Canadian Cincinnatus

So tell me again Bush lied about WMD’s in Iraq: ISIS occupies Iraqi chemical warfare stockpike

An interesting tidbit of news that has come out of the recent fighting in Iraq that the Mainstream Media is curiously quiet on: 

‘The State Department and other U.S. government officials have revealed that ISIS now occupies the Al Muthanna Chemicals Weapons Complex. Al Muthanna was Saddam Hussein’s primary chemical weapons facility, and it is located less than 50 miles from Baghdad.

The Obama administration claims that the weapons in that facility, which include sarin, mustard gas, and nerve agent VX, manufactured to prosecute the war against Iran in the 1980s, do not pose a threat because they are old, contaminated and hard to move. “We do not believe that the complex contains CW materials of military value and it would be very difficult, if not impossible to safely move the materials,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.’

The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies had this to say about Saddam Hussein’s secret stash at Al Muthanna  in a 2010 report:

‘Although the damaged Bunker 13 at Muthanna contained thousands of sarin-filled rockets, the presence of leaking munitions and unstable propellant and explosive charges made it too hazardous for UNSCOM inspectors to enter. Because the rockets could not be recovered safely, Iraq declared the munitions in Bunker 13 as ‘destroyed in the Gulf War’ and they were not included in the inventory of chemical weapons eliminated under UNSCOM supervision.

Because of the hazardous conditions in Bunker 13, UNSCOM inspectors were unable to make an accurate inventory of its contents before sealing the entrances in 1994. As a result, no record exists of the exact number or status of the sarin-filled rockets remaining in the bunker. … In the worst-case scenario, the munitions could contain as much as 15,000 liters of sarin. Although it is likely that the nerve agent has degraded substantially after nearly two decades of storage under suboptimal conditions, UNMOVIC cautioned that ‘the levels of degradation of the sarin fill in the rockets cannot be determined without exploring the bunker and taking samples from intact warheads.’ If the sarin remains highly toxic and many of the rockets are still intact, they could pose a proliferation risk.”’

Then there is this:

‘In 2008, American and Iraqi officials had “completed nearly the last chapter in dismantling Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program with the removal of hundreds of tons of natural uranium from the country’s main nuclear site,” the New York Times reported. Approximately 600 tons of “yellowcake” was removed from the Tuwaitha facility, the main site for Iraq’s nuclear program. According to global security.org, uranium enrichment levels of 95 percent were achieved at the Tuwaitha facility. That site was also the location of the Osirak nuclear reactor destroyed by Israel in 1981.’

And this: 

‘In 2010, documents procured by Wikileaks revealed more information on the WMD threat posed by Iraq that was known to the government. The self-described whistleblowers, who could hardly be called pro-war, released 392,000 military reports from Iraq that revealed several instances of American encounters with potential WMDs or their manufacture. These included 1200 gallons of a liquid mustard agent in Samarra that tested positive for a blister agent; tampering by large earth movers thought to be attempting to penetrate the bunkers at Muthanna; the discovery of a chemical lab and a chemical cache in Fallujah; and the discovery of a cache of weapons hidden at an Iraqi Community Watch checkpoint with 155 mm rounds that subsequently tested positive for mustard.’

From these reports, it sounds like the whole country was packed to the rafters with ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – or their immediate precursors. Another left-wing shibboleth exposed as a hoax.

You know what? I don’t want to hear another God-damned thing about how Bush lied, and soldiers died.

 

P.S. As a side note, why didn’t George W Bush’s ‘architect’, Karl Rove, beat Bush’s domestic critics like a club with stuff like this? Reports like this reflect poorly on his ability to get his side of the story out to protect the reputation of his client. George W Bush and his foam-flecked critics are wrong. Rove is no genius, evil or otherwise.  

 

Karlene Nation: A conservative star who was buried by Hudak’s PCs

On election night last Thursday, while I was absentmindedly following the dismal results on TV at my local PC candidate’s ‘victory’ party, I saw a name come up in the feed that surprised me: Karlene Nation. Not watching the local TV news in the past ten years, I did not immediately recognize why I recognized her name. It took me a few moments to realize Karlene Nation is (or was, until recently) a TV reporter for CTV News. I did not know until then that she had been a candidate for the Progressive Conservative Party in the recent provincial election. (I presume her conservatism came from her father, one of the first black police officers on the Toronto force.) 

