a societal conclusion and moved on.

But far too often, the Left today seeks to stifle debate, whether it be by organizing protesters to shout down conservative speakers on college campuses, or by turning those who disagree with them into laughing stocks and social pariahs. They’re not debating anything, they’re shutting off debate. And as a result, issues that need to be resolved by debate just fester, and often become uncivil.

I’m reminded of a time when Rush Limbaugh was a spokesman for Pizza Hut. It was in the mid-1990′s, and I guess I thought nothing of a fat guy hocking pizza on TV. But when I was over a gay friend’s house that I saw a gay newspaper instructing its readers to write to the executives of Pizza Hut saying how offended they were, how they wouldn’t frequent the joint, etc. I was pretty appalled. I mean, granted, Limbaugh is a political figure, he’s pretty much in the mainstream of conservative political thought. He’s certainly not a bigot or anything. So what the heck? Should Pizza Hut not advertise to conservatives? Were these gay people really big Pizza Hut fans in the first place? I mean, seriously…

Years later, I was working at LoJack, and the CEO of the company at the time was an old tight-fisted yankee type. I was friends with the #2 guy in marketing while I was there. LoJack advertised almost exclusively on radio at the time, because they found that people weren’t thinking of car accessories unless they were in their car. And of course, the biggest show we advertised on was the Howard Stern show. Of course, the Howard Stern show was despised by religious types, who were attempting the same social pariah tactics that the Left often uses, and they sent countless letters complaining. But the marketing department had to run a conspiracy within the company to keep those letters from reaching the CEO’s desk, because if they did reach his desk, and if he was made aware of what went on on the Howard Stern Show, he would have certainly pulled the advertising, something that would have had a seriously deleterious effect on the company’s marketing efforts.

Which I guess brings me to my next point, that these tactics are rarely effective, and when they are, they aren’t. The Howard Stern show would have survived without LoJack, and Rush Limbaugh is rich beyond most people’s wildest dreams without the endorsement of Pizza Hut. So really, what exactly are you trying to accomplish here?

Finally, these kinds of tactics amount to little more than bullying. It’s schoolyard stuff that we should have long since grown out of, but some of us just don’t. Rosslyn Smith has a great piece up today on this point, and I would strongly encourage you to read the whole thing:

For years now much of our comedy has gotten increasingly mean. It laughs less and less at the contradictions inherent in the human condition and increasingly picks out and personalizes targets to demean and humiliate. In the world of the comedian-cum-bully, wit has been replaced with name calling and the wry irony of the nerdish observer with the swagger of the schoolyard bully who decides who is among the in group and who are “them”, the outcasts to be made the butt of every mean spirited politically correct joke. Name calling is the stock in trade of the bully. So is telling the target who protests, “What’s a matter, can’t you take a joke?”

There’s a great Family Guy clip illustrating this point, but I’ll have to wait until I get home to find it as they block video at work.

But to be fair, Smith does think that some sort of reaction is warranted:

Allowing the bullies to go unmolested has hurt the party among other voters, too. One lesson I learned when I moved to rural America is that while blowing your own horn doesn’t cut it here, defending one’s honor does. The reticence of party insiders to challenge the elitist liberal media culture has been a huge source of dissatisfaction with the Republican brand among the rank and file outside the major urban areas. Nowhere has it been more apparent than with the media scorn heaped on Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber and the me-too echo of certain party insiders anxious to keep their credentials on the Sunday news show circuit

I agree that some sort of reaction is warranted, I’m not sure exactly what it is. But I’m not sure getting Letterman fired is it, or will amount to much if successful, We need to be able to speak freely to each other in this country, to debate and resolve political issues with our intellects. I think that it’s appropriate to respond to demagoguery with demagoguery. And I think a below the belt punch or insult is deserving of another. So here goes my effort in that vein:

Fuck you David Letterman. I hope your bastard son gets raped. And when you die, I will seek out your resting place and take a dump on it.

UPDATE: Letterman has apologized. Transcript.

UPDATE 2: Jim Treacher gets it right. I suppose I should also say I do not, in fact, hope Letterman’s son gets raped. But I still reserve the right to take a dump on his grave, if only because that actually is funny.

UPDATE 3: Found the Family Guy clip:

I found this surprising:

Some LGF readers ask me: Am I “obsessed?” Do I “hate Christians?” Why do I keep “harping” on this issue?

Answer: The top 3 GOP governors in America are all creationists, who have no problems with teaching pseudo-science to American children.

That’s why. This is wrong, and it’s one reason why the Democrats now control both houses of Congress. If this anti-scientific insanity continues, the Democrats will be in power for the next 20 years.

