Remember the bizarre case of Bill Sparkman, the census worker found hanging from a tree in Kentucky with the letters FED scrawled on his chest?  Remember the media frenzy about crazy Southerners and their hatred of the federal government?  At the time, I cautioned against jumping to conclusions, saying there could be any number of explanations.  I also agreed with Andrew Sullivan that suicide was unlikely given what we then knew about Sparkman.

Well, it turns out, the unlikely explanation was the right one.

A Kentucky census worker found naked, bound with duct tape and hanging from a tree with “fed” scrawled on his chest killed himself but staged his death to make it look like a homicide, authorities said Tuesday.

Bill Sparkman, 51, was found strangled Sept. 12 with a rope around his neck near a cemetery in a heavily wooded area of the Daniel Boone National Forest in southeastern Kentucky. Authorities said his wrists were loosely bound, his glasses were taped to his head and he was gagged.

Kentucky State Police Capt. Lisa Rudzinski said an analysis found that “fed” was written “from the bottom up.” He was touching the ground, and to survive “all Mr. Sparkman had to do at any time was stand up,” she said. Authorities said Sparkman was not under the influence of any drugs or alcohol at the time of his death. His clothes were found in the bed of his nearby pickup. “Our investigation, based on evidence and witness testimony, has concluded that Mr. Sparkman died during an intentional, self-inflicted act that was staged to appear as a homicide,” Rudzinski said.

[...]

Authorities said Sparkman alone manipulated the suicide scene, which was so elaborate that a man who discovered the body was convinced Sparkman was murdered.

Rudzinski said Sparkman “told a credible witness that he planned to commit suicide and provided details on how and when.” Authorities wouldn’t say who Sparkman told of his plan, but said Sparkman talked about it a week before his suicide and the person did not take him seriously. He told the person he believed his lymphoma, which he had previously been treated for, had recurred, police said.

Sparkman also had recently taken out two accidental life insurance policies totaling $600,000 that would not pay out for suicide, authorities said. One policy was taken out in late 2008; the other in May. If Sparkman had been killed on the job, his family also would have been be eligible for up to $10,000 in death gratuity payments from the government.

Michelle Malkin wonders, “When will the Left retract the Kentucky census worker case smear against conservatives?”  Stacy McCain piles on:

Bill Sparkman committed suicide. So much for “Southern populist terrorism” — and the credibility of Andrew Sullivan. So much for “Send the body to Glenn Beck” — and the credibility of Rick Ungar.

But at least some on the Left are quickly getting the word out.  Zachary Roth at TPM writes, “Sparkman deliberately played on rural Kentucky’s reputation as a hotbed of anti-government sentiment to create the impression that he had been murdered because of his job.”  TLOOG’s Mark Thompson adds,

After all the speculation that the death of a census worker was fueled by anti-government extremismand how the Tea Party movement (whatever its faults) was a vanguard for a violent anti-government uprising, it now appears that the killing was a suicide made to look like a homicide so the man’s family could collect a substantial life insurance payout.  This is a saddening portrait of a deeply troubled man in deeply troubled times. It is not, however, evidence that anti-government activists are uniquely violent.

When information is scant, we tend to fill in the gaps based on our prejudices about how the world works.  On the whole, it’s a completely reasonable thing to do.  Indeed, the nature of wisdom is the ability to extrapolate from what we’ve learned.   But sometimes jumping to conclusions bites you in the ass.

Story links: memeorandum

The University of East Anglia mail server was hacked earlier in the week and a string of private correspondences between esteemed climate scientists were published.  In addition to some juicy internecine gossip becoming embarrassingly public, a few of the messages seem to reveal doubts about the evidence for global warming and at least one refers to a statistical “trick” being used to hide lower-than-predicted surface temperatures in recent years.  James Delingpole dubs this “Climategate” and pronounces it “the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming.’”  Andrew Bolt calls it evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory – a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science.  Michelle Malkin terms it “The global warming scandal of the century.”

Andrew Revkin of the NYT — himself a subject of some of the emails in question — summarizes the controversy:

The e-mail messages, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.

Some of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by the skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them.

The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument. However, the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists.

In several e-mail exchanges, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and other scientists discuss gaps in understanding of recent variations in temperature. Skeptic Web sites pointed out one line in particular: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” Dr. Trenberth wrote.

Ronald Bailey, though, warns, “Before jumping to conclusions, remember that many of us write private emails that we might not want to see publicly distributed.”

Indeed, an unsigned post at the RealClimate blog (which I presume was written by NASA’s  Gavin Schmidt, given parallels with the Revkin story) argues,

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

Given what I know about academia, research, and science, this strikes me as eminently plausible.

Ed Morrissey sees evidence in the emails that the scientists in question are rejecting data that goes against the prevailing consensus and concludes, “That’s not science; it’s religious belief.”   But producing research findings that conclusively shatters the prevailing wisdom is the gold standard of science.  It’s the stuff of Nobel Prizes and eternal fame.  That’s how the handful of scientists known to every schoolboy (Galileo, Newton, Einstein, etc.) got there.

But one doesn’t want to publish findings claiming to shatter the consensus only to have one’s work revealed as shoddy.  So, scientists having a Eureka! finding are likely to test and test again before going public.  And, sadly for them, they’ll likely find that their novel finding was a not so novel error.

Climate change, while an important topic, is one that I follow only at the periphery.  Frankly, it’s an incredibly specialized field and I lack the time to keep up with the literature, the training to understand it, and the motivation to change either of those facts.   My biases and general impressions on the matter, however, are as follows:

• There’s overwhelming consensus among the experts on this subject

• Conspiracies involving hundreds of people over several decades are next to impossible to pull off

• There’s next to zero incentive to perpetrate this conspiracy on the part of scientists

• There are enormous incentives for people wanting to influence government to leap from the scientific data to grandiose public policy solutions

Because of the above and biases that spring from my academic training and political ideology,

• I tend to believe the vast preponderance of scientists who say the climate is changing and that human technology is a significant variable in said change

• I tend to be skeptical of radical government-mandated fixes

Story links via memeorandum.  Graphic via Green Irene.