Looking her up on the Internet I saw that she had lost in the riding of York West, but I was surprised by how much. This long-time reporter for the top-rated TV station in Toronto had received a shellacking. The Liberal candidate won with 11,800 votes; the NDP candidate received 10,000 votes; and she only got 2,800 votes. She had also represented PC Ontario in this riding in the 2011 election with similar results. (She had also run municipally for a council seat in Ward 19 in the 2010.) 

This situation perfectly illustrates a serious problem with the people running the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. Here they had a star candidate - an award winning TV journalist, who also happened to be a black woman - and they buried her in a no-hope riding. I presume she chose that riding because she lives there but somebody in the party should have spoken to her and parachuted her into a swing riding where her name recognition and star power might have shifted a marginal riding into the Conservative column. They should have also made her one of the party spokesmen, subtly countering the inevitable accusations of racism, stated or implied, that left-wing parties and the MSM routinely make against conservatives.

But they didn’t. They were asleep at the wheel. The Tim Hudak brain-trust: no killer instinct, and no will to win.

 

Well, that didn’t take long: Premier Wynne to freeze civil servant pay

According to the Toronto Sun, Premier Wynne said:

The budget that we are going to be re-introducing in the next couple of weeks is the same budget that we introduced at the beginning of May and there is no new money for wages and salaries in that budget,” Wynne said. “So any groups or individuals who supported us either knew that or they should get to know it now because that’s the plan that we brought forward.”

Well she sure didn’t emphasize that in her campaign.

On Tuesday, I posted an article predicting that Premier Wynne would stab her union supporters in the back now that she has got her majority. I was right, except in that the timelines I was considering was a year or two, not two days. I also advised this:

If Kathleen Wynne is smart, she will pull a Dalton McGuinty and break all her promises immediately.

The only thing is, at the time I wrote those words, even I didn’t think she would be so brazen as to take my advice so openly. I also wrote: 

The only choice was whether to elect the honest, straight shooter or his dishonest and deluded rivals. 

Well Mr. Union Man, what do you think now about supporting the party of dishonesty?

 

P.S. If the pay freeze really was buried in the fine print of the Wynne budget, it speaks poorly of the Hudak campaign that they didn't dig it up and feature it in anti-Liberal attack ads aimed at splitting her off from her union supporters. As I said before, no killer instinct.

A tale of a million jobs

In the recent provincial election, Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak touted his ‘million jobs’ plan. While the plan to produce those million jobs included many proven common sense measures like lower corporate taxes, less regulation, lower energy prices and getting rid of the recently created College of Trade, the opposition parties derided his plan for its supposed ‘bad math’ and trotted out a bunch of Keynesian economists to prove it.

The problem with the plan was not in the details. They were quite solid. The problem is that by saying you will create a million jobs, the onus is now on you to prove your numbers. As the challenger, you should not put yourself into this position, particularly when you are campaigning against a feckless, incompetent and corrupt government with a horrible economic track record. The onus should be on them to prove their record. 

That’s why the correct political strategy would have centered over some actual job numbers, such as, for instance, the 300,000 manufacturing jobs that Ontario lost since 2003. Instead of touting a million new jobs, ask Wynne to defend the indefensible Liberal record of destroying jobs. Then, you roll out the exact same policy proscriptions contained in the million jobs plan. Of course, the Keynesians would have still been trotted out, but if Hudak had been properly prepared, he would have foreseen that and had free-market economists lined up counter them. 

With the academics and policy wonks duking it out on increasingly incomprehensible technical points, Hudak’s coup de grace would have been this retort: 

Ms. Wynne, what is your plan? In truth you have none, because if you had, you would have implemented it by now. All you can do is nitpick the ideas of others and naysay people who want to get those 300,000 neglected workers working again. If you can’t do anything constructive, get out of the way. Get out of the way Madam Premier so that hard working Ontarians can get back to work!

I point this out not to refight a war that has already been lost, but to point out that the reason Hudak lost was not with his policies. They were quite good, and he was admirably honest and straightforward about them. Hudak’s problem - and the reason he lost - is because he was unable to connect with the Low Information Voter, i.e. with the undecided.

As I have tirelessly pointed out on these pages, this segment of the body politic cannot be won over with policies, either conservative or socialist. They don’t care about issues. Booring. Right-wing, left-wing, chicken wing. They make their decisions using an entirely different logic than used by politically active people, which is why we (the politically active) so often misread them. They don’t think like us. They need to be persuaded on more emotional terms.

