CPAC 2013 - Best Zingers

From Mitt Romney to Mitch McConnell, here are some humorous highlights from the Conservative Political Action Conference.

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Robin of Berkeley - Donald Trump, Street Fighting Man

I love Sarah. Michele Bachmann is, to me, a gift to humankind. In fact, I like most of the potential conservative candidates for president.

However, my number one choice for the Republican candidate for President? Donald Trump -- or a Trump-like man. A strong man; that is, someone willing to get into the ring and get his hands dirty. A Street Fighting Man.

Now it pains me enormously to admit this. Up until three years ago, I was a progressive, and a big fan of identity politics. In fact, I gave some of my hard-earned money to Hillary Clinton's campaign, in part, because she's a woman.

I've changed since then, and no longer vote along gender or ethnic lines. However, my eschewing identity politics isn't the reason I support someone like Trump. It's because conservatives need someone who can go head-to-head with Obama -- and win. We don't need a David against their Goliath. We need a Goliath of our own.

Certainly, there are many strong female politicians out there, the so-called Mama Grizzlies. Some of them, for instance, Gov. Jan Brewer, have bigger cojones than many of the conservative pols. The question is not whether or not these women are formidable. It's whether they could win.

My opinion is no, and for one simple reason: because of what the left does to women.

I've written about the subject several times -- how the left has a long and sordid history of abusing women, both then and now. Sarah Palin has been subjected to a high tech wilding, replete with verbal rape and sexual objectification. Just recently Bill Maher called her the "C" word with no apparent consequences.

The left degrades and menaces any woman who stands in their way. Bachmann's abuse has already started, and it will get even worse should she run for President.

However, it's not just conservative women that the left will eat alive. It is any nice guy or gal, anyone who plays by the rules. Mitt Romney, that wholesome Mormon; Tim Pawlenty, the soft spoken Midwesterner; Paul Ryan, the brainiac; Huckabee, the pious. Obama and his henchman will chew them up for breakfast and spit them out before noon.

Why? Because Obama and his people do not play by the rules; they make up their own rules as they go along. Take, for instance, how Obama and his compatriots won this election.

A documentary entitled We Will Not Be Silenced describes in painstaking detail what many of us knew all along: that there was widespread chicanery during the presidential primary. The left enlisted hoodlums like the New Black Panthers -- and then protected them afterwards.

Now that Obama is president, he has no qualms about appointing dozens of mysterious Czars, bypassing Senate approval. He even plans to sit at the head of the UN Security Council, which no president has done before, an action that was constitutionally questionable.

Bombing Libya without congressional approval? No problem. Assassinating Americans abroad without due process? If Obama wants it done, he will.

Now Trump is different from Obama in some fundamental ways. Trump wouldn't park himself at the helm of the UN. He's not going to assemble a cabal of creepy czars. But Trump can be powerful in his own right.

The Donald has money and fame -- and a tenacious competitive spirit. And he does not take well to being dissed or controlled.

Not only does Trump do a stellar job of defending himself when under enemy fire, he's willing to go on the offensive. Notice how Trump didn't back down after The View's Whoopie Goldberg insinuated that he's a racist.

In fact, Trump went on to confront that other black icon, Bill Cosby. Who among the other potential candidates would have had the guts to do such a thing? And yet Trump's continual hammering on the left, Alinsky-style, has so confused and overwhelmed them that Trump has apparently inoculated himself from the racist label.

Trump isn't the only Street Fighting Man out there. Gov. Chris Christie, Congressman (and Lt. Colonel) Allen West, and businessman Herman Cain could also take on the Herculean task of defeating Obama. All these tough guys are bold, straight shooters who've been deep down in the trenches.

Why is it so essential that the conservative contender be tough and audacious? Because the left figured out years ago that they needed a candidate made of tougher stuff to shed the impression that they were the 98 pound weaklings.

The left's epiphany came after John Kerry's humiliating loss to George Bush. Even though George Soros sank millions into Kerry's campaign to purchase the Democratic Party, like another of his investments, the windsurfing Kerry lost big time. Soros, et al. realized that only someone like Obama would be able to win, because Obama will do so through any means necessary.

Although the word on the street is that Obama won because of his terrific campaign, this isn't the whole story: Obama nailed it because of his take-no-prisoners, community organizing style.

While Obama himself doesn't like to get his hands dirty, he surrounds himself with people willing to do the dirty deed for him, such as the mainstream media, street radicals, and the classroom revolutionaries, Cornel West and Frances Fox Piven.

This is why Donald Trump, or someone Trump-like, is what the conservatives need. He has already shown that he'll get up every time someone throws him a punch.

Sarah, Newt, Huckabee, and Mitt -- all capable and affable. None of them, however, is a force to be reckoned with. If you're trapped in a burning vehicle, you want the strongest and biggest and toughest guy to save you. And this country is crashing and burning just as surely as that flaming vehicle.