The special election to fill New York’s 23rd Congressional District seat vacated by the appointment of Republican John McHugh as Secretary of the Army has taken yet another bizarre twist.  Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava dropped out over the weekend, causing great celebration on the part of Republicans like Michelle Malkin, who termed her “radical leftist GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava” and chortled “don’t let the door hit you on the way out!”  Earlier, Malkin had explained why, in her view, “the GOP should be ‘purged’ of left-wing saboteurs.”

Well, now Scozzafava has endorsed Democrat Bill Owens over Conservative Doug Hoffman in a press release.

I am supporting Bill Owens for Congress and urge you to do the same.

It’s not in the cards for me to be your representative, but I strongly believe Bill is the only candidate who can build upon John McHugh’s lasting legacy in the U.S. Congress. John and I worked together on the expansion of Fort Drum and I know how important that base is to the economy of this region. I am confident that Bill will be able to provide the leadership and continuity of support to Drum Country just as John did during his tenure in Congress.

In Bill Owens, I see a sense of duty and integrity that will guide him beyond political partisanship. He will be an independent voice devoted to doing what is right for New York. Bill understands this district and its people, and when he represents us in Congress he will put our interests first.

Hoffman’s campaign dubbed her a “turncoat” and said “This afternoon Dede Scozzafava betrayed the GOP.”   But, um, Hoffman split from the GOP and was running against its candidate!

Malkin, happy a day earlier to purge the likes of the radical leftist Scozzafava from the GOP thinks she’s being ungrateful.

Hey, how did that six-figure RNC donation to the NRCC plus $85,000 to the New York GOP plus nearly half-million-dollar investment in advertising and other independent expenditures on behalf of radical leftist Dede Scozzafava work out?

She repaid the GOP by endorsing Democrat candidate Bill Owens. Some gratitude, eh?

But why should she be grateful for the humiliation of having out-of-state Republicans calling her names and openly campaigning for a third party candidate against the duly nominated candidate of their own party?

While I’m a Big Tent guy who thinks the Republican Party needs to accept the fact that winning seats in the Northeast will require backing candidates who would be considered “liberal” in Mississippi, I fully understand the thinking of people like Malkin who prefer an ideological party.  At some point, having an “R” after a candidate’s name doesn’t mean much if they’re going to work against your leadership.   But you can’t have it both ways.  Either the GOP accepts people like Scozzafava as candidates in liberal districts or it runs them off to become Democrats.

Nate Silver calls the race “nearly impossible to forecast.”

Special elections, with their low turnout, are intrinsically pretty difficult to predict. So are multi-candidate races. And certainly, races where there are substantial late-breaking developments — such as the Republican candidate dropping out four days before the election and endorsing her Democratic rival — present especial difficulties for forecasters. Here, you have all three of those circumstances, producing a perfect storm of uncertainty. Not only will I not be surprised if either Democrat Bill Owens or Conservative Doug Hoffman wins on Tuesday — I will not be surprised if one of them wins by a substantial, possibly even double-digit margin.

His gut says that it helps Owens (but then his heart is pulling for Owens).

Owens is probably in a better position than he was 48 hours ago. Endorsements don’t usually matter very much, but with Scozzafava’s exit from the race, you suddenly have as much as 30 percent of the electorate up for grabs and undoubtedly feeling very, very confused. Plus, the endorsement was unexpected (although perhaps it shouldn’t have been, since Scozzafava is much closer ideologically to Owens than to Hoffman), which might make it more impactful.

At least one poll — which Silver “respects” because of its good showing in recent races — shows Hoffman with “a commanding lead.”

In a three way contest with Democrat Bill Owens and Republican Dede Scozzafava Hoffman leads with 51% to 34% for Owens and 13% for Scozzafava. In a head to head contest with Owens Hoffman holds a 54-38 advantage.

Polling the race was a little haphazard in a weekend with many twists and turns but Hoffman showed a similar lead at all junctures. In interviews conducted before Scozzafava announced the suspension of her campaign Hoffman led Owens 49-31 with 17% going to Scozzafava. Poll respondents Saturday afternoon/evening and early Sunday afternoon were informed that Scozzafava had dropped out but that her name would still be on the ballot. During that period of time Hoffman led Owens 51-34 with Scozzafava’s share going down to 12%. After Scozzafava announced she was endorsing Owens the remaining Sunday respondents were informed of that and the race showed a little tightening with Hoffman up 52-38 on Owens and Scozzafava’s share dropping to 7%.

If Hoffman was at 51% with Scozzafava running, he’ll almost certainly win.  I’d guess almost all of those supporting the Republican candidate will wind up voting Conservative or staying home.  And I’d guess that, in a race where turnout will be extraordinarily low, Hoffman’s True Believers will be far more likely to actually show up.

But, as Silver says, with so many late-breaking developments, prediction is “nearly impossible.”

UPDATE:  Not shockingly, perhaps, but the WSJ editorial board sums up my thoughts exactly:

The voter revolt ought to be a lesson to the GOP’s backroom boys, especially in New York state, where the old Al D’Amato insider club has led the party to irrelevance. GOP state chairman Joe Mondello, now thankfully retired, and Beltway bigs misjudged public dismay against the Democratic agenda in Washington. Nominating a candidate who “can win” in the Northeast does not have to mean someone whose voting record is more liberal on taxes and unions than that of most Blue Dog Democrats.

But that lesson will be for naught if conservatives conclude that their victory is reason to challenge any candidate who doesn’t agree with them on every issue. The truth is that some conservatives are as bloody-minded and intolerant of all dissent as the hard left is at the Daily Kos. A majority political party requires a far more diverse coalition than the audience for your average right-wing blogger or talk show host. Some of those voices prefer having Democrats in power because it drives up their own ratings.

Democrats did themselves no favors by driving Joe Lieberman out of their party, and conservatives will do their cause no good by forcing GOP candidates in Illinois, California and Connecticut to sound like Tom DeLay. If conservatives now revolt against every GOP candidate who disagrees with them on trade, immigration or abortion, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will keep their majorities for a very long time.