Hudak’s deficiencies were entirely in the categories of political packaging and strategy. A leader with the same policy platform, but with the fingerspitzengefuhl of a natural politician, like say Rob Ford (minus the addictions), would have walked away with this election - leaving the Ontario Liberal Party in smoking ruins.

 

Kathleen Wynne is now free to stab the unions in the back

In the National Post, Matt Gurney nails it. From a fiscal perspective, it doesn’t matter who won the recent provincial election. The province is out of money and a debt crisis is at hand (or will be shortly). The only choice was whether to elect the honest, straight shooter or his dishonest and deluded rivals. Ontario chose one of the latter. 

For Ontario, 2014 is like 1993 was for Canada as a whole. In the 1993 federal election, the upstart Reform Party was branded as ‘extremist’ by the victorious Chretien Liberals for mentioning the looming debt crisis and the need to take proscriptive measures. But two years later, the predicted debt crisis was at hand. As a result, the bond markets forced Jean Chretien to hack and slash, to do the very things he slandered Preston Manning as an extremist for proposing. In Ontario, it’s déjà vu all over again.

But look at it from the perspective of Ontario’s public sector unions. Their ideal outcome would have been a minority government. It wouldn’t really matter much to them which party was in charge because the unions could play one off against the other. If a Wynne minority had proposed the cuts, the unions could have moved their support behind the NDP, killing the Liberals in the next election. If a Hudak minority, the unions could make the NDP and the Liberals compete for their favour with the result that both would staunchly oppose any cuts with lock-step unanimity. This would make meaningful reform to the size of the Ontario government next to impossible – at least until the next majority government.

On the other hand, with a majority government, playing off one party against the others is no longer possible. If Kathleen Wynne is smart, she will pull a Dalton McGuinty and break all her promises immediately. The unions will go ballistic but she will have four years to recover and if, after four years, the budget is balanced and the Ontario economy is riding high, the Ontario public (minus the unions) might reward her steely-eyed decisiveness with another majority. A risky strategy to be sure but better than continuing to spend recklessly until the debt wall is hit. The resulting cuts will be much deeper, the political recovery time for the Liberals much shorter, and no glory at all will flow to the Liberals for demonstrating leadership skills.

This is why, counterintuitively, a Hudak majority would have been slightly better for the civil servants. Hudak’s victory would have come with a mandate to shrink the Ontario government, something he would likely have begun to do immediately. This is actually a better thing for government workers than a debt crisis because the sooner the budget is balanced, the less pain that needs to be inflicted overall, and the greater the percentage of job cuts that can be achieved by attrition. (If McGuinty had run a tight ship all along, no job cuts at all would now be required.) 

Oh well. For Ontario’s public sector unions, be careful what you wish for. You might just get it – good and hard.

One Ontario public sector union leader gets it, the Wynne Liberals will cut government jobs

According to the Toronto Sun:

‘Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne is lying when she says she will not cut public sector jobs, the top boss of the Ontario Public Sector Employees' Union said Tuesday.

Warren "Smokey" Thomas accused Wynne of burying $1.2 billion in cuts in the dead-on-arrival budget earlier this year.’

The stupidity of people who think they can avoid a fiscal reckoning by not electing Conservative leader Tim Hudak simply amazes me. Earth to Ontario liberals: there will be a reckoning no matter who you vote for, and sooner rather than later. Why do I know this?

Think about it in terms of the power grid. With the power grid, supply has to meet demand. There is no choice about it. The grid cannot remain out of balance for long. The only real choice hydro controllers have is whether supply and demand will be balanced in a controlled manner, or in an uncontrolled manner - such as with a blackout resulting from blown circuit breakers and exploding transformers. There are no other options. 

The budget is kind of like the power grid. Where supply has to meet demand on the grid, expenses have to meet revenue in the balance sheet. The only difference is that financial books can remain out of balance for more time than a power grid, allowing some Ontario residents to indulge in the fantasy that Ontario’s books don’t ever have to return to balance. This is a childish wish, and given that the province's operating deficit is projected to be $12.5 billion this year, and that it has been at or over $10 billion for the past four years, the day of reckoning will be sooner rather than later. 

As with the power grid, the only choice the financial controllers have is whether spending and revenue will be balanced in a controlled manner or an uncontrolled manner. As voters, our only choice is whether to elect budget controllers who wish to balance the Ontario budget the first way or the second way.

