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Thad McCotter: "This is not a nostalgic 'anti-colonial uprising' from within"

"Your Cairo statement rings true. Am I right here," we twittered Rep. Thad McCotter this afternoon, linking our own tweet (above), a layman's take on the ongoing Middle East turmoil based upon keeping our virtual ear to the ground in the last period of time:

This is what's really happening. Muslim Brotherhood poised to co-opt restless populations thoughout Middle East.

"Yes, you are right," McCotter direct-messaged back. We're inclined to take the Michigan Congressman's well-considered assessments seriously. Any politician who can hold his own on Greg Gutfeld's transcendent, "take no prisoners" Red Eye on Fox in the wee hours is top salesman in the global marketplace of ideas. A few excerpts from McCotter's "Statement on Egyptian Crisis: America Must Stand with Her Ally Egypt" — a counterpoint to the standard-issue "let my people go" narrative spin that seems to be dominating the airwaves — and then, as might be expected, a few thoughts of our own. Here's our Thad:

The Egyptian demonstrations are not the equivalent of Iran's 2009 Green Revolution. The Egyptian demonstrations are the reprise of Iran's 1979 radical revolution.

Thus, America must stand with her ally Egypt to preserve an imperfect government capable of reform; and prevent a tyrannical government capable of harm …

Though many will be tempted to superficially interpret the Egyptian demonstrations as an uprising for populist democracy, they must recall how such similar initial views of the 1979 Iranian Revolution were belied by the mullahs' radical jackbooted murderers, who remain bent upon grasping regional hegemony and nuclear weaponry … 

This is not a nostalgic 'anti-colonial uprising' from within, of all places, the land of Nassar.  Right now, freedom's radicalized enemies are subverting Egypt and our other allies.

"MuslimBrotherhood ethos = Exact opposite of USA: 'rid Arab lands of non-believers' vs 'give me your huddled masses yearn'g to breathe free,'" we twittered this afternoon.

John Bolton's on the same wavelength. Cubachi explains:

Ambassador John Bolton is putting cold water to this growing sense among the media that this is a “pro-democracy movement.” This is a nation that has not seen democracy in centuries …

This is a protest percolated by the Muslim Brotherhood. As Big Peace revealed on its blog, What Do the Egyptian Crowds Want? Caliphate Dreams and Strict Sharia.

Googling our own posts on the subject of radicalized enemies from within, an über theme of our blog, we stumbled upon "Thad McCotter and the wicked wisp of a woman's hair," a post from May of last year that says it all:

Whatever role Nazi propaganda may have played in fanning the fires of ancient tribal hatreds, all utopian ideologies that feed on hatred and fear of "the other" — whether that "other" be women, Tea Partiers [!] or the Jewish people — are doomed to failure because they deny human nature. Thad McCotter expressed the idea most brilliantly in a CPAC showstopper last February …

Men who would fit women's world to their mind by forcing the veil upon us are in reality attempting a futile veiling of their own fearful human nature. Is it too much of a stretch to posit a similar psychological projection at work in the savage attempts of political elites — who know better than we what is best for us — to silence dissent?

Where will it all lead? Only time will tell. One intriguing possiblitiy:

The fixer in the shadows who may emerge as Egypt's leader.

General Omar Suleiman is already one of the world's most powerful spy chiefs. And in time, says David Blair, he could well be Hosni Mubarak's successor as leader of Egypt.

Finally, for a little comic relief, THE Robert Fisk rises from the dead to offer his half-cent's worth on what it might all mean:

How this elderly apparatchik [Suleiman] might be expected to deal with the anger and joy of liberation of 80 million Egyptians is beyond imagination. When I told the demonstrators on the tank around me the news of Suleiman's appointment, they burst into laughter. 

Update: Instalanche!

Update II: Michelle Malkin Buzzworthy link!