Striking that balance isn’t easy.  But it’s essential.

A series of scandals uncovered by conservative outlets and ignored by the mainstream press are starting to raise some uncomfortable questions.

The right-wing media’s single-minded focus on a handful of targets over the past months and its success in pushing those stories into the mainstream have underscored the sharp divide between traditional news organizations and the bloggers and talk show hosts aggressively pursuing an ideological agenda on-line and on TV and radio.

From birthers to tea parties to town halls and ACORN, the scandal-plagued anti-poverty group — not to mention President Obama’s speech last week to school children and the background of former White House aide Van Jones — issues initially dismissed or missed entirely by the national media have burst, if only fleetingly, onto the national agenda after relentless coverage on Fox News, talk radio and in the blogosphere.

“If it wasn’t for Fox or talk radio, we’d be done as a republic,” Glenn Beck declared Tuesday morning on “Fox & Friends.” Beck, who’s aggressively pushed the Van Jones and ACORN stories, told the morning show hosts that he plans to devote his hour-long, top-rated 5 p.m. show to new undercover tapes of ACORN employees.

Last week, Big Government, a site run by conservative Andrew Breitbart, showed videos of undercover stings in three ACORN offices, where journalists posing as pimps and prostitutes were instructed by employees on how to skirt legal restrictions on housing. The tapes got big play on The Drudge Report—where Breitbart has worked—and right-leaning news outlets and commentary shows. But only after the Senate voted to cut off federal funding to ACORN on Monday did the story get more attention in the mainstream media.

ABC “World News” anchor Charles Gibson seemed caught off guard by the ACORN tapes on Tuesday when he told Chicago radio hosts Don Wade and Roma that he hadn’t heard of them, in a clip flagged by prominent conservative blogger Michelle Malkin. Gibson added that “maybe this is just one you leave to the cables.”

Gibson’s executive producer, Jon Banner, echoes that sentiment: “There’s a tremendous amount of – for lack of a better word – ‘noise’ out there. We’re not in the business of noise.”

And he’s got a point. Heck, I saw a lot of these stories percolating on the blogs and Twitter and didn’t get around to blogging about them until they were pretty developed — if at all.  And I’ve long since stopped trying to cover every major story here, going back to focusing just on topics on which I have something to say.

The problem with Banner’s argument, though, is threefold. First, even in the context of a show that gets 22 minutes to cover all the major news of the day, there’s plenty of fluff.  Usually, a good third of the show is filled with fluffy human interest stories. Second, as Jeffrey Lord notes in a tangentially related piece, there’s a pretty long history of the mainstream media gatekeepers keeping a lid on stories harmful to Democrats while running with rumors harmful to Republicans. (Although, to be fair, there are surely examples of the reverse happening.) Third — and most importantly, perhaps — is that the networks are still operating as if they’re the only game in town.  Given that there is now a reasonably mature alternative media percolating these stories to rather large, if self-selecting, audiences, the judgment as to what constitutes “news” has been democratized.  It’s simply unwise for large media outlets that claim to deliver “all the news that’s fit to print” to ignore big political stories when millions of people are talking about them.

Related to the third, because there are alternative media for the left and right, it’s now incumbent on the mainstream press to investigate the big stories that percolate in those venues to ensure that they’re shared outside of self-selected cliques and to present the story in proper context, not just the cherry picked facts touted by the partisans.  Is there more to Van Jones than youthful sympathy with Communists and having put his weight behind the Truther movement?  Is ACORN corrupt at its core or is it merely mismanaged, with a shoddy business model that invites corruption?  Are the Tea Party protesters racist yahoos marching to the tune of Glenn Beck and Freedom Works, a diverse grass roots movement, or what?  The partisan media generally lack both the resources and incentives to report these things.

Update (Alex Knapp):The Daily Show took a look at this last night, and it was both funny and took the media to task on the story:

Update 2 (Alex Knapp): For the record, it appears that at least one of the ACORN workers “caught” in this video was just playing along because she thought it was funny:

ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke is shown meeting with them, telling them that she once was an escort and got away with killing her husband.

But Kaelke insisted Tuesday she made up her story for shock value.

“They were clearly playing with me,” she said “I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me.”

[...]

Since she claimed on the video to have killed her husband, two San Bernardino police homicide detectives interviewed her at the office Tuesday.

Police said they have been in contact with Kaelke’s former husbands and the homicide claims do not appear accurate.

Heh, yeah. I would say that talking with someone is generally a good indication that they weren’t murdered.

And of course, as always, there’s some question over whether the videos were themselves selectively edited to make ACORN look bad:

San Bernardino resident Jim Miller, who lives near ACORN’s office and is also featured in the video giving business advice, said he thought the “whole thing was a preposterous production.”

He said he continued talking just to learn more.

Miller, a retired businessman, said he couldn’t believe the people wanted to propose such a “ludicrous enterprise,” but continued talking to them and asking questions to see where it would lead.

In the video, the filmmakers claim they would bring underage prostitutes from overseas

Amy Schur, ACORN’s head organizer in California, said the video is selectively edited. Kaelke repeatedly said ACORN couldn’t help the fake pimp and prostitute, but that does not appear on the video, Schur said.

I have to admit, if I saw two people dressed up in ludicrous costumes asking outrageous questions, I might play along for the fun of it, too, at least just to see where it was going.

Update 3 (Alex Knapp): Whew! After reading a few other stories, it looks like Tresa Kaelke is something of a nutjob. Additionally, and just for clarification, I’m not saying that the ACORN workers in these videos are all playing along or anything like that. Just that they have a side of the story, too. I’m generally inclined towards the more conventional interpretation of the videos (as noted in the Stewart clip above.)

I normally don’t pay attention to Michelle Malkin because of my general policy of not paying attention to those uninterested in rational discussion (a policy that extends to, for example, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Keith Olbermann, Michael Moore, etc.). However, I have to say that I admire the chutzpah of her recent blog post, in which she decries the “racial thuggery” of an assault that currently has no evidence of racial motivation.

