Surrendie is highly amused this Friday. While he generally enjoys when Democrats surrender, it is almost as fun for him when those in the GOP lose their minds as well: 3 Successful Republicans Caution Against a Move to the Right

Senator Collins, Senator Alexander and Representative King were among Republicans who defied the odds in a terrible year for their colleagues. Their re-elections provide a possible road map for how the party can succeed in a challenging political environment. The answer, the three veteran politicians agreed, is not to become a more conservative, combative party focused on narrow partisan issues.

Right, because we wouldn’t want to do the same thing that the Democrats did, especially starting in 2001, and we wouldn’t want to actually stand for anything. Let’s just become the same as the Democrat Party.

“What doesn’t work is drawing a harsh ideological line in the sand,” said Ms. Collins, of Maine, who early in the year was a top Democratic target for defeat but ended up winning 61 percent of the vote while Senator Barack Obama received 58 percent in the presidential race in her state.

Worked for Democrats over the past 8 years. Oh, and it worked really, really well for that guy elected president in 1980.

“We make a mistake if we are going to make our entire appeal rural and outside the Northeast and outside the Rust Belt,” said Mr. King, of New York, who easily won re-election in a region shedding Republicans at a precipitous rate.

Well, if you stand for Conservative principles, shouldn’t be an issue.

“We can stand around and talk about our principles, but we have to put them into actions that most people agree with,” said Mr. Alexander, of Tennessee, a self-described conservative who was able to attract African-American voters.

That’s right, and the reason you lost was because you STOPPED BEING EVEN WISHY WASHY REPUBLICANS, much less Conservatives. It is a very simple proposition, spelled out millions of times by those in the base

• limited spending
• reducing the role of government in our personal and private lives
• increasing State’s Rights
• national security, which includes getting off your butts and securing the borders and making domestic energy production increases happen
• wise spending
• Constitutionality

That’s it. Simple. There are other issues out there, such as abortion on demand and gay marriage, that are very important to some Conservatives, but not for others. My personal opinion is that issues such as that should be left in the hands of the State’s and their voters. The Federal government has no place in legislating, except in terms of cross border. The morality push by the GOP is a loser issue.

But the GOP will not win by being Democrat Lite, but by having a coherent, adult, responsible, and simple policy stance. And they have to walk the talk.

It is a simple matter of protecting their special interests. That’s right Their - special - interests.

Democrats in spite of all their campaign rhetoric about standing up to the special interests actually have to answer to some of the biggest special interests in the country. In this case - labor unions.

The reason why Democrats are pushing for additional bailouts for the auto industry is the fact that if Ford, GM, and Chrysler have to take their financials before a federal bankruptcy court, they would have an open door to tear apart their contracts with the UAW and Democrats cannot allow that to happen. If they do, they could lose the support of millions of union workers. The UAW has close ties with the AFL-CIO (especially since their members are likely also members of the AFL-CIO) which also has close ties to just about every other major labor union. That translates into a couple of million heavily influenced voters (see also Politically Apathetic American Lemmings*)

If any one or all of the Big 3 file for Chapter 11 reorganization through the federal courts, their employees will lose benefits. These benefits are at the core of what is wrong with the American auto industry.

The Big 3 spend so much of their working capital in their employees’ benefit packages that it cuts into their design budgets. So these major companies have to take risks on a limited number of models of cars. Unfortunately the gamble that they took several years ago was to invest in designs for SUVs. It takes several years to engineer a new model of car so the changing landscape of the automotive market has caught the Big 3 with no attractive models.

The energy crunch of the past couple of years has bitten into the Big 3. An over abundance of gas guzzling models that are now sitting on lots does not translate into sales. Foreign car manufacturers who have production facilities inside the United States are in a better position. Why? The obvious is to say that the models that they produce are more fuel efficient. But a bigger reality is that they are largely non-union and are less obligated to provide extreme benefit packages.

Several years ago, I worked for a company that supplied body and trim parts to General Motors believe it or not. And an even bigger surprise to all of you may be that I was the local President for our Union. Now the company that I worked for wasn’t a very well run company. It was top heavy with management employees which was the reason for their financial problems. The company had a habit of coming to the union a year and a half into a three year contract wanting to renegotiate. It’s not like I’m very big into extorting extravagant benefits out of my employer but I did expect them to honor a contract negotiated before I took office.

