Finally, we get to have a Battlefield post that references the political battlefield and not the actual battlefield on our streets. No more Chattanoogas or Lafayettes for a while, if you please.

This week’s installment is about fighting on that political battlefield. Our readers are aware by now that one of the things I simply can’t abide about the modern Republican Party – hell, it’s been a failing of the GOP since the 1930’s and never seems to get fixed with any permanence – is the lack of fighting spirit among the people who lead it.

I say this a lot and perhaps some of you are tired of hearing it but a fundamental problem with Republican politics is that we get our politicians out of the business community, where you’re taught not to be provocative or confrontational, because doing so will run off half your customers, you always want to keep a maximum number of people comfortable with the idea of doing business with you, the customer is always right and in every negotiation you get in you’re looking for a win-win resolution. Those attitudinal characteristics make American businesspeople the best in the world and the experience of doing business in this country the best in the world, taxes and regulations notwithstanding.

The Democrats get their politicians from union bosses, trial lawyers, academics, race hustlers and government bureaucrats. In none of those professions is the customer always right, and to the extent there are negotiations it’s never a win-win resolution being sought. In fact, in all of those negotiations it’s a win-lose – and more to the point the Democrat pol-to-be is in the pursuit of chiseling money out of someone in exchange for a negative consideration. “We won’t publicly accuse your company of racial discrimination,” for example, or “we won’t go on strike,” or “we won’t sue you and trash your reputation in the process.”

And a great deal of American politics comes down to the Republican “win-win” guy getting absolutely taken to the cleaners by the Democrat “win-lose” guy when they’re trying to negotiate things like legislation and budgets and so forth.

The solution to this, obviously, is to find as many Republicans with a “win-lose” mentality and put them in positions of political leverage as possible.  You certainly can’t wait around for “win-win” Democrats to emerge; we’ll get the Rapture first and long before then they’ll have turned this country into Cuba or Zaire.

People might not understand this as I just explained it, but they do understand it. It’s why Donald Trump is doing as well as he’s doing. It’s why a lot of the more popular conservative pundits, like Charles Krauthammer, David Horowitz and PJ Media’s Roger Simon, used to be liberals. The ones who came up understanding politics the way the Left understands them have an advantage over the country-club nice set.

Ted Cruz, who understands debate and argument because he was trained as one of the best in the world at it, understands politics this way. Mitt Romney, who personifies the nice-guy “win-win” mentality, does not.

It’s interesting, because Romney was known in his Bain Capital days as a guy who could drive a hard bargain. But those skills never made it to his political career. He’ll be forever known as, at best, a lovable loser and a guy who choked when he had a chance to be president.

Exit polls following the 2012 election showed that Romney polled better than President Obama on all the major issues in that campaign. On some of those issues he beat Obama by fairly wide margins. But Romney lost the election because by a 4-to-1 margin Obama wiped him out on the question of “who cares most about people like me?”

And why is that? Because Barack Obama and his goon consultants went after Romney as an out-of-touch plutocrat, a vulture capitalist who kills working men’s wives with cancer and a tyrannical abusive male who keeps women in binders.

And Romney let him do it. Romney took the attitude that Barack Obama was a nice man and a good father who simply wasn’t very good at his job. It was the same sort of narrative John McCain allowed his idiot advisers to talk him into using, and he failed miserably against Obama as well.

And this is against a guy named Barack Hussein Obama, who spent his formative years in Jakarta and marinated in the tutelage of communists from adolescence all the way up through his 30’s, somebody who had never done a productive day’s work in his life and came out of the political sewer of Chicago, of all places. If ever there was a political opponent you’d go nuclear against, Obama was it.

Which means that while it’s OK to like Mitt Romney as a person, as a political figure he ought to be detested by Republicans for having subjected us to four more years of the worst president in American history by sucking as a candidate.

Where that manifests itself is in categorically rejecting Romney when he makes political statements like these…

I am opposed to the Iran deal, but @SenTedCruz is way over the line on the Obama terrorism charge. Hurts the cause.

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) July 30, 2015

You can go to the tweet and look at the responses and you’ll get essentially the same reaction you’ll see here, but the stunning lack of awareness on Romney’s part leading to the idea that Cruz’ statement about the Iran deal “hurts the cause” is what’s at issue.

Cruz said, and it’s factually correct, that the $150 billion Obama is handing over to the Iranians will be used to support terrorism – meaning that the Obama administration will on a de facto basis become one of the world’s largest state sponsors of terrorism.

How is this not true? Iran is already the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. A $150 billion payoff to Iran has the same impact on their economy that $2.4 trillion would have to America’s economy, and the money flows through the Iranian regime.

Of course it will be used on terrorism. Terrorism is a weapon of jihadist governments because it’s a lot cheaper than an air force or a navy. Supposedly the price tag on 9/11 was like $250,000. Can you imagine what $250 million could do? They’re getting that from Obama, times 600. And we have no guarantees or even reasons to believe that the regime won’t deposit that money in their terror account.