Trump may not have the sunniest personality. He may have more bad hair days than good. However, he doesn't show fear -- and therefore weakness -- when the left's pit bulls go on the attack.

That's why I hope that someone like Trump, a Street Fighting Man, will throw his hat into the ring.

Yes, Sarah and Michele and Mike Huckabee are as nice as can be. But when it comes to challenging the Obama machine, nice guys and gals will finish last.
I love Sarah. Michele Bachmann is, to me, a gift to humankind. In fact, I like most of the potential conservative candidates for president.

However, my number one choice for the Republican candidate for President? Donald Trump -- or a Trump-like man. A strong man; that is, someone willing to get into the ring and get his hands dirty. A Street Fighting Man.

Now it pains me enormously to admit this. Up until three years ago, I was a progressive, and a big fan of identity politics. In fact, I gave some of my hard-earned money to Hillary Clinton's campaign, in part, because she's a woman.

I've changed since then, and no longer vote along gender or ethnic lines. However, my eschewing identity politics isn't the reason I support someone like Trump. It's because conservatives need someone who can go head-to-head with Obama -- and win. We don't need a David against their Goliath. We need a Goliath of our own.

Certainly, there are many strong female politicians out there, the so-called Mama Grizzlies. Some of them, for instance, Gov. Jan Brewer, have bigger cojones than many of the conservative pols. The question is not whether or not these women are formidable. It's whether they could win.

My opinion is no, and for one simple reason: because of what the left does to women.

I've written about the subject several times -- how the left has a long and sordid history of abusing women, both then and now. Sarah Palin has been subjected to a high tech wilding, replete with verbal rape and sexual objectification. Just recently Bill Maher called her the "C" word with no apparent consequences.

The left degrades and menaces any woman who stands in their way. Bachmann's abuse has already started, and it will get even worse should she run for President.

However, it's not just conservative women that the left will eat alive. It is any nice guy or gal, anyone who plays by the rules. Mitt Romney, that wholesome Mormon; Tim Pawlenty, the soft spoken Midwesterner; Paul Ryan, the brainiac; Huckabee, the pious. Obama and his henchman will chew them up for breakfast and spit them out before noon.

Why? Because Obama and his people do not play by the rules; they make up their own rules as they go along. Take, for instance, how Obama and his compatriots won this election.

A documentary entitled We Will Not Be Silenced describes in painstaking detail what many of us knew all along: that there was widespread chicanery during the presidential primary. The left enlisted hoodlums like the New Black Panthers -- and then protected them afterwards.

Now that Obama is president, he has no qualms about appointing dozens of mysterious Czars, bypassing Senate approval. He even plans to sit at the head of the UN Security Council, which no president has done before, an action that was constitutionally questionable.

Bombing Libya without congressional approval? No problem. Assassinating Americans abroad without due process? If Obama wants it done, he will.

Now Trump is different from Obama in some fundamental ways. Trump wouldn't park himself at the helm of the UN. He's not going to assemble a cabal of creepy czars. But Trump can be powerful in his own right.

The Donald has money and fame -- and a tenacious competitive spirit. And he does not take well to being dissed or controlled.

Not only does Trump do a stellar job of defending himself when under enemy fire, he's willing to go on the offensive. Notice how Trump didn't back down after The View's Whoopie Goldberg insinuated that he's a racist.

In fact, Trump went on to confront that other black icon, Bill Cosby. Who among the other potential candidates would have had the guts to do such a thing? And yet Trump's continual hammering on the left, Alinsky-style, has so confused and overwhelmed them that Trump has apparently inoculated himself from the racist label.

Trump isn't the only Street Fighting Man out there. Gov. Chris Christie, Congressman (and Lt. Colonel) Allen West, and businessman Herman Cain could also take on the Herculean task of defeating Obama. All these tough guys are bold, straight shooters who've been deep down in the trenches.

Why is it so essential that the conservative contender be tough and audacious? Because the left figured out years ago that they needed a candidate made of tougher stuff to shed the impression that they were the 98 pound weaklings.

The left's epiphany came after John Kerry's humiliating loss to George Bush. Even though George Soros sank millions into Kerry's campaign to purchase the Democratic Party, like another of his investments, the windsurfing Kerry lost big time. Soros, et al. realized that only someone like Obama would be able to win, because Obama will do so through any means necessary.

Although the word on the street is that Obama won because of his terrific campaign, this isn't the whole story: Obama nailed it because of his take-no-prisoners, community organizing style.

While Obama himself doesn't like to get his hands dirty, he surrounds himself with people willing to do the dirty deed for him, such as the mainstream media, street radicals, and the classroom revolutionaries, Cornel West and Frances Fox Piven.

