National Review

Sixty-eight percent of Americans oppose the so-called “ground zero mosque,” according to one CNN poll. According to an Economist poll, a majority of Americans acknowledge that Muslims have the constitutional right to build houses of worship.

Fifty-five percent of people support the immigration bill. A majority of respondents — 54 percent! — also believe that the bill will lead to anti-Hispanic discrimination.

Then his list of things 70 percent of Americans support gets odd. A vast majority of Americans supported stricter financial reform, in April. In July, pollsters found that most Americans had no opinion of the financial reform bill, and many had never heard of it. Other polls found that people didn’t think it would work. Responses seem to depend entirely on how the question is worded.

California’s Proposition 8 passed with 52.24 percent of the votes. One recent CNN poll found a majority of Americans favoring gay marriage, and support for gay marriage is on the rise in every state in the nation.

Opposition to healthcare reform remains, with fluctuations, around 50 percent. Many Americans don’t know much about it.

Americans no longer particularly support the war in Afghanistan, but being antiwar doesn’t track with the “liberals think 70 percent of Americans are imperialists and bigots” argument, at all. (When the question is about Obama’s handling of the way, the results are usually close to tied between approval and disapproval, in the mid-40s.)

According to Gallup, 47 percent of Americans support lifting the drilling moratorium and 46 percent oppose.

So! “If the polling on these issues is reasonably accurate,” Peter Kirsanow basically just imagines, in his head, that 70 percent of Americans agree with him about everything.

It takes a strange sort of psychology to imagine that slim majorities of Americans, as measured by sometimes wildly divergent opinion polls, are infallible, as long as they agree with you. Though I guess the task is made easier if you are simply convinced, without evidence, that vast majorities are on your side.

But, based on that logic, how can Kirsanow possibly claim to love this nation, when majorities still hate his former boss, and so many millions voted to elect Barack Obama and this entire Democratic Congress?

The best part of Kirsanow’s post is actually the second line, on Democrats’ complaining about having their patriotism called into question during the Bush years: “Of course, no one had questioned their patriotism….” Someone tell that to the entire 2004 Republican convention!

Gingrich should not listen to them. At all. (Not that Gingrich listens to anyone, besides perhaps his wife, but still.) This editorial can be safely ignored for the following reasons:

First of all, everyone should always do the opposite of whatever a National Review editorial says to do. The opposite of what “The Editors” want is invariably the correct choice, morally and politically. If politicians always made “doing the opposite of what The Editors of the National Review want” a top priority, there would be universal peace and prosperity and kick-ass super-trains crisscrossing the nation.

Second, The Editors don’t even have the facts of Santorum’s surge correct: As Dave Weigel points out, Gingrich, contrary to The Editors’ claims, has won more delegates than Santorum thus far. Santorum has three delegates. Three. The press likes to cover caucuses and primaries even when they’re meaningless and non-binding and feature negligible turnout because those are the only actual events to cover in a primary race, but the result is that a couple of random wins are massively over-imbued with supposed import, leading even the politically savvy Editors of the National Review to believe that Rick Santorum has actually won a bunch of delegates because he got some old people into some auditoriums in suburban Minnesota.

Third, there is nothing about the Santorum surge that makes it any more sustainable or solid than all the previous candidate surges, except that it’s happening while primary contests are actually happening instead of last September. In other words, a Santorum collapse could be imminent, and it could come whenever Mitt Romney gets around to seriously devoting his attention to destroying him with money. Santorum has a lot of room to be attacked from the right, especially since he’s got the Rust Belt Republican politician habit of occasionally sounding sympathetic to working-class resentment of rich people. And his political history is filled with assorted crimes against current fanatical GOP dogma. Weigel posted a good one earlier: An old campaign ad in which Santorum actually admits to loving newspapers.

Oh also something about supporting Amtrak, despite trains being part of the UN plot to destroy American sovereignty.

Finally, there is the fact that Rick Santorum is an unambiguously awful candidate. He is not just a “social conservative,” he is a paleolithic anachronism of reactionary thought. The American people, despite the fervid wishes of a couple bishops and Kathryn Jean Lopez, are not actually remotely anti-contraception. Most voters — especially since the ratification of the 19th Amendment — think women should be allowed to have jobs outside the home. The last time the Republicans won a presidential election, they had 48% of the female vote, and I imagine they’d like to tie or beat that number this year, maybe? Rick Santorum is decidedly not the man for that job, unless scientists invent some sort of mind control ray that falls into the hands of Phyllis Schlafly.

