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John Fund starts our look at Cantor’s loss. First though, Pickerhead wonders why everyone is so breathless about this loss. Remember in 1994 when a sitting Speaker of the House, Tom Foley, was defeated in the general election? That was an earthquake of larger proportions than this.
Eric Cantor’s loss is historic. No sitting House majority leader has lost an election since the office was created in 1899. While Cantor’s loss was a stunning surprise, the warning signals were around for a while:
1. Cantor managed to muddle his message on immigration. His direct-mail pieces claimed he was foursquare against amnesty. But the newspapers covering Washington, D.C., quoted him as saying he was seeking a compromise with President Obama on immigration. Voters resolved the seeming contradiction by deciding to vote out their establishment congressman. Cantor’s loss destroys any chance of a comprehensive immigration bill passing the House this year.
2. The majority leader outspent his opponent, David Brat, by $2.5 million to $40,000. Much of that money went to negative ads against Brat that turned off voters and were so vitriolic as not to be credible.
3. Cantor was also hurt by a subterranean campaign by Democrats to convince their supporters to vote in the Republican primary against Cantor. Apparently, some of them did. …
Roger Simon posts on what Cantor’s defeat means.
… At this point few if any Republicans will go near immigration reform as an issue, supposedly alienating the Hispanic vote beyond repair. Meanwhile, Democrats will have a field day branding Republicans as Tea Party crazies. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was already at it minutes after the Brat victory. Talk about projection!
But is this primary such a disaster? I am not so sure — and I was the one defending Cantor not long ago in these pages. To put it mildly, politics as usual has obviously been failing. That of course means Obama and the rest of the tawdry “progressive” crew but it also inevitably means his loyal (actually too loyal) opposition. The old pas de deux must go. Now maybe it will — or more of it anyway.
Listening to Brat being interviewed by Sean Hannity after the primary, I was encouraged. The professor seemed a bright man, refreshingly direct and honest, addressing ideas and issues in a, well, professorial manner rarely heard in politics these days. It almost made me sad he was leaving academia, such men having become as extinct in universities as they are in politics. …
Last on this from John Podhoretz.
The staggering Republican primary defeat tonight of Eric Cantor, the second highest-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives and the third most-powerful Republican in Washington, is a reminder of just how volatile American politics has become. And how responsive.
Eric Cantor wasn’t supposed to lose. His own pollster had him up by, get this, 34 points the other week. He’d raised nearly $5 million, and in the past two weeks spent $1 million against his rival’s $79,000. Not enough.
There’s a lot of triumphalist talk tonight about sending a message to Washington and the establishment vs. the outsiders and all that. Most of it is nonsense. Eric Cantor was “Establishment” by definition because he was in the House Republican leadership. But he was a constant source of agitation to House Speaker John Boehner because he insisted on representing the party’s more rightward elements during negotiations with President Obama. He is the Republican Obama detests the most because he was so stalwart against the president. …
Jason Riley thinks Mia Love’s success puts the lie to constant racial complaints.
If, as expected, Mia Love is elected to the seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson of Utah, she will make history as the first black Republican woman in Congress. But she will also become another example of why racial gerrymandering is unnecessary.
Ms. Love, who won the party’s nomination in April, is the former mayor of Saratoga Springs, a city that is 95 percent white in a state that is 86 percent white. If voting districts need to be racially segregated because whites won’t vote for black candidates, how do you explain the political career of this daughter of Haitian immigrants?
Ms. Love is hardly the only example of white support for a black candidate, and that’s leaving aside the fact that a majority-white country twice elected Barack Obama, who performed better among white voters in 2008 in states like Georgia, Texas and the Carolinas than did John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000. …
Roger Simon with a good post on moral narcissism.
In 1979, Christopher Lasch published The Culture of Narcissism warning of the normalizing of pathological narcissism in our society. Considering events since then, he was evidently on to something. Now, some 35 years later in the Obama era, with the Bergdahl incident only the latest in a parade of endless scandals, we have arrived at a full blown era of what has lately been called Moral Narcissism.
Moral Narcissism is an evocative term for the almost schizophrenic divide between intentions and results now common in our culture. It doesn’t matter how anything turns out as long as your intentions are good. And, just as importantly, the only determinant of those intentions, the only one who defines them, is you.
