Romney newtered in South Carolina…
A comfortable win for Gingrich in South Carolina as the BBC reports.
The scale of the win (40-28) must be of particular concern to Romney.
RealClearPolitics is particularly damning with it’s three takeaways from SC.
1) There is no good news buried in here for Mitt Romney
…2) This is worse than George W. Bush’s loss to John McCain in New Hampshire. John McCain caught Bush off-guard in 2000, but Bush was given an opportunity to regroup. He hadn’t fired any major shots at McCain at that point, and was able to bury McCain beneath a torrent of attacks in South Carolina.
…
3) Analysts are kidding themselves if they say Romney is the inevitable nominee. Simply put, there are very few states where he can perform among the major demographic groups the way he performed in South Carolina and still expect to win…….…..This vote was an utter repudiation of Romney, and it absolutely will be repeated in state after state if something doesn’t change the basic dynamic of the race. It is true that Gingrich doesn’t have funds or organization, but he gets a ton of free media from the debates, and he has an electorate that simply wants someone other than Romney.
Topic: Politics
Region: Global
Irrelevant as usual MR.
As in “irrelevant” = “inconvenient truths”.
Let us, however, stick with the totally-relevant, particularly pertinent to this thread, case of Ayn Rand.
She, let us recall, was the arch-priestess of individualism, to the present day the libertarians’ over-hyped Moses. Much appreciated. Often cited. Hardly read (her prose is more hard-hewn than finely-honed). Very popular among the poseur wing of the Tea-Party tendency. The junior Senator for Kentucky decries his nickname from her. His father, the Congressman for the Texas 14th, and serial candidate for the Presidency, engages in university tutorials on her work. The Washington Times diagnoses: Ayn Rand, like Typhoid Mary, is highly contagious, having infected key players in the Republican Party, leaving it weakened and often toxic.
Note her definition: Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.
Her main character, the anti-collectivist John Galt declares: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
Yet the same Ayn Rand ["The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on. There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all”] chose to hide under a name she had never used, to take long-term and terminal medical care at the expense of the tax-payers of the State of New York. The beneficiary of that deceit was her designated heir, Leonard Peikoff, that he might perpetuate her doctrine of total selfishness.
Harry Flashman, in particular, should heed another couple of her maxims.
One is a bit lengthy for Harry Flashman‘s concentration span: Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practise, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think — not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment.
The second is pithy enough even for Harry: “If you don’t know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.”
You can discuss Ayn Rand all you want, it is of no concern to me. Although as a matter of fact she believed that as the government forcibly extracted money from citizens it was their right to take it back.
But frankly I don’t care, it’s your obsession not mine.
Harry Flashman @ 9:25 am:
Allow me to assist. The Randism you may be reaching for is:
[The Virtue of Selfishness, page 118]
As I feel I have shown, Ms Rand went out of her way to see the State of New York dispensed her something for nothing.