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Rand Paul: "The president has been co-opted by the Tea Party"

"Young America's Foundation stepped in to save President Reagan'sWestern White House [in santa Barbara] Rancho del Cielo (above), in the spring of 1998 to preserve it as a living monument to Ronald Reagan to pass on [his] ideas to future generations," explains the organization's mission statement. Now Sarah Palin has accepted their invitation to keynote "Reagan 100 celebration" next weekend commemorating the 100th anniversary of The Great Communicator's birth.

"The president has been co-opted by the Tea Party," exulted Rand Paul as he and fellow Republican Senators Jim DeMint and Mike Lee launched their Senate Tea Party Caucus Wednesday. With hats — crowns of laurel? — off to Ovid, "Those three form a multitude":

I went to the State of the Union … and guess who now is against earmarks?

Yes, you, Mr. President. Some of our fellow conservatives flew into a tizzy when Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio declined to join the caucus, but not to worry. Here's Rubio, and then our take:

If all of a sudden being in the Tea Party is not something that is happening in Main Street, but rather something that’s happening in Washington D.C., the "Tea Party" all of a sudden becomes some sort of movement run by politicians … I think that the real power of the Tea Party comes from its ability to drive the debate and the issues from the grassroots up, as opposed to from the politicians down.

Not a problem. As we twittered this morning:

Jim DeMnt, Rand Paul & Mike Lee launch Senate Tea Party Caucus, MarcoRubio declines to join. Room for both. Conservatives don't march in lockstep!

And that's the point that's been eluding some of our old-think fellow conservative opinionators who worried that Michele Bachmann's "unofficial" Tea-Party-Express-sponsored State of the Union response the other night would undermine Paul Ryan's party-sanctioned reply. Predictably, the usual suspects on the other side of the aisle — unmoved by the whole-cloth "new civility" — used Bachmann's presentation as an excuse to mount a same-old, same-old attack on a conservative woman, but in the light of day the next morning, leading conservative commentators acknowledged they'd weathered a tempest in a teapot. Erick Erickson said it best: 

I’m glad I was wrong. And it just goes to show that the narrative of concern, built up in the media in large part by nervous Republicans, was silly. It yet again shows the GOP is unwilling to seriously treat the tea party movement as a legitimate player.

We loved uber-seeker-of-wisdom-and-truth Andrew Breitbart's twitter reaction to the news that Sarah Palin would be keynote speaker (caption at top of post) at Young America Foundation's "Reagan 100 Celebration" (screenshot above). It represents the Fuddy-Duddies of Codevilla's Ruling Class's comeuppance as the Country Class finds its voice. Poking about YAF's web site, we felt as though we had come home. From John Heyward at Human Events:

Her presentation will include reflections on Reagan’s great “Time for Choosing” speech, in which he asked “whether we believe in our capacity for self-government, or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”

Speaking of that "little intellectual elite in a distant capitol," it's beyond irony — chutzpah comes to mind — that our Corporatist in Chief and his minions appear to believe that "We the people" have learned nothing during the first two years of his Administration and are dumb enough to fall for the "optics" of the shiny new Obama-as-Reagan narrative:

"I think Obama's reflecting Reagan's optimism" Joe Trippi told a skeptical Megyn Kelly this afternoon.

No. We knew Ronald Reagan's vision of the Shining City, and central planner that you are at heart, Mr. President, you are no Ronald Reagan.

Update: Ed Driscoll retweets with a comment:

Maybe that explains this.

Update II: Sarah nails it on Facebook:

Consider what his “big government greatness” really amounts to. It’s basically a corporatist agenda – it’s the collaboration between big government and the big businesses that have powerful friends in D.C. and can afford to hire big lobbyists. This collaboration works in a manner that distorts and corrupts true free market capitalism. This isn’t just old-fashioned big government liberalism; this is crony capitalism on steroids. In the interests of big business, we’re “investing” in technologies and industries that venture capitalists tell us are non-starters, but which will provide lucrative returns for some corporate interests who have major investments in these areas.

Update III: Woo hoo: Instalanche!

Update IV: Michelle Malkin Buzzworthy link!

Update V: Maggie's links!

