Despite all of this, will it matter what she has to say about Libby, knowledgeable or not? No, because she said “faggot” at CPAC, and shot herself in the foot. ~Mary Katharine Ham

I have no love for Ann Coulter or pro-Libby apologetics, but obviously it is the reasonableness or lack thereof of Coulter’s argument about the Libby case that ought to matter.  To take seriously the weird idea that anyone should hereafter ignore everything she says because of one example of name-calling is to give the episode far too much importance.  Instead, do what I do: ignore what Coulter says because she has a stunning habit of being wrong, as I assume she probably is on the Libby case as well.

Ultimately the film takes a moral stance, Herodotean in nature:  there is a difference, an unapologetic difference between free citizens who fight for eleutheria and imperial subjects who give obeisance. ~Victor Davis Hanson

So it sounds as if 300 will be worth watching, but an obvious question remains: why would Hanson et al. endorse a film that derides “imperial subjects who give obeisance”?  Do they like seeing themselves ridiculed on screen?

Not since the days of the Hitler Youth have young people been subjected to more propaganda on more politically correct issues. ~Thomas Sowell

Good grief, these people can’t even talk about education without mentioning Nazis!

A new low has already been struck with an exploitation of the religious issue with claims that some of Governor Mitt Romney’s Mormon ancestors had multiple wives.

Are Governor Romney’s ancestors going to be on the ballot? The fields are so crowded that I hadn’t noticed. The irony in all this, as someone has pointed out, is that Governor Romney seems to be one of the few politicians these days who has had only one wife.

The religious issue was supposed to have been put to rest back in 1960 when John F. Kennedy was elected as the first Catholic president. Actually, it wasn’t that big an issue in 1960, and some cynics said that the only one talking about it was JFK himself. ~Thomas Sowell

As I have said before, the AP story on Romney’s ancestors was a huge boon and benefit to Romney by making it clear how Mormonism has changed and how basically normal and conventional his family life is and has been.  People who don’t understand that really puzzle me.  The idea that a story that could only improve the public’s perception of Romney and his religion is a “low blow” or a “new low” is just bizarre.  Take note, journalists: only write scurrilous hit pieces that denigrate the candidate himself in especially lurid and gruesome ways, or else you will be accused of…writing scurrilous hit pieces.

It seems perverse to pretend that Kennedy’s Catholicism was not a problem that cost him votes.  People seem to forget that Kennedy prevailed in what was at that point the closest electoral victory in a presidential contest ever, and even then he probably only prevailed thanks to fraud.  It seems strange to argue that a Democrat could not have reasonably expected to do much better than Kennedy did.  In a country where roughly 50% of the population identified with the Democratic Party at that time and GOP party identification was at one of its lowest points at roughly 25%, Kennedy pulled a mere 49.7% of the vote.  The Democrats failed to carry Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana, all but one of which Truman had carried in 1948 with a similar percentage of the national vote.  Kennedy did not carry these states because of something to do with his candidacy.  Arguably it was not his Catholicism that did him in with voters in these states, but it seems odd to pretend that Kennedy did not underperform compared to the total Democratic/Dixiecrat/Progressive take of 54% in 1948.  Given that his Catholicism is one of the most plausible explanations for Kennedy’s performance, all this talk of how it didn’t really matter seems awfully like wishful thinking on the part of Republicans who are trying to pretend that Romney’s Mormonism will not be an issue.    

Surely I am not the only one who notices the strange incongruity of Republican whining about the “dirty tricks” of talking about Romney’s ancestors while Democrats talk up the frankly strange and partly foreign ancestry of Barack Obama as if it were itself a qualification for being President.  Just the other day in Selma Obama once again made his parentage and his biography his “in” with the civil rights leadership by tying (rather cleverly, as far as it goes) his parents’ marriage and, by extension, his birth to the civil rights movement.  This is identity politics at its most elemental, and Obama has been playing the game masterfully. 

Romney meanwhile has fumbled about throughout his career with references to his parents, talking about his mother’s Senate run in ’94 and ’02 (though he doesn’t talk about her Senate run anymore, you’ll notice!) and then reminiscing about his father at the Henry Ford Museum.  The museum was “full of cars and memories” of his father, while Romney was just full of it.  Then his supporters become indignant that anyone would bring up his polygamous ancestors, even though this provides a helpful contrast with Romney himself.  In the meantime, Obama quite freely and happily talks about his family background, even though his probably polygamous Muslim grandfather, his father’s multiple marriages, his parents’ divorce and his absentee father hardly qualify as the kind of family history that a candidate might be inclined to publicise.  Like Clinton, though, Obama has taken to making his biography into a political asset (Clinton sometimes did this by inventing the most egregious lies) by weaving it into a story of struggle and wrestling with his own identity, and in this way he tries to make the strangeness of his family background into a sort of virtue.  This works well with Americans, many of whom are obsessively genealogical, while the Romneyite horror at revelations about Romney’s family comes across as the reaction of people who find their candidate’s ancestry profoundly embarrassing and scandalous.  Take note: it is the Romney boosters, not his critics, who have been making the most out of this story. 

