Agita Alert: Cliff Kincaid Suggests Obama Not Born in US to Applause from CPAC

It's the kind of throwaway line guaranteed to get laughs and applause.

But is it worth it?

Nope. We conservatives are already alienated from the rest of the country by about a 65/35 split on a lot of critical issues. We're already marginalized. We really don't have to increase the marginalization by pushing silly nits like this.

There are a lot of issues we can potentially win on -- but this ain't one of them. I view this as unserious stuff when we'e got to be deadly serious indeed.

John Bolton's Mustache of White Bushy Justice was unable to control its host organism and let out a joke about Chicago being nuked that played well in the hall but isn't exactly politic.

This stuff isn't outrageous or worthy of condemnation. But we just got our asses kicked big time and really should be focusing like lasers on the real, live issues.

Gingrich hosted a roundtable briefing for bloggers this morning and was stressing that, particularly in this environment, we push issues we're already pretty much winning on, such as Drill Baby Drill and cutting business taxes. More of that, less of the cheap and ultimately counterpoductive gags.

(Besides, the latter is my stock in trade.)

Thanks to Gabriel and Slublog.

Thanks to Gabriel and Slublog.

The Weird Kids Who Eat Paste: So much of politics comes down to gut-level affinities for the sort of person one imagines a part to be made up of. Liberals have long had a natural advantage on this score, as the media never stops painting them as cool, open-minded, hip, and so forth.

When conservatives prosper, they tend to be viewed as bit hipper than they usually are. I'm not saying that's causation, but is is correlation.

Conservatives really have to watch out for the sort of stuff that pushes out into further orbits away from the center of political gravity. Particularly now -- again we have gotten our asses kicked two cycles in a row. It makes our mission all more difficult if we go off chasing politcal exotica.

Is this a legitimate issue? I split the difference and say yeah, he really ought to be a lot more forthcoming about this, but no, in the end it's not at all likely we win on this, anywhere. It might be a good topic to discuss privately but not so much in public fora.

posted by Ace at 11:27 AM

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