So, no, Newt Gingrich, don’t quit just yet, and I’m not just saying that because having Gingrich around makes a political writer’s work marginally more colorful. All Gingrich really needs to remain “competitive” in the media race through Super Tuesday is one more big check from his rich uncle Scrooge McAdelson.

(Not that Gingrich is going to be the nominee! It’s still going to be Romney unless something unprecedentedly hilarious happens at the convention.)

She was so excited, in fact, that she forgot that the decision was NOT ABOUT ABORTION WHATEVER GAVE YOU THAT IDEA. Later she posted that hilarious YouTube video of Komen CEO Nancy Brinker explaining that the Planned Parenthood decision was not in any way political, no sir. (At least one commenter noted the disconnect: “Really curious what K-Lo thinks Komen is actually doing here. When the news broke, she seemed pleased and pointed out right-to-lifers had been trying to force Komen to shuck PP. But she also believes Komen’s [ridiculous] assertion that the decision has nothing to do with politics and was just a big coincidence? Hunh?”)

After a great deal of public outcry, Komen reversed itself and said Planned Parenthood would be eligible for future grants.

This, obviously, was very sad news for K-Lo. She seemed stunned at first, but then decided that Komen was the victim of bullying.

The years-long campaign by antiabortion groups to lobby Komen to cease sending money to Planned Parenthood — the campaign Lopez cited in her initial post crowing about that campaign’s victory — was just regular political speech, but the widespread outcry over the decision was, obviously, bullying. (Or, as Daniel Foster put it, “gangsterism.” Foster only approves of reasonable and polite “speech,” which is to say, writing checks.)

Lopez, like many conservatives whose baffling interpretation of common liberal concepts leads them to find “hypocrisies” where none exist (Michelle Obama ate a french fry!!!!), darkly mutters about “that anti-bullying campaign,” because accusing a massive charitable foundation of playing politics with its supposed mission is patently the same thing as humiliating vulnerable young people until they become suicidal.

(Bullying, for Lopez’s future reference, is not just “people being mean to you,” but more accurately lengthy campaigns of abuse carried out against people who are or feel unable to defend themselves. Just ask the students of Anoka-Hennepin public schools if you’re still confused.)

Some are wise enough to bemoan the entire remaining slate, though they of course blame outsiders, and not the actual rank-and-file of their own movement. Jim Geraghty hates Iowa, and says the kooky results (Ron Paul!!!) can be blamed on the lack of a Democratic primary sending unreliable “independents” — presumably baked out of their minds — to GOP caucuses to spoil the entire campaign.

Erick Erickson — a longtime Santorum hater and one of the few pundits brave enough to label the culture warrior a false conservative, because Erickson declares everyone he dislikes for any reason to be Not a True Conservative — was so dispirited that he literally blamed Bush. (Well, Bush and those damned Paul-voting independents: “If you take out the non-Republicans who came into the caucuses last night for Ron Paul, the Republican turnout was less than 2008 — even considering the ratio of independents to Republicans who turned out in 2008.” And if you take out the votes for Santorum, Romney, Paul and Gingrich, Rick Perry won!)

The problem, per Erickson, is that Bush picked Cheney instead of a likable young president-in-waiting. The GOP, he has heard, likes “orderly processes” of succession. If only Bush had shown the foresight to select Marco Rubio as his running mate! In Erickson’s eyes, Bush’s failure to appoint an heir is what led to the John McCain campaign and Mitt Romney’s painful stumble toward the nomination. There is still hope, we’re told, for someone else (unnamed!) to enter the race and build momentum for the really important contests, which are now apparently scheduled for April.

If I were Perry, I’d wake up tomorrow, say I refuse to surrender the Republican Party into the hands of big government conservatives after all the gains the tea party has made, and then announce I’m firing all my political staffers and communications staffers and ask South Carolina to help me reboot to victory. Make it an Alamo stand and, if like at the Alamo Perry goes down, perhaps there’ll at least be a rallying cry for small government conservatism left over.