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Why do they hate her? "Sarah Palin is apparently all that they are not"

"You have become a lighting rod less for your clarity of vision, but more for your ability to turn any criticism of you of into persecution of you," Jon Stewart for the Persecution addressed Sarah Palin without irony on his "Daily Show" the other night.

“She challenges me a little bit. She keeps me a little more honest,” says The Alaska Dispatch's Amanda Coyne, who gave Howard Kurtz one of a series of punchy and twitterable quotes for his crisp and crunchy column on "Sarah Palin's Enforcer," Rebecca Mansour, "an ex-Hollywood screenwriter with sharp teeth who felt so strongly about Palin —  whom she'd never met — that she founded the website Conservatives4Palin. Originally hired to help with Palin's famous Facebook page," SarahPAC staffer Mansour is a one-woman response team who uses Twitter to "whack Palin’s detractors with such thumb-in-the-eye passion as to make her boss seem downright diplomatic": 

Matthew Continetti, a Weekly Standard reporter and the author of The Persecution of Sarah Palin, calls Mansour “a new model of spokesperson — very new-media-oriented and much more combative than any typical spokesperson. That world has become something of a black box — every so often it releases a particle of information.”

"My piece asks: Why doesn't Palin have anyone who deals with reporters & can defend her? Most pundits puzzled," author Kurtz twittered this morning. She "often acts like she is under siege," he wrote. As we replied in a series of tweets:

You nailed it, sir, with your "MOST PUNDITS PUZZLED" when it comes to Sarah. All have opinions but few have a clue.

Sarah Palin "often acts like she is under siege"? She IS under siege by narrative-spinning PDS sufferers in the chattersphere.

IRONY ALERT: Cillizza says Palin's approach means she can dictate the terms of conversation "BUT SHE CAN BE MISINTERPRETED."

"Not only do people want you to show up and talk, they're begging you to show up and talk. You're the one who refuses to go on all these outlets that keep asking you to join them for a conversation. And by the way, I'm one of them." Eat your heart out, Jon.

"A couple of Palin advisers are sympathetic to the complaints and try to help, even as they are overwhelmed by the volume of requests," notes Kurtz:

But they also dismiss some of the journalists as whiners who seem to think they have a constitutional right to have Palin cooperate with their hit piece.

Exactly. As Michelle Malkin told Fox and Friends this morning, "It is not a persecution complex for the right to be wary." As for "Why Sarah Palin Drives Them Wild," Jedediah Bila, who did an exclusive telephone interview with Sarah a couple of months back, has their number:

Palin’s work ethic, record of achievement, and commitment to principle inspire many ambitious Americans. Because they get that she’s not a superhero, but a hard worker. And if she can do it, so can they.

But to the insecure, to those who feel the need to tear you down in order to lift themselves up, Palin is an absolute nightmare. Because she’s “not going to sit down…not going to shut up.” Because in the face of vicious attacks and death threats, she continues to prove that she’s bigger and better than those who play dirty. She continues to prove that her family and her faith are her anchors. And she continues to prove that her commitment to principle is impervious to their constant digs.

Victor Davis Hanson comes to very much the same conclusion in a richly textured, must-read column of his own:

So why the war against Palin, when Palinisms are not demonstrably different from Bidenisms, Obamaisms, or Goreisms? Uppity-ness I suppose is the short answer. In the binary world of a Sullivan, Letterman, or Griffin, or in the larger culture of network news, NPR, PBS, the New York Times and Washington Post and their columnists, and the weekly newspapers like Time and Newsweek, Sarah Palin is apparently all that they are not.

Update: Conservatives4Palin links.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

MLK: The only weapon in our hands is the weapon of protest

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter," twittered Brandon Keser this morning, quoting Martin Luther King on the occasion of this 25th observation of MLK Day. The hare-brained idea floating about in the "post-vitriolic" Tucson-massacre ether that would urge Democrats and Republicans to cross the aisle and sit down together for the forthcoming SOTU comes to mind. They would have us become silent about our deeply-held philosophical differences, forgetting that those two sides of the aisle symbolize the great deliberative tradition of our democratic republic. "GOP T-Shirt Logo for bi-partisan seating at SOTU," above, h/t danthebarbarian on twitter.