Now, it may well turn out that there was a racial component to the assault. However, when one considers that Michelle Malkin wrote a book in which she defends the idea that it’s okay for the government to use force to round people up and detain them solely on the basis of their race, for her to condemn any action as “racial thuggery” without a sense of irony shows a cosmic lack of self-awareness that is, in a very literal sense, awesome.

Yesterday, somewhere between “tens of thousands” and “two million” people flooded the nation’s capital to protest somethingoranother.

Thousands Rally in Capital to Protest Big Government (Jeff Zeleny, NYT)

Amanda Lucidon for The New York Times

A sea of protesters filled the west lawn of the Capitol and spilled onto the National Mall on Saturday in the largest rally against President Obama since he took office, a culmination of a summer-long season of protests that began with opposition to a health care overhaul and grew into a broader dissatisfaction with government.

On a cloudy and cool day, the demonstrators came from all corners of the country, waving American flags and handwritten signs explaining the root of their frustrations. Their anger stretched well beyond the health care legislation moving through Congress, with shouts of support for gun rights, lower taxes and a smaller government.

But as they sang verse after verse of patriotic hymns like “God Bless America,” sharp words of profane and political criticism were aimed at Mr. Obama and Congress.

Dick Armey, a former House Republican leader whose group Freedomworks helped organize the protest, stood before the crowd and led the rallying cries in nearly the same spot where Mr. Obama took his oath of office eight months ago. “He pledged a commitment of fidelity to the United States Constitution,” Mr. Armey said, suggesting that Mr. Obama was in violation of what the founding fathers intended the size and scope of the government to be.

“Liar! Liar! Liar! Liar!” the crowd shouted back, echoing the accusation that Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, hurled at the president three days earlier during his address to Congress.

The demonstrators numbered well into the tens of thousands, though the police declined to estimate the size of the crowd. Many came on their own and were not part of an organization or group. But the magnitude of the rally took the authorities by surprise, with throngs of people streaming from the White House to Capitol Hill for more than three hours.

Lashing Out at the Capitol – Tens of Thousands Protest Obama Initiatives and Government Spending (Emma Brown, James Hohmann and Perry Bacon Jr. – WaPo)

Tens of thousands of conservative protesters, many complaining that the nation is racing toward socialism, massed outside the U.S. Capitol on Saturday, angrily denouncing President Obama’s health-care plan and other initiatives as threats to the Constitution.

The crowd — loud, animated and sprawling — gathered at the West Front of the Capitol after a march along Pennsylvania Avenue NW from Freedom Plaza. Invocations of God and former president Ronald Reagan by an array of speakers drew loud cheers that echoed across the Mall. On a windy, overcast afternoon, hundreds of yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags flapped in the breeze.

“Hell hath no fury like a taxpayer ignored,” declared Andrew Moylan, head of government affairs for the National Taxpayers Union, urging protesters to call their representatives. The demonstrators roared their approval. “We own the dome!” they chanted, pointing at the Capitol.

The demonstrators are part of a loose-knit movement that is galvanizing anti-Obama sentiment across the country, stoking a populist dimension to the Republican Party, which has struggled to find its voice since the 2008 elections.

Tea Party Protesters March on Washington – Thousands March to U.S. Capitol to Protest Government Spending, Health Care; Many Chanted ‘You Lie’ (Russell Goldman, ABC)

Thousands of conservative protesters from across the country converged on the Capitol Saturday morning to demonstrate against President Obama’s proposals for health care reform and voicing opposition to big government, what they say is over-the-top spending.

Carrying signs depicting President Obama as Adolf Hitler and the Joker, and chanting slogans such as “‘No big government” and “Obamacare makes me sick,” approximately 60,000 to 70,000 people flooded Pennsylvania Ave, according to the Washington DC Fire Department.

Organized by FreedomWorks, a conservative activist group led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, many of the protestors were affiliated with the Tea Party movement, grassroots demonstrations that began across the country last spring to protest Democratic tax policies, and government bailouts of the banking and auto industries.

The big blogospheric debate seems to be over crowd size. FreedomWorks apparently quoted ABC News as reporting the crowd size at “1 million to 1.5 million” and others claimed as much as 2 million. ABC issued a report denying that it ever said anything of the sort: “At no time did ABC News, or its affiliates, report a number anywhere near as large. ABCNews.com reported an approximate figure of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters, attributed to the Washington, D.C., fire department. In its reports, ABC News Radio described the crowd as “tens of thousands.” The fact of the matter is that nobody ever has a very good idea how many people attended these things and, since the fiasco of the “Million Man March,” the Capitol Police have wisely stopped providing estimates.

Suffice it to say: A whole lot of people showed up. Michelle Malkin has crowd photos and there’s no refuting that the turnout was simply massive.

What’s more interesting to me is not how many but Why? Matt Yglesias does what pretty much everybody does when there’s a big protest from the other side: Point to the yahoos.

I wouldn’t want to tell you that the majority of the people I saw at this morning’s tea party were such hard-core patriots that they felt the need to walk around waving flags of treason and slavery:

Still it did strike me as noteworthy that your basic tea party crowd isn’t the sort of crowd in which a Confederate flag is unwelcome. I feel like if you’d tried to bring this to a health care rally, folks would have gotten upset. But the tea parties, like a lot of big time conservative events, are a very racism friendly environment. This guy, for example, clearly isn’t so much the type to march with a racist shirt on as he is the kind of guy who’d march with a shirt ridiculing the idea of anti-racism:

As was the case with the bulk of the protesters, there was very little sense that anyone had any actual specific complaint with Obama’s health care proposals. That one woman loves the confederacy. This guy thinks guns are great and diversity is stupid. Many protesters feel that abortion is murder and/or that Barack Obama is in league with terrorists. But nobody had a sign urging the president to adopt more stringent cost control measures, or slamming the concept of regulations to require insurers to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions.

Now, as a Southerner, I tend to have a more benign view of people waving Confederate flags or wearing pro-gun T-shirts. Some of them are racist yahoos, to be sure, but most of them are just decent folks taking pride in a way of life they feel is under assault.