I can’t for the life of me figure out what makes Rick Perry “more conservative” than Rick Santorum but something something Alamo guns a-blazin’ cowboy Custer etc., etc. (Erickson then promoted a blog from a diarist making the case that perhaps Mitt Romney isn’t such an unmitigated socialistic big government evil.)

Kathryn Jean Lopez, of course, truly has always liked Rick, because they share a religion and a twisted puritanical revulsion for the whole of modernity.

As Roy Edroso noted, Jennifer Rubin’s been a Santorum fan since about August, so with the race now down to her two favorites, I imagine she’s thrilled. She certainly seems pleased — in her usual dyspeptic loathsome way — to stick it to those liberals who hoped vaguely for a Ron Paul victory. (She knows liberals like Paul because of his “bizarre views on Iran” and they hate Santorum for “his robust foreign policy.” She used the word “robust” again later, because it is code for “wants to bomb Muslims.”)

That post was just a warmup to her true defense of Santorum, whom she defends from Ericksonian charges of secret man-on-big government love. The case boils down to the facts that Santorum — like everyone else in the Republican Party — promises to repeal Obamacare and slash taxes yet further on our put-upon 1 percenters. (And let’s be honest — Santorum got into politics solely to be a soldier in God’s war on gays and abortionists. On every other issue he always has and always will just do whatever the think tanks and well-connected interest groups say, making his “record” on something like Medicare Part D entirely beside the point. If the party doesn’t like Medicare anymore, he doesn’t either!)

Ira Stoll makes the entirely unconvincing case that Santorum’s slight victory over Ron Paul was because voters were hungering for “a candidate who was willing to take on Ron Paul on foreign policy,” which, last I checked, was all of them. Those who vote Republican solely on “foreign policy” issues (bomb Iran) will likely continue pretending that the race from here on out will come down to which man can sound the hawkiest, even as the candidates themselves run on which one promises to ban the most abortions and deport the most immigrants.

There is, in other words, plenty for “establishment conservatives” to talk themselves into liking about Mr. Santorum as he takes his Iowa victory lap. Those who consider him an unlikable and decidedly unelectable boob will probably just keep quiet until he begins fading.

Belief in American exceptionalism is declining, the Pew Research Center concludes in a new report:

About half of Americans (49%) and Germans (47%) agree with the statement, “Our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others;” 44% in Spain share this view. In Britain and France, only about a third or fewer (32% and 27%, respectively) think their culture is better than others.

While opinions about cultural superiority have remained relatively stable over the years in the four Western European countries surveyed, Americans are now far less likely to say that their culture is better than others; six-in-ten Americans held this belief in 2002 and 55% did so in 2007.

Oh no! We’re barely more nationalistic than the Germans!

What’s causing the numbers to fall? Is it the fact that many conservatives intensely hate “our culture,” on account of all the wanton postmodernism, vulgarity, hip-hop “music” and anti-family themes on prime-time television?

No. It’s because of those leftists in academia: “In the four Western European countries and in the U.S., those who did not graduate from college are more likely than those who did to agree that their culture is superior, even if their people are not perfect.”

As Corner commenter “Ed in Cary” says:

And thus is proven the corrosive effect of modern “education.” What kind of a moron believes the implied corollary to the disbelief in the superiority of any culture, which is that “all cultures are equal?”

Conservatives: Standing up for our superior American culture, by calling 51 percent of Americans morons.

This morning, she published a longer reaction to last night’s debate, informed by a night of careful consideration. “These candidates aren’t half bad,” she declares. “I do wish Santorum would have his moment,” she sighs, wistfully, imagining herself chastely holding hands with the former senator on a lovely spring day as they block the entrance of a Planned Parenthood clinic.

Her conclusion:

The winner of the night was the delightfully talented young Taylor Swift, though, who just won the Country Music Awards “Entertainer of the Year” award. Who scheduled country-music awards the same night as a Republican party debate? CNBC wins for ending the debate in time for the Glen Campbell tribute.

As I said: World’s greatest political blogger.

(The commenters are similarly unimpressed with this item, or at least many of them don’t really understand what Taylor Swift has to do with anything. AndrewTP: “For some reason you seem to have been brainwashed into believing that Taylor represents your side in a culture war, a belief for which there is no evidence.” Uh oh, they’re catching on! Quick, Rich Lowry, write a post about how you heard a liberal New Yorker disrespect NASCAR or something!)