This is why Donald Trump, or someone Trump-like, is what the conservatives need. He has already shown that he'll get up every time someone throws him a punch.

Sarah, Newt, Huckabee, and Mitt -- all capable and affable. None of them, however, is a force to be reckoned with. If you're trapped in a burning vehicle, you want the strongest and biggest and toughest guy to save you. And this country is crashing and burning just as surely as that flaming vehicle.

Trump may not have the sunniest personality. He may have more bad hair days than good. However, he doesn't show fear -- and therefore weakness -- when the left's pit bulls go on the attack.

That's why I hope that someone like Trump, a Street Fighting Man, will throw his hat into the ring.

Yes, Sarah and Michele and Mike Huckabee are as nice as can be. But when it comes to challenging the Obama machine, nice guys and gals will finish last.

Robin of Berkeley

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Robin is a recovering liberal, and a licensed psychotherapist who lives in Berkeley, California. The above information is intended for entertainment and educational purposes, rather than to offer any kind of definitive diagnoses.
Visit Robin’s blog.

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Austin Hill - President Trump?

Do those words, strung together in that order, seem strange?

After the release of last week’s Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showing Trump tied for 2nd among the prospective Republican presidential nominees, a lot of people are undoubtedly trying to wrap their minds around the idea.

If it seems out of reach for you, consider this: it was only three and a half years ago that the words “Barack” and “Obama” were so foreign to the American lexicon that they drew red flags from your spellchecker (and if you haven’t enabled a Microsoft update on your computer lately, you may still be plagued with red flags).

So here we are today, into the third year of the Obama presidency. And when Trump says things like “ America has become the laughing stock” of the world, and the world’s “punching bag,” and we’re all getting “ripped off” by our government – well, it’s difficult to argue otherwise. His words resonate deeply with a good many of us.

Of course there is a gulf of difference between being a public figure that successfully connects with people’s fear and anger, and being a statesman who successfully executes the duties of elective office. But one does not generally get to be the latter, without first accomplishing the former.

So before you dismiss Trump altogether – and before you get overly excited about the prospect of a Trump presidency – consider a few of these ideas.

First, consider the thoughts of “Harold” – a regular reader of my columns who frequently (yet thoughtfully) emails me to criticize what I write. Harold seems to assume that I speak for the Republican Party – which of course, I don’t – and he’s been visceral in his complaints to me about how the Republican Party has been, so far as he’s concerned, “ignoring” Trump.

Harold gave me permission to quote from a personal message he sent to me back in October of 2010 – so here it goes: “…Some people may write-off Trump as nothing more than a nutty by-product of reality TV. But Austin , at least he’s a productive nut. At least Trump has taken the opportunities that being an American has afforded him, and made something of himself and produced something of value with those opportunities. Our current President is a nut of the destructive kind who spouts the gospel of economic re-distribution and paves the way for his mindless followers to live off the largesse of the productive. I’ll take a productive nut, over a destructive nut, any day…”

I doubt that Trump would wear the label “productive nut” with any great sense of pride. But that aside, it’s difficult to deny the legitimacy of Harold’s premise.

In some ways, Donald Trump has perhaps come to represent opulence and excess. Yet beyond the “brash” and the “flash,” Trump also represents productivity, success, and wealth creation. And Americans are intuitively recognizing that those are three things our country desperately needs more of right now.

President Obama, on the other hand, has spent far too much of his presidency trying to make us all more dependent on government for everything, while also making sure that no individual or group is allowed to amass too much wealth for themselves. When you juxtapose the two, Obama clearly looks more and more like the “thing that is ailing us,” while Trump looks more and more like the “cure.”

This is not the first time that Americans have had that horrible sinking feeling about our federal government’s leadership, and have looked for a presidential candidate that was somewhat “unconventional.” When I was a kid, for example, there was quite an aggressive push to “draft” a certain other businessman for the presidency.

Amid the country’s chronic unemployment, double-digit inflation and international humiliations of the late 1970’s, Americans began to lose confidence in not only President Jimmy Carter, but the two major political parties generally (sound familiar?). This brought about an attempt to draft then-Chrysler Corporation CEO Lee Iacocca to run as a Republican challenger to Democrat Carter, the belief at that time being that America needed a “real executive” to run the country (Iacocca later admitted that he never gave serious consideration to the opportunity, although in the late 1980’s the Democratic Party tried again to draft him for a run against Republican presidential nominee George H.W. Bush).

In 1992, with a mild recession underway and conservative Americans woefully underwhelmed with incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush, the “Independent” candidacy of Ross Perot sprung up. Politically speaking Perot proved to be nothing more than a spoiler candidate that paved the way for President Bill Clinton. He did nonetheless provide quite a “wake up call” for the Republican Party.