Regardless, however, Matt’s right about the last part:  There’s not one single thing motivating all these people.  They likely have vastly different policy preferences even on the central issue that supposedly ties them together: opposition to Big Government, whose era is not in fact over.  I would simply add that this is true of all mass protest movements.

We on the Right have always made fun of these protestors — which have, until now, been almost exclusively the province of the Left — because, frankly, there are always a lot of yahoos in the crowd.   There are always plenty of signs and t-shirts and epithets shouted that would make the organizers cringe because they take away from the intended message and make the protest seem less serious.  (Matt Welch, who is very sympathetic to the Tea Party cause, points to a man carrying a sign saying “Stop spending our tacos. I love tacos.”  I have no idea what inspired that but it’s epic.)

On the Left, there seem to be a solid cohort who will show up to protest anything; they’re damned near professional protesters.    With the Tea Party protests, we may finally be seeing their analog on the Right.

It’s unfair, regardless of the loose cause that motivates them to show up, to criticize the “movement” because individual protesters seem unable to articulate why they’re there.  Most people really can’t do that.  And people who show up to protest are usually motivated by emotion rather than cold logic.  They’re simply angry at the direction they think they’re country’s going and want to vent their frustrations and show that they’re not alone.  Welch nails it:

Political rallies are no place to seek the subtle truth, nor feel particularly glowing about your countrymen, and today was no different in that regard for me. But the meta-fact about a huge anti-Obamanomics protest eight months into his term is certainly significant, and very little of what I saw made me fear that Alex Pareene will be blown to smithereens by a suicide hijacker from Arkansas.

Malkin’s got my favorite photo:

Not only is the sign defiantly funny — and decidedly not Astroturfed — but it’s a great crowd shot of a bunch of regular Americans getting together to express their displeasure with their government in a civilized manner.  Protest rallies aren’t, so to speak, my cup of tea.  But there are worse outlet valves for the inevitable frustrations of a huge and incredibly diverse country.

President Obama is set to address the nation’s schoolchildren next week, presumably to propagandize them into his evil agenda of turning the country into Communist Russia (pronounced “roo-shuh”) and offing granny to save money on health care just as they do in his native Kenya. There are even instruction manuals to enlist the support of the teachers unions in brainwashing our youth.

Michelle Malkin has a huge exposé on this scandal:

Instead of practicing cursive, reviewing multiplication tables, diagramming sentences, or learning something concrete, America’s kids will be lectured about the importance of learning. And then the schoolchildren, from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, will be exhorted to Do Something — other than sit in their seats and receive academic instruction, that is.

What is it that something they’re supposed to do?  They’re not saying but apparently they want the kids to figure it out for themselves.

The activist tradition of government schools using students as junior lobbyists cannot be ignored. Zealous teacher’s unions have enlisted captive schoolchildren as letter-writers in their campaigns for higher education spending. Out-of-control activists have enlisted their secondary-school charges in pro-illegal immigration protests, gay marriage ceremonies, environmental propaganda stunts, and anti-war events.

And that’s without the cult-inducing powers of a presidential speech!

Stephen Green would keep his son out of public school that day if his son were old enough and he urges you to do the same.

Nope, Obama can’t just say hey to the kiddies and encourage them to do their homework. He has to make this a — what does the Left call it? — a teachable moment. A speech-in, if you will. Teachers have even been given handy instructions on how best to integrate The One into the classroom.

AllahPundit thinks this is overreacting a mite,

One pap-filled 20-minute speech about working hard and serving others is so lethal a threat to tender minds that they have to be yanked off the premises for the day to shield them from it?

[...]

If this turns out to be some hamfisted attempt by The One to pitch his agenda to kids — which would be politically insane given the outcry it would cause, a sneak preview of which may be found here — there’ll be ample time for outrageous outrage later. For all the media fainting spells over Obama’s oratory, you can count on one hand the number of truly memorable lines he’s uttered; I doubt he’s going to come up with such a corker next week that kids will be planning their lives around it. Remember, this is the same guy who can’t sell universal health care, the virtual raison d’etre of the Democratic Party these days, to the Blue Dogs.

Steve retorts:

Yes, the speech itself will almost certainly be harmless. I don’t expect anyone’s kids to be coming home and berating their parents for being against this program or that agenda. I do expect Allah has it quite right, that this speech will be just another Daddy Speech, meant to encourage my son to work hard in school.

But you know what? The President of the United States — whether an Obama a Bush or a Lincoln — is not my son’s daddy. That’s my job. We’ve had enough nannystatism, and enough daddystatism, too.

I actually agree with every word of that. Granted, “stay in school” is such an innocuous message that it’s hard to object to its being presented.  But do we really need to add to the already inflated sense of the president of the United States as our national daddy?  The man’s in charge of one branch of the federal government; he’s not king.

Still, as Doug Mataconis points out, this is hardly new.  Why, Ronald Reagan himself gave such as speech. So did both Presidents Bush.  Indeed, Reagan went to far as to answer questions from the kiddies on federal budget priorities and gun control!

MichaelW thinks the whole thing is “creepy” and says it’s different than what Republican presidents have done.  For example, Bush 41 was telling kids to stay off drugs.  He sees a more nefarious agenda from Obama:

President Obama has already shown that he’s not above using children to advance his political agenda, so it’s not surprising that those opposed to his aims would be a bit skeptical of his speech. Adding to the wariness is the fact that he only seems to make these speeches when he needs help with bolstering his political capital (e.g. the “race speech” after Jeremiah Wright blew up in his face). After the battering his health care insurance reform plans took in August, it almost seems too convenient that he would suddenly want to address all the school kids in the nation, right about when he’s planning to try and save the one program he truly wants to enact.

But Allah’s right on this.  Not only is it hard to believe Obama is going to say anything that rises above the level of pabulum but, if he does, the national outrage will make the health care town halls look like love-ins.