But you can’t use such provocative language, says Romney, because it’s not classy and it hurts the cause.

Obama’s people went after Romney for his dog riding atop his car in a crate on a family trip to Canada. They accused him of killing a steelworker’s wife with cancer because Bain laid people off after buying a failing steel mill in Kansas City. They attacked him personally over and over and over again. Did it hurt Obama’s cause? Is that what Romney was saying?

There have been Yankee/Ivy League patrician politicians who have done well as presidential candidates. FDR did fine. JFK did quite well. Those were Democrats.

Republican Yankee patrician politicians are garbage, and universally so. They’re blithering incompetents, and the party cannot disqualify them quickly enough. The Ivy League elite nice-guy mentality only reinforces the Democrats’ name-calling of Republicans as smarmy rich bastards who got theirs by denying you yours (and look at them trying to show off their rich-bastard manners while your kids have holes in their shoes!), and none of these people have ever figured out how to counter those attacks.

We’re better off locking the Mitt Romneys in political jail and never letting them out for more than a Congressional race in a safe GOP district.

Cruz responded perfectly. He basically told Romney, “Shut up, loser.”

Give me street fighters who are willing to cut throats and fight for the cause. Give me people who believe in what they’re doing and refuse to take any shit from the Left. Give me people who will call the other side out for who they are without being afraid to go “way over the line.”

Give me people other than Romney. Mitt’s a nice guy who ought to stick to venture capital. He’s good at that.

 

 We’re not allowed to discuss anything else but the Cecil the Lion stupidity this week, as you know. You can’t talk about the Planned Parenthood videos, which show something as close to true evil as you’re going to see in a clinical setting, because some dentist from Minneapolis went big-game hunting and shot a 500-pound apex predator in Zimbabwe which happened to have been exploited by the Mugabe government as a tourist attraction.

A few things on this, prefaced by this statement – big-game hunting doesn’t particular do it for me. I imagine there’s a big-time rush that comes out of taking down a lion or an elephant, but I don’t see myself being one of those guys. But the animal rights crowd, nearly every one of whom has absolutely no problem whatsoever with what Planned Parenthood does (and if you want to talk about evil, just consider that for a while), has no idea what it’s talking about in screaming about Cecil The Lion.

Does everybody here recognize that lions are nuisance animals in Zimbabwe? They’re a threat to livestock and people. They’re hunted not just for sport but for survival. A lion is not dissimilar to an alligator or a grizzly bear. There are more lions than alligators in Zimbabwe. But because lions are cuter than alligators we have howling about Cecil.

And it’s possible Cecil was poached, but the dentist who shot him swears up and down that it was a legal hunt and he did what the guides he hired told him was what he was supposed to do. Now, the guides might well have led him astray, but the idea that you’d bait a lion to come off a game reserve onto a private farm where it’s legal to shoot it (because a lion on a farm is, after all, a threat) hardly seems like an unprecedented idea. And the dentist paid $55,000 to shoot the lion. For $55,000 in Zimbabwe, one of the poorest and worst-run countries on earth, they’d probably let you hunt people rather than lions and take as many as you want. That is a lot of money over there. Big game hunting is a big business in that country because it pays to preserve the habitat of animals like lions – which without hunting are an economic drain in a place they can’t afford economic drains. Cecil might have had a collar on him, but guess what? If you’re shooting a lion you’re going to do it from a distance such that you might not be able to see the collar.

Shit happens.

Reuters went and asked the locals what they thought of the international outrage about Cecil and got a little different reaction than they expected. “What lion?” was one. Others were a little disgusted at the fact nobody in Toulouse or Stamford or Kensington or Malmo gets upset when some Zimbabwean kid gets carted off and eaten by the lions there, and yet Cecil is a big deal.

Frankly, while it’s not a joke that the poor dentist’s livelihood has been destroyed and he’s in hiding because he’s having death threats made against him, this whole business is a joke. It’s a lion, for crying out loud. There are other lions. The good animal rights douche canoes screaming about Cecil couldn’t be bothered about human victims all around them, and yet they care about some animal they never heard of until this week.

I offer this…

 

 Closer to home, this week on the Red Bayou Show we had Lt. Governor candidate John Young as a guest, and he was pretty impressive. I don’t have a candidate in that race quite yet, but Young might be the guy before it’s all said and done.

What I will say is that if you get a runoff between Young and Kip Holden, the horrendous mayor of Baton Rouge who’ll be the Democrat in the final round, you get Young’s media consultant Brent Barksdale dropping commercials on Holden. And with what Barksdale has to work with that might be more entertainment than anybody realizes. It’s not quite a valid reason to vote for Young to make the runoff, but I gotta tell you…it’s close.

 

 WOW. TWO POINT THREE PERCENT GROWTH in the second quarter?

WOW.

I’m blown away. We’re booming!