“George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party”

Here is an interesting analysis from Peggy Noonan. With the current state of the Republican party I can’t seem to find fault in her analysis. The Conservative movement seems to have waned after the Gingrich congress. Once Hasert took the helm and then George Bush won the presidency everything seems to have gone down hill as far as Conservative values and ideals.

Here is a scary thought… perhaps the Republicans need Hillary to win the presidency. You know the whole ‘one step back to take two steps forward’ line of thinking. Hillary could be just the person to refocus the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy‘ that this country so desperately needs. The thought makes me a bit nauseous.

Here is the analysis:

On the pundit civil wars, Rush Limbaugh declared on the radio this week, “I’m here to tell you, if either of these two guys [Mr. McCain or Mike Huckabee] get the nomination, it’s going to destroy the Republican Party. It’s going to change it forever, be the end of it!”

This is absurd. George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.

Were there other causes? Yes, of course. But there was an immediate and essential cause.

And this needs saying, because if you don’t know what broke the elephant you can’t put it together again. The party cannot re-find itself if it can’t trace back the moment at which it became lost. It cannot heal an illness whose origin is kept obscure.

I believe that some of the ferocity of the pundit wars is due to a certain amount of self-censorship. It’s not in human nature to enjoy self-censorship. The truth will out, like steam from a kettle. It hurts to say something you supported didn’t work. I would know. But I would say of these men (why, in the continuing age of Bill Clinton, does the emoting come from the men?) who are fighting one another as they resist naming the cause for the fight: Sack up, get serious, define. That’s the way to help.

Nature Needs to Be Respected

There are certain things that I will never do out of respect to nature. For example I will never go shark diving; as much as I am awed by mankind’s ingenuity I think it is foolish to needlessly put it to the test with ones life on the line. The reason I bring this up is because the the truth of what happened this past Christmas at the San Francisco zoo has finally come out.

This past Christmas a news story broke that a Siberian tiger escaped from its pin and mauled 3 teenage boys, killing one. The tiger was later killed by police that arrived on the scene and saw it laying next to one of its victims. The two survivors denied having done anything to provoke the tiger. Reports later came out that the walls of the tiger’s pin were lower than the recommended minimum, thus placing all the blame on the zoo.

Giant Rat Skull Found

This is pretty cool, Paleontologists have found a giant rat skull in Uruguay, South America. The estimate that the rat was about the size of a hippopotamus and lived around 4 million years ago.

2008 USA Presidential Primary

Who to vote for?

I’m a registered Republican so when the it comes time to vote here in California I can only vote for another Republican in the primaries. However the current Democratic primary is intensely interesting to watch. First you have Hillary Clinton, who needs no introduction, running under the guise of ‘experience’ but with the stigma of being a part of the ‘establishment.’ Then you have the main challenger Barack Obama running as the champion of change and hope. Then you have John Edwards who is running, again, as the traditional Democrat.

2008 Will Cool Down, But Not Really

Apparently British Forecasters are predicting 2008 to be cooler than 2007 but still in the top 10 hottest years since 1850.

 LONDON (Reuters) – 2008 will be slightly cooler than recent years globally but will still be among the top 10 warmest years on record since 1850 and should not be seen as a sign global warming was on the wane, British forecasters said.

The Met Office and experts at the University of East Anglia on Thursday said global average temperatures this year would be 0.37 of a degree Celsius above the long-term 1961-1990 average of 14 degrees and be the coolest since 2000.

Then there is this Russian Scientist, Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, that says to get ready for global cooling!

MOSCOW. (Oleg Sorokhtin for RIA Novosti) – Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world.

Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.

The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason—solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.