Election Choices

The political “buzz” of the day is that Mitch Daniels has decided no to run, and that his reason has to do with consideration for his family.

Attywood decried the national sentiment that prevails today where, he says, a military draft would never be politically viable because families will never allow their children to be put in harm’s way. He quotes Daniels, “I love my country, I love my family more,” and contrasts that with JFK in 1961, “Ask not what your country can do for you…”

There is an implication there, I suppose, that Daniels has concerns about the effect on his family should he run, concerns regarding attacks by media and opponents.

James Joyner is a little more direct in his thoughts along those lines,

It’s long been cliché that the process drives out all the good candidates and that anyone who would willingly subject himself and his family to their process has proven he shouldn’t be president. Neither are quite true. We continue to get outstanding people to run for high office every cycle.

Oh, yeah, name one. What “outstanding people” have run for any office of significance in this country in the last couple of decades? We thought we had one in Obama, didn’t we, but he has turned out only to be an outstanding campaigner. He was running against McCain. In California I was hoping to get rid of Barbara Boxer, a woman so arrogant that she publicly corrects a senior general for courteously calling her “ma’am” instead of the title of her choice, but was confronted with Carley Fiorina as the only alternative. For Governor we get a choice between Whitman and Brown. Where are the “outstanding people” in this past cycle?

We’ve had George Bush as President twice. Did he defeat an “outstanding person” in each of two national elections?

Joyner goes on to say that he sees no solution to what he just said was not a problem,

I haven’t the foggiest idea what to do about it. The cost of limiting free speech–let alone political speech–would be much higher than we’re paying in weakened fields.

It isn’t necessary to limit political speech, let the fringe candidates say whatever they want to say, and then simply ignore them. They problem is not what the lunatic fringe is saying, they’ve been doing that since politics was first invented. The problem is all of the attention that the media and the opposition is giving to that lunatic fringe.

New Gingrich makes one idiotic statement and, instead of ignoring it as it so richly deserves, the liberal media “discusses” and analyses it for a solid week. Chris Matthews, Lawrence O’Donnell, Ed Shultz, and Rachel Maddow will be screaming about it on their shows every evening for a solid week, causing all of the conservative media to be rebutting them for the same week and giving that one idiotic comment a life and a measure of importance orders of magnitude beyond what it deserves.

Had all of the Liberals ignored Newt’s idiotic statement it would have been heard by the handful of people who were in the audience when he made it. By prating about it on their shows for a week or more, and by making it an “issue” that conservatives feel they must defend, the idiots in the liberal media make sure that a stupid remark is heard by several millions, and they give it an undeserved sense of importance.

Limiting political speech is a breach of our constitution; ignoring stupid speech is not.