In other words, if you propose or do something, it only matters that you feel good or righteous about what you did or are proposing, that it makes you feel better personally. The results are irrelevant, as are how the actual activity affects others.
Also, although it pretends (especially to the self) to altruism, moral narcissism is in essence passive aggressive, asserting superiority over the ignorant or “selfish” other. It is elitist, anti-democratic and quite often, consciously or unconsciously, sadistic.
The Obama administration is loaded with moral narcissists, including, obviously, the president himself — Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton etc. The media and Hollywood are also clearly stuffed to the gills with moral narcissists. …
No better illustration today of moral narcissism is the situation in Mosul, Iraq. WSJ Editors have the story of how the good intentions of the administration have created a disaster.
… The Administration’s policy of strategic neglect toward Iraq has created a situation where al Qaeda effectively controls territories stretching for hundreds of miles through AnbarProvince and into Syria. It will likely become worse for Iraq as the Assad regime consolidates its gains in Syria and gives ISIS an incentive to seek its gains further east. It will also have consequences for the territorial integrity of Iraq, as the Kurds consider independence for their already autonomous and relatively prosperous region.
All this should serve as a warning to what we can expect in Afghanistan as the Administration replays its Iraq strategy of full withdrawal after 2016. It should also serve as a reminder of the magnitude of the strategic blunder of leaving no U.S. forces in Iraq after the country finally had a chance to serve as a new anchor of stability and U.S. influence in the region. An Iraqi army properly aided by U.S. air power would not have collapsed as it did in Mosul.
In withdrawing from Iraq in toto, Mr. Obama put his desire to have a talking point for his re-election campaign above America’s strategic interests. Now we and the world are facing this reality: A civil war in Iraq and the birth of a terrorist haven that has the confidence, and is fast acquiring the means, to raise a banner for a new generation of jihadists, both in Iraq and beyond.
The Guardian, UK covers the possible development of another El Nino.
The global El Niño weather phenomenon, whose impacts cause global famines, floods – and even wars – now has a 90% chance of striking this year, according to the latest forecast released to the Guardian.
El Niño begins as a giant pool of warm water swelling in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, that sets off a chain reaction of weather events around the world – some devastating and some beneficial.
India is expected to be the first to suffer, with weaker monsoon rains undermining the nation’s fragile food supply, followed by further scorching droughts in Australia and collapsing fisheries off South America. But some regions could benefit, in particular the US, where El Niño is seen as the “great wet hope” whose rains could break the searing drought in the west.
The knock-on effects can have impacts even more widely, from cutting global gold prices to making England’s World Cup footballers sweat a little more.
The latest El Niño prediction comes from the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which is considered one the most reliable of the 15 or so prediction centres around the world. “It is very much odds-on for an event,” said Tim Stockdale, principal scientist at ECMWF, who said 90% of their scenarios now deliver an El Niño. “The amount of warm water in the Pacific is now significant, perhaps the biggest since the 1997-98 event.” That El Niño was the biggest in a century, producing the hottest year on record at the time and major global impacts, including a mass die-off of corals.
“But what is very much unknowable at this stage is whether this year’s El Niño will be a small event, a moderate event – that’s most likely – or a really major event,” said Stockdale, adding the picture will become clearer in the next month or two. “It is which way the winds blow that determines what happens next and there is always a random element to the winds.” …
Andrew Malcolm ends our week with late night humor.
Jay Leno spoke at an awards ceremony in Israel recently honoring Michael Bloomberg. He commented on how Obama‘s administration has handled its ‘special relationship’ with Israel.
Leno said, “President Obama declared the month of May to be Jewish American Heritage Month. He is calling it an opportunity to renew our ‘unbreakable bond with the nation of Israel.’ And Obama knows it’s unbreakable because he’s been trying to break it for the last five years.”
Meyers: Phil Mickelson is under investigation by the FBI for insider trading of Clorox stock. By the way, insider trading of Clorox stock by a pro golfer is the whitest collar crime possible.
Conan: Pope Francis says married people should have more kids. Married people said the Pope should “have a kid and then get back to us.”
Meyers: President Obama unveils a 600-page proposal to lower carbon emissions and help stop global warming. Step One: Stop printing 600-page proposals.