The company wanted the union to freeze our pension plan locking out current employees and freezing benefits to retirees. They wanted the union to change our retirement to a 401k that would be matched by the company up to a limited amount. This was bad enough, but they actually wanted to begin to cut into our health care.

I have no doubt that should the Big 3 be able to get out from under some of the more outrageous provisions in their contracts with labor they could be solvent again. The capital that they are begging SanFran Nan and Dingy Harry (Rushism alert) for is so that they can continue to pay for employee benefits as they rush to produce designs that would be more attractive to cash strapped consumers.

It is the position of those of us on the right that these companies cannot pay for these massively expensive employee benefit packages on the backs of the taxpayers. Let them take their cases before a bankruptcy judge and eliminate these expensive contracts.

CIA Director, Michael Hayden reports that Osama Bin Laden is still alive more than seven years after the 9/11 attacks. However, he’s been spending most of that time dodging missiles.

Osama bin Laden is alive and “putting a lot of energy into his own security,” the director of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, said today.

He also claimed, without providing details, that the US intelligence community had disrupted an attack “that would have rivaled the destruction of 9/11.” …

Without directly referring to the CIA’s offensive blitz of unmanned missile attacks in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the CIA boss said the US had successfully isolated the al Qaeda leader bin Laden, referring to him in the present tense.

“He appears to be largely isolated from the day-to-day operations of the organization he leads,” Hayden said in a speech delivered to the Atlantic Council in Washington.

This is the plot he is talking about being disrupted:

OSAMA bin Laden is planning an attack against the United States that will “outdo by far” September 11, an Arab newspaper in London has reported.
And according to a former senior Yemeni al-Qaeda operative, the terrorist organisation has entered a “positive phase”, reinforcing specific training camps around the world that will lead the next “wave of action” against the West.

It obviously didn’t happen. Maybe some of Bush’s policies were not so bad? Don’t worry though, Obama will protect us. Who will he tap to replace Hayden?

Ed Morrissey has a scary thought:

I’d expect Hayden to be asked to resign within a short period after the inauguration. Who will they tap to replace him? Richard Clarke?

Perhaps the unrepentant domestic terrorist friend of Barack Obama did his part avoiding the media, but most of the media certainly lacked in pursuing him. Suddenly, now that that Barack Obama has been elected, the media are interested in extending this America hater’s fifteen minutes of fame. Good Morning America is promoting their exclusive interview with Bill Ayers, which will most likely be a puff-piece interview touting how he is really a harmless professor who lives in Obama’s neighborhood. Maybe they will let him promote his newly reissued book on the Weather Underground too! If so, perhaps they will ask him about this interesting quote in the book’s new afterword:

We had served together on the board of a foundation, knew one another as neighbors and family friends, held an initial fund-raiser at my house, where I’d made a small donation to his earliest political campaign,” he writes.

What convenient timing for Mr. Ayers to tell everyone of his close family friendship he had with the Obamas. Perhaps Good Morning America will corner him with this important question, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Maybe they will ask him about his plan for socialism to take over America, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. The fact the media are only showing interest in this man after the Obama is safely on his way to the White House speaks volumes.

Rumor says maybe!

There’s increasing chatter in political circles that the Obama camp is not overly happy with the usual suspects for secretary of state these days and that the field might be expanding somewhat beyond Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Gov. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.), Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and maybe former Democratic senator Sam Nunn of Georgia.

There’s talk, indeed, that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) may now be under consideration for the post. Her office referred any questions to the Obama transition; Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to comment.

The pick of the former presidential contender and Senate Armed Services Committee member would go a long way toward healing any remaining divisions within the Democratic Party after the divisive primaries.

How far down the line of succession does this put her? 4th in line? Thats probably a safe distance, but I’d still watch my back if I were Obama.

Allahpundit doesn’t think there is much to this rumor and says, “naming Hillary achieves nothing.”

Blue Grass, Red State:

Senator Giuliani?

