Moralia

That’s the headline emblazoned across the sky in this brilliant bit of photoshoppery.  It’s done in the style of the “Surrender Dorothy” the Wicked Witch of the West wrote in the sky with her broomstick.  I can’t insert it here, because of technical difficulties, but the picture is at Nice Deb and Frugal Cafe).  Nice Deb cites Hot Air and Club for Growth, but I don’t see the photo at either of those places, so I’m not sure where it originates.  As usual, I don’t have the time to spend online digging around to find out.

I cannot tell you how much Doug Hoffman’s surge in the polls encourages me.  If angry conservatives can bring down a RINO annointed by the GOP and actually elect a third party conservative candidate, it will deal a significant blow to my longstanding cynicism.   If they bag their RINO in elephant’s clothing but end up just splitting the Republican vote so as to elect a Democrat, that will only reinforce the perception that you can’t fight the Demopublicans, and any third party effort is doomed to failure.  I hope and pray that Doug Hoffman’s supporters in New York prove that longstanding assumption wrong.  Dead wrong.  Deader than the political future of Dede Scozzafava unless she stops pretending to be a Republican and follows in Arlen Specter’s footsteps.

Perhaps the best thing about a Hoffman victory would be another nail in the coffin of Newt Gingrich’s presidential prospects.  Newt’s following the “in for a penny, in for a pound” approach on NY23, but it’s beginning to look like that pound is going to come out of his own political flesh.

Update:  I was really tired when I wrote this last night (what else is new?).  Nice Deb is the creator of the image. The New York Post has endorsed Hoffman (hat tip to McCain).

Big name Republicans like Rick Santorum, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey and Sarah Palin have broken with the Party establishment to endorse him.  I wonder who will be next?  If Mitt Romney really wants to be president — and is as smart as people say he is — it ought to be he.

The baby is teething and had me up twice last night, and once happened to be when Fox was replaying Glenn Beck’s interview with Hoffman.  I haven’t been watching much TV lately, getting all my news from the paper and the internet, so I’ve read a lot about Hoffman and seen his photo, but had never seen him on video.   He isn’t a particularly impressive speaker, not at all smooth and eloquent like Obama.  He isn’t handsome or telegenic.  He isn’t any of the things that candidates in the age of imagery usually are.  And yet he is beating both major party candidates.  He’s not doing it by good looks, snappy rhetoric or political connections.  He’s doing it by sticking to conservative principles when others will not.   This is the most important factor in the Hoffman phenomenon — and the most inspiring.