"Everyone quotes pretty much the same MLK passages; I had to go in a different direction," writes twitter buddy dustbury, aka Charles G. Hill. Looking beyond the audacious "I Have a Dream" speech others are citing in observance of this 25th celebration of Martin Luther King Day, Hill pulls out King's Montgomery, Alabama speech at the start of the bus boycott of December 1955 in his post "Locating the turning point." As we twittered him back, it resonates in today's "vitriolic" echo chamber where so many of our trigger-happy friends on the left side of the aisle are all too quick to project their own violent impulses onto us tea partiers here on the right. Listen to Reverend King:

And I want to say that we are not here advocating violence. We have never done that. I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are Christian people. We believe in the Christian religion. We believe in the teachings of Jesus. The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest. That’s all.

And certainly, certainly, this is the glory of America, with all of its faults. This is the glory of our democracy. If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a Communistic nation, we couldn’t do this. If we were dropped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime, we couldn’t do this. But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.

Update: Sarah Palin in brief, eloquent Facebook tribute.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Leadership: Sarah Palin's rousing invocation to a grieving nation

"Public discourse and debate isn't a sign of crisis but of our enduring strength. It is part of why America is exceptional," Sarah Palin tells the nation in "America's Enduring Strength" on Facebook and Vimeo. Read full transcript here and watch/listen here.

"It is time to restore the precept that each of us is responsible for our actions," Sarah Palin cuts through the ersatz outrage of the vitriolic "character assassins, partisans, liars and propagandists," in John Nolte's words, who have been "doing everything in their power to bring down the right" in the wake of the Tucson massacre. Listen to Sarah's rousing invocation here. Once again she disintermediates the moribund powers that be to speak directly to the American people with her vision of the Shining City, based upon what Thomas Sowell calls the "constrained vision" of human nature. Here's Sarah:

Our Founders' genius was to design a system that helps settle the inevitable conflicts caused by our imperfect passions in civil ways. So we must condemn violence if our Republic is to endure …

Public discourse and debate isn't a sign of crisis but of our enduring strength. It is part of why America is exceptional.

No one should be deterred from speaking up and speaking out in peaceful dissent. And we certainly must not be deterred by those who embrace evil and call it good. And we will not be stopped from celebrating the greatness of our country and our foundational freedoms by those who mock its greatness by being intolerant of differing opinion. and seeking to muzzle dissent with shrill cries of imagined insults.

Following the life lesson her father taught her — "Don't retreat, reload" — she doesn't let those character assassins get away with metaphorical murder:

Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio, not with maps of swing districts used by both sides of the aisle, not with law-abiding citizens who respectfully exercise their First Amendment rights at campaign rallies, not with those who proudly voted in the last election. 

"But frustration makes you stupid and the left is frustrated, especially those in the media, because they are losing," John Nolte explains:

And other than embarrassing ratings and cratering circulation numbers, nothing points to their diminishing power more than Sarah Palin’s ascendancy as a bona fide political force in this country. Whether or not the former Alaskan Governor becomes president isn’t an issue. She’s already changed the face of electoral politics and even managed to gain a serious foothold on the beach of popular culture while doing so.

Update: We like twitterfriend Daniel Morgan's take:

She totally nailed what needed to be said and is the shadow president!

Update II: Michelle Malkin Buzzworthy link!

Update III: Sarah's address is top story on Memeorandum.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Vitriol spinners losing the battle for hearts and minds?

The view from our front porch at daybreak this morning: Deck cranes of the container ship "West Bay" out of Hong Kong catch the sun's early rays dockside at Eastern Minerals across the street.

"It looks like the vitriol spinners are losing the battle for hearts & minds," we just twittered," referencing a brand new CBS News poll that finds "Most Americans Feel Rhetoric, Tucson Shooting Unrelated":

Overall, 57 percent of respondents said the harsh political tone had nothing to do with the shooting, compared to 32 percent who felt it did …

In the wake of the shooting, much focus has been put on the harsh tone of politics in Washington and around the country, particularly after a contentious midterm election. Rhetoric and imagery from both Republicans and Democrats have included gun-related metaphors, but the majority of the country isn't connecting the shooting to politics.