Ameripundit:

Team Obama does what benefits it politically and the Hillary nomination would do almost nothing for it. In fact, Hillary would probably become her own star in the administration and take some attention away from Obama. Can’t have that.

Help a vet. I missed the email on this on Veterans Day, but it’s a good cause. If you have some change help out!

After consulting with Brian from snapped shot, seeing the high res photos he was able to get, I was pretty much convinced he was correct in that the missile was real, as was the launch. I suspect that the UPI did a tiny bit of airbrushing and/or enhancement to make the missile look a bit sharper. And, here is more evidence that the missile launch was real

Detroit is a Petri dish, in which mad scientists have allowed the loathsome bacterium that is liberalism to flourish without restraint. As a result of this misguided experiment, the former capital of industry has been reduced to a Third-World hellhole. The most liberal city in America has bankrupted itself, and now has its hand out:

The Detroit City Council passed a resolution today calling for a $10-billion bailout for the city of Detroit.

Council President Pro-Tem JoAnn Watson sponsored the resolution to use the money for public service employment, to fund mass transit plans and to place a moratorium on home foreclosures for two years.

$10 billion: for make-work jobs, mass transit boondoggles, and to help parasites live beyond their means. When that has been flushed down the toilet, New Mogadishu will demand $10 billion more. Socialism was imposed on Russia and China at gunpoint. Here it’s being imposed by the sniveling victims of self-inflicted crises.

The new rule is: anyone who is too inept or crippled by moonbattery to be solvent is owed baskets of free cash by those who are competent and industrious enough to keep their heads above water.

Punishing success and rewarding failure have inevitable consequences. If you like what liberals have done to Detroit, you’ll love the new America after Obama brings Change.

On a tip from V the K. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

While the stock market continues to go down post election, gun sales continue fabulously. But, how fabulously?

Between Nov. 3 and Nov. 9, the Federal Bureau of Investigation received 374,000 requests for background checks on gun buyers - 49 per cent more than the same time last year, CNN reported.

That’s a lot of checks! One of them mine.

“The spike in gun sales … is a serious overreaction to Obama’s election,” said Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet in an e-mail to The Globe and Mail.

Prof. Tushnet, who has written a book about the U.S. gun debate, said that while Mr. Obama may support moderate gun control, he won’t - and couldn’t - enact swift changes.

“Whatever [Mr. Obama's] ‘deep’ views on gun control, the issue is going to be very low priority for his administration and for Democrats in Congress,” Prof. Tushnet said. “And such legislation would, of course, be extremely controversial. I don’t see any significant political force among Democrats to spend the political capital needed to enact more than the most minor tinkering with existing gun regulations.”

It won’t be sweeping legislation. It will be death by 1,000 papercuts. Tiny legislation that no one really notices. And regardless of what Obama said on the campaign trail, Obama has always been against guns.

Apparently, Barry is looking to hire Glinda The Good

Want a top job in the Obama administration? Only pack rats need apply, preferably those not packing controversy.

A seven-page questionnaire being sent by the office of President-elect Barack Obama to those seeking cabinet and other high-ranking posts may be the most extensive — some say invasive — application ever.

The questionnaire includes 63 requests for personal and professional records, some covering applicants’ spouses and grown children as well, that are forcing job-seekers to rummage from basements to attics, in shoe boxes, diaries and computer archives to document both their achievements and missteps.

Only the smallest details are excluded; traffic tickets carrying fines of less than $50 need not be reported, the application says. Applicants are asked whether they or anyone in their family owns a gun. They must include any e-mail that might embarrass the president-elect, along with any blog posts and links to their Facebook pages.

Some of the questions include

• Have you ever hung with an unreformed domestic terrorist?
• Have you ever earmarked $1 million for the hospital your wife works at, then seen her get a massive raise?
• Have you ever had your peeps sue to silence your critics?
• Have you ever worked against the security and/or foreign policy interests of the United States?

Interestingly, much of the real substance in the questionnaire are focused on the question “will you be an embarrassment to Obama?” Two of the names thrown around for the Barry administration are John Kerry and Jamie Gorelick. Let’s see: John Kerry came back from Vietnam and not only consistently smeared his fellow soldiers, but went to Paris on at least one occasion to speak with the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. Jamie Gorelick was the one who put in The Wall between law enforcement and intelligence, which certainly helped lead to not being able to stop 9/11.

