Last Wednesday with Sean Hannity, and with Brian Kilmeade, Dana Loesch and Stuart Varney in the ensuing 24 hours, I said that Scott Walker had bombed bigtime in the Republican debate, starting with his lame pre-scripted "We don't need another 'Apprentice' in the White House" Trump joke. Here I am with one of the debate moderators, Hugh Hewitt:
MARK STEYN: Scott Walker I thought had a disastrous night...
HUGH HEWITT: I don't agree with you on Walker, only because I think it plays so well in Iowa and small town America to be Midwestern reserved. I just think there's a different audience that you and I live with that listens and views it differently, and that slow and steady does win some races.
Not this time. Today, Scott Walker quit the presidential race. Having a great "record", as Walker insisted, turned out not to matter. As I said to Stuart or Brian or someone on Thursday morning, if you have in effect a three-year election campaign then the ability to campaign becomes what matters: that's the "record" that counts.
And so the destabilization of the primary process caused by Trump's entry into the race has claimed its second gubernatorial scalp. Walker made it to the top table in both debates and, by the end of the second, had turned himself into Jim Gilmore. Also from my interview with Hugh:
MS: At the time of the last debate, which was only a few weeks ago, people assumed that Donald Trump's appearance was some kind of freak show, and that at a certain point, it was going to settle down and become a normal Republican primary. And I think it's clear now that actually that is not going to happen.
As Perry and Walker have discovered.
~At The American Thinker, Richard Kirk has a review of my new book "A Disgrace to the Profession", and begins with an ingenious comparison:
The final episode of "Seinfeld" involved a "Good Samaritan" court case that featured witness after witness testifying passionately about the moral misdemeanors perpetrated against them by the show's protagonists: Elaine, George, Kramer, and Jerry. One segment simulated a TV newscast in which Geraldo's onsite reporter summarized the testimony. The number of prosecution witnesses, she concluded, "just went on and on and on into the night." That's the feeling one gets reading the negative evidence Steyn has amassed in A Disgrace to the Profession, his work about the litigious climatologist and "hockey-stick" inventor, Michael Mann.
Steyn's book is, in fact, a series of relatively short "testimony" segments by scores of "witnesses" to the shoddy science and shocking intimidation tactics employed by Mann and colleagues.. Almost all focus on damning observations about Mann's methods, conclusions, and harassment of dissenting scientists.
He concludes by reminding readers that "A Disgrace to the Profession" is a title with broader application:
True to form, Mann is using intimidation to silence critics... The fact that this speech-suppressing defamation suit in the D.C. courts has been going on for years without media outrage clearly shows that Steyn's derogatory book title applies to American journalists and courts as much as to the now-greatly-diminished Penn State climatologist.
Do read the whole thing. And don't forget "A Disgrace to the Profession" is still doing boffo biz on the Climatology Hit Parade, and is generously discounted at Amazon. And, if you need it in the next 90 seconds, it can be yours anywhere on the planet via Kindle or Nook.
~On Tuesday evening I'll be checking in with Sean Hannity on Fox News, coast to coast at 10pm Eastern/7pm Pacific. Following last week's epic TV showdown, when Sean savaged my necktie and ate it up and spit it out, Andrew Kern of the Circe Institute writes:
Never can make up my mind about anything I read on your site, but Hannity owned you on the tie issue. You actually got defensive. I bought my pink Sean Hannity tie eight years ago and have been waiting for people to catch up ever since. I guess I'm the true conservative, always ahead by being far enough behind.
Andrew Kern
With my luck, the last words I'll hear will be "Allahu akbar - oh, and your tie sucks too, infidel loser."