Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary

Fixing The Tax System?

If true, here’s a non-war reason to hope for a Bush reelection. Reagan could never do this, but he never had a Republican congress.

I should add that people are paying far too much attention to polls, including the approval ratings and “right-track/wrong-track” polls. It’s way too early for them to have any significance whatsoever. The campaign hasn’t even started yet, and it won’t really kick in until after the Republican convention, and not really until after Labor Day.

At this point in 1988, Dukakis was several points ahead of the president’s father, and stayed there through August. He barely got over a hundred electoral votes.

I don’t think this race is going to be close–certainly not as close as 2000 (if for no other reason than regression to the mean). It’s very unlikely that we’d have two elections so close consecutively.

I in fact think that it will be a landslide, one way or the other (and my money’s on Bush, or would be if I participated in the Iowa electronic futures market, which currently agrees with me).

Political Commentary

Questions For Bill

Here is a compilation of what some people would like to see in the Great Prevaricator’s book, when it’s released next week. I have lots of these myself, but here’s one that no one else mentioned:

Will he deny the rape charge? Will he call Juanita Broderick a liar?

He’s never had a comment on this–whenever asked, he has simply said to talk to his lawyer. His lawyer denies it, of course, but that’s meaningless since he has no knowledge.

Political Commentary

One-Way Flow

There are still a few people attempting to fight against the now-prevailing wisdom that Reagan ended the Cold War through his policies, claiming that he just had the good luck to be president when it happened. Now, of course one can never know for sure what the causes were, but I find it interesting that some people are determined to continue to attempt to prove that it wasn’t Reagan’s doing. I wonder why they have such a powerful emotional investment in that?

They should consider something–if there were a good case to be made for their position, then it should have persuaded many of those on the fence, and perhaps even some who originally thought that it was Reagan’s doing, to change their opinion, but I don’t see that happening.

From James Lileks, to Bill Whittle, Matt Welch, Roger Simon and others, many people this past week have confessed that they thought Reagan was a dunce at the time, but they’ve seen the light now. This kind of commentary has abounded in comments sections as well. But I haven’t seen a single post or comment anywhere to the effect that someone thought Reagan was great at the time, but now they realize he was an idiot who had nothing to do with defeating the Soviet Union.

I wonder why that is?

[Update a few minutes later]

And yes, I do realize that I’ve just motivated them to start leaving me spurious comments with unverifiable claims about how brilliant they thought that Reagan was at the time, but that now they’re older and wiser.

I point this out preemptively to make their claims all the more ridiculous, since none have appeared spontaneously heretofore.