Of course, to Liberals, those are embarrassments, but a source of pride. Especially since the first question asks for all resumes for the past 10 years, to avoid resume falsehoods. I wonder if he asked Joe Biden for one.

-By Warner Todd Huston

Douglas Turner of the Buffalo News wants conservative radio talkers silenced. He calls them “virulent,” “violent” and “coarse” and hopes that starting January 1 the “work of flushing” them will begin. Turner fills his little anti-free speech screed with claims and a few examples of how rotten he thinks righty talkers are and how they need to be shut down, yet can’t seem to find a single cross word to say about the “coarseness” of lefty talkers. In other words, it is plain that “coarseness” or “one-sided” radio isn’t really a concern of his. Only eliminating the free speech of the right is his goal not any leveling of the playing field.

Naturally, his is filled with prosaic generalizations. Turner assumes that all conservative talk show hosts “were fond” of addressing Obama as “Hussein,” his middle name. Yet, Turner offers no list of those that did. He says righty talkers are “violent” but does not offer a single example to prove the allegation. It also seems that Turner can’t understand why radio hosts that call themselves conservative would be “one-sided.” Curiously, he didn’t excoriate Alan Colmes, Randi Rhodes, or Al Franken for being “one-sided.” (I know… Imagine that, huh?)

His “violent” claim has me wondering, though. (Bold mine)

As station ownership became more consolidated, talk radio became more virulent, if not violent, and one-sided.

He makes this “violent” claim but offers not one single example. Who was “violent”? What radio host urged listeners to violence? This is quite a charge and it would be nice if Turner would provide an example instead of throwing such a bomb without proving his wild-eyed claim.

Turner goes on to talk about how fewer station owners there are as if media consolidation has something to do with the fact that fewer minorities own stations. He bemoans that women and minority owned radio stations have fallen in number since 1996 when Clinton relaxed certain requirements for how many stations a single entity may own. Turner also seems to hint that the inaptly named Fairness Doctrine that was ended by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s is also a culprit.

But, one wonders if Turner imagines that a successful radio station is something that the federal government is supposed to insure via government legislation instead of by the successful business practices of the station owners? Is a radio station for minorities a new Constitutional right as far as Turner is concerned? It sure looks that way by his piece.

Turner also seems to think that “truth” is a “commodity” that can be doled out by government largess through licensing rules.

The basic service that a broadcast licensee owes a community is truth. As the election neared, that commodity was in short supply.

The question is, Mr. Turner, whose “truth” are you claiming is “owed” a community? Yours? The Democrat Party’s?

Turner spends the next few paragraphs giving examples of what he imagines are the evil, uncivil, and “violent” things that righty talkers have said on the air. He calls these examples “the fetid puddle of falsehoods and coarseness that talk radio has become.”

But not once did he mention the even worse “coarseness” of the many lefty talkers that filled the airwaves from coast-to-coast all during the last 8 years. Apparently, no left leaning talkers are “coarse” as far as Turner is concerned.

Just as a reminder, here are just a very few examples of the hate spewing from lefty radio talkers:

• Randi Rhodes Calls Hillary ‘Big F—ing Whore’
• Randi Rhodes Compares Katrina Evacuation to the Holocaust!
• Mike Malloy Calls Conservatives ‘Neo-Nazis’
• Al Franken Says Rove, Libby Bush Should be Executed
• Alan Colmes: Americans are Xenophobes
• Ed Schultz Calls McCain ‘Warmonger’

… and that is just a short list. There are plenty more where that came from.

Lastly, Turner showed his disdain for the U.S. Constitution and seemed to infer that it is just an obstacle for his free speech-banning compatriots to overcome with backdoor legislation.

“There are constitutional issues related to imposing equal time,” Turner blandly said, “So the Democratic route seems to be to roll-back media consolidation.”