In promising to spend, spend, spend, Ontario Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne is either lying to the voters or she will precipitate Ontario’s fiscal collapse. If the former, then the choice Ontarians face is between honesty and dishonesty. If the latter, then it is between avoiding a debt crisis and having one.

Even ol’ ‘Smokey’ seems to grasp this: 

‘While Wynne has tried to scare voters with warnings that Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak would weaken government services with his plan to cut 100,000 government jobs, Thomas said at least Hudak is "honest and straightforward" with what's he's proposing to do.’

Then again, maybe not. Later on in the article he talks about voting NDP. Hmmm, I wonder how well he thinks his members will make out when the government loses its ability to borrow money.

Why the bottom isn’t falling out of Kathleen Wynne’s reelection campaign

At first it seems like a paradox. The 11-year reign of the Liberal Party in the province of Ontario has brought more misfortune – and certainly more farce – than the misbegotten NDP government of Bob Rae in the early 1990’s. And yet, public support for the current premier, Kathleen Wynne, is holding up much better than it did for Bob Rae. Considering all the billion dollar boondoggles her government has precipitated – almost all of them self-inflicted – this is almost unbelievable. Why?

The theory I have been nursing for a while is that, while a political party can lose an election for a whole host of reasons, it will only get creamed when it betrays its base.

Take Bob Rae. His party wasn’t wiped out in the 1995 provincial election because he completely mismanaged the provincial economy and drove the provincial government to near bankruptcy. Those things would only have resulted in a dignified loss. What turned defeat into unmitigated disaster was that he had attacked his base – the unions. His imposition of ‘Rae Days’ (unpaid holidays for provincial civil servants to save money and thereby avoid mass layoffs) was considered to be a fundamental betrayal. As a result, on Election Day, he had no supporters left. His base thought he was traitor, everybody else thought he was incompetent. 

When former premier Dalton McGuinty suspended collective bargaining rights for teachers, that was his Bob Rae moment. The teachers were outraged at McGuinty. Everybody else was outraged at the teachers – and McGuinty. Not having the integrity of Bob Rae to try and fix the mess he created, McGuinty took the coward’s way out and called it a career.

His successor, Kathleen Wynne, seems to have learned the ‘Bob Rae’ lesson: don’t abandon your base. She quickly awarded sweetheart deals to the unions and they are now joined at the hip with her Liberal Party. The unions, for their part, also learned a lesson. Don’t declare war on your patron. In going after Bob Rae in 1995 for “Rae Days’, they ended up with Mike Harris, the most libertarian provincial leader ever elected in Canada. Layoffs followed. 

(As an aside, I wonder if Wynne is planning on stabbing her union buddies in the back after the election – assuming she wins a majority. That would be the smart Machiavellian thing to do. With $12 billion deficits year-in-year-out, something drastic has to happen. Better to get the unpleasantries over with right away. Four years later, the unions will still hate her, but the rest of the people might see four years of prosperity and restraint, and award her a second majority.)

The lesson transcends Ontario politics. This is the reason Barack Obama’s poll numbers have not tanked like Jimmy Carter’s. Carter saw the error in his ways and began real reform. Airline deregulation and trucking deregulation were the first moves in Reaganomics, but they began under Carter. Conservatives saw malaise and defeat. Socialists saw a betrayal. In contrast, President Obama has the American left locked down. As a result, Obama’s popularity has a floor of 40% in the public opinion polls, below which it won’t go.

The lesson also transcends the political divide. The reasons Red Tories and RINO’s lose all the time, in spite of their vaulted ‘moderation’, is because their base - the people whose donations, volunteer time and moral support they need - hate them. The reason the poll numbers tumbled so badly for George W Bush was not Katrina, it was the immigration debate immediately preceding Hurricane Katrina, so that when the hurricane cane ashore, the people who normally would have stepped up to the plate to defend their President, didn’t. When Bush did all those bailouts and stimulus deals in the final year of his presidency, that sealed the deal. Conservatives abandoned him in droves, and he discovered that, as a result, there was no floor to his poll numbers. Iraq didn’t kill Bush (by his final year, he was winning that war), amnesty for illegal aliens and the bank bailouts did.

It’s also the reason John McCain (amnesty and McCain-Feingold) and Mitt Romney (Romneycare) lost to Obama. The base didn’t trust them.

The first rule of politics is, protect your base. The low information voters can always be can be corralled in at the last minute.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why exactly is the annexation of Turks and Caicos such a bad idea?