American voters may not know much, but they are not completely foolish.  What a man’s great-grandfather did or didn’t do is of no concern to them.  But if a candidate and his supporters seem unduly embarrassed by the man’s own ancestors, some folks will think he and his supporters are a bit odd.  Surely, of all Americans Mormons should be the most interested in telling about their family histories.  In viewing the telling of that history with such horror and offense, Romneyites give the impression that there is some reason why we should view this story about Romney’s ancestors as a slight against Romney, when instead they could try to turn it to his advantage.  

Both Obama and Romney have potential political liabilities because of their backgrounds.  The difference is that Obama knew his background could be a liability, so he got out in front of attempts to define him and worked to tell his own story.  Romney continues to operate on the optimistic, but probably false assumption that his Mormonism will be irrelevant.  He might be right, but everything we think we know about attitudes on this subject says otherwise.  The longer Romney avoids talking about his background, the greater the advantage his critics will have to paint him as we see fit.  To the extent that the Romneyites express dismay each time the subject comes up, they are hurting their candidate and helping those who want to shut him down.

“They’ve got some kind of wild teachings, I guess, but they [Mormons] are such decent people,” she [Ruth Malhotra] told me. ~Howard Fineman, Newsweek

I guess that’s some kind of endorsement.  Ms. Malhotra has joined the Romney fan club, it would seem, because of his “business mind set.”  So the one thing Romney can hope for is that enough Christian conservatives are more concerned about Mammon than “values,” as so many Republicans often are.

A journey of political self-discovery is what one would expect from a college student navigating between his professors’ chalk-dust-encrusted socialism and the liberating ideas of Milton Friedman. A tax-abused businessman pondering his first bid for public office at age 35 deserves such latitude. However, a 59-year-old prospective commander in chief of the United States Armed Forces should be more firmly rooted in his beliefs than Romney appears to be.

On the other hand, Romney truly could be further Left on the political spectrum than he now admits and has lurched sharply Rightward merely to impress conservative GOP primary voters. If so, he is fueled more by ambition than principle.

No wonder an astute, free-market-activist friend of mine recently christened Mitt Romney “Slick Willard.” ~Deroy Murdock

Romney’s serpentine statements are becoming almost too numerous to tabulate. ~Deroy Murdock

Those blasted liberals in the media keep hammering away at poor old Mitt!  Why won’t the liberals…oh, what’s that?  This is in Human Events?  That’s strange–don’t those misguided conservatives know that Romney is our saviour who endured the harrowing of Massachusetts so that he could mandate that everyone in the country buy health insurance on pain of fines?  Deliverance is at hand!

Fortunately for him, he didn’t shave his head first (although that would get rid of the “slick hair” and “Ken doll” image problems):

Mitt Romney may be low in the polls right now, but he is a man with a plan, a plan to make him the Republican nominee for president.

Though he is at only 4 percent in national polls, The Politico has learned that in the coming weeks and months, he will:

— Game the system. Romney intends to take advantage of the various and complicated rules governing the primaries.

The prime example is the change in the way California will conduct its Republican primary on Feb. 5.

Unlike Democratic primaries, Republican primaries are winner-take-all. Whoever wins statewide gets all the delegates at stake. This favors front-runners, who, with their early money and early support, can wrap up the nomination quickly.

But, in a barely noticed move, California Republicans have changed the system. Now it is winner-take-all by congressional district.

That means a candidate no longer needs to win the whole state to get delegates. It also means a candidate does not need a $25 million TV budget to do a serious statewide media buy.

Romney not only will target his TV ads to certain congressional districts, but he intends to treat California as if it were a “retail” political state instead of a tarmac state. (Because California is so large geographically, candidates spend most of their time flying from airport to airport, standing on the tarmac, doing a sound bite for local TV and then flying on.)

Romney intends to emphasize more intensive, face-to-face campaigning in select congressional districts in which he has the best chance of winning delegates.

— Feel the burn. While Romney expects to raise significant amounts of money, his “burn rate,” or expenses, will be high. (Howard Dean impressed the media by raising tens of millions of dollars on the Internet in 2003, but his campaign burned through it so fast that he had almost nothing left by the time he faced the New Hampshire primary in early 2004.)

Romney says he’ll spend his money wisely — but spend it. Although it is early, he’s already putting TV commercials on the air. He has to raise his poll numbers, which are in the single digits.

Via Jim Antle

Former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was convicted Tuesday of obstruction, perjury and lying to the FBI in an investigation into the leak of a CIA operative’s identity.

Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was accused of lying and obstructing the investigation into the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity to reporters. ~MSNBC 

One down, and somewhere around fifty to go.

Dan McCarthy makes some very smart points about the Coulter brouhaha.  The problem is not that Coulter predictably says obnoxious things, but that when it comes time to dissent from any party line on anything that actually matters she is mute or, worse, serves the role of an enforcer.  Her fake image as this hard-charging, truth-telling conservative, while always somewhat absurd for a lawyer who clerked at the Supreme Court, doesn’t even have the benefit of unsettling the functionaries and lackeys by using her popularity to oppose or criticise the GOP when it is going wildly astray (as it always is).  All the more reason why it would be far better to ignore her and her remarks than to rush about declaring how appalled everyone is supposed to feel.  This lends her credibility as some sort of rebel or dissenter when she is anything but that.  She is a party hack, of course, and should not get much sympathy now that her fellow wolves have turned on her.