Gosh darn that darned ol’ Constitution thingie that causes problems for him “imposing” speech requirements on the nation! If ONLY he could get rid of that stinkin’ piece of old paper. Well, he now has a president that agrees with him on the need to quash the political speech of his enemies. Let’s see where it goes from here.

(Photo credit: Buffalonews.com)

-By Warner Todd Huston

To show how foolishly hyperbolic the Old Media and the ignorati in our universities are, the Associated Press issued a dire report that breathlessly informed us all that Barack Obama is facing a “nation in crisis” and it’s all “just like Lincoln and FDR.” The AP even gets an historically illiterate university professor to sonorously declare how Obama is “one step away” from Lincoln and FDR. But a review of our nation’s real history shows that the America Obama will inherit is in nowhere near the state of crisis that Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to deal with. But, in the end, this isn’t about real reporting or true historiography but about pumping Obama up and trying to shoehorn him in among what are considered by many our greatest presidents before he’s even taken office.

The absurd hyperbole and wild stretching of the historical record to give gravity to Obama’s reign is transparent for its effort to force readers into imagining that Obama should be given a mandate to do anything he wants. I’d suggest that the reason this foolish overestimate of our state of national “crisis” is being ladled out to an unsuspecting public is because the AP realizes that Obama did not get a mandate vote and the AP fears that Obama might face more resistance than it would like to his starkly socialist policy proscriptions. So, the AP is trying its best to break down those barriers beforehand.

This idiotic piece tries its best to claim that Obama is “just like” FDR and Lincoln and that he faces a day “just like” theirs. However, this is pure bunk. Lincoln was a far better man than FDR and Obama is likely NO FDR!

First we get the addled opinion of another AP “expert.” This time it is the blather of Terry Sullivan, associate professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He sternly tells us that the nation is in crisis mode… “just like.”

“With two wars and an economic crisis, this is one step away from what Lincoln or FDR faced. ” The question is ‘which direction is the nation going to go?’”

This is a ridiculous assessment. The wars we face now are nowhere NEAR as intense as the ones Lincoln and FDR contended with. Lincoln faced a war where more Americans died than in all our other wars combined. 650,000 Americans perished as a result of the War Between the States — in today’s numbers that’s an equivalent population percentage to nearly 6 million Americans killed! FDR faced a war where 291,557 Americans died. And what do we have in Iraq? Less than five thousand casualties in five years. Yes it’s a horrible thing to lose a single soldier, but to say the Civil War and WWII are equivalent to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is simply ridiculous.

Even more to the point Lincoln and FDR faced war as it grew, became furious and at last nearly ended before they were done on this earth. Both presidents had to lead these hard fought conflicts and only left the mopping up for their successors. Obama comes to office with the efforts of better men having about finished the conflicts in the most direct terms. He will but mop up if he does things right. If things get worse, it will be because of his failures, not because of that of his predecessors.

Further, the national sacrifice that we have made in today’s war on terror has barely been a blip on the radar of most American citizens compared to what the nation sacrificed during the Civil War and WWII. Even socially we cannot make the Civil War and WWII equivalent to today.

Yes, Obama will inherit a war era. Absolutely, the clash of cultures between the west and the evils of Islam is supremely volatile. Yes it is a serious and important war that he will probably make worse with his childish notions of “diplomacy.” But even at that the situations he will inherit are nowhere near the levels of Lincoln and FDR’s crises. Obama can thank George W. Bush for that, too.

Additionally, the economic crisis that Obama faces, while again serious, is nowhere near the level of the Great Depression. Unemployment was in the high teens when FDR entered office and advanced to the middle 20s as a result of his disastrous economic policies. Throughout his four terms the economy was in dire straights. For his part, the Civil War caused high inflation during Lincoln’s two terms and the country was constantly in fear of economic collapse. If it weren’t for the great efforts of Lincoln’s cabinet members, most especially Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, the economy would have been even worse.

Today, however, Obama finds around 6% unemployment and an economy that is still fairly strong despite the pressures upon it. Obama will also find no inflation, deflation, stagflation or any other-flation for that matter. This is hardly a crisis in comparison.