So can Donald Trump become our next President? There’s a campaign waiting for him if he wants it. And if Americans are sufficiently fed-up with the status quo then, yes, he most certainly could be.

Austin Hill

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Austin Hill is an emerging American voice, addressing culture-defining questions through books, talk radio, web, speaking, and interviews. His recent books "White House Confidential" and his new title "The Virtues Of Capitalism" show his range from whit-infused writer to thought-provoking expert on the intersection of philosophy, religion, politics & culture. Hill helps to make the complex seem simple when exploring capitalism, socialism, and other "Isms".

He is an editorial contributor to national publications such as U.S. News & World Report, a columnist with TownHall.com, and is a popular expert-host on radio from leading stations in Washington DC, Chicago, Phoenix and Los Angeles, and nationally with networks such as Fox NewsTalk Radio.  He hosts the "Austin Hill Show" weekday mornings at Fresno, California's Talk Radio 105-9 KMJ-FM,  and weekday afternoons at Boise, Idaho's Newstalk 580 K I D O radio.

Hill holds a Bachelor's Degree in English Literature from California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, and a Master's Degree in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics from Biola University in California.

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Robin of Berkeley - Obama, Donald Trump, and the Collective Unconscious

There is a fascinating concept in Jungian psychology called the "collective unconscious." While the "personal unconscious" stores our own unique memories, the "collective unconscious" is the reservoir for an entire culture.

It's amazing how certain people and phenomena find their way into the collective unconscious, whether intentionally or not. For instance, take the term, "googling." Those young Stanford dudes didn't realize that they would not only change the nature of Internet searching, they'd add a new word into the vocabulary.

People may choose to search via Bing or Yahoo, but nobody "bings." So why did googling sweep the nation? Perhaps Google is a superior search engine. But it may simply come down to being in the right place at the right time.

There are people who become overnight sensations, both for good and nefarious reasons. Back in the 60's, everyone was familiar with those evil people who comprised the Manson Family.

And when Joe the Plumber asked Obama a question, he was suddenly famous (and subject to government investigations). While very few people outside of Alaska heard of Sarah Palin a few years ago, she became a household name as soon as she entered the national arena.

And then there's the "birther" controversy. The progressives have controlled and framed the concept right from the get-go. This has been one of the many issues (including "tea baggers") that the left has seized upon to tar conservatives.

The left has painted "birthers" as racists, nuts, and paranoids. What gets left out of the equation is: one, Obama has spent millions of dollars on attorneys protecting his birth certificate; two, Obama apparently traveled to Pakistan in 1981 when Americans were advised against* going there; and three, Obama's social security number is purportedly from Connecticut, a state in which he never lived.

Although there are valid questions about the mysterious Mr. O, until lately, it's been impossible to get the average American to listen. This is because the left is so much better at controlling what enters the collective unconscious.

Of course, the left controls the flow of ideas by maintaining a stranglehold on the mainstream media. But there's another reason: the left subscribes to Alinsky-type smear tactics.

Progressives will call their opponents a "tea bagger" even though the phrase is sexually explicit and lewd. They'll allow Bill Maher and other amoral types to verbally rape conservative women. Conservatives don't follow suit because these below-the-belt tactics are anathema.

While conservatives don't have to practice gutter politics, we do need our message to penetrate the collective unconscious. Enter the intrepid Donald Trump.

Trump has been beating the drum lately about Obama's birth certificate -- and the lack thereof. Trump has also been wondering whether there's something else on Obama's birth certificate (who's his daddy?) that Obama doesn't want anyone to know. Fortunately for conservatives, when Donald Trump talks, people listen.

And this is why Trump needs to keep raising the birth certificate issue. He shouldn't stop even when the left ridicules him. I hope that he expands his mission to include the salient question of whether unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers penned Obama's autobiography. We need a magnetic figure like Trump going where no man or woman has been able to go.

Because if Trump keeps putting the heat on Obama, something amazing may happen. Rather than Obama and his henchmen continually putting conservatives on the defensive, we may finally see the reverse.

People may start getting nervous about Obama and pay attention to the cracks in the facade. Their concerns may leak into the collective unconscious and take root, as surely as did the concept of "googling." If people start questioning who is this mystery man in the White House, they may feel less comfortable pulling the lever for him in November next year.

*It is unclear to me if Americans were banned from travel to Pakistan or merely advised against it.

Robin of Berkeley

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Robin is a recovering liberal, and a licensed psychotherapist who lives in Berkeley, California. The above information is intended for entertainment and educational purposes, rather than to offer any kind of definitive diagnoses.
Visit Robin’s blog.

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Donald Trump - Barack Obama Birth Certificate

Donald Trump's Emotional Birther Defense to Giggles Smirks on Morning Joe

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