I tend to agree with Joanne Jacobs that the whole thing is innocuous, if unlikely to much matter: “I think the president is going to ask kids to work hard in school and teachers will try to get them to pledge to work hard in school and most of them will work just as hard this year as they did last year.”

AP Photo

Jayvie Canono has a useful discussion about the magazine-style format that has taken the blog world by storm over the last couple of years. Among the non-technical issues he raises is this:

Will your readers like it? Maybe they would prefer that they just keep scrolling down to keep reading your posts. Maybe you should ask them when you play-test your site.

Having invested in the Thesis theme for Manzine, I’m seriously considering porting OTB and some of my other sites over at some point.  Manzine’s thumbnail-for-every-article format is too labor intensive for OTB but I like the idea of a featured post or posts followed by headlines and excerpts for older entries.

What say you?  Do you like “magazine” formats on blogs like Michelle Malkin, Hot Air, TPM, and Lifehacker?  Or do you prefer the standard blog format such as OTB now uses?  Or does it matter at all?

I’ve thought about doing this for awhile but have resisted partly because I think most people read blogs, as I do, via their RSS reader rather than directly.  But that may just be idiosyncratic to those of us who peruse a hundred or more blogs.

The Outrage of the Day, apparently, is a USA Today op-ed by Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer in which they assert “Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American.”

Weekly Standard, Gateway Pundit, The Huffington Post, Top of the Ticket, Moe_Lane’s blog, The Moderate Voice, JammieWearingFool, JustOneMinute, The Atlantic Politics Channel, Le·gal In·sur·rec· tion, The Jawa Report, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Swamp, Townhall.com, QandO, Sense of Events, Flopping Aces, American Power, Daily Dose, Confederate Yankee, Hot Air, Riehl World View, Patterico’s Pontifications, Political Byline, Below The Beltway, Politics Daily, Balloon Juice, YID With LID, Donklephant, Blue Crab Boulevard, Macsmind, Founding Bloggers, Scared Monkeys, Right Wing News, Think Progress, The Plum Line, Taylor Marsh, Atlas Shrugs, Don Surber, Raw Story, Perfunction, Pundit & Pundette, Dennis the Peasant, The Strata-Sphere, Michelle Malkin, Neptunus Lex, AmSpecBlog, Sister Toldjah, Cato @ Liberty, The Next Right, TPMDC, GayPatriot, Freedom’s Lighthouse, Arkansas News, Shot in the Dark, The Campaign Spot, Sam Adams Alliance, LewRockwell.com Blog, The Caucus, Politics Nation, The Page, Instapundit, msnbc.com, Weasel Zippers, Firedoglake, NewsBusters.org, Cold Fury, No More Mister Nice Blog , Weekly Standard, The Huffington Post, Dr. Melissa Clouthier, The Swamp, JammieWearingFool, Gateway Pundit, Pat Dollard Power Line, and Newsalert are among those weighing in, as aggregated by the good robots at Memeorandum.

Now, Congressmen probably shouldn’t go around calling their fellow countrymen “un-American.”  It’s unhelpful in persuading opponents and not particularly shrewd politically.  But, considering that I both disagree with Pelosi and Hoyer on the direction we should take our national health care policy and preceded them by three days in asserting that “we should be able to agree that shutting down public debate on the matter in the guise of ‘being heard’ is not only unproductive but un-American,” I’m hard pressed to muster much outrage over this one.

DrewM. passes on Michelle Malkin’s post and column noting that the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller by a white “Christian” got scads more media commentary and more intense presidential attention than did the murder of Private William Long and maiming and attempted murder of Private Quinton Ezeagwula by a black “Muslim.”

It’s a fair point and very much worth noting that there are craziest on both sides.

At the same time, the first shooting naturally fit into an ongoing storyline whereas the second seemingly comes out of the blue.  Malkin’s done yeoman work over the years in rounding up little-reported incidents by leftist extremists targeting American troops but it remains a tiny, disaggrated fringe movement whereas the anti-abortion movement is massive and even its extreme elements, like Operation Rescue, are rather large and public.

Nutcases aside, there’s been a loud and bitter debate over abortion going on since at least decision in Roe v. Wade some thirty-six years ago. So, naturally, when an abortionist gets murdered, there’s a ready frame into which to plug stories, sidebars, and commentaries.  Columns from 1986 can be dusted off and re-run by changing a few names and throwing in a new quote or three.

By contrast, those who genuinely dislike American soldiers are so far into the lunatic fringe that they’re not part of the public debate.  Just about every liberal male politician over the age of 50 — John Kerry, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, George McGovern, Ted Kennedy, Charlie Rangel — served in the military.  Hell, so did Jeremiah Wright.

To be sure, there are liberals who hate the way our military is used.   Others hate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  But, by and large, those are handled as debates over public policy.  It’s presidents who are the object of that wrath, not American soldiers.  Indeed, when someone dares criticize soldiers — as in the General Betray Us flap — they’re roundly slapped down, even by other liberals.

All that said, I agree with Michelle on the much narrower points.  Yes, President Obama should have said something about the recruiting station incident, especially after his comments on the Tiller murder.  He’s commander-in-chief, after all.  And it would have been good politics, too, earning credit for taking on left-wing crazies without alienating a significant part of his coalition.

And, yes, the press should have used the occasion of the latest shooting to point out that this was not a totally isolated incident.  The press really needs to get beyond its tired story frames and do broader reporting more often.

Photo by Flickr user DRB62 under Creative Commons license.

One soldier was killed and another seriously injured in a shooting at an Army-Navy Recruiting Center in west Little Rock, Arkansas.  Thankfully, the second’s injuries are not considered life-threatening.  Contrary to earlier reports, both victims were “just out of basic training,” participating in the “Hometown Recruiting Assistance” program, and not Army Recruiters.  An arrest has been made but no names are released.  An “assault rifle” of some sort was reportedly used in the shootings.

Thus far, blogospheric commentary seems to be relegated to the right.  Not surprisingly, comparisons are being drawn to the murder of abortionist George Tiller despite the fact that “Police are trying to determine a motive” and the police spokesman “did not know whether the recruiting office was specifically targeted or was randomly chosen.”