Then the AP piece wastes our time with discussions of what FDR and Lincoln did during their transition times. I say it is a waste of time because thus far Obama has had a transition time of precisely 5 days so there is NOTHING whatever to compare historical transitions and Obama’s to! But there is a reason AP goes on and on with this pointless discussion. They intend to prop up Obama by associating him with historically great and burdened presidents to suggest that Obama is “just like” them.

After the historical meandering, AP asks us a suggestive, “Sound familiar?” To that we have to say a firm and informed “no.” What FDR and Lincoln faced only resembles the world that Obama will face in the remotest of ways. Of course we all have to admit that Obama may take his place as a great president. Who can say what the future holds? No one, of course. But we can say what the past held and with that we can surely say that the AP is silly to try and use the historical record of Lincoln and FDR as an example of Obama’s.

But, then, we’d be looking at the actual historical record and not trying to misuse it to pump up the currently non-existent record of the AP’s messiah, now, wouldn’t we?

It’s those uber-fashionable Islamic insurgents!

Islamic insurgents seized a strategic port city in Somalia on Wednesday, raising fears that they were gearing up for an assault on the capital, about 50 miles away.

The fighters, wearing red head scarves and chanting “God is great,” marched into Marka without firing a shot. Government troops had fled the night before upon hearing that an attack was imminent, residents said.

I hear that they also had very chic green smocks and some of those cool shoes that Don Johnson always wore in Miami Vice.

The seizure of Marka comes amid peace talks between the government and one opposition faction. But the most dangerous insurgent group, Shabab, which has acknowledged ties with Al Qaeda, has rejected the negotiations and vowed to overthrow the government.

The same group took responsibility for Wednesday’s seizure. Several local government officials have been assassinated in the city in the last month, including the acting governor and a deputy police commissioner.

“Our martyrs are in full control of the town,” Mohammed Awil, a Shabab commander, said by telephone from Marka. “We will govern all of Somalia through Islamic law, reaching our goal step by step.”

So, they weren’t just Islamic insurgents (props to the LA Times for even going that far in the title and the story), but Al Qaeda. Good to know. And a great fashion sense.

As Rusty Shackleford writes

These would be the same people who publicly stoned a 13 year old girl to death last month. Since the “real enemy” is in Afghanistan, I wonder if the new Obama administration will turn a blind eye to what is happening in the Horn of Africa?

WWBD?

Meanwhile, off the coast of Somalia, some pirates made the mistake of engaging the Royal Navy.

The article below starts out with the claim — popular among Leftist psychologists — that conservatives are dogmatic and rigid and less flexible and less open to new ideas. There was never any good evidence for that, just some methodologically very weak research among college students. See here and here, for instance. It is a very common finding that conservatives are happier though. Whining is basic to Leftism. It is interesting that the findings below seem to have been based on an adult sample. The findings should therefore be more generalizable than the findings from college students — whom psychologists normally study

In strict accordance with experimental protocol, we begin by asking you to rate, on a scale of 1 (not funny at all) to 9 (hilarious) the following three attempts at humor:

A) Jake is about to chip onto the green at his local golf course when a long funeral procession passes by. He stops in midswing, doffs his cap, closes his eyes and bows in prayer. His playing companion is deeply impressed. “That’s the most thoughtful and touching thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. Jake replies, “Yeah, well, we were married 35 years.”

B) I think there should be something in science called the “reindeer effect.” I don’t know what it would be, but I think it’d be good to hear someone say, “Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.”

C) If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I’d say Flippy, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong, though. It’s Hambone.

Those were some of the jokes rated by nearly 300 people in Boston in a recent study. (You can rate some of the others at TierneyLab, nytimes.com/tierneylab.) The researchers picked out a variety of jokes - good, bad, conventional, absurdist - to look for differences in reactions between self-described liberals and conservatives.

They expected conservatives to like traditional jokes, like the one about the golfing widower, that reinforce racial and gender stereotypes. And because liberals had previously been reported to be more flexible and open to new ideas, the researchers expected them to get a bigger laugh out of unconventional humor, like Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts” about the reindeer effect and Hambone.

Indeed, the conservatives did rate the traditional golf and marriage jokes as significantly funnier than the liberals did. But they also gave higher ratings to the absurdist “Deep Thoughts.” In fact, they enjoyed all kinds of humor more.