The three governors he’s talking about are Sanford, Pawlenty and Jindal, all three likely Presidential contenders in 2012. Palin, to the best of my knowledge, has not said anything explicitly advocating creationism, despite what you may see implied in mainstream media reports.

In any event, Johnson is right. A creationist party will be doomed to failure. Yet that is where the party seems to be heading. That is what Bush & Rove hath wrought.

Read more here.

Let’s get one thing absolutely clear: Bush was an incompetent who surrounded himself with bad advisers from the Nixon/Bush I years. And he took their advice WAY too often. Moreover, he split the Republican party apart by relegating free marketers to hangers on and elevating evangelicals into the true core of the Conservative movement. It will take years for the party to recover from the damage he has done.

But for all of that, he still didn’t deserve the vituperation and hatred spewed at him by the left for the past 8 years. J.R. Dunn gets to the point in a piece that is otherwise far too laudatory to Bush:

As in all such cases, Bush hatred involves a number of factors that will be debated by historians for decades to come. But one component that cannot be overlooked is ideology, specifically the ideologization of American politics. It is no accident that the three most hated recent presidents are all Republican. These campaigns are yet another symptom of the American left’s collapse into an ideological stupor characterized by pseudo-religious impulses, division of the world into black and white entities, and the unleashing of emotions beyond any means of rational control. The demonization of Bush — and Reagan, and Nixon — is the flip-side of the messianic response to Barack Obama.[...]

For the country as a whole, the prospects are bleaker. The left is convinced that hatred works, that it’s a perfect tactic, one that will work every time out. They have already started the process with Sarah Palin, their next target in their long row of hate figures. They’re wrong, of course. In a democracy, hatred is not a keeper, as the Know-Nothings, Radical Republicans, segregationists, Birchers, and many others have learned to their eventual dismay. But the process can take a long time to work itself out — nearly a century, in the case of racial segregation — and no end of damage can occur in the meantime.

I couldn’t agree more. Anyone not on the left who shows promising signs of achieving popularity will be smeared, denigrated by and defecated on by the left and their mouthpiece, the media. And we all know who will be leading THAT charge…

Obama’s Presidency will be a welcome breather. But the hatred will be back in spades should he lose congress, reelection, or should a Republican be elected in 2016.

Previously: Magnanimity

Virginia Postrel writes:

Now I may have to go back to being a Republican, to gear up for the struggle between the Jindal-Daniels wing and the Palin-Huckabee wing of the party.

Funny, I thought the divisions would be Palin-Daniels vs Jindal-Huckabee. It was Jindal, after all, who claims to have taken part in an exorcism, and Palin who left her wacky evangelical church.

She’s correct that we need this debate. But I think evangelicals (and their detractors) have been projecting much onto Palin that simply isn’t there.

(via Freedom and Shit)

Have fun at Palin As President.

I still don’t get what so enrages some people about her. And yes, it does say something that I can laugh at Palin while the left seems incapable of laughing at Obama…

There are instances where positing a theory directly interferes with your ability to measure it’s usefulness (or truthiness if you’re some kind of asshole). It’s like how in physics, quantum theory states that the act of measuring the smallest particles in the universe directly effects those particles’ behavior. Much the same can be true with people. The most basic example is how people try to psyche each other out by telling each other not to choke, or how in baseball people chant “Sawwwwing, batter batter batter batter…”

The same thing happens in politics. Dan Quayle was a perfect example of it. They kept saying he was stupid. And so when he, like every human, makes the occasional dumb utterance, it got magnified, reinforcing the belief that he was stupid, which in turn made him nervous around the cameras, thus increasing the likelihood that he would say something else stupid. And so a self fulfilling prophecy is born.

Much the same thing is happening with Gov. Palin right now. The press grossly mistreats her, by among other things calling her inexperienced and a fool. This, in turn, leads her to not want to conduct press interviews with people who she (rightly) views as inherently hostile towards her. And when she does conduct the occasional interview, she gets nervous and seems to lack confidence, which causes the press to exclaim, “Ah Ha!!! We told you she was out of her depth…”

That’s how saying something can often make it so.

Metaphor of the week from Eric Raymond:

The attempt to smear, discredit and delegitimize Palin has steadily become more intense and more damaging — to the Democrats. She’s become the Road Runner to the Democrats’ Wile E. Coyote; they keep devising ever more ingenious and elaborate traps for their proxies in the MSM to spring on her, only to wind up having them blow up spectacularly and autodestructively.

Read Eric Raymond. His metaphor is actually taken from Iowahawk. But the essay is the best one summarizing the current political scene I’ve seen. Be sure to read the whole thing.