Inane Name-Calling v. The Actual Problem

Jay Nordlinger in NRO:

...Lately, I have been more and more impatient with 100-percenters — people who have to agree with someone 100 percent in order to consider him any good. There is very little room for 100-percentism in politics. In other spheres of life, maybe, but not this one.

Occasionally, I will quote someone favorably in my column. And someone will e-mail me, “Yeah, but do you recall what he said on September 8, 1999? Traitor!” That word could refer to me or the fellow I had originally quoted.

Sometimes it seems that no one is ever good enough for us: not 41, not Dole, not 43, not anybody. In the summer of 2012, people said that Mitt Romney would be a sell-out commie squish if he picked anyone but Paul Ryan as his running mate. If he picked Rob Portman or Tim Pawlenty or Kelly Ayotte, that would be proof positive of his sell-out commie squishdom. He picked the sainted Ryan — so “Mittens” got a reprieve for a while.....

Well, Jay, lately I've been disappointed with people who are inane name-callers.  Usually, they are (R) Party establishment figures just drooling for more power.  Or--if they are editorialists--a nice speech-writing job or sub-Cabinet level position in a sprawling, stultifying, Federal Agency with excellent retirement bennies.

Let's look back.......ooohhhh......really, really far back, (maybe into your infancy years, Jay), to 1988.  Did 41 get any votes?  Maybe that's a hard question for you, Jay, so let's get a little closer in time, say 2004.  Was 43 re-elected?  Did McPain get votes a few years later?  (Take a few minutes to Google the answer, Jay.)

See, Jay, the "100 percenters" that you yap about don't exist.  They vote for turkeys like 43, McPain, and Dole.  They vote for them, even if the vote is really against outright Marxists like Obozo or Fascists like Gore.  They vote for them even though these candidates are by and large married to their own power-madness and dream only of getting their butts into the Oval Office's big chair so they or their minions--like Christie and his--can destroy their enemies, "public good" be damned.  Or--just as bad--so they can impose their own view of "the public good" on the tattered remains of this country as was the case with 41, 43, and Romney.

Let's contrast with this from Domenech:

In the year since President Barack Obama’s re-election, a handful of advocates for compassionate conservatism have re-emerged to push back against limited government conservatives with the same agenda they’ve been peddling for nearly 15 years. Built around a message of governance in favor of the public good, they have chided the Tea Party and its limited government allies for ignoring the plight of the poor, heartlessly pursuing libertarian ends, and adopting a view of government’s proper role which is unrealistic and ahistorical.

... they fail to recognize the inherent weakness of their message, which confuses a political slogan with a coherent philosophy of governance and would allow for sweeping expansions of the state.

Yes, Jay, the not-really-"100 percenters" vote for incoherent, inarticulate, largely un-principled oafs who could not spell "subsidiarity" nor be able to distill that principle of governance from the Bill of Rights, when in reality, the entire Bill of Rights is a paean to that very principle.

(And Jay:  Ryan actually 'gets' subsidiarity.  It remains to be seen if he will work toward implementing it.)