"Much focus has been put," indeed. Dan Spencer cuts to the chase:

The left-wing hate machine's efforts to blame the shooting on the right has failed to persuade Americans, who continue to show they are smarter than many political activists give them credit for being.

Not only that, two new Rasmussen polls find "45% worried that Obama opponents will turn to violence, down from 53% last year" and "Voters Still See Democratic Agenda in Congress As More Extreme than GOP’s." Uh oh. We almost feel sorry for Soros-funded Media Matters founder David Brock, who's calling on Rupert Murdock to "rein in" Glenn Beck's and Sarah Palin's "violent rhetoric," or else:

If they fail to do so, it is incumbent upon you to fire them or be responsible for the climate they create and any consequences thereof.

It's not gonna happen. We loved Weasel Zippers' analysis:

Oh please. Now David Brock has his panties in a bunch because Beck used vampire imagery and compared him to a “smelly kid in third grade.”

Oh, the humanity! Do you suppose that our fellow citizens, despite — or perhaps because of? — media spin, have noticed after nearly two years of the usual suspects' crying wolf, that Tea Partiers really aren't into violence? As Allah Pundit, scanning the Journolista horizon twittered:

You know the media coverage was bad when even David Brooks is rushing to defend Palin.

Update: Nuance and further insight from Professor Jacobson.

Update II: Michelle Malkin Buzzworthy link!

Update III: Top story on Memeorandum.

Update IV: Moe Lane at Red State links.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Vitriol: Progressives would eviscerate the metaphorically rich language that is our birthright

 

"Wonder which Journolist/cabalist wordsmith came up with the now viral 'vitriol' to tar Sarah & the Tea Party. John Podesta, EzraKlein?" we twittered this afternoon. The local sheriff was apparently the first to use the term in this context, but its ubiquity in the left's craven attempt to shape the narrative of the Saturday Night Massacre to blame the usual suspects suggested media-control mavens were on the case. "Broken Glass," above, references etymology of vitriol.

"People like that "are especially susceptible to vitriol," Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik told reporters at an Arizona Massacre news conference last night, uttering the word that would launch a thousand disingenuous news and opinion pieces. Google "vitriol giffords" and you get 14,722 related articles. Here's where it apparently all started:

Law enforcement officials continue to piece together the facts in Saturday's shooting rampage that left a federal judge dead and a congresswoman critically injured in Arizona, and some are questioning whether divisive political rhetoric may have played a role …

Dupnik … repeatedly cited what he characterized as the "vitriol" that has infected public discourse … There is reason to believe, he said, that the shooting suspect "may have a mental issue," adding that people like that "are especialy susceptible to vitriol"

Having been on twitter yesterday as the horrific news was breaking, we watched the sausage being made by those "some" who were "questioning whether divisive political rhetoric may have played a role," twitterers, bloggers, news reporters and opinionators picking up the "vitriol" narrative and running with it. Megyn Kelly took on the tendentious Sheriff Dupnik this evening. He's still sticking to the Journolist/Cabalist talking points. You know. "People like that" are "especially susceptible to vitriol." Megyn was polite, but she wasn't taking any prisoners: 

There were madmen then, there are madmen now. Is it really the role of the sheriff to stir the pot? Sheriffs have a duty to speak to the facts of the case.

Professor Jacobson of Legal Insurrection was more direct:

Dupnik should resign - He held press conference and blamed right-wing rhetoric, not admit it's just his opinion.