Michelle Malkin ruefully quips, “I wonder if the Justice Department will send marshals to beef up protection at recruiting centers — especially given the past targeting of military centers on campuses and elsewhere across the country.”  She rounds up some of her own reports from over the years to demonstrate that violence aimed at military recruiters happens with some frequency, even if it gets less attention than abortion clinic violence.

Charles Johnson wisely refrains from speculation, merely passing on a noteworthy story.  Similarly, Ed Morrissey cautions, “This could have any of several different motives: political, personal, insanity.  I’d caution against reading too much into it until we hear more from the police.  We’ll be keeping an eye on it.”

AJ Strata wonders, “Is this country ready to finally deal with the fringe nut cases in the fevered swamps on the left and right?”

Rob Port observes,

Now, not to use this tragedy for politics or anything, but we could jump to the conclusion that this man was motivated by a hatred for the military (or something along those lines) and then blame groups like Code Pink and Media Matters and MoveOn.org for fanning anti-military, anti-Iraq war passions for years.  We could, much as the left has with people like Bill O’Reilly in the George Tiller murder claim that those groups have blood on their hands.

But we won’t.  Because that’s stupid.  This murder, whatever the motivation (it’s not clear at this point), was committed by a murderous thug who acted of his own volition.  Not because he was compelled to by liberal dissent.

Until we know whether the shooter was some yahoo with a beef against military recruiters, a garden variety lunatic, or part of some organized conspiracy, it’s not much worth speculating on the politics.  But Strata and Port are right:  There are fringe elements out there on various points of the political spectrum and some handful of them are willing to kill.

Most murders, though, are apolitical. They’re human tragedies with horrific consequences for friends and loved ones with little public policy meaning.  Sadly, that doesn’t stop people from trying to make political hay out of them.

I fully expect, by the way, some commenters on the left to start exploiting this case to argue for a strengthened assault rifle ban in 5, 4, 3 . . .

Photo:  KATV7

For the second time in less than a week, Andrew Sullivan has handed out one of his positive awards to someone for whom a different and negative award was named.   This time, Michelle Malkin gets an Yglesias Award for calling the murder of George Tiller “terrorism.”   (For those who don’t keep up with such things, the Malkin Award is given for “shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric.”)

Amusingly, while I join Malkin in condemning the murder of Tiller, I consider terming it “terrorism” to be rather hyperbolic.  Quite a few bloggers I read, especially those on the left, join her in using it.  Steve Benen, for example, argues “We’re dealing with an act of politically-motivated violence, against a law-abiding American on American soil, intended to scare, intimidate, and change U.S. policy.”

That’s not quite right.  While no universally accepted definition exists, Benen’s is as good as any.  But I’d argue that it constitutes a three-pronged test and that this murder falls short on one prong.   Yes, this act was politically motivated and designed to scare and intimidate.  But, while one hesitates to fathom what a deranged lunatic “intends,” but there’s no way a rational person, even an evil one, would think that murdering abortionists will change public policy.  Indeed, if anything, it’s likely to make people on the fence more sympathetic to abortion providers while putting reasoned critics of abortion on the defensive.

At best, this murder was intended to stop Tiller from providing services he was legally free to provide and to intimidate other current or would-be providers.  But that’s “terrorism” of the same sort carried out by the Ku Klux Klan or the Mafia and so far afield from what those who seek to overthrow governments or induce radical changes in public policy do as to require a different category.

UPDATE: An email from a colleague suggests the above needs clarification.  Obviously, many no-question terrorists — Timothy McVeigh and the 9/11 highjackers were offered as examples — kill with no sane hope of actually changing U.S. Government policy.   But that was at least their direct aim.   My presumption is that Tiller’s murderer was aimed at intimidating other would-be abortionists.

As for the KKK, they no doubt terrorized; I’m not sure that makes them “terrorists.” They’re just criminal scumbags.  Indeed, “terrorist,” like “assassin,” actually conveys some legitimacy in a way “murderer” does not. The former, after all, are fighting for something they believe in.

In terms of the Mafia, they conduct all manner of killings to “send a message” of some sort.  Generally, it’s not a political message, to be sure, but it’s intended to intimidate people who get in their way.

UPDATE 2: Thoreau largely dismisses the title question but makes an interesting point about the discussion.

I see plenty of downsides in letting the government treat terrorism as a special category that “regular” laws can’t address.  (For examples, see the past 8 years.)  So I’m fine with calling things by accurate and descriptive names in public discourse, but I see little advantage to having different laws for a special subset of murders.  There’s an important difference between what we say in open discussions and what we actually do in courtrooms.

Now, there may be a need for some sort of different treatment of terrorism in an international context, to distinguish a soldier attacking a military target under orders (these guys are normally accorded POW status) from a guy attacking a civilian target (these guys normally aren’t).  However, in the domestic context I see no need for a distinction.

That’s a fair point.  McVeigh was a terrorist but, more importantly, he was a mass murderer.  He was convicted and punished accordingly.

UPDATE 3: Ezra Klein argues that Congress should not let Tiller’s killer win by making late-term abortions harder to get.   Hilzoy agrees and lists several steps Congress should take.  Coincidentally, these are policy changes that they already favored.

Now, here’s something I thought I’d never see:  Andrew Sullivan has nominated Hugh Hewitt for an Yglesias Award for his defense of Sonia Sotomayor.

For those who don’t keep up with such things, “The Yglesias Award is for writers, politicians, columnists or pundits who actually criticize their own side, make enemies among political allies, and generally risk something for the sake of saying what they believe.”

What’s particularly ironic about this is that there’s also an award named after Hewitt:  “The Hewitt Award – named after the absurd partisan fanatic, Hugh Hewitt, is given for the most egregious attempts to label Barack Obama as un-American, alien, treasonous, and far out of the mainstream of American life and politics.”

This is not to be confused, incidentally, with “The Malkin Award – named after blogger, Michelle Malkin – [which] is for shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric. Ann Coulter is ineligible – to give others a chance.”  It’s a counterpart to “The Moore Award – named after film-maker, Michael Moore – [which] is for divisive, bitter and intemperate left-wing rhetoric.”

