Random Thoughts

Every blogger, sooner or later, needs to clear out those ideas that didn't quite make it into full posts but that didn't quite get dismissed either.

• Betsy Newmark (hat tip: michellemalkin.com) discusses the progressively increasing wimpiness of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. It's hard to disagree with that assessment given that Frist instinctively plays the Elmer Fudd to Senator John McCain's Bugs Bunny. The only good aspect to Frist's wimpiness is that he is likely to be relatively harmless in the Republican 2008 primaries. Does anyone really believe that the "Frist for President" campaign could survive losing the Iowa primary to McCain (or anybody, for that matter)?


• George Will recently assessed the future of conservatism and concisely expressed a neglected truth about the conservative movement:

  But, then, the limited-government impulse is a spent force in a Republican Party that cannot muster congressional majorities to cut the growth of Medicaid from 7.3 percent to 7 percent next year. That "cut'' was too draconian for some Republican "moderates.''
  
  But, then, most Republicans are moderates as that term is used by persons for whom it is an encomium: Moderates are people amiably untroubled by Washington's single-minded devotion to rent-seeking -- to bending government for the advantage of private factions.

  Incidentally, this is another reason why conservatives shouldn't be backing McCain's presidential bid in 2008. Remember how McCain broke with the Senate Republicans to support President Clinton's publicly waged shakedown of Big Tobacco?


• Charles Krauthammer also agrees with George Will that creationism and intelligent design are political embaressments for Republicans.


• By the way, it occurred to me today that intelligent design is self-refuting as a scientific theory. The only way to empirically prove intelligent design would be to observe the postulated "Intelligent Designer" in the act of creating a new species. But as the proponents of intelligent design take pains to admit, intelligent design theories provide absolutely no information about the identity of the Intelligent Designer.