A final note. Google "vitriol" without "giffords" and you get "Sulfuric acid; Cruel and bitter criticism," along with this ironic "usage example" from the Vitriolizer in Chief:

I do think that, as I said last night, we have to get to the point where we can have a conversation about big important issues that matter to the American people without vitriol, without name-calling, without the assumption of the worst of other …

                 Sep 10, 2009 - Barack Obama

We've been onto then-candidate Obama's con game since December of 2006, when he implied we were a racist for disagreeing with his statist politics. 'Wish they taught things like history and English in the schools today. Lots of folks who weren't paying attention bought candidate Obama's purple prose back then. Will they now fall for humorless progressives' bowldlerized evisceration of the metaphorically rich language that is our birthright? The inedible Mara Laisson on Fox News Sunday is pontificating that "It's going to make people think twice before using certain metaphors in politics." Not. Mara and her fellow travelers need to read between the lines of Dana Loesch's tweet:

I also denounce all metaphors because we as humans are apparently too susceptible and unintelligent to not take them literally.

Update: Oh, ick. Woman who helped squelch killer just told Shep it's evil for Republicans to cast Obamacare as job-killing law.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

After the Fall: Boehner's Humility releases us from Pelosi's Pride?

"Instapundit's Washed Away By the Preference Cascade?: John Boehner's humility releases us from Pelosi's pride?" we twittered this morning. More about that below. Above, After-the-Fall former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Steny "Tea Party people come from unhappy families" Hoyer and fellow members of the new House minority listen in stunned silence to Boehner's remarks to the opening session Wednesday.

"If these sane and humble words are real, we might be able to save ourselves," writes Elizabeth Scalia, lifting our spirits with a skeptic's message of hope in "Boehner's Aria; No Hook for Now." A couple of excerpts, and then a few thoughts of our own on the "preference cascade" that appears to be washing away the old regime. Here's Scalia on Speaker Boehner's remarks to the opening session of the 112th Congress Wednesday:

Boehner cleared his throat with four magical words that would be unimaginable coming from the throats of most of our current cabal of political “leaders”: “It’s still just me…”

And then he sang not of hubris but of humility, not of superiority but of service. And in such a refreshing tone …

If this is genuine – and Boehner’s penchant for weepiness suggests to me that he is a man familiar with authentic humility – then it might actually become catalytic …

The word "catalytic" caught our eye. We used that word to explain the effect of Scott Brown's winning the Kennedy People's Seat last year:

… the "Massachusetts Miracle" served as a catalyst to break up the incumbent logjam, promising "term limits by other means" in local and national elections this spring and come November.

It was Glenn Reynolds, always ahead of the curve, who had revealed to us in another context "the phenomenon of 'preference cascades' — in which people who have been obliged to conceal their true beliefs by social pressure or sheer force suddenly discover that a lot of other people feel the same way":

This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers - or even to the citizens themselves.

"The Congressman from K Street" may have "seemed an unlikely clarion for an anti-establishment revolt," wrote Peter Boyle in an excellent New Yorker profile of the Speaker-designate a few weeks back:

But Boehner was among the first Beltway Republicans to recognize [way back in April of 2009] that the rise of the Tea Party represented, for Republicans, a near-miracle of good luck" …

While many Democrats and the mainstream media mocked the Tea Party, Boehner pressed his members to get out in front of the movement or, at least, get out of its way. "I urge you to get in touch with these efforts and connect with them," he told a closed-door meeting of the Republican Conference. "The people participating in these protests will be the soldiers for our cause a year from now."

How's that rebranding working out, Minority Leader Pelosi?

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Tears of joy: Boehner re-imposes term limits for GOP chairmanships

NMA World's animation stills (above and below) from "GOP vows to repeal Obamacare" feature Speaker-designate John Boehner's signature tendency to tear up.

"Just as fresh blood is reinvigorating the House GOP rank and file, there will be new energy in the leadership, too," writes Byron York, lifting the spirits of Tea Partiers everywhere:

Even though Republicans were out of power for just four years, the old GOP committee chairmen haven't come back to reclaim their old spots; nearly all the lawmakers who are taking over committees have never held the chairman's gavel before.