Will this require that the Hewitt Award be renamed?  Will Sullivan nominate himself for an Yglesias Award for nominating Hewitt for one?  Truly, the mind boggles.

The Obamas are coming under criticism from around the blogosphere for their dealings with royals.  First, Barack Obama gave Queen Elizabeth II a video iPod filled with some rather add materials (along with an actually thoughtful gift).  Then, Michelle Obama got into trouble for getting too familiar with the the queen.  Now, Barack Obama is getting chastised for bowing to the Saudi king.

Now, frankly, I don’t give a hoot what the president gives the British figurehead.  I’m slightly concerned, as evidenced by his also giving PM Gordon Brown a boxed set of DVDs, that he seems not to understand that the UK is a First World country and that its leaders can probably afford anything available at Amazon for under $200.  But, really, it’s the thoughtlessness that counts.

Second, QE2 has been at the monarch thing for several decades, so one presumes that she gets a reasonable amount of obsequious treatment.  Being touched on the shoulder by the wife of the American president, presumably, is something from which her ego shall rebound.  As for Mrs. O, she is not a subject of the queen and thus not obligated to be anything other than cordial in dealing with her.

The bowing to the king thing annoys me.  It’s a proper enough show of respect for a monarch in his home and it would be rude for an ordinary American citizen not to follow this protocol.  But Obama isn’t a tourist being granted an audience with the king, he’s our de facto head of state.   Then again, a quick bow is less creepy than holding hands with him, as Obama’s predecessor was known to do.

At the end of the day, I just can’t muster the outrage of Michelle Malkin or even Mark Steyn on this one.  (I do find amusement, however, at Steyn’s description: “So let me see if I understand American protocol in the age of Obama: The First Lady hugs Queen Elizabeth as if she’s some granny at a seniors’ center photo-op, but the President of this republic prostrates himself before King Abdullah as if he’s a subject of the Saudi pseudo-Crown.”) Mostly, I share Pat Lang’s befuddlement that Americans care so much about monarchs and their little rituals.

Photo: Sydney Morning Herald

RNC chairman Michael Steele was on D.L. Hughley’s CNN show Saturday night and people are slowly getting interested:

Some obvious questions come to mind:

• D.L. Hughley has a talk show?!

• What’s up with that shirt Steele’s wearing?

Mostly, though, people are talking about Steele’s comments about Rush Limbaugh.

So let’s put it into context here. Let’s put it into context here. Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh, his whole thing is entertainment. Yes, it’s incendiary. Yes, it’s ugly.

To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it’s unclear what the meaning of “it’s” is here.    As best I can tell, it’s Limbaugh’s assertion at CPAC that he wants Barack Obama to fail.

If I wanted Obama to succeed, I’d be happy the Republicans have laid down. And I would be encouraging Republicans to lay down and support him. Look, what he’s talking about is the absorption of as much of the private sector by the U.S. government as possible, from the banking business, to the mortgage industry, the automobile business, to health care. I do not want the government in charge of all of these things. I don’t want this to work. So I’m thinking of replying to the guy, ‘Okay, I’ll send you a response, but I don’t need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails.’ (interruption) What are you laughing at? See, here’s the point. Everybody thinks it’s outrageous to say. Look, even my staff, ‘Oh, you can’t do that.’ Why not? Why is it any different, what’s new, what is unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails? Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what’s gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here. Why do I want more of it? I don’t care what the drive-by story is. I would be honored if the drive-by media headlined me all day long: ‘Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails.’ Somebody’s gotta say it.”

That’s mildly entertaining, in a red meat to the party faithful sort of way.  It’s “incendiary” and “ugly,” though, only if taken out of context.   Of course he wants Obama to fail at imposing policies he disagrees with.  That’s a far different thing than, for example, hoping the economy continues to tank to make it easier for Republicans to win seats in 2010.

Michelle Malkin isn’t happy.  I’m mostly befuddled.

Limbaugh’s response was pretty good.

“I’m not in charge of the Republican Party, and I don’t want to be,” Rush said. “I would be embarrassed to say that I’m in charge of the Republican Party in a sad-sack state that it’s in. If I were chairman of the Republican Party, given the state that it’s in, I would quit.”

Rush then mocked those who have criticized him for saying he wants Obama to fail, and directly challenged them to choose: You either want Obama to succeed or fail at his goal of dismantling conservatism.

“So send those fundraising requests out,” Rush said in a sneering tone, in an apparent reference to Steele, adding: “Make sure you say, `We want Obama to succeed.’ So people understand your compassion.”

My CPAC neighbor Melissa Clouthier thinks Steele could learn a thing or two from Limbaugh:

Washington insiders are bathed in moderate and liberal group-think. Any idea outside the liberal mainstream is branded as mean, hateful, and base. So Republican leaders find themselves saying,”I’m not a racist! I’m not dispassionate! I care! I do!” And then, they go about working on crap legislation to make it somewhat better. These disgusting half-measures make Republicans look weak and confused ideologically.

Instead of playing defense, the Republicans, including Chairman Steele need to go on offense. We need to demonstrate that we are the party of the little guy, the small business man. We need to have the best ideas on health care, the environment, and the economy. We need to speak these ideas clearly and unequivocally.

And when a man like Rush Limbaugh articulates what millions of Republicans are feeling, the leader of the RNC does not get on the liberally biased station CNN and bash an ally and friend. It’s wrong. He should apologize. And Chairman Steele should go to work doing what he has said he wants done: a changed Republican Party that will win elections by winning in the arena of ideas.

Limbaugh played a powerful role in mobilizing the base in 1994 and he’s still a major influencer today.  But he’s not the leader of the Republican  Party; Steele is.   Unfortunately, this was a misstep on the new leader’s part.   This wasn’t a Sister Soulja Moment; he was merely attacking a figure popular with his base for no apparent reason.  It’s one thing to condemn Limbaugh when he says something that’s actually ugly and incendiary.  This, though, was nonsensical.