“I was surprised,” said Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University, who collaborated on the study with Elisabeth Malin, a student at Mount Holyoke College. “Conservatives are supposed to be more rigid and less sophisticated, but they liked even the more complex humor.”

Do conservatives have more fun? Should liberals start describing themselves as humor-challenged? To investigate these questions, we need to delve into the science of humor (not a funny enterprise), starting with two basic kinds of humor identified in the 1980s by Willibald Ruch, a psychologist who now teaches at the University of Zurich.

The first category is incongruity-resolution humor, or INC-RES in humor jargon. It covers traditional jokes and cartoons in which the incongruity of the punch line (the husband who misses his wife’s funeral) can be resolved by other information (he’s playing golf). You can clearly get the joke, and it often reinforces stereotypes (the golf-obsessed husband).

Dr. Ruch and other researchers reported that this humor, with its orderly structure and reinforcement of stereotypes, appealed most to conservatives who shunned ambiguity and complicated new ideas, and who were more repressed and conformist than liberals.

The second category, nonsense humor, covers many “Far Side” cartoons, Monty Python sketches and “Deep Thoughts.” The punch line’s incongruity isn’t neatly resolved - you’re left to enjoy the ambiguity and absurdity of the reindeer effect or Hambone’s affection for dolphins. This humor was reported to appeal to liberals because of their “openness to ideas” and their tendency to “seek new experiences.”

But then why didn’t the liberals in the Boston experiment like the nonsense humor of “Deep Thoughts” as much as the conservatives did? One possible explanation is that conservatives’ rigidity mattered less than another aspect of their personality. Rod Martin, the author of “The Psychology of Humor,” said the results of the Boston study might reflect another trait that has been shown to correlate with a taste for jokes: cheerfulness.

“Conservatives tend to be happier than liberals in general,” said Dr. Martin, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. “A conservative outlook rationalizes social inequality, accepting the world as it is, and making it less of a threat to one’s well-being, whereas a liberal outlook leads to dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and a sense that things need to change before one can be really happy.”

Another possible explanation is that conservatives, or at least the ones in Boston, really aren’t the stiffs they’re made out to be by social scientists. When these scientists analyze conservatives, they can sound like Victorians describing headhunters in Borneo. They try to be objective, but it’s an alien culture.

The studies hailing liberals’ nonconformity and “openness to ideas” have been done by social scientists working in a culture that’s remarkably homogenous politically. Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one on social science and humanities faculties, according to studies by Daniel Klein, an economist at George Mason University. If you’re a professor who truly “seeks new experiences,” try going into a faculty club today and passing out McCain-Palin buttons.

Could it be that the image of conservatives as humorless, dogmatic neurotics is based more on political bias than sound social science? Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who reviews the evidence of cognitive differences in his 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” said that while there were valid differences, “liberals and conservatives are roughly equally closed-minded in dealing with dissonant real-world evidence.”

So perhaps conservatives don’t have a monopoly on humorless dogmatism. Maybe the stereotype of the dour, rigid conservative has more to do with social scientists’ groupthink and wariness of outsiders - which, come to think of it, resembles the herding behavior of certain hoofed animals. Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.

Source

Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me (John Ray) here

My specialty is making Fedzilla punks squirm and turn into a puddle of sweat and drool. Therefore, in the spirit of famous butt kickers Generals Chesty Puller and George Patton, I say we launch an attack on all fronts. Uncle Ted hereby declares it is open season on RINOs. No bag limits or permits required. Conservative ideas, arguments and votes are the weapons we will use. Hunt them down and shine a blazing light on these RINO turncoat cockroaches. Zero in the “we the people” crosshairs of your voting assault weapon and aim for the RINO pumpstation. Double tap center mass. Whack em and stack em, track em and hack em, pack em and give em no slack. Let’s do to the RINO beasts what we did to the passenger pigeon. Force out of the Republican Party out the subspecies known as RINOs.

We must not make the mistake of keeping the GOP tent so big that there’s room for RINOs. They are in the business of producing conservative defeats. Instead, join me in the new Conservative Revolution. Let’s go out and win another one for the Gipper.

Read it all!