The annexation of Turks and Caicos by Canada is a proposal that has been around a while, but has never taken seriously by the Canadian establishment. I never understood that. The latest dismissal is by National Post Columnist Chris Selley:

“Canada doesn’t ‘need a Hawaii’ because it just doesn’t. Here we are, with no tropical overseas territories at all, doing pretty OK. Bam – proof of concept. And the main problem with Turks and Caicos becoming Canada’s Hawaii is that Canada has several de facto Hawaiis. Hawaii is one of them. In 2013, excluding cruise ship visits, just 32,000 Canadians visited Turks and Caicos. More than a million visited the Aloha State.”

Except that Canada doesn’t have Hawaii or any other tropical overseas territories.

If there is something that military strategy – and history – teaches us is that islands can sometimes be very useful things to have. First, they come with a 200 nautical mile Economic Exclusion Zone. Right now Turks and Caicos’s is not very important, but you never know what will be found in the future. Look at the Spratly Islands. Until recently, it was just a bunch of low-lying reefs in the middle of nowhere that nobody cared a whit about. But now that oil might be found there, it is in the middle of a five-way tug of war between China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam

Second, you never know when an island will be propelled onto the center stage of international politics. Take Diego Garcia. Britain acquired that island in 1814 as part of the Treaty of Paris. While it was used as a seaplane base in World War II, it was pretty much a strategic backwater - until the fall of the Shah. All of a sudden, it became an important US naval base guarding the strategically crucial Strait of Hormuz, as well as an air base for operations against both Iran and Iraq. In fifty years, maybe Turks and Caicos will be similarly important, either economically or militarily, who knows? 

In the meantime, how much will it cost Canada? It has only 30,000 residents so it can hardly precipitate a flood of welfare claimants to the Great White North. But once it comes under the rule of a rich country with a cold climate, tourism from Canada will likely skyrocket, good for the Turks and Caicos economy, and good for Canada’s balance of payments.  What’s not to like?

It seems to me that Canada has such an inferiority complex about it place in the world, due to the historical fact that it has played second-fiddle to either the British Empire or the United States for so long. As a result, our elites can’t help but snigger when the possibility of Canada having a strategic interest of its own is mentioned. 

At least that’s my explanation of Selley’s proof by comic-book sound effect.

 

It's Time for Attack Ads on Tim Hudak's Real Opponents: The Unions

Rob Ford didn't get elected mayor of Toronto because he has good hair, like the former mayor, David Miller, or because he's slim and has a good pedigree, like Justin Trudeau. He got elected by promising to go after the city unions and their spend-happy councillor enablers. Ford wasted little time talking about his main opponent, George Smithermen. He just kept pounding home the message that he would stop the gravy train and ensure, "Respect for Taxpayers." For anyone in Toronto, that was code for, "I'll get those greedy, arrogant garbage workers who forced you to endure a five week strike in the middle of a hot summer last year."

The memory of that strike was very fresh four years ago. One story that did untold damage to the union reputation was of a senior citizen forced by union members to walk a 1/2 kilometer in the hot sun, carrying her one allowed bag of garbage, so that she could drop in on the stinking temporary pile. Of course she had to walk back to her car too. This is just one example of how the union enraged the voters. Worse, Mayor David Miller spent most of the strike haranguing citizens and promising that they would be severely punished if they illegally dumped. Everyone knew he was in the union's pocket, especially after he caved in to their demands. I suspect he took one look at the polls after that debacle and decided to quit rather than face humiliating defeat.

In Ontario, people still remember last year's teachers' work to rule, and believe me, we parents are still peeved. I recall showing up at 6:30 at my son's middle school for a parent-teacher night. Many parents had rushed home from work, wolfed down a quick dinner, and hurried over to find out how their children were doing at school, only to discover that the teachers had all left in protest without notice three hours earlier. Most of us are on the school's e-mail list, so sending out a warning that the teachers would not be there would've been simple, but the teachers kept their protest a secret until the last minute because they wanted parents to be inconvenienced. They wanted to hurt us under the mistaken assumption that we'd all blame McGuinty and call our MPPs. It never occurred to them that we would blame the people who beat rush hour every day by leaving for home as early as 3:30 pm, even when there isn't a work-to-rule.

The greatest damage to the tories is being done by the Working Families, so it's time to attack them. It's very simple. Make the following statements over ominous music:

The unions, including the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation, fund the advertising of the Working Families.

