The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Ann Althouse: Rube

Posted on | July 9, 2011 | 124 Comments

“[Obama] really is a solid, normal person who remained grounded in the middle of all this craziness. And I like to think that, now that he’s President, with his steely nerve, his intelligence, and his groundedness, he’ll do the job that must be done. The trickery is over.”
— Ann Althouse, Jan. 22, 2009

“The guy who said that his election would heal the planet and cause the seas to recede was the guy we were warning Ann and all the other rubes about. Ann thought she had Obama figured out; that the guy behind the curtain was sane and smart and up to the job; the guy on stage was all an act. As Glenn Reynolds so often asks ‘who’s the rube,’ Ann?”
— Moneyrunner, July 9, 2011

Friday, the Wisconsin law professor asserted that she “made a rational choice” in voting for Obama in 2008, because she does not want to admit the truth: She was wrong, and not merely incidentally wrong, but disastrously, catastrophically wrong.

Like I said on Election Day: “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Bob Barr!”

No American should ever feel compelled to vote for a candidate they believe to be the lesser of two evils, and I didn’t. 

If you put a gun to my head and told me to vote for John McCain, I’d tell you to go ahead and pull the trigger. The whole point of calling this blog “The Other McCain” was to distance myself from the disgrace of my distant cousin. He is the emblem and example of all that is wretched, dishonest and corrupt in American politics, and if there is any comfort in the Obama Age, it is this: John McCain will never be president.

We should all thank God for that. And the Republican Party should hang its head in shame at having nominated that treacherous bastard.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2008 election, I wrote three columns analyzing the GOP’s well-deserved defeat:

Go read all of those and tell me if I was wrong about any of it. I wasn’t. I was right, right, right, the whole time Ann Althouse was being wrong, wrong , wrong. However, I’m not just reminding you of how right I was for the sake of my own vainglorious ego, but because Althouse — by continuing to defend her disastrous choice as “rational” — is undermining the work that needs to be done to convince millions of her fellow rubes that they should become ex-Democrats:

Such irrational expectations are inevitably followed by disillusionment. No prediction of what the next four years might bring is safer than this: The yawning gap between Hope and reality will produce a bumper crop of ex-Democrats.

I wrote that less than three weeks after Election Day, and Professor Althouse is doing the exact opposite of what needs to be done to persuade those millions to abandon the Democratic Party. Instead of claiming she “made a rational choice,” she needs to begin asking herself why — and honestly telling readers how — she was so completely deluded as to believe that Obama would be successful because of “his steely nerve, his intelligence, and his groundedness.”

He’s a left-wing ideological fanatic, Professor!

His calm exterior demeanor, his resonant baritone voice, his occasional nod toward political pragmatism — these superficialities cannot deceive intelligent observers. Barack Hussein Obama is a menace to American liberty, inimicably hostile to everything good and decent in our nation’s traditions, and he must be defeated.

Why does Ann Althouse refuse to own up to being a rube? Does intellectual pride prevent her from admitting that her expectations of Hope and Change were no more rational than those of Peggy Joseph?

“I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car; I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage. You know, if I help him, he’s gonna help me.”

You’re even a bigger rube than Peggy Joseph, Professor, because you should have known better, and you refuse to confess your error.

I agree wholeheartedly with Moneyrunner: “Intellectual Pride Makes You Stupid. . . . and denial is not a river in Egypt.”

UPDATE: Donald Douglas accuses me of insincere traffic-baiting:

We know Althouse breaks political convention, and she’s been hammering Obama for some time now. Besides, you just like posting her picture.

No, honestly: Read the linked posts — both Althouse and Moneyrunner — and see if you don’t think it was a bit too much for her to put an asterisked footnote into her Friday post, trying to deny her rubeness.

Or should that be “rubehood”? Never mind. The point is that she needs to own it, and until she does, she deserves to be mocked, and often, and by someone who knows how.

UPDATE II: Thanks to the commenter who suggested “rubitude” for Althouse’s condition. The Lonely Conservative offers lots of rational reasons why she didn’t support Obama.

UPDATE III: Linked by Pat Austin at So It Goes in Shreveport — thanks!

UPDATE IV: Linked by That Mr. G. Guy — thanks! — and now a Memeorandum thread.

UPDATE V: Small Dead Animals suggests morning-after remorse on Professor Althouse’s part. It’s probably sexist to think of it that way. But I’m scarcely the one to be lecturing others about sexism, eh?

UPDATE VI: Everything you ever need to know about not trusting Obama, Cynthia Yockey learned as a lesbian Democrat supporting Hillary Clinton.

UPDATE VII: “From the Undeceived to the Rube: My Second Notice of Your Previous Insult.”


Category: Ann Althouse, Barack Obama

Comments

124 Responses to “Ann Althouse: Rube”

  1. Finrod Felagund
    July 9th, 2011 @ 8:39 pm

    In my view, in voting for the Republican ticket in 2008 I wasn’t voting for John McCain, I was voting for Palin and her running-mate.  I was intending to write in Ronald Reagan before he picked her.