It's a consequence of a decision Republicans made back in 1995, just after taking over the House for the first time in 40 years. For years prior to that, then-Rep. Newt Gingrich and his GOP colleagues watched as the oldest of Democratic old bulls turned House committees into personal fiefdoms. Lawmakers like Reps. Dan Rostenkowski, John Dingell, Jack Brooks and Jamie Whitten each led key committees for more than a decade.

"The Republican answer, included in the Contract With America, was to support term limits for all members of Congress. But that would have required amending the Constitution, and they didn't have the support," notes York:

So House leaders did something that was within their authority: They put a six-year limit on the tenures of committee chairmen.

"Boehner's re-imposition of chairmanship term limits is just one more way the GOP is trying to tell the American people that the party has learned its lesson":

And that is one more result of the GOP's remarkable victory on Nov. 2. 

From Matt Lewis's column a coupla weeks back: "When asked about Rep. John Boehner's penchant for weeping, Palin said: 'I don't know if a woman would be given a pass necessarily … I respect John Boehner because he has worn his feelings on his sleeve on things that are so important to him … and I give him that pass, too.'" It's totally endearing to us, the opposite of Bubba's camera-ready crocodile tears at Ron Brown's funeral. 

As our readers know, Boehner will livestream opening day of the new Congress on Facebook at noon today. Pull out your hankies and enjoy! Meanwhile, in other news to set the tea partier's heart aflutter, this from the Wall Street Journal:

House Republicans are pledging to cut spending, and one early sign they're serious is the rules package they are bringing to the House floor tomorrow. More than the last time it held power, the GOP is changing the rules to make it harder to tax and spend.

Update: Larwyn's Linx links.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Speaker Boehner: The revolution will be livestreamed

"In addition to Facebook, Boehner (above) often 'tweets' out comments or announcements, but the Speaker-designate will change his Twitter name to reflect his new position. That change is not expected to happen until later Tuesday night and Boehner's staff is not releasing what his new Twitter handle will be yet," reports CNN's politicalticker.

"Seems like John Boehner's been studying Sarah Palin's embrace of the full panoply of media, old & new," we just twittered: "Opening gavel tomorrow to livestream on Facebook":

According to a blog post that will be posted on Boehner's website this afternoon, the incoming speaker will direct people to visit the "Pledge to America" Facebook page to view the transition to the GOP-controlled House.

Nick Schaper, Boehner's director of digital media, tells CNN, "This kind of streaming and real-time interaction is not only unprecedented for the House, it's helping to set the tone for a new majority that will continue to find new ways to listen to and better represent the American people." Those watching on Facebook will be able to offer feedback and comment on the proceedings as they happen live.

We assume they'll be livestreaming the controversial reading of the Constitution on Friday, blogged here. Rube that we are, we have to admit we get goosebumps at the thought of this obvious "stunt," the "showy equivalent of wearing a flag pin" — We're still sporting our post-9/11 flag pin to this day! — as bitter dustbin-of-history opinionator David Corn scoffs. Sorry, David. Disintermediating the powers that be via the internet is where we're at. Been there since our first tea party/town hall in March of 2009 and never looked back. Republican vs Democrat are no longer the relevant categories. It's "them vs us," Angelo Codevilla's the Ruling Class vs the Country Class, the vested powers that be vs the Sons and Daughters of Liberty. Check out the cynical conventional "wisdom" of this item from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: 

But the question being debated in legal and political circles is whether the constitutional rules are simply symbolic flourishes to satisfy an emboldened and watchful tea party base. "I think it's entirely cosmetic," said Western Connecticut State University history professor Kevin Gutzman, who said he is a conservative libertarian and sympathizes with the tea party.

 "This is the way the establishment handles grass-roots movements," he said. "They humor people who are not expert, or not fully cognizant. And then once they've humored them, and those people go away, it's right back to business as usual. It looks like this will be business as usual — except for the half-hour, or however long it takes, to read the Constitution out loud."

"Not fully cognizant"? Harrumph! Thanks to the internet-facilitated freedom of assembly — both virtual and on the ground — we're not going away any time soon.

Update: Michelle Malkin Buzzworthy link!

Update II: "Boehner to livestream" trending on Memeorandum.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.