In the last election, Working Families spent big money on ads attacking Tim Hudak and the Progressive Conservatives.

The Teachers' unions also supported Kathleen Wynn's bid to become the leader of the Ontario Liberal Party.

Now they're again attacking Tim Hudak and the Progressive Conservatives.

Why?

What are they afraid of?

It's time for a government that represents all the people of Ontario, not just union members. Paid for by the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario.

This ad will make all the advertising of the Working Families toxic. Each attack ad aimed at the tories will suddenly sound self-serving. Remember, most voters don't know who funds the Working Families, which is why their advertising is so effective. Educate voters and you will irreparably damage the brand of the Working Familes, and all their future advertising will only hurt their cause.

Obviously, numbers would be good. I'm pretty sure researchers can say exactly how much Working Families spent on attack ads in the last election, and I'm pretty sure it's a matter of public record about who contributed to Kathleen Wynn's bid for Liberal leadership and how much. It wouldn't hurt to mention that Wynn gave the teachers a huge settlement in exchange for labour peace as soon as she took control.

In order to pay for this advertising, simply cease all attack ads against Wynn. She looks like a grandmother, like everyone's grandmother, and attacking a grandmother makes you look weak.

Tim Hudak and the Progressive Conservatives need to remember that no union members are going to vote for them anyway. Attacking the unions is win-win.

Mike Downtown

Joe the Plumber and the California Massacre victims: why we need smart culture warriors

Joe the Plumber rose to fame from obscurity when he confronted then Presidential Candidate Barack Obama in October, 2008 over Obama’s redistribution scheme. He became an instant internet sensation for being virtually the only person to directly confront Obama over his dirigisme. McCain certainly didn’t. Many people standing on the sidelines cheered – including me.

Unfortunately, after the recent California massacre, Joe the Plumber demonstrated his intellectual limitations. He wrote an “open letter” to the families of the victims of the recent shooting spree. He said, “Your dead kids don’t trump my constitutional rights.”

You know what? I agree with him on the underlying principles: security concerns don’t trump ancient and sacred liberties.

But in terms of persuasion, Joe the Plumber could not have framed his argument more poorly. My God, choosing the parents of children who were recently killed in cold blood to be your nemesis – it would hardly be possible to stake out a position to make yourself look more loathsome. If it weren’t for his past run-in with Obama, I would think he was a deep cover agent of Handgun Control Inc. sent on a mission to discredit their adversaries with a false flag operation. 

Anybody who understands anything about political debate knows that he who frames the debate wins the debate. In other words, you must set out the terms of the argument in such a way that your position is as easy to defend as possible while your opponents’ are as difficult as possible. To do this effectively, you must first understand that in any controversy there are people who wear white hats and people who wear black hats. Who wears the white hats and who wears the black hats when you walk into the room is a given. You have no control over that. Life isn’t fair.

But you do have a choice of who you align yourself with. If possible, you side with the white hats against the black hats. If you can do this, most of your work is already done. If you can’t and you have no choice but to challenge a white hat, you must first replace their white hat with a black hat. Doing this requires a deft touch because you can’t really attack them overtly while they are wearing the white hat. That can only be done once they have the black hat on. One way to do that is to redefine your adversary in terms that are less complimentary to them. An example of this from political history was when the Regan campaign redefined single mothers on welfare as ‘welfare queens’, parasites cynically manipulating the system to live at the expense of hard-working taxpayers. Only after this was done, could they be subject to robust criticism. Until that moment, you had to handle them with kid gloves.

In the gun control debate following the Elliot Rodger’s killing spree, Joe the Plumber had it easy, for there were black hats already present. Opportunistic gun-grabbing politicians and ditzy celebrities were there for the bashing. He could have gone after them with all the gusto he could muster and we would have all cheered. But going after grieving parents in the depth of their despair? Fie. Don’t be an ass.

This incident illustrates why smart cultural warriors are such an important asset. Unfortunately, the establishment conservative parties show no sign of understanding this. They are more interested on Sheldon Adelson’s next donation cheque. In fact, when smart culture warriors like Senators’ Mike Lee, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul come along, they try to stop them. That is why the conservative blogosphere and their media offshoots, like PJMedia and Breitbart.com are so valuable. On the internet we are now getting culture warriors –like Glenn Reynolds, Bill Whittle, James O’Keefe, and the late, great Andrew Breitbart - who